You should know while reading my response that I am a 26 year-old woman. It is possible (though I consider it unlikely) that the education of boys and girls differs on some point that I address. It is also possible that things changed in between the time Kip was in young mens and the time I was in young womens. You decide whether you believe my experience is relevant to your concerns.
Utah has the highest birthrate and the largest families in America. More than 50% of all births are by teenage mothers, with seven of ten out of wedlock, and it has one of the highest divorce rates in the nation.
Utah probably does have a high birthrate and large families. Maybe it even has a high rate of birth out of wedlock. However, the divorce rate among Mormons nationwide is lower than the national average, and the teenage birthrate is also lower nationwide among Mormons than the average. There's this common misconception that all Mormons are in Utah, and that all Utah residents are serious Mormons. I grew up out of Utah, and knew very few Utah-Mormons. Outside of Utah, Utah-Mormons are even the subject of some ridicule (mostly good-natured) in the Mormon community. It's generally believed that more Mormons in Utah are Mormons because everyone else there is too, and that they are less likely to take their religious beliefs seriously (sort of like European Catholics).
Besides having a powerhouse football team, the Mormons' very own Brigham Young University -- alma mater of Donny and Marie Osmond and 1984 Miss America Sharlene Wells -- has one of the highest coed-pregnancy rates in America.
This is a half-truth which implies a falsehood. Reading this without knowing better I might assume we are talking about pregnancy out of marriage. But BYU has one of the highest marriage rates among universities in the US. I bet the vast majority of those pregnancies are in marriage and not accidental. The real tragedy here is that so many women go to BYU to get married and then drop out. It's jokingly called getting your "MRS" in the Mormon church. It's also a problem church leaders are openly trying to combat. They don't have anything against these women getting married and having children, but they want them to finish their educations.
Mormon anti-sex indoctrinations start early. Children are taught that sex is dirty and disgusting, that it is the tool of Satan.
This is a message repeated throughout the article which is simply incorrect. Mormons are taught that sex is something beautiful and sacred to be shared between a man and a woman who are married. I remember hearing this and variants on this lesson repeatedly in my young womanhood, both from my parents and from church leaders. Whether or not you agree with the man and woman part or the married part is your decision, but I don't see that message as harmful for people who want to believe it.
The suit also contends that the Mormon Church subjected Kip to what amounted to an intentional attempt at mind control by using brainwashing techniques under the guise of spiritual teaching.
Okay here's one where I have to call bullshit. The Mormon Church repeatedly tells young people that they have to learn for themselves. It was through my own struggle to learn for myself that I eventually decided the Mormon Church doesn't cut it for me. Yes, they do believe they are the only true religion. That is in fact one of my major problems with the church. But they emphasize discovering this for oneself.
Becoming "worthy" and ultimately reaching "perfection" means living up to the church's 4,300 commandments -- including those condemning natural sex acts.
Um... hello? Where are they coming up with this number? There is no list of 4,314 commandments which all need to be memorized and followed. The commandments Mormons are given are 90% identical with that of other conservative Christian religions. (Okay I'm making up numbers too here -- let's just say very similar.)
Speaking as someone who is somewhere between an inactive and a non- member of the LDS church, I can say that the article you are linking there contains a large number of falsehoods and half-truths. A lot of the information which I cannot claim from personal knowledge to be false, I consider rather implausible.
If you are actually interested in hearing what's wrong with that article, and what are (in my opinion of course) the real problems with the Mormon church, respond to this post. I don't really feel like making the effort of a sentence by sentence rebuttal of that article though for a religion I don't believe in, if you don't actually care about the truthfulness of what you post.
Please read the parent and consider modding him up. His most important point is to clear up the old misconception that creating a solar cell costs more energy than a solar cell can produce.
(Skip the last two sentences though, where he succombs to the common slashdot disease of using insult as argument.)
People with who are blind in one eye can also recognize faces from 2D photographs. I have a fairly subtle problem which reduces the effectiveness of this particular depth cue for me, and I too have no problem recognizing faces from 2D photographs. The two-eye trick is not the only cue people use to determine 3rd dimension information.
And face recognition doesn't have much to do with the 3rd dimension even for "normal" people. Try looking at the back of a mask that imitates the facial contours on both sides. If you hold it at the correct angle, your brain will flip it inside out and you'll think you're looking at the front of it. Face recognition is a special case of visual recognition for your brain.
I suspect the reason it's difficult to recognize people you don't know in a crowd has more to do with the mass of data you have to take it to know the faces of a lot of criminals. That probably combines with the low resolution on those cameras to increase the difficulty of the problem for humans. You probably would have very little difficulty picking out someone you know better.
One important advantage of electronic voting is the ability to eliminate option order advantages. All other things being equal, people have a statistically significant tendency towards choosing certain positions from a ballot. Electronic voting can present the options in a different order for each voter to eliminate the psychological effect of option position.
I agree with you though that paper's the only way to persist the voter's choice. If speed is so important, we can create a preliminary election result from electronic data. We can even do an automated machine count of the paper ballots. But we still need at least the ability to do a proper hand count of the paper ballots, at least until the technology for pure electronic voting is much more proven than it currently is.
The real problem arises in simulating truly creative human activities - for example the creation of an entirely new method of composing music that did not previously exist
I've always found this argument interesting. Basically you are arguing that the definition of sentience is the ability to create entirely new areas of art and science. While these are, in my opinion, the most noble pursuits of the human race, they are not activities that every human individual takes part in. I would even go so far as to say that 90% or more of the people in this world can't do this. Even if the number is lower, you basically end up saying that a large portion of the human race isn't sentient.
I think that sentience requirements which put sentience out of reach of more that just the severely mentally handicapped are too strict. I would put the bar lower and try a definition more like: the ability to learn significant facts and ideas without being explicitly taught them. Unfortunately this definition doesn't exclude all computer programs. Some can "learn" through experience.
