I believe it's the other way around: we're prevented from talking about changes because we're too stuck on the large number of people who insist that the answer is "do nothing because nothing is happening/it's not our fault/it'll all be OK," based on information that is usually outright wrong.
The short answer to "what do we do?" is "cut back on CO2 emissions". How we do that is a genuinely good question, since it breaks down into questions like "Who will cut, and how much? What will they do instead? How will we enforce it? Is it fair for some to cut more than others? Can a market-based solution help, or do we need something more extreme? Can we help developing countries that really need cheap energy to continue advancing?" The answers are complex, and hampered by the fact that this is an international problem rather than a local one.
There are things that can be done on a national level, especially in western countries, which have far higher per-capita CO2 production than elsewhere. We can encourage more fuel-efficient transportation and more carbon-efficient fuels. We can spend money on research for energy production which can't compete with fossil fuels today and won't turn a profit this quarter or the next. We can find ways to "price in" carbon emissions, to encourage people to shift towards more climate-friendly alternatives. And you can find ways to create carbon tariffs, so that we don't merely export carbon-producing activities to countries with smaller per-capita economies (and thus smaller per-capita CO2 production, even though they're selling off the results of that CO2 production to other countries).
These aren't easy, but they have been discussed, widely. The problem is that the discussions are utterly moot when the United States is unwilling to even consider them. It has the highest per-capita CO2 production (outside of a few oil producers and a couple of tiny countries that don't contribute much overall). (source)
There's a lot more discussion to have. But until we get past the sheer denialism, which is based on outright lies and paranoia, there's no hope of having it.
I suppose, but the distinction seems to me more a matter of where you point them. The damn-near-certain downing of that airliner was with a conventional weapon, and they were surely the intended target, not collateral. We've taken rather a lot of genocides with equanimity, but when Assad did the same thing with chemicals, people started to get outraged.
Nukes do seem most effective in cases where they're going to kill a lot of civilians, even if there's a military objective. It's hard to imagine just what Putin means about a "tactical" usage: it's rare to be able to drop it on a military unit in the field. And even if he did, I'm pretty sure people would still treat it as if it meant he were likely to consider using them on even more obviously civilian targets.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that actual use of nuclear weapons crosses a Rubicon, even for Putin. It suddenly becomes an existential crisis for the rest of Europe, and even the most pacifist, non-interventionist parts of Europe will see themselves as the next target.
In a sense that's purely symbolic: as you point out he's already gone far beyond the pale. But it's a kind of invisible line, like the use of chemical weapons in Syria that had even the French considering action against Assad. It was vigorous enough that Assad agreed to destruction of the chemical weapons.
It's hard to imagine what the response might be; none of the options are anything but awful. But I think that the actual use of a nuclear weapon would put options back on the table that many countries wouldn't have considered in response to more "conventional" atrocities. I don't really completely understand why mass murder with nuclear and chemical weapons is somehow worse than mass murder with bombs and guns, but it's widely perceived that way.
I'd love to think that "truthful and honest" would work, but it seems pretty unlikely to me. If it's going to cost anybody money, or even just face, it's going to be pretty easy to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt. As you say, the Koch Brothers are winning, but I can't think of any way to prevent them from winning. The deck is heavily stacked in their favor.
As scientists, we like to think that the universe ultimately and undeniably stacks the deck in favor of reality, and that's true... eventually. A century from now, people will look back and say, "Wow, the data was all there, and it was really obvious. It would have saved so much pain for them to make small changes back then." But that's retrospective. All but the very youngest of denialists will be safely dead before they're forced to confront reality. Even then, there will be those who will blame Milankovich cycles or volcanoes or even just say "look at all the wonderful new Canadian farmland we have!"
So honestly... I really don't know what "truthful and honest" will get us. Sure, hysteria will turn some off... and it will click with others in a "Won't somebody think of the children!" kind of way. This is persuasion, not science, and I truly can't tell you what the most effective tack will be. But there has been plenty of clear-eyed, non-hysterical discussion available for decades, and polls show that it's losing. You can blame the more aggressive promoters for that, but I think that's just an excuse. Really, I think that people will mostly continue to believe what they want to believe, especially when the Koch Brothers and the Daily Fail give them all the FUD they can swallow, and even if there were not a single overhyped story it would have been precisely the same. It might even have been worse.
Would Russia invade if Ukraine still had their nukes?
They might, actually. It's a decent bet that Ukraine wouldn't respond, even to invasion, with a city-destroying bomb. They would instantly become the bad guys in the situation. And if Russia responds to the escalation, the next bomb goes off in Kiev.
