It's best not to assume that people are entirely rational OR irrational.
Most people who rise to a point of power, or who maintain power in an adverse environment, display a certain self-preservatory cunning. To a first order, you can model them as rationally self-interested actors. But to that model you have to add the universal human ability to make irrational, emotionally driven choices, and the ability to rationalize those choices.
It's better to assume a political leader is a rational actor who is capable of believing things that are manifestly not true, particularly when they are emotionally appealing. Hitler was a pretty effective leader until he started to run into serious difficulties; the harder things got, the less rational his decisions were, to the point he began demanding his military do things which were for practical purposes impossible.
Then add to that that governments aren't individuals, they're collections of people who disagree with each other and struggle against each other, and who has the upper hand has more to do with internal politics than who has the best ideas.
The net result is that any government is capable of both extremely clever and extremely boneheaded decisions. This is why nuclear proliferation is so dangerous. Governments simply can't be trusted not to do incredibly stupid things, no matter what their organization is.
Right. Leaving aside the loaded question of the role of oil in US Middle East policy, security is why Iran wanted a nuclear weapon, back in the day. Iran is bordered by Iraq on one side and Afghanistan on the other, both countries which the US toppled regimes by overwhelming force in a matter of weeks. Iran would be a much tougher nut to crack than either of those countries, but there's no question that radical elements in US politics were greatly emboldened by how easy it was to eliminate a hostile regime in those places, just as radical elements in the Iranian regime might think taking a nuclear pot-shot at Israel isn't such a bad idea. Every functioning political system has its lunatic fringe.
Now Iran having nuclear weapons is a bad thing for us; it's a bad thing for the region; but it doesn't necessarily mean it's an entirely bad thing for Iran. Like most complicated questions it has two sides. People don't like questions to be complicated, so they don't like the idea that Iran might have rational reasons to want a nuclear weapons (as well as rational reasons to avoid having one).
Specifically social media, which is a massively distributed operant conditioning machine which rewards people to conformity. Conformity to what? Here's the novel wrinkle: anything. The owners of social media don't really care where the bandwagon you jump on is going, as long as a lot of people jump on; people whom they will be able to sell.
It's not access to information. It's the intrusion of information designed to trigger montetizable responses that's the problem.
Sanders lost to Clinton because Clinton had spent nearly 40 years, from her days as First Lady of Arkansas, cultivating relationships with Democratic activists and party insiders. She'd campaigned nationally multiple times, twice as the wife of Bill Clinton and once as a candidate herself. The only way to overcome that kind of advantage is to have a candidate with immense natural political talent, like Obama.
To win the nomination of either party you have to win the party base, which Sanders failed to do; whether you voted for Sander or Clinton was largely a function of how long you'd spent in the Democratic party. To win the generals you need someone with the power to talk to people who don't pay attention; what you want is someone who has the capacity to "come out of nowhere" and win, because that's where you're starting with the general electorate.
People have difficulty distinguishing between their personal feelings for or against a politician and that politician's ability to win over people who aren't committed one way or the other. I supported Sanders in the primary, even though I thought Clinton would have been a better president, because I didn't think she could win.
Er, no. There is nothing Unix "-like" about NeXTSTEP, which is the basis for the MacOS; both NextSTEP and MacOS *are* Unixes descending from BSD 4.4.
Apple had done a lot of excellent software when Jobs came in from Next and decided to bring NextStep with him. Hypercard and Applescript, for example. OpenDoc had tremendous promise, I thought, to simplify application development, although it had gotten a little ahead of what was typical hardware resources for the era (e.g. it added 2 MB of RAM to an app's memory requirements at a time when RAM ). Appleworks, given its origin in the era of 128K RAM memories, was quite impressive. Al Gore's *An Inconvenient Truth* started life as an Apple Keynote presentation he'd put together; Keynote was originally developed by Apple software guys for Steve Jobs' use.
What Apple wasn't really good at until Jobs came back was business. They had a confusing large (and thus expensive to build and hard to market) product line. They had bad, often schizophrenic relationships with partners, developers, and indeed enterprise customers.
