Both the United States and Japan actually have considerable unexploited hydroelectric capacity, but construction of major new dams has been effectively discontinued for several decades now, because of a mixture of local opposition and environmental worries. It's renewable, but not sure it's really "green", since it requires a massive, permanent change to a river basin. Nuclear is probably greener, despite not being renewable.
I think a large number of Slashdotters used it in the late 90s, when it wasn't free at all. I know I used it as my main browser 1998-99, but haven't used it since then. Perhaps everyone in this thread is an old curmudgeon.
I'm not sure what percentage of people actually reflect on their past, and certainly it's not that prominent in the mainstream media. I think considerable amount of reflection does happen, though, and it isn't actively suppressed. There are a lot of critical books on the Reagan presidency that you can buy from Amazon or other major bookstores. There are books attacking the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada, the suppression of the Black Panthers, etc. You cannot buy similarly critical books in China, which seems like a key difference: it's not just that Chinese don't want to read books attacking the invasion of Tibet or the Tiananmen Square massacres, but that these books simply cannot be purchased in China even if you're one of the minority of people who does want to read about it.
In fact, not only are such critical books published in the United States, but I have taken taxpayer-funded university courses that assign them as required reading! Angela Davis is a tenured university professor at a state-run university. None of that kind of thing happens in China.
Much like the fate that befell Olympic runner Tyson Homosexual, the Shanghai Stock Exchange could've found itself falling Harmonious Society points today.
I do think the amount that you can learn from "simple infographics and animations" can be higher than it is today, but I don't think it will ever be at an impressive level, unless some truly revolutionary things happen in science, which I think is unlikely. It is simply impossible to get a handle on modern science, even at fairly basic levels, without a good understanding of mathematics, because science is so heavily mathematical. And the trend over the past 100 years, if anything, has been towards more pervasive use of mathematical formalisms, replacing things that were previously discussed more informally. I simply don't see a path towards being able to do even fairly basic 2nd-year-of-college level engineering if a student doesn't get comfortable with equations and symbolic manipulation.
I don't think there's a logical distinction, but I do see significant current differences. I have not seen very many infographics that approach the level of mathematical rigor that you find in even introductory physics courses. They seem to be more about comic-style drawings, big text, and simple graphics. Not much in the way of derivations or working equations.
I would be interested if someone had pointers to more math-heavy infographics, though. Maybe they exist and I just don't know about them?
I was hoping to cut through the chit-chat and blackboards and get straight into the infographics and animations that will help me understand complex ideas.
While there is some amount of popular science at the conceptual level that can be conveyed this way, you aren't really going to get far into even basic chemistry or physics via "infographics and animations", unless the latter have a lot more mathematics than is usually the case. One thing blackboards (and textbooks) have going for them is that, so far at least, they seem to be the main venues via which mathematics is conveyed, and it's quite difficult to get any serious understanding of science without being able to model phenomena mathematically.
If you object too loudly to "cloud cheating", we're probably just going to be saddled with "cybercheating" instead. Unless that's already taken for marital infidelity involving cybersex.
While I agree it's pretty annoying, and certainly confusing for many consumers, it's not as if you can't tell what's inside a particular model, since it's pretty easy to find that information by googling.
I'm not arguing specifically for Joules, just that in most cases when a rate is used, it's explicit: miles-per-hour, km/hr, m^3/s. Power is a somewhat odd case because a derived unit, J/s, is given its own name, W, which wraps the fact that it's a rate into the unit, "burying" the per-unit-time portion of the unit, rather than keeping it explicitly written out as in km/hr or m^3/s.
A lot of people seem to intuitively like to think of energy capacity in terms of energy generated per hour, which seems to be what causes the confusion. You can use Joules per hour, but J aren't used conventionally in electricity generation; instead watt-hours, kilowatt-hours, and gigawatt-hours are used. But then if you want to talk about energy generation per unit time, you'd talk about how many gigawatt-hours per hour are being generated, GW*hr/hr. Which is of course just gigawatts. But now you have something that doesn't sound like "energy per hour" again, unless you know that a watt is a unit of power, and that power is already energy over time.
