I'm sorry, but no. My main just passed the 9400 gold threshold today, and will probably pass 10,000 in the next week or so. The secret to my success? Daily quests, and a little bit of auctioning. Epic flying is a sizable chunk of gold, but it's not particularly difficult in the post-BC world, and even before I had it I was making due quite nicely with a 60% flying speed mount (including the World Explorer achievement). Crazily enough, I did all this entirely solo, without playing through even a single Outland or Northrend dungeon.
Bad analogy time. Paying someone else to play WoW for you is akin to paying someone else to play your half of a game of chess, knowing that they'll just be running a copy of Deep Blue and moving the pieces like a good little monkey. Then, at the very end, they give your chess game back to you, just in time for you to make the actual winning checkmate in person. Chess is a mental battle of tactics and wills; if you pay someone else to play chess for you, you can't honestly call yourself a chess player. WoW is similarly a mental battle, but this time focused on patience and mastery of patterns, and pitted against the game's developers rather than a single opponent. The epic flying, the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, and all the other myriad status symbols are the developers' way of saying "congratulations, you win", meant to give you the same spark of victory that chess gives you when you call checkmate after a grueling session. To call checkmate against an opponent you didn't beat, or to buy epic flying with gold you didn't earn, is straight up dishonesty — borne from impatience and an unearned sense of entitlement.
One thing hasn't changed: London was and is a colossal trading centre, so if it exists and I have the money I can buy it. But everything else is completely different. What if I want a passage to Boston, in the colonies - and back again? Well, in 1709, my sovereigns might buy my passage, several weeks on a sailing ship in dubious conditions. Just. The cost of such a trip was many months' pay for a labourer - people would indenture themselves for years in exchange for their passage. What if I want the same in 2009? Why, I can get from London to Boston and back again the next day if I wish it, and I'll have ample change left over for shopping while I'm there.
You've actually hit one of the key insights as to why the Chicago-school idea of using liquidity to maintain flat prices is a bad thing.
In some industries, constant improvements in technology or specialization of labor lead to prices that fall rapidly year-over-year (because the increased efficiency allows the same goods/services to be produced/performed at less cost). In other industries, prices are stable because technology is mature or has temporarily plateaued. In yet other industries, prices rise because of unforeseen disruptions (example causes: droughts, shifts in climate, changing sociopolitical landscapes, and so on). Computers are a perfect example of a rapidly maturing technology: viz. Moore's Law. Beer is a good example of a mature technology, albeit one somewhat disrupted by increasing costs of doing business (example causes: shifts in global agricultural production toward corn, greater regulation of breweries and alcohol distributors, and so on). Overall, the general trend is dominated by technology and increased efficiency, allowing the same monetary value to purchase more value — or, on a broader scale, for the same resources to support a larger population.
Put Friedman's followers in charge, though, and they'll try to "add liquidity" (print money) to counteract this general trend, and scream "deflation!" if they don't get their way. When one tries to use an artificial index like PPI or CPI, information is lost: any index is going to be an artificial subset of what people are actually buying, so it will be dominated by the bias of whatever industries were hand-picked for the index. The result is basically an information-free number: if it conveys any information at all, the information it conveys (to the extent that the index is representative of the entire economy) is a measure of how much more efficient the economy has become over time, with falling CPI/PPI numbers ("deflation") being better. But measure the same index in the context of an inflating currency, and use such an index as a bellweather for "managing inflation" (choosing whether or not to print money), and the whole system becomes a chaotic self-referential mess, with the last bits of biased-but-useful information squeezed out entirely. (And when I say "chaotic", I mean it in the same sense as the Three Body Problem of Newtonian gravity: a differential equation that references its own derivative, which is thus subject to highly unpredictable behavior — the occasional tidy-looking attractor hiding the fact that it's subject to rapid and volatile changes without prior warning.)
That's my main problem with this article as well. Supporters of evolution should not be playing with semantics to convince creationists of their work.
The fundamental problem here is that "species" is a matter of mere semantics. Creationists imagine that these lines are sharp and were drawn by their God at the beginning of time, but the reality is that the lines are messy and were drawn by humans in recent times. Arguing semantics over what "species" means really does change the number of species that exist, because "species" is an entirely artificial categorization.
In animals, hybrid viability is usually a good indicator of speciation... except that there are a number of species, of insects in particular, where two species can produce fertile offspring but refuse to mate with each other under natural conditions, even though their ranges overlap. (Evolutionary theory generally suggests that these examples were once one species, but they have split to fill two separate niches, and the crossbreeds are selected against because they cannot fit either niche as well as the specialized parents.) There's also the classic liger example, where lion/tigress hybrids are healthy and fertile if they survive infancy and are fully capable of interbreeding with either parent species, but they don't socially fit in either as lions or as tigers and spend their lives as outcasts.
In plants, though, all the animal-kingdom bets are off. Plants are much happier than animals at surviving with polyploidy (abnormally large numbers of chromosomes), which allows them to hybridize in ways that would be unimaginable to animals. The Brassica genus, part of the mustard family, is a good example: it took the Triangle of U theory to explain the mess. When three different Brassica species, each with a different chromosome count (8, 9, or 10 pairs; 16, 18, or 20 total), paired up in every possible way to form three separate hybrid species, the results each effectively had double the appropriate number of chromosomes (tetraploidy), which was how they ensured that every chromosome was part of a pair, thus allowing survival with full fertility. Wheat is even more fucked up (bread wheat is hexaploid — 6 sets of chromosomes instead of 2 — while durum pasta wheat is merely tetraploid), and strawberries are the reigning champions of fucked-up-ness among things we grow as crops (decaploid — 10 sets of chromosomes).