MAD never really had to cope with a ground invasion of the US by Russia, or vice versa. It's a very good thing that we didn't share a border, or somebody might have tested it. But even under MAD, there were all kinds of proxy wars, where our allies were invaded, and we never decided to reply with nuclear weapons, even while throwing thousands of lives and billions of dollars at it.
So yeah, Russia might well have taken a gamble on a ground invasion even with a nuclear-armed Ukraine. Nukes are a tricky weapon to use. The main thing they do is deter other nukes, and nobody's threatening Ukraine with nukes. Putin would have to ask himself if he thought the Ukrainian government was crazy enough to respond to its existential, but conventional, crisis with unconventional weapons. And given how aggressive he's been so far in flouting international judgment, he might well believe it.
It's not even really the donors, per se, but their voters. Climate change denialism is very popular. The businesses ensure that candidates who favor them connect with those voters, but it's not like the candidate would suddenly change their mind if those donations dried up. They'd continue to be denialists. And if that politician leaves, the denialist voters will be sure to pick up another denialist candidate.
The business help ensure denialism not with the politicians, but by funding denialist news networks and web sites. They also run attack ads (on any subject, not just climate) to defeat candidates who would oppose denialism.
They don't need to buy politicians. They buy voters instead, by scaring them. You won't fix the candidates, who are just doing what their constituents (at least, 50%+1 of them) want. The direct donations are a pittance. It's the overall miasma of denialism that give us anti-intellectual politicians, not the other way around.
I've got no idea how to fix it. It's famously said that you can't fix stupid, and there's a LOT of stupid.
I don't necessarily disagree about the time frame, but I'm not sure why you're concerned about the price. The computers and sensors they're talking about putting in are fairly cheap. The software cost a lot of money to develop, but it would be amortized over a lot of people.
I don't think they'd have to go the luxury-car route, the way Tesla has. If anything, I'd expect them to want to sell it under cost, since there's a lot more cool stuff they can do once they can start treating computer-controlled cars as the default. The switchover period will be the least safe.
It's not even really about the headlines, per se. What they're looking for is content that users click through to, but don't read. The clickbait headline was part of that, setting up the expectation that the user would want to at least a little time reading it (and then failing to), but it sounds as if they're trying to eliminate bad content via the measure of whether or not people spend any time reading it.
The straw, at least, was clean. I wouldn't want to stick my finger in my drink after I've been in a bar all night. Of course, I like being drugged even less. But carrying around disposable straws or swizzle sticks strikes me as a lot more hygienic.
I guess one can hope that the alcohol will solve that problem, especially since women's garments are notorious for lacking pockets in which to carry such things. That does make this particularly brilliant: you put it on before you go and it's always with you. But I'd still want to wash my hands a lot. (I hope it's durable to hand-washing.)
Date rape doesn't just happen to drunken girls at frat parties. The whole idea of date rape drugs is that they're used in places where women otherwise have a reason to feel safe, with someone they aren't actively afraid of, and having consumed only reasonable amounts of alcohol. It happens in very nice bars by very nice-seeming men, surrounded by other well-behaved people.
They're making good choices, unless we want to tell women that the only good choice is to lock herself in her house. The whole idea of this is to test the drink before she drinks it, and if it's been tampered with, she doesn't.
I've had one negative experience with AirBnB. It wasn't terrible, more disorganized than dangerous, and it's only one out of over a dozen excellent experiences, but that sounds about right: a very small percentage of problems. 124 in New York City also sounds about right for the worst-of-the-worst.
In other words: no, not widespread, but if you can eliminate the few bad actors it increases overall confidence in the system. And if it decreases slightly the hostility from the industry they're trying to displace, it's better for the customer. The only losers in that are those who have been bad, and I just don't see anything wrong with that.
In the US, the newspaper industry has been flailing for decades. TV was eating their lunch even before the Internet did. The national "newspapers of record" still have some sway, but they no longer swing elections. They are still the last best hope of serious journalism as the fourth estate, but there's just not much left of it.
In the US, it's not even fishwrap; people just don't buy them. They do get it online, but what little actual news is in that stream is mostly thinly rewritten (or not) wire reports.
DC's violent crime rates are largely about its poverty. Aside from the federal government, it has no real industry. It was heavily populated by poor blacks fleeing the South during the civil war, and during the next century-plus they were heavily discriminated against. There were few jobs for them except at the very bottom of service. While the place is on average pretty wealthy, its real population is quite poor.
