Obviously both Wh/kg and$/kWh are important. Until the Wh/kg and Wh/m^3 figures for a new tech get good enough to make it physically practical, $/kWh is irrelevant; but beyond that with most new tech there's usually an adoption curve.
After you've done all the lab based tinkering you can to make new tech affordable, there comes a time when the only way to make it cheaper is to make it in quantity. But unless you are lucky (or persuasive) enough to be swimming in unlimited investor dollars, chances are you don't have the money to set up an operation on that scale.
That's why you target niche applications and early tech adopters. Elon Musk was smart about this: he didn't set out to build the electric equivalent of the Model T; he started out with an exotic roadster and then a near-as-exotic high end luxury sedan.
But then Henry Ford didn't start out with the Model T either; his first car was the Model A. The original 1903 Model A cost $800, at the time when the median US income was $543. He sold about 10,000 of them. The Model T was introduced in 1908 for $825, but five years later he managed to drop that price down to $440; sales increased twentyfold. By 1925 he'd managed to drop the price to $260 (the equivalent of less than $3700 in 2017 dollars) at a time median income had risen to $750. Not surprising he sold nearly two million of the things that year.
That's the power of the adoption curve. Early adopters bootstrap economies of scale you need to make something cheap enough for everyone.
Oh, there's really no such thing as "underground" on the Internet. Even on the dark web, insofar as they can find each other, other people can find them.
I would say in most cases there is no practical or moral difference between lying by omission and lying by false statements. The effect is the same: to establish an untrue picture of reality in the recipient's mind. The method by which you do this is just a minor detail.
There is, however, another class of untruth which ihas always been important politically but has become even more important in recent years: bullshit.
Bullshit is distinct from a normal lie in that the target is not the recipient's factual beliefs, but his feelings and attitudes towards things and people. It often takes the case of statements which the recipient is not expected to believe, but which he will nonetheless react to emotionally as if true. Diplomacy, for example, is largely bullshit. If someone has a "frank exchange of views" there was a shouting match. In Japan there is a phrase maemuki-ni kento sasete itadakimasu which literally means "I will examine your proposal in a forward-looking manner", but really means the speaker regards this idea is too stupid to be considered at all.
I suspect bullshit is fundamental facet of human communication; rooted in the need to communicate emotion without necessarily imparting facts. But in a modern media environment it's possible to weaponize this communication mechanism.
But it's not just dumb people. Confirmation bias is baked into human cognition, and it's hard to overcome; even if you're inclined, it bites everyone on the ass.
Bandwagon effect too. It's easy to see when other people who you disagree with indulge in it, but I strongly suspect everyone does. And, in a natural enviornment (e.g. small hunter gatherer groups) the bandwagon effect is probably a useful heuristic. But it makes the social media the most powerful amplifier of propaganda ever. It's no longer Big Brother playing on everyone's TV, it's your friends and family who are indoctrinating you.
I've got a longstanding interest in the pulp and popular fiction of the 20s and 30s, and right now I'm working my way Earl Derr Bigger's Charlie Chan novels. These are very controversial today because of the issue of cultural appropriation, and probably also because of their association with the movies in which European actors in yellowface played the detective.
Because of the movies, many younger Asian Americans reject the Chan stories out of hand as racist without even looking at them. And indeed Biggers gets a lot of details wrong, particularly in his inaccurate attempt to render the dialect of Chinese characters other than Chan (who himself is represented as speaking with awkward syntax but normal pronunciation). But the real test of any writer isn't whether he gets every detail right -- nobody ever does. It's whether he creates characters that on the whole have depth and believably, regardless of the inevitable mistakes.
As a detective, Chan falls in the middle of the spectrum between Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade; he doesn't have superhuman intelligence, but he doesn't solve problems with his fists either, although he's not shy about using a gun when it makes sense. What sets him apart is maturity. Things are frustrating for Chan; but despite his somewhat overblown humility he always carried through by his well-founded confidence in his ability. That makes his success that much more satisfying.
