Right. I put Nielsen in the "expert" category, not the "genius" category. That was precisely my point: that "experts" are not necessarily "geniuses".
I also didn't say the geniuses require public reknown, just that most of them have some adoring fans at least in their fields. If you go and ask a random person on the street who Donald Knuth is, most will say they have no idea. If you ask a computer scientist who Knuth is, they'll immediately start talking about his work on algorithms.
The geniuses I refer to have names that you know, like Donald Knuth, Woody Guthrie, and the Dalai Lama. And not because they spend a lot of their time promoting themselves either.
Ahh, the old "Global Warming is not caused by humans, or not happening" theory.
Perhaps you'd like to explain why not one scientific organization has produced a convincing argument against the existence of global warming, while many other scientific studies have. The only possibilities I can think of that make your argument reasonable are some combination of:
1. A vast conspiracy of climatologists made the whole thing up.
2. Al Gore and some environmentalists cajoled and bullied the vast majority of climatologists into making the whole thing up.
3. realcoolguy425 knows more about how the Earth's climate works than the vast majority of climatologists.
4. There's some built-in bias that means that all climatologists are predisposed to seeing evidence of global warming when there isn't any.
You know solving nitrogen run-off and cow methane production are not mutually exclusive, right? There's absolutely nothing preventing them from being done in parallel.
Meat packing? Do you really think government regulations has made food safer, or market forces?
Required reading for anyone who wants to answer this question: The Jungle, the book that was probably responsible more than anything else for the creation of the present-day FDA.
What's so subjective about "Detroit, Arkansas and Cleveland suck"?
Because the judgment that "such-and-such city sucks" in this case isn't based off of any objective data, merely the writer's opinions (whether justified or not). I don't think you really understand what "subjective" means.
And if Jefferson isn't geeky enough for you, there's always Herbert Hoover (degree in geology, worked as a mining engineer, and advocated technocratic solutions). Of course many folks don't like to claim him, for obvious reasons.
Well, usually what they do to get around regulations preventing the CIA from spying on the US (for example) is simply work out an agreement with an ally, so that (for instance) the CIA sends intel on Israelis to Mossad in return for Mossad sending intel on Americans to the CIA. So in fact outsourcing is often exactly the sort of thing intelligence agencies are up to.
This also allows us to come up with a new method of judging these guys: If Alan Ralsky weighs the same as a duck, then he floats in water, so he's made of wood, so he burns, so he's... a spammer!
So now all the employers in your vicinity work you 90 hours a week at the equivalent of $3 per hour. And they collude (there's nothing forceful or fraudulent about that), and say that if a particular candidate doesn't win elections in your area they're going to fire everyone (there are plenty of replacement workers out there, since only half the number of people are employed thanks to the 90 hr/week rule). And before you say that some of those unemployed masses could just start their own businesses, the same employers in your area also make deals with anyone who could possibly distribute what those businesses would be selling in order to prevent them from doing business with anyone who isn't part of the cartel. Any retail-oriented businesses are driven out of business by either not selling goods to them wholesale at all, or if they do sell wholesale sell to the small businesses at 3 times the price they do to the big box store that's part of the cartel.
And if you think that's a completely made-up scenario, I suggest you read up more on US Steel, Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, or the mining industry. That's a big part of how the great fortunes of the Gilded Age came into existence.
In short, economic coercion exists, and that leaves you slave to an unelected group or individual with financial power rather an elected government.
In other words: This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Except that they don't actually do that under most conditions.
Let's say that the market is divided with about 3500 of A subscribers at $75/month and 6500 C subscribers at $70/month. If A reduces their price, they can swipe 30% of market share from C, but that will start a price war with C reducing the overall price to 30 (the actual cost to provide a month's worth of service). Since A knows this, and it is more profitable to have 3500 of the market at $75 than it is to have 6500 of the market at $30, they won't kick off the price war. The same logic is even more obvious when you're talking about C kicking off the price war, so long as you have anti-trust laws.
If you don't have anti-trust laws, then what happens in the above situation is that C kicks off the price war, eventually taking prices to $20 / month (below cost) to grab A's market share at a loss, and then immediately raises their prices to around $100 / month once they've run A out of the market and the 10000 customers have no other options. In this situation, the customers lose even more than in the oligopoly.
