Nope, as the other poster has mentioned, here in Germany the consumer chooses his provider and depending on where you live you can choose between a dozen or so suppliers. Also, switching is very easy. Basically, all you have to do is fill out a form with your new supplier and he will take care of everything else.
The system actually works really well. There's real competition and it's hassle-free.
I, for example, have a contract with a provider that provides 100% renewable energy into the grid. And I only pay about a Euro more per month than I paid before.
Yeah, see, I believe that it's working, I'm asking how it's physically possible. Because regardless of who you're paying, when you draw current from the grid, that power necessarily comes from everyone who is proving current to the grid, including electric companies that don't use renewable energy. If there's a non-renewable energy source providing power to the grind, you're using non-renewable energy. How is it possible that you're not? That's my question.
The city doesn't get to choose, you do. I have the choice of 3 different gas companies, but only one pipe comes in to my house. I can switch whenever I want to with only a few days notice.
Please, just tell me how this works. I believe that it occurs, I just can't see any way it is physically possible. How can you "choose a supplier" of gas, when your pipe is the exact same pipe that every supplier and customer uses. Whoever supplies you is, by physical necessity supplying your neighbor because you can't direct the gas molecules to only visit one house.
Actually, it is a lot like second party DSL providers, where it is always same phone company, but you pick the name on the bill and it is usually cheaper than using the phone company directly, for some bizarre reason. Ditto for my gas, the company that owns the pipes is almost never the cheapest, it is always the refinery out in the boonies.
It may be like DSL in practice, but in physical reality it's not the same. Because you can receive a different signal than your neighbor, and your DSL provider can have different equipment on their end that makes a material difference to what you receive on yours. They can also have better router etc.
I just don't get how you can get materially different service from people putting fluids into a pipe.
Credit is needed in a system where you are able to make purchases in certain items. The problem is when people over leverage themselves.
Well, that's how the problem starts.
The problem gets compounded when you treat debt like it's a magical source of new money. As in, if I loan you $10, then you have $10, but then I also have a "debt asset" worth $10, which makes a total of $20. That's exactly how people were explaining it to me as recently as 2007 when suggesting that debt is good and actually "creates wealth". But that's bullshit. Ultimately there's not $20, there's the $10 I used to have but instead gave to you, and at the end of the day I can at best expect to end up with that $10 back plus interest. But people kept treating the debt itself like it was additional money, selling the debt, and making additional loans with debt as collateral -- debt-backed debt! So there were trillions of non-existent dollars spinning around in a big financial machine and everyone loved it. It reminds me of Worldcom who made billions of dollars selling unused bandwidth to a subsidiary and then buying it back, tons of money spinning in circles but none of it actually real.
Now this was all fine and dandy for a while, but eventually the system only works if that debt is paid off, which is when the problem became apparent. It turns out that a lot of that debt was never going to be paid back, which means the big debt-amplification-machine was not just running based on a false premise, is was running on nothing. When the debt failed to be paid, that failure was amplified up the system and soon our entire financial system is at risk because of an unusual number of home mortgage defaults. The bubble was burst, the curtain was lifted, and now we're all paying for it.
Credit is essential to our economy. That's for sure. But we can't keep treating debt like it's wealth when really it's a negative asset that you hope to recoup with some payoff. Too much of it is bad, building a whole economic system on it is, well, what we're seeing the consequences of now.
But the Constitution does not have any magical power to protect us. It is a statement that WE must support. Our forefathers died for those words.
Exactly! I like to think of it this way: The Constitution is not a list of Things That Are -- meaning we have freedom of speech because the 1st Amendment says we do. The Constitution is instead a list of Things That We, The People, Demand -- meaning that the 1st Amendment says we demand that Congress respect our freedom of speech, and if they don't they'll get the King George treatment.
To the extent that we have retained our rights, it is because we have refused to abrogate them, and to the extent we have lost our rights, it is because we have allowed them to be taken without consequence.
As you said, Gas is gas, water is water, etc.. so it doesn't really matter WHICH gas you get, just the AMMOUNT matters.
You have a meter at the place where the gas leaves the infrastructure (which is owned by an entire different company or the City).
The service providers have meters at the places where they put their gas into the infrastructure.
Okay, THAT makes sense to me. The thing is, that means that the City (or whoever owns the meter at your house) can select between different providers as they choose, but you are still stuck with a single choice, and thus this is still a monopoly. It's like my local phone monopoly can pick whatever providers they want for their servers or internet connectivity, but I'm still stuck with them as my only choice (outside of orthogonal technologies like cell or cable phone).
