Since when is the enemy my responsibility as well?
How many true enemies did the US have in Iraq? Not everybody who dies because of US military action is an enemy.
Tell you what, you pay US taxes or fucking behave yourself at the very least as nation and I'll either regard you as someone that my country has to actually worry about or we likewise won't have a reason to show up.
You think we like to go to war? Fucking peasants.
I don't think you like going to war, but I do think you overestimate its effectiveness.
What did the Iraq war actually accomplish? Vietnam? Bosnia probably helped, though that combined with the NATO expansion inspired Russian aggression and Georgia and Ukraine are paying the price now.
Much of Afghanistan is better but in total war is incredibly destructive, it's very rare circumstances that it actually helps.
I can't wait until the US starts actually putting out of global affairs. The shocked looks on your stupid faces as you realize the US was actually doing something vital for you the whole time... I'll be giggling at your expense for the rest of my days.
I don't disagree that the US is generally a positive influence but I don't think you really understand how much hostility that aggressive attitude incurs.
Remember Americans aren't the only ones proud of their country or who think they should have influence, imagine you're not an American but you're an Iranian or Russian cheering for your side. You might hate your government, be all about free speech, democracy, and everything else you associate with the US. But when you see the arrogance that the US acts with on the international state you're going to find it very difficult to cheer for the US.
With your patriotism if you weren't an American I'd very much expect you'd hate the US.
So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.
What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?
The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.
From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.
But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.
These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.
If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.
In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.
Like the summary says, nuclear weapons require expensive and hard to obtain raw materials and a significant amount of technology not common in the civilian space. This is the only reason, IMHO, that nuclear proliferation treaties work as well as they do.
On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.
But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.
How does this group expect governments to keep a lid on military tech that relies on ubiquitous technology found throughout the civilian economy?
Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.
I'm guessing the vast majority of ad benefits come from impressions rather than clicks.
I don't think I've ever clicked on a movie ad, but I'm sure a lot of my movie choices come from movie ads.
Same thing for other products, the ads annoy you, but when you go to buy something the one you've seen the ad for suddenly looks a whole lot more credible and familiar.
I think the biggest problem is that a two party system completely dumbs down the whole process of government and removes nuance. If you're pro-gun, you pretty much have to be a Republican and if you're pro-gay, you pretty much have to be a Democrat.
Remove the winner-take-all election contents and rather divide districts such that they elect several representatives from each district. This eventually leads to choices that don't exist along party lines and you can find a candidate that more closely represents your views (e.g., pro-gun, pro-gay, anti-abortion, pro-immigration, etc.) that has a reasonable chance at election.
Any changes that make it more difficult for political parties to operate would go a long way towards improving the country. Politicians would have to start voting their own mind, or better yet talking with their electorate, rather than simply falling into line with the party, and there would be less pandering to small, vocal parties that serve as important parts of the political parties' bases.
I think you've got it backwards.
In Canada the parties are far stronger than they are in the US and the individual MPs are almost irrelevant as they're simply expected to vote with their party, yet we seem to have a lot less of this kind of corruption and I don't think it's a coincidence.
Look at the emails, the guy was so compliant partly because he was relying on the MPAA for fund-raising, he's a state level politician dealing with the representative of the US media industry, of course he was playing ball. Just like if he was some individual legislator with a big group threatening to flood his district with money for his opponent, it's really easy for powerful interests to manipulate the government by picking off individual legislators.
If you make the parties stronger then the interests have to deal with the party instead of the legislator, and the parties are strong enough (and often incentivized) to tell the powerful interests to screw off.
Prof Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute, Oxford, said he was pleased and encouraged by the EMA's decision but added that the vaccine was not a "magic bullet".
He said: "A bed net is more effective than this vaccine, but nonetheless it is a very significant scientific achievement.
While research into a vaccine is great, why haven't we focused efforts on supplying bed nets for everyone? I'm assuming that they'll cost less than the vaccine per unit and they also have the advantage of being reused.
