German consumers pay a lot of money to subsidize big corporations and manufacturers of solar and energy-intensive manufacturing is being outsourced from Germany. Is that what you want for the US?
Yes, everybody can do what Tesla is doing, if all entry-level cars cost $70000, last only a few years, and were still subsidized massively by tax payers.
Is that the world you want to live in? A world in which only the wealthy can afford cars?
That's from 2008. You know who the guy responsible, the head of the executive branch, was at the time. Punish his party at the polls next presidential election.
And by that "one party", you surely mean the Democrats. After all, they are in bed with law enforcement unions and lawyers. And in half a dozen years, instead of asset forfeiture has greatly increased under a Democratic government, when Obama had every opportunity to stop it.
Basically, they seem to be mostly saying it's unlikely that a small mutation (because that's what a SNP is mostly) that was selected/amplified by evolution can determine our intelligence.
Yeah, but that's an incorrect conclusion. They tested only for a small fraction of all possible SNPs, so not finding a big effect doesn't prove that it isn't there. In addition, there are SNPs that have a big effect on intelligence that you would never pick up in their kind of screen (e.g., Phenylketonuria).
Finally, there is no reason to believe that unusually high intelligence would evenbe selected for evolutionarily; high intelligence is a trait favored by academics, not mates. Disease resistance, famine resistance, social skills, and a good physique are probably much more important for reproductive success.
"The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."
That debate was resolved long ago: ethnicity does not influence intelligence per se. However, other factors may cause a correlation. For example, if Indians coming to the US frequently work in high tech, then in the US, Indian ethnicity will correlate with higher intelligence, even though the total populations of Indians in the world score lower than the total population of Americans.
The AT article seems to try to put a spin on it, but the actual abstract sounds quite different:
We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxy-phenotype method.... Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory.
It's clear from twin studies that IQ has a strong genetic component, about as strong as height: both have a heritability of around 0.8 (on a scale from 0 to 1, with 1 being variability being entirely genetically determined). Here's a bit more info on heritability from Nature: http://www.nature.com/scitable...
Failing to find the genes responsible in this study means nothing since the current SNPs we test for are quite limited. Ultimately, these questions can only be resolved by full genome sequencing of large numbers of people. Until then, we may get lucky in identifying genes in these kinds of studies, but failure to find something means little. And, actually, they did find something interesting.
But the majority of the worlds pollution comes from Power plants and Shipping.
Bullshit. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... Transport accounts for 13% and energy accounts for 26% of global carbon emissions. Even if you managed to eliminate all of those, it would only slow down climate change a little.
There are only a few dozen huge container ships in the world that are producing more pollution than all the cars combine.
We could build more nuclear power plants while we wait for Solar to mature.
Nuclear power plants aren't the answer; they are hugely expensive, there is only limited fuel available, and we have no political solution to the waste disposal problem. And solar won't "mature" if the first thing you do is dampen down the world economy through emission restrictions.
We can do something about it.
Why won't anybody think of the children! It would be totally ineffective, it would wreck the world economy, it would hurt people far more than climate change itself, but at least we would feel like we are doing something!
The most effective way of getting emissions to go down is for government to stay out of the way. Fossil fuels are costly and people are highly motivated to use less of it already. If you make it harder for people to ship solar cells, or buy them, or make silicon, or whatever, solar cells will "mature" more slowly or stop maturing at all.
The first two points have been scientifically demonstrated to be true to a staggering degree of certainty, whereas the third point you plucked out of thin air. Classy.
The carbon is in the air; it doesn't magically disappear; from the AGW activists themselves: http://www.skepticalscience.co... Capping or reducing carbon emissions will have very little effect on climate change; it may delay it by a few years if that. And even those steps have proven to be impossible.
Sorry to bust your belief in Santa Claus, but here's no viable plan for stopping climate change.
I find many of the things that people choose to *do* in a free society distasteful.
So do I, but that's not the point. By objecting to public photography, you are objecting to one of the foundations of a free society itself, not merely something that a free society enables people to do. We're talking about an act similar to voting, not to getting an offensive neck tattoo.
My reaction is purely emotional, and I don't like for my emotions to dictate my actions.
