A group which profited immensely and rose to national scale power on the US's former prohibition on alcohol.
In America it started with Columbus cutting the hands of the native labourers if they didn't produce enough gold.
Columbus was sponsored by and appointed as a representative of the Spanish crown. And the Crown was to keep 90% of whatever profit he obtained from the various expeditions. From Wikipedia:
The Capitulations of Santa Fe between Christopher Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs were signed in Santa Fe, Granada on April 17, 1492. They granted Columbus the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the Viceroy, the Governor-General and honorific Don, and also the tenth part of all riches to be obtained from his intended voyage.
Moving on:
This went to the limit in the Congo Free State, the only privately operated African colony, where whippings and amputation were used regularly on labourers who didn't produce enough.
A private corporation owned by the head of state of Belgium and which used the military power of Belgium to help maintain profits.
There's also the examples of the various East India companies where private companies had whole armies to get what they wanted.
Again, backed by military power of countries, particularly that of England and the Netherlands.
And back to America, the Pinkertons and such were private corporations that were hired by other private corporations to enforce taking labour for below costs, and often keeping the labourers working in the company town so they had to give their paycheck back to the company.
And backed by law enforcement at various levels from local through to federal. If one reads of their exploits, one notices that there are always some sort of government representative present (usually a law enforcement officer).
It's just that recently private companies have discovered it is better to socialize these costs and it's better PR.
How many millennia is "recently"? I recall several infamous cases during the times of the Roman Republic and Empire, such as Boudicca's rebellion (which happened because a bunch of politically connected Romans grabbed real estate via military force from her tribe in a very nasty and brutal takeover which included the flogging of Boudicca and rape of her daughters) or the various state-funded misadventures of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man of the time in the Roman Empire.
Sure, business provides a ready motive to turn on fellow man, but the power of the state provides the means.
As to whether these particular people did better than your inflated measure of investment, let's have a look. I don't know about Trump, he seems to have bounced around a lot, including an episode of bankruptcy, but is worth $3 billion now. Romney doesn't appear to have inherited any money from his parents, yet he's still worth somewhere around $200 million. The Koch brothers seem to have done quite well, turning a fortune into a much larger fortune.
Also, it's worth noting here that Trump and the Koch brothers don't have very liquid wealth. They can't just turn around, sell everything they have for near market price instantaneously, and then buy NASDAQ index funds.
They also spend money. Even if they were tied perfectly to a relevant stock index, they would still have lower performance just because they do more with their money than invest it. Fancy homes, yachts, charity donations, whatever. For example, the Koch brothers only were mentioned here because of their spending on various sorts of pie-in-the-sky conservative and libertarian-flavored advocacy. That's not making them bank.
Despite your implications to the contrary, I don't buy that these people are dumb and can't imagine getting out of their little niches into something highly public like stock index funds. It's not like they wouldn't have heard about it.
Of course you won't, a republican choosing ideology over facts, what else is news?
I am not republican.
And I see you're propagating your own flavor of myths. Someone has a moderately wealthy or positioned dad, then nothing they do can possibly be due to their own merits.
Which is false. He got the job for the same reason he won the coveted Harvard Law Review editorship: he was damn bright one you could tell. The first time I read a speech from him in the early 2000s I knew he would one day be president, because you see, some of us can recognize talent while others like you cannot see past the color of a man's skin.
There are lots of bright people out there. But how many people get book deals just because they get a fancy college achievement? Or opportunity after opportunity thrown at their feet? And would people actually have voted for him in 2008, if he was just another white guy? That's why I believe the color of his skin got him where he is now.
The question has been asked and answered, and no, they have not outperformed the stock indices, which is why I brought it up.
Not in terms of the thread. I think it's dishonest to pretend that it's the most important question when no one has even asked it, including you.
And it's worth noting that not even the stocks that comprise the stock indices outperform the stock indices which are significantly inflated by how they rate and derate the components of the indices (there's a bump in price when a stock gets put in a popular index and a corresponding drop when it is removed - both happen in a way that inflates the index since the actions of adding or removing happen before the stock market reacts to it and thus gets added to the index valuation).