This is all very different from the movies. Chan in the movies is a big wheel; government officials, captains of industry, and policemen are always fawning over him. In one movie he calls up the Coast Guard and orders them to close the port of Los Angeles. This is a fantasy -- not that I have anything against that as long as you know what it is. In books, the white people are depicted as diverse in their attitudes to Chan. Some see him for what he is and treat him as an equal; others are condescending, and a few even expect him to wait on them -- and they aren't necessarily the villains.
The writing style of the books is somewhat crude by modern standards, and by post-Christie standards they're not particularly finely crafted as mysteries. But Biggers delivers something you really want from a writer: characters that seem real and individual, not stamped out some second-hand mold.
But it's not necessarily too much for what the purchasers are really buying: time.
Just from an economic standpoint, it's not hard to justify if you value the time spent and earn what's typical for a senior engineer in the region. Suppose your time is worth $200/hour, and you save ten hours a week on your commute for 48 weeks out of the year. At a seven percent discount rate the net present value of time you'd save over the course of 20 years is over 1.1 million. Of course then you still have the house, which unless the regional economy collapses is going to be worth more.
But having had a job where I commuted over an hour each way for ten years, it's not just the value of your time. You get used to it, but it take a toll on your quality of life. Especially if you have kids. Being able to see your kids off in the morning, and have dinner with your family most nights (even if you have to back into work!), what price would you put on that?
Well, depending on when you were in college, Java's probably got a lot better since then. But we're not talking about Java. Java EE isn't a language; it's large framework written in Java for creating complex distributed systems, along with specifications for how to package and deploy software written in that framework.
Early versions of Java EE had serious design flaws, the most serious of which was that it used a kind of thin interface to theoretically remoteable objects that in practice seldom were. Under the covers simple method calls incurred massive overhead that made those parts of Java EE impractical. But Java EE has one cool property: it makes it easy to create objects with method calls that are atomic, even when implementation underneath calls on resources that are distributed across a network and may individually fail.
That's a pretty cool property, but here's the problem: not many projects actually *need* that. One thing that's become clear in the last ten years is that most of the time you can live with relaxed consistency. Global consistency always nice to have, but very seldom something you can't work around. But Java EE also came with a bunch of other stuff, unrelated stuff really, for packaging web applications, rendering HTML and so forth, and this is the bulk of most peoples' experience with Java EE. <carAnalogy: >That's like buying a car because it has a cool MP3 player, but you never actually listen to music.</carAnalogy:>
Here's the problem with the car appendage to that metaphorical MP3 player: it was never particularly pleasant or convenient to drive. Which is not to say it didn't have its positive points, but it introduced a lot of behavioral complexity in order to scale a style of application that wasn't very scalable. Today, if wanted to build say, a website, that had a lot of user by modern standards, you just wouldn't build it that way. Probably the worst thing about Java EE was the sheer amount of brainspace it took to be competent in it. I ran a small development team, most of whom had graduate degrees, and many of them were almost crippled with information overload. That's bad; a good developer isn't satisfied with just getting something running.
Java EE should always have been much smaller than it was; and the good bits probably should have been separate standards; and those standards should have been delivered as a specific, non-proprietary product (like Node.js) rather than an elaborate common blueprint for competing proprietary vendors. The fact that after all these years everyone's heard of Java EE but almost nobody really understands what it is shows there's a problem with the very concept of the thing. BUT, there are still important use cases for the good bits. Most of us will never be involved with those use cases, but they exist nonetheless.
Seth MacFarlane seems to understand how the Trek tropes work.
I don't think the jokes in The Orville were that funny, but practically every scene had some reference that made me laugh out loud, right down to the musical motifs.
The biggest unicode concern I know about is spoofing. With text messages I guess you'd have the risk that people will respond to an email address that isn't who they think it is, or copy and paste a URL that doesn't take them where they expect to go. This vulnerability isn't any worse with text rather than HTML mail.
Well, there's a different between conspiracy theories and theories about possible conspiracies.
Conspiracy theories are prima facie irrational, because they require the believer to assume that the actors will do a number of improbable things -- usually things that are actually against their interests or wildly risky -- with a level of perfection that is beyond what could be practical. Typically vast numbers of people who have good reason to distrust each other work together in a perfectly trustworthy way.
