Security was not handled by the city of Pittsburgh, although they did provide a good proportion of the actual policemen. The summit was designated a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland Security, a designation which by law puts the Secret Service, a police force closely associated with the President, in charge of operations.
People have been debating this explanation for decades, and studies are all over the map. It'd be more accurate to say that there is yet another new study on the subject of the relationship between season-of-birth correlates and socioeconomic factors, this one claiming that the relationship is in fact significant. There's a bunch more studies if you'd like.
It's possible, but my impression is that most scientists think it's unlikely--- Mars's poorly shielding atmosphere would probably have led to any lifeforms on our probes being killed off within hours at most.
An alternate interesting observation is that large meteor impacts appear to eject enough material to transfer lifeforms between planetary bodies.
I'm not sure that's really dogma. Sure, it's not widely accepted that there is life on Mars, and a number of people think it's unlikely, but there's quite a lot of fairly open discussion about the possibility.
Here's some data, listing the millionaire residents per 1,000 resident households in each state. The high-tax states seem to be doing pretty well retaining them.
Maybe billionaires are distributed differently, but they're such a small number of people they hardly count when talking about the majority of the "productive people" in the country, which started this thread.
I agree they're a factor; my main point was that they aren't one of the largest factors when people decide where to live. Some wealthy people live in exurbs of Boston in New Hampshire, sure. But overall, more wealthy people choose to live in high-tax places like New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Taxes are way up there in perceived "badness", among the productive.
In my experience, they aren't, and empirical evidence seems to suggest they're at least not the deciding factor, given how large a percentage of the productive live in high-tax states likes New York, California, and Massachusetts.
How so? The earliest versions of the technique only date back to about 2002, and I don't see any evidence that research has been slower than one might expect.
The FTC has an archive of case materials. Looks like a complaint was brought in 1996, and he settled in 1997, which included agreeing to a permanent injunction. The FTC brought another complaint in 2006, got a temporary restraining order, and a finding of contempt of court in 2007. The 2007 filing is the one that instituted a $3.2 million fine and ordered Neiswonger to turn over title to a specific residence in Las Vegas as part of paying it.
It's not clear to me if that's his primary residence or a secondary one. Usually primary residences are shielded from civil judgments. If it's a secondary one, this case isn't unusual at all, since ordering a 2nd home to be sold to pay a judgment is common. If it's a primary one, I'm not sure if the rules are different because it's a contempt proceeding. (In theory it seems the rules might also be different for even primary residences purchased with ill-gotten money, but none of the complaints seem to allege that specifically.)
As the article explains, the purpose was to keep Soviet generals from being less hot-headed, by assuring them there was retaliatory capability. It wasn't to deter the US, so no need to tell the US.
Not a subjective judgment in either direction, but for what it's worth, this paper abstract quantifies the heat imparted to Lake Cayuga as "equivalent to an additional two hours of sunlight each year".
This reminds me of the old efficient-market-hypothesis joke about the economics professor who refused to believe there was a quarter on the ground in front of him--- because if there was, someone would've picked it up already.
He doesn't keep them separate, though. A strong undercurrent in The God Delusion is that his atheism is a consequence of his biology, not a separately held viewpoint. This leads people who reject the consequence to assume evolutionary biology must be wrong, too. If evolutionary biology implies atheism, as Dawkins strongly suggests, and you a priori reject atheism, then by modus tollens, evolutionary biology is wrong.
It might be that I have contact with a lot of neuroscientists, but that view seems very common there: that mind really doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, and is "just" chemicals and neural firing. Maybe it's a more sophisticated version of the issue with behaviorism, which wasn't actually wrong as science, but had some philosophical overreach?
There are cases where it's tactically useful to apply such a view, which also helps promote it: e.g. if you argue that depression is "just brain-chemical imbalance", it can make it easier to convince depressed people to accept treatment, by delegitimizing the depressed mental state as a real thought or aspect of personality. You want to argue that it's not "them" thinking things, but just "the depression speaking"; a physical brain problem that medication can correct.
