A category 4 hurricane just hit the Texas coast and our President still hasn't appointed anyone to head the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, or any of the agencies that deal with hurricanes.
Today, as he flew off on a golfing trip to Camp David, he was asked if he had a message for the people of Texas. His reply was, "Good luck".
Also, Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process so that at the current rate, congress will get through all of Trump's nominations in 11 years (!).
Also also, the senate pulled a parliamentary trick to block Trump recess appointments.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.
So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?
It would only take a degree or two of variation to trigger the runaway event, but that's never happened due to variations in sun activity?
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every morning I read Breitbart first, then MSM (via Google News). Breitbart to find out what happened, and MSM to find out why it was Trump's fault.
The GCSB has said that it was impossible to plead the case as it would jeopardize national security.
Should that be understood as: "GCSB - and possibly the government of New Zealand - is controlled by a non-public foreign governance."?
I find it very interesting that not disclosing this information was more important to this entity than getting Kim to the USA for (false claims of) copyright infringements.
What struck me is the potential trouble that will happen if the state tries to return his assets.
I was under the impression that the State seized his domain and didn't renew it, so that other parties scooped it up. Also, are they going to give back the seized data intact?
Back in the day, software projects used to be killed because of technical limitations. Now they are killed because someone objects to what someone else does in their spare time.
So let me get this straight.
Rod Vagg tweeted using his personal twitter account, on his own time, and referred to an article which appears to be quite worthy of discussion. The title The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech pretty-much describes what one finds in the article. It's about "speech codes", and the effects of limiting what people can say.
The article is completely and totally academic, with a position and supporting argument, written by a psychology professor!
And for tweeting a link to this article, he loses his position as Director of Engineering?
You can get doxxed, threatened, and fired for having a political opinion on your own time if you get caught. Even if you don't publicly voice your opinion on the net, you can get fired for being caught on a security camera at a protest.
This political climate - the one we are living in right now - is insane.
We know how many jobs will be lost. Do we know how many workers will benefit from a $1 per hour increase? I think that number will be larger than the number of jobs lost.
Be careful of that calculation.
The justification behind Chinese off-shoring was that the benefits of reduced prices outweigh the domestic loss of wages. For example, the damage from losing one worker at $50K is more than compensated if 10 million people spend $1 less on some product. That frees up $10 million to be spent on other things, and the economy gets stronger.
The problem is that the benefits are not linear. You can easily see that by going to the limits of the policy - when all manufacturing is done in China and all workers are out of a job, for instance.
If you assume a fixed or shrinking pool of available jobs, then you quickly come to the point where there are more job-seekers than there are jobs. In this case the economic benefits can still be argued, but the cost of doing so is the loss of the $50K job and the extra burden of having an unemployed person in the labor pool.
It's not a linear function, and you can't rely on past economic studies that were done based on a previous historical situation.
do you have a source that is a reputable news organization for that?
Here's a direct quote from a Finnish man on vacation who observed the situation:
I was expecting to enter a peaceful protest to protect this monument and part of United States history from utter and total rewriting. I entered with people from the United States who were aware there were going to be counter-protesters. They promised to keep me safe, which they did. But what happened was, the police force, which should have kept the protesting parties separate, in fact funneled the right-wing protesters, the people defending the monument, right into Antifa, [making them run] a gauntlet of Antifa to the monument Then – I don’t know the details of it – on dubious legal grounds, [the police] declared the gathering of right-wing protesters unlawful. We were forced to leave the venue and run another gauntlet.
Call me jaded, but I don't think we'll find accurate reporting on *anything* about this incident from the MSM.
There's an elephant in the room that no one's talking about.
"Unite the right" was not afforded the protection of law during their rally.
Furthermore, law enforcement purposely directed the rally-goers into the antifa crowd, putting them in significant danger.
The Antifa crowd was flinging urine, poop, and one ralley-goer suffered permanent eye damage from having acid (!) thrown at him. The police were widely observed as doing nothing to stop the fighting.
Think about this for a minute: The government withdrew the protection of law from a group based on their political ideals. The state governor and the mayor simply decided not to enforce the law for an ideology they don't like.
This is a profoundly scary thought - that a political faction within the government can simply decide not to enforce the law in order to promote their narrative.
I'm going to have to side with the ACLU on this one. Hate speech is protected speech, and UniteTheRight should have been allowed to peaceably assemble.
Repetition does play a key-role, obviously, in enforcing lies. Just look at the mechanism of "prayer". This has been known for a very long time to work.
There's a mechanism in your brain(*) that filters out all the incoming sensory stimulus and only presents items that are deemed important to the conscious mind.
So for example, while reading this you're probably unaware of your weight on your chair, the ambient sounds in the room, What you see outside the screen, and so on. The feel of pants on your legs goes unnoticed, but if a bug starts crawling up your calf it's immediately presented to your conscious mind for action.
It's well known that if you purchase a new car you suddenly start noticing other cars of the same model as you pass them (when you didn't before), and women who purchase a style of dress start noticing other women wearing that same style.
