I care enough about my fellow citizens to not take the "run to Canada / Europe / Australia" approach.
The problems you describe are completely solvable. If everyone who wants to and is able to help solve them leaves, then that just accelerates the decline.
Also, the people who are most likely to think what you describe aren't problems are over 65 years old. They're dying off, and steadily losing their political power. In another decade or so, I suspect that the worst will be over.
Brian May also played 12 string on several songs ('39 and A Night At the Opera come to mind) and he played with Freddy Mercury in Queen.
He also is one of the few people with a known and defined Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number: He's co-authored astrophysics papers that can trace back to Paul Erdos to get an Erdos Number of 7, is 3 steps away from Kevin Bacon on IMDB, and unsurprisingly has performed with Black Sabbath.
"The same thing is true of the effects of carbon on climate. We cannot predict the effects of carbon on climate until we understand the science of climate much better than we do now. "
The thing is, Dr Dyson, that this is one of the few predictions that those who study climate for a living have made, and so far have been fairly accurate about. I agree that climatology is in its infancy, but that doesn't mean it can't accurately predict things on the level of "whatever goes up at a velocity we can manage to launch it right now always comes down again".
Vegetarian sources of protein include (but aren't completely limited to): - beans - whole grains - soy, including tofu, tempeh, and most "meat substitutes" like veggie burgers - nuts - eggs and dairy (if not vegan)
That's why when the USDA puts together food groups and food guide pyramids and such, it puts beans, nuts, and eggs into the same category as meats.
After all, they've actually tried to blow up bridges(Ohio)
No, they didn't.
2 of the 4 anarchists who were caught in the bridge plot showed up at Cleveland's OWS protest. They found basically a bunch of left-wingers sitting around holding signs, chatting, and getting along well with local police, and were disappointed because they had shown up hoping to fight cops. They got no support for their ideas at Cleveland OWS. As soon as the anarchists were discovered, Cleveland's OWS released a statement condemning the attack, which is hardly surprising as non-violence was a founding principle of the OWS movement. These were 2 guys (the other 2 bombers didn't have anything to do with OWS) out of 150 people or so involved in the protest, with no evidence that they received any support whatsoever from the protest organization or any of the prominent members of the group. The only real questions are (1) whether they decided to blow up the bridge before or after attending OWS, current evidence pointing to "before", and (2) whether these guys were entrapped in any way by the FBI informant who was supplying the bogus explosives and the expertise in using them.
This story got quickly turned into "OWS tries blows up a bridge" by people who opposed OWS, but it is in all respects a lie.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar story in Oklahoma, but this is a local story for me and I've met some of the players in this story - the guy who was the closest thing Occupy Cleveland had to a leader was head of a local chapter of a national Quaker organization, and if there's one thing Quakers are known for it's an absolute commitment to opposing violence.
Here's the difference between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin: Joe Biden sometimes says stupid things. He also says smart and effective things. He also corrects himself when he realizes that what he said was stupid. Generally speaking, the smart things outweigh the stupid things, so he is viewed as a basically smart guy who sometimes goofs up and says something stupid.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, says many many things that aren't only stupid, but indicative of an underlying idiocy well beyond just making mistakes. For instance, the question that really did her in back in 2008 was Katie Couric asking "And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this [the vice-presidency] - to stay informed and to understand the world?" Sarah Palin couldn't come up with a straight answer, while Biden would probably have cited Foreign Policy, the New York Times, or the Delaware News Journal.
On several documented occasions, they've foreclosed on people who had no mortgage whatsoever. They've foreclosed on people that lived next door to people they were intending to foreclose on due to typos. They've foreclosed on people who have paid their mortgage on time but the paperwork got mixed up by a servicer.
The victims aren't just victims of their own stupidity.
You left out foreclosing on homes without the legal right to do so, laundering drug money, trading with Iran and other enemies of the country you're based on, and of course occasionally paying off regulators to help get away with it all. But then again, banks committing serious crimes is nothing new. As Major General Smedley Butler argued:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
I never understood why they bother to lock the phones in the first place.
Oh, I can think of some reasons: 1. So they can sell the right to install an app on a phone that a consumer can't get rid of. 2. So they can set up "app stores" that collect a significant cut of whatever the user wants to buy. 3. So they can prevent third parties from creating and selling alternative services to their own products that are cheaper and/or better. 4. To reduce the number of ways a user can mess it up.
I'll tell you what doesn't: voting for the school board.
Tell that to the citizens of Dover, PA and the several other places that have pushed intelligent design into public school classrooms.
