"You'll be glad to know that GNOME is faster than it has been for a while. That's because some nasty memory leaks have been patched."
That's not what memory leaks do. Unless you leak so much memory that the system starts paging out RAM contents to the swap partition on the drive. Was it really that bad?
Stronger immune systems are why Europeans suffer from far more severe autoimmune disorders, conditions barely known in Africa.
There is compelling evidence that one cause of increasing rates of autoimmune disorders at more Northern latitudes is lower sunlight exposure and consequent Vitamin D deficiency; Vitamin D supplementation reduces rates of auto-immune disease significantly.
"For years, the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of radiation, carcinogens, and other toxic chemicals has been based on the cautious scientific reasoning that considers even slight exposure to toxins potentially risky to public health."
That is the fundamental error underlying all environmental regulatory policy in the U.S. Every nutrient essential for human life has some dose at which it becomes toxic. Water and table salt are two common examples. Whether a substance is harmful or beneficial to life depends on both the substance and the quantity. If the EPA were serious about that policy, then it would demand that the oceans be ejected into space to clean up the environment of deadly salt and water toxins.
It says "cautious scientific reasoning." There are two problems with that description. First, it is value judgment which violates presumed editorial neutrality of straight news. Second, it is the wrong value judgment. "idiotic non-scientific assumptions" would be an accurate description.
The consequence of a completely unworkable policy is regulatory confusion and rule by bureaucratic fiat.
...Germany still compares well to Canada, Australia, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and some other industrialized countries - not just Trumpistan.
On the contrary, the U.S. is leading CO2 emissions reductions under Trump.
Take a wild guess what country is reducing its CO2 emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan?...The answer to that question is the U.S. of A....
Nearly every nation that signed on to Paris and has admonished America for not doing so, has already violated the agreement. According to Climate Action Network Europe, "All EU countries are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal."
The complexity of the physics and chemistry, the enormous manufacturing engineering effort and the management coordination required to direct the billions of dollars in capital necessary to achieve that is mind-boggling. Six point nine billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. It's at times like this when it seems we are finally living in the future. Electric cars, re-usable space rockets, 3D printed titanium.
Meanwhile, FEMA finally found the 20,000 pallets of potable water bottles it shipped to Puerto Rico. On the airfield where it left them. After the expiration date.
Without devolving into absolutist Ayn Rand libertarian zealots, maybe we can all agree that there is something to this invisible hand, free market, capitalism stuff.
A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that are inherent to the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.
The Tesla Model X 100D has an official EPA rated range of up to 295 mi (475 km).
So the summary incorrectly states that the Mercedes EQC has a greater range (280 miles) than the Tesla Model X, when in fact the Mercedes has the lesser range.
There are different standards for measurement for electrical vehicle range, so it's not clear if the figures are comparable. Nonetheless, the value given appears either outdated or otherwise in error.
[under capitalism] if you refuse to play the game, your children starve to death....
That is the opposite of communism, where if you accept the game your children starve to death.
Industrial nationalization and farm collectivization under communist regimes have resulted in mass famines in North Korea, the USSR, Venezuela and China. In China alone, about 55 million people perished in a four-year period during the Great Leap Forward.
Participating in communism kills. Participating in capitalism saves children's lives (according to Bruce.) An idiot considers those points and concludes, "communism good, capitalism bad."
In addition to his inverted value system, Bruce is pushing an argument that communism provides social safety nets and capitalism excludes social safety nets. That is a lie. If communism indeed provided social safety nets, then it would not be widely associated mass starvation. Capitalism is the only economic system which generates sufficient wealth to adequately fund social safety nets.
One of the most zealous advocates for capitalism, the late Milton Friedman, devised the negative income tax specifically to benefit the poor and he advocated for it persistently. (It was eventually implemented under Reagan as the earned income tax credit) Earlier, Hayek maintained that social safety nets were consistent with classical liberalism.
While you are next driving down our public roads to our parks...
Their construction and maintenance is funded by tax revenues collected from capitalist enterprises and their employees.
...consider that all of these things are commons.
"Commons" not "Communist". In your own words.
And they don't do all of those bad things some folks pin on communism.
Because they are commons, not Communism.