It's thought that this is part of a goal-seeking mechanism in the brain. Tell the mechanism your goals and it automatically filters out anything unrelated to that goal.
This is how prayer works. We live our lives awash in information that might be relevant to our personal goals, but most of it is ignored by the RAS unless we program it with these goals.
Prayer allows people to identify and set these goals in their mind, so that you start noticing the relevant opportunities. Pray to God for a miracle, and later you notice something comes along that helps you through your problem. Prayer works, God answers, hallelujah!
Repetition is important, but simply setting clear goals is often sufficient to get help from the almighty.
(*) In the Reticular Activation System, but there's some disagreement as to where it actually resides
Yes, it's annoying when your kids question you all the time, and I feel for teachers who have to deal with everyone else's kids... but maybe we ought to stop with the Santa and Tooth Fairy and all the other 'cute and harmless' lies we tell kids.
Instead, we ought to be asking them what they think, and why, and then show them where they've made errors... so when they come up against something new, they have a fighting chance of figuring it out without someone holding their hand the whole time.
The best experience I ever had in school was a teacher mocking me for being afraid to be wrong, which is really the fork in the road where you either try to figure something out or just shut down and stick with your initial belief. We need more of that for our kids.
Damore's essay was a fascinating peek into the sociology of lies.
The vast, vast majority of discussion about this(*) fell into two categories:
1) He said *that* shocking thing! (Countered with "He didn't say that") 2) He wrote prejudiced opinions not based in fact (Countered with "He cited references for each position he took")
Note the pattern here: the vast majority of discussion can be described as "make something up, then complain about it".
It's a complete surprise to me how *much* dishonesty arose over this incident. I suppose it's partly due to MSM wanting to drive clicks to their sites: Gizmodo published the essay with the references removed, bolstering item #2, and CNN headlined that Damore argues women aren't suited for tech jobs for "biological" reasons, which ginned up a lot of outrage on item #1.
There were a handful of lessor discussions in the same mould(**).
It's fascinating because this is one example where anyone can drill down to the exact truth in moments - the published news reports are available, the words he used are available for comparison, everything everyone said is now part of the written record.
Despite all this - despite the truth being so easy to determine - the vast majority of discussion of every aspect of this incident has been based on lies and attempts to correct them.
We can find the truth quite easily. How, in the face of Gizmodo and CNN, can the average person do that?
Maybe it's time we stopped worrying about what people think, and examine how they *come* to the beliefs they have.
Having a higher quality stream of truth would be a good first step.
(*) You can verify this for yourself: check the commentary for any of Slashdot's recent articles about Damore's essay (such as this one). The rule holds true for other social media channels.
(**) Including: the citations he used were from institutions with clear bias, the citations he used didn't confirm his point, he claims to be a PhD but isn't (an ad-hominem attack unrelated to his point), he's not allowed to cite scientific studies because he's not himself a scientist (wtf?), he can't sue Google because CA is an "at will" state (difference between "fired for no reason" and "fired for the *wrong* reason).
Try owning linux some time and see if you can find the best of anything.
I wanted a program to do backups, and went to google to see if there was one or two favorites to choose from.
The first page of results lists "14 outstanding backup utilities for linux", "10 best linux backup solutions", "10 outstanding backup utilities", "34 best free linux backup" (wtf?), and "5 awesome open source backup software for linux".
None of these sites has the programs sorted in the same order, so... which one is the best? Which are the 3 most popular?
It's not clear that there can be "34 best" of anything, and once you get that far down the list it simply becomes "a list of all backup programs", with no realistic way to choose.
Next I'm going to implement a web page on a Raspberry pi - I'll start with a google search for "top open source web server". and see what's popular...
While in the medium term you could see more precipitation in the American Midwest, in the long term it will mean higher precipitation in winter and much less in summer, with much higher temperatures. In other words, one of North America's major bread baskets will become less conducive to agriculture.
The climate issue has a lot of actual problems, and here's the one that counter's your position.
Climate prediction is based on mathematical models which are trained on historical data and then carried forward to predict the future.
This process has never worked in any other human endeavour.
For example, the same process is used by many people in an attempt to predict the stock market. Does that ever work out?
The same process is used to predict the effect of changes in the economy, such as raising the interest rates. Has that ever gone horribly wrong(*)?
The same process is used to predict disease outbreaks, product viability, and the effect of importing cane toads in Australia.
There is no instance where a mathematical model with the complexity of Earth's climate has made reliable predictions in any way.
Furthermore, there are a multitude of models, scientists discount out the ones that don't seem right, and hand-tune some of the parameters to make the outcomes more reasonable.
So saying that "such-and-so" will happen is simply the output of an elaborate random generator, tuned and selected for the outcome that fits the narrative.
This is one of the real problems with the climate science debate: no model of that complexity has ever been accurate, therefore it's incorrect to be making decisions based on their results.
(*) It was used as a justification for the bank bailouts, offshoring, free trade, and easy immigration. All of these were predicted to make our economy stronger.