As a sibling pointed out, if you really are upset, why not run yourself? Or why not recruit a friend or neighbor to run, and help with his campaign? In many places, you can get elected to local government (in what is frequently a non-partisan election) by doing a door-to-door canvas all by your lonesome, because a few hundred votes may be all it takes.
Network television is one of the best means of social control invented so far, second only to religion. Think about how many people really care about who wins American Idol, and think about how many people really care about who is elected to their local government. Who the American Idol winner is has no real effect on my life, whereas my local city council does when they decide whether to put money into repairing nearby streets or changing the zoning to accommodate a CVS in my neighborhood.
On the third hand, in theory theory and practice are identical, while in practice they aren't. Those kiwis might be on to something there.
That's a different sort of anti-intellectualism than, say, active policy efforts in the United States to try to prevent kids from ever encountering scientifically proven ideas.
The reason I feel unsafe in a commercial aircraft is because they've proven that a system such as the one Musk proposes where the autopilot cuts out and hands control to the pilot when it doesn't know what to do often results in the plane crashing and burning (or splashing and sinking, in the AF447 case)
It's really quite simple, if you compare 1 statistic: Death per billion km Air - 0.05 Car - 3.1
It feels safer to deal with your stupidity or the stupidity of the drivers around you rather than potential pilot stupidity, but it's simply wrong.
Humans love to bask in the feeling of being in control, especially when it comes to cars.
Specifically, there's an important cognitive bias at work here, in that people feel safer about things they control than about things they don't control. That's why people who feel perfectly safe driving feel unsafe riding a commercial aircraft, even though planes are much much safer than driving. That's also why geeks feel comfortable with computers, while non-geeks are frequently scared of them - geeks know how to control those machines, non-geeks don't.
How long do we uphold the polite pretense that China isn't behind the overwhelming majority of real world hacking?
They probably aren't, given that there are lots of other kinds of people hacking out there: - The NSA and US Air Force Cyber Command. - Israeli's intelligence agency Mossad (Most notably Stuxnet) - Former Soviet bloc mobsters - For that matter, the Russians - Anonymous - Script kiddies - Spammers
in economic terms, what price you are willing to pay is irrelevant, if you are not willing (or able) to pay the price that it costs, you are not considered part of the demand side of things. Look it up.
The demand curve is, in theory at least, the aggregation of what price people are willing to pay for the product. For instance, you might have a 100 people that would buy a widget if it cost $100, 1000 people that would buy it if it cost $80, and 10000 people that would buy it if it cost $60. If the equilibrium price is $80, then from the point of view of the 9000 people trying to pay only $60 there's a shortage, because they're going around and saying "$60 for a widget, anyone want to sell?" and getting no answer. But as soon as the sellers are willing to sell at $60, those 9000 people will happily buy up the widgets.
Those players are the part of the market who's demand is not satisfied because their bidding price is too low. This is very similar to those who are attempting to sell, but can't because their asking price is too high (which is what an economist would see as a surplus).
A quick look at the economics dictionary would tell the story of why there's a shortage of programmers. Shortage (n): Not able to buy something at a price you are willing to pay.
It is potentially a false cognate. At the same time, sounds similar to "pa" for fathers and sounds similar to "ma" for mothers are pretty universal among Indo-European languages, so it's perfectly plausible that those words are older than that.
Developing skill sets for the workplace is a decidedly secondary task of higher education. This isn't unimportant, but it isn't the primary purpose.
Here's the problem: - From the point of view of most colleges and universities, an ideal college graduate has a basic grounding in economics, contracts, labor law, English literature, history, a foreign language or two, mathematics, and some practical skills somewhere in there.
- From the point of view of business management, an ideal college graduate has an excellent understanding of the particular practical skill they're trying to hire for, and no understanding whatsoever of economics (could understand what they're really worth), contracts (harder to cheat), labor law (harder to cheat), literature (could distract from work), or foreign languages (could learn that people in other countries get a better deal).
This is why we don't have classes in plumbing
Yes we do, typically as part of 2-year technical schools. We also have technical schools set up for bricklaying, welding, auto mechanics, electrical circuits, telephone networking, culinary arts, carpentry, child care, and many other professions that you probably make use of on a regular basis.
Reminds me of an important rule: A society that fails to punish bad philosophers and fails to reward great plumbers will end up with both theories and pipes that don't hold water.
Slashdot Mirror
I care enough about my fellow citizens to not take the "run to Canada / Europe / Australia" approach.
The problems you describe are completely solvable. If everyone who wants to and is able to help solve them leaves, then that just accelerates the decline.
Also, the people who are most likely to think what you describe aren't problems are over 65 years old. They're dying off, and steadily losing their political power. In another decade or so, I suspect that the worst will be over.