But it's hard to keep that compartmentalized, and increasingly popular-science writing purports to show that e.g. whether someone like chocolate or not is "just" a particular chemical or neural response. People are willing to accept it very narrowly, I think, that e.g. extreme cases of very mentally disturbed individuals are "just" suffering some physical brain problem; but if you extend it to a reductionist explanation of all mental activity, that we're just bags of brain chemicals, it sounds nihilist.
Yeah, I see that viewpoint to some extent, but even as someone non-religious, I kind of find the reductionist explanations not always that useful. I mean, yes, in some sense human history is just a particular level of description for "history of a subset of particles in the universe"--- the earth is made up of matter and subject to physical laws, and so are humans, and so is everything else. But if you actually want to understand human history, it's a lot more sensible to pretend that the basic ontological elements are things like: civilizations, governments, people, leaders, economies, food, ideas, institutions, knowledge, war, weapons, migration, etc. It's just a level of description, but it's a useful one, and there's no particular reason to try to delegitimize it by saying it's "just" something else. Similarly, I'm not sure neuroscience is the exclusive or always the best way of understanding human thought and behavior. It tells you something about it, but not always at a level of description that's useful.
It raises risks, though: not only do you have to think your product is better than everyone else's, but that it'll stay that way indefinitely. I think a lot of companies aren't that confident that, sometime in the future, someone else won't come along with a better---maybe even much better---product. Then they're suddenly out of business, unless they've made it harder for people to quickly switch. If they did make it hard to switch, though, they'll have residual business for years after being obsoleted, from locked-in "legacy" customers.
Depending on how you value risks, it might not be irrational to accept slower growth (scare off customers due to lock-in) in return for diminished chance of rapid, large-scale customer desertion (they can't easily leave, due to lock-in).
I was initially going to comment that this analogy is a bit off:
Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.
The obvious problem is that no particular landlord is interested in "the housing industry as a whole": they're interested in their own corner of it. And so it's not clear why the landlord would want to do something to make it easier for tenants to move out, just because the end result is good for "the industry as a whole", unless they're altruists.
But in this case, I think the analogy might actually work well. What if the landlord controlled, say, more than half of the housing industry? Then they might well want to do what's good for the housing industry as a whole, because they'll gain more customers from increasing the size of the industry as a whole than they'll lose to competitors within the industry. Google plausibly controls such a large proportion of "the cloud" that that's their interest.
It does reduce the competitive moat, though. It may make it easier to grow by doing something like this, but it also makes it easier for some future competitor to much more quickly poach Google's customers. It looks like that's a risk they're willing to take, but many companies aren't. I think that's because many companies realize they are where they are at least partly due to luck, and can't count on staying there without taking active measures to cling to that position.
Dawkins is an odd case. I feel that he often does both good evolutionary biology, and good popular-science writing about it. But The God Delusion, while fine as a statement of his views, causes trouble when it's taken, as he implies strongly in some parts, as a claim that science disproves god, or proves belief in god to be Mistaken. That's getting into philosophy of science and philosophy of religion, and Dawkins is frankly just not very good at it, or even well-read in the subject. At the very least, the book has caused a bit of embarrassment among atheist or atheist-leaning philosophers of religion, who generally have better arguments. Sort of a "yes, we agree with your conclusion, but...".
If you want a better-reasoned book that argues that science and philosophy make believing in religion unreasonable, I'd recommend J.L. Mackie's somewhat sarcastically titled Miracle of Theism as a better starting point.
That's not really true in a lot of areas. I don't think there's any working scientist who's thought about the subject who couldn't tell you a dozen terms in frequent use in their area that are there primarily for historical reasons, and could be made simpler or unified with terms in other fields. They persist because the actual process of changing over would be disruptive.
If you're going to be an evangelist for science, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. I personally was almost turned off science by the half-assed philosophy that many scientists seem to implicitly hold.
