You make it sound awfully high-minded and artfully constructed. It looks to me more like a crude political compromise to get Rhode Island, Delaware and Georgia to sign on to this Constitution thing without feeling like Virginia and New York were going to completely trample them. It's tempting to see everything the founding fathers did as wonderfully wise and perfect. But while they were quite amazingly far-sighted, they were also politicians cutting deals to get things done within the partisan realities of the day.
Since roughly the election of Andrew Jackson, quite a few people have felt that the President ought to be a direct representative of the People, which would argue for a popular vote.
But even if you think of the President as a representative of state legislatures, as the founders might, the electoral college is lame. The modern effect is to give citizens of smaller states a disproportionate say in selecting the President. While this is hailed as protecting the rights of smaller states, if that's the goal it's ridiculously inadequate. The demographics of state populations today just aren't comparable to when the Constitution was adopted. It's hard to imagine a polarizing big-state-vs-little state issue today, but if there was one and it drove a presidential election, the big states would roll over the little ones without difficulty. 51% of the votes in the biggest eleven states wins all by itself.
The modern effect of the Electoral college is that only battlegound states matter. Nobody campaigns in California, nor in Wyoming; it's all about Ohio and Florida. It doesn't ensure popularity in a wide area; it ensures that the concerns of most voters are irrelevant. In the last election, there was no point in either candidate courting voters in either the biggest or smallest state, because everyone knew how their votes were going to go, and everywhere but Nebraska and Maine is winner-take all.
It doesn't ensure the President is "representative of a diverse electorate" - it encourages the opposite; a President who can appeal to a few very narrow key demographics to push them over the top in a handful of states.
"Who, what, where, when? If you're trying to make an argument you will need to provide more than conjecture."
The overt, offered reason for enacting Social Security in the first place was a class of indigent elderly persons that had grown to crisis proportions. My understanding of the demographics of the time is that these people did in fact exist. If you would like to conjecture that they did not exist, and vast numbers of census records, etc. were faked in some conspiracy to enact social security for some other purpose, I think the burden of proof is on you.
"No government mandate is necessary. However a government is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights such as the right to property."
You believe that your right to own some piece of property exists in some meaningful sense even if no government mandate enforces it and nobody around you agrees that you own the property in question? That's an interesting opinion. What if the guy next to you had exactly the same belief about the same piece of property?
"Is that it or were you going to explain how/why you don't agree?"
I thought it was obvious, but I can spell it out: I think you think the government should force people to ascribe to social contracts in some circumstances. For example, I think you think the government should force me to respect your property rights. So if you claim to object to Social Security based on some idea that the government shouldn't force people to do things, I find that disingenuous. I will reject such an argument out of hand, because I don't think you really believe the principle you're claiming to rest on.
If you want to provide an argument I will think about and be potentially swayed by, you'll have to argue why government shouldn't force people to do this particular thing; i.e. ensure that members of our society too old to work retain some minimal non-starvation standard of living even if they don't manage to ensure this for themselves. I (bleeding heart liberal that I am) tend to believe that this is something we as a society can do and should do, and that government is a reasonable way to do it. So it will be a tough sell, but if you want to make a pitch I'll think about it. It's only the blanket claim "Government shouldn't force people to do things" that I reject immediately, because clearly even you don't believe it.
If you wanted to argue that society, via government, should take care of the indigent elderly, but that Social Security specifically was a poorly constructed program, doomed to eventual failure, well then I'd just agree.
Yes, well, we used to do it that way. Some of those pesky elderly poor were starving to death in the streets. Most unsightly. Really brought down property values.
Hey, speaking of property values -
Do you support a government mandate forcing everyone to agree with your opinion that you own property?
If you want to argue social security is badly set up, I'll agree. If you want to argue it's a bad idea in the first place, I'll disagree. If you say you think government shouldn't ever force people to ascribe to social contracts, I don't believe you.
"Using that logic would clearly negate a bailout of GM, Chrysler and possibly Ford. "
Sounds like good logic then.
"Harvesting the moon and moving into the solar system will happen."
Seems unlikely. I mean, sure, space colonies sound wicked cool to geek like me who have read too much scifi, but realistically? It's fantastically hard to get to. It's vastly more hostile to life than any of the huge number of places on earth considered too unpleasant to live. And there's nothing there.