Brian May also played 12 string on several songs ('39 and A Night At the Opera come to mind) and he played with Freddy Mercury in Queen.
He also is one of the few people with a known and defined Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number: He's co-authored astrophysics papers that can trace back to Paul Erdos to get an Erdos Number of 7, is 3 steps away from Kevin Bacon on IMDB, and unsurprisingly has performed with Black Sabbath.
"The same thing is true of the effects of carbon on climate. We cannot predict the effects of carbon on climate until we understand the science of climate much better than we do now. "
The thing is, Dr Dyson, that this is one of the few predictions that those who study climate for a living have made, and so far have been fairly accurate about. I agree that climatology is in its infancy, but that doesn't mean it can't accurately predict things on the level of "whatever goes up at a velocity we can manage to launch it right now always comes down again".
That's absolute nonsense.
Vegetarian sources of protein include (but aren't completely limited to):
- beans
- whole grains
- soy, including tofu, tempeh, and most "meat substitutes" like veggie burgers
- nuts
- eggs and dairy (if not vegan)
That's why when the USDA puts together food groups and food guide pyramids and such, it puts beans, nuts, and eggs into the same category as meats.
What about the conspiracy to put a Tim Horton's in every town on the planet? Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
After all, they've actually tried to blow up bridges(Ohio)
No, they didn't.
2 of the 4 anarchists who were caught in the bridge plot showed up at Cleveland's OWS protest. They found basically a bunch of left-wingers sitting around holding signs, chatting, and getting along well with local police, and were disappointed because they had shown up hoping to fight cops. They got no support for their ideas at Cleveland OWS. As soon as the anarchists were discovered, Cleveland's OWS released a statement condemning the attack, which is hardly surprising as non-violence was a founding principle of the OWS movement. These were 2 guys (the other 2 bombers didn't have anything to do with OWS) out of 150 people or so involved in the protest, with no evidence that they received any support whatsoever from the protest organization or any of the prominent members of the group. The only real questions are (1) whether they decided to blow up the bridge before or after attending OWS, current evidence pointing to "before", and (2) whether these guys were entrapped in any way by the FBI informant who was supplying the bogus explosives and the expertise in using them.
This story got quickly turned into "OWS tries blows up a bridge" by people who opposed OWS, but it is in all respects a lie.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar story in Oklahoma, but this is a local story for me and I've met some of the players in this story - the guy who was the closest thing Occupy Cleveland had to a leader was head of a local chapter of a national Quaker organization, and if there's one thing Quakers are known for it's an absolute commitment to opposing violence.
I was thinking more of a different car-to-car data exchange mechanism, namely the extended middle finger.
Here's the difference between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin:
Joe Biden sometimes says stupid things. He also says smart and effective things. He also corrects himself when he realizes that what he said was stupid. Generally speaking, the smart things outweigh the stupid things, so he is viewed as a basically smart guy who sometimes goofs up and says something stupid.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, says many many things that aren't only stupid, but indicative of an underlying idiocy well beyond just making mistakes. For instance, the question that really did her in back in 2008 was Katie Couric asking "And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this [the vice-presidency] - to stay informed and to understand the world?" Sarah Palin couldn't come up with a straight answer, while Biden would probably have cited Foreign Policy, the New York Times, or the Delaware News Journal.
On several documented occasions, they've foreclosed on people who had no mortgage whatsoever. They've foreclosed on people that lived next door to people they were intending to foreclose on due to typos. They've foreclosed on people who have paid their mortgage on time but the paperwork got mixed up by a servicer.
The victims aren't just victims of their own stupidity.
You left out foreclosing on homes without the legal right to do so, laundering drug money, trading with Iran and other enemies of the country you're based on, and of course occasionally paying off regulators to help get away with it all. But then again, banks committing serious crimes is nothing new. As Major General Smedley Butler argued:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
I never understood why they bother to lock the phones in the first place.
Oh, I can think of some reasons:
1. So they can sell the right to install an app on a phone that a consumer can't get rid of.
2. So they can set up "app stores" that collect a significant cut of whatever the user wants to buy.
3. So they can prevent third parties from creating and selling alternative services to their own products that are cheaper and/or better.
4. To reduce the number of ways a user can mess it up.
I'll tell you what doesn't: voting for the school board.
Tell that to the citizens of Dover, PA and the several other places that have pushed intelligent design into public school classrooms.
As a sibling pointed out, if you really are upset, why not run yourself? Or why not recruit a friend or neighbor to run, and help with his campaign? In many places, you can get elected to local government (in what is frequently a non-partisan election) by doing a door-to-door canvas all by your lonesome, because a few hundred votes may be all it takes.
