this dynamic is pretty much the driving force in all of politics
in a totally free market place, everyone behaves themselves (placid libertarian lie)
vs
you need a strong government heavily regulating a market to keep it fair (ugly truth)
or
everyone guaranteed the same reward leads to a happy productive society (placid communist lie)
vs
if i am going to get the same as that guy busting his ass off over there, why work at all? (ugly truth)
the truth is often ugly in this world. in fact, at times, it is very, very ugly. enough of it, and people will get depressed. this is why we tell ourselves pleasant lies, and believe them: to make our lives livable, to smile when we get up in the morning. take any central tenet of your belief system, and at it's core is a nice pleasant lie. but without that lie, you pretty much lose all motivation to wake up in the morning
us human beings are weak. we need pleasant lies, pleasant whitewashing and wallpapering over of the ugliness of reality with little pleasant ideas that simply aren't true. look at all of religion. for those of you who mock religion, i simply say that if you removed it in many people's lives, they'd just kill themselves. so let them continue on in their lie, if their belief is innocuous. yes, there are dangerous religious fundamentalists. go ahead and fight them. but leave the vast majority of believers alone: they are harmless, and destroying their beliefs only destroys their desire to live, so that makes you the greater evil than the lies they tell themselves about the afterlife and invisible sky people. we're not all made to be great logicians and philosophers. leave the simple folk alone, you are only molesting their peace and causing them pain if you think bringing home to them the truth about their simple lies is doing any good in this world. that's a pleasant lie you tell yourself, in fact, that a strident atheism is helping anyone in this world. no, its just another form of intolerant religious fundamentalism, in fact
so that's why i say this: if more people read mark twain because we cut out a word considered nasty in today's world, guess what? i'm all for it. they read great literature
of course some of you consider this horribly wrong. well guess what: your belief that not white washing ugly truths leads to a better world is a pacid lie you tell yourself, and i challenge you to understand that whitewashing the past is actually psychologically normal, and will never stop, and you should just get used to it. not because it is good, not because it is bad. because it just is, and its never going away. its a simple facet of human pscyhology and how we cope with the past: we censor it, as individuals, and as a society
It is believed that Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) was born the same month as the passing of Halley's comet in November 1835. Halley's Comet passed on November 10th 1835 and Twain was born November 30th 1835. Twain vowed he would "go out"with the passing of the comet, as it passes in 75 year cycles. Halley's comet passed again April 20th 1910, Twain passed April 21st 1910.
mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet
they rely on herd mentality, all vaccines do, of every kind of vaccine. no vaccine is 100% effective, ever, nor is that even theoretically possible
if say 90% work, and all kids get the vaccine, that 90% represents a wall, a certain level of impenetrability for the disease into a given population: no vectors or outbreak paths possible
but if say, only half get vaccinated, only 45% of kids are effectively vaccinated, and for the disease, this represents an explosion of possible vectors for further spread in a given population, and to stay and further reinfect
i don't know what this kind of scientific study is called, but someone could, given the vaccination rate, and certain characteristics of a disease (mode of transmission, ease of transmission, infectious period, latency, chronic infection rate, etc), they could calculate a % for effective vaccinations in a given population. where above that %, most kids don't get sick, and below that %, outbreaks become possible. a sort of critical threshold of effective vaccination across which mass infections and deaths become possible
i bet someone could prove, mathematically, and with surveys of parents in areas where measles and mumps outbreaks occurred, what effect this man's lies had on death rates in some parts of the western world where his lies were widespread. charge him, charge jenny mccarthy, charge other prominent loud ignorant voices in this vaccination=autism movement with mass murder. i'm serious, these people are lethal and must be stopped
the great lesson is: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. any parent who isn't getting their kid's vaccinated is depending on every other kid to keep their kid healthy. and if enough parents think like that, kids die
and then charge those asshole parents with irresponsible ignorant murder too
it is hard to quantify, but the amount of idiots of didn't get their kids vaccinated because of this guy's "research" probably resulted in many unnecessary deaths of children. and this includes children who were vaccinated: an effective vaccine relies on "herd immunity". if enough kids are resistant to say, whooping cough, whooping cough can't get a leg up into a given population. but if enough aren't immune, the disease gets a certain amount of circulation in the community, and is able to try to infect many more kids. eventually, it is able to infect kids of parents who dutifully got their kids vaccinated (since for every vaccination, many vaccines don't take), and eventually, it is able to kill many kids
oh, and someone infect jenny mccarthy with whooping cough, that ignorant bitch. let her know what her "advocacy" really means
if you use thorium powered nuclear reactors, we have domestic reserves. and there's no fundamentalists on the sun
lithium comes from bolivia. evo morales is friendly with hugo chavez, but also lula in brazil, so he's just playing the room, he's not crazy. he wants to help the indigenous populations, being that he is bolivia's first indigenous president
yes, Saudi Arabia would probably still be barbaric. but at least it would be poor, its level of prosperity equal to its medieval set of values and beliefs. rather than artificially inflated by oil reserves, which allows them to export Wahabbism to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Without oil in Saudi Arabia, there never would have been a 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden would be a goat herder.