Also, some of the most popular mobile services. Pretty much the #1 most useful thing about a smartphone is being able to access Google Maps while you're out.
Just because someone did something famous some decades ago doesn't mean all their pronouncements in an op-ed count as science. It's an interesting hypothesis, but note the distinct lack of peer-reviewed papers mentioned in the article on the subject (the article mentions some peer-reviewed papers in vaguely related areas, like the big debate over violence in videogames, but nothing on this new hypothesis). It could turn out to have some truth to it; could turn out not to. It will probably turn out to be more complex than this op-ed indicates, in any case.
In short, wait for actual science. Until then it's just some speculation.
This is a fairly common procedural follow-up to a Supreme Court ruling that might have implications for other cases. The situation is roughly like this:
1. Cases A, B, and C, on related but not identical subjects, file for Supreme Court review of a lower-court decision.
2. The Supreme Court hears A, and issues a significant new ruling. This ruling might have implications for B and C, but they weren't considered by the Court, because the Court only heard A.
3. Now the question is, what should the Supreme Court do with B and C, whose appeals are still pending? They could accept the cases for hearing and decide them, too. If they were on exactly the same issue as A, the Court could've consolidated A/B/C and issued one ruling. But in the more common case where they have potential but not 100% overlap, the Supreme Court doesn't usually want to hear all three cases. Instead they pick a representative one, in this case A, and issue a ruling. But if A overlaps with B/C, it could lead to an injustice if they just reject the B/C appeals.
4. There is basically a new question: in light of the Supreme Court's recent decision in A, are the lower-court decisions in B and C still correct, or should they be modified?
5. The principle is that the lower courts are supposed to look at such questions first, so the Supreme Court orders that lower courts reconsider cases B and C in light of the recent opinion in A. It's up to the lower courts then to look into whether their original decisions should now be modified. Then once they issue a new ruling, this can be appealed to the Supreme Court again.
In that case, the FAA fee sounds more like a blend of both types: it's 7.5% of the fare plus $3.80 per segment. So its amount very much depends on the price of airfare, unlike a typical excise tax, such as your gasoline example, which is not percentage-based.
I don't think there's actually a legally solid difference between sales taxes and excise taxes. I agree it's arguably an excise tax, since it's applied to a certain product, not generally. But excise taxes are usually not based on a percentage of the sales price, rather on volume or units or some other such objective measure. In that sense, the "September 11 Security Fee" of $5 per segment is more of a classic excise tax, while an x%-of-all-airline-tickets tax is more like a sales tax. It's definitely not the same as the general state sales taxes that this article is about, in any case.
There is somewhat of a move in California towards removing local shares of tax collection, in part because of too many special-case deals like this where the money gets used like a slush fund. Although many are a lot more corrupt than this one; this is clearly special-case, but it's fairly transparent. Local redevelopment agencies were recently all-but-eliminated in last year's state budget, for example, partly to close the state's budget gap by taking back the money, but also partly because local redevelopment agencies had become notoriously corrupt slush funds for politicians, politically connected construction contractors, and real-estate speculators to divvy up.
The downside to that is that sometimes local politicians really do know better what the local needs are than Sacramento does, so can be more responsive. But overall California's municipal and county governments have not given anyone much confidence, even compared to the not-great-either state government.
As far as I can tell, empirically this doesn't really happen: when FAA taxes were suspended for a bit recently, due to a Congressional screw-up when it came to reauthorizing the agency to collect the fees, airlines didn't lower their fares, they just pocketed the savings as higher profit margins.
Another way of putting it is that profit margins, like almost everything else, aren't completely fixed, so tax hikes and tax cuts don't necessarily get passed through to retail prices, but instead may modulate profit margins (or other things, such as employee pay).