Still I'm interested in the argument. Can you come up with a definition of sentience which excludes as few humans as possible, and excludes all machines? In order to convince me of the correctness of your definition, you will have to convincingly argue that the humans who don't fit your definition of sentience really aren't sentient...
Well actually, in the US it is decided from state to state as well. And there are states in which it is proportional. So while I obviously made an error, your comment only points out that Europe is even more similar to the US in this respect than we both suspected.
I'm not going to defend the punch card system. But it's not used "all over [my] great country". There are some backwards states.
The electoral college is irritating, but there is no true theoretical difference between it and party discipline in Germany. In both cases a majority opinion can theoretically and occasionally practically be voted down. In Europe, all representatives to the European parlaiment are also chosen by the majority party, and not proportionally. That system developed in Europe for exactly the same reasons that the electoral college developed in the US.
I'm highly critical of my country on a large number of issues. Knowing the facts however, I can't agree with you on this one.
Speaking as someone who lives in Germany and pays the solidarity tax you are refering to, I can clearly state that although there are cultural problems between east and west Germany which also still cause costs, the major cause of those 50 billion is infrastructure. First off, the Soviets didn't have the resources to build an infrastructure like that in West Germany. So money is now being poored in to update railroads and streets, restore cultural treasures, and etc. Second, the Germans decided, perhaps foolishly -- people are still arguing about it, to move their capitol to Berlin. So not only did the infrastructure have to be improved to match that of west Germany, in Berlin it had to be better. And moving the government, restoring the Reichstag and building the Sony center was also anything but cheap. Neither of these are cultural problems. Both of them are expensive.
And now speaking as someone who has a certain level of interest in India (my roommate for 2.5 years was Indian-American and I got yelled out a couple of times for making stupid assumptions;o), I can clearly state that your calling that slave labor is also overly simplistic. India definitely has problems with its caste system. People from lower castes do have problems getting the education required to break out, and there is discrimination in all aspects of life. But part of the reason the service sector in India accepts such low wages is also that they can live on those wages. Rent and food are also very inexpensive. As more money moves into the economy, not only the middle class will be able to afford more, but also the people they pay (trickle-down economics, but from middle to poor rather than from rich to poor). More money in an area changes the demand curves, which in turn changes the prices. Check out the housing costs in Silicon valley before the dot com bust as an excellent example of this principle at work.
In addition to changes in the demand curves, there is another important effect -- an increasingly large middle class. Many of the successful revolutions in recent history (the French revolution, the American revolution, even the end of apartheid in South Africa) resulted indirectly from an increasingly large and politically interested middle class. Very poor people don't have time or energy to even realise how repressed they are. They can be easily retaliated against once they try to organize simply by taking away the last of those life necessities which they still have. But once people start having a little bit more, they start wanting to have a lot more. They also start having more access to the education, and the organizational abilities they need to get others interested and involved in their cause. They have the reserves to hold out against economic attacks, and the power to react with their own economic attacks.
America essentially had slave labor of the same variety around the early 1900's. And we managed to end it too. We didn't have anybody attacking our economy from the outside at the same time.
Of course this doesn't happen in just one generation (or maybe it does -- one can sometimes be pleasantly surprised). Economics is a long-term game. But we don't need to overcome all of the cultural barriers to do this. Sometimes simply not negatively interfering (with trade barriers, wars, etc) can do more good than one might think. After all India did manage to free itself from its colonial masters in England without violence and without much help.
I might add, that many of the countries that we are now complaining about being somehow unfair in their trade practices (ie India with "slave labor", or Vietnam "dumping" catfish, etc) we basically forced to open their economies to our products. We benefit enormously from this trade but are often unwilling to reciprocate. To be consistent in your opinion, you also have to hold the position that we don't sell anything to those countries either. We also don't buy things there that we can't get in the US if you are to be consistent. Do you hold that position?
You are going to be competing with them anyways, whether or not IBM specifically outsources those jobs. Imagine the following scenario:
IBM decides it's immoral to move jobs overseas, so it doesn't.
Some Indian notices that he can produce the same products that IBM is producing, for a tenth of the price just by hiring people from his own country. He gets some investors together and does just that.
IBM's customers start noticing that there's another product out that which does what IBM's products do just as well, but costs half as much (the Indian business man and his investors keeps 4/5 of the production price difference as a reward for noticing a lucrative situation). They stop buying IBM's products and start buying the Indian products.
IBM has to lower its prices to compete. This cuts into its profit margins and it is forced to lay off some of its workers.
The Indian business man benefits, his investors benefit, his employees benefit, and his new customers benefit. The only ones who loose are the former IBM employees. Assuming that the number of investors, and employees in effected each company are about the same, there is still a net benefit, because the customers are paying less.
The only way to avoid this situation is to either approximately equalize the costs of labor between the two countries, or to erect trade barriers so that the Indian business man can't sell his product in the US. But since reduced costs of goods is actually a net benefit, and since most of those customers are probably in the US, it is actually a net benefit for America. Besides, the costs of labor will eventually even out, as the two economies move onto equal ground. Why would a reasonable policy maker, want to create artifical barriers to this process?
I know it hurts to loose a job -- I've been through my father's unemployment twice. But he found a new job both times because he was willing to be flexible. And the Indian who gets a job, and the people he pays out of his salary are all glad to see the money coming into their country. For some of them it means the difference between eating and not. There are less people in the US for whom it means that difference. And hey, we all belong to the human race, so we're not going to take the found out of 5 people's mouths in India to feed 1 person here just because they're not American right?
How many elite sprinters are white? How many boxers? There are physical differences between the various sub-species that may contribute towards things like whites doing better at SATs. Anyone who says anything different is a politically correct nutter. But I'd bet you anything you like that the differences are not significant enough to explain the discrepencies, within at least an order of magnitude.
Actually if you read Jared Diamond's _Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel_, you'll find he makes a fairly good argument (in the introduction) as to why you might expect to find people coming more recently from hunter-gatherer societies to be more intelligent when you exclude other factors. Basically his argument is that people who live in high-population areas like cities breed for disease-resistance. People who live in highly varied, difficult to survive in environments breed for ability to memorize thousands of dangerous and beneficial species and quickly recognize and react to predators and prey.
