Let me lay this crisis out for you. There are five federal government fiscal concepts you need to understand to understand what's going on. (1) Budget; (2) Budget Resolution; (3) Authorization; (4) Appropriation; (5) Debt Authorization. This establishes a kind of belt-and-suspenders-and-another-pair-of-suspenders Congressional control of spending. Why? As you can well guess, control over spending is a major political prize. Roughly speaking, the budget is analyzed, then chopped into little pieces which are then approved piecemeal, giving Congress multiple opportunities to tweak expenditures.
(1) Budget -- the President's proposal to Congress on what to spend in the next fiscal year.
(2) Budget Resolution -- Congress's formal response to the President's budget as a whole; not a "law" per se, but like a letter of intent. It allows government agencies to plan ahead, but not actually spend money.
(3) Authorization -- A law giving Congressional consent to begin work on some program or set of actions that is going to cost money, but not to actually spend any money. Prevents the President from presenting Congress with a fait accompli that would be politically impossible not to fund (e.g. a troop surge).
(4) Appropriation -- A law giving Congressional consent to actually spending money on some program or part of the budget. ** This is where Congress actually gives the Executive branch permission to spend money**. If all the necessarily appropriations aren't passed by the time the fiscal year starts, parts of the government would have to stop running. When this happens Congress passes a "continuing resolution", which allows the effected part of government to continue operating while the appropriation is worked out.
(5) **Debt authorization** -- After the money is spent, the cash to pay the bills incurred has to be raised. Constitutionally this is a Congressional function, but it would be impractical for Congress to vote on every treasury bill issuance, so instead Congress delegates this to the Treasury, authorizing it to raise so much money. *** THIS IS WHAT THE CURRENT FIGHT IS OVER ***.
Normally debt authorization is a routine matter. It is required because the Constitution makes debt issuance a Congressional function, but the Treasury actually does the work. In the current crisis Congress has authorized, appropriated and in many cases *mandated* expenditures, but is refusing to raise money to pay for them after the money has been spent.
This is a new and completely unprecedented kind of crisis. In the 94 years since the current system for handling debt was established, Congress has *never* refused to authorize raising money to pay for expenditures it has appropriated. Not during the Great Depression, not in WW2; not in the stagflation crisis of the 1970s; not in the struggles between the Republican House and the Clinton White House in the 1990s.
Er... this has almost nothing to do with what happened with the banks in 2008. In fact, it's about as unrelated as it is possible for one looming economic crisis to be to some recently past economic crisis. The fallout from the prior crisis is a major contributing factor, of course, but if there is any issue of "looting", it's going to be we the people, through our elected representatives in Congress, who do it.
This crisis is entirely voluntarily precipitated by our political leadership, albeit with the excuse that they believe *some* crisis is coming sooner or later. We are facing default not because we've spent more than was budgeted, or more than was appropriated, but because we spent money that as budgeted and appropriated but now Congress won't let the Treasury raise the money to pay the people we owe money to as a result.
Ideas may be bulletproof, but they aren't dangerous until they're supported with a training and funding infrastructure. It doesn't take *much* training and funding to turn a handful of disgruntled guys hanging out in a radical mosque into a dangerous terrorist cell, but it takes *some*. As in every other field of human endeavor, the number of dreamers vastly outnumber the number of doers. It's a good thing too, because we'd have been over our heads after 9/11 if everyone who cheered at that decided to become a majority of one and strike a blow themselves.
Sure, Ted Kacyznski managed to conduct a solo terror campaign, but he had a lot more brains and energy than your average radical malcontent. Look around you at all the people who have ideas about how the world should be changed. Now start counting the number who do *anything at all* to act on those ideas.
So, yes. The organization matters. In fact it matters more than the idea. There are people with radically different ideas that would be amenable to the same general practical program.
If I were about to die and the only way I could save myself was locking in my employer to a huge, mission critical MySQL installation, I'd prefer the MySQL fate to death.
I watched the STS-135 launch with my teenaged daughter a few minutes ago. I was only a few years older than she when I watched the STS-1 launch with a couple of my friends who stayed over my house for the even. We still had the Apollo era habit of watching all the televised launches.
It really did feel like a new beginning, the dawn of the era of (mostly) reusable spacecraft, just like in science fiction. The Shuttle may have turned out to be an abortive step toward the future, but it also accomplished a great deal and has important lessons for us, if we only have the will to learn them.