I'm not sure what market share they have, but at least the company mentioned in this article, SolarWorld, manufactures its panels in the U.S. and Germany.
1. For a while now, many people have viewed he per-infringement statutory damages as pretty ridiculous, since you can end up owing like, $10 million in damages for sharing a folder of mp3s, which does not seem anywhere near any actual damage caused.
2. The U.S. Supreme Court in the past has held that, for punitive damages, an award of more than about 4x actual damages, and definitely anything in excess of 10x actual damages, is unconstitutional.
3. Commentators have urged courts to combine #1 and #2 above by extending the holding to statutory damages: i.e. that statutory damages cannot exceed some reasonable multiplier over actual damages.
4. In the case at issue, Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, a court did precisely that. A jury returned a $675,000 statutory damages verdict, and the defendant moved to have it reduced as unconstitutionally out of line with actual damages. The court accepted that argument, and reduced it to $67,500.
5. That decision was subsequently set aside, by an Appeals Court, on some obscure statutory grounds I'm not entirely familiar with, and returned to the District Court for a new trial. Tenenbaum is appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court, asking for the Appeals Court to be overturned, and the District Court's constitutional ruling on excessive damages to be reinstated.
6. More generally, many commentators see this case as a particularly good opportunity for the Supreme Court to speak definitively on the question, hopefully extending the punitive damages rule to statutory damages.
Oh, I'm quite sure many religious donations are genuinely charitable. I'd just like a more specific breakdown of the statistics. Donating money to fund door-to-door missionaries trying to convert people, versus donating money to fund a soup kitchen, versus donating money for a new stained-glass window, are all very different activities.
Statistics on charitable donation are pretty interesting, but that article doesn't provide a very good overview. In particular, religious donations are quite large in the United States, and I think a considerably different sort of thing than charitable donations (in many cases, imo, religious donations are closer to political contributions, intended to advance one's viewpoint). Republicans do donate considerably more to churches (especially Mormons, who are overwhelmingly Republican and often still tithe a full 10% of their income), so certainly Republicans donate more to charity, if you count organizations like the LDS church as charities.
If you're willing to openly flout research ethics, it's not very hard to produce disinformation in many different venues, most of which rely to a greater or lesser extent on trust.
Here are some other things you can do:
1. Create an authoritative-looking website on an.edu domain with false information about historical events. Odds are, bits of it will eventually start to percolate into the literature and academic talks, especially if you're well-regarded in the area, and the false information is relatively obscure.
2. Insert false historical facts slightly off the main article thesis into peer-reviewed articles. For example, write an engineering paper for an IEEE journal, and then insert a historical footnote with made-up biographical information. This will typically get a weak level of peer review, because IEEE journals will be primarily reviewing your technical contributions, not your historical footnote. Later, "launder" this false information into a more prominent position: write a more historical article, which cites the previous footnote as a source, thereby upgrading it. Now the peer-reviewed literature has confirmed your false information. Now you can really get it enmeshed in Wikipedia: write a Wikipedia article that cites your paper.
3. If you're invited to contribute an article or two to a specialist encyclopedia, one of those "Biographical Dictionary of [Field]" type things, insert false information into it. These carry some authoritative weight, but facts in them are rarely checked in detail, because the work of putting the encyclopedia together at all usually strains resources as it is, so authors have to be trusted.
If anything, I would say that Wikipedia is somewhat more resilient than many of these avenues are. The trick is that its resilience is somewhat eyeball-weighted: if you insert fabricated information into a widely read article such as [[George W. Bush]] or [[Byzantine Empire]], it will be noticed much sooner than if you insert it into a very obscure article that isn't linked anywhere, where nobody is even going to see it until some bored editor hits "Random Article" enough times.
