I realize that they do not want to pay taxes. I also don't want to pay Apple prices for their laptops. However, if I take a laptop from one of their stores and give them $1 in exchange I would get arrested for theft. The same should apply to whoever in Apple valued the building at $200, only the charge should be deliberate tax fraud...and if by some chance this is even vaguely legal then the US government needs to do some very serious overhauling of its corporate tax laws.
If the tax evaluation of the building is supposed to include its contents as well then it should be easy to prove tax fraud. If there is literally any Apple computer in that building then the contents are, using Apple's own valuations, at least about ten times higher than they state.
These details are in the paper. In particular, they did not test any device but just exposure to the chemicals which they note may not provide the same levels seen by actual people who vape. I think it's unreasonable to expect this level of detail in a popular news site given that they are writing a few paragraphs for a general audience. The paper is there for those who want this level of detail.
Also, somewhat ironically, cow flatulence actually is important for determining climate change!
Unless everything is so entrenched in beauracracy like NASA that hardly anything gets done, there will always be mistakes.
Correct. There will be random accidents caused by human fuck-ups in either system. However, on top of this there is pressure to beat your competition leads people to take short cuts and cut costs in the capitalist system which will undoubtedly lead to most mistakes. This is a pressure that is almost completely absent from the socialist system where the tendency is to become NASA-like: completely safe but utterly boring. This is why socialism tends to be used for "boring" things like water, electricity and gas where there is little to no competition or innovation.
I'll bring this a step further: one ridiculous argument I heard for communism is that slavery would never have occured.
That really is ridiculous because in communism everyone is a slave to the state!
No, socialism has a broader meaning than that. See this. In particular, "worker self-management of production" is a key element and that directly relates to trade unions which are clearly a step in that direction. Strict regulations on private industry is also another tool which falls under the socialism banner even though ownership may reside in the private sector. In a free, public healthcare system often the hospitals and clinics etc. are all government owned and hence socialist, although private companies may be contracted to provide services too.
Canada and much of Europe is socialist to varying degrees. It seems to work well where the competition required to make capitalism work is impractical e.g. utilities, public transport, passenger trains etc. Even in the US you have strict regulations for utility providers which is on the socialism spectrum.
In Canada and most European countries, it goes far beyond that though. Many utilities and service providers are owned, or partially owned, by some level of government. There has been a trend to sell off some of these providers but, at least in Canada, the post, trains and some utilities are still government owned in some fashion and even in the UK the post office was only privatized a few years ago and back in the 1970s and 80s the level of socialism was far, far higher with all utilities, including phones, under government control.
Generally privatizing these things is a mixed bag. It has worked exceptionally well for telecomunications but far less well for things like water because there is only one water pipe into your house so there is no competition when it comes to the water service they provide: you will not get cleaner/purer/higher pressure etc. water if you switch to a different provider.
There is no single incident but lost of smaller ones e.g. the Bhopal gas disaster plus lots of similar accidents often caused by companies prioritizing profit over people's safety with the dumping of toxic chemicals, refusal of valid health insurance claims etc. On top of this, there are the unknown numbers of preventable deaths caused by the US's lack of free, public healthcare which is a socialist idea.
While these do not meet the standard of "brutalize and murder" it is also true to say that I cannot really think of any incidents where socialism has lead to much of this either except for similar isolated incidents with the trade union movement. On the other hand, Communism has clearly caused massive suffering on this sort of scale so perhaps you are getting communism and socialism confused? The two are not the same.
Yeah, now they want another trial at what failed in the Eastern Europe
What failed in Eastern Europe was communism. I'm not a huge fan of socialism but it is far less extreme than communism. Europe and Canada are now somewhere on the spectrum between socialism and capitalism, trying to find a balance between allowing people the freedom to generate wealth while also ensuring that some of that wealth provides a social safety net for those less fortunate.
What you mean by "common sense" is really just information gained from years of training which the human brain has. Hence, when even the most unusual situation occurs, the human brain has got something to compare it with and can come up with some sort of reasonable action even though it might not be the optimal one.
