...he fossil fuel industry is subsidized more than 8b PER year in America...
Not to mention that the Internet was started by the government.
Not according to Gordon Crovitz, the Wall Street Journal editorial page writer who wrote that the Internet was actually created by free-market entrepreneurs in the private sector, and made a fool of himself when the people who actually created the Internet wrote to the WSJ saying that he was all wrong.
"It is widely believed that taxes are highly progressive and, furthermore, that the top several percent of income earners pay most of the taxes received by the federal government. Both ideas are wrong because they focus on official, rather than "effective" tax rates and ignore payroll taxes, which are mostly paid by those with incomes below $100,000 per year."
Adam Smith, who wrote Wealth of Nations, said that those who have benefited more from society should pay a greater proportion of their income for the costs of running that society. In other words, Smith advocated progressive taxes.
and you understand that government mandated loans drove the cost of those schools up right?
That's right.
It's cheap to have the government set up a school like City College and pay the costs directly.
It's much more expensive to have the government give (or loan) people money, and tell them to buy their education from the private sector in the free market.
Of course, if you get a high score because you spent hours studying the SAT in order to get a high score then that also measures something. Maybe not intelligence, but "ambition" and "self-discipline".
Authoritarianism. Following orders. Lack of creativity. Willing to accept the system even when it's wrong.
When you spend more than you make, do you force your employer to give you a raise to cover the difference? No, you spend less. Its called living within your means, and you have zero understanding of what that means. Just because the government can alter its means to support its lifestyle does not mean that its a good idea.
So when you want to buy a house, you don't take out a loan and go into debt. You save up the money in the bank until you can buy it in cash, because you're living within your means.
If everybody was like you, they wouldn't be selling many houses.
Certainly it didn't occur to you that the million bucks you want to spend is coming from my family, whre I AM struggling to pay for my own college while supporting the family, while my wife waits for her turn to go to school when we can afford it. Then we hope to save up for our daughter to go to school.
(Violins playing)
Schmuck. You don't realize that 35 years ago, public colleges were free* or almost free around the country. City College in New York City was free, the University of California system was almost free, and state colleges around the country were almost free.
They turned out Nobel laureates and the innovators who created Silicon Valley. They paid back the cost of their education thousands of times over.
Your anti-tax politicians took that all away.
When I went to college, they paid me to attend. In Europe, college is still free, and many countries (like Finland) pay expenses as well. That's why you're competing with all those college-educated HB-1s.
Your wife wouldn't have to wait for you to graduate; you would have been able to go to school at the same time. I knew a lot of couples who did that.
Parents didn't worry about sending their kids to college. (Although they should have worried, because that system was coming to an end.)
Now that anti-tax madness has taken over, you have to pay for your college tuition at exorbitant, inflated, free-market levels. You're working like a slave. You have to go into debt. And unlike the big guys, you can't discharge your debt in bankruptcy.
____________ *Yes, they were paid out of taxes, because taxpayers realized that it was cheaper to pay $10,000 in taxes for free colleges than to pay $20,000 in private tuition. They realized it's better to pay taxes after you've graduated when you're using your skills and making a lot of money, than to pay tuition when you're in college and struggling. And "entrepreneurs" realized that when they wanted to expand a profitable business, they need a college-educated workforce, not low-paid illiterates. The tech companies were happy to pay taxes for education. College tuition is free, like he energy in a steam engine cycle is free: you get more energy out than you put into it.
Are you really afraid of a 2 pound multirotor? Do you really think it will ever be possible to achieve that much destruction with one? I really hate seeing fear mongering, be realistic and see there is very little danger from the current hobby sized systems available.
Actually people have been accidentally killed by hobbyist model planes, and by multirotors.
Science journalists should be better than "average schlubs". They owe it to their readers to do at least a few minutes of fact checking before publishing.
Gary Schwitzer, who runs the Health News Review blog, gave a checklist that makes it easier.
Mixed messages about statistical significance
Surrogate markers may not tell the whole story
Be careful with composites
Does The Language Fit The Evidence? - Association Versus Causation
Odds ratios
Resources for Reporting on Costs of Medical Interventions
"Off-label" Drug Use and Marketing
7 Words (and more) You Shouldn't Use in Medical News
News from Scientific Meetings
Absolute vs. Relative Risk
Number Needed to Treat
Commercialism
Single Source Stories
FDA Approval Not Guaranteed
Phases of Drug Trials
Medical Devices
Animal & Lab Studies
It happens a lot. There is a, shall we say, generation gap in Germany and Austria. The Germans also have this attitude about "making things right."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... When Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, it was claimed in Vienna that he was an "Austrian" Nobel, something he found "typically Viennese: very opportunistic, very disingenuous, somewhat hypocritical." He also said it was "... certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel." After that, he got a call from then Austrian president Thomas Klestil asking him, "How can we make things right?" Kandel said that first, Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring should be renamed; Karl Lueger was an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The street was ultimately renamed in 2012.[17] Second, he wanted the Jewish intellectual community to be brought back to Vienna, with scholarships for Jewish students and researchers.[18] He also proposed a symposium on the response of Austria to National Socialism.[19] Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city.
I used to write for an environmental magazine. I quickly found out that whenever you have a controversy over safety, the ultimate question is, "Who has the burden of proof?"
