I find companies often make decisions like this, so long as it will not be they who bear the cost of it.
Yeah. That's what companies do.
Mostly, though, I find your description of the situation to be cherry-picking. The situation on YouTube isn't a "slight inconvenience"; the comments are unusable at present and they might as well be shut off entirely; the useless of YouTube comments are legendary. And conversely, the odds of somebody refusing you a job because you went "CAT VIDEO!! WOO!!!" are negligible.
Really, you're asking if ten billion comments are worth one poor unfortunate losing his job because he said the wrong thing at the wrong time on the web. My answer: yeah. Life is full of hazards, and it's never going to be fair. I can't prevent you from being hit by a bus, and I'm not going to ground every bus to preserve your right to cross the street whenever you feel like it.
In the end, of course it's a business decision. You don't like their web site, you don't use it. If you do like their web site, you take the personal responsibility to watch your mouth.
that's like saying the police 'help' you out by writing a traffic ticket for jaywalking.
Ordinarily, I make a general comment about how analogies are generally not helpful reasoning tools, since they either simplify out crucial elements of the issue or remain just as complicated as the original question and no easier to resolve.
But that is the worst analogy I've ever heard in an argument, so I'll just stand here and blink.
They're not forcing you to do anything. You don't want to reveal your name, all you have to do is not post on their web site. Their house, their rules.
if you force us to expose ourselves, many of us just won't.
And I suspect that they're OK with that. The value of YouTube comments even on the best of days is negligible. It's not the Pentagon Papers.
The most valuable comments are just about community: people making inane chatter at each other to increase each other's enjoyment of an entertainment site. Most people don't mind having such comments associated with their names. The stakes are just too low.
There are ways it can come back to bite you, and the very paranoid will avoid them at all costs. Google's helping you out here: if you don't want something remembered, you don't say it on the Internet, with your name or without. It costs Google your participation, but the number of such people are small, and the benefits it brings to their community (raising the bar on trolls and spammers) may be worth it.
Generally, daylight produces more light than you get from light bulbs. Your eyes adjust so you see just as well either way, but most of the light is unnecessary and eventually devolves to heat.
That heat is useful in cold climes, and obviously this device will be most useful in sunny places. At that, it might even help cool the room as well as producing electricity.
The ability to pocket excess campaign cash ended quite some time ago, in 1989. The FEC has spent a long time tightening the laws. They're still far from perfect, of course.
Candidates do from time to time get big donations from groups who disagree with them, and they need to look closely at just what's going on there. It's illegal to promise to vote for their pet bill in exchange. About the most you can do is an unspoken opportunity to take their meeting, though you have to pretend it's a coincidence rather than quid pro quo. And sometimes, that meeting really is all they want. It's their right to try to get you to change your mind.
Most of the time, people with money give it to a candidate who already supports what they want, rather than trying to change a candidate's mind. It's cheaper, too: they may be a large campaign contribution, but as a simple trade of value, other people also gave you money. Switch your vote on them and they don't give you money again, and you find yourself out of office.
Yep. Usually, they just spend it, of course. In fact, they're usually in debt, and spend the beginning of the term trying to pay off those debts before they can run again. Hillary Clinton is still trying to pay down the debt from her campaign, so the "Hillary Clinton for President" committee still exists.
If there's anything left over, they usually end up giving it to somebody else's campaign or to the national committee. Charitable donations are also legal.
It specifically forbids personal use (where the previous section gives a lengthy description of what constitutes "personal use", to the point where they have to say explicitly "yes, it's OK if you wear campaign tee-shirt".)
Very little of lobbying is corrupt. There are exceptions, of course, but the vast majority of lobbying is a rather dull profession involving large numbers of meetings and endless phone calls. No significant money changes hands. Some lobbying takes the form of fundraising, but that goes into campaign coffers and the FEC tracks it closely to ensure that it doesn't end up in the candidates' personal accounts.
I'm not saying it's a perfect system, far from it. But it's not even close to the "legalized bribe" that most people who don't work in Washington imagine it is.
And how are they supposed to do that? Individual workers calling their Senators up on the phone, each one of them telling the Senator something slightly different from the last one? Senators don't take phone calls from workers. They take phone calls from executives.
Actually, they don't take phone calls from either. They take phone calls from lobbyists, people with whom they have a relationship and who have worked with them before. Corporate management has plenty of money to hire them. Individual workers don't.