Nor do I buy your assertion that the above people didn't outperform the stock indices.
Dude, he got where he is in spite of the color of his skin.
The world exists outside of your limited universe. Remember that?
simply because a few token morsels thrown their way in the name of affirmative action.
Let's look at these few, token morsels: his first job as leader of a non profit based on nothing more than having a college degree and a car, getting several book contracts (the first which appears to be just on the basis of him getting elected as editor of the Harvard Law Review), 12 year lightweight gig at the University of Chicago law school, parlaying that community organizer beginning into a considerable bit of wealth (over $7 million last time he reported it), those numerous political positions, and other bits of political grooming (such as being appointed to run relatively high profile projects like Project Vote (Illinois branch) and board of directors for two major non profits in Chicago.
A huge warning sign for me is the near absence of what normally would be considered a real job - working for or managing in a for profit business like most people do. Romney, the Koch brothers, and Trump in particular have all done that. Even G. W. Bush has spent time working in a business. Meanwhile McCain was career military, serving 17 years in the military on top of 6 years as a POW in a nasty Vietnamese prison. I consider these jobs to give life experiences that you just aren't going to get from Obama's fluff of a career.
Sure, there are. There also are degrees of knowledge. I think this failing results in the subsequent argument.
And "unknown until you know" is not circular reasoning. It's a tautology, not reasoning.
I didn't say "unknown", I said "unknowable". Look at the original premise rather than just misreading what I wrote. Moving on:
They need money, but have no money, hence they have no choice if they want to do science. That's what this whole topic is about. Money is only given to those who play it safe or those that lie. And if they didn't have to play it safe, more would be willing to take greater chances. And if they didn't have to lie, there wouldn't be less fake science.
Well, here's another case of circular reasoning which starts with the assumption that scientists have no money. Well, they could always use their wealth which for some reason you assumed they didn't have, instead, if they really don't want constraints on what they do.
Sorry, but the question is "have they done sginificantly better than if they had simply invested their parents wealth in the stock market" and the answer is no.
No. That's not "the" question, not least because no one, including you, has yet to ask it. And the answer, for the people in question, is "Yes" they are doing significantly better than if their parents' wealth was just invested on the stock market.
Obama is the furthest you can be from being on 3rd base.
And yet, he got where he is through the color of his skin and not by his merits. For example, in addition to various political offices, we have plush book deals and academic positions just handed to him.
See where I'm going with this? Having the right parents is not the only way to end a meritocracy. Anything that allows someone to advance without regard to their merits also counts.
That is why my list is biased towards one party.
In other words, you're just grinding an ideological ax and only accusing the opposition of a much more universal ill. You exhibit the very same hypocrisy that you accuse these "Republicans" of.
Further, if hypocrisy is more important to you than wealth inequality, then why should wealth inequality be important to me. Shouldn't you at least act like these things are important to you?
The poster didn't say that he never followed rules. The previous poster ending a great deal of privacy for people.
Humans have too many privacy rights as it is. Groups like ISIS happen because we're more concerned about doing all of our daily tasks in secret rather than being safe.
I think the previous poster already answered your question about what rules he thinks are unjust.
I find it interesting how we can gloss over the power from being a government agency with access to the data of billions of people and veer right into ZOMG someone's making money! The real story is power without accountability. You could have dropped the first two paragraphs without materially changing a thing.
Motive just isn't that relevant. An organization brutalizing or blackmailing you for your own good is just not that different from one doing it to make a buck. Except that the latter would stop when things start to get unprofitable.
Right. Because good hunches are the fundamentally sound foundations of modern science
They're sounder than the original circular assertion that scientific knowledge is unknowable until you know it.
But they are only permitted to venture into where the light somewhat shines already.
Nobody forces them to use other peoples' money with other peoples' strings attached. A huge part of the problem here is that the people getting the funding aren't actually the exhilarating risk takers you make them out to be.
