Intelligence, or even common sense, isn't something you get from a PhD.
People who are smart academically, or who are smart in a narrow field, can have some of the stupidest ideas on the planet outside their ridiculously narrow specialty. George McGovern had a PhD in history, but my grandmother had more sane ideas than he did.
Furthermore academic brilliance doesn't mean you have any values. Hans Reiser is an example.
For the most part, no. But there is at least one crucial difference: Comcast can't send goons to your door and arrest you. Also, for some reason, the IRS isn't held to the constitution.
A rather caricatured vision of religion, probably to suit his ends. As I implied, but will ask explicitly, find a real world case where religious people "put up with" abuse by those in power. The American colonies, for instance, are not examples.
... There is no debt crisis. It's not even that no one is ever going to pay it. It's that the US can print its own money. It is not like state governments or a household. It has the capacity for infinite dollars. It will always be able to pay its debts.
So yes, we have plenty of money for science. We have plenty of money for everything. It is only political decisions that affect funding.
Great. Let's print $10000000000000000000 of money and save the world.
That doesn't make sense. Religious people aren't taught to blindly take unjust abuse. When has that ever happened that Marx came up with such a lame brained idea.
France, no. Germany, yes because they are fairly low in debt. Sweden is more free market now after their socialist disaster. Norway has North Sea oil propping them up. Spain? Italy?... well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "well", not well by my definition.
There may not be a significant desire by consumers to get serious about drag reduction. If the desire was serious, carmakers would hardly refuse the money for changing their aerodynamics.
I think part of the problem is that they intentionally put them on the most unconventional looking cars just to help ensure they don't sell
Hmmm.... I could MAYBE see that, if they are forced to sell them at a loss, or if they didn't want consumer's money. But really, I think you are ignoring half the equation: consumers want all of these at once:
Cheap, aerodynamic, acceleration, space, speed, good looks, low maintenance costs, longevity. If they want a thing enough, they have to pay for it.
Auto labor unions ARE a factor outside buying and selling, though. Japanese companies don't have the legacy of a mafia-like organization forcing workers to fork over dues and making the companies accept less productivity on top of it. Small wonder American employees who have any vision for the future prefer working for them.
It's amusing how frequently liberal arts types, including tenured professors who should know better, attempt to imply that STEM workers don't learn critical thinking skills.
To my mind, it's the surest proof that the liberal arts don't teach any critical thinking skills worth mentioning.
STEM workers may learn critical thinking skills in certain domains, but they don't automatically cross over into other domains.
Aside: Tenured professors in the humanities have some of the looniest ideas. When you're tenured, you don't have to worry about little things like the real world. You just have to sound clever and rest on past laurels. Some universities are rethinking whether to offer tenure.
And Democrats aren't the champions of Republicans-are-wrong. Yeah. I see no evidence for that whatsoever, especially on Slashdot.
And BTW, regarding the poster child for criticism on Slashdot, Fox News... a UCLA study of media bias found them to be in the top 4 news outlets for balanced reporting.
Jim Lehrer, CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC Good Morning America were the top 3.
Wall Street Journal and New York Times came in last at #19 and #20.
The author of the study asked for peer reviews of his methodology. Most peers found it sound except when they began to see the results, when suddenly many deduced it "couldn't be right". So the author kept going back asking for changes to make it more objective. He kept on adding or tweaking measures until they had nothing left to criticize.
A Measure of Media Bias by Tim Groseclose, Department of Political Science, UCLA, 2004.
Yeah, since the neo-cons created tax benefits to send our manufacturing out of the nation...
Outsourcing has little impact on the number of jobs in the U.S. Furthermore it isn't exclusively neocons that have supported it. Clinton signed NAFTA and Obama is pushing new free trade agreements.
But artificial measures to prevent outsourcing definitely do make the job situation worse because it reduces incentives for competitiveness.
Also don't forget that we benefit from other country's outsourcing. Think of people who work for Toyota and Honda.
Solar City is getting ready to announce a NEW solar plant that will be heavily automated and cheaper costs than what China can produce.