I mean, wake me when the Antarctic ice sheet and the entire ocean floor are populated; we can talk about the lack of air in space...
The void in our launch capabilities left by the shuttle is mainly a void in our manned launch capabilities. Since that's a void in our ability to senselessly blow money for nothing, it would be nice to let it slide.
The "moon mission" and eventual mars mission are indeed red herrings. They prevent us from serious discussion of NASA priorities, and probably will for years, all to provide a few days distraction from bad news Bush didn't want to deal with years ago. I can't even remember what the thing he wanted to distract us from was; all that's left is this rotting herring.
"'A Spherical estimation is good enough for most purposes.'
True, at least by the old engineer's rule of thumb that only three places are significant for practical purposes.
But there are some situations where it's not good enough. One is if you're dealing with the orbits of satellites."
That's what I was trying to get at: there are times when a spherical approximation isn't good enough, but in every of those, an ellipsoid approximation isn't good enough either.
I've lived in a direct democracy (as many small towns in New England are); it mostly worked pretty well.
People can act pretty responsibly when it's a "mob" of people who care enough to show up for town meeting and listen to and participate in discussions of issues right there with people they know.
All the problems you list strike me as far less prevalent at town meeting than any other system of government I've experienced.
"NIST has changed its story on how WTC 7 fell 3 times now."
Sounds like they don't know. Look:
A couple airplanes hit the main towers - If you want to dispute that, forget it.
It seems entirely possible, that somehow, one way or another, this led to the building next door falling down too. I don't know exactly how; it sounds from your report NIST doesn't know exactly how, but whatever; seems like a posibility. What doesn't seem like a posibility is that anyone would go to the trouble of hijacking airplanes and crashing them into different buildings in order to cover up a demolition that could be much more easily passed off as an entirely ground-based terrorist attack.
So you've got the possibility that the obvious, plausible way things seem to have happened is reality. vs. some huge number of people before and after the event deciding to participate in a conspiracy to cover up, what exactly? What could possibly be covered up by such massive destruction but not more subtle means? in any case, this conspiracy must be brilliant, since theyv'e been so amazingly successful, yet they've pursued this entirely brain-damaged byzantine plan.
"I believe the mathematical term for its shape is a 'prolate sphereoid.'
Oblate spheroid."
Just to descend completely into pedantry: "Geoid". Which is a total cop out of a term, but you're allowed to cop out and make up new terms if your name is Gauss.
A Spherical estimation is good enough for most purposes. Elipsoid or oblate spheroid estimations are better, but as soon as you're looking at scales where they're better, you note that the flattening of the earth is not symetrical; the South pole is significantly flatter than the North (because Antarctica is heavy.)
No. If you do Newtonian mechanics in a rotating reference frame (which is probably a bad idea) you need to include 2 additional forces to make things turn out right. These "forces" don't really exist, they are making up for pretending your reference frame isn't rotating, when actually it is. Centrifugal force pulls objects away from the axis of rotation. Coriolis force acts perpendicular to that on moving objects, making objects otherwise following straight courses curve. (They didn't really curve, your frame turned) Both forces are pretend in the same way that you "pretend" things sitting still on the ground aren't constantly accelerating like crazy which of course they are.
Anyway, people confuse the two all the time, including, (I expect) multiple posters in this thread, possibly including me.
It is not 0 at the equator, it is perpendicular to the ground at the equator. It is effectively 0 at the equator for objects (e.g. storm systems) moving more or less along the ground. So you can "just build it there!" as long as your elevator doesn't involve making any significant altitude changes... Hmmm...
You are correct only in a narrow technical sense that you clearly do not actually understand. The difference between that and being wrong is a bit philosophical for me.
The coriolis effect is not a "force" in the clasical Newtonian definition. The coriolis effect is a real effect, that will cause real problems for anyone trying to build a real space elevator.
"I know this is going to be viewed somewhat as flamebait, but to put it bluntly, doctors are mechanics for the human body"
Yes, and if I want to know how to set the ignition timing on my engine, do I go to a theoretical physicist? Even an automotive design engineer? Or to a mechanic?
