Obviously true and completely irrelevant. If he'd been violent, he'd have been fired long ago.
Is it your opinion that a team should be forced to accept a toxic but technically competent individual? Typically what the toxic individual will do is use words in a hurtful manner. That generally brings down productivity and job satisfaction, and it's very reasonable for a company to fire such a toxic individual. In this case, there was an individual who apparently was considered somewhat toxic, hurting other people's relations and sense of well-being. In that case, the company should fire the individual.
However, I'd guess you're for equality of opportunity.
The problem is that outcomes are fairly easy to measure, unlike opportunities. Moreover, when we've investigated inequality of outcomes, we have very often discovered inequality of opportunity. This means that a clear inequality of outcome is suspicious at best.
Moreover, many people seem to think we have an ideal society. Let's say that there are biological reasons favoring men in software development, and cultural reasons discouraging women. I see a lot of people claiming that the observed difference is due to biology, when that's only part of the reason. We could do better by finding the cultural factors working against women and eliminating them, or at least weakening them, but many people think that it's the woman's choice and they want special treatment, when in fact we're doing our best to come out neutral.
I think if all claims of discrimination had to come with solid evidence, we'd see a lot less complaining and a lot more productivity.
Less complaining, maybe. Productivity? That's a lot iffier.
The fact is that it's difficult to prove discrimination. No company is going to list a job as no Jews, send out a rejection letter saying the applicant is too old, or announce that they're not promoting women. What they will do is not hire older people or Jews, and fail to promote women individually. Any complaint of discrimination relating to an individual will come with solid evidence only if the company is really, really stupid (and sometimes not then).
And, indeed, people were hired and fired because of their race, gender, and sexual preference when I was young. White men got almost all the good jobs, and homosexuals were at risk of being outed. Any step to move away from that hurts some white men.
Any step that moves away from that will be lambasted as wanting special treatment.
I'm not saying modern Affirmative Action programs are a good idea, but there's reasons for them.
Thing is, dark matter is easy to understand. WIMPs are at least much like large slow neutrinos, and the idea of "something like regular matter but - " shouldn't be hard to grasp.
Why would it have to interact with itself through non-gravitational means? It doesn't clump like regular matter does, so it would seem that it doesn't have anything corresponding to electromagnetism.
Is there a good idea to think they're WI and not just MP? There's the practical matter that we can go looking for WIMPs, but I don't know of any reason why nonstandard matter would be affected by the weak nuclear force.
Or maybe, just maybe, if you're simply curious, you don't have to be an astronomer to throw some speculation out in the wild.
Sure. Bear in mind that your speculation is almost certainly wrong, and it's very likely that a real astrophysicist could come up with a counterexample. I like science fiction, and if you're going to have FTL ships you need to speculate. (For extra points, come up with a speculation that shows how it doesn't make time travel possible and practical.) What you are extremely unlikely to do is to come up with anything that's useful for anything other than entertainment.
Why dismiss someone else's answer simply because their credentials don't match what you consider "know more about this than you"?
First, it's not possible to address every crackpot theory while still get anything done. Second, most of the time the non-scientist's answer is clearly wrong, in that there's some more or less obscure observation (sometimes glaringly obvious observations) that contradict the non-scientist's answer.
If you have a crackpot theory that you think might be true, to get accepted you're going to have to show that it explains observations better than what we've got now. That's going to require a firm grounding in the appropriate science. Most people who don't have the credentials don't know nearly enough to do that.
Time is flat and constant and causality happens in forward time.
In which case you're throwing out Special Relativity, and need to explain what it explains. It's one of the most tested theories in modern physics, and has been shown to offer very exact explanations of a variety of things.
For example, we know that unstable subatomic particles, when at near-light speeds, decay more slowly than if they were still.
Note that "The Big Bang occurred" and "God occurred and caused the Big Bang" are equal in explanatory power - both say something happened without us being able to observe why (if there is a why). By Occam's Razor, we eliminate superfluous entities in our theories and therefore God.
This isn't to say that there is no God, or the God didn't create the Universe, but that there is absolutely no evidence for divine origin.
What I have concluded is that, if a God exists vaguely in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sense, that God has a sense of humor.
There's nothing paranormal about Dark Matter or Dark Energy. Dark Matter is matter that has gravity but doesn't interact electromagnetically. We actually have an example of such matter in the neutrino, although what we're observing isn't what neutrinos would do.
Like many things in science, they're a name for something we haven't been able to observe more directly. Are you familiar with how we found Uranus and Neptune? Astronomers observed anomalies in the orbit of Saturn, and figured that these could be explained by another planet further out, and they could figure where to look, and so they found Uranus. Neptune was found in a similar manner. Both of these were cases where scientists realized that something unknown would make the equations fit observations better.
What separated from the stars in the Bullet Cluster is the gas and dust, which apparently are the largest amount of visible mass. I'd expect much the same effect from lots of small black holes as from WIMPs - in this case, anyway..
