It's nothing like echolocation. First of all, echolocation is active scanning, vision is passive scanning (nobody can detect you're looking at them, however you can tell if someone's using echolocation). Echolocation is dependant upon 1 or 2 sensors, while vision needs thousands (and prefers millions) of sensors.
The article makes several good points. After minimal practice you are able to identify the location of the sun blindfolded.
A bit more practice and you can find people in closed rooms. Or behind you. This is trivially easy if the person behind you is really close, but with training you can increase the range quite a bit. It's impossibly to "feel" further than 2 or 3 meters or so, however, so while it beats our eyes in low light conditions at short ranges, it's not useful to see very far (the article explains this : it *is* possible to make skin vision work for very, very long distances, but the computational cost is off the scale).
Not only do we have skin vision, the article claims, but we use it often. To avoid staring into the sun for example, but also to detect hot objects before touching them.
Do an experiment. Heat up your stove. Hold your hand above it. It's quite clearly there isn't it ? Surely this must be the heated air rising, right ? (even though if you calculate how fast the heat transfers into your hand it doesn't quite make sense, and you don't actually feel air rise)
So now try the same with a pot. Try to identify if it's hot or cold, by just holding your hand close to it (don't touch it). You should, again, with a little concentration, be able to do this with 100% accuracy. Nevertheless, with a vertical surface, there is hardly any heated air coming to your hand, yet you're able to identify the heat from about the same distance.
We're not only able to see with our skin, but we see more than we see with our eyes. No amount of visual inspection with your eyes would tell you a cooking pot is hot or cold : the radiation that gives it away is outside of the spectrum of our eyes (this is due to the limitations of the lens "assembly"). Nevertheless clearly we can detect that radiation.
The theory goes that this is how eyes developed. Skin is sensitive at very short range, and can actually form images of very close objects. But even with the huge brain humans have it only works for at best a few meters.
However a dimpled piece of skin will see more, due to it's shape and will be able to focus further. Making that dimple moveable is an obvious next step.
From there it's a short step to what amounts to a pinhole camera.
Fill a pinhole camera that is round with a drop of water and you've got basic optics (that aren't very stable).
Put a transparent layer of skin above the droplet of water and you have reptile eyes, much, much more stable than the pinhole kind and not nearly as prone to infection.
Let the skin immediately above the hole in the skin grow a little bit and you've got mammal eyes. Add a muscle within that loose hanging skin and you've got human eyes.
There's also price. Of course pandora has many more features, perhaps a comparison is in order. @#$!@#$ slashdot doesn't support tables, so this is the best I could do :
Pandora
Pandora ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz CPU 128M ram 3D opengl ES 2.0 acceleration 800x480 4.3" touchscreen LCD Wifi Keyboard dual SDHC card (both expansion and storage) Internal battery and USB charger $329.99 / £199.99 (Inc VAT) / E249.99 (Inc VAT)
GP2x WIZ
Wiz 533Mhz ARM CPU 64M ram 3D opengl acceleration OLED Touch Screen 2.8" 320x200 No wifi (BUT easy to add because of USB host) No keyboard (BUT again, easy to add because of USB host) single SD card (both expansion and storage, 99% sure SDHC card) Internal battery and USB charger (thank God ! compared to GP2X F-200 this is heaven)
PSP PSP cpu 333Mhz 32M ram (64M for the psp slim) 3D acceleration (?) 480x272 LCD screen (great screen imho) Wifi MS pro duo expansion (expensive, only storage) Internal battery and USB charger Probably USB host capability but not useable
Surprisingly of all these devices it's the PSP that has the largest library of emulators (even a "somewhat playable" n64 emu, something the pandora devs think impossible (read the gp2x forums... well... euhm tomorrow should be better, right ?)
As an ebook reader the PSP blows the socks of the WIZ though, even if just because of larger screen, and it is also larger than the pandora, so I wonder.
This list is limited to devices with actual useable gaming controls. The iphone/ipod touch and the nokia n810 are obvious competitors, but lack (decent) gaming controls. Actually the n810 is kinda nice, I ought to try one.
And now the catch... while this tower is beyond inefficient :
Coal produces 2.117 pounds per kwh. = 0.000960255047 tonne per kwh. = 1041 kwh per tonne Co2
This needs about 10% of that power, combined with some 15% transmission loss, and the fact that this is a lower bound over time (obviously if we lower athmospheric co2 this cost will raise).