"Hell, he even told us about how he shot a buck in some guy's front yard"
and that's what always bothered me about some people who complain about limits on their freedom. they really are complaining about their "right" to impose on the freedoms of others
the rest of your post is spot on. but no service is done to the cause of freedom when you confuse freedom with your "right" to impose on others
for example: the right to smoke in an office, or a bar, or on the street. what about my right to fresh air? so the real story with smoking, and with you shooting deer in someone else's yard, is less about loss of "freedom", and more about complaining about the loss of license to impose on other people's rights and freedoms
ummm... what? there's no appreciable coal deposits in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia paying West Virginia for coal isn't exactly a problem. Because the net flow of cash is to West Virginia, not Saudi Arabia. Yes, there's a lot of money floating around in the world of finance, and Saudi Arabia can and does partake of that. But the essential problem is the creation of cash, oodles of it, just for sitting on top of a bathtub full of crude. Not some bond holder skimming off a little extra value for what goes on elsewhere in the world.
if the usa stopped buying oil from canada, the price of oil on the world stage would drop. price is a simple function of supply and demand. saudi arabia would get less money
besides, my call to buy electric and not ICE cars is a call to the world, not just the american consumer. anyone who is bothered by islamic extremism can stop funding islamic extremism just by buying an electric car, nevermind all the other good reason why they should be doing that
the amount of money people pay to saudi arabia is a function of worldwide demand. and my call to buy electric cars does not apply to only american people
less demand for product x=lower price for product x=less money for supplier of product x
it's just simple economics
do you want fight islamic extremism? buy an electric car. never mind all the other good reasons to do that
how do you detect a socially organized click fraud? you would have random time periods, random IPs, random locations...
i call bullshit on "Fraudulent clicks, and in particular scripted ones, are pretty easy to detect."
well, if someone clicked the same ad on a one minute interval from the same IP, yeah, I can see your point, that's an easy script to detect
but anything more technically sophisticated than that, i don't think that's easy to stop. especially if there is an Anonymous social networking component to it. No black list of bot IPs... a level of technical sophistication...
but, come to think of hit: heck, who needs the scripts?
just have people click the ads once, and only once... but done by tens of thousands of real people, Anonymous actors. tell them to do it at random times, so you can't isolate a given time period
you're not going to detect that or in any way isolate that from genuine clicks, i challenge you about how you are going to isolate that
Not because of the environment, but so we stop funding Saudi Arabia. If it weren't for oil, Saudi Arabia would be a few poor camel herders in the desert, and their children would look on their ultraconservative religious views and go "I'm outta here," and ultraconservative Islam would die as a force in this world.
But we are artificially maintaining Saudi Arabia's Wahabbi beliefs every time we fill up our fuel tanks, and Saudi Arabia exports ultraconservative Wahabbism to Pakistan, to absolutely wonderful results, sarcasm clearly intended.