For people on the borderline---who might've accepted a scientific worldview but ultimately rejected it---anecdotally the biggest factor I've found is a feeling that accepting the scientific worldview is nihilistic. Usually this seems (again, anecdotally), to be a result of some particularly overreaching attempts to use science as a sort of naive-reductionist philosophy, where every discovery of mechanisms delegitimizes higher-level things, because now they're "only X", and in some sense don't "really" exist anymore. People particularly object to this with humans. Arguments like "X is just brain chemicals" or "Y is just evolved behavior" get thrown around, and you ultimately end up at claims like: "You don't really love her; that's just brain chemicals". "There isn't really any such thing as morality; that's just evolved group behavior". And people generally recoil at and reject that view, if you're implying that actually nothing about human existence is "real".
Of course, nothing in science actually demands that sort of explanation at a philosophical level. Nobody argues that since chemistry is "just physics", it's therefore in any sense not real or illegitimate. It's a perfectly correct way of explaining, at a particular level of description, how the universe works, and chemical properties are real properties, that really do exist. The fact that chemical properties are due to lower-level interactions doesn't change that. Daniel Dennett even coined a term for some of these kinds of philosophical misuse of science: greedy reductionism.
Fortunately, I was saved from that by some more philosophically sophisticated scientists who pointed out to me that the views held by people who study physicalist explanations of the world are much better thought out. And on, say, what the mind "really" is, fully defended physicalist accounts of mind don't have the same greedy-reductionism that characterizes the rather questionable comments of a lot of neuroscientists.
Sure, there are all sorts of other problems, like fundamentalist Christians who won't ever accept any explanation not derived from the Bible. But as a scientist, I tend to think some outreach is better than just attacking them: there's plenty I might change about their organizations, but I can't, so what can I change about mine? Simply being more accurate about the philosophical implications of science, I find, helps to dispel a lot of unnecessary worries, while having the added benefit of actually being, well, more accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
just like the training they do for the Taser.
Since police routinely abuse the Taser, this isn't much of an assurance.
Security was not handled by the city of Pittsburgh, although they did provide a good proportion of the actual policemen. The summit was designated a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland Security, a designation which by law puts the Secret Service, a police force closely associated with the President, in charge of operations.
People have been debating this explanation for decades, and studies are all over the map. It'd be more accurate to say that there is yet another new study on the subject of the relationship between season-of-birth correlates and socioeconomic factors, this one claiming that the relationship is in fact significant. There's a bunch more studies if you'd like.
It's possible, but my impression is that most scientists think it's unlikely--- Mars's poorly shielding atmosphere would probably have led to any lifeforms on our probes being killed off within hours at most.
An alternate interesting observation is that large meteor impacts appear to eject enough material to transfer lifeforms between planetary bodies.
I'm not sure that's really dogma. Sure, it's not widely accepted that there is life on Mars, and a number of people think it's unlikely, but there's quite a lot of fairly open discussion about the possibility.
Isn't 4000 lines/code a second 4 kHz, not GHz, if we're using Hz to measure the frequency of line-processing?
Here's some data, listing the millionaire residents per 1,000 resident households in each state. The high-tax states seem to be doing pretty well retaining them.
Maybe billionaires are distributed differently, but they're such a small number of people they hardly count when talking about the majority of the "productive people" in the country, which started this thread.
I agree they're a factor; my main point was that they aren't one of the largest factors when people decide where to live. Some wealthy people live in exurbs of Boston in New Hampshire, sure. But overall, more wealthy people choose to live in high-tax places like New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
In my experience, they aren't, and empirical evidence seems to suggest they're at least not the deciding factor, given how large a percentage of the productive live in high-tax states likes New York, California, and Massachusetts.
Have you left yet?
How so? The earliest versions of the technique only date back to about 2002, and I don't see any evidence that research has been slower than one might expect.
The FTC has an archive of case materials. Looks like a complaint was brought in 1996, and he settled in 1997, which included agreeing to a permanent injunction. The FTC brought another complaint in 2006, got a temporary restraining order, and a finding of contempt of court in 2007. The 2007 filing is the one that instituted a $3.2 million fine and ordered Neiswonger to turn over title to a specific residence in Las Vegas as part of paying it.