And I'm saying it would be good to reflect on that emotion and get it under control. Nobody likes to be photographed by random strangers. Nobody likes to go to the dentist either. But adults curb those negative emotions when they realize that whatever triggered them actually serves a greater good. With respect to photography, you don't seem to have made that step.
I don't expect respect from people that don't know me, but for something to be called a "dick move", it actually has to be an action. But go ahead and keep making the assumption...
I didn't make any assumptions. You accused people of "dick moves" and I merely reflected your offensive language back at you, for rhetorical reasons. I actually assume that you are actually far too timid to walk up to a photographer and start a discussion, if not for any other reason, since you obviously have no arguments for objecting to what he is doing. So spare me the self-righteous indignation; if you don't want such language applied to you, don't apply it to other people.
I want them to be a whole lot more restricted in what they can do than "any other employer," because they're not "any other employer," they're a goddamn government!
You are right that they are not any other employer, they are paid for by tax dollars. And we have a right to demand that our tax dollars are spent without discriminating. But the government has the same interests and faces the same difficulties as any other employer: they need to get good employees and need to avoid risky employees. So there is a conflict.
Okay, so that was a bit over-the-top, but I trust you got my point. More specifically, while the government should be allowed to be selective in terms of who it hires based on competency, it should not be allowed to be selective based on race, gender, age, political affiliation, favorite color, preference for vi vs. emacs or any other non-job-competency-related basis whatsoever.
Your mistake here is in assuming that "not being allowed to be selective based on... any other non-job-competency-related basis whatsoever" is a reasonable selection criterion for an employer. Neither private companies nor the government can do this because nobody knows how to do it. In the private market, this sort of thing sorts itself out because companies that frequently select based on the wrong criteria will go out of business. The government can't go out of business: you force it to use the wrong selection criteria and you get bad service, deficits, and police brutality. You're right: the government isn't any other employer because it's not subject to market forces. You can't hold it to a higher standard in hiring because nobody can definitively decide what good criteria for employees are any more than they can definitively decide what products people will want to buy 5 years from now.
Any form of government employment is going to be intrinsically unfair to some degree: people are going to get unfairly rejected for irrelevant criteria, there is going to be nepotism, raises despite poor performance, corruption, and even brutality that goes unpunished. You can wave your hands and say "fix this", but it's not going to get fixed, never has, never will be. All you can do is to minimize the unfairness by only making government as large as strictly speaking necessary.
As for Valerie Barr, she objectively shouldn't be working at the NSF. Her citation record is not that of a top scientific expert, not even close; the only reason she was likely considered in the first place was because of personal connections based on her political and social advocacy. Furthermore, she used to advocate violence against her employer, and the fact that she hid that fact during her interviews calls her motivations into question. But anybody working at the NSF should have a long track record of being politically absolutely impartial, because science requires that; given her history, it seems implausible that she could act in a politically impartial way. So the reasons she got fired are absolutely job-competency-related for this kind of job. You may or may not disagree with my analysis; if you do disagree, it's another example of the fact that objective evaluation based only on job-related-competency is not something government can do, because your objective criteria differ from mine.
Since Google's being forced to delist web pages (DMCA and all), Yelp and other such directory sites probably should be forced to have a delist procedure as well
You can't force Google to "delist web pages" in the US except for blatant copyright violations or a few other issues. Of course, you can always choose not to have your own web pages indexed by Google (robots.txt).
People forget that consumer protection is not just about protecting the consumer directly, but also about preventing unfair business practices to maintain a competitive landscape
Ah, yes, the rallying cry of crooks, cheats, and crony capitalists: "we're just protecting the consumer". Uh huh, right... Go suck a lemon.
If you doubt the scientific consensus on climate change at this point you're just an ideolog that will argue your political point until the house burns down around you.
It is getting warmer. Man is responsible. We can't do anything about it. The last point is just as much of a fact as the first two. So you better start living in the real world, rather than the fantasy world you seem to inhabit.
It is utterly offensive to me that the State Department gets to decide who and what groups are "terrorists". Free Association is one of the key tenants of a functioning Democracy.
I don't see how her freedom of association was curtailed. The US government simply has acted like any other employer, in that it is selective in who it hires. What do you want them to do?
