"It's like dealing with a bunch of raving Creationist lunatics."
Creationists, pro-tabacoo and anti-AGW groups fund and work for the same think tanks that produce the red-herring theories. It may be obvious propoganda but their marketing efforts are nothing short of outstanding. I started debunking denialist on slashdot almost a decade ago, back then almost every one of my posts was modded down, nowadays I get much better treatment from the mods.
It's not the hard core nutjobs that need to be convinced, an impossible task. It's the moderate but disinterested observer who has been befudled by clever marketing. As with educating people about tabacoo and evolution, it's a slow process but a necassary one.
The best tax plan I saw was proposed decades ago, for a flat income tax. One rate (17% I think was the rate at the time) and 1 deduction for everyone of $25,000. The rate would be applied to the difference between what you make and the deduction. So, if you make $26,000 one year, you pay $170. You make $1,026,000, you pay $170,000. Index the deduction base on inflation, and require unanimous approval from both House and Senate to raise the percentage. No other deductions, no loopholes, no exceptions. Poor people pay no taxes, rich people pay big taxes, and everyone is treated equally. Withholding can be handled by multiplying your paycheck by.17 after you reach the $25,000 deduction and sending that in to the IRS.
Obviously this doesn't cover Social Security or Medicare, which are a separate problem. It would also mean thousands of tax lawyers and accountants would be out of work, and it would reduce the power of the Federal Government, so it has zero chance of becoming anything more than a dream.
States haven't been represented in the Senate since Teddy Roosevelt's day, when Senators became publicly elected instead of being chosen by state governments.
What it does is, it eliminates one possible cause of errors. Software that doesn't do bounds checking, for instance, is like uncalibrated measuring instruments. Writing 100 numbers into an array of 10 integers will cause 90 numbers to be written into random areas of memory, and you can't be guaranteed that they aren't affecting other parts of your model, including parts that have been calculated previously and which are now overwritten by false values. I saw something just like this when converting a legacy communications package from Fortran to C, all through the code the previous programmers had defined 16 character strings and were writing 256 characters into them, due to a change in one constant that wasn't used to define the array bounds. Fortunately the problem caused the C code to crash, but the Fortran code would occasionally produce strange results, caused by this coding error.
I've been a programmer for 30 years, and a science geek for longer than that, and I would assume that a scientist would be in favor of eliminating as many potential errors as possible in the instruments they use, whether the instruments are hardware or software.
This seems logical, and jibes with my experience so far, in possibly explaining why my time sense is skewed longer than my contemporaries. For me time goes by very slowly even though I'm just over 50. I'm trying to learn Japanese and occasionally trying my had at photography, as well as trying to keep up with learning more programming things for my day job. Used to be a voracious book reader and TV watcher, but now I'm more active in going out and looking for new things on the Internet. Trying to stay in "learning mode" as much as possible, and hopefully avoiding the Alzheimer's that took my father and grandfather. Except for during work when time drags on and on, I don't really mind having a slower time sense.
It's strange, I have this discussion with my older siblings (20 and 18 years older, and I'm 51). For them time is rushing past, and years seem to go by quickly. For me, time has slowed down drastically from what it felt like years ago. I don't know for sure, but about 7 years ago I started unintentionally reducing the time I spend watching TV. Now I go days without watching anything (and missing some programs I would like to watch but forget about). I spend a huge amount of time reading articles and looking for things on the Internet, and can spend hours randomly surfing Youtube. I don't read as many books as I used to, and except for the odd photography magazine I've bailed out on magazines altogether. About all I read in book form now are manga takubon, and maybe 8 or 9 times a year I'll re-read one of my paperbacks. I study Japanese for about an hour a night after work, and work days drag on and on. I just got back from Christmas vacation with my family about 4 weeks ago, and it seems like 4 months. It may be that I perceive the time when I'm not doing things I want to do as taking longer than things I do, like time off from work. The time between vacations feels like forever.
I don't know, all I know is time seems to go by at the same rate as it did back when I was in college 30 years ago, so maybe it's a good thing.
I'm an old enough fart to have been taught English grammar in school. One of the things that stood me in good stead when I got into computer programming, especially AI, was the ability to parse a sentence. Knowing that languages have rules, and that computer languages are mainly intended to be read by humans, helped in learning languages like C and Smalltalk. At an early age I got turned on to Reader's Digest "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power". Thanks to those articles and to some very good teachers of English and Latin, I have a vocabulary that occasionally surprises people, mainly because I grew up in Appalachia, and most people don't expect erudition from that area. My honors English teacher was a college teacher in the 40's and 50's, and by the time I got into college in the mid-70's I found the English classes to be much easier than high school, thanks to her.
