Health clubs in the US live on the majority of the membership who pay dues and almost never show up to use the facilities.
Nor does the fact that the UK pays money, net, mean there are no services. I pay money to the various levels of governments where I live, and get a lot of services from them overall.
A file shared is a copyright violation, since it involves creating another unauthorized copy. It isn't commercial copyright infringement, but it's still against the law, and still can be a criminal matter (as opposed to a civil matter) in the US.
Copyright serves useful purposes, in allowing people to create things more or less on spec, and profit from them according to the popularity. We do want to compensate creative people who create things for our use and/or enjoyment, and I haven't seen a better way.
As to why the US citizenry doesn't do much, it's a matter of distribution of harm. There are a small number of people who profit very much from ridiculous copyright laws, and a much larger number of people who are harmed very little and in an indirect way, so they really don't care.
I do know a woman who had an abortion when she just couldn't care for a child, and had four children once life became more stable. I suspect that's more people in the world, net.
However, I'll tell you one thing common to all aborted fetuses: they're unwanted. Being an unwanted child, which the fetus will become, is not a good thing.
There's plenty of food for all, OK, but it's not distributed to everyone. Changing that would require some massive changes in society and the economy. Communities do not educate themselves to a satisfactory level nowadays.
In other words, you're making crap up to fit with your prejudices.
No, you're starting with an incorrect assumption (not all females need to reproduce to perpetuate a species), reasoning from it incorrectly (not all things that are necessary are basic instincts in humans - babies aren't born knowing how to breast-feed, for example, although most figure it out really fast), and coming up with a dogmatic and extreme conclusion.
In which case mules are zombies, since they can't reproduce and hence aren't alive. I've been wandering around as an undead revenant since my vasectomy. You know, I think that definitions of life that say that living things must be able to reproduce aren't very useful.
Self-control, in general, is not a public health issue, any more than the susceptibility of humans to flu viruses. It is part of the state of humanity, and has been as long as we know of.
Young men and women are going to have sex no matter what. This is not open to question by anyone who bothers to look at current and historical behavior. We have evidence that discouraging premarital sex too harshly can have bad consequences (for one, consider a young woman trying to ditch years of strict training between the wedding and the wedding night).
People concerned with public health need to deal with this.
Science isn't arbitrary. As you say, it's the latest in a series of educated guesses which haven't yet been disproven, and there are sufficient rules to keep the arbitrariness to a minimum.
However, science is applicable only to certain things, namely things that can be disproven by experiment and/or observation. I know of no experiment that would tell me that human rights don't begin at some particular point between conception (itself slightly arbitrary) and birth, and therefore (unless I'm seriously wrong) this is not a matter for science.
We're talking about the cost of deductible items, such as business expenses, etc. If I use a lower tax bracket than I really should, it's still a better basis for planning than disregarding the value of the deduction, and it's a conservative estimate, since the savings could be more.
My point is that, by reading the Second Amendment, I find that it should be legal for the average citizen to buy and use modern infantry rifles. There is only one purpose specified in the Amendment, and it's disregarded. Many other things can be waffled around, and have been, but I believe modern gun laws regarding automatic weapons are unConstitutional.
Simple solution: England withdraws from the UK, which becomes the United Kingdom of Scotland and Northern Ireland, with a new sovereign Kingdom of England formed. England isn't in the EU, the remaining parts of the UK remain, everybody's happy.
The UN is a good place for people to yell at each other (much better than shooting) and make deals. It can't be an actual government, since it represents too many cultures that are too different. An actual government that includes the traditional West, China, and the Middle East is going to be dictatorial to some of them.
Globalization is increasing, and the EU is a step in the right direction. There's enough shared culture and values in most of Europe to make a government possible.
FWIW, the Confederates started the Civil War. The Union might have eventually, and once the war started the Union intended to defeat and reincorporate the Confederacy, but firing on Fort Sumter was just plain dumb.
Then Greece wound up with insufficient money to power its economy. If it were on the drachma, it could devalue and keep its economy going, but Greek GDP went down dramatically under the imposed austerity measures.
This is ridiculous. She was the Secretary of State. If a document was classified, she needed it, and she couldn't get it through classified channels, it was perfectly reasonable for her to make the judgment call. She had some classification authority, how much I'm not sure, which most people briefed on how to handle classified information don't have. She was not trying to leak the information to unauthorized people, she was trying to get it herself.
The rules are different for people in different roles, and that's how it has to be for effective government.
The reporter had admitted, in a public document, to selling expensive stuff that wasn't his. That's a pretty serious crime. Have you ever tried committing a serious crime and publicizing it widely? I wouldn't be surprised if the police paid you a visit.
First, you're misrepresenting my position. Nobody is born solving differential equations. It has to be learned. My claim is that different people have different aptitude and potential, and when given similar educations will learn at greater rates. Obviously, some methods of education are better than others, and the field is insufficiently studied. If we come up with better educational techniques, so much the better.
