Total Failure of Government and Society and not a good sign for the future of the human race. I personally have been well aware of the risks of Antibiotic-Resistant for over 20 years. This was the text book example of natural selection in my High School Biology class.
Instead of listening to the scientists and public health officals on the risks, we have let the greed and money in big ag run make our laws. We let them dump antibiotics in our livestock food in so we could have cheap meat and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Welcome back to the pre-antibiotic era where a cut can be deadly and hospitals can kill you. Nice job humanity!
While what you say may be true, I disagree with your conclusions and your hindsight.
There should be no problem giving massive amounts of antibiotics to livestock. In fact, we should be giving *more*, or at least *more effective* antibiotics to livestock.
The regulatory problem wasn't from giving out too many antibiotics, it was because the regulations are so stiff that it's impossible to create new antibiotics. The fundamental flaw in the system was to make government bureaucrats responsible for risk, while making drug companies responsible for that risk.
This has led to risk-averse government bureaucrats setting the bar so high that it's become impossible to make new drugs.
The Hippocratic oath reads (in part): "above all, do no harm". This was rewritten by the FAA to be: "do no harm at any cost!"
It currently costs upwards of a billion dollars to bring a new prescription drug to market. No company can afford to make a new drug unless it can apply to everyone as a maintenance dose.
Viagra was only developed because it was a noticed side-effect of a high blood pressure medicine.
Suppose we had 25 approved antibiotics, and used them in 5-year increments in a rotating scale. Each year 5 of the 25 antibiotics could be used, and each year one would be rotated out and another added. Each antibiotic would be used for 5 years and then disappear for 20. It would take a very long time under that scheme for diseases to develop immunity.
We can't do that any more, because it's impossible to develop new antibiotics.
There's lots of common-sense ways we could change this, but we don't.
We're killing ourselves from an abundance of caution.
So-called 'Universal Basic Income' will not scale up; everyone points to small EU countries who are only talking about it, haven't actually done it, who don't have trillions in National Debt to deal with. It won't work here in the U.S and in any number of first-world countries.
You UBI people also make another fatal assumption: That people, not having to work, will 'find their purpose in life'. They will not. Most people have no clue, their entire lives, what their 'purpose' is, and never find one; these people need to be given a purpose; it's called 'earning a living and surviving', AKA 'having a job'. Most people will sit around, eat, have sex, get fat, litter the planet with their directionless offspring, and otherwise get in trouble out of utter boredom and too-much-time-on-their-hands, all on the government dole.
Okay, calm down.
You are predicting that something won't work based on little more than your opinion. Let's throw some facts into the mix.
POINT 1
Taking the US as an example, since you mentioned it specifically, note that the GDP per capita in the US is a little over $53K per person. If the productivity output of the US were evenly distributed, that means that every man, woman, and child could spend $53,000 on goods and services this year, and next year they would have another $53 to spend.
Count only the working adults (about half the population) and that number doubles.
POINT 2
Productivity has about doubled since 1970. That's only 40 years ago. If you believe the trend is linear, it will double again in another 40 years, but if it is exponential, then it will quadrouple in another 40 years.
POINT 3
A hypothetical $1,000,000 invested in an index fund is expected to return around 7% interest over the long term. You need to take the long view on this rate, and not cherry-pick individual past decades - it's been consistent with the rise of productivity. See point 2 above.
Given 1% for management fees and 2% to account for inflation, that $1 million would pay out $40,000 per year in perpetuity.
The US could start a process of putting $1 million deposits aside and awarding the payouts to working class people on some schedule. A lottery, for example. If you want to work, you don't have to enter the lottery.
Note that the cost of the Iraq war was $1.7 trillion dollars, spent over a decade. That amount of money awarded to worker annuities could have reduced the workforce by 1.7 million workers, making the remaining jobs easier to find.
POINT 4
Note that we are rapidly developing self-driving vehicles. The first self-driving semi is on the road right now!
Even if the self-driving vehicle isn't useful 100% of the time (snow, limited visibility), by my calculations this will dump 2.5 million into the labor force almost instantly.
Note that Amazon is experimenting with delivery by drone. This could potentially drop another million into the workforce almost overnight. (If you include postal workers and some others not accounted for in the previous link.)
POINT 5
Regardless of whether you think it will work or not, something has to change.
You either make it work, or try to survive the burning destruction of the US, a modern recast of the French Revolution.
Do you have kids? You might consider what type of world you want them to live in.
Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796, from cows.
This was quite controversial at the time, because it involved injecting bits of cow into humans and... what could go wrong? Caricatures of the time show cows "breaking out" of people after the cow vaccine was given.
In religious terms, how ethical is it to inject humans with pieces derived from the lower animals? Didn't Jenner's vaccine meddle with God's great plan and pollute the integrity of the human form?
Pure ethics can be based on suffering, so there shouldn't be any problem. Later on we'll develop methods for growing organs without the animal host to reduce suffering even further.
It gets murky when you think ethics is derived from some religious dogma with irrational basis and no interior logic. Once you believe there's something special about the human form/genome/purpose, you start to have ethical pangs for no good reason.
Give it a couple of years, it'll become mainstream. Like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, eventually everyone will see the usefulness and ethics more clearly.
There is no background check involved for one individual selling to another in most states. If you're purchasing a firearm (rifle or not) from a gun store, pawn shop, dealer at a gun show etc, anyone who sells guns with an FFL, then there is a background check.
I can corroborate this. I've seen pistols and rifles at yard sales in NH. Pistols are less common than rifles, but you can find them.
This is fine in NH, we don't have a lot of gun violence. If your state is concerned about citizen death, consider disarming the law-abiding ones.
It's because China is using a protectionist practice.
Western scholars figured out the problem with this practice hundreds of years ago. Problem is - it screws with your money supply something fierce. You end up having to radically manipulate your money supply, and you wind up with deflation and endless stimulus spending. Japan did the same thing in the 70's and 80's, and they've been paying for it over the last two decades (stagflation in the 90's-2000's, deflation since then.) China's turn is coming up soon.
I'm happy to learn more about this, but I am a bit sceptical about your conclusions. (Not the least of which is the general religious undertone of economic schools of thought.)
Firstly, the US is mostly free trade, and yet we've had to do stimulus spending for the last six-or-seven years. I don't really see the difference on that dimension.
Secondly, although the US isn't in a deflation cycle, we *almost* are. Checking the monthly inflation rates shows negative inflation for several months of 2015, and fairly low inflation for the last couple of years. Despite massive stimulus spending, despite the government spending trillions more than revenue over the last decade, we're *still* not up to the generally-accepted-healthy value of inflation of 2.5%.