Nah. Just return the tax rates to what they werewhen the so-called "Reagan Boom" started. Budget crisis averted without raising taxes beyond what everyone agrees is consistent withdrawal robust economic growth. Bill Gates chips in his share without having to give up the benefactor to humanity gig. Everyone chips in some and the rising tides lift the yachts along with the dinghies.
For the most part I agree with you on the jumping to conclusions part, for example the idea that the editors deliberately deleted voicemails to keep the story alive. We can't know that for sure.
But having printed stories based on the contents of the girl's voicemail, the editors had to have at least been aware that the PI was accessing the voicemail account. This makes them responsible for tampering with potential evidence. Their subsequent use of PIs to illegally access celebrity voicemail accounts shows that this was editorial policy. And since News Corp. hired the editors, it is ultimately responsible.
There's plenty damning here without making things up.
The point isn't that they're made out of human hair. The point is that things we *assume* have to be made from petroleum could be made from *other raw materials*.
The proposed "solution" here isn't making everything we make out of plastic from human hair. The proposed solution is to apply chemistry and ingenuity to problems whose solutions we've taken for granted for the last fifty years or so. It's the materials science wizardry that makes these things cool, not the (ugh) design. Some years ago the company Arthur D. Little set out to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear -- actually they made a nylon-like polymer out of the collagen that forms the bulk of the ear. You'd probably say that was a pointless exercise since actual silk is cheaper, not to mention nylon, but that's because you're missing the point.
Even if you don't give a rat's ass a bout the environment, this is the stuff we'll need to maintain a modern, polymer material dependent lifestyle when petroleum becomes prohibitively expensive. There are plenty of valid criticisms of the environmental movement, but one of the *in*valid ones is that environmentalists want us to live with the tech level of medieval peasants. Possibly some do, but the serious thinkers are well aware of the need for advanced technology to provide an acceptable, sustainable standard of living.
What happened to Rumsfeld promising that we'd get Iraq's Oil...
So far as I know Rumsfeld never promised the American taxpayer any Iraqi loot. There *was* a lot of administration talk about "low hanging fruit", and indeed that fruit was picked, but not for the benefit of the American taxpayer. A lot of people made a lot of money off of the Iraq war, money that came out of the pockets of the American taxpayer. That part of the post-war reconstruction went off as planned, and no shareholders were harmed in the conduct of the war.
What Rumsfeld (and others in the administration) *did* promise was that Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction. The problem with that scenario was that it was like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps -- while somebody with a sharp knife is attempting to cut off your thumbs.
In a way the whole Iraq war resembled the Iran-Contra fiasco. The Bush administration even named one of the key figures in Iran Contra as ambassador to Iraq during the initial phases of reconstruction. Although it *sounds* a lot worse, it might not have been so bad if the plan was to make Iraq pay the US for the service of being liberated. But that deal was never on the table for the American taxpayer. What the administration was lusting after was a pot of money outside of Constitutionally mandated oversight.
Of course this particular fiasco we are discussing shows once more that congressional oversight doesn't exactly strain the national security budget through a fine tooth comb. Even a project going down in flames doesn't attract much scrutiny. A defense project has to crash and leave nothing behind but a smoking hole in the ground before anyone dares to question it.
I think this is one of those "depends" questions. It depends on the kinds of traffic the rotary serves and it depends on how well engineered the rotary is.
We've used rotaries in New England for as long as I can remember -- back into the 60s at least. The problem with *our* rotaries is that they're engineered to hold a lot of cars moving very fast. Some of the huger examples cars are driving at close to highway speeds. Compare this behemoth with this example. It's not *only* like comparing an elephant to a mouse; it's apples and oranges. The big rotary feeds a major numbered urban route to an interstate highway, the little one handles much less and slower traffic.
Several times I've almost been killed on the big rotary by people entering the rotary at 50mph while talking on their cell phones. I always keep an eye peeled for that so I avoided an accident, but in one case the guy did ended up heading the wrong way because he fishtailed out of control. Now he was an idiot for not paying attention in a dangerous situation, but that is much less likely to happen in the small rotary which *feels* more dangerous, but is much safer on that account.
If this were sentencing, I'd agree with you, but this is *bail* which is assessed *before* guilt is proven. Bail is not supposed to be punitive, it is security that the suspect will not flee the court's jurisdiction before trial. Attempting to punish someone through bail sends the wrong message: that it is acceptable to break the law if you are in a position to get away with it.
