Of course. It's not one FDA that does what you want and a different FDA that does what the extreme "Christians" want. It's the same beast making the same bad decisions.
Another company borrowed huge sums of money from the Department of Energy only to declare bankruptcy a few years later. Sure, it's not a big piece of the pie as far as the US budget goes. But the US government isn't making a few bad decisions. But many thousands of them.
Thus hedge-fund manager "carried interest" is just as much an entitlement as food stamps.
Nonsense. Carried interest is part of the contract between the hedge-fund manager and their customers and hence, not an entitlement. It's also worth noting that hedge fund entitlements don't make up more than 50% of the whole federal budget, while the primary individual entitlements, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and unemployment insurance do.
Ideas of open government based on social fairness and strong government are not discussed or even mentioned in the article.
I gather this is mostly a reaction piece to O'Reilly. So the author can be excused. But I must admit to being puzzled by how this was casually dropped in your post without comment or justification. First, I don't believe there is such thing as social fairness. Some people are naturally going to do better and have more advantages than others. They'll be more socially connected, more intelligent or knowledge, better genes, or just luckier. Reality is inherently unfair and I don't see society improving by trying to equalize those circumstances.
Or maybe you're speaking of social fairness of opportunity, but that's something we do now. Maybe we could implement it a little better with considerably less racial bias (though most of that bias now comes from government than from the populace).
The ease with which I was able to come up with different interpretations of "social justice" illustrates a fatal problem with it. It is inherently subjective with the meaning changing based on point of view. There will be no acceptable definition of social justice that a majority will agree to.
Similarly, strong government seems inherently at odds with open government. Openness is after all a very large constraint on government. While strongness seems to also mean very large and complex, which tends to mean opaque and closed (even if the US government were completely open, it'd still be very hard to keep track of what the things it's doing, just due to its vast size). And what do we need a "strong" government for? I don't see the role being useful anywhere.
The only thing that is mentioned is the specific idea of open government based on hardcore capitalism and tea partyish libertarianism.
Now that seems like some good ideas at last. What's wrong with private ownership of capital or the basic tenets of so-called "tea partyish libertarianism" (like fiscal responsibility, constitution-based law, and a smaller, less costly government)?
I'll briefly go over why I think those are good ideas. Private owners tend to care more about capital and try to use it better than an indifferent government which doesn't have the incentives to care. So as a society, we have better use of capital to our benefit.
While it occasionally has been pointed out that a government can do some crazy stuff with currencies, budgets, and wealth that a family or a business can't, no one has ever bothered to explain why having a near balanced budget is a worse idea (other than it has some impact on short term economic activity which is supposed to be a big deal for some reason).
Constitutional-based law? If government doesn't respect law, then why should people obey the government? It's just a good idea, if you want a society that cooperates. Finally, as I indicated early on, I think a smaller government is a good idea. Among other things, even in the absence of government openness, it is far easier to keep track of a small government than a large one. And there's far less opportunity for corruption and tyranny than in a large, strong government.
BTW, I don't expect anyone to get the "Mindless" thing without having studied Zen. (In 15+ years, not many have, so you're in good company.)
Sounds like you need a few more decades of it, assuming it helps at all in your situation.
the Tea Partiers *wish* they were brave and fanatical enough to be terrorists, but they're too cowardly and self-centred either to put up, or to shut up.
You're at the point where you're so divergent from reality that you're almost not even wrong. At least you still use labels that can be matched with real world things. There's no "wish" like that in the real world.
And while I understand the psychological need of political rivals to talk trash about the Tea Party movement, I don't understand at all the need to just make up wild shit. What is it about fiscal responsibility, honoring the Constitution (for those who care, a real "social contract"), and reduction in government power that brings out such "hate speech" to use the term of the day?
Also, while dismissing people's religious beliefs as "pychopathy" is perfectly valid in some contexts, it is not very smart at all in others.
Which contexts apply here? It looks to me like we're talking about the religious beliefs of "terrorists". The people who can on occasion be conned into believing that killing someone for the mere act of not sharing exactly to the last iota your beliefs, allows you to go to a heaven where there are X number of virgins to wait on your every need?
You mean those psychopaths? Sure, if they have my testicles hooked up to a battery or my neck on the chopping block, I would, no doubt, try to find a more diplomatic term for it, but that context doesn't apply here.
I don't agree with Al-Qaeda's objectives
This is the strongest criticism you can muster? Why do you disagree? Not a high enough body count? They could have better target selection? Because they commit great evil for crazy ends?