This is the advantage we have over AI algorithms: our brains can receive, interpret and learn from a massive variety of data and they do this every hour we are awake. This gives us a huge breadth and depth of experience to draw on when handling unknown situations. Unfortunately, AI systems can only currently learn from the limited set of data that they have been programmed to understand and, until that changes, humans will always have the upper hand dealing with rare/unusual situations.
A 5C or even 10C rise will not render the planet uninhabitable for humans. If it did then, based on living in a Canadian city where the average annual temperature is approximately 0C, this would mean that Europe, Africa, Australia and most of the US should be completely uninhabitable because they have average temperatures +5-10C above here.
The concern with climate change is that it will significantly alter which areas of the planet are the most habitable and so can easily support the largest populations. This is going to result in large population migrations causing huge political problems. You are insane if you think even something as extreme as a 10C increase (which nobody is even suggesting!) will render the planet uninhabitable for humans - although it will probably mean a lot more people living in the arctic circle and far fewer at the equator.
To avoid the huge problems that this sort of mass migration will cause we need to act to limit climate change. Running around making utterly outlandish doomsday claims that anyone can see are wrong with a little bit of thought is not going to achieve that.
Not exactly the best example of nothing to worry about.
I never said it was nothing to worry about - in fact if you read my comment I said exactly the opposite: it is plenty to worry about. However, bad as it may be the survivability of the human race is not one of those things which is what the article claimed.
Why do you think more food production is a problem?
Not all crops grow in all climates and water is also a concern. The areas where crops will grow will change and while areas of the arctic may open up to productive farming to offset land lost to deserts we don't have the land prepared for farming nor do we have the people there to do the farming. This is something we can adapt to but it is going to take time, cause numerous political and logistical problems and if we get is badly wrong people will starve.
Past the point of no return for the survival of humans.
Humans live in sub-saharan Africa. No climate change model I have ever seen suggests that the Earth is going to warm by even vaguely close to the amount that the entire surface will be warmer than places that humans already inhabit and thrive in. Get a grip. Climate change is a very serious problem that is going to cause huge upheaval if we do not get it under control but nothing suggests that it is going to make life impossible for humans.
...and if we were talking about surviving a collision this would be relevant. The rate is what makes it hard to adapt to - if it occurred over 1,000 years we would not notice it much. However, having to adapt to rapid changes is something we can do. As I said it is going to cause a huge amount of disruption which is why we want to avoid it but that is nowhere near the same as claiming that human life will be impossible. Mammals very similar to us survived in the Eocene so there is no reason to suppose that we cannot survive a far smaller increase in temperature.
Global warming is a serious problem and we absolutely do need to combat it because if we don't it will cause massive political destabilization as food production changes, populations move, water resources change, cities flood etc. However, claiming that it's the "end of the world" because it is irreversible and will make the planet inhospitable to human life is complete crap and counterproductive because it leads to dispair rather than action.
So let's put little Johnny behind the wheel of that SUV, I'm pretty sure driving is more sensible for him than watching a destruction derby on the screen.
You think that's bad? I'm a physics prof and with this idiot's policies teaching nuclear criticality is one lecture that sure to go off with a bang!
"it's obvious" DOESN'T CUT IT, when you're debating a controversial topic
This is exactly correct because it's not just a controversial topic it is also a highly complex topic. For example, it is extremely "obvious" to me that my son is far more engaged in front of a screen learning to program than he was going around several European cities on holiday this summer. So, going on this idiot's logic this clearly means that I must conclude that all students, everywhere are better off learning in front of a screen. If you also like the utterly wrong appeal to authority I'm a full professor of a real science.
However, as a real scientist, I know that without data on many different students my observation of one student is irrelevant for determining education policy for everyone. Not only that but, unlike say electrons people do not always respond in the same way towards any one stimulus. My son loves computers and learning from a screen works well for him. My daughter does not and she definitely benefits more from non-screen learning.
I would have expected that a vaulted associate professor of "political science" would both be politically and scientifically aware enough to know you need data to back up any argument and that people are complex and a variety of approaches is needed to get the best from everyone.
They should also average all the browser performance over Mac, Windows and Linux or state which OS the results are valid for. It is unlikely that Edge will win any speed contest outside Windows because it will have to run inside a VM.