I was getting the impression that there was some way for there to actually be competition at the end-user consumer level for these last-mile natural monopolies.
I have one of each going to my house but I can buy gas, water and power from different companies. I never deal with the companies which own and maintain the actual pipes and cables, that is done by my service provider.
If there's one gas pipe going into your house, and this same pipe is connected to your neighbor's house, then how exactly can you select a different provider? It's not like Gas Co A can put gas into the pipeline and make sure that only you get that gas, while your neighbor gets Gas Co B's gas. Whatever gas you use is going to necessarily come from both Gas Co A and gas Co B in proportion to the amount of gas they're putting into the line.
That's what's confusing me. I really don't understand. Is there some deal they have where all the providers share all their profits, and you're basically choosing what call center you go to and who you write your bill to? How can they actually provide meaningfully different service via the same pipes?
Well, if you want me to take what is in the next textbook seriously, yeah. Or at least, if you want me to believe in evolution as firmly as most scientists believe it
And you should get beyond that textbook if you want me to take your skepticism as anything more than that of an a-priori prejudice. If you will not believe in anything for which there has existed errors, then you cannot believe in anything, including anything you yourself have reasoned about.
(and I attribute that to having no alternative that matches their religious views or social pressures).
You mean no alternative which stands up to scientific scrutiny. There were alternatives which were hotly debated between until there was sufficient evidence to throw one away. To this day there are hotly debated variations on the theory to evolution. Sorry but as much as the disbelieving like to talk about the "religion" of science, having a scientifically valid way of upending the "orthodoxy" is highly desired, since that's how you get your name in the history books. What do you think Charles Darwin was in his day if not, in your parlance, a "heretic"? Oh and no he isn't a "saint" or "prophet" now, since we've modified and corrected his theories just as we have Newton's.
As for micro evolution, I decline to take the bait. But I will say that the delineation between micro- and macro- evolution appears to come down to a philosophical, rather than observable, difference.
Good for you. There is no observable difference, which is why it's not considered a difference by biologists, and only part of the "philosophy" of deniers who think that's a way to drive a wedge between theory and observed fact. The "trap" involves showing how it is logically impossible to believe in one but not the other.
And, lastly, the evidence of evolution thing... refer back to the interpretation-of-evidence comments that I made. Data does not support this or that theory by simply existing. Data is interpreted into evidence. The question of whether or not evidence is being interpreted correctly appears to be a very poignant consideration in light of the numerous errors that have been latched on to in support of evolution.
Fair enough, though I have to warn you that it's very telling that you yourself latch onto the errors, as if that's the only support of evolution and without those data points, the whole edifice is called into question. There are mountains of evidence for evolution, much of it verified as well as anything in biology can be verified.
As much as I'd like to get into a discussion about evidence for evolution or other theories and against evolution and other theories, I unfortunately don't have time nor is slashdot the best place anyways, hehe... so I'm constraining myself more to the philosophy of science side of things.
Yes. If you actually had evidence for an alternative theory,/. is the last place you should post it. A scientific journal would be the ideal place, as it would be the start of your ascent into the history books. Of course when this doesn't happen, it's because the religious cabal rejected your "truth" for their own "religion", and not that your idea fails scientific rigor. It couldn't be that coming up with a better hypothesis is excruciatingly difficult because the current theory is very, very good. Oh no. That's impossible. It must be that you are Galileo and science is the Catholic Church.
There is a big difference between infrastructure and service.
In theory, but in practice how does that actually work? There's a single gas pipe coming into my house, and it's connected to the gas pipe that also goes into my neighbor's house. Our gas must necessarily be coming from the same source, it must necessarily be the same gas.
Because I work for a large US utility, I know that most utilities have infrastructure in a separate business unit and the service business unit in another.
But what does that mean outside of corporate accounting and the name on my bill? How can there be meaningfully different service providers using that same natural gas infrastructure?
I see how it is at least possible with something like internet, because unlike a gas pipe, different wires (or the same multiplexed wire and so on) can be carrying different signals, and part of the infrastructure includes the routers at the ISP. This was how different ISPs in Ann Arbor were able to provide meaningfully different ADSL service using Ameritech's phone lines, simply by having better ADSL equipment and better routers and so on. Of course that differentiation ended the very second you had a problem that involved the phone lines themselves. Then you were dealing with Ameritech, who was required by law to lease their lines to 3rd parties and fix problems, but had about zero motivation to do anything in a timely fashion since they sold (shitty shitty) ADSL themselves.