There's recent evidence that depression and deflation aren't empirically linked, so it's no longer clear to me that deflation is as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
And finally, your analysis may be correct but myopic in that it doesn't take into account other factors such as employment. The US could be in a good financial situation and also on the precipice of revolt. If enough people are unemployed and *can't* find a job, if enough people drop from middle-class to poor-class, then there would be a great deal of unrest.
We're 'kinda seeing that now. Productivity is up, overall profits are up, but for the vast majority of Americans wages have remained stagnant. All the profits go to the upper echelons, so it *seems* like we're doing fine financially when in reality a lot of people are miserable.
I'm not an economist, I'm only trying to figure out this stuff on my own. Some aspects of "current economic theory" don't seem to make sense.
Can you explain why unemployment (or more accurately, the labor force participation rate isn't a priority in your analysis?
It's because China is using a protectionist practice.
China wants domestic companies selling things domestically(*). If an outside company has a product it wants to sell, it has to license it to a domestically-owned company inside China.
This forces at least some of the money to stay in China, paying Chinese people, and otherwise helping the local economy. It reduces the trade deficit somewhat and makes the Chinese economy stronger.
Compare and contrast to modern American economics, which holds that "free trade is best trade", all the money from the sale of foreign goods and products goes to the foreign entity. The money leaves the country and no Americans get paid.
(*) I was under the impression that the rule was that a Chinese company had to be at least 51% owned by Chinese in order to sell domestically, but that was years ago. I don't know if this is still the case.
An alternative approach was to attenuate the wild-type virus and render it safe as a replicating antigen. Both were successful and today there are two forms of the vaccine: the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which is administered by the parenteral route, and the live attenuated vaccine, which is administered orally and hence is known as the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
Shortly after the licensure of IPV in 1955, the vaccine manufactured by Cutter was found to cause paralytic disease. It contained residual infectious virus. The reason was traced to the method of inactivation. At that time the dynamics of the inactivation process were not fully understood, and the U.S. government's requirements for vaccine production were ambiguous. All of these problems have since been corrected.
Another view of the incidence of paralysis following oral poliovaccine (OPV) shows that the risk is about 1.6 cases per 10(6) nonimmune children given OPV and that this rises to about ten cases per 10(6) nonimmune adults exposed to OPV.
The risk was quite real, and non-zero. About 1-in-100,000
In the US in 1978 (the year of the 2nd study), the number of polio cases in the US was 15, against a population of 222 million.
Thus, the odds of getting polio induced paralysis from the vaccine is 1-in-100,000, while getting polio in the wild was 15-in-222 million.
In 1978, you were 148 times more likely to be paralyzed by the vaccine than to get polio.
Get your facts right if you want to be trusted.
Help me out here. If not the NIH studies above, which sources of information should I trust?
I want to be as knowledgeable and trustworthy as you are...
This is absolutely incorrect. Time and time again it has been shown that Andrew Wakefield (the scumbag piece of shit who published the fraudulent report linking vaccines to autism) is a incorrect. Britain yanked his medical license. The very simplest evidence that thiomersal doesn't lead to autism is that it was taken out of vaccines, yet the rates of autism didn't go down.Case closed.
So... you're saying that the evidence of the time *wasn't* indirect?
Further, just because the element mercury is in something doesn't mean it is dangerous. An example analogy is sodium. Elemental sodium reacts violently with water, yet sodium chloride (table salt) doesn't react violently with water.
So... you're saying that the evidence of the time *wasn't* indirect?
You're putting words in my mouth - words I didn't say.
These people already distrust anything science. They likely didn't get the point in high school and have been training their resistance to critical thinking and evidence based reasoning ever since. All that this will do is start a bunch of human rights complaints. The government would probably have better luck forcing all non-vaccinated kids into one school for the parentally challenged.
It's hard to see this from the parents' point of view, but keep in mind that their fears are not *completely* without merit.
The original polio vaccine was a weakened strain, and it was possible to get the disease from the vaccine.
This meant that there was a time when getting polio from the wild was less likely than getting it from the vaccine, so it's completely reasonable from the *individual* point of view that the best course is the one that minimizes risk.
Factor in the general devotion parents have to their child's well-being, and it 'kinda makes sense.
Then it was thiomersal. Thiomersal is a mercury compound mixed with vaccines to suppress fungi growth and such.
At the time, there was a large body of indirect evidence that suggested Tiomersal was safe. There was a lot of evidence, but it was all indirect(*).
Then one researcher published a study that directly linked thiomersal to autism and suddenly, the emperor has no clothes!
You see, direct evidence trumps indirect evidence every time. Indirect evidence makes assumptions about similarity that may or may not be true.
When the autism study came out, everyone realized that the evidence was indirect, and everyone freaked. It took medical science another decade to show that they were right.
In my opinion, I think science got lucky. Scientists relied on indirect evidence for something that was an emotional powderkeg, and it *could* have gone the other way. This sort of thing has certainly happened before(**), and still happens (***).
And also in my opinion, I'm not 100% certain that the science was right about this. Thiomersal was removed from most vaccines "out of an abundance of caution", and the political pressure on "being right" and "showing the researcher was a fraud" was so high that I'm not sure either question was fairly settled.
I'm not an anti-vaxer at all, just looking at the history.
The position against vaccines is incorrect, but not *completely* baseless.
(*) For example, Thiomersal is ethyl mercury, and risk was extrapolated from known exposure to methyl mercury.
(**) Tetra ethyl lead, for instance.
(***) Science now says that SSRI's are ineffective, despite being the go-to prescription medication for depression.
Contributing to open source always seemed intimidating as a novice. I'm too afraid I'd wreck the code or introduce bugs. Basically create more problems than solutions.
Then you should contribute to the linux kernel.
Linus always takes an encouraging and tolerant attitude towards new users, especially ones who make mistakes.
If you want to learn to code, there's no better place to start than the linux kernel.
I've often wondered if someone could set up a black-list of government-owned computers.
This could be set up and managed much like the SPAM black lists or the AdBlock lists - managed by an interested party, using information submitted by the public. Execute "sudo apt-get install govblock", and your system automatically sends a 404 response to requests from government computers.
Now, anyone with an inkling of how the net works will realize that this is trivial to get around, but consider it from the point of view of the (for example) FBI: you are the IT director for the building, and you need a way to route these requests through an external computer somewhere not in the building.
That's an enormous amount of work for the FBI, and it could come to naught if someone figures it out and puts the external computers on the black list. It's easy for an individual to do, not so much for an organization.
You could automatically block all access within, say, 35 miles of Pennsylvania Ave in Washington. That would cover the FBI and pretty-much *all* of its employees. This means that an employee can't even browse from their home and send the results to the office.