If you have the burden of proof to prove that a chemical is safe, you'll never prove it. Your opponents can simply raise the standard of evidence until you don't meet it.
If you have the burden of proof to prove that a chemical is dangerous, you'll (almost) never prove it. Your opponents can simply raise the standard of evidence until you don't meet it.
So you wind up having to make a judgment call on inadequate evidence. It's not as if there's a scientific argument on one side and ignorant anti-science people on the other.
But I think the Europeans should be able to make their own judgment calls. They're not luddites.
The proposed ban was suspended because researchers have, so far, been unable to find ANY actual causality. Yes, these pesticides are harmful if you mix them into a mouse's drinking water.
If you find that a chemical is harmful if you mix it in a mouse's drinking water, you've found causality -- in mice. That's not definitive evidence that it's harmful in humans, but it is evidence.
But that doesn't mean they are significantly harmful in the way they are actually employed in agriculture.
Yes, but that doesn't mean they're safe either. I think it's reasonable for Europeans to say that they don't want companies to go pouring a chemical in their environment until they've convinced people it's safe.
Even if they are harmful (and it is likely they are to some degree) that needs to be compared against the harm from the alternative chemicals that would be used instead.
Well, which is it? Are they significantly harmful? Or just a little harmful? Or not harmful at all?
What is the economic cost of the chemicals -- in dollars? What is the economic benefit -- in dollars? That's what you need to compare.
The truth is that you don't know. You're just making arbitrary assumptions.
Environmental regulations should be based on a deliberative scientific process, not on which interest group can shout the loudest.
Yes, that's what I say. There is some evidence that chemicals like phthalates can disrupt sexual development in human embryos. They've gone through a deliberate scientific process. They've concluded, "There's no conclusive evidence one way or the other." Then what?
It's perfectly reasonable for environmentalists to say, "We want convincing evidence of safety, the manufacturers haven't prove it, we can live without phthalates, so we don't want it in our environment."
If you think environmentalists are irrational and anti-science, you ought to see some of the industry's economists. I used to read Sam Peltzman's articles. He said that if a drug is successful on the market, it must be effective. You don't need scientific evidence. If a drug sells for $100, it must be worth $100, otherwise consumers wouldn't buy it.
Conservative economists (when they testify for the chemical industry) believe that the free market is perfectly efficient, so if they can make money doing something, it must be good.
Let's assume per capita GDP is a meaningful measure of the country's economy. Another measure of the country's economy is the equality or distribution of income.
I'd rather live in a country with more equality of income, even if it had a lower per capita GDP. (And some economists argue that more equality would produce a higher per capita GDP.)
Since we can't compare alternative Americas, empirical examination of the data is the best evidence we have.
I'm saying that other industrial countries have higher minimum wages, greater equality, and still have high production and a pretty good quality of life.
The difference between a per capita GDP of $55,000 a year and $45,000 a year is not that dramatic. The difference between a country in which people are left to die of treatable diseases because they can't afford health care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... and a country where everyone gets needed health care is dramatic.
I don't care about high unemployment, if you also have a German- or Scandinavian-style social safety net, so that unemployed people can still maintain a comfortable life. In Germany, unemployed workers are paid almost as much as they are when employed. Some of them take additional training during their down time. Some of them were go on vacation. That's fine with me. The economy doesn't collapse just because you have 10% of the workforce on the dole.
I had friends in California when Reagan was governor. They were able to go on welfare, get enough to live on, go to the California state university system free, and get a college degree. California got a lot more scientists and engineers just as Silicon Valley was developing. I think that's good.
The US does have a per capita GDP of about $10,000 more than Germany ($45,000 vs. $55,000). OK.
Suppose you had 2 countries:
Country A has a per capital GDP of $55,000, but the distribution is unequal.
If you divide the country into quintiles, people in each category are:
Bottom 1/5 $13,750 a year
Next 1/5 $27,500
Next 1/5 $55,000
Next 1/5 $110,000
Top 1/5 $220,000
(which is roughly the actual income distribution in the US.)
Country B has a GDP of $45,000. But there is more equality. The distribution is:
Bottom 1/3 $22,500
Middle 1/3 $45,000
Top 1/3 $90,000
Which would you prefer? In country A, you have 1 chance in 5 of being in third-world poverty. ($13,750 is the per capita GDP of China.)
I'd prefer country B. In country B, I'm guaranteed a comfortable life.
Of course other countries have higher GDP per capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... All of the modern industrial countries are clustered in about the same range.
Besides, most of that $55,000 per year per capita GDP in the US doesn't go to me. It goes to people at the top of the income distribution, and since 1980 it's been going disproportionately to the people at the very top of the income distribution.
It's like the economist's joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. The average income in that bar goes up to $100 million a year.
Many thanks for this very informing post. One follow-up question, what news sources (online and offline) would you recommend as alternatives to the (pre-Murdoch) WSJ? What is your opinion on the FT?
I don't know of any substitute. The nice thing about the WSJ was that I could get a complete overview of everything important in one place. You could read the front page of the WSJ every day in 5 minutes, and at least be aware of everything important.
The most important thing was that I could trust them to give it to me as straight as they could. If I read a story in the WSJ that a job training program wasn't working, I'd see right there that the reporter talked to people on all sides, looked at the evidence, and the evidence was that it wasn't working. It wasn't because one of the publisher's right-wing editors decided to attack job training programs.
