Okay, let's try that line of reasoning: in world war 2, strategists didn't have any way of predicting whether the Nazis could build an atomic bomb. So all that sabotage that was undertook to destroy their supply of heavy water was a mistake, right? We should have waited until we were sure?
Or what about lead poisoning? The links between lead in the environment and lead poisoning is STILL being studied. A causal link is virtually impossible to prove. Better put all that lead paint back in your house, lest you fall victim to the horrors of acting on a hypothesis.
Sorry, but when the destruction of western civilization is on the line, a well-supported hypothesis is enough to go on. You're just pissed off that you might not get to drive an SUV anymore.
Regarding the facts: with chaotic systems, prediction is generally impossible. NO models have predictive power over chaotic systems. They can explain what happens, and show you what some of the possible outcomes are, but that's about it. And interestingly enough, you switch from demanding predictive power from a model to demanding that a model merely "fits our observations", which is EXACTLY what the global warming models do -- which is consistent with my theory that you have only the education necessary to flip burgers or be president of the USA and have never studied science. So which is it? Is action ONLY possible when you have a model that predicts the future? No matter how serious the consequences and how strongly the theory matches observation?
Yeah, except that the time between the industrial revolution and today does not constitute "geological time scales". Nice try though. You almost seemed informed for a minute.
Realistically speaking, pornography is only considered immoral by a small, highly vocal minority of crackpots. Not unlike the small, highly vocal minority of crackpots that consider copyright violation to be immoral. Of course, you have clearly placed yourself in both groups by your statements. Particularly, confusing THEFT (taking something away from someone else, so that you have it and they don't) with COPYRIGHT VIOLATION (a form of sharing that hasn't been approved by some particular third party). From that, I surmise that you are American, very likely a fundamentalist christian (that is, a christian who completely ignores the new testament), and probably opposed to any kind of individual freedom whatsoever.
So, based on your personal experience, you expect people to believe that chemicals can not be used to enhance Human performance despite an enormous amount of scientific data to the contrary? Your singular anecdote is somehow supposed to stand against centuries of research? Thanks, but no thanks.
Speaking from MY personal experience, I can tell you caffeine vastly improves my performance. It lets me sit for hours and work, and concentrate, and all that. Without caffeine, I can barely muster the energy to move, let alone work or pay attention (and I nearly failed to graduate from high school because of that). Does that describe most people? Of course not.
Anecdote is not the singular form of the word data.
Some people don't receive any benefit from stimulants, but most people do. Some people receive enormous, dramatic benefits from them -- like people that have ADD, certain kinds of anxiety disorders , certain kinds of sleep disorders (or who just need to stay awake for 50 hours for some reason). Discounting these drugs' importance just because YOU don't like them is profoundly misguided.
Well said. Democracy dies a little every time that someone says "it's a two party system". It's basically a complete resignation, and an acknowledgement that democracy was a failed experiment.
I don't know about other regions, but here in British Columbia, the first $5000 that one earns every year doesn't count towards your income for tax purposes. And that's regardless of how much money you make. So if you earn $50,000 at your job, and do $3000 worth of contracting, that $3000 doesn't even show up, it doesn't raise your tax bracket, it just doesn't exist to the government. Cool, huh? Admittedly, it might make more sense for it to be higher (say $10,000 or even $20,000) if it is to encourage the growth of the contract-labour market, but there it is.
Although this is true, it skips over one of the ways in which modern corporations shoot themselves in the foot. They are incredibly attached to the idea that employees are completely replaceable, and ideally that would be true (wouldn't it be great if labour could truly be treated as a commodity?) But the fact is that employees take time to hire, train, more time to reach their full potential in a position, and so on. Replacing an employee is like buying a house -- it's expensive, and there are a lot of costs that you might not consider if you look at it from a naive point of view. And of course, it often means that, for a while, you just don't have as many employees as you need -- which may cause your best employees to quit because they have to do the work of the person who was fired.