The paper calls out this Infowars spirit cooking article as an example of fake news and how it spreads. The diffusion chart for that one article takes up the entirety of page 4 of the paper.
I reviewed that article, and couldn't find anything that was in any way "fake".
John Podesta's brother forwarded an E-mail where Marina Abramovic invited them to a spirit cooking dinner. All of this is fact, made public when wikileaks published the actual E-mail.
There's some background on spirit cooking (which I didn't check - looks legit), and some references to innuendo (which I *did* check - they're legit).
Overall, there's nothing in the Infowars article that appears fake, or even blown out of proportion. Snopes.com pretty-much agrees with the facts laid out in the article.
John Podesta didn't go to that dinner or participate in spirit cooking, and InforWars didn't say that he did!
Not to take partisan shots here, but what part of that article is fake news?
A quick scan shows that they... apparently use every type of data representation. You'll find a scatter plot with non-linear regression, a joint distribution image, a histogram, line charts, diffusion networks, and a triangular distribution thingy where color indicates the log of the number of articles (what the heck is that called?).
It plots the Gini coefficient of the various tweets. (I'll save you the trouble.)
The paper goes from the introduction directly to the results, then the discussion, then talks about the methods afterwards. Is that typical? I always thought the methods section comes before the results.
As near as I can tell, there is no supplemental data that indicates what their data is. Their entire paper relies on the correctness of "hoaxy" and "botometer".
Taking "botometer" as an example, looking for an estimate of accuracy, I could find no papers in established journals about this service. There are a couple of conference papers though - will those do? None has an indication of how accurate the service is.
So if "botometer" has an accuracy of 80%, which would be pretty good, and "hoaxy" had an accuracy of 80%, which would also be pretty good, then the results of the cited paper would be... how good?
Looking at the paper, I have to wonder if it's an elaborate hoax.
There's a *lot* of... um... surprising things about this paper.
The way to get net neutrality is to convince Republicans that it is important, not cater to the 0.01% of the population who might actually change their votes over this.
A very insightful post.
One of the problems with the current implementation is that a) it isn't what most people think of, and b) it was an FCC overreach of jurisdiction that should have been done by a different department.
This whole thing could be solved instantly by a law passed by congress. That way there would be no arguing, and the administration would be required to implement it.
If the law isn't passed because you don't have the majority, then you can base the upcoming elections on the merits of that law (among other meritorious issues). You could use it as a policy plank to help drive your party's elections.
I'm astonished that no one is trying anything *constructive* to fix this.
We could also have stayed out of it till ISIS and Assad had fought to the end, then knocked out the now weakened winner.
Hillary Clinton could also have not assassinated Qaddafi, which left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven. Qaddafi was not one of the good guys, but he was keeping all the local terrorism in check.
Intelligence sources brought the opportunity to Hillary while she was SOS, and also noted that killing him would be a bad idea and predicted the rise of terrorism and [something similar to] ISIS if he was killed.
Hillary overrode that decision and had him killed anyway(*).
Nah, that's a false dichotomy. USA backed Syrian rebel forces, until Trump switched to backing Assad due to his Russian links. So he's currently ended CIA training of Syrian Rebels.
He doesn't like Assad one bit (he's said as much), but he's also trying to stop the terrorism. Lesser of two evils and all that.
You know - the terrorism that was enabled by Hillary's assassination of Qaddafi.
(*) My personal view is that she did it because she wanted a "win" during here stint as SOS - something that would show leadership and decision making in her upcoming presidential run. Boy, *that* decision sure turned out to be a bad move for the rest of us!
(*) Whether the Republicans are also corrupt, or have a different level of corruption, is still an open question.
Whether the Republicans are also corrupt is only a question an idiot would have to ask at this point. If they have a different level of corruption, it is not apparently significantly different, so that question is not already answered, merely irrelevant.
Your first response is to name calling.
It's interesting, because I've always held that the Republicans were cold, selfish Scrooge-like people who don't care about others.
Coming through the election, I've just now realized how poorly based that opinion is. When I mentally gauge the amount of hate and loathing from the left to come up with a "compensation" metric, and if I apply this metric to some of the widely-held beliefs that I've been told over the years, many of them evaporate.
Political parties have a right to set their own standards. But both parties have a flawed primary system, and so does the presidential election itself. Not to mention the various legislative seats, which are grossly imbalanced.
I'm coming to the realization that the Democrats are actually corrupt(*).
I was reading about the DOJ slush fund(**) and it struck me just how deep and insidious the corruption has been in this country.
And let us not forget after the election, leftists pleaded with the EC delegates to be faithless, then pleaded with the supreme court to invalidate the results, then pleaded with the U.S. military to step in and prevent the inauguration (wtf?), leaked secret and sensitive information - not to expose crimes, but for political slander, and rioted for weeks. They thought all this was OK, if it somehow got them to their goals. For example, Hillary made no statements condemning the riots, and most of the left blamed the rioting on Trump.
All this *in addition* to the Sanders thing, and getting special treatment in the press and for the debates, blocking reasonable voter registration, and suppressing the military vote.