As a parent, I think the most important thing about punishments is that they be consistent and very strictly just. I don't believe this out of a concern for the civil rights of children, but out of my understanding of what it takes for a punishment to send the *right* lesson. Any loophole will be seized upon to prove that the punishment was chosen to suit some other purpose than justice. That's why I never punish in anger. If I do, I retract the punishment, explain that I'm only human, then impose a more thoughtful punishment.
The point is that I want my kids to connect the punishment with *their* decisions, not *mine*. I want them to see the punishment as an entirely reasonable and predictable outcome of their actions. That way there's a chance they'll learn right and wrong. I *also* teach them that some rules that are imposed on them from outside *can be* arbitrary. For example, if a teacher wants something that is unreasonable, it's OK to say "no" and take the hit on their grades. That's because when they grow up and are faced by some kind of institutionalized wrong, I want them to act in accordance with their own internal moral compass. This puts me in conflict some times with teachers, who explain they are trying to teach the moral lesson that life requires sacrifices. I reply that while that is an important lesson that I do want my children to learn, I also want them to learn to stand up to people in authority when those people are wrong. Life does require reasonable compromise with the just demands of authority, but when authority overreaches itself the lesson about standing up to it becomes paramount.
Well, who is their competition for Health, PowerMeter and Tranlation API, and what is that competition up to? Why business rationale does Google have to continue those services?
From a purely economic view, Facebook is a direct competitor for the transactions that bring cash into Google. The eyeball brokers. Why does Google have mail and mapping and all that other stuff? To keep your eyeballs corralled on Google services. Facebook is trying to extend its offerings for the identical reason. Google would be stupid to let Facebook offer competing services without offering some challenge in Facebook's core business.
I've never understood the desire to make personal information about yourself public.
Well, it's no wonder you don't understand the desire to make everything about your life completely public, because for most people *total* exposure isn't a feature of the Facebook model; it's an unfortunate side effect.
The problem with Facebook is that it assumes you have only *one* social network. That your work colleagues, family, and spouse swapping club are just different entry points into one big homogeneous social network. This is manifestly false, but Facebook wants every individual's social network to be as large as possible because that's more profitable. That's why Facebook's twiddling of its privacy controls only produces more confusion. Users can't *get* what they really want with Facebook's network model, so any attempt to impose security on top of that model only makes it harder to share what they *do* want to share with the people they want to share it with.
The big question is how much of this is deliberate? Some think Facebook has a goal of training people to accept less privacy. I don't think that their goals are that long term. Still, I do not think Facebook is unaware that they're not providing the service that people want, nor do I think they are unable to give people what they want. The one homogeneous network model happened to be the one that maximized revenue in the short term. With the gathering backlash against Facebook's usability and security, I think users have figured what Facebook probably already knows: Facebook isn't the service they need.
For a tiny tropical fish like neons, you can use put it in a container of water and put the container in an ice bath. You don't take them out of the water and put them in the freezer; air might not cool them fast enough even though it is colder than the chilling water. It's like that for humans too. Being dumped in 50 degree F water is fatal; in early spring that's shirtsleeves weather for us New Englanders.
For large tropical fish oscars or tinfoil barbs, the fish would be way too massive for the chilled water method.
The anesthesia route is almost certainly the most reliably humane method.
Actually, people very commonly abuse fish by keeping them in extremely bad conditions. The problem is that fish don't communicate pain in a way that is obvious to humans. I've heard people advise putting tropical fish in the freezer to euthanise them! Just because the fish can't scream doesn't mean it's not in pain. The simplest way to euthanize a fish is to quickly cut its head off, but the most humane method is probably an overdose of anesthetic.
Keeping a goldfish in a goldfish bowl is usually death by slow torture. That two inch long goldfish you're keeping in a one gallon bowl is a pond fish which as an adult reaches six times the length and two hundred times the body weight. People don't know this because they keep killing their pets of as tiny juveniles, by slow and painful means I might add. In the long term you probably need *at least* 30 gallons per fish if you intend to keep your goldfish in an aquarium.
Then there's the people who buy single fish of schooling species like neon tetras. You should research the fish you are buying, know the minimum school size, and aim *above* that. A species whose minimum school size is eight will be stressed if you only have four, and *much* healthier (and more interesting to watch) if you keep sixteen.