A handful of 35-mile blocked geolocated areas would put a big damper on government intrusions. The loss in viewership would be minimal.
Just a thought.
It's only a matter of time before the public steps in and solves the surveilance problems once and for all.
What you describe is fascinating, and I'd love to read more.
I am exactly nowhere on this. I'm starting to believe that position is an emergent phenomena, and not an attribute of particles.
For example, suppose you set up an interference experiment where a photon has 90% chance of going into one detector, and 10% chance of getting into the other. How much resolution is there in these numbers?
Experimentally, it would appear that probabilities are precise to hundreds of digits... for each and every photon.
No matter what data structures I come up with, nothing seems to account for all the interaction weirdness in a finite amount of information.
So far as I can tell, it's turtles all the way down.
I was wondering how the increase in lawyers graduating from schools was going to play out. As college costs crept up and profit motive took over the schools were cranking out law graduates because it's dirt cheap to make a lawyer compared to a doctor. Pretty soon we were going to have far more trained lawyers than we needed. Think of it: millions of young, well trained law school grads with $80k+ in debt and no job prospects whatsoever. They were bound to go after corporate America in a massive frenzy of class action lawsuits.
And yet, with all the lawyers in the country that are under-utilized, we see nothing comparable to the "open source" movement.
Engineers get together and create massive public value in works such as Mozilla, Apache, and LibreOffice. Lesser projects abound, free for use by anyone.
With all the abuse we take from the government and the expense of taking something to court, you would think that some of these lawyers with spare time on their hands would take an interesting case and litigate it for cost. Not the $450/hr they charge, but just the court fees.
The could build a portfolio of experience and reputation, something that would attract paying customers and perhaps donations from benefactors.
I read about one (count them - one!) lawyer who set up a house with grow lamps, trying to catch the cops using thermal cameras with no probable cause.
One lawyer did one smart setup in ten years or so.
If the cops knew that there might be lawyer stings, but didn't know where they were or what they might be, there'd be a *lot* less abuse.
For the past couple of months I've been idly trying to deduce how the universe works from the point of view of a computable machine. (It's sort of a relaxing hobby I use to cleanse my mental palette from the day job.)
Basically, assume that the universe is computable. This means that all information must be represented by a *finite* amount of information - position, probability, and so on. Computability in this sense means that any operation must complete in a finite amount of time(*).
This implies that space must be quantized, because having infinite precision in position requires an infinitely long floating point number, which would be uncomputable. So far so good.
A quantized space is roughly analogous to binary B/W images, and in order to prevent "jaggies" we have Bresenham's algorithm and anti-aliasing.
So the wave nature of particles seems like the universe's answer to anti-aliasing: you have the probability of particle position be in multiple places at once depending on it's movement, and you choose one when you do an interaction. The "position" of a particle is held as a sum of waves, and this can be represented as a bit field, where each "1" in the field indicates that the wave of that frequency is part of the position, and "0" says that the frequency is not(**).
The advantage is that you can calculate a sin wave to arbitrary precision depending on your needs. If you want a particle position in order to do an interaction, you start rolling binary dice bit-by-bit until you get a "1" on your dice. Each time you roll a "0", you calculate the position to finer and finer levels of detail. When you roll a "1", that sets the position of the particle and you then do the interaction.
The problem with all this is that a complete description gets wildly complex. Each pair of entangled photons has a link to the other, so that if you collapse the waveform on one you have to collapse the other as well.
When a photon hits a semi-silvered mirror, the path becomes *two* paths that have to be added together. When it encounters a regular mirror, the sin() and cos() terms are swapped.
When you get to the point of interaction, you have to add together for *all* possible paths the photon could have taken, including all the non-straight lines, and blocked direct paths.
This is wildly complex, and defies conventional representation! What data structure is needed to keep track of all these paths?
(As a thought problem, consider a photon emitted from a galaxy. An ever-expanding sphere of probability extends from the point of origin, with pieces of the sphere interacting with everything it encounters, said pieces can be reflected or bent or modified in various ways, and this goes on for billions of years. When it reaches a point of interaction, all these myriad pieces get added together to make the probability that the photon appears at the interaction point. And yet, we encounter photons from distant galaxies all the time.)
If someone has sorted this out and created a truly universal representation of the universe, it would be a landmark paper and sit alongside Einstein's discovery of relativity and QM, and Newton's discovery of gravitation and integration.
(*) With one-and-only-one *possible* exception being the entire program. Individual interactions must be resolved in a finite time, but the total universe is allowed to go on forever.
(**) A little more complicated than this, because the amplitudes can be +1/0/-1, and there's sin() and cos() components, but I don't want to cloud the description with details.
Same day delivery is a luxury. As a business you want to please as many of your customers as possible as it correlates to making a profit.
Wealthier neighborhoods order more stuff. Those customers in effect do get (and rightly so) more of a consideration when it comes to service. Smaller areas that correspond to more business. You need fewer drivers than for servicing an entire city. Those customers are paying for better service by doing more business with amazon.
I will give better service to customers that deserve it. Period.
Out of curiosity, does that position include other luxuries such as cable and internet service?
I bet those companies could roll out good service to "selected" areas that give a great profit, and ignore the marginal profit areas.
Or how about phone service? The per-person infrastructure cost for people in rural areas is staggering!
Maybe we should let the phone company dial back their service in unprofitable areas.
It makes perfect sense to be worried about the future, and devote time to complaining and looking for solutions.
(And not to put too fine a point on it, WE are the smart people in the room. If answers are to come, they will come from forward-looking individuals like us.)
Why the fuck would anyone create yet another disposable anything? Is there a widespread contagion of viruses caused by unsanitary lasers shared by groups of people?
We live in a closed system with limited ressources, stop wasting them and turning them into garbage!
Please, won't someone think of the potential for advertizing?
This could be a revolution in the way we highlight products and services that the consumer might be interested in.
The magnetic field of an MRI determines the wavelength of the absorbed/re-emitted signal. MRIs use high-strength magnetic fields to get the higher precision that comes from using shorter wavelengths.
You can make an MRI that sits on your desktop. See "The Amateur Scientist" by C.L. Strong for an example.
The big issue with MRIs is uniformity of the magnetic field. Since the signal is dependent on the field strength, any variation in this strength results in signals of a different frequency. MRIs are traditionally big in order to have uniform magnetic fields in the cylindrical chamber.
We've actually come a long way in processing algorithms as well. For example, this project is attempting to make a desktop MRI using structured-light algorithms to compensate for the field variation.
Perhaps Mary Lou Jepson did due dilligence before embarking on this venture.
Unless we see some truly shocking advances in module efficiency
It wouldn't work with 100% efficiency, so why would increase in efficiency matter as far as making it practical? What is happening to critical thinking skills?