There's a sub-conversation on the net that holds that the Democratic party *won't survive* once all the corruption has been rooted out. The Democratic ideals are so far from what people want that they require all the extra boost they get from a tilted playing field.
I'm not sure I believe that bit about the Democratic party not surviving, but after reading about the DOJ thing, and knowing the level of effort we're putting into the Russia probe while ignoring some seemingly obvious evidence on the Democratic side, it makes me wonder...
(*) Whether the Republicans are also corrupt, or have a different level of corruption, is still an open question.
(**) DOJ plea-bargains where the offending company pays its fine to charity, but the DOJ only chooses charities that promote left-wing causes.
it shows "the financial sector" has it's priorities reversed if they seem to think "investing in production machines" is "burning cash"
Actually, their priorities are fine, it's just not the priorities that people think they have.
About a month ago a huge percentage of Tesla's stock was held short(*), and everyone was screaming about how the stock was going to tank any day now.
Except that they knew the Model 3 would be announced around the turn of the month, so people started getting out of the short position. That caused the stock to dip, and more people exited the short strategy, and the stock went from $383 at the end of June to $319 a couple of days ago.
Now that most of the short positions are out, we might see some bull predictions for the stock. The stock jumped $10 yesterday and $22 today.
The short positions are gone, and good riddance. Now maybe we will see some legitimate news and analysis about the health of the company.
(*) I don't remember the figure, something like 15% of the total shares
There's also Gab.ai, which has sprung up in response to complaints about one-sided censorship by the company.
Gab has a much more elegant solution to censorship: if you don't like something, put it on your personal list of "things I don't want to see", and you'll never see those. You can specify users or specific words you don't like.
Compare with Twitter, where you can complain about something being in violation of their rules of conduct for partisan reasons... and most likely it'll get banned.
Lots and lots of people are moving over to gab once they've been banned at twitter.
Usually with a screenshot of their *completely reasonable* post that got them banned.
(Even Scott Adams gets banned and shadow-banned - for nothing more than questioning the science behind global warming. It's almost as if the science behind global warming can't stand up to scrutiny!)
(Several of the recent bannings are for supporting the military trans' ban decision. Almost as if no one is allowed to debate that issue!)
I'm a biologist, I don't understand P values [...]
Here's some light for that subject.
Suppose you make 20 measurements of rats in a maze and discover that 15 out of the 20 times they turn left on their first corridor junction. Is that significant?
We know that if the decisions were random we'd expect 10 out of 20, but we also know that there is variation in that number. 10 out of 20 is the highest probability of individual outcome, but it's even *more* probable that something other than 10 out of 20 will occur.
So to see if the 15 out of 20 is significant, we can compare this outcome to random chance.
We can simulate 20 coin flips in a computer and then write down the number of heads versus tails. Then we do it again and write down the new results, and then do it again and again for a million rounds.
Tallying the results, we can then find the *probability* that 20 random coin tosses will equal 15 or more heads, and this will give us a way to compare the rat data with random chance. What percent of random tosses yield 15 or more heads?
This is the P-value in a nutshell: it's the probability that your measurements could be the result of chance.
Note that we can never be *certain* that the results are significant, only that there is a *probability* that the results are significant. The probability of significance is chosen by convention depending on the outcome risks. For normal scientific studies, it's 5% (P < 0.05). If you're studying a new medicine, you might want to bump that up to 1% (P < 0.01) for safety. If you're exploring subatomic physics, and the experiments are very difficult to reproduce, you might want that to be P <.00001% to be relatively certain.
The conventional value of 5% is often incorrectly attributed to Pearson. He said the 5% value makes the results worthy of more study, not that 5% value makes the results significant.
Also of note, if everyone makes studies to P 5%, then on average 1 out of 20 studies *will* be due to random chance, which means that fully 5% of all scientific studies are reporting random events.
And of course, if your degree requires you to publish, or your tenure is based on your publishing history, there are ways to adjust the results to make the significance more likely.
(For example, you can record 8 different measurements of your rats. There are 8*7 = 76 possible pairs of measurements, so on average about 3 of those pairs will correlate to within 5%. If you want to publish a paper, this is one way to do it.)
Very, very few recent scientific papers have ever been verified (by reproducing), and when later examined were found to be unreproducible.
This is leading people to lose faith in the scientific method.
Slashdot Mirror
A category 4 hurricane just hit the Texas coast and our President still hasn't appointed anyone to head the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, or any of the agencies that deal with hurricanes.
Today, as he flew off on a golfing trip to Camp David, he was asked if he had a message for the people of Texas. His reply was, "Good luck".
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
If Trump appointed Brock Long to head Fema you'd be lying.
Oh wait... you are!
And wonder of wonders, Brock is not incompetent!.
Also, Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process so that at the current rate, congress will get through all of Trump's nominations in 11 years (!).
Also also, the senate pulled a parliamentary trick to block Trump recess appointments.
Be sure to blame all of that on Trump!
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.