I don't know how much a full solution would affect cost.
remember what the nuclear people used to say: "electricity too cheap to meter"
now it's "we don't know what it will actually cost"
We don't know how much anything truly costs, we're barely aware of what happens to solar panel waste the moment it's built, much less 10,000 years from now. We're just putting a lot more effort into figuring it out for Nuclear.
The electricity prices are still low in France thanks to government regulation, but they are scheduled to rise significantly over the next years. The prices have been artificially held low so that the French nuclear energy sector (EDF etc.) have been bleeding money and raking up debt like there is no tomorrow, while taxpayers have footed the rest of the bill.
So if EDF is losing money that tells me the power might be underpriced, but even rising 30% they'll still be one of the cheaper rates.
So the French nuclear sector are also effectively subsidizing their nuclear power by making French tax payers pay the bill.
Where are the subsidies? The EDF has its own finances. If it goes bankrupt maybe you could say the government subsidized it by losing equity but I'm not sure I'd buy that. Besides, all other power generation including fossil fuel and renewables are heavily subsidized as well.
The move to reduce dependency on nuclear power is made because France is moving away from subsidized prices, so the consumers will pay more in line with what it actually cost to produce the energy directly instead of hiding the costs in higher taxes or forcing the utility companies to sell at too low prices.
You're talking about a pretty intense subsidy to justify that price, and other than the fact that the EDF is in financial trouble I'm not really finding any evidence.
because they haven't yet paid for the eventual disposal of the waste
It's underway though I don't know how much a full solution would affect cost. And realistically I think we overemphasize Nuclear waste because it's Nuclear, we generate lots of nasty industrial waste that we don't treat with the same paranoia.
The main reason is cost. Nuclear power can't compete on price with neither fossil fuels nor renewable energy like solar or wind. So basically every french nuclear power station is a hole into which the consumers are shoveling money into.
You simply can't build or operate a nuclear reactor power station anywhere in the world that can compete on market prices.
For France, the ever more connected EU electricity grid means an ever increasing pressure on the energy sector to be able to compete on EU electricity prices. The long term prospects for nuclear energy to ever be able to compete on prices looks bleak, even if fossil fuel prices rises significantly.
In the meantime much more nimble energy technologies like solar and wind continues to make significant progress in cost and efficiency. And unlike nuclear power plants, they can quickly deploy the newest technology in the field.
So it really makes a lot of sense for France to lower its reliance on nuclear power and start to invest more in renewable energy resources.
I mean it's not proof that France's electricity generation is fundamentally cheaper, or that Nuclear power has anything to do with it, but I can't find any evidence to back up your claims.
That's missing the point. Identifying 1 or 2 differences in approach between experts and non-experts shows 1 or 2 things you can tell the non-experts to do to greatly improve security overall.
In this case, the take away action would seem to be to make sure you keep all the software updated.
The other take away is to figure out why the non-experts don't use the expert approach already. Are the password managers poorly advertised or otherwise unwieldy? For instance I know a lot of sites have login windows that the Firefox password manager doesn't recognize.
Honestly this is a case where I've learned to reason heuristically. I've seen many studies of this nature, I don't know what the specific flaws in the study might be (though I can think of many potential ones) and I would be very shocked if in a few years this led to a clinically validated form of something that's recognizable as acupuncture.
Skepticism involves being skeptical about your own deductive abilities, this study shifts my beliefs slightly, but overall I realize I'm not qualified to accept this study as proper evidence.
So, the demand is show proof or go home. Proof shown and people fall all over themselves to ignore it. Still wonder why nobody bothers to look for proof?
This isn't even the first evidence found.
It's not proof.
a) The electric current was critical and is not part of typical or historical acupuncture.
b) They showed one effect related to a point, acupuncture claims many more.
c) 42 rats in 4 groups. Not a huge sample size.
d) Acupuncture is a controversial subject where one might expect dubious research to occasionally be published.
At most this offers very mild evidence that is consistent with acupuncture being effective. Note this study is at odds with studies that find the points don't really matter.