You are right of course to distrust your own mind; it has a bias for convenience. But someone gives you a thing like a crypto token and tells you to entrust your deepest secrets, perhaps even to imbue the artifact with your personal authority.
Should you trust that thing so much, keeping mind that in effect means trusting everyone involved in its programming and provisioning?
I foresee passwords remaining useful and indeed essential, despite their obvious limitations, as part of two factor authentication. Even if you are using biometrics, those can be stolen or counterfeited by various methods.
Dreamers are by that logic not illegals, because as children they bore no legal responsibility for their parents' actions. That's why most people choose to treat them as a separate category from their undocumented parents.
But I am interested in your logic as it applies to their parents. Does it apply only to immigrants, or is anybody who breaks the law an "illegal"? For example is a burglar or a rapist an "illegal"? Well then how about people who don't always obey the speed limit? Or fail to report income from stuff they sell on eBay?
But wait, minor tax evasion and speeding don't count because everyone does them; in fact some of that is expected.
*** me waiting to see how many people detect the irony here ***
A reasonable case could be made that illegal immigrants are actually less serious criminals than people who habitually speed or cheat on their taxes, but you have to make that argument based on the consequences of their actions, not how you feel about Mexicans.
We have an economy that cannot function without more immigrant labor than our immigration laws allow. In the agricultural sector alone, the number of undocumented workers needed to bring in harvests is over three times the legal limit for total immigration to the US. Does that make any sense? If you could wave a magic wand and deport them all, one of the first effects the average American would feel is a dramatic increase in food prices.
This situation is the fault of the Democrats -- from the 50s and 60s. Back then it was the Democratic rank and file that were xenophobic nativists, but Democratic politicians as well as Republicans understood the need for immigration. So they passed tough restrictions and proceeded to turn a blind eye toward violations -- much like cops turn a blind eye to people going 65 in a 55 mph zone.
You say that like it's a good thing. Methane is easier to handle and makes refurbishing the engine for reuse simpler, cutting costs all around.
I think the game-changing aspect is supposed to be a combination of low manufacture cost, low operation cost, high thrust, and very high reusabiity -- 25 missions. The idea is to be pretty good on every metric, not necessarily the best (e.g. highest thrust) in every metric. That's engineering for you: it involves making choices. And you can never be certain you made the right ones until the produce either succeeds or fails.
Well the research consistently shows extroverts as happier, however there is an ongoing debate as to whether the tests used to determine happiness aren't biased toward extroversion.
I once worked for a non-profit that funded scientific field research. Two of us were standing outside with a researcher who had just returned from spending months in one of those inflatable rainforest tree rafts, when a huge, iridescent staghorn beetle landed right at our feet.
The scientist shoved us back. "Don't step on it!"
The other staffer I was with gave him a totally uncomprehending look, and I had to explain to the researcher: "The kind of people who work here don't step on weird looking bugs. They pick them up and play with them."
This just like setting up an inertial platform in the ocean. You tow the long tube out horizontally and then flood one end of it. The flooding end sinks while the not-flooded-yet end pops up.
If you divided the platform into two watertight segments, you could flood just one of the compartments and it would flip up to a vertical orientation with part of the non-flooded compartment below the waterline. You then position the tower where you want it, and flood the upper compartment just enough to settle it on the sea floor with enough force to keep it in place. It remains in part supported in its upright position by bouyancy. The flooded section is under compression; the part with air is under tension up to the displacement point of the above-water part.
You're also getting a bit mixed up with the introvert/extrovert scale; extroverts are generally happier, introverts are generally more thoughtful -- although that's not the same as "intelligent"; it's somewhat orthogonal although both thoughtfulness and intelligence contribute to mental performance.
Here's a better heuristic. Look at your family. If you think you're the only one that isn't crazy, that's because you're just as crazy as the rest of them.
I can't comment on recent ones, but I have a 2011 17" MBP in the kitchen doing light duty. I picked it up cheap because it wouldn't boot. The problem was a bad keyboard, which I replaced.