Value systems and cultural believe systems that work in this world create value for their societies and result in rich societies. And those values and beliefs are therefore furthered. Meanwhile, broken value systems and abusive cultural believe systems that don't work in this world result in impoverished suffering societies no one wants to be a part of, and so those societies change to seek out more prosperity. But if your society is sitting upon a giant vat of petroleum, and other societies pay you trillions for that, there's no reason to change, and so you keep these medieval belief systems, because you can afford to do that. We need to make sure Saudi Arabia can't afford to do that anymore.
If Islamic extremism bothers you, then your next automobile purchase should be electric. There's very little you can do in this world as an individual to right horrible complicated wrongs. But here is one clear way you can.
new Anonymous gameplan: find a list of the most expensive google adwords, script them to be clicked like mad, cause millions of dollars in costs in no time
but... all you really are doing is paying google. but... you are also ruining faith in their ad program. hmmm. quite the powerful little prank
i remember an article, awhile back, that said the most expensive word in google's adword program (where advertisers pay a biddable amount each time someone clicks on their ad when someone searches for that word) was not some sex-related term, not some date site term, but... drum roll please... mesothelioma
if you searched for that word, and clicked on an ad next to the search results, you were costing that advertiser something like $10 just for that click
Slashdot Mirror
this dynamic is pretty much the driving force in all of politics
in a totally free market place, everyone behaves themselves (placid libertarian lie)
vs
you need a strong government heavily regulating a market to keep it fair (ugly truth)
or
everyone guaranteed the same reward leads to a happy productive society (placid communist lie)
vs
if i am going to get the same as that guy busting his ass off over there, why work at all? (ugly truth)
the truth is often ugly in this world. in fact, at times, it is very, very ugly. enough of it, and people will get depressed. this is why we tell ourselves pleasant lies, and believe them: to make our lives livable, to smile when we get up in the morning. take any central tenet of your belief system, and at it's core is a nice pleasant lie. but without that lie, you pretty much lose all motivation to wake up in the morning
us human beings are weak. we need pleasant lies, pleasant whitewashing and wallpapering over of the ugliness of reality with little pleasant ideas that simply aren't true. look at all of religion. for those of you who mock religion, i simply say that if you removed it in many people's lives, they'd just kill themselves. so let them continue on in their lie, if their belief is innocuous. yes, there are dangerous religious fundamentalists. go ahead and fight them. but leave the vast majority of believers alone: they are harmless, and destroying their beliefs only destroys their desire to live, so that makes you the greater evil than the lies they tell themselves about the afterlife and invisible sky people. we're not all made to be great logicians and philosophers. leave the simple folk alone, you are only molesting their peace and causing them pain if you think bringing home to them the truth about their simple lies is doing any good in this world. that's a pleasant lie you tell yourself, in fact, that a strident atheism is helping anyone in this world. no, its just another form of intolerant religious fundamentalism, in fact
so that's why i say this: if more people read mark twain because we cut out a word considered nasty in today's world, guess what? i'm all for it. they read great literature
of course some of you consider this horribly wrong. well guess what: your belief that not white washing ugly truths leads to a better world is a pacid lie you tell yourself, and i challenge you to understand that whitewashing the past is actually psychologically normal, and will never stop, and you should just get used to it. not because it is good, not because it is bad. because it just is, and its never going away. its a simple facet of human pscyhology and how we cope with the past: we censor it, as individuals, and as a society
do you know he's currently on the ny times best seller list?
