As a parent you have to do both: trust your own judgment referring to your own memories and experience, and seek out the experience and knowledge of others. Parenting is an exercise in critical thinking, and that applies both to understanding the limitations of your own experience and the limitations of the findings of people regarded as "experts".
You do your best as a parent, and part of that is seeking out other points of view, although not necessarily accepting them wholesale. You filter them through your own judgment.
One of the things every system designer needs to understand is the role of emotion in human cognition. Survival-related reactions like fear or anger have absolute priority over all higher levels of cognition. Once you suspect a tiger in the grass, your perceptions will tend to process only confirmatory data. That's your reptilian brain trying to get you the hell out of Dodge.
So it's a statistical certainty that if you broadcast an emergency announcement that concludes with "exercise, exercise, exercise", a substantial fraction of the recpients will not perceive that concluding disclaimer at all. That inability to process contradictory data will continue until the level of emotional arousal drops. Cognitive psychologists call this the "Emotional Refractory Period", or ERP. Until the ERP is over you can't count on rational judgment, only on rote training.
So from a systems or exercise designer's standpoint, you need to start the drill with the disclaimer. Ending it with a disclaimer is nearly useless. What's more, introducing conflicting signals ("this is not a drill") is a really bad idea, because you risk triggering a higher priority behavior control system.
The refractory nature of emotions is why it's so important to control things like anger, which served us well when we were living in paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands but causes mostly mischief in modern society. If you get angry or fearful because of misinformation, you literally can't fix that until you stop being angry or afraid. That's what makes survival related emotions such potent tools of political manipulation.
Well, I don't know what it takes to be a "child expert", but presumably it takes more than having had a childhood. One thing that having a business taught me about customers, and by extension people in general, is that you can't take it for granted that your own experiences and preferences are universal, or even typical.
And in any case I don't think the real problem with children -- particularly teenagers -- is them seeing bad things, although that's a kind of weird cultural obsession we have.
I stand corrected. But one of those pharmacies got 9 million pills in two years. Given that there are larger pharmacies just across the river from it, it's still pretty damned ridiculous.
In 2016. opioid overdoses claimed 64,000 lives. That's like a 9/11 attack every 17 days. It's like terrorists wiping out a city the size of Topeka KS every two years. It's amazing to me that anything else is news while something this big is going on, and our politicians are literally doing nothing about it.
Oh, last year Congress allocated a billion dollars in block grants to be spent over two years, but I have seen what dropping these kinds of hot potato money bombs on state public health agencies does: it just ends up lining the pockets of politically connected contractors. Give a state agency currently operating on a shoestring ten million dollars it has to spend by the end of the year and it won't even have the manpower to oversee that much spending while doing the other things it has to do.
In one case I know of a state public health agency spent a million dollars on a public reporting website that the state's own internal IT people told me they'd have charged back $10,000 for. But they had to spend the money immediately, and so they turned to one of the very few contractors capable of absorbing that much federally encumbered money on such short notice. And because those contractors maintain substantial Washington lobbying presence they were probably ready to take the hot potato off the agency's hand before the agency knew it was coming.
A serious effort to spend 20 million dollars in a state on this problem would give them that money over ten years to be spent at whatever pace they could manage effectively. That would do far more for the people working closest to the problem. Hot potato funding is just a gift to the congressens' political cronies.
In any case a billion dollars is peanuts. We spent trillions in response to 9/11, and even reorganized the Executive Branch, all for what is in comparison a minor event.
They were shipped to two pharmacies in the small town but is also county seat and has the only hospital in the county.
208 million divided by a population of 26839 is 7750 pills per person.. Over the course of ten years that's two oxycodone doses per day for every man, woman, child and infant in the county, and that's assuming everyone in the county went to the county seat rather than closer pharmacies in adjacent counties, which include several Walmarts.
There's really no way to make this even close to reasonable. West Virginia has the highest opioid death rate in the country, 52 deaths per 100,0000, but even so there probably aren't even enough opioid addicts in the vicinity of these pharmacies to absorb all those pills. They must have been funneled into the black market.
Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.
No, the researchers were able to us normal investigative techniques to recover real names. It'd hardly be news if someone's ID was determined because they told the world, would it?
I've long thought most Bitcoin users are naively confident that Bitcoin by itself protects their identity. This is typical in tech -- people rely too much on the properties of the technology to keep them safe and don't put enough thought into how they use the tech. Even if Bitcoin were technically perfect, every place where your transactions interface with the real world is a loose thread that law enforcement could pull -- and at the other end of that thread is your identity.