And that's just two kingdoms of multicellular organisms, not even touching fungi, protists, bacteria, and archaea. Each one of those kingdoms needs its own definition of species, because it's wholly unlike the others and our human classification systems break down when they're applied outside of the original context.
Today's oil and coal was once carbon dioxide that floated in the atmosphere. What was life like back then? Pretty much the same as now, but more tropical.
Actually, no, it wasn't like that at all. The coastlines were warmer and sometimes wetter, but the continental interiors formed vast deserts, and as CO2 levels rose in the Cretaceous, even coastal areas became deserts. Of course, the fact that Pangaea existed at the time is a confounding factor for any direct comparison, because the configuration of land and ocean has a huge effect in shaping the climate.
Um, check the definition of NP. An NP problem is one that can be solved in polynomial time, if you can somehow nondeterministically guess the answer (e.g. with a quantum computer).
Much as GMail is an interesting mail platform, I don't like the idea of Google getting all of my email to look thru, along with my entire contact list and traffic records with them. Even if GMail received and sent only encrypted messages, the metadata would be private. And Google already has my entire search history, as well as a lot of my click trail (REFERER incoming to searches, cached/PDF-to-HTML docs, YouTube, whatever might even run across a Google backbone). I don't need one filthy rich entity with cross-referenced records of my entire online activity.
If the GMail server were downloadable to my own server or independent ISP, I'd use it. I'd love it as software. But as service, it seems too tempting for Google to be evil.
In all likelihood, GMail is so dependent on internal Google infrastructure that the source code will never make sense outside that context. We *are* talking about the company that created GFS and Bigtable. These days all the cool kids are using more Bigtable-ish ideas for their cloud computing needs, but those approaches just don't scale down to tens of servers or fewer. The whole model is radically different from the LAMP model that's appropriate for personal servers and small businesses.
To make things worse, AFAIK nobody with a commercially run cloud computing infrastructure has open sourced their code for that, Google included, so you wouldn't have anything to run GMail on even if you did need it at a scale that made sense. ("A twisty maze of shell scripts and SSH, all alike" is not a viable cloud computing infrastructure.)
Even without anger, that's still a pretty f---ed up worldview. An all-powerful, all-knowing God chooses to create a world where the only way to cleanse sin is through (blood) sacrifice, then creates a Son for the express purpose of letting Him be (gruesomely) killed? And we're supposed to be happy that He did things this way?
Um, Möbius strips can and do exist in three dimensional space. You're thinking of Klein bottles, which require four spatial dimensions to properly exist.
The holiday 1.1 firmware, which is the rc33 equivalent for the phones google gave to their employees, is also unable to see __protected__ apps on the market.
The important part is protected, not paid. You will be able to see/buy unprotected paid applications, but not protected paid applications. So the holiday 1.1 adp firmware is 'banned' from purchasing protected apps as the news says.
Mod parent up. The issue is that, since you have root access on an ADP1 (via su), you can pluck.apk files directly from the phone's/data/apps directory, and these can then be installed on other phones or even P2Ped since Android has no DRM tying the.apk to a specific phone.
Of course, given that there are several well-known Android images with rooted user builds that can buy these apps just fine, this "feature" is realistically a bit of a moot point. *Insert pithy quote about making bits not copyable and water not wet.* But if Google actually admitted that to app developers, many would run away — for some reason, the knowledge that copy protection schemes are incompatible with reality seems to provoke reactions on par with the revelation of a Lovecraftian horror.
Way to completely miss my point. Two 12-year-olds probably don't know what they're doing and almost certainly don't understand the implications. They really shouldn't be having sex at that age (though I'd be a hypocrite if I said there should be no fooling around whatsoever). But whether or not they understand the implications of their actions has practically nothing to do with my point.
My point is that there's an inherent power imbalance whenever you have dramatic differences in emotional maturity. Power imbalances don't create learning experiences; they create lifelong emotional traumas (molestation, rape, etc.) that are quite likely to increase the risk of depression and self-destructive behaviors, up to and including suicide. In such a situation, the more mature individual is likely to get his/her way through the use of emotional manipulation, creating situations where the less mature one doesn't want to go through with something but is afraid to say no because of intimidation. That's rape. R-A-P-E, full stop. And there's no lesson to be learned from that.
Why did I use 12+16 as an example point? Emotional maturity seems to follow either O(log age) or O(age^n) for some 0<n<1. The age surrounding puberty (~9-14) is a period of extremely rapid emotional maturation where the slope of the curve is still extreme. After 14-ish the curve starts to flatten out, and it's practically asymptotic after ~25. (For reference, see this XKCD comic — I didn't invent this idea that the creepiness of an age delta is a function of absolute age, and neither did Randall Munroe for that matter.) Because the period between 12 and 16 has such rapid emotional development, it's a vastly different situation than the difference between 16 and 20.
Anyway, the key takeaway point: At 12, a two year difference in age is a stupendously huge amount, and a four year difference is unfathomable. After age 25, a four year difference is yawn-worthy, and a two year difference goes unnoticed. The law currently ignores this. This is bad, because the punishment doesn't fit the crime (both small differences being punished too much, and large differences being punished too little).
That the Internet can't ever replace newspapers and proper reporting. Smaller newspapers will fold (no pun intended) but larger ones will always exist. I remember one comment was "How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah?"
