The same could be said for the oil and gas industries. With billions in pure profits, why the fuck are they still getting subsidies and tax breaks?
The effect of subsidies to the oil and gas industries is not to increase their profits, it is to lower the price of oil and gas, and increase consumption.
So why did they ever get subsidies? Basically because mainstream America wanted lower gas prices and wanted to drive more.
He is publishing the "Official Code of Georgia", published under the "Authority of the State of Georgia". Either the annotations are an essential and/or official part of Georgia law, in which case they should not be copyrighted, or they are a convenient additional aid for lawyers, in which case they shouldn't be part of the "Official Code of Georgia" "Published Under Authority of the State of Georgia" and published separately and given no special preference to any other private publication.
Under your logic, the State of Georgia could publish its laws in a made up language and then have a copyright on the information necessary to decode the language. That clearly isn't the intent of our laws.
In most states the statute itself is available, but to get to an annotated version you have to use a lawyers database service, which charges a subscription fee.
Yes, and that is a good solution. For a state to partner with a private firm and publish a mix of free and commercial stuff as an official publication is wrong. What's even more wrong is that the state attempts to enforce the private copyright.
Sure there is a problem: ads are annoying. But addressing problems comes at a price in the real world. In this case, regulating add supported services would mean that a lot of services would then have to be for pay and a lot of people couldn't afford them. That's a lousy tradeoff.
Here is a little lesson for you from the real world: when people say "live with it" , it's not shorthand for "resign to it because you are a lazy bum", it's shorthand for " the cure would be worse than the disease ".
It's the real world. Live with it or jump off a bridge.
If you don't want to see ads, don't use ad-supported services. They are called "ad supported" because your attention is what you use to pay with for those services. There are plenty of ad-free for-pay services if you want to. They are generally not as good because they are not as popular, but that's the choice most people make; live with it.
You are mistaken. Poverty and privilege correlate with competence, not race.
You're quite right: poverty and "privilege" correlate with competence. The "privilege" of coming from a two parent household with one or both parents working, parents who value education and savings, who are educated themselves, who read to their kids at night, and who aren't in trouble with the law.
That kind of middle class upbringing, however, also correlates strongly with race: whites and Asians have it much more frequently than African Americans. As a result, job competence and job success in professions like IT also strongly correlate with race at the population level, which explains the biased racial statistics at Silicon Valley companies.
Perhaps you don't understand what the term "correlate" means? Perhaps you are trying to make an argument about causation?
Do you have any proof to back that up? Citations? Recent published accounts?
Have you been living under a rock? There have been SCOTUS cases about this. Yes, colleges and universities lower their standards for African Americans and have stricter requirements for Asian Americans. And the African Americans that are admitted are served poorly by this kind of affirmative action: they do worse than if they had gone to lesser institutions and (apparently) don't get hired at the same rates afterwards either.
If the only difference is in opportunities in life for training then not checking to see if those candidates have that training is limiting the pool of good candidates unnecessarily.
As a population, African Americans produce more good basketball players and fewer good computer scientists than the population at large. That is neither surprising nor does it require racism or discrimination as an explanation. In fact, as a population, African Americans also have a lower average IQ even though race does not, by itself, correlate with intelligence in any significant way. There is no contradiction there either. You only see contradictions there because your mental model of correlation and statistics is wrong.
So while what you say may be true in some areas, it only applies to populations and not individuals.
Populations is what we are discussing here, namely the difference in racial composition of the workforce of Silicon Valley companies and the graduates of top CS departments. You are trying to use this as evidence for discrimination against individuals when, in fact, it provides no evidence for discrimination.
Individuals don't seem to be limited by their race
Correct: your race doesn't limit your potential IQ per se. But that is after correcting for a lot of other historical and environmental variables.
But Silicon Valley employers don't hire newborn babies drawn at random from the world population, they hire adults drawn from the US population. Within the US population, for historical, cultural, and environmental reasons, race does correlate strongly with competence in particular fields. Nor is this at all unique to the US.