What complicates matters is that conspiracies *do* happen. Even stupid, hard-to-believe conspiracies happen. Some real conspiracies, such as the Tuskeegee Syphillis Experiment, are so outrageous that absent evidence they're in conspiracy theory territory. But gerrymandering and partisan vote suppression aren't really that outrageous. There's strong statistical evidence that polling places in some states are placed to inconvenience certain blocs of voters.
Now, I don't necessarily believe that voter suppression is the or the only explanation for the use of voting machines. Innumeracy is rife in our population, so it wouldn't be surprising for an election supervisor not to realize that adopting a solution that speeds up the process for the voter while he's using it won't necessarily speed up the whole voting experience. But the pretty well established fact that planners deliberately inconvenience voters in a partisan manner is enough to support a suspicion.
While I agree, we have to be careful about the limits of statistical inference. Just because Rotten Tomatoes scores in aggregate don't affect industry-wide box office receipts very much doesn't mean that Rotten Tomatoes never makes or breaks a movie.
This is generally the case: averages and correlations over large, inhomogeneous event sets may not tell the story accurately for every event in the set. E.g., the US as a whole has long since recovered from the Great Recession, but certain areas (specifically certain types of areas) have yet to recover to their pre-recession levels of employment.
This could be an interesting machine learning project; use regression techniques to classify movies as to whether they might be affected economically by critical response.
I have a theory why some districts may prefer voting machines to electronically scanned paper ballots. Voting machines make it possible to manipulate election results without actually hacking the machines themselves. You just have to hack the wait times in districts unfavorable to you. Lest that seem far-fetched, note that studies have shown that waits in minority-dominated precincts are on average almost twice that of white districts.
For the price of a single voting machine you can put up a dozen of those cheap pop-up voting booths. This means the marginal cost of scaling up an overloaded precinct's capacity is extremely low. I live in a state that uses scanned paper ballots, and the voting places have so many booths that in 45 years of voting I've never had to wait more than five minutes to vote -- and that's for checking in with the elderly volunteers. There's always free booths, no matter how heavy the turnout.
Researchers who've studied creativity define it as an unusual and appropriate solution to a problem. It's easy to get unusual with drugs, but appropriate is more of a challenge.
Creativity presupposes an unsually deep understanding of a problem domain. That's why your weird doodles aren't worth as much as Picasso's. He could do representational art if he wanted to. He drew this when he was twelve years old.
Now in my experience moments of creative inspiration come after you struggle with a problem for a long time, and you've exhausted all the conventional approaches to it. But because inspiration only comes after a struggle doesn't mean it always comes.
In particular you can be derailed by certain distractions. Fear of failure is one. A little bit of fear is healthy, but if you're ruminating about what comes after failure you're off-task. And another thing that takes your brain off-task is wanting to appear creative.
So I wouldn't be surprised if someone who'd put in the blood sweat and tears but wasn't letting his brain get on with the job might benefit from a little chemical help. But I'd be amazed if someone could waltz into an unfamiliar situation, pop a pill, and know what to do.
Instead, the people receiving these taxpayer-funded handouts would have to actually do something productive with their lives.
Let's look at the how well this notion fares in light of Department of Agriculture figures on the program:
About 1/3 of food stamp recipients already work.
1/5 of recipients have a disability such as blindness or acute cancer that prevents them from working.
1/5 of recipients have no income. Most commonly they are single mothers with young children; nonetheless the median time in program for people in this class is about three months.
10% are on some time-limited welfare program.
So the idea that ending food stamps will make people more productive isn't really supported by the data.
Contrary to the stereotype of a food stamp recipient as a black person living indefinitely on welfare (technically impossible since 1996), the most common food stamp recipient is white (not that that should matter but it evidently does) and has a job. Of those that *could* be forced to get a job by ending the program, most already do so within a few months.
For various reasons its also doubtful that ending the program per se will save much if any money. For example it is much easier to help a senior stay healthy and independent with food assistance than it is to institutionalize him.
You *could* save government expenditures by getting rid of medicare, medicaid and food stamps at the same time.
I don't pretend on being able to predict the future; ultimately we're talking about how people feel about Bitcoin, and anything could happen to that. My point is that the design of Bitcoin makes an inflationary crash less likely, not impossible.
While I think it's probably stretching the facts to assume Bitcoin will behave exactly analogously, why is it unfair to make the comparison?