So based on that, I'd expect people of Southern African, and North American descent to be more intelligent; and Northern African, European, and Asian descent to be more disease-resistant. But that's of course only assuming that such differences survive two or three generations in dramatically changed environment. Since they are such subtle complex traits (much more so than height, or strength), I doubt that they do.
Even definitons of intelligence become fairly controversial. I mean seriously, what kind of definition of intelligence is an SAT anyways? It tests knowledge much more than it tests intelligence. IQ tests may come closer but among neurologists and psycholigists they are even more controversial.
It's all speculation anyways, since we can't actually separate human beings from their environments. And as long as it can't (and shouldn't) be moved from the speculation realm into the scientific realm (ie. through controlled scientific experiments), we probably should just leave the topic alone.
So call me a "politically correct nutter".
Nonetheless, I very definitely agree with the idea of doing affirmitave action at the University level based on socioeconomic status rather than based on race or gender. Gender-based discrepencies need to be resolved much earlier in the education process, and race-based affirmitive action misses the point, just as you said. In fact the only problem race-based affirmitive action can hope to solve (or at least balance out) is bias directly at the university level, but socioeconomic-class-based affirmitive action would solve that problem too.
That seems reasonable for cases where people could suffer bodily harm, but this isn't such a case.
Not only that, but I'm not sure I agree with the comparison even if you equate computer damage to bodily harm. Try the following metaphor: some kid trespasses on your property and breaks into a properly secured locked box to steal fireworks you were storing there. He then takes them home and tries to set them off, and he gets hurt in the process. Are you then liable?
Of course in the grandparent posts case, I guess you do still have a non-zero probability that some innocent could accidentally come across the files and be harmed by them. But assuming this guy is setting up his security conscientiously, I still think the probability is close enough to zero as to be negligable.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. By the time AI is far enough along to start implementing ethical systems for intelligent agents, this patent will probably be expired.
I personally think effective ethics requires a theory of mind (ie the ability to deduce/guess how other people are feeling and from that understanding, deduce how they will react to and feel in various possible scenarios). And I expect developing that in software should be a challenging problem that will take more than 25 years to solve.
Speaking as an American who lives in Germany, I can provide a few examples of unexpected problems in international business from my own experience:
Tolls at Customs: I recently shipped myself software that I had bought in the US a few years ago. When you ship things internationally you have to note the value. I was charged about 30% of the value that I notated in order to get my own possessions back from the post office. Companies also have to pay import fees and they vary by country. Often they also have to pay sales tax in the country in question. Unless you want to piss your customer off with unexpected expenses, you have to include this in the price you state up front.
Export laws -- The US prohibits the export of certain types of goods to certain countries. The laws are often complex and subject to interpretation. Some companies choose not to hire an expert to look at questions of this nature alone. These companies have to limit the countries in which they will sell. It may well be that the easiest way to deal with this is to only sell in the US.
Warranties -- in Germany electronic goods are required to be warrantied against failure for 3 years. If you read through one of those warranty books that is printed in several languages, and you are multi-lingual, you'll notice that the warranties have contents which vary by language. Some companies don't make their goods to last 3 years, and as such don't want to be subject to warranty law in Germany. These companies don't sell their goods in Germany. I imagine that a lot countries have highly varying warranty law. If I were a business person, I wouldn't be willing to go blind into that potential mine field. I would either choose not to go, or hire someone who knows the territory.
Varying demand curves -- People in different cultures have different average incomes and differing desires to buy a product. This leads to varying intersection points between the supply and demand curves. A company that wants to earn more money won't just choose an average from the global market -- they'll adjust their prices locally to reflect local demand. In order to do this though, they need to isolate the markets. This means that the web-sites need to become country specific. We can argue about morality, but it's not illegal to run a business this way, so many businesses do.
Oh and your argument that US salespersons/websites should direct international customers to the sales site set up for them runs face first into the problem the original poster stated -- that the local product offering may not include the product the customer wants. It also may be selling locally for a higher price than it does in the US.
Actually I'd be very interested to know what the legal status of translations in copyright law is. My understanding is that copyright law pretty much covers exact copies of the information and not derivative works.
But translations require a certain level of creativity in order to localize the concepts and words into the culture in question. Different translators might make different choices in how to translate a particular phrase or concept thus resulting in a variety of qualities of translation.
A translation is definitely not an exact copy, and might have some merit independently from what it is translating. The question is, is it enough to call it a derivative work? I suspect not, but as IANAL, I don't know.
If it is though, then prohibiting the dissemination of an independent work is by definition censorship.
Of course Amerikaner is also a word for a German pastry -- it's a round and made out of a sugary white dough and frosted typically with butter or chocolate frosting. When Clinton visited Aachen in 2000, they were selling Amerikaner with his picture in frosting on top of them.
A few months ago while the Americans were renaming French Fries, it occurred to me and a few friends that maybe it would be a good idea to rename the Amerikaner. A few of our ideas:
Französer
Freiheit Sandbrötchen
OK. None of them was great. Anybody with better suggestions?
I see some people making disparaging comments about cities, but I don't think we need to succomb to that excuse. Even the smallest bits of nature bring their own magic with them, and there's plenty of room for just a little something here and there.
I live in the city and have a little balcony garden. When I get home from work in the evening, I carefully water the plants that need it, remove the aphids from my chives by hand, fertilize the poppys, check if any of my strawberries are ripe, remove dead and sick leaves from other plants, make sure neither my mint nor my oregano is getting the upper hand in its fight for space, etc... This all sounds very mundane, but somehow while I'm doing it all, the world seems much more beautiful then it did the rest of the day.
Then I go and use my home-grown thyme, oregano, cilantro, etc, to make a beautiful meal, better than you could get in any restaurant. I eat it while watching the bees come and go from my columbine and bleeding hearts. And that's an important portion of the joy in my life.
Actually before I fixed it, it was even worse -- an owner class acquired the memory and a base class of the class in question released it. But remember, as I said in my post, I didn't create this code -- I just got the opportunity to improve it. Bad code is common enough and few enough people get to start from a ground zero project that my anecdote is almost certainly representative.
And that is exactly my point. I personally am perfectly capable of handling it. The reason I didn't find the deletes in those 15 minutes of searching is that I went through exactly the list of logical locations that you just posted to try to find them. And "there's a bug in the documentation"? What documentation?
In Java, if you make an erroneous assumption about the type of something, you get an immediate exception. In C++, your exception/crash may come later or not at all. No guarantees. So you could miss it in your testing and debugging, whereas you won't miss the Java exception unless you actually didn't test the input. Getting feedback is good if you make a mistake -- C++ doesn't give enough feedback. (Okay there are better casts developed, but not everyone uses them, and then we're back to the problem of code from other people.)
We don't live in an ideal world -- sometimes we have to deal with the mistakes of others. So it would be nice to be able to work with a language which helps out with that.
Your personalization of this issue with an "if you can't handle it" is uncalled for, ignores information I provided in my post, and entirely misses the point.
A truly good carpenter avoids joining things with nails. He uses dowls, or even better dove tail joints, and the like. At the very least he uses screws which at least hold better than nails. Likewise, when he's cutting an edge, or drilling a hole, he uses guides and shields to help him prevent errors and injuries while using his power tools. A joint in a good piece of furniture should either be invisible or good-looking.
C/C++ is your nail and hammer -- sometimes the right tool despite it's drawbacks, but definitely over-used by amateurs. There are other languages which are the professional tools of choice among true craftsmen and women for creating handsome and robust software (when they have a choice -- unfortunately I don't).
Disclaimer: I haven't programmed in Java since my undergrad, but I learned it before C++. I've been programming in C++ professionally for 3 years straight now, not counting internships and class assignments before that.
I'd rather have an exception than a crash. It gives me more information about what I did wrong. A crash that's not reliably repeatable and only happens in your release version under Windows OT systems with IE 4 installed, is next to impossible to find and fix -- in C++ it's only worse.
Not only that, but memory management is more than just a nuisance. Just yesterday, I wanted to move some code from one class to another to improve the object-oriented structure of some code which I've taken over from another developer. In that code were a couple of news, and I couldn't find the deletes which matched them. So I asked the original developer. Turns out the deletes were in a base class of the class that I was moving the code to. If I had been programming in Java, this would have been a cut and paste job finished in 30 seconds, plus 15 minutes for testing the change before checking in. In C++, it was 15 minutes trying to find the deletes myself, 15 minutes waiting for the other developer to get to a break point in his work and another 15 minutes assuring myself that the deletes really were called for all cases, and another 15 minutes for testing the change before checking in. That's a factor of 3-4 (depending on if I have something else I can do while waiting) for the C++ program.
Memory management and other unnecessary tasks which C++ saddles the developer with do make an impact on either development time, program stability, or both. And that is also true for experienced C++ programmers.
They also make an impact on language learning time, which is not to be underestimated with the number of newbies today, and people moving up from still worse languages like Cobol. In addition, even for an experienced C++ programmer, they make a difference in the time it takes to understand code which was programmed by another programmer.
I agree with you that there are situations where every language, including C++, is the most appropriate for the problem in question. I just think that C++ is over-used, thus reducing the average stability of modern programs and the average productivity of modern programmers.
I think you failed to understand that I was picking Vietnamese out as an exception to the general Asian rule. As a rule, Vietnamese immigrate to the US because of political/economic problems. As such the Vietnamese who immigrate are not necessarily wealthy or well-educated. The Chinese, Japanese, and Indians who immigrate to the US are often the cream of the crop in the countries they are immigrating from. They are immigrating despite the fact that they are well-off where they are, because they think they can do even better in the US.
One thing that bothered me about your post though, is your obvious belief in the superiority of Western culture. You do realize that Arab culture and science and Western culture and science have had complex interactions over the centuries, and that Western culture and science would not be where they are today without that interaction. In talking to Turkish and Japanese friends here in Germany, I've come to the conclusion that at least Turkish culture is significantly more similar to my own, than is Japanese culture. And a female Japanese friend of mine made it very clear that there is still very serious gender-based and class-based discrimination in Japan today. As a society, they have been successful anyways. Japanese aren't eagerly adopting Western culture. They are to some extent eagerly adopting Western fashions, and learning English, but that is the extent of it. The English is for business, and fashion has never been rational, much less constant.
Anyways, a few books that I would suggest, if you're interested in the relation between Western culture and the rest of the world are Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, and John L. Esposito's The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (published before the 11 of September, and only becoming more relevant). Before reading these books, I also read William P. Alston's Perceiving God, the ideas in which are very related, but don't actually touch on the culture question.
I'll just leave the education question alone, as it was only tangential to my original point. Suffice it to say I don't agree, but maybe we can pick up that discussion some other time.
Anyone who really thinks that ``able'' correlates to race is dead wrong. But, ``able'' does correlate pretty well to culture. Look at the different success rates for new Asian and Carribean immigrants, compared to the grandchildren of earlier immigrants from those same areas. As their families acculturate here, their academic and business achievments tend to fall toward (or below) the mean for the US.
Well it's a matter of opinion of course, but I think that able has its highest correlation to education. This in turn correlates to the wealth of the family or nation in question. New Asian immigrants from Vietnam for example perform about as well as new immigrants from Mexico (warning: word-of-mouth statistic). Also, when you look at the US's success stories rebuilding countries (Germany, Japan), they all seem to have a pre-existing highly educated populous. This makes me think that US will have some success in Iraq (even without forcing a western culture down their throats), but that Afghanistan probably won't work. In addition if you sort black students by academic success, you'll find that at almost every level, that rich black kids perform much closer to white kids in the same economic class (warning: another word-of-mouth statistic). I suspect that any remaining difference could be explained away based on the education level of the parents, as parents also play an important role in the education of their children.
