Ever had the thought that the contempt that intellectuals hold the rest of us in might be the cause of some of the bad feelings? How many intellectuals do you know who consider ordinary Americans to be 'dumbfucks'? What would you think about someone who considered you to be a dumbfuck?
Most of the population really are 'dumbfucks', but it's not contempt you're seeing. It's frustration. Most of the population are content making decisions, both big and small, based on emotional feelings rather than rational reasoning. Emotions are easily, and regularly, manipulated and can have huge society-wide consequences. The common man is treated like a sheep because he acts like a sheep. And because his every other action solely benefits the [shepherds?|wolves?], everyone else gets dragged down with him. This is frustrating, and watching people make the same stupid mistakes over and over boggles the mind.
Its right up there with "PL-259s are impossible to install"
Well the problem with PL-259s are most people have undersized soldering irons. Not to mention there are better connectors out there nowadays anyways.
I'm not sure why PL-259 is still used so often. I can't wait for that abomination to die off. Appropriate replacements have been available for over sixty years.
Using your bank's online bill pay gives you positive control
Wrong. If you send them a check, they have access to your checking account, whether that check is from your personal checkbook or through the bank's electronic checking system. Everything they need for an ACH transaction is available on your personal check. Most online bill payments made through your bank go through ACH; they match up the payee and mailing address, checking if the payee accepts electronic transactions. Also, many vendors will take your paper check, photocopy it, destroy it and initialize an ACH transaction.
Except authorization. The check is authorization for a specific amount. If they try to claim your check for $50 as authorization to repeatedly empty your bank account, they will run afoul of very real laws. There are boatloads of laws and cases relating to the use of checks for transactions and giving someone a check does not give them unfettered access to your account.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case in Denver. Here, you are almost guaranteed to have to stop at least every other light unless you speed (about five over the limit seems to do it, or significantly under the limit). The traffic in the other directions is the same. That, complete with red lights on parkways without cross streets (presumable to slow people down, but if you're going the speed limit, you'll always be stopped, if you're speeding, you'll make it through) and intersections where an entire green cycle occurs with 100% of the traffic stopped at another red light fifty meters behind it, makes me think that the goal is really just to inconvenience people (and increase pollution, gas consumption, and brake service costs).
It is LITERALLY the same exact medication without a trade name
Ideally, yes. But that's not the case in reality. Different generics will use different fillers and different dyes, some of which cause an allergic reaction. The rules for drug content are also quite flexible. Per wikipedia:
The FDA requires the bioequivalence of the generic product to be between 80% and 125% of that of the innovator product.
This can mean different salts of the drug or, in the case of drugs with multiple active ingredients, quite different mixtures (usually with the about of the cheap ingredient boosted and the amount of the expensive ingredient cut). This can have a huge impact on side effects and overall efficacy (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse).
The face is just there for secondary verification. In a false fingerprint match, you would expect the fingerprints to be similar, but not the faces.
His point is that a face match is great for secondary verification if the people are of obviously different races or genders, but if an American soldier is comparing a heavily bearded Afghani man to to the picture of a different heavily bearded Afghani man it may not work so well.
I freaked out a couple of British exchange students at university by pulling out a (not big or scary) pocket knife to open a plastic bag in a chemistry class. The idea of having a pocket knife on you is not unheard of in the US, but apparently it's completely alien in the UK. It's easy to outlaw the things that nobody does.
I had always used + to ensure that a word was in the text of the returned pages. I'm fairly sure that it was different than quotes, because of this. The reason I dropped Google was first the increasing need to use + to keep it from randomly dropping search terms in order to inflate the number of results (and then not telling me it even dropped those terms) and then the loss of + entirely. Searching for anything technical in Google has become a nightmare of massaging the search terms over and over with "-" operators and "intext:" to turn off its assumptions about my search.
If I'm searching for something obscure, I'd rather know that there were no hits (or only five) than get 450,000 hits with random words dropped from my search terms.
But Christmas (and the tree in particular) are only vaguely Christian. They're more traditional than anything else. Plus, I like having a holiday in December. Would we be expected to fill that void with more workdays (or fewer holiday-pay workdays)?