What if the choices are:
Comcast - offers you Internet service at $75 / month
AT&T - offers you Internet service at $70 / month
Municipal system - offers you Internet service at $30 / month (which is enough to pay for the system)
Private options in a competitive market can be beaten in all senses by public options if a few conditions are met:
1. The public organization has to be accountable to their customers via an electoral process.
2. The public option is required to break even (over a period of time).
3. The people who go to work for the public option do so because they genuinely want to do a good job. That includes management.
Something that you need to be very aware of is that oligopolies (e.g. you're left with a choice between Comcast and AT&T and no other options) do not behave in the same way that competitive markets (e.g. lettuce at your local farmers' market) do, because each seller in an oligopoly has a significant amount of pricing power. For instance, airlines used to regularly raise their fares on Friday at 4:45 PM to give all their competitors time to follow suit before Monday morning when the travel agencies opened.
Thankfully, the Unitarian Universalist churches don't require you to believe anything about Jesus except that either he (or whoever made up what he said) had some pretty good ideas about how to treat people. They tend to be very inclusive of atheists as well as theists of all stripes.
See, I disagree that Ninjas > Pirates. My logic is as followed: 1. Ninjas control all the land area, and can totally flip out and kill people anywhere on the land. 2. Pirates control the seas, and can totally send anyone to Davy Jones' Locker anywhere on sea. 3. 70% of Earth is ocean, while only 30% is land. Ergo, Pirates controller more of the Earth than Ninjas, and thus Pirates > Ninjas.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Randall Munroe was arrested today, due to this comic:
http://xkcd.com/584/
The comic in question was deemed to be potentially referring to minors in panels 4 and 5, and thus was child pornography.
Right. I put Nielsen in the "expert" category, not the "genius" category. That was precisely my point: that "experts" are not necessarily "geniuses".
I also didn't say the geniuses require public reknown, just that most of them have some adoring fans at least in their fields. If you go and ask a random person on the street who Donald Knuth is, most will say they have no idea. If you ask a computer scientist who Knuth is, they'll immediately start talking about his work on algorithms.
I consider myself neither.
The geniuses I refer to have names that you know, like Donald Knuth, Woody Guthrie, and the Dalai Lama. And not because they spend a lot of their time promoting themselves either.
expert(n): Someone who will charge you a large amount of money to state the obvious (possibly to someone else who needs to be convinced of something).
The real geniuses of the world don't go around calling themselves "experts", they just do nifty things and solve interesting and difficult problems.
And of course, Slackware means "can't make own distribution".
None of the above: use option 5, which is including your verification as a lemma, and also referring them to the work described in option #4.
Come on, this far in and there have been absolutely know "playing the bone flute" jokes?
Ahh, the old "Global Warming is not caused by humans, or not happening" theory.
Perhaps you'd like to explain why not one scientific organization has produced a convincing argument against the existence of global warming, while many other scientific studies have. The only possibilities I can think of that make your argument reasonable are some combination of:
1. A vast conspiracy of climatologists made the whole thing up.
2. Al Gore and some environmentalists cajoled and bullied the vast majority of climatologists into making the whole thing up.
3. realcoolguy425 knows more about how the Earth's climate works than the vast majority of climatologists.
4. There's some built-in bias that means that all climatologists are predisposed to seeing evidence of global warming when there isn't any.
In some areas of South America, notably Patagonia, that isn't really the case. In Brazil, it is, but South America isn't all rainforest.
You know solving nitrogen run-off and cow methane production are not mutually exclusive, right? There's absolutely nothing preventing them from being done in parallel.
Meat packing? Do you really think government regulations has made food safer, or market forces?
Required reading for anyone who wants to answer this question: The Jungle, the book that was probably responsible more than anything else for the creation of the present-day FDA.
What's so subjective about "Detroit, Arkansas and Cleveland suck"?
Because the judgment that "such-and-such city sucks" in this case isn't based off of any objective data, merely the writer's opinions (whether justified or not). I don't think you really understand what "subjective" means.
And if Jefferson isn't geeky enough for you, there's always Herbert Hoover (degree in geology, worked as a mining engineer, and advocated technocratic solutions). Of course many folks don't like to claim him, for obvious reasons.
