I'm not sure whether you're going for "funny" or "insightful"; perhaps you're going for "funny" but getting modded "insightful". So for the benefit of the irony impaired:
SO far they claimed Russia hacked the 2016 election but yet not 1 piece of proof has shown that to be true, only so called "hack" that happened on elections was by the DNC
Gee, how do we know about the so-called DNC "hacking" exactly [note 1]?
as well as in states like California letting people vote that don't even hold US citizenship.
California did no such thing. What California did was pass two separate laws, one of which enabled American citizens to register to vote when they obtain a driver's license, another of which provided a separate registration process that allows undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses. That process does not include voter registration, for obvious reasons.
note 1: the DNC did not "hack" the election. It just worked for HRC and against Sanders, which pissed of some Sanders voters, but in fact was legal both by US law and the party bylaws (you *have* read your party's bylaws, haven't you?)
The DNC, like the RNC, is not an impartial, non-partisan organization. Both national committees are power centers which, by design (those bylaws again) serve the party insiders. The way you deal with people using the national committees in ways you don't like is you put your own people on them.
You evidently believe that facts can do no harm to your understanding.
Except they can. Only a fool treats carefully selected facts the same as if they were impartially selected, but there are quite evidently a lot of fools out there.
If you can't understand the importance of considering the selection and arrangement of information, you are utterly helpless in the face of a simple product testimonial. Even if the testimonial is completely factual, it gives you no useful information.
Well, there are figures you can compare this to. A algae farm can produce (according to the literature) 36 tons of dry biomass per hectare per year, which probably represents an upper limit on biomass production per area. That's 3.6 kg/m^2/year. This thing is vertical, true, but the implication of the way you're reading it is that it produces over 20,000 kg/m^2/year.
Clearly that's not possible, even with constant harvesting, but there's an even bigger problem: any CO2 removed as biomass will simply return to the atmosphere as biomass if it's just landfilled.
Here's what I think is happening: 240 metric tons is market-speak. They added up all the possible secondary effects they could think of for these devices, under the most favorable imaginable circumstances, add in some ridiculously optimistic predictions for human behavior (e.g. we'll assume we can get the residents of Atlanta go give up air conditioning in the summer) and then say the device removes "up to" whatever figure you come up with.
That's about as true as saying that toothpaste will increase your sex appeal.
Alright, time to drive a stake through the heart of this brain-dead water vapor meme.
There's one important fact about water which you are overlooking: it is wet. That is to say it can exist as a liquid (or a solid) at normal atmospheric temperatures and pressures. This means it can't diffuse throughout the entire troposphere like CO2 can before it exits the atmosphere as rain, snow, or dew.
And this is a good thing, because water is a potent greenhouse gas and all things being equal higher temperatures means more evaporation. If evaporation could drive warming the way CO2 does, we'd be looking at a runaway positive feedback loop that would end with the oceans boiling away.
Still, water doesplay a key role in anthropogenic climate change models. That's because CO2 can increase water evaporation in a global way that water vapor itself cannot. Water vapor basically doubles the impact of anthropogenic CO2.
The situation is actually much more complex than you seem to think. Sure, as matter of US law, the accord is not technically a "treaty", and therefore the President can give it the old heave ho. But as a matter international law...
Well, let's start there. Calling international law "law" is misleading. It's not law in the sense of state and federal law, where there is an authority with overwhelming power who compels obedience. International law is more like politics, or norms of behavior.
There is no power on Earth that can compel the United States to do anything -- even obey a treaty. In 1977 we signed a treaty with Panama which ceded control over the Panama Canal to them. If we said today, screw it, we're talking it back, who would stop us? Panama? That's just reality, and reality trumps any other theoretical basis for law.
The US is effectively above any sort of international "law". But being above the law is not the same as being beyond the reach of consequences. And the consequence of breaking an international agreement -- "treaty" or not -- is that other countries begin to expect bad faith from you. That's why US diplomats always negotiate a ratification clause or a withdrawal clause into any agreement we enter into, to avoid the possibility of conflict between international expectations and US law. If the agreement has a ratification clause we think of it as a treaty, but in fact from an international standpoint that makes exactly 0 difference.