Second, it may be intuitive that the Earth is flat to some people, but if you start casually observing things you notice things that imply otherwise. Lunar eclipses suggest that the Earth is round. There is such a thing as a horizon. I've sailed on Lake Superior, and have observed that I can't see the bottoms of sufficiently distant objects. If I assume that different people are inherently better at different things, I look around, and I see nothing to change my mind. If there are indeed decades of research, I should observe large groups of people suddenly becoming very high functioning. I should observe people exceeding the previous maxima in various fields in fairly large numbers. It's conceivable that I have failed to notice these things going on under my nose, but it seems unlikely.
I make a very good living from being much better at software development than most people. Lots of people want to get into the field, and there's all sorts of schools to teach them. If some of them had the secret of turning out people as good as I am, they'd get popular, and other schools would copy them. Then I'd be laid off because I'm old and no better than someone just out of school, just more expensive, and I'd retire. This doesn't appear to be happening. I still hear about a shortage of really good software developers.
From the assumptions that some people are better at some things and worse at others, and that education matters a great deal in helping people realize their potentials, I get a world like the one I see. From the assumption that it's all in the education, and we know how to teach anybody how to be very, very good at X, I get a world considerably different from the one I see. Where's the legions of superheroes?
Joshua Foer, like any individual, proves nothing. If there was a class teaching the memory techniques he used, taking more or less random people in, and they all had incredibly good memories, I'd be impressed.
In professional sports, teams start with unusually good players, and the question is how much unusually good. If you're referring to "Moneyball", that was the As coming up with a better technique to evaluate potential, not a better training method.
I'll look up Ericsson, but it really seems to me that this would have massive real-world effects if it actually worked, and I'm not seeing them.
The explanation given is that militias are necessary. Militias form into military units in times of war, so the intent I get out of it is that people should definitely be able to have military weapons. That seems to me to be the emphasis. I don't think the "right to bear arms" necessarily means private ownership of any weapon a private person could buy, although it certainly did back then. It's arguable that handguns haven't been real military weapons since the demise of cavalry, although they are very often carried by people high enough in the chain of command that they aren't normally called on to shoot the enemy.
The enormity of the alleged crime can't make a difference before conviction. The police, according to that opinion, are allowed to not only get your IP address (which I consider reasonable), but also to hack in and search.
Looking at the Court's decision: "Furthermore, the Court FINDS suppression unwarranted because the Government did not need a warrant in this case." In this case, there was a warrant, but the Court said one was not needed. I find the argument that there is no expectation of privacy for one's IP address when on the internet reasonable, but the argument that a search of the contents of the computer is reasonable. The argument that there is no expectation of privacy for the contents of one's computer seems to be based on the fact that there are hackers out there, and that the FBI was able to hack in easily. One could as easily argue that burglars enter people's homes, and the police can break in, so there's no expectation of privacy there.
This ruling is pretty well irrelevant to the case, since the Court found that the warrants that actually covered all the searches were valid, but I still find it very troubling.
"The right of the people do be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...." My computer is one of my "effects" in the meaning of the Amendment, and it's usually in my house, which falls under the category "houses" in the Amendment. This is really bad Constitutional law, and is going to be overthrown on appeal, which I'd like to happen ASAP.
In the meantime, strong full-disk encryption is your friend.
A theory is a collection of observations and a model of how things seem to work to produce the observations. From the theory, you make predictions. You test the predictions, and adjust the theory. Eventually, you've got a pretty robust theory, and you know that because you've tested a whole lot of varied predictions and they hold.
You can't do theoretical physics without a source of observations. You don't have to make them yourself. You can come up with your theory, show how it explains things, and let other people test its other predictions, so it's possible to do physics by making up interesting theories for others to test.
In science, you make observations. You make a theory to explain them. You figure out what your theory predicts, and this is where the simulation comes in. You test the predictions. If your observations don't match your predictions, you adjust your theory. If they do, you make more predictions and test them. You can't refine a theory unless it predicts something false. (Alternately, you can make several variations and examine their predictions.)
Obviously, simulations aren't tests. You use simulations to predict consequences of the theory you plugged into the simulation, and you test the predictions. In this case, the simulation predicted that the gravitational wave detector would detect stuff, which indeed turned out to agree with what was observed. This increased confidence in the theory being simulated, and provides other means for observations.
In the scenario you outlined, you don't deduct $1200/year from tixes. Not even taxes. That reduces your taxable income, and saves you your effective tax rate times the $1200. At an income of about $26K, that's going to be only a few hundred dollars in tax reductions.
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Health clubs in the US live on the majority of the membership who pay dues and almost never show up to use the facilities.