"Robotic surgery was more expensive ($39,030 vs $36,340) but was associated with a shorter length of stay (5 vs 6 days), lower mortality (1.0% vs 1.9%), and lower overall complication rates (27.2% vs 30.3%)."
When I needed to have a mitral valve repaired, I was told I was a good candidate for robotic surgery because I was relatively young and in good health otherwise. I went in Tuesday morning and left the hospital Friday afternoon, and instead of a twelve-inch scar down the middle of my chest, I have a 3.5-inch scar on my right side surrounded by three puncture wound scars (for the robotic arms). I'm glad I had the option.
That said, I'm concerned that some hospitals, having made a big investment in a surgical robot, might be tempted to get additional use out of it by adding on other procedures where the cost/benefit analysis isn't so clear.
If you were a good candidate because you were young & healthy that suggests there are higher risks associated with the robotic surgery but they were small enough they figured it was worth the convenience in your case. Of the paper you linked all I saw was the summary so it wasn't clear to me it corrected for doctors being potentially more risk-adverse with robotic surgery.
I'm wondering if this is simply a case of people feeling weird having a subordinate 10-20 years younger than themselves or bringing a 45 year old onto a team with a bunch of twenty-somethings.
Managers are paid the dollars because they are supposed to be able to cope. What would the military be like if officers only had subordinates younger than them? Sounds pretty silly doesn't it? Well it's just as silly in other industries and IT only gets a free ride because it's an immature industry with a lot of immature management.
That's a very simplistic argument, "person X should be able to handle Y, therefore I'll assume Y has no cost" that completely misses what's happening.
Modern discrimination doesn't happen because of blanket policies, it happens because people are trying to extract marginal benefits like younger employees who may be slightly easier to manage, or male employees who are slightly more likely to watch the same TV shows as the rest of the team.
While it is ageism to generalize when making a judgment about one individual, it is not ageism to generalize when making sense of statistical information about an age group. It works the same way for any kind of discrimination. One rational reason why there would always be more male firefighters than women firefighters is that males are much stronger on average. That is not a sexist statement. But denying employment to any one woman simply because her gender is physically weaker on average is sexist.
This is what I'm wondering about.
Say most of the people at the office bond over comic book movies, the Daily Show, and playing badminton or soccer after work.
At the margins it makes sense to hire people with those characteristics since they'll bond with the team better and are more likely to enjoy their jobs and to be communicative with people on their team.
But biasing for those characteristics also means you'll bias towards young white males from middle class backgrounds. To what extent can you seek those characteristics then? If it skews against older workers a lot of people will think it's unfortunate but acceptable, but if it skews against women or black people it seems very wrong.
Kind of like only hiring men might be a culture thing? "Culture" is very often a word people hide behind for illegal hiring bias.
I'm not defending it as much as speculating as to the source of the issue.
Though how does workplace culture legally intersect with discrimination anyway? It may be that certain personality types don't fit in at Google, and as people get older their personalities tend to develop into those types.
Does that mean not hiring based on those traits (regardless of the applicant's age) is illegal?
Getting into my late 40's, I find my friends are experiencing this all over. EMC keeps contacting a buddy who is a storage architect, he designed storage hardware at sun, they never make an offer after multiple interviews, he says its because hes almost 60. Facebook keeps calling a few of my buddies, but they too never get hired and are in their 50's. I was turned down by 2 companies when they learned my age and I had a family. But I dont want to work in a sweat shop anymore, so its good to know exactly how bad some places can be. Amazon so far seems to be hiring everyone, because they burn them out quicker than they can hire.
Yeah, people are working until retirement age now, so this is a problem. (You know, that reset button that wipes out your entire life savings called divorce)
Any theories on why this is happening?
My thought is it might be culture thing, unless the new hire is coming on as a team lead or manager they're probably going to be working under someone in their 20s or 30s. I'm wondering if this is simply a case of people feeling weird having a subordinate 10-20 years younger than themselves or bringing a 45 year old onto a team with a bunch of twenty-somethings.