Yes, they can track the neutrino through the detector, and that gives them a direction.
Not quite - we cannot see neutrinos directly. What we see are the particles they produce when they interact in the ice. At these energies, the boost of the particles created is so large that it basically has the same direction as the original neutrino. However, if the neutrino produces an electron or a tau (unless it is really high energy) this produces a cascade of particles which we see as a point source that has little to no pointing. Only when the neutrino produces a muon do we get a long track that we can point back to the source.
No, to do that you would need to tie neutrino emission to some visible change detectable by light in a source and then measure the difference in time of arrival between the light and the neutrino. This is because particles with a mass always have a velocity less than light and if your propagation distance is long enough this will result in light arriving before the neutrino.
However, incredibly high energy neutrinos like this are not the ones you want to use because, even with a really distant source, their energy is so great and their mass so small that even with incredibly long baselines the difference in arrival time with light will be incredibly small. This neutrino had about 40 times the energy of an LHC proton but a mass that is at least about a billion times smaller and probably closer to a trillion times smaller - we do not actually know because the mass is so small nobody has ever managed to measure it!
I am wondering how they managed to find the source.
When this neutrino interacted with the ice it converted itself into a muon which is a heavy cousin of the electron that can travel a huge distance through the ice at these energies. So what we saw was a track of light that moved through the whole ~1km width of the detector that we could then point back to a region of the sky. So we do not detect the neutrino itself only what it produces after an interaction and, if it produces a muon, we have a good long track if there is enough energy.
The light from the track is because the muon has a charge and travels incredibly close to the speed of light in vacuum. However, the speed of light in ice is quite a bit less than the speed in vacuum and so the muon emits a shockwave cone of light called Cherenkov radiation just like a supersonic aircraft emits a conical sonic shockwave of sound called the sonic boom.
Slashdot Mirror
...with its robot drones!
I realize that they do not want to pay taxes. I also don't want to pay Apple prices for their laptops. However, if I take a laptop from one of their stores and give them $1 in exchange I would get arrested for theft. The same should apply to whoever in Apple valued the building at $200, only the charge should be deliberate tax fraud...and if by some chance this is even vaguely legal then the US government needs to do some very serious overhauling of its corporate tax laws.
If the tax evaluation of the building is supposed to include its contents as well then it should be easy to prove tax fraud. If there is literally any Apple computer in that building then the contents are, using Apple's own valuations, at least about ten times higher than they state.
These details are in the paper. In particular, they did not test any device but just exposure to the chemicals which they note may not provide the same levels seen by actual people who vape. I think it's unreasonable to expect this level of detail in a popular news site given that they are writing a few paragraphs for a general audience. The paper is there for those who want this level of detail.
Also, somewhat ironically, cow flatulence actually is important for determining climate change!
Unless everything is so entrenched in beauracracy like NASA that hardly anything gets done, there will always be mistakes.
Correct. There will be random accidents caused by human fuck-ups in either system. However, on top of this there is pressure to beat your competition leads people to take short cuts and cut costs in the capitalist system which will undoubtedly lead to most mistakes. This is a pressure that is almost completely absent from the socialist system where the tendency is to become NASA-like: completely safe but utterly boring. This is why socialism tends to be used for "boring" things like water, electricity and gas where there is little to no competition or innovation.
I'll bring this a step further: one ridiculous argument I heard for communism is that slavery would never have occured.
That really is ridiculous because in communism everyone is a slave to the state!
No, socialism has a broader meaning than that. See this. In particular, "worker self-management of production" is a key element and that directly relates to trade unions which are clearly a step in that direction. Strict regulations on private industry is also another tool which falls under the socialism banner even though ownership may reside in the private sector. In a free, public healthcare system often the hospitals and clinics etc. are all government owned and hence socialist, although private companies may be contracted to provide services too.
Canada and much of Europe is socialist to varying degrees. It seems to work well where the competition required to make capitalism work is impractical e.g. utilities, public transport, passenger trains etc. Even in the US you have strict regulations for utility providers which is on the socialism spectrum.
Sorry - just to clarify I meant passenger trains in the above post! Goods trains are privatized in Canada.