They can, however, get together and pool their money to hire a lobbyist. We should make up a name for such a unified group of people.
Its Office suite is still pretty much mandatory in a lot of offices, and any place else where you have to exchange editable documents.
This is due in part to the abysmal nature of those formats: nobody from outside can get them working with 100% fidelity. If you hand me a Word doc, and I edit it or fill it out with anything other than Genuine Microsoft(tm)-brand Word, there's a good chance it's going to look like crap when you get it back. Job security through incompetence.
That's diminishing as people find other ways of sharing stuff, but there's still a large place for the Big File Full Of Carefully Formatted Words And Pictures that needs to be edited on both ends.
I'd say it's not wrong to call it navel-gazing. Physics occasionally turns its navel-gazing into technology, and when it does, the results are stunning because they're completely unexpected. It's rather naive to assume it will happen again.
The best you can say is that it's paid off enough in the past that it's worth the expense to give it another go, but you can't really quantify the odds and it's not really the reason people do it. They do it because it's not just navel-gazing, it's the ultimate navel-gazing. People are fascinated by their origins and the Standard Model is part of the road to figuring that out.
In some ways it more closely resembles the value of art than the value of technology. It's something civilized cultures do because they enjoy it, rather than because they're compelled to. But for those who don't feel compelled, they're probably not wrong to say it's a waste of their money. (They may actually be wrong about that, as the huge wins of quantum mechanics demonstrate. But I won't be so naive as to pretend it's a guarantee.)
The problem, I think, is that this is on the frontiers of science. There isn't any layman's explanation for this, not one that ends with "... and that's how it relates to your daily life."
People assume that the physicists have some special insight into the meaning of life because they work with the most fundamental bits of the universe. If there's a philosophical implication here, it's just that the score is now: "Science: 235,593,935,914. Religion: 0" on matters of how the universe operates. But they've kind of been running up the score for a while, and anybody who still takes the Bible seriously as a physics textbook is too brain-damage to educate.
And it's also quite clear that fundamental physics isn't going to give you any insights into the meaning of life. I don't think religion does, either, but at least physics isn't going to actively tell you that it's wrong, and the physicists have no special answers. It's time to stop looking at them as priests, and their pronouncements from Geneva are important but won't give you the answers you're after.
The only other option is technology, but nobody wanted to take "no" for an answer. Yes, quantum mechanics has had some incredible unpredicted applications. If people had tried to make predictions, they'd have been wrong; if they'd predicted what we did get, we'd have called them stupid. So don't talk about it.
So, we've got a bunch of scientists who are unfairly raised to the status of oracles, which completely misses the actual value of their work. I don't think the Standard Model is going to get more than a passing mention in high school textbooks, as a way of grounding chemistry, but that's it.
This is the NPR tote bag of space. The tote bag would actually be more useful. They're looking to raise money, and they want to give you a token of appreciation. It's like letting you put your name on it, only a little more personal and a little more sciencey.
You're not getting DNA delivery out of it. The DNA up there is going to be useless. You're getting bragging rights: "my DNA is on board that rover" when/if they actually make the news by succeeding. It's pricey for bragging rights, but it's cheaper than the $150 million somebody's asking to actually drive you past it (and that, too, is really just bragging rights).
The only immortality you get out of it is the story.
It's actually aimed primarily at Manning-style leaks, where somebody just dumps everything they have access to onto a disk and sends it to be printed. The kind where people don't even read what they're taking, and don't have any actual connection to it.
The paper describes a kind of glorified Mad Libs, to be thrown out whenever somebody tries to make a big copy of a data system. At the very least you'd need to scan the documents to separate out the ones that were fake before you publish them. If you miss one, the fingerprint would identify who took it.
It still seems rather impractical, even for its limited goal. You'd need to insert it at the network level, and the system operators really would not enjoy maintaining that. IT is a hassle even for ordinary operations. Adding an extra layer of complication for obfuscation purposes makes IT's job even harder.
The paper is full of other ideas, including using obfuscated source code to finger people who leak software. Doesn't that sound like fun to work with?
This is DARPA. They're expected to do a bunch of useless stuff in hopes that something will actually turn out well. Some ideas, though...
It's very literally a matter of opinion. Sudokus are trivial for computers. "Hard" for a sudoku means "not amenable to the kinds of tricks a human brain throws at the problem", and since brains vary, hardness is a matter of opinion.