We are fast moving to a system where the person in charge, be it at a company or in government is no longer the most capable, but the one born in third base. Have a look at GW Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Koch brothers, Donald Trump, etc.
Romney, McCain, the Koch brothers, and Trump don't belong on that list. Three of those listed have successfully run businesses in the billions of dollars range. Meanwhile, McCain went from being a cripple in a nasty prison to high political office. That demonstrates a lot of social mobility.
Sure, if you exclude actual demonstrations of doing things of merit, then of course, you won't have a meritocracy.
And notice how all of your targets are all whipping boys for a particular political party? Where's some high profile Democrats like for example, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama? They're shiny examples of the end of meritocracy too. Kerry and Obama have been groomed for higher office, just like George W. Bush. And Clinton got where she was only because she was married to Bill Clinton.
Stuff that is risky, cheap, and has big payoffs has already been done for the most part.
The past twenty years of the internet are a huge counterexample. Even in the relatively staid world of particle accelerators, we are finding substantial room for improvement.
As an aside, do you think that climatology, geology, or astronomy can't have the scientific method applied to them due to the intractability of large portions of those fields to repeatable experiment?
No,I've explained why it's been so attractive to all sorts of scientists. Here, I think it's been a little bit of a surprise that the model has been so resistant to physical observation. Sure, everyone has a good idea that most of the theory is well beyond current observation, but I think they expected they'd find more testable aspects to it by now.
Only utterly ignorant and stupid people will demand scientific method on something that is not scientific.
We're not speaking of something that isn't scientific. We're speaking of science itself.
Of course, trying to explain this to people who are not creative, innovative, enterpreneurial, curious or loving, is pretty much like throwing pearls to swine.
But I think it's worth trying anyway. Maybe you'll get it next time.
I gather the reason is that it turned out to be a rather fertile field, mathematically. There are a variety of symmetries including a complete characterization of all string theory models in terms of each other (and a higher order M theory model which has each of them as a special case), connections to other models and mathematical concepts, and a huge realm in which a budding PhD can stake a claim.
So when it came to a choice between this field and a bunch of rather stagnant and/or even more complex and further abstracted areas (eg, quantum loop gravity, mundane quantum field theory), they choose the grounds that were more likely for them to make a mark.
Speaking of convenient myths, this is a huge one. Science is "unpredictable and unprofitable" therefore you just have to give us a lot of money and stop asking questions about why we're not doing anything useful with what you are giving us.
All they have is their curiosity and a hunch.
That hunch can be quite good.
Have you ever bothered to test your assertions using the scientific method, or have you merely assumed this myth is true?
In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses.
I think a large part of the problem are convenient myths that never were true. I don't believe these "old days" ever happened. And lots and lots of scientists are granted tax payers' monies now with remarkably little oversight (and behavior that demonstrates the public's lack of trust is warranted IMHO).
Online comments have no scientific merit whatsoever, ratings systems are abitrary and error prone (who computes the ratings? is it an algorithm, or some full time secretarial type? Does he/she even have a degree?), and citation statistics are gameable, in similar ways that Google rankings are gameable in fact.
The problem is that peer review has these same flaws. It has no more scientific merit than online comments; it is just as error prone and arbitrary as rating systems; and it's gameable just like citation statistics.
Beliving Russia can create a puppet goverment but that america can't incite a revolt, means you are watching too much propaganda from your "team".
I didn't say that. There is this remarkable disparity in results. Russia has all this trouble making its regimes and rebellions stick while the US doesn't. That's because it's easier to push a boulder downhill.
Ukraine collectively wants greater democracy and freedom. And they don't want to live under the thumb of the neighborhood strongman, Putin. That's why the previous government was successfully overthrown with at best a modest contribution from the US and why Putin has so much trouble now maintaining traction with his sham revolt.
