And there you put your finger on the distinguishing characteristic of the authoritarian personality: its obsession with punishment and avoiding punishment. Someone who has been thoroughly trained to avoid punishment is malleable, therefore seen as "responsible".
The thing is that the US military understands obedience is not enough, even for a military culture. That they want is someone who can not only follow instructions, but understand them and take personal initiative when appropriate. They understand that they need resilient people, but the supply of people who can be trained to that standard is limited.
A lot of American cops have prior military training. That's because most police forces have strong veteran hiring policies that weigh military experience before education or test scores. America fights a lot of wars, and therefore has a huge number of of veterans.
It's not military training that's needed, it's cop training. In fact I'd guess being trained for military urban combat means you've got a lot to unlearn.
I'm not disagreeing with you. If the police can do no wrong, then you pretty much have to turn a blind eye to the inevitable. Nor is it a pretense that can be maintained by denial alone.
The police are in fact protecting sociopaths, and it goes all the way up to the judges and prosecutors who protect them every time something like this happens.
Yes, but that's because people don't have the framework by which they can distinguish sociopathy and organizational dysfunction. By denying dysfunction exists, that leaves you with either pretending that bad things didn't happen, that they happened for a good reason, or that they were the result of a few bad apples.
Visualize human knowledge as a sphere. The surface area of that sphere increases as the square of the radius -- in other words our contact with the unknown grows more rapidly than our reach.
At the edge of that sphere is a shell of things we've only recently become aware of -- the known but unfamiliar. For a stone age hunter-gatherer this was a very thin rind, like the skin of an apple. For us, that rind is big fraction of the fruit's volume. In other words Og the Caveman almost always knew exactly what he was doing. In comparison we spend a huge amount of effort in making things up as we go along, and it will only get worse as knowledge continues to advance.
A column of traffic can act like a one dimensional fluid. If everyone drove as you did, that fluid would be compressible -- any local variation in speed would tend to propagate slowly and continuously, if at all. But if everyone tailgates, the column of traffic acts like an *incompressible* fluid. That means when you tap the brakes, it generates something analogous to a shockwave which can propagate faster than the traffic itself is moving. In fact that's the norm in heavy traffic.
Well, I think you got the right conclusion, but I don't support how you got there. You can't allow somebody to do something wrong because if they don't do it, someone else will. No the real issue is that Amazon didn't do anything wrong here -- and I can't believe I just wrote that.
As long as they don't represent themselves *as* Birkenstock, or sell counterfeit goods, what they're doing is looking for people in the market for sandals.
That's the simplistic explanation, and the problem with simplistic explanations is that they can be true -- some of the time. You have to assume police have at least their share of sociopaths and substance abusers. But I think the problem is bigger than that. You can't personify the police, you have to view them as a population.
That's why I'm interested in the actual details of the model. Exactly what you are optimizing and how you describe it makes a big difference.
For example widening a highway clearly increases its capacity, but if the capacity of the roads it feeds is limited you just end up turning a long skinny traffic jam into a short fat one. I've seen this happen on multiple occasions. The parameter being optimized (throughput) was the wrong one.
That's not surprising. Spread cars out too much and you reduce the roadway's capacity. Put them too close together and you have to slow down to accommodate the driver's minimal reaction time. Having every driver choose his own distance means you can have both effects simultaneously: wasted space and insufficient response time.
Put all these constraints on and it seems obvious that you want to space cars uniformly with the minimal distance consistent with whatever statistical level of safety you demand. Naturally robotic systems will be more efficient since they require less response time -- in fact they can react to events that will cause the car in front to slow.
What would be interesting is to see the exact results they came up with: how far for how fast and under what conditions? What are the significant input parameters of the model? For example I'm sure varying the acceptable probability of a crash has a powerful effect on the optimal distance.
This is the problem with franchises. It's the promise of the same thing over and over again that brings fans back, but you can't really have the same experience over and over again. What you have to do is open up new facets of the story, the way the Battlestar Galactica reboot did, but even that you can't do that indefinitely.
