I know there are a lot of very reliable people with bad credit, as well as tons of unreliable sleazeballs with great credit. And you seem to be part of the first unfortunate group.
But I also think that statistically, a higher percentage of the lower scorers are unreliable and/or incompetent. And if that's true, it makes sense for employers to give prefernce for those with higher ratings. But it would be insane to use it as the one and only criteria, or even one of the most important.
I guess you'd like to see firemen go into a burning building, well-prepared with a printed list of the local credit "screw-ups." The folks above a certain credit score get pulled out first. Right?
That would make sense if my motivation was to punish people with low credit scores. You seem to have assumed that's my agenda.
But what I'm saying is simply that it would be in an employers interest to consider the credit score as one of many factors in hiring decisions.
Since I can't understand what benefit firemen would get from deliberately leaving some people to die a fiery death, the same argument doesn't apply at all. And the same goes for the rest of your examples.
It seems very likely to me that someone who screws up and/or is unreliable in one area in life, will show the same behaviour in others. I would bet that if you compare employee performance and reliability with people's credit scores at hiring, you'd find a substantial correlation. Somebody has probably already done this.
Of course, I'm just speculating, and would be happy to be corrected by facts, if anyone has some to offer.
That was actually done quite well by a San Francisco startup called iAmaze back in 1999. They got acquired by Netscape/AOL and the product was never heard from again...
I will never understand why some people thing 9/11 style attacks will create the exact opposite response in foreign countries than it did here. Killing one million muslims in Medina will radicalize muslim opinion and make them much more violence prone. Just as 9/11 radicalized US opinion. Threatening to exterminate Meccans will make people leave Mecca, not make them give up the fight.
If you're advocating genocide, that's different in that it does "work". If Al Queda kills every single American (300 million) of the US kills every single muslim (1200 million?), the conflict is over. But the remaining side will of course be universally hated by the rest of humanity. And rightly so.
Just that something "works" doesn't make it right. All sorts of hideous crimes work as a way to achieve various desrable goals.
Your original scenario, with numbers to make it more concrete.
Before: Local farmer produces for for $4. Sells it on local market for $5. People buy food for $5.
After: France sells surplus to importer for $2. He sells it on local market for $3. Farmer has to quit farming. Local people buy food for $3.
Clearly the local food buying public is better off in the After scenario. The argument that they're too poor to afford it makes no sense. They would be even less able to afford the locally produced, more expensive food.
The whole "money stays in the country" stuff is mumbo jumbo, possibly of mercantilist origin. Economy is about the flow of goods and services. The pieces of paper with numbers on them are only there to help keep track. It's usually more confusing than enlightening to look at the money flow, especially when some actors can just print more of it.
As for famines, they're caused by criminally bad government in the affected countries, not by rich countries dumping cheap food. If it was the causation you suggest, all the countries the west exports/dumps cheap food to would experience famines. But it in fact only occurs in very oppressive ones.
It's revealing that you decide that someone you know nothing about must be ignorant and uneducated, just for disagreeing with you.
The problem is stopping western farmers dumping their products on third world markets at far below cost. Destroying the local market for locally produced food, thereby driving local farmers out of business and off the land. The famines, are caused by US and EU farming subsidies.
This makes no sense.
Your claim/accusation is that US & EU food is made available to third world consumers at a lower cost than the local farmers can provide.
That could certainly cause some problems. But famine can not be one of them. Famines happen when food prices are too high for people to afford feeding themselves. Making food prices lower can only work to lower the risks of famine, not the other way.
I don't want to sound too condescending, but perhaps it can help to point out that when you hear some argument, even - no, especially - if it claims that someone you deeply dislike is doing something bad, try to critically think it through. Try evaluating and understanding what they're actually saying.
Also remember that if all your friends believe the same thing, chances are none of them have actually thought it through, and they're quite likely wrong. Or at least right for the wrong reason.
Can this "dark matter" be regular matter that is just not well lit, or does it have to be some new kind of elemental particle as much of the discussion here seems to imply?
Since the only things we can see out there are stars and things close enough to them to be lit by them, I would assume there can be enormous amounts of other things in space that we just don't see. Think a trillion earths, and/or huge thin gas clouds. But it sounds like that's not what's being discussed here.
That's not a search result. It's an ad. And it's clearly marked as such.
You can of course be annoyed at them selling ads and/or placing the ads above the search result. But don't confuse it with selling search results placement.
So do you think this will mean that the only results will be the ones that any particular big media Google partner wants to push that week?