The guy who did Dear Raed was in Baghdad, not Fallujah, but his coverage of the Iraqi occupation in general was more accurate than pretty much anything found in the US.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as you make it sound. Two 12 year olds might be reasonably said to be capable of consenting with each other, but neither of those same 12 year olds is likely capable of consenting with a 16 year old. When it comes to consenting to sex, emotional age is what matters, or more specifically the difference in emotional age between the individuals.
To put it bluntly, adults play mind games with each other, and an important part of the growing up process is discovering the existence of these mind games and learning how to use them — applying them to others, both offensively and defensively, and seeing through them when applied to yourself. The mind games aren't an inherently bad thing — they're how adults protect themselves from being taken advantage of by opportunists, liars, and con-men, and they're also the means by which salary negotiations and business deals take place. They're powerful, though, and that makes them potentially dangerous. They're so second nature to adults that it's easy to forget that children and teenagers learn them piece by piece, by practicing them against each other — they don't spring fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus or anything. And in the absence of an even match-up, the party with less preparation will end up manipulated and exploited, even without the harmful party doing so deliberately.
And while it would be great if there were some external, objective measure of saying "so-and-so scored blah on the Standardized Mind Games Test" — which would actually have massive implications on the business world — the reality is that intellectual prodigies and the mentally retarded aren't much different than their peers in terms of emotional maturity. When contrasted with intellect, there seems to be far less variation in emotional growth rates. Emotional age tends to track reasonably well with chronological age, if only because peer groups tend to stratify by chronological age and emotional maturity emerges as a group exercise. So in the end, while 18 or 16 or whatever is an arbitrary cutoff point that's silly at some level, I can at least see the utility of it as a first-pass guess, and my only complaint is that we need to handle the cases of 12+12 or 17+18 with more grace while still forbidding instances of 12+16.
Sadly, it's not a matter of realization, it's a matter of mathematics. Duverger's Law states that plurality voting systems lead to two-party domination as a steady state, and it's borne out both in game theory and in reality.
... but citizens can't veto bills, so Congress doesn't listen to citizens. They do listen to the President. His veto power is precisely why he sets the agenda.
The Austrian school holds that a big chunk of irrationality is actually due to the Fed's manipulation of the money supply. The rationale is surprisingly straightforward: interest rates in a healthy economy represent time preferences. If most people want their money now, interest rates shoot up. If most people are content with having their money later, interest rates fall. Thus, high interest rates are a signal that people ought to think more about the long-term future and save (by investing money), whereas low interest rates are a signal that the future is already taken care of and people can focus on the short-term (by borrowing money).
The outcome, then, is that when the Fed creates money in order to lower interest rates, it causes people to irrationally favor the short term over the long term. This causes a boom, and for a while it looks good. But the new money flooding the economy inevitably causes price inflation, which exposes bad assumptions about underlying costs and profitability. The price inflation is always uneven: commodities rise the most, because they are heavily traded, whereas other areas of the economy hardly have any inflation at all. Because investors expected inflation to be evenly distributed, it eventually turns out that many projects didn't actually make economic sense. Meanwhile, more fundamentally necessary projects languished because they didn't have high enough returns (compared to the bad investments). When the malinvestment finally boils to the surface, deals go bad, people lose money, irrational short-term spending becomes unsustainable, and a bust results.
The crazy part, from an Austrian school perspective, is that both the Democrats (generally Keynesians) and the Republicans (generally Monetarist Friedmanites) support the Fed's "stimulative" creation of money during a bust, thus ensuring that another boom-bust cycle will inevitably follow. Neither party believes that creating money is an inherently bad thing, particularly during a bust, and because it benefits them politically they do it at every opportunity. The people see the short-term benefits (the boom) and vote accordingly, but never connect the long-term consequences (the bust) back to the original cause.
I lived in San Francisco for 7 years after university, and became accustomed to urban life - having things open 24 hours, having china town a few steps away, having everything so close and easy to get to. On the other hand I always felt distracted, stressed, and like I was unable to do half the things I wanted because of crowds, traffic, too long of lines, waiting lists for restaurant reservations, you name it. I was not being very productive as I was always thinking about the logistical ramifications.
Funny thing for me is, I just moved to San Francisco about a year ago and I feel more relaxed than ever. Driving, parking, gas prices? Pfft, sell the car and take Muni. Lines? *shrug* If it's worth waiting for, I wait for it. Otherwise I go somewhere else. There's always somewhere else, and it's probably in walking distance. (It helps that, as nice as e.g. the Slanted Door is, I'm perfectly happy with a burrito or a burger. I don't set a very high bar when it comes to enjoying food or events.)
The best part for me is leaving behind the car: all I need is my Muni fast pass and my smartphone and I can go anywhere in the city purely on a whim. That's very liberating. No worrying about "where am I going to park the car?", or "where *did* I park the car?", or "did I lock the car?", and so on. It's very different from when I grew up in Wichita, KS. In Wichita, a car is mandatory to get around, and I always felt tethered to it and a bit resentful of it. In SF, I feel like the entire city is at my fingertips. This alone removed a surprisingly large amount of stress from my life and lets me focus on the here-and-now, instead of worrying about how I'm going to get from A to B or the logistics of transporting groups of friends. Or, for that matter, the logistics of getting home with a BAC above the legal limit.
Compare this to Android, where the user doesn't have root access and is locked out the filesystem. The Android developer is similarly fucked -- she can't just package his application as a file and send it off to whoever but must submit it for approval and then, if the overlords deign to approve, can only distribute it through their app store.
Conservatives have been more scientific: use history as our laboratory, and pick plans that work, and leave moralistic bloviation about individual liberty for later.
