Electrical power companies are normally regulated to certain levels of service, since power distribution is a natural monopoly. They may be required to upgrade the network to keep the neighbors within spec.
Basically, I woke up one day and found out that consensus is considered fact.
Is it supposed to work some other way? Scientists are going to interpret consensus as "almost certainly true to within appropriate limits". For practical purposes, when non-scientists work with sciency stuff, scientific consensus is fact (again within appropriate limits). There's no other way to do it.
I am not even sure where the idea of settled science came from. If the science was settled, we'd stop doing it.
Pretty much you do. There's a whole lot of settled things that scientists just assume, and don't work on. That's how it's got to be, for more esoteric scientific observations to be properly interpreted. A chemist using a mass spectrometer is assuming that molecular masses are pretty much what you'd expect from the atoms involved. It's not possible to detect dark matter without knowing the effects of mass. Scientists work on the unsettled stuff in general. (Every so often somebody comes up with a new or more precise tool or technique and decides to go over settled stuff in greater detail to see if anything changes when you look at it closer or differently, but given that settled science is settled to certain limits rather than absolutely this makes sense.)
Of course, one of the really neat things about science is that settled science can become unsettled at any time. It can start with one person saying "That's funny...it really shouldn't work that way." and go almost anywhere from there.
What science of imminent ruin? The climate change stuff I read talks about very serious consequences by the end of the century. I haven't seen any scientific suggestion of imminent ruin ever, so there's no surprise that it's not a tradition.
The political consensus that climate change is happening and we should do something about it is way over 50%. The US is atypically stupid in this regard.
I have a friend who's referred to himself as African-American, and it's true that his European ancestors had African ancestors.
I have friends who are somewhat involved with what happens on Lakota reservations, and know what many of the off-reservation whites think of the Lakota. I think that challenging the established white narrative might be a good idea.
A peer review can comment on known deficiencies in methodology, but not on unknown ones. Peer review is not the last line of defense against inaccuracy. Everybody in science knows that peer-reviewed papers can be wrong, but that a consensus among peer-reviewed papers for some time is very likely to be reasonably correct.
When a software company discontinues a program, their patents and copyrights likely apply to newer products also.
What you are proposing to do is put a potentially very large burden on any piece of proprietary software released, for a relatively small gain. I can't see that turning out well.
I haven't seen old books, music, etc. go away from software obsolescence. I've lost stuff to hardware obsolescence when I didn't keep up with changing standards. I can't read any floppy disks anymore, for example. Documents are data files, and as long as you retain physical access something's going to be able to read them.
There are potential uses for more than 64-bit address spaces. I don't know that that will ever become an issue with RAM, but memory-mapping SSD storage could be useful. Given enough connectivity, it might become desirable to have an address space that includes IP addresses separately, so maybe 256 bits. My limited imagination is not coming up with any reason to go to 512 bits, though.
Heavy in relation to what? It's lighter than an equivalent amount of any liquid we'd reasonably send through a long pipeline. It's moving faster, but without actually looking things up I can't tell whether it's more or less momentum than the liquid in a pipeline.
At a certain pressure, air ceases to be much of a fluid for practical purposes. Even if it isn't that thin, it's predictable. It will be transient extra pressure moving through the pipe, and that can be accounted for.
I reread the thread, and I didn't see a claim that governments are perfect. I saw what looked like an implicit claim that government should run ATC, nothing explicit. It mentioned mistakes of private companies, but never said anything about government. Governments tend to make certain kinds of mistakes, and private industry tends to make other kinds of mistakes. The argument that a government would be better suited to run X is not based on the perfection of government, but on the idea that the mistakes private industry would make in this particular case are worse than the mistakes government would make in this particular case.
If we were to streamline the health insurance industry, we'd save money on health care. If we had some sort of negotiation on drug prices like other countries do, we'd save money on health care. Doing these things would significantly reduce health care costs. It wouldn't get us anywhere near second place, but it would be significant savings.
Let's stick to the UK, since I know something about that. There is no executive branch. There are executive departments, under the control of Parliament. Parliament, with more or less meaningless concessions to the monarch, has all the control. I believe that's typically how parliamentary democracies work. In some countries, seats in parliament are based on how many people voted for which party.
In any case but one where there is an executive with legal power who isn't a monarch, said executive is elected by popular vote.
So you have an example of "people (who may be on the left) blocking certain people from certain forums they control". The attached article didn't explain what @Sweden is or who controls it (which you do not appear to know either). It described what looks like a mistake in trusting a certain person. While one of the people blocked is a conservative, and one is considered to have Nazi affiliations, we don't know of any actual political slant to the blocklist. It could be a case of a leftist blocking people pre-emptively (there's no evidence that it's "the left", whatever we are), but the evidence is pretty scanty.