Sorry, Uber is a cab company, no matter what they say.
I'm not a fan of Uber but I'm not certain this is true, in my understanding a typical cab will drive around looking for random people to wave it down and potentially wait at certain high pickup locations.
An Uber (or Lyft) vehicle will only respond to a request from the webapp, it strikes me as more analogous to a Limo service or other hired vehicle. Are those considered taxis? (not rhetorical, I'm actually curious. For tax purposes it appears they are).
Given that it's rather easy to use a credit card with an assumed name, and also a fake billing address submitted while paying, I really don't see why the people who wanted to stay discreet/anonymous didn't do so.
In case anyone wanted to know how to do it, at least in the U.S. it's rather trivial:
Because it sounds complex and not entirely legal (it might be legal but it sounds like it might be illegal).
The vast majority of users are going to be using their real credit card.
If the hackers get your data, all they have dirt on is a fictional character. This is 21st century, I thought every guy who knows how to use a bank account and a computer would know this shit?
I'm not even sure every guy who knows how to use a bank account and a computer fully understands how credit cards work. I think you need to seriously recalibrate your opinion of what typical people are capable of.
Your work improving slaughterhouses essentially involved empathizing with the animals and understanding the factors that were causing them excessive stress.
Why do you think most people have so much trouble doing this? Is it just experience, ie we don't realize a certain rake is making the cattle nervous because we haven't lived the life of a cow. Or do you think there's something fundamentally different about the cognition of different animals that makes them respond in ways that humans have trouble relating to?
Humans are animals. Humans also have the concept of "social justice" (which is, in fact, neither social nor justice, but rather a perversion of both). Yet other animals do not have this concept.
The adherence to "social justice" by many of its proponents also follows many of the symptoms of autism, most importantly a complete willingness to overlook irrational and hypocritical behavior.
If autism is found in other animals, why do we not see these animals also suffering from "social justice"?
That must have been hard to phrase your angry off-topic rant in the form of a question.
I'd also question your claim that animals don't have social justice. If we ignore your incoherent definition (ie any moral judgement you disagree with) and look at actual social justice things like concepts of fairness and policing social norms it's clear animals do have social justice.
Because crazy, paranoid people, in my experience, tend to not want to let anyone in on their delusions. Even if you agree with them, they'll call you a CIA\Jewish\Alien plant setting a trap for them. They are arrogant and believe that they are the center of the world, and everyone is out to hurt them.
Besides that, let me rephrase my question: what evidence do you have that this is a common theme in "virtually all" cases? Naming three of the dozens does not establish a trend. Furthermore, claiming that there it just doesn't get reported on doesn't release you from that burden. It just comes off as an old man blaming the ills of the world on that damn Satanic rock-and-roll music.
I concede "virtually all" is an overstatement and I'm not sure how to find evidence other than anecdotes and a general impression, but I do think there is a definite pattern with people falling into extremist bubbles which is a lot easier on the internet.
As for the reporting aspect I do think I have some evidence of it being under reported. Luka Magnotta was very active on social media and extremist sites like Stormfront, posted multiple videos of himself killing animals and uploaded the video of his murder of Justin Lin to a gore website. However, the only mention of this you ever saw in the media was that he had uploaded videos of the kitten killings and murder and that the owner of the gore website was arrested.
It wasn't even made clear that Magnotta uploaded the video himself, the fact that he was extremely active in social media (and probably the gore website as well) was almost unreported in an extremely sensationalized case. It follows that there's a lot of other cases where it's likely under publicized as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when is the enemy my responsibility as well?
How many true enemies did the US have in Iraq? Not everybody who dies because of US military action is an enemy.
Tell you what, you pay US taxes or fucking behave yourself at the very least as nation and I'll either regard you as someone that my country has to actually worry about or we likewise won't have a reason to show up.
You think we like to go to war? Fucking peasants.
I don't think you like going to war, but I do think you overestimate its effectiveness.
