Economic progress depends on eliminating jobs. If we can't free up people to do new jobs, we can't fill those new jobs. It can cause a lot of hardship in the short run, but it improves standards of living in the long run.
What would life in the US be if we needed 80% of the population doing basic farming?
I've worked on software such that a complete failure would be a minor annoyance. I've written Perl for single-use format changes that I just hacked into shape and ran several times until the output was what I wanted, and robustness and maintainability didn't matter. (Yes, I could have done those more efficiently.) I've also worked on code that could kill people if I got something sufficiently wrong. I do those things differently. (No "Oops, killed three people, maybe if I change this parameter....")
Are you ashamed of your code because of some stupid SJW viewpoint?
All of the SJW viewpoints I espouse have been carefully considered by at least one allegedly intelligent person (me). They may be wrong, but they're not stupid.
That being said, people do have moral codes, and can be ashamed of what they do to violate them. For example, someone working in Nazi Germany on something to save Jews might be ashamed (that's about as far from a SJW viewpoint as I can get).
Okay, why the hell do you care this much about stopping other people from trying to find solutions to their problems? And what the hell is this "trans-gender lobby"? Can I get a job with them? The transsexuals I know seem to be interested in just fitting into society the best way they can and not causing problems related to their gender.
You're also mixing up gender and sex. Skirt-wearing behavior is not physiological. Skirt-wearing behavior in a society where only women wear skirts is more complicated..
Let's take an example, who for the sake of anonymity we'll call Barbara Hudson. How does her history, physiology, medical history, or anything like that hurt you? You have a right to your own opinion, but not to force it on her. You're talking like you're personally offended by what an individual chooses to do with herself.
You're also trivializing this. I've had surgery done in some pretty sensitive areas (I could give more details for those who think they'd actually be happier knowing them), and I've modified my brain chemistry artificially. I've also changed shirts (and even laundered them). There's a difference.
X and Y makes you male or female. If you aren't comfortable in your body then the problem is in your own head, and you need to take responsibility for it, not make everyone around you treat you like a special snowflake.
As with most human genetics, it's more complicated than that, and we can get physiologically female brains in male bodies. If you aren't comfortable in your body, you've got a problem. Being generally a nice guy, I'd like to see your problem solved. We don't know how to change a mind between male and female, but we can do surgical alteration and hormone therapy to get the body more suited to the mind. Most people with this problem just want to fix it somehow, and don't want to be treated as anyone special because of it. I've got a few surgical modifications and body chemistry alterations that I don't bring up in conversations until they seem relevant.
Lastly, we're all special snowflakes, each in their own way. That's what makes humanity so wonderful.
The fact that "black" people seem to do a lot worse on IQ tests, when "black" consists of a ridiculously large set of populations, suggests that culture and societal expectations play a very large role that is hard to disentangle.
They also seem to do no worse than the white population did in the 1930s (look up the Flynn Effect). I'm willing to bet there hasn't been any genetic improvement in the white population in the past century.
Looking at Sanders' agenda, it seems pretty typical for what most First World countries actually do. I'd peg him as a centrist on that scale. Would someone more familiar with politics outside the US care to comment?
To be honest, I've never managed to figure out what the facts on gun control really are. I do know there are an unusually large number of idiots on both sides of the debate, such as "ban scary-looking guns" or "we can overthrow the government".
The above post is hereby dedicated to all of you on Slashdot who argued that it isn't racist or sexist or anything like that if it uses a predefined algorithm. You know who you are.
Since I have been able to vote (1972), Democratic Presidents have lowered the deficit, and Republicans (with the arguable exception of Nixon) have raised it.
If you're asking if a US agency broke the law, it is, indeed, an excuse. As far as I know, there's no international law against espionage Terrorism is against international law, and that includes treaties the US has signed and ratified, and therefore are part of US law. Also, terrorism includes the use of violence against the innocent by design, and espionage doesn't. They aren't really comparable.
You don't give up, do you? Neither attempts to explain nor ignorance slow you down.
From a mathematical and statistical point of view, asteroid hits work just like dice. You use statistics to get an estimated probability (which have bounds depending on available data and how certain you want to be of the bounds), and probability for the rest. When estimating the probabilities, you can use any structure you know about to refine them. In this case, we don't have any (it is a chaotic system, after all), so we go with the straight statistics.
The reason you can't win at roulette without cheating is that all individual possible bets are losing bets, and there's no way you can add them up to get a positive expected value. The sum of the expectations is equal to the expectation of the sum; that's something you learn early on in probability. BTW, there is no guarantee that the ball will land on 16 ever again, although with increasing additional spins it becomes more and more likely. A guarantee would require that the roulette table had some sort of memory.