The keyboard, at least on the old MBPs, feels very solid, but when you get the replacement it's incredibly thin and flimsy; the metal body is little more than foil. You could easily fold it in half like a piece of paper. It's basically a flimsy dome switch keyoboard with a mechanical gizmos added to the key to give it a crisper feel. This also means its unlikely to be a piece of dust causing your problems -- unless the dust was put there in the factory. The business parts of the switch are safely under a silicone membrane.
What give the installed keyboard its solid feel is that it is screwed into the very sturdy aluminum laptop chassis with dozens of tiny screws. What you feel when you type on it is not the solidity of the keyboard, but of the heavy sheet of aluminum it is very firmly attached to. This is how the engineers got the machine to feel sturdy and light at the same time.
My advice is if the key seems mechanically good but doesn't register, first test an external keyboard to make sure it's not some kind of software issue, then replace the whole keyboard. It's not a particularly complicated repair, but be advised the screws are tiny, about the size of coarsely ground coffee. A fine jeweler's phillips head screwdriver, strong magnifier, and a large expanse of uncluttered workspace is recommended. The screws are small enough you can't just put them into the hole. You have to nudge them into the hole and hope they go in business end first, which takes several tries.
Also: given the severe abuse keyboards get in normal use, I recommend using an external keyboard whenever you can; that way you can just toss the keyboard when it breaks. Only use the laptop keyboard when you're on the road. This also gives you the chance to get a keyboard that you really like.
Maybe. But you *do* have to be careful when you try to make inferences from time series data, because underlying conditions do change; you can't always assume that you're sampling from the same basket, as it were.
One thing that has changed is the percentage of phones that are smartphones. Five years ago it was 40%. Today it is over 80%. So the statistics from 2011 aren't really comparable.
You're right that we don't have conclusive evidence whether this has any bearing on this particular event. To humans hurricanes are powerful, but they are also fragile and often dissipate, not from losing energy as they pass over land or cool water, but from chaotic interactions with other weather systems. The one thing we're fairly certain of under AGW is that there will be a lot more rainfall in tropical storms; that alone will make them more destructive since flooding and its aftermath is the main cause of destruction outside the tropics. However wind speed and frequency correlation to increased temperature is to weak to speak confidently of global warming's effect on those parameters for any particular storm.
However I don't think we're exaggerating the record setting trends for temperatures. Modern datasets are more precise, both spatially and temporally. But it would take a willful discarding of Occam's razor to imagine any year prior to 1970 is close to as warm as any year after 1980 -- counting from 1880.
I don't know why you picked 1939, which was cooler than average; 1938 and 1940 were both anomalously warm years globally, in fact records at the time. However neither of those years cracks the current top 40 list. In any case beware of people who choose arbitrary years as benchmarks. They're often cherry picked. How many years did we hear "no warming since 1998", then "no significant warming since 1998"? That was because 1998 was a barnbuster of a record setting year.
Unless you are in some kind of Internet business, you are not a line department. You are a support department. just like the janitorial service. You are being paid, not to pursue your own ambitions, but to make other peoples' ambitions come true. Maybe you get to do some professionally interesting things along the way, but to be a professional you can't let that affect your decision-making.
Perhaps a better analogy than the janitors would be the organization's lawyers. Corporate counsel a highly skilled position, but as a lawyer your job is to look after the interest of your client. If you decided to take a particular legal course because it involved a new and interesting legal theory that would be legal malpractice, but IT people do that sort of shit all the time.
I have found working in the staff role very rewarding; you can even have a transformative effect on an organization. But if you're not interested in what the organization does and helping the people who do those things you'll never be good at your job.
Slashdot Mirror
It's best not to assume that people are entirely rational OR irrational.
Most people who rise to a point of power, or who maintain power in an adverse environment, display a certain self-preservatory cunning. To a first order, you can model them as rationally self-interested actors. But to that model you have to add the universal human ability to make irrational, emotionally driven choices, and the ability to rationalize those choices.
