Oh, I see the problem. We're just going to roll with opinions, not logic. Got it.
It doesn't matter how logical your argument is if you're basing it on an unestablished premise -- just as you can't convince an atheist by appealing to the Bible as authority.
Warren Buffet is trying to make the case that everybody should be legally obligated to pay more money. But if he thought everybody should be compelled to pay more money, he must already believe he should pay more money. He does not.
I was going to avoid the equivalence argument -- but to go into it here:
Wealth as a measure of social status is relative in nature.
That is to say -- beyond meeting my needs (and a certain level of wants), I care more about being in the top N% of my social group than I do about exactly how many dollars it takes to be in that top N%, or exactly how much effective spending power those dollars give me. There are plenty of game-theory exercises which back this as a general rule of human behavior.
Paying M% more when everyone else does the same doesn't change relative social stature derived from that wealth. Paying M% more when nobody else does so does. As such, it's no surprise that people who would be willing to accept a decrease in absolute wealth are far less willing to accept a decrease in relative wealth.
To claim that someone who is arguing in favor of an absolute decrease be willing to accept a (more severe from a social-stature perspective) relative decrease lest they be branded hypocritical ignores the difference between these categories.
It only hurts his argument if you're coming from a mindset in which "paying $X more, while everyone else does not" and "paying $X more, like everyone else" are equivalent acts.
Allow me to assert that the bulk of the people you disagree with here do not see these as equivalent, so your argument of hypocracy rings false in their ears.
Now, you can argue about whether hypocracy is in valid here, or whether this equivalency is true or false, or you can find an argument your opposition will actually consider weighty. Guess which of these is most likely to be productive if your goal is to actually convince someone?
Texas doesn't have state income tax -- so property tax and sales tax are all that there is for revenue here. As such, either of those being dodged is not so great.
I agree with you inasmuch as brainteasers being useless, but I'm 100% with the parent on being fluent in terms of the art.
Trying to decide when to use encapsulation to hide implementation details isn't esoteric -- it's something that should be coming up in design reviews regularly, and in my experience, does. If you aren't thinking about your designs -- and having the vocabulary to recognize patterns and discuss them in higher-level terms is an important part of being able to reason about just about anything[1]... well, it's a relevant concern.
(A similar example applies to databases -- it's one thing, and valuable, to have a feel for what "smells like" good schema design... but if you don't have the vocabulary to talk about schema normalization, you're not the right person to be on a design review for decisions that will be impacting folks writing code for a product for potentially years to come).
[1] -...if you give the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis any kind of weight.
People that do this crap are more willfully ignorant than anyone and it drives me crazy to talk to them.
Quite a generalization, there. Not everyone has blinders on -- I have my list of gripes with the party that got most of my votes last election and which will probably get most of them in the coming one, but evaluating my options, they're by far the better choice for the things that matter to me even though I'm occasionally upset by their actions.
There's the people who put on blinders and convince themselves that a politician or party is absolutely in the right (or, conversely, that their opposition is so absolutely in the wrong as to be unwilling to give intelligent consideration to viewpoints of same), and the people who can appreciate that the real world has shades of grey and compromise is important... and then, with that realization firmly in place, make a decision about whose agenda will best work to create the kind of society they most want to live in.
Pay attention much? For some people, the "wedge issues" are genuinely important.
Have a chronic illness and want to start your own business (or otherwise work anywhere that isn't a government or Fortune 50)? Health reform matters, a lot. In a long-term relationship with someone of the same gender? Legal recognition for that relationship matters, a lot. Go to Planned Parenthood for affordable mammograms and other preventative care? There's one very specific party trying hard to de-fund them for an activity that's less than 2% of the procedures they do. Perhaps you're pushing for urban design that encourages active transportation and liveable spaces -- guess what, one major party tends to support your efforts and another one doesn't (and as something of an activist in this area myself -- while state and local government support is also critical in this area, the comparatively tiny amounts of federal funding that do support programs such as Safe Routes To Schools matter, a lot).
And so on. There are certainly plenty of places where the major parties hold the same viewpoint -- but to say that they're entirely equivalent in every way that matters in peoples' day-to-day lives is nothing short of willful ignorance.
The purpose of a church is to be a moral authority. Societies degenerate badly without some sort of moral authority. There nothing wrong with a group simply saying "we think X is right and Y is wrong, and you're not welcome among us unless you at least try to toe the line": that's more or less the basis of civilization.
The idea of teaching people to defer moral decisions to a third-party authority, rather than making their own best effort to be a decent person and follow the golden rule, scares me greatly. I say this as someone who grew up as a church-going, ${DEITY}-fearing religious adherent, and today is none of those things.
As a lone agent, moral decisions can be hard: I have to consider the perspectives, positions, intent and rationale of those around me; to think hard about my actions, how those actions impact others, and the consequences thereof. At the risk of caricaturing the opposing view (and to be sure, a great many religious people have extremely nuanced views on morality), there aren't any easy shortcuts: "${AUTHORITY} says that ${FOO} is good, so my actions are clearly justified"; nor, "${PERSON} is an agent of ${ENTITY}, so I can disregard their positions without further consideration". Can I decide that someone else's actions are harmful to others or otherwise wrong? Certainly. At the same time, the frequency with which I do so is distinctly limited to times when such harm is real and unwelcome, and when the consequences of my decision to condemn are themselves things I consider morally acceptable.
Moreover -- in a society in which individuals are moral free agents, moral arguments can be freely defined through discussion and debate. If I disagree with someone about, say, the merits of the SlutWalk movement, that should be something we can talk about -- not just name-calling debate but genuine effort to understand the other's views and find some middle ground. Argument from authority lends a rigidity to one's perspectives making them resistant to refinement -- a rigidity which tends to result in an unwillingness to consider harm to others which may result from the stances one takes, and an unwillingness to take into account the grey areas and nuances make up the world as it is.
I don't by any means argue that churches have no right to take moral stances. I do argue that making those moral stances overly rigid, and teaching them in such a way as to encourage argument from authority rather than discussion and debate, is a harmful activity and counterproductive to the goal of having a robust and morally self-aware society... and I am not at all convinced that I agree that such authorities are necessary to maintain prevent "societal decline".
I don't need a cloud service for that, my home box can serve this role too.
You don't, but not everyone is so lucky. If your home connection is sitting behind two layers of 3rd-party NAT, or subject to a low upload-rate cap, or simply unreliable, running your own public file server from home can be a bit trickier to pull off.
It's also perfectly legit for folks to simply want the administrative overhead of keeping a public-facing service appropriately configured, up-to-date, patched and secure to be offloaded to someone else.
It's cheaper and not that difficult for them to just ignore the judgement, especially if they do not have an office in your state. Crossing state lines is a bit out of the local sheriff's jurisdiction.
EA has a lot of offices -- they have a presence in the state I live in now (actually, the same city), and the state I was in before this one as well. But even if they didn't -- it wouldn't be hard to use that judgement to generate bad PR worth more than its face value.
So this is a bonus. Not a huge one, but it paid for his new car, no doubt.
And if he'd lost he would only be out $120,000 in legal fees, a huge amount of time spent (not just in court, but preparing for court), and some amount of professional embarrassment.
Keep in mind, again, that this case began over him getting prosecuted for something he did to expose police brutality ("excessive use of force") that wasn't hurting him personally.
Why you'd want to paint someone who took huge personal risks standing up for the rights of others as in it for a profit motive is simply beyond me.
And I would have a reasonable amount of trust in the government in Finland to make that decision correctly, but I would not in the US--meaning the exact same model will not translate to our society. I think that's why the US is so slow to fix the issue--our government is rather poor at managing systems (typically very high overhead cost and low productivity relative to the private sector), and so far our society has preferred to accept the evils of the private sector and legislation rather than trust our government to fix it all.
I need to be getting to bed, and don't have time for an extended reply at the moment -- but the VA hospital system, for all its flaws, serves as a rather effective counterargument to the position that a desirable outcomes-per-dollar ratio couldn't be achieved by government-run healthcare in the US.
If you need healthcare in the US, you go and get it. You get care that day, no waiting. Your doctor is damn good. You get a bill in the mail. If you're broke, you get the bill and don't pay it. Worst case, you end up declaring bankruptcy with your health restored.
Unless you're lucky enough to be born with a chronic condition that requires constant management, both through care and drugs. A hospital is only obliged to provide care for those who can't pay if their condition is immediately life-threatening -- if it's "management now would stop it from being life-threatening later", well, too bad.