I'm horrified that this made it to Nature. It has certainly sealed my opinion that Nature publishes based more on name than content. Aside from nitpicky little things like leaving the structure such a horrible looking mess (when even my undergrads know how to use the clean-up tool in ChemDraw), why do they think that they can recreate a molecular structure from an IR spectrum obtained from a heterogeneous point source? Occam's Razor would suggest that this bizarrely complex structure isn't what they are actually seeing; they're seeing a population of less complex molecules whose signals are all added together.
This is one of the parts I consider most shocking. I could understand Springer or one of the commercial publishing houses being a pain like this -- they are for-profit businesses whose primary interest is supposed to be sustainability of their business. But IEEE, ACM, and others are learned societies -- charitable institutions whose raison d'être is to support science (rather than enclose and restrict it). And yet there are so many examples of them being, well, uncharitable and inhibiting the use of science by scientists. They should be the ones pushing open access, not having to have it pushed upon them.
I'm not sure about IEEE and ACM, but in chemistry, ACS (who publish the top chemistry journals) are huge opponents of open access. They are a professional society, but member dues are a drop in the bucket compared to what they make from the journals. I wouldn't be surprised if IEEE and ACM are the same. It feels dirty that they used my dues to lobby congress against all of the open access policies.
Good point. It was fun... getting to hang out outside of the school and home settings and seeing the city from a native's perspective. It was a taste of how it was to grow up there. Now, if only I could have got them to speak German instead of English! Yes, their English was better (and they wanted to practice as much as I did), but my German wasn't bad at all.
Will Verizon actually release the SIM lock, though? Things seem to be "different" when an iPhone is involved. AT&T, for example, will release the SIM lock for every one of their phones except the iPhone. I suppose we'll have to wait two months to find out.
As an exchange student in Hamburg, the German students I was with insisted on going to McDonalds. They had some stuff that we didn't have but it was all OK at best. They'd walk for like half an hour to get to it too. It was a little sad. I don't think they understood that I had no interest in eating there.
And what happens if your GPS receiver runs out of batteries or fail in some other way? You die on your fishing trip then as well?
Maybe this type of jamming exercises should me MORE common so people learn to actually have some backup method of getting home if they go far off shore / in to the wilderness.
That's the point. What if GPS was the backup method? What if the map caught on fire or the sextant fell into the sea and "thank god I brought along a GPS," only to find that it's unavailable for artificial reasons. We're not talking about the end of the world where the satellites are falling out of the sky; yes people will die then. We're talking about critical infrastructure being denied to civilians of the convenience of a training exercise.
The question is, if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them?
Hysteresis. They're coasting along on yesterday's economy. It's the same reason why outsourcing all production is profitable in the present, even though it's obvious that it cannot remain profitable indefinitely.
So the people who would have moved to America to work for US Software, Inc and paid US taxes instead stay in their country and start up Cheaper Than US Software, Inc and the jobs move abroad.
H1B isn't a path to US citizenship. It's a means for undercutting the domestic wages while holding the foreign worker in a position where displeasing their employer can lead to being deported. We want the best and brightest of the world to become US citizens, not indentured servants.
My thermodynamics prof was Japanese and had very poor English. He knew it, though, and helpfully covered his mouth with his hand and trailed off at the end of every sentence. That, coupled with his complete disuse of the blackboard or powerpoint, made for a very enjoyable class. Ironically, his accent wasn't all that bad.
The last paragraph of the linked article mentions that they had no choice but to do this:
Though Comcast no doubt loves children and cares deeply about the digital divide, its Internet Essentials program was also a part of the conditions under which it was allowed to buy NBC earlier this year. The company pledged to reach 2.5 million low income households with high speed Internet for less than $10 a month, and to sell some sort of computer for $150 or less.
Your entire argument seems to be centered around this concept. Either you're implying an interpretation of tax brackets that is simply false or you're implying an interpretation of human behavior that is at odds with all of human history.
I'm sure you know this, but while your taxes go up per dollar you make, they only do so in discrete sets. Making more money will lead to paying more tax and paying a higher average per dollar rate, but you will still net more income than if you made less money.
Which leads to the second implication: if given the chance, people will choose to earn more money. I am unfamiliar with this hypothetical person you speak of who refuses to invest his money or take a promotion because, while his net income will increase, it won't increase as much as it could have (if the rules of the game were inexplicably different).