Hayek makes the point in his book The Road to Serfdom that some types of collectivism are consistent with classical liberalism. Namely, those collective actions for which there is broad public agreement on specific policies. The distinction is that, instead, Communism compels collective action in the circumstance of many differing factions, with the necessary outcome that a small minority imposes its will on the majority. (Necessary because, with division into many factions, there are only small minorities.)
Furthermore, non-rivalrous goods such as roads and parks are special cases. By citing such examples alone, you have failed to make the general case for collectivism.
And you are cherry-picking, listing only the success and leaving off your list such massive fiascos such as the the New York subway system. Construction costs are 10x per mile higher than they should be because of graft, the stations are disgustingly filthy, trains are frequently late.
Additionally, you have not addressed if in those cases which you mentioned, parks and roads, the public would be better or worse served by privatization. You failed to make the comparison. Instead, you merely defended the collectivized case by stating that it was not a worst-case scenario. What an absurd endorsement. In any context outside of politics such and endorsement would be laughed at. "Hitting your thumb with a hammer is not as bad as the critics says." The meaningful question is: is a person better off when the government compels him to pay taxes which it expends on road building, or better off when private businesses build roads for which that person pays fees to access. Well there are many aspects to consider. There are network effects, so that benefits accrue to those not using roads. There are transaction costs for collecting fees for road travel only in the case of private roads. Public roads subsidize trucking, which creates price distortion, artificially lowering the cost of truck transportation. That means it wins out over other more efficient means of transportation in some cases, and also that it distorts the price of goods transported by truck, resulting in over consumption of goods and fuel. Finally, with privatized roads, the poor can be subsidized using currency or vouchers, so this is purely an issue of efficiency, not equity.
The point here is not that generally or specifically either private or public roads or parks are preferred, but that there are many considerations involved when addressing the issue, of which none you seem even slightly aware. You lack any rational framework for addressing the issue, having made no comparison between alternatives. In summary, you demonstrate a severe incapacity to address issues competently. It's like anything that comes to your mind that makes Communism sound good, or less shitty, you type. That is ideology, not intellect. You seem like more of cheerleader than a thinker.
Capitalism doesn't have a great record for social good either.
A few points in reponse:
Capitalism is orthogonal to tyranny. Pinochet endorsed capitalism; so did British governors of Hong Kong. Those mid-20th century German National Socialists maintained and controlled capitalist enterprises; Thomas Edison was a capitalist.
Improvement in the material well-being is the essential foundation for progress in all fields of human endeavor; Art, Music, Literature. Science, Mathematics, Open Source software. That improvement is primarily the product of capitalism and secondarily the product of volunteer and non-profit endeavors in free markets.
Because of its essential role in sustaining all other endeavors, it is no exaggeration to say that almost all social gain has been, either directly or indirectly, the product of capitalism. Look at the times and places in the world where the greatest advancements have taken place and how those coincided with capitalism, there is a consistent relationship.
Bruce, what was your thought process there, exactly? Like you compared the consequences of Mao's collectivization in the Great Leap Forward to the results of Deng Xiaoping economic reforms? So about 55 million people died in a four year period under communism and the transition to improved standards of living in China began with the introduction of capitalism, so you concluded that "Capitalism doesn't have a great record for social good...?" Well, it does, subjectively, to those who prefer to eat food and live instead of dying en masse.
Communism isn't inherently evil, it's just that it has often come with totalitarianism.
Communism is a lie told by tyrants to grow and sustain political support for themselves.
Because falsehoods told to advance malevolent ends are categorically evil, Communism is inherently evil.
So Bruce, would you say it is an accurate characterization of your own beliefs that the lies and propaganda use by tyrants to gain power are not themselves evil? That it is exclusively the exercise of power for harmful ends which is evil? If so, what is your basis for that distinction? Additionally, would you make the same distinction for any other grift, such as an advance-fee scam; Are the deliberate falsehoods told to the mark not evil, but only the subsequent monetary transactions evil?
"It's not that advance-fee deals with Nigerians don't work, its just that they have never really been tried," says the mark.
