Many of those stops were on Broadway. I've walked down those very same streets many times. I'm white and I've never been stopped, even when I was walking home late at night. Black guys get stopped.
The thing that impressed me about their testimony is that they sound like really cool guys. They're black law students, medical students, teachers, social workers, etc. They're getting hassled by cops all the time, they're tired of it, and they're responding in reasonable ways. The cops are unreasonably arbitrary and rude, and according to the judge's decision, the cops repeatedly broke the law. These guys filed protests with the police department, complained to the ACLU, and finally took the cops to court. They've got balls. They're complaining that they're being singled out all the time because they're black, and if you read the court documents, they made a pretty good argument.
DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK, David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.
You probably have no idea what the Catholic church really teaches about sex, abortion, and contraceptives, and that's probably why you conclude they are crazy and hypocritical.
I lived with Catholic roomates all through college, and I had four Catholic girlfriends. My Jesuit roommates sent me to the library to read Thomas Aquinis. I went to mass. I marched in anti-war demonstrations with Catholics. I worked with Catholic lawyers who were suing the city to force them to provide housing for the homeless. And (at the recommendation of a Catholic right-to-life activist), I read Roe vs. Wade, which went through all the arguments, including the Catholic arguments, in great detail.
I also know that there are a lot of Catholics, and they don't all agree with each other.
So your link didn't tell me anything I don't know.
I can understand how somebody could oppose abortion. They don't interpret Leveticus the way other people do.
I can understand the "whole cloth" argument against abortion, unjust war (like the one we had in Iraq), and the death penalty, taken together. They're more convincing when they provide welfare for women who do have unintended children (and less convincing when they oppose welfare). I heard Mary Jo Bane explain why she resigned from the White House in response to Clinton's "welfare reform."
But when the Catholic hierarchy rules out contraception, they're choosing a medieval theological construction over the reality of life today. The Billings method only works for some women, and isn't reliable even for them. (I've talked to gynecologists about that and read the medical literature.) The reality is that unmarried people, especially teenagers, will have sex. Having an unplanned child during college (or high school) can take blow your chance to get a degree. A lot of women start a relationship with a guy, find out that he's got problems, and drop him. If they have a child together, she'll never get him out of her life. It's not "open to life." It's anti-sex.
Contraception is where the Catholics pass the boundary into craziness.
They hold people up to an impossible standard of chastity. It took me a while to figure out that Catholics just ignore those teachings. And then later on we found out that Catholic priests themselves were having sex with their parishoners, including young children. I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the sex scandals destroyed all their credibility.
The whole Catholic Church doctrine on sex is fucked up, and causes Catholics a lot of suffering, to the extent that they try to follow it. One striking thing that I've seen repeatedly is that a girl will be brought up in a strict Catholic upbringing, fall for the chastity line, and then, the first time she's away from home, she'll break up with her first boyfriend and start sleeping with everybody. I've seen statistics that Catholics were more likely to have abortions. And the Catholic guys went to prostitutes. Herpes is forever.
In conclusion (as my Jesuit roommates taught me to say), a lot of religions do some good things, even though they're crazy in some ways, and also do some harm in other ways. The Catholic Church is the best example I could think of. If only they got rid of that obsession with sex they could do a lot more good.
I must defend the CSM. I knew their technology reporter, and he turned me on to Linux.
I can't speak with authority on the Christian Science religion, but I have met a lot of hospital medical ethicists who deal with them and other religions that discourage medicine. There were some big problems with Christian Science up to 1993, when they lost a big lawsuit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_science#Children.27s_rights.2C_relationship_with_medicine Since that time they seem to be moving away from their anti-medicine position significantly. I don't know what their vaccination practices are now, but Mary Baker Eddy said that they should get vaccinated if that's the law. These problems of children (and adults) dying for lack of medical care come up now more often with the Evangelical churches that interpret the Bible "literally", and with "naturalistic" practitioners.
The CSM is an excellent newspaper. They won 7 Pulitzer prizes. I read a book about newspapers in New England, and one chapter was about the CSM. They (like most other journalists) gave the CSM a great evaluation, although they pointed out the ironic failing of a newspaper based in Boston, one of the centers of academic medicine, that didn't cover medicine. OTOH, they said that the CSM was edited with a philosophy of trying to contribute something positive to the world, which sounds hokey but if you look at their coverage they were really doing it. They lost money. They refused to take cigarette or liquor ads. They never covered crime, except for a broad view as a social problem that we should try to do something about. Most of their circulation was by mail, which arrived a day or two later, so they eschewed deadline coverage of the day's news and instead wrote more analytical, fact-checked, thoughtful stories.