It's better to assume a political leader is a rational actor who is capable of believing things that are manifestly not true, particularly when they are emotionally appealing. Hitler was a pretty effective leader until he started to run into serious difficulties; the harder things got, the less rational his decisions were, to the point he began demanding his military do things which were for practical purposes impossible.
Then add to that that governments aren't individuals, they're collections of people who disagree with each other and struggle against each other, and who has the upper hand has more to do with internal politics than who has the best ideas.
The net result is that any government is capable of both extremely clever and extremely boneheaded decisions. This is why nuclear proliferation is so dangerous. Governments simply can't be trusted not to do incredibly stupid things, no matter what their organization is.
Right. Leaving aside the loaded question of the role of oil in US Middle East policy, security is why Iran wanted a nuclear weapon, back in the day. Iran is bordered by Iraq on one side and Afghanistan on the other, both countries which the US toppled regimes by overwhelming force in a matter of weeks. Iran would be a much tougher nut to crack than either of those countries, but there's no question that radical elements in US politics were greatly emboldened by how easy it was to eliminate a hostile regime in those places, just as radical elements in the Iranian regime might think taking a nuclear pot-shot at Israel isn't such a bad idea. Every functioning political system has its lunatic fringe.
Now Iran having nuclear weapons is a bad thing for us; it's a bad thing for the region; but it doesn't necessarily mean it's an entirely bad thing for Iran. Like most complicated questions it has two sides. People don't like questions to be complicated, so they don't like the idea that Iran might have rational reasons to want a nuclear weapons (as well as rational reasons to avoid having one).
However it rewards them if they try.
Specifically social media, which is a massively distributed operant conditioning machine which rewards people to conformity. Conformity to what? Here's the novel wrinkle: anything. The owners of social media don't really care where the bandwagon you jump on is going, as long as a lot of people jump on; people whom they will be able to sell.
It's not access to information. It's the intrusion of information designed to trigger montetizable responses that's the problem.
Sanders lost to Clinton because Clinton had spent nearly 40 years, from her days as First Lady of Arkansas, cultivating relationships with Democratic activists and party insiders. She'd campaigned nationally multiple times, twice as the wife of Bill Clinton and once as a candidate herself. The only way to overcome that kind of advantage is to have a candidate with immense natural political talent, like Obama.
To win the nomination of either party you have to win the party base, which Sanders failed to do; whether you voted for Sander or Clinton was largely a function of how long you'd spent in the Democratic party. To win the generals you need someone with the power to talk to people who don't pay attention; what you want is someone who has the capacity to "come out of nowhere" and win, because that's where you're starting with the general electorate.
People have difficulty distinguishing between their personal feelings for or against a politician and that politician's ability to win over people who aren't committed one way or the other. I supported Sanders in the primary, even though I thought Clinton would have been a better president, because I didn't think she could win.
Er, no. There is nothing Unix "-like" about NeXTSTEP, which is the basis for the MacOS; both NextSTEP and MacOS *are* Unixes descending from BSD 4.4.
Apple had done a lot of excellent software when Jobs came in from Next and decided to bring NextStep with him. Hypercard and Applescript, for example. OpenDoc had tremendous promise, I thought, to simplify application development, although it had gotten a little ahead of what was typical hardware resources for the era (e.g. it added 2 MB of RAM to an app's memory requirements at a time when RAM ). Appleworks, given its origin in the era of 128K RAM memories, was quite impressive. Al Gore's *An Inconvenient Truth* started life as an Apple Keynote presentation he'd put together; Keynote was originally developed by Apple software guys for Steve Jobs' use.
What Apple wasn't really good at until Jobs came back was business. They had a confusing large (and thus expensive to build and hard to market) product line. They had bad, often schizophrenic relationships with partners, developers, and indeed enterprise customers.
I explained my reasoning. You simply say "bullshit" because you've got nothing.
You are right of course to distrust your own mind; it has a bias for convenience. But someone gives you a thing like a crypto token and tells you to entrust your deepest secrets, perhaps even to imbue the artifact with your personal authority.