That means we need 23% or about 1/4th of total energy to merely break even. Petroleum and gas aren't that much better, and aren't feasible over even the medium term anymore. To actually make a difference we'd need 50% of all energy produced, which means our generating capacity needs to rise by 100% (and not 50% because if we raise it by 50% we'd have 1.5 times the energy which would be divided into 0.75 for carbon nonsense and 0.75 for us. So we'd need 200% of the energy making it 1 unit for us, and 1 unit for co2 nonsense).
That's not exactly good news, is it ? It gets worse.
Trees are much worse in efficiency than this. Yes, they do produce their own energy. They're however 2% efficient solar panels (so in reality a tree presents lost energy, in that a solar panel could have been standing where the tree stood and produce about 20 TIMES more energy, making these towers more efficient even if trees were 100% efficient chemical machines, since that would only give them 5% of the efficiency of the solar panels).
Well trees do about 650 kg per tree per year. Needless to say this is beyond pitiful. Using solar panels to power a tower like this would replace a forest in about 100 square meters. Combine this with the need to double generating capacity in order to make the towers work and you'll see exactly where this would be going in the real world.
Russel's paradox is only a problem if you have an axiom that defines infinity (like the choice axiom he's clearly using). Otherwise the problem is quite simple.
Russel's paradox depends on the choice axiom, therefore the choice axiom might be an axiom that makes any resulting theory inconsistent.
Of course the choice axiom is so basic that you need it for just about any theory (you need it to express mathematically that there is a difference between a table and a chair for example, you need it to prove the existence of anything). If anyone were to discover it leads to inconsistencies, you would be correct that this would invalidate just about any existing theory, except again the very basics of logic.
0 exists, we're sure of that. The choice axiom proves that there is something other than 0 in existence. And we clearly need another way to do that.
For example we could say that properties are defined by collections, as opposed to the other way round. There is a set of things that defines what a table is, not a concept "table" and a set of all existing tables. That does make first order logic much less expressive, however.
But the real problem with this way of thinking is mainly that the old way of thinking is "grandfathered in". There is no real mathematical problem, but nevertheless people are not accepting this.
Every ethnic group [wsj.com], including white people, were given these awful loans. There's no actual evidence to support your argument that the sweet, innocent lily white banking community was *forced* to give a disproportionately high number of horrible loans to awful dark people, who unlike their snow white brethren, were unable to pay them back, as a function of them being not white.
Read the CRA. So what exactly do you call the threat "not allowed to write out loans in any american market" ? Btw that threat is made that if banks don't serve minority communities "equally" with loans. Taken to the extreme, that means that unless the Italian maffia doesn't get the same proportional amount of loans as African nuns, banks could lose the entire American market. Of course this causes banks to write out loans to, let's call them "unreliable", individuals.
Is that truly such an amazing revelation to you ?
By the way, what effect do you think legislation like that has ?
Just wondering... Do feel free to include how a bank CEO will tell his investors "oh by the way we can't loan to americans anymore, but we haven't had to write out bad loans".
Furthermore, I only claim it started out this way. "Minorities" got loans quicker for perhaps 1 or max 2 years only, after which everybody got them, and here's the point I've repeated 5 times already but you can't seem to make a better argument against me than 'Racist !'. "Majority" americans, when given what looks like free money (in the form of loans without collateral) do every bit as bad as minority americans.
But this was forced on the banks in the name of positive discrimination. The lesson is simple : different people are different. Don't MEDDLE. Positive discrimination is exactly the same disaster racism was before it.
Allow me to tell you how this works at my university. You have whites, and you have blacks. Now the university HAS to get the same amount of passing blacks.
It's immoral to "fail more whites", and fortunately they don't. So, every year that more whites than blacks pass (let's say every other year), a number of worse-performing black people get a free pass. The result is that some black people get their degrees for free.
However, that is not the end of the story. Employers have by now caught on. Their reaction is simple : they know that almost no white guy (very rare exceptions) are given their degree without doing the work and learning the trade, but every other year or so quite a few blacks are.
So the result of positive discrimination is simple, if you've got a white person in an interview with a degree, you can basically trust that he's (she's) done the work, and knows his/her stuff. If it's a black person before you, not so much.
Obviously the same applies to people who start their own business, just a little more indirect.
The result of positive discrimination here was simple : blacks who actually studied and worked can't find a job, because they can't differentiate themselves on paper from (black) idiots, while smart whites can perfectly well be differentiated from white idiots, and now people are having to fix that. The idiocy is : people on the university "side" don't see the problem.