The problem isn't the universe, the problem is not having anything to add to it. I feel this way about steampunk novels. Using the standard tropes simplifies the writer's job, and return he ought to give us something extra: add new tropes to the trove, or have something interesting or even subversive to say. A story should offer more than watching someone play with this store-bought Star Wars play set does.
Because it would have been so much better if they'd got the "right" guy...
Any time a SWAT team is used, police come prepared for war, and where you have war, you have fog-of-war. Everyone knows hasty decisions are unreliable, and none are more hasty and unreliable than split second decisions made under the belief that it's your life or theirs.
Consider the fovea, the only part of the retina which provides clear, high resolution images. It covers an angular extent roughly equivalent to twice your thumbnail's width held at arm's length. And yet we experience the world as if in super-HD resolution. That experience is interpolated by the brain out of a narrow stream of visual data. That is how police have, in documented cases, mistaken things like a slice of pizza for a gun. They expected there to be a gun, and their brains put the gun where that blob of pixels was. It's exact the same perceptual phenomenon that caused the Apache helicopter pilots to mistake a journalist's camera for an RPG in the so-called "collateral murder" video.
Seeing what you expect to see is why stage magic works too; magicians exploit the fact we each live in a conjectural world, the product of the brain's building complete and coherent models of our surroundings from incomplete data. These models only have to be good enough to confer an evolutionary advantage, and they're often exaggerated as anyone who has ever been surprised by an animal they don't immediately recognize can tell you. Your brain makes the critter larger.
All this makes sending men in primed for a fight for survival tantamount to manslaughter if there is no actual need for that.
Alright, link me to your 800,000 years of evidence.
As for the what-if models, they worked out pretty well when the predicted, in the 1970s, the reversal of a global cooling trend that had been going on since 1940. That's pretty damn good confirmation.
Calling a model "what if" makes it sounds dodgy, but any prediction of the future is "what if" -- even if that prediction is that there will be no change. Predicting that the atmosphere will warm because of some other reason is also relying on a "what if" model.
Standard minimum ground clearance for the rotors is something like 20m, chosen to minimize events like Quixote strikes, which could be ugly given that the blades can be moving at 80 m/sec, or about 180 mph.
Oh, there was some bad storytelling back in the original trilogy.
"A New Hope" was apparently a total mess in the rough cut; some radical and brilliant editing that cut out Lucas's flat-footed exposition and created the quick pacing we remember that film for. Lucas was largely absent from the second installment and returned to deliver a disappointing Return of the Jedi.
Lucas has tried to blame the bad rough cut of New Hope on his first editor and take credit for the changes in the final theatrical cut, but many of the thing that were wrong with that rough cut returned in Phantom Menace, when Lucas had become too powerful to say "no" to.
It really isn't true you can turn anything into a hit with marketing and branding. I think the truth is more like this: with a powerful brand, any reasonably solid installment is guaranteed to be a hit. That's why Disney wanted this brand.
But solid isn't the same as perfect. Anything as complex as a movie is bound to have plenty of flaws you can latch onto. When Disney bought this brand they didn't put it into the hands of complete hacks, they put smart people on it, and the mistakes are the kinds of mistakes smart people make when they're trying to be clever. For example the movie deals with peoples' anxiety the Mouse Empire buying the IP rights to their childhoods by giving us a subplot with an anti-corporate theme. Now I think it's usually a good idea for a writer to have a strong point of view (even if I disagree), but this doesn't feel sincere. It doesn't have the bite of genuine anger, it's just some throw-away posturing.
The script also struggles with the truth that franchise can't survive by serving the fans exactly what they want. That creative struggle bleeds through to all that "destroy the old" theme that runs through the movie. I thought that was overdone; it would have been wiser to pander to fans just a *little* bit more.
But the biggest problem of this franchise is its biggest strength: people who've been fans since childhood. These fans bring an adult perspective that they didn't have when they imprinted on the franchise. I think Disney is right to pitch the films a bit more to the fans more adult selves, but there's also a built in futility to that.
