By the way, Obama's arrogance is probably the key character trait that people see -- not the fact that he is black. He's just brazenly defiant of the people. And Romney (while he maybe wealthy) is seen as pliant. In fact, pliancy is probably Romney's greatest weakness. But it won't be enough. Obama's arrogance is misdirected. It doesn't project bravado (which would be ok -- it would make him appear a strong leader). Obama's arrogance projects dismissiveness of the will of the people. And this won't fly. Elections are often emotional responses based on well-established cultural trends. In other words, the baseline emotional response is anti-Obama (even though it's not pro-Romney). All it will take is a few pre-election irritations for that emotional response to manifest itself. And that's not something you can measure by polls (all of which are within the margin of error, btw).
Have enough coin flippers and you'd have a few that predicted every election up to now correctly, even though they flipped. I've been accurate as well; I'm predicting Obama. See how that works?
I said it was going to be Clinton when Clinton was still polling 3rd in the Democratic primaries. I am quite comfortable trusting my intuition. Obama is a sinking ship. Everyone is abandoning it. Polls might still indicate that the ship is above water, but every sinking ship is above water until it sinks.
Obama might be black, but Romney is seen by many as an entitled elitist ass.
The fact that he is black will not hurt him as much as his performance. Everyone has this general mood that everyone else is incompetent right now. And Obama is no exception. Elitist might actually be a plus for Romney -- it might be seen as an indication of competence.
not being a left wing boot licker hardly makes me a right wing nut. you missed the main point of my post -- the main moves have not been made yet. no one watches either convention. they are for the birds. both sides have been shooting political scatter shot for now. except that the left has nothing left. i have called EVERY presidential election I have ever observed.... even in 2000 I said until the last day before the election that it was too close to call. Romney is a dud. But Obama is a non-starter. Just because the left has played all the cards already, doesn't mean they win. Now come the counter moves. Btw, I voted for Gore in 2000, didn't vote in 2004 and wrote in Ron Paul in 2008. Oh, and I still have friends who are Democrats. Most of them are too embarrassed to discuss politics. They won't be too embarrassed to vote, but they won't have too many independents joining them. All political arguments (without exception) are moot, btw. All they do is argue pros of point A vs cons of point B... also known as comparing apples to oranges.
All historical trends indicate that this will not be a close election. Obama is fundamentally unelectable right now. He will be less electable when the gas prices increase by 30% in a month or so. He only won by 3% (of the votes cast, not of the votes difference: 47% to 53%) last time around. And last time he had the luxury of running against (a) a Republican while the other Republican President was at 33% approval rating (b) an opponent who picked a folksy woman as his VP (folksy is easy to sell as stupid in the eyes of anyone who doesn't look too hard) (c) an opponent who had an adopted black child (and who, therefore, was not that hot on being the guy who kept the 1st black man of out of the presidency.... not that he didn't want it... just not hard enough). Now add in the fact that plenty of people simply felt guilty voting against Obama even if they disagreed with his policy objectives and you get a perfect storm of reversal.
They just do another bayesian filter on chance of lying. You'll still be within the margin of error as a result. Now if you randomize your lying AND randomize what percentage of time you lie and what percentage of time you tell the truth, then you'll force them to triple the number of people polled (you won't effect the accuracy of their results, but you will increase their expenses). Correlation is just cos between 2 times series.... All they do is measure derivative spaces. All you are trying to do is increase the dimension of the space. But it's still the same problem for them afterwards as it was before you started. You are not forcing them to solve a fundamentally different math problem.
A weak President (D) and a strong Congress (R). At least there is the impeachment hearings to look forward to. Republicans just finally get their wet dream of impeaching a democratic President. It's ok though. It works out for both parties. Republicans will validate their belief that Democrats are pro-crime and Democrats will validate their belief that Republicans are racist. You see, the problem is that you can't make TV for smart people anymore. Smart people find out too fast how to watch it for free. So you only get TV for dumb people. Impeachment hearing will cost tv studios zilch. Aah... I just love it when there is fun to be had.
