I don't want the death penalty for them, but I realize that it's a fucking huge problem that brewers, distillers, tavern owners and liquor store owners profit from slowly killing people. It's perverse incentives. If we like free markets (and we do) we need to do something about it, or we'll be using the invisible hand to choke people to death in an exemplary efficient manner.
Alcohol consumption follows a log-normal distribution, it's skewed to the heavily drinking end. If the 20% heaviest drinkers suddenly stopped cold turkey, you could expect 80% of the breweries, distillers, taverns and liquor stores to go as well.
(Another disturbing issue is that the distribution appears not to change very much across times and space. Median consumption and heavy consumption are closely related, so the alcohol industry can't simply compensate by selling more to people who drink little today - all evidence indicates that would cause the heavy drinkers to consume even more.)
Changing the law like this is not in fact illegal. If they change the law to make dancing illegal, prosecuting you for dancing in the past would be illegal, but you better stop dancing right now.
> Alcohol makes people more violent. Heroin makes people very mellow.
Wrong, and wrong. In many cultures, alcohol that makes people mellow, and sometimes there's something else that makes them aggressive. In one peculiar culture, imported western alcohol consumed in cities made people aggressive and traditional alcohol consumed in villages made them mellow.
Learned effects, people. We know it from comparative anthropology, and we know it from large, double blind studies performed in the sixties and seventies: alcohol changes you the way you expect it to change you.
People use the supposed effects largely as excuses. Alcohol gives you the excuse to say what you want to say, or occasionally punch who you want to punch. Someone who beats his wife when drinking isn't exactly excused, but he's called a drunk. If he did it when cold sober he would be called a psychopath instead. Both alcohol and cannabis are useful excuses for your grades not being as good as they "could" be.
What about heroin? Heroin, the king of chemical excuses around here, gives a rather plausible explanation for your life being a mess. (If you've heard the life story of a couple of street addicts, you know there's usually more than enough explanations already, but it's more appealing to be a victim of a powerful chemical than just not coping with a messed-up life. )
The main downside for you is that you would have another extremely powerful lobby making money from completely breaking down human beings. I thought I said that already.
But sure, it's not as if you or anyone you care about would fall victim to their marketing. You have free will, after all.
Alcohol is also extremely damaging, second only to smoking and obesity as a threat to public health issue. In North America as a whole, some estimates even place alcohol above obesity. And that's just the direct damages, not counting what heavy alcohol use does to families and communities.
Legalization advocates speak as if the problem with alcohol was solved. It never was.
It would solve the problem, in the same way legalizing corruption would solve Mexico's corruption problem.
Consider tobacco companies. A crime syndicate may seem a powerful thing, but it's nothing compared to a for-profit corporation with government-backed limited liability and protection. We have seen again and again that private, legal corporations which have incentives to do things that harm people, will be extremely good at doing it if it earns them money.
Even alcohol, the only legal intoxicant of significance, has extremely bad incentives: 80% of the profit comes from the top 20% consumers. The consumption curve is similarly skewed all over the world, even over different time periods, suggesting that you simply can't get moderate drinkers to drink more without getting more extremely heavy drinkers. Alcohol companies can't survive without actively encouraging millions of people to wreck their lives, families and communities. Yet they get a free pass.
This should scare you. It shows just how good corporations can be in exporting the costs, keeping the profits, and getting away with it. You want to give them cocaine money as well?
But you are right, in a sense. If Mexico legalized cocaine, and somehow avoided the harsh reactions from the US that would likely follow, they would probably be better off. It would be the US which would be worse off. Exporting the problem to another country and keeping a share of the profits for themselves must have been an appealing idea for many governments through the ages. That the international community works so hard preventing any country from breaking the ranks in this way, should tell you something about just how big those exported damages would be.
Considering what he did, the news were extremely favorable. Before Bush, no one would have thought you could thump your chest about doing torture (after first denying it), invade foreign countries on trumped-up charges, and purge the legislative branch of people suspected of being insufficiently supportive, without getting impeached.
> There is only one real solution. Don't give any part of government or politicians too much power over too large a portion of the nation.
Then they can just take the power they want through non-governmental channels. Where there are no chiefs, you need to have a very special environment indeed, or people will start making themselves into chiefs with tooth and nail.