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html
how'd he do that? he wrote a book, said "wait 100 years before publishing", and they did, and here he is, selling a new book, in 2011
quite an impressive man
and did you know about twain and halley's comet?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_connection_between_Mark_twain_and_Halley's_comet
mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet
LOL
but that would just further the anti-vaccination myth. it would boomerang ...the hero of the movie could kill zombies with a boomerang!
symbolism! we could pepper the movie with references to common social issues in epidemiology!
they rely on herd mentality, all vaccines do, of every kind of vaccine. no vaccine is 100% effective, ever, nor is that even theoretically possible
if say 90% work, and all kids get the vaccine, that 90% represents a wall, a certain level of impenetrability for the disease into a given population: no vectors or outbreak paths possible
but if say, only half get vaccinated, only 45% of kids are effectively vaccinated, and for the disease, this represents an explosion of possible vectors for further spread in a given population, and to stay and further reinfect
i don't know what this kind of scientific study is called, but someone could, given the vaccination rate, and certain characteristics of a disease (mode of transmission, ease of transmission, infectious period, latency, chronic infection rate, etc), they could calculate a % for effective vaccinations in a given population. where above that %, most kids don't get sick, and below that %, outbreaks become possible. a sort of critical threshold of effective vaccination across which mass infections and deaths become possible
i bet someone could prove, mathematically, and with surveys of parents in areas where measles and mumps outbreaks occurred, what effect this man's lies had on death rates in some parts of the western world where his lies were widespread. charge him, charge jenny mccarthy, charge other prominent loud ignorant voices in this vaccination=autism movement with mass murder. i'm serious, these people are lethal and must be stopped
the great lesson is: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. any parent who isn't getting their kid's vaccinated is depending on every other kid to keep their kid healthy. and if enough parents think like that, kids die
and then charge those asshole parents with irresponsible ignorant murder too
it is hard to quantify, but the amount of idiots of didn't get their kids vaccinated because of this guy's "research" probably resulted in many unnecessary deaths of children. and this includes children who were vaccinated: an effective vaccine relies on "herd immunity". if enough kids are resistant to say, whooping cough, whooping cough can't get a leg up into a given population. but if enough aren't immune, the disease gets a certain amount of circulation in the community, and is able to try to infect many more kids. eventually, it is able to infect kids of parents who dutifully got their kids vaccinated (since for every vaccination, many vaccines don't take), and eventually, it is able to kill many kids
oh, and someone infect jenny mccarthy with whooping cough, that ignorant bitch. let her know what her "advocacy" really means
but i saw this coming
no, that would be:
moxie marlinspike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
bonus points, he looks like a hippie dr. who:
http://www.google.com/images?q=moxie+marlinspike
no
but the reception was at the top of a grand staircase
after 3 hours of trying to figure out how to use the stairs, the dalek's leveled the entire building in frustration and anger
the new bad blood will serve forthcoming dr. who episodes very well, so, all in all, a good wedding for fans
genius: how much does it cost to charge a car? not in the future, right now. look it up. thanks
you really should try to understand the subject before spouting off about it
enlightenment?
when we stopped using horses and switched to petroleum, was the us and canadian economy hurt? lot of horse raising then
so if we start using CHEAPER electricity, are the economies hurt?
think
LOL
someone needs to introduce you to 4chan and anonymous
if you believe that, you have idea what economics is, and so you should stop talking about the subject
if you use thorium powered nuclear reactors, we have domestic reserves. and there's no fundamentalists on the sun
lithium comes from bolivia. evo morales is friendly with hugo chavez, but also lula in brazil, so he's just playing the room, he's not crazy. he wants to help the indigenous populations, being that he is bolivia's first indigenous president
yes, Saudi Arabia would probably still be barbaric. but at least it would be poor, its level of prosperity equal to its medieval set of values and beliefs. rather than artificially inflated by oil reserves, which allows them to export Wahabbism to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Without oil in Saudi Arabia, there never would have been a 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden would be a goat herder.