Unfortunately those blacks that do make it are starting to tell their children that going to university makes no sense. You don't have to do the work if you're black, you don't have to learn, and even if you do, employers won't trust that you did.
The lesson ? Don't meddle. There are years that percentually more blacks succeed (esp. the ones from really bad neighbourhoods who make it to college do succeed more often).
Honestly, a part of me wants the fuckers in the financial industry to *burn* for this. No handouts, just let the companies collapse on themselves. In a few years with our wonderfully relaxed regulations, there will be two major financial institutions, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase...
You don't get it. The "fuckers" in the financial industry did not have a choice. The democrat CRA caused their information gatherers to lie to them.
Once one bank was allowed to do this, this was considered a way to increase market value of the bank and to reduce their tax burden (which was the *express purpose* of the CRA), and all banks were forced to grant at subprime loans, at the very least to all non-whites (this is literally what the CRA did).
Then this was followed by allowing the same for "majority" americans (whose only crime in not getting loans was to be white), thank God.
Then once again combined, these groups went on to go on a loaning binge which caused the subprime crisis.
I don't say anyone's better than anyone, except for democrats knowingly causing this. They forced the banks to extend subprime loans in a racist way (only to non-whites, non-majority americans), who did not have loan responsibly any more, followed, obviously, by white americans also not loaning responsibly anymore.
This crisis was caused for and by "positive discrimination", by democrats. There is nothing in this post that claims that whites or whoever are any more responsible than others in loaning. It was giving them the chance to fuck up that caused the problem. This chance was forced upon the banks in the name of positive discrimiation. So you can see my point : racism on the part of the democrat party caused this problem. Racism in that they thought whites were better and "needed to be" disadvantaged in the loaning market.
There was a republican law that was called the Gramm-Leach-Biley act, as the wikipedia page explains. It was vetoed by the democratic party.
From your source on wikipedia (the "removing" link):
Democrats agreed to support the bill only after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act and address certain privacy concerns.
Economist Stan Liebowitz has also expressed his opinion that banks were forced to loan to un-credit worthy consumers with "no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant's ability to make payments; no down payment." However, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, is said to have "bragged" that to approve minority applications "lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit", suggesting...
And the final "OK" was given by...
... Without forcing a veto vote, this bipartisan legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.
The version that is in force now, is one with massive democrat additions. Why did they veto it ? Because it was racist (at the time there were a much larger percentage of whites that qualified for loans than blacks or hispanics, and the republican version of it "wasn't going to fix that").
So now let the flamewar begin ! Was the republican act without the additions equally problematic as the democratic one that is actually in force ? Well... good question (actually in fairness it might very well have been). The only sure thing is that the democrat-altered bill was a disaster, and was a disaster in that the democrat additions massively created something called "subprime" loans... hmmm...
We could also just assume common sense is correct... lending to people without income (or far, far above their income) is... well... bad business (now there's a great insight ! It's bad for both the loaners, who lose their house, and for banks, who lose their money). And if this causes some population groups to get less loans... perhaps we should meddle less and let them first acquire and demonstrate income, THEN let them loan. Not the other way around.
Maybe I should repeat that... we should MEDDLE LESS. That was equally clear before all the recessions we've ever known so this probably justifies another few repeats...
I'm guessing right now I'll be branded racist. Oh well. I didn't cause the subprime crisis. What really caused the subprime crisis is simple :
"positive discrimiation" (specifically rubber-stamping "minority" loan applications, followed by rubber-stamping of (nearly) ALL loan applications)
Actually given Obama's track record of generally being a bad guy, I don't think he'll win. So I'd like to s/Obama/McCain/ in your post.
But otherwise, it seems quite correct.
However one thing that could change things is simple : people will see what will happen in other countries, like the EU or Russia. And the US is a *lot* better of peak-oil wise than the EU or basically any other country.
So if people compare enough to the situation abroad, and are fair (heh, fat chance of that, I know, but the media could help this), things could change.
Actually 122,267,553 votes were counted and of those 62,040,610 got what they wanted (ie. president Bush). That was 50.73% of the total.
Quite a bit more than "269 votes". I'm guessing you're a democrat, right ? If you feel so strongly about losing, perhaps it's time to get out of politics.
Besides the real conspiracy is against ME. First they ignore my application, which I put in the yellow bucket near my neighbours garage. I labeled it "express" so surely it couldn't have been late !
Then they ignore the voter's INTENT, which surely was to elect ME.