Failure to abide by the withdrawal terms of a non-treaty pact may be perfectly legal as a matter of domestic US law, but it violates the norms of international "law". And that would have consequences for us because we ourselves expect other nations to follow those norms. Not even we can get everything we want through force; we don't even want to.
Well, clearly we agree there. I think that "hate crime" gives certain people want to minimize those crimes ammunition because they can (and do) attempt to paint it as a class of thought crimes, which of course they aren't. It's not illegal to hate anyone.
The "why" can make a great deal of difference. Someone killing a person for molesting their kid is different than killing someone randomly.
You don't even have to make such an emotional argument. Every crime by definition has two parts: actus reus (the actual act) and mens rea, literally "guilty mind". If you kill somebody but only intended to hurt them, then you get the lesser charge of manslaughter. Do exactly the same act with the intent of killing, and it's murder.
In hate crimes (which I think are grossly misnamed) the intent goes beyond the individual targeted, to all people who are like them. Burning a cross on someone's lawn isn't just tresspass and property damage, it sends a message to the people there and everyone like them: people like you aren't allowed to live here.
Hate crimes and terrorism are one and the same thing. We just call it a "hate crime" if it's directed against a minority and "terrorism" if the majority is intended to receive the message as well. If it were up to me I'd reclassify both of them "crimes against liberty".
There is nothing that says that whistleblowing has to be legal; in fact in repressive regimes it's always illegal.
Daniel Ellsberg certainly broke the law when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. But he was no traitor -- at least not to the country. Ellsberg was a very senior person who knew exactly what he was doing and measured his actions very precisely to avoid harming US security interests. People were furious when they learned how dishonest their government had been.
Classification is neither here nor there as far as whistleblowing is concerned. The strongest argument against Reality Winner being a whistleblower is that she didn't reveal any US government wrongdoing. She didn't even reveal any wrongdoing by Donald Trump, his campaign, or transition team.
She clearly is no Daniel Ellsberg; she's more like Chelsea Manning, well-meaning but naive and inexperienced. While she wasn't so foolish as to reveal any methods or resources, we can't be certain whether Russia was aware we were onto them.
Overall I have mixed feelings. On one hand what she did has counterintelligence implications. But you have to weigh the value of the public knowing that the Russians really were meddling. There has been an active campaign to paint that as paranoia. It's good that we know, but we can't really be sure what the cost was.
Well, the thing about technology is its capacity to surprise you, both in positive and negative ways.
I still find the capacity of search engines to provide instantaneous response covering millions of data sites to millions of simultaneous users astonishing. It's something that thirty years ago I would have put more like a hundred years in the future, not ten.
And yet, we still don't have a flying car, largely I think because while people think it's something they want, when you put one together it's just not that compelling. Not like a service that allows them to broadcast their thoughts a 140 characters at a time -- people just can't live without that.
It's that combination of astonishing things turning out to be possible with stubborn human capriciousness that makes tech fascinating. On the face of it Hyperloop seems far-fetched, and yet if engineers, working with hard numbers and physics, prove that it is technically feasible, I wouldn't be surprised. And then if people simply decided they didn't want to use it, well that wouldn't surprise me either.
I actually looked the guy up and he does have some of the typical background for the job, having worked in the US attorneys' office and DOJ for about eight years.
That's a little thin compared to Comey's 18 years of public service before nomination, or Mueller's 15 years. Louis Freeh was an actual FBI agent for six years, followed by ten years as a prosecutor and two as a federal judge.
So given that his relevant experience is a bit thin by recent standards, why Wray? Probably because he's willing to do the job under circumstances. As to whether his personal loyalty to the President will be greater than Comey's, that only people who know him could say.
If the President is relying solely on the fact that Wray represented Chris Christie in a case where Christie was widely viewed as having abused his executive power, well then the President would be a fool. Smart lawyers understand where their duty lies. When their defending a client it's to the client. But while an FBI director works under the president, he's not the president's personal lawyer; his duty is to the country.
We'll have to watch the confirmation hearings to get a sense of who this guy is.
As I get older I realize that progress usually comes with a cost; when something is gained, something is inevitably lost. The access that search engines and social media have given us to volumes of data is invaluable; and yet for many people their mental life has been reduced to an endless cycle: skim and react, skim and react. Just as it is possible to become more informed than any human being of any past generation, it has also become easy to be plugged into current events, and yet ignorant.