"Hell, he even told us about how he shot a buck in some guy's front yard"
and that's what always bothered me about some people who complain about limits on their freedom. they really are complaining about their "right" to impose on the freedoms of others
the rest of your post is spot on. but no service is done to the cause of freedom when you confuse freedom with your "right" to impose on others
for example: the right to smoke in an office, or a bar, or on the street. what about my right to fresh air? so the real story with smoking, and with you shooting deer in someone else's yard, is less about loss of "freedom", and more about complaining about the loss of license to impose on other people's rights and freedoms
ummm... what? there's no appreciable coal deposits in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia paying West Virginia for coal isn't exactly a problem. Because the net flow of cash is to West Virginia, not Saudi Arabia. Yes, there's a lot of money floating around in the world of finance, and Saudi Arabia can and does partake of that. But the essential problem is the creation of cash, oodles of it, just for sitting on top of a bathtub full of crude. Not some bond holder skimming off a little extra value for what goes on elsewhere in the world.
if the usa stopped buying oil from canada, the price of oil on the world stage would drop. price is a simple function of supply and demand. saudi arabia would get less money
besides, my call to buy electric and not ICE cars is a call to the world, not just the american consumer. anyone who is bothered by islamic extremism can stop funding islamic extremism just by buying an electric car, nevermind all the other good reason why they should be doing that
you didn't notice all the fundamentalist madrassas and mujahedin saudi arabia exports to pakistan and afghanistan?
with whose money is that made possible?
with money that some soccer mom provided when she filled up her minivan
the amount of money people pay to saudi arabia is a function of worldwide demand. and my call to buy electric cars does not apply to only american people
less demand for product x=lower price for product x=less money for supplier of product x
it's just simple economics
do you want fight islamic extremism? buy an electric car. never mind all the other good reasons to do that
really?
how do you detect a socially organized click fraud? you would have random time periods, random IPs, random locations...
i call bullshit on "Fraudulent clicks, and in particular scripted ones, are pretty easy to detect."
well, if someone clicked the same ad on a one minute interval from the same IP, yeah, I can see your point, that's an easy script to detect
but anything more technically sophisticated than that, i don't think that's easy to stop. especially if there is an Anonymous social networking component to it. No black list of bot IPs... a level of technical sophistication...
but, come to think of hit: heck, who needs the scripts?
just have people click the ads once, and only once... but done by tens of thousands of real people, Anonymous actors. tell them to do it at random times, so you can't isolate a given time period
you're not going to detect that or in any way isolate that from genuine clicks, i challenge you about how you are going to isolate that
Not because of the environment, but so we stop funding Saudi Arabia. If it weren't for oil, Saudi Arabia would be a few poor camel herders in the desert, and their children would look on their ultraconservative religious views and go "I'm outta here," and ultraconservative Islam would die as a force in this world.
But we are artificially maintaining Saudi Arabia's Wahabbi beliefs every time we fill up our fuel tanks, and Saudi Arabia exports ultraconservative Wahabbism to Pakistan, to absolutely wonderful results, sarcasm clearly intended.
Value systems and cultural believe systems that work in this world create value for their societies and result in rich societies. And those values and beliefs are therefore furthered. Meanwhile, broken value systems and abusive cultural believe systems that don't work in this world result in impoverished suffering societies no one wants to be a part of, and so those societies change to seek out more prosperity. But if your society is sitting upon a giant vat of petroleum, and other societies pay you trillions for that, there's no reason to change, and so you keep these medieval belief systems, because you can afford to do that. We need to make sure Saudi Arabia can't afford to do that anymore.
If Islamic extremism bothers you, then your next automobile purchase should be electric. There's very little you can do in this world as an individual to right horrible complicated wrongs. But here is one clear way you can.
LOL
new Anonymous gameplan: find a list of the most expensive google adwords, script them to be clicked like mad, cause millions of dollars in costs in no time
but... all you really are doing is paying google. but... you are also ruining faith in their ad program. hmmm. quite the powerful little prank
i remember an article, awhile back, that said the most expensive word in google's adword program (where advertisers pay a biddable amount each time someone clicks on their ad when someone searches for that word) was not some sex-related term, not some date site term, but... drum roll please... mesothelioma
if you searched for that word, and clicked on an ad next to the search results, you were costing that advertiser something like $10 just for that click
jeepers
Zed, we have a bug.