(The NYT had those very problems of advertisers and publisher's calling the shots. For example, their second-biggest advertiser was the automobile industry. The publisher, AO Sulzberger, actually ordered his editors to run stories about how auto safety and pollution regulations were destroying the economy. He wrote a memo that got out. And they did a lousy job of covering the Vietnam war.)
I don't want to make it sound like I let the WSJ do my critical thinking for me, but they did a lot of the preliminary work.
So now I'm back to reading news media on all sides, and evaluating each story myself on a case by case basis. If I read the NYT, and Democracy Now, etc., with some effort I can figure out something close to the truth. I know the FT has a lot of fans, but I don't read it regularly so I can't evaluate it.
I mostly follow medicine right now, and the professional journals, like Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. do a pretty good job. Once in the while, the editors will go too far, and get fired, which is what happened at Journal of the American Medical Association and Canadian Medical Association Journal. Maybe that's proof that the editors are willing to push it as far as they can.
But there was a time when I could tell a college student, "Read the WSJ every day and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the world." I can't say that any more.
But I'm a bit confused by the last paragraph of the article you quoted. Why would the new WSJ not embrace "death tax" if it was a dog-whistle for its opponents?
My sense is that Murdoch wants to use the WSJ for his propaganda, but he wants to maintain the pretense that it's still an accurate and objective newspaper, so he can't overdo it. Calling inheritance taxes a "death tax" in the news pages was overdoing it.
I remember when they printed that article, and people were complaining in the comments pages that the story was propaganda. The reporter apologized.
And a significant portion of the population is now an ex-prisoner or ex-felon. "In 2008, about one in 33 working-age adults was an ex-prisoner, and about one in 15 working-age adults was an ex-felon. Among working-age men in that same year, about one in 17 was an ex-prisoner and one in eight was an ex-felon." http://www.cepr.net/press-cent...
It's dramatically worse for black men. In some cities, a third of the young black men are in jail or otherwise in the criminal justice system. That seriously affects the marriage rates among black women.
A criminal record takes away opportunities for work, education, housing, and welfare.
No other country imprisons as many people, either absolutely or per capita, and most other countries have far less violence than we do. And don't think we have less crime because of the prisons.
The criminologists say that there's an aggregation phenomenon -- when you put criminals together in one place, they encourage and teach each other to become criminals. Go to prison and you'll learn how to steal a car.
That's why those boot camps didn't work. They would take young offenders, put them together, and have some father figure yell at them like an army sergeant. But when they put young criminals together, they actually taught each other that crime was acceptable. They wound up with higher re-arrest rates than offenders who didn't go through boot camp.
A lot of times you had some kid who was busted for grass, together with kids who had been committing car theft, burglary, robbery, etc. And they would fight.
Well for one thing, the population of Denmark is 89.6% Danish. Finland is effectively ethnically homogeneous as well.
Homogeneity breeds better understanding and better community outcomes. Less fear of the other, more ability to emphasize with your neighbor who happened to get in trouble.
In other words, nothing like the United States. Make no mistake, immigration and diversity have good effects, but it has some pretty breathtaking challenges as well.
They are also economically homogeneous. That is, they have almost no poverty.
I've compared the distribution of income in US and Scandinavian countries. You can divide US families into 5 levels based on their income. In Sweden, the bottom 2 levels are missing.
Swedes have the same income as the middle and two upper income levels in the US. They're all middle class and upper class, without the poverty.
(Number Of People Serving Time For Drug Offenses In US Prisons)
Federal: "Between 2001 and 2013, more than half of prisoners serving sentences of more than a year in federal facilities were convicted of drug offenses (table 15 and table 16). On September 30, 2013 (the end of the most recent fiscal year for which federal offense data were available), 98,200 inmates (51% of the federal prison population) were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other drug crimes."
State: "Drug offenders comprised 16% (210,200 inmates) of the total state prison population in 2012. Twenty-five percent of female prisoners were serving time for drug offenses, compared to 15% of male prisoners. Similar proportions of white, black, and Hispanic offenders were convicted of drug and public-order crimes."
After years of suffering and resignation about disrespect and mistreatment at the hands of local police, young and older African-American residents of inner city west and east Baltimore, joined by others, came together these past two weeks to say: “we’ve had enough.” The spark for this was the fatal injuring, while in police custody on 12 April, of 25 year old Freddie Gray, who died a week later on 19 April. Gray was a resident of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood and also a childhood victim of lead paint poisoning. He was arrested for making eye contact with a policeman and then trying to run away. His death acted as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Fortunately, the Baltimore City States Attorney took swift action on 1 May to charge all six police officers implicated in the death of Freddie Gray.
Lesson #1—The public’s health includes being free not only from the threat of gun violence, but also from the violence suffered at the hands of police officers and other government agencies.
Lesson #2—A long history in Baltimore and elsewhere of police disrespect and abuse of authority eventually can become intolerable and lead to explosions of public outrage, some of which may include violence against property or persons. The relentless, massive “war on drugs” is largely responsible for this police abuse. America’s longstanding decision to criminalize the abuse of drugs has virtually eliminated the practice of requiring “probable cause” for arrests, and has led to thousands of lives damaged and wasted by wholesale warehousing in jails and prisons.