It's not clear to me if that's his primary residence or a secondary one. Usually primary residences are shielded from civil judgments. If it's a secondary one, this case isn't unusual at all, since ordering a 2nd home to be sold to pay a judgment is common. If it's a primary one, I'm not sure if the rules are different because it's a contempt proceeding. (In theory it seems the rules might also be different for even primary residences purchased with ill-gotten money, but none of the complaints seem to allege that specifically.)
The FTC also has a slightly more detailed version of this news, fwiw.
As the article explains, the purpose was to keep Soviet generals from being less hot-headed, by assuring them there was retaliatory capability. It wasn't to deter the US, so no need to tell the US.
Not a subjective judgment in either direction, but for what it's worth, this paper abstract quantifies the heat imparted to Lake Cayuga as "equivalent to an additional two hours of sunlight each year".
IPv6 adoption, I predict, will increase markedly in The Year of the Linux Desktop.
This reminds me of the old efficient-market-hypothesis joke about the economics professor who refused to believe there was a quarter on the ground in front of him--- because if there was, someone would've picked it up already.
I personally switched to IIS to avoid offending my Native American brethren!
He doesn't keep them separate, though. A strong undercurrent in The God Delusion is that his atheism is a consequence of his biology, not a separately held viewpoint. This leads people who reject the consequence to assume evolutionary biology must be wrong, too. If evolutionary biology implies atheism, as Dawkins strongly suggests, and you a priori reject atheism, then by modus tollens, evolutionary biology is wrong.
It might be that I have contact with a lot of neuroscientists, but that view seems very common there: that mind really doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, and is "just" chemicals and neural firing. Maybe it's a more sophisticated version of the issue with behaviorism, which wasn't actually wrong as science, but had some philosophical overreach?
There are cases where it's tactically useful to apply such a view, which also helps promote it: e.g. if you argue that depression is "just brain-chemical imbalance", it can make it easier to convince depressed people to accept treatment, by delegitimizing the depressed mental state as a real thought or aspect of personality. You want to argue that it's not "them" thinking things, but just "the depression speaking"; a physical brain problem that medication can correct.
But it's hard to keep that compartmentalized, and increasingly popular-science writing purports to show that e.g. whether someone like chocolate or not is "just" a particular chemical or neural response. People are willing to accept it very narrowly, I think, that e.g. extreme cases of very mentally disturbed individuals are "just" suffering some physical brain problem; but if you extend it to a reductionist explanation of all mental activity, that we're just bags of brain chemicals, it sounds nihilist.
Yeah, I see that viewpoint to some extent, but even as someone non-religious, I kind of find the reductionist explanations not always that useful. I mean, yes, in some sense human history is just a particular level of description for "history of a subset of particles in the universe"--- the earth is made up of matter and subject to physical laws, and so are humans, and so is everything else. But if you actually want to understand human history, it's a lot more sensible to pretend that the basic ontological elements are things like: civilizations, governments, people, leaders, economies, food, ideas, institutions, knowledge, war, weapons, migration, etc. It's just a level of description, but it's a useful one, and there's no particular reason to try to delegitimize it by saying it's "just" something else. Similarly, I'm not sure neuroscience is the exclusive or always the best way of understanding human thought and behavior. It tells you something about it, but not always at a level of description that's useful.
It raises risks, though: not only do you have to think your product is better than everyone else's, but that it'll stay that way indefinitely. I think a lot of companies aren't that confident that, sometime in the future, someone else won't come along with a better---maybe even much better---product. Then they're suddenly out of business, unless they've made it harder for people to quickly switch. If they did make it hard to switch, though, they'll have residual business for years after being obsoleted, from locked-in "legacy" customers.
Depending on how you value risks, it might not be irrational to accept slower growth (scare off customers due to lock-in) in return for diminished chance of rapid, large-scale customer desertion (they can't easily leave, due to lock-in).