The real fail of the politicians was that for two centuries the federal government ran the place. They didn't live there permanently, so they didn't treat it well. They eventually established a city government, but it was chronically mis-managed for decades.
They finally got in some good mayors. Poverty and violent crime are falling (though some of that is part of the broader national trend). They still bicker with the feds over governance, but the federal government is still its primary source of income, both directly and from the taxes they collect from people who work for it. That, too, has boomed for a few decades. It's nowhere near the crime capital it used to be.
In fact, I'm almost surprised he wasn't fired. You're not just not paid enough to run. It's potentially dangerous, and the damage from the shoplifting is smaller than the potential harm to you: it's unlikely but expensive when it does happen. Most stores I know tell you to just call attention and get security to come: they ARE tasked with that. (Most of them, in fact, are also told not to chase people, just to collect identifying information and report it to the police.)
The main purpose is to scare people away with the knowledge that they could be caught and could spend time in jail. Again the risk is low but the potential cost high. Most store managers would have given you all the "Look, I admire your bravery, but don't do it again" speech. It's just not worth it for the store.
Taken together, does that imply that the OP read about it in Dr. Dobbs but didn't cite the source? That doesn't speak particularly well of his work on the article.
I'm not crazy about the deletionists, but it doesn't surprise me that they're not doing independent research on notability. There should be (and probably is, somewhere) a good set of guidelines entitled, "So, you want to write a new entry for Wikipedia? Here's a checklist for avoiding the deletionists." And that would include "[] Cite at least three independent sources in the references section."
Yeah, violent crime seems to go with density, rather than poverty. It's committed by the poor, but closely-packed poor rather than rural poor.
DC is ALL urban, every single inch of it, so it's not really appropriate to compare it to a state. It's mid-pack compared to other cities of comparable size; it fell between Indianapolis and Miami on the 2012 list (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012), and near Toledo and Nashville.
More urban states have higher violent crime rates, but it's centered in the urban cores. States with fewer cities will have lower violent crime rates, even though they may have more, poorer poor people. A lot of it, I gather, is drug related; I know that rural areas have their own drug problems but the distribution networks lead to a kind of organized violent crime.
The problem is that it takes thousands of man hours to produce a movie
Hundreds of thousands, actually. Millions, in some cases. High-end movies are enormous affairs. Each of those hundreds of names in the credits got $20-$50 per hour (less for the interns) for one to two months of full time work (and often with a fair bit of overtime). It's an insane amount of work, but it's the difference between a cutesy indie film (which will still take several thousand man hours) and the real slick look of a big Hollywood movie.
I think it's more useful to think of the number as a quantification of how much that advertising is worth: that's the amount of money operators are depending on (one way or the other) to keep providing what they're providing.
How you actually get it to them is a whole different question. They've talked about micropayments and subscription models and other things, but ads have the nice characteristic of requiring zero overhead for the viewer. There's nothing to install; you "pay" just by having it on your screen. Whether it's actually worth it to the advertiser is insanely difficult to say, but they are (at least for the moment) actually forking over the money.
Everybody would love a more precise system, where you pay for the page views that are of interest to you, but that shifts the burden from millions-of-site-operators to billions-of-viewers, and they're all incensed about having to "pay" for something they were previously getting for "free". People keep trying things, but it comes as no surprise to me that for a lot of side, throwing a few basic ads onto the page for pennies-per-thousand-impressions is the easiest way to monetize their effort, at least for the vast array of small sites.
Big sites (like Slashdot) can do better, because the economies of scale make it worth the overhead to try to get money from viewers, and maybe some day we'll get that packaged down to a point where other sites can get it. But since the total sum of money is pretty substantial, I think a lot of viewers will say, "I hate ads, but I hate paying even more."
I gather that there is a countervailing trend, in the form of reformers in the government. China's version of "communism" is pretty far removed from anything visualized by the early social theorists, and it was plagued by a lot of outright insanity for decades, but it always had collectivism at its core. Mao was one of the great mass-murderers of history, but he wasn't corrupt, merely deranged.
I wouldn't call it a benevolent dictatorship, but I was put in mind of it by your mention of the unelected senators. They still had to campaign; it's just that they ended up stumping on behalf of the legislators-cum-electors. The most prominent example was the Lincoln-Douglas debates: they were running for the Senate but really trying to get legislators to vote for their party. It meant that national issues often trumped local issues, and the state legislature suffered for it.