You want to know one guys interesting theory about the expression of a particular viral gene? Ask a molecular biologist. You want to know what you should do about a particular medical question in regard to your body, based on a broad understanding and balancing of all available research? Ask a doctor.
Kids who don't get vaccines still get autism at the same rate. That's what proves vaccines don't cause autism. Lack of correlation implies lack of causation.
"Since the cause of autism is unknown, but the incidence of it is up the last few decades, it seems quite likely that at least one of the assertions regarding what supposedly doesn't cause it may be wrong."
Or that we just don't know. It is perfectly poisible that we have correctly ruled a bunch of stuff out and still don't know.
I'd like to know what causes autism. I think it's important. A lot of people insist we spend a lot of our energy talking about one of the very few things we know for sure isn't the cause. They are slowing down useful progress, and assuming we ever find a way to prevent autism, their determined ignorance means more people will suffer from it before that happens. They disgust me.
"If germs actually could mutate in a manner that made themselves invulnerable to vaccines, we better start vaccinating the population of the Third World!"
Germs do actually mutate that way, which is why you need to vaccinate people int the third world if you want to eradicate anything.
"Imagine all those non-vaccinated Mexicans with super-mumps and rubella!"
MMR vaccination rates in Mexico exceed those of the US; they're at 98-99%. Ignoring that for a moment, a mostly unvaccinated population would not produce super-mumps, as there would be no selection pressure.
"I actually doubt that vaccinations and antibiotics work in that manner. "
Well, you're actually wrong.
"With the exception of the flu, I'm unaware of a vaccine..."
With the exception of the clear example you're aware of, you're not aware of any? The Flu virus mutates more rapidly than most, but they all mutate. The more Mumps there is around, the more chance of a mutation that gets around the vaccine.
Well, that is a bold statement, and makes me feel much better!
The original posters point that we pay more and get less than comparable countries is completely undermined by your noting that less comparable countries get even less by paying almost nothing.
"First off, we're not a democracy so that doesn't really matter."
Democracy: a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
I'm not sure why you think the US is not a democracy, but I am unable to find a dictionary that would support such a contention.
Your post doesn't become more correct after that. Historically, the state of education in this and other countries improved dramatically with the introduction of universal public education. Of the other wealthy democracies with better educational systems referenced by the other poster, they all have public education too. Generally more of it.
Complex product: A product such that when you point out someone has shipped a billion of them in comparison to Logitech having shipped a billion mice, it doesn't make you look like a twit.
"The ultimate algorithm is called Warnsdorf's heuristic..."
In this, as with so much else, the ultimate algorithm is a lookup table. Back in school, I wrote such a program (in Pascal) in connection with a talk I gave based on this paper:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2690649
which describes on exactly which NxM boards a knights tour is possible. Moreover, it decribes a method for taking a solution for an NxM board that meets certain criteria, and adding 4 rows or columns to it to produce a larger board that also meets those criteria. And it provides appropriate solutions for the 9 starting boards to which you can successively add sets of 4 rows/columns to get any board for which a tour is possible. All without any searching at all. My program spit out whatever order you wanted in roughly as fast as the answer could be output to the screen.
True, writing out a (mostly) pre-generated solution to a problem is not as interesting a program as doing the (unnecessary) search. But for the math geeks out there it's a fun paper; the negative proof for the m=4 case is particularly nifty.
"It was always the payment end of things that made using robots impossible."
No it wasn't; that's ridiculous. I eat at several (cheap) restaurants that have you pay up front at the end - the wait staff doesn't do payment there at all, yet are still plenty busy. On the flip side, payment has to be the easiest part of a waitstaff job to automate.
Good luck getting a robot to understand you want the pickles on the side, and swiss cheese, not cheddar; or to wipe down a table without breaking the salt shaker, or any of the other hundred tasks that will separately require pushing the state of the art, yet are trivial for a human.
But automated payment? We do that now at the supermarket; what's so hard at the bistro?
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound awfully high-minded and artfully constructed. It looks to me more like a crude political compromise to get Rhode Island, Delaware and Georgia to sign on to this Constitution thing without feeling like Virginia and New York were going to completely trample them. It's tempting to see everything the founding fathers did as wonderfully wise and perfect. But while they were quite amazingly far-sighted, they were also politicians cutting deals to get things done within the partisan realities of the day.