It is an issue because race doesn't correlate with competence.
Ah, there is your error: race is, in fact, is highly correlated (both positively and negatively) in many fields. The relationship isn't genetic, it's environmental and historical, but that doesn't make it any less real.
I suggest reading someone who actually knows about this stuff, Thomas Sowell, on The Disparate Impact Racket.
To explain the Silicon Valley statistics with white racism, you'd have to conclude that white hiring committees discriminate against both African Americans and other whites in favor of Asians, a ridiculous proposition.
The bug is that the Japanese, Chinese, Korean and mathematical versions of this character all share a common code point. There is no reliable way for an application to select the right character and render it properly.
What you probably mean is that an application can't select the right glyph based on the Unicode string. That is correct, but nothing specific to CJK. Without markup or metadata, Unicode often won't render as expected by readers even in Western languages. Unicode used to have its own system for marking language context, but it was dropped since it was redundant with widely used markup and metadata. If you don't know what language your string is written in, you can't pick the right glyphs, and that's true in many languages besides CJK. (CJK has good heuristics for language identification, so it's not a problem.)
Mostly, CJK deunification is something some Westerners try to use for showing off their (usually limited) knowledge of Japanese and Chinese and demonstrate how morally superior they are to the culturally ignorant, imperialist, evil white men that, in their imagination, made up the Unicode consortium.
In reality, the Chinese and Japanese are big boys. If they wanted to de-unify their scripts in Unicode, they'd have the political clout, and no Westerner would stop them because, frankly, nobody outside Japan or China gives a f*ck. However, I suspect they are too smart to screw themselves that way.
I have never seen a study that proves that safety nets and government assistance led to inner city poverty cycles (which bring with them drugs/crime/etc..).
Spending on the war on poverty was justified by reducing poverty; has poverty been reduced? No. Hence, the war on poverty has failed to deliver what it promised. When policies fail to deliver what they were justified by, nobody else has to prove causation of anything.
But, in fact, data from other countries does indicate that generous government assistance leads to cycles of poverty, because when they cut back, people move back into the workforce.
There are many countries around the world with higher levels of "handouts" than the USA has
Actually, not that many. The US welfare system is quite generous.
and those safety nets have not caused inner city projects, slums, or seemed to target one specific race of people.
Well, coming from one of those other countries, I can tell you first hand that they have caused the existence of inner city projects and slums. The fact that identifiable minorities correlate with poverty, social barriers, and discrimination is also extremely commonplace elsewhere.
The Bill of Rights specifically is a list of NEGATIVE rights where in the government is FORBIDDEN to make any law concerning certain things.
Yes, The Bill of Rights is a list of negative rights, but it is superfluous. It gives Americans no rights they didn't already have under the Constitution. The US Constitution grants a set of limited, specific powers to government. It does not grant rights to citizens, nor does it impose specific limits on government. Citizens have all rights that aren't explicitly granted as powers to government, and government is limited to only those powers enumerated in the Constitution.
As to the fact that many don't take the constitution seriously... Which segment of our political spectrum is doing that, sport?
Primarily the Democrats; limited government is something that strongly contradicts both progressivism and social democracy. Why do you ask?
Short of that... you're an interesting vacation destination. A nice place to visit but I need something like the Bill of Rights to call a country home.
What makes the US different is that its Constitution is a list of enumerated powers of government, not a list of rights given to citizens. The Bill of Rights doesn't give you any rights you didn't already have under the Constitution, and it doesn't limit government powers any more than the Constitution. The fact that you think the Bill of Rights is important is a sad reflection on how much the US Constitution is being ignored.
Australia does things all the time that just casually violate what I consider to be sacred rights.