While I'm firmly on your side in the opposition to overtaxation (and much of taxation in general), I don't follow your arguments that increasing tax rates would disincentivize investing or working for money. As long as the net income is positive (and we're talking ~35% taxes here, not 90%+) there is still significant return and incentive to invest (or work). If the choices are invest and make your money grow or not invest on principle to oppose taxation, the former is always going to be the overwhelmingly popular choice.
Do you feel like you're being punished for working by being taxed? Then why is being taxed on capital gains punishment? You're saying that at 15%, they're able to become ultra-wealthy, but at 35% they'd be broke and working in fast food or just give up as it isn't worth it. Do you really believe this?
It also comes from the US hospitals being very conservative when it comes to offering new procedures.
But, but, duriing the health care "debate" we were told that all inovation came from the wonderful free market American system and the socilist eurofags would be screwed if they couldn't steal American ideas.
I'm so confused.
Actually, we do a lot of great medical research in the US. We just tend to collaborate with European researchers for human trials and ultimately they get to use the new techniques years (or decades) before we do (if we ever do). So they're not stealing our ideas (I know you were kidding), but we are prohibited from using ideas that we developed. It's still pretty screwed up.
I'm too lazy to install VPN software to get article access from my couch
Most schools have an EZproxy or similar system available through the library. A quick bookmarklet in the style of [javascript:void((function()%7Blocation.href=location.href.replace(/%5Ehttp%5C:%5C/%5C/(%5B%5E%5C/%5C@%5D+)%5C/(?:)/,%22http://0-%22+%22$1%22.replace(%22%5C:%22,%22.%22)+%22.proxyserver.your-uni.edu/%22);%7D)())] can allow easy journal access without having to screw with VPNs and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever had the thought that the contempt that intellectuals hold the rest of us in might be the cause of some of the bad feelings? How many intellectuals do you know who consider ordinary Americans to be 'dumbfucks'? What would you think about someone who considered you to be a dumbfuck?
Most of the population really are 'dumbfucks', but it's not contempt you're seeing. It's frustration. Most of the population are content making decisions, both big and small, based on emotional feelings rather than rational reasoning. Emotions are easily, and regularly, manipulated and can have huge society-wide consequences. The common man is treated like a sheep because he acts like a sheep. And because his every other action solely benefits the [shepherds?|wolves?], everyone else gets dragged down with him. This is frustrating, and watching people make the same stupid mistakes over and over boggles the mind.
Well the problem with PL-259s are most people have undersized soldering irons. Not to mention there are better connectors out there nowadays anyways.
I'm not sure why PL-259 is still used so often. I can't wait for that abomination to die off. Appropriate replacements have been available for over sixty years.
Wrong. If you send them a check, they have access to your checking account, whether that check is from your personal checkbook or through the bank's electronic checking system. Everything they need for an ACH transaction is available on your personal check. Most online bill payments made through your bank go through ACH; they match up the payee and mailing address, checking if the payee accepts electronic transactions. Also, many vendors will take your paper check, photocopy it, destroy it and initialize an ACH transaction.
Except authorization. The check is authorization for a specific amount. If they try to claim your check for $50 as authorization to repeatedly empty your bank account, they will run afoul of very real laws. There are boatloads of laws and cases relating to the use of checks for transactions and giving someone a check does not give them unfettered access to your account.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case in Denver. Here, you are almost guaranteed to have to stop at least every other light unless you speed (about five over the limit seems to do it, or significantly under the limit). The traffic in the other directions is the same. That, complete with red lights on parkways without cross streets (presumable to slow people down, but if you're going the speed limit, you'll always be stopped, if you're speeding, you'll make it through) and intersections where an entire green cycle occurs with 100% of the traffic stopped at another red light fifty meters behind it, makes me think that the goal is really just to inconvenience people (and increase pollution, gas consumption, and brake service costs).
It is LITERALLY the same exact medication without a trade name
Ideally, yes. But that's not the case in reality. Different generics will use different fillers and different dyes, some of which cause an allergic reaction. The rules for drug content are also quite flexible. Per wikipedia:
The FDA requires the bioequivalence of the generic product to be between 80% and 125% of that of the innovator product.