Regarding critical thinking, why couldn't we just use solar panels on the ground to make jet fuel(*)?
Jet fuel in this instance is just an energy carrier, and has a much higher energy density than lithium. While Lithium batteries may be appropriate in some cases (portable devices, ground transportation), for air flight it's more appropriate to use something else.
(*) Or perhaps a biological method such as GM modified algae or a bio-yielding plant. The Wikipedia page of crop yields indicates that Algae can yield 80,000 kg/ha/yr, with "ha" being the area of a square 100 meters on a side.
A quick calculation shows that a 747 holds around 183,000 kg of fuel, so 3ha of open-pond algae could supply enough fuel for one tank each year.
Anyone who has driven across the "great basin" and other nearby sections of the US (western part of Utah, Nevada, parts of Arizona) knows that we have lots and lots of unused area that gets a lot of sunlight, and water is generally available from wells.
It seems reasonable that we could put up large solar and wind installations in these places, generate biodiesel and other organics, then ship them by tanker truck to where they are needed.
About 11 million gallons of fuel used in the US for aviation annually, that's 31 million kg, which requires 387 of those 10m x 10m algae pools(*).
At roughly $5 per gallon, the output of such an installation would be worth $55 million per year.
This seems like a futuristic prediction, but it makes sense.
Once the price of fuel goes up, this sort of installation may not be far in our future.
(*) This seems low. Have I dropped a digit somewhere?
So, here's my question. If Hillary gets indicted, convicted, or goes to jail, etc., after the DNC picks her as the candidate, but before the general elections, does Bernie get to be on the ballot? Or nobody from the Democratic party goes on the ballot? Is that the Republican's strategy all along?
It's really unclear what would happen.
Nothing in the constitution prevents a felon from running for president.
However, apparently(*) many states have laws about felons running for office. Apparently(*) in some states, to run for office you must be registered to vote, and many states do not allow felons to vote. Also apparently(*) some states do not allow their electoral college representatives to vote for convicted felons.
Although the constitution doesn't prevent a felon from running, an elected felon could be immediately subject to impeachment, viz:
"The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
There's no clear standard as to what "other high crimes and misdemeanors" is, so it's effectively what a majority of the House thinks is relevant at the time.
If a chosen candidate is unable to continue to the election (dies or has medical issues, for example), the vice-presidential candidate does *not* automatically assume the candidate role. The rules are complicated on both sides, but effectively the parties get to choose new candidates.
It's conceivable that a felon serving time in prison would be considered unable to continue, and in this case the parties would step in and choose another candidate. Apparently, the new candidate is at the discretion of the party leaders, and *not* automatically any of the runners-up.
(*) I couldn't get a clear answer for this whole mess online, if someone has a clear answer I'd like to hear it.
We've all been told that the final authority of what is classified rests with the Secretary of State.
Since Hillary was Secretary of State at the time, it's OK if a Romanian hacker and about 10 others got into her E-mail server. All the documents on it were declassified, because she said so.
Karl Popper once tried to come up with an exact rule to determine what a scientific discipline is.
For example, astrology is based on mathematics. Should that be considered a science?
In regards to social and political theories, he noted that the Communist revolution was predicted to start in a highly industrialized country and England was held the likely starting spot. This was thought to be all kinds of scientific, and made historical predictions from rationalization over observations of the social, political, economic scenes at the time.
It was literally, at the time, felt that future predictions from historical precedent was a science.
When it actually happened in Russia (a rural, pastoral, mostly rustic country) the historical scientists of the time had to change their assumptions. The end result was still Communism, but the extra data from Russia allowed for the revolution to start in rural countries as well.
Popper didn't think that this was proper science.
And neither do I.
You can't just cherry-pick historical precedent and think it has any predictive power on the future.
Our situation is absolutely, completely not the same as the ones Robert Paxton has written about.
For one, he is cherry picking his examples. It's an obvious psychological trick - most people can't come up with counter-examples on their own, so his position *seems* like it's always the case and is inevitable.
For two, he's a popular writer, and is encouraged to make things seem just a bit more lurid to make his works more popular. (Not by lying, but he can choose which examples and situations he uses.)
For three, he notes specifically that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have progressed through all 5 stages. Among the hundred-or-so counter examples for which we have good information.
And finally, there are stark differences between Trump and, for example Hitler (source):
.) Hitler wanted to conquer other countries. Trump is opposed to war unless for defense..) Hitler tried to exterminate minorities. Trump’s policies lean pro-minority:
1. Veterans are disproportionately minorities.
2. Aborted babies are often minorities.
3. Trump wants to avoid people “dying in the streets” with no healthcare, and that benefit is good for minorities.
4. Trump wants to keep Social Security strong, which helps everyone, but mostly people at lower incomes.
5. Trump’s spokesperson is half African-American. Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism. And so on, and so on.
6. Stopping illegal immigration reduces job competition for lower-income families.
7.. Some say it also reduces violence to women of all ethnicities.
7. Trump wants citizens to be armed. Hitler didn’t want that.
Unlike Hitler, Trump is happy to invite anyone with useful technical skills to the country, no matter their ethnicity. And unlike Hitler, Trump has never made reference to ethnicity. Trump often mentions countries of origin and also religion. But so far, not ethnicity. Not ever.
And for a bit of icing, note that we live in a world of communication where it is infinitely more difficult for propaganda to thrive. That's a yuuuuge difference right there!
Stop treating history as a science, 'cause it aint.
The analysis is all bullshit. Scott Adams is full of shit and possibly mentally deranged. The word "sad" is not what swung that primary election.
And "Priming" routinely fails all of the replications anyone tries for it. From your link: "Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called on priming researchers to check the robustness of their findings in an open letter to the community, claiming that priming has become a 'poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research.'"
Gee, "some random anonymous dude on the internet", that's a particularly cogent and persuasive argument you got there.
I happen to know that priming works because I use it.
As one of my AI lectures, I use a priming example that requires audience participation(*). It's always worked, never had it fail.
But again, who am I to argue? I'm just another "dude on the internet".
Here's a video of Derren Brown using priming as a sort of magic trick.
Priming is sort of like bullets. The fact that *you* don't believe in them doesn't mean that they don't work.
(*) As part of my argued position that AI is not based on hidden Markov models. HMMs are a fine construct and a fertile ground for research and innovation, but have nothing to do with AI.
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Total Failure of Government and Society and not a good sign for the future of the human race. I personally have been well aware of the risks of Antibiotic-Resistant for over 20 years. This was the text book example of natural selection in my High School Biology class.
Instead of listening to the scientists and public health officals on the risks, we have let the greed and money in big ag run make our laws. We let them dump antibiotics in our livestock food in so we could have cheap meat and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Welcome back to the pre-antibiotic era where a cut can be deadly and hospitals can kill you. Nice job humanity!
While what you say may be true, I disagree with your conclusions and your hindsight.
There should be no problem giving massive amounts of antibiotics to livestock. In fact, we should be giving *more*, or at least *more effective* antibiotics to livestock.
The regulatory problem wasn't from giving out too many antibiotics, it was because the regulations are so stiff that it's impossible to create new antibiotics. The fundamental flaw in the system was to make government bureaucrats responsible for risk, while making drug companies responsible for that risk.
This has led to risk-averse government bureaucrats setting the bar so high that it's become impossible to make new drugs.
The Hippocratic oath reads (in part): "above all, do no harm". This was rewritten by the FAA to be: "do no harm at any cost!"
It currently costs upwards of a billion dollars to bring a new prescription drug to market. No company can afford to make a new drug unless it can apply to everyone as a maintenance dose.
Viagra was only developed because it was a noticed side-effect of a high blood pressure medicine.
Suppose we had 25 approved antibiotics, and used them in 5-year increments in a rotating scale. Each year 5 of the 25 antibiotics could be used, and each year one would be rotated out and another added. Each antibiotic would be used for 5 years and then disappear for 20. It would take a very long time under that scheme for diseases to develop immunity.
We can't do that any more, because it's impossible to develop new antibiotics.
There's lots of common-sense ways we could change this, but we don't.
We're killing ourselves from an abundance of caution.
So-called 'Universal Basic Income' will not scale up; everyone points to small EU countries who are only talking about it, haven't actually done it, who don't have trillions in National Debt to deal with. It won't work here in the U.S and in any number of first-world countries.
You UBI people also make another fatal assumption: That people, not having to work, will 'find their purpose in life'. They will not. Most people have no clue, their entire lives, what their 'purpose' is, and never find one; these people need to be given a purpose; it's called 'earning a living and surviving', AKA 'having a job'. Most people will sit around, eat, have sex, get fat, litter the planet with their directionless offspring, and otherwise get in trouble out of utter boredom and too-much-time-on-their-hands, all on the government dole.
Okay, calm down.
You are predicting that something won't work based on little more than your opinion. Let's throw some facts into the mix.
POINT 1
Taking the US as an example, since you mentioned it specifically, note that the GDP per capita in the US is a little over $53K per person. If the productivity output of the US were evenly distributed, that means that every man, woman, and child could spend $53,000 on goods and services this year, and next year they would have another $53 to spend.
Count only the working adults (about half the population) and that number doubles.
POINT 2
Productivity has about doubled since 1970. That's only 40 years ago. If you believe the trend is linear, it will double again in another 40 years, but if it is exponential, then it will quadrouple in another 40 years.
POINT 3
A hypothetical $1,000,000 invested in an index fund is expected to return around 7% interest over the long term. You need to take the long view on this rate, and not cherry-pick individual past decades - it's been consistent with the rise of productivity. See point 2 above.
Given 1% for management fees and 2% to account for inflation, that $1 million would pay out $40,000 per year in perpetuity.
The US could start a process of putting $1 million deposits aside and awarding the payouts to working class people on some schedule. A lottery, for example. If you want to work, you don't have to enter the lottery.
Note that the cost of the Iraq war was $1.7 trillion dollars, spent over a decade. That amount of money awarded to worker annuities could have reduced the workforce by 1.7 million workers, making the remaining jobs easier to find.
POINT 4
Note that we are rapidly developing self-driving vehicles. The first self-driving semi is on the road right now!
Even if the self-driving vehicle isn't useful 100% of the time (snow, limited visibility), by my calculations this will dump 2.5 million into the labor force almost instantly.
Note that Amazon is experimenting with delivery by drone. This could potentially drop another million into the workforce almost overnight. (If you include postal workers and some others not accounted for in the previous link.)
POINT 5
Regardless of whether you think it will work or not, something has to change.
You either make it work, or try to survive the burning destruction of the US, a modern recast of the French Revolution.
Do you have kids? You might consider what type of world you want them to live in.
Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796, from cows.
This was quite controversial at the time, because it involved injecting bits of cow into humans and... what could go wrong? Caricatures of the time show cows "breaking out" of people after the cow vaccine was given.
In religious terms, how ethical is it to inject humans with pieces derived from the lower animals? Didn't Jenner's vaccine meddle with God's great plan and pollute the integrity of the human form?
Pure ethics can be based on suffering, so there shouldn't be any problem. Later on we'll develop methods for growing organs without the animal host to reduce suffering even further.
It gets murky when you think ethics is derived from some religious dogma with irrational basis and no interior logic. Once you believe there's something special about the human form/genome/purpose, you start to have ethical pangs for no good reason.
Give it a couple of years, it'll become mainstream. Like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, eventually everyone will see the usefulness and ethics more clearly.
Bystander: "Hey android! Do you herd sheep?"
Android: "That's incorrect, it should be "Have you heard sheep.""
There is no background check involved for one individual selling to another in most states. If you're purchasing a firearm (rifle or not) from a gun store, pawn shop, dealer at a gun show etc, anyone who sells guns with an FFL, then there is a background check.
I can corroborate this. I've seen pistols and rifles at yard sales in NH. Pistols are less common than rifles, but you can find them.
This is fine in NH, we don't have a lot of gun violence. If your state is concerned about citizen death, consider disarming the law-abiding ones.
Here is one paper that talks about deflation and depression, many others can be found in a google search.
It's because China is using a protectionist practice.
Western scholars figured out the problem with this practice hundreds of years ago. Problem is - it screws with your money supply something fierce. You end up having to radically manipulate your money supply, and you wind up with deflation and endless stimulus spending. Japan did the same thing in the 70's and 80's, and they've been paying for it over the last two decades (stagflation in the 90's-2000's, deflation since then.) China's turn is coming up soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm happy to learn more about this, but I am a bit sceptical about your conclusions. (Not the least of which is the general religious undertone of economic schools of thought.)
Firstly, the US is mostly free trade, and yet we've had to do stimulus spending for the last six-or-seven years. I don't really see the difference on that dimension.
Secondly, although the US isn't in a deflation cycle, we *almost* are. Checking the monthly inflation rates shows negative inflation for several months of 2015, and fairly low inflation for the last couple of years. Despite massive stimulus spending, despite the government spending trillions more than revenue over the last decade, we're *still* not up to the generally-accepted-healthy value of inflation of 2.5%.