Australia is doing well in the area of economic freedoms: http://www.heritage.org/index/ Economic freedoms are inseparable from other freedoms, and the fact that the US government has been increasingly violating them also curtails many other freedoms. That may be attractive to wealthier folks. Having said that, I wouldn't want to move to Australia. Beautiful as it is, I think in practice, I think its society and culture are still pretty limiting compared to the US.
I don't know where you get your figures from, but this well referenced wikipedia page has different stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Geez, please read the page you are pointing to: Please consider that car is different from road motor vehicle as the latter includes automobiles, SUVs, trucks, vans, buses, commercial vehicles and freight motor road vehicles. I was talking about passenger cars. http://chartsbin.com/view/1113
Note that this makes sense because the US is considerably more urbanized than Switzerland.
Yes, the train journey did take twice as long (when there is no traffic) for my specific commute.
Yes, and that is quite typical.
Often, between major cities it is much faster taking the train, between Bern and Zurich it takes 1 h 34 min by car (without traffic), by train it's always 55 minutes. It's great for business meetings, you prepare on the way there, and relax on the way back.
Bern to Zurich is probably the best case scenario, and even there the numbers don't work out because you're comparing apples to oranges: the train ride is station-to-station, while the car is origin-to-destination.
But the public transport system there is fantastic, it was fast and efficient.
Switzerland is probably the best case scenario, since the trains run on time and it's a small country. Nevertheless, Switzerland has more passenger cars per capita than the US, and for longer trips, the train is still much slower than simply driving due to frequent stops and the need for connections.
It's not clear if you think that CO2 doesn't cause global warming or that global warming itself isn't a significant problem.
I'm sorry, but how much clearer can I put it?
Of course [climate change] is happening. Global average temperatures are increasing, probably as much as the IPCC is predicting, and ice caps are melting.
[Nevertheless] rising CO2 is not a significant problem
You can look at the effects of climate change on the world in the IPCC reports:
Probable effects of increasing global atmospheric CO2 concentration on crop yield, crop water use, and world climate are discussed. About 430 observations of the yields of 37 plant species grown with CO2 enrichment were extracted from the literature and analyzed. CO2 enrichment increased agricultural weight yields by an 36%. Additional analysis of 81 experiments which had controlled CO2 concentrations showed that yields will probably increase by 33% with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Another 46 observations of the effects of CO2 enrichment on transpiration were extracted and averaged. These data showed that a doubling of CO2 concentration could reduce transpiration by 34%, which combined with the yield increase, indicates that water use efficiency may double.
We evaluated how soybean yields have been enhanced by historical atmospheric [CO2] increases in three major soybean-producing countries. The estimated average yields during 2002–2006 in the USA, Brazil, and China were 4.34%, 7.57%, and 5.10% larger, respectively, than the average yields estimated using the atmospheric [CO2] of 1980.
We will lose a lot more than coral.
Yes we will.
I love how you put "mitigation and migration" in there as if they would take an afternoon's work to sort out.
No, they will take centuries to "sort out". But that's OK because climate change takes centuries and because humans tend not to even notice change on the scale of centuries.
You really are not too interested in being accurate, are you?
It is impossible to "be accurate" about the effects of climate change. Anybody who pretends to be able to "be accurate" about the effects of climate change a charlatan and a liar.
Slashdot Mirror
The effect of subsidies to the oil and gas industries is not to increase their profits, it is to lower the price of oil and gas, and increase consumption.
So why did they ever get subsidies? Basically because mainstream America wanted lower gas prices and wanted to drive more.
He is publishing the "Official Code of Georgia", published under the "Authority of the State of Georgia". Either the annotations are an essential and/or official part of Georgia law, in which case they should not be copyrighted, or they are a convenient additional aid for lawyers, in which case they shouldn't be part of the "Official Code of Georgia" "Published Under Authority of the State of Georgia" and published separately and given no special preference to any other private publication.
Under your logic, the State of Georgia could publish its laws in a made up language and then have a copyright on the information necessary to decode the language. That clearly isn't the intent of our laws.