That's the road Alta Vista, Excite and many other now forgotten search engines went down to make a quick buck back in the day. Google stubbornly stuck to providing relevant links for their users.
That's why Google is now raking in the billions, and they are very aware of that. There is no way they are going to throw away their biggest competitive advantage for a few lousy millions. It's not like they're desperate for money, and (see above) even when they were they didn't resort to things like this.
I can see how this made the local news in that town, but why the hell is one random British cop's one bad day at work on Slashdot?
No one even got their head smashed in! If you're gonna cover questionable police actions, there is much much more and better material, from closer to the Slashdot office complex to choose from.
And since when is tree climbing part of the "nerd" agenda? Is it the DNA part?
That's all true, but the biggest breeding factor for soldiers historically is rape.
Traditionally, when conquering a city, soldiers will rape all the women and pillage its riches. This is one of the main attractions of the soldier profession. Killing all the males is optional, but also has obvious evolutionary implications.
During WW2, certainly the Red Army practiced this to the fullest, and I would guess that it was practiced by more civilized armies more than was publiciced too.
There is no need for quantum effects to communicate at a distance. Regular electromagnetic radio waves work just fine for that. The delay due to being bound by speed of light is under 0.1 sec for anywhere on earth.
Politics aside, I wonder how much eavesdropping affects internet performance?
If every packet on the net is intercepted by, say, an average of three secret spy agencies, you would think the global network is only operating on 25% of it's capacity.
Or is this not how these technologies work?
Inversely, could there be some way to measure the amount of spying by observing network performance?
Slashdot Mirror
The submission seems to say "Google may do something evil in the future, let's start the backlash now so it's over with".
Wake me up when there's something real.
I know there are a lot of very reliable people with bad credit, as well as tons of unreliable sleazeballs with great credit. And you seem to be part of the first unfortunate group.
But I also think that statistically, a higher percentage of the lower scorers are unreliable and/or incompetent. And if that's true, it makes sense for employers to give prefernce for those with higher ratings. But it would be insane to use it as the one and only criteria, or even one of the most important.
I guess you'd like to see firemen go into a burning building, well-prepared with a printed list of the local credit "screw-ups." The folks above a certain credit score get pulled out first. Right?
That would make sense if my motivation was to punish people with low credit scores. You seem to have assumed that's my agenda.
But what I'm saying is simply that it would be in an employers interest to consider the credit score as one of many factors in hiring decisions.
Since I can't understand what benefit firemen would get from deliberately leaving some people to die a fiery death, the same argument doesn't apply at all. And the same goes for the rest of your examples.
It seems very likely to me that someone who screws up and/or is unreliable in one area in life, will show the same behaviour in others. I would bet that if you compare employee performance and reliability with people's credit scores at hiring, you'd find a substantial correlation. Somebody has probably already done this.
Of course, I'm just speculating, and would be happy to be corrected by facts, if anyone has some to offer.
That was actually done quite well by a San Francisco startup called iAmaze back in 1999. They got acquired by Netscape/AOL and the product was never heard from again...
Does this mean we can finally send Rob Schneider off the planet?
I will never understand why some people thing 9/11 style attacks will create the exact opposite response in foreign countries than it did here. Killing one million muslims in Medina will radicalize muslim opinion and make them much more violence prone. Just as 9/11 radicalized US opinion. Threatening to exterminate Meccans will make people leave Mecca, not make them give up the fight.
If you're advocating genocide, that's different in that it does "work". If Al Queda kills every single American (300 million) of the US kills every single muslim (1200 million?), the conflict is over. But the remaining side will of course be universally hated by the rest of humanity. And rightly so.
Just that something "works" doesn't make it right. All sorts of hideous crimes work as a way to achieve various desrable goals.
Your original scenario, with numbers to make it more concrete.
Before:
Local farmer produces for for $4. Sells it on local market for $5. People buy food for $5.
After:
France sells surplus to importer for $2. He sells it on local market for $3. Farmer has to quit farming. Local people buy food for $3.
Clearly the local food buying public is better off in the After scenario. The argument that they're too poor to afford it makes no sense. They would be even less able to afford the locally produced, more expensive food.
The whole "money stays in the country" stuff is mumbo jumbo, possibly of mercantilist origin. Economy is about the flow of goods and services. The pieces of paper with numbers on them are only there to help keep track. It's usually more confusing than enlightening to look at the money flow, especially when some actors can just print more of it.