During the Tulip Mania, people actually did use tulip bulbs as a medium of exchange. They were compact, portable carrier of value that unlike, say, a bearer bond or letter of credit, couldn't be forged. If the Tulip Mania happened today, contraband dealers absolutely would be taking payment in bulbs.
The whole idea of Bitcoin is that there is no central authority that controls it; well if there's no central authority intervening in its valuation the market will send its value on a random walk. That random walk absolutely has one absorbing boundary: if the value of Bitcoin drops enough, people will lose confidence in it. This is unlikely to happen, because by design Bitcoin encourages deflation -- which means that by design it becomes more valuable on average as time goes on.
Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics?
Sure, but what does that have to do with race? Race is a naive folk hypothesis that purports to explain the geographic distribution of certain sets of superficial phenotype characteristics. As a scientific concept it fell apart as soon as we were able to actually look at people's genotypes.
There's this notion that the US will become a majority minority nation by 2044. Except, as one demographer I've read pointed out, by the one-drop standards used to reach that conclusion it's already happened. After 2044 the US will continue to be majority white because a majority of people will self-identify as white, regardless of their geographic heritage.
If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
Well, I think you could make a philosophical case for not asking, but I find it extremely unlikely that racial inequality would simply disappear. Whiteness and blackness is an identity, and identities have proven to be extremely durable social constructs once established in the public mind.
No, it's not less rain; it's less evaporation because particulates are shading the ocean.
Particulate cooling *is* a real effect. In fact, it outpaced CO2 based warming from the 1940s to roughly the mid 80s. The difference is CO2 persists in the atmosphere longer.
Emitting more particulates per ton of CO2 emitted would be a viable short term geoengineering method for slowing anthropogenic warming, but only short term. As long as you're emitting more CO2 net than you're capturing in some way, CO2 will dominate.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously both Wh/kg and$/kWh are important. Until the Wh/kg and Wh/m^3 figures for a new tech get good enough to make it physically practical, $/kWh is irrelevant; but beyond that with most new tech there's usually an adoption curve.
After you've done all the lab based tinkering you can to make new tech affordable, there comes a time when the only way to make it cheaper is to make it in quantity. But unless you are lucky (or persuasive) enough to be swimming in unlimited investor dollars, chances are you don't have the money to set up an operation on that scale.
That's why you target niche applications and early tech adopters. Elon Musk was smart about this: he didn't set out to build the electric equivalent of the Model T; he started out with an exotic roadster and then a near-as-exotic high end luxury sedan.
But then Henry Ford didn't start out with the Model T either; his first car was the Model A. The original 1903 Model A cost $800, at the time when the median US income was $543. He sold about 10,000 of them. The Model T was introduced in 1908 for $825, but five years later he managed to drop that price down to $440; sales increased twentyfold. By 1925 he'd managed to drop the price to $260 (the equivalent of less than $3700 in 2017 dollars) at a time median income had risen to $750. Not surprising he sold nearly two million of the things that year.
That's the power of the adoption curve. Early adopters bootstrap economies of scale you need to make something cheap enough for everyone.
Oh, there's really no such thing as "underground" on the Internet. Even on the dark web, insofar as they can find each other, other people can find them.
Well, you can't go by averages when you're talking about people who purchase rare and expensive commodities.
I would say in most cases there is no practical or moral difference between lying by omission and lying by false statements. The effect is the same: to establish an untrue picture of reality in the recipient's mind. The method by which you do this is just a minor detail.
There is, however, another class of untruth which ihas always been important politically but has become even more important in recent years: bullshit.
Bullshit is distinct from a normal lie in that the target is not the recipient's factual beliefs, but his feelings and attitudes towards things and people. It often takes the case of statements which the recipient is not expected to believe, but which he will nonetheless react to emotionally as if true. Diplomacy, for example, is largely bullshit. If someone has a "frank exchange of views" there was a shouting match. In Japan there is a phrase maemuki-ni kento sasete itadakimasu which literally means "I will examine your proposal in a forward-looking manner", but really means the speaker regards this idea is too stupid to be considered at all.