Calling Tea Party "fanatics" is just insane. Most of the people attending those have never been politically engaged prior to that. That makes them the very antithesis of fanatics.
Because in the US, we've decided that the only people that get health care are those with jobs.
Nonsense. Pure nonsense. I pay my primary doctor cash whether I have insurance or not.
We'd be better off decoupling health care from employment. One side effect would be that medical information wouldn't be so secret.
Or so useful. Astronomy is not secret. Cause you can't do anything about it or with it. If your medical history is just as useless because you can't get treatment (a world order for which you are actively advocating despite your arguments to the contrary), then your medical history is as valuable to anyone as astronomy.
That is actually not accurate in this case. Imposing a universal surcharge on all providers would make them pass that fee to the customers. Imposing fees only on the guilty would make the providers who are innocent of such violations more competitive (they wouldn't have the added costs of the fees). So if you believe in markets, the effect of such charges would be to make compliant behavior more competitive in the market place.
Slashot is full of luddites though. Every community has the self-hating losers. Don't be discouraged or think, even for a second, that there is anything wrong with you just because your derision in their direction raises their cackles.
but only insofar as it has made the entire market no more meaningful than a biased random number generator.
The fact that you don't have the ability to process information does not make it noise. If you have a study which shows that the entropy of the data increased, then it would be noise. As it stands, the prices are much more stable than they have been traditionally. Anyone who argues against HFT, is either a trade or an unwitting fool buying their crap.
Or more to the point, why do we even have a stock market?
So that companies could sell papers which give rights to vote on board membership. This is done in the hope that the board members, in fear for their jobs, will reward company owners with dividends. Anyone who buys stocks for any other reason has been duped or is hoping to dupe someone else. Before you start arguing how things "are in the real world", remind yourself that there is nothing real about exchanging money for paper unless that paper entitles you to something.... something other than just the right to sell that paper.
A transaction tax, and an end to intraday trading
Go back to hell, please. So that humans here on earth could continue to do that which enables life. Speculators role is to improve prices for willing parties exchanges goods and services. This is as true in stocks markets as it is in other markets. Idiots (or ass holes... not sure that I care which one you are) who argue against speculators argue for worsening prices for those who have goods to exchange or who wish to buy them to keep them. Cretins like you argue for waste. If you ever wonder what's wrong with the world, look in the mirror.
You fall into the trap of arguing good vs bad. Real life choices are rarely between good and bad. They are usually between better or worse. If critical thinking gives students with poor judgement more confidence in their ability to judge but does not actually improve their judgement, then it is worse (despite the fact that such a course might be good for those who do have a good judgement).
There are paths of studies which are better than critical thinking for all students. This makes critical thinking a worse (much worse, in fact) overall alternative. As someone who wants to seriously ponder what servers best most students, one would do well to read Polya's "Solving it". He shows that reasoning is a gradual incremental process.
Trying to "teach" people to reason the way people are taught history (by presenting them with overall context and demanding that they remember all the details of the context before they can understand the picture) is foolishness. Learning reasoning is best done as a side effect of being forced to reason in subject matters in which everything is done as a logical deduction. Only after the students have internalized the process of reasoning does it become useful to formalize it with teaching them the distinct categories of arguments and their names and formal relations. Until the students have internalized such reasoning methods, teaching this formalism only helps students with good memory.
Logical thinking, on the other hand, is a tool which is useful to those with both good and bad memory.
Just remember, not good or bad... better or worse. If you accept that this is always the choice of alternatives, then you won't fall into the trap of arguing pro's of position A vs con's of position B.
If we taught Geometry the way we teach basketball (starting with simple moves at early age and gradually building up to more complicated parts by lots of practice and slow progress), we would not be having this argument. Most Americans would understand logical thinking to a much larger degree than even the best of "critical thinking" students do now.
It's been a long time since I took a logic/critical thinking class. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this one of the first things that they teach? Perhaps I misunderstand what you're saying.