In that scenario, the treaty only serves to hold back the non-crazy countries. If you're truly concerned, then a better approach is to restrict the number of such weapons, just like is done in current treaty with regular nuclear weapons and regular delivery systems. Don't ban the development of hypersonic missiles. Ban the deployment of a thousand nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles.
Slashdot Mirror
Never heard of the mafia?
A group which profited immensely and rose to national scale power on the US's former prohibition on alcohol.
In America it started with Columbus cutting the hands of the native labourers if they didn't produce enough gold.
Columbus was sponsored by and appointed as a representative of the Spanish crown. And the Crown was to keep 90% of whatever profit he obtained from the various expeditions. From Wikipedia:
Moving on:
A private corporation owned by the head of state of Belgium and which used the military power of Belgium to help maintain profits.
There's also the examples of the various East India companies where private companies had whole armies to get what they wanted .
Again, backed by military power of countries, particularly that of England and the Netherlands.
And back to America, the Pinkertons and such were private corporations that were hired by other private corporations to enforce taking labour for below costs, and often keeping the labourers working in the company town so they had to give their paycheck back to the company.
And backed by law enforcement at various levels from local through to federal. If one reads of their exploits, one notices that there are always some sort of government representative present (usually a law enforcement officer).
It's just that recently private companies have discovered it is better to socialize these costs and it's better PR.
How many millennia is "recently"? I recall several infamous cases during the times of the Roman Republic and Empire, such as Boudicca's rebellion (which happened because a bunch of politically connected Romans grabbed real estate via military force from her tribe in a very nasty and brutal takeover which included the flogging of Boudicca and rape of her daughters) or the various state-funded misadventures of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man of the time in the Roman Empire.
Sure, business provides a ready motive to turn on fellow man, but the power of the state provides the means.
Well, you could always pay them money. I gather saving lives is considered valuable in some quarters.
Where's the evidence that someone isn't complying with the GPL?
Because a 2 pound drone can cause as much damage as a 25 kiloton atomic warhead!
As to whether these particular people did better than your inflated measure of investment, let's have a look. I don't know about Trump, he seems to have bounced around a lot, including an episode of bankruptcy, but is worth $3 billion now. Romney doesn't appear to have inherited any money from his parents, yet he's still worth somewhere around $200 million. The Koch brothers seem to have done quite well, turning a fortune into a much larger fortune.
Also, it's worth noting here that Trump and the Koch brothers don't have very liquid wealth. They can't just turn around, sell everything they have for near market price instantaneously, and then buy NASDAQ index funds.
They also spend money. Even if they were tied perfectly to a relevant stock index, they would still have lower performance just because they do more with their money than invest it. Fancy homes, yachts, charity donations, whatever. For example, the Koch brothers only were mentioned here because of their spending on various sorts of pie-in-the-sky conservative and libertarian-flavored advocacy. That's not making them bank.
Despite your implications to the contrary, I don't buy that these people are dumb and can't imagine getting out of their little niches into something highly public like stock index funds. It's not like they wouldn't have heard about it.
Of course you won't, a republican choosing ideology over facts, what else is news?
I am not republican.
And I see you're propagating your own flavor of myths. Someone has a moderately wealthy or positioned dad, then nothing they do can possibly be due to their own merits.
Which is false. He got the job for the same reason he won the coveted Harvard Law Review editorship: he was damn bright one you could tell. The first time I read a speech from him in the early 2000s I knew he would one day be president, because you see, some of us can recognize talent while others like you cannot see past the color of a man's skin.
There are lots of bright people out there. But how many people get book deals just because they get a fancy college achievement? Or opportunity after opportunity thrown at their feet? And would people actually have voted for him in 2008, if he was just another white guy? That's why I believe the color of his skin got him where he is now.
The question has been asked and answered, and no, they have not outperformed the stock indices, which is why I brought it up.
Not in terms of the thread. I think it's dishonest to pretend that it's the most important question when no one has even asked it, including you.