The Japanese devote a great deal of attention and concern to abiding conventions for social interaction. I believe it a weak claim (how would you ever test such a thing experimentally?) but there is a theory that the historical necessity for large-scale coordinated communal rice planting and harvesting exerted selective pressure for personality traits of conformism, cooperation and agreeableness. With more certainty, Japan is a substantially racially uniform culture, and there is loads of psychological and sociological evidence that racial diversity promotes social disharmony. About 98.5% of residents of Japan are ethnic Japanese. As the Japanese Government states: "...there are no issues of race relations among Japanese citizens as they are all of the same race". It's a little fishy because they include small domestic minorities such as the Ainu, but still those would not be substantial minorities if categorized out and to some degree they remain geographically isolated within Japan.
Regardless of the causes for it, Japanese society is extraordinarily and wonderfully polite, civil and organized. However, that has the trade-off that social norms become so suffocating that Japanese seek escape from social obligations and comfort in relationships in what seems to westerners, bizarre commercial services. Following the rules means that sometimes the best way to get what you want while staying in bounds is to purchase it.
My father attended grade school in rural Maryland in the 1950's. The boys in his class brought their rifles to school in the morning so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home from school. That was typical in rural America during that era. Fathers judged when boys were mature enough to handle a gun and taught them gun safety and shooting skills. Hunting and shooting were social and communal. There were very few fatalities from rural grade school shootings in the decade of the 1950's, despite the common practice of allowing students to bring guns to schools. Some schools had shooting clubs. Rural American was safe because it had a healthy gun culture.
Gun culture is about advocating and practicing responsibility and safety. Can you name any mass shooting carried out by an NRA class instructor or a competitive shooter? Are the U.S. Olympic shooting teams "sick?" What about those in the armed forces? Someone is willing to risk his life at war for his country and you describe his affinity for the weapons used to perform his job as "sick?"
Study the biographies of those who commit mass shootings. They are not part of gun culture, but usually loners with histories of anti-social behavior.
Well professional bionformaticians had already been working on the problem of personalized medicine and medical diagnosis before IBM and Watson got involved. If you listen to them, there is a clear consensus of how that is is going to work in the future.
Part 1: Because of a dependence of both disease and the effectiveness of treatments upon personal genetics, every person will get sequenced at birth. That will do at least three things: reduce what otherwise appears as statistical noise in assessing treatment efficacy by resolving interdependencies between the treatment and personal genetics, improve estimates of the likelihood of any individual developing a disease or disorder, and help to identify the best treatments for specific individuals.
Part 2: Every patient treatment and its outcome become a trail logged into a massive database along with the patient's medical history and genetics. Currently, massive amounts of information about the effectiveness of treatments is discarded because the records of treatment after a drug is released are not accumulated. Now, before a drug is introduced to the market, there are clinical trials on a subpopulation, and that becomes an authoritative record of the drug effectiveness. That is a tiny fraction of the potential information out there and insufficient to assess interactions of drugs with other factors such as genetics.
One of the barriers to implementing that system is the price of sequencing, about $1000.00/person. Prices are projected to fall until sequencing becomes ubiquitous.
The other barrier is privacy legislation (HIPAA) and financial incentives acting on institutions against information sharing. Despite endless funded government initiatives to implement sharable electronic medical records, patient medical information remains siloed within provider and insurance networks. Rather than work to share information, those institutions are competing to build the largest silo. (This circumstance exemplifies a typical type of government ineptitude, which is to continuously and futilely throw enormous sums of money at a problem rather than simply and cheaply reforming the legislation and regulation giving rise to the perverse incentives which created the problem. Information sharing for research medical use to benefit personalized medicine was the main driver behind the U.K. slackening medical records privacy, demonstrating that in the U.K. not all government officials are complete idiots.)
Finally, the main point of this post: The bioinformaticians have wished for that future because they knew that the problem of personalized medicine was information-starved before IBM threw billions at the problem. Given adequate information, the computational solutions of personalized medicine are already known by those humans with domain-specific expertise.
If IBM had instead invested those billions in reducing the cost of sequencing further and in lobbying government to fix the stupid incentives and restrictions acting against medical information sharing, the problem could have been solved by now. Another case of someone with a hammer looking for nails by pounding on things to see if they move.