2 men in white clothes at the door ? Now who could that be ?
So he would have invaded pakistan ? Now that would have been just peachy.
The next president will have to deal with peak oil, so whoever it is he's going to take many people's toys away. Whoever it is, we're not going to like him anymore in 2012 and true hate is going to surface before 2016.
We have a democrat congress, so shear damage control voting would be voting for McCain. Congress and the presidency in the hands of the same bunch of nitwits has always been disastrous.
At least when they both control parts "some" stupidities cancel eachother out. (or so I hope)
Admittedly, the incompleteness of axiomatic systems is philosophically difficult. Some people see it as proof that logic is insufficient. Personally, I see it as explaining the illogicality of God: any system that contains a proof of its own existence cannot be logical. In any case, it is not necessarily of any practical importance when constructing theories that explain reality.
The proof is nowhere near as strong as you allude here. Set theory can prove it's own consistency, without any axioms. So can first order logic "even God would have to abide by (first-order) logic", is how it's sometimes called. ZFC can't (and there is a small subset of ZFC that poses the problem). Furthermore any theory containing ZFC can't either.
Since any theory about reality contains the ZFC axioms, it will have these limitations. For any scientific theory one of the following two statements are true. No matter how complicated or well supported. 1) it proves that 1=0, that the sky is a yellow madonna painting, anything and everything (and is therefore wrong. Inconsistent) 2) a proof of that theory cannot exist
There was even a very stubborn physicist that constructed a basic theory that WAS able to be proven. 2 years later it was shown that his theory was inconsistent, and did indeed "prove" that 1=0.
Now obviously this has ramifications for any theory. Since this is a problem that every theory, including all physics theories and even moral theories will have to deal with, the same limitations exist for those theories. Physics theories can only be tested and measured, not proven. Since another problem requires any "correct" physics theory to have an infinite amount of natural laws, which will always remain both unproven, non-negotiable and absolute (and which will remain wrong, since it's also proven that it will take an infinite amount of time to construct any correct theory*), it's about time this starts getting actually mentioned by "experts".
And any moral theory has similar problems cannot prove itself to be good, except by axiom. This obviously also means that any non-axiomatic (= non-dogmatic) moral theory is inconsistent, and therefore allows one to claim any act is both 100% good and 100% evil. Any non-dogmatic moral theory calls genocide good (and evil) and calls saving someone's life evil (and good). Therefore any non-dogmatic ethical theory does not contain even a single moral law, not a single moral limit anywhere. Therefore if there is even a single act that you'd call evil/not good, for whatever reason, you're thinking dogmatic, not rational.
Since we're in the 21st century, and this has been known now for close to 50 years, it's about time people take this into account.
* so if you think for example "Newton was wrong", or even "the four elements of nature" were wrong, then you're doomed, if you're honest, to call every last scientific theory, not just existing but also all future scientific theories, wrong. Therefore they should be tought as being "mostly correct, but inaccurate", and several of them should be taught (people still teach Newton's laws obviously since both relativity and quantum theory are hideously complex even when you're talking about tiny, tiny systems. Relativity effects cannot currently be solved for even a single helium atom, and quantum effects cannot currently be solved for a single lithium nucleus. So when you're talking about a car, you don't use either relativity or quantum mechanics).
Set theory does NOT depend on ZFC. Using natural numbers defined in some way within set theory does. But "just" set theory does not have a single axiom. It merely has a few notations.
Oh yes, "some say" it does have one axiom, I believe. That it is possible to contemplate such a thing as "nothing" (it doesn't have to actually exist). The empty set. It does indeed depend on that. But that's it. Since it doesn't even require existence of the empty set, I don't think you'd need to call it an axiom.
First order logic is also a theory that does not have any axioms. I wonder how I missed that one.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nothing like echolocation. First of all, echolocation is active scanning, vision is passive scanning (nobody can detect you're looking at them, however you can tell if someone's using echolocation). Echolocation is dependant upon 1 or 2 sensors, while vision needs thousands (and prefers millions) of sensors.
The calculations are explained in this link :
arXivBlog
The article makes several good points. After minimal practice you are able to identify the location of the sun blindfolded.
A bit more practice and you can find people in closed rooms. Or behind you. This is trivially easy if the person behind you is really close, but with training you can increase the range quite a bit. It's impossibly to "feel" further than 2 or 3 meters or so, however, so while it beats our eyes in low light conditions at short ranges, it's not useful to see very far (the article explains this : it *is* possible to make skin vision work for very, very long distances, but the computational cost is off the scale).