Yes, and that is a good solution. For a state to partner with a private firm and publish a mix of free and commercial stuff as an official publication is wrong. What's even more wrong is that the state attempts to enforce the private copyright.
Oh, that is so cute!
Why, yes! Didn't Obamacare conclusively settle that one?
That was simple
Sure there is a problem: ads are annoying. But addressing problems comes at a price in the real world. In this case, regulating add supported services would mean that a lot of services would then have to be for pay and a lot of people couldn't afford them. That's a lousy tradeoff.
Here is a little lesson for you from the real world: when people say "live with it" , it's not shorthand for "resign to it because you are a lazy bum", it's shorthand for " the cure would be worse than the disease ".
It's the real world. Live with it or jump off a bridge.
If you don't want to see ads, don't use ad-supported services. They are called "ad supported" because your attention is what you use to pay with for those services. There are plenty of ad-free for-pay services if you want to. They are generally not as good because they are not as popular, but that's the choice most people make; live with it.
You're quite right: poverty and "privilege" correlate with competence. The "privilege" of coming from a two parent household with one or both parents working, parents who value education and savings, who are educated themselves, who read to their kids at night, and who aren't in trouble with the law.
That kind of middle class upbringing, however, also correlates strongly with race: whites and Asians have it much more frequently than African Americans. As a result, job competence and job success in professions like IT also strongly correlate with race at the population level, which explains the biased racial statistics at Silicon Valley companies.
Perhaps you don't understand what the term "correlate" means? Perhaps you are trying to make an argument about causation?
Have you been living under a rock? There have been SCOTUS cases about this. Yes, colleges and universities lower their standards for African Americans and have stricter requirements for Asian Americans. And the African Americans that are admitted are served poorly by this kind of affirmative action: they do worse than if they had gone to lesser institutions and (apparently) don't get hired at the same rates afterwards either.
http://priceonomics.com/post/4...
Why don't you tone down your own racist banter and get some facts?
That's not evidence of bias, it's evidence of unequal outcomes. Unequal outcomes have lots of causes other than bias.
Yeah, it's not like Apple has ever been litigious about "their" patents! Oh no, never!
That means other companies can't use this "technology".
As a population, African Americans produce more good basketball players and fewer good computer scientists than the population at large. That is neither surprising nor does it require racism or discrimination as an explanation. In fact, as a population, African Americans also have a lower average IQ even though race does not, by itself, correlate with intelligence in any significant way. There is no contradiction there either. You only see contradictions there because your mental model of correlation and statistics is wrong.
Populations is what we are discussing here, namely the difference in racial composition of the workforce of Silicon Valley companies and the graduates of top CS departments. You are trying to use this as evidence for discrimination against individuals when, in fact, it provides no evidence for discrimination.
Correct: your race doesn't limit your potential IQ per se. But that is after correcting for a lot of other historical and environmental variables.
But Silicon Valley employers don't hire newborn babies drawn at random from the world population, they hire adults drawn from the US population. Within the US population, for historical, cultural, and environmental reasons, race does correlate strongly with competence in particular fields. Nor is this at all unique to the US.
Ah, there is your error: race is, in fact, is highly correlated (both positively and negatively) in many fields. The relationship isn't genetic, it's environmental and historical, but that doesn't make it any less real.
I suggest reading someone who actually knows about this stuff, Thomas Sowell, on The Disparate Impact Racket.
To explain the Silicon Valley statistics with white racism, you'd have to conclude that white hiring committees discriminate against both African Americans and other whites in favor of Asians, a ridiculous proposition.
I get it: for you to break out of the European theocratic tradition of limited, divinely-granted human rights is really, really hard.
What you probably mean is that an application can't select the right glyph based on the Unicode string. That is correct, but nothing specific to CJK. Without markup or metadata, Unicode often won't render as expected by readers even in Western languages. Unicode used to have its own system for marking language context, but it was dropped since it was redundant with widely used markup and metadata. If you don't know what language your string is written in, you can't pick the right glyphs, and that's true in many languages besides CJK. (CJK has good heuristics for language identification, so it's not a problem.)