What did the Iraq war actually accomplish? Vietnam? Bosnia probably helped, though that combined with the NATO expansion inspired Russian aggression and Georgia and Ukraine are paying the price now.
Much of Afghanistan is better but in total war is incredibly destructive, it's very rare circumstances that it actually helps.
I can't wait until the US starts actually putting out of global affairs. The shocked looks on your stupid faces as you realize the US was actually doing something vital for you the whole time... I'll be giggling at your expense for the rest of my days.
I don't disagree that the US is generally a positive influence but I don't think you really understand how much hostility that aggressive attitude incurs.
Remember Americans aren't the only ones proud of their country or who think they should have influence, imagine you're not an American but you're an Iranian or Russian cheering for your side. You might hate your government, be all about free speech, democracy, and everything else you associate with the US. But when you see the arrogance that the US acts with on the international state you're going to find it very difficult to cheer for the US.
With your patriotism if you weren't an American I'd very much expect you'd hate the US.
So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.
What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?
The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.
From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.
But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.
These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.
If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.
In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.
Like the summary says, nuclear weapons require expensive and hard to obtain raw materials and a significant amount of technology not common in the civilian space. This is the only reason, IMHO, that nuclear proliferation treaties work as well as they do.
On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.
But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.
How does this group expect governments to keep a lid on military tech that relies on ubiquitous technology found throughout the civilian economy?
Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.
I'm guessing the vast majority of ad benefits come from impressions rather than clicks.
I don't think I've ever clicked on a movie ad, but I'm sure a lot of my movie choices come from movie ads.
Same thing for other products, the ads annoy you, but when you go to buy something the one you've seen the ad for suddenly looks a whole lot more credible and familiar.
I think the biggest problem is that a two party system completely dumbs down the whole process of government and removes nuance. If you're pro-gun, you pretty much have to be a Republican and if you're pro-gay, you pretty much have to be a Democrat.
Remove the winner-take-all election contents and rather divide districts such that they elect several representatives from each district. This eventually leads to choices that don't exist along party lines and you can find a candidate that more closely represents your views (e.g., pro-gun, pro-gay, anti-abortion, pro-immigration, etc.) that has a reasonable chance at election.
Any changes that make it more difficult for political parties to operate would go a long way towards improving the country. Politicians would have to start voting their own mind, or better yet talking with their electorate, rather than simply falling into line with the party, and there would be less pandering to small, vocal parties that serve as important parts of the political parties' bases.
I think you've got it backwards.
In Canada the parties are far stronger than they are in the US and the individual MPs are almost irrelevant as they're simply expected to vote with their party, yet we seem to have a lot less of this kind of corruption and I don't think it's a coincidence.
Look at the emails, the guy was so compliant partly because he was relying on the MPAA for fund-raising, he's a state level politician dealing with the representative of the US media industry, of course he was playing ball. Just like if he was some individual legislator with a big group threatening to flood his district with money for his opponent, it's really easy for powerful interests to manipulate the government by picking off individual legislators.
If you make the parties stronger then the interests have to deal with the party instead of the legislator, and the parties are strong enough (and often incentivized) to tell the powerful interests to screw off.
From the article:
Prof Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute, Oxford, said he was pleased and encouraged by the EMA's decision but added that the vaccine was not a "magic bullet".
He said: "A bed net is more effective than this vaccine, but nonetheless it is a very significant scientific achievement.
While research into a vaccine is great, why haven't we focused efforts on supplying bed nets for everyone? I'm assuming that they'll cost less than the vaccine per unit and they also have the advantage of being reused.
Why aren't the locals buying bed nets themselves?
Supposedly $5 gets you an insecticide treated bed net that's good for 2 years, I know we're talking about very poor people but that sounds like somewhere where'd I'd expect a local industry to pop up.
I don't know how much a full solution would affect cost.
remember what the nuclear people used to say: "electricity too cheap to meter"
now it's "we don't know what it will actually cost"
We don't know how much anything truly costs, we're barely aware of what happens to solar panel waste the moment it's built, much less 10,000 years from now. We're just putting a lot more effort into figuring it out for Nuclear.
The electricity prices are still low in France thanks to government regulation, but they are scheduled to rise significantly over the next years. The prices have been artificially held low so that the French nuclear energy sector (EDF etc.) have been bleeding money and raking up debt like there is no tomorrow, while taxpayers have footed the rest of the bill.
So if EDF is losing money that tells me the power might be underpriced, but even rising 30% they'll still be one of the cheaper rates.
So the French nuclear sector are also effectively subsidizing their nuclear power by making French tax payers pay the bill.
Where are the subsidies? The EDF has its own finances. If it goes bankrupt maybe you could say the government subsidized it by losing equity but I'm not sure I'd buy that. Besides, all other power generation including fossil fuel and renewables are heavily subsidized as well.
The move to reduce dependency on nuclear power is made because France is moving away from subsidized prices, so the consumers will pay more in line with what it actually cost to produce the energy directly instead of hiding the costs in higher taxes or forcing the utility companies to sell at too low prices.
You're talking about a pretty intense subsidy to justify that price, and other than the fact that the EDF is in financial trouble I'm not really finding any evidence.
Then why does France have some of the lowest energy prices in the developed EU and why are they exporting energy to Britain?
because they haven't yet paid for the eventual disposal of the waste
It's underway though I don't know how much a full solution would affect cost. And realistically I think we overemphasize Nuclear waste because it's Nuclear, we generate lots of nasty industrial waste that we don't treat with the same paranoia.
The main reason is cost. Nuclear power can't compete on price with neither fossil fuels nor renewable energy like solar or wind. So basically every french nuclear power station is a hole into which the consumers are shoveling money into.
You simply can't build or operate a nuclear reactor power station anywhere in the world that can compete on market prices.
For France, the ever more connected EU electricity grid means an ever increasing pressure on the energy sector to be able to compete on EU electricity prices. The long term prospects for nuclear energy to ever be able to compete on prices looks bleak, even if fossil fuel prices rises significantly.
In the meantime much more nimble energy technologies like solar and wind continues to make significant progress in cost and efficiency. And unlike nuclear power plants, they can quickly deploy the newest technology in the field.
So it really makes a lot of sense for France to lower its reliance on nuclear power and start to invest more in renewable energy resources.
Then why does France have some of the lowest energy prices in the developed EU and why are they exporting energy to Britain?
I mean it's not proof that France's electricity generation is fundamentally cheaper, or that Nuclear power has anything to do with it, but I can't find any evidence to back up your claims.
That's missing the point. Identifying 1 or 2 differences in approach between experts and non-experts shows 1 or 2 things you can tell the non-experts to do to greatly improve security overall.
In this case, the take away action would seem to be to make sure you keep all the software updated.
The other take away is to figure out why the non-experts don't use the expert approach already. Are the password managers poorly advertised or otherwise unwieldy? For instance I know a lot of sites have login windows that the Firefox password manager doesn't recognize.
How about just rendering everything as text? Avoid rendering URL's or HTML and you'll solve most of the problems.
Not going to happen, HTML email is a feature, a feature a lot of people find very useful and will not give up without a big fight.
Honestly this is a case where I've learned to reason heuristically. I've seen many studies of this nature, I don't know what the specific flaws in the study might be (though I can think of many potential ones) and I would be very shocked if in a few years this led to a clinically validated form of something that's recognizable as acupuncture.
Skepticism involves being skeptical about your own deductive abilities, this study shifts my beliefs slightly, but overall I realize I'm not qualified to accept this study as proper evidence.
So, the demand is show proof or go home. Proof shown and people fall all over themselves to ignore it. Still wonder why nobody bothers to look for proof?
This isn't even the first evidence found.
It's not proof.
a) The electric current was critical and is not part of typical or historical acupuncture.
b) They showed one effect related to a point, acupuncture claims many more.
c) 42 rats in 4 groups. Not a huge sample size.
d) Acupuncture is a controversial subject where one might expect dubious research to occasionally be published.
At most this offers very mild evidence that is consistent with acupuncture being effective. Note this study is at odds with studies that find the points don't really matter.
"Critical Outcomes in Nonrobotic vs Robotic-Assisted Cardiac Surgery"
http://www.ctsnet.org/jans/cri...
"Robotic surgery was more expensive ($39,030 vs $36,340) but was associated with a shorter length of stay (5 vs 6 days), lower mortality (1.0% vs 1.9%), and lower overall complication rates (27.2% vs 30.3%)."
When I needed to have a mitral valve repaired, I was told I was a good candidate for robotic surgery because I was relatively young and in good health otherwise. I went in Tuesday morning and left the hospital Friday afternoon, and instead of a twelve-inch scar down the middle of my chest, I have a 3.5-inch scar on my right side surrounded by three puncture wound scars (for the robotic arms). I'm glad I had the option.
That said, I'm concerned that some hospitals, having made a big investment in a surgical robot, might be tempted to get additional use out of it by adding on other procedures where the cost/benefit analysis isn't so clear.
If you were a good candidate because you were young & healthy that suggests there are higher risks associated with the robotic surgery but they were small enough they figured it was worth the convenience in your case. Of the paper you linked all I saw was the summary so it wasn't clear to me it corrected for doctors being potentially more risk-adverse with robotic surgery.
Managers are paid the dollars because they are supposed to be able to cope. What would the military be like if officers only had subordinates younger than them? Sounds pretty silly doesn't it? Well it's just as silly in other industries and IT only gets a free ride because it's an immature industry with a lot of immature management.
That's a very simplistic argument, "person X should be able to handle Y, therefore I'll assume Y has no cost" that completely misses what's happening.
Modern discrimination doesn't happen because of blanket policies, it happens because people are trying to extract marginal benefits like younger employees who may be slightly easier to manage, or male employees who are slightly more likely to watch the same TV shows as the rest of the team.
While it is ageism to generalize when making a judgment about one individual, it is not ageism to generalize when making sense of statistical information about an age group. It works the same way for any kind of discrimination. One rational reason why there would always be more male firefighters than women firefighters is that males are much stronger on average. That is not a sexist statement. But denying employment to any one woman simply because her gender is physically weaker on average is sexist.
This is what I'm wondering about.
Say most of the people at the office bond over comic book movies, the Daily Show, and playing badminton or soccer after work.
At the margins it makes sense to hire people with those characteristics since they'll bond with the team better and are more likely to enjoy their jobs and to be communicative with people on their team.
But biasing for those characteristics also means you'll bias towards young white males from middle class backgrounds. To what extent can you seek those characteristics then? If it skews against older workers a lot of people will think it's unfortunate but acceptable, but if it skews against women or black people it seems very wrong.
"It might be a culture thing"
Kind of like only hiring men might be a culture thing? "Culture" is very often a word people hide behind for illegal hiring bias.
I'm not defending it as much as speculating as to the source of the issue.
Though how does workplace culture legally intersect with discrimination anyway? It may be that certain personality types don't fit in at Google, and as people get older their personalities tend to develop into those types.
Does that mean not hiring based on those traits (regardless of the applicant's age) is illegal?
Getting into my late 40's, I find my friends are experiencing this all over. EMC keeps contacting a buddy who is a storage architect, he designed storage hardware at sun, they never make an offer after multiple interviews, he says its because hes almost 60. Facebook keeps calling a few of my buddies, but they too never get hired and are in their 50's. I was turned down by 2 companies when they learned my age and I had a family. But I dont want to work in a sweat shop anymore, so its good to know exactly how bad some places can be. Amazon so far seems to be hiring everyone, because they burn them out quicker than they can hire.
Yeah, people are working until retirement age now, so this is a problem. (You know, that reset button that wipes out your entire life savings called divorce)
Any theories on why this is happening?