Not only do we have skin vision, the article claims, but we use it often. To avoid staring into the sun for example, but also to detect hot objects before touching them.
Do an experiment. Heat up your stove. Hold your hand above it. It's quite clearly there isn't it ? Surely this must be the heated air rising, right ? (even though if you calculate how fast the heat transfers into your hand it doesn't quite make sense, and you don't actually feel air rise)
So now try the same with a pot. Try to identify if it's hot or cold, by just holding your hand close to it (don't touch it). You should, again, with a little concentration, be able to do this with 100% accuracy. Nevertheless, with a vertical surface, there is hardly any heated air coming to your hand, yet you're able to identify the heat from about the same distance.
We're not only able to see with our skin, but we see more than we see with our eyes. No amount of visual inspection with your eyes would tell you a cooking pot is hot or cold : the radiation that gives it away is outside of the spectrum of our eyes (this is due to the limitations of the lens "assembly"). Nevertheless clearly we can detect that radiation.
The theory goes that this is how eyes developed. Skin is sensitive at very short range, and can actually form images of very close objects. But even with the huge brain humans have it only works for at best a few meters.
However a dimpled piece of skin will see more, due to it's shape and will be able to focus further. Making that dimple moveable is an obvious next step.
From there it's a short step to what amounts to a pinhole camera.
Fill a pinhole camera that is round with a drop of water and you've got basic optics (that aren't very stable).
Put a transparent layer of skin above the droplet of water and you have reptile eyes, much, much more stable than the pinhole kind and not nearly as prone to infection.
Let the skin immediately above the hole in the skin grow a little bit and you've got mammal eyes. Add a muscle within that loose hanging skin and you've got human eyes.
Does that include the cycloDS ?
have you tried gaming on that thing ? Try it, super mario bros. You have to put your fingers *IN* the screen and ...
AARGH !
There's also price. Of course pandora has many more features, perhaps a comparison is in order. @#$!@#$ slashdot doesn't support tables, so this is the best I could do :
Pandora
Pandora
ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz CPU
128M ram
3D opengl ES 2.0 acceleration
800x480 4.3" touchscreen LCD
Wifi
Keyboard
dual SDHC card (both expansion and storage)
Internal battery and USB charger
$329.99 / £199.99 (Inc VAT) / E249.99 (Inc VAT)
GP2x WIZ
Wiz
533Mhz ARM CPU
64M ram
3D opengl acceleration
OLED Touch Screen 2.8" 320x200
No wifi (BUT easy to add because of USB host)
No keyboard (BUT again, easy to add because of USB host)
single SD card (both expansion and storage, 99% sure SDHC card)
Internal battery and USB charger (thank God ! compared to GP2X F-200 this is heaven)
US$ 179.90 (~124.32 EUR)
PSP
PSP
PSP cpu 333Mhz
32M ram (64M for the psp slim)
3D acceleration (?)
480x272 LCD screen (great screen imho)
Wifi
MS pro duo expansion (expensive, only storage)
Internal battery and USB charger
Probably USB host capability but not useable
US$ 213.99 (179 euro)
Surprisingly of all these devices it's the PSP that has the largest library of emulators (even a "somewhat playable" n64 emu, something the pandora devs think impossible (read the gp2x forums ... well ... euhm tomorrow should be better, right ?)
As an ebook reader the PSP blows the socks of the WIZ though, even if just because of larger screen, and it is also larger than the pandora, so I wonder.
This list is limited to devices with actual useable gaming controls. The iphone/ipod touch and the nokia n810 are obvious competitors, but lack (decent) gaming controls. Actually the n810 is kinda nice, I ought to try one.
And now the catch ... while this tower is beyond inefficient :
Coal produces 2.117 pounds per kwh.
= 0.000960255047 tonne per kwh.
= 1041 kwh per tonne Co2
This needs about 10% of that power, combined with some 15% transmission loss, and the fact that this is a lower bound over time (obviously if we lower athmospheric co2 this cost will raise).
That means we need 23% or about 1/4th of total energy to merely break even. Petroleum and gas aren't that much better, and aren't feasible over even the medium term anymore. To actually make a difference we'd need 50% of all energy produced, which means our generating capacity needs to rise by 100% (and not 50% because if we raise it by 50% we'd have 1.5 times the energy which would be divided into 0.75 for carbon nonsense and 0.75 for us. So we'd need 200% of the energy making it 1 unit for us, and 1 unit for co2 nonsense).