I thank you for factoring in us Jatravartids from Viltvodle VI.
Network television is one of the best means of social control invented so far, second only to religion. Think about how many people really care about who wins American Idol, and think about how many people really care about who is elected to their local government. Who the American Idol winner is has no real effect on my life, whereas my local city council does when they decide whether to put money into repairing nearby streets or changing the zoning to accommodate a CVS in my neighborhood.
On the third hand, in theory theory and practice are identical, while in practice they aren't. Those kiwis might be on to something there.
That's a different sort of anti-intellectualism than, say, active policy efforts in the United States to try to prevent kids from ever encountering scientifically proven ideas.
The reason I feel unsafe in a commercial aircraft is because they've proven that a system such as the one Musk proposes where the autopilot cuts out and hands control to the pilot when it doesn't know what to do often results in the plane crashing and burning (or splashing and sinking, in the AF447 case)
It's really quite simple, if you compare 1 statistic: Death per billion km
Air - 0.05 Car - 3.1
It feels safer to deal with your stupidity or the stupidity of the drivers around you rather than potential pilot stupidity, but it's simply wrong.
Humans love to bask in the feeling of being in control, especially when it comes to cars.
Specifically, there's an important cognitive bias at work here, in that people feel safer about things they control than about things they don't control. That's why people who feel perfectly safe driving feel unsafe riding a commercial aircraft, even though planes are much much safer than driving. That's also why geeks feel comfortable with computers, while non-geeks are frequently scared of them - geeks know how to control those machines, non-geeks don't.
How long do we uphold the polite pretense that China isn't behind the overwhelming majority of real world hacking?
They probably aren't, given that there are lots of other kinds of people hacking out there:
- The NSA and US Air Force Cyber Command.
- Israeli's intelligence agency Mossad (Most notably Stuxnet)
- Former Soviet bloc mobsters
- For that matter, the Russians
- Anonymous
- Script kiddies
- Spammers
in economic terms, what price you are willing to pay is irrelevant, if you are not willing (or able) to pay the price that it costs, you are not considered part of the demand side of things. Look it up.
The demand curve is, in theory at least, the aggregation of what price people are willing to pay for the product. For instance, you might have a 100 people that would buy a widget if it cost $100, 1000 people that would buy it if it cost $80, and 10000 people that would buy it if it cost $60. If the equilibrium price is $80, then from the point of view of the 9000 people trying to pay only $60 there's a shortage, because they're going around and saying "$60 for a widget, anyone want to sell?" and getting no answer. But as soon as the sellers are willing to sell at $60, those 9000 people will happily buy up the widgets.
Those players are the part of the market who's demand is not satisfied because their bidding price is too low. This is very similar to those who are attempting to sell, but can't because their asking price is too high (which is what an economist would see as a surplus).
Bedevere: How do you known it is a bomb?
Peasant: Well, it blew me to smithereens!
Bedevere: To smithereens?!
Peasant: I got better.
A quick look at the economics dictionary would tell the story of why there's a shortage of programmers.
Shortage (n): Not able to buy something at a price you are willing to pay.
It is potentially a false cognate. At the same time, sounds similar to "pa" for fathers and sounds similar to "ma" for mothers are pretty universal among Indo-European languages, so it's perfectly plausible that those words are older than that.
Wouldn't this violate HIPAA? This is a medical record of the health of a specific patient, easily identified.
What's Neil Armstrong going to do about it if it is a HIPAA violation?
Developing skill sets for the workplace is a decidedly secondary task of higher education. This isn't unimportant, but it isn't the primary purpose.
Here's the problem:
- From the point of view of most colleges and universities, an ideal college graduate has a basic grounding in economics, contracts, labor law, English literature, history, a foreign language or two, mathematics, and some practical skills somewhere in there.
- From the point of view of business management, an ideal college graduate has an excellent understanding of the particular practical skill they're trying to hire for, and no understanding whatsoever of economics (could understand what they're really worth), contracts (harder to cheat), labor law (harder to cheat), literature (could distract from work), or foreign languages (could learn that people in other countries get a better deal).
This is why we don't have classes in plumbing
Yes we do, typically as part of 2-year technical schools. We also have technical schools set up for bricklaying, welding, auto mechanics, electrical circuits, telephone networking, culinary arts, carpentry, child care, and many other professions that you probably make use of on a regular basis.
Reminds me of an important rule: A society that fails to punish bad philosophers and fails to reward great plumbers will end up with both theories and pipes that don't hold water.
An LED and a switch connected to my fiber sucks. I use butterflies.