And it's worth noting that not even the stocks that comprise the stock indices outperform the stock indices which are significantly inflated by how they rate and derate the components of the indices (there's a bump in price when a stock gets put in a popular index and a corresponding drop when it is removed - both happen in a way that inflates the index since the actions of adding or removing happen before the stock market reacts to it and thus gets added to the index valuation).
Nor do I buy your assertion that the above people didn't outperform the stock indices.
Dude, he got where he is in spite of the color of his skin.
The world exists outside of your limited universe. Remember that?
simply because a few token morsels thrown their way in the name of affirmative action.
Let's look at these few, token morsels: his first job as leader of a non profit based on nothing more than having a college degree and a car, getting several book contracts (the first which appears to be just on the basis of him getting elected as editor of the Harvard Law Review), 12 year lightweight gig at the University of Chicago law school, parlaying that community organizer beginning into a considerable bit of wealth (over $7 million last time he reported it), those numerous political positions, and other bits of political grooming (such as being appointed to run relatively high profile projects like Project Vote (Illinois branch) and board of directors for two major non profits in Chicago.
A huge warning sign for me is the near absence of what normally would be considered a real job - working for or managing in a for profit business like most people do. Romney, the Koch brothers, and Trump in particular have all done that. Even G. W. Bush has spent time working in a business. Meanwhile McCain was career military, serving 17 years in the military on top of 6 years as a POW in a nasty Vietnamese prison. I consider these jobs to give life experiences that you just aren't going to get from Obama's fluff of a career.
There are no degrees in soundness here.
Sure, there are. There also are degrees of knowledge. I think this failing results in the subsequent argument.
And "unknown until you know" is not circular reasoning. It's a tautology, not reasoning.
I didn't say "unknown", I said "unknowable". Look at the original premise rather than just misreading what I wrote. Moving on:
They need money, but have no money, hence they have no choice if they want to do science. That's what this whole topic is about. Money is only given to those who play it safe or those that lie. And if they didn't have to play it safe, more would be willing to take greater chances. And if they didn't have to lie, there wouldn't be less fake science.
Well, here's another case of circular reasoning which starts with the assumption that scientists have no money. Well, they could always use their wealth which for some reason you assumed they didn't have, instead, if they really don't want constraints on what they do.
Except that you would rarely see new people.
Unless, of course, new people go there all the time. There is a way to fix that problem.
Sorry, but the question is "have they done sginificantly better than if they had simply invested their parents wealth in the stock market" and the answer is no.
No. That's not "the" question, not least because no one, including you, has yet to ask it. And the answer, for the people in question, is "Yes" they are doing significantly better than if their parents' wealth was just invested on the stock market.
Obama is the furthest you can be from being on 3rd base.
And yet, he got where he is through the color of his skin and not by his merits. For example, in addition to various political offices, we have plush book deals and academic positions just handed to him.
See where I'm going with this? Having the right parents is not the only way to end a meritocracy. Anything that allows someone to advance without regard to their merits also counts.
That is why my list is biased towards one party.
In other words, you're just grinding an ideological ax and only accusing the opposition of a much more universal ill. You exhibit the very same hypocrisy that you accuse these "Republicans" of.
Further, if hypocrisy is more important to you than wealth inequality, then why should wealth inequality be important to me. Shouldn't you at least act like these things are important to you?
Humans have too many privacy rights as it is. Groups like ISIS happen because we're more concerned about doing all of our daily tasks in secret rather than being safe.
I think the previous poster already answered your question about what rules he thinks are unjust.
I find it interesting how we can gloss over the power from being a government agency with access to the data of billions of people and veer right into ZOMG someone's making money! The real story is power without accountability. You could have dropped the first two paragraphs without materially changing a thing.
Motive just isn't that relevant. An organization brutalizing or blackmailing you for your own good is just not that different from one doing it to make a buck. Except that the latter would stop when things start to get unprofitable.
Right. Because good hunches are the fundamentally sound foundations of modern science
They're sounder than the original circular assertion that scientific knowledge is unknowable until you know it.