They were actually quite liberal, and during the times when the war hawks were beating the drums of war, the CSM took one step back, reported the objective facts, and treated our "enemies" like human beings, when even papers like the New York Times were doing their job as stenographers to the military-industrial complex. Foreign correspondents in war zones are awfully expensive, but it was worth it. They also had local freelancers, who knew the people and understood the culture. For example, the CSM had some of the earliest coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they actually talked to people on both sides and treated their ideas seriously. In national coverage, they don't treat politics like a spectator sport where the Democrats and Republicans are supposed to score points against each other. They realize that we have problems to solve.
At one time I read the CSM more or less regularly, and it was pretty good. Like the Wall Street Journal, they would have one crazy editorial every day, and the rest of the paper was independent, rock-solid objective reporting. You don't find too many newspapers like that, now or ever.
They were missing the cynicism in most of the media that "things are corrupt and we can't do anything about it so let's go along with it and make smug jokes about it." See for yourself http://www.csmonitor.com/
Every religion is crazy in some way, and I don't understand how intelligent people can fall for them, but the fact is that a lot of people, including some of my friends, follow religions and do good things. The Catholics are crazy (and hypocritical) about sex, abortion and even contraceptives, but they run hospitals and bring lawsuits to help the homeless. The evangelical Christians believe in creationism, but Forest Mimms is the best electronic engineer I ever saw. The Jews are acting like Nazis towards the Palestinians, but then there's Noam Chomsky and the rest fighting for social justice. The Scientologists I don't have to tell you about, but a bunch of Scientologists were running Earthlink, which was one of the best ISPs at
First, the increase in phone usage is just 7.5% so any effects would already be marginal.
Good point.
My question was, where did they get the fatalities from? How sensitive was their analysis? Could they have identified a 5% increase of fatalities among cell phone users? If you look at Figure 3, they seem to be comparing about 60 fatalities before 9pm to 60 fatalities after 9pm. Their whole argument is based on being able to find about 3 fatalities among the statistical noise.
Suppose it increases the number of fatalities by 1%. Suppose there are 30,000 fatalities a year.
Is that marginal?
Is that large enough that you could find it in nationwide accident reports, and distinguish it from other causes of increases and decreases of fatalities?
As I recall, the main factor in variations of vehicle fatalities from year to year is the weather. If you have a year with big winter storms, the fatality rate increases so much that it swamps out almost every other factor, like speed limits, seat belt wearing rates, etc. Funeral home operators know their business will pick up after a big storm.
Look at Figure 3, which is where they demonstrate that the number of accidents goes down.
They have about 60 accidents before 9pm, and about 60 accidents after 9pm. (I don't see the actual numbers, so I'm eyeballing it from the chart.)
Suppose being on the cell phone increases your risk of having an accident by 5%. That's 3 more accidents. You might expect a difference of 3 or more accidents just by chance.
Can somebody who knows statistics better than me tell me whether his accident data is sensitive enough to find a 5% increase in accidents, if there was one?
Since we can't do randomized controlled trials of using cell phones while driving, then we have to do retrospective studies like this, among other things. The more studies, the better. Let's have provocative ideas. And then let's have critical analysis.
I find it interesting that they mention Sam Peltzman's 1975 argument that people who engage in dangerous activities, like using the cell phone while driving, will compensate by driving more carefully, and wind up with the same number of accidents. At that time, anti-regulatory conservatives were arguing that set belts won't work, because people who drove in safer cars would compensate by driving faster and more regularly. Since that time, seat belt use approached 100%, and the fatality rates have gone down a lot (about 50% per mile). I don't think that idea of "compensation" has ever been proven. But it's a handy argument against any safety regulation.
There are economics departments where conservative professors send their graduate students out into the world to prove that every government regulation is really a failure. It's fun to watch them try to prove the impossible, and sometimes they turn out to be right. But it's pretty hard to get statistics right. Medical journals have reviewers just to review the statistics in their articles. Even statisticians make mistakes. I'd like to see a good critical review of this article.
In one of the cold war's proxy battles, the United States took China's side against the Soviet Union, which meant accepting the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate Government of Cambodia in opposition to the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh. Previously, the United States had sided with China to punish the Soviet Union for its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power.