If you're going to build your career around government programs and government policies, well, you may just have to accept the fact that they can be arbitrary, capricious, irrational, and harmful too. If you didn't realize that before, now you do.
My point is that photography in public places is similar to voting and free speech. If you find it "distasteful", you effectively find living in a free society "distasteful". Now, you are entitled to preferring totalitarianism to freedom as much as you like, but don't expect people to respect you for it. The "dick move" is entirely on your side. And expect fierce opposition if you're trying to impose your anti-democratic preferences on others.
There are many things wrong with clinical trials, but this isn't one of them. Both the original article and the reanalysis use valid statistical procedures and do not contradict each other. The original analysis didn't prove absence of an effect, it merely failed to show the existence of an effect. The new analysis shows that the drug is, in fact, more effective under some (weak, reasonable) a priori assumptions.
Whether to use statistical hypothesis testing (frequentist methods) or Bayesian analysis is a long-running debate in statistics and medicine. Both techniques are mathematically valid. Statistical hypothesis testing makes fewer a priori assumptions, which is why people have traditionally trusted it more and why it is widely taught and used in science. But over the years that people have come to realize that pessimistic assumptions can be harmful, such as when you continue clinical trials too long or reject the use of life saving drugs. Although I personally think Bayesian methods are a better way of analyzing the data, I think the debate over which methods to use is the way scientific debate and change should happen: slowly and with careful re-analysis and re-examination of data and experimental results.
So, you see, there are things that can be done and we do have some legal legs to stand on.
Oh, as far as the EU is concerned, you're absolutely right. Of course, Europe has a long tradition of totalitarianism and hostility to individual liberties, democracy, and the rule of law. So that's entirely in character for Europe.
Oh, no, it's not "inevitable" at all. There are plenty of totalitarian places around the world where people have lost the right to take pictures; it goes right along with losing the right to free speech. We need to fight that the same doesn't happen here.
I don't like the idea of anyone else recording me, either (stores, etc), but I find the benefits of getting food, goods, doing my banking, etc outweigh my distaste.
Well, and the benefit of putting up with Google Glass, cell phone cameras, and the like is that you can actually venture out in the street.
That, and the fact that a lot of those personal, private recording devices record police abuse, crimes, funny events, alien landings, daily life, polluters, political and corporate scoundrels, whatever. Photography is not a crime; it's a vital and useful part of our democracy. Lose your distaste.
or asking all the people in the area to pay attention to the little light, if they're bothered by the idea of being recorded?
Well, you better get used to the "idea of being recorded" because you are almost constantly being recorded when out and about: by surveillance cameras, smartphones, and wearables of all sorts. Your objections to Google Glass logically have nothing to do with being recorded, you just have a stick up your ass about Google Glass in particular. And you better get over it, because you don't have a legal leg to stand on if you don't like being recorded; your only option is to leave and hide somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Electricity costs consumers three times what it costs in the US:
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
German consumers pay a lot of money to subsidize big corporations and manufacturers of solar and energy-intensive manufacturing is being outsourced from Germany. Is that what you want for the US?
Yes, everybody can do what Tesla is doing, if all entry-level cars cost $70000, last only a few years, and were still subsidized massively by tax payers.
Is that the world you want to live in? A world in which only the wealthy can afford cars?
That's from 2008. You know who the guy responsible, the head of the executive branch, was at the time. Punish his party at the polls next presidential election.
And by that "one party", you surely mean the Democrats. After all, they are in bed with law enforcement unions and lawyers. And in half a dozen years, instead of asset forfeiture has greatly increased under a Democratic government, when Obama had every opportunity to stop it.
Reining in Forfeiture
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
Federal Asset Forfeiture Continues to Skyrocket Under Obama
http://reason.com/blog/2012/07...
Rand Paul introduces bill to reform civil asset forfeiture
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The Stealing of America By the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
(As usual, the Huff Post gives the primary culprit, the head of the executive branch, a pass.)
Yeah, but that's an incorrect conclusion. They tested only for a small fraction of all possible SNPs, so not finding a big effect doesn't prove that it isn't there. In addition, there are SNPs that have a big effect on intelligence that you would never pick up in their kind of screen (e.g., Phenylketonuria).