In a earlier ruling, the judge David Eady (already infamous for poor judgement in libel cases) gave the BCA a major victory by declaring that "bogus" meant "deliberately deceptive". The case would have been impossible to fight for Singh while that stood, since he would have to prove that BCA chiropractics are deliberately deceptive. That is not true, and he didn't believe it either.
So apparently that was rejected, or the BCA retreated to less favourable ground for some reason.
In fact, it's the real scientists who are suppressed by lawsuits. The story of Roger Revelle and Justin Lancaster is a particularly ugly example.
Revelle was a conservative climate scientist, who waited quite long with asserting that the world was warming as a result of human actions. He was also the one who taught the climatology course Al Gore took in university. While he lay severly ill and dying, Fred Singer persuaded him to put his name to a paper he had authored, allegedly for helping with some details. Naturally, Fred Singer's paper denied AGW. But Singer was prudent enough to wait until Revelle was dead before starting to cite it (as a Revelle paper) far and wide. Revelle's last student and assistant, Jusin Lancaster, tried to call him on it, saying that Revelle told him he hoped the paper would "sink into the ground" as quickly as possible. Lancaster also disputed its authorship at a congress.
So what did that champion of free discourse, Fred Singer do? He filed a SLAPP libel lawsuit, of course. A student doesn't have the funds to stand up to a think tank veteran like Singer, although it wasn't for lack of trying. He tried to represent himself, and paid court costs for a while, until his wife convinced him to give up. He was forced to retract everything and forbidden from speaking on the issue. Fortunately for us, he did anyway. (Google Cache link, maybe Singer found out as the original's gone)
The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.
The BCA latched onto the word "bogus". They claimed that it implied intentional deception, that the BCA knew it didn't work but promoted it anyway. It's still stupid, of course. No one reading the piece by Singh will think he accuses them of not believing what they teach.
It's not in the same league. Maybe you could shift the pitch a little with this thing, like compressing a few seconds off a song and preserving the pitch, but I bet if you did anything like they do today, you would sound like a vocoder pretty quickly. (I haven't heard this thing you link to, would love to if you had a sample. I assume, though, that it couldn't have been better than early digital autotuning, or they wouldn't have switched?).
A phenomenon I've heard people who teach children to sing use is "droning". Kids who drone sing an entire song on roughly the same tone. It's not just that they have a poor ear, it's like they haven't mastered the knack of conscious control over voice pitch. They are also called (maybe a little more PC) monotones.
Some never get it, although adult monotones usually know of their inability and refuse to show it. Modern autotune could take droning and make it sound about like nickleback, with little or no effort from the studio technician.
This changed singing style dramatically, which was my point.
There's a difference between technical skill (which for instance Sting definitively has) and pleasant artistic impression, which is more arguable... To put it like that, it takes effort and training to sing poorly like Sting.
The eighties did not have autotune. The eighties had pop singers who could actually sing. You notice when people attempt to do karaoke versions of "Take on me" or "Still haven't found what I'm looking for" at the original pitch...
That people are interfering with your TV and/or radio in order to mess with your head, is standard paranoid delusion nr. 1. It's not just a cliche either, it really is common.
I wonder why. Maybe static and noise are especially easy for people with schizophrenia to see non-existent patterns in.
People who claim to get ill by cell phones fall in another category entirely. Sometimes it's simply a perfectly understandable stress reaction - people who literally are sick of getting calls all the time, but prefer to have a physical explanation rather than a psychological. Even Dr. Brundtland, former general secretary of WHO, claimed to have EM sensitivity at one point.
That presupposes that a politician is merely someone who does a job for you, where qualifications is what matters. However, we often call politicians representatives, and if you've been in office too long, maybe you aren't as representative (as in "representative sample") as you were.
It's not just how well you do it, it's what you do. I'm not saying term limits is always a good idea, but there is a reason for it.
Labour call themselves a socialist party. They are currently (in Norway) in a government coalition with the Socialist Left, which according to your numbers must be the "socialists". The Socialist Left even have the minister of finance, and even the wealth pundits have had to admit that it has not been the end of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
*Cue special music*
Boss fight!!!
I don't want the death penalty for them, but I realize that it's a fucking huge problem that brewers, distillers, tavern owners and liquor store owners profit from slowly killing people. It's perverse incentives. If we like free markets (and we do) we need to do something about it, or we'll be using the invisible hand to choke people to death in an exemplary efficient manner.