Well, usually what they do to get around regulations preventing the CIA from spying on the US (for example) is simply work out an agreement with an ally, so that (for instance) the CIA sends intel on Israelis to Mossad in return for Mossad sending intel on Americans to the CIA. So in fact outsourcing is often exactly the sort of thing intelligence agencies are up to.
This also allows us to come up with a new method of judging these guys: If Alan Ralsky weighs the same as a duck, then he floats in water, so he's made of wood, so he burns, so he's ... a spammer!
So now all the employers in your vicinity work you 90 hours a week at the equivalent of $3 per hour. And they collude (there's nothing forceful or fraudulent about that), and say that if a particular candidate doesn't win elections in your area they're going to fire everyone (there are plenty of replacement workers out there, since only half the number of people are employed thanks to the 90 hr/week rule). And before you say that some of those unemployed masses could just start their own businesses, the same employers in your area also make deals with anyone who could possibly distribute what those businesses would be selling in order to prevent them from doing business with anyone who isn't part of the cartel. Any retail-oriented businesses are driven out of business by either not selling goods to them wholesale at all, or if they do sell wholesale sell to the small businesses at 3 times the price they do to the big box store that's part of the cartel.
And if you think that's a completely made-up scenario, I suggest you read up more on US Steel, Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, or the mining industry. That's a big part of how the great fortunes of the Gilded Age came into existence.
In short, economic coercion exists, and that leaves you slave to an unelected group or individual with financial power rather an elected government.
I, for one, think that our cops are smart enough to learn how to do a simple field test.
Oh, I think the cops know exactly how to do a simple field test:
1. Smoke some of it.
2. Are they high? If so, it's pot.
In other words:
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Except that they don't actually do that under most conditions.
Let's say that the market is divided with about 3500 of A subscribers at $75/month and 6500 C subscribers at $70/month. If A reduces their price, they can swipe 30% of market share from C, but that will start a price war with C reducing the overall price to 30 (the actual cost to provide a month's worth of service). Since A knows this, and it is more profitable to have 3500 of the market at $75 than it is to have 6500 of the market at $30, they won't kick off the price war. The same logic is even more obvious when you're talking about C kicking off the price war, so long as you have anti-trust laws.
If you don't have anti-trust laws, then what happens in the above situation is that C kicks off the price war, eventually taking prices to $20 / month (below cost) to grab A's market share at a loss, and then immediately raises their prices to around $100 / month once they've run A out of the market and the 10000 customers have no other options. In this situation, the customers lose even more than in the oligopoly.
What if the choices are:
Comcast - offers you Internet service at $75 / month
AT&T - offers you Internet service at $70 / month
Municipal system - offers you Internet service at $30 / month (which is enough to pay for the system)
Private options in a competitive market can be beaten in all senses by public options if a few conditions are met:
1. The public organization has to be accountable to their customers via an electoral process.
2. The public option is required to break even (over a period of time).
3. The people who go to work for the public option do so because they genuinely want to do a good job. That includes management.
Something that you need to be very aware of is that oligopolies (e.g. you're left with a choice between Comcast and AT&T and no other options) do not behave in the same way that competitive markets (e.g. lettuce at your local farmers' market) do, because each seller in an oligopoly has a significant amount of pricing power. For instance, airlines used to regularly raise their fares on Friday at 4:45 PM to give all their competitors time to follow suit before Monday morning when the travel agencies opened.
I don't know why anyone believes what is written in a blog without first checking it out.
See, the problem is that the people you know are the minority that aren't complete idiots.
Which in some ways adds strength to his argument: if he can get any looking like that, he must really know what he's doing.
Thankfully, the Unitarian Universalist churches don't require you to believe anything about Jesus except that either he (or whoever made up what he said) had some pretty good ideas about how to treat people. They tend to be very inclusive of atheists as well as theists of all stripes.
Case in point: Alan Turing.
Statistically, if you know more than about 30 male developers you have a good chance of knowing at least 1 gay male developer.
See, I disagree that Ninjas > Pirates. My logic is as followed:
1. Ninjas control all the land area, and can totally flip out and kill people anywhere on the land.
2. Pirates control the seas, and can totally send anyone to Davy Jones' Locker anywhere on sea.
3. 70% of Earth is ocean, while only 30% is land. Ergo, Pirates controller more of the Earth than Ninjas, and thus Pirates > Ninjas.