But they are only permitted to venture into where the light somewhat shines already.
Nobody forces them to use other peoples' money with other peoples' strings attached. A huge part of the problem here is that the people getting the funding aren't actually the exhilarating risk takers you make them out to be.
Romney, McCain, the Koch brothers, and Trump don't belong on that list. Three of those listed have successfully run businesses in the billions of dollars range. Meanwhile, McCain went from being a cripple in a nasty prison to high political office. That demonstrates a lot of social mobility.
Sure, if you exclude actual demonstrations of doing things of merit, then of course, you won't have a meritocracy.
And notice how all of your targets are all whipping boys for a particular political party? Where's some high profile Democrats like for example, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama? They're shiny examples of the end of meritocracy too. Kerry and Obama have been groomed for higher office, just like George W. Bush. And Clinton got where she was only because she was married to Bill Clinton.
The past twenty years of the internet are a huge counterexample. Even in the relatively staid world of particle accelerators, we are finding substantial room for improvement.
but the X-Prize lead to an evolutionary dead end that's still grounded.
SpaceShipTwo has been test flying since October, 2010.
As an aside, do you think that climatology, geology, or astronomy can't have the scientific method applied to them due to the intractability of large portions of those fields to repeatable experiment?
No,I've explained why it's been so attractive to all sorts of scientists. Here, I think it's been a little bit of a surprise that the model has been so resistant to physical observation. Sure, everyone has a good idea that most of the theory is well beyond current observation, but I think they expected they'd find more testable aspects to it by now.
Only utterly ignorant and stupid people will demand scientific method on something that is not scientific.
We're not speaking of something that isn't scientific. We're speaking of science itself.
Of course, trying to explain this to people who are not creative, innovative, enterpreneurial, curious or loving, is pretty much like throwing pearls to swine.
But I think it's worth trying anyway. Maybe you'll get it next time.
I gather the reason is that it turned out to be a rather fertile field, mathematically. There are a variety of symmetries including a complete characterization of all string theory models in terms of each other (and a higher order M theory model which has each of them as a special case), connections to other models and mathematical concepts, and a huge realm in which a budding PhD can stake a claim.
So when it came to a choice between this field and a bunch of rather stagnant and/or even more complex and further abstracted areas (eg, quantum loop gravity, mundane quantum field theory), they choose the grounds that were more likely for them to make a mark.
All they have is their curiosity and a hunch.
That hunch can be quite good.
Have you ever bothered to test your assertions using the scientific method, or have you merely assumed this myth is true?
I think a large part of the problem are convenient myths that never were true. I don't believe these "old days" ever happened. And lots and lots of scientists are granted tax payers' monies now with remarkably little oversight (and behavior that demonstrates the public's lack of trust is warranted IMHO).
Online comments have no scientific merit whatsoever, ratings systems are abitrary and error prone (who computes the ratings? is it an algorithm, or some full time secretarial type? Does he/she even have a degree?), and citation statistics are gameable, in similar ways that Google rankings are gameable in fact.
The problem is that peer review has these same flaws. It has no more scientific merit than online comments; it is just as error prone and arbitrary as rating systems; and it's gameable just like citation statistics.
Beliving Russia can create a puppet goverment but that america can't incite a revolt, means you are watching too much propaganda from your "team".
I didn't say that. There is this remarkable disparity in results. Russia has all this trouble making its regimes and rebellions stick while the US doesn't. That's because it's easier to push a boulder downhill.
Ukraine collectively wants greater democracy and freedom. And they don't want to live under the thumb of the neighborhood strongman, Putin. That's why the previous government was successfully overthrown with at best a modest contribution from the US and why Putin has so much trouble now maintaining traction with his sham revolt.
In that scenario, the treaty only serves to hold back the non-crazy countries. If you're truly concerned, then a better approach is to restrict the number of such weapons, just like is done in current treaty with regular nuclear weapons and regular delivery systems. Don't ban the development of hypersonic missiles. Ban the deployment of a thousand nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles.