any data that refutes a well-reasoned logical argument is considered incomplete.
Another possibility is that the "well-reasoned logical argument" wasn't actually well-reasoned. For example, I've seen a perversion of the Austrian School axiom of action in which it is claimed that humans and only humans can act.
That bolded part can be refuted easily by observing non-human actors such as computer trading programs and animals. The latter can make economically relevant decisions without having a human involved anywhere in the process, for example, bees harvesting honey and incidentally pollinating plants or a host of scavengers and predators taking turns on a large carcass.
Thus, empirical observation trumps the perceived "well-reasoned" logical argument. I'm not claiming that this particular argument is representative of all Austrian School adherents, but rather of someone who thought they had a well-reasoned logical framework for which empirically based scrutiny should be useless. It turned out not to be so.
Also, how does one determine the well-reasoned nature of a logical argument? In an abstract sense, via a construction of a mathematically valid certificate, which is traditionally called a "proof" in mathematics. The problem is that construction of such a proof may be computationally very hard while construction of an empirical counterexample can take much less effort.
Nor are these problems considered in a vacuum. All this effort is to explain empirical observation of real world economic systems.
Are you suggesting that the earthquake and ensuing tsunami were somehow not natural disasters?
Back at you. I don't see any reason I need to answer that any more than you do. One could also read my post.
Or are you suggesting that this was a disaster that couldn't have been prepared for, despite the fact that TEPCO had been warned of the possibility years before? They dismissed the prediction as an unrealistic scenario and literally didn't bother preparing for it, so yeah... they were unprepared.
But they weren't unprepared for a more or less uncontrolled meltdown. When things fail hard, the planners of a system can still steer how the system fails.
Erm... just to be pedantic, you didn't just observe effects.
An effect is the result of a cause. So to demonstrate "effect", I have to show an initial phenomenon, such as the cessation of nuclear plant building (while I don't demonstrate in the previous post that it's due to anti-nuclear hysteria, there's plenty of evidence such as propaganda, lawsuits, and restrictive regulations to back that up). Then I have to show a second, subsequent phenomena (here, the continued operation of old nuclear plants). Finally, I have to present an model which explains the connection between the first phenomenon and the following one (my "claim" as you put it).
Just like a certain magnitude 9 earthquake was a disaster that the operators of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant weren't prepared for? A big difference is that the nuclear plant was designed to fail in a certain way that would greatly reduce its risk (including a number of safety features such as shutting down near instantly in response to the earthquake and a concrete containment vessel for holding a meltdown), while no similar effort had been done with the dams that failed in the 1975 Chinese disaster.
One doesn't need to be an expert to observe this effect in action. And some of it is painfully, mallet whacking on the head, obvious.
For example, no new nuclear plant has started construction in the US since the late 70s (the little bit of recent construction has all happened at existing nuclear plants).
Then in Japan there's the scuttling of an entire generation of nuclear plants in the decade 1995-2005 which led directly to the pre-earthquake decision (beginning of 2011) to keep the oldest of the Fukushima reactors, reactor 1 operating for another ten years rather than shutting down and decommissioning the reactor at the end of April, 2011.
Lack of options has forced these countries to make unsafe decisions, particularly to extend the lifespan of older less safe reactors.
Yep - all the woes of the nuclear power industry is the anti-nuclear NIMBYS fault. They caused all of the problems if they just shut up all the problems would go away.
I wouldn't say "all", just "most". Anohter classic example is the continued operating of older, less safe plants because new ones can't get built.
In Jane Q. Public's defense, you're just an innumerate savage flinging poo. Not only does the non-free cost of power plants not boggle the minds of economists, it doesn't boggle the minds of engineers who routinely calculate these sorts of costs. The field is called "engineering economics". Look it up sometime.
Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Because social costs happen to be whatever numbers you decide to pull out of your ass that day. But even if we were to somehow find a valid and objective means to calculate such social costs, you would find that hydroelectric wouldn't far that well simply because it kills more people per watt of generated power, causes more environmental damage per watt, and prevents the use of more land for normal human activities per watt of generated power - all of these include the effects of meltdowns.
No, I don't think this is a serious post. First, we have proof by a research paper where the researcher spends a fair portion of their time inventing terms for imaginary phenomena. Now, we're consulting Seinfeld as if it were scientific observation. That's pretty much the progression one would expect for this topic.