Bitcoin only has marginal value in protecting privacy. To someone already taking extraordinary steps to protect themselves it has some value. But to someone who thinks it will magically shield them from law enforcement, I'd be surprised if it has any value at all. If you convert Bitcoins to dollars and vice versa, you'd better have laundered them first. And if you have contraband shipped, you'd better have it shipped to a neighbor and then grab it off his porch.
You are confusing two separate issues: connecting a bunch of cells together to create a large format battery, which of course has been done before, and doing it on a scale that will achieve a 30% reduction in per unit costs.
I think Hollywood is incapable of intentionally making movies that might offend people it needs to watch them.
Hollywood is basically squishy. It'll appeal to non-controversial middle-of-the road sentiments, like patriotism or respect for minorities, but don't expect it to challenge its audiences.
I don't see fantasy as being intrinsically toxic; it's mixing up fantasy with reality that's dangerous.
That includes de-humanizing the SS. The problem is that the SS were all too human. We call them "inhuman" because they violate our ideals about what humans are supposed to be like. But in fact what they did was far from historically unprecedented, except for the way in which modern organization and technology gave scope to their behavior, something that should give all of us a shudder of horror.
Still, those ideals, while historically false, are important. As Terry Pratchett said, "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."
... read Gordie Dickson's Dorsai!. Starship Troopers is something very, very different, and more difficult to dismiss. You can't put Heinlein in a neat box because he challenges you, and himself. That's what makes Heinlein a great writer where Dickson is merely an entertaining one.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Dickson, he's just not on Heinlein's level.
Now is Starship Troopers militaristic? Absolutely. Is it fascist? I think not, although I can see the appeal for the simple-minded fascist. It is a militaristic novel that questions the concept of fundamental individual rights.
But I don't think Heinlein was a fascist, I think he was a ferocious skeptic. What if you organized a society around something other than inherent an inalienable individual rights? What's telling is the Heinlein makes this world neither a dystopia nor a utopia; it's just workable. Fascists are always selling a formula for establishing a kind of golden age.
I suggest that there's a difference between bringing up the first factory of its kind and bringing up a factory which is just a variation on what's been done many times before. Even if an entire vehicle is fundamentally more complex than an enormous battery back, the number of novel solutions you need to come up with is probably a truer measure of engineering risk.
If you were to line up the people in order of their responsibility for the result, he'd be in the lineup, but at the back, behind the people responsible for his hiring and training him. Also the people responsible for militarizing the police force.
SWAT was popularized in the 60s due to fear of political unrest by minorities. LA forrmed its squad -- immensely influential because of its impact on popular entertainment -- in the wake of the Watts riots. One of the earliest uses of SWAT was against peaceful demonstrations by the Latino farm workers. Fears of the civil rights movement accelerated the adoption of SWAT tactics. Which is not to say in an era of unprecedented private firearm ownership you don't need some kind of more highly armed response, but intimidation has always been one of the purposes of SWAT teams.
If you build a tool for intimidation and leave it lying around, someone is going to use it. They are responsible for their own actions, but you are responsible for enabling them.
Somebody wanting something they ought not have doesn't make them an imbecile. Things would be a lot easier if people were only ever wrong because they were idiots or liars.
The world is full of people who are neither, but each is working off his personal experience, which is inevitably only a small slice of the big picture. Which means on any particular issue any of us can get things very wrong where they bear on things outside our expertise.
That's why we need democracy, transparent government, and open debate on issues like this.
As for him being not to be trusted -- that goes without saying. He runs a large law enforcement agency responsible for domestic security and counter-intelligence. Even if he were the most personally honest person in the world, he should not be trusted. You don't have to intend harm to do it.
I read an article by a data analytics guy for an online dating company in which he noted that while there was a positive correlation between attractiveness ratings of profile pictures and attempted contacts, profile pictures with the greatest variance in ratings got the most interest of all.
In other words your best bet is not to be conventionally pretty, but to appeal strongly to unconventional tastes.
Slashdot Mirror
As a parent you have to do both: trust your own judgment referring to your own memories and experience, and seek out the experience and knowledge of others. Parenting is an exercise in critical thinking, and that applies both to understanding the limitations of your own experience and the limitations of the findings of people regarded as "experts".
You do your best as a parent, and part of that is seeking out other points of view, although not necessarily accepting them wholesale. You filter them through your own judgment.
According to the NPR story the message concluded with "exercise, exercise, exercise". I don't know where you're getting your information.