Gas is gas. Water is water. Sewage is sewage. You can't multiplex gas molecules. How can you have differentiated service?
I'd prefer to say a grossly over-simplified version:)
Fair enough.:)
Anyhow, in my opinion, the by-population-plus-2 formula adds a bit of wackiness to a system that would be best without it, but is not that terrible. Compare, for example, the wacky-accident-of-history based procedures determining the government of Canada in recent weeks.
I honestly know nothing about what is happening in Canada. It's hard enough for me to keep track of U.S. politics, and I'm still pretty exhausted from our elections.:P
It's the statewide winner-take-all aspect that really produces injustice. I've voted for President half a dozen times and only in this last election could you reasonably say there was any chance my vote would make any difference. Several of those elections were quite close, but if you didn't live in Florida or Ohio, your vote wasn't significant.
Absolutely agreed. This is the first election I actually felt strongly about, and yet my vote was a-priori worthless. And we wonder why voter turnout is low? If we had proportional electoral votes in every state, it at least wouldn't be a completely and utter travesty and mockery of the democratic process.
In my last post I mentioned an Amendment but didn't mention any specifics because while one is clearly needed to fix our system, it's unclear what exactly the scope and nature of that Amendment should be. Upend the whole system? Specify a new system in excruciating detail? Minimize loopholes or minimize what could in the future be considered anachronisms? A minimalist approach is probably best, and probably more likely to be successful. Bearing that in mind, how about an Amendment requiring all states to allocate electoral votes proportionally? Not only would this mean that the (political) minority populations in a given state wouldn't be completely voiceless, it would also help validate the concept of 3rd party voting by allowing them to get more than zero electoral votes.
It only seems to contradict global warming if you have only a superficial understanding of it. "Monotonic increase of temperature" was never a theory of global warming, so because a piece of data contradicts your understanding means nothing.
Also, the moth thing is more an example of natural selection than the evolution of a new trait. We've observed evolution in labs with flies and plants. Again, just because a layman's example and understanding doesn't seem to completely explain the theory, that doesn't mean that's all the understanding or explanation possible.
I think you need to look up what "law" means in a scientific context. The only "Law" of gravity I'm familiar with is Newton's Law of Gravity, which is known to be inaccurate and has been supplanted (at the theoretical if not all practical levels) by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. So tell me how a law is something more than a theory again?
The scientific community is completely open to other explanations that have actual evidence behind them. Debate about evolution happens all the time, and is ongoing as further evidence is accumulated. Now if you mean that science hasn't embraced whatever non-evolutionary theory you think is being neglected, well that's probably because outside of some blogs there's little to no evidence for it. We've watched evolution* happen in controlled environments. If you've got anything resembling the tiniest fraction of the evidence for evolution, your theory would be considered. If it had as much evidence as evolution, you'd up-end biology (much like evolutionary theory up-ended it).
Lastly, am I supposed to be shocked or dismayed that a textbook contained an error? Scientific knowledge advances, things previously held to be true are corrected, and freshmen-level textbooks often lag behind. And is your argument really that a false "missing link" means that humans (as opposed to all the other life forms on the planet) didn't undergo evolution? That's not the "proof". It's a step in the family tree. Just because you incorrectly identified your grandmother does not mean you have no family tree.
* Deliberate trap for the "Well sure microevolution is observed fact, but that doesn't mean anything about macro" response. Feel free not to take the bait.
The birds are the same? Evolution! They're not the same? Uh, convergent evolution. That's it!
Well what would you call it when two species that are not closely related end up developing the same features?
It really is just a theory folks. How about some warnings for the textbooks?
Oh, right, this is another of those "argumentation through lack of understanding" things. Of course you aren't going to know what any of these words (like "theory") actually mean. My bad. As you were.
So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?
Here's a hint... parental consent to statutory rape does not make it any less illegal.
Well I'm not the kind of person who figures that any breaking of a law should necessarily be punished, nor that all laws are inherently just or wise or whatever. Consent laws fall squarely into that category, since they're often nonsensical and contradictory or outright broken. This case isn't all that ludicrous (compared to say someone getting arrested on their 18th birthday for sleeping with their 17 year old partner), but it does seem like a gray area. Should they have been punished for this crime? I don't know, but I'm not going to definitively say yes.