I omitted the "not". One need not remember the full probability course... And what I was saying was that most people can't understand what is a correlation. And without understand the nature of the thing, it's nearly impossible to distinguish it from that which is similar to it. This is why most people fall for the correlational arguments. They don't know what a correlation is.
What's wrong with questioning every argument?
This! This is exactly the problem with critical thinking students. They don't know when the argument has been proven. They've been taught to always question, but they have not been taught to understand when a conclusion has been legitimately reached. That would require subject-matter expertise. And that's the part they don't get. And it is why they keep arguing in circles.
You don't need calculus to state Newtonian physics. You need calculus to arrive at Newtonian physics (essentially to rediscover it). But if want to just teach the results without showing how they are derived, you can do it with algebra/geometry/trigonometry.
You don't have an understanding of history if you don't understand basic math. In fact, you can't understand any history if you don't understand cause and effect. And how historical effects arose out of historical causes is very much related to measurable quantities. If that's the part you skipped, you don't understand what you think you understand. You just know that things happened... you really, really don't know why.
Anyone who doesn't understand exponents can't understand time value of money. And, therefore, cannot understand a credit card contract or a mortgage. And yet such people do insist on knowing something about regulating banks.
"Critical thinking" is a waste of time. In fact, it's worse. It's a negative expenditure of time. Before you decide to pick an argument with me, be warned: I have a PhD in math... not throwing it out as a "shut up" bona fides, but rather to thwart the "you don't know what you are talking about" sea of trolls. I've had actual barred lawyers trying to convince me that they understood logic simply because they took critical thinking. It gives students confidence that they can question every argument... even a solidly proven one. They have no concept of probability, so it useless to argue likely vs known vs unknown vs unlikely with them. One need remember the full probability course to understand what is a correlation and why it doesn't imply causation. But then a critical thinking students is unlikely to understand what is an implication.
Probably not; those are very specific criteria for evil.
I am pretty certain those were examples. You can dismiss any example (used to establish a pattern) by claiming that particular example is used as too odd a criterion. Of course, when you do that, you can't claim objectivity.
I also wasn't aware that Apple personally employed the police department responsible for investigating a criminal act involving Gizmodo and the purchase of stolen property. Good to know. How are they managing to keep it funded and yet still remain enormously profitable?
Haven't heard, have you? Samsung doubled the number of units they sold. This is despite injunctions and crap. Apple did not double the number of units they sold and Apple itself reduced estimates for its next quarter (ie, they are not releasing iPhone 5 anytime soon). Laughing at the Apple fanbois is going to be much more fun this time around... there is more of them, but they are just as fanatical and foaming at the mouth as they were 15 years ago. It's over. This time Steve is gone. There is no magic rescue by a cult figure. Last one out, turn off the lights.
Apple will always be a flash in a pan. They'll always come up with a concept and sulk when someone else thinks of how to do it better. It's not because of some anti-birth-right where they can't do it better just because they are "Apple." It's because they think they can do it all. And when you want to do the software, the hardware, the marketing, the sales, you have to get everything to align just right... all the schedules if nothing else. And when you do it and it works, it's great. But it happens much less often than when you have a software company which allows a bunch of hardware vendors to use the software and a bunch of retailers/providers to sell the hardware. If you get to concentrate, you get to develop core strengths. When you want to control the full retail-service-hardware-software stack, you are as weak as the weakest link. And you are guaranteed to eventually lose to those who allow for a few players to duke it out at each level of their stack. This is why they lost to PC. And this is why they lost (fata complete at this point) to Google. This is pretty much like MS developing MS Office for Apple back in the day. They did it mostly because they could.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, Obama's arrogance is probably the key character trait that people see -- not the fact that he is black. He's just brazenly defiant of the people. And Romney (while he maybe wealthy) is seen as pliant. In fact, pliancy is probably Romney's greatest weakness. But it won't be enough. Obama's arrogance is misdirected. It doesn't project bravado (which would be ok -- it would make him appear a strong leader). Obama's arrogance projects dismissiveness of the will of the people. And this won't fly. Elections are often emotional responses based on well-established cultural trends. In other words, the baseline emotional response is anti-Obama (even though it's not pro-Romney). All it will take is a few pre-election irritations for that emotional response to manifest itself. And that's not something you can measure by polls (all of which are within the margin of error, btw).