Lesson #3—This specific public outrage about police misconduct is fueled by a broader and deeper public outrage at the severe economic, social, and health disparities which have persisted for many years within some Baltimore City neighborhoods.
https://www.themarshallproject... 04.29.2015 Q&A David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of “real policing.” By Bill Keller (The war on drugs led to ignoring the Bill of Rights.) Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
In my professional judgment the WSJ used to be the best, most reliable news source in English. Then Murdoch took over, and turned it into a right-wing propaganda sheet. It was a tragedy. This crowd-sourcing of Hillary's emails is maybe the worst example of their partisan bias and seeking sensationalism.
I read the WSJ daily for 40 years (along with the New York Times, Washington Post, and professional magazines like Science and JAMA). I used to pick up their stories, and interview the same people they interviewed.
I knew reporters who wrote for the WSJ. I believed, and most journalists I knew agreed, that the WSJ was the best newspaper in the English language. The reason I liked it was that the news sections were as objective and fact-checked as humanly possible, and one of the few publications not influenced by advertisers and political pressure from the publisher. They really were fair and balanced.
The WSJ's defining moment was in the 1950s when they got leaked photos of the new model GM cars, which were a big trade secret. GM threatened to cancel their advertising if they published it. The WSJ told them to fuck off. Newspapers didn't do that. It was a long time before they accepted GM's advertising again.
An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy, but if he picked up a story from the WSJ, he could take a chance without checking because he could depend on them to get it right.
If I read a story in the WSJ, I could depend on them getting everything right. (The quick formula is, get all sides; and especially if you attack somebody, get their side too.)
I remember one story on welfare reform in California in which the reporter quoted everybody, from the governor's assistant in charge of welfare, to the supervisors, to the caseworkers, to several welfare mothers. The story made it clear that welfare "reform" wasn't working, merely harassing welfare recipients and making it harder for them to get back on their feet.
A. Kent Macdougal was a WSJ reporter until he retired to teach journalism. He wrote an article in Monthly Review, the marxist magazine, about his experience. (Can't find it online, sorry.) He said that in his career in the WSJ, he could write whatever he wanted, as long as he followed the formula for getting all sides and supporting every statement with documented facts, even though he was a socialist who was criticizing the capitalist system in the WSJ's own pages. The WSJ was one of the few places where you could read news stories that actually criticized the American free-market system, and stood up to companies like GM. I follow health care and drugs, and the WSJ published some of the great exposes of drug companies and the medical establishment.
The ironic thing about the WSJ was that they had a very liberal news section, and a very right wing editorial page. I used to enjoy the editorial page because every day they would publish a tightly-argued, logical, well-documented right wing argument, and I would have to figure out where they made their mistake. Sometimes I had to agree that they were right, and they changed my mind. That's a good editorial page. However, there was a sharp division between the editorial section and the news section.
When Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ, it was a tragedy for journalism and even for democracy, because the WSJ was the best thing you could read to be an informed citizen and voter.
Ironically, the best business story the WSJ ever did was their coverage of the takeover of their own newspaper by News Corporation. They gave the whole background of the ownership and control of the WSJ, and how the older generation of the Bancroft (sp?) family was committed to the mission of great journalism, but the younger generation just wanted to get higher dividends. And some of those editors and reporters, who knew they would be leaving, gave the best story ever of how un
That is a high level overview of policy that must have exceptions otherwise every kid that snapped a picture or wrote an article that ended up in a yearbook or school newspaper would have a copyright claim. At some point they have to grant use to the school.
Usually the parent would have to sign a consent form for yearbook class it would grant publication rights to the school district to be published in the yearbook and may hold an exclusivity clause for a term probably one year from the initial publication of the yearbook.
Every kid who snapped a picture or wrote an article for the school newspaper does have copyright ownership of that work. He can assign part of the rights to the school to use them in a yearbook.
Interestingly, copyright rights can only be assigned in writing, in my understanding. If I write for a publication, we usually have some back-and-forth emails in which we discuss the terms under which I'm writing it, and the rights that I'm transferring.
If I were the kid's lawyer, I'd ask the principal for the written contract the school and the kid signed for transfer of the rights to the photographs to the yearbook. If the principal can't present a signed contract, he doesn't have any rights.
He is a taking a yearbook class, using the schools equipment, and at the end of the year the book will be sold to the students. If the school did it correctly his parents would have signed a consent form giving the school the rights to the work for publication in the yearbook. The question is did they give the school ownership of the copyright like work for hire, exclusive publication rights for a time period, or just nonexclusive rights to publish the work?
From the article:
In addition, the District’s Board Policy Manual explicitly states “a student shall retain all rights to work created as part of the instruction or using District technology resources.”
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...he fossil fuel industry is subsidized more than 8b PER year in America...
Not to mention that the Internet was started by the government.
Not according to Gordon Crovitz, the Wall Street Journal editorial page writer who wrote that the Internet was actually created by free-market entrepreneurs in the private sector, and made a fool of himself when the people who actually created the Internet wrote to the WSJ saying that he was all wrong.
That bottom 50% not paying anything in taxes is understandable if you look at the amount of wealth it represents in this country.
Graph here:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
"It is widely believed that taxes are highly progressive and, furthermore, that the top several percent of income earners pay most of the taxes received by the federal government. Both ideas are wrong because they focus on official, rather than "effective" tax rates and ignore payroll taxes, which are mostly paid by those with incomes below $100,000 per year."