That said, when the only thing stopping you from being charged with a serious crime is the cooperation of your partner and their parent, who is a SHERIFF, you damn well better consider what happens if the relationship goes south! Oh and for God's sake use protection! Those are two big lack-of-responsibility red flags right there that tell me he got more or less what he deserved, or at least what he should have expected.
My main issue with the analogy is that, to the extent that the internet is like a series of tubes, how is it not like a truck? Data flow is not continuous, it's sent in discreet packets of variable sizes, it can take multiple routes to get to a destination, and every so often at a switching point there's a collision so the data never arrives and has to be resent. Honestly, I think roads and trucks is a much better analogy. Given that, I think it's safe to say that he still really had no idea what he was talking about, and the plausibility of one of his analogies is due to chance alone.
You make it sound awfully high-minded and artfully constructed. It looks to me more like a crude political compromise to get Rhode Island, Delaware and Georgia to sign on to this Constitution thing without feeling like Virginia and New York were going to completely trample them.
That's the mostly revisionist version of the nature of the compromise. It wasn't strictly speaking an issue of small population states vs big states. It was an issue of slave states vs non-slave states. Yes, the southern states tended to have lower populations than the northern states, certainly in aggregate, and they were worried about being trampled by the populous states like New York due to the population difference. But the line was slave vs non-slave*.
That's not the only compromise in the Constitution regarding slavery. More obvious than the electoral college is the compromise that only three fifths of slaves would count for purposes of determining representatives and taxes. The slave states, having such large populations of slaves, wanted them to count fully (even though those people could not vote and were clearly not represented by the Representatives of their states), while the free states wanted them not to count at all. Also Congress was also prohibited by the Constitution from passing laws prohibiting the importation of slaves until the year 1808, and practically this meant there could be no debate over the issue in Congress until that time.
These compromised postponed the issue and allowed the United States to be formed and to survive, but didn't erase the issue which ultimately culminated in the Civil War. Whether these were good or bad compromises isn't really the issue, here. My point is that these really are nothing more than a political compromise for an issue that doesn't even exist anymore. A compromise that no longer works, for anything.
Your observations on the practical realities of the college vis-a-vis the ret-conned "rural vs urban" states purpose are correct. In addition, the college actually does much more harm than good in granting power to the rural areas. Sure Wyoming has slightly more influence than they might without an extra two electors. On the other hand, rural California, rural New York, even rural Illinois are all more populous than Wyoming yet still almost completely irrelevant. Their votes aren't just drowned out by more populous areas, their votes don't matter at all, their portion of the electors actually goes towards whoever the metropolitan centers in their states votes towards, even if it's a different candidate. How can we argue in favor of a system on the basis of giving the under-represented a greater voice, when the reality is it completely takes away representation from many, many more?
It's a broken system, it was a passable political compromise in the day it was created, it serves no function any more. We need an Amendment.
* That's really a misnomer, since all of the states had slaves in them at the time of the Constitutional Convention, but the trend was apparent.
Who said anything about "ever"? We all know that the price of RAM goes down, and the capacity goes up, and we all know this, so what's the problem? 8GB is a lot of RAM for a desktop today, and in the future the price of those 4GB DIMMs will decrease. Or buy them today for a total of 16GB, and a lot less cost than a flash disk (and are people really using these as RAM or as "fast" non-volatile storage? Because even with modern max write cycles that seems like a silly thing to do)
By the way, part of the reason for only having 2 slots per channel is because it makes it much easier to reach higher DRAM speeds. It's a tradeoff.
Sure a bad strap is worse than no strap at all. It's not that the people are trying to throw it, they are using the strap to hold it in their hand, leaving their fingers free to move more quickly on the buttons. That's what the strap is for.
Can you explain to me how that's supposed to work? Seriously, I'm baffled. The strap goes around your wrist, how does that keep the wiimote in your hand? I really want to know what I'm missing, here.
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Nope, as the other poster has mentioned, here in Germany the consumer chooses his provider and depending on where you live you can choose between a dozen or so suppliers. Also, switching is very easy. Basically, all you have to do is fill out a form with your new supplier and he will take care of everything else.
The system actually works really well. There's real competition and it's hassle-free.
I, for example, have a contract with a provider that provides 100% renewable energy into the grid. And I only pay about a Euro more per month than I paid before.
Yeah, see, I believe that it's working, I'm asking how it's physically possible. Because regardless of who you're paying, when you draw current from the grid, that power necessarily comes from everyone who is proving current to the grid, including electric companies that don't use renewable energy. If there's a non-renewable energy source providing power to the grind, you're using non-renewable energy. How is it possible that you're not? That's my question.
The city doesn't get to choose, you do. I have the choice of 3 different gas companies, but only one pipe comes in to my house. I can switch whenever I want to with only a few days notice.
Please, just tell me how this works. I believe that it occurs, I just can't see any way it is physically possible. How can you "choose a supplier" of gas, when your pipe is the exact same pipe that every supplier and customer uses. Whoever supplies you is, by physical necessity supplying your neighbor because you can't direct the gas molecules to only visit one house.
Actually, it is a lot like second party DSL providers, where it is always same phone company, but you pick the name on the bill and it is usually cheaper than using the phone company directly, for some bizarre reason. Ditto for my gas, the company that owns the pipes is almost never the cheapest, it is always the refinery out in the boonies.
It may be like DSL in practice, but in physical reality it's not the same. Because you can receive a different signal than your neighbor, and your DSL provider can have different equipment on their end that makes a material difference to what you receive on yours. They can also have better router etc.
I just don't get how you can get materially different service from people putting fluids into a pipe.
Credit is needed in a system where you are able to make purchases in certain items. The problem is when people over leverage themselves.
Well, that's how the problem starts.
The problem gets compounded when you treat debt like it's a magical source of new money. As in, if I loan you $10, then you have $10, but then I also have a "debt asset" worth $10, which makes a total of $20. That's exactly how people were explaining it to me as recently as 2007 when suggesting that debt is good and actually "creates wealth". But that's bullshit. Ultimately there's not $20, there's the $10 I used to have but instead gave to you, and at the end of the day I can at best expect to end up with that $10 back plus interest. But people kept treating the debt itself like it was additional money, selling the debt, and making additional loans with debt as collateral -- debt-backed debt! So there were trillions of non-existent dollars spinning around in a big financial machine and everyone loved it. It reminds me of Worldcom who made billions of dollars selling unused bandwidth to a subsidiary and then buying it back, tons of money spinning in circles but none of it actually real.
Now this was all fine and dandy for a while, but eventually the system only works if that debt is paid off, which is when the problem became apparent. It turns out that a lot of that debt was never going to be paid back, which means the big debt-amplification-machine was not just running based on a false premise, is was running on nothing. When the debt failed to be paid, that failure was amplified up the system and soon our entire financial system is at risk because of an unusual number of home mortgage defaults. The bubble was burst, the curtain was lifted, and now we're all paying for it.
Credit is essential to our economy. That's for sure. But we can't keep treating debt like it's wealth when really it's a negative asset that you hope to recoup with some payoff. Too much of it is bad, building a whole economic system on it is, well, what we're seeing the consequences of now.
Thanks for the hint! Now I know why my life of crime has been so slow to take off.
But the Constitution does not have any magical power to protect us. It is a statement that WE must support. Our forefathers died for those words.
Exactly! I like to think of it this way: The Constitution is not a list of Things That Are -- meaning we have freedom of speech because the 1st Amendment says we do. The Constitution is instead a list of Things That We, The People, Demand -- meaning that the 1st Amendment says we demand that Congress respect our freedom of speech, and if they don't they'll get the King George treatment.
To the extent that we have retained our rights, it is because we have refused to abrogate them, and to the extent we have lost our rights, it is because we have allowed them to be taken without consequence.
Yeah, Spam already came in cans! Duh!
Works that way here in Germany, too.
As you said, Gas is gas, water is water, etc.. so it doesn't really matter WHICH gas you get, just the AMMOUNT matters.
You have a meter at the place where the gas leaves the infrastructure (which is owned by an entire different company or the City).
The service providers have meters at the places where they put their gas into the infrastructure.
Okay, THAT makes sense to me. The thing is, that means that the City (or whoever owns the meter at your house) can select between different providers as they choose, but you are still stuck with a single choice, and thus this is still a monopoly. It's like my local phone monopoly can pick whatever providers they want for their servers or internet connectivity, but I'm still stuck with them as my only choice (outside of orthogonal technologies like cell or cable phone).
I was getting the impression that there was some way for there to actually be competition at the end-user consumer level for these last-mile natural monopolies.
I have one of each going to my house but I can buy gas, water and power from different companies. I never deal with the companies which own and maintain the actual pipes and cables, that is done by my service provider.
If there's one gas pipe going into your house, and this same pipe is connected to your neighbor's house, then how exactly can you select a different provider? It's not like Gas Co A can put gas into the pipeline and make sure that only you get that gas, while your neighbor gets Gas Co B's gas. Whatever gas you use is going to necessarily come from both Gas Co A and gas Co B in proportion to the amount of gas they're putting into the line.
That's what's confusing me. I really don't understand. Is there some deal they have where all the providers share all their profits, and you're basically choosing what call center you go to and who you write your bill to? How can they actually provide meaningfully different service via the same pipes?
Well, if you want me to take what is in the next textbook seriously, yeah. Or at least, if you want me to believe in evolution as firmly as most scientists believe it
And you should get beyond that textbook if you want me to take your skepticism as anything more than that of an a-priori prejudice. If you will not believe in anything for which there has existed errors, then you cannot believe in anything, including anything you yourself have reasoned about.
(and I attribute that to having no alternative that matches their religious views or social pressures).
You mean no alternative which stands up to scientific scrutiny. There were alternatives which were hotly debated between until there was sufficient evidence to throw one away. To this day there are hotly debated variations on the theory to evolution. Sorry but as much as the disbelieving like to talk about the "religion" of science, having a scientifically valid way of upending the "orthodoxy" is highly desired, since that's how you get your name in the history books. What do you think Charles Darwin was in his day if not, in your parlance, a "heretic"? Oh and no he isn't a "saint" or "prophet" now, since we've modified and corrected his theories just as we have Newton's.
As for micro evolution, I decline to take the bait. But I will say that the delineation between micro- and macro- evolution appears to come down to a philosophical, rather than observable, difference.
Good for you. There is no observable difference, which is why it's not considered a difference by biologists, and only part of the "philosophy" of deniers who think that's a way to drive a wedge between theory and observed fact. The "trap" involves showing how it is logically impossible to believe in one but not the other.
And, lastly, the evidence of evolution thing... refer back to the interpretation-of-evidence comments that I made. Data does not support this or that theory by simply existing. Data is interpreted into evidence. The question of whether or not evidence is being interpreted correctly appears to be a very poignant consideration in light of the numerous errors that have been latched on to in support of evolution.
Fair enough, though I have to warn you that it's very telling that you yourself latch onto the errors, as if that's the only support of evolution and without those data points, the whole edifice is called into question. There are mountains of evidence for evolution, much of it verified as well as anything in biology can be verified.
As much as I'd like to get into a discussion about evidence for evolution or other theories and against evolution and other theories, I unfortunately don't have time nor is slashdot the best place anyways, hehe... so I'm constraining myself more to the philosophy of science side of things.
Yes. If you actually had evidence for an alternative theory, /. is the last place you should post it. A scientific journal would be the ideal place, as it would be the start of your ascent into the history books. Of course when this doesn't happen, it's because the religious cabal rejected your "truth" for their own "religion", and not that your idea fails scientific rigor. It couldn't be that coming up with a better hypothesis is excruciatingly difficult because the current theory is very, very good. Oh no. That's impossible. It must be that you are Galileo and science is the Catholic Church.
There is a big difference between infrastructure and service.
In theory, but in practice how does that actually work? There's a single gas pipe coming into my house, and it's connected to the gas pipe that also goes into my neighbor's house. Our gas must necessarily be coming from the same source, it must necessarily be the same gas.
Because I work for a large US utility, I know that most utilities have infrastructure in a separate business unit and the service business unit in another.
But what does that mean outside of corporate accounting and the name on my bill? How can there be meaningfully different service providers using that same natural gas infrastructure?
I see how it is at least possible with something like internet, because unlike a gas pipe, different wires (or the same multiplexed wire and so on) can be carrying different signals, and part of the infrastructure includes the routers at the ISP. This was how different ISPs in Ann Arbor were able to provide meaningfully different ADSL service using Ameritech's phone lines, simply by having better ADSL equipment and better routers and so on. Of course that differentiation ended the very second you had a problem that involved the phone lines themselves. Then you were dealing with Ameritech, who was required by law to lease their lines to 3rd parties and fix problems, but had about zero motivation to do anything in a timely fashion since they sold (shitty shitty) ADSL themselves.