In Canada and most European countries, it goes far beyond that though. Many utilities and service providers are owned, or partially owned, by some level of government. There has been a trend to sell off some of these providers but, at least in Canada, the post, trains and some utilities are still government owned in some fashion and even in the UK the post office was only privatized a few years ago and back in the 1970s and 80s the level of socialism was far, far higher with all utilities, including phones, under government control.
Generally privatizing these things is a mixed bag. It has worked exceptionally well for telecomunications but far less well for things like water because there is only one water pipe into your house so there is no competition when it comes to the water service they provide: you will not get cleaner/purer/higher pressure etc. water if you switch to a different provider.
There is no single incident but lost of smaller ones e.g. the Bhopal gas disaster plus lots of similar accidents often caused by companies prioritizing profit over people's safety with the dumping of toxic chemicals, refusal of valid health insurance claims etc. On top of this, there are the unknown numbers of preventable deaths caused by the US's lack of free, public healthcare which is a socialist idea.
While these do not meet the standard of "brutalize and murder" it is also true to say that I cannot really think of any incidents where socialism has lead to much of this either except for similar isolated incidents with the trade union movement. On the other hand, Communism has clearly caused massive suffering on this sort of scale so perhaps you are getting communism and socialism confused? The two are not the same.
Yeah, now they want another trial at what failed in the Eastern Europe
What failed in Eastern Europe was communism. I'm not a huge fan of socialism but it is far less extreme than communism. Europe and Canada are now somewhere on the spectrum between socialism and capitalism, trying to find a balance between allowing people the freedom to generate wealth while also ensuring that some of that wealth provides a social safety net for those less fortunate.
What you mean by "common sense" is really just information gained from years of training which the human brain has. Hence, when even the most unusual situation occurs, the human brain has got something to compare it with and can come up with some sort of reasonable action even though it might not be the optimal one.
This is the advantage we have over AI algorithms: our brains can receive, interpret and learn from a massive variety of data and they do this every hour we are awake. This gives us a huge breadth and depth of experience to draw on when handling unknown situations. Unfortunately, AI systems can only currently learn from the limited set of data that they have been programmed to understand and, until that changes, humans will always have the upper hand dealing with rare/unusual situations.
"We" as in living humans, not the planet.
A 5C or even 10C rise will not render the planet uninhabitable for humans. If it did then, based on living in a Canadian city where the average annual temperature is approximately 0C, this would mean that Europe, Africa, Australia and most of the US should be completely uninhabitable because they have average temperatures +5-10C above here.
The concern with climate change is that it will significantly alter which areas of the planet are the most habitable and so can easily support the largest populations. This is going to result in large population migrations causing huge political problems. You are insane if you think even something as extreme as a 10C increase (which nobody is even suggesting!) will render the planet uninhabitable for humans - although it will probably mean a lot more people living in the arctic circle and far fewer at the equator.
To avoid the huge problems that this sort of mass migration will cause we need to act to limit climate change. Running around making utterly outlandish doomsday claims that anyone can see are wrong with a little bit of thought is not going to achieve that.
Not exactly the best example of nothing to worry about.
I never said it was nothing to worry about - in fact if you read my comment I said exactly the opposite: it is plenty to worry about. However, bad as it may be the survivability of the human race is not one of those things which is what the article claimed.
Why do you think more food production is a problem?
Not all crops grow in all climates and water is also a concern. The areas where crops will grow will change and while areas of the arctic may open up to productive farming to offset land lost to deserts we don't have the land prepared for farming nor do we have the people there to do the farming. This is something we can adapt to but it is going to take time, cause numerous political and logistical problems and if we get is badly wrong people will starve.
Past the point of no return for the survival of humans.
Humans live in sub-saharan Africa. No climate change model I have ever seen suggests that the Earth is going to warm by even vaguely close to the amount that the entire surface will be warmer than places that humans already inhabit and thrive in. Get a grip. Climate change is a very serious problem that is going to cause huge upheaval if we do not get it under control but nothing suggests that it is going to make life impossible for humans.