Nor does the fact that the UK pays money, net, mean there are no services. I pay money to the various levels of governments where I live, and get a lot of services from them overall.
A file shared is a copyright violation, since it involves creating another unauthorized copy. It isn't commercial copyright infringement, but it's still against the law, and still can be a criminal matter (as opposed to a civil matter) in the US.
Copyright serves useful purposes, in allowing people to create things more or less on spec, and profit from them according to the popularity. We do want to compensate creative people who create things for our use and/or enjoyment, and I haven't seen a better way.
As to why the US citizenry doesn't do much, it's a matter of distribution of harm. There are a small number of people who profit very much from ridiculous copyright laws, and a much larger number of people who are harmed very little and in an indirect way, so they really don't care.
I do know a woman who had an abortion when she just couldn't care for a child, and had four children once life became more stable. I suspect that's more people in the world, net.
However, I'll tell you one thing common to all aborted fetuses: they're unwanted. Being an unwanted child, which the fetus will become, is not a good thing.
There's plenty of food for all, OK, but it's not distributed to everyone. Changing that would require some massive changes in society and the economy. Communities do not educate themselves to a satisfactory level nowadays.
In other words, you're making crap up to fit with your prejudices.
No, you're starting with an incorrect assumption (not all females need to reproduce to perpetuate a species), reasoning from it incorrectly (not all things that are necessary are basic instincts in humans - babies aren't born knowing how to breast-feed, for example, although most figure it out really fast), and coming up with a dogmatic and extreme conclusion.
You must be a man.
In which case mules are zombies, since they can't reproduce and hence aren't alive. I've been wandering around as an undead revenant since my vasectomy. You know, I think that definitions of life that say that living things must be able to reproduce aren't very useful.
Self-control, in general, is not a public health issue, any more than the susceptibility of humans to flu viruses. It is part of the state of humanity, and has been as long as we know of.
Young men and women are going to have sex no matter what. This is not open to question by anyone who bothers to look at current and historical behavior. We have evidence that discouraging premarital sex too harshly can have bad consequences (for one, consider a young woman trying to ditch years of strict training between the wedding and the wedding night).
People concerned with public health need to deal with this.
Science isn't arbitrary. As you say, it's the latest in a series of educated guesses which haven't yet been disproven, and there are sufficient rules to keep the arbitrariness to a minimum.
However, science is applicable only to certain things, namely things that can be disproven by experiment and/or observation. I know of no experiment that would tell me that human rights don't begin at some particular point between conception (itself slightly arbitrary) and birth, and therefore (unless I'm seriously wrong) this is not a matter for science.
We're talking about the cost of deductible items, such as business expenses, etc. If I use a lower tax bracket than I really should, it's still a better basis for planning than disregarding the value of the deduction, and it's a conservative estimate, since the savings could be more.
My point is that, by reading the Second Amendment, I find that it should be legal for the average citizen to buy and use modern infantry rifles. There is only one purpose specified in the Amendment, and it's disregarded. Many other things can be waffled around, and have been, but I believe modern gun laws regarding automatic weapons are unConstitutional.
Simple solution: England withdraws from the UK, which becomes the United Kingdom of Scotland and Northern Ireland, with a new sovereign Kingdom of England formed. England isn't in the EU, the remaining parts of the UK remain, everybody's happy.
The UN is a good place for people to yell at each other (much better than shooting) and make deals. It can't be an actual government, since it represents too many cultures that are too different. An actual government that includes the traditional West, China, and the Middle East is going to be dictatorial to some of them.
Globalization is increasing, and the EU is a step in the right direction. There's enough shared culture and values in most of Europe to make a government possible.
FWIW, the Confederates started the Civil War. The Union might have eventually, and once the war started the Union intended to defeat and reincorporate the Confederacy, but firing on Fort Sumter was just plain dumb.
Then Greece wound up with insufficient money to power its economy. If it were on the drachma, it could devalue and keep its economy going, but Greek GDP went down dramatically under the imposed austerity measures.
This is ridiculous. She was the Secretary of State. If a document was classified, she needed it, and she couldn't get it through classified channels, it was perfectly reasonable for her to make the judgment call. She had some classification authority, how much I'm not sure, which most people briefed on how to handle classified information don't have. She was not trying to leak the information to unauthorized people, she was trying to get it herself.
The rules are different for people in different roles, and that's how it has to be for effective government.
The reporter had admitted, in a public document, to selling expensive stuff that wasn't his. That's a pretty serious crime. Have you ever tried committing a serious crime and publicizing it widely? I wouldn't be surprised if the police paid you a visit.
First, you're misrepresenting my position. Nobody is born solving differential equations. It has to be learned. My claim is that different people have different aptitude and potential, and when given similar educations will learn at greater rates. Obviously, some methods of education are better than others, and the field is insufficiently studied. If we come up with better educational techniques, so much the better.