-- which is a pretty safe assumption if the lawyers drawing up contest rules were competent -- how to deal with the PR fallout?
If it were me I'd do what lotteries are set up to do: make people regard a worthless piece of paper as valuable.
The SC lottery transfer about $400 million annually to the state. 5% of that -- the usual accounting benchmark for a "not materially significant" fraction -- would amount to $20 million. $20 million is a lot of money to a lottery player.
So I'd take $20 million and set up a lottery for people who are holding worthless winning tickets. They'd still be worthless, but they wouldn't seem worthless. To make the game exciting I'd have a big jackpot -- say $5 million -- but lots and lots of small prizes too.
Legally the liability of the state is likely limited in several ways, including terms of service and sovereign immunity. It's almost certain they can get away with not honoring the tickets *legally*. That doesn't mean they can get away with it flat-out.
A lottery ticket sale is a transaction in which someone gives you perfectly good money in exchange for something which is practically worthless. In other words a lottery is the next thing to a license to print money. But the whole thing depends on suckers trusting a system which is deliberately statistically rigged against them. If someone bought what looks like a winning lottery ticket in good faith, pointing out that the systems is also legally rigged is not going to restore that all important naive faith.
So the lottery commission is gong to have to do *something* for people who bought their tickets in good faith, even if it's not compelled to legally. Excluding people who knowingly attempted to exploit what was going on is probably acceptable, particularly to good-faith buyers, but it's going to be hard given the anonymous nature of lottery sales.
That said, I often like to convert volumetric measurements like cups into metric mass units. This makes it much easier to achieve consistent quantities for things like flour that can be compacted, and easy to scale recipes up and down.
I also measure out coffee grounds and water for coffee in grams because I use set ratios (depending on method) of 1:12 or 1:15.
First of all, ten years isn't the right time frame. For most of that time replaceable batteries were still the norm. You have to focus on the the period in which replaceable batteries had become a rarity. During that shorter period, more phones than just those two developed battery issues over their lifetime. The Samsung Galaxy S6, for example. That would have been a fiasco, except that by the time it started to be a problem it was overshadowed by a bigger fiasco Samsung was having with its next gen phones.
Li-ion batteries means they lose capacity rather quickly, but that didn't matter when you could replace them. These days the only way to be sure that a phone still usable after two years is to spec a battery with plenty excess capacity.
But do customers appreciate that capacity? Not when they're auditioning the phone in the showroom, and not in the first few months when critical word of mouth could kill sales. So future capacity is an attractive place to shortchange the customer.
As Mr. Scott would say, you canna change the laws of physics.
All batteries have internal resistance, which limits the power the battery can deliver. As you draw more and more current, the voltage across the internal resistance increases, and that limits the amount of power you can actually deliver into a load.
This is true of every battery, so to the designers have to supply a "big" battery -- which is the same as saying a battery with a low internal resistance. The wrinkle here is that batteries age. Lithium ion batteries age rather quickly too, even if they're just kept on the shelf. And by age, I mean that the internal resistance rises, which is the same as saying they become "smaller" as they get older.
So saying that some models have this problem and others don't is just wrong. *All* models have this problem, it just affects some models earlier than others.
I think natural persons and by extension their estates should have the inalienable moral and natural right to their name as far as trademarks go.
Technically this would make company names like "Honda" or "Walgreens" invalid. What "inalienable" means is that it is legally impossible for you to part with the thing or convey it to someone else. Any contract in which you sold the rights to use your name would be unenforceable.
The reason for calling the right to liberty "inalienable" is that it automatically renders any claim that the people implicitly accepted a reduction in liberty void. Even if they explicitly agreed to give up their liberty in exchange for something else, that agreement would be null. But if you believe this, there is no argument by which you can justify slavery, something that Thomas Jefferson himself was too intelligent to miss.