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
Wealth, Income, and Power
by G. William Domhoff
Do Taxes Redistribute Income?
Adam Smith, who wrote Wealth of Nations, said that those who have benefited more from society should pay a greater proportion of their income for the costs of running that society. In other words, Smith advocated progressive taxes.
and you understand that government mandated loans drove the cost of those schools up right?
That's right.
It's cheap to have the government set up a school like City College and pay the costs directly.
It's much more expensive to have the government give (or loan) people money, and tell them to buy their education from the private sector in the free market.
Of course, if you get a high score because you spent hours studying the SAT in order to get a high score then that also measures something. Maybe not intelligence, but "ambition" and "self-discipline".
Authoritarianism. Following orders. Lack of creativity. Willing to accept the system even when it's wrong.
When you spend more than you make, do you force your employer to give you a raise to cover the difference? No, you spend less. Its called living within your means, and you have zero understanding of what that means. Just because the government can alter its means to support its lifestyle does not mean that its a good idea.
So when you want to buy a house, you don't take out a loan and go into debt. You save up the money in the bank until you can buy it in cash, because you're living within your means.
If everybody was like you, they wouldn't be selling many houses.
Certainly it didn't occur to you that the million bucks you want to spend is coming from my family, whre I AM struggling to pay for my own college while supporting the family, while my wife waits for her turn to go to school when we can afford it. Then we hope to save up for our daughter to go to school.
(Violins playing)
Schmuck. You don't realize that 35 years ago, public colleges were free* or almost free around the country. City College in New York City was free, the University of California system was almost free, and state colleges around the country were almost free.
They turned out Nobel laureates and the innovators who created Silicon Valley. They paid back the cost of their education thousands of times over.
Your anti-tax politicians took that all away.
When I went to college, they paid me to attend. In Europe, college is still free, and many countries (like Finland) pay expenses as well. That's why you're competing with all those college-educated HB-1s.
Your wife wouldn't have to wait for you to graduate; you would have been able to go to school at the same time. I knew a lot of couples who did that.
Parents didn't worry about sending their kids to college. (Although they should have worried, because that system was coming to an end.)
Now that anti-tax madness has taken over, you have to pay for your college tuition at exorbitant, inflated, free-market levels. You're working like a slave. You have to go into debt. And unlike the big guys, you can't discharge your debt in bankruptcy.
____________
*Yes, they were paid out of taxes, because taxpayers realized that it was cheaper to pay $10,000 in taxes for free colleges than to pay $20,000 in private tuition. They realized it's better to pay taxes after you've graduated when you're using your skills and making a lot of money, than to pay tuition when you're in college and struggling. And "entrepreneurs" realized that when they wanted to expand a profitable business, they need a college-educated workforce, not low-paid illiterates. The tech companies were happy to pay taxes for education. College tuition is free, like he energy in a steam engine cycle is free: you get more energy out than you put into it.
Are you really afraid of a 2 pound multirotor? Do you really think it will ever be possible to achieve that much destruction with one? I really hate seeing fear mongering, be realistic and see there is very little danger from the current hobby sized systems available.
Actually people have been accidentally killed by hobbyist model planes, and by multirotors.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
I assume detecting the RF signature of the transmitter controlling the drone is the best way.
Of course there are these problems:
1. There are many signals on the bands used for RC.
2. It is possible to build an autonomous drone.
3. In these days of software defined radio, people can spin up non-off-the-shelf, non-standard radio control systems.
Hedy Lamar solved this problem. http://www.google.com/patents/...
Science journalists should be better than "average schlubs". They owe it to their readers to do at least a few minutes of fact checking before publishing.
Gary Schwitzer, who runs the Health News Review blog, gave a checklist that makes it easier.
http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
Tips for Understanding Studies
Mixed messages about statistical significance
Surrogate markers may not tell the whole story
Be careful with composites
Does The Language Fit The Evidence? - Association Versus Causation
Odds ratios
Resources for Reporting on Costs of Medical Interventions
"Off-label" Drug Use and Marketing
7 Words (and more) You Shouldn't Use in Medical News
News from Scientific Meetings
Absolute vs. Relative Risk
Number Needed to Treat
Commercialism
Single Source Stories
FDA Approval Not Guaranteed
Phases of Drug Trials
Medical Devices
Animal & Lab Studies
It happens a lot. There is a, shall we say, generation gap in Germany and Austria. The Germans also have this attitude about "making things right."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
When Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, it was claimed in Vienna that he was an "Austrian" Nobel, something he found "typically Viennese: very opportunistic, very disingenuous, somewhat hypocritical." He also said it was "... certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel." After that, he got a call from then Austrian president Thomas Klestil asking him, "How can we make things right?" Kandel said that first, Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring should be renamed; Karl Lueger was an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The street was ultimately renamed in 2012.[17] Second, he wanted the Jewish intellectual community to be brought back to Vienna, with scholarships for Jewish students and researchers.[18] He also proposed a symposium on the response of Austria to National Socialism.[19] Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city.
I used to write for an environmental magazine. I quickly found out that whenever you have a controversy over safety, the ultimate question is, "Who has the burden of proof?"
If you have the burden of proof to prove that a chemical is safe, you'll never prove it. Your opponents can simply raise the standard of evidence until you don't meet it.