You know who bases their business on exactly the sort of reasoning I've been talking about? Insurance companies. They have no a priori way of knowing what sort of accidents a 22-year-old man will be in, so they look at the performance of such people over time, and figure that the future rate is about the same as the past rate. Traffic accidents are part of a far more complicated system than orbital mechanics. Yet, insurance companies seem to make money.
You want to know what the original purpose was? Read Federalist Paper 68. That's not the whole story; the EC was also set up to allow slave states more influence in who becomes President, but that is also no longer relevant.
The EC was set up to be a group of educated and well-informed men who would consider the candidates carefully, eliminate all the unqualified ones seeking office, and vote for the best of a potentially large slate of candidates. If they didn't give anyone a majority, they'd at least provide a short list for the House to decide from. Less than fifteen years later, the original intent was abandoned and the electors were then intended to be rubber stamps for the party that won in each individual state.
If the EC were functioning as designed, Trump would get no votes. Clinton and Sanders, and likely other Democrats, would be considered. Assorted Republicans, not including Trump, would also be considered. They might well agree on someone who wasn't even running a campaign.
I'm telling you the likelihood of being hit in the next thousand years is unknowable.
Let's try this out in another context.:
The likelihood of rolling a 24 on four dice in ten rolls is unknowable (notice that I didn't say "fair dice"). We roll dice for a while, and we note how often 6 comes up on each die (probably somewhere a little over 1/6).
There's no difference between the two. In both, we're establishing an estimated probability from observation (that's statistics, and approximate by nature), and coming up with the probability of a certain combination of events (that's probability, and mathematically exact).
If you consider the probability of rolling a 24 in ten tries unknowable, I'll happily offer you 10:1 odds that you won't, and it would be in your interest to accept. (Hint: Assuming that no more than one die always roll 6s, and the others are moderately fair, I'll clean up.)
I hate appeals to authority, but I'm getting tired of being told I'm wrong without being told why. I'm a math major with a year of probability and a year of statistics courses under my belt. I can be wrong, but if you're going to say stupid things about what I've studied I'd at least like to see reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I told my son that, if I found porn, drugs, and a COBOL book under his bed, I was going to go up to him and say, "COBOL? Really? Where have I failed?"
Yeah, but sometimes I've been my own manager, written my own specs, set my own deadlines, did my own QA....
Economic progress depends on eliminating jobs. If we can't free up people to do new jobs, we can't fill those new jobs. It can cause a lot of hardship in the short run, but it improves standards of living in the long run.
What would life in the US be if we needed 80% of the population doing basic farming?
You work at Microsoft?
I've worked on software such that a complete failure would be a minor annoyance. I've written Perl for single-use format changes that I just hacked into shape and ran several times until the output was what I wanted, and robustness and maintainability didn't matter. (Yes, I could have done those more efficiently.) I've also worked on code that could kill people if I got something sufficiently wrong. I do those things differently. (No "Oops, killed three people, maybe if I change this parameter....")
Okay, why the hell do you care this much about stopping other people from trying to find solutions to their problems? And what the hell is this "trans-gender lobby"? Can I get a job with them? The transsexuals I know seem to be interested in just fitting into society the best way they can and not causing problems related to their gender.
You're also mixing up gender and sex. Skirt-wearing behavior is not physiological. Skirt-wearing behavior in a society where only women wear skirts is more complicated..
Let's take an example, who for the sake of anonymity we'll call Barbara Hudson. How does her history, physiology, medical history, or anything like that hurt you? You have a right to your own opinion, but not to force it on her. You're talking like you're personally offended by what an individual chooses to do with herself.
You're also trivializing this. I've had surgery done in some pretty sensitive areas (I could give more details for those who think they'd actually be happier knowing them), and I've modified my brain chemistry artificially. I've also changed shirts (and even laundered them). There's a difference.
As with most human genetics, it's more complicated than that, and we can get physiologically female brains in male bodies. If you aren't comfortable in your body, you've got a problem. Being generally a nice guy, I'd like to see your problem solved. We don't know how to change a mind between male and female, but we can do surgical alteration and hormone therapy to get the body more suited to the mind. Most people with this problem just want to fix it somehow, and don't want to be treated as anyone special because of it. I've got a few surgical modifications and body chemistry alterations that I don't bring up in conversations until they seem relevant.
Lastly, we're all special snowflakes, each in their own way. That's what makes humanity so wonderful.