So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?
It would only take a degree or two of variation to trigger the runaway event, but that's never happened due to variations in sun activity?
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every morning I read Breitbart first, then MSM (via Google News). Breitbart to find out what happened, and MSM to find out why it was Trump's fault.
Trump will get how many years for... Treason?
Probably none.
Hillary will get how many years for...?
The GCSB has said that it was impossible to plead the case as it would jeopardize national security.
Should that be understood as: "GCSB - and possibly the government of New Zealand - is controlled by a non-public foreign governance."?
I find it very interesting that not disclosing this information was more important to this entity than getting Kim to the USA for (false claims of) copyright infringements.
What struck me is the potential trouble that will happen if the state tries to return his assets.
I was under the impression that the State seized his domain and didn't renew it, so that other parties scooped it up. Also, are they going to give back the seized data intact?
Back in the day, software projects used to be killed because of technical limitations. Now they are killed because someone objects to what someone else does in their spare time.
So let me get this straight.
Rod Vagg tweeted using his personal twitter account, on his own time, and referred to an article which appears to be quite worthy of discussion. The title The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech pretty-much describes what one finds in the article. It's about "speech codes", and the effects of limiting what people can say.
The article is completely and totally academic, with a position and supporting argument, written by a psychology professor!
And for tweeting a link to this article, he loses his position as Director of Engineering?
You can get doxxed, threatened, and fired for having a political opinion on your own time if you get caught. Even if you don't publicly voice your opinion on the net, you can get fired for being caught on a security camera at a protest.
This political climate - the one we are living in right now - is insane.
can anyone provide evidence of trump being a nazi?
Here you go.
We know how many jobs will be lost. Do we know how many workers will benefit from a $1 per hour increase? I think that number will be larger than the number of jobs lost.
Be careful of that calculation.
The justification behind Chinese off-shoring was that the benefits of reduced prices outweigh the domestic loss of wages. For example, the damage from losing one worker at $50K is more than compensated if 10 million people spend $1 less on some product. That frees up $10 million to be spent on other things, and the economy gets stronger.
The problem is that the benefits are not linear. You can easily see that by going to the limits of the policy - when all manufacturing is done in China and all workers are out of a job, for instance.
If you assume a fixed or shrinking pool of available jobs, then you quickly come to the point where there are more job-seekers than there are jobs. In this case the economic benefits can still be argued, but the cost of doing so is the loss of the $50K job and the extra burden of having an unemployed person in the labor pool.
It's not a linear function, and you can't rely on past economic studies that were done based on a previous historical situation.
So... be careful with that calculation.
do you have a source that is a reputable news organization for that?
Here's a direct quote from a Finnish man on vacation who observed the situation:
I was expecting to enter a peaceful protest to protect this monument and part of United States history from utter and total rewriting. I entered with people from the United States who were aware there were going to be counter-protesters. They promised to keep me safe, which they did. But what happened was, the police force, which should have kept the protesting parties separate, in fact funneled the right-wing protesters, the people defending the monument, right into Antifa, [making them run] a gauntlet of Antifa to the monument Then – I don’t know the details of it – on dubious legal grounds, [the police] declared the gathering of right-wing protesters unlawful. We were forced to leave the venue and run another gauntlet.
Call me jaded, but I don't think we'll find accurate reporting on *anything* about this incident from the MSM.
do you have a source that is a reputable news organization for that?
Which part? The ACLU just confirmed that the police were told to stand down, and the permanent eye damage thing comes directly from the victim.
There's an elephant in the room that no one's talking about.
"Unite the right" was not afforded the protection of law during their rally.
Furthermore, law enforcement purposely directed the rally-goers into the antifa crowd, putting them in significant danger.
The Antifa crowd was flinging urine, poop, and one ralley-goer suffered permanent eye damage from having acid (!) thrown at him. The police were widely observed as doing nothing to stop the fighting.
Think about this for a minute: The government withdrew the protection of law from a group based on their political ideals. The state governor and the mayor simply decided not to enforce the law for an ideology they don't like.
This is a profoundly scary thought - that a political faction within the government can simply decide not to enforce the law in order to promote their narrative.
I'm going to have to side with the ACLU on this one. Hate speech is protected speech, and UniteTheRight should have been allowed to peaceably assemble.
Repetition does play a key-role, obviously, in enforcing lies. Just look at the mechanism of "prayer". This has been known for a very long time to work.
There's a mechanism in your brain(*) that filters out all the incoming sensory stimulus and only presents items that are deemed important to the conscious mind.
So for example, while reading this you're probably unaware of your weight on your chair, the ambient sounds in the room, What you see outside the screen, and so on. The feel of pants on your legs goes unnoticed, but if a bug starts crawling up your calf it's immediately presented to your conscious mind for action.
It's well known that if you purchase a new car you suddenly start noticing other cars of the same model as you pass them (when you didn't before), and women who purchase a style of dress start noticing other women wearing that same style.
It's thought that this is part of a goal-seeking mechanism in the brain. Tell the mechanism your goals and it automatically filters out anything unrelated to that goal.