If you have the burden of proof to prove that a chemical is dangerous, you'll (almost) never prove it. Your opponents can simply raise the standard of evidence until you don't meet it.
So you wind up having to make a judgment call on inadequate evidence. It's not as if there's a scientific argument on one side and ignorant anti-science people on the other.
But I think the Europeans should be able to make their own judgment calls. They're not luddites.
The proposed ban was suspended because researchers have, so far, been unable to find ANY actual causality. Yes, these pesticides are harmful if you mix them into a mouse's drinking water.
If you find that a chemical is harmful if you mix it in a mouse's drinking water, you've found causality -- in mice. That's not definitive evidence that it's harmful in humans, but it is evidence.
But that doesn't mean they are significantly harmful in the way they are actually employed in agriculture.
Yes, but that doesn't mean they're safe either. I think it's reasonable for Europeans to say that they don't want companies to go pouring a chemical in their environment until they've convinced people it's safe.
Even if they are harmful (and it is likely they are to some degree) that needs to be compared against the harm from the alternative chemicals that would be used instead.
Well, which is it? Are they significantly harmful? Or just a little harmful? Or not harmful at all?
What is the economic cost of the chemicals -- in dollars? What is the economic benefit -- in dollars? That's what you need to compare.
The truth is that you don't know. You're just making arbitrary assumptions.
Environmental regulations should be based on a deliberative scientific process, not on which interest group can shout the loudest.
Yes, that's what I say. There is some evidence that chemicals like phthalates can disrupt sexual development in human embryos. They've gone through a deliberate scientific process. They've concluded, "There's no conclusive evidence one way or the other." Then what?
It's perfectly reasonable for environmentalists to say, "We want convincing evidence of safety, the manufacturers haven't prove it, we can live without phthalates, so we don't want it in our environment."
If you think environmentalists are irrational and anti-science, you ought to see some of the industry's economists. I used to read Sam Peltzman's articles. He said that if a drug is successful on the market, it must be effective. You don't need scientific evidence. If a drug sells for $100, it must be worth $100, otherwise consumers wouldn't buy it.
Conservative economists (when they testify for the chemical industry) believe that the free market is perfectly efficient, so if they can make money doing something, it must be good.
I don't believe that unemployment is lower when the minimum wage is lower. What's the evidence for that?
Let's assume per capita GDP is a meaningful measure of the country's economy. Another measure of the country's economy is the equality or distribution of income.
I'd rather live in a country with more equality of income, even if it had a lower per capita GDP. (And some economists argue that more equality would produce a higher per capita GDP.)
Since we can't compare alternative Americas, empirical examination of the data is the best evidence we have.
I'm saying that other industrial countries have higher minimum wages, greater equality, and still have high production and a pretty good quality of life.
The difference between a per capita GDP of $55,000 a year and $45,000 a year is not that dramatic. The difference between a country in which people are left to die of treatable diseases because they can't afford health care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... and a country where everyone gets needed health care is dramatic.
I don't care about high unemployment, if you also have a German- or Scandinavian-style social safety net, so that unemployed people can still maintain a comfortable life. In Germany, unemployed workers are paid almost as much as they are when employed. Some of them take additional training during their down time. Some of them were go on vacation. That's fine with me. The economy doesn't collapse just because you have 10% of the workforce on the dole.
I had friends in California when Reagan was governor. They were able to go on welfare, get enough to live on, go to the California state university system free, and get a college degree. California got a lot more scientists and engineers just as Silicon Valley was developing. I think that's good.
The US does have a per capita GDP of about $10,000 more than Germany ($45,000 vs. $55,000). OK.
Suppose you had 2 countries:
Country A has a per capital GDP of $55,000, but the distribution is unequal.
If you divide the country into quintiles, people in each category are:
Bottom 1/5 $13,750 a year
Next 1/5 $27,500
Next 1/5 $55,000
Next 1/5 $110,000
Top 1/5 $220,000
(which is roughly the actual income distribution in the US.)
Country B has a GDP of $45,000. But there is more equality. The distribution is:
Bottom 1/3 $22,500
Middle 1/3 $45,000
Top 1/3 $90,000
Which would you prefer? In country A, you have 1 chance in 5 of being in third-world poverty. ($13,750 is the per capita GDP of China.)
I'd prefer country B. In country B, I'm guaranteed a comfortable life.
Of course other countries have higher GDP per capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... All of the modern industrial countries are clustered in about the same range.
Besides, most of that $55,000 per year per capita GDP in the US doesn't go to me. It goes to people at the top of the income distribution, and since 1980 it's been going disproportionately to the people at the very top of the income distribution.
It's like the economist's joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. The average income in that bar goes up to $100 million a year.
When I'm writing something, I like to run it past somebody who disagrees with me, to see whether I got anything wrong.
If this is the worst that you and jmac_the_man and cold fjord can come up with, I'm confident I got it right.
Many thanks for this very informing post. One follow-up question, what news sources (online and offline) would you recommend as alternatives to the (pre-Murdoch) WSJ? What is your opinion on the FT?
I don't know of any substitute. The nice thing about the WSJ was that I could get a complete overview of everything important in one place. You could read the front page of the WSJ every day in 5 minutes, and at least be aware of everything important.
The most important thing was that I could trust them to give it to me as straight as they could. If I read a story in the WSJ that a job training program wasn't working, I'd see right there that the reporter talked to people on all sides, looked at the evidence, and the evidence was that it wasn't working. It wasn't because one of the publisher's right-wing editors decided to attack job training programs.
(The NYT had those very problems of advertisers and publisher's calling the shots. For example, their second-biggest advertiser was the automobile industry. The publisher, AO Sulzberger, actually ordered his editors to run stories about how auto safety and pollution regulations were destroying the economy. He wrote a memo that got out. And they did a lousy job of covering the Vietnam war.)
I don't want to make it sound like I let the WSJ do my critical thinking for me, but they did a lot of the preliminary work.
So now I'm back to reading news media on all sides, and evaluating each story myself on a case by case basis. If I read the NYT, and Democracy Now, etc., with some effort I can figure out something close to the truth. I know the FT has a lot of fans, but I don't read it regularly so I can't evaluate it.
I mostly follow medicine right now, and the professional journals, like Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. do a pretty good job. Once in the while, the editors will go too far, and get fired, which is what happened at Journal of the American Medical Association and Canadian Medical Association Journal. Maybe that's proof that the editors are willing to push it as far as they can.
But there was a time when I could tell a college student, "Read the WSJ every day and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the world." I can't say that any more.
Great post. Moderators take note.
But I'm a bit confused by the last paragraph of the article you quoted. Why would the new WSJ not embrace "death tax" if it was a dog-whistle for its opponents?
My sense is that Murdoch wants to use the WSJ for his propaganda, but he wants to maintain the pretense that it's still an accurate and objective newspaper, so he can't overdo it. Calling inheritance taxes a "death tax" in the news pages was overdoing it.
I remember when they printed that article, and people were complaining in the comments pages that the story was propaganda. The reporter apologized.
And a significant portion of the population is now an ex-prisoner or ex-felon. "In 2008, about one in 33 working-age adults was an ex-prisoner, and about one in 15 working-age adults was an ex-felon. Among working-age men in that same year, about one in 17 was an ex-prisoner and one in eight was an ex-felon." http://www.cepr.net/press-cent...
It's dramatically worse for black men. In some cities, a third of the young black men are in jail or otherwise in the criminal justice system. That seriously affects the marriage rates among black women.
A criminal record takes away opportunities for work, education, housing, and welfare.
It's like bringing back slavery.
No other country imprisons as many people, either absolutely or per capita, and most other countries have far less violence than we do. And don't think we have less crime because of the prisons.
The criminologists say that there's an aggregation phenomenon -- when you put criminals together in one place, they encourage and teach each other to become criminals. Go to prison and you'll learn how to steal a car.
That's why those boot camps didn't work. They would take young offenders, put them together, and have some father figure yell at them like an army sergeant. But when they put young criminals together, they actually taught each other that crime was acceptable. They wound up with higher re-arrest rates than offenders who didn't go through boot camp.
A lot of times you had some kid who was busted for grass, together with kids who had been committing car theft, burglary, robbery, etc. And they would fight.
Well for one thing, the population of Denmark is 89.6% Danish. Finland is effectively ethnically homogeneous as well.
Homogeneity breeds better understanding and better community outcomes. Less fear of the other, more ability to emphasize with your neighbor who happened to get in trouble.
In other words, nothing like the United States. Make no mistake, immigration and diversity have good effects, but it has some pretty breathtaking challenges as well.
They are also economically homogeneous. That is, they have almost no poverty.
I've compared the distribution of income in US and Scandinavian countries. You can divide US families into 5 levels based on their income. In Sweden, the bottom 2 levels are missing.
Swedes have the same income as the middle and two upper income levels in the US. They're all middle class and upper class, without the poverty.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm...
Overview of Basic Data
(Number Of People Serving Time For Drug Offenses In US Prisons)
Federal: "Between 2001 and 2013, more than half of prisoners serving sentences of more than a year in federal facilities were convicted of drug offenses (table 15 and table 16). On September 30, 2013 (the end of the most recent fiscal year for which federal offense data were available), 98,200 inmates (51% of the federal prison population) were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other drug crimes."
State: "Drug offenders comprised 16% (210,200 inmates) of the total state prison population in 2012. Twenty-five percent of female prisoners were serving time for drug offenses, compared to 15% of male prisoners. Similar proportions of white, black, and Hispanic offenders were convicted of drug and public-order crimes."
Funnily many of the examples you provided are driven by the enforcement of white supremacy perpetuated by the anti-drug establishment.
Here's somebody who developed that idea for the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) and made a good argument for the racism motivation.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2015/...
Art Cohen and Selwyn Ray: The lessons of late April in Baltimore
8 May, 15
BMJ
After years of suffering and resignation about disrespect and mistreatment at the hands of local police, young and older African-American residents of inner city west and east Baltimore, joined by others, came together these past two weeks to say: “we’ve had enough.” The spark for this was the fatal injuring, while in police custody on 12 April, of 25 year old Freddie Gray, who died a week later on 19 April. Gray was a resident of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood and also a childhood victim of lead paint poisoning. He was arrested for making eye contact with a policeman and then trying to run away. His death acted as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Fortunately, the Baltimore City States Attorney took swift action on 1 May to charge all six police officers implicated in the death of Freddie Gray.