Have enough coin flippers and you'd have a few that predicted every election up to now correctly, even though they flipped. I've been accurate as well; I'm predicting Obama. See how that works?
I said it was going to be Clinton when Clinton was still polling 3rd in the Democratic primaries. I am quite comfortable trusting my intuition. Obama is a sinking ship. Everyone is abandoning it. Polls might still indicate that the ship is above water, but every sinking ship is above water until it sinks.
Obama might be black, but Romney is seen by many as an entitled elitist ass.
The fact that he is black will not hurt him as much as his performance. Everyone has this general mood that everyone else is incompetent right now. And Obama is no exception. Elitist might actually be a plus for Romney -- it might be seen as an indication of competence.
Can you explain the change in your views that moved you from each individual vote ? What did Kerry lack that Gore gave you?
Gore was a policy wonk. Kerry was a placeholder.
I know. But in common parlance, it does. It's faster than saying remove from office through impeachment.
not being a left wing boot licker hardly makes me a right wing nut. you missed the main point of my post -- the main moves have not been made yet. no one watches either convention. they are for the birds. both sides have been shooting political scatter shot for now. except that the left has nothing left. i have called EVERY presidential election I have ever observed.... even in 2000 I said until the last day before the election that it was too close to call. Romney is a dud. But Obama is a non-starter. Just because the left has played all the cards already, doesn't mean they win. Now come the counter moves. Btw, I voted for Gore in 2000, didn't vote in 2004 and wrote in Ron Paul in 2008. Oh, and I still have friends who are Democrats. Most of them are too embarrassed to discuss politics. They won't be too embarrassed to vote, but they won't have too many independents joining them. All political arguments (without exception) are moot, btw. All they do is argue pros of point A vs cons of point B... also known as comparing apples to oranges.
All historical trends indicate that this will not be a close election. Obama is fundamentally unelectable right now. He will be less electable when the gas prices increase by 30% in a month or so. He only won by 3% (of the votes cast, not of the votes difference: 47% to 53%) last time around. And last time he had the luxury of running against (a) a Republican while the other Republican President was at 33% approval rating (b) an opponent who picked a folksy woman as his VP (folksy is easy to sell as stupid in the eyes of anyone who doesn't look too hard) (c) an opponent who had an adopted black child (and who, therefore, was not that hot on being the guy who kept the 1st black man of out of the presidency.... not that he didn't want it... just not hard enough). Now add in the fact that plenty of people simply felt guilty voting against Obama even if they disagreed with his policy objectives and you get a perfect storm of reversal.
They just do another bayesian filter on chance of lying. You'll still be within the margin of error as a result. Now if you randomize your lying AND randomize what percentage of time you lie and what percentage of time you tell the truth, then you'll force them to triple the number of people polled (you won't effect the accuracy of their results, but you will increase their expenses). Correlation is just cos between 2 times series.... All they do is measure derivative spaces. All you are trying to do is increase the dimension of the space. But it's still the same problem for them afterwards as it was before you started. You are not forcing them to solve a fundamentally different math problem.
A weak President (D) and a strong Congress (R). At least there is the impeachment hearings to look forward to. Republicans just finally get their wet dream of impeaching a democratic President. It's ok though. It works out for both parties. Republicans will validate their belief that Democrats are pro-crime and Democrats will validate their belief that Republicans are racist. You see, the problem is that you can't make TV for smart people anymore. Smart people find out too fast how to watch it for free. So you only get TV for dumb people. Impeachment hearing will cost tv studios zilch. Aah... I just love it when there is fun to be had.