That's not exactly good news, is it ? It gets worse.
Trees are much worse in efficiency than this. Yes, they do produce their own energy. They're however 2% efficient solar panels (so in reality a tree presents lost energy, in that a solar panel could have been standing where the tree stood and produce about 20 TIMES more energy, making these towers more efficient even if trees were 100% efficient chemical machines, since that would only give them 5% of the efficiency of the solar panels).
Well trees do about 650 kg per tree per year. Needless to say this is beyond pitiful. Using solar panels to power a tower like this would replace a forest in about 100 square meters. Combine this with the need to double generating capacity in order to make the towers work and you'll see exactly where this would be going in the real world.
There cannot be a better possible answer than this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
You need arms to protect those arms.
(recursion is fun)
Russel's paradox is only a problem if you have an axiom that defines infinity (like the choice axiom he's clearly using). Otherwise the problem is quite simple.
Russel's paradox depends on the choice axiom, therefore the choice axiom might be an axiom that makes any resulting theory inconsistent.
Of course the choice axiom is so basic that you need it for just about any theory (you need it to express mathematically that there is a difference between a table and a chair for example, you need it to prove the existence of anything). If anyone were to discover it leads to inconsistencies, you would be correct that this would invalidate just about any existing theory, except again the very basics of logic.
0 exists, we're sure of that. The choice axiom proves that there is something other than 0 in existence. And we clearly need another way to do that.
For example we could say that properties are defined by collections, as opposed to the other way round. There is a set of things that defines what a table is, not a concept "table" and a set of all existing tables. That does make first order logic much less expressive, however.
But the real problem with this way of thinking is mainly that the old way of thinking is "grandfathered in". There is no real mathematical problem, but nevertheless people are not accepting this.
Every ethnic group [wsj.com], including white people, were given these awful loans. There's no actual evidence to support your argument that the sweet, innocent lily white banking community was *forced* to give a disproportionately high number of horrible loans to awful dark people, who unlike their snow white brethren, were unable to pay them back, as a function of them being not white.
Read the CRA. So what exactly do you call the threat "not allowed to write out loans in any american market" ? Btw that threat is made that if banks don't serve minority communities "equally" with loans. Taken to the extreme, that means that unless the Italian maffia doesn't get the same proportional amount of loans as African nuns, banks could lose the entire American market. Of course this causes banks to write out loans to, let's call them "unreliable", individuals.
Is that truly such an amazing revelation to you ?
By the way, what effect do you think legislation like that has ?
Just wondering ... Do feel free to include how a bank CEO will tell his investors "oh by the way we can't loan to americans anymore, but we haven't had to write out bad loans".
Furthermore, I only claim it started out this way. "Minorities" got loans quicker for perhaps 1 or max 2 years only, after which everybody got them, and here's the point I've repeated 5 times already but you can't seem to make a better argument against me than 'Racist !'. "Majority" americans, when given what looks like free money (in the form of loans without collateral) do every bit as bad as minority americans.
But this was forced on the banks in the name of positive discrimination. The lesson is simple : different people are different. Don't MEDDLE. Positive discrimination is exactly the same disaster racism was before it.
Allow me to tell you how this works at my university. You have whites, and you have blacks. Now the university HAS to get the same amount of passing blacks.
It's immoral to "fail more whites", and fortunately they don't. So, every year that more whites than blacks pass (let's say every other year), a number of worse-performing black people get a free pass. The result is that some black people get their degrees for free.
However, that is not the end of the story. Employers have by now caught on. Their reaction is simple : they know that almost no white guy (very rare exceptions) are given their degree without doing the work and learning the trade, but every other year or so quite a few blacks are.
So the result of positive discrimination is simple, if you've got a white person in an interview with a degree, you can basically trust that he's (she's) done the work, and knows his/her stuff. If it's a black person before you, not so much.
Obviously the same applies to people who start their own business, just a little more indirect.
The result of positive discrimination here was simple : blacks who actually studied and worked can't find a job, because they can't differentiate themselves on paper from (black) idiots, while smart whites can perfectly well be differentiated from white idiots, and now people are having to fix that. The idiocy is : people on the university "side" don't see the problem.
Unfortunately those blacks that do make it are starting to tell their children that going to university makes no sense. You don't have to do the work if you're black, you don't have to learn, and even if you do, employers won't trust that you did.