Many human strategies are known and categorized; a puzzle that is amenable to none of them is "harder" than one that isn't. Within the range, though, it will vary from person to person.
It's kinda like the inverse of a Turing test. Too bad we can't use it for a reverse CAPTCHA: Can you solve this Sudoku? Oops, you must be a bot!
This is a bit different. This is controlling the light source, rather than the receiver. Rather making it easier to ignore the reflections from the raindrops, they darken part of the "headlight" so that the raindrops themselves don't receive any light. This decreases the total light output slightly, but it avoids the confusing glare from the bright spots, without having to put anything between your eyes and the world.
It means that instead of running a $10 light bulb you've got a $1,000+ projector that needs to run for hours on end in the weather, so it all seems kind of unlikely outside of the lab. The IR and heads-up display may be more practical. But it's a nifty display of computer vision work.
Yes, it's the DLP one. They didn't actually say if it was a DLP or other kind of projector, but the gist is that they can control the light beams leaving the headlight. You think of the raindrops as forming a screen (albeit one spread out in depth) and darken the spots that would fall on a raindrop.
There's also a beam splitter, so that the camera is seeing exactly the same view as the car's headlights are projecting into. Any ordinary projector would work, so long as it can control what points on the "screen" light falls.
The article is spectacularly unclear on this, but this link to the page of one of the authors is quite lucid and well-illustrated:
But thanks to Conor Myhrvold, author of TFA, for downgrading the readability so that he can score some extra blog hits that would be better directed to the actual work.
Some water is being created, though I suppose not enough to be noticeable. For each atom of CO2 created, there's another atom of H2O, since you're burning hydrocarbons of the form CnH(2n+2). Plus one extra water molecule per hydrocarbon, but that's a small factor.
I doubt it's enough to contribute to sea level rise, though. The effect of pulling those liquid hydrocarbons out of the land must be causing at least as much of a problem.
Yes, there is. The Higgs completes the Standard Model, which covers a lot of stuff, but leaves a lot of crucial questions unanswered. It doesn't explain why we see a universe of matter and not antimatter; it doesn't explain why the mass of the particles are what they are; it doesn't explain the egregious discrepancy between observed vacuum energy and the theoretical one ("egregious" meaning "a factor of 10^120").
There are models that do cover these things, and these models predict particles not currently observed. One of the most promising is called "supersymmetry", and the particles it predicts have names like "sleptons" and "squarks" and "neutralinos".
There's a very, very faint hope that the LHC might find them, but it's probably not powerful enough even if they exist. So the first step isn't to start a new search, but to examine the Higgs more closely and see if we can narrow the hunt.
There's also a search in a different direction, for the graviton, in an attempt to unify general relativity with the standard model. (The Standard Model takes special relativity into account, but not general relativity.) Those experiments are already underway, and sadly they're not turning up anything, which is a little discouraging. And worse, it's not the kind of null result that they can use to throw out the old model and begin on a new one, because they didn't expect to see much.
Still, they soldier on. There's always more work to do. This is the end of one phase of physics, and the beginning of another.
Instead, the article goes alarmist by twisting "don't teach that there is no god" to "we oppose all critical thinking skills because they might make kids doubt jesus."
Without having RTFA... does the program really "teach that there is no god"? I, too, would oppose such a program, but I honestly can't imagine that is the program they're talking about. It sounds an awful lot like a program the Republicans would imagine.
I, too, oppose linguistic games that twist people's words. But it sounds an awful lot to me like that's what the Republicans are doing. (Which doesn't mean that the article isn't also doing the same thing. I won't go so far as to say that turnabout is fair play, but it's a game the creationists seem to play a lot and I don't mind them getting a taste of their own medicine.)
It's equally silly that the mislabeling was required. The last few votes were cobbled into the supermajority precisely because it was mislabeled. They felt, probably correctly, that if it had been labeled a "tax", their constituents would have been more outraged than over an identical bill not labeled a tax.
That's politics, not rational lawmaking. The Supreme Court likes to pretend that they get to be rational, even though they're generally just as partisan as any other branch of government.
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I find companies often make decisions like this, so long as it will not be they who bear the cost of it.
Yeah. That's what companies do.
Mostly, though, I find your description of the situation to be cherry-picking. The situation on YouTube isn't a "slight inconvenience"; the comments are unusable at present and they might as well be shut off entirely; the useless of YouTube comments are legendary. And conversely, the odds of somebody refusing you a job because you went "CAT VIDEO!! WOO!!!" are negligible.