If it is part of the real message, then it needs to be in the exercise message.
What I'm saying is if that is true, it shouldn't be part of the real message. Otherwise, what purpose do you imagine it serving in a real emergency?
There is no purpose to the phrase "this is not a drill" if you use it in drills. Better to omit it.
I've just heard an exercise message that began "exercise exercise exercise." I'm so angry I'm going to forget that I heard it. What?
The relevant emotion here is fear.
One of the things every system designer needs to understand is the role of emotion in human cognition. Survival-related reactions like fear or anger have absolute priority over all higher levels of cognition. Once you suspect a tiger in the grass, your perceptions will tend to process only confirmatory data. That's your reptilian brain trying to get you the hell out of Dodge.
So it's a statistical certainty that if you broadcast an emergency announcement that concludes with "exercise, exercise, exercise", a substantial fraction of the recpients will not perceive that concluding disclaimer at all. That inability to process contradictory data will continue until the level of emotional arousal drops. Cognitive psychologists call this the "Emotional Refractory Period", or ERP. Until the ERP is over you can't count on rational judgment, only on rote training.
So from a systems or exercise designer's standpoint, you need to start the drill with the disclaimer. Ending it with a disclaimer is nearly useless. What's more, introducing conflicting signals ("this is not a drill") is a really bad idea, because you risk triggering a higher priority behavior control system.
The refractory nature of emotions is why it's so important to control things like anger, which served us well when we were living in paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands but causes mostly mischief in modern society. If you get angry or fearful because of misinformation, you literally can't fix that until you stop being angry or afraid. That's what makes survival related emotions such potent tools of political manipulation.
Well, I don't know what it takes to be a "child expert", but presumably it takes more than having had a childhood. One thing that having a business taught me about customers, and by extension people in general, is that you can't take it for granted that your own experiences and preferences are universal, or even typical.
And in any case I don't think the real problem with children -- particularly teenagers -- is them seeing bad things, although that's a kind of weird cultural obsession we have.
I stand corrected. But one of those pharmacies got 9 million pills in two years. Given that there are larger pharmacies just across the river from it, it's still pretty damned ridiculous.
In 2016. opioid overdoses claimed 64,000 lives. That's like a 9/11 attack every 17 days. It's like terrorists wiping out a city the size of Topeka KS every two years. It's amazing to me that anything else is news while something this big is going on, and our politicians are literally doing nothing about it.
Oh, last year Congress allocated a billion dollars in block grants to be spent over two years, but I have seen what dropping these kinds of hot potato money bombs on state public health agencies does: it just ends up lining the pockets of politically connected contractors. Give a state agency currently operating on a shoestring ten million dollars it has to spend by the end of the year and it won't even have the manpower to oversee that much spending while doing the other things it has to do.
In one case I know of a state public health agency spent a million dollars on a public reporting website that the state's own internal IT people told me they'd have charged back $10,000 for. But they had to spend the money immediately, and so they turned to one of the very few contractors capable of absorbing that much federally encumbered money on such short notice. And because those contractors maintain substantial Washington lobbying presence they were probably ready to take the hot potato off the agency's hand before the agency knew it was coming.
A serious effort to spend 20 million dollars in a state on this problem would give them that money over ten years to be spent at whatever pace they could manage effectively. That would do far more for the people working closest to the problem. Hot potato funding is just a gift to the congressens' political cronies.
In any case a billion dollars is peanuts. We spent trillions in response to 9/11, and even reorganized the Executive Branch, all for what is in comparison a minor event.
They were shipped to two pharmacies in the small town but is also county seat and has the only hospital in the county.
208 million divided by a population of 26839 is 7750 pills per person.. Over the course of ten years that's two oxycodone doses per day for every man, woman, child and infant in the county, and that's assuming everyone in the county went to the county seat rather than closer pharmacies in adjacent counties, which include several Walmarts.
There's really no way to make this even close to reasonable. West Virginia has the highest opioid death rate in the country, 52 deaths per 100,0000, but even so there probably aren't even enough opioid addicts in the vicinity of these pharmacies to absorb all those pills. They must have been funneled into the black market.
calling the accusations "speculative and baseless" is not actually a denial.
Believing a different source uncritically doesn't make you a skeptic. It just makes you another kind of fool.
Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.
No, the researchers were able to us normal investigative techniques to recover real names. It'd hardly be news if someone's ID was determined because they told the world, would it?