I find it interesting how you can make up outrageous stuff (no doubt with a sneer) about one group whose most vile crime is merely to disagree with you and then pussy-foot around a second group which deliberately targets and kills innocents on a regular basis. Even the US military doesn't do that and they've killed a lot of innocents over the years.
So I have to look good while pecking at the keyboard? Maybe with the occasional pensive, tension-building comment ("I'm not sure I can do this, Boss! They changed all the codes!"). Saving the world, here I come!
In my experience, I got paid to do my PhD. So it was a job. It was also by far the hardest thing I've yet done. So it was solidly in the work category too.
culture is pretty much the entire point of human existence
I can get a better culture by leaving milk out on the counter for a couple of weeks. At least, with materialism, you get stuff. Human existence doesn't have to have a point, be it culture, stuff, knowledge, morality, purpose, happiness, exploration, whatever. I don't have to care how "poor and undeveloped" someone's worldview is, although in practice, I do care.
Too bad all the evidences points to that not being true..
Let's look at the claims in question:
Politicians, after all, are the easiest people in the world to bribe, it is the only job in America where bribes are legal.
People or businesses with interests before the government can contribute to the campaigns of legislators, the president, and a variety of political groups and PACs. Legally. So claim is TRUE.
The result is something that pervades every aspect of government at all levels called PAY TO PLAY.
Given the endless dribble of pro-IP law and bills coming out of Congress and the White House these days, I'd say there's some evidence for this position. MAYBE which might be upgraded to TRUE, if I bothered to google for it.
1) The biggest briber gets the best deal
That's going to take work to verify. Not feeling it. MAYBE.
2) Everyone else gets screwed.
Would be a consequence of point 1). MAYBE.
Worse, governments spout all kinds of emotional propaganda to cover up the actual reality of how the system works, directing people's anger away from the real criminals onto other groups in society.
Examples: the one percent, commies, gungrabbers, liberals, neocons, neolibs, tea baggers, etc. TRUE.
Then they promise "openness" and "transparency:" while doing the exact opposite.
While Obama made such a promise, his illustrious predecessor, Bush probably didn't. Insufficiently motivated to google. MAYBE FALSE.
Millions of well intentioned good people are duped by this propaganda every single day.
Bush and Obama both got elected. TRUE.
While not every claim has been demonstrated, there's enough there to indicate that your statement is FALSE.
Tl;dr: Think tank wonk mistakes Tim O'Reilly for a technolibertarian and turgidly tilts at windmills of his own invention.
Thanks. That's more than I got out of it. The Baffler baffled me. I hope that most of their articles won't be that long. The rest of the internet needs words too.
I already explained how it works. FDA makes any sort of medical research ridiculously expensive greatly slowing new discoveries and inventions that would help us live longer. There are other ways the FDA inhibits health care too.
Take the case of the "morning after" pill. Effectively, the FDA was blocking certain over-the-counter (OTC) sales of a particular emergency contraception. for more than a decade. It got to the point where physicians would fill out prescriptions for the medication in advance of a potential need.
This came through at the beginning of the Bush administration (in 2001) and as the story claims:
"Scientists, including an expert advisory panel to the F.D.A., gave early support to that request. But top F.D.A. officials rejected the application because, some said later, they worried they would be fired if they approved it."
Even when the FDA decided to overturn that decision in 2011 (well into the Obama administration's tenure), it was overruled by the Secretary of Health and Human Services who claimed that "After careful consideration of the F.D.A. summary review, I have concluded that the data submitted by Teva do not conclusively establish that Plan B One-Step should be made available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age".
The judge above determined this decision was "arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable". Looks to me like election year games took priority over the health of young women.
So we have the FDA obstructing the use of a drug for twelve years, to the detriment of young women's health, over the course of two completely different administrations for a variety of rather frivolous political and ideological reasons.
And nobody was punished.
The FDA can make decisions to protect the health of people currently taking drugs and undergoing related medical treatments. Or it can make decisions on the basis of protecting rent seeking, ideology, or keeping an issue away from an election year. What it doesn't do is make decisions on the basis of what is good for us in the long run.
That's a pretty good solution especially since it allows for efficient filtering of messages of precisely the sort that congressionally delivered intelligence are concerned about.
A stable system is not inherently a controlled system. There's a big different in control of the Sun between "I put my sunglasses on" (which just controls the little bit of solar power that falls on you) and "I use the Hand of Omega to increase solar output by 0.1%" (which is controlling the entire Sun).