Gas is gas. Water is water. Sewage is sewage. You can't multiplex gas molecules. How can you have differentiated service?
I'd prefer to say a grossly over-simplified version :)
Fair enough. :)
Anyhow, in my opinion, the by-population-plus-2 formula adds a bit of wackiness to a system that would be best without it, but is not that terrible. Compare, for example, the wacky-accident-of-history based procedures determining the government of Canada in recent weeks.
I honestly know nothing about what is happening in Canada. It's hard enough for me to keep track of U.S. politics, and I'm still pretty exhausted from our elections. :P
It's the statewide winner-take-all aspect that really produces injustice. I've voted for President half a dozen times and only in this last election could you reasonably say there was any chance my vote would make any difference. Several of those elections were quite close, but if you didn't live in Florida or Ohio, your vote wasn't significant.
Absolutely agreed. This is the first election I actually felt strongly about, and yet my vote was a-priori worthless. And we wonder why voter turnout is low? If we had proportional electoral votes in every state, it at least wouldn't be a completely and utter travesty and mockery of the democratic process.
In my last post I mentioned an Amendment but didn't mention any specifics because while one is clearly needed to fix our system, it's unclear what exactly the scope and nature of that Amendment should be. Upend the whole system? Specify a new system in excruciating detail? Minimize loopholes or minimize what could in the future be considered anachronisms? A minimalist approach is probably best, and probably more likely to be successful. Bearing that in mind, how about an Amendment requiring all states to allocate electoral votes proportionally? Not only would this mean that the (political) minority populations in a given state wouldn't be completely voiceless, it would also help validate the concept of 3rd party voting by allowing them to get more than zero electoral votes.
It only seems to contradict global warming if you have only a superficial understanding of it. "Monotonic increase of temperature" was never a theory of global warming, so because a piece of data contradicts your understanding means nothing.
Also, the moth thing is more an example of natural selection than the evolution of a new trait. We've observed evolution in labs with flies and plants. Again, just because a layman's example and understanding doesn't seem to completely explain the theory, that doesn't mean that's all the understanding or explanation possible.
I think you need to look up what "law" means in a scientific context. The only "Law" of gravity I'm familiar with is Newton's Law of Gravity, which is known to be inaccurate and has been supplanted (at the theoretical if not all practical levels) by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. So tell me how a law is something more than a theory again?
The scientific community is completely open to other explanations that have actual evidence behind them. Debate about evolution happens all the time, and is ongoing as further evidence is accumulated. Now if you mean that science hasn't embraced whatever non-evolutionary theory you think is being neglected, well that's probably because outside of some blogs there's little to no evidence for it. We've watched evolution* happen in controlled environments. If you've got anything resembling the tiniest fraction of the evidence for evolution, your theory would be considered. If it had as much evidence as evolution, you'd up-end biology (much like evolutionary theory up-ended it).
Lastly, am I supposed to be shocked or dismayed that a textbook contained an error? Scientific knowledge advances, things previously held to be true are corrected, and freshmen-level textbooks often lag behind. And is your argument really that a false "missing link" means that humans (as opposed to all the other life forms on the planet) didn't undergo evolution? That's not the "proof". It's a step in the family tree. Just because you incorrectly identified your grandmother does not mean you have no family tree.
* Deliberate trap for the "Well sure microevolution is observed fact, but that doesn't mean anything about macro" response. Feel free not to take the bait.
The birds are the same? Evolution! They're not the same? Uh, convergent evolution. That's it!
Well what would you call it when two species that are not closely related end up developing the same features?
It really is just a theory folks. How about some warnings for the textbooks?
Oh, right, this is another of those "argumentation through lack of understanding" things. Of course you aren't going to know what any of these words (like "theory") actually mean. My bad. As you were.
So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?
Here's a hint... parental consent to statutory rape does not make it any less illegal.
Well I'm not the kind of person who figures that any breaking of a law should necessarily be punished, nor that all laws are inherently just or wise or whatever. Consent laws fall squarely into that category, since they're often nonsensical and contradictory or outright broken. This case isn't all that ludicrous (compared to say someone getting arrested on their 18th birthday for sleeping with their 17 year old partner), but it does seem like a gray area. Should they have been punished for this crime? I don't know, but I'm not going to definitively say yes.