Since roughly the election of Andrew Jackson, quite a few people have felt that the President ought to be a direct representative of the People, which would argue for a popular vote.
But even if you think of the President as a representative of state legislatures, as the founders might, the electoral college is lame. The modern effect is to give citizens of smaller states a disproportionate say in selecting the President. While this is hailed as protecting the rights of smaller states, if that's the goal it's ridiculously inadequate. The demographics of state populations today just aren't comparable to when the Constitution was adopted. It's hard to imagine a polarizing big-state-vs-little state issue today, but if there was one and it drove a presidential election, the big states would roll over the little ones without difficulty. 51% of the votes in the biggest eleven states wins all by itself.
The modern effect of the Electoral college is that only battlegound states matter. Nobody campaigns in California, nor in Wyoming; it's all about Ohio and Florida. It doesn't ensure popularity in a wide area; it ensures that the concerns of most voters are irrelevant. In the last election, there was no point in either candidate courting voters in either the biggest or smallest state, because everyone knew how their votes were going to go, and everywhere but Nebraska and Maine is winner-take all.
It doesn't ensure the President is "representative of a diverse electorate" - it encourages the opposite; a President who can appeal to a few very narrow key demographics to push them over the top in a handful of states.
"Who, what, where, when? If you're trying to make an argument you will need to provide more than conjecture."
The overt, offered reason for enacting Social Security in the first place was a class of indigent elderly persons that had grown to crisis proportions. My understanding of the demographics of the time is that these people did in fact exist. If you would like to conjecture that they did not exist, and vast numbers of census records, etc. were faked in some conspiracy to enact social security for some other purpose, I think the burden of proof is on you.
"No government mandate is necessary. However a government is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights such as the right to property."
You believe that your right to own some piece of property exists in some meaningful sense even if no government mandate enforces it and nobody around you agrees that you own the property in question? That's an interesting opinion. What if the guy next to you had exactly the same belief about the same piece of property?
"Is that it or were you going to explain how/why you don't agree?"
I thought it was obvious, but I can spell it out: I think you think the government should force people to ascribe to social contracts in some circumstances. For example, I think you think the government should force me to respect your property rights. So if you claim to object to Social Security based on some idea that the government shouldn't force people to do things, I find that disingenuous. I will reject such an argument out of hand, because I don't think you really believe the principle you're claiming to rest on.
If you want to provide an argument I will think about and be potentially swayed by, you'll have to argue why government shouldn't force people to do this particular thing; i.e. ensure that members of our society too old to work retain some minimal non-starvation standard of living even if they don't manage to ensure this for themselves. I (bleeding heart liberal that I am) tend to believe that this is something we as a society can do and should do, and that government is a reasonable way to do it. So it will be a tough sell, but if you want to make a pitch I'll think about it. It's only the blanket claim "Government shouldn't force people to do things" that I reject immediately, because clearly even you don't believe it.
If you wanted to argue that society, via government, should take care of the indigent elderly, but that Social Security specifically was a poorly constructed program, doomed to eventual failure, well then I'd just agree.
Yes, well, we used to do it that way. Some of those pesky elderly poor were starving to death in the streets. Most unsightly. Really brought down property values.
Hey, speaking of property values -
Do you support a government mandate forcing everyone to agree with your opinion that you own property?
If you want to argue social security is badly set up, I'll agree. If you want to argue it's a bad idea in the first place, I'll disagree. If you say you think government shouldn't ever force people to ascribe to social contracts, I don't believe you.
"Using that logic would clearly negate a bailout of GM, Chrysler and possibly Ford. "
Sounds like good logic then.
"Harvesting the moon and moving into the solar system will happen."
Seems unlikely. I mean, sure, space colonies sound wicked cool to geek like me who have read too much scifi, but realistically? It's fantastically hard to get to. It's vastly more hostile to life than any of the huge number of places on earth considered too unpleasant to live. And there's nothing there.
I mean, wake me when the Antarctic ice sheet and the entire ocean floor are populated; we can talk about the lack of air in space...
The void in our launch capabilities left by the shuttle is mainly a void in our manned launch capabilities. Since that's a void in our ability to senselessly blow money for nothing, it would be nice to let it slide.