There's recent evidence that depression and deflation aren't empirically linked, so it's no longer clear to me that deflation is as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
And finally, your analysis may be correct but myopic in that it doesn't take into account other factors such as employment. The US could be in a good financial situation and also on the precipice of revolt. If enough people are unemployed and *can't* find a job, if enough people drop from middle-class to poor-class, then there would be a great deal of unrest.
We're 'kinda seeing that now. Productivity is up, overall profits are up, but for the vast majority of Americans wages have remained stagnant. All the profits go to the upper echelons, so it *seems* like we're doing fine financially when in reality a lot of people are miserable.
I'm not an economist, I'm only trying to figure out this stuff on my own. Some aspects of "current economic theory" don't seem to make sense.
Can you explain why unemployment (or more accurately, the labor force participation rate isn't a priority in your analysis?
Somehow this sounds bad....
It's because China is using a protectionist practice.
China wants domestic companies selling things domestically(*). If an outside company has a product it wants to sell, it has to license it to a domestically-owned company inside China.
This forces at least some of the money to stay in China, paying Chinese people, and otherwise helping the local economy. It reduces the trade deficit somewhat and makes the Chinese economy stronger.
Compare and contrast to modern American economics, which holds that "free trade is best trade", all the money from the sale of foreign goods and products goes to the foreign entity. The money leaves the country and no Americans get paid.
(*) I was under the impression that the rule was that a Chinese company had to be at least 51% owned by Chinese in order to sell domestically, but that was years ago. I don't know if this is still the case.
A google search shows this NIH study:
An alternative approach was to attenuate the wild-type virus and render it safe as a replicating antigen. Both were successful and today there are two forms of the vaccine: the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which is administered by the parenteral route, and the live attenuated vaccine, which is administered orally and hence is known as the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
Shortly after the licensure of IPV in 1955, the vaccine manufactured by Cutter was found to cause paralytic disease. It contained residual infectious virus. The reason was traced to the method of inactivation. At that time the dynamics of the inactivation process were not fully understood, and the U.S. government's requirements for vaccine production were ambiguous. All of these problems have since been corrected.
And from this 1978 study:
Another view of the incidence of paralysis following oral poliovaccine (OPV) shows that the risk is about 1.6 cases per 10(6) nonimmune children given OPV and that this rises to about ten cases per 10(6) nonimmune adults exposed to OPV.
The risk was quite real, and non-zero. About 1-in-100,000
In the US in 1978 (the year of the 2nd study), the number of polio cases in the US was 15, against a population of 222 million.
Thus, the odds of getting polio induced paralysis from the vaccine is 1-in-100,000, while getting polio in the wild was 15-in-222 million.
In 1978, you were 148 times more likely to be paralyzed by the vaccine than to get polio.
Get your facts right if you want to be trusted.
Help me out here. If not the NIH studies above, which sources of information should I trust?
I want to be as knowledgeable and trustworthy as you are...
This is absolutely incorrect. Time and time again it has been shown that Andrew Wakefield (the scumbag piece of shit who published the fraudulent report linking vaccines to autism) is a incorrect. Britain yanked his medical license. The very simplest evidence that thiomersal doesn't lead to autism is that it was taken out of vaccines, yet the rates of autism didn't go down.Case closed.
So... you're saying that the evidence of the time *wasn't* indirect?
Further, just because the element mercury is in something doesn't mean it is dangerous. An example analogy is sodium. Elemental sodium reacts violently with water, yet sodium chloride (table salt) doesn't react violently with water.
So... you're saying that the evidence of the time *wasn't* indirect?
You're putting words in my mouth - words I didn't say.
Reread the post and try again.
These people already distrust anything science. They likely didn't get the point in high school and have been training their resistance to critical thinking and evidence based reasoning ever since. All that this will do is start a bunch of human rights complaints. The government would probably have better luck forcing all non-vaccinated kids into one school for the parentally challenged.
It's hard to see this from the parents' point of view, but keep in mind that their fears are not *completely* without merit.
The original polio vaccine was a weakened strain, and it was possible to get the disease from the vaccine.
This meant that there was a time when getting polio from the wild was less likely than getting it from the vaccine, so it's completely reasonable from the *individual* point of view that the best course is the one that minimizes risk.
Factor in the general devotion parents have to their child's well-being, and it 'kinda makes sense.
Then it was thiomersal. Thiomersal is a mercury compound mixed with vaccines to suppress fungi growth and such.
At the time, there was a large body of indirect evidence that suggested Tiomersal was safe. There was a lot of evidence, but it was all indirect(*).
Then one researcher published a study that directly linked thiomersal to autism and suddenly, the emperor has no clothes!
You see, direct evidence trumps indirect evidence every time. Indirect evidence makes assumptions about similarity that may or may not be true.
When the autism study came out, everyone realized that the evidence was indirect, and everyone freaked. It took medical science another decade to show that they were right.
In my opinion, I think science got lucky. Scientists relied on indirect evidence for something that was an emotional powderkeg, and it *could* have gone the other way. This sort of thing has certainly happened before(**), and still happens (***).
And also in my opinion, I'm not 100% certain that the science was right about this. Thiomersal was removed from most vaccines "out of an abundance of caution", and the political pressure on "being right" and "showing the researcher was a fraud" was so high that I'm not sure either question was fairly settled.
I'm not an anti-vaxer at all, just looking at the history.
The position against vaccines is incorrect, but not *completely* baseless.
(*) For example, Thiomersal is ethyl mercury, and risk was extrapolated from known exposure to methyl mercury.
(**) Tetra ethyl lead, for instance.
(***) Science now says that SSRI's are ineffective, despite being the go-to prescription medication for depression.
Contributing to open source always seemed intimidating as a novice. I'm too afraid I'd wreck the code or introduce bugs. Basically create more problems than solutions.
Then you should contribute to the linux kernel.
Linus always takes an encouraging and tolerant attitude towards new users, especially ones who make mistakes.
If you want to learn to code, there's no better place to start than the linux kernel.
I've often wondered if someone could set up a black-list of government-owned computers.
This could be set up and managed much like the SPAM black lists or the AdBlock lists - managed by an interested party, using information submitted by the public. Execute "sudo apt-get install govblock", and your system automatically sends a 404 response to requests from government computers.
Now, anyone with an inkling of how the net works will realize that this is trivial to get around, but consider it from the point of view of the (for example) FBI: you are the IT director for the building, and you need a way to route these requests through an external computer somewhere not in the building.
That's an enormous amount of work for the FBI, and it could come to naught if someone figures it out and puts the external computers on the black list. It's easy for an individual to do, not so much for an organization.
You could automatically block all access within, say, 35 miles of Pennsylvania Ave in Washington. That would cover the FBI and pretty-much *all* of its employees. This means that an employee can't even browse from their home and send the results to the office.