Had Watson been genuinely intelligent, it would explained all that that IBM.
"Samsung said it would invest heavily in four key areas through 2020. Auto tech, artificial intelligence and new fifth-generation, or 5G, cellular technology."
This is just make-believe, but wouldn't it be wonderful if the government agency with oversight authority had Justice successfully prosecute the executives responsible and they received large fines and long jail sentences?
But we all know how this works in the real world; regulators go after the corporation instead, then announce to the public what amazing heroes they for a large financial settlement against an evil corporation. Then Elizabeth Warren has an orgasm and proclaims how wonderful is government regulation. Also, if you are the Obama administration, then you misdirect the proceeds of settlements to left-wing political activists instead of to Treasury. (Really. They did that routinely.) The stock holders, who are at no fault themselves, pay the penalty and the executives who committed the crime are granted immunity in exchanged for testimony and continue on happily with their outsized salaries. Summary: The government responds to corporate crime by punishing the innocent and exonerating the guilty.
Corporations would act less criminally if officials enforcing the laws sought penalties for those who actually perpetrated the crimes. Achieving that depends on replacing regulation with rule-of-law and reforming a grandstanding and ethically corrupt Justice Department.
Stock shorts serve a valuable social purpose which is to monetize accurate information that a corporation is overvalued, thereby incentivizing efficient pricing. But shorts can also play a roll in illegitimate scams, where an accurately-valued stock is shorted, then publicly badmouthed to drive down its price.
Not to name names here, but a lot of the outstanding Tesla shorts are held by the those with a documented record of engaging in the latter. These are not ethical people and one certain event that would mitigate against future massive financial losses from their outstanding short positions would be a drop in Tesla share prices if Elon Musk had an accident. To put it bluntly: The insane amount of money involved and the demonstrated lack of ethics of those who stand to lose it should make Musk worry about there being contract on his life.
...all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
It appears likely that all recent commercial color laser printers print some kind of forensic tracking codes...
This is going to sound a bit critical so let me preface it by stating that Cody Wilson is an interesting guy and I endorse Defense Distributed.
That said, Defense Distributed is really a political rhetorical tactic; Nobody is actually firing rounds and their oppressors from 3D printed guns. Fundamentally, freely publishing gun blueprints is a clever strategy to force Democrats into a corner, compelling them to choose between either of two undesirable options: allowing gun rights or opposing free speech rights. If Democrats suppress publication of gun blueprints, then they betray their own free-speech principles. If Democrats allow publication of gun blueprints, then they forego their anti-gun agenda.
As soon as Defense Distributed freely published gun blueprints, anti-gun Democrats confronted a no-win scenario. Because they necessarily loose, their best option is to minimize casualties. Wow, are they screwing that up:
"Frankly, it is terrifying... We think that it is important to put a stop to this right away and make it as difficult as humanly possible to access this information." Washington Attorney General Bill Ferguson told reporters...
Any government official publicly demanding that information be suppressed and censored instantly loses in the court of public opinion. That statement achieves nothing but to help Republicans heading into the November elections. "Democrats are working to suppress the right to free speech" is now a 100% truthful statement. It will get even worse after they lose in court, which will be viewed by the public as an authoritative rebuke of their attempts to suppress the right to free speech.
As I favor an adversarial and competitive political process, it would be nice to see the Democrats get their game on. As a first step, stop playing politics like it is tiddlywinks when the other side treats it as chess.
Past convictions of other suspects arrested by those officers and convictions obtained by the prosecutor should be voided if they depended on testimony by the officers or the accuracy of statements made to the court by the prosecutor.
Does anyone here know if English law works that way? Do the previous victims of the dishonest officers and prosecutor now have a right to re-trial?
Slashdot Mirror
from the ./ summary:
"You'll be glad to know that GNOME is faster than it has been for a while. That's because some nasty memory leaks have been patched."
That's not what memory leaks do. Unless you leak so much memory that the system starts paging out RAM contents to the swap partition on the drive. Was it really that bad?
Stronger immune systems are why Europeans suffer from far more severe autoimmune disorders, conditions barely known in Africa.