Alcohol consumption follows a log-normal distribution, it's skewed to the heavily drinking end. If the 20% heaviest drinkers suddenly stopped cold turkey, you could expect 80% of the breweries, distillers, taverns and liquor stores to go as well.
(Another disturbing issue is that the distribution appears not to change very much across times and space. Median consumption and heavy consumption are closely related, so the alcohol industry can't simply compensate by selling more to people who drink little today - all evidence indicates that would cause the heavy drinkers to consume even more.)
Changing the law like this is not in fact illegal. If they change the law to make dancing illegal, prosecuting you for dancing in the past would be illegal, but you better stop dancing right now.
> Alcohol makes people more violent. Heroin makes people very mellow.
Wrong, and wrong. In many cultures, alcohol that makes people mellow, and sometimes there's something else that makes them aggressive. In one peculiar culture, imported western alcohol consumed in cities made people aggressive and traditional alcohol consumed in villages made them mellow.
Learned effects, people. We know it from comparative anthropology, and we know it from large, double blind studies performed in the sixties and seventies: alcohol changes you the way you expect it to change you.
People use the supposed effects largely as excuses. Alcohol gives you the excuse to say what you want to say, or occasionally punch who you want to punch. Someone who beats his wife when drinking isn't exactly excused, but he's called a drunk. If he did it when cold sober he would be called a psychopath instead. Both alcohol and cannabis are useful excuses for your grades not being as good as they "could" be.
What about heroin? Heroin, the king of chemical excuses around here, gives a rather plausible explanation for your life being a mess. (If you've heard the life story of a couple of street addicts, you know there's usually more than enough explanations already, but it's more appealing to be a victim of a powerful chemical than just not coping with a messed-up life. )
The main downside for you is that you would have another extremely powerful lobby making money from completely breaking down human beings. I thought I said that already.
But sure, it's not as if you or anyone you care about would fall victim to their marketing. You have free will, after all.
Alcohol is also extremely damaging, second only to smoking and obesity as a threat to public health issue. In North America as a whole, some estimates even place alcohol above obesity. And that's just the direct damages, not counting what heavy alcohol use does to families and communities.
Legalization advocates speak as if the problem with alcohol was solved. It never was.
It would solve the problem, in the same way legalizing corruption would solve Mexico's corruption problem.
Consider tobacco companies. A crime syndicate may seem a powerful thing, but it's nothing compared to a for-profit corporation with government-backed limited liability and protection. We have seen again and again that private, legal corporations which have incentives to do things that harm people, will be extremely good at doing it if it earns them money.
Even alcohol, the only legal intoxicant of significance, has extremely bad incentives: 80% of the profit comes from the top 20% consumers. The consumption curve is similarly skewed all over the world, even over different time periods, suggesting that you simply can't get moderate drinkers to drink more without getting more extremely heavy drinkers. Alcohol companies can't survive without actively encouraging millions of people to wreck their lives, families and communities. Yet they get a free pass.
This should scare you. It shows just how good corporations can be in exporting the costs, keeping the profits, and getting away with it. You want to give them cocaine money as well?
But you are right, in a sense. If Mexico legalized cocaine, and somehow avoided the harsh reactions from the US that would likely follow, they would probably be better off. It would be the US which would be worse off. Exporting the problem to another country and keeping a share of the profits for themselves must have been an appealing idea for many governments through the ages. That the international community works so hard preventing any country from breaking the ranks in this way, should tell you something about just how big those exported damages would be.
Considering what he did, the news were extremely favorable. Before Bush, no one would have thought you could thump your chest about doing torture (after first denying it), invade foreign countries on trumped-up charges, and purge the legislative branch of people suspected of being insufficiently supportive, without getting impeached.
Wow, you can kill bad mods just by replying? Cool - but Isn't it a bit harsh, though?
> There is only one real solution. Don't give any part of government or politicians too much power over too large a portion of the nation.
Then they can just take the power they want through non-governmental channels. Where there are no chiefs, you need to have a very special environment indeed, or people will start making themselves into chiefs with tooth and nail.
*cough*borland*cough*
> Do people really think Africa is only peopled by savage tribesmen running around with grass skirts and spears?
No, but I have read the Ubuntu Cola blog, from rural Malawi. I recommend it, it's plenty exotic enough!
and people who should know better will still jump on every new release because everyone else does.