Fishkeeping is a thinking person's hobby. While it's not rocket science, it takes a fair amount of practical scientific knowledge. You have to research the fish you're buying. I've seen 2" "sharks" in pet stores that are fry of giant catfish species that grow to eight or even ten feet in length.
Science is competitive. If you've ever worked with scientific data sharing you know that scientists are totally paranoid about unpublished data. And history shows they're justified. Watson and Crick weren't entirely up front with Rosalind Franklin about how they were using her data. Later they stiffed her on the degree of credit she deserved, minimizing her contribution even though they'd have had no chance of being first to publish without her xray data.
The claims being disputed here are too vague to be entirely true or false.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, equilibrium governs many aspects of ecosystems. Looked at different ways, an equilibrium could be called both "static" and "dynamic". An equilibrium could be called "static" in that it maintains certain parameters within a certain narrow range, but it does so by reacting "dynamically" to changes.
That said, an equilibrium's *tendency* to resist change doesn't mean change is impossible, or even uncommon. An equilibrium can collapse when the conditions supporting it change, or it's capacity to resist change can be overwhelmed.
Let's say you are fishing wild stocks. All other things being equal, if you take a ton of fish out of a fishing grounds within a generation or two the fish you've removed are replaced because there's more food or habitat for the next generation. Equilibrium re-establishes the old population numbers. But, if I remove pollack faster than they can reproduce, I can overwhelm the equilibrium. In the extreme case let's say I take *all* the tiger muskies out of a pond; equilibrium won't magically conjure replacements out of nothing. Or let's say we're trawling for ocean bottomfish. If our gear destroys the habitat needed by the fish population, we undermine the conditions producing the equilibrium.
We can't understand the natural world without models, but expecting those models outside their limits and assumptions is stupid.
Apparently you have misunderstood me somehow, because you are merely repeating what I have already stated, multiple times. (If not to you, then to others in this same thread.)
Then perhaps we are talking past each other, because that's a common symptom of each side pursuing a different point.
Someone's credibility might be justifiably low, but that doesn't prevent them from saying true things.
This statement is crux of our dispute. We agree on its truth, but not it's practical significance, as we can see here:
you can't determine the truth or falsehood of any given statement by other statements that have been made in the past.
This is absolutely true, and shows we're aiming at two different things. You are aiming for proof beyond any reasonable doubt, the kind of belief that you absolutely won't have to retract unless something you assumed a priori is shown to be wrong. I am aiming at justifiable belief which I am willing to retract as more evidence becomes available.
I think we can both agree that my belief Uncle Fred won't pay me back this time. But we can both agree that it *is* possible something he has changed and he will. I don't have morally certain proof he's lying, but I have reasonable justification for the belief.
An ad hominem argument is one where assertions are made about the person making the claim that have no bearing on judging the truth of that claim. The evidence relevant to an argument depends on the standard of certainty you are aiming for.
Suppose Uncle Fred offers to sell me his car at an amazing price, which he claims is in perfect condition. The effusive manner of his claims rouses my suspicions. I *know* Uncle Fred is a liar, so it's reasonable for me to proceed on the assumption that he is lying once more. By the standard of justifiable belief I can use his past performance as a reasonable basis for turning him down. I don't have to meet the standard of proof beyond all reasonable doubt by paying a mechanic to go over the car with a fine tooth comb.
But let's say I'm really interested in Uncle Fred's car. Maybe it's classic Corvette convertible. My justifiable belief that he's offering me a bad deal makes me a fool if I buy it on his terms, but *not* if I pay a mechanic to inspect the car. The standard of proof needed for justification depends on which action I choose. To walk away and not waste any time on Fred's offer, I need only aim for justifiable belief, which means the fact he's a liar is relevant to my argument. To accept Uncle Fred's offer I ought to adopt a proof beyond substantial doubt standard and hire a mechanic. Once I have the mechanic's report in hand, Uncle Fred's character becomes irrelevant.
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Of course it doesn't include private debt.
Let me lay this crisis out for you. There are five federal government fiscal concepts you need to understand to understand what's going on. (1) Budget; (2) Budget Resolution; (3) Authorization; (4) Appropriation; (5) Debt Authorization. This establishes a kind of belt-and-suspenders-and-another-pair-of-suspenders Congressional control of spending. Why? As you can well guess, control over spending is a major political prize. Roughly speaking, the budget is analyzed, then chopped into little pieces which are then approved piecemeal, giving Congress multiple opportunities to tweak expenditures.