This is how prayer works. We live our lives awash in information that might be relevant to our personal goals, but most of it is ignored by the RAS unless we program it with these goals.
Prayer allows people to identify and set these goals in their mind, so that you start noticing the relevant opportunities. Pray to God for a miracle, and later you notice something comes along that helps you through your problem. Prayer works, God answers, hallelujah!
Repetition is important, but simply setting clear goals is often sufficient to get help from the almighty.
(*) In the Reticular Activation System, but there's some disagreement as to where it actually resides
Yes, it's annoying when your kids question you all the time, and I feel for teachers who have to deal with everyone else's kids... but maybe we ought to stop with the Santa and Tooth Fairy and all the other 'cute and harmless' lies we tell kids.
Instead, we ought to be asking them what they think, and why, and then show them where they've made errors... so when they come up against something new, they have a fighting chance of figuring it out without someone holding their hand the whole time.
The best experience I ever had in school was a teacher mocking me for being afraid to be wrong, which is really the fork in the road where you either try to figure something out or just shut down and stick with your initial belief. We need more of that for our kids.
Damore's essay was a fascinating peek into the sociology of lies.
The vast, vast majority of discussion about this(*) fell into two categories:
1) He said *that* shocking thing! (Countered with "He didn't say that")
2) He wrote prejudiced opinions not based in fact (Countered with "He cited references for each position he took")
Note the pattern here: the vast majority of discussion can be described as "make something up, then complain about it".
It's a complete surprise to me how *much* dishonesty arose over this incident. I suppose it's partly due to MSM wanting to drive clicks to their sites: Gizmodo published the essay with the references removed, bolstering item #2, and CNN headlined that Damore argues women aren't suited for tech jobs for "biological" reasons, which ginned up a lot of outrage on item #1.
There were a handful of lessor discussions in the same mould(**).
It's fascinating because this is one example where anyone can drill down to the exact truth in moments - the published news reports are available, the words he used are available for comparison, everything everyone said is now part of the written record.
Despite all this - despite the truth being so easy to determine - the vast majority of discussion of every aspect of this incident has been based on lies and attempts to correct them.
We can find the truth quite easily. How, in the face of Gizmodo and CNN, can the average person do that?
Maybe it's time we stopped worrying about what people think, and examine how they *come* to the beliefs they have.
Having a higher quality stream of truth would be a good first step.
(*) You can verify this for yourself: check the commentary for any of Slashdot's recent articles about Damore's essay (such as this one). The rule holds true for other social media channels.
(**) Including: the citations he used were from institutions with clear bias, the citations he used didn't confirm his point, he claims to be a PhD but isn't (an ad-hominem attack unrelated to his point), he's not allowed to cite scientific studies because he's not himself a scientist (wtf?), he can't sue Google because CA is an "at will" state (difference between "fired for no reason" and "fired for the *wrong* reason).
Try owning linux some time and see if you can find the best of anything.
I wanted a program to do backups, and went to google to see if there was one or two favorites to choose from.
The first page of results lists "14 outstanding backup utilities for linux", "10 best linux backup solutions", "10 outstanding backup utilities", "34 best free linux backup" (wtf?), and "5 awesome open source backup software for linux".
None of these sites has the programs sorted in the same order, so... which one is the best? Which are the 3 most popular?
It's not clear that there can be "34 best" of anything, and once you get that far down the list it simply becomes "a list of all backup programs", with no realistic way to choose.
Next I'm going to implement a web page on a Raspberry pi - I'll start with a google search for "top open source web server". and see what's popular...
While in the medium term you could see more precipitation in the American Midwest, in the long term it will mean higher precipitation in winter and much less in summer, with much higher temperatures. In other words, one of North America's major bread baskets will become less conducive to agriculture.
The climate issue has a lot of actual problems, and here's the one that counter's your position.
Climate prediction is based on mathematical models which are trained on historical data and then carried forward to predict the future.
This process has never worked in any other human endeavour.
For example, the same process is used by many people in an attempt to predict the stock market. Does that ever work out?
The same process is used to predict the effect of changes in the economy, such as raising the interest rates. Has that ever gone horribly wrong(*)?
The same process is used to predict disease outbreaks, product viability, and the effect of importing cane toads in Australia.
There is no instance where a mathematical model with the complexity of Earth's climate has made reliable predictions in any way.
Furthermore, there are a multitude of models, scientists discount out the ones that don't seem right, and hand-tune some of the parameters to make the outcomes more reasonable.
So saying that "such-and-so" will happen is simply the output of an elaborate random generator, tuned and selected for the outcome that fits the narrative.
This is one of the real problems with the climate science debate: no model of that complexity has ever been accurate, therefore it's incorrect to be making decisions based on their results.
(*) It was used as a justification for the bank bailouts, offshoring, free trade, and easy immigration. All of these were predicted to make our economy stronger.
The paper calls out this Infowars spirit cooking article as an example of fake news and how it spreads. The diffusion chart for that one article takes up the entirety of page 4 of the paper.