In other words: I don't buy the culture argument any more than I buy the race argument. I think a capable populous has to be built by steadily simultaneously increasing the wealth and education of a populous.
Of course my conclusion (unscientific as I admit it is in its current form) has implications for the future success of the US. Are those tax cuts being taken out of school budgets?
I know it's offtopic but:
Even scriblings on an envelope can be automatically read these days. Only about 1-5% which the machine can't manage get sent to humans for decyphering. Which means that hand-scribbling should only be marginally more expensive than the bar codes.
I had the privilege of seeing one of those machines in action here in Aachen Germany. They sort so fast, you can't follow the letters with your eyes! Pretty cool stuff.
1.) European governments don't cover transportation -- at very least not completely. A monthly bus ticket in Aachen, Germany costs about 40 Euros. A monthly bus ticket in Austin, TX costs about 25 dollars.
2.) 80% is maybe a maximum (I don't know), but the amount of my money that is going away in taxes is about 50%. I'm an above-average earner in Germany.
3.) There's plenty left to pay for after the govm't has taken it's share. The average German family pays 1/5 of their pre-tax income on rent. After rent, taxes, payments on my American student loans, and the yearly vacation to see my family in Texas, I can't afford a car, or a computer. Remember, I don't have any dependents, and I'm an above-average earner.
4.) The government would not halve the costs. My socialized German health insurance costs a little under 500 Euros per month. That's significantly more than 300 dollars, and again, I don't have any dependents. I'd be willing to bet that the average is also higher than 300 dollars/month. The reason is rampant beaurocracy in the public health care system. Just because the goal is to break even doesn't mean that it will cost less.
5.) Even with socialized health care, coverage is still not guaranteed. There are things that are by-law not covered in Germany which could still be considered to be medically necessary. And the government is currently in the process of cutting back the coverage further (without reducing the price-tag of course). The politics-driven government is not necessarily better at determining what is medically necessary than the profit-driven private health insurance company.
I appreciate your idealism, and I doubt that these facts will change your opinion as a whole. I agree that the US system is not ideal. I just don't think the ideal is achievable, and I doubt that socialized health care is currently closer to the ideal.
Slashdot Mirror
Utah has the highest birthrate and the largest families in America. More than 50% of all births are by teenage mothers, with seven of ten out of wedlock, and it has one of the highest divorce rates in the nation.
Utah probably does have a high birthrate and large families. Maybe it even has a high rate of birth out of wedlock. However, the divorce rate among Mormons nationwide is lower than the national average, and the teenage birthrate is also lower nationwide among Mormons than the average. There's this common misconception that all Mormons are in Utah, and that all Utah residents are serious Mormons. I grew up out of Utah, and knew very few Utah-Mormons. Outside of Utah, Utah-Mormons are even the subject of some ridicule (mostly good-natured) in the Mormon community. It's generally believed that more Mormons in Utah are Mormons because everyone else there is too, and that they are less likely to take their religious beliefs seriously (sort of like European Catholics).
Besides having a powerhouse football team, the Mormons' very own Brigham Young University -- alma mater of Donny and Marie Osmond and 1984 Miss America Sharlene Wells -- has one of the highest coed-pregnancy rates in America.
This is a half-truth which implies a falsehood. Reading this without knowing better I might assume we are talking about pregnancy out of marriage. But BYU has one of the highest marriage rates among universities in the US. I bet the vast majority of those pregnancies are in marriage and not accidental. The real tragedy here is that so many women go to BYU to get married and then drop out. It's jokingly called getting your "MRS" in the Mormon church. It's also a problem church leaders are openly trying to combat. They don't have anything against these women getting married and having children, but they want them to finish their educations.
Mormon anti-sex indoctrinations start early. Children are taught that sex is dirty and disgusting, that it is the tool of Satan.
This is a message repeated throughout the article which is simply incorrect. Mormons are taught that sex is something beautiful and sacred to be shared between a man and a woman who are married. I remember hearing this and variants on this lesson repeatedly in my young womanhood, both from my parents and from church leaders. Whether or not you agree with the man and woman part or the married part is your decision, but I don't see that message as harmful for people who want to believe it.
The suit also contends that the Mormon Church subjected Kip to what amounted to an intentional attempt at mind control by using brainwashing techniques under the guise of spiritual teaching.
Okay here's one where I have to call bullshit. The Mormon Church repeatedly tells young people that they have to learn for themselves. It was through my own struggle to learn for myself that I eventually decided the Mormon Church doesn't cut it for me. Yes, they do believe they are the only true religion. That is in fact one of my major problems with the church. But they emphasize discovering this for oneself.
Becoming "worthy" and ultimately reaching "perfection" means living up to the church's 4,300 commandments -- including those condemning natural sex acts.
Um... hello? Where are they coming up with this number? There is no list of 4,314 commandments which all need to be memorized and followed. The commandments Mormons are given are 90% identical with that of other conservative Christian religions. (Okay I'm making up numbers too here -- let's just say very similar.)
In
If you are actually interested in hearing what's wrong with that article, and what are (in my opinion of course) the real problems with the Mormon church, respond to this post. I don't really feel like making the effort of a sentence by sentence rebuttal of that article though for a religion I don't believe in, if you don't actually care about the truthfulness of what you post.
(Skip the last two sentences though, where he succombs to the common slashdot disease of using insult as argument.)
And face recognition doesn't have much to do with the 3rd dimension even for "normal" people. Try looking at the back of a mask that imitates the facial contours on both sides. If you hold it at the correct angle, your brain will flip it inside out and you'll think you're looking at the front of it. Face recognition is a special case of visual recognition for your brain.
I suspect the reason it's difficult to recognize people you don't know in a crowd has more to do with the mass of data you have to take it to know the faces of a lot of criminals. That probably combines with the low resolution on those cameras to increase the difficulty of the problem for humans. You probably would have very little difficulty picking out someone you know better.
I agree with you though that paper's the only way to persist the voter's choice. If speed is so important, we can create a preliminary election result from electronic data. We can even do an automated machine count of the paper ballots. But we still need at least the ability to do a proper hand count of the paper ballots, at least until the technology for pure electronic voting is much more proven than it currently is.
I've always found this argument interesting. Basically you are arguing that the definition of sentience is the ability to create entirely new areas of art and science. While these are, in my opinion, the most noble pursuits of the human race, they are not activities that every human individual takes part in. I would even go so far as to say that 90% or more of the people in this world can't do this. Even if the number is lower, you basically end up saying that a large portion of the human race isn't sentient.
I think that sentience requirements which put sentience out of reach of more that just the severely mentally handicapped are too strict. I would put the bar lower and try a definition more like: the ability to learn significant facts and ideas without being explicitly taught them. Unfortunately this definition doesn't exclude all computer programs. Some can "learn" through experience.
Still I'm interested in the argument. Can you come up with a definition of sentience which excludes as few humans as possible, and excludes all machines? In order to convince me of the correctness of your definition, you will have to convincingly argue that the humans who don't fit your definition of sentience really aren't sentient...
Do you have a source?
Thank you for the information.
The electoral college is irritating, but there is no true theoretical difference between it and party discipline in Germany. In both cases a majority opinion can theoretically and occasionally practically be voted down. In Europe, all representatives to the European parlaiment are also chosen by the majority party, and not proportionally. That system developed in Europe for exactly the same reasons that the electoral college developed in the US.
I'm highly critical of my country on a large number of issues. Knowing the facts however, I can't agree with you on this one.
And now speaking as someone who has a certain level of interest in India (my roommate for 2.5 years was Indian-American and I got yelled out a couple of times for making stupid assumptions;o), I can clearly state that your calling that slave labor is also overly simplistic. India definitely has problems with its caste system. People from lower castes do have problems getting the education required to break out, and there is discrimination in all aspects of life. But part of the reason the service sector in India accepts such low wages is also that they can live on those wages. Rent and food are also very inexpensive. As more money moves into the economy, not only the middle class will be able to afford more, but also the people they pay (trickle-down economics, but from middle to poor rather than from rich to poor). More money in an area changes the demand curves, which in turn changes the prices. Check out the housing costs in Silicon valley before the dot com bust as an excellent example of this principle at work.
In addition to changes in the demand curves, there is another important effect -- an increasingly large middle class. Many of the successful revolutions in recent history (the French revolution, the American revolution, even the end of apartheid in South Africa) resulted indirectly from an increasingly large and politically interested middle class. Very poor people don't have time or energy to even realise how repressed they are. They can be easily retaliated against once they try to organize simply by taking away the last of those life necessities which they still have. But once people start having a little bit more, they start wanting to have a lot more. They also start having more access to the education, and the organizational abilities they need to get others interested and involved in their cause. They have the reserves to hold out against economic attacks, and the power to react with their own economic attacks.
America essentially had slave labor of the same variety around the early 1900's. And we managed to end it too. We didn't have anybody attacking our economy from the outside at the same time.
Of course this doesn't happen in just one generation (or maybe it does -- one can sometimes be pleasantly surprised). Economics is a long-term game. But we don't need to overcome all of the cultural barriers to do this. Sometimes simply not negatively interfering (with trade barriers, wars, etc) can do more good than one might think. After all India did manage to free itself from its colonial masters in England without violence and without much help.
I might add, that many of the countries that we are now complaining about being somehow unfair in their trade practices (ie India with "slave labor", or Vietnam "dumping" catfish, etc) we basically forced to open their economies to our products. We benefit enormously from this trade but are often unwilling to reciprocate. To be consistent in your opinion, you also have to hold the position that we don't sell anything to those countries either. We also don't buy things there that we can't get in the US if you are to be consistent. Do you hold that position?
- IBM decides it's immoral to move jobs overseas, so it doesn't.
- Some Indian notices that he can produce the same products that IBM is producing, for a tenth of the price just by hiring people from his own country. He gets some investors together and does just that.
- IBM's customers start noticing that there's another product out that which does what IBM's products do just as well, but costs half as much (the Indian business man and his investors keeps 4/5 of the production price difference as a reward for noticing a lucrative situation). They stop buying IBM's products and start buying the Indian products.
- IBM has to lower its prices to compete. This cuts into its profit margins and it is forced to lay off some of its workers.
- The Indian business man benefits, his investors benefit, his employees benefit, and his new customers benefit. The only ones who loose are the former IBM employees. Assuming that the number of investors, and employees in effected each company are about the same, there is still a net benefit, because the customers are paying less.
The only way to avoid this situation is to either approximately equalize the costs of labor between the two countries, or to erect trade barriers so that the Indian business man can't sell his product in the US. But since reduced costs of goods is actually a net benefit, and since most of those customers are probably in the US, it is actually a net benefit for America. Besides, the costs of labor will eventually even out, as the two economies move onto equal ground. Why would a reasonable policy maker, want to create artifical barriers to this process?I know it hurts to loose a job -- I've been through my father's unemployment twice. But he found a new job both times because he was willing to be flexible. And the Indian who gets a job, and the people he pays out of his salary are all glad to see the money coming into their country. For some of them it means the difference between eating and not. There are less people in the US for whom it means that difference. And hey, we all belong to the human race, so we're not going to take the found out of 5 people's mouths in India to feed 1 person here just because they're not American right?
Actually if you read Jared Diamond's _Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel_, you'll find he makes a fairly good argument (in the introduction) as to why you might expect to find people coming more recently from hunter-gatherer societies to be more intelligent when you exclude other factors. Basically his argument is that people who live in high-population areas like cities breed for disease-resistance. People who live in highly varied, difficult to survive in environments breed for ability to memorize thousands of dangerous and beneficial species and quickly recognize and react to predators and prey.
So based on that, I'd expect people of Southern African, and North American descent to be more intelligent; and Northern African, European, and Asian descent to be more disease-resistant. But that's of course only assuming that such differences survive two or three generations in dramatically changed environment. Since they are such subtle complex traits (much more so than height, or strength), I doubt that they do.
Even definitons of intelligence become fairly controversial. I mean seriously, what kind of definition of intelligence is an SAT anyways? It tests knowledge much more than it tests intelligence. IQ tests may come closer but among neurologists and psycholigists they are even more controversial.
It's all speculation anyways, since we can't actually separate human beings from their environments. And as long as it can't (and shouldn't) be moved from the speculation realm into the scientific realm (ie. through controlled scientific experiments), we probably should just leave the topic alone.
So call me a "politically correct nutter".
Nonetheless, I very definitely agree with the idea of doing affirmitave action at the University level based on socioeconomic status rather than based on race or gender. Gender-based discrepencies need to be resolved much earlier in the education process, and race-based affirmitive action misses the point, just as you said. In fact the only problem race-based affirmitive action can hope to solve (or at least balance out) is bias directly at the university level, but socioeconomic-class-based affirmitive action would solve that problem too.
Not only that, but I'm not sure I agree with the comparison even if you equate computer damage to bodily harm. Try the following metaphor: some kid trespasses on your property and breaks into a properly secured locked box to steal fireworks you were storing there. He then takes them home and tries to set them off, and he gets hurt in the process. Are you then liable?
Of course in the grandparent posts case, I guess you do still have a non-zero probability that some innocent could accidentally come across the files and be harmed by them. But assuming this guy is setting up his security conscientiously, I still think the probability is close enough to zero as to be negligable.
I personally think effective ethics requires a theory of mind (ie the ability to deduce/guess how other people are feeling and from that understanding, deduce how they will react to and feel in various possible scenarios). And I expect developing that in software should be a challenging problem that will take more than 25 years to solve.
But maybe I'm being to pessimistic.
Tolls at Customs: I recently shipped myself software that I had bought in the US a few years ago. When you ship things internationally you have to note the value. I was charged about 30% of the value that I notated in order to get my own possessions back from the post office. Companies also have to pay import fees and they vary by country. Often they also have to pay sales tax in the country in question. Unless you want to piss your customer off with unexpected expenses, you have to include this in the price you state up front.
Export laws -- The US prohibits the export of certain types of goods to certain countries. The laws are often complex and subject to interpretation. Some companies choose not to hire an expert to look at questions of this nature alone. These companies have to limit the countries in which they will sell. It may well be that the easiest way to deal with this is to only sell in the US.
Warranties -- in Germany electronic goods are required to be warrantied against failure for 3 years. If you read through one of those warranty books that is printed in several languages, and you are multi-lingual, you'll notice that the warranties have contents which vary by language. Some companies don't make their goods to last 3 years, and as such don't want to be subject to warranty law in Germany. These companies don't sell their goods in Germany. I imagine that a lot countries have highly varying warranty law. If I were a business person, I wouldn't be willing to go blind into that potential mine field. I would either choose not to go, or hire someone who knows the territory.
Varying demand curves -- People in different cultures have different average incomes and differing desires to buy a product. This leads to varying intersection points between the supply and demand curves. A company that wants to earn more money won't just choose an average from the global market -- they'll adjust their prices locally to reflect local demand. In order to do this though, they need to isolate the markets. This means that the web-sites need to become country specific. We can argue about morality, but it's not illegal to run a business this way, so many businesses do.
Oh and your argument that US salespersons/websites should direct international customers to the sales site set up for them runs face first into the problem the original poster stated -- that the local product offering may not include the product the customer wants. It also may be selling locally for a higher price than it does in the US.
But translations require a certain level of creativity in order to localize the concepts and words into the culture in question. Different translators might make different choices in how to translate a particular phrase or concept thus resulting in a variety of qualities of translation.
A translation is definitely not an exact copy, and might have some merit independently from what it is translating. The question is, is it enough to call it a derivative work? I suspect not, but as IANAL, I don't know.
If it is though, then prohibiting the dissemination of an independent work is by definition censorship.
A few months ago while the Americans were renaming French Fries, it occurred to me and a few friends that maybe it would be a good idea to rename the Amerikaner. A few of our ideas:
- Französer
- Freiheit Sandbrötchen
OK. None of them was great. Anybody with better suggestions?I see some people making disparaging comments about cities, but I don't think we need to succomb to that excuse. Even the smallest bits of nature bring their own magic with them, and there's plenty of room for just a little something here and there.
I live in the city and have a little balcony garden. When I get home from work in the evening, I carefully water the plants that need it, remove the aphids from my chives by hand, fertilize the poppys, check if any of my strawberries are ripe, remove dead and sick leaves from other plants, make sure neither my mint nor my oregano is getting the upper hand in its fight for space, etc... This all sounds very mundane, but somehow while I'm doing it all, the world seems much more beautiful then it did the rest of the day.
Then I go and use my home-grown thyme, oregano, cilantro, etc, to make a beautiful meal, better than you could get in any restaurant. I eat it while watching the bees come and go from my columbine and bleeding hearts. And that's an important portion of the joy in my life.
And that is exactly my point. I personally am perfectly capable of handling it. The reason I didn't find the deletes in those 15 minutes of searching is that I went through exactly the list of logical locations that you just posted to try to find them. And "there's a bug in the documentation"? What documentation?
In Java, if you make an erroneous assumption about the type of something, you get an immediate exception. In C++, your exception/crash may come later or not at all. No guarantees. So you could miss it in your testing and debugging, whereas you won't miss the Java exception unless you actually didn't test the input. Getting feedback is good if you make a mistake -- C++ doesn't give enough feedback. (Okay there are better casts developed, but not everyone uses them, and then we're back to the problem of code from other people.)
We don't live in an ideal world -- sometimes we have to deal with the mistakes of others. So it would be nice to be able to work with a language which helps out with that.
Your personalization of this issue with an "if you can't handle it" is uncalled for, ignores information I provided in my post, and entirely misses the point.
C/C++ is your nail and hammer -- sometimes the right tool despite it's drawbacks, but definitely over-used by amateurs. There are other languages which are the professional tools of choice among true craftsmen and women for creating handsome and robust software (when they have a choice -- unfortunately I don't).