And, in the long run, everybody dies.
But not everything does. There are things of lasting value. They usually appreciate in price with time.
Calling Tea Party "fanatics" is just insane. Most of the people attending those have never been politically engaged prior to that. That makes them the very antithesis of fanatics.
Because in the US, we've decided that the only people that get health care are those with jobs.
Nonsense. Pure nonsense. I pay my primary doctor cash whether I have insurance or not.
We'd be better off decoupling health care from employment. One side effect would be that medical information wouldn't be so secret.
Or so useful. Astronomy is not secret. Cause you can't do anything about it or with it. If your medical history is just as useless because you can't get treatment (a world order for which you are actively advocating despite your arguments to the contrary), then your medical history is as valuable to anyone as astronomy.
That is actually not accurate in this case. Imposing a universal surcharge on all providers would make them pass that fee to the customers. Imposing fees only on the guilty would make the providers who are innocent of such violations more competitive (they wouldn't have the added costs of the fees). So if you believe in markets, the effect of such charges would be to make compliant behavior more competitive in the market place.
Slashot is full of luddites though. Every community has the self-hating losers. Don't be discouraged or think, even for a second, that there is anything wrong with you just because your derision in their direction raises their cackles.
but only insofar as it has made the entire market no more meaningful than a biased random number generator.
The fact that you don't have the ability to process information does not make it noise. If you have a study which shows that the entropy of the data increased, then it would be noise. As it stands, the prices are much more stable than they have been traditionally. Anyone who argues against HFT, is either a trade or an unwitting fool buying their crap.
Or more to the point, why do we even have a stock market?
So that companies could sell papers which give rights to vote on board membership. This is done in the hope that the board members, in fear for their jobs, will reward company owners with dividends. Anyone who buys stocks for any other reason has been duped or is hoping to dupe someone else. Before you start arguing how things "are in the real world", remind yourself that there is nothing real about exchanging money for paper unless that paper entitles you to something.... something other than just the right to sell that paper.
A transaction tax, and an end to intraday trading
Go back to hell, please. So that humans here on earth could continue to do that which enables life. Speculators role is to improve prices for willing parties exchanges goods and services. This is as true in stocks markets as it is in other markets. Idiots (or ass holes... not sure that I care which one you are) who argue against speculators argue for worsening prices for those who have goods to exchange or who wish to buy them to keep them. Cretins like you argue for waste. If you ever wonder what's wrong with the world, look in the mirror.
You fall into the trap of arguing good vs bad. Real life choices are rarely between good and bad. They are usually between better or worse. If critical thinking gives students with poor judgement more confidence in their ability to judge but does not actually improve their judgement, then it is worse (despite the fact that such a course might be good for those who do have a good judgement).
There are paths of studies which are better than critical thinking for all students. This makes critical thinking a worse (much worse, in fact) overall alternative. As someone who wants to seriously ponder what servers best most students, one would do well to read Polya's "Solving it". He shows that reasoning is a gradual incremental process.
Trying to "teach" people to reason the way people are taught history (by presenting them with overall context and demanding that they remember all the details of the context before they can understand the picture) is foolishness. Learning reasoning is best done as a side effect of being forced to reason in subject matters in which everything is done as a logical deduction. Only after the students have internalized the process of reasoning does it become useful to formalize it with teaching them the distinct categories of arguments and their names and formal relations. Until the students have internalized such reasoning methods, teaching this formalism only helps students with good memory.
Logical thinking, on the other hand, is a tool which is useful to those with both good and bad memory.
Just remember, not good or bad... better or worse. If you accept that this is always the choice of alternatives, then you won't fall into the trap of arguing pro's of position A vs con's of position B.
If we taught Geometry the way we teach basketball (starting with simple moves at early age and gradually building up to more complicated parts by lots of practice and slow progress), we would not be having this argument. Most Americans would understand logical thinking to a much larger degree than even the best of "critical thinking" students do now.