Interestingly enough, I saw a program on NHKWorld concerning the same problem, that teachers and companies are finding students and graduates that don't have a good grasp of Japanese grammar and vocabulary. Companies are having to set up remedial Japanese classes in order for their employees to be able to do their jobs. That, and apparently Japan has fallen from the top in math scores as well, according to an article we read in my Japanese class.
Not only that, but if at some future time "religious whackjobs" take over the government and force public schools to teach "anti-science" these same Slashdotters would be singing a different tune.
The majority of people have the mistaken idea that just because things are the way they are now, that they'll always stay that way. Usually it's younger people who haven't been around long enough to see change that feel that way, but many adults nowadays seem to do so, as well.
Employers (and those that hire contractors) very seldom appreciate breadth of experience in how affects the ability to come up to speed on new systems. I've programmed satellite data analysis systems in Fortran, AI assistants in Smalltalk, mortgage-backed transaction systems in C++, and a dozen or so smaller things in Perl and Korn shell and now Java. There's very little you could throw at me that I can't learn quickly, but it doesn't matter to hiring managers. Unless you have the specific checkboxes and exactly the minimum years experience in that particular language/OS, anything related (like C++ to Java) is ignored. I've been unemployed for far too many long stretches because I didn't meet the specifics. Currently working as a mid-Junior level Java programmer for half my previous rate, solely because they need clearable Java programmers and are experimenting to see if older C++ programmers can be "rehabilitated" into the new language. So far the 25 years of OO programming (20 in C++) seems to have helped...
Nope, haven't stopped learning, in fact I've done so many different systems and used so many different languages that picking up the new ones is a matter of 1-2 weeks. Unfortunately, companies don't want to spend weeks on someone coming up to speed, and in my case, for example, treat 20+ years of C++ as worthless when it comes to programming (or even learning) Java. As far as contracting goes, did that for about 8 years until the contracts started drying up or going to India. People who would be willing to hire contractors are just as picky or more so than regular employers. Look around and see how many 52 year old contractors you see in the industry (that aren't management).
There's a bell curve at play, though, which peaks at about age 35. After that experience becomes a detraction, and unless you settle on one company that looks stable enough to keep you till retirement, going from job to job will lead to decreasing salaries/rates.
Michael Totten is a foreign correspondent and Michael Yon is a combat correspondent who have reported from Afghanistan and Iraq, and who are funded mainly from reader donations.
These places are month-to-month, so you can stay as long as you pay. Now if you mean "long-term" to be "permanent resident" that's different, but in that case you have a whole lot of other headaches besides finding a place to live.
There are a couple of companies that offer month-to-month short term leases to gaijin in Tokyo, the largest one being Sakura House. I stayed at one of their 100,000 yen/month places for about 4 weeks in '07. Not big, but it had a bed, a stove, a sink, a bath and toilet, a refrigerator, and all utilities included (including wired Internet access). For my purposes (trying to cram as much sightseeing into 4 weeks as possible) it was much better and cheaper than a hotel, and it was good to know I had a place to keep my stuff. It was great too, in that there was only a security deposit (which I got 2/3 back when I checked out) and I didn't need a co-signer or Japanese native to vouch for me. I did try to keep electricity usage to a minimum (no need to run the aircon when I was trudging around in the Tokyo summer, but when I got back...)
The apartments where I stayed at in Monzennakacho were 8 tatami in size, about 13 square meters. Granted, that was only about the size of my living room here in the States, but it was more than enough to hold my stuff and the souvenirs I bought. Can't wait to go back...
We used to have to get up half an hour before we went to bed, look at a handful of cold gravel for breakfast, code 35 hours a day downstream from the mill, lick the lake clean, and come home where Dad would kill us and dance on our graves.
You try to tell kids that these days, they'll never believe you.
So for that reason, that there are non-statisticians interested in the data, it should not be released, nor should the specific "automated statistical tests" which were used to reject data, because the non-statisticians wouldn't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's like dealing with a bunch of raving Creationist lunatics." Creationists, pro-tabacoo and anti-AGW groups fund and work for the same think tanks that produce the red-herring theories. It may be obvious propoganda but their marketing efforts are nothing short of outstanding. I started debunking denialist on slashdot almost a decade ago, back then almost every one of my posts was modded down, nowadays I get much better treatment from the mods. It's not the hard core nutjobs that need to be convinced, an impossible task. It's the moderate but disinterested observer who has been befudled by clever marketing. As with educating people about tabacoo and evolution, it's a slow process but a necassary one.