The "moon mission" and eventual mars mission are indeed red herrings. They prevent us from serious discussion of NASA priorities, and probably will for years, all to provide a few days distraction from bad news Bush didn't want to deal with years ago. I can't even remember what the thing he wanted to distract us from was; all that's left is this rotting herring.
Your understanding of government "appears to be" at a "similar level" to your understanding of what "quotation marks" are "for".
"'A Spherical estimation is good enough for most purposes.'
True, at least by the old engineer's rule of thumb that only three places are significant for practical purposes.
But there are some situations where it's not good enough. One is if you're dealing with the orbits of satellites."
That's what I was trying to get at: there are times when a spherical approximation isn't good enough, but in every of those, an ellipsoid approximation isn't good enough either.
I've lived in a direct democracy (as many small towns in New England are); it mostly worked pretty well.
People can act pretty responsibly when it's a "mob" of people who care enough to show up for town meeting and listen to and participate in discussions of issues right there with people they know.
All the problems you list strike me as far less prevalent at town meeting than any other system of government I've experienced.
"NIST has changed its story on how WTC 7 fell 3 times now."
Sounds like they don't know.
Look:
A couple airplanes hit the main towers - If you want to dispute that, forget it.
It seems entirely possible, that somehow, one way or another, this led to the building next door falling down too. I don't know exactly how; it sounds from your report NIST doesn't know exactly how, but whatever; seems like a posibility.
What doesn't seem like a posibility is that anyone would go to the trouble of hijacking airplanes and crashing them into different buildings in order to cover up a demolition that could be much more easily passed off as an entirely ground-based terrorist attack.
So you've got the possibility that the obvious, plausible way things seem to have happened is reality. vs. some huge number of people before and after the event deciding to participate in a conspiracy to cover up, what exactly? What could possibly be covered up by such massive destruction but not more subtle means? in any case, this conspiracy must be brilliant, since theyv'e been so amazingly successful, yet they've pursued this entirely brain-damaged byzantine plan.
"I believe the mathematical term for its shape is a 'prolate sphereoid.'
Oblate spheroid."
Just to descend completely into pedantry: "Geoid". Which is a total cop out of a term, but you're allowed to cop out and make up new terms if your name is Gauss.
A Spherical estimation is good enough for most purposes. Elipsoid or oblate spheroid estimations are better, but as soon as you're looking at scales where they're better, you note that the flattening of the earth is not symetrical; the South pole is significantly flatter than the North (because Antarctica is heavy.)
No. If you do Newtonian mechanics in a rotating reference frame (which is probably a bad idea) you need to include 2 additional forces to make things turn out right. These "forces" don't really exist, they are making up for pretending your reference frame isn't rotating, when actually it is. Centrifugal force pulls objects away from the axis of rotation. Coriolis force acts perpendicular to that on moving objects, making objects otherwise following straight courses curve. (They didn't really curve, your frame turned) Both forces are pretend in the same way that you "pretend" things sitting still on the ground aren't constantly accelerating like crazy which of course they are.
Anyway, people confuse the two all the time, including, (I expect) multiple posters in this thread, possibly including me.
It is not 0 at the equator, it is perpendicular to the ground at the equator. It is effectively 0 at the equator for objects (e.g. storm systems) moving more or less along the ground.
So you can "just build it there!" as long as your elevator doesn't involve making any significant altitude changes... Hmmm...
"The coriolis effect is not a real force."
You are correct only in a narrow technical sense that you clearly do not actually understand. The difference between that and being wrong is a bit philosophical for me.
The coriolis effect is not a "force" in the clasical Newtonian definition. The coriolis effect is a real effect, that will cause real problems for anyone trying to build a real space elevator.
"I know this is going to be viewed somewhat as flamebait, but to put it bluntly, doctors are mechanics for the human body"
Yes, and if I want to know how to set the ignition timing on my engine, do I go to a theoretical physicist? Even an automotive design engineer? Or to a mechanic?
You want to know one guys interesting theory about the expression of a particular viral gene? Ask a molecular biologist. You want to know what you should do about a particular medical question in regard to your body, based on a broad understanding and balancing of all available research? Ask a doctor.