As long as webapps are designed like things are designed, built like things that are built, and operated like things that are operated, you'll have this reciprocal problem of things that are designed, built, and operated like webapps.
Is anyone else unnerved by the short notice of passing asteroids?
No, because we're getting early warning of near inconsequential asteroids. That indicates that we have decent early warning. You do want to know that at least you're detecting this stuff before it hits.
Maybe you could learn to spell out names of things so that we don't decide to interpret it some other, more entertaining way. Assuming we even have a clue what you are trying to insinuate.
It's just that the state chose not to enforce the law and throw executives in prison for tax evasion.
If it's not illegal, which is the case here, then it's not tax evasion (which is illegal by definition) and we wouldn't have cause to throw anyone in prison for tax evasion.
I don't see your concern myself. There are obvious benefactors from such laws. And one way to both draw attention to the law and pressure the legislature is to protest in front of these businesses. It seems a straightforward strategy.
However the point is that Microsoft is a victim of unconstitutional, illegal government system that usurped power and is stealing people's money. Income taxes are illegal and are collected illegally for a wide range of reasons.
The state of Washington is not held to the constitutional taxation restrictions of the US federal government. Collecting income tax is quite legal for them.
The state chose not to pursue over a billion in unpaid taxes.
You also have to show that the business in question actually owed those taxes. We're not even yet to the moral statement where you state that corporations should pay their taxes. I don't see why that's supposed to be true. Sure, someone has to pay taxes for all the good things that government does for society. One also pays taxes for the bad things government does to society.
Congratulations, you're part of the problem. It seems that you expect all research funded in this way to have immediate, practical applications. Science does not work that way.
Funny, how the same silly rebuttal keeps coming up. Because we want to see return on investment, it is automatically assumed that we want "immediate, practical applications".
I think the point here is that the (relatively) uneducated people are making the decisions about what to fund and what not to fund, and it should be scientists who are in a position to know what the fuck they're talking about that should be making that call.
I'd take the scientists more seriously, if they take acceptance of public funding more seriously? Want funding without any sort of accountability? Then fund it yourself. Everything else will have strings attached.
What. Legally, he has inherited money, but appears not have kept it. Romney claims to have received money from his father and then donated it to charity which would count at not inheriting it in my book (or rather the appearance of not inheriting it).
Which would have no teeth, if it weren't for employment laws enabling the lawsuit. That's the government action behind the lawsuit.
As to the conflict here, I don't see compelling interests on either side. As the original poster noted, allowing businesses to collude in hiring would encourage them to employ US workers. OTOH, it's not that much of an incentive.
You are what Reiss refers to as a self-hugger--you mistakenly believe that most individuals share the same motivations as you. Studies have shown that this simply isn't true.
Yes, that thing where humans are motivated by "different ranges of desires" which happen to be the same for everyone. And where's the evidence humans are biologically or mentally capable of being something other than a "self-hugger"?
The studies may well measure something meaningful, but you are running a traditional argument from ignorance fallacy.
Except no major political group actually acts on what you said (and I'm counting the Libertarian left in' major' there). Why fuss about the size of government if that argument leads to cutting only the parts of government that can't directly come and shoot you?
The "Libertarian left" is an obvious counterexample to your above assertion. Among other things, they advocate substantial decrease in the US military and an end to US military adventurism. It doesn't make sense to me how people can just assert things without even looking at what actually is happening.
Or we could, you know, just restore the massive State and Federal funding
Where's this money coming from? Tax increases have a cost too.
Further, I don't think people get that the massive funding in question just wasn't that massive or that different from today. Recall that college costs have increased for decades at a far greater rate than the US economy has. What was ample funding forty years ago just doesn't come close today.
From the above link, education costs increased by a factor of six in a 26 year period from 1985 to 2011. In that time, nominal GDP (not adjusted for inflation to compare apples to apples) didn't even increase by a factor of 4 (4.35 trillion dollars to 16.16 trillion dollars).
So it's not just a matter of just maintaining historical levels of spending, which probably has been done for most states, but to increase spending as a fraction of the overall economy by 60%.
Slashdot Mirror
any data that refutes a well-reasoned logical argument is considered incomplete.