As for famines, they're caused by criminally bad government in the affected countries, not by rich countries dumping cheap food. If it was the causation you suggest, all the countries the west exports/dumps cheap food to would experience famines. But it in fact only occurs in very oppressive ones.
It's revealing that you decide that someone you know nothing about must be ignorant and uneducated, just for disagreeing with you.
The problem is stopping western farmers dumping their products on third world markets at far below cost. Destroying the local market for locally produced food, thereby driving local farmers out of business and off the land. The famines, are caused by US and EU farming subsidies.
This makes no sense.
Your claim/accusation is that US & EU food is made available to third world consumers at a lower cost than the local farmers can provide.
That could certainly cause some problems. But famine can not be one of them. Famines happen when food prices are too high for people to afford feeding themselves. Making food prices lower can only work to lower the risks of famine, not the other way.
I don't want to sound too condescending, but perhaps it can help to point out that when you hear some argument, even - no, especially - if it claims that someone you deeply dislike is doing something bad, try to critically think it through. Try evaluating and understanding what they're actually saying.
Also remember that if all your friends believe the same thing, chances are none of them have actually thought it through, and they're quite likely wrong. Or at least right for the wrong reason.
I have a basic question:
Can this "dark matter" be regular matter that is just not well lit, or does it have to be some new kind of elemental particle as much of the discussion here seems to imply?
Since the only things we can see out there are stars and things close enough to them to be lit by them, I would assume there can be enormous amounts of other things in space that we just don't see. Think a trillion earths, and/or huge thin gas clouds. But it sounds like that's not what's being discussed here.
That's not a search result. It's an ad. And it's clearly marked as such.
You can of course be annoyed at them selling ads and/or placing the ads above the search result. But don't confuse it with selling search results placement.
So do you think this will mean that the only results will be the ones that any particular big media Google partner wants to push that week?
That's the road Alta Vista, Excite and many other now forgotten search engines went down to make a quick buck back in the day. Google stubbornly stuck to providing relevant links for their users.
That's why Google is now raking in the billions, and they are very aware of that. There is no way they are going to throw away their biggest competitive advantage for a few lousy millions. It's not like they're desperate for money, and (see above) even when they were they didn't resort to things like this.
It started with search results placement...
Google doesn't sell search results placement.
Actually, there is strong evidence that humans have a very strong evolutionary impulse to not kill each other.
More details here
So what you're really saying is that Pluto shouldn't count because it's adopted?
Even without wires, bugs and fleas would be able to get in the bed by hitchhiking on your person, as well as pillows and blankets.
I can see how this made the local news in that town, but why the hell is one random British cop's one bad day at work on Slashdot?
No one even got their head smashed in! If you're gonna cover questionable police actions, there is much much more and better material, from closer to the Slashdot office complex to choose from.
And since when is tree climbing part of the "nerd" agenda? Is it the DNA part?
That's all true, but the biggest breeding factor for soldiers historically is rape.
Traditionally, when conquering a city, soldiers will rape all the women and pillage its riches. This is one of the main attractions of the soldier profession. Killing all the males is optional, but also has obvious evolutionary implications.
During WW2, certainly the Red Army practiced this to the fullest, and I would guess that it was practiced by more civilized armies more than was publiciced too.
AFAIK, they haven't found any ancient factories at all.
And if you go to earth, you won't find any factories for power stations. Some things are built from scratch.
For the first colony in a galaxy, it would make sense that they brought their power supplies from where they started.
It just means that the Horde women are cow spankin' fugly!
We have essentially the same genes as 3 generations ago. Evolutionary change takes much, much longer than that,
We just live in a much better environment these days. Had our ancestors gotten to live like we, they would have been just as healthy.
Personally, for example, I am formally employed as a software engineer, but I read Slashdot far more than I did a few years back.
I don't think this will be much of a hit.
If they could produce pictureless television, it would be a very different matter. But that will probably just remain a dream for many years.
And they wonder why consumers want to block all ads. Its because of illegal virus ads like this
I thought I followed the field fairly well, but I have never heard of any previous virus ads like this.
There is no need for quantum effects to communicate at a distance. Regular electromagnetic radio waves work just fine for that. The delay due to being bound by speed of light is under 0.1 sec for anywhere on earth.
Politics aside, I wonder how much eavesdropping affects internet performance?
If every packet on the net is intercepted by, say, an average of three secret spy agencies, you would think the global network is only operating on 25% of it's capacity.
Or is this not how these technologies work?
Inversely, could there be some way to measure the amount of spying by observing network performance?