The lesson ? Don't meddle. There are years that percentually more blacks succeed (esp. the ones from really bad neighbourhoods who make it to college do succeed more often).
You might as well say "droplets". America has 10x that capacity in Texas alone, not counting Alaska.
And they're using more oil (they have more population, however they only use *slightly* less per capita, so they need more oil).
Honestly, a part of me wants the fuckers in the financial industry to *burn* for this. No handouts, just let the companies collapse on themselves. In a few years with our wonderfully relaxed regulations, there will be two major financial institutions, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase...
You don't get it. The "fuckers" in the financial industry did not have a choice. The democrat CRA caused their information gatherers to lie to them.
Once one bank was allowed to do this, this was considered a way to increase market value of the bank and to reduce their tax burden (which was the *express purpose* of the CRA), and all banks were forced to grant at subprime loans, at the very least to all non-whites (this is literally what the CRA did).
Then this was followed by allowing the same for "majority" americans (whose only crime in not getting loans was to be white), thank God.
Then once again combined, these groups went on to go on a loaning binge which caused the subprime crisis.
I don't say anyone's better than anyone, except for democrats knowingly causing this. They forced the banks to extend subprime loans in a racist way (only to non-whites, non-majority americans), who did not have loan responsibly any more, followed, obviously, by white americans also not loaning responsibly anymore.
This crisis was caused for and by "positive discrimination", by democrats. There is nothing in this post that claims that whites or whoever are any more responsible than others in loaning. It was giving them the chance to fuck up that caused the problem. This chance was forced upon the banks in the name of positive discrimiation. So you can see my point : racism on the part of the democrat party caused this problem. Racism in that they thought whites were better and "needed to be" disadvantaged in the loaning market.
And Netherlands is 0% nuclear. So is Denmark and quite a few others ...
The only reason public transport is better is because of much thicker population density, which is not a good thing, at all.
There was a republican law that was called the Gramm-Leach-Biley act, as the wikipedia page explains. It was vetoed by the democratic party.
From your source on wikipedia (the "removing" link) :
Democrats agreed to support the bill only after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act and address certain privacy concerns.
Community reinvestment act ? Oh, right.
Economist Stan Liebowitz has also expressed his opinion that banks were forced to loan to un-credit worthy consumers with "no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant's ability to make payments; no down payment." However, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, is said to have "bragged" that to approve minority applications "lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit", suggesting ...
And the final "OK" was given by ...
... Without forcing a veto vote, this bipartisan legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.
The version that is in force now, is one with massive democrat additions. Why did they veto it ? Because it was racist (at the time there were a much larger percentage of whites that qualified for loans than blacks or hispanics, and the republican version of it "wasn't going to fix that").
So now let the flamewar begin ! Was the republican act without the additions equally problematic as the democratic one that is actually in force ? Well ... good question (actually in fairness it might very well have been). The only sure thing is that the democrat-altered bill was a disaster, and was a disaster in that the democrat additions massively created something called "subprime" loans ... hmmm ...
We could also just assume common sense is correct ... lending to people without income (or far, far above their income) is ... well ... bad business (now there's a great insight ! It's bad for both the loaners, who lose their house, and for banks, who lose their money). And if this causes some population groups to get less loans ... perhaps we should meddle less and let them first acquire and demonstrate income, THEN let them loan. Not the other way around.
Maybe I should repeat that ... we should MEDDLE LESS. That was equally clear before all the recessions we've ever known so this probably justifies another few repeats ...
I'm guessing right now I'll be branded racist. Oh well. I didn't cause the subprime crisis. What really caused the subprime crisis is simple :
"positive discrimiation" (specifically rubber-stamping "minority" loan applications, followed by rubber-stamping of (nearly) ALL loan applications)
People support people who win wars. Other than that I don't know any way of gettin 80% approval.
Where exactly will the EU get *any* oil whatsoever ? North sea is a joke.
Actually given Obama's track record of generally being a bad guy, I don't think he'll win. So I'd like to s/Obama/McCain/ in your post.
But otherwise, it seems quite correct.
However one thing that could change things is simple : people will see what will happen in other countries, like the EU or Russia. And the US is a *lot* better of peak-oil wise than the EU or basically any other country.
So if people compare enough to the situation abroad, and are fair (heh, fat chance of that, I know, but the media could help this), things could change.
You must really dislike medicare :-p. That position would quite easily translate into a vote, unless I'm missing something.
Actually 122,267,553 votes were counted and of those 62,040,610 got what they wanted (ie. president Bush). That was 50.73% of the total.