I have tried twice to get a PhD in math, finally getting it in 2009. I figured out fairly early that a PhD in math wasn't going to go far for me into academia career-wise especially with the weaknesses I have as a researcher and teacher. I did it because partly due to stubbornness and partly because I wanted to learn how to think at a really deep level.
Now, I'm an accountant working from the heart of a supervolcano. It doesn't pay well, but I live in a cool place, have plenty of time off over the year, save a bit of money, and am picking up some useful experience. I do find the occasional use for my mad math skillz, but I accept that I'm not going to be fully challenged at a job like this.
âoeUsing existing rocket fuels, itâ(TM)s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,â said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. âoeWe are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.â
[...]
NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology. The sheer amount of chemical rocket fuel needed in space would be extremely expensive â" the launch costs alone would be more than $12 billion.
That's not true at all. Chemical rockets work as well. And with the Falcon Heavy in the near future, there's no reason to pay $12 billion in launch costs for a Mars mission, even if you use chemical rockets.
Note also the phrase "take more than four years". That makes it sound like it takes two years to come and go from Mars. It really only takes six months with chemical rockets (plus some time for attaining Mars orbit, there's probably not going to be a direct landing on Mars due to the high risks of aerocapture) The reason it would take that long is because humans would be staying on the surface of Mars for at least two years. I doubt even instantaneous travel would cut off more than a year and a half.
The more reasonable 90 day passage to Mars would takes six months off the travel time plus reduce the time needed to get into Mars orbit. It would also enable trips at any time rather than just during the most optimal trajectories. This really is the key constraint of chemical rockets.
At this point, it is worth noting that there are other viable near future propulsion technologies as well. A key one is electric propulsion which can be solar or nuclear powered. It has a good mass fraction and travel times. Solar sails could be used to ferry radiation-immune loads over very slowly.
Thank you, walking straw man for your endorsement. I'll just have to disagree with Scott Adams about population reduction being better than any else we could possibly be doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. It's not one FDA that does what you want and a different FDA that does what the extreme "Christians" want. It's the same beast making the same bad decisions.
That's what it is supposed to do.
I had to laugh at this. Sure, someone needs to make all those bad decisions to cover for the slackers in private industry.
Another company borrowed huge sums of money from the Department of Energy only to declare bankruptcy a few years later. Sure, it's not a big piece of the pie as far as the US budget goes. But the US government isn't making a few bad decisions. But many thousands of them.
Thus hedge-fund manager "carried interest" is just as much an entitlement as food stamps.
Nonsense. Carried interest is part of the contract between the hedge-fund manager and their customers and hence, not an entitlement. It's also worth noting that hedge fund entitlements don't make up more than 50% of the whole federal budget, while the primary individual entitlements, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and unemployment insurance do.
Ideas of open government based on social fairness and strong government are not discussed or even mentioned in the article.
I gather this is mostly a reaction piece to O'Reilly. So the author can be excused. But I must admit to being puzzled by how this was casually dropped in your post without comment or justification. First, I don't believe there is such thing as social fairness. Some people are naturally going to do better and have more advantages than others. They'll be more socially connected, more intelligent or knowledge, better genes, or just luckier. Reality is inherently unfair and I don't see society improving by trying to equalize those circumstances.
Or maybe you're speaking of social fairness of opportunity, but that's something we do now. Maybe we could implement it a little better with considerably less racial bias (though most of that bias now comes from government than from the populace).
The ease with which I was able to come up with different interpretations of "social justice" illustrates a fatal problem with it. It is inherently subjective with the meaning changing based on point of view. There will be no acceptable definition of social justice that a majority will agree to.
Similarly, strong government seems inherently at odds with open government. Openness is after all a very large constraint on government. While strongness seems to also mean very large and complex, which tends to mean opaque and closed (even if the US government were completely open, it'd still be very hard to keep track of what the things it's doing, just due to its vast size). And what do we need a "strong" government for? I don't see the role being useful anywhere.
The only thing that is mentioned is the specific idea of open government based on hardcore capitalism and tea partyish libertarianism.
Now that seems like some good ideas at last. What's wrong with private ownership of capital or the basic tenets of so-called "tea partyish libertarianism" (like fiscal responsibility, constitution-based law, and a smaller, less costly government)?
I'll briefly go over why I think those are good ideas. Private owners tend to care more about capital and try to use it better than an indifferent government which doesn't have the incentives to care. So as a society, we have better use of capital to our benefit.