Lesson #1—The public’s health includes being free not only from the threat of gun violence, but also from the violence suffered at the hands of police officers and other government agencies.
Lesson #2—A long history in Baltimore and elsewhere of police disrespect and abuse of authority eventually can become intolerable and lead to explosions of public outrage, some of which may include violence against property or persons. The relentless, massive “war on drugs” is largely responsible for this police abuse. America’s longstanding decision to criminalize the abuse of drugs has virtually eliminated the practice of requiring “probable cause” for arrests, and has led to thousands of lives damaged and wasted by wholesale warehousing in jails and prisons.
Lesson #3—This specific public outrage about police misconduct is fueled by a broader and deeper public outrage at the severe economic, social, and health disparities which have persisted for many years within some Baltimore City neighborhoods.
https://www.themarshallproject...
04.29.2015
Q&A
David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish
Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of “real policing.”
By Bill Keller
(The war on drugs led to ignoring the Bill of Rights.)
Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.
the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
In my professional judgment the WSJ used to be the best, most reliable news source in English. Then Murdoch took over, and turned it into a right-wing propaganda sheet. It was a tragedy. This crowd-sourcing of Hillary's emails is maybe the worst example of their partisan bias and seeking sensationalism.
I read the WSJ daily for 40 years (along with the New York Times, Washington Post, and professional magazines like Science and JAMA). I used to pick up their stories, and interview the same people they interviewed.
I knew reporters who wrote for the WSJ. I believed, and most journalists I knew agreed, that the WSJ was the best newspaper in the English language. The reason I liked it was that the news sections were as objective and fact-checked as humanly possible, and one of the few publications not influenced by advertisers and political pressure from the publisher. They really were fair and balanced.
The WSJ's defining moment was in the 1950s when they got leaked photos of the new model GM cars, which were a big trade secret. GM threatened to cancel their advertising if they published it. The WSJ told them to fuck off. Newspapers didn't do that. It was a long time before they accepted GM's advertising again.
An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy, but if he picked up a story from the WSJ, he could take a chance without checking because he could depend on them to get it right.
If I read a story in the WSJ, I could depend on them getting everything right. (The quick formula is, get all sides; and especially if you attack somebody, get their side too.)
I remember one story on welfare reform in California in which the reporter quoted everybody, from the governor's assistant in charge of welfare, to the supervisors, to the caseworkers, to several welfare mothers. The story made it clear that welfare "reform" wasn't working, merely harassing welfare recipients and making it harder for them to get back on their feet.
A. Kent Macdougal was a WSJ reporter until he retired to teach journalism. He wrote an article in Monthly Review, the marxist magazine, about his experience. (Can't find it online, sorry.) He said that in his career in the WSJ, he could write whatever he wanted, as long as he followed the formula for getting all sides and supporting every statement with documented facts, even though he was a socialist who was criticizing the capitalist system in the WSJ's own pages. The WSJ was one of the few places where you could read news stories that actually criticized the American free-market system, and stood up to companies like GM. I follow health care and drugs, and the WSJ published some of the great exposes of drug companies and the medical establishment.
The ironic thing about the WSJ was that they had a very liberal news section, and a very right wing editorial page. I used to enjoy the editorial page because every day they would publish a tightly-argued, logical, well-documented right wing argument, and I would have to figure out where they made their mistake. Sometimes I had to agree that they were right, and they changed my mind. That's a good editorial page. However, there was a sharp division between the editorial section and the news section.
When Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ, it was a tragedy for journalism and even for democracy, because the WSJ was the best thing you could read to be an informed citizen and voter.
Ironically, the best business story the WSJ ever did was their coverage of the takeover of their own newspaper by News Corporation. They gave the whole background of the ownership and control of the WSJ, and how the older generation of the Bancroft (sp?) family was committed to the mission of great journalism, but the younger generation just wanted to get higher dividends. And some of those editors and reporters, who knew they would be leaving, gave the best story ever of how un
That is a high level overview of policy that must have exceptions otherwise every kid that snapped a picture or wrote an article that ended up in a yearbook or school newspaper would have a copyright claim. At some point they have to grant use to the school.
Usually the parent would have to sign a consent form for yearbook class it would grant publication rights to the school district to be published in the yearbook and may hold an exclusivity clause for a term probably one year from the initial publication of the yearbook.
Every kid who snapped a picture or wrote an article for the school newspaper does have copyright ownership of that work. He can assign part of the rights to the school to use them in a yearbook.
Interestingly, copyright rights can only be assigned in writing, in my understanding. If I write for a publication, we usually have some back-and-forth emails in which we discuss the terms under which I'm writing it, and the rights that I'm transferring.
If I were the kid's lawyer, I'd ask the principal for the written contract the school and the kid signed for transfer of the rights to the photographs to the yearbook. If the principal can't present a signed contract, he doesn't have any rights.
He is a taking a yearbook class, using the schools equipment, and at the end of the year the book will be sold to the students. If the school did it correctly his parents would have signed a consent form giving the school the rights to the work for publication in the yearbook. The question is did they give the school ownership of the copyright like work for hire, exclusive publication rights for a time period, or just nonexclusive rights to publish the work?
From the article:
In addition, the District’s Board Policy Manual explicitly states “a student shall retain all rights to work created as part of the instruction or using District technology resources.”