A handful of 35-mile blocked geolocated areas would put a big damper on government intrusions. The loss in viewership would be minimal.
Just a thought.
It's only a matter of time before the public steps in and solves the surveilance problems once and for all.
What you describe is fascinating, and I'd love to read more.
I am exactly nowhere on this. I'm starting to believe that position is an emergent phenomena, and not an attribute of particles.
For example, suppose you set up an interference experiment where a photon has 90% chance of going into one detector, and 10% chance of getting into the other. How much resolution is there in these numbers?
Experimentally, it would appear that probabilities are precise to hundreds of digits... for each and every photon.
No matter what data structures I come up with, nothing seems to account for all the interaction weirdness in a finite amount of information.
So far as I can tell, it's turtles all the way down.
I've gotten nowhere on this.
I was wondering how the increase in lawyers graduating from schools was going to play out. As college costs crept up and profit motive took over the schools were cranking out law graduates because it's dirt cheap to make a lawyer compared to a doctor. Pretty soon we were going to have far more trained lawyers than we needed. Think of it: millions of young, well trained law school grads with $80k+ in debt and no job prospects whatsoever. They were bound to go after corporate America in a massive frenzy of class action lawsuits.
And yet, with all the lawyers in the country that are under-utilized, we see nothing comparable to the "open source" movement.
Engineers get together and create massive public value in works such as Mozilla, Apache, and LibreOffice. Lesser projects abound, free for use by anyone.
With all the abuse we take from the government and the expense of taking something to court, you would think that some of these lawyers with spare time on their hands would take an interesting case and litigate it for cost. Not the $450/hr they charge, but just the court fees.
The could build a portfolio of experience and reputation, something that would attract paying customers and perhaps donations from benefactors.
I read about one (count them - one!) lawyer who set up a house with grow lamps, trying to catch the cops using thermal cameras with no probable cause.
One lawyer did one smart setup in ten years or so.
If the cops knew that there might be lawyer stings, but didn't know where they were or what they might be, there'd be a *lot* less abuse.
For the past couple of months I've been idly trying to deduce how the universe works from the point of view of a computable machine. (It's sort of a relaxing hobby I use to cleanse my mental palette from the day job.)
Basically, assume that the universe is computable. This means that all information must be represented by a *finite* amount of information - position, probability, and so on. Computability in this sense means that any operation must complete in a finite amount of time(*).
This implies that space must be quantized, because having infinite precision in position requires an infinitely long floating point number, which would be uncomputable. So far so good.
A quantized space is roughly analogous to binary B/W images, and in order to prevent "jaggies" we have Bresenham's algorithm and anti-aliasing.
So the wave nature of particles seems like the universe's answer to anti-aliasing: you have the probability of particle position be in multiple places at once depending on it's movement, and you choose one when you do an interaction. The "position" of a particle is held as a sum of waves, and this can be represented as a bit field, where each "1" in the field indicates that the wave of that frequency is part of the position, and "0" says that the frequency is not(**).
The advantage is that you can calculate a sin wave to arbitrary precision depending on your needs. If you want a particle position in order to do an interaction, you start rolling binary dice bit-by-bit until you get a "1" on your dice. Each time you roll a "0", you calculate the position to finer and finer levels of detail. When you roll a "1", that sets the position of the particle and you then do the interaction.
The problem with all this is that a complete description gets wildly complex. Each pair of entangled photons has a link to the other, so that if you collapse the waveform on one you have to collapse the other as well.
When a photon hits a semi-silvered mirror, the path becomes *two* paths that have to be added together. When it encounters a regular mirror, the sin() and cos() terms are swapped.
When you get to the point of interaction, you have to add together for *all* possible paths the photon could have taken, including all the non-straight lines, and blocked direct paths.
This is wildly complex, and defies conventional representation! What data structure is needed to keep track of all these paths?
(As a thought problem, consider a photon emitted from a galaxy. An ever-expanding sphere of probability extends from the point of origin, with pieces of the sphere interacting with everything it encounters, said pieces can be reflected or bent or modified in various ways, and this goes on for billions of years. When it reaches a point of interaction, all these myriad pieces get added together to make the probability that the photon appears at the interaction point. And yet, we encounter photons from distant galaxies all the time.)
If someone has sorted this out and created a truly universal representation of the universe, it would be a landmark paper and sit alongside Einstein's discovery of relativity and QM, and Newton's discovery of gravitation and integration.
(*) With one-and-only-one *possible* exception being the entire program. Individual interactions must be resolved in a finite time, but the total universe is allowed to go on forever.
(**) A little more complicated than this, because the amplitudes can be +1/0/-1, and there's sin() and cos() components, but I don't want to cloud the description with details.
Same day delivery is a luxury. As a business you want to please as many of your customers as possible as it correlates to making a profit.
Wealthier neighborhoods order more stuff. Those customers in effect do get (and rightly so) more of a consideration when it comes to service. Smaller areas that correspond to more business. You need fewer drivers than for servicing an entire city. Those customers are paying for better service by doing more business with amazon.
I will give better service to customers that deserve it. Period.
Out of curiosity, does that position include other luxuries such as cable and internet service?
I bet those companies could roll out good service to "selected" areas that give a great profit, and ignore the marginal profit areas.
Or how about phone service? The per-person infrastructure cost for people in rural areas is staggering!
Maybe we should let the phone company dial back their service in unprofitable areas.
Or how about electricity? Same thing.
Now nerds want comic book movies and to complain about the doom and gloom of the future. Well good luck with that.
To be fair, wages have stagnated and lots of people are out of a job.
It makes perfect sense to be worried about the future, and devote time to complaining and looking for solutions.
(And not to put too fine a point on it, WE are the smart people in the room. If answers are to come, they will come from forward-looking individuals like us.)
Why the fuck would anyone create yet another disposable anything? Is there a widespread contagion of viruses caused by unsanitary lasers shared by groups of people?
We live in a closed system with limited ressources, stop wasting them and turning them into garbage!
Please, won't someone think of the potential for advertizing?
This could be a revolution in the way we highlight products and services that the consumer might be interested in.
Why do you hate capitalism?
The magnetic field of an MRI determines the wavelength of the absorbed/re-emitted signal. MRIs use high-strength magnetic fields to get the higher precision that comes from using shorter wavelengths.
You can make an MRI that sits on your desktop. See "The Amateur Scientist" by C.L. Strong for an example.
The big issue with MRIs is uniformity of the magnetic field. Since the signal is dependent on the field strength, any variation in this strength results in signals of a different frequency. MRIs are traditionally big in order to have uniform magnetic fields in the cylindrical chamber.
We've actually come a long way in processing algorithms as well. For example, this project is attempting to make a desktop MRI using structured-light algorithms to compensate for the field variation.