This can mean different salts of the drug or, in the case of drugs with multiple active ingredients, quite different mixtures (usually with the about of the cheap ingredient boosted and the amount of the expensive ingredient cut). This can have a huge impact on side effects and overall efficacy (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse).
... baselessly arrogant...
Funny, the same thing could be said about Isaac Newton, or Karl Gauss, or just about any of the big names in mathematics.
Stephen Wolfram's no Newton or Gauss.
The face is just there for secondary verification. In a false fingerprint match, you would expect the fingerprints to be similar, but not the faces.
His point is that a face match is great for secondary verification if the people are of obviously different races or genders, but if an American soldier is comparing a heavily bearded Afghani man to to the picture of a different heavily bearded Afghani man it may not work so well.
I freaked out a couple of British exchange students at university by pulling out a (not big or scary) pocket knife to open a plastic bag in a chemistry class. The idea of having a pocket knife on you is not unheard of in the US, but apparently it's completely alien in the UK. It's easy to outlaw the things that nobody does.
I had always used + to ensure that a word was in the text of the returned pages. I'm fairly sure that it was different than quotes, because of this. The reason I dropped Google was first the increasing need to use + to keep it from randomly dropping search terms in order to inflate the number of results (and then not telling me it even dropped those terms) and then the loss of + entirely. Searching for anything technical in Google has become a nightmare of massaging the search terms over and over with "-" operators and "intext:" to turn off its assumptions about my search.
If I'm searching for something obscure, I'd rather know that there were no hits (or only five) than get 450,000 hits with random words dropped from my search terms.
How about instead of fighting the religion-agnostic shit like "In God We Trust", we fight the obviously Christian-agenda shit like Christmas being a Federal holiday, the National Christmas Tree, or the White House Christmas tree?
But Christmas (and the tree in particular) are only vaguely Christian. They're more traditional than anything else. Plus, I like having a holiday in December. Would we be expected to fill that void with more workdays (or fewer holiday-pay workdays)?
I'm horrified that this made it to Nature. It has certainly sealed my opinion that Nature publishes based more on name than content. Aside from nitpicky little things like leaving the structure such a horrible looking mess (when even my undergrads know how to use the clean-up tool in ChemDraw), why do they think that they can recreate a molecular structure from an IR spectrum obtained from a heterogeneous point source? Occam's Razor would suggest that this bizarrely complex structure isn't what they are actually seeing; they're seeing a population of less complex molecules whose signals are all added together.
Yuck.
This is one of the parts I consider most shocking. I could understand Springer or one of the commercial publishing houses being a pain like this -- they are for-profit businesses whose primary interest is supposed to be sustainability of their business. But IEEE, ACM, and others are learned societies -- charitable institutions whose raison d'être is to support science (rather than enclose and restrict it). And yet there are so many examples of them being, well, uncharitable and inhibiting the use of science by scientists. They should be the ones pushing open access, not having to have it pushed upon them.
I'm not sure about IEEE and ACM, but in chemistry, ACS (who publish the top chemistry journals) are huge opponents of open access. They are a professional society, but member dues are a drop in the bucket compared to what they make from the journals. I wouldn't be surprised if IEEE and ACM are the same. It feels dirty that they used my dues to lobby congress against all of the open access policies.
Good point. It was fun... getting to hang out outside of the school and home settings and seeing the city from a native's perspective. It was a taste of how it was to grow up there. Now, if only I could have got them to speak German instead of English! Yes, their English was better (and they wanted to practice as much as I did), but my German wasn't bad at all.
Will Verizon actually release the SIM lock, though? Things seem to be "different" when an iPhone is involved. AT&T, for example, will release the SIM lock for every one of their phones except the iPhone. I suppose we'll have to wait two months to find out.
As an exchange student in Hamburg, the German students I was with insisted on going to McDonalds. They had some stuff that we didn't have but it was all OK at best. They'd walk for like half an hour to get to it too. It was a little sad. I don't think they understood that I had no interest in eating there.
And what happens if your GPS receiver runs out of batteries or fail in some other way? You die on your fishing trip then as well?