We'll see. If they do, good for them. But if they don't, guess what would make more sense, to go back to outsourcing, or prop up a failing business?
We have past experience with cancer and how it progresses. There are variations in individuals, of course, but we have good retrospective data on risks.
With GW, we have no retrospective data on (hypothesized) large effects, hence no test of the magnitude or time scale for them.
Furthermore, climatologists, leaving alone their predictions for the future, can't even use their current models and current data to propagate variables backwards in time to agree with earlier measurements.
I believe the evidence suggests GW is something worth treating now.
"Suggests" is not enough to warrant investing barrels of money, taking away money from other obvious and immediate problems (poverty, disease... etc).
Perhaps you meant "almost certain" instead of "suggests". I don't have confidence (yet) in GW advocate's models for reasons given above.
By that logic if you have a cancer that's not going to bother you for the next couple months you'd suggested waiting until the tumour starts causing issues before you get it treated.
Not a good analogy and not my logic. The phenomenology of cancer is much better understood than GW.
A nuclear war with today's stockpiles (much less Cold War stockpiles) would quite likely mean the end of the human race. IOW, the end of the world. Nuclear winter is a red herring
While it would cause more destruction than anyone wants, this is a pretty big earth. I allow you the benefit of a doubt, though. Do you have a credible source for your claims about ending the human race?
It's not something to worry about in the next decade but beyond that...
Unfortunately, there are those that want to commit hundreds of billions of dollars right now to GW instead of things that we know right now will make a difference. If we committed that much to every "what if" we couldn't do anything else.
Doing something in the name of non-religious dogma such as Communism is not the same thing as doing something in the name of Atheism.
I'll grant you that there are atheists who do not want to eliminate religion. A few decades ago, they constituted the majority. Today, though, their numbers seem to be shrinking, and the remainder of atheists like Dawkins share their over-hyped fear of religion with Communism's legitimate fear of religion. (Legitimate because religion IS a threat to Communism.)
Slashdot Mirror
Intelligence, or even common sense, isn't something you get from a PhD. People who are smart academically, or who are smart in a narrow field, can have some of the stupidest ideas on the planet outside their ridiculously narrow specialty. George McGovern had a PhD in history, but my grandmother had more sane ideas than he did. Furthermore academic brilliance doesn't mean you have any values. Hans Reiser is an example.
They said "orders of magnitude" more were shared than were not shared. Of course, they neglected to say it was orders in base 1, not base 10, but hey.
You seem like a very happy individual.
For the most part, no. But there is at least one crucial difference: Comcast can't send goons to your door and arrest you. Also, for some reason, the IRS isn't held to the constitution.
Yet another problem with Apple. This would never have happened with an Android device.
A rather caricatured vision of religion, probably to suit his ends. As I implied, but will ask explicitly, find a real world case where religious people "put up with" abuse by those in power. The American colonies, for instance, are not examples.
... There is no debt crisis. It's not even that no one is ever going to pay it. It's that the US can print its own money. It is not like state governments or a household. It has the capacity for infinite dollars. It will always be able to pay its debts.
So yes, we have plenty of money for science. We have plenty of money for everything. It is only political decisions that affect funding.
Great. Let's print $10000000000000000000 of money and save the world.
That doesn't make sense. Religious people aren't taught to blindly take unjust abuse. When has that ever happened that Marx came up with such a lame brained idea.
France, no. Germany, yes because they are fairly low in debt. Sweden is more free market now after their socialist disaster. Norway has North Sea oil propping them up. Spain? Italy? ... well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "well", not well by my definition.
America is not actually litigation happy. Stop using the news and pundits as is they are accurate.
The insurance is not that big of a deal.
How do you figure that? U.S. per capita legal liability costs are twice the average European country.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...
I think part of the problem is that they intentionally put them on the most unconventional looking cars just to help ensure they don't sell
Hmmm .... I could MAYBE see that, if they are forced to sell them at a loss, or if they didn't want consumer's money. But really, I think you are ignoring half the equation: consumers want all of these at once:
Cheap, aerodynamic, acceleration, space, speed, good looks, low maintenance costs, longevity. If they want a thing enough, they have to pay for it.