More to the point, can I get in on the next such survey?
Empirically false. I voted for her because I thought she'd be a good President, although she's a pretty bad candidate.
They also seem to do no worse than the white population did in the 1930s (look up the Flynn Effect). I'm willing to bet there hasn't been any genetic improvement in the white population in the past century.
Looking at Sanders' agenda, it seems pretty typical for what most First World countries actually do. I'd peg him as a centrist on that scale. Would someone more familiar with politics outside the US care to comment?
To be honest, I've never managed to figure out what the facts on gun control really are. I do know there are an unusually large number of idiots on both sides of the debate, such as "ban scary-looking guns" or "we can overthrow the government".
The above post is hereby dedicated to all of you on Slashdot who argued that it isn't racist or sexist or anything like that if it uses a predefined algorithm. You know who you are.
Ah, a conservative who can't take a joke. Or, probably, base social policy on evidence of what works and what doesn't.
I don't remember a lot of leftist outrage when whats-his-name the football player refused to stand for the national anthem.
I believe anti-vaxxers are roughly split between left and right. Can I substitute abstinence-only sex education?
Since I have been able to vote (1972), Democratic Presidents have lowered the deficit, and Republicans (with the arguable exception of Nixon) have raised it.
Also, as far as these things go, I also have had an experience that I simply can't explain physically. I prefer not to discuss it in a public forum.
If you're asking if a US agency broke the law, it is, indeed, an excuse. As far as I know, there's no international law against espionage Terrorism is against international law, and that includes treaties the US has signed and ratified, and therefore are part of US law. Also, terrorism includes the use of violence against the innocent by design, and espionage doesn't. They aren't really comparable.
You don't give up, do you? Neither attempts to explain nor ignorance slow you down.
From a mathematical and statistical point of view, asteroid hits work just like dice. You use statistics to get an estimated probability (which have bounds depending on available data and how certain you want to be of the bounds), and probability for the rest. When estimating the probabilities, you can use any structure you know about to refine them. In this case, we don't have any (it is a chaotic system, after all), so we go with the straight statistics.
The reason you can't win at roulette without cheating is that all individual possible bets are losing bets, and there's no way you can add them up to get a positive expected value. The sum of the expectations is equal to the expectation of the sum; that's something you learn early on in probability. BTW, there is no guarantee that the ball will land on 16 ever again, although with increasing additional spins it becomes more and more likely. A guarantee would require that the roulette table had some sort of memory.
You know who bases their business on exactly the sort of reasoning I've been talking about? Insurance companies. They have no a priori way of knowing what sort of accidents a 22-year-old man will be in, so they look at the performance of such people over time, and figure that the future rate is about the same as the past rate. Traffic accidents are part of a far more complicated system than orbital mechanics. Yet, insurance companies seem to make money.
You want to know what the original purpose was? Read Federalist Paper 68. That's not the whole story; the EC was also set up to allow slave states more influence in who becomes President, but that is also no longer relevant.
The EC was set up to be a group of educated and well-informed men who would consider the candidates carefully, eliminate all the unqualified ones seeking office, and vote for the best of a potentially large slate of candidates. If they didn't give anyone a majority, they'd at least provide a short list for the House to decide from. Less than fifteen years later, the original intent was abandoned and the electors were then intended to be rubber stamps for the party that won in each individual state.
If the EC were functioning as designed, Trump would get no votes. Clinton and Sanders, and likely other Democrats, would be considered. Assorted Republicans, not including Trump, would also be considered. They might well agree on someone who wasn't even running a campaign.
Let's try this out in another context.:
The likelihood of rolling a 24 on four dice in ten rolls is unknowable (notice that I didn't say "fair dice"). We roll dice for a while, and we note how often 6 comes up on each die (probably somewhere a little over 1/6).
There's no difference between the two. In both, we're establishing an estimated probability from observation (that's statistics, and approximate by nature), and coming up with the probability of a certain combination of events (that's probability, and mathematically exact).
If you consider the probability of rolling a 24 in ten tries unknowable, I'll happily offer you 10:1 odds that you won't, and it would be in your interest to accept. (Hint: Assuming that no more than one die always roll 6s, and the others are moderately fair, I'll clean up.)
I hate appeals to authority, but I'm getting tired of being told I'm wrong without being told why. I'm a math major with a year of probability and a year of statistics courses under my belt. I can be wrong, but if you're going to say stupid things about what I've studied I'd at least like to see reasons.
From what I heard, both Clinton and Trump are in good health. I was more interested in Trump's tax returns.