There is compelling evidence that one cause of increasing rates of autoimmune disorders at more Northern latitudes is lower sunlight exposure and consequent Vitamin D deficiency; Vitamin D supplementation reduces rates of auto-immune disease significantly.
This wrench does.
from the ./ summary:
"For years, the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of radiation, carcinogens, and other toxic chemicals has been based on the cautious scientific reasoning that considers even slight exposure to toxins potentially risky to public health."
That is the fundamental error underlying all environmental regulatory policy in the U.S. Every nutrient essential for human life has some dose at which it becomes toxic. Water and table salt are two common examples. Whether a substance is harmful or beneficial to life depends on both the substance and the quantity. If the EPA were serious about that policy, then it would demand that the oceans be ejected into space to clean up the environment of deadly salt and water toxins.
It says "cautious scientific reasoning." There are two problems with that description. First, it is value judgment which violates presumed editorial neutrality of straight news. Second, it is the wrong value judgment. "idiotic non-scientific assumptions" would be an accurate description.
The consequence of a completely unworkable policy is regulatory confusion and rule by bureaucratic fiat.
...Germany still compares well to Canada, Australia, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and some other industrialized countries - not just Trumpistan.
On the contrary, the U.S. is leading CO2 emissions reductions under Trump.
Take a wild guess what country is reducing its CO2 emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? ...The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. ...
Nearly every nation that signed on to Paris and has admonished America for not doing so, has already violated the agreement. According to Climate Action Network Europe, "All EU countries are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal."
The complexity of the physics and chemistry, the enormous manufacturing engineering effort and the management coordination required to direct the billions of dollars in capital necessary to achieve that is mind-boggling. Six point nine billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. It's at times like this when it seems we are finally living in the future. Electric cars, re-usable space rockets, 3D printed titanium.
Meanwhile, FEMA finally found the 20,000 pallets of potable water bottles it shipped to Puerto Rico. On the airfield where it left them. After the expiration date.
Without devolving into absolutist Ayn Rand libertarian zealots, maybe we can all agree that there is something to this invisible hand, free market, capitalism stuff.
what's with the fake grille - was that really necessary?
Presumably it is a skeuomorph.
from the ./ summary:
The Model X has a range of 237 miles.
from wikipedia
The Tesla Model X 100D has an official EPA rated range of up to 295 mi (475 km).
So the summary incorrectly states that the Mercedes EQC has a greater range (280 miles) than the Tesla Model X, when in fact the Mercedes has the lesser range.
There are different standards for measurement for electrical vehicle range, so it's not clear if the figures are comparable. Nonetheless, the value given appears either outdated or otherwise in error.
Bruce Perens wrote:
[under capitalism] if you refuse to play the game, your children starve to death....
That is the opposite of communism, where if you accept the game your children starve to death.
Industrial nationalization and farm collectivization under communist regimes have resulted in mass famines in North Korea, the USSR, Venezuela and China. In China alone, about 55 million people perished in a four-year period during the Great Leap Forward.
Participating in communism kills. Participating in capitalism saves children's lives (according to Bruce.) An idiot considers those points and concludes, "communism good, capitalism bad."
In addition to his inverted value system, Bruce is pushing an argument that communism provides social safety nets and capitalism excludes social safety nets. That is a lie. If communism indeed provided social safety nets, then it would not be widely associated mass starvation. Capitalism is the only economic system which generates sufficient wealth to adequately fund social safety nets.
One of the most zealous advocates for capitalism, the late Milton Friedman, devised the negative income tax specifically to benefit the poor and he advocated for it persistently. (It was eventually implemented under Reagan as the earned income tax credit) Earlier, Hayek maintained that social safety nets were consistent with classical liberalism.
Bruce Perens Wrote:
While you are next driving down our public roads to our parks...
Their construction and maintenance is funded by tax revenues collected from capitalist enterprises and their employees.
"Commons" not "Communist". In your own words.
And they don't do all of those bad things some folks pin on communism.
Because they are commons, not Communism.
Hayek makes the point in his book The Road to Serfdom that some types of collectivism are consistent with classical liberalism. Namely, those collective actions for which there is broad public agreement on specific policies. The distinction is that, instead, Communism compels collective action in the circumstance of many differing factions, with the necessary outcome that a small minority imposes its will on the majority. (Necessary because, with division into many factions, there are only small minorities.)