(1) Budget -- the President's proposal to Congress on what to spend in the next fiscal year.
(2) Budget Resolution -- Congress's formal response to the President's budget as a whole; not a "law" per se, but like a letter of intent. It allows government agencies to plan ahead, but not actually spend money.
(3) Authorization -- A law giving Congressional consent to begin work on some program or set of actions that is going to cost money, but not to actually spend any money. Prevents the President from presenting Congress with a fait accompli that would be politically impossible not to fund (e.g. a troop surge).
(4) Appropriation -- A law giving Congressional consent to actually spending money on some program or part of the budget. ** This is where Congress actually gives the Executive branch permission to spend money**. If all the necessarily appropriations aren't passed by the time the fiscal year starts, parts of the government would have to stop running. When this happens Congress passes a "continuing resolution", which allows the effected part of government to continue operating while the appropriation is worked out.
(5) **Debt authorization** -- After the money is spent, the cash to pay the bills incurred has to be raised. Constitutionally this is a Congressional function, but it would be impractical for Congress to vote on every treasury bill issuance, so instead Congress delegates this to the Treasury, authorizing it to raise so much money. *** THIS IS WHAT THE CURRENT FIGHT IS OVER ***.
Normally debt authorization is a routine matter. It is required because the Constitution makes debt issuance a Congressional function, but the Treasury actually does the work. In the current crisis Congress has authorized, appropriated and in many cases *mandated* expenditures, but is refusing to raise money to pay for them after the money has been spent.
This is a new and completely unprecedented kind of crisis. In the 94 years since the current system for handling debt was established, Congress has *never* refused to authorize raising money to pay for expenditures it has appropriated. Not during the Great Depression, not in WW2; not in the stagflation crisis of the 1970s; not in the struggles between the Republican House and the Clinton White House in the 1990s.
Er... this has almost nothing to do with what happened with the banks in 2008. In fact, it's about as unrelated as it is possible for one looming economic crisis to be to some recently past economic crisis. The fallout from the prior crisis is a major contributing factor, of course, but if there is any issue of "looting", it's going to be we the people, through our elected representatives in Congress, who do it.
This crisis is entirely voluntarily precipitated by our political leadership, albeit with the excuse that they believe *some* crisis is coming sooner or later. We are facing default not because we've spent more than was budgeted, or more than was appropriated, but because we spent money that as budgeted and appropriated but now Congress won't let the Treasury raise the money to pay the people we owe money to as a result.
Ideas may be bulletproof, but they aren't dangerous until they're supported with a training and funding infrastructure. It doesn't take *much* training and funding to turn a handful of disgruntled guys hanging out in a radical mosque into a dangerous terrorist cell, but it takes *some*. As in every other field of human endeavor, the number of dreamers vastly outnumber the number of doers. It's a good thing too, because we'd have been over our heads after 9/11 if everyone who cheered at that decided to become a majority of one and strike a blow themselves.
Sure, Ted Kacyznski managed to conduct a solo terror campaign, but he had a lot more brains and energy than your average radical malcontent. Look around you at all the people who have ideas about how the world should be changed. Now start counting the number who do *anything at all* to act on those ideas.
So, yes. The organization matters. In fact it matters more than the idea. There are people with radically different ideas that would be amenable to the same general practical program.
If I were about to die and the only way I could save myself was locking in my employer to a huge, mission critical MySQL installation, I'd prefer the MySQL fate to death.
Call me weird.
Reading between the lines, I'd say PayPal has plans to develop a digital condom.
I watched the STS-135 launch with my teenaged daughter a few minutes ago. I was only a few years older than she when I watched the STS-1 launch with a couple of my friends who stayed over my house for the even. We still had the Apollo era habit of watching all the televised launches.
It really did feel like a new beginning, the dawn of the era of (mostly) reusable spacecraft, just like in science fiction. The Shuttle may have turned out to be an abortive step toward the future, but it also accomplished a great deal and has important lessons for us, if we only have the will to learn them.