“They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men. Residents say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.”
Pol Pot's major war crimes were committed between 1975 and 1979 and the U.S. government knew the full extent of that horror during all the ensuing years in which it tried to bring him back to power as part of the U.S.-China sponsored coalition
President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has admitted, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. . . . Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could." But the U.S. did support Pol Pot covertly, including whitewashing his crimes. As Ben Kiernan points out in an indispensable Yale University Law School monograph entitled "Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia," the CIA in May of 1980 "denied that there had been any executions in the last two years of the Pol Pot regime." In fact, half a million innocent people were killed during that period. Even well after the "killing fields" were unearthed, the U.S. continued to legitimize the Khmer Rouge, voting at the U.N. Geneva Conference in 1981 to defeat an ASEAN proposal that the Khmer Rouge be disarmed.
OK, look at it in context. We killed 3 million Vietnamese because the war hawks told us that if Vietnam fell to Communism, all the other southeast countries will fall to Communism, like dominoes. Vietnam fell to Communism. The dominoes didn't fall. They were wrong. 3 million lives destroyed for nothing. The war contractors made billions. Sound familiar? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_war
Despite opinions on ethics for or against, the NSA is still widely considered to have interesting technologies to play with and viewed as leaders in computer system security development. I'm in IT because I love problem solving and the adrenaline rush of having to solve difficult problems under pressure. The responsibility of my job comes first. The only ethical dilemma for me is if someone with authority were to ask me to let a system fail to prove some kind of point.
With all due respect to Godwin, this ethical debate started during the cold war when everybody was thinking about the Nazis in WWII.
I aim at the stars, says Werner von Braun. The rockets go up, and where they come down, that's not my department, says Werner von Braun. Sometimes I miss, I hit England. But I aim at the stars, says Werner von Braun.
After they thought about WWII, a lot of scientists decided that it was wrong to just be a scientist and work on an interesting technical problem that can kill people at the end.
In particular, the top people who worked on nuclear weapons did some calculations and realized that they had constructed a machine that could destroy humanity. The people who worked on the intercontinental ballistics missiles developed some of the most advanced, cost-is-no-object integrated circuit chips, and every other technology.
Most good engineers will think out the end purpose of the work they're doing. They worked during WWII to save their country. During the cold war, they were working to destroy their country. I appreciate the adrenalin rush of problem-solving too, but you have to resist it if it's leading towards turning New York and Moscow into Hiroshima.
During the 1960s, a lot of people thought that the Vietnam war was horribly wrong (and after 3 million Vietnamese were killed in a country that now makes our sneakers, you can see their point). If you're an engineer, then on some level you want to contribute to society. Killing 3 million people in a stupid war is going in the opposite direction.
You wouldn't kill prisoners of war in order to solve an interesting scientific problem, would you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment Why is that different from helping to kill 3 million Vietnamese in exchange for working on an interesting technical problem?
Of course, maybe you're totally immoral. Maybe you want to be like Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold the Pakistani nuclear weapons secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya. I'm not sure what to say to those people.
69. Numerous instances of discriminatory intent have come to light.
70. While working on the assignment at Vinings, Georgia in December 2008, Infosys employee-whistleblower Jay Palmer claims that another Infosys employee wrote “Americans cost $,” and “No Americans/Christians” on a whiteboard.
71. Palmer claims that he received a couple of telephone calls in which the caller asked, “Why are you doing this, you stupid American, we have been good to you.” While Palmer does not know who made these calls, they came after he began to complain about Infosys’s misuse of the visa system.
72. On February 28, 2011, while Palmer was working on a project in Alpharetta,Georgia, he claims that he found a typewritten note on his keyboard, and a Word document on his computer, both of which stated, “Just leave your [sic] not wanted here hope your journey brings you death stupid american.”
73. On April 21, 2011, Palmer claims that he received an e-mail on his personal e-mail account stating, “if you make cause for us to sent [sic] back to india [sic] we will destroy you and your family.
74. Palmer claims that he was called a stupid American on one occasion by two Infosys employees.
75. Mr. Palmer brought these issues to the attention of Infosys, but Infosys did nottake significant steps to investigate or prevent future issues
76. During Mr. Palmer’s lawsuit, another employee also testified that Americans generally were made to feel unwelcome at Infosys.