Oh bull. Conservatism has never been more scientific. All European governments were feudalistic monarchies, from the Dark Ages clear to the Enlightenment. That's an unbroken string of 1000 years of monarchies. There were no differences to observe, no laboratories to experiment in, and therefore nothing to be learned. The absence of variation meant that no one, no matter how intelligent or scientifically minded, could pick the best form of government — the parameter space was almost completely unexplored.
The only variation that remained was the strength of the feudal system's influence. And, lo and behold, the few places where the system was weakest — 12th century northern Italy being a prominent example — were precisely the ones that prospered the most. Not only did northern Italy become the epicenter of the Renaissance in culture and art, it also became Europe's leader in science, finance, trade, and prosperity in general.
If the aristocracy had been scientifically seeking what worked best, they would have observed Italy and then attempted to replicate Italy's findings by loosening their own control over distant holdings and observing the results. That didn't happen. Instead, they fought back by strangling free commerce with the creation of mercantilism: a system of government-approved monopolies (e.g. the British East India Company) and strict punitive tariffs on anyone who attempted to circumvent the monopoly.
Conservatives also acknowledge what liberals fear: most people are irrational and cannot, even through voting, make sane decisions about who should lead a country.
If most people are irrational, why would you want to put them in power where they can maximize their irrationality? A democratically elected despot is bad, but that doesn't mean that the "democratically elected" is the part you should be taking issue with. The correct response is to attack the idea that a single person should be exalted to the point of despotism. As you yourself rightly point out, most people are irrational: therefore, whichever person becomes a despot is quite likely irrational. The means of ascension to power are irrelevant: democratic vote among the rabble, aristocratic vote among the land-holding nobles, dynastic feuding within a royal line, or bloody coup. The danger is in the outcome, not the method.
No matter how intelligent or aristocratic or rich or whatever a person is, people aren't naturally rational beings, and even the most educated and intelligent people are frequently damn irrational people on anything but a few narrow subjects. There are vitamin-peddling physicists, young-earth creationist neurosurgeons, mathematicians who believe in an entire spectrum of religious beliefs (most of which I guarantee you don't believe in), engineers who believe in crystal healing or homeopathy, molecular biologists who believe AIDS is a government conspiracy to poison people and HIV itself is harmless. The list goes on and on. (Scarily, I had a specific scientist or other professional in mind for every one of those examples.) Elevating one of them to a leadership position over an entire nation is foolish and stupid — no matter how carefully you vet someone's credentials, whoever you pick is pretty much guaranteed to have irrational beliefs. This is, of course, one of the underlying reasons why Jefferson was so keen on checks-and-balances when Hamilton made his push for an elected president-king. Checks and balances keep any one person's irrationality from harming others.
Centralization of power is the danger here, because it allows irrational decisions to be enforced over people other than the person making the irrational decision. It's not that majorities are right
I always thought (from, you know, reading his work) that Marx was big on the dismantling of the state. His view of the final state of socialism was quite anarchistic, in fact. The totalitarian forms of "Marxism" that were starting to spring up in his day were criticised by him leading him to famously state "If that is Marxism, I am not a Marxist!"
True, Marx's ultimate vision of Communism was the "withering away of the state". But Marx's explanation of how that would come about basically amounted to:
Workers own the means of production
???
Profit^H^H^H^H^H^HWithering away of the state!
And, not surprisingly, the state has never actually withered away under any form of centralized Communist government.
Classically, in most models, "Conservatives" want to minimize government regulation and involvement; while "Liberals" want to maximize it, regulate business, and do all "for the people" that they can-- as far as telling businesses who they have to hire, what they should/must make (see France), to go as far as taking peoples' insurance away and instead forcing their own insurance on them at cost in taxes (see socialized healthcare).
Actually, this is exactly backwards when you look at history prior to, say, 1840ish. Liberals were people who wanted to maximize liberty (individualistic personal freedom) for the sake of individual happiness and prosperity, and Conservatives were people who wanted centralized power (divinely-appointed kings) because it appealed to their aesthetic craving for orderliness and organization. In US history, the split was perhaps best exemplified by the wide gulf between far-Left Jefferson and far-Right Hamilton.
Then around the mid-1800s, things flipped around when a number of thinkers (most notably Karl Marx) decided that the goals of Liberalism (maximum individual happiness and prosperity) could be achieved through the mechanisms of Conservatism (centralized power), and that since centralized power seemed much more "efficient" it should therefore be implemented. (Donald Knuth's comment that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is apt here.)
The proper Liberal-Conservative spectrum, viewed from that pre-Marx perspective, thus has Classical Liberalism on the far Left, Monarchy on the far Right, and both Fascism and Communism on the far Right just slightly left of Monarchy (with the famed Communism/Fascism mutual hatred stemming from professional jealousy and egoism nearly as much as from actual ideological divides, not much different from the internecine Communist hatreds like Stalinism/Trotskyism and Stalinism/Maoism).
Against this scale, the US Democratic Party is rather ill-defined: most are in a fuzzy mass toward the middle, with some straying far left or right. FDR, today cheered/vilified as a paragon of the Left, was actually a Right-winger who was only a step away from Fascism. If you actually look at what was said during the 1930s, he lavishly praised Mussolini and favored big business interests in the New Deal. He actually had the balls to say that competition was a bad thing, and encouraged industrial consolidation into monopolies. Big businesses were actually major FDR supporters, while small entrepreneurs were squashed as he neutered antitrust laws and increased barriers to entry.