Nah. Just return the tax rates to what they werewhen the so-called "Reagan Boom" started. Budget crisis averted without raising taxes beyond what everyone agrees is consistent withdrawal robust economic growth. Bill Gates chips in his share without having to give up the benefactor to humanity gig. Everyone chips in some and the rising tides lift the yachts along with the dinghies.
For the most part I agree with you on the jumping to conclusions part, for example the idea that the editors deliberately deleted voicemails to keep the story alive. We can't know that for sure.
But having printed stories based on the contents of the girl's voicemail, the editors had to have at least been aware that the PI was accessing the voicemail account. This makes them responsible for tampering with potential evidence. Their subsequent use of PIs to illegally access celebrity voicemail accounts shows that this was editorial policy. And since News Corp. hired the editors, it is ultimately responsible.
There's plenty damning here without making things up.
The point isn't that they're made out of human hair. The point is that things we *assume* have to be made from petroleum could be made from *other raw materials*.
The proposed "solution" here isn't making everything we make out of plastic from human hair. The proposed solution is to apply chemistry and ingenuity to problems whose solutions we've taken for granted for the last fifty years or so. It's the materials science wizardry that makes these things cool, not the (ugh) design. Some years ago the company Arthur D. Little set out to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear -- actually they made a nylon-like polymer out of the collagen that forms the bulk of the ear. You'd probably say that was a pointless exercise since actual silk is cheaper, not to mention nylon, but that's because you're missing the point.
Even if you don't give a rat's ass a bout the environment, this is the stuff we'll need to maintain a modern, polymer material dependent lifestyle when petroleum becomes prohibitively expensive. There are plenty of valid criticisms of the environmental movement, but one of the *in*valid ones is that environmentalists want us to live with the tech level of medieval peasants. Possibly some do, but the serious thinkers are well aware of the need for advanced technology to provide an acceptable, sustainable standard of living.
So -- what you're saying is that these are *too ridiculous to become fashionable*?
What happened to Rumsfeld promising that we'd get Iraq's Oil...
So far as I know Rumsfeld never promised the American taxpayer any Iraqi loot. There *was* a lot of administration talk about "low hanging fruit", and indeed that fruit was picked, but not for the benefit of the American taxpayer. A lot of people made a lot of money off of the Iraq war, money that came out of the pockets of the American taxpayer. That part of the post-war reconstruction went off as planned, and no shareholders were harmed in the conduct of the war.
What Rumsfeld (and others in the administration) *did* promise was that Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction. The problem with that scenario was that it was like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps -- while somebody with a sharp knife is attempting to cut off your thumbs.
In a way the whole Iraq war resembled the Iran-Contra fiasco. The Bush administration even named one of the key figures in Iran Contra as ambassador to Iraq during the initial phases of reconstruction. Although it *sounds* a lot worse, it might not have been so bad if the plan was to make Iraq pay the US for the service of being liberated. But that deal was never on the table for the American taxpayer. What the administration was lusting after was a pot of money outside of Constitutionally mandated oversight.
Of course this particular fiasco we are discussing shows once more that congressional oversight doesn't exactly strain the national security budget through a fine tooth comb. Even a project going down in flames doesn't attract much scrutiny. A defense project has to crash and leave nothing behind but a smoking hole in the ground before anyone dares to question it.
I think this is one of those "depends" questions. It depends on the kinds of traffic the rotary serves and it depends on how well engineered the rotary is.
We've used rotaries in New England for as long as I can remember -- back into the 60s at least. The problem with *our* rotaries is that they're engineered to hold a lot of cars moving very fast. Some of the huger examples cars are driving at close to highway speeds. Compare this behemoth with this example. It's not *only* like comparing an elephant to a mouse; it's apples and oranges. The big rotary feeds a major numbered urban route to an interstate highway, the little one handles much less and slower traffic.
Several times I've almost been killed on the big rotary by people entering the rotary at 50mph while talking on their cell phones. I always keep an eye peeled for that so I avoided an accident, but in one case the guy did ended up heading the wrong way because he fishtailed out of control. Now he was an idiot for not paying attention in a dangerous situation, but that is much less likely to happen in the small rotary which *feels* more dangerous, but is much safer on that account.
If this were sentencing, I'd agree with you, but this is *bail* which is assessed *before* guilt is proven. Bail is not supposed to be punitive, it is security that the suspect will not flee the court's jurisdiction before trial. Attempting to punish someone through bail sends the wrong message: that it is acceptable to break the law if you are in a position to get away with it.