Standing up for certain legal rights is a legally-protected quality in an employee, and employers can't retaliate against them for that.
There were a lot of sex bias cases in which the employee didn't have enough evidence to prove the bias, but they did have enough evidence to prove retaliation, and they won the case.
You can't discriminate against people who refuse to work below the minimum wage, for example.
In addition, if they did preferentially hire Asians for some reason -- on the assumption that Asians were more deferential, for example -- that could be racial discrimination. If they found Infosys managers saying that clearly in emails, they'd win.
I thought so too, but then I read the complaint. They claim harassment on basis of national origin.
At one job, the Asian workers left messages for (non-Asian) American workers threatening them and their families if they made trouble, etc. The Asians weren't just working cheaper. They were harassing the Americans. It sounded like they really didn't understand American culture.
There was also an element of anti-American discrimination.
The complaint also argues that they got H-1B visas by certifying that there were no available American workers, when it wasn't true. They also certified that they would pay Asian workers the prevailing wage, when that wasn't true either.
How many blind people are there who use the Internet without assistance?
I know blind people, and people who have very poor eyesight. Most of them are older. When I talk to them about computers, they're not interested. One woman with macular degeneration tried a screen reader, and didn't like it. (That's $10,000 worth of equipment sitting in her closet.)
Back in the days of COBOL, there were a lot of training programs to teach programming to blind people. And there were a lot of successful blind programmers. There were braille printers. Then came Windows, and it got a lot harder for them to read the screens....
There are laws that require organizations that serve the public to provide reasonable accommodations to the handicapped. I support those laws. A lot of people have problems with hearing or vision. A lot of people can't climb stairs.
The question is, "What's reasonable"? If this were a widespread problem, and a million blind people can't read CAPTCHAs well enough to use Skype, that's a big problem and we might have to throw out CAPTCHAs. If it's just a dozen blind techies, maybe we could work out some simpler solution.
It's a cost/benefit question. What's the scope of the problem?
During the Cold War and the McCarthy days, the government decided not to prosecute Communist spies, like Theodore Hall, because the constitutionally-required discovery would have revealed security methods that they didn't want to disclose.
Now, they just prosecute them anyway and ignore the constitution.
If you read the article more carefully you'll see that the author quotes several experts from Blackfish, and he wrote a book himself about the orca Keiko.
If someone writes books and articles like that for a living, he can easily interview two dozen researchers or more, and find out what all the researchers think. "Students" of orca are scientists who study orca.
If you want scientific research with references, Science magazine has had some articles about orca.
There are other problems: Cultured meat is now grown in medium with fetal calf serum, a supplement made from blood collected at slaughterhouses; scientists have yet to find an alternative that doesn't involve dead animals.
Lawyers have repeatedly told me (1) never talk to the cops unless you have a lawyer. (2) Never give them permission to enter your home without a warrant. (3) Never give them permission to search your home without a warrant.
Once they get inside your home, they can look around and possibly find something illegal.
The husband's answer should have been, "Give me your business card and I'll get back to you after I've talked to a lawyer."
Yes, it's tempting to get rid of them by explaining that you're not doing anything wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the memorandum in the case.
Many of those stops were on Broadway. I've walked down those very same streets many times. I'm white and I've never been stopped, even when I was walking home late at night. Black guys get stopped.
The thing that impressed me about their testimony is that they sound like really cool guys. They're black law students, medical students, teachers, social workers, etc. They're getting hassled by cops all the time, they're tired of it, and they're responding in reasonable ways. The cops are unreasonably arbitrary and rude, and according to the judge's decision, the cops repeatedly broke the law. These guys filed protests with the police department, complained to the ACLU, and finally took the cops to court. They've got balls. They're complaining that they're being singled out all the time because they're black, and if you read the court documents, they made a pretty good argument.
DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.
OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf
And no bullsh*t interpretations of the above rules.
You mean like
drugs==terrorism
child sex abuse==terrorism
child=<17 years old
You probably have no idea what the Catholic church really teaches about sex, abortion, and contraceptives, and that's probably why you conclude they are crazy and hypocritical.
I lived with Catholic roomates all through college, and I had four Catholic girlfriends. My Jesuit roommates sent me to the library to read Thomas Aquinis. I went to mass. I marched in anti-war demonstrations with Catholics. I worked with Catholic lawyers who were suing the city to force them to provide housing for the homeless. And (at the recommendation of a Catholic right-to-life activist), I read Roe vs. Wade, which went through all the arguments, including the Catholic arguments, in great detail.