While it occasionally has been pointed out that a government can do some crazy stuff with currencies, budgets, and wealth that a family or a business can't, no one has ever bothered to explain why having a near balanced budget is a worse idea (other than it has some impact on short term economic activity which is supposed to be a big deal for some reason).
Constitutional-based law? If government doesn't respect law, then why should people obey the government? It's just a good idea, if you want a society that cooperates. Finally, as I indicated early on, I think a smaller government is a good idea. Among other things, even in the absence of government openness, it is far easier to keep track of a small government than a large one. And there's far less opportunity for corruption and tyranny than in a large, strong government.
BTW, I don't expect anyone to get the "Mindless" thing without having studied Zen. (In 15+ years, not many have, so you're in good company.)
Sounds like you need a few more decades of it, assuming it helps at all in your situation.
the Tea Partiers *wish* they were brave and fanatical enough to be terrorists, but they're too cowardly and self-centred either to put up, or to shut up.
You're at the point where you're so divergent from reality that you're almost not even wrong. At least you still use labels that can be matched with real world things. There's no "wish" like that in the real world.
And while I understand the psychological need of political rivals to talk trash about the Tea Party movement, I don't understand at all the need to just make up wild shit. What is it about fiscal responsibility, honoring the Constitution (for those who care, a real "social contract"), and reduction in government power that brings out such "hate speech" to use the term of the day?
Also, while dismissing people's religious beliefs as "pychopathy" is perfectly valid in some contexts, it is not very smart at all in others.
Which contexts apply here? It looks to me like we're talking about the religious beliefs of "terrorists". The people who can on occasion be conned into believing that killing someone for the mere act of not sharing exactly to the last iota your beliefs, allows you to go to a heaven where there are X number of virgins to wait on your every need?
You mean those psychopaths? Sure, if they have my testicles hooked up to a battery or my neck on the chopping block, I would, no doubt, try to find a more diplomatic term for it, but that context doesn't apply here.
I don't agree with Al-Qaeda's objectives
This is the strongest criticism you can muster? Why do you disagree? Not a high enough body count? They could have better target selection? Because they commit great evil for crazy ends?
I find it interesting how you can make up outrageous stuff (no doubt with a sneer) about one group whose most vile crime is merely to disagree with you and then pussy-foot around a second group which deliberately targets and kills innocents on a regular basis. Even the US military doesn't do that and they've killed a lot of innocents over the years.
So I have to look good while pecking at the keyboard? Maybe with the occasional pensive, tension-building comment ("I'm not sure I can do this, Boss! They changed all the codes!"). Saving the world, here I come!
In my experience, I got paid to do my PhD. So it was a job. It was also by far the hardest thing I've yet done. So it was solidly in the work category too.
culture is pretty much the entire point of human existence
I can get a better culture by leaving milk out on the counter for a couple of weeks. At least, with materialism, you get stuff. Human existence doesn't have to have a point, be it culture, stuff, knowledge, morality, purpose, happiness, exploration, whatever. I don't have to care how "poor and undeveloped" someone's worldview is, although in practice, I do care.
Don't worry. We at the Slashdot community take your opinions seriously. Very. Seriously.
Didn't someone campaign in 2008 on the idea of transparency and open government?
Remember kids! It's a "position" not a "promise"!
Too bad all the evidences points to that not being true..
Let's look at the claims in question:
Politicians, after all, are the easiest people in the world to bribe, it is the only job in America where bribes are legal.
People or businesses with interests before the government can contribute to the campaigns of legislators, the president, and a variety of political groups and PACs. Legally. So claim is TRUE.
The result is something that pervades every aspect of government at all levels called PAY TO PLAY.
Given the endless dribble of pro-IP law and bills coming out of Congress and the White House these days, I'd say there's some evidence for this position. MAYBE which might be upgraded to TRUE, if I bothered to google for it.
1) The biggest briber gets the best deal
That's going to take work to verify. Not feeling it. MAYBE.
2) Everyone else gets screwed.
Would be a consequence of point 1). MAYBE.
Worse, governments spout all kinds of emotional propaganda to cover up the actual reality of how the system works, directing people's anger away from the real criminals onto other groups in society.
Examples: the one percent, commies, gungrabbers, liberals, neocons, neolibs, tea baggers, etc. TRUE.
Then they promise "openness" and "transparency:" while doing the exact opposite.
While Obama made such a promise, his illustrious predecessor, Bush probably didn't. Insufficiently motivated to google. MAYBE FALSE.
Millions of well intentioned good people are duped by this propaganda every single day.
Bush and Obama both got elected. TRUE.
While not every claim has been demonstrated, there's enough there to indicate that your statement is FALSE.