My thought is it might be culture thing, unless the new hire is coming on as a team lead or manager they're probably going to be working under someone in their 20s or 30s. I'm wondering if this is simply a case of people feeling weird having a subordinate 10-20 years younger than themselves or bringing a 45 year old onto a team with a bunch of twenty-somethings.
Sorry, Uber is a cab company, no matter what they say.
I'm not a fan of Uber but I'm not certain this is true, in my understanding a typical cab will drive around looking for random people to wave it down and potentially wait at certain high pickup locations.
An Uber (or Lyft) vehicle will only respond to a request from the webapp, it strikes me as more analogous to a Limo service or other hired vehicle. Are those considered taxis? (not rhetorical, I'm actually curious. For tax purposes it appears they are).
Given that it's rather easy to use a credit card with an assumed name, and also a fake billing address submitted while paying, I really don't see why the people who wanted to stay discreet/anonymous didn't do so.
In case anyone wanted to know how to do it, at least in the U.S. it's rather trivial:
Because it sounds complex and not entirely legal (it might be legal but it sounds like it might be illegal).
The vast majority of users are going to be using their real credit card.
If the hackers get your data, all they have dirt on is a fictional character. This is 21st century, I thought every guy who knows how to use a bank account and a computer would know this shit?
I'm not even sure every guy who knows how to use a bank account and a computer fully understands how credit cards work. I think you need to seriously recalibrate your opinion of what typical people are capable of.
Whether you agree with parent post or not, it would be interesting to see what response it engenders.
That even after you remove the rant and bias it's still a really stupid question.
You might as well ask why animals don't have political pundits.
Why ask why animals don't have X when you'd probably agree people didn't even have X until some time in the last few hundred years.
Your work improving slaughterhouses essentially involved empathizing with the animals and understanding the factors that were causing them excessive stress.
Why do you think most people have so much trouble doing this? Is it just experience, ie we don't realize a certain rake is making the cattle nervous because we haven't lived the life of a cow. Or do you think there's something fundamentally different about the cognition of different animals that makes them respond in ways that humans have trouble relating to?
Humans are animals. Humans also have the concept of "social justice" (which is, in fact, neither social nor justice, but rather a perversion of both). Yet other animals do not have this concept.
The adherence to "social justice" by many of its proponents also follows many of the symptoms of autism, most importantly a complete willingness to overlook irrational and hypocritical behavior.
If autism is found in other animals, why do we not see these animals also suffering from "social justice"?
That must have been hard to phrase your angry off-topic rant in the form of a question.
I'd also question your claim that animals don't have social justice. If we ignore your incoherent definition (ie any moral judgement you disagree with) and look at actual social justice things like concepts of fairness and policing social norms it's clear animals do have social justice.
Because crazy, paranoid people, in my experience, tend to not want to let anyone in on their delusions. Even if you agree with them, they'll call you a CIA\Jewish\Alien plant setting a trap for them. They are arrogant and believe that they are the center of the world, and everyone is out to hurt them.
Besides that, let me rephrase my question: what evidence do you have that this is a common theme in "virtually all" cases? Naming three of the dozens does not establish a trend. Furthermore, claiming that there it just doesn't get reported on doesn't release you from that burden. It just comes off as an old man blaming the ills of the world on that damn Satanic rock-and-roll music.
I concede "virtually all" is an overstatement and I'm not sure how to find evidence other than anecdotes and a general impression, but I do think there is a definite pattern with people falling into extremist bubbles which is a lot easier on the internet.
As for the reporting aspect I do think I have some evidence of it being under reported. Luka Magnotta was very active on social media and extremist sites like Stormfront, posted multiple videos of himself killing animals and uploaded the video of his murder of Justin Lin to a gore website. However, the only mention of this you ever saw in the media was that he had uploaded videos of the kitten killings and murder and that the owner of the gore website was arrested.
It wasn't even made clear that Magnotta uploaded the video himself, the fact that he was extremely active in social media (and probably the gore website as well) was almost unreported in an extremely sensationalized case. It follows that there's a lot of other cases where it's likely under publicized as well.