Should you trust that thing so much, keeping mind that in effect means trusting everyone involved in its programming and provisioning?
I foresee passwords remaining useful and indeed essential, despite their obvious limitations, as part of two factor authentication. Even if you are using biometrics, those can be stolen or counterfeited by various methods.
Dreamers are by that logic not illegals, because as children they bore no legal responsibility for their parents' actions. That's why most people choose to treat them as a separate category from their undocumented parents.
But I am interested in your logic as it applies to their parents. Does it apply only to immigrants, or is anybody who breaks the law an "illegal"? For example is a burglar or a rapist an "illegal"? Well then how about people who don't always obey the speed limit? Or fail to report income from stuff they sell on eBay?
But wait, minor tax evasion and speeding don't count because everyone does them; in fact some of that is expected.
*** me waiting to see how many people detect the irony here ***
A reasonable case could be made that illegal immigrants are actually less serious criminals than people who habitually speed or cheat on their taxes, but you have to make that argument based on the consequences of their actions, not how you feel about Mexicans.
We have an economy that cannot function without more immigrant labor than our immigration laws allow. In the agricultural sector alone, the number of undocumented workers needed to bring in harvests is over three times the legal limit for total immigration to the US. Does that make any sense? If you could wave a magic wand and deport them all, one of the first effects the average American would feel is a dramatic increase in food prices.
This situation is the fault of the Democrats -- from the 50s and 60s. Back then it was the Democratic rank and file that were xenophobic nativists, but Democratic politicians as well as Republicans understood the need for immigration. So they passed tough restrictions and proceeded to turn a blind eye toward violations -- much like cops turn a blind eye to people going 65 in a 55 mph zone.
... if they noticed it. Then cheated so blatantly they were certain to notice.
Sounds like somebody flunked cheating too.
that wasn't even using LH2 which I hear is harder
You say that like it's a good thing. Methane is easier to handle and makes refurbishing the engine for reuse simpler, cutting costs all around.
I think the game-changing aspect is supposed to be a combination of low manufacture cost, low operation cost, high thrust, and very high reusabiity -- 25 missions. The idea is to be pretty good on every metric, not necessarily the best (e.g. highest thrust) in every metric. That's engineering for you: it involves making choices. And you can never be certain you made the right ones until the produce either succeeds or fails.
Well the research consistently shows extroverts as happier, however there is an ongoing debate as to whether the tests used to determine happiness aren't biased toward extroversion.
*help me*
I once worked for a non-profit that funded scientific field research. Two of us were standing outside with a researcher who had just returned from spending months in one of those inflatable rainforest tree rafts, when a huge, iridescent staghorn beetle landed right at our feet.
The scientist shoved us back. "Don't step on it!"
The other staffer I was with gave him a totally uncomprehending look, and I had to explain to the researcher: "The kind of people who work here don't step on weird looking bugs. They pick them up and play with them."
This just like setting up an inertial platform in the ocean. You tow the long tube out horizontally and then flood one end of it. The flooding end sinks while the not-flooded-yet end pops up.
If you divided the platform into two watertight segments, you could flood just one of the compartments and it would flip up to a vertical orientation with part of the non-flooded compartment below the waterline. You then position the tower where you want it, and flood the upper compartment just enough to settle it on the sea floor with enough force to keep it in place. It remains in part supported in its upright position by bouyancy. The flooded section is under compression; the part with air is under tension up to the displacement point of the above-water part.
You're also getting a bit mixed up with the introvert/extrovert scale; extroverts are generally happier, introverts are generally more thoughtful -- although that's not the same as "intelligent"; it's somewhat orthogonal although both thoughtfulness and intelligence contribute to mental performance.
Here's a better heuristic. Look at your family. If you think you're the only one that isn't crazy, that's because you're just as crazy as the rest of them.
I can't comment on recent ones, but I have a 2011 17" MBP in the kitchen doing light duty. I picked it up cheap because it wouldn't boot. The problem was a bad keyboard, which I replaced.