Kids who don't get vaccines still get autism at the same rate.
That's what proves vaccines don't cause autism. Lack of correlation implies lack of causation.
"Since the cause of autism is unknown, but the incidence of it is up the last few decades, it seems quite likely that at least one of the assertions regarding what supposedly doesn't cause it may be wrong."
Or that we just don't know. It is perfectly poisible that we have correctly ruled a bunch of stuff out and still don't know.
I'd like to know what causes autism. I think it's important. A lot of people insist we spend a lot of our energy talking about one of the very few things we know for sure isn't the cause. They are slowing down useful progress, and assuming we ever find a way to prevent autism, their determined ignorance means more people will suffer from it before that happens. They disgust me.
"If germs actually could mutate in a manner that made themselves invulnerable to vaccines, we better start vaccinating the population of the Third World!"
Germs do actually mutate that way, which is why you need to vaccinate people int the third world if you want to eradicate anything.
"Imagine all those non-vaccinated Mexicans with super-mumps and rubella!"
MMR vaccination rates in Mexico exceed those of the US; they're at 98-99%. Ignoring that for a moment, a mostly unvaccinated population would not produce super-mumps, as there would be no selection pressure.
"I actually doubt that vaccinations and antibiotics work in that manner. "
Well, you're actually wrong.
"With the exception of the flu, I'm unaware of a vaccine..."
With the exception of the clear example you're aware of, you're not aware of any? The Flu virus mutates more rapidly than most, but they all mutate. The more Mumps there is around, the more chance of a mutation that gets around the vaccine.
Well, that is a bold statement, and makes me feel much better!
The original posters point that we pay more and get less than comparable countries is completely undermined by your noting that less comparable countries get even less by paying almost nothing.
Thanks so much for that insight.
Which wealthy democracies in central Africa are you referring to?
"Why should a private company be required to provide universal education? "
Because they want my tax dollars. If they don't want my tax dollars, than they can take over with their greater efficiency right now.... waiting.
"First off, we're not a democracy so that doesn't really matter."
Democracy: a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
I'm not sure why you think the US is not a democracy, but I am unable to find a dictionary that would support such a contention.
Your post doesn't become more correct after that. Historically, the state of education in this and other countries improved dramatically with the introduction of universal public education. Of the other wealthy democracies with better educational systems referenced by the other poster, they all have public education too. Generally more of it.
It's a gee-wiz line in a press interview, not an engineering spec. Comprehend the quote.
Complex product: A product such that when you point out someone has shipped a billion of them in comparison to Logitech having shipped a billion mice, it doesn't make you look like a twit.
HTH.
"The ultimate algorithm is called Warnsdorf's heuristic..."
In this, as with so much else, the ultimate algorithm is a lookup table. Back in school, I wrote such a program (in Pascal) in connection with a talk I gave based on this paper:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2690649
which describes on exactly which NxM boards a knights tour is possible. Moreover, it decribes a method for taking a solution for an NxM board that meets certain criteria, and adding 4 rows or columns to it to produce a larger board that also meets those criteria. And it provides appropriate solutions for the 9 starting boards to which you can successively add sets of 4 rows/columns to get any board for which a tour is possible. All without any searching at all. My program spit out whatever order you wanted in roughly as fast as the answer could be output to the screen.
True, writing out a (mostly) pre-generated solution to a problem is not as interesting a program as doing the (unnecessary) search. But for the math geeks out there it's a fun paper; the negative proof for the m=4 case is particularly nifty.
You know, if you took a tenth of the time you spent constructing your parody, and read the fucking article... you wouldn't look so foolish.
It's not a patent on splitting checks.
"It was always the payment end of things that made using robots impossible."
No it wasn't; that's ridiculous. I eat at several (cheap) restaurants that have you pay up front at the end - the wait staff doesn't do payment there at all, yet are still plenty busy. On the flip side, payment has to be the easiest part of a waitstaff job to automate.
Good luck getting a robot to understand you want the pickles on the side, and swiss cheese, not cheddar; or to wipe down a table without breaking the salt shaker, or any of the other hundred tasks that will separately require pushing the state of the art, yet are trivial for a human.
But automated payment? We do that now at the supermarket; what's so hard at the bistro?