And if lack of management means you don't qualify for the organ recipient list [yes, a history of appropriate care is a qualifying factor] to get a transplant that would let you keep living after your lungs become unworkable due to a lack of ongoing care that you couldn't afford [and couldn't get for free because it wasn't yet an "emergency"]... well, that's just too damned bad; seems you died of being poor.
I think my other responsce is still accurate here -- fact-checking is a process, not a result.
So based on your interpretation we would conclude that TAL fact checked, found a significant lie and went ahead with the story making them complicit in the lie
They put a disclaimer in the story indicating the lie they found, so not so much complicit in that one, no.
Consider that some of the parameters involve things like human strength and control (for spin avoidance, for instance) -- a weighted suit and a suit being controlled by a human with training don't necessarily behave the same.
The one-man re-entry suit GE built (but never finished testing) back in the day was real research. I don't see why this doesn't qualify similarly.
Moreover -- just dropping the suit without anyone in it could be what they'd do if they only wanted the data. Being a publicity stunt and being real research aren't necessarily mutually exclusive -- you've got two groups, they each have their own goals, and being able to make them both happy from the same funding pool is a win.
...but it makes sense when one considers how long it's been since we were really going full-tilt at doing this kind of research in the public sector. (Every time I see it, this xkcd leaves me a little more depressed about our willingness, as a population, to go to the risks and expenses necessary to accomplish great things).
Serious kudos to Red Bull for sponsoring this -- it's a happy day when one person's marketing budget is another person's research budget, and I sincerely hope both the PR people and the research people get the results they're looking for.
And in this case "didn't fact check adequately" and "didn't fact check" is hard to distinguish when you consider that it would lead to the same conclusion: the TAL staff was duped, humiliated, and issued their first-ever retraction.
Fact-checking is a process, not a result. If you followed the process, it's false to claim you didn't, even if it failed to get the desired result.
Example: I'm in a car, changing lanes. If I check my mirrors, and miss a motorcycle, subsequently running them off the road, it's entirely accurate to say that I completely screwed up and am culpable. It's inaccurate to say that I didn't check my mirrors.
Explicitly untrue. They did make an effort at fact-checking, and noted the one exageration they successfully detected, but they let it slide when Daisey wouldn't give them accurate contact information for his interpreter, rather than killing the story.
It was a judgement call, and they were wrong, but at least they're doing the right thing in followup.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter how logical your argument is if you're basing it on an unestablished premise -- just as you can't convince an atheist by appealing to the Bible as authority.
I was going to avoid the equivalence argument -- but to go into it here:
Wealth as a measure of social status is relative in nature.
That is to say -- beyond meeting my needs (and a certain level of wants), I care more about being in the top N% of my social group than I do about exactly how many dollars it takes to be in that top N%, or exactly how much effective spending power those dollars give me. There are plenty of game-theory exercises which back this as a general rule of human behavior.
Paying M% more when everyone else does the same doesn't change relative social stature derived from that wealth. Paying M% more when nobody else does so does. As such, it's no surprise that people who would be willing to accept a decrease in absolute wealth are far less willing to accept a decrease in relative wealth.
To claim that someone who is arguing in favor of an absolute decrease be willing to accept a (more severe from a social-stature perspective) relative decrease lest they be branded hypocritical ignores the difference between these categories.
It only hurts his argument if you're coming from a mindset in which "paying $X more, while everyone else does not" and "paying $X more, like everyone else" are equivalent acts.
Allow me to assert that the bulk of the people you disagree with here do not see these as equivalent, so your argument of hypocracy rings false in their ears.
Now, you can argue about whether hypocracy is in valid here, or whether this equivalency is true or false, or you can find an argument your opposition will actually consider weighty. Guess which of these is most likely to be productive if your goal is to actually convince someone?
"Every SCUD"? Not so much -- only after they'd been left on too long; the error didn't add up until some time after boot.
Do you seriously think the hardware would get deployed if it wouldn't function even in a perfect-world test case?
The truth of the matter is bad enough; no reason to make it worse.
Texas doesn't have state income tax -- so property tax and sales tax are all that there is for revenue here. As such, either of those being dodged is not so great.