A usable public forum will have some mechanism to keep trolls at least contained. Slashdot has downmods and flagging.
I'm very unimpressed by this example. Do you have a better one?
High technology survived in early WWI, despite nobody having an appropriate industrial base. The British lacked the ability to make enough machine guns, and all armies struggled with ammo shortages. High tech can get strained, but I haven't seen it go away.
I still don't know what you mean by tyranny of the weak. I gave it my best shot, and missed. Could you explain further?
Who is arbiter of who should speak? The one who controls the venue. Speaking opportunities are limited resources, and so people have to make judgment calls. My time is also a limited resource. I can't listen to every speaker I want (I'm missing one next week, in fact). I'm also not that fond in general about listening to people to learn what they think, although there are exceptions. I can read with comprehension faster than people can speak.
FWIW, I don't think my feminist friends and relatives would acknowledge anyone as a mentor who thinks male/female sex is sexist, and that it requires the subjugation of women. Again, I'm hearing about how people of a certain class think, despite me knowing members of the class and knowing that none of them think anything close to that. I didn't and don't think my circle is all that atypical in terms of the people who represent viewpoints..
I'm also not particularly interested in self-affirmation. I can't learn anything that way. However, I've found that I don't learn much from listening to doctrinaires of any stripe. I'd rather argue honestly with people with different viewpoints, to get a closer-up feel as to why they think what they do. I get interested in talking theology with some of my Christian friends, because I find what they think and why, and it's a viewpoint I don't have. I'm not interested in talking theology with anyone who hasn't seriously thought about it.
Yet, a psychologist saying "almost all Americans have psychological problems, based on the sample that I see in my practice" would be idiotic.
Why do you think that a selection bias, which you can get in any area of science, has anything to do with social sciences and basing science on self-reporting?
If I go to my doctor with a complaint that might be urological, he will hit me lightly on my kidneys and ask if that hurt. Self-reporting, and he'll use that in his diagnosis. If I complain about something that might be depression, I'll get a sheet of things to self-report on, and my doctor will go from there.
If you're only doing the light stuff you mention, I'd recommend a user-friendly Linux distro like Linux. That isn't everybody.
If you can't play some AAA game on anything but Windows, that's not a monopoly problem; that's a luxury
Why do you think monopolies can't exist on luxuries? "Monopoly" is an economic term, not a moral one.
If your business uses some software package that's only supported on Windows, find a new vendor or complain to that one. Worst case, build your own software, or find some other way, or just go out of business. As I mentioned before, with the rise of web apps, it's easier than ever now to do stuff without Windows.
In many cases, there are no vendors of anything similar that doesn't run on Windows, the vendors are completely uninterested in running on Linux, and it's way infeasible to roll your own. The old rule is to run the OS that runs the applications you need or want, and in many business-critical cases that's Windows. Web apps work fine for some things, badly for others. Are you seriously claiming that Windows isn't a monopoly because you can always disband your company to avoid buying it? Would you claim you can't have a monopoly on food because customers can always starve to death?
I don't need to bash Ayn Rand to feel morally superior.
It's been a while, but I remember a few things. I'd rather not subject myself to that again.
First, she dismisses pretty much all Western philosophy of ethics without understanding it. She calls it "altruistic", and apparently therefore to be disregarded.
Second, she laid out a philosophical position that seemed to lack support, big-time.
Third, no society based strictly on her philosophy can survive. It's not possible to base a society on strong individuals dealing as equals, since we're not strong all the time and often aren't in roughly equal negotiation positions. The trivial example is that no child raised in her Republic would survive infancy, and therefore some level of altruism is necessary for survival. I don't remember if or how she addressed it, but if she special-cased it it was as an aside. An ethical stance based on no altruism except..., leaving the exceptions vague is saying nothing. Certainly it's best if strong people deal as equals, and you'll find little or nothing against that in Western philosophy, but the real questions are about the weaker people, which Rand dodges by assuming the questions are unimportant.
Beyond that, read the thing and see for yourself. I'm not going to read it again to refresh my memory.
I did. Don't bother. It's sort of stream of consciousness, and it's Hitler's consciousness. One interesting thing was how he could go from something actually insightful (Hitler wasn't dumb, although he sure wasn't a good writer) into a moral abyss so easily.
I picked up her "non"-fiction book, "The Virtue of Selfishness" when I was a teen, and couldn't understand why anyone would pay attention to any philosophy she backed. I read it quite a few years later, and was pleased to find that my original impression was more correct than I'd realized.