I reviewed that article, and couldn't find anything that was in any way "fake".
John Podesta's brother forwarded an E-mail where Marina Abramovic invited them to a spirit cooking dinner. All of this is fact, made public when wikileaks published the actual E-mail.
There's some background on spirit cooking (which I didn't check - looks legit), and some references to innuendo (which I *did* check - they're legit).
Overall, there's nothing in the Infowars article that appears fake, or even blown out of proportion. Snopes.com pretty-much agrees with the facts laid out in the article.
John Podesta didn't go to that dinner or participate in spirit cooking, and InforWars didn't say that he did!
Not to take partisan shots here, but what part of that article is fake news?
Here's a link to the original paper.
A quick scan shows that they... apparently use every type of data representation. You'll find a scatter plot with non-linear regression, a joint distribution image, a histogram, line charts, diffusion networks, and a triangular distribution thingy where color indicates the log of the number of articles (what the heck is that called?).
It plots the Gini coefficient of the various tweets. (I'll save you the trouble.)
The paper goes from the introduction directly to the results, then the discussion, then talks about the methods afterwards. Is that typical? I always thought the methods section comes before the results.
As near as I can tell, there is no supplemental data that indicates what their data is. Their entire paper relies on the correctness of "hoaxy" and "botometer".
Taking "botometer" as an example, looking for an estimate of accuracy, I could find no papers in established journals about this service. There are a couple of conference papers though - will those do? None has an indication of how accurate the service is.
So if "botometer" has an accuracy of 80%, which would be pretty good, and "hoaxy" had an accuracy of 80%, which would also be pretty good, then the results of the cited paper would be... how good?
Looking at the paper, I have to wonder if it's an elaborate hoax.
There's a *lot* of... um... surprising things about this paper.
Can someone link to a Breitbart article that's actually fake news?
From what I've read, their reporting is very tight, usually with references to whatever it is they're talking about.
Yes, they have a conservative bias, but bias is not the same thing as fake.
then the story is worthless.
The way to get net neutrality is to convince Republicans that it is important, not cater to the 0.01% of the population who might actually change their votes over this.
A very insightful post.
One of the problems with the current implementation is that a) it isn't what most people think of, and b) it was an FCC overreach of jurisdiction that should have been done by a different department.
This whole thing could be solved instantly by a law passed by congress. That way there would be no arguing, and the administration would be required to implement it.
If the law isn't passed because you don't have the majority, then you can base the upcoming elections on the merits of that law (among other meritorious issues). You could use it as a policy plank to help drive your party's elections.
I'm astonished that no one is trying anything *constructive* to fix this.
This guy just died, and YOU are JOKING about it, jackoff.
Ah, social justice.
We're now living in a post-joke society.
We could also have stayed out of it till ISIS and Assad had fought to the end, then knocked out the now weakened winner.
Hillary Clinton could also have not assassinated Qaddafi, which left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven. Qaddafi was not one of the good guys, but he was keeping all the local terrorism in check.
Intelligence sources brought the opportunity to Hillary while she was SOS, and also noted that killing him would be a bad idea and predicted the rise of terrorism and [something similar to] ISIS if he was killed.
Hillary overrode that decision and had him killed anyway(*).
Nah, that's a false dichotomy. USA backed Syrian rebel forces, until Trump switched to backing Assad due to his Russian links. So he's currently ended CIA training of Syrian Rebels.
He doesn't like Assad one bit (he's said as much), but he's also trying to stop the terrorism. Lesser of two evils and all that.
You know - the terrorism that was enabled by Hillary's assassination of Qaddafi.
(*) My personal view is that she did it because she wanted a "win" during here stint as SOS - something that would show leadership and decision making in her upcoming presidential run. Boy, *that* decision sure turned out to be a bad move for the rest of us!
(*) Whether the Republicans are also corrupt, or have a different level of corruption, is still an open question.
Whether the Republicans are also corrupt is only a question an idiot would have to ask at this point. If they have a different level of corruption, it is not apparently significantly different, so that question is not already answered, merely irrelevant.
Your first response is to name calling.
It's interesting, because I've always held that the Republicans were cold, selfish Scrooge-like people who don't care about others.
Coming through the election, I've just now realized how poorly based that opinion is. When I mentally gauge the amount of hate and loathing from the left to come up with a "compensation" metric, and if I apply this metric to some of the widely-held beliefs that I've been told over the years, many of them evaporate.
Republicans are more charitable than Democrats, for instance.
Apply your own metric to well-known memes about the Republican party, and what do you come up with?
And then look up some actual statistics. You may be surprised at the results.
Nope, just corrupt and unrepresentative.
Political parties have a right to set their own standards. But both parties have a flawed primary system, and so does the presidential election itself. Not to mention the various legislative seats, which are grossly imbalanced.
I'm coming to the realization that the Democrats are actually corrupt(*).
I was reading about the DOJ slush fund(**) and it struck me just how deep and insidious the corruption has been in this country.