Another possibility is that the "well-reasoned logical argument" wasn't actually well-reasoned. For example, I've seen a perversion of the Austrian School axiom of action in which it is claimed that humans and only humans can act.
That bolded part can be refuted easily by observing non-human actors such as computer trading programs and animals. The latter can make economically relevant decisions without having a human involved anywhere in the process, for example, bees harvesting honey and incidentally pollinating plants or a host of scavengers and predators taking turns on a large carcass.
Thus, empirical observation trumps the perceived "well-reasoned" logical argument. I'm not claiming that this particular argument is representative of all Austrian School adherents, but rather of someone who thought they had a well-reasoned logical framework for which empirically based scrutiny should be useless. It turned out not to be so.
Also, how does one determine the well-reasoned nature of a logical argument? In an abstract sense, via a construction of a mathematically valid certificate, which is traditionally called a "proof" in mathematics. The problem is that construction of such a proof may be computationally very hard while construction of an empirical counterexample can take much less effort.
Nor are these problems considered in a vacuum. All this effort is to explain empirical observation of real world economic systems.
Are you suggesting that the earthquake and ensuing tsunami were somehow not natural disasters?
Back at you. I don't see any reason I need to answer that any more than you do. One could also read my post.
Or are you suggesting that this was a disaster that couldn't have been prepared for, despite the fact that TEPCO had been warned of the possibility years before? They dismissed the prediction as an unrealistic scenario and literally didn't bother preparing for it, so yeah... they were unprepared.
But they weren't unprepared for a more or less uncontrolled meltdown. When things fail hard, the planners of a system can still steer how the system fails.
Erm... just to be pedantic, you didn't just observe effects.
An effect is the result of a cause. So to demonstrate "effect", I have to show an initial phenomenon, such as the cessation of nuclear plant building (while I don't demonstrate in the previous post that it's due to anti-nuclear hysteria, there's plenty of evidence such as propaganda, lawsuits, and restrictive regulations to back that up). Then I have to show a second, subsequent phenomena (here, the continued operation of old nuclear plants). Finally, I have to present an model which explains the connection between the first phenomenon and the following one (my "claim" as you put it).
I did so.
Just like a certain magnitude 9 earthquake was a disaster that the operators of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant weren't prepared for? A big difference is that the nuclear plant was designed to fail in a certain way that would greatly reduce its risk (including a number of safety features such as shutting down near instantly in response to the earthquake and a concrete containment vessel for holding a meltdown), while no similar effort had been done with the dams that failed in the 1975 Chinese disaster.
One doesn't need to be an expert to observe this effect in action. And some of it is painfully, mallet whacking on the head, obvious.
For example, no new nuclear plant has started construction in the US since the late 70s (the little bit of recent construction has all happened at existing nuclear plants).
Then in Japan there's the scuttling of an entire generation of nuclear plants in the decade 1995-2005 which led directly to the pre-earthquake decision (beginning of 2011) to keep the oldest of the Fukushima reactors, reactor 1 operating for another ten years rather than shutting down and decommissioning the reactor at the end of April, 2011.
Lack of options has forced these countries to make unsafe decisions, particularly to extend the lifespan of older less safe reactors.
Yep - all the woes of the nuclear power industry is the anti-nuclear NIMBYS fault. They caused all of the problems if they just shut up all the problems would go away.
I wouldn't say "all", just "most". Anohter classic example is the continued operating of older, less safe plants because new ones can't get built.
Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Because social costs happen to be whatever numbers you decide to pull out of your ass that day. But even if we were to somehow find a valid and objective means to calculate such social costs, you would find that hydroelectric wouldn't far that well simply because it kills more people per watt of generated power, causes more environmental damage per watt, and prevents the use of more land for normal human activities per watt of generated power - all of these include the effects of meltdowns.
Because a dollar 20,000 years from now is just as valuable as a dollar today.
No, I don't think this is a serious post. First, we have proof by a research paper where the researcher spends a fair portion of their time inventing terms for imaginary phenomena. Now, we're consulting Seinfeld as if it were scientific observation. That's pretty much the progression one would expect for this topic.
As long as webapps are designed like things are designed, built like things that are built, and operated like things that are operated, you'll have this reciprocal problem of things that are designed, built, and operated like webapps.
