This is one of the reasons that the whole idea of "scientific consensus" or "the science is settled" bugs me. People try to act like science is a completely rational activity. It's simply not: it's a human activity, fraught with all the prejudices, biases and shortcomings — as well as the wonder and majesty and achievement — that implies. Here is an excellent example of exactly that.
Yes, and I've recently had a teacher tell me that there is no bell curve of teachers because the training that they get ensures that they are all excellent. She seemed offended when I (nicely) disagreed with her that her contention was possible, and that even were it so, it did not line up with, for example, the honors English teacher I once had who spent class time working out aerobics routines.
You need to take into account Broder's and Tesla's history if you're going to try to judge that without evidence. Broder has a long-standing animus towards electric vehicles. Tesla does not, so far as I can tell, have a history of wildly inflated claims about what their cars can do.
Oh, very debatable. Fundamentally, the purpose of a version number is to differentiate between different versions of the software, nothing more. If you want to use version numbers to track release date, why not use a version number plus a release date? If you want to use version numbers to differentiate between stable, development and experimental versions, why not use a version number plus a stability indicator? The basic idea is that it's not particularly useful to use one piece of metadata to encode other pieces of metadata. Just use multiple pieces of metadata.
Murder is murder, but war is not murder. So yes, it matters whether a person is killed by their own government or another. It matters whether a person is killed on a battlefield or in an area without any combat occurring. It may not matter much to the person killed, but it matters a lot to the ones not yet killed, but at risk.
Sort of. Originally, that is how it was supposed to work. However, the states now select electors in such a manner as to ensure that they are pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote in that state. In other words, in practice, each presidential candidate submits a slate of electors, we vote for the candidate (not the electors) and the electors submitted by the candidate that wins the popular vote are the ones chosen to represent the state in the Electoral College. These slates are always party loyalists. It's extraordinarily rare to have an elector not vote for the ticket to which they are pledged.
That said, I really like the way that the Electoral College was intended to function. The idea is that locally-respected people would get together with locally-respected people from other places and seek out the best possible President from among the eligible Americans. For a long time, people didn't even campaign for the office. Perhaps if we chose the electors in different years than we chose the President, and also made the electors responsible for choosing cabinet secretaries and judges, we'd be able to get more of that ideal back. Especially if we were to combine that with truly local elections for electors, like Maine and Nebraska do (1 per congressional district, with the 2 who equate to the Senators being chosen based on the statewide popular vote). But in practical terms, it's more likely that the Electoral College will go away than that it will be substantively reformed to have more power.
I am assuming no such thing. I assume that if government raises the minimum wage, a substantial part of the people making between the old and the new minimum wages would lose their jobs, and that fewer new jobs at the new minimum wage would form in the future. While I didn't discuss the effects that would apply to the business employing these people, context alone should have indicated that I think it would be bad, simply because now the people already working there would have extra duties to compensate for those no longer being hired out separately because it's not profitable to do so.
I'm trying to figure out if you think you're disagreeing with me or not. You write in an apparent tone of disagreement, but then substantively agree with what I said about the effect on unemployment.
So you're not much of a fan of the Westphalian system, I see. I don't necessarily disagree with you in the case of real slavery, though in the case of, say, China, the "slavery" is prison labor, and we use that in the US in a lot of cases as well. So maybe open to discussion, but with more light and less heat.Or do you simply mean that Chinese people being paid less in absolute terms constitutes slavery, period? If so, I have to disagree, because voluntary labor for pay is not slavery, even if you dislike the pay rates.
You should read more carefully. I did not say that killing someone is equivalent to imprisoning them. I said that not granting them due process (ability to contest their guilt before being punished) is equivalent to not granting them due process (ability to contest their guilt before being punished).
I agree with him that the Supreme Court often issues decisions clearly at odds with what the Constitution plainly says, and that its legitimacy as an arbiter of Constitutionality (probably not justice overall, though) is in serious doubt. But I suspect he and I would disagree on which decisions the Court has been wrong about.
What's really amusing about this comment is that it presents no logic or facts, merely strong beliefs. No good arguments are made, merely name-calling. And further, rather than attempt to engage any argument, or even admit that one is available to be engaged, the poster instead accuses (by redirection to "psychological studies of conservatives) all conservatives of being insane, or at least mentally unbalanced. If only there were a psychological term for when one projects their own internal feelings and faults onto others....
Economic history would suggest that inflation is caused by the government increasing money supply faster than the underlying material support (of population, resources and productivity) can rise, and deflation is the opposite. Which would explain why, for example, highly innovative industries like electronics and highly competitive industries like plastic surgery can see falling prices in an otherwise inflating economy, while low competition or low innovation or resource constrained sectors can see rising prices even in an otherwise deflating economy.