Slashdot Mirror
Both the United States and Japan actually have considerable unexploited hydroelectric capacity, but construction of major new dams has been effectively discontinued for several decades now, because of a mixture of local opposition and environmental worries. It's renewable, but not sure it's really "green", since it requires a massive, permanent change to a river basin. Nuclear is probably greener, despite not being renewable.
I think a large number of Slashdotters used it in the late 90s, when it wasn't free at all. I know I used it as my main browser 1998-99, but haven't used it since then. Perhaps everyone in this thread is an old curmudgeon.
I'm not sure what percentage of people actually reflect on their past, and certainly it's not that prominent in the mainstream media. I think considerable amount of reflection does happen, though, and it isn't actively suppressed. There are a lot of critical books on the Reagan presidency that you can buy from Amazon or other major bookstores. There are books attacking the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada, the suppression of the Black Panthers, etc. You cannot buy similarly critical books in China, which seems like a key difference: it's not just that Chinese don't want to read books attacking the invasion of Tibet or the Tiananmen Square massacres, but that these books simply cannot be purchased in China even if you're one of the minority of people who does want to read about it.
In fact, not only are such critical books published in the United States, but I have taken taxpayer-funded university courses that assign them as required reading! Angela Davis is a tenured university professor at a state-run university. None of that kind of thing happens in China.
Much like the fate that befell Olympic runner Tyson Homosexual, the Shanghai Stock Exchange could've found itself falling Harmonious Society points today.
I do think the amount that you can learn from "simple infographics and animations" can be higher than it is today, but I don't think it will ever be at an impressive level, unless some truly revolutionary things happen in science, which I think is unlikely. It is simply impossible to get a handle on modern science, even at fairly basic levels, without a good understanding of mathematics, because science is so heavily mathematical. And the trend over the past 100 years, if anything, has been towards more pervasive use of mathematical formalisms, replacing things that were previously discussed more informally. I simply don't see a path towards being able to do even fairly basic 2nd-year-of-college level engineering if a student doesn't get comfortable with equations and symbolic manipulation.
I don't think there's a logical distinction, but I do see significant current differences. I have not seen very many infographics that approach the level of mathematical rigor that you find in even introductory physics courses. They seem to be more about comic-style drawings, big text, and simple graphics. Not much in the way of derivations or working equations.
I would be interested if someone had pointers to more math-heavy infographics, though. Maybe they exist and I just don't know about them?
I was hoping to cut through the chit-chat and blackboards and get straight into the infographics and animations that will help me understand complex ideas.
While there is some amount of popular science at the conceptual level that can be conveyed this way, you aren't really going to get far into even basic chemistry or physics via "infographics and animations", unless the latter have a lot more mathematics than is usually the case. One thing blackboards (and textbooks) have going for them is that, so far at least, they seem to be the main venues via which mathematics is conveyed, and it's quite difficult to get any serious understanding of science without being able to model phenomena mathematically.
If you object too loudly to "cloud cheating", we're probably just going to be saddled with "cybercheating" instead. Unless that's already taken for marital infidelity involving cybersex.
While I agree it's pretty annoying, and certainly confusing for many consumers, it's not as if you can't tell what's inside a particular model, since it's pretty easy to find that information by googling.
I'm not arguing specifically for Joules, just that in most cases when a rate is used, it's explicit: miles-per-hour, km/hr, m^3/s. Power is a somewhat odd case because a derived unit, J/s, is given its own name, W, which wraps the fact that it's a rate into the unit, "burying" the per-unit-time portion of the unit, rather than keeping it explicitly written out as in km/hr or m^3/s.
A lot of people seem to intuitively like to think of energy capacity in terms of energy generated per hour, which seems to be what causes the confusion. You can use Joules per hour, but J aren't used conventionally in electricity generation; instead watt-hours, kilowatt-hours, and gigawatt-hours are used. But then if you want to talk about energy generation per unit time, you'd talk about how many gigawatt-hours per hour are being generated, GW*hr/hr. Which is of course just gigawatts. But now you have something that doesn't sound like "energy per hour" again, unless you know that a watt is a unit of power, and that power is already energy over time.