That said, when the only thing stopping you from being charged with a serious crime is the cooperation of your partner and their parent, who is a SHERIFF, you damn well better consider what happens if the relationship goes south! Oh and for God's sake use protection! Those are two big lack-of-responsibility red flags right there that tell me he got more or less what he deserved, or at least what he should have expected.
My main issue with the analogy is that, to the extent that the internet is like a series of tubes, how is it not like a truck? Data flow is not continuous, it's sent in discreet packets of variable sizes, it can take multiple routes to get to a destination, and every so often at a switching point there's a collision so the data never arrives and has to be resent. Honestly, I think roads and trucks is a much better analogy. Given that, I think it's safe to say that he still really had no idea what he was talking about, and the plausibility of one of his analogies is due to chance alone.
Actually I have choice for my electricity and my phone and my natural gas.
Could you explain how that works? I'm honestly curious. Are their multiple gas pipes and electric cables running to your house?
You make it sound awfully high-minded and artfully constructed. It looks to me more like a crude political compromise to get Rhode Island, Delaware and Georgia to sign on to this Constitution thing without feeling like Virginia and New York were going to completely trample them.
That's the mostly revisionist version of the nature of the compromise. It wasn't strictly speaking an issue of small population states vs big states. It was an issue of slave states vs non-slave states. Yes, the southern states tended to have lower populations than the northern states, certainly in aggregate, and they were worried about being trampled by the populous states like New York due to the population difference. But the line was slave vs non-slave*.
That's not the only compromise in the Constitution regarding slavery. More obvious than the electoral college is the compromise that only three fifths of slaves would count for purposes of determining representatives and taxes. The slave states, having such large populations of slaves, wanted them to count fully (even though those people could not vote and were clearly not represented by the Representatives of their states), while the free states wanted them not to count at all. Also Congress was also prohibited by the Constitution from passing laws prohibiting the importation of slaves until the year 1808, and practically this meant there could be no debate over the issue in Congress until that time.
These compromised postponed the issue and allowed the United States to be formed and to survive, but didn't erase the issue which ultimately culminated in the Civil War. Whether these were good or bad compromises isn't really the issue, here. My point is that these really are nothing more than a political compromise for an issue that doesn't even exist anymore. A compromise that no longer works, for anything.
Your observations on the practical realities of the college vis-a-vis the ret-conned "rural vs urban" states purpose are correct. In addition, the college actually does much more harm than good in granting power to the rural areas. Sure Wyoming has slightly more influence than they might without an extra two electors. On the other hand, rural California, rural New York, even rural Illinois are all more populous than Wyoming yet still almost completely irrelevant. Their votes aren't just drowned out by more populous areas, their votes don't matter at all, their portion of the electors actually goes towards whoever the metropolitan centers in their states votes towards, even if it's a different candidate. How can we argue in favor of a system on the basis of giving the under-represented a greater voice, when the reality is it completely takes away representation from many, many more?
It's a broken system, it was a passable political compromise in the day it was created, it serves no function any more. We need an Amendment.
* That's really a misnomer, since all of the states had slaves in them at the time of the Constitutional Convention, but the trend was apparent.
Who said anything about "ever"? We all know that the price of RAM goes down, and the capacity goes up, and we all know this, so what's the problem? 8GB is a lot of RAM for a desktop today, and in the future the price of those 4GB DIMMs will decrease. Or buy them today for a total of 16GB, and a lot less cost than a flash disk (and are people really using these as RAM or as "fast" non-volatile storage? Because even with modern max write cycles that seems like a silly thing to do)
By the way, part of the reason for only having 2 slots per channel is because it makes it much easier to reach higher DRAM speeds. It's a tradeoff.
Meh, it's all fire damage. Useless to hunters.
I have no freaking clue, man.
Oh, wait, you said to those who don't understand, not from.
Does Journey ever get credit for inventing Leetspeak?
I'm not in the habit of giving Journey credit for anything, deserved or not.
Sure a bad strap is worse than no strap at all. It's not that the people are trying to throw it, they are using the strap to hold it in their hand, leaving their fingers free to move more quickly on the buttons. That's what the strap is for.
Can you explain to me how that's supposed to work? Seriously, I'm baffled. The strap goes around your wrist, how does that keep the wiimote in your hand? I really want to know what I'm missing, here.
How many football fields away is that?
Lots. Like, a whole fucking lot.
Dear God. You know, we have plenty of problems over on this side of the pond, but damn am I glad that we revolted when we had the chance.