Second, it may be intuitive that the Earth is flat to some people, but if you start casually observing things you notice things that imply otherwise. Lunar eclipses suggest that the Earth is round. There is such a thing as a horizon. I've sailed on Lake Superior, and have observed that I can't see the bottoms of sufficiently distant objects. If I assume that different people are inherently better at different things, I look around, and I see nothing to change my mind. If there are indeed decades of research, I should observe large groups of people suddenly becoming very high functioning. I should observe people exceeding the previous maxima in various fields in fairly large numbers. It's conceivable that I have failed to notice these things going on under my nose, but it seems unlikely.
I make a very good living from being much better at software development than most people. Lots of people want to get into the field, and there's all sorts of schools to teach them. If some of them had the secret of turning out people as good as I am, they'd get popular, and other schools would copy them. Then I'd be laid off because I'm old and no better than someone just out of school, just more expensive, and I'd retire. This doesn't appear to be happening. I still hear about a shortage of really good software developers.
From the assumptions that some people are better at some things and worse at others, and that education matters a great deal in helping people realize their potentials, I get a world like the one I see. From the assumption that it's all in the education, and we know how to teach anybody how to be very, very good at X, I get a world considerably different from the one I see. Where's the legions of superheroes?
Joshua Foer, like any individual, proves nothing. If there was a class teaching the memory techniques he used, taking more or less random people in, and they all had incredibly good memories, I'd be impressed.
In professional sports, teams start with unusually good players, and the question is how much unusually good. If you're referring to "Moneyball", that was the As coming up with a better technique to evaluate potential, not a better training method.
I'll look up Ericsson, but it really seems to me that this would have massive real-world effects if it actually worked, and I'm not seeing them.
The explanation given is that militias are necessary. Militias form into military units in times of war, so the intent I get out of it is that people should definitely be able to have military weapons. That seems to me to be the emphasis. I don't think the "right to bear arms" necessarily means private ownership of any weapon a private person could buy, although it certainly did back then. It's arguable that handguns haven't been real military weapons since the demise of cavalry, although they are very often carried by people high enough in the chain of command that they aren't normally called on to shoot the enemy.
You don't divide on your income tax form. It's reasonable to do so for your own financial planning.
Yup. The FBI did good. The warrants were valid, as the judge carefully explained, so the FBI did the searches right.
Why did the judge add an irrelevant and legally lame statement about not needing a warrant? That's puzzling and disturbing.
The enormity of the alleged crime can't make a difference before conviction. The police, according to that opinion, are allowed to not only get your IP address (which I consider reasonable), but also to hack in and search.
Looking at the Court's decision: "Furthermore, the Court FINDS suppression unwarranted because the Government did not need a warrant in this case." In this case, there was a warrant, but the Court said one was not needed. I find the argument that there is no expectation of privacy for one's IP address when on the internet reasonable, but the argument that a search of the contents of the computer is reasonable. The argument that there is no expectation of privacy for the contents of one's computer seems to be based on the fact that there are hackers out there, and that the FBI was able to hack in easily. One could as easily argue that burglars enter people's homes, and the police can break in, so there's no expectation of privacy there.
This ruling is pretty well irrelevant to the case, since the Court found that the warrants that actually covered all the searches were valid, but I still find it very troubling.
"The right of the people do be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...." My computer is one of my "effects" in the meaning of the Amendment, and it's usually in my house, which falls under the category "houses" in the Amendment. This is really bad Constitutional law, and is going to be overthrown on appeal, which I'd like to happen ASAP.
In the meantime, strong full-disk encryption is your friend.
A theory is a collection of observations and a model of how things seem to work to produce the observations. From the theory, you make predictions. You test the predictions, and adjust the theory. Eventually, you've got a pretty robust theory, and you know that because you've tested a whole lot of varied predictions and they hold.
You can't do theoretical physics without a source of observations. You don't have to make them yourself. You can come up with your theory, show how it explains things, and let other people test its other predictions, so it's possible to do physics by making up interesting theories for others to test.
In science, you make observations. You make a theory to explain them. You figure out what your theory predicts, and this is where the simulation comes in. You test the predictions. If your observations don't match your predictions, you adjust your theory. If they do, you make more predictions and test them. You can't refine a theory unless it predicts something false. (Alternately, you can make several variations and examine their predictions.)
Obviously, simulations aren't tests. You use simulations to predict consequences of the theory you plugged into the simulation, and you test the predictions. In this case, the simulation predicted that the gravitational wave detector would detect stuff, which indeed turned out to agree with what was observed. This increased confidence in the theory being simulated, and provides other means for observations.
In the scenario you outlined, you don't deduct $1200/year from tixes. Not even taxes. That reduces your taxable income, and saves you your effective tax rate times the $1200. At an income of about $26K, that's going to be only a few hundred dollars in tax reductions.