I also know that there are a lot of Catholics, and they don't all agree with each other.
So your link didn't tell me anything I don't know.
I can understand how somebody could oppose abortion. They don't interpret Leveticus the way other people do.
I can understand the "whole cloth" argument against abortion, unjust war (like the one we had in Iraq), and the death penalty, taken together. They're more convincing when they provide welfare for women who do have unintended children (and less convincing when they oppose welfare). I heard Mary Jo Bane explain why she resigned from the White House in response to Clinton's "welfare reform."
But when the Catholic hierarchy rules out contraception, they're choosing a medieval theological construction over the reality of life today. The Billings method only works for some women, and isn't reliable even for them. (I've talked to gynecologists about that and read the medical literature.) The reality is that unmarried people, especially teenagers, will have sex. Having an unplanned child during college (or high school) can take blow your chance to get a degree. A lot of women start a relationship with a guy, find out that he's got problems, and drop him. If they have a child together, she'll never get him out of her life. It's not "open to life." It's anti-sex.
Contraception is where the Catholics pass the boundary into craziness.
They hold people up to an impossible standard of chastity. It took me a while to figure out that Catholics just ignore those teachings. And then later on we found out that Catholic priests themselves were having sex with their parishoners, including young children. I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the sex scandals destroyed all their credibility.
The whole Catholic Church doctrine on sex is fucked up, and causes Catholics a lot of suffering, to the extent that they try to follow it. One striking thing that I've seen repeatedly is that a girl will be brought up in a strict Catholic upbringing, fall for the chastity line, and then, the first time she's away from home, she'll break up with her first boyfriend and start sleeping with everybody. I've seen statistics that Catholics were more likely to have abortions. And the Catholic guys went to prostitutes. Herpes is forever.
In conclusion (as my Jesuit roommates taught me to say), a lot of religions do some good things, even though they're crazy in some ways, and also do some harm in other ways. The Catholic Church is the best example I could think of. If only they got rid of that obsession with sex they could do a lot more good.
P.S. My father went to Fordham.
I must defend the CSM. I knew their technology reporter, and he turned me on to Linux.
I can't speak with authority on the Christian Science religion, but I have met a lot of hospital medical ethicists who deal with them and other religions that discourage medicine. There were some big problems with Christian Science up to 1993, when they lost a big lawsuit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_science#Children.27s_rights.2C_relationship_with_medicine Since that time they seem to be moving away from their anti-medicine position significantly. I don't know what their vaccination practices are now, but Mary Baker Eddy said that they should get vaccinated if that's the law. These problems of children (and adults) dying for lack of medical care come up now more often with the Evangelical churches that interpret the Bible "literally", and with "naturalistic" practitioners.
The CSM is an excellent newspaper. They won 7 Pulitzer prizes. I read a book about newspapers in New England, and one chapter was about the CSM. They (like most other journalists) gave the CSM a great evaluation, although they pointed out the ironic failing of a newspaper based in Boston, one of the centers of academic medicine, that didn't cover medicine. OTOH, they said that the CSM was edited with a philosophy of trying to contribute something positive to the world, which sounds hokey but if you look at their coverage they were really doing it. They lost money. They refused to take cigarette or liquor ads. They never covered crime, except for a broad view as a social problem that we should try to do something about. Most of their circulation was by mail, which arrived a day or two later, so they eschewed deadline coverage of the day's news and instead wrote more analytical, fact-checked, thoughtful stories.
They were actually quite liberal, and during the times when the war hawks were beating the drums of war, the CSM took one step back, reported the objective facts, and treated our "enemies" like human beings, when even papers like the New York Times were doing their job as stenographers to the military-industrial complex. Foreign correspondents in war zones are awfully expensive, but it was worth it. They also had local freelancers, who knew the people and understood the culture. For example, the CSM had some of the earliest coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they actually talked to people on both sides and treated their ideas seriously. In national coverage, they don't treat politics like a spectator sport where the Democrats and Republicans are supposed to score points against each other. They realize that we have problems to solve.
At one time I read the CSM more or less regularly, and it was pretty good. Like the Wall Street Journal, they would have one crazy editorial every day, and the rest of the paper was independent, rock-solid objective reporting. You don't find too many newspapers like that, now or ever.