Even Quake one would barely run on a 486.
In a earlier ruling, the judge David Eady (already infamous for poor judgement in libel cases) gave the BCA a major victory by declaring that "bogus" meant "deliberately deceptive". The case would have been impossible to fight for Singh while that stood, since he would have to prove that BCA chiropractics are deliberately deceptive. That is not true, and he didn't believe it either.
So apparently that was rejected, or the BCA retreated to less favourable ground for some reason.
In fact, it's the real scientists who are suppressed by lawsuits. The story of Roger Revelle and Justin Lancaster is a particularly ugly example.
Revelle was a conservative climate scientist, who waited quite long with asserting that the world was warming as a result of human actions. He was also the one who taught the climatology course Al Gore took in university. While he lay severly ill and dying, Fred Singer persuaded him to put his name to a paper he had authored, allegedly for helping with some details. Naturally, Fred Singer's paper denied AGW. But Singer was prudent enough to wait until Revelle was dead before starting to cite it (as a Revelle paper) far and wide. Revelle's last student and assistant, Jusin Lancaster, tried to call him on it, saying that Revelle told him he hoped the paper would "sink into the ground" as quickly as possible. Lancaster also disputed its authorship at a congress.
So what did that champion of free discourse, Fred Singer do? He filed a SLAPP libel lawsuit, of course. A student doesn't have the funds to stand up to a think tank veteran like Singer, although it wasn't for lack of trying. He tried to represent himself, and paid court costs for a while, until his wife convinced him to give up. He was forced to retract everything and forbidden from speaking on the issue. Fortunately for us, he did anyway. (Google Cache link, maybe Singer found out as the original's gone)
Not exactly. What he said was:
The BCA latched onto the word "bogus". They claimed that it implied intentional deception, that the BCA knew it didn't work but promoted it anyway. It's still stupid, of course. No one reading the piece by Singh will think he accuses them of not believing what they teach.
I've finally started using the minus button on stories, and modded most posts of today as "stupid".
It's not in the same league. Maybe you could shift the pitch a little with this thing, like compressing a few seconds off a song and preserving the pitch, but I bet if you did anything like they do today, you would sound like a vocoder pretty quickly. (I haven't heard this thing you link to, would love to if you had a sample. I assume, though, that it couldn't have been better than early digital autotuning, or they wouldn't have switched?).
A phenomenon I've heard people who teach children to sing use is "droning". Kids who drone sing an entire song on roughly the same tone. It's not just that they have a poor ear, it's like they haven't mastered the knack of conscious control over voice pitch. They are also called (maybe a little more PC) monotones.
Some never get it, although adult monotones usually know of their inability and refuse to show it. Modern autotune could take droning and make it sound about like nickleback, with little or no effort from the studio technician.
This changed singing style dramatically, which was my point.
There's a difference between technical skill (which for instance Sting definitively has) and pleasant artistic impression, which is more arguable... To put it like that, it takes effort and training to sing poorly like Sting.
The eighties did not have autotune. The eighties had pop singers who could actually sing. You notice when people attempt to do karaoke versions of "Take on me" or "Still haven't found what I'm looking for" at the original pitch...
That people are interfering with your TV and/or radio in order to mess with your head, is standard paranoid delusion nr. 1. It's not just a cliche either, it really is common.
I wonder why. Maybe static and noise are especially easy for people with schizophrenia to see non-existent patterns in.
People who claim to get ill by cell phones fall in another category entirely. Sometimes it's simply a perfectly understandable stress reaction - people who literally are sick of getting calls all the time, but prefer to have a physical explanation rather than a psychological. Even Dr. Brundtland, former general secretary of WHO, claimed to have EM sensitivity at one point.
Then obviously you haven't played "Companions of Xanth" enough.
That presupposes that a politician is merely someone who does a job for you, where qualifications is what matters. However, we often call politicians representatives, and if you've been in office too long, maybe you aren't as representative (as in "representative sample") as you were.
It's not just how well you do it, it's what you do. I'm not saying term limits is always a good idea, but there is a reason for it.
Labour call themselves a socialist party. They are currently (in Norway) in a government coalition with the Socialist Left, which according to your numbers must be the "socialists". The Socialist Left even have the minister of finance, and even the wealth pundits have had to admit that it has not been the end of the world.