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And there you put your finger on the distinguishing characteristic of the authoritarian personality: its obsession with punishment and avoiding punishment. Someone who has been thoroughly trained to avoid punishment is malleable, therefore seen as "responsible".
The thing is that the US military understands obedience is not enough, even for a military culture. That they want is someone who can not only follow instructions, but understand them and take personal initiative when appropriate. They understand that they need resilient people, but the supply of people who can be trained to that standard is limited.
A lot of American cops have prior military training. That's because most police forces have strong veteran hiring policies that weigh military experience before education or test scores. America fights a lot of wars, and therefore has a huge number of of veterans.
It's not military training that's needed, it's cop training. In fact I'd guess being trained for military urban combat means you've got a lot to unlearn.
I'm not disagreeing with you. If the police can do no wrong, then you pretty much have to turn a blind eye to the inevitable. Nor is it a pretense that can be maintained by denial alone.
Irony is dead, I guess.
The police are in fact protecting sociopaths, and it goes all the way up to the judges and prosecutors who protect them every time something like this happens.
Yes, but that's because people don't have the framework by which they can distinguish sociopathy and organizational dysfunction. By denying dysfunction exists, that leaves you with either pretending that bad things didn't happen, that they happened for a good reason, or that they were the result of a few bad apples.
Visualize human knowledge as a sphere. The surface area of that sphere increases as the square of the radius -- in other words our contact with the unknown grows more rapidly than our reach.
At the edge of that sphere is a shell of things we've only recently become aware of -- the known but unfamiliar. For a stone age hunter-gatherer this was a very thin rind, like the skin of an apple. For us, that rind is big fraction of the fruit's volume. In other words Og the Caveman almost always knew exactly what he was doing. In comparison we spend a huge amount of effort in making things up as we go along, and it will only get worse as knowledge continues to advance.
A column of traffic can act like a one dimensional fluid. If everyone drove as you did, that fluid would be compressible -- any local variation in speed would tend to propagate slowly and continuously, if at all. But if everyone tailgates, the column of traffic acts like an *incompressible* fluid. That means when you tap the brakes, it generates something analogous to a shockwave which can propagate faster than the traffic itself is moving. In fact that's the norm in heavy traffic.
Well, I think you got the right conclusion, but I don't support how you got there. You can't allow somebody to do something wrong because if they don't do it, someone else will. No the real issue is that Amazon didn't do anything wrong here -- and I can't believe I just wrote that.
As long as they don't represent themselves *as* Birkenstock, or sell counterfeit goods, what they're doing is looking for people in the market for sandals.
That's the simplistic explanation, and the problem with simplistic explanations is that they can be true -- some of the time. You have to assume police have at least their share of sociopaths and substance abusers. But I think the problem is bigger than that. You can't personify the police, you have to view them as a population.
That's why I'm interested in the actual details of the model. Exactly what you are optimizing and how you describe it makes a big difference.
For example widening a highway clearly increases its capacity, but if the capacity of the roads it feeds is limited you just end up turning a long skinny traffic jam into a short fat one. I've seen this happen on multiple occasions. The parameter being optimized (throughput) was the wrong one.
That's not surprising. Spread cars out too much and you reduce the roadway's capacity. Put them too close together and you have to slow down to accommodate the driver's minimal reaction time. Having every driver choose his own distance means you can have both effects simultaneously: wasted space and insufficient response time.
Put all these constraints on and it seems obvious that you want to space cars uniformly with the minimal distance consistent with whatever statistical level of safety you demand. Naturally robotic systems will be more efficient since they require less response time -- in fact they can react to events that will cause the car in front to slow.
What would be interesting is to see the exact results they came up with: how far for how fast and under what conditions? What are the significant input parameters of the model? For example I'm sure varying the acceptable probability of a crash has a powerful effect on the optimal distance.
This is the problem with franchises. It's the promise of the same thing over and over again that brings fans back, but you can't really have the same experience over and over again. What you have to do is open up new facets of the story, the way the Battlestar Galactica reboot did, but even that you can't do that indefinitely.