Slashdot Mirror
I know something about network architecture. Would you care to explain yourself?
Electrical power companies are normally regulated to certain levels of service, since power distribution is a natural monopoly. They may be required to upgrade the network to keep the neighbors within spec.
Is it supposed to work some other way? Scientists are going to interpret consensus as "almost certainly true to within appropriate limits". For practical purposes, when non-scientists work with sciency stuff, scientific consensus is fact (again within appropriate limits). There's no other way to do it.
Pretty much you do. There's a whole lot of settled things that scientists just assume, and don't work on. That's how it's got to be, for more esoteric scientific observations to be properly interpreted. A chemist using a mass spectrometer is assuming that molecular masses are pretty much what you'd expect from the atoms involved. It's not possible to detect dark matter without knowing the effects of mass. Scientists work on the unsettled stuff in general. (Every so often somebody comes up with a new or more precise tool or technique and decides to go over settled stuff in greater detail to see if anything changes when you look at it closer or differently, but given that settled science is settled to certain limits rather than absolutely this makes sense.)
Of course, one of the really neat things about science is that settled science can become unsettled at any time. It can start with one person saying "That's funny...it really shouldn't work that way." and go almost anywhere from there.
Convergent evolution of particular traits is reasonable. Convergent evolution of DNA seems to me a lot less likely.
What science of imminent ruin? The climate change stuff I read talks about very serious consequences by the end of the century. I haven't seen any scientific suggestion of imminent ruin ever, so there's no surprise that it's not a tradition.
The political consensus that climate change is happening and we should do something about it is way over 50%. The US is atypically stupid in this regard.
I have a friend who's referred to himself as African-American, and it's true that his European ancestors had African ancestors.
I have friends who are somewhat involved with what happens on Lakota reservations, and know what many of the off-reservation whites think of the Lakota. I think that challenging the established white narrative might be a good idea.
A peer review can comment on known deficiencies in methodology, but not on unknown ones. Peer review is not the last line of defense against inaccuracy. Everybody in science knows that peer-reviewed papers can be wrong, but that a consensus among peer-reviewed papers for some time is very likely to be reasonably correct.
When a software company discontinues a program, their patents and copyrights likely apply to newer products also.
What you are proposing to do is put a potentially very large burden on any piece of proprietary software released, for a relatively small gain. I can't see that turning out well.
I haven't seen old books, music, etc. go away from software obsolescence. I've lost stuff to hardware obsolescence when I didn't keep up with changing standards. I can't read any floppy disks anymore, for example. Documents are data files, and as long as you retain physical access something's going to be able to read them.
We used to use XP64. I've read that it had serious compatibility issues, but it worked well for running our own software.
I've got a slide rule app on my iPhone. To be honest, it's not one or my more-used apps.
There are potential uses for more than 64-bit address spaces. I don't know that that will ever become an issue with RAM, but memory-mapping SSD storage could be useful. Given enough connectivity, it might become desirable to have an address space that includes IP addresses separately, so maybe 256 bits. My limited imagination is not coming up with any reason to go to 512 bits, though.
Heavy in relation to what? It's lighter than an equivalent amount of any liquid we'd reasonably send through a long pipeline. It's moving faster, but without actually looking things up I can't tell whether it's more or less momentum than the liquid in a pipeline.
At a certain pressure, air ceases to be much of a fluid for practical purposes. Even if it isn't that thin, it's predictable. It will be transient extra pressure moving through the pipe, and that can be accounted for.
I reread the thread, and I didn't see a claim that governments are perfect. I saw what looked like an implicit claim that government should run ATC, nothing explicit. It mentioned mistakes of private companies, but never said anything about government. Governments tend to make certain kinds of mistakes, and private industry tends to make other kinds of mistakes. The argument that a government would be better suited to run X is not based on the perfection of government, but on the idea that the mistakes private industry would make in this particular case are worse than the mistakes government would make in this particular case.
If we were to streamline the health insurance industry, we'd save money on health care. If we had some sort of negotiation on drug prices like other countries do, we'd save money on health care. Doing these things would significantly reduce health care costs. It wouldn't get us anywhere near second place, but it would be significant savings.
Let's stick to the UK, since I know something about that. There is no executive branch. There are executive departments, under the control of Parliament. Parliament, with more or less meaningless concessions to the monarch, has all the control. I believe that's typically how parliamentary democracies work. In some countries, seats in parliament are based on how many people voted for which party.
In any case but one where there is an executive with legal power who isn't a monarch, said executive is elected by popular vote.