I've long thought most Bitcoin users are naively confident that Bitcoin by itself protects their identity. This is typical in tech -- people rely too much on the properties of the technology to keep them safe and don't put enough thought into how they use the tech. Even if Bitcoin were technically perfect, every place where your transactions interface with the real world is a loose thread that law enforcement could pull -- and at the other end of that thread is your identity.
Bitcoin only has marginal value in protecting privacy. To someone already taking extraordinary steps to protect themselves it has some value. But to someone who thinks it will magically shield them from law enforcement, I'd be surprised if it has any value at all. If you convert Bitcoins to dollars and vice versa, you'd better have laundered them first. And if you have contraband shipped, you'd better have it shipped to a neighbor and then grab it off his porch.
You are confusing two separate issues: connecting a bunch of cells together to create a large format battery, which of course has been done before, and doing it on a scale that will achieve a 30% reduction in per unit costs.
The problem is even bad operations get some things right.
The question is, is any organization actually competent with IT?
I think Hollywood is incapable of intentionally making movies that might offend people it needs to watch them.
Hollywood is basically squishy. It'll appeal to non-controversial middle-of-the road sentiments, like patriotism or respect for minorities, but don't expect it to challenge its audiences.
I don't see fantasy as being intrinsically toxic; it's mixing up fantasy with reality that's dangerous.
That includes de-humanizing the SS. The problem is that the SS were all too human. We call them "inhuman" because they violate our ideals about what humans are supposed to be like. But in fact what they did was far from historically unprecedented, except for the way in which modern organization and technology gave scope to their behavior, something that should give all of us a shudder of horror.
Still, those ideals, while historically false, are important. As Terry Pratchett said, "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."
... read Gordie Dickson's Dorsai!. Starship Troopers is something very, very different, and more difficult to dismiss. You can't put Heinlein in a neat box because he challenges you, and himself. That's what makes Heinlein a great writer where Dickson is merely an entertaining one.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Dickson, he's just not on Heinlein's level.
Now is Starship Troopers militaristic? Absolutely. Is it fascist? I think not, although I can see the appeal for the simple-minded fascist. It is a militaristic novel that questions the concept of fundamental individual rights.
But I don't think Heinlein was a fascist, I think he was a ferocious skeptic. What if you organized a society around something other than inherent an inalienable individual rights? What's telling is the Heinlein makes this world neither a dystopia nor a utopia; it's just workable. Fascists are always selling a formula for establishing a kind of golden age.
Straw man much?
I suggest that there's a difference between bringing up the first factory of its kind and bringing up a factory which is just a variation on what's been done many times before. Even if an entire vehicle is fundamentally more complex than an enormous battery back, the number of novel solutions you need to come up with is probably a truer measure of engineering risk.
If you were to line up the people in order of their responsibility for the result, he'd be in the lineup, but at the back, behind the people responsible for his hiring and training him. Also the people responsible for militarizing the police force.
SWAT was popularized in the 60s due to fear of political unrest by minorities. LA forrmed its squad -- immensely influential because of its impact on popular entertainment -- in the wake of the Watts riots. One of the earliest uses of SWAT was against peaceful demonstrations by the Latino farm workers. Fears of the civil rights movement accelerated the adoption of SWAT tactics. Which is not to say in an era of unprecedented private firearm ownership you don't need some kind of more highly armed response, but intimidation has always been one of the purposes of SWAT teams.
If you build a tool for intimidation and leave it lying around, someone is going to use it. They are responsible for their own actions, but you are responsible for enabling them.
If you believe the whole Russian collusion line I feel bad for you.
Interesting that you can't even call "bullshit" without bullshit.
Somebody wanting something they ought not have doesn't make them an imbecile. Things would be a lot easier if people were only ever wrong because they were idiots or liars.
The world is full of people who are neither, but each is working off his personal experience, which is inevitably only a small slice of the big picture. Which means on any particular issue any of us can get things very wrong where they bear on things outside our expertise.
That's why we need democracy, transparent government, and open debate on issues like this.
As for him being not to be trusted -- that goes without saying. He runs a large law enforcement agency responsible for domestic security and counter-intelligence. Even if he were the most personally honest person in the world, he should not be trusted. You don't have to intend harm to do it.
Ah, now that's proper pedantry.
I read an article by a data analytics guy for an online dating company in which he noted that while there was a positive correlation between attractiveness ratings of profile pictures and attempted contacts, profile pictures with the greatest variance in ratings got the most interest of all.
In other words your best bet is not to be conventionally pretty, but to appeal strongly to unconventional tastes.