This is paired with the IRS selecting conservative charities for intense scrutiny, 11 California counties have more registered voters than adults, all the leaks and outright disobeying of executive orders from the WH.
And let us not forget after the election, leftists pleaded with the EC delegates to be faithless, then pleaded with the supreme court to invalidate the results, then pleaded with the U.S. military to step in and prevent the inauguration (wtf?), leaked secret and sensitive information - not to expose crimes, but for political slander, and rioted for weeks. They thought all this was OK, if it somehow got them to their goals. For example, Hillary made no statements condemning the riots, and most of the left blamed the rioting on Trump.
All this *in addition* to the Sanders thing, and getting special treatment in the press and for the debates, blocking reasonable voter registration, and suppressing the military vote.
There's a sub-conversation on the net that holds that the Democratic party *won't survive* once all the corruption has been rooted out. The Democratic ideals are so far from what people want that they require all the extra boost they get from a tilted playing field.
I'm not sure I believe that bit about the Democratic party not surviving, but after reading about the DOJ thing, and knowing the level of effort we're putting into the Russia probe while ignoring some seemingly obvious evidence on the Democratic side, it makes me wonder...
(*) Whether the Republicans are also corrupt, or have a different level of corruption, is still an open question.
(**) DOJ plea-bargains where the offending company pays its fine to charity, but the DOJ only chooses charities that promote left-wing causes.
it shows "the financial sector" has it's priorities reversed if they seem to think "investing in production machines" is "burning cash"
Actually, their priorities are fine, it's just not the priorities that people think they have.
About a month ago a huge percentage of Tesla's stock was held short(*), and everyone was screaming about how the stock was going to tank any day now.
Except that they knew the Model 3 would be announced around the turn of the month, so people started getting out of the short position. That caused the stock to dip, and more people exited the short strategy, and the stock went from $383 at the end of June to $319 a couple of days ago.
Now that most of the short positions are out, we might see some bull predictions for the stock. The stock jumped $10 yesterday and $22 today.
The short positions are gone, and good riddance. Now maybe we will see some legitimate news and analysis about the health of the company.
(*) I don't remember the figure, something like 15% of the total shares
There's also Gab.ai, which has sprung up in response to complaints about one-sided censorship by the company.
Gab has a much more elegant solution to censorship: if you don't like something, put it on your personal list of "things I don't want to see", and you'll never see those. You can specify users or specific words you don't like.
Compare with Twitter, where you can complain about something being in violation of their rules of conduct for partisan reasons... and most likely it'll get banned.
Lots and lots of people are moving over to gab once they've been banned at twitter.
Usually with a screenshot of their *completely reasonable* post that got them banned.
(Even Scott Adams gets banned and shadow-banned - for nothing more than questioning the science behind global warming. It's almost as if the science behind global warming can't stand up to scrutiny!)
(Several of the recent bannings are for supporting the military trans' ban decision. Almost as if no one is allowed to debate that issue!)
I'm a biologist, I don't understand P values [...]
Here's some light for that subject.
Suppose you make 20 measurements of rats in a maze and discover that 15 out of the 20 times they turn left on their first corridor junction. Is that significant?
We know that if the decisions were random we'd expect 10 out of 20, but we also know that there is variation in that number. 10 out of 20 is the highest probability of individual outcome, but it's even *more* probable that something other than 10 out of 20 will occur.
So to see if the 15 out of 20 is significant, we can compare this outcome to random chance.
We can simulate 20 coin flips in a computer and then write down the number of heads versus tails. Then we do it again and write down the new results, and then do it again and again for a million rounds.
Tallying the results, we can then find the *probability* that 20 random coin tosses will equal 15 or more heads, and this will give us a way to compare the rat data with random chance. What percent of random tosses yield 15 or more heads?
This is the P-value in a nutshell: it's the probability that your measurements could be the result of chance.
Note that we can never be *certain* that the results are significant, only that there is a *probability* that the results are significant. The probability of significance is chosen by convention depending on the outcome risks. For normal scientific studies, it's 5% (P < 0.05). If you're studying a new medicine, you might want to bump that up to 1% (P < 0.01) for safety. If you're exploring subatomic physics, and the experiments are very difficult to reproduce, you might want that to be P < .00001% to be relatively certain.
The conventional value of 5% is often incorrectly attributed to Pearson. He said the 5% value makes the results worthy of more study, not that 5% value makes the results significant.
Also of note, if everyone makes studies to P 5%, then on average 1 out of 20 studies *will* be due to random chance, which means that fully 5% of all scientific studies are reporting random events.
And of course, if your degree requires you to publish, or your tenure is based on your publishing history, there are ways to adjust the results to make the significance more likely.
(For example, you can record 8 different measurements of your rats. There are 8*7 = 76 possible pairs of measurements, so on average about 3 of those pairs will correlate to within 5%. If you want to publish a paper, this is one way to do it.)
Very, very few recent scientific papers have ever been verified (by reproducing), and when later examined were found to be unreproducible.
This is leading people to lose faith in the scientific method.