I was initially going to comment that this analogy is a bit off:
The obvious problem is that no particular landlord is interested in "the housing industry as a whole": they're interested in their own corner of it. And so it's not clear why the landlord would want to do something to make it easier for tenants to move out, just because the end result is good for "the industry as a whole", unless they're altruists.
But in this case, I think the analogy might actually work well. What if the landlord controlled, say, more than half of the housing industry? Then they might well want to do what's good for the housing industry as a whole, because they'll gain more customers from increasing the size of the industry as a whole than they'll lose to competitors within the industry. Google plausibly controls such a large proportion of "the cloud" that that's their interest.
It does reduce the competitive moat, though. It may make it easier to grow by doing something like this, but it also makes it easier for some future competitor to much more quickly poach Google's customers. It looks like that's a risk they're willing to take, but many companies aren't. I think that's because many companies realize they are where they are at least partly due to luck, and can't count on staying there without taking active measures to cling to that position.
Dawkins is an odd case. I feel that he often does both good evolutionary biology, and good popular-science writing about it. But The God Delusion, while fine as a statement of his views, causes trouble when it's taken, as he implies strongly in some parts, as a claim that science disproves god, or proves belief in god to be Mistaken. That's getting into philosophy of science and philosophy of religion, and Dawkins is frankly just not very good at it, or even well-read in the subject. At the very least, the book has caused a bit of embarrassment among atheist or atheist-leaning philosophers of religion, who generally have better arguments. Sort of a "yes, we agree with your conclusion, but...".
If you want a better-reasoned book that argues that science and philosophy make believing in religion unreasonable, I'd recommend J.L. Mackie's somewhat sarcastically titled Miracle of Theism as a better starting point.
That's not really true in a lot of areas. I don't think there's any working scientist who's thought about the subject who couldn't tell you a dozen terms in frequent use in their area that are there primarily for historical reasons, and could be made simpler or unified with terms in other fields. They persist because the actual process of changing over would be disruptive.
If you're going to be an evangelist for science, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. I personally was almost turned off science by the half-assed philosophy that many scientists seem to implicitly hold.
For people on the borderline---who might've accepted a scientific worldview but ultimately rejected it---anecdotally the biggest factor I've found is a feeling that accepting the scientific worldview is nihilistic. Usually this seems (again, anecdotally), to be a result of some particularly overreaching attempts to use science as a sort of naive-reductionist philosophy, where every discovery of mechanisms delegitimizes higher-level things, because now they're "only X", and in some sense don't "really" exist anymore. People particularly object to this with humans. Arguments like "X is just brain chemicals" or "Y is just evolved behavior" get thrown around, and you ultimately end up at claims like: "You don't really love her; that's just brain chemicals". "There isn't really any such thing as morality; that's just evolved group behavior". And people generally recoil at and reject that view, if you're implying that actually nothing about human existence is "real".
Of course, nothing in science actually demands that sort of explanation at a philosophical level. Nobody argues that since chemistry is "just physics", it's therefore in any sense not real or illegitimate. It's a perfectly correct way of explaining, at a particular level of description, how the universe works, and chemical properties are real properties, that really do exist. The fact that chemical properties are due to lower-level interactions doesn't change that. Daniel Dennett even coined a term for some of these kinds of philosophical misuse of science: greedy reductionism.
Fortunately, I was saved from that by some more philosophically sophisticated scientists who pointed out to me that the views held by people who study physicalist explanations of the world are much better thought out. And on, say, what the mind "really" is, fully defended physicalist accounts of mind don't have the same greedy-reductionism that characterizes the rather questionable comments of a lot of neuroscientists.
Sure, there are all sorts of other problems, like fundamentalist Christians who won't ever accept any explanation not derived from the Bible. But as a scientist, I tend to think some outreach is better than just attacking them: there's plenty I might change about their organizations, but I can't, so what can I change about mine? Simply being more accurate about the philosophical implications of science, I find, helps to dispel a lot of unnecessary worries, while having the added benefit of actually being, well, more accurate.