My point there is that democracy, while important, isn't a cure-all. It's inherently adversarial, a conflict which has notably ground today's national legislature to a standstill. Even popularly-supported reforms get no traction, much less anything with even a whiff of controversy. And it's too inflexible to stop the largest discretionary component of our budget from pumping many billions to the military-industrial complex: I don't buy the theory that they're manufacturing wars for it, but even without that kind of explicit corruption it's still not as responsive as you'd like to imagine a directly-elected legislature should be.
I'm not an expert in China's structure, but I wouldn't count them out just because they're unfamiliar. Certainly the system is ripe for corruption, and they do need to fix it, but they have managed to reform themselves already even under one-party control. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. There's much to do.
The Faustian bargain there is that they're not supposed to be expressing any specific purposes. If you're categorizing your product as a "supplement" you have to avoid making specific health claims. It generally says so, right on the package, via the incantation "This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease".
Generally in very, very tiny print. In much larger print, they'll hint strongly that it's good for something (often, something fairly vacuous). It's on the FDA to judge when it crosses the line into a medical claim, and they don't have anywhere near the kind of manpower it takes to evaluate the multi-billion-dollar market. It took an outside organization to sue the makers of Airborne, via the FTC, for false advertising rather than a violation of the more specific FDA rules.
So yeah, there are rules about dietary supplements, but they're badly flouted. They walk right up to the line, or even cross right over it, and rely on people's gullibility to make the jump to believe that these worthless products do anything.
Yep, came here to say that. And since effectively every daily news story on any science subject fails to answer any of them, it would be a pretty good heuristic to simply ignore all of them.
Newspapers and TV news are designed to sell news today, and to sell you news again tomorrow. Science doesn't turn out news on a daily basis like that. Important results take a very long time from first inkling to confirmation. You won't be able to act on that news today at any rate. Wait until the news comes out in a source like Science News or Scientific American, when it's got at least a few days worth of evaluation and consideration under its belt. Everything that comes out more frequently than that is going to be just plain rubbish the overwhelming majority of the time. And you'll hear about the stuff that isn't rubbish plenty quickly enough.
The IPCC report does discuss what happens if we don't, and it's more than enough to call for some kind of measures. A proper outcome of geoengineering studies will treat that as the control: "This is what we get if we do nothing... this is what we get if we just control carbon output... this is what we get if we apply technique X/Y/Z".
It's just that measuring "this is what we get" is really hard. Temperature is the easiest to predict (and even that is proving aggravatingly difficult on scales smaller than multiple decades), but it's not the only factor. And we need to take ALL of the effects into account to judge what's going to be most cost-effective.
I'm really just asking for somebody to make the case as clearly as possible. A comment downthread told me "Oh, you just throw a bunch of water into the air, and the clouds will fix it." I *know* it's not that simple; it's obvious that a lot isn't being taken into account.
Unfortunately, most conversation about climate change is dominated by the just-plain-stupidity of denialism, rather than getting to ask the hard questions. I want them to be asked, though I'm also sadly fatalistic: denialism has pushed us, as you have said, past the point the ship has sailed. I end up thinking of this as largely academic, and by the time it comes to be implemented it'll be much too late to help. But we're going to do the research anyway. I'm just hoping it will come with enough of the right answers to be compelling to those prepared to understand it.
Even if it's produced with zero human labor, the price isn't going to be free. There already is practically zero human labor in the actual growing of food. The process is heavily automated already. The consumer price is dominated by the various middle men (distributors, shippers, retailers, etc.) The actual farmer receives less than a dime for each dollar you spend. Far, far less for prepared foods.
If you're willing to cook, you can buy more than enough raw ingredients to feed yourself quite well, for well under a dollar a day. And very little of that money goes to the farmer himself; you're mostly paying to get the food from the farmer to your local outlet, and then to you.
I personally wouldn't mind if MORE people had to get into farming. There are downsides to that massively automated farming: increased pesticide use, large amounts of fossil fuels, soil loss, lack of variety, etc. I'm just fine with subsidizing the food for those people who can't work, or even don't wish to: the raw materials end up costing practically nothing already, at least at the farm itself. But if people want to work... and many do... I think that more labor-intensive agriculture has some advantages.
It sounds to me as if he's pulling a switch in the middle of his argument. He didn't spend $1.6 million on the "episodic content" part. He spent the money on the playing device, which may have been noble and good, but he got his lunch eaten. (Not even by Apple. If it was a "cassette tape product", then it wasn't wireless and had less space than a Nomad.)
I'm sorry his product failed, but it seems like a reach to claim priority on the obvious parts of it. And I have even less sympathy when he's dragging in unrelated expenses to try to justify it.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it's the other way around: we're prevented from talking about changes because we're too stuck on the large number of people who insist that the answer is "do nothing because nothing is happening/it's not our fault/it'll all be OK," based on information that is usually outright wrong.