Some industries are already facing up to this reality, which is why there is more talk about "employee retention strategies" these days. I have a friend who does human resources at a hospital, and they basically never fire ANYONE, unless they are unusually and pathologically bad at their job. It's nearly always cheaper in the long run to invest in a bad employee and bring them up to an acceptable level of performance. Health-care is an extreme case, of course, due to the chronic labour shortage in that field, but the principles do apply elsewhere.
To summarize, although I agree that no one has a right to retain their job (nor should they -- that's why we have unemployment insurance, job placement services, retraining programs, etcetera, and, in a pinch, welfare), many businesses are quite self-destructive in their tendency to fire anyone for any reason, ignoring the costs and inefficiency that this will incurr.
You know, strictly speaking, the whole point of reserve forces is that they can be deployed during wars or crises. And the US is managing a civil war in Iraq, the remnants of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and trying to smoke out Al-Qaeda along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. At least one of those should count as a "war", making reserves fair game.
I oppose the US invasion of Iraq as much as anyone; but the whole "you can't send the reserves!" issue is silly. They are a part of the military, and this is exactly their purpose -- to augment the standing military when it gets stretched too thinly.
Are you insane? Ever heard of Abu Ghraib? Haitha? Or the countless incidents that place during the Vietnam war? Soldiers -- particularly American soldiers, are bloodthirsty psychopathic fuck-ups for the most part. And they've failed at nearly everything they've ever done since World War 2. North Korea? Still communist. Vietnam? Still communist. Iraq? A warzone that has yet to actuall see any of that "rebuilding" that was supposed to happen. Osama? Still free and laughing at the west.
So you have a military that accomplishes nothing while torturing and murdering people. Would you hire people that were a part of that? Why not just go down to the prison and hire some people. Get a few serial killers maybe -- no one can "get er done" like a serial killer. They're just about the most organized people you can hope to find in this world.
Isn't aluminum known for being quite combustible? I seem to recall there being a rather serious "incident" when it turned out that the aluminum hulls on Britain's destroyers would ignite after being hit by torpedoes, resulting in self-sustaining combustion. I could be misremembering though, so don't take my word for it.
You make chainmail? Truly, a geek among geeks. You ought to be careful -- if the amount of geekosity in a given area of space gets too high, it can collapse into a dork-hole.
Just jeffin' ya. Sounds like an interesting hobby. Know anyone who makes swords? I've heard that the metallurgy that goes into a modern metal blade is quite impressive, and that modern swords -- despite being made almost entire by hobbyists -- are far superior to the swords of antiquity.
Read a newspaper some time. The united states is holding thousands of people without charge right now, who are assumed guilty until proven innocent (not that they are ever given a chance to prove themselves innocent). Police routinely kill people who aren't resisting arrest. Millions of people go to jail without trials, simply because their lawyers don't want to waste time that could be better spent with clients that can actually afford to pay them.
People DO periodically go after gun manufacturers nand gun distributors, including governments. That's not to say that that's a reasonable course of action (isn't it then, by extension, the government's own fault for allowing the manufacture and sale of guns? Why don't they sue themselves?), but it's entirely inline with the way people in positions of authority behave.
Gasp! Are you saying that American law isn't the supreme law of the world? Handed down by god himself to the puritans, so that they might convince the entire world of the immorality of nipples, pot, and sharing?
Isn't the city and/or state of New York suing a number of gun distributors for essentially that reason? There's some extra nonsense about the fact that the distributors weren't able to read the minds of their customers and determine how they intended to use the guns that they were buying.
Presumably you could just fire a reusable rocket at the station carrying nothing but fuel (ie: no astronauts, satellites, robots, space weapons, toxic/nuclear waste, orphans, or toupees for the hole in the ozone layer). Then that fuel is available to vehicles that are laden down with those things, allowing those craft to be slightly smaller because they initially only have to carry their launch fuel.
Not being an engineer, or even a particularly practical mathematician (but ask me about finite automata! ), I'm not sure about the logistics of this. But hey, why not?