I agree with you inasmuch as brainteasers being useless, but I'm 100% with the parent on being fluent in terms of the art.
Trying to decide when to use encapsulation to hide implementation details isn't esoteric -- it's something that should be coming up in design reviews regularly, and in my experience, does. If you aren't thinking about your designs -- and having the vocabulary to recognize patterns and discuss them in higher-level terms is an important part of being able to reason about just about anything[1]... well, it's a relevant concern.
(A similar example applies to databases -- it's one thing, and valuable, to have a feel for what "smells like" good schema design... but if you don't have the vocabulary to talk about schema normalization, you're not the right person to be on a design review for decisions that will be impacting folks writing code for a product for potentially years to come).
[1] - ...if you give the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis any kind of weight.
Quite a generalization, there. Not everyone has blinders on -- I have my list of gripes with the party that got most of my votes last election and which will probably get most of them in the coming one, but evaluating my options, they're by far the better choice for the things that matter to me even though I'm occasionally upset by their actions.
There's the people who put on blinders and convince themselves that a politician or party is absolutely in the right (or, conversely, that their opposition is so absolutely in the wrong as to be unwilling to give intelligent consideration to viewpoints of same), and the people who can appreciate that the real world has shades of grey and compromise is important... and then, with that realization firmly in place, make a decision about whose agenda will best work to create the kind of society they most want to live in.
Pay attention much? For some people, the "wedge issues" are genuinely important.
Have a chronic illness and want to start your own business (or otherwise work anywhere that isn't a government or Fortune 50)? Health reform matters, a lot. In a long-term relationship with someone of the same gender? Legal recognition for that relationship matters, a lot. Go to Planned Parenthood for affordable mammograms and other preventative care? There's one very specific party trying hard to de-fund them for an activity that's less than 2% of the procedures they do. Perhaps you're pushing for urban design that encourages active transportation and liveable spaces -- guess what, one major party tends to support your efforts and another one doesn't (and as something of an activist in this area myself -- while state and local government support is also critical in this area, the comparatively tiny amounts of federal funding that do support programs such as Safe Routes To Schools matter, a lot).
And so on. There are certainly plenty of places where the major parties hold the same viewpoint -- but to say that they're entirely equivalent in every way that matters in peoples' day-to-day lives is nothing short of willful ignorance.
No, they don't -- not by a long shot. According to SubsidyScope, use taxes cover only 51% of the costs of highways -- whereas city streets are paid out of the city's general fund, not by gas taxes at all (so cyclists pay as much for the streets they use as everyone else).
The idea of teaching people to defer moral decisions to a third-party authority, rather than making their own best effort to be a decent person and follow the golden rule, scares me greatly. I say this as someone who grew up as a church-going, ${DEITY}-fearing religious adherent, and today is none of those things.
As a lone agent, moral decisions can be hard: I have to consider the perspectives, positions, intent and rationale of those around me; to think hard about my actions, how those actions impact others, and the consequences thereof. At the risk of caricaturing the opposing view (and to be sure, a great many religious people have extremely nuanced views on morality), there aren't any easy shortcuts: "${AUTHORITY} says that ${FOO} is good, so my actions are clearly justified"; nor, "${PERSON} is an agent of ${ENTITY}, so I can disregard their positions without further consideration". Can I decide that someone else's actions are harmful to others or otherwise wrong? Certainly. At the same time, the frequency with which I do so is distinctly limited to times when such harm is real and unwelcome, and when the consequences of my decision to condemn are themselves things I consider morally acceptable.
Moreover -- in a society in which individuals are moral free agents, moral arguments can be freely defined through discussion and debate. If I disagree with someone about, say, the merits of the SlutWalk movement, that should be something we can talk about -- not just name-calling debate but genuine effort to understand the other's views and find some middle ground. Argument from authority lends a rigidity to one's perspectives making them resistant to refinement -- a rigidity which tends to result in an unwillingness to consider harm to others which may result from the stances one takes, and an unwillingness to take into account the grey areas and nuances make up the world as it is.
I don't by any means argue that churches have no right to take moral stances. I do argue that making those moral stances overly rigid, and teaching them in such a way as to encourage argument from authority rather than discussion and debate, is a harmful activity and counterproductive to the goal of having a robust and morally self-aware society... and I am not at all convinced that I agree that such authorities are necessary to maintain prevent "societal decline".