Perhaps Mary Lou Jepson did due dilligence before embarking on this venture.
Unless we see some truly shocking advances in module efficiency
It wouldn't work with 100% efficiency, so why would increase in efficiency matter as far as making it practical? What is happening to critical thinking skills?
Regarding critical thinking, why couldn't we just use solar panels on the ground to make jet fuel(*)?
Jet fuel in this instance is just an energy carrier, and has a much higher energy density than lithium. While Lithium batteries may be appropriate in some cases (portable devices, ground transportation), for air flight it's more appropriate to use something else.
(*) Or perhaps a biological method such as GM modified algae or a bio-yielding plant. The Wikipedia page of crop yields indicates that Algae can yield 80,000 kg/ha/yr, with "ha" being the area of a square 100 meters on a side.
A quick calculation shows that a 747 holds around 183,000 kg of fuel, so 3ha of open-pond algae could supply enough fuel for one tank each year.
Anyone who has driven across the "great basin" and other nearby sections of the US (western part of Utah, Nevada, parts of Arizona) knows that we have lots and lots of unused area that gets a lot of sunlight, and water is generally available from wells.
It seems reasonable that we could put up large solar and wind installations in these places, generate biodiesel and other organics, then ship them by tanker truck to where they are needed.
About 11 million gallons of fuel used in the US for aviation annually, that's 31 million kg, which requires 387 of those 10m x 10m algae pools(*).
At roughly $5 per gallon, the output of such an installation would be worth $55 million per year.
This seems like a futuristic prediction, but it makes sense.
Once the price of fuel goes up, this sort of installation may not be far in our future.
(*) This seems low. Have I dropped a digit somewhere?
So, here's my question. If Hillary gets indicted, convicted, or goes to jail, etc., after the DNC picks her as the candidate, but before the general elections, does Bernie get to be on the ballot? Or nobody from the Democratic party goes on the ballot? Is that the Republican's strategy all along?
It's really unclear what would happen.
Nothing in the constitution prevents a felon from running for president.
However, apparently(*) many states have laws about felons running for office. Apparently(*) in some states, to run for office you must be registered to vote, and many states do not allow felons to vote. Also apparently(*) some states do not allow their electoral college representatives to vote for convicted felons.
Although the constitution doesn't prevent a felon from running, an elected felon could be immediately subject to impeachment, viz:
"The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
There's no clear standard as to what "other high crimes and misdemeanors" is, so it's effectively what a majority of the House thinks is relevant at the time.
If a chosen candidate is unable to continue to the election (dies or has medical issues, for example), the vice-presidential candidate does *not* automatically assume the candidate role. The rules are complicated on both sides, but effectively the parties get to choose new candidates.
It's conceivable that a felon serving time in prison would be considered unable to continue, and in this case the parties would step in and choose another candidate. Apparently, the new candidate is at the discretion of the party leaders, and *not* automatically any of the runners-up.
(*) I couldn't get a clear answer for this whole mess online, if someone has a clear answer I'd like to hear it.
We've all been told that the final authority of what is classified rests with the Secretary of State.
Since Hillary was Secretary of State at the time, it's OK if a Romanian hacker and about 10 others got into her E-mail server. All the documents on it were declassified, because she said so.
Nothing to see here, onward to the presidency!
Karl Popper once tried to come up with an exact rule to determine what a scientific discipline is.
For example, astrology is based on mathematics. Should that be considered a science?
In regards to social and political theories, he noted that the Communist revolution was predicted to start in a highly industrialized country and England was held the likely starting spot. This was thought to be all kinds of scientific, and made historical predictions from rationalization over observations of the social, political, economic scenes at the time.
It was literally, at the time, felt that future predictions from historical precedent was a science.
When it actually happened in Russia (a rural, pastoral, mostly rustic country) the historical scientists of the time had to change their assumptions. The end result was still Communism, but the extra data from Russia allowed for the revolution to start in rural countries as well.
Popper didn't think that this was proper science.
And neither do I.
You can't just cherry-pick historical precedent and think it has any predictive power on the future.
Our situation is absolutely, completely not the same as the ones Robert Paxton has written about.
For one, he is cherry picking his examples. It's an obvious psychological trick - most people can't come up with counter-examples on their own, so his position *seems* like it's always the case and is inevitable.
For two, he's a popular writer, and is encouraged to make things seem just a bit more lurid to make his works more popular. (Not by lying, but he can choose which examples and situations he uses.)
For three, he notes specifically that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have progressed through all 5 stages. Among the hundred-or-so counter examples for which we have good information.
And finally, there are stark differences between Trump and, for example Hitler (source):
.) Hitler wanted to conquer other countries. Trump is opposed to war unless for defense. .) Hitler tried to exterminate minorities. Trump’s policies lean pro-minority:
1. Veterans are disproportionately minorities.
2. Aborted babies are often minorities.
3. Trump wants to avoid people “dying in the streets” with no healthcare, and that benefit is good for minorities.
4. Trump wants to keep Social Security strong, which helps everyone, but mostly people at lower incomes.
5. Trump’s spokesperson is half African-American. Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism. And so on, and so on.
6. Stopping illegal immigration reduces job competition for lower-income families.
7.. Some say it also reduces violence to women of all ethnicities.
7. Trump wants citizens to be armed. Hitler didn’t want that.
Unlike Hitler, Trump is happy to invite anyone with useful technical skills to the country, no matter their ethnicity. And unlike Hitler, Trump has never made reference to ethnicity. Trump often mentions countries of origin and also religion. But so far, not ethnicity. Not ever.
And for a bit of icing, note that we live in a world of communication where it is infinitely more difficult for propaganda to thrive. That's a yuuuuge difference right there!
Stop treating history as a science, 'cause it aint.
The analysis is all bullshit. Scott Adams is full of shit and possibly mentally deranged. The word "sad" is not what swung that primary election.
And "Priming" routinely fails all of the replications anyone tries for it. From your link: "Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called on priming researchers to check the robustness of their findings in an open letter to the community, claiming that priming has become a 'poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research.'"
Gee, "some random anonymous dude on the internet", that's a particularly cogent and persuasive argument you got there.
I happen to know that priming works because I use it.
As one of my AI lectures, I use a priming example that requires audience participation(*). It's always worked, never had it fail.
But again, who am I to argue? I'm just another "dude on the internet".
Here's a video of Derren Brown using priming as a sort of magic trick.
Priming is sort of like bullets. The fact that *you* don't believe in them doesn't mean that they don't work.
(*) As part of my argued position that AI is not based on hidden Markov models. HMMs are a fine construct and a fertile ground for research and innovation, but have nothing to do with AI.