I'd rather have an exception than a crash. It gives me more information about what I did wrong. A crash that's not reliably repeatable and only happens in your release version under Windows OT systems with IE 4 installed, is next to impossible to find and fix -- in C++ it's only worse.
Not only that, but memory management is more than just a nuisance. Just yesterday, I wanted to move some code from one class to another to improve the object-oriented structure of some code which I've taken over from another developer. In that code were a couple of news, and I couldn't find the deletes which matched them. So I asked the original developer. Turns out the deletes were in a base class of the class that I was moving the code to. If I had been programming in Java, this would have been a cut and paste job finished in 30 seconds, plus 15 minutes for testing the change before checking in. In C++, it was 15 minutes trying to find the deletes myself, 15 minutes waiting for the other developer to get to a break point in his work and another 15 minutes assuring myself that the deletes really were called for all cases, and another 15 minutes for testing the change before checking in. That's a factor of 3-4 (depending on if I have something else I can do while waiting) for the C++ program.
Memory management and other unnecessary tasks which C++ saddles the developer with do make an impact on either development time, program stability, or both. And that is also true for experienced C++ programmers.
They also make an impact on language learning time, which is not to be underestimated with the number of newbies today, and people moving up from still worse languages like Cobol. In addition, even for an experienced C++ programmer, they make a difference in the time it takes to understand code which was programmed by another programmer.
I agree with you that there are situations where every language, including C++, is the most appropriate for the problem in question. I just think that C++ is over-used, thus reducing the average stability of modern programs and the average productivity of modern programmers.
I found an excellent article on this subject in the Berkeley McNair Journal, that also goes some way towards explaining the "Asian gang" problem in California that I learned about from a friend at Rice: Re-examining the Model Minority Myth: A Look at Southeast Asian Youth
Nonetheless, we may both be being too simplistic. Check out this article: Different Factors Affect the Academic Achievement of Asian and Latino Immigrant and Second-Generation Students
One thing that bothered me about your post though, is your obvious belief in the superiority of Western culture. You do realize that Arab culture and science and Western culture and science have had complex interactions over the centuries, and that Western culture and science would not be where they are today without that interaction. In talking to Turkish and Japanese friends here in Germany, I've come to the conclusion that at least Turkish culture is significantly more similar to my own, than is Japanese culture. And a female Japanese friend of mine made it very clear that there is still very serious gender-based and class-based discrimination in Japan today. As a society, they have been successful anyways. Japanese aren't eagerly adopting Western culture. They are to some extent eagerly adopting Western fashions, and learning English, but that is the extent of it. The English is for business, and fashion has never been rational, much less constant.
Anyways, a few books that I would suggest, if you're interested in the relation between Western culture and the rest of the world are Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, and John L. Esposito's The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (published before the 11 of September, and only becoming more relevant). Before reading these books, I also read William P. Alston's Perceiving God, the ideas in which are very related, but don't actually touch on the culture question.
I'll just leave the education question alone, as it was only tangential to my original point. Suffice it to say I don't agree, but maybe we can pick up that discussion some other time.
Well it's a matter of opinion of course, but I think that able has its highest correlation to education. This in turn correlates to the wealth of the family or nation in question. New Asian immigrants from Vietnam for example perform about as well as new immigrants from Mexico (warning: word-of-mouth statistic). Also, when you look at the US's success stories rebuilding countries (Germany, Japan), they all seem to have a pre-existing highly educated populous. This makes me think that US will have some success in Iraq (even without forcing a western culture down their throats), but that Afghanistan probably won't work. In addition if you sort black students by academic success, you'll find that at almost every level, that rich black kids perform much closer to white kids in the same economic class (warning: another word-of-mouth statistic). I suspect that any remaining difference could be explained away based on the education level of the parents, as parents also play an important role in the education of their children.
In other words: I don't buy the culture argument any more than I buy the race argument. I think a capable populous has to be built by steadily simultaneously increasing the wealth and education of a populous.
Of course my conclusion (unscientific as I admit it is in its current form) has implications for the future success of the US. Are those tax cuts being taken out of school budgets?
Even scriblings on an envelope can be automatically read these days. Only about 1-5% which the machine can't manage get sent to humans for decyphering. Which means that hand-scribbling should only be marginally more expensive than the bar codes.
I had the privilege of seeing one of those machines in action here in Aachen Germany. They sort so fast, you can't follow the letters with your eyes! Pretty cool stuff.
1.) European governments don't cover transportation -- at very least not completely. A monthly bus ticket in Aachen, Germany costs about 40 Euros. A monthly bus ticket in Austin, TX costs about 25 dollars.
2.) 80% is maybe a maximum (I don't know), but the amount of my money that is going away in taxes is about 50%. I'm an above-average earner in Germany.
3.) There's plenty left to pay for after the govm't has taken it's share. The average German family pays 1/5 of their pre-tax income on rent. After rent, taxes, payments on my American student loans, and the yearly vacation to see my family in Texas, I can't afford a car, or a computer. Remember, I don't have any dependents, and I'm an above-average earner.
4.) The government would not halve the costs. My socialized German health insurance costs a little under 500 Euros per month. That's significantly more than 300 dollars, and again, I don't have any dependents. I'd be willing to bet that the average is also higher than 300 dollars/month. The reason is rampant beaurocracy in the public health care system. Just because the goal is to break even doesn't mean that it will cost less.
5.) Even with socialized health care, coverage is still not guaranteed. There are things that are by-law not covered in Germany which could still be considered to be medically necessary. And the government is currently in the process of cutting back the coverage further (without reducing the price-tag of course). The politics-driven government is not necessarily better at determining what is medically necessary than the profit-driven private health insurance company.
I appreciate your idealism, and I doubt that these facts will change your opinion as a whole. I agree that the US system is not ideal. I just don't think the ideal is achievable, and I doubt that socialized health care is currently closer to the ideal.
I wish there was a perfect solution.