I suspect bullshit is fundamental facet of human communication; rooted in the need to communicate emotion without necessarily imparting facts. But in a modern media environment it's possible to weaponize this communication mechanism.
"Lie" is the genus and "fake news" is the species.
However, if I were to choose a more helpful term than "fake news", I'd use "propaganda".
But it's not just dumb people. Confirmation bias is baked into human cognition, and it's hard to overcome; even if you're inclined, it bites everyone on the ass.
Bandwagon effect too. It's easy to see when other people who you disagree with indulge in it, but I strongly suspect everyone does. And, in a natural enviornment (e.g. small hunter gatherer groups) the bandwagon effect is probably a useful heuristic. But it makes the social media the most powerful amplifier of propaganda ever. It's no longer Big Brother playing on everyone's TV, it's your friends and family who are indoctrinating you.
Assuming they paid cash for the house.
I've got a longstanding interest in the pulp and popular fiction of the 20s and 30s, and right now I'm working my way Earl Derr Bigger's Charlie Chan novels. These are very controversial today because of the issue of cultural appropriation, and probably also because of their association with the movies in which European actors in yellowface played the detective.
Because of the movies, many younger Asian Americans reject the Chan stories out of hand as racist without even looking at them. And indeed Biggers gets a lot of details wrong, particularly in his inaccurate attempt to render the dialect of Chinese characters other than Chan (who himself is represented as speaking with awkward syntax but normal pronunciation). But the real test of any writer isn't whether he gets every detail right -- nobody ever does. It's whether he creates characters that on the whole have depth and believably, regardless of the inevitable mistakes.
As a detective, Chan falls in the middle of the spectrum between Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade; he doesn't have superhuman intelligence, but he doesn't solve problems with his fists either, although he's not shy about using a gun when it makes sense. What sets him apart is maturity. Things are frustrating for Chan; but despite his somewhat overblown humility he always carried through by his well-founded confidence in his ability. That makes his success that much more satisfying.
This is all very different from the movies. Chan in the movies is a big wheel; government officials, captains of industry, and policemen are always fawning over him. In one movie he calls up the Coast Guard and orders them to close the port of Los Angeles. This is a fantasy -- not that I have anything against that as long as you know what it is. In books, the white people are depicted as diverse in their attitudes to Chan. Some see him for what he is and treat him as an equal; others are condescending, and a few even expect him to wait on them -- and they aren't necessarily the villains.
The writing style of the books is somewhat crude by modern standards, and by post-Christie standards they're not particularly finely crafted as mysteries. But Biggers delivers something you really want from a writer: characters that seem real and individual, not stamped out some second-hand mold.
But it's not necessarily too much for what the purchasers are really buying: time.
Just from an economic standpoint, it's not hard to justify if you value the time spent and earn what's typical for a senior engineer in the region. Suppose your time is worth $200/hour, and you save ten hours a week on your commute for 48 weeks out of the year. At a seven percent discount rate the net present value of time you'd save over the course of 20 years is over 1.1 million. Of course then you still have the house, which unless the regional economy collapses is going to be worth more.
But having had a job where I commuted over an hour each way for ten years, it's not just the value of your time. You get used to it, but it take a toll on your quality of life. Especially if you have kids. Being able to see your kids off in the morning, and have dinner with your family most nights (even if you have to back into work!), what price would you put on that?
Well, depending on when you were in college, Java's probably got a lot better since then. But we're not talking about Java. Java EE isn't a language; it's large framework written in Java for creating complex distributed systems, along with specifications for how to package and deploy software written in that framework.
Early versions of Java EE had serious design flaws, the most serious of which was that it used a kind of thin interface to theoretically remoteable objects that in practice seldom were. Under the covers simple method calls incurred massive overhead that made those parts of Java EE impractical. But Java EE has one cool property: it makes it easy to create objects with method calls that are atomic, even when implementation underneath calls on resources that are distributed across a network and may individually fail.