I'd say the chemist/biochemist might be the best bet. Really, what is the hallmark of life, other than that it causes unusual chemical reactions to take place? You don't typically see CO_2 turning into sugar when bombarded by sunlight, unless there's a cyanobacteria or something around to do the job. Sugar tends to be fairly stable in O_2 without monsters to catalyze its breakdown. So if you seal up a wee little ecosystem, and catch it changing in some way that is inconsistent with simpler, non-living chemical reactions, that's a good clue that you might have a sample worth probing further.
Actually, now that I think about it, wouldn't a chemosynthetic creature (or what would be called a chemosynthetic creature were it part of our tree of life) be hard to detect, since they typically just expedite reactions that take place anyway? Like metal oxidation?
Well, it's unfortunately not that easy, easy even here on Earth. We're still working out the boundaries of what life is, with discoveries like the mimivirus, nanobes, viroids, and the fact that the Archaea appear to be fantastically abundant in the oceans, yet remain virtually undetectable there. Life is a slippery beast, even when dealing with plain old carbon-based DNA critters. Unless you know what you're looking for, or are looking for something big and colourful and obvious like Euglena in pond water, it can be very difficult to find anything at all.
Still, the fact that the samples haven't been shared out widely speaks ill of this researcher. After all, didn't this stuff rain from the sky? It can't be in particularly short supply.
You'll notice I used the term "traditionally". America traditionally valued freedom, and ruined the shit of oppressive empires like Spain, Britain, and Germany. Sure, since then, America has only fought (and lost) wars against third-world nations, harmless weeds, and sharing -- but it really wasn't always like that. Up to and including World War 2, America was a relatively inspiring place compared to the alternatives.
So America would have no terrorism if only they had the balls to adopt totalitarianism? I'd say the alternate attitude -- you know, the one about it being better to die free than live as slave -- is the somewhat more ballsy attitude. Giving up your freedom to be safe is the cowards' attitude.
Where do Americans come by this attitude that war, surveillance, executions, and secret prisons is somehow brave? If you are brave -- that is, NOT AFRAID -- terrorism simply doesn't exist, because you can't be terrified. All that leaves is a small number of dead people and destroyed infrastructure, which makes terrorists slightly less relevant than bad weather. But, if you'd rather live in a modern-day version of the USSR just so that you don't spend every second trembling and fearing for your live, that's your perogative. Just don't expect me to think of you as anything other than a dirty, stinking coward.
The point? Having balls doesn't mean the willingness to hurt other people to make yourself slightly safer. It means facing danger unafraid. By way of example: people who mine gold underground are brave, because they face danger unafraid. People who kill their neighbours and steal all their food because they're terrified that the incoming tropical storm might destroy civilized society are cowards. America (at least traditionally) is the former. You are the latter.
It depends on what people were saying was nonsense. If the media had been running reports about how "Y2K will cause untold manhours in overtime labour!", that would have been a reasonable thing to take seriously. But the media was actually running reports about the shortages of fresh water we'd all be facing, and how there wouldn't be enough shotguns to go around when the zombies came for us. So yes, that was definitely ridiculous. Y2K was a serious problem in the sense that global warming is a serious problem -- it will take some work to fix, and millions of people will be tragically inconvenienced. It was NOT a problem in the apocalyptic sense that fear-mongers made it out to be.
Well, they are right once in a while, so if we amortize that rate, we can say that chicken littles predict minor disasters quite frequently. Minor disasters are usually the responsibility of the local firedepartment. Issue resolved. Next!
Slashdot Mirror
Or what about lead poisoning? The links between lead in the environment and lead poisoning is STILL being studied. A causal link is virtually impossible to prove. Better put all that lead paint back in your house, lest you fall victim to the horrors of acting on a hypothesis.
Sorry, but when the destruction of western civilization is on the line, a well-supported hypothesis is enough to go on. You're just pissed off that you might not get to drive an SUV anymore.