Really, you're asking if ten billion comments are worth one poor unfortunate losing his job because he said the wrong thing at the wrong time on the web. My answer: yeah. Life is full of hazards, and it's never going to be fair. I can't prevent you from being hit by a bus, and I'm not going to ground every bus to preserve your right to cross the street whenever you feel like it.
In the end, of course it's a business decision. You don't like their web site, you don't use it. If you do like their web site, you take the personal responsibility to watch your mouth.
that's like saying the police 'help' you out by writing a traffic ticket for jaywalking.
Ordinarily, I make a general comment about how analogies are generally not helpful reasoning tools, since they either simplify out crucial elements of the issue or remain just as complicated as the original question and no easier to resolve.
But that is the worst analogy I've ever heard in an argument, so I'll just stand here and blink.
They're not forcing you to do anything. You don't want to reveal your name, all you have to do is not post on their web site. Their house, their rules.
if you force us to expose ourselves, many of us just won't.
And I suspect that they're OK with that. The value of YouTube comments even on the best of days is negligible. It's not the Pentagon Papers.
The most valuable comments are just about community: people making inane chatter at each other to increase each other's enjoyment of an entertainment site. Most people don't mind having such comments associated with their names. The stakes are just too low.
There are ways it can come back to bite you, and the very paranoid will avoid them at all costs. Google's helping you out here: if you don't want something remembered, you don't say it on the Internet, with your name or without. It costs Google your participation, but the number of such people are small, and the benefits it brings to their community (raising the bar on trolls and spammers) may be worth it.
And they don't trust you not to abuse the anonymity. Seems fair to me. Seriously.
Generally, daylight produces more light than you get from light bulbs. Your eyes adjust so you see just as well either way, but most of the light is unnecessary and eventually devolves to heat.
That heat is useful in cold climes, and obviously this device will be most useful in sunny places. At that, it might even help cool the room as well as producing electricity.
Once the money goes into the campaign coffers, it stays there. There's no exception in the law for paying back the candidate.
The ability to pocket excess campaign cash ended quite some time ago, in 1989. The FEC has spent a long time tightening the laws. They're still far from perfect, of course.
Candidates do from time to time get big donations from groups who disagree with them, and they need to look closely at just what's going on there. It's illegal to promise to vote for their pet bill in exchange. About the most you can do is an unspoken opportunity to take their meeting, though you have to pretend it's a coincidence rather than quid pro quo. And sometimes, that meeting really is all they want. It's their right to try to get you to change your mind.
Most of the time, people with money give it to a candidate who already supports what they want, rather than trying to change a candidate's mind. It's cheaper, too: they may be a large campaign contribution, but as a simple trade of value, other people also gave you money. Switch your vote on them and they don't give you money again, and you find yourself out of office.
Yep. Usually, they just spend it, of course. In fact, they're usually in debt, and spend the beginning of the term trying to pay off those debts before they can run again. Hillary Clinton is still trying to pay down the debt from her campaign, so the "Hillary Clinton for President" committee still exists.
If there's anything left over, they usually end up giving it to somebody else's campaign or to the national committee. Charitable donations are also legal.
http://law.justia.com/cfr/title11/11-1.0.1.1.21.0.1.2.html
It specifically forbids personal use (where the previous section gives a lengthy description of what constitutes "personal use", to the point where they have to say explicitly "yes, it's OK if you wear campaign tee-shirt".)
Very little of lobbying is corrupt. There are exceptions, of course, but the vast majority of lobbying is a rather dull profession involving large numbers of meetings and endless phone calls. No significant money changes hands. Some lobbying takes the form of fundraising, but that goes into campaign coffers and the FEC tracks it closely to ensure that it doesn't end up in the candidates' personal accounts.
I'm not saying it's a perfect system, far from it. But it's not even close to the "legalized bribe" that most people who don't work in Washington imagine it is.
And how are they supposed to do that? Individual workers calling their Senators up on the phone, each one of them telling the Senator something slightly different from the last one? Senators don't take phone calls from workers. They take phone calls from executives.
Actually, they don't take phone calls from either. They take phone calls from lobbyists, people with whom they have a relationship and who have worked with them before. Corporate management has plenty of money to hire them. Individual workers don't.