Also, some of the most popular mobile services. Pretty much the #1 most useful thing about a smartphone is being able to access Google Maps while you're out.
Just because someone did something famous some decades ago doesn't mean all their pronouncements in an op-ed count as science. It's an interesting hypothesis, but note the distinct lack of peer-reviewed papers mentioned in the article on the subject (the article mentions some peer-reviewed papers in vaguely related areas, like the big debate over violence in videogames, but nothing on this new hypothesis). It could turn out to have some truth to it; could turn out not to. It will probably turn out to be more complex than this op-ed indicates, in any case.
In short, wait for actual science. Until then it's just some speculation.
This is a fairly common procedural follow-up to a Supreme Court ruling that might have implications for other cases. The situation is roughly like this:
1. Cases A, B, and C, on related but not identical subjects, file for Supreme Court review of a lower-court decision.
2. The Supreme Court hears A, and issues a significant new ruling. This ruling might have implications for B and C, but they weren't considered by the Court, because the Court only heard A.
3. Now the question is, what should the Supreme Court do with B and C, whose appeals are still pending? They could accept the cases for hearing and decide them, too. If they were on exactly the same issue as A, the Court could've consolidated A/B/C and issued one ruling. But in the more common case where they have potential but not 100% overlap, the Supreme Court doesn't usually want to hear all three cases. Instead they pick a representative one, in this case A, and issue a ruling. But if A overlaps with B/C, it could lead to an injustice if they just reject the B/C appeals.
4. There is basically a new question: in light of the Supreme Court's recent decision in A, are the lower-court decisions in B and C still correct, or should they be modified?
5. The principle is that the lower courts are supposed to look at such questions first, so the Supreme Court orders that lower courts reconsider cases B and C in light of the recent opinion in A. It's up to the lower courts then to look into whether their original decisions should now be modified. Then once they issue a new ruling, this can be appealed to the Supreme Court again.
In that case, the FAA fee sounds more like a blend of both types: it's 7.5% of the fare plus $3.80 per segment. So its amount very much depends on the price of airfare, unlike a typical excise tax, such as your gasoline example, which is not percentage-based.
I don't think there's actually a legally solid difference between sales taxes and excise taxes. I agree it's arguably an excise tax, since it's applied to a certain product, not generally. But excise taxes are usually not based on a percentage of the sales price, rather on volume or units or some other such objective measure. In that sense, the "September 11 Security Fee" of $5 per segment is more of a classic excise tax, while an x%-of-all-airline-tickets tax is more like a sales tax. It's definitely not the same as the general state sales taxes that this article is about, in any case.
There is somewhat of a move in California towards removing local shares of tax collection, in part because of too many special-case deals like this where the money gets used like a slush fund. Although many are a lot more corrupt than this one; this is clearly special-case, but it's fairly transparent. Local redevelopment agencies were recently all-but-eliminated in last year's state budget, for example, partly to close the state's budget gap by taking back the money, but also partly because local redevelopment agencies had become notoriously corrupt slush funds for politicians, politically connected construction contractors, and real-estate speculators to divvy up.
The downside to that is that sometimes local politicians really do know better what the local needs are than Sacramento does, so can be more responsive. But overall California's municipal and county governments have not given anyone much confidence, even compared to the not-great-either state government.
As far as I can tell, empirically this doesn't really happen: when FAA taxes were suspended for a bit recently, due to a Congressional screw-up when it came to reauthorizing the agency to collect the fees, airlines didn't lower their fares, they just pocketed the savings as higher profit margins.
Another way of putting it is that profit margins, like almost everything else, aren't completely fixed, so tax hikes and tax cuts don't necessarily get passed through to retail prices, but instead may modulate profit margins (or other things, such as employee pay).