The US Republican Party, in contrast with the Democrats, is divided into three clearly defined and strikingly different camps: the "Social Conservatives" at the far right, who think that the whole democracy thing is overrated and would be content to return to divine kingship (so long as said king was appointed by the correct religion, i.e. theirs); the "Neoliberals" and "Fiscal Conservatives", who despite lip service toward laissez faire principles are actually somewhere in the middle not far from the Democrats (the principle difference being which industries they favor); and the tiny handful of libertarians, Ron Paul now being the default example, who are actually farther left than most Democrats but foolishly think of themselves as "Conservatives" and "right-wingers".
Their spiel about the phone being a gift (and the employee being taxed for it), but that they're not supposed to sell it is very telling. Among other things, it tells me just how out of touch with reality Google is.
Sorry, but if you give me a bonus and I have to pay taxes on it, it is mine to do with as I please, just as the money from my paycheck is because that's all it is - a physical good in place of a portion of pay (in this case as a holiday bonus).
I agree that "you can't sell it but you're getting taxed on it" is bull****. The problem here is that the legalese in Google's stated policy carves a much broader path than necessary for CYA purposes — which you'll see at *any* company, Google is hardly unique in that respect. Lawyers always maximize the CYA-ness of their legalese, and the only way to prevent legalese creep is to constantly ask questions and push back against overly-CYA policies.
What Google needs to do, and what I expect they will sometime during January (after the Slashdot crowd has long forgotten this leak), is update the policy so that anything a Googler has to pay taxes on is exempt from the "do not resell" policy. The policy is supposed to be for things like reselling GMail invitations (back when GMail was invite-only) or internal-use AdWords accounts — things that, if sold by a Googler, would essentially walk the line of being fraud. Gifts that get taxed as income clearly don't fall under the intended umbrella of the policy — and the legalese needs updated to fix this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but no. My main just passed the 9400 gold threshold today, and will probably pass 10,000 in the next week or so. The secret to my success? Daily quests, and a little bit of auctioning. Epic flying is a sizable chunk of gold, but it's not particularly difficult in the post-BC world, and even before I had it I was making due quite nicely with a 60% flying speed mount (including the World Explorer achievement). Crazily enough, I did all this entirely solo, without playing through even a single Outland or Northrend dungeon.
Bad analogy time. Paying someone else to play WoW for you is akin to paying someone else to play your half of a game of chess, knowing that they'll just be running a copy of Deep Blue and moving the pieces like a good little monkey. Then, at the very end, they give your chess game back to you, just in time for you to make the actual winning checkmate in person. Chess is a mental battle of tactics and wills; if you pay someone else to play chess for you, you can't honestly call yourself a chess player. WoW is similarly a mental battle, but this time focused on patience and mastery of patterns, and pitted against the game's developers rather than a single opponent. The epic flying, the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, and all the other myriad status symbols are the developers' way of saying "congratulations, you win", meant to give you the same spark of victory that chess gives you when you call checkmate after a grueling session. To call checkmate against an opponent you didn't beat, or to buy epic flying with gold you didn't earn, is straight up dishonesty — borne from impatience and an unearned sense of entitlement.
(Warning: obligatory Austrian-school-informed left-libertarian ramble ahead.)
You've actually hit one of the key insights as to why the Chicago-school idea of using liquidity to maintain flat prices is a bad thing.
In some industries, constant improvements in technology or specialization of labor lead to prices that fall rapidly year-over-year (because the increased efficiency allows the same goods/services to be produced/performed at less cost). In other industries, prices are stable because technology is mature or has temporarily plateaued. In yet other industries, prices rise because of unforeseen disruptions (example causes: droughts, shifts in climate, changing sociopolitical landscapes, and so on). Computers are a perfect example of a rapidly maturing technology: viz. Moore's Law. Beer is a good example of a mature technology, albeit one somewhat disrupted by increasing costs of doing business (example causes: shifts in global agricultural production toward corn, greater regulation of breweries and alcohol distributors, and so on). Overall, the general trend is dominated by technology and increased efficiency, allowing the same monetary value to purchase more value — or, on a broader scale, for the same resources to support a larger population.
Put Friedman's followers in charge, though, and they'll try to "add liquidity" (print money) to counteract this general trend, and scream "deflation!" if they don't get their way. When one tries to use an artificial index like PPI or CPI, information is lost: any index is going to be an artificial subset of what people are actually buying, so it will be dominated by the bias of whatever industries were hand-picked for the index. The result is basically an information-free number: if it conveys any information at all, the information it conveys (to the extent that the index is representative of the entire economy) is a measure of how much more efficient the economy has become over time, with falling CPI/PPI numbers ("deflation") being better. But measure the same index in the context of an inflating currency, and use such an index as a bellweather for "managing inflation" (choosing whether or not to print money), and the whole system becomes a chaotic self-referential mess, with the last bits of biased-but-useful information squeezed out entirely. (And when I say "chaotic", I mean it in the same sense as the Three Body Problem of Newtonian gravity: a differential equation that references its own derivative, which is thus subject to highly unpredictable behavior — the occasional tidy-looking attractor hiding the fact that it's subject to rapid and volatile changes without prior warning.)
The fundamental problem here is that "species" is a matter of mere semantics. Creationists imagine that these lines are sharp and were drawn by their God at the beginning of time, but the reality is that the lines are messy and were drawn by humans in recent times. Arguing semantics over what "species" means really does change the number of species that exist, because "species" is an entirely artificial categorization.