That's a pretty cool property, but here's the problem: not many projects actually *need* that. One thing that's become clear in the last ten years is that most of the time you can live with relaxed consistency. Global consistency always nice to have, but very seldom something you can't work around. But Java EE also came with a bunch of other stuff, unrelated stuff really, for packaging web applications, rendering HTML and so forth, and this is the bulk of most peoples' experience with Java EE. <carAnalogy: >That's like buying a car because it has a cool MP3 player, but you never actually listen to music.</carAnalogy:>
Here's the problem with the car appendage to that metaphorical MP3 player: it was never particularly pleasant or convenient to drive. Which is not to say it didn't have its positive points, but it introduced a lot of behavioral complexity in order to scale a style of application that wasn't very scalable. Today, if wanted to build say, a website, that had a lot of user by modern standards, you just wouldn't build it that way. Probably the worst thing about Java EE was the sheer amount of brainspace it took to be competent in it. I ran a small development team, most of whom had graduate degrees, and many of them were almost crippled with information overload. That's bad; a good developer isn't satisfied with just getting something running.
Java EE should always have been much smaller than it was; and the good bits probably should have been separate standards; and those standards should have been delivered as a specific, non-proprietary product (like Node.js) rather than an elaborate common blueprint for competing proprietary vendors. The fact that after all these years everyone's heard of Java EE but almost nobody really understands what it is shows there's a problem with the very concept of the thing. BUT, there are still important use cases for the good bits. Most of us will never be involved with those use cases, but they exist nonetheless.
Seth MacFarlane seems to understand how the Trek tropes work.
I don't think the jokes in The Orville were that funny, but practically every scene had some reference that made me laugh out loud, right down to the musical motifs.
Well, what about unicode?
The biggest unicode concern I know about is spoofing. With text messages I guess you'd have the risk that people will respond to an email address that isn't who they think it is, or copy and paste a URL that doesn't take them where they expect to go. This vulnerability isn't any worse with text rather than HTML mail.
Well, there's a different between conspiracy theories and theories about possible conspiracies.
Conspiracy theories are prima facie irrational, because they require the believer to assume that the actors will do a number of improbable things -- usually things that are actually against their interests or wildly risky -- with a level of perfection that is beyond what could be practical. Typically vast numbers of people who have good reason to distrust each other work together in a perfectly trustworthy way.
What complicates matters is that conspiracies *do* happen. Even stupid, hard-to-believe conspiracies happen. Some real conspiracies, such as the Tuskeegee Syphillis Experiment, are so outrageous that absent evidence they're in conspiracy theory territory. But gerrymandering and partisan vote suppression aren't really that outrageous. There's strong statistical evidence that polling places in some states are placed to inconvenience certain blocs of voters.
Now, I don't necessarily believe that voter suppression is the or the only explanation for the use of voting machines. Innumeracy is rife in our population, so it wouldn't be surprising for an election supervisor not to realize that adopting a solution that speeds up the process for the voter while he's using it won't necessarily speed up the whole voting experience. But the pretty well established fact that planners deliberately inconvenience voters in a partisan manner is enough to support a suspicion.
While I agree, we have to be careful about the limits of statistical inference. Just because Rotten Tomatoes scores in aggregate don't affect industry-wide box office receipts very much doesn't mean that Rotten Tomatoes never makes or breaks a movie.
This is generally the case: averages and correlations over large, inhomogeneous event sets may not tell the story accurately for every event in the set. E.g., the US as a whole has long since recovered from the Great Recession, but certain areas (specifically certain types of areas) have yet to recover to their pre-recession levels of employment.
This could be an interesting machine learning project; use regression techniques to classify movies as to whether they might be affected economically by critical response.
I have a theory why some districts may prefer voting machines to electronically scanned paper ballots. Voting machines make it possible to manipulate election results without actually hacking the machines themselves. You just have to hack the wait times in districts unfavorable to you. Lest that seem far-fetched, note that studies have shown that waits in minority-dominated precincts are on average almost twice that of white districts.
For the price of a single voting machine you can put up a dozen of those cheap pop-up voting booths. This means the marginal cost of scaling up an overloaded precinct's capacity is extremely low. I live in a state that uses scanned paper ballots, and the voting places have so many booths that in 45 years of voting I've never had to wait more than five minutes to vote -- and that's for checking in with the elderly volunteers. There's always free booths, no matter how heavy the turnout.
Identity politics is racism. Erase identity from the social constructs...
Well, then. Easy-peasy.
But it's not a substitute for effort.