I doubt that minimum wage changes affect prices much. But by raising the cost of labor, they certainly affect unemployment among the least well off, because there are fewer jobs that are profitable to hire out at, say, $9 per hour than at, say, $6 per hour.
That's not actually much of a "solution," unless the "problem" is too high of a standard of living. What trade restrictions do, in practice, is impoverish the nation that imposes them (in a relative sense). Trade increases wealth generally, which is why we don't have tarriffs for goods going from Alabama to California, despite the difference in wages and cost of living. That scales internationally as well. We'd be far better off with the removal of distortions to the market (much of the regulatory structure, and essentially all of the subsidies), coupled with tarriffs and trade restrictions only on countries impeding our trade with them (so that free trade doesn't become a one-way street).
He's a president, not a king; certainly not a god. He is not our ruler, but our leader. We do not serve him; he serves us. I realize that most of the world doesn't get this (at least, not the places in Europe and Asia where I've lived), but we Americans really do take the idea of citizenship and the republic quite seriously. And somehow, I doubt you were saying the same thing when Bush was president. (Not that he was great shakes either, but it's odd how so many people who had a real problem with Bush ostensibly on policy grounds are fine with those policies executed by Obama instead.)
The definition of tyranny was and remains a government that does not protect the natural rights of its people. The fact that people don't like a government which, like ours, routinely abrogates those rights does not mean that the abrogation is not tyrannical. So just to give one example, the President asserts the right to kill Americans without due process if he deems them to be a terrorist threat, even in America, on the theory that "the battlefield is everywhere." Is that, the utter abrogation of the right to life, not to be taken without due process of law (which doesn't simply mean making a law, or worse a regulation, or worst an executive order), not tyranny? And before you stalk off about this, yes, Bush was tyrannical, too, as witness the Padilla case.
Sadly we know the Obama boilerplate speech by heart, and so the inaugural address was by now unfortunately straw-man psychodrama. Five years ago, the well-delivered script caused fainting, now it should earn mostly yawns: Fault the well off; invest more borrowed money in more federal programs that have no demonstrable record of success; blame the bad news on others; ignore the $1 trillion-plus annual borrowing; threaten to use more executive orders; demonize the opposition; take bad news abroad and declare it good, and fluff everything up with the hope-and-change cadences that address the trivial and avoid the fundamental.
He wrote that about the inaugural address, but frankly it also applies to the State of the Union, and pretty much every other public utterance by this President.
I haven't read his argument, just the summary provided here, but it's not clear to me that he's that far off. Fundamentally, our economy, our education systems, our corporate structure, and most assuredly our laws and regulations are stuck in the industrial era. By that, I mean that those structures are reactions to the problems encountered in industrializing: jobs had become less secure, cities had become crowded and crime-ridden, even basic jobs required literate employees and the like. Right now we are in the midst of a dramatic change in social structure, as profound and deep as that which accompanied the industrial revolution.
Before the industrial revolution, livings were primarily made in agriculture, with a thin layer of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and professionals in the urban centers, which were quite small. After the industrial revolution, livings were primarily made in large urban centers, and in manufacturing, the bureacracies required by and mass-market retailing enabled by industrialization, with a thin layer of farmers in the country. It appears to me that we are heading for a point where livings are primarily made by independent workers creating goods and services in small organizations, and providing them either online and globally, or offline and hyperlocally. The bureaucracies and clerks required by industrialization will largely be replaced, I think, by a combination of customer-management tools online, and the ability of small companies locally to deal directly with their customers without high overhead in either information or regulation. This will mean that living patterns will shift again, because people can do most of this kind of work living anywhere. It will also mean that the legal and regulatory structures will change to meet the challenges of that way of living, as the support systems of the city and the bureaucracy break down in the face of changes in where people are and how they work and what they do.
So in the face of all of that, the structures that IT was built up to support and enable — big business and big government primarily — will become more and more rare, and more and more distributed and cooperative rather than centralized and hierarchical. In such a world, where do big IT departments fit? I suspect that hosting will become largely cloud-based, and regulations will arise to ensure privacy and security in such systems. I suspect that the front-end to cloud-based services will be largely through devices owned and controlled by those accessing the data, but through applications owned and controlled by those who provide the data. Sure, there will be a need for a lot of savvy IT workers in such an environment, but the traditional IT departments are not only unhelpful in such a condition, they are actively harmful. And so they will be reduced, and mostly survive in large organizations that cannot or will not downsize to become more nimble.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the reasons that the whole idea of "scientific consensus" or "the science is settled" bugs me. People try to act like science is a completely rational activity. It's simply not: it's a human activity, fraught with all the prejudices, biases and shortcomings — as well as the wonder and majesty and achievement — that implies. Here is an excellent example of exactly that.