In animals, hybrid viability is usually a good indicator of speciation... except that there are a number of species, of insects in particular, where two species can produce fertile offspring but refuse to mate with each other under natural conditions, even though their ranges overlap. (Evolutionary theory generally suggests that these examples were once one species, but they have split to fill two separate niches, and the crossbreeds are selected against because they cannot fit either niche as well as the specialized parents.) There's also the classic liger example, where lion/tigress hybrids are healthy and fertile if they survive infancy and are fully capable of interbreeding with either parent species, but they don't socially fit in either as lions or as tigers and spend their lives as outcasts.
In plants, though, all the animal-kingdom bets are off. Plants are much happier than animals at surviving with polyploidy (abnormally large numbers of chromosomes), which allows them to hybridize in ways that would be unimaginable to animals. The Brassica genus, part of the mustard family, is a good example: it took the Triangle of U theory to explain the mess. When three different Brassica species, each with a different chromosome count (8, 9, or 10 pairs; 16, 18, or 20 total), paired up in every possible way to form three separate hybrid species, the results each effectively had double the appropriate number of chromosomes (tetraploidy), which was how they ensured that every chromosome was part of a pair, thus allowing survival with full fertility. Wheat is even more fucked up (bread wheat is hexaploid — 6 sets of chromosomes instead of 2 — while durum pasta wheat is merely tetraploid), and strawberries are the reigning champions of fucked-up-ness among things we grow as crops (decaploid — 10 sets of chromosomes).
And that's just two kingdoms of multicellular organisms, not even touching fungi, protists, bacteria, and archaea. Each one of those kingdoms needs its own definition of species, because it's wholly unlike the others and our human classification systems break down when they're applied outside of the original context.
Actually, no, it wasn't like that at all. The coastlines were warmer and sometimes wetter, but the continental interiors formed vast deserts, and as CO2 levels rose in the Cretaceous, even coastal areas became deserts. Of course, the fact that Pangaea existed at the time is a confounding factor for any direct comparison, because the configuration of land and ocean has a huge effect in shaping the climate.
No, it shows that the mind is inconsistent or incomplete (or both).
Um, check the definition of NP. An NP problem is one that can be solved in polynomial time, if you can somehow nondeterministically guess the answer (e.g. with a quantum computer).
In all likelihood, GMail is so dependent on internal Google infrastructure that the source code will never make sense outside that context. We *are* talking about the company that created GFS and Bigtable. These days all the cool kids are using more Bigtable-ish ideas for their cloud computing needs, but those approaches just don't scale down to tens of servers or fewer. The whole model is radically different from the LAMP model that's appropriate for personal servers and small businesses.
To make things worse, AFAIK nobody with a commercially run cloud computing infrastructure has open sourced their code for that, Google included, so you wouldn't have anything to run GMail on even if you did need it at a scale that made sense. ("A twisty maze of shell scripts and SSH, all alike" is not a viable cloud computing infrastructure.)
How much time do people spend praying to 2+2=4 each week?
Even without anger, that's still a pretty f---ed up worldview. An all-powerful, all-knowing God chooses to create a world where the only way to cleanse sin is through (blood) sacrifice, then creates a Son for the express purpose of letting Him be (gruesomely) killed? And we're supposed to be happy that He did things this way?
Um, Möbius strips can and do exist in three dimensional space. You're thinking of Klein bottles, which require four spatial dimensions to properly exist.
Mod parent up. The issue is that, since you have root access on an ADP1 (via su), you can pluck .apk files directly from the phone's /data/apps directory, and these can then be installed on other phones or even P2Ped since Android has no DRM tying the .apk to a specific phone.
Of course, given that there are several well-known Android images with rooted user builds that can buy these apps just fine, this "feature" is realistically a bit of a moot point. *Insert pithy quote about making bits not copyable and water not wet.* But if Google actually admitted that to app developers, many would run away — for some reason, the knowledge that copy protection schemes are incompatible with reality seems to provoke reactions on par with the revelation of a Lovecraftian horror.
Way to completely miss my point. Two 12-year-olds probably don't know what they're doing and almost certainly don't understand the implications. They really shouldn't be having sex at that age (though I'd be a hypocrite if I said there should be no fooling around whatsoever). But whether or not they understand the implications of their actions has practically nothing to do with my point.
My point is that there's an inherent power imbalance whenever you have dramatic differences in emotional maturity. Power imbalances don't create learning experiences; they create lifelong emotional traumas (molestation, rape, etc.) that are quite likely to increase the risk of depression and self-destructive behaviors, up to and including suicide. In such a situation, the more mature individual is likely to get his/her way through the use of emotional manipulation, creating situations where the less mature one doesn't want to go through with something but is afraid to say no because of intimidation. That's rape. R-A-P-E, full stop. And there's no lesson to be learned from that.
Why did I use 12+16 as an example point? Emotional maturity seems to follow either O(log age) or O(age^n) for some 0<n<1. The age surrounding puberty (~9-14) is a period of extremely rapid emotional maturation where the slope of the curve is still extreme. After 14-ish the curve starts to flatten out, and it's practically asymptotic after ~25. (For reference, see this XKCD comic — I didn't invent this idea that the creepiness of an age delta is a function of absolute age, and neither did Randall Munroe for that matter.) Because the period between 12 and 16 has such rapid emotional development, it's a vastly different situation than the difference between 16 and 20.
Anyway, the key takeaway point: At 12, a two year difference in age is a stupendously huge amount, and a four year difference is unfathomable. After age 25, a four year difference is yawn-worthy, and a two year difference goes unnoticed. The law currently ignores this. This is bad, because the punishment doesn't fit the crime (both small differences being punished too much, and large differences being punished too little).