Auto labor unions ARE a factor outside buying and selling, though. Japanese companies don't have the legacy of a mafia-like organization forcing workers to fork over dues and making the companies accept less productivity on top of it. Small wonder American employees who have any vision for the future prefer working for them.
It's amusing how frequently liberal arts types, including tenured professors who should know better, attempt to imply that STEM workers don't learn critical thinking skills.
To my mind, it's the surest proof that the liberal arts don't teach any critical thinking skills worth mentioning.
STEM workers may learn critical thinking skills in certain domains, but they don't automatically cross over into other domains. Aside: Tenured professors in the humanities have some of the looniest ideas. When you're tenured, you don't have to worry about little things like the real world. You just have to sound clever and rest on past laurels. Some universities are rethinking whether to offer tenure.
And BTW, regarding the poster child for criticism on Slashdot, Fox News ... a UCLA study of media bias found them to be in the top 4 news outlets for balanced reporting.
Jim Lehrer, CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC Good Morning America were the top 3.
Wall Street Journal and New York Times came in last at #19 and #20.
The author of the study asked for peer reviews of his methodology. Most peers found it sound except when they began to see the results, when suddenly many deduced it "couldn't be right". So the author kept going back asking for changes to make it more objective. He kept on adding or tweaking measures until they had nothing left to criticize.
A Measure of Media Bias by Tim Groseclose, Department of Political Science, UCLA, 2004.
Yeah, since the neo-cons created tax benefits to send our manufacturing out of the nation ...
Outsourcing has little impact on the number of jobs in the U.S. Furthermore it isn't exclusively neocons that have supported it. Clinton signed NAFTA and Obama is pushing new free trade agreements. But artificial measures to prevent outsourcing definitely do make the job situation worse because it reduces incentives for competitiveness. Also don't forget that we benefit from other country's outsourcing. Think of people who work for Toyota and Honda.
Solar City is getting ready to announce a NEW solar plant that will be heavily automated and cheaper costs than what China can produce.
We'll see. If they do, good for them. But if they don't, guess what would make more sense, to go back to outsourcing, or prop up a failing business?
There's a difference between tolerating falsehoods and not making stupid harmless ones front page news.
They managed to arrest the guy, that is good defense. Who want to steal stuff if the outcome is guaranteed to be jail?
Most criminals don't think long term, or think they'll get caught. For that matter, humans in general are only partly influenced by reason.
I believe the evidence suggests GW is something worth treating now.
"Suggests" is not enough to warrant investing barrels of money, taking away money from other obvious and immediate problems (poverty, disease ... etc).
Perhaps you meant "almost certain" instead of "suggests". I don't have confidence (yet) in GW advocate's models for reasons given above.
By that logic if you have a cancer that's not going to bother you for the next couple months you'd suggested waiting until the tumour starts causing issues before you get it treated.
Not a good analogy and not my logic. The phenomenology of cancer is much better understood than GW.
A nuclear war with today's stockpiles (much less Cold War stockpiles) would quite likely mean the end of the human race. IOW, the end of the world. Nuclear winter is a red herring
While it would cause more destruction than anyone wants, this is a pretty big earth. I allow you the benefit of a doubt, though. Do you have a credible source for your claims about ending the human race?
It's not something to worry about in the next decade but beyond that ...
Unfortunately, there are those that want to commit hundreds of billions of dollars right now to GW instead of things that we know right now will make a difference. If we committed that much to every "what if" we couldn't do anything else.
Doing something in the name of non-religious dogma such as Communism is not the same thing as doing something in the name of Atheism.
I'll grant you that there are atheists who do not want to eliminate religion. A few decades ago, they constituted the majority. Today, though, their numbers seem to be shrinking, and the remainder of atheists like Dawkins share their over-hyped fear of religion with Communism's legitimate fear of religion. (Legitimate because religion IS a threat to Communism.)