They were missing the cynicism in most of the media that "things are corrupt and we can't do anything about it so let's go along with it and make smug jokes about it." See for yourself http://www.csmonitor.com/
Every religion is crazy in some way, and I don't understand how intelligent people can fall for them, but the fact is that a lot of people, including some of my friends, follow religions and do good things. The Catholics are crazy (and hypocritical) about sex, abortion and even contraceptives, but they run hospitals and bring lawsuits to help the homeless. The evangelical Christians believe in creationism, but Forest Mimms is the best electronic engineer I ever saw. The Jews are acting like Nazis towards the Palestinians, but then there's Noam Chomsky and the rest fighting for social justice. The Scientologists I don't have to tell you about, but a bunch of Scientologists were running Earthlink, which was one of the best ISPs at
Eastasia has always been our enemy.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306742
Hospital Outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:407-416 August 1, 2013DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1306742
Free, no paywall.
Good diagram here.
http://www.nejm.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1056%2FNEJMoa1306742&iid=f02
Biggest problem is heart attacks among elderly people. http://www.bmj.com/content/330/7483/133?
Since hand-washing one of the most important ways of infection control, that's a fortunate convergence.
Getting a little hysterical now, aren't we?
They've been doing this for a long time. They have lots of doctors figuring it out. Pilgrims are required to get vaccinations. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2u48UKUiN7P-J4kpKLxAebg0ovg?docId=CNG.acecd21530a5cd7893d6d481941594e6.261
This research is total crap.
First, the increase in phone usage is just 7.5% so any effects would already be marginal.
Good point.
My question was, where did they get the fatalities from? How sensitive was their analysis? Could they have identified a 5% increase of fatalities among cell phone users? If you look at Figure 3, they seem to be comparing about 60 fatalities before 9pm to 60 fatalities after 9pm. Their whole argument is based on being able to find about 3 fatalities among the statistical noise.
Suppose it increases the number of fatalities by 1%. Suppose there are 30,000 fatalities a year.
Is that marginal?
Is that large enough that you could find it in nationwide accident reports, and distinguish it from other causes of increases and decreases of fatalities?
As I recall, the main factor in variations of vehicle fatalities from year to year is the weather. If you have a year with big winter storms, the fatality rate increases so much that it swamps out almost every other factor, like speed limits, seat belt wearing rates, etc. Funeral home operators know their business will pick up after a big storm.
Here's my problem with that study.
Look at Figure 3, which is where they demonstrate that the number of accidents goes down.
They have about 60 accidents before 9pm, and about 60 accidents after 9pm. (I don't see the actual numbers, so I'm eyeballing it from the chart.)
Suppose being on the cell phone increases your risk of having an accident by 5%. That's 3 more accidents. You might expect a difference of 3 or more accidents just by chance.
Can somebody who knows statistics better than me tell me whether his accident data is sensitive enough to find a 5% increase in accidents, if there was one?
Since we can't do randomized controlled trials of using cell phones while driving, then we have to do retrospective studies like this, among other things. The more studies, the better. Let's have provocative ideas. And then let's have critical analysis.
I find it interesting that they mention Sam Peltzman's 1975 argument that people who engage in dangerous activities, like using the cell phone while driving, will compensate by driving more carefully, and wind up with the same number of accidents. At that time, anti-regulatory conservatives were arguing that set belts won't work, because people who drove in safer cars would compensate by driving faster and more regularly. Since that time, seat belt use approached 100%, and the fatality rates have gone down a lot (about 50% per mile). I don't think that idea of "compensation" has ever been proven. But it's a handy argument against any safety regulation.
There are economics departments where conservative professors send their graduate students out into the world to prove that every government regulation is really a failure. It's fun to watch them try to prove the impossible, and sometimes they turn out to be right. But it's pretty hard to get statistics right. Medical journals have reviewers just to review the statistics in their articles. Even statisticians make mistakes. I'd like to see a good critical review of this article.
The U.S. supported Pol Pot.
Cold-war anti-Communism worked against the interests of the U.S. The U.S. is worse off because of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/17/world/death-of-pol-pot-the-diplomacy-pol-pot-s-end-won-t-stop-us-pursuit-of-his-circle.html
DEATH OF POL POT: THE DIPLOMACY; Pol Pot's End Won't Stop U.S. Pursuit of His Circle
By ELIZABETH BECKER
Published: April 17, 1998
In one of the cold war's proxy battles, the United States took China's side against the Soviet Union, which meant accepting the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate Government of Cambodia in opposition to the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh. Previously, the United States had sided with China to punish the Soviet Union for its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-thatcher-helped-pol-pot/5330873
How Thatcher helped Pol Pot
By John Pilger
Global Research, April 11, 2013
Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power.