Your wish is granted [informit.com]. Skip down to "The use of GPLv2-licensed code is authorized for compliant users, even if they receive the code from a non-compliant licensee."
Well, yes. Your speech can result in personal or financial harm to you. Also, your speech can result in personal or financial benefit for you. The two are different ways of saying the same exact thing.
Does it matter if someone believes that women are worse at software engineering? Patton got some black soldiers in WWII. He thought them inferior, and commented in a letter that they didn't think quickly enough to be good tank crew. He gave them "The Speech" (the version at the start of the movie "Patton" is a pretty good rendition, except that the profanity and high squeaky voice were removed) and set them up to succeed. Patton thought blacks were inferior, and gave each individual a chance to do well. Someone can consistently believe that women are worse and act reasonably fairly.
Think if the states changed their laws so that individual elector votes could go to a candidate instead of the entire state based on a majority it may do better.
It's not likely to happen, since it would reduce the state's influence. Consider a state with ten electoral votes. Under winner-takes-all, the winner in the state gets all ten, so that's a big swing for the winner. Under a proportional representation system, each major party would get between three and seven votes, so the maximum possible swing would be four, probably less. Candidates would be less interested in picking up the odd electoral vote than the odd ten. Since the State Legislatures are required to decide how electors are picked, it would take each state to agree to reduce its influence on picking the President, to get a result that would probably be better for the country.
The local system seems very good to me. We have paper ballots that go into tabulating machines, which store the ballots. When the election is over, the ballots are put in a sealed box and stored, ready for later verification. There is spot verification of the process, with random precincts having their tabulations checked against their ballot boxes, and if we need a recount we've got the ballots.
Obviously, all of this can be subverted by poll workers, but that's true of any system. In this case, we've always got observers from both major parties, who would report any wrongdoing. If one party tried to do anything wrong, the other observer would see it.
What we've got is a system where we keep the paper ballots, there's procedures to follow, there's observers from both parties, and officials who will take action if wrongdoing is reported.
The problem I have is that every voter ID proposal I've seen has a stinger somewhere. The Minnesota Voter ID constitutional amendment would have made it very difficult to cast an absentee ballot. There was one case that was accompanied by what looked like a serious effort to remove DMVs and such places from poor black neighborhoods.
So, if there's a genuine and effective initiative to make it relatively easy to get IDs for everyone, I'm happy with voter ID laws. So far, I haven't seen that.
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Obviously true and completely irrelevant. If he'd been violent, he'd have been fired long ago.
Is it your opinion that a team should be forced to accept a toxic but technically competent individual? Typically what the toxic individual will do is use words in a hurtful manner. That generally brings down productivity and job satisfaction, and it's very reasonable for a company to fire such a toxic individual. In this case, there was an individual who apparently was considered somewhat toxic, hurting other people's relations and sense of well-being. In that case, the company should fire the individual.
However, I'd guess you're for equality of opportunity.
The problem is that outcomes are fairly easy to measure, unlike opportunities. Moreover, when we've investigated inequality of outcomes, we have very often discovered inequality of opportunity. This means that a clear inequality of outcome is suspicious at best.
Moreover, many people seem to think we have an ideal society. Let's say that there are biological reasons favoring men in software development, and cultural reasons discouraging women. I see a lot of people claiming that the observed difference is due to biology, when that's only part of the reason. We could do better by finding the cultural factors working against women and eliminating them, or at least weakening them, but many people think that it's the woman's choice and they want special treatment, when in fact we're doing our best to come out neutral.
Less complaining, maybe. Productivity? That's a lot iffier.
The fact is that it's difficult to prove discrimination. No company is going to list a job as no Jews, send out a rejection letter saying the applicant is too old, or announce that they're not promoting women. What they will do is not hire older people or Jews, and fail to promote women individually. Any complaint of discrimination relating to an individual will come with solid evidence only if the company is really, really stupid (and sometimes not then).
The question is where you'd be if you were black or female, not whether you had the same advantages as the average white man.
And, indeed, people were hired and fired because of their race, gender, and sexual preference when I was young. White men got almost all the good jobs, and homosexuals were at risk of being outed. Any step to move away from that hurts some white men. Any step that moves away from that will be lambasted as wanting special treatment.
I'm not saying modern Affirmative Action programs are a good idea, but there's reasons for them.
Too bad people go to extremes in arguing.
Heck, I found the Putinbots amusing. (Were they bots? I always assumed they were humans being paid.)
Thing is, dark matter is easy to understand. WIMPs are at least much like large slow neutrinos, and the idea of "something like regular matter but - " shouldn't be hard to grasp.
Why would it have to interact with itself through non-gravitational means? It doesn't clump like regular matter does, so it would seem that it doesn't have anything corresponding to electromagnetism.
Is there a good idea to think they're WI and not just MP? There's the practical matter that we can go looking for WIMPs, but I don't know of any reason why nonstandard matter would be affected by the weak nuclear force.