The short answer to "what do we do?" is "cut back on CO2 emissions". How we do that is a genuinely good question, since it breaks down into questions like "Who will cut, and how much? What will they do instead? How will we enforce it? Is it fair for some to cut more than others? Can a market-based solution help, or do we need something more extreme? Can we help developing countries that really need cheap energy to continue advancing?" The answers are complex, and hampered by the fact that this is an international problem rather than a local one.
There are things that can be done on a national level, especially in western countries, which have far higher per-capita CO2 production than elsewhere. We can encourage more fuel-efficient transportation and more carbon-efficient fuels. We can spend money on research for energy production which can't compete with fossil fuels today and won't turn a profit this quarter or the next. We can find ways to "price in" carbon emissions, to encourage people to shift towards more climate-friendly alternatives. And you can find ways to create carbon tariffs, so that we don't merely export carbon-producing activities to countries with smaller per-capita economies (and thus smaller per-capita CO2 production, even though they're selling off the results of that CO2 production to other countries).
These aren't easy, but they have been discussed, widely. The problem is that the discussions are utterly moot when the United States is unwilling to even consider them. It has the highest per-capita CO2 production (outside of a few oil producers and a couple of tiny countries that don't contribute much overall). (source)
There's a lot more discussion to have. But until we get past the sheer denialism, which is based on outright lies and paranoia, there's no hope of having it.
I suppose, but the distinction seems to me more a matter of where you point them. The damn-near-certain downing of that airliner was with a conventional weapon, and they were surely the intended target, not collateral. We've taken rather a lot of genocides with equanimity, but when Assad did the same thing with chemicals, people started to get outraged.
Nukes do seem most effective in cases where they're going to kill a lot of civilians, even if there's a military objective. It's hard to imagine just what Putin means about a "tactical" usage: it's rare to be able to drop it on a military unit in the field. And even if he did, I'm pretty sure people would still treat it as if it meant he were likely to consider using them on even more obviously civilian targets.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that actual use of nuclear weapons crosses a Rubicon, even for Putin. It suddenly becomes an existential crisis for the rest of Europe, and even the most pacifist, non-interventionist parts of Europe will see themselves as the next target.
In a sense that's purely symbolic: as you point out he's already gone far beyond the pale. But it's a kind of invisible line, like the use of chemical weapons in Syria that had even the French considering action against Assad. It was vigorous enough that Assad agreed to destruction of the chemical weapons.
It's hard to imagine what the response might be; none of the options are anything but awful. But I think that the actual use of a nuclear weapon would put options back on the table that many countries wouldn't have considered in response to more "conventional" atrocities. I don't really completely understand why mass murder with nuclear and chemical weapons is somehow worse than mass murder with bombs and guns, but it's widely perceived that way.
I'd love to think that "truthful and honest" would work, but it seems pretty unlikely to me. If it's going to cost anybody money, or even just face, it's going to be pretty easy to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt. As you say, the Koch Brothers are winning, but I can't think of any way to prevent them from winning. The deck is heavily stacked in their favor.
As scientists, we like to think that the universe ultimately and undeniably stacks the deck in favor of reality, and that's true... eventually. A century from now, people will look back and say, "Wow, the data was all there, and it was really obvious. It would have saved so much pain for them to make small changes back then." But that's retrospective. All but the very youngest of denialists will be safely dead before they're forced to confront reality. Even then, there will be those who will blame Milankovich cycles or volcanoes or even just say "look at all the wonderful new Canadian farmland we have!"
So honestly... I really don't know what "truthful and honest" will get us. Sure, hysteria will turn some off... and it will click with others in a "Won't somebody think of the children!" kind of way. This is persuasion, not science, and I truly can't tell you what the most effective tack will be. But there has been plenty of clear-eyed, non-hysterical discussion available for decades, and polls show that it's losing. You can blame the more aggressive promoters for that, but I think that's just an excuse. Really, I think that people will mostly continue to believe what they want to believe, especially when the Koch Brothers and the Daily Fail give them all the FUD they can swallow, and even if there were not a single overhyped story it would have been precisely the same. It might even have been worse.
Would Russia invade if Ukraine still had their nukes?
They might, actually. It's a decent bet that Ukraine wouldn't respond, even to invasion, with a city-destroying bomb. They would instantly become the bad guys in the situation. And if Russia responds to the escalation, the next bomb goes off in Kiev.