Regarding the facts: with chaotic systems, prediction is generally impossible. NO models have predictive power over chaotic systems. They can explain what happens, and show you what some of the possible outcomes are, but that's about it. And interestingly enough, you switch from demanding predictive power from a model to demanding that a model merely "fits our observations", which is EXACTLY what the global warming models do -- which is consistent with my theory that you have only the education necessary to flip burgers or be president of the USA and have never studied science. So which is it? Is action ONLY possible when you have a model that predicts the future? No matter how serious the consequences and how strongly the theory matches observation?
Yeah, except that the time between the industrial revolution and today does not constitute "geological time scales". Nice try though. You almost seemed informed for a minute.
Realistically speaking, pornography is only considered immoral by a small, highly vocal minority of crackpots. Not unlike the small, highly vocal minority of crackpots that consider copyright violation to be immoral. Of course, you have clearly placed yourself in both groups by your statements. Particularly, confusing THEFT (taking something away from someone else, so that you have it and they don't) with COPYRIGHT VIOLATION (a form of sharing that hasn't been approved by some particular third party). From that, I surmise that you are American, very likely a fundamentalist christian (that is, a christian who completely ignores the new testament), and probably opposed to any kind of individual freedom whatsoever.
Speaking from MY personal experience, I can tell you caffeine vastly improves my performance. It lets me sit for hours and work, and concentrate, and all that. Without caffeine, I can barely muster the energy to move, let alone work or pay attention (and I nearly failed to graduate from high school because of that). Does that describe most people? Of course not.
Anecdote is not the singular form of the word data.
Some people don't receive any benefit from stimulants, but most people do. Some people receive enormous, dramatic benefits from them -- like people that have ADD, certain kinds of anxiety disorders , certain kinds of sleep disorders (or who just need to stay awake for 50 hours for some reason). Discounting these drugs' importance just because YOU don't like them is profoundly misguided.
The monkesphere... too depressing... must drink six cups of coffee to compensate...
Well said. Democracy dies a little every time that someone says "it's a two party system". It's basically a complete resignation, and an acknowledgement that democracy was a failed experiment.
I don't know about other regions, but here in British Columbia, the first $5000 that one earns every year doesn't count towards your income for tax purposes. And that's regardless of how much money you make. So if you earn $50,000 at your job, and do $3000 worth of contracting, that $3000 doesn't even show up, it doesn't raise your tax bracket, it just doesn't exist to the government. Cool, huh? Admittedly, it might make more sense for it to be higher (say $10,000 or even $20,000) if it is to encourage the growth of the contract-labour market, but there it is.
Some industries are already facing up to this reality, which is why there is more talk about "employee retention strategies" these days. I have a friend who does human resources at a hospital, and they basically never fire ANYONE, unless they are unusually and pathologically bad at their job. It's nearly always cheaper in the long run to invest in a bad employee and bring them up to an acceptable level of performance. Health-care is an extreme case, of course, due to the chronic labour shortage in that field, but the principles do apply elsewhere.
To summarize, although I agree that no one has a right to retain their job (nor should they -- that's why we have unemployment insurance, job placement services, retraining programs, etcetera, and, in a pinch, welfare), many businesses are quite self-destructive in their tendency to fire anyone for any reason, ignoring the costs and inefficiency that this will incurr.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reserve. Definition #6.
I oppose the US invasion of Iraq as much as anyone; but the whole "you can't send the reserves!" issue is silly. They are a part of the military, and this is exactly their purpose -- to augment the standing military when it gets stretched too thinly.
So you have a military that accomplishes nothing while torturing and murdering people. Would you hire people that were a part of that? Why not just go down to the prison and hire some people. Get a few serial killers maybe -- no one can "get er done" like a serial killer. They're just about the most organized people you can hope to find in this world.
I haven't ... yet. Now I have one less excuse to not go camping.