You'd think Planck-mass black holes would evaporate through Hawking Radiation almost immediately.
Sure. Bear in mind that your speculation is almost certainly wrong, and it's very likely that a real astrophysicist could come up with a counterexample. I like science fiction, and if you're going to have FTL ships you need to speculate. (For extra points, come up with a speculation that shows how it doesn't make time travel possible and practical.) What you are extremely unlikely to do is to come up with anything that's useful for anything other than entertainment.
First, it's not possible to address every crackpot theory while still get anything done. Second, most of the time the non-scientist's answer is clearly wrong, in that there's some more or less obscure observation (sometimes glaringly obvious observations) that contradict the non-scientist's answer.
If you have a crackpot theory that you think might be true, to get accepted you're going to have to show that it explains observations better than what we've got now. That's going to require a firm grounding in the appropriate science. Most people who don't have the credentials don't know nearly enough to do that.
In which case you're throwing out Special Relativity, and need to explain what it explains. It's one of the most tested theories in modern physics, and has been shown to offer very exact explanations of a variety of things.
For example, we know that unstable subatomic particles, when at near-light speeds, decay more slowly than if they were still.
Note that "The Big Bang occurred" and "God occurred and caused the Big Bang" are equal in explanatory power - both say something happened without us being able to observe why (if there is a why). By Occam's Razor, we eliminate superfluous entities in our theories and therefore God.
This isn't to say that there is no God, or the God didn't create the Universe, but that there is absolutely no evidence for divine origin.
What I have concluded is that, if a God exists vaguely in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sense, that God has a sense of humor.
There's nothing paranormal about Dark Matter or Dark Energy. Dark Matter is matter that has gravity but doesn't interact electromagnetically. We actually have an example of such matter in the neutrino, although what we're observing isn't what neutrinos would do.
Like many things in science, they're a name for something we haven't been able to observe more directly. Are you familiar with how we found Uranus and Neptune? Astronomers observed anomalies in the orbit of Saturn, and figured that these could be explained by another planet further out, and they could figure where to look, and so they found Uranus. Neptune was found in a similar manner. Both of these were cases where scientists realized that something unknown would make the equations fit observations better.
What separated from the stars in the Bullet Cluster is the gas and dust, which apparently are the largest amount of visible mass. I'd expect much the same effect from lots of small black holes as from WIMPs - in this case, anyway..
Thank you. Very interesting.
Well, yes. Your speech can result in personal or financial harm to you. Also, your speech can result in personal or financial benefit for you. The two are different ways of saying the same exact thing.
Does it matter if someone believes that women are worse at software engineering? Patton got some black soldiers in WWII. He thought them inferior, and commented in a letter that they didn't think quickly enough to be good tank crew. He gave them "The Speech" (the version at the start of the movie "Patton" is a pretty good rendition, except that the profanity and high squeaky voice were removed) and set them up to succeed. Patton thought blacks were inferior, and gave each individual a chance to do well. Someone can consistently believe that women are worse and act reasonably fairly.
It doesn't have the same leisure hours as hunting and gathering. It tends to overwork people.
Looks like I should have said "can be" instead of "is".
It's not likely to happen, since it would reduce the state's influence. Consider a state with ten electoral votes. Under winner-takes-all, the winner in the state gets all ten, so that's a big swing for the winner. Under a proportional representation system, each major party would get between three and seven votes, so the maximum possible swing would be four, probably less. Candidates would be less interested in picking up the odd electoral vote than the odd ten. Since the State Legislatures are required to decide how electors are picked, it would take each state to agree to reduce its influence on picking the President, to get a result that would probably be better for the country.
In other words, it's the Prisoner's Dilemma.
The local system seems very good to me. We have paper ballots that go into tabulating machines, which store the ballots. When the election is over, the ballots are put in a sealed box and stored, ready for later verification. There is spot verification of the process, with random precincts having their tabulations checked against their ballot boxes, and if we need a recount we've got the ballots.
Obviously, all of this can be subverted by poll workers, but that's true of any system. In this case, we've always got observers from both major parties, who would report any wrongdoing. If one party tried to do anything wrong, the other observer would see it.
What we've got is a system where we keep the paper ballots, there's procedures to follow, there's observers from both parties, and officials who will take action if wrongdoing is reported.
The problem I have is that every voter ID proposal I've seen has a stinger somewhere. The Minnesota Voter ID constitutional amendment would have made it very difficult to cast an absentee ballot. There was one case that was accompanied by what looked like a serious effort to remove DMVs and such places from poor black neighborhoods.
So, if there's a genuine and effective initiative to make it relatively easy to get IDs for everyone, I'm happy with voter ID laws. So far, I haven't seen that.
And if a failure destroys a Space-X rocket, they just lost a rocket. If it destroys an airliner, hundreds of people are likely to die.
The Constitution guarantees a democratic government for each state, and state governments have certain requirements.