To someone of my generation, the need to ask the question "what software do news organizations use to keep track of so much information" is baffling. It's like people haven't even considered the capabilities of a group of human brains, each of which is closely studying a particular source of data.
Not that I don't appreciate the importance and value of computers as an adjunct to the human brain. But it's no surprise we're finding it increasingly plausible to supplant the human brain, because never before have even educated people been using the capacity of their brains less.
Future historians may well identify this time as the dawn of the Age of Analytics -- or perhaps some machine learning algorithm will. A point in time when the perennial balance between deduction and induction tilted towards induction; when people began to run their lives on masses of data nobody has ever looked at our thought about.
This, by the way, is where fake news comes from. There's always been fake news, but when you spend time with a piece of bullshit, examining it closely and reflecting upon it, you start to notice that it stinks. But you'll never notice if it's flying past at a hundred miles an hour. We know that the entire stream of BS stinks, but we still build our world view out of the individual pieces.
Well, I agree that you shouldn't have to be a minority. However to designate a place specifically safe for LGBT students does not violate the principle that it should be safe for all. It's a specific application of the general principle.
Just to be clear, I haven't lived on a campus in 35 years; I don't speak for anyone but myself. I'm simply stating what I believe safe space advocates are talking about. But that doesn't mean that that every last one of them has fully worked out the consequences of what, is a fairly unobjectionable starting point. One of those consequences is that you have to live with other people who are expressing viewpoints you find odious.
Just as an evangelical Christian has to cede some of the public space for atheists and people who think homosexuality is natural, those people in turn have to cede some of the public space to people who think gays will burn in hell.
Does this make safe space advocates hypocrites? I have no doubt some of them are. But in my experience very few people escape hypocrisy completely. It's a struggle to do the right thing, and anyone who thinks it's always easy is probably more self-righteous than righteous.
Milgram's experiment proves no such thing, the very least because 1/3 of the subjects refused to comply. In any case Milgram's results showed higher rates of obedience than most follow-ups.
Since attempts at reproduction always find a significant number of conforming AND non-conforming subjects, the only reasonable conclusion is that humans vary in that characteristic.
As for social influence on opinions, of course that exists but humans vary in that as well. Strictly speaking if I had to trust my life to someone's ethics, though, I suspect I might prefer someone with Asperger's.
Isn't California in the middle of a multi-year effort to reduce the size of its prison population? And didn't they just pass a proposition to increase the number of non-violent offenders given parole?
Simple thought experiment. Suppose you had facilities for a million prisoners, and they were totally full. Then you reduce the number of prisoners to just one, maintaining the capacity to handle a million inmates. What would happen to your total prison spending? What would happen to your per inmate spending?
It seems pretty obvious to me that your total prison spending would drop, but your per-prisoner cost would be astronomical.
PPC = M + TFC/n
where:
PPC -- per prisoner cost
M -- marginal expenses for each prisoner (food, clothing, etc.)
TFC -- total fixed costs for the system (building maintenance, administrataion)
n -- number inmates in the system.
So right off the bat the taxpayers are paying less on prisons, but you can't instantaneously make all that excess capacity disappear. You'd expect a short term spike in per prisoner spending until you could start closing parts of each prison, or maybe even entire prisons.
Only a person ignorant of history could write something like that. Those old feudal lords basically owned everything in their grasp, including people. This was what made people enthusiastic for powerful central monarchies; nothing could be worse than barons.
Don't like the IRS bureaucrats? Well at least you can vote for your representative, senator and President.
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I'm not sure whether you're going for "funny" or "insightful"; perhaps you're going for "funny" but getting modded "insightful". So for the benefit of the irony impaired:
SO far they claimed Russia hacked the 2016 election but yet not 1 piece of proof has shown that to be true, only so called "hack" that happened on elections was by the DNC
Gee, how do we know about the so-called DNC "hacking" exactly [note 1]?
as well as in states like California letting people vote that don't even hold US citizenship.