Finally, there is no reason to believe that unusually high intelligence would evenbe selected for evolutionarily; high intelligence is a trait favored by academics, not mates. Disease resistance, famine resistance, social skills, and a good physique are probably much more important for reproductive success.
That debate was resolved long ago: ethnicity does not influence intelligence per se. However, other factors may cause a correlation. For example, if Indians coming to the US frequently work in high tech, then in the US, Indian ethnicity will correlate with higher intelligence, even though the total populations of Indians in the world score lower than the total population of Americans.
The AT article seems to try to put a spin on it, but the actual abstract sounds quite different:
It's clear from twin studies that IQ has a strong genetic component, about as strong as height: both have a heritability of around 0.8 (on a scale from 0 to 1, with 1 being variability being entirely genetically determined). Here's a bit more info on heritability from Nature: http://www.nature.com/scitable...
Failing to find the genes responsible in this study means nothing since the current SNPs we test for are quite limited. Ultimately, these questions can only be resolved by full genome sequencing of large numbers of people. Until then, we may get lucky in identifying genes in these kinds of studies, but failure to find something means little. And, actually, they did find something interesting.
Bullshit. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... Transport accounts for 13% and energy accounts for 26% of global carbon emissions. Even if you managed to eliminate all of those, it would only slow down climate change a little.
Bullshit too. http://www.statista.com/statis...
Nuclear power plants aren't the answer; they are hugely expensive, there is only limited fuel available, and we have no political solution to the waste disposal problem. And solar won't "mature" if the first thing you do is dampen down the world economy through emission restrictions.
Why won't anybody think of the children! It would be totally ineffective, it would wreck the world economy, it would hurt people far more than climate change itself, but at least we would feel like we are doing something!
The most effective way of getting emissions to go down is for government to stay out of the way. Fossil fuels are costly and people are highly motivated to use less of it already. If you make it harder for people to ship solar cells, or buy them, or make silicon, or whatever, solar cells will "mature" more slowly or stop maturing at all.
The carbon is in the air; it doesn't magically disappear; from the AGW activists themselves: http://www.skepticalscience.co... Capping or reducing carbon emissions will have very little effect on climate change; it may delay it by a few years if that. And even those steps have proven to be impossible.
Sorry to bust your belief in Santa Claus, but here's no viable plan for stopping climate change.
You're reading impaired? I agree with "It is getting warmer. Man is responsible."
The part you don't seem to be able to respond to is "We can't do anything about it."
So do I, but that's not the point. By objecting to public photography, you are objecting to one of the foundations of a free society itself, not merely something that a free society enables people to do. We're talking about an act similar to voting, not to getting an offensive neck tattoo.
And I'm saying it would be good to reflect on that emotion and get it under control. Nobody likes to be photographed by random strangers. Nobody likes to go to the dentist either. But adults curb those negative emotions when they realize that whatever triggered them actually serves a greater good. With respect to photography, you don't seem to have made that step.
I didn't make any assumptions. You accused people of "dick moves" and I merely reflected your offensive language back at you, for rhetorical reasons. I actually assume that you are actually far too timid to walk up to a photographer and start a discussion, if not for any other reason, since you obviously have no arguments for objecting to what he is doing. So spare me the self-righteous indignation; if you don't want such language applied to you, don't apply it to other people.
You are right that they are not any other employer, they are paid for by tax dollars. And we have a right to demand that our tax dollars are spent without discriminating. But the government has the same interests and faces the same difficulties as any other employer: they need to get good employees and need to avoid risky employees. So there is a conflict.
Your mistake here is in assuming that "not being allowed to be selective based on ... any other non-job-competency-related basis whatsoever" is a reasonable selection criterion for an employer. Neither private companies nor the government can do this because nobody knows how to do it. In the private market, this sort of thing sorts itself out because companies that frequently select based on the wrong criteria will go out of business. The government can't go out of business: you force it to use the wrong selection criteria and you get bad service, deficits, and police brutality. You're right: the government isn't any other employer because it's not subject to market forces. You can't hold it to a higher standard in hiring because nobody can definitively decide what good criteria for employees are any more than they can definitively decide what products people will want to buy 5 years from now.