MAD never really had to cope with a ground invasion of the US by Russia, or vice versa. It's a very good thing that we didn't share a border, or somebody might have tested it. But even under MAD, there were all kinds of proxy wars, where our allies were invaded, and we never decided to reply with nuclear weapons, even while throwing thousands of lives and billions of dollars at it.
So yeah, Russia might well have taken a gamble on a ground invasion even with a nuclear-armed Ukraine. Nukes are a tricky weapon to use. The main thing they do is deter other nukes, and nobody's threatening Ukraine with nukes. Putin would have to ask himself if he thought the Ukrainian government was crazy enough to respond to its existential, but conventional, crisis with unconventional weapons. And given how aggressive he's been so far in flouting international judgment, he might well believe it.
It's not even really the donors, per se, but their voters. Climate change denialism is very popular. The businesses ensure that candidates who favor them connect with those voters, but it's not like the candidate would suddenly change their mind if those donations dried up. They'd continue to be denialists. And if that politician leaves, the denialist voters will be sure to pick up another denialist candidate.
The business help ensure denialism not with the politicians, but by funding denialist news networks and web sites. They also run attack ads (on any subject, not just climate) to defeat candidates who would oppose denialism.
They don't need to buy politicians. They buy voters instead, by scaring them. You won't fix the candidates, who are just doing what their constituents (at least, 50%+1 of them) want. The direct donations are a pittance. It's the overall miasma of denialism that give us anti-intellectual politicians, not the other way around.
I've got no idea how to fix it. It's famously said that you can't fix stupid, and there's a LOT of stupid.
I don't necessarily disagree about the time frame, but I'm not sure why you're concerned about the price. The computers and sensors they're talking about putting in are fairly cheap. The software cost a lot of money to develop, but it would be amortized over a lot of people.
I don't think they'd have to go the luxury-car route, the way Tesla has. If anything, I'd expect them to want to sell it under cost, since there's a lot more cool stuff they can do once they can start treating computer-controlled cars as the default. The switchover period will be the least safe.
Interesting. Thanks!
It's not even really about the headlines, per se. What they're looking for is content that users click through to, but don't read. The clickbait headline was part of that, setting up the expectation that the user would want to at least a little time reading it (and then failing to), but it sounds as if they're trying to eliminate bad content via the measure of whether or not people spend any time reading it.
The straw, at least, was clean. I wouldn't want to stick my finger in my drink after I've been in a bar all night. Of course, I like being drugged even less. But carrying around disposable straws or swizzle sticks strikes me as a lot more hygienic.
I guess one can hope that the alcohol will solve that problem, especially since women's garments are notorious for lacking pockets in which to carry such things. That does make this particularly brilliant: you put it on before you go and it's always with you. But I'd still want to wash my hands a lot. (I hope it's durable to hand-washing.)
Date rape doesn't just happen to drunken girls at frat parties. The whole idea of date rape drugs is that they're used in places where women otherwise have a reason to feel safe, with someone they aren't actively afraid of, and having consumed only reasonable amounts of alcohol. It happens in very nice bars by very nice-seeming men, surrounded by other well-behaved people.
They're making good choices, unless we want to tell women that the only good choice is to lock herself in her house. The whole idea of this is to test the drink before she drinks it, and if it's been tampered with, she doesn't.
I've had one negative experience with AirBnB. It wasn't terrible, more disorganized than dangerous, and it's only one out of over a dozen excellent experiences, but that sounds about right: a very small percentage of problems. 124 in New York City also sounds about right for the worst-of-the-worst.
In other words: no, not widespread, but if you can eliminate the few bad actors it increases overall confidence in the system. And if it decreases slightly the hostility from the industry they're trying to displace, it's better for the customer. The only losers in that are those who have been bad, and I just don't see anything wrong with that.
Does anybody read them?
In the US, the newspaper industry has been flailing for decades. TV was eating their lunch even before the Internet did. The national "newspapers of record" still have some sway, but they no longer swing elections. They are still the last best hope of serious journalism as the fourth estate, but there's just not much left of it.
In the US, it's not even fishwrap; people just don't buy them. They do get it online, but what little actual news is in that stream is mostly thinly rewritten (or not) wire reports.
Is it any better in Australia?
DC's violent crime rates are largely about its poverty. Aside from the federal government, it has no real industry. It was heavily populated by poor blacks fleeing the South during the civil war, and during the next century-plus they were heavily discriminated against. There were few jobs for them except at the very bottom of service. While the place is on average pretty wealthy, its real population is quite poor.