The guy who did Dear Raed was in Baghdad, not Fallujah, but his coverage of the Iraqi occupation in general was more accurate than pretty much anything found in the US.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as you make it sound. Two 12 year olds might be reasonably said to be capable of consenting with each other, but neither of those same 12 year olds is likely capable of consenting with a 16 year old. When it comes to consenting to sex, emotional age is what matters, or more specifically the difference in emotional age between the individuals.
To put it bluntly, adults play mind games with each other, and an important part of the growing up process is discovering the existence of these mind games and learning how to use them — applying them to others, both offensively and defensively, and seeing through them when applied to yourself. The mind games aren't an inherently bad thing — they're how adults protect themselves from being taken advantage of by opportunists, liars, and con-men, and they're also the means by which salary negotiations and business deals take place. They're powerful, though, and that makes them potentially dangerous. They're so second nature to adults that it's easy to forget that children and teenagers learn them piece by piece, by practicing them against each other — they don't spring fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus or anything. And in the absence of an even match-up, the party with less preparation will end up manipulated and exploited, even without the harmful party doing so deliberately.
And while it would be great if there were some external, objective measure of saying "so-and-so scored blah on the Standardized Mind Games Test" — which would actually have massive implications on the business world — the reality is that intellectual prodigies and the mentally retarded aren't much different than their peers in terms of emotional maturity. When contrasted with intellect, there seems to be far less variation in emotional growth rates. Emotional age tends to track reasonably well with chronological age, if only because peer groups tend to stratify by chronological age and emotional maturity emerges as a group exercise. So in the end, while 18 or 16 or whatever is an arbitrary cutoff point that's silly at some level, I can at least see the utility of it as a first-pass guess, and my only complaint is that we need to handle the cases of 12+12 or 17+18 with more grace while still forbidding instances of 12+16.
Yet. Give it a hundred years or so.
Sadly, it's not a matter of realization, it's a matter of mathematics. Duverger's Law states that plurality voting systems lead to two-party domination as a steady state, and it's borne out both in game theory and in reality.
... but citizens can't veto bills, so Congress doesn't listen to citizens. They do listen to the President. His veto power is precisely why he sets the agenda.
The Austrian school holds that a big chunk of irrationality is actually due to the Fed's manipulation of the money supply. The rationale is surprisingly straightforward: interest rates in a healthy economy represent time preferences. If most people want their money now, interest rates shoot up. If most people are content with having their money later, interest rates fall. Thus, high interest rates are a signal that people ought to think more about the long-term future and save (by investing money), whereas low interest rates are a signal that the future is already taken care of and people can focus on the short-term (by borrowing money).
The outcome, then, is that when the Fed creates money in order to lower interest rates, it causes people to irrationally favor the short term over the long term. This causes a boom, and for a while it looks good. But the new money flooding the economy inevitably causes price inflation, which exposes bad assumptions about underlying costs and profitability. The price inflation is always uneven: commodities rise the most, because they are heavily traded, whereas other areas of the economy hardly have any inflation at all. Because investors expected inflation to be evenly distributed, it eventually turns out that many projects didn't actually make economic sense. Meanwhile, more fundamentally necessary projects languished because they didn't have high enough returns (compared to the bad investments). When the malinvestment finally boils to the surface, deals go bad, people lose money, irrational short-term spending becomes unsustainable, and a bust results.
The crazy part, from an Austrian school perspective, is that both the Democrats (generally Keynesians) and the Republicans (generally Monetarist Friedmanites) support the Fed's "stimulative" creation of money during a bust, thus ensuring that another boom-bust cycle will inevitably follow. Neither party believes that creating money is an inherently bad thing, particularly during a bust, and because it benefits them politically they do it at every opportunity. The people see the short-term benefits (the boom) and vote accordingly, but never connect the long-term consequences (the bust) back to the original cause.
Funny thing for me is, I just moved to San Francisco about a year ago and I feel more relaxed than ever. Driving, parking, gas prices? Pfft, sell the car and take Muni. Lines? *shrug* If it's worth waiting for, I wait for it. Otherwise I go somewhere else. There's always somewhere else, and it's probably in walking distance. (It helps that, as nice as e.g. the Slanted Door is, I'm perfectly happy with a burrito or a burger. I don't set a very high bar when it comes to enjoying food or events.)
The best part for me is leaving behind the car: all I need is my Muni fast pass and my smartphone and I can go anywhere in the city purely on a whim. That's very liberating. No worrying about "where am I going to park the car?", or "where *did* I park the car?", or "did I lock the car?", and so on. It's very different from when I grew up in Wichita, KS. In Wichita, a car is mandatory to get around, and I always felt tethered to it and a bit resentful of it. In SF, I feel like the entire city is at my fingertips. This alone removed a surprisingly large amount of stress from my life and lets me focus on the here-and-now, instead of worrying about how I'm going to get from A to B or the logistics of transporting groups of friends. Or, for that matter, the logistics of getting home with a BAC above the legal limit.
*cough* *cough* *wheeze*
Oh bull. Conservatism has never been more scientific. All European governments were feudalistic monarchies, from the Dark Ages clear to the Enlightenment. That's an unbroken string of 1000 years of monarchies. There were no differences to observe, no laboratories to experiment in, and therefore nothing to be learned. The absence of variation meant that no one, no matter how intelligent or scientifically minded, could pick the best form of government — the parameter space was almost completely unexplored.
The only variation that remained was the strength of the feudal system's influence. And, lo and behold, the few places where the system was weakest — 12th century northern Italy being a prominent example — were precisely the ones that prospered the most. Not only did northern Italy become the epicenter of the Renaissance in culture and art, it also became Europe's leader in science, finance, trade, and prosperity in general.