The problem isn't the universe, the problem is not having anything to add to it. I feel this way about steampunk novels. Using the standard tropes simplifies the writer's job, and return he ought to give us something extra: add new tropes to the trove, or have something interesting or even subversive to say. A story should offer more than watching someone play with this store-bought Star Wars play set does.
Because it would have been so much better if they'd got the "right" guy...
Any time a SWAT team is used, police come prepared for war, and where you have war, you have fog-of-war. Everyone knows hasty decisions are unreliable, and none are more hasty and unreliable than split second decisions made under the belief that it's your life or theirs.
Consider the fovea, the only part of the retina which provides clear, high resolution images. It covers an angular extent roughly equivalent to twice your thumbnail's width held at arm's length. And yet we experience the world as if in super-HD resolution. That experience is interpolated by the brain out of a narrow stream of visual data. That is how police have, in documented cases, mistaken things like a slice of pizza for a gun. They expected there to be a gun, and their brains put the gun where that blob of pixels was. It's exact the same perceptual phenomenon that caused the Apache helicopter pilots to mistake a journalist's camera for an RPG in the so-called "collateral murder" video.
Seeing what you expect to see is why stage magic works too; magicians exploit the fact we each live in a conjectural world, the product of the brain's building complete and coherent models of our surroundings from incomplete data. These models only have to be good enough to confer an evolutionary advantage, and they're often exaggerated as anyone who has ever been surprised by an animal they don't immediately recognize can tell you. Your brain makes the critter larger.
All this makes sending men in primed for a fight for survival tantamount to manslaughter if there is no actual need for that.
Alright, link me to your 800,000 years of evidence.
As for the what-if models, they worked out pretty well when the predicted, in the 1970s, the reversal of a global cooling trend that had been going on since 1940. That's pretty damn good confirmation.
Calling a model "what if" makes it sounds dodgy, but any prediction of the future is "what if" -- even if that prediction is that there will be no change. Predicting that the atmosphere will warm because of some other reason is also relying on a "what if" model.
Nor any comments about Dutch boys putting their fingers in dykes... er, dikes.
Standard minimum ground clearance for the rotors is something like 20m, chosen to minimize events like Quixote strikes, which could be ugly given that the blades can be moving at 80 m/sec, or about 180 mph.
Oh, there was some bad storytelling back in the original trilogy.
"A New Hope" was apparently a total mess in the rough cut; some radical and brilliant editing that cut out Lucas's flat-footed exposition and created the quick pacing we remember that film for. Lucas was largely absent from the second installment and returned to deliver a disappointing Return of the Jedi.
Lucas has tried to blame the bad rough cut of New Hope on his first editor and take credit for the changes in the final theatrical cut, but many of the thing that were wrong with that rough cut returned in Phantom Menace, when Lucas had become too powerful to say "no" to.
Most of the money in the franchise is in toy licensing.
It really isn't true you can turn anything into a hit with marketing and branding. I think the truth is more like this: with a powerful brand, any reasonably solid installment is guaranteed to be a hit. That's why Disney wanted this brand.
But solid isn't the same as perfect. Anything as complex as a movie is bound to have plenty of flaws you can latch onto. When Disney bought this brand they didn't put it into the hands of complete hacks, they put smart people on it, and the mistakes are the kinds of mistakes smart people make when they're trying to be clever. For example the movie deals with peoples' anxiety the Mouse Empire buying the IP rights to their childhoods by giving us a subplot with an anti-corporate theme. Now I think it's usually a good idea for a writer to have a strong point of view (even if I disagree), but this doesn't feel sincere. It doesn't have the bite of genuine anger, it's just some throw-away posturing.
The script also struggles with the truth that franchise can't survive by serving the fans exactly what they want. That creative struggle bleeds through to all that "destroy the old" theme that runs through the movie. I thought that was overdone; it would have been wiser to pander to fans just a *little* bit more.