I'm not sure what market share they have, but at least the company mentioned in this article, SolarWorld, manufactures its panels in the U.S. and Germany.
1. For a while now, many people have viewed he per-infringement statutory damages as pretty ridiculous, since you can end up owing like, $10 million in damages for sharing a folder of mp3s, which does not seem anywhere near any actual damage caused.
2. The U.S. Supreme Court in the past has held that, for punitive damages, an award of more than about 4x actual damages, and definitely anything in excess of 10x actual damages, is unconstitutional.
3. Commentators have urged courts to combine #1 and #2 above by extending the holding to statutory damages: i.e. that statutory damages cannot exceed some reasonable multiplier over actual damages.
4. In the case at issue, Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, a court did precisely that. A jury returned a $675,000 statutory damages verdict, and the defendant moved to have it reduced as unconstitutionally out of line with actual damages. The court accepted that argument, and reduced it to $67,500.
5. That decision was subsequently set aside, by an Appeals Court, on some obscure statutory grounds I'm not entirely familiar with, and returned to the District Court for a new trial. Tenenbaum is appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court, asking for the Appeals Court to be overturned, and the District Court's constitutional ruling on excessive damages to be reinstated.
6. More generally, many commentators see this case as a particularly good opportunity for the Supreme Court to speak definitively on the question, hopefully extending the punitive damages rule to statutory damages.
While it's true that they do have private conferences where they discuss draft opinions, there is also considerable public debate at oral argument.
Oh, I'm quite sure many religious donations are genuinely charitable. I'd just like a more specific breakdown of the statistics. Donating money to fund door-to-door missionaries trying to convert people, versus donating money to fund a soup kitchen, versus donating money for a new stained-glass window, are all very different activities.
Statistics on charitable donation are pretty interesting, but that article doesn't provide a very good overview. In particular, religious donations are quite large in the United States, and I think a considerably different sort of thing than charitable donations (in many cases, imo, religious donations are closer to political contributions, intended to advance one's viewpoint). Republicans do donate considerably more to churches (especially Mormons, who are overwhelmingly Republican and often still tithe a full 10% of their income), so certainly Republicans donate more to charity, if you count organizations like the LDS church as charities.
If you're willing to openly flout research ethics, it's not very hard to produce disinformation in many different venues, most of which rely to a greater or lesser extent on trust.
Here are some other things you can do:
1. Create an authoritative-looking website on an .edu domain with false information about historical events. Odds are, bits of it will eventually start to percolate into the literature and academic talks, especially if you're well-regarded in the area, and the false information is relatively obscure.
2. Insert false historical facts slightly off the main article thesis into peer-reviewed articles. For example, write an engineering paper for an IEEE journal, and then insert a historical footnote with made-up biographical information. This will typically get a weak level of peer review, because IEEE journals will be primarily reviewing your technical contributions, not your historical footnote. Later, "launder" this false information into a more prominent position: write a more historical article, which cites the previous footnote as a source, thereby upgrading it. Now the peer-reviewed literature has confirmed your false information. Now you can really get it enmeshed in Wikipedia: write a Wikipedia article that cites your paper.
3. If you're invited to contribute an article or two to a specialist encyclopedia, one of those "Biographical Dictionary of [Field]" type things, insert false information into it. These carry some authoritative weight, but facts in them are rarely checked in detail, because the work of putting the encyclopedia together at all usually strains resources as it is, so authors have to be trusted.
If anything, I would say that Wikipedia is somewhat more resilient than many of these avenues are. The trick is that its resilience is somewhat eyeball-weighted: if you insert fabricated information into a widely read article such as [[George W. Bush]] or [[Byzantine Empire]], it will be noticed much sooner than if you insert it into a very obscure article that isn't linked anywhere, where nobody is even going to see it until some bored editor hits "Random Article" enough times.
You could also say: Americans willing to donate money to the poor, but only a little bit of money.