The keyboard, at least on the old MBPs, feels very solid, but when you get the replacement it's incredibly thin and flimsy; the metal body is little more than foil. You could easily fold it in half like a piece of paper. It's basically a flimsy dome switch keyoboard with a mechanical gizmos added to the key to give it a crisper feel. This also means its unlikely to be a piece of dust causing your problems -- unless the dust was put there in the factory. The business parts of the switch are safely under a silicone membrane.
What give the installed keyboard its solid feel is that it is screwed into the very sturdy aluminum laptop chassis with dozens of tiny screws. What you feel when you type on it is not the solidity of the keyboard, but of the heavy sheet of aluminum it is very firmly attached to. This is how the engineers got the machine to feel sturdy and light at the same time.
My advice is if the key seems mechanically good but doesn't register, first test an external keyboard to make sure it's not some kind of software issue, then replace the whole keyboard. It's not a particularly complicated repair, but be advised the screws are tiny, about the size of coarsely ground coffee. A fine jeweler's phillips head screwdriver, strong magnifier, and a large expanse of uncluttered workspace is recommended. The screws are small enough you can't just put them into the hole. You have to nudge them into the hole and hope they go in business end first, which takes several tries.
Also: given the severe abuse keyboards get in normal use, I recommend using an external keyboard whenever you can; that way you can just toss the keyboard when it breaks. Only use the laptop keyboard when you're on the road. This also gives you the chance to get a keyboard that you really like.
Well if you read the summary, the people they laid off were allegedly the highest paid people in their job categories.
Maybe. But you *do* have to be careful when you try to make inferences from time series data, because underlying conditions do change; you can't always assume that you're sampling from the same basket, as it were.
One thing that has changed is the percentage of phones that are smartphones. Five years ago it was 40%. Today it is over 80%. So the statistics from 2011 aren't really comparable.
Texas probably has speed limits too.
If a law is sufficiently ignored, it is impossible to even start enforcing.
Well, if 2% of Tesla's workforce was so bad it needed firing all at once, I'd say it's the management that was underperforming.
You're right that we don't have conclusive evidence whether this has any bearing on this particular event. To humans hurricanes are powerful, but they are also fragile and often dissipate, not from losing energy as they pass over land or cool water, but from chaotic interactions with other weather systems. The one thing we're fairly certain of under AGW is that there will be a lot more rainfall in tropical storms; that alone will make them more destructive since flooding and its aftermath is the main cause of destruction outside the tropics. However wind speed and frequency correlation to increased temperature is to weak to speak confidently of global warming's effect on those parameters for any particular storm.
However I don't think we're exaggerating the record setting trends for temperatures. Modern datasets are more precise, both spatially and temporally. But it would take a willful discarding of Occam's razor to imagine any year prior to 1970 is close to as warm as any year after 1980 -- counting from 1880.
I don't know why you picked 1939, which was cooler than average; 1938 and 1940 were both anomalously warm years globally, in fact records at the time. However neither of those years cracks the current top 40 list. In any case beware of people who choose arbitrary years as benchmarks. They're often cherry picked. How many years did we hear "no warming since 1998", then "no significant warming since 1998"? That was because 1998 was a barnbuster of a record setting year.
Right. I was going to post this. Ophelia was simply maintained hurricane force winds further east than any tropical storm on record.
Unless you are in some kind of Internet business, you are not a line department. You are a support department. just like the janitorial service. You are being paid, not to pursue your own ambitions, but to make other peoples' ambitions come true. Maybe you get to do some professionally interesting things along the way, but to be a professional you can't let that affect your decision-making.
Perhaps a better analogy than the janitors would be the organization's lawyers. Corporate counsel a highly skilled position, but as a lawyer your job is to look after the interest of your client. If you decided to take a particular legal course because it involved a new and interesting legal theory that would be legal malpractice, but IT people do that sort of shit all the time.
I have found working in the staff role very rewarding; you can even have a transformative effect on an organization. But if you're not interested in what the organization does and helping the people who do those things you'll never be good at your job.
Infineon is a German company.