Mostly, CJK deunification is something some Westerners try to use for showing off their (usually limited) knowledge of Japanese and Chinese and demonstrate how morally superior they are to the culturally ignorant, imperialist, evil white men that, in their imagination, made up the Unicode consortium.
In reality, the Chinese and Japanese are big boys. If they wanted to de-unify their scripts in Unicode, they'd have the political clout, and no Westerner would stop them because, frankly, nobody outside Japan or China gives a f*ck. However, I suspect they are too smart to screw themselves that way.
Spending on the war on poverty was justified by reducing poverty; has poverty been reduced? No. Hence, the war on poverty has failed to deliver what it promised. When policies fail to deliver what they were justified by, nobody else has to prove causation of anything.
But, in fact, data from other countries does indicate that generous government assistance leads to cycles of poverty, because when they cut back, people move back into the workforce.
Actually, not that many. The US welfare system is quite generous.
Well, coming from one of those other countries, I can tell you first hand that they have caused the existence of inner city projects and slums. The fact that identifiable minorities correlate with poverty, social barriers, and discrimination is also extremely commonplace elsewhere.
Yes, The Bill of Rights is a list of negative rights, but it is superfluous. It gives Americans no rights they didn't already have under the Constitution. The US Constitution grants a set of limited, specific powers to government. It does not grant rights to citizens, nor does it impose specific limits on government. Citizens have all rights that aren't explicitly granted as powers to government, and government is limited to only those powers enumerated in the Constitution.
Primarily the Democrats; limited government is something that strongly contradicts both progressivism and social democracy. Why do you ask?
What makes the US different is that its Constitution is a list of enumerated powers of government, not a list of rights given to citizens. The Bill of Rights doesn't give you any rights you didn't already have under the Constitution, and it doesn't limit government powers any more than the Constitution. The fact that you think the Bill of Rights is important is a sad reflection on how much the US Constitution is being ignored.
Australia is doing well in the area of economic freedoms: http://www.heritage.org/index/ Economic freedoms are inseparable from other freedoms, and the fact that the US government has been increasingly violating them also curtails many other freedoms. That may be attractive to wealthier folks. Having said that, I wouldn't want to move to Australia. Beautiful as it is, I think in practice, I think its society and culture are still pretty limiting compared to the US.
Geez, please read the page you are pointing to: Please consider that car is different from road motor vehicle as the latter includes automobiles, SUVs, trucks, vans, buses, commercial vehicles and freight motor road vehicles. I was talking about passenger cars. http://chartsbin.com/view/1113
Note that this makes sense because the US is considerably more urbanized than Switzerland.
Yes, and that is quite typical.
Bern to Zurich is probably the best case scenario, and even there the numbers don't work out because you're comparing apples to oranges: the train ride is station-to-station, while the car is origin-to-destination.
Switzerland is probably the best case scenario, since the trains run on time and it's a small country. Nevertheless, Switzerland has more passenger cars per capita than the US, and for longer trips, the train is still much slower than simply driving due to frequent stops and the need for connections.
I'm sorry, but how much clearer can I put it?
Of course [climate change] is happening. Global average temperatures are increasing, probably as much as the IPCC is predicting, and ice caps are melting.
[Nevertheless] rising CO2 is not a significant problem
You can look at the effects of climate change on the world in the IPCC reports:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm...
Basic biology tells you that that is implausible, and experimental data contradicts what you are saying.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.nature.com/srep/201...
Yes we will.
No, they will take centuries to "sort out". But that's OK because climate change takes centuries and because humans tend not to even notice change on the scale of centuries.
It is impossible to "be accurate" about the effects of climate change. Anybody who pretends to be able to "be accurate" about the effects of climate change a charlatan and a liar.