It's been a long time since I took a logic/critical thinking class. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this one of the first things that they teach? Perhaps I misunderstand what you're saying.
I omitted the "not". One need not remember the full probability course... And what I was saying was that most people can't understand what is a correlation. And without understand the nature of the thing, it's nearly impossible to distinguish it from that which is similar to it. This is why most people fall for the correlational arguments. They don't know what a correlation is.
What's wrong with questioning every argument?
This! This is exactly the problem with critical thinking students. They don't know when the argument has been proven. They've been taught to always question, but they have not been taught to understand when a conclusion has been legitimately reached. That would require subject-matter expertise. And that's the part they don't get. And it is why they keep arguing in circles.
You don't need calculus to state Newtonian physics. You need calculus to arrive at Newtonian physics (essentially to rediscover it). But if want to just teach the results without showing how they are derived, you can do it with algebra/geometry/trigonometry.
Same people who do it now? Pretty immigrant girls who came to America because it's where you find a rich husband?
You don't have an understanding of history if you don't understand basic math. In fact, you can't understand any history if you don't understand cause and effect. And how historical effects arose out of historical causes is very much related to measurable quantities. If that's the part you skipped, you don't understand what you think you understand. You just know that things happened... you really, really don't know why.
Anyone who doesn't understand exponents can't understand time value of money. And, therefore, cannot understand a credit card contract or a mortgage. And yet such people do insist on knowing something about regulating banks.
"Critical thinking" is a waste of time. In fact, it's worse. It's a negative expenditure of time. Before you decide to pick an argument with me, be warned: I have a PhD in math... not throwing it out as a "shut up" bona fides, but rather to thwart the "you don't know what you are talking about" sea of trolls. I've had actual barred lawyers trying to convince me that they understood logic simply because they took critical thinking. It gives students confidence that they can question every argument... even a solidly proven one. They have no concept of probability, so it useless to argue likely vs known vs unknown vs unlikely with them. One need remember the full probability course to understand what is a correlation and why it doesn't imply causation. But then a critical thinking students is unlikely to understand what is an implication.
Probably not; those are very specific criteria for evil.
I am pretty certain those were examples. You can dismiss any example (used to establish a pattern) by claiming that particular example is used as too odd a criterion. Of course, when you do that, you can't claim objectivity.
I also wasn't aware that Apple personally employed the police department responsible for investigating a criminal act involving Gizmodo and the purchase of stolen property. Good to know. How are they managing to keep it funded and yet still remain enormously profitable?
Even you yourself don't believe this argument.
You did good in listing Apple's evil actions as reported by the press. Now can you do the same for Google?
That's an attempt at false equivalence.
Haven't heard, have you? Samsung doubled the number of units they sold. This is despite injunctions and crap. Apple did not double the number of units they sold and Apple itself reduced estimates for its next quarter (ie, they are not releasing iPhone 5 anytime soon). Laughing at the Apple fanbois is going to be much more fun this time around... there is more of them, but they are just as fanatical and foaming at the mouth as they were 15 years ago. It's over. This time Steve is gone. There is no magic rescue by a cult figure. Last one out, turn off the lights.
Apple will always be a flash in a pan. They'll always come up with a concept and sulk when someone else thinks of how to do it better. It's not because of some anti-birth-right where they can't do it better just because they are "Apple." It's because they think they can do it all. And when you want to do the software, the hardware, the marketing, the sales, you have to get everything to align just right... all the schedules if nothing else. And when you do it and it works, it's great. But it happens much less often than when you have a software company which allows a bunch of hardware vendors to use the software and a bunch of retailers/providers to sell the hardware. If you get to concentrate, you get to develop core strengths. When you want to control the full retail-service-hardware-software stack, you are as weak as the weakest link. And you are guaranteed to eventually lose to those who allow for a few players to duke it out at each level of their stack. This is why they lost to PC. And this is why they lost (fata complete at this point) to Google. This is pretty much like MS developing MS Office for Apple back in the day. They did it mostly because they could.