Furthermore, non-rivalrous goods such as roads and parks are special cases. By citing such examples alone, you have failed to make the general case for collectivism.
And you are cherry-picking, listing only the success and leaving off your list such massive fiascos such as the the New York subway system. Construction costs are 10x per mile higher than they should be because of graft, the stations are disgustingly filthy, trains are frequently late.
Additionally, you have not addressed if in those cases which you mentioned, parks and roads, the public would be better or worse served by privatization. You failed to make the comparison. Instead, you merely defended the collectivized case by stating that it was not a worst-case scenario. What an absurd endorsement. In any context outside of politics such and endorsement would be laughed at. "Hitting your thumb with a hammer is not as bad as the critics says." The meaningful question is: is a person better off when the government compels him to pay taxes which it expends on road building, or better off when private businesses build roads for which that person pays fees to access. Well there are many aspects to consider. There are network effects, so that benefits accrue to those not using roads. There are transaction costs for collecting fees for road travel only in the case of private roads. Public roads subsidize trucking, which creates price distortion, artificially lowering the cost of truck transportation. That means it wins out over other more efficient means of transportation in some cases, and also that it distorts the price of goods transported by truck, resulting in over consumption of goods and fuel. Finally, with privatized roads, the poor can be subsidized using currency or vouchers, so this is purely an issue of efficiency, not equity.
The point here is not that generally or specifically either private or public roads or parks are preferred, but that there are many considerations involved when addressing the issue, of which none you seem even slightly aware. You lack any rational framework for addressing the issue, having made no comparison between alternatives. In summary, you demonstrate a severe incapacity to address issues competently. It's like anything that comes to your mind that makes Communism sound good, or less shitty, you type. That is ideology, not intellect. You seem like more of cheerleader than a thinker.
Capitalism doesn't have a great record for social good either.
A few points in reponse:
Capitalism is orthogonal to tyranny. Pinochet endorsed capitalism; so did British governors of Hong Kong. Those mid-20th century German National Socialists maintained and controlled capitalist enterprises; Thomas Edison was a capitalist.
Improvement in the material well-being is the essential foundation for progress in all fields of human endeavor; Art, Music, Literature. Science, Mathematics, Open Source software. That improvement is primarily the product of capitalism and secondarily the product of volunteer and non-profit endeavors in free markets.
Because of its essential role in sustaining all other endeavors, it is no exaggeration to say that almost all social gain has been, either directly or indirectly, the product of capitalism. Look at the times and places in the world where the greatest advancements have taken place and how those coincided with capitalism, there is a consistent relationship.
Bruce, what was your thought process there, exactly? Like you compared the consequences of Mao's collectivization in the Great Leap Forward to the results of Deng Xiaoping economic reforms? So about 55 million people died in a four year period under communism and the transition to improved standards of living in China began with the introduction of capitalism, so you concluded that "Capitalism doesn't have a great record for social good...?" Well, it does, subjectively, to those who prefer to eat food and live instead of dying en masse.
Bruce Perens wrote:
Communism isn't inherently evil, it's just that it has often come with totalitarianism.
Communism is a lie told by tyrants to grow and sustain political support for themselves.
Because falsehoods told to advance malevolent ends are categorically evil, Communism is inherently evil.
So Bruce, would you say it is an accurate characterization of your own beliefs that the lies and propaganda use by tyrants to gain power are not themselves evil? That it is exclusively the exercise of power for harmful ends which is evil? If so, what is your basis for that distinction? Additionally, would you make the same distinction for any other grift, such as an advance-fee scam; Are the deliberate falsehoods told to the mark not evil, but only the subsequent monetary transactions evil?
"It's not that advance-fee deals with Nigerians don't work, its just that they have never really been tried," says the mark.