Any form of government employment is going to be intrinsically unfair to some degree: people are going to get unfairly rejected for irrelevant criteria, there is going to be nepotism, raises despite poor performance, corruption, and even brutality that goes unpunished. You can wave your hands and say "fix this", but it's not going to get fixed, never has, never will be. All you can do is to minimize the unfairness by only making government as large as strictly speaking necessary.
As for Valerie Barr, she objectively shouldn't be working at the NSF. Her citation record is not that of a top scientific expert, not even close; the only reason she was likely considered in the first place was because of personal connections based on her political and social advocacy. Furthermore, she used to advocate violence against her employer, and the fact that she hid that fact during her interviews calls her motivations into question. But anybody working at the NSF should have a long track record of being politically absolutely impartial, because science requires that; given her history, it seems implausible that she could act in a politically impartial way. So the reasons she got fired are absolutely job-competency-related for this kind of job. You may or may not disagree with my analysis; if you do disagree, it's another example of the fact that objective evaluation based only on job-related-competency is not something government can do, because your objective criteria differ from mine.
You can't force Google to "delist web pages" in the US except for blatant copyright violations or a few other issues. Of course, you can always choose not to have your own web pages indexed by Google (robots.txt).
Ah, yes, the rallying cry of crooks, cheats, and crony capitalists: "we're just protecting the consumer". Uh huh, right... Go suck a lemon.
You know what else is like a box of chocolates?
It is getting warmer. Man is responsible. We can't do anything about it. The last point is just as much of a fact as the first two. So you better start living in the real world, rather than the fantasy world you seem to inhabit.
I don't see how her freedom of association was curtailed. The US government simply has acted like any other employer, in that it is selective in who it hires. What do you want them to do?
If you're going to build your career around government programs and government policies, well, you may just have to accept the fact that they can be arbitrary, capricious, irrational, and harmful too. If you didn't realize that before, now you do.
My point is that photography in public places is similar to voting and free speech. If you find it "distasteful", you effectively find living in a free society "distasteful". Now, you are entitled to preferring totalitarianism to freedom as much as you like, but don't expect people to respect you for it. The "dick move" is entirely on your side. And expect fierce opposition if you're trying to impose your anti-democratic preferences on others.
You mean like yourself?
There are many things wrong with clinical trials, but this isn't one of them. Both the original article and the reanalysis use valid statistical procedures and do not contradict each other. The original analysis didn't prove absence of an effect, it merely failed to show the existence of an effect. The new analysis shows that the drug is, in fact, more effective under some (weak, reasonable) a priori assumptions.
Whether to use statistical hypothesis testing (frequentist methods) or Bayesian analysis is a long-running debate in statistics and medicine. Both techniques are mathematically valid. Statistical hypothesis testing makes fewer a priori assumptions, which is why people have traditionally trusted it more and why it is widely taught and used in science. But over the years that people have come to realize that pessimistic assumptions can be harmful, such as when you continue clinical trials too long or reject the use of life saving drugs. Although I personally think Bayesian methods are a better way of analyzing the data, I think the debate over which methods to use is the way scientific debate and change should happen: slowly and with careful re-analysis and re-examination of data and experimental results.
Oh, as far as the EU is concerned, you're absolutely right. Of course, Europe has a long tradition of totalitarianism and hostility to individual liberties, democracy, and the rule of law. So that's entirely in character for Europe.
Oh, no, it's not "inevitable" at all. There are plenty of totalitarian places around the world where people have lost the right to take pictures; it goes right along with losing the right to free speech. We need to fight that the same doesn't happen here.
Well, and the benefit of putting up with Google Glass, cell phone cameras, and the like is that you can actually venture out in the street.
That, and the fact that a lot of those personal, private recording devices record police abuse, crimes, funny events, alien landings, daily life, polluters, political and corporate scoundrels, whatever. Photography is not a crime; it's a vital and useful part of our democracy. Lose your distaste.
Well, you better get used to the "idea of being recorded" because you are almost constantly being recorded when out and about: by surveillance cameras, smartphones, and wearables of all sorts. Your objections to Google Glass logically have nothing to do with being recorded, you just have a stick up your ass about Google Glass in particular. And you better get over it, because you don't have a legal leg to stand on if you don't like being recorded; your only option is to leave and hide somewhere.