Is anyone else unnerved by the short notice of passing asteroids?
No, because we're getting early warning of near inconsequential asteroids. That indicates that we have decent early warning. You do want to know that at least you're detecting this stuff before it hits.
I wouldn't call a failed state a superpower.
Maybe you could learn to spell out names of things so that we don't decide to interpret it some other, more entertaining way. Assuming we even have a clue what you are trying to insinuate.
This is settled case law.
Heh, apparently not that settled.
It's just that the state chose not to enforce the law and throw executives in prison for tax evasion.
If it's not illegal, which is the case here, then it's not tax evasion (which is illegal by definition) and we wouldn't have cause to throw anyone in prison for tax evasion.
That's almost always why protests happen. I don't expect Microsoft to protest that they're saving a billion dollars. But YMMV.
Washington state is a state and hence, not subject to most of your arguments, even if we accept your claims at face value.
I don't see your concern myself. There are obvious benefactors from such laws. And one way to both draw attention to the law and pressure the legislature is to protest in front of these businesses. It seems a straightforward strategy.
However the point is that Microsoft is a victim of unconstitutional, illegal government system that usurped power and is stealing people's money. Income taxes are illegal and are collected illegally for a wide range of reasons.
The state of Washington is not held to the constitutional taxation restrictions of the US federal government. Collecting income tax is quite legal for them.
The state chose not to pursue over a billion in unpaid taxes.
You also have to show that the business in question actually owed those taxes. We're not even yet to the moral statement where you state that corporations should pay their taxes. I don't see why that's supposed to be true. Sure, someone has to pay taxes for all the good things that government does for society. One also pays taxes for the bad things government does to society.
Congratulations, you're part of the problem. It seems that you expect all research funded in this way to have immediate, practical applications. Science does not work that way.
Funny, how the same silly rebuttal keeps coming up. Because we want to see return on investment, it is automatically assumed that we want "immediate, practical applications".
I think the point here is that the (relatively) uneducated people are making the decisions about what to fund and what not to fund, and it should be scientists who are in a position to know what the fuck they're talking about that should be making that call.
I'd take the scientists more seriously, if they take acceptance of public funding more seriously? Want funding without any sort of accountability? Then fund it yourself. Everything else will have strings attached.
What. Legally, he has inherited money, but appears not have kept it. Romney claims to have received money from his father and then donated it to charity which would count at not inheriting it in my book (or rather the appearance of not inheriting it).
So there's no actual demonstration of a violation of the license.
Which would have no teeth, if it weren't for employment laws enabling the lawsuit. That's the government action behind the lawsuit.
As to the conflict here, I don't see compelling interests on either side. As the original poster noted, allowing businesses to collude in hiring would encourage them to employ US workers. OTOH, it's not that much of an incentive.
You are what Reiss refers to as a self-hugger--you mistakenly believe that most individuals share the same motivations as you. Studies have shown that this simply isn't true.
Yes, that thing where humans are motivated by "different ranges of desires" which happen to be the same for everyone. And where's the evidence humans are biologically or mentally capable of being something other than a "self-hugger"?
The studies may well measure something meaningful, but you are running a traditional argument from ignorance fallacy.
Except no major political group actually acts on what you said (and I'm counting the Libertarian left in' major' there). Why fuss about the size of government if that argument leads to cutting only the parts of government that can't directly come and shoot you?
The "Libertarian left" is an obvious counterexample to your above assertion. Among other things, they advocate substantial decrease in the US military and an end to US military adventurism. It doesn't make sense to me how people can just assert things without even looking at what actually is happening.
Where's this money coming from? Tax increases have a cost too.
Further, I don't think people get that the massive funding in question just wasn't that massive or that different from today. Recall that college costs have increased for decades at a far greater rate than the US economy has. What was ample funding forty years ago just doesn't come close today.
From the above link, education costs increased by a factor of six in a 26 year period from 1985 to 2011. In that time, nominal GDP (not adjusted for inflation to compare apples to apples) didn't even increase by a factor of 4 (4.35 trillion dollars to 16.16 trillion dollars).
So it's not just a matter of just maintaining historical levels of spending, which probably has been done for most states, but to increase spending as a fraction of the overall economy by 60%.