The Japanese devote a great deal of attention and concern to abiding conventions for social interaction. I believe it a weak claim (how would you ever test such a thing experimentally?) but there is a theory that the historical necessity for large-scale coordinated communal rice planting and harvesting exerted selective pressure for personality traits of conformism, cooperation and agreeableness. With more certainty, Japan is a substantially racially uniform culture, and there is loads of psychological and sociological evidence that racial diversity promotes social disharmony. About 98.5% of residents of Japan are ethnic Japanese. As the Japanese Government states: "...there are no issues of race relations among Japanese citizens as they are all of the same race". It's a little fishy because they include small domestic minorities such as the Ainu, but still those would not be substantial minorities if categorized out and to some degree they remain geographically isolated within Japan.
Regardless of the causes for it, Japanese society is extraordinarily and wonderfully polite, civil and organized. However, that has the trade-off that social norms become so suffocating that Japanese seek escape from social obligations and comfort in relationships in what seems to westerners, bizarre commercial services. Following the rules means that sometimes the best way to get what you want while staying in bounds is to purchase it.
Japan's Rent-a-Family Industry
How to Hire Fake Friends and Family
Rental family service
Gun culture is sick culture.
My father attended grade school in rural Maryland in the 1950's. The boys in his class brought their rifles to school in the morning so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home from school. That was typical in rural America during that era. Fathers judged when boys were mature enough to handle a gun and taught them gun safety and shooting skills. Hunting and shooting were social and communal. There were very few fatalities from rural grade school shootings in the decade of the 1950's, despite the common practice of allowing students to bring guns to schools. Some schools had shooting clubs. Rural American was safe because it had a healthy gun culture.
Gun culture is about advocating and practicing responsibility and safety. Can you name any mass shooting carried out by an NRA class instructor or a competitive shooter? Are the U.S. Olympic shooting teams "sick?" What about those in the armed forces? Someone is willing to risk his life at war for his country and you describe his affinity for the weapons used to perform his job as "sick?"
Study the biographies of those who commit mass shootings. They are not part of gun culture, but usually loners with histories of anti-social behavior.
Where do members of gun culture congregate? At shooting ranges. If gun culture is sick, then where are the mass shootings at ranges??
from the ./ summary:
"welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients."
To be precise, detecting welfare fraud is extremely rare.
We need stronger laws.
Wrong. We need smarter laws.
Well professional bionformaticians had already been working on the problem of personalized medicine and medical diagnosis before IBM and Watson got involved. If you listen to them, there is a clear consensus of how that is is going to work in the future.
Part 1: Because of a dependence of both disease and the effectiveness of treatments upon personal genetics, every person will get sequenced at birth. That will do at least three things: reduce what otherwise appears as statistical noise in assessing treatment efficacy by resolving interdependencies between the treatment and personal genetics, improve estimates of the likelihood of any individual developing a disease or disorder, and help to identify the best treatments for specific individuals.
Part 2: Every patient treatment and its outcome become a trail logged into a massive database along with the patient's medical history and genetics. Currently, massive amounts of information about the effectiveness of treatments is discarded because the records of treatment after a drug is released are not accumulated. Now, before a drug is introduced to the market, there are clinical trials on a subpopulation, and that becomes an authoritative record of the drug effectiveness. That is a tiny fraction of the potential information out there and insufficient to assess interactions of drugs with other factors such as genetics.
One of the barriers to implementing that system is the price of sequencing, about $1000.00/person. Prices are projected to fall until sequencing becomes ubiquitous.
The other barrier is privacy legislation (HIPAA) and financial incentives acting on institutions against information sharing. Despite endless funded government initiatives to implement sharable electronic medical records, patient medical information remains siloed within provider and insurance networks. Rather than work to share information, those institutions are competing to build the largest silo. (This circumstance exemplifies a typical type of government ineptitude, which is to continuously and futilely throw enormous sums of money at a problem rather than simply and cheaply reforming the legislation and regulation giving rise to the perverse incentives which created the problem. Information sharing for research medical use to benefit personalized medicine was the main driver behind the U.K. slackening medical records privacy, demonstrating that in the U.K. not all government officials are complete idiots.)
Finally, the main point of this post: The bioinformaticians have wished for that future because they knew that the problem of personalized medicine was information-starved before IBM threw billions at the problem. Given adequate information, the computational solutions of personalized medicine are already known by those humans with domain-specific expertise.