California did no such thing. What California did was pass two separate laws, one of which enabled American citizens to register to vote when they obtain a driver's license, another of which provided a separate registration process that allows undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses. That process does not include voter registration, for obvious reasons.
note 1: the DNC did not "hack" the election. It just worked for HRC and against Sanders, which pissed of some Sanders voters, but in fact was legal both by US law and the party bylaws (you *have* read your party's bylaws, haven't you?)
The DNC, like the RNC, is not an impartial, non-partisan organization. Both national committees are power centers which, by design (those bylaws again) serve the party insiders. The way you deal with people using the national committees in ways you don't like is you put your own people on them.
You evidently believe that facts can do no harm to your understanding.
Except they can. Only a fool treats carefully selected facts the same as if they were impartially selected, but there are quite evidently a lot of fools out there.
If you can't understand the importance of considering the selection and arrangement of information, you are utterly helpless in the face of a simple product testimonial. Even if the testimonial is completely factual, it gives you no useful information.
Well, there are figures you can compare this to. A algae farm can produce (according to the literature) 36 tons of dry biomass per hectare per year, which probably represents an upper limit on biomass production per area. That's 3.6 kg/m^2/year. This thing is vertical, true, but the implication of the way you're reading it is that it produces over 20,000 kg/m^2/year.
Clearly that's not possible, even with constant harvesting, but there's an even bigger problem: any CO2 removed as biomass will simply return to the atmosphere as biomass if it's just landfilled.
Here's what I think is happening: 240 metric tons is market-speak. They added up all the possible secondary effects they could think of for these devices, under the most favorable imaginable circumstances, add in some ridiculously optimistic predictions for human behavior (e.g. we'll assume we can get the residents of Atlanta go give up air conditioning in the summer) and then say the device removes "up to" whatever figure you come up with.
That's about as true as saying that toothpaste will increase your sex appeal.
Alright, time to drive a stake through the heart of this brain-dead water vapor meme.
There's one important fact about water which you are overlooking: it is wet. That is to say it can exist as a liquid (or a solid) at normal atmospheric temperatures and pressures. This means it can't diffuse throughout the entire troposphere like CO2 can before it exits the atmosphere as rain, snow, or dew.
And this is a good thing, because water is a potent greenhouse gas and all things being equal higher temperatures means more evaporation. If evaporation could drive warming the way CO2 does, we'd be looking at a runaway positive feedback loop that would end with the oceans boiling away.
Still, water doesplay a key role in anthropogenic climate change models. That's because CO2 can increase water evaporation in a global way that water vapor itself cannot. Water vapor basically doubles the impact of anthropogenic CO2.
The situation is actually much more complex than you seem to think. Sure, as matter of US law, the accord is not technically a "treaty", and therefore the President can give it the old heave ho. But as a matter international law...
Well, let's start there. Calling international law "law" is misleading. It's not law in the sense of state and federal law, where there is an authority with overwhelming power who compels obedience. International law is more like politics, or norms of behavior.
There is no power on Earth that can compel the United States to do anything -- even obey a treaty. In 1977 we signed a treaty with Panama which ceded control over the Panama Canal to them. If we said today, screw it, we're talking it back, who would stop us? Panama? That's just reality, and reality trumps any other theoretical basis for law.
The US is effectively above any sort of international "law". But being above the law is not the same as being beyond the reach of consequences. And the consequence of breaking an international agreement -- "treaty" or not -- is that other countries begin to expect bad faith from you. That's why US diplomats always negotiate a ratification clause or a withdrawal clause into any agreement we enter into, to avoid the possibility of conflict between international expectations and US law. If the agreement has a ratification clause we think of it as a treaty, but in fact from an international standpoint that makes exactly 0 difference.
Failure to abide by the withdrawal terms of a non-treaty pact may be perfectly legal as a matter of domestic US law, but it violates the norms of international "law". And that would have consequences for us because we ourselves expect other nations to follow those norms. Not even we can get everything we want through force; we don't even want to.
A question you might ask yourself...
Well, clearly we agree there. I think that "hate crime" gives certain people want to minimize those crimes ammunition because they can (and do) attempt to paint it as a class of thought crimes, which of course they aren't. It's not illegal to hate anyone.
The "why" can make a great deal of difference. Someone killing a person for molesting their kid is different than killing someone randomly.