Conspiracy!
Wouldn't that be "anyone who can build a boat can be a Cretan"?
The best tax plan I saw was proposed decades ago, for a flat income tax. One rate (17% I think was the rate at the time) and 1 deduction for everyone of $25,000. The rate would be applied to the difference between what you make and the deduction. So, if you make $26,000 one year, you pay $170. You make $1,026,000, you pay $170,000. Index the deduction base on inflation, and require unanimous approval from both House and Senate to raise the percentage. No other deductions, no loopholes, no exceptions. Poor people pay no taxes, rich people pay big taxes, and everyone is treated equally. Withholding can be handled by multiplying your paycheck by .17 after you reach the $25,000 deduction and sending that in to the IRS.
Obviously this doesn't cover Social Security or Medicare, which are a separate problem. It would also mean thousands of tax lawyers and accountants would be out of work, and it would reduce the power of the Federal Government, so it has zero chance of becoming anything more than a dream.
States haven't been represented in the Senate since Teddy Roosevelt's day, when Senators became publicly elected instead of being chosen by state governments.
I think those are called "SmartCars". And they're "Better 'cause they're Greener"
What it does is, it eliminates one possible cause of errors. Software that doesn't do bounds checking, for instance, is like uncalibrated measuring instruments. Writing 100 numbers into an array of 10 integers will cause 90 numbers to be written into random areas of memory, and you can't be guaranteed that they aren't affecting other parts of your model, including parts that have been calculated previously and which are now overwritten by false values. I saw something just like this when converting a legacy communications package from Fortran to C, all through the code the previous programmers had defined 16 character strings and were writing 256 characters into them, due to a change in one constant that wasn't used to define the array bounds. Fortunately the problem caused the C code to crash, but the Fortran code would occasionally produce strange results, caused by this coding error.
I've been a programmer for 30 years, and a science geek for longer than that, and I would assume that a scientist would be in favor of eliminating as many potential errors as possible in the instruments they use, whether the instruments are hardware or software.
Maybe he needs pharmacology.
This seems logical, and jibes with my experience so far, in possibly explaining why my time sense is skewed longer than my contemporaries. For me time goes by very slowly even though I'm just over 50. I'm trying to learn Japanese and occasionally trying my had at photography, as well as trying to keep up with learning more programming things for my day job. Used to be a voracious book reader and TV watcher, but now I'm more active in going out and looking for new things on the Internet. Trying to stay in "learning mode" as much as possible, and hopefully avoiding the Alzheimer's that took my father and grandfather. Except for during work when time drags on and on, I don't really mind having a slower time sense.
It's strange, I have this discussion with my older siblings (20 and 18 years older, and I'm 51). For them time is rushing past, and years seem to go by quickly. For me, time has slowed down drastically from what it felt like years ago. I don't know for sure, but about 7 years ago I started unintentionally reducing the time I spend watching TV. Now I go days without watching anything (and missing some programs I would like to watch but forget about). I spend a huge amount of time reading articles and looking for things on the Internet, and can spend hours randomly surfing Youtube. I don't read as many books as I used to, and except for the odd photography magazine I've bailed out on magazines altogether. About all I read in book form now are manga takubon, and maybe 8 or 9 times a year I'll re-read one of my paperbacks. I study Japanese for about an hour a night after work, and work days drag on and on. I just got back from Christmas vacation with my family about 4 weeks ago, and it seems like 4 months. It may be that I perceive the time when I'm not doing things I want to do as taking longer than things I do, like time off from work. The time between vacations feels like forever.
I don't know, all I know is time seems to go by at the same rate as it did back when I was in college 30 years ago, so maybe it's a good thing.
And I have this pain in all the diodes on my right side, oh I'm so depressed...
I once encountered some Canadian girls telling me that the second person plural 'you' is 'you guys'. Seriously.
Utter nonsense, everyone knows the second person plural is "y'all".
I'm an old enough fart to have been taught English grammar in school. One of the things that stood me in good stead when I got into computer programming, especially AI, was the ability to parse a sentence. Knowing that languages have rules, and that computer languages are mainly intended to be read by humans, helped in learning languages like C and Smalltalk. At an early age I got turned on to Reader's Digest "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power". Thanks to those articles and to some very good teachers of English and Latin, I have a vocabulary that occasionally surprises people, mainly because I grew up in Appalachia, and most people don't expect erudition from that area. My honors English teacher was a college teacher in the 40's and 50's, and by the time I got into college in the mid-70's I found the English classes to be much easier than high school, thanks to her.