They can, however, get together and pool their money to hire a lobbyist. We should make up a name for such a unified group of people.
Regardless of perception, the point is that they still have a big market share in the office software market.
Its Office suite is still pretty much mandatory in a lot of offices, and any place else where you have to exchange editable documents.
This is due in part to the abysmal nature of those formats: nobody from outside can get them working with 100% fidelity. If you hand me a Word doc, and I edit it or fill it out with anything other than Genuine Microsoft(tm)-brand Word, there's a good chance it's going to look like crap when you get it back. Job security through incompetence.
That's diminishing as people find other ways of sharing stuff, but there's still a large place for the Big File Full Of Carefully Formatted Words And Pictures that needs to be edited on both ends.
I'd say it's not wrong to call it navel-gazing. Physics occasionally turns its navel-gazing into technology, and when it does, the results are stunning because they're completely unexpected. It's rather naive to assume it will happen again.
The best you can say is that it's paid off enough in the past that it's worth the expense to give it another go, but you can't really quantify the odds and it's not really the reason people do it. They do it because it's not just navel-gazing, it's the ultimate navel-gazing. People are fascinated by their origins and the Standard Model is part of the road to figuring that out.
In some ways it more closely resembles the value of art than the value of technology. It's something civilized cultures do because they enjoy it, rather than because they're compelled to. But for those who don't feel compelled, they're probably not wrong to say it's a waste of their money. (They may actually be wrong about that, as the huge wins of quantum mechanics demonstrate. But I won't be so naive as to pretend it's a guarantee.)
Two English proverbs come to mind. More apt:
"It is better to remain silent, and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
And a bit punchier:
"A closed mouth gathers no foot."
The problem, I think, is that this is on the frontiers of science. There isn't any layman's explanation for this, not one that ends with "... and that's how it relates to your daily life."
People assume that the physicists have some special insight into the meaning of life because they work with the most fundamental bits of the universe. If there's a philosophical implication here, it's just that the score is now: "Science: 235,593,935,914. Religion: 0" on matters of how the universe operates. But they've kind of been running up the score for a while, and anybody who still takes the Bible seriously as a physics textbook is too brain-damage to educate.
And it's also quite clear that fundamental physics isn't going to give you any insights into the meaning of life. I don't think religion does, either, but at least physics isn't going to actively tell you that it's wrong, and the physicists have no special answers. It's time to stop looking at them as priests, and their pronouncements from Geneva are important but won't give you the answers you're after.
The only other option is technology, but nobody wanted to take "no" for an answer. Yes, quantum mechanics has had some incredible unpredicted applications. If people had tried to make predictions, they'd have been wrong; if they'd predicted what we did get, we'd have called them stupid. So don't talk about it.
So, we've got a bunch of scientists who are unfairly raised to the status of oracles, which completely misses the actual value of their work. I don't think the Standard Model is going to get more than a passing mention in high school textbooks, as a way of grounding chemistry, but that's it.
This is the NPR tote bag of space. The tote bag would actually be more useful. They're looking to raise money, and they want to give you a token of appreciation. It's like letting you put your name on it, only a little more personal and a little more sciencey.
You're not getting DNA delivery out of it. The DNA up there is going to be useless. You're getting bragging rights: "my DNA is on board that rover" when/if they actually make the news by succeeding. It's pricey for bragging rights, but it's cheaper than the $150 million somebody's asking to actually drive you past it (and that, too, is really just bragging rights).
The only immortality you get out of it is the story.
It's actually aimed primarily at Manning-style leaks, where somebody just dumps everything they have access to onto a disk and sends it to be printed. The kind where people don't even read what they're taking, and don't have any actual connection to it.
The paper describes a kind of glorified Mad Libs, to be thrown out whenever somebody tries to make a big copy of a data system. At the very least you'd need to scan the documents to separate out the ones that were fake before you publish them. If you miss one, the fingerprint would identify who took it.
It still seems rather impractical, even for its limited goal. You'd need to insert it at the network level, and the system operators really would not enjoy maintaining that. IT is a hassle even for ordinary operations. Adding an extra layer of complication for obfuscation purposes makes IT's job even harder.
The paper is full of other ideas, including using obfuscated source code to finger people who leak software. Doesn't that sound like fun to work with?
This is DARPA. They're expected to do a bunch of useless stuff in hopes that something will actually turn out well. Some ideas, though...