You don't even have to make such an emotional argument. Every crime by definition has two parts: actus reus (the actual act) and mens rea, literally "guilty mind". If you kill somebody but only intended to hurt them, then you get the lesser charge of manslaughter. Do exactly the same act with the intent of killing, and it's murder.
In hate crimes (which I think are grossly misnamed) the intent goes beyond the individual targeted, to all people who are like them. Burning a cross on someone's lawn isn't just tresspass and property damage, it sends a message to the people there and everyone like them: people like you aren't allowed to live here.
Hate crimes and terrorism are one and the same thing. We just call it a "hate crime" if it's directed against a minority and "terrorism" if the majority is intended to receive the message as well. If it were up to me I'd reclassify both of them "crimes against liberty".
I never said Manning wasn't a whistleblower. Only that she was naive and inexperienced -- and vulnerable.
Sure. If all your doctor was a drunken quack, and you didn't have a choice of another doctor, you wouldn't trust him to save your life.
But you'd still want him to.
Yes, Minister.
It's a fair point, but my point is really we can't predict a lawyer's future actions by the actions of his clients.
There is nothing that says that whistleblowing has to be legal; in fact in repressive regimes it's always illegal.
Daniel Ellsberg certainly broke the law when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. But he was no traitor -- at least not to the country. Ellsberg was a very senior person who knew exactly what he was doing and measured his actions very precisely to avoid harming US security interests. People were furious when they learned how dishonest their government had been.
Classification is neither here nor there as far as whistleblowing is concerned. The strongest argument against Reality Winner being a whistleblower is that she didn't reveal any US government wrongdoing. She didn't even reveal any wrongdoing by Donald Trump, his campaign, or transition team.
She clearly is no Daniel Ellsberg; she's more like Chelsea Manning, well-meaning but naive and inexperienced. While she wasn't so foolish as to reveal any methods or resources, we can't be certain whether Russia was aware we were onto them.
Overall I have mixed feelings. On one hand what she did has counterintelligence implications. But you have to weigh the value of the public knowing that the Russians really were meddling. There has been an active campaign to paint that as paranoia. It's good that we know, but we can't really be sure what the cost was.
Well, the thing about technology is its capacity to surprise you, both in positive and negative ways.
I still find the capacity of search engines to provide instantaneous response covering millions of data sites to millions of simultaneous users astonishing. It's something that thirty years ago I would have put more like a hundred years in the future, not ten.
And yet, we still don't have a flying car, largely I think because while people think it's something they want, when you put one together it's just not that compelling. Not like a service that allows them to broadcast their thoughts a 140 characters at a time -- people just can't live without that.
It's that combination of astonishing things turning out to be possible with stubborn human capriciousness that makes tech fascinating. On the face of it Hyperloop seems far-fetched, and yet if engineers, working with hard numbers and physics, prove that it is technically feasible, I wouldn't be surprised. And then if people simply decided they didn't want to use it, well that wouldn't surprise me either.
I wouldn't touch the short end of that bet.
I actually looked the guy up and he does have some of the typical background for the job, having worked in the US attorneys' office and DOJ for about eight years.
That's a little thin compared to Comey's 18 years of public service before nomination, or Mueller's 15 years. Louis Freeh was an actual FBI agent for six years, followed by ten years as a prosecutor and two as a federal judge.
So given that his relevant experience is a bit thin by recent standards, why Wray? Probably because he's willing to do the job under circumstances. As to whether his personal loyalty to the President will be greater than Comey's, that only people who know him could say.
If the President is relying solely on the fact that Wray represented Chris Christie in a case where Christie was widely viewed as having abused his executive power, well then the President would be a fool. Smart lawyers understand where their duty lies. When their defending a client it's to the client. But while an FBI director works under the president, he's not the president's personal lawyer; his duty is to the country.
We'll have to watch the confirmation hearings to get a sense of who this guy is.
As I get older I realize that progress usually comes with a cost; when something is gained, something is inevitably lost. The access that search engines and social media have given us to volumes of data is invaluable; and yet for many people their mental life has been reduced to an endless cycle: skim and react, skim and react. Just as it is possible to become more informed than any human being of any past generation, it has also become easy to be plugged into current events, and yet ignorant.