“They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men. Residents say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.”
http://articles.latimes.com/1997-06-24/local/me-6271_1_pol-pot
In the Dock With Pol Pot: Uncle Sam
An immoral connivance between China and the U.S. allowed killing fields to flourish.
June 24, 1997
Robert Scheer
Pol Pot's major war crimes were committed between 1975 and 1979 and the U.S. government knew the full extent of that horror during all the ensuing years in which it tried to bring him back to power as part of the U.S.-China sponsored coalition
President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has admitted, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. . . . Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could." But the U.S. did support Pol Pot covertly, including whitewashing his crimes. As Ben Kiernan points out in an indispensable Yale University Law School monograph entitled "Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia," the CIA in May of 1980 "denied that there had been any executions in the last two years of the Pol Pot regime." In fact, half a million innocent people were killed during that period. Even well after the "killing fields" were unearthed, the U.S. continued to legitimize the Khmer Rouge, voting at the U.N. Geneva Conference in 1981 to defeat an ASEAN proposal that the Khmer Rouge be disarmed.
Ken Shirriff did teardowns of an Apple charger and a generic charger.
http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html
OK, look at it in context. We killed 3 million Vietnamese because the war hawks told us that if Vietnam fell to Communism, all the other southeast countries will fall to Communism, like dominoes. Vietnam fell to Communism. The dominoes didn't fall. They were wrong. 3 million lives destroyed for nothing. The war contractors made billions. Sound familiar? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_war
Despite opinions on ethics for or against, the NSA is still widely considered to have interesting technologies to play with and viewed as leaders in computer system security development. I'm in IT because I love problem solving and the adrenaline rush of having to solve difficult problems under pressure. The responsibility of my job comes first. The only ethical dilemma for me is if someone with authority were to ask me to let a system fail to prove some kind of point.
With all due respect to Godwin, this ethical debate started during the cold war when everybody was thinking about the Nazis in WWII.
I aim at the stars, says Werner von Braun.
The rockets go up, and where they come down,
that's not my department, says Werner von Braun.
Sometimes I miss, I hit England.
But I aim at the stars, says Werner von Braun.
After they thought about WWII, a lot of scientists decided that it was wrong to just be a scientist and work on an interesting technical problem that can kill people at the end.
In particular, the top people who worked on nuclear weapons did some calculations and realized that they had constructed a machine that could destroy humanity. The people who worked on the intercontinental ballistics missiles developed some of the most advanced, cost-is-no-object integrated circuit chips, and every other technology.
Most good engineers will think out the end purpose of the work they're doing. They worked during WWII to save their country. During the cold war, they were working to destroy their country. I appreciate the adrenalin rush of problem-solving too, but you have to resist it if it's leading towards turning New York and Moscow into Hiroshima.
During the 1960s, a lot of people thought that the Vietnam war was horribly wrong (and after 3 million Vietnamese were killed in a country that now makes our sneakers, you can see their point). If you're an engineer, then on some level you want to contribute to society. Killing 3 million people in a stupid war is going in the opposite direction.
You wouldn't kill prisoners of war in order to solve an interesting scientific problem, would you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment Why is that different from helping to kill 3 million Vietnamese in exchange for working on an interesting technical problem?
Of course, maybe you're totally immoral. Maybe you want to be like Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold the Pakistani nuclear weapons secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya. I'm not sure what to say to those people.
It's in the court documents, which are linked from TFA. http://www.pbclaw.com/2013/08/02/proposed-class-action-complaint-filed-against-infosys-for-failure-to-hire-national-origin-discrimination/
D. Particular Instances of Discrimination
69. Numerous instances of discriminatory intent have come to light.
70. While working on the assignment at Vinings, Georgia in December 2008, Infosys employee-whistleblower Jay Palmer claims that another Infosys employee wrote “Americans cost $,” and “No Americans/Christians” on a whiteboard.
71. Palmer claims that he received a couple of telephone calls in which the caller asked, “Why are you doing this, you stupid American, we have been good to you.” While Palmer does not know who made these calls, they came after he began to complain about Infosys’s misuse of the visa system.