You don't, but not everyone is so lucky. If your home connection is sitting behind two layers of 3rd-party NAT, or subject to a low upload-rate cap, or simply unreliable, running your own public file server from home can be a bit trickier to pull off.
It's also perfectly legit for folks to simply want the administrative overhead of keeping a public-facing service appropriately configured, up-to-date, patched and secure to be offloaded to someone else.
Might I mention The Mismeasure Of Man as suggested reading, before we start talking about just which science has and hasn't been discredited?
EA has a lot of offices -- they have a presence in the state I live in now (actually, the same city), and the state I was in before this one as well. But even if they didn't -- it wouldn't be hard to use that judgement to generate bad PR worth more than its face value.
Sure, but for a company like EA, and a judgement that small? It's cheaper to just pay it.
Only if they bother to show up. Which costs them money. Otherwise, he gets a default judgement regardless of the merits.
And if he'd lost he would only be out $120,000 in legal fees, a huge amount of time spent (not just in court, but preparing for court), and some amount of professional embarrassment.
Keep in mind, again, that this case began over him getting prosecuted for something he did to expose police brutality ("excessive use of force") that wasn't hurting him personally.
Why you'd want to paint someone who took huge personal risks standing up for the rights of others as in it for a profit motive is simply beyond me.
He ended up with $50K after his lawyers were paid, for 5 years spent in court. I can think of easier ways to make $10K/year.
I need to be getting to bed, and don't have time for an extended reply at the moment -- but the VA hospital system, for all its flaws, serves as a rather effective counterargument to the position that a desirable outcomes-per-dollar ratio couldn't be achieved by government-run healthcare in the US.
Unless you're lucky enough to be born with a chronic condition that requires constant management, both through care and drugs. A hospital is only obliged to provide care for those who can't pay if their condition is immediately life-threatening -- if it's "management now would stop it from being life-threatening later", well, too bad.
And if lack of management means you don't qualify for the organ recipient list [yes, a history of appropriate care is a qualifying factor] to get a transplant that would let you keep living after your lungs become unworkable due to a lack of ongoing care that you couldn't afford [and couldn't get for free because it wasn't yet an "emergency"]... well, that's just too damned bad; seems you died of being poor.
I think my other responsce is still accurate here -- fact-checking is a process, not a result.
They put a disclaimer in the story indicating the lie they found, so not so much complicit in that one, no.
Consider that some of the parameters involve things like human strength and control (for spin avoidance, for instance) -- a weighted suit and a suit being controlled by a human with training don't necessarily behave the same.
The one-man re-entry suit GE built (but never finished testing) back in the day was real research. I don't see why this doesn't qualify similarly.
Moreover -- just dropping the suit without anyone in it could be what they'd do if they only wanted the data. Being a publicity stunt and being real research aren't necessarily mutually exclusive -- you've got two groups, they each have their own goals, and being able to make them both happy from the same funding pool is a win.
Read the article much? Kittinger is one of the people helping.
...but it makes sense when one considers how long it's been since we were really going full-tilt at doing this kind of research in the public sector. (Every time I see it, this xkcd leaves me a little more depressed about our willingness, as a population, to go to the risks and expenses necessary to accomplish great things).
Serious kudos to Red Bull for sponsoring this -- it's a happy day when one person's marketing budget is another person's research budget, and I sincerely hope both the PR people and the research people get the results they're looking for.
Fact-checking is a process, not a result. If you followed the process, it's false to claim you didn't, even if it failed to get the desired result.
Example: I'm in a car, changing lanes. If I check my mirrors, and miss a motorcycle, subsequently running them off the road, it's entirely accurate to say that I completely screwed up and am culpable. It's inaccurate to say that I didn't check my mirrors.
I'm saying that "didn't fact check" is flatly false.
"Didn't fact check adequately" is true, but "didn't fact check" is a lie. I'm not so fond of lies.
didn't fact check the story in the first place
Explicitly untrue. They did make an effort at fact-checking, and noted the one exageration they successfully detected, but they let it slide when Daisey wouldn't give them accurate contact information for his interpreter, rather than killing the story.
It was a judgement call, and they were wrong, but at least they're doing the right thing in followup.