To someone of my generation, the need to ask the question "what software do news organizations use to keep track of so much information" is baffling. It's like people haven't even considered the capabilities of a group of human brains, each of which is closely studying a particular source of data.
Not that I don't appreciate the importance and value of computers as an adjunct to the human brain. But it's no surprise we're finding it increasingly plausible to supplant the human brain, because never before have even educated people been using the capacity of their brains less.
Future historians may well identify this time as the dawn of the Age of Analytics -- or perhaps some machine learning algorithm will. A point in time when the perennial balance between deduction and induction tilted towards induction; when people began to run their lives on masses of data nobody has ever looked at our thought about.
This, by the way, is where fake news comes from. There's always been fake news, but when you spend time with a piece of bullshit, examining it closely and reflecting upon it, you start to notice that it stinks. But you'll never notice if it's flying past at a hundred miles an hour. We know that the entire stream of BS stinks, but we still build our world view out of the individual pieces.
Well, I agree that you shouldn't have to be a minority. However to designate a place specifically safe for LGBT students does not violate the principle that it should be safe for all. It's a specific application of the general principle.
Just to be clear, I haven't lived on a campus in 35 years; I don't speak for anyone but myself. I'm simply stating what I believe safe space advocates are talking about. But that doesn't mean that that every last one of them has fully worked out the consequences of what, is a fairly unobjectionable starting point. One of those consequences is that you have to live with other people who are expressing viewpoints you find odious.
Just as an evangelical Christian has to cede some of the public space for atheists and people who think homosexuality is natural, those people in turn have to cede some of the public space to people who think gays will burn in hell.
Does this make safe space advocates hypocrites? I have no doubt some of them are. But in my experience very few people escape hypocrisy completely. It's a struggle to do the right thing, and anyone who thinks it's always easy is probably more self-righteous than righteous.
Well, then I apologize. One does lose lose sight of what seems simple to others.
This reminds me of one of my former colleagues, a CPA, called "the accounting koan": When are fixed costs variable, and variable costs fixed?
Let me say, that gem simply killed in our little group.
No. I read your "definition" that tried to claim that there were inclusive safe spaces,
Clearly you are confused about what a definition is. Unfortunately, until you clear up that confusion there's not much interesting that you can say.
Well, if you read my post you'd have known I was responding to people here who claim they were fake.
Nor did I imply document to said anything about how past leakers were treated.
Milgram's experiment proves no such thing, the very least because 1/3 of the subjects refused to comply. In any case Milgram's results showed higher rates of obedience than most follow-ups.
Since attempts at reproduction always find a significant number of conforming AND non-conforming subjects, the only reasonable conclusion is that humans vary in that characteristic.
As for social influence on opinions, of course that exists but humans vary in that as well. Strictly speaking if I had to trust my life to someone's ethics, though, I suspect I might prefer someone with Asperger's.
Well, my point isn't that the medieval curriculum was perfect. Only that it was more rigorous.
Now as for philosophy, sure, but probably nothing highly technical until more basic skills have been acquired. Surely some epistemology and ethics.
Isn't California in the middle of a multi-year effort to reduce the size of its prison population? And didn't they just pass a proposition to increase the number of non-violent offenders given parole?
Simple thought experiment. Suppose you had facilities for a million prisoners, and they were totally full. Then you reduce the number of prisoners to just one, maintaining the capacity to handle a million inmates. What would happen to your total prison spending? What would happen to your per inmate spending?
It seems pretty obvious to me that your total prison spending would drop, but your per-prisoner cost would be astronomical.
PPC = M + TFC/n
where:
PPC -- per prisoner cost
M -- marginal expenses for each prisoner (food, clothing, etc.)
TFC -- total fixed costs for the system (building maintenance, administrataion)
n -- number inmates in the system.
So right off the bat the taxpayers are paying less on prisons, but you can't instantaneously make all that excess capacity disappear. You'd expect a short term spike in per prisoner spending until you could start closing parts of each prison, or maybe even entire prisons.
Only a person ignorant of history could write something like that. Those old feudal lords basically owned everything in their grasp, including people. This was what made people enthusiastic for powerful central monarchies; nothing could be worse than barons.
Don't like the IRS bureaucrats? Well at least you can vote for your representative, senator and President.