Quite a bit more than "269 votes". I'm guessing you're a democrat, right ? If you feel so strongly about losing, perhaps it's time to get out of politics.
if you switched the vote, I have no doubt it would indeed have.
Why not double republican votes too while we're at it ?
That's gonna cost you soooo many carbon credits !
That sounds like soviet elections.
Besides the real conspiracy is against ME. First they ignore my application, which I put in the yellow bucket near my neighbours garage. I labeled it "express" so surely it couldn't have been late !
Then they ignore the voter's INTENT, which surely was to elect ME.
2 men in white clothes at the door ? Now who could that be ?
So he would have invaded pakistan ? Now that would have been just peachy.
The next president will have to deal with peak oil, so whoever it is he's going to take many people's toys away. Whoever it is, we're not going to like him anymore in 2012 and true hate is going to surface before 2016.
We have a democrat congress, so shear damage control voting would be voting for McCain. Congress and the presidency in the hands of the same bunch of nitwits has always been disastrous.
At least when they both control parts "some" stupidities cancel eachother out. (or so I hope)
Admittedly, the incompleteness of axiomatic systems is philosophically difficult. Some people see it as proof that logic is insufficient. Personally, I see it as explaining the illogicality of God: any system that contains a proof of its own existence cannot be logical. In any case, it is not necessarily of any practical importance when constructing theories that explain reality.
The proof is nowhere near as strong as you allude here. Set theory can prove it's own consistency, without any axioms. So can first order logic "even God would have to abide by (first-order) logic", is how it's sometimes called. ZFC can't (and there is a small subset of ZFC that poses the problem). Furthermore any theory containing ZFC can't either.
Since any theory about reality contains the ZFC axioms, it will have these limitations. For any scientific theory one of the following two statements are true. No matter how complicated or well supported.
1) it proves that 1=0, that the sky is a yellow madonna painting, anything and everything (and is therefore wrong. Inconsistent)
2) a proof of that theory cannot exist
There was even a very stubborn physicist that constructed a basic theory that WAS able to be proven. 2 years later it was shown that his theory was inconsistent, and did indeed "prove" that 1=0.
Now obviously this has ramifications for any theory. Since this is a problem that every theory, including all physics theories and even moral theories will have to deal with, the same limitations exist for those theories. Physics theories can only be tested and measured, not proven. Since another problem requires any "correct" physics theory to have an infinite amount of natural laws, which will always remain both unproven, non-negotiable and absolute (and which will remain wrong, since it's also proven that it will take an infinite amount of time to construct any correct theory*), it's about time this starts getting actually mentioned by "experts".
And any moral theory has similar problems cannot prove itself to be good, except by axiom. This obviously also means that any non-axiomatic (= non-dogmatic) moral theory is inconsistent, and therefore allows one to claim any act is both 100% good and 100% evil. Any non-dogmatic moral theory calls genocide good (and evil) and calls saving someone's life evil (and good). Therefore any non-dogmatic ethical theory does not contain even a single moral law, not a single moral limit anywhere. Therefore if there is even a single act that you'd call evil/not good, for whatever reason, you're thinking dogmatic, not rational.
Since we're in the 21st century, and this has been known now for close to 50 years, it's about time people take this into account.
* so if you think for example "Newton was wrong", or even "the four elements of nature" were wrong, then you're doomed, if you're honest, to call every last scientific theory, not just existing but also all future scientific theories, wrong. Therefore they should be tought as being "mostly correct, but inaccurate", and several of them should be taught (people still teach Newton's laws obviously since both relativity and quantum theory are hideously complex even when you're talking about tiny, tiny systems. Relativity effects cannot currently be solved for even a single helium atom, and quantum effects cannot currently be solved for a single lithium nucleus. So when you're talking about a car, you don't use either relativity or quantum mechanics).
Set theory does NOT depend on ZFC. Using natural numbers defined in some way within set theory does. But "just" set theory does not have a single axiom. It merely has a few notations.
Oh yes, "some say" it does have one axiom, I believe. That it is possible to contemplate such a thing as "nothing" (it doesn't have to actually exist). The empty set. It does indeed depend on that. But that's it. Since it doesn't even require existence of the empty set, I don't think you'd need to call it an axiom.
First order logic is also a theory that does not have any axioms. I wonder how I missed that one.
But this is their typical reaction. They buy something expensive, that looks good. Then they let it rot.
A fool and his money ...