Tl;dr: Think tank wonk mistakes Tim O'Reilly for a technolibertarian and turgidly tilts at windmills of his own invention.
Thanks. That's more than I got out of it. The Baffler baffled me. I hope that most of their articles won't be that long. The rest of the internet needs words too.
Dr. Evil doesn't have to because job satisfaction and cool work environment go a long ways.
Take the case of the "morning after" pill. Effectively, the FDA was blocking certain over-the-counter (OTC) sales of a particular emergency contraception. for more than a decade. It got to the point where physicians would fill out prescriptions for the medication in advance of a potential need.
This came through at the beginning of the Bush administration (in 2001) and as the story claims:
"Scientists, including an expert advisory panel to the F.D.A., gave early support to that request. But top F.D.A. officials rejected the application because, some said later, they worried they would be fired if they approved it."
Even when the FDA decided to overturn that decision in 2011 (well into the Obama administration's tenure), it was overruled by the Secretary of Health and Human Services who claimed that "After careful consideration of the F.D.A. summary review, I have concluded that the data submitted by Teva do not conclusively establish that Plan B One-Step should be made available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age".
The judge above determined this decision was "arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable". Looks to me like election year games took priority over the health of young women.
So we have the FDA obstructing the use of a drug for twelve years, to the detriment of young women's health, over the course of two completely different administrations for a variety of rather frivolous political and ideological reasons.
And nobody was punished.
The FDA can make decisions to protect the health of people currently taking drugs and undergoing related medical treatments. Or it can make decisions on the basis of protecting rent seeking, ideology, or keeping an issue away from an election year. What it doesn't do is make decisions on the basis of what is good for us in the long run.
That's a pretty good solution especially since it allows for efficient filtering of messages of precisely the sort that congressionally delivered intelligence are concerned about.
This is beyond oxymorons. They're sadistically toying with our sanity to watch us break. It's seagulls and alka seltzers.
Actually that is fairly well controlled.
A stable system is not inherently a controlled system. There's a big different in control of the Sun between "I put my sunglasses on" (which just controls the little bit of solar power that falls on you) and "I use the Hand of Omega to increase solar output by 0.1%" (which is controlling the entire Sun).
how much do you owe?
Zero. Graduate school in a STEM field tends to be paid for.
The whole "what would happen to an astronaut"
...is part of a collection of classic thought experiments by real scientists which predate the internet. Your concerns are misplaced.
You're going to need radiation shielding anyway due to the uncontrolled nuclear reactor that sits at the center of the Solar System.
I have tried twice to get a PhD in math, finally getting it in 2009. I figured out fairly early that a PhD in math wasn't going to go far for me into academia career-wise especially with the weaknesses I have as a researcher and teacher. I did it because partly due to stubbornness and partly because I wanted to learn how to think at a really deep level.
Now, I'm an accountant working from the heart of a supervolcano. It doesn't pay well, but I live in a cool place, have plenty of time off over the year, save a bit of money, and am picking up some useful experience. I do find the occasional use for my mad math skillz, but I accept that I'm not going to be fully challenged at a job like this.
âoeUsing existing rocket fuels, itâ(TM)s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,â said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. âoeWe are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.â
[...]
NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology. The sheer amount of chemical rocket fuel needed in space would be extremely expensive â" the launch costs alone would be more than $12 billion.
That's not true at all. Chemical rockets work as well. And with the Falcon Heavy in the near future, there's no reason to pay $12 billion in launch costs for a Mars mission, even if you use chemical rockets.
Note also the phrase "take more than four years". That makes it sound like it takes two years to come and go from Mars. It really only takes six months with chemical rockets (plus some time for attaining Mars orbit, there's probably not going to be a direct landing on Mars due to the high risks of aerocapture) The reason it would take that long is because humans would be staying on the surface of Mars for at least two years. I doubt even instantaneous travel would cut off more than a year and a half.
The more reasonable 90 day passage to Mars would takes six months off the travel time plus reduce the time needed to get into Mars orbit. It would also enable trips at any time rather than just during the most optimal trajectories. This really is the key constraint of chemical rockets.
At this point, it is worth noting that there are other viable near future propulsion technologies as well. A key one is electric propulsion which can be solar or nuclear powered. It has a good mass fraction and travel times. Solar sails could be used to ferry radiation-immune loads over very slowly.
DIVE!!!!
Thank you, walking straw man for your endorsement. I'll just have to disagree with Scott Adams about population reduction being better than any else we could possibly be doing.