As a parent, I think the most important thing about punishments is that they be consistent and very strictly just. I don't believe this out of a concern for the civil rights of children, but out of my understanding of what it takes for a punishment to send the *right* lesson. Any loophole will be seized upon to prove that the punishment was chosen to suit some other purpose than justice. That's why I never punish in anger. If I do, I retract the punishment, explain that I'm only human, then impose a more thoughtful punishment.
The point is that I want my kids to connect the punishment with *their* decisions, not *mine*. I want them to see the punishment as an entirely reasonable and predictable outcome of their actions. That way there's a chance they'll learn right and wrong. I *also* teach them that some rules that are imposed on them from outside *can be* arbitrary. For example, if a teacher wants something that is unreasonable, it's OK to say "no" and take the hit on their grades. That's because when they grow up and are faced by some kind of institutionalized wrong, I want them to act in accordance with their own internal moral compass. This puts me in conflict some times with teachers, who explain they are trying to teach the moral lesson that life requires sacrifices. I reply that while that is an important lesson that I do want my children to learn, I also want them to learn to stand up to people in authority when those people are wrong. Life does require reasonable compromise with the just demands of authority, but when authority overreaches itself the lesson about standing up to it becomes paramount.
You read TFA? Here I was afraid you'd be caught behind, and it looks like you finished your innings out LBW. Rotten, luck old bean. But there it is.
The secret is to work in a field that is useful, but unglamorous. Best treatment I ever had was in my first job, working on inventory software.
It starts with a mommy engineer and a daddy EE geek who love each other very much.
He said *Laser*-pumped, not *Maser*-pumped.
Do try to keep up, dear chap. It's not like we're knapping flint here, old boy.
Humans are animals.
Well, who is their competition for Health, PowerMeter and Tranlation API, and what is that competition up to? Why business rationale does Google have to continue those services?
From a purely economic view, Facebook is a direct competitor for the transactions that bring cash into Google. The eyeball brokers. Why does Google have mail and mapping and all that other stuff? To keep your eyeballs corralled on Google services. Facebook is trying to extend its offerings for the identical reason. Google would be stupid to let Facebook offer competing services without offering some challenge in Facebook's core business.
I've never understood the desire to make personal information about yourself public.
Well, it's no wonder you don't understand the desire to make everything about your life completely public, because for most people *total* exposure isn't a feature of the Facebook model; it's an unfortunate side effect.
The problem with Facebook is that it assumes you have only *one* social network. That your work colleagues, family, and spouse swapping club are just different entry points into one big homogeneous social network. This is manifestly false, but Facebook wants every individual's social network to be as large as possible because that's more profitable. That's why Facebook's twiddling of its privacy controls only produces more confusion. Users can't *get* what they really want with Facebook's network model, so any attempt to impose security on top of that model only makes it harder to share what they *do* want to share with the people they want to share it with.
The big question is how much of this is deliberate? Some think Facebook has a goal of training people to accept less privacy. I don't think that their goals are that long term. Still, I do not think Facebook is unaware that they're not providing the service that people want, nor do I think they are unable to give people what they want. The one homogeneous network model happened to be the one that maximized revenue in the short term. With the gathering backlash against Facebook's usability and security, I think users have figured what Facebook probably already knows: Facebook isn't the service they need.
For a tiny tropical fish like neons, you can use put it in a container of water and put the container in an ice bath. You don't take them out of the water and put them in the freezer; air might not cool them fast enough even though it is colder than the chilling water. It's like that for humans too. Being dumped in 50 degree F water is fatal; in early spring that's shirtsleeves weather for us New Englanders.
For large tropical fish oscars or tinfoil barbs, the fish would be way too massive for the chilled water method.
The anesthesia route is almost certainly the most reliably humane method.
Actually, people very commonly abuse fish by keeping them in extremely bad conditions. The problem is that fish don't communicate pain in a way that is obvious to humans. I've heard people advise putting tropical fish in the freezer to euthanise them! Just because the fish can't scream doesn't mean it's not in pain. The simplest way to euthanize a fish is to quickly cut its head off, but the most humane method is probably an overdose of anesthetic.
Keeping a goldfish in a goldfish bowl is usually death by slow torture. That two inch long goldfish you're keeping in a one gallon bowl is a pond fish which as an adult reaches six times the length and two hundred times the body weight. People don't know this because they keep killing their pets of as tiny juveniles, by slow and painful means I might add. In the long term you probably need *at least* 30 gallons per fish if you intend to keep your goldfish in an aquarium.