Maybe this type of jamming exercises should me MORE common so people learn to actually have some backup method of getting home if they go far off shore / in to the wilderness.
That's the point. What if GPS was the backup method? What if the map caught on fire or the sextant fell into the sea and "thank god I brought along a GPS," only to find that it's unavailable for artificial reasons. We're not talking about the end of the world where the satellites are falling out of the sky; yes people will die then. We're talking about critical infrastructure being denied to civilians of the convenience of a training exercise.
The question is, if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them?
Hysteresis. They're coasting along on yesterday's economy. It's the same reason why outsourcing all production is profitable in the present, even though it's obvious that it cannot remain profitable indefinitely.
So the people who would have moved to America to work for US Software, Inc and paid US taxes instead stay in their country and start up Cheaper Than US Software, Inc and the jobs move abroad.
H1B isn't a path to US citizenship. It's a means for undercutting the domestic wages while holding the foreign worker in a position where displeasing their employer can lead to being deported. We want the best and brightest of the world to become US citizens, not indentured servants.
My thermodynamics prof was Japanese and had very poor English. He knew it, though, and helpfully covered his mouth with his hand and trailed off at the end of every sentence. That, coupled with his complete disuse of the blackboard or powerpoint, made for a very enjoyable class. Ironically, his accent wasn't all that bad.
The last paragraph of the linked article mentions that they had no choice but to do this:
Though Comcast no doubt loves children and cares deeply about the digital divide, its Internet Essentials program was also a part of the conditions under which it was allowed to buy NBC earlier this year. The company pledged to reach 2.5 million low income households with high speed Internet for less than $10 a month, and to sell some sort of computer for $150 or less.
But my taxes have gone up per dollar I make.
Your entire argument seems to be centered around this concept. Either you're implying an interpretation of tax brackets that is simply false or you're implying an interpretation of human behavior that is at odds with all of human history.
I'm sure you know this, but while your taxes go up per dollar you make, they only do so in discrete sets. Making more money will lead to paying more tax and paying a higher average per dollar rate, but you will still net more income than if you made less money.
Which leads to the second implication: if given the chance, people will choose to earn more money. I am unfamiliar with this hypothetical person you speak of who refuses to invest his money or take a promotion because, while his net income will increase, it won't increase as much as it could have (if the rules of the game were inexplicably different).
While I'm firmly on your side in the opposition to overtaxation (and much of taxation in general), I don't follow your arguments that increasing tax rates would disincentivize investing or working for money. As long as the net income is positive (and we're talking ~35% taxes here, not 90%+) there is still significant return and incentive to invest (or work). If the choices are invest and make your money grow or not invest on principle to oppose taxation, the former is always going to be the overwhelmingly popular choice.
Do you feel like you're being punished for working by being taxed? Then why is being taxed on capital gains punishment? You're saying that at 15%, they're able to become ultra-wealthy, but at 35% they'd be broke and working in fast food or just give up as it isn't worth it. Do you really believe this?
It also comes from the US hospitals being very conservative when it comes to offering new procedures.
But, but, duriing the health care "debate" we were told that all inovation came from the wonderful free market American system and the socilist eurofags would be screwed if they couldn't steal American ideas.
I'm so confused.
Actually, we do a lot of great medical research in the US. We just tend to collaborate with European researchers for human trials and ultimately they get to use the new techniques years (or decades) before we do (if we ever do). So they're not stealing our ideas (I know you were kidding), but we are prohibited from using ideas that we developed. It's still pretty screwed up.
I shot him in self defense, here's why usually works wonders, assuming it's true and reasonable.
In the UK? I'm thinking any sentence that starts with "I shot him..." ends with you in prison.
I'm too lazy to install VPN software to get article access from my couch
Most schools have an EZproxy or similar system available through the library. A quick bookmarklet in the style of [javascript:void((function()%7Blocation.href=location.href.replace(/%5Ehttp%5C:%5C/%5C/(%5B%5E%5C/%5C@%5D+)%5C/(?:)/,%22http://0-%22+%22$1%22.replace(%22%5C:%22,%22.%22)+%22.proxyserver.your-uni.edu/%22);%7D)())] can allow easy journal access without having to screw with VPNs and such.