The real fail of the politicians was that for two centuries the federal government ran the place. They didn't live there permanently, so they didn't treat it well. They eventually established a city government, but it was chronically mis-managed for decades.
They finally got in some good mayors. Poverty and violent crime are falling (though some of that is part of the broader national trend). They still bicker with the feds over governance, but the federal government is still its primary source of income, both directly and from the taxes they collect from people who work for it. That, too, has boomed for a few decades. It's nowhere near the crime capital it used to be.
In fact, I'm almost surprised he wasn't fired. You're not just not paid enough to run. It's potentially dangerous, and the damage from the shoplifting is smaller than the potential harm to you: it's unlikely but expensive when it does happen. Most stores I know tell you to just call attention and get security to come: they ARE tasked with that. (Most of them, in fact, are also told not to chase people, just to collect identifying information and report it to the police.)
The main purpose is to scare people away with the knowledge that they could be caught and could spend time in jail. Again the risk is low but the potential cost high. Most store managers would have given you all the "Look, I admire your bravery, but don't do it again" speech. It's just not worth it for the store.
Taken together, does that imply that the OP read about it in Dr. Dobbs but didn't cite the source? That doesn't speak particularly well of his work on the article.
I'm not crazy about the deletionists, but it doesn't surprise me that they're not doing independent research on notability. There should be (and probably is, somewhere) a good set of guidelines entitled, "So, you want to write a new entry for Wikipedia? Here's a checklist for avoiding the deletionists." And that would include "[] Cite at least three independent sources in the references section."
Yeah, violent crime seems to go with density, rather than poverty. It's committed by the poor, but closely-packed poor rather than rural poor.
DC is ALL urban, every single inch of it, so it's not really appropriate to compare it to a state. It's mid-pack compared to other cities of comparable size; it fell between Indianapolis and Miami on the 2012 list (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012), and near Toledo and Nashville.
More urban states have higher violent crime rates, but it's centered in the urban cores. States with fewer cities will have lower violent crime rates, even though they may have more, poorer poor people. A lot of it, I gather, is drug related; I know that rural areas have their own drug problems but the distribution networks lead to a kind of organized violent crime.
The problem is that it takes thousands of man hours to produce a movie
Hundreds of thousands, actually. Millions, in some cases. High-end movies are enormous affairs. Each of those hundreds of names in the credits got $20-$50 per hour (less for the interns) for one to two months of full time work (and often with a fair bit of overtime). It's an insane amount of work, but it's the difference between a cutesy indie film (which will still take several thousand man hours) and the real slick look of a big Hollywood movie.
I think it's more useful to think of the number as a quantification of how much that advertising is worth: that's the amount of money operators are depending on (one way or the other) to keep providing what they're providing.
How you actually get it to them is a whole different question. They've talked about micropayments and subscription models and other things, but ads have the nice characteristic of requiring zero overhead for the viewer. There's nothing to install; you "pay" just by having it on your screen. Whether it's actually worth it to the advertiser is insanely difficult to say, but they are (at least for the moment) actually forking over the money.
Everybody would love a more precise system, where you pay for the page views that are of interest to you, but that shifts the burden from millions-of-site-operators to billions-of-viewers, and they're all incensed about having to "pay" for something they were previously getting for "free". People keep trying things, but it comes as no surprise to me that for a lot of side, throwing a few basic ads onto the page for pennies-per-thousand-impressions is the easiest way to monetize their effort, at least for the vast array of small sites.
Big sites (like Slashdot) can do better, because the economies of scale make it worth the overhead to try to get money from viewers, and maybe some day we'll get that packaged down to a point where other sites can get it. But since the total sum of money is pretty substantial, I think a lot of viewers will say, "I hate ads, but I hate paying even more."
I gather that there is a countervailing trend, in the form of reformers in the government. China's version of "communism" is pretty far removed from anything visualized by the early social theorists, and it was plagued by a lot of outright insanity for decades, but it always had collectivism at its core. Mao was one of the great mass-murderers of history, but he wasn't corrupt, merely deranged.
I wouldn't call it a benevolent dictatorship, but I was put in mind of it by your mention of the unelected senators. They still had to campaign; it's just that they ended up stumping on behalf of the legislators-cum-electors. The most prominent example was the Lincoln-Douglas debates: they were running for the Senate but really trying to get legislators to vote for their party. It meant that national issues often trumped local issues, and the state legislature suffered for it.