Interestingly enough, I saw a program on NHKWorld concerning the same problem, that teachers and companies are finding students and graduates that don't have a good grasp of Japanese grammar and vocabulary. Companies are having to set up remedial Japanese classes in order for their employees to be able to do their jobs. That, and apparently Japan has fallen from the top in math scores as well, according to an article we read in my Japanese class.
Not only that, but if at some future time "religious whackjobs" take over the government and force public schools to teach "anti-science" these same Slashdotters would be singing a different tune.
The majority of people have the mistaken idea that just because things are the way they are now, that they'll always stay that way. Usually it's younger people who haven't been around long enough to see change that feel that way, but many adults nowadays seem to do so, as well.
Employers (and those that hire contractors) very seldom appreciate breadth of experience in how affects the ability to come up to speed on new systems. I've programmed satellite data analysis systems in Fortran, AI assistants in Smalltalk, mortgage-backed transaction systems in C++, and a dozen or so smaller things in Perl and Korn shell and now Java. There's very little you could throw at me that I can't learn quickly, but it doesn't matter to hiring managers. Unless you have the specific checkboxes and exactly the minimum years experience in that particular language/OS, anything related (like C++ to Java) is ignored. I've been unemployed for far too many long stretches because I didn't meet the specifics. Currently working as a mid-Junior level Java programmer for half my previous rate, solely because they need clearable Java programmers and are experimenting to see if older C++ programmers can be "rehabilitated" into the new language. So far the 25 years of OO programming (20 in C++) seems to have helped...
Nope, haven't stopped learning, in fact I've done so many different systems and used so many different languages that picking up the new ones is a matter of 1-2 weeks. Unfortunately, companies don't want to spend weeks on someone coming up to speed, and in my case, for example, treat 20+ years of C++ as worthless when it comes to programming (or even learning) Java. As far as contracting goes, did that for about 8 years until the contracts started drying up or going to India. People who would be willing to hire contractors are just as picky or more so than regular employers. Look around and see how many 52 year old contractors you see in the industry (that aren't management).
There's a bell curve at play, though, which peaks at about age 35. After that experience becomes a detraction, and unless you settle on one company that looks stable enough to keep you till retirement, going from job to job will lead to decreasing salaries/rates.
Michael Totten is a foreign correspondent and Michael Yon is a combat correspondent who have reported from Afghanistan and Iraq, and who are funded mainly from reader donations.
And you can become a manager, and undo the things others do...
Aye sink ewe knead two get hay gnu spill chucker, lake thee won aye rote four dose peephole.
Maybe that's my problem, I've been living within my standard deviations.
Of course, I could be living well above my substandard deviations...
But then again my deviations are anything but standard....
Thanks, I'll be here all week, be sure to tip your waitress, but not so much that she falls over...
These places are month-to-month, so you can stay as long as you pay. Now if you mean "long-term" to be "permanent resident" that's different, but in that case you have a whole lot of other headaches besides finding a place to live.
There are a couple of companies that offer month-to-month short term leases to gaijin in Tokyo, the largest one being Sakura House. I stayed at one of their 100,000 yen/month places for about 4 weeks in '07. Not big, but it had a bed, a stove, a sink, a bath and toilet, a refrigerator, and all utilities included (including wired Internet access). For my purposes (trying to cram as much sightseeing into 4 weeks as possible) it was much better and cheaper than a hotel, and it was good to know I had a place to keep my stuff. It was great too, in that there was only a security deposit (which I got 2/3 back when I checked out) and I didn't need a co-signer or Japanese native to vouch for me. I did try to keep electricity usage to a minimum (no need to run the aircon when I was trudging around in the Tokyo summer, but when I got back...) The apartments where I stayed at in Monzennakacho were 8 tatami in size, about 13 square meters. Granted, that was only about the size of my living room here in the States, but it was more than enough to hold my stuff and the souvenirs I bought. Can't wait to go back...
We used to have to get up half an hour before we went to bed, look at a handful of cold gravel for breakfast, code 35 hours a day downstream from the mill, lick the lake clean, and come home where Dad would kill us and dance on our graves.
You try to tell kids that these days, they'll never believe you.
So for that reason, that there are non-statisticians interested in the data, it should not be released, nor should the specific "automated statistical tests" which were used to reject data, because the non-statisticians wouldn't understand.
As long as "bad data" is not defined as "data that doesn't match our models' results"...