72. On February 28, 2011, while Palmer was working on a project in Alpharetta,Georgia, he claims that he found a typewritten note on his keyboard, and a Word document on his computer, both of which stated, “Just leave your [sic] not wanted here hope your journey brings you death stupid american.”
73. On April 21, 2011, Palmer claims that he received an e-mail on his personal e-mail account stating, “if you make cause for us to sent [sic] back to india [sic] we will destroy you and your family.
74. Palmer claims that he was called a stupid American on one occasion by two Infosys employees.
75. Mr. Palmer brought these issues to the attention of Infosys, but Infosys did nottake significant steps to investigate or prevent future issues
76. During Mr. Palmer’s lawsuit, another employee also testified that Americans generally were made to feel unwelcome at Infosys.
Standing up for certain legal rights is a legally-protected quality in an employee, and employers can't retaliate against them for that.
There were a lot of sex bias cases in which the employee didn't have enough evidence to prove the bias, but they did have enough evidence to prove retaliation, and they won the case.
You can't discriminate against people who refuse to work below the minimum wage, for example.
In addition, if they did preferentially hire Asians for some reason -- on the assumption that Asians were more deferential, for example -- that could be racial discrimination. If they found Infosys managers saying that clearly in emails, they'd win.
I thought so too, but then I read the complaint. They claim harassment on basis of national origin.
At one job, the Asian workers left messages for (non-Asian) American workers threatening them and their families if they made trouble, etc. The Asians weren't just working cheaper. They were harassing the Americans. It sounded like they really didn't understand American culture.
There was also an element of anti-American discrimination.
The complaint also argues that they got H-1B visas by certifying that there were no available American workers, when it wasn't true. They also certified that they would pay Asian workers the prevailing wage, when that wasn't true either.
How many blind people are there who use the Internet without assistance?
I know blind people, and people who have very poor eyesight. Most of them are older. When I talk to them about computers, they're not interested. One woman with macular degeneration tried a screen reader, and didn't like it. (That's $10,000 worth of equipment sitting in her closet.)
Back in the days of COBOL, there were a lot of training programs to teach programming to blind people. And there were a lot of successful blind programmers. There were braille printers. Then came Windows, and it got a lot harder for them to read the screens....
There are laws that require organizations that serve the public to provide reasonable accommodations to the handicapped. I support those laws. A lot of people have problems with hearing or vision. A lot of people can't climb stairs.
The question is, "What's reasonable"? If this were a widespread problem, and a million blind people can't read CAPTCHAs well enough to use Skype, that's a big problem and we might have to throw out CAPTCHAs. If it's just a dozen blind techies, maybe we could work out some simpler solution.
It's a cost/benefit question. What's the scope of the problem?
How times have changed.
During the Cold War and the McCarthy days, the government decided not to prosecute Communist spies, like Theodore Hall, because the constitutionally-required discovery would have revealed security methods that they didn't want to disclose.
Now, they just prosecute them anyway and ignore the constitution.
If you read the article more carefully you'll see that the author quotes several experts from Blackfish, and he wrote a book himself about the orca Keiko.
If someone writes books and articles like that for a living, he can easily interview two dozen researchers or more, and find out what all the researchers think. "Students" of orca are scientists who study orca.
If you want scientific research with references, Science magazine has had some articles about orca.
He gets drunk on vodka and says, "Bring on the cat!"
FTA:
There are other problems: Cultured meat is now grown in medium with fetal calf serum, a supplement made from blood collected at slaughterhouses; scientists have yet to find an alternative that doesn't involve dead animals.
Lawyers have repeatedly told me (1) never talk to the cops unless you have a lawyer. (2) Never give them permission to enter your home without a warrant. (3) Never give them permission to search your home without a warrant.
Once they get inside your home, they can look around and possibly find something illegal.
The husband's answer should have been, "Give me your business card and I'll get back to you after I've talked to a lawyer."
Yes, it's tempting to get rid of them by explaining that you're not doing anything wrong.
But a lot of people who didn't think they were doing anything wrong have wound up in jail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Butler
I am starting to think you don't even have the capability to think for yourself. I will even go so far as to call you a stupid fuck.
I see you have declined to engage in rational debate, and have chosen name-calling instead, which is where your talents are.
Excuse me for mistaking you for a rational person.