Then there's the people who buy single fish of schooling species like neon tetras. You should research the fish you are buying, know the minimum school size, and aim *above* that. A species whose minimum school size is eight will be stressed if you only have four, and *much* healthier (and more interesting to watch) if you keep sixteen.
Fishkeeping is a thinking person's hobby. While it's not rocket science, it takes a fair amount of practical scientific knowledge. You have to research the fish you're buying. I've seen 2" "sharks" in pet stores that are fry of giant catfish species that grow to eight or even ten feet in length.
Science is competitive. If you've ever worked with scientific data sharing you know that scientists are totally paranoid about unpublished data. And history shows they're justified. Watson and Crick weren't entirely up front with Rosalind Franklin about how they were using her data. Later they stiffed her on the degree of credit she deserved, minimizing her contribution even though they'd have had no chance of being first to publish without her xray data.
The claims being disputed here are too vague to be entirely true or false.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, equilibrium governs many aspects of ecosystems. Looked at different ways, an equilibrium could be called both "static" and "dynamic". An equilibrium could be called "static" in that it maintains certain parameters within a certain narrow range, but it does so by reacting "dynamically" to changes.
That said, an equilibrium's *tendency* to resist change doesn't mean change is impossible, or even uncommon. An equilibrium can collapse when the conditions supporting it change, or it's capacity to resist change can be overwhelmed.
Let's say you are fishing wild stocks. All other things being equal, if you take a ton of fish out of a fishing grounds within a generation or two the fish you've removed are replaced because there's more food or habitat for the next generation. Equilibrium re-establishes the old population numbers. But, if I remove pollack faster than they can reproduce, I can overwhelm the equilibrium. In the extreme case let's say I take *all* the tiger muskies out of a pond; equilibrium won't magically conjure replacements out of nothing. Or let's say we're trawling for ocean bottomfish. If our gear destroys the habitat needed by the fish population, we undermine the conditions producing the equilibrium.
We can't understand the natural world without models, but expecting those models outside their limits and assumptions is stupid.
Apparently you have misunderstood me somehow, because you are merely repeating what I have already stated, multiple times. (If not to you, then to others in this same thread.)
Then perhaps we are talking past each other, because that's a common symptom of each side pursuing a different point.
Someone's credibility might be justifiably low, but that doesn't prevent them from saying true things.
This statement is crux of our dispute. We agree on its truth, but not it's practical significance, as we can see here:
you can't determine the truth or falsehood of any given statement by other statements that have been made in the past.
This is absolutely true, and shows we're aiming at two different things. You are aiming for proof beyond any reasonable doubt, the kind of belief that you absolutely won't have to retract unless something you assumed a priori is shown to be wrong. I am aiming at justifiable belief which I am willing to retract as more evidence becomes available.
I think we can both agree that my belief Uncle Fred won't pay me back this time. But we can both agree that it *is* possible something he has changed and he will. I don't have morally certain proof he's lying, but I have reasonable justification for the belief.
An ad hominem argument is one where assertions are made about the person making the claim that have no bearing on judging the truth of that claim. The evidence relevant to an argument depends on the standard of certainty you are aiming for.
Suppose Uncle Fred offers to sell me his car at an amazing price, which he claims is in perfect condition. The effusive manner of his claims rouses my suspicions. I *know* Uncle Fred is a liar, so it's reasonable for me to proceed on the assumption that he is lying once more. By the standard of justifiable belief I can use his past performance as a reasonable basis for turning him down. I don't have to meet the standard of proof beyond all reasonable doubt by paying a mechanic to go over the car with a fine tooth comb.
But let's say I'm really interested in Uncle Fred's car. Maybe it's classic Corvette convertible. My justifiable belief that he's offering me a bad deal makes me a fool if I buy it on his terms, but *not* if I pay a mechanic to inspect the car. The standard of proof needed for justification depends on which action I choose. To walk away and not waste any time on Fred's offer, I need only aim for justifiable belief, which means the fact he's a liar is relevant to my argument. To accept Uncle Fred's offer I ought to adopt a proof beyond substantial doubt standard and hire a mechanic. Once I have the mechanic's report in hand, Uncle Fred's character becomes irrelevant.