So you have an example of "people (who may be on the left) blocking certain people from certain forums they control". The attached article didn't explain what @Sweden is or who controls it (which you do not appear to know either). It described what looks like a mistake in trusting a certain person. While one of the people blocked is a conservative, and one is considered to have Nazi affiliations, we don't know of any actual political slant to the blocklist. It could be a case of a leftist blocking people pre-emptively (there's no evidence that it's "the left", whatever we are), but the evidence is pretty scanty.
A usable public forum will have some mechanism to keep trolls at least contained. Slashdot has downmods and flagging.
I'm very unimpressed by this example. Do you have a better one?
High technology survived in early WWI, despite nobody having an appropriate industrial base. The British lacked the ability to make enough machine guns, and all armies struggled with ammo shortages. High tech can get strained, but I haven't seen it go away.
I still don't know what you mean by tyranny of the weak. I gave it my best shot, and missed. Could you explain further?
Who is arbiter of who should speak? The one who controls the venue. Speaking opportunities are limited resources, and so people have to make judgment calls. My time is also a limited resource. I can't listen to every speaker I want (I'm missing one next week, in fact). I'm also not that fond in general about listening to people to learn what they think, although there are exceptions. I can read with comprehension faster than people can speak.
FWIW, I don't think my feminist friends and relatives would acknowledge anyone as a mentor who thinks male/female sex is sexist, and that it requires the subjugation of women. Again, I'm hearing about how people of a certain class think, despite me knowing members of the class and knowing that none of them think anything close to that. I didn't and don't think my circle is all that atypical in terms of the people who represent viewpoints..
I'm also not particularly interested in self-affirmation. I can't learn anything that way. However, I've found that I don't learn much from listening to doctrinaires of any stripe. I'd rather argue honestly with people with different viewpoints, to get a closer-up feel as to why they think what they do. I get interested in talking theology with some of my Christian friends, because I find what they think and why, and it's a viewpoint I don't have. I'm not interested in talking theology with anyone who hasn't seriously thought about it.
Why do you think that a selection bias, which you can get in any area of science, has anything to do with social sciences and basing science on self-reporting?
If I go to my doctor with a complaint that might be urological, he will hit me lightly on my kidneys and ask if that hurt. Self-reporting, and he'll use that in his diagnosis. If I complain about something that might be depression, I'll get a sheet of things to self-report on, and my doctor will go from there.
If you're only doing the light stuff you mention, I'd recommend a user-friendly Linux distro like Linux. That isn't everybody.
Why do you think monopolies can't exist on luxuries? "Monopoly" is an economic term, not a moral one.
In many cases, there are no vendors of anything similar that doesn't run on Windows, the vendors are completely uninterested in running on Linux, and it's way infeasible to roll your own. The old rule is to run the OS that runs the applications you need or want, and in many business-critical cases that's Windows. Web apps work fine for some things, badly for others. Are you seriously claiming that Windows isn't a monopoly because you can always disband your company to avoid buying it? Would you claim you can't have a monopoly on food because customers can always starve to death?
Usually I only say "you must be new here" to people with a lower UID than mine, but I figured you were close enough.
I don't need to bash Ayn Rand to feel morally superior.
It's been a while, but I remember a few things. I'd rather not subject myself to that again.
First, she dismisses pretty much all Western philosophy of ethics without understanding it. She calls it "altruistic", and apparently therefore to be disregarded.
Second, she laid out a philosophical position that seemed to lack support, big-time.
Third, no society based strictly on her philosophy can survive. It's not possible to base a society on strong individuals dealing as equals, since we're not strong all the time and often aren't in roughly equal negotiation positions. The trivial example is that no child raised in her Republic would survive infancy, and therefore some level of altruism is necessary for survival. I don't remember if or how she addressed it, but if she special-cased it it was as an aside. An ethical stance based on no altruism except..., leaving the exceptions vague is saying nothing. Certainly it's best if strong people deal as equals, and you'll find little or nothing against that in Western philosophy, but the real questions are about the weaker people, which Rand dodges by assuming the questions are unimportant.
Beyond that, read the thing and see for yourself. I'm not going to read it again to refresh my memory.
I presume you do your own research in all fields, and don't accept consensus optics or quantum mechanics or biochemistry or....
I did. Don't bother. It's sort of stream of consciousness, and it's Hitler's consciousness. One interesting thing was how he could go from something actually insightful (Hitler wasn't dumb, although he sure wasn't a good writer) into a moral abyss so easily.
I picked up her "non"-fiction book, "The Virtue of Selfishness" when I was a teen, and couldn't understand why anyone would pay attention to any philosophy she backed. I read it quite a few years later, and was pleased to find that my original impression was more correct than I'd realized.