If the aristocracy had been scientifically seeking what worked best, they would have observed Italy and then attempted to replicate Italy's findings by loosening their own control over distant holdings and observing the results. That didn't happen. Instead, they fought back by strangling free commerce with the creation of mercantilism: a system of government-approved monopolies (e.g. the British East India Company) and strict punitive tariffs on anyone who attempted to circumvent the monopoly.
If most people are irrational, why would you want to put them in power where they can maximize their irrationality? A democratically elected despot is bad, but that doesn't mean that the "democratically elected" is the part you should be taking issue with. The correct response is to attack the idea that a single person should be exalted to the point of despotism. As you yourself rightly point out, most people are irrational: therefore, whichever person becomes a despot is quite likely irrational. The means of ascension to power are irrelevant: democratic vote among the rabble, aristocratic vote among the land-holding nobles, dynastic feuding within a royal line, or bloody coup. The danger is in the outcome, not the method.
No matter how intelligent or aristocratic or rich or whatever a person is, people aren't naturally rational beings, and even the most educated and intelligent people are frequently damn irrational people on anything but a few narrow subjects. There are vitamin-peddling physicists, young-earth creationist neurosurgeons, mathematicians who believe in an entire spectrum of religious beliefs (most of which I guarantee you don't believe in), engineers who believe in crystal healing or homeopathy, molecular biologists who believe AIDS is a government conspiracy to poison people and HIV itself is harmless. The list goes on and on. (Scarily, I had a specific scientist or other professional in mind for every one of those examples.) Elevating one of them to a leadership position over an entire nation is foolish and stupid — no matter how carefully you vet someone's credentials, whoever you pick is pretty much guaranteed to have irrational beliefs. This is, of course, one of the underlying reasons why Jefferson was so keen on checks-and-balances when Hamilton made his push for an elected president-king. Checks and balances keep any one person's irrationality from harming others.
Centralization of power is the danger here, because it allows irrational decisions to be enforced over people other than the person making the irrational decision. It's not that majorities are right
True, Marx's ultimate vision of Communism was the "withering away of the state". But Marx's explanation of how that would come about basically amounted to:
And, not surprisingly, the state has never actually withered away under any form of centralized Communist government.
Actually, this is exactly backwards when you look at history prior to, say, 1840ish. Liberals were people who wanted to maximize liberty (individualistic personal freedom) for the sake of individual happiness and prosperity, and Conservatives were people who wanted centralized power (divinely-appointed kings) because it appealed to their aesthetic craving for orderliness and organization. In US history, the split was perhaps best exemplified by the wide gulf between far-Left Jefferson and far-Right Hamilton.
Then around the mid-1800s, things flipped around when a number of thinkers (most notably Karl Marx) decided that the goals of Liberalism (maximum individual happiness and prosperity) could be achieved through the mechanisms of Conservatism (centralized power), and that since centralized power seemed much more "efficient" it should therefore be implemented. (Donald Knuth's comment that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is apt here.)
The proper Liberal-Conservative spectrum, viewed from that pre-Marx perspective, thus has Classical Liberalism on the far Left, Monarchy on the far Right, and both Fascism and Communism on the far Right just slightly left of Monarchy (with the famed Communism/Fascism mutual hatred stemming from professional jealousy and egoism nearly as much as from actual ideological divides, not much different from the internecine Communist hatreds like Stalinism/Trotskyism and Stalinism/Maoism).
Against this scale, the US Democratic Party is rather ill-defined: most are in a fuzzy mass toward the middle, with some straying far left or right. FDR, today cheered/vilified as a paragon of the Left, was actually a Right-winger who was only a step away from Fascism. If you actually look at what was said during the 1930s, he lavishly praised Mussolini and favored big business interests in the New Deal. He actually had the balls to say that competition was a bad thing, and encouraged industrial consolidation into monopolies. Big businesses were actually major FDR supporters, while small entrepreneurs were squashed as he neutered antitrust laws and increased barriers to entry.
The US Republican Party, in contrast with the Democrats, is divided into three clearly defined and strikingly different camps: the "Social Conservatives" at the far right, who think that the whole democracy thing is overrated and would be content to return to divine kingship (so long as said king was appointed by the correct religion, i.e. theirs); the "Neoliberals" and "Fiscal Conservatives", who despite lip service toward laissez faire principles are actually somewhere in the middle not far from the Democrats (the principle difference being which industries they favor); and the tiny handful of libertarians, Ron Paul now being the default example, who are actually farther left than most Democrats but foolishly think of themselves as "Conservatives" and "right-wingers".
I agree that "you can't sell it but you're getting taxed on it" is bull****. The problem here is that the legalese in Google's stated policy carves a much broader path than necessary for CYA purposes — which you'll see at *any* company, Google is hardly unique in that respect. Lawyers always maximize the CYA-ness of their legalese, and the only way to prevent legalese creep is to constantly ask questions and push back against overly-CYA policies.
What Google needs to do, and what I expect they will sometime during January (after the Slashdot crowd has long forgotten this leak), is update the policy so that anything a Googler has to pay taxes on is exempt from the "do not resell" policy. The policy is supposed to be for things like reselling GMail invitations (back when GMail was invite-only) or internal-use AdWords accounts — things that, if sold by a Googler, would essentially walk the line of being fraud. Gifts that get taxed as income clearly don't fall under the intended umbrella of the policy — and the legalese needs updated to fix this.
Not the Christmas bonus. The big, performance-based bonus, yes, but the Christmas bonus is a pleasant surprise they don't tell you about when hiring.