If IBM had instead invested those billions in reducing the cost of sequencing further and in lobbying government to fix the stupid incentives and restrictions acting against medical information sharing, the problem could have been solved by now. Another case of someone with a hammer looking for nails by pounding on things to see if they move.
Had Watson been genuinely intelligent, it would explained all that that IBM.
from the ./ summary:
"Samsung said it would invest heavily in four key areas through 2020. Auto tech, artificial intelligence and new fifth-generation, or 5G, cellular technology."
That's three, not four.
There are still people who imagine that Brexit was a bad thing.
This is just make-believe, but wouldn't it be wonderful if the government agency with oversight authority had Justice successfully prosecute the executives responsible and they received large fines and long jail sentences?
But we all know how this works in the real world; regulators go after the corporation instead, then announce to the public what amazing heroes they for a large financial settlement against an evil corporation. Then Elizabeth Warren has an orgasm and proclaims how wonderful is government regulation. Also, if you are the Obama administration, then you misdirect the proceeds of settlements to left-wing political activists instead of to Treasury. (Really. They did that routinely.) The stock holders, who are at no fault themselves, pay the penalty and the executives who committed the crime are granted immunity in exchanged for testimony and continue on happily with their outsized salaries. Summary: The government responds to corporate crime by punishing the innocent and exonerating the guilty.
Corporations would act less criminally if officials enforcing the laws sought penalties for those who actually perpetrated the crimes. Achieving that depends on replacing regulation with rule-of-law and reforming a grandstanding and ethically corrupt Justice Department.
Stock shorts serve a valuable social purpose which is to monetize accurate information that a corporation is overvalued, thereby incentivizing efficient pricing. But shorts can also play a roll in illegitimate scams, where an accurately-valued stock is shorted, then publicly badmouthed to drive down its price.
Not to name names here, but a lot of the outstanding Tesla shorts are held by the those with a documented record of engaging in the latter. These are not ethical people and one certain event that would mitigate against future massive financial losses from their outstanding short positions would be a drop in Tesla share prices if Elon Musk had an accident. To put it bluntly: The insane amount of money involved and the demonstrated lack of ethics of those who stand to lose it should make Musk worry about there being contract on his life.
Next thing will probably be outlawing 3D printers.
If they treat it like paper printers then it will be government-mandated watermarking. From the EFF:
...all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
It appears likely that all recent commercial color laser printers print some kind of forensic tracking codes...
This is going to sound a bit critical so let me preface it by stating that Cody Wilson is an interesting guy and I endorse Defense Distributed.
That said, Defense Distributed is really a political rhetorical tactic; Nobody is actually firing rounds and their oppressors from 3D printed guns. Fundamentally, freely publishing gun blueprints is a clever strategy to force Democrats into a corner, compelling them to choose between either of two undesirable options: allowing gun rights or opposing free speech rights. If Democrats suppress publication of gun blueprints, then they betray their own free-speech principles. If Democrats allow publication of gun blueprints, then they forego their anti-gun agenda.
As soon as Defense Distributed freely published gun blueprints, anti-gun Democrats confronted a no-win scenario. Because they necessarily loose, their best option is to minimize casualties. Wow, are they screwing that up:
"Frankly, it is terrifying... We think that it is important to put a stop to this right away and make it as difficult as humanly possible to access this information." Washington Attorney General Bill Ferguson told reporters...
Any government official publicly demanding that information be suppressed and censored instantly loses in the court of public opinion. That statement achieves nothing but to help Republicans heading into the November elections. "Democrats are working to suppress the right to free speech" is now a 100% truthful statement. It will get even worse after they lose in court, which will be viewed by the public as an authoritative rebuke of their attempts to suppress the right to free speech.
As I favor an adversarial and competitive political process, it would be nice to see the Democrats get their game on. As a first step, stop playing politics like it is tiddlywinks when the other side treats it as chess.
...American farmers are paid for by American tax dollars whether you consume dairy products or not.
This is why we have a 1.39 billion pound cheese surplus.
Past convictions of other suspects arrested by those officers and convictions obtained by the prosecutor should be voided if they depended on testimony by the officers or the accuracy of statements made to the court by the prosecutor.
Does anyone here know if English law works that way? Do the previous victims of the dishonest officers and prosecutor now have a right to re-trial?