But the biggest problem of this franchise is its biggest strength: people who've been fans since childhood. These fans bring an adult perspective that they didn't have when they imprinted on the franchise. I think Disney is right to pitch the films a bit more to the fans more adult selves, but there's also a built in futility to that.
-- which is a pretty safe assumption if the lawyers drawing up contest rules were competent -- how to deal with the PR fallout?
If it were me I'd do what lotteries are set up to do: make people regard a worthless piece of paper as valuable.
The SC lottery transfer about $400 million annually to the state. 5% of that -- the usual accounting benchmark for a "not materially significant" fraction -- would amount to $20 million. $20 million is a lot of money to a lottery player.
So I'd take $20 million and set up a lottery for people who are holding worthless winning tickets. They'd still be worthless, but they wouldn't seem worthless. To make the game exciting I'd have a big jackpot -- say $5 million -- but lots and lots of small prizes too.
Legally the liability of the state is likely limited in several ways, including terms of service and sovereign immunity. It's almost certain they can get away with not honoring the tickets *legally*. That doesn't mean they can get away with it flat-out.
A lottery ticket sale is a transaction in which someone gives you perfectly good money in exchange for something which is practically worthless. In other words a lottery is the next thing to a license to print money. But the whole thing depends on suckers trusting a system which is deliberately statistically rigged against them. If someone bought what looks like a winning lottery ticket in good faith, pointing out that the systems is also legally rigged is not going to restore that all important naive faith.
So the lottery commission is gong to have to do *something* for people who bought their tickets in good faith, even if it's not compelled to legally. Excluding people who knowingly attempted to exploit what was going on is probably acceptable, particularly to good-faith buyers, but it's going to be hard given the anonymous nature of lottery sales.
That said, I often like to convert volumetric measurements like cups into metric mass units. This makes it much easier to achieve consistent quantities for things like flour that can be compacted, and easy to scale recipes up and down.
I also measure out coffee grounds and water for coffee in grams because I use set ratios (depending on method) of 1:12 or 1:15.
First of all, ten years isn't the right time frame. For most of that time replaceable batteries were still the norm. You have to focus on the the period in which replaceable batteries had become a rarity. During that shorter period, more phones than just those two developed battery issues over their lifetime. The Samsung Galaxy S6, for example. That would have been a fiasco, except that by the time it started to be a problem it was overshadowed by a bigger fiasco Samsung was having with its next gen phones.
Li-ion batteries means they lose capacity rather quickly, but that didn't matter when you could replace them. These days the only way to be sure that a phone still usable after two years is to spec a battery with plenty excess capacity.
But do customers appreciate that capacity? Not when they're auditioning the phone in the showroom, and not in the first few months when critical word of mouth could kill sales. So future capacity is an attractive place to shortchange the customer.
As Mr. Scott would say, you canna change the laws of physics.
All batteries have internal resistance, which limits the power the battery can deliver. As you draw more and more current, the voltage across the internal resistance increases, and that limits the amount of power you can actually deliver into a load.
This is true of every battery, so to the designers have to supply a "big" battery -- which is the same as saying a battery with a low internal resistance. The wrinkle here is that batteries age. Lithium ion batteries age rather quickly too, even if they're just kept on the shelf. And by age, I mean that the internal resistance rises, which is the same as saying they become "smaller" as they get older.
So saying that some models have this problem and others don't is just wrong. *All* models have this problem, it just affects some models earlier than others.
I think natural persons and by extension their estates should have the inalienable moral and natural right to their name as far as trademarks go.
Technically this would make company names like "Honda" or "Walgreens" invalid. What "inalienable" means is that it is legally impossible for you to part with the thing or convey it to someone else. Any contract in which you sold the rights to use your name would be unenforceable.
The reason for calling the right to liberty "inalienable" is that it automatically renders any claim that the people implicitly accepted a reduction in liberty void. Even if they explicitly agreed to give up their liberty in exchange for something else, that agreement would be null. But if you believe this, there is no argument by which you can justify slavery, something that Thomas Jefferson himself was too intelligent to miss.