Researchers who've studied creativity define it as an unusual and appropriate solution to a problem. It's easy to get unusual with drugs, but appropriate is more of a challenge.
Creativity presupposes an unsually deep understanding of a problem domain. That's why your weird doodles aren't worth as much as Picasso's. He could do representational art if he wanted to. He drew this when he was twelve years old.
Now in my experience moments of creative inspiration come after you struggle with a problem for a long time, and you've exhausted all the conventional approaches to it. But because inspiration only comes after a struggle doesn't mean it always comes.
In particular you can be derailed by certain distractions. Fear of failure is one. A little bit of fear is healthy, but if you're ruminating about what comes after failure you're off-task. And another thing that takes your brain off-task is wanting to appear creative.
So I wouldn't be surprised if someone who'd put in the blood sweat and tears but wasn't letting his brain get on with the job might benefit from a little chemical help. But I'd be amazed if someone could waltz into an unfamiliar situation, pop a pill, and know what to do.
Not really. What explains that is the psychology of gain. The anticipation of making a killing is, literally, mind altering.
Instead, the people receiving these taxpayer-funded handouts would have to actually do something productive with their lives.
Let's look at the how well this notion fares in light of Department of Agriculture figures on the program:
So the idea that ending food stamps will make people more productive isn't really supported by the data.
Contrary to the stereotype of a food stamp recipient as a black person living indefinitely on welfare (technically impossible since 1996), the most common food stamp recipient is white (not that that should matter but it evidently does) and has a job. Of those that *could* be forced to get a job by ending the program, most already do so within a few months.
For various reasons its also doubtful that ending the program per se will save much if any money. For example it is much easier to help a senior stay healthy and independent with food assistance than it is to institutionalize him.
You *could* save government expenditures by getting rid of medicare, medicaid and food stamps at the same time.
Formerly, but no longer, e.g. Hurricane Patricia, which started on the Pacific side of Mexico and never entered the Atlantic Basin.
I don't pretend on being able to predict the future; ultimately we're talking about how people feel about Bitcoin, and anything could happen to that. My point is that the design of Bitcoin makes an inflationary crash less likely, not impossible.
While I think it's probably stretching the facts to assume Bitcoin will behave exactly analogously, why is it unfair to make the comparison?
During the Tulip Mania, people actually did use tulip bulbs as a medium of exchange. They were compact, portable carrier of value that unlike, say, a bearer bond or letter of credit, couldn't be forged. If the Tulip Mania happened today, contraband dealers absolutely would be taking payment in bulbs.
The whole idea of Bitcoin is that there is no central authority that controls it; well if there's no central authority intervening in its valuation the market will send its value on a random walk. That random walk absolutely has one absorbing boundary: if the value of Bitcoin drops enough, people will lose confidence in it. This is unlikely to happen, because by design Bitcoin encourages deflation -- which means that by design it becomes more valuable on average as time goes on.
Is this a bad thing that we can correlate things like intelligence to genetics?
Sure, but what does that have to do with race? Race is a naive folk hypothesis that purports to explain the geographic distribution of certain sets of superficial phenotype characteristics. As a scientific concept it fell apart as soon as we were able to actually look at people's genotypes.
There's this notion that the US will become a majority minority nation by 2044. Except, as one demographer I've read pointed out, by the one-drop standards used to reach that conclusion it's already happened. After 2044 the US will continue to be majority white because a majority of people will self-identify as white, regardless of their geographic heritage.
If people want to see racial inequality disappear then, IMHO at least, we should stop asking for race on applications to university and jobs.
Well, I think you could make a philosophical case for not asking, but I find it extremely unlikely that racial inequality would simply disappear. Whiteness and blackness is an identity, and identities have proven to be extremely durable social constructs once established in the public mind.
I hate the music industry.
No, it's not less rain; it's less evaporation because particulates are shading the ocean.
Particulate cooling *is* a real effect. In fact, it outpaced CO2 based warming from the 1940s to roughly the mid 80s. The difference is CO2 persists in the atmosphere longer.
Emitting more particulates per ton of CO2 emitted would be a viable short term geoengineering method for slowing anthropogenic warming, but only short term. As long as you're emitting more CO2 net than you're capturing in some way, CO2 will dominate.