It's very literally a matter of opinion. Sudokus are trivial for computers. "Hard" for a sudoku means "not amenable to the kinds of tricks a human brain throws at the problem", and since brains vary, hardness is a matter of opinion.
Many human strategies are known and categorized; a puzzle that is amenable to none of them is "harder" than one that isn't. Within the range, though, it will vary from person to person.
It's kinda like the inverse of a Turing test. Too bad we can't use it for a reverse CAPTCHA: Can you solve this Sudoku? Oops, you must be a bot!
This is a bit different. This is controlling the light source, rather than the receiver. Rather making it easier to ignore the reflections from the raindrops, they darken part of the "headlight" so that the raindrops themselves don't receive any light. This decreases the total light output slightly, but it avoids the confusing glare from the bright spots, without having to put anything between your eyes and the world.
It means that instead of running a $10 light bulb you've got a $1,000+ projector that needs to run for hours on end in the weather, so it all seems kind of unlikely outside of the lab. The IR and heads-up display may be more practical. But it's a nifty display of computer vision work.
Also: cool story, bro.
Yes, it's the DLP one. They didn't actually say if it was a DLP or other kind of projector, but the gist is that they can control the light beams leaving the headlight. You think of the raindrops as forming a screen (albeit one spread out in depth) and darken the spots that would fall on a raindrop.
There's also a beam splitter, so that the camera is seeing exactly the same view as the car's headlights are projecting into. Any ordinary projector would work, so long as it can control what points on the "screen" light falls.
The article is spectacularly unclear on this, but this link to the page of one of the authors is quite lucid and well-illustrated:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ILIM/projects/IL/smartHeadlight/
But thanks to Conor Myhrvold, author of TFA, for downgrading the readability so that he can score some extra blog hits that would be better directed to the actual work.
Some water is being created, though I suppose not enough to be noticeable. For each atom of CO2 created, there's another atom of H2O, since you're burning hydrocarbons of the form CnH(2n+2). Plus one extra water molecule per hydrocarbon, but that's a small factor.
I doubt it's enough to contribute to sea level rise, though. The effect of pulling those liquid hydrocarbons out of the land must be causing at least as much of a problem.
Yes, there is. The Higgs completes the Standard Model, which covers a lot of stuff, but leaves a lot of crucial questions unanswered. It doesn't explain why we see a universe of matter and not antimatter; it doesn't explain why the mass of the particles are what they are; it doesn't explain the egregious discrepancy between observed vacuum energy and the theoretical one ("egregious" meaning "a factor of 10^120").
There are models that do cover these things, and these models predict particles not currently observed. One of the most promising is called "supersymmetry", and the particles it predicts have names like "sleptons" and "squarks" and "neutralinos".
There's a very, very faint hope that the LHC might find them, but it's probably not powerful enough even if they exist. So the first step isn't to start a new search, but to examine the Higgs more closely and see if we can narrow the hunt.
There's also a search in a different direction, for the graviton, in an attempt to unify general relativity with the standard model. (The Standard Model takes special relativity into account, but not general relativity.) Those experiments are already underway, and sadly they're not turning up anything, which is a little discouraging. And worse, it's not the kind of null result that they can use to throw out the old model and begin on a new one, because they didn't expect to see much.
Still, they soldier on. There's always more work to do. This is the end of one phase of physics, and the beginning of another.
Instead, the article goes alarmist by twisting "don't teach that there is no god" to "we oppose all critical thinking skills because they might make kids doubt jesus."
Without having RTFA... does the program really "teach that there is no god"? I, too, would oppose such a program, but I honestly can't imagine that is the program they're talking about. It sounds an awful lot like a program the Republicans would imagine.
I, too, oppose linguistic games that twist people's words. But it sounds an awful lot to me like that's what the Republicans are doing. (Which doesn't mean that the article isn't also doing the same thing. I won't go so far as to say that turnabout is fair play, but it's a game the creationists seem to play a lot and I don't mind them getting a taste of their own medicine.)
It's equally silly that the mislabeling was required. The last few votes were cobbled into the supermajority precisely because it was mislabeled. They felt, probably correctly, that if it had been labeled a "tax", their constituents would have been more outraged than over an identical bill not labeled a tax.
That's politics, not rational lawmaking. The Supreme Court likes to pretend that they get to be rational, even though they're generally just as partisan as any other branch of government.