...and if we were talking about surviving a collision this would be relevant. The rate is what makes it hard to adapt to - if it occurred over 1,000 years we would not notice it much. However, having to adapt to rapid changes is something we can do. As I said it is going to cause a huge amount of disruption which is why we want to avoid it but that is nowhere near the same as claiming that human life will be impossible. Mammals very similar to us survived in the Eocene so there is no reason to suppose that we cannot survive a far smaller increase in temperature.
It's only a matter of time, we're well past the point of no return.
Really? Well someone should have told that to the planet in the early Eocene then when temperatures were +12-14C above current levels . Somehow it reversed that trend and cooled down considerably.
Global warming is a serious problem and we absolutely do need to combat it because if we don't it will cause massive political destabilization as food production changes, populations move, water resources change, cities flood etc. However, claiming that it's the "end of the world" because it is irreversible and will make the planet inhospitable to human life is complete crap and counterproductive because it leads to dispair rather than action.
Because if it weren't for liberal arts majors, the STEM people wouldn't be able to go home after work and watch Netflix.
We would be able to but we would not want to.
So let's put little Johnny behind the wheel of that SUV, I'm pretty sure driving is more sensible for him than watching a destruction derby on the screen.
You think that's bad? I'm a physics prof and with this idiot's policies teaching nuclear criticality is one lecture that sure to go off with a bang!
"it's obvious" DOESN'T CUT IT, when you're debating a controversial topic
This is exactly correct because it's not just a controversial topic it is also a highly complex topic. For example, it is extremely "obvious" to me that my son is far more engaged in front of a screen learning to program than he was going around several European cities on holiday this summer. So, going on this idiot's logic this clearly means that I must conclude that all students, everywhere are better off learning in front of a screen. If you also like the utterly wrong appeal to authority I'm a full professor of a real science.
However, as a real scientist, I know that without data on many different students my observation of one student is irrelevant for determining education policy for everyone. Not only that but, unlike say electrons people do not always respond in the same way towards any one stimulus. My son loves computers and learning from a screen works well for him. My daughter does not and she definitely benefits more from non-screen learning.
I would have expected that a vaulted associate professor of "political science" would both be politically and scientifically aware enough to know you need data to back up any argument and that people are complex and a variety of approaches is needed to get the best from everyone.
For several years now Safari has outpaced Chrome...
It needs to because it has to load all the ads. I never used Safari because of the absence of a decent adblocker.
They should also average all the browser performance over Mac, Windows and Linux or state which OS the results are valid for. It is unlikely that Edge will win any speed contest outside Windows because it will have to run inside a VM.
Yes, they can track the neutrino through the detector, and that gives them a direction.
Not quite - we cannot see neutrinos directly. What we see are the particles they produce when they interact in the ice. At these energies, the boost of the particles created is so large that it basically has the same direction as the original neutrino. However, if the neutrino produces an electron or a tau (unless it is really high energy) this produces a cascade of particles which we see as a point source that has little to no pointing. Only when the neutrino produces a muon do we get a long track that we can point back to the source.
No, to do that you would need to tie neutrino emission to some visible change detectable by light in a source and then measure the difference in time of arrival between the light and the neutrino. This is because particles with a mass always have a velocity less than light and if your propagation distance is long enough this will result in light arriving before the neutrino.
However, incredibly high energy neutrinos like this are not the ones you want to use because, even with a really distant source, their energy is so great and their mass so small that even with incredibly long baselines the difference in arrival time with light will be incredibly small. This neutrino had about 40 times the energy of an LHC proton but a mass that is at least about a billion times smaller and probably closer to a trillion times smaller - we do not actually know because the mass is so small nobody has ever managed to measure it!
I am wondering how they managed to find the source.
When this neutrino interacted with the ice it converted itself into a muon which is a heavy cousin of the electron that can travel a huge distance through the ice at these energies. So what we saw was a track of light that moved through the whole ~1km width of the detector that we could then point back to a region of the sky. So we do not detect the neutrino itself only what it produces after an interaction and, if it produces a muon, we have a good long track if there is enough energy.
The light from the track is because the muon has a charge and travels incredibly close to the speed of light in vacuum. However, the speed of light in ice is quite a bit less than the speed in vacuum and so the muon emits a shockwave cone of light called Cherenkov radiation just like a supersonic aircraft emits a conical sonic shockwave of sound called the sonic boom.