Isn't aluminum known for being quite combustible? I seem to recall there being a rather serious "incident" when it turned out that the aluminum hulls on Britain's destroyers would ignite after being hit by torpedoes, resulting in self-sustaining combustion. I could be misremembering though, so don't take my word for it.
Just jeffin' ya. Sounds like an interesting hobby. Know anyone who makes swords? I've heard that the metallurgy that goes into a modern metal blade is quite impressive, and that modern swords -- despite being made almost entire by hobbyists -- are far superior to the swords of antiquity.
I'd say the whole problem with our government is that it doesn't discriminate based on stupidity.
Read a newspaper some time. The united states is holding thousands of people without charge right now, who are assumed guilty until proven innocent (not that they are ever given a chance to prove themselves innocent). Police routinely kill people who aren't resisting arrest. Millions of people go to jail without trials, simply because their lawyers don't want to waste time that could be better spent with clients that can actually afford to pay them.
People DO periodically go after gun manufacturers nand gun distributors, including governments. That's not to say that that's a reasonable course of action (isn't it then, by extension, the government's own fault for allowing the manufacture and sale of guns? Why don't they sue themselves?), but it's entirely inline with the way people in positions of authority behave.
Gasp! Are you saying that American law isn't the supreme law of the world? Handed down by god himself to the puritans, so that they might convince the entire world of the immorality of nipples, pot, and sharing?
Isn't the city and/or state of New York suing a number of gun distributors for essentially that reason? There's some extra nonsense about the fact that the distributors weren't able to read the minds of their customers and determine how they intended to use the guns that they were buying.
Not being an engineer, or even a particularly practical mathematician (but ask me about finite automata! ), I'm not sure about the logistics of this. But hey, why not?
Actually, now that I think about it, wouldn't a chemosynthetic creature (or what would be called a chemosynthetic creature were it part of our tree of life) be hard to detect, since they typically just expedite reactions that take place anyway? Like metal oxidation?
Still, the fact that the samples haven't been shared out widely speaks ill of this researcher. After all, didn't this stuff rain from the sky? It can't be in particularly short supply.
You'll notice I used the term "traditionally". America traditionally valued freedom, and ruined the shit of oppressive empires like Spain, Britain, and Germany. Sure, since then, America has only fought (and lost) wars against third-world nations, harmless weeds, and sharing -- but it really wasn't always like that. Up to and including World War 2, America was a relatively inspiring place compared to the alternatives.
Where do Americans come by this attitude that war, surveillance, executions, and secret prisons is somehow brave? If you are brave -- that is, NOT AFRAID -- terrorism simply doesn't exist, because you can't be terrified. All that leaves is a small number of dead people and destroyed infrastructure, which makes terrorists slightly less relevant than bad weather. But, if you'd rather live in a modern-day version of the USSR just so that you don't spend every second trembling and fearing for your live, that's your perogative. Just don't expect me to think of you as anything other than a dirty, stinking coward.
The point? Having balls doesn't mean the willingness to hurt other people to make yourself slightly safer. It means facing danger unafraid. By way of example: people who mine gold underground are brave, because they face danger unafraid. People who kill their neighbours and steal all their food because they're terrified that the incoming tropical storm might destroy civilized society are cowards. America (at least traditionally) is the former. You are the latter.
It depends on what people were saying was nonsense. If the media had been running reports about how "Y2K will cause untold manhours in overtime labour!", that would have been a reasonable thing to take seriously. But the media was actually running reports about the shortages of fresh water we'd all be facing, and how there wouldn't be enough shotguns to go around when the zombies came for us. So yes, that was definitely ridiculous. Y2K was a serious problem in the sense that global warming is a serious problem -- it will take some work to fix, and millions of people will be tragically inconvenienced. It was NOT a problem in the apocalyptic sense that fear-mongers made it out to be.
Well, they are right once in a while, so if we amortize that rate, we can say that chicken littles predict minor disasters quite frequently. Minor disasters are usually the responsibility of the local firedepartment. Issue resolved. Next!