My point there is that democracy, while important, isn't a cure-all. It's inherently adversarial, a conflict which has notably ground today's national legislature to a standstill. Even popularly-supported reforms get no traction, much less anything with even a whiff of controversy. And it's too inflexible to stop the largest discretionary component of our budget from pumping many billions to the military-industrial complex: I don't buy the theory that they're manufacturing wars for it, but even without that kind of explicit corruption it's still not as responsive as you'd like to imagine a directly-elected legislature should be.
I'm not an expert in China's structure, but I wouldn't count them out just because they're unfamiliar. Certainly the system is ripe for corruption, and they do need to fix it, but they have managed to reform themselves already even under one-party control. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. There's much to do.
The Faustian bargain there is that they're not supposed to be expressing any specific purposes. If you're categorizing your product as a "supplement" you have to avoid making specific health claims. It generally says so, right on the package, via the incantation "This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease".
Generally in very, very tiny print. In much larger print, they'll hint strongly that it's good for something (often, something fairly vacuous). It's on the FDA to judge when it crosses the line into a medical claim, and they don't have anywhere near the kind of manpower it takes to evaluate the multi-billion-dollar market. It took an outside organization to sue the makers of Airborne, via the FTC, for false advertising rather than a violation of the more specific FDA rules.
So yeah, there are rules about dietary supplements, but they're badly flouted. They walk right up to the line, or even cross right over it, and rely on people's gullibility to make the jump to believe that these worthless products do anything.
Yep, came here to say that. And since effectively every daily news story on any science subject fails to answer any of them, it would be a pretty good heuristic to simply ignore all of them.
Newspapers and TV news are designed to sell news today, and to sell you news again tomorrow. Science doesn't turn out news on a daily basis like that. Important results take a very long time from first inkling to confirmation. You won't be able to act on that news today at any rate. Wait until the news comes out in a source like Science News or Scientific American, when it's got at least a few days worth of evaluation and consideration under its belt. Everything that comes out more frequently than that is going to be just plain rubbish the overwhelming majority of the time. And you'll hear about the stuff that isn't rubbish plenty quickly enough.
The IPCC report does discuss what happens if we don't, and it's more than enough to call for some kind of measures. A proper outcome of geoengineering studies will treat that as the control: "This is what we get if we do nothing... this is what we get if we just control carbon output... this is what we get if we apply technique X/Y/Z".
It's just that measuring "this is what we get" is really hard. Temperature is the easiest to predict (and even that is proving aggravatingly difficult on scales smaller than multiple decades), but it's not the only factor. And we need to take ALL of the effects into account to judge what's going to be most cost-effective.
I'm really just asking for somebody to make the case as clearly as possible. A comment downthread told me "Oh, you just throw a bunch of water into the air, and the clouds will fix it." I *know* it's not that simple; it's obvious that a lot isn't being taken into account.
Unfortunately, most conversation about climate change is dominated by the just-plain-stupidity of denialism, rather than getting to ask the hard questions. I want them to be asked, though I'm also sadly fatalistic: denialism has pushed us, as you have said, past the point the ship has sailed. I end up thinking of this as largely academic, and by the time it comes to be implemented it'll be much too late to help. But we're going to do the research anyway. I'm just hoping it will come with enough of the right answers to be compelling to those prepared to understand it.
Even if it's produced with zero human labor, the price isn't going to be free. There already is practically zero human labor in the actual growing of food. The process is heavily automated already. The consumer price is dominated by the various middle men (distributors, shippers, retailers, etc.) The actual farmer receives less than a dime for each dollar you spend. Far, far less for prepared foods.
If you're willing to cook, you can buy more than enough raw ingredients to feed yourself quite well, for well under a dollar a day. And very little of that money goes to the farmer himself; you're mostly paying to get the food from the farmer to your local outlet, and then to you.
I personally wouldn't mind if MORE people had to get into farming. There are downsides to that massively automated farming: increased pesticide use, large amounts of fossil fuels, soil loss, lack of variety, etc. I'm just fine with subsidizing the food for those people who can't work, or even don't wish to: the raw materials end up costing practically nothing already, at least at the farm itself. But if people want to work... and many do... I think that more labor-intensive agriculture has some advantages.
It sounds to me as if he's pulling a switch in the middle of his argument. He didn't spend $1.6 million on the "episodic content" part. He spent the money on the playing device, which may have been noble and good, but he got his lunch eaten. (Not even by Apple. If it was a "cassette tape product", then it wasn't wireless and had less space than a Nomad.)
I'm sorry his product failed, but it seems like a reach to claim priority on the obvious parts of it. And I have even less sympathy when he's dragging in unrelated expenses to try to justify it.