But logically, only one is necessarily wrong.
Yes, and I've recently had a teacher tell me that there is no bell curve of teachers because the training that they get ensures that they are all excellent. She seemed offended when I (nicely) disagreed with her that her contention was possible, and that even were it so, it did not line up with, for example, the honors English teacher I once had who spent class time working out aerobics routines.
You need to take into account Broder's and Tesla's history if you're going to try to judge that without evidence. Broder has a long-standing animus towards electric vehicles. Tesla does not, so far as I can tell, have a history of wildly inflated claims about what their cars can do.
Oh, very debatable. Fundamentally, the purpose of a version number is to differentiate between different versions of the software, nothing more. If you want to use version numbers to track release date, why not use a version number plus a release date? If you want to use version numbers to differentiate between stable, development and experimental versions, why not use a version number plus a stability indicator? The basic idea is that it's not particularly useful to use one piece of metadata to encode other pieces of metadata. Just use multiple pieces of metadata.
s/tech related //
Murder is murder, but war is not murder. So yes, it matters whether a person is killed by their own government or another. It matters whether a person is killed on a battlefield or in an area without any combat occurring. It may not matter much to the person killed, but it matters a lot to the ones not yet killed, but at risk.
They are more likely angling for a settlement with Apple than trying to actually compete with other Android phone makers.
That said, I really like the way that the Electoral College was intended to function. The idea is that locally-respected people would get together with locally-respected people from other places and seek out the best possible President from among the eligible Americans. For a long time, people didn't even campaign for the office. Perhaps if we chose the electors in different years than we chose the President, and also made the electors responsible for choosing cabinet secretaries and judges, we'd be able to get more of that ideal back. Especially if we were to combine that with truly local elections for electors, like Maine and Nebraska do (1 per congressional district, with the 2 who equate to the Senators being chosen based on the statewide popular vote). But in practical terms, it's more likely that the Electoral College will go away than that it will be substantively reformed to have more power.
Really not sure what you mean by actual slavery in China, if you're not referring to prison labor, then. References would be useful.
I am assuming no such thing. I assume that if government raises the minimum wage, a substantial part of the people making between the old and the new minimum wages would lose their jobs, and that fewer new jobs at the new minimum wage would form in the future. While I didn't discuss the effects that would apply to the business employing these people, context alone should have indicated that I think it would be bad, simply because now the people already working there would have extra duties to compensate for those no longer being hired out separately because it's not profitable to do so.
I'm trying to figure out if you think you're disagreeing with me or not. You write in an apparent tone of disagreement, but then substantively agree with what I said about the effect on unemployment.
So you're not much of a fan of the Westphalian system, I see. I don't necessarily disagree with you in the case of real slavery, though in the case of, say, China, the "slavery" is prison labor, and we use that in the US in a lot of cases as well. So maybe open to discussion, but with more light and less heat.Or do you simply mean that Chinese people being paid less in absolute terms constitutes slavery, period? If so, I have to disagree, because voluntary labor for pay is not slavery, even if you dislike the pay rates.
You should read more carefully. I did not say that killing someone is equivalent to imprisoning them. I said that not granting them due process (ability to contest their guilt before being punished) is equivalent to not granting them due process (ability to contest their guilt before being punished).
OK, maybe most of the people in California don't and quite a few in NYC don't, but other than that, yeah, we do.
I agree with him that the Supreme Court often issues decisions clearly at odds with what the Constitution plainly says, and that its legitimacy as an arbiter of Constitutionality (probably not justice overall, though) is in serious doubt. But I suspect he and I would disagree on which decisions the Court has been wrong about.
What's really amusing about this comment is that it presents no logic or facts, merely strong beliefs. No good arguments are made, merely name-calling. And further, rather than attempt to engage any argument, or even admit that one is available to be engaged, the poster instead accuses (by redirection to "psychological studies of conservatives) all conservatives of being insane, or at least mentally unbalanced. If only there were a psychological term for when one projects their own internal feelings and faults onto others....
No, but holding someone for more than a year without access to legal counsel and without filing formal charges is as much of a due process violation.
Economic history would suggest that inflation is caused by the government increasing money supply faster than the underlying material support (of population, resources and productivity) can rise, and deflation is the opposite. Which would explain why, for example, highly innovative industries like electronics and highly competitive industries like plastic surgery can see falling prices in an otherwise inflating economy, while low competition or low innovation or resource constrained sectors can see rising prices even in an otherwise deflating economy.
I doubt that minimum wage changes affect prices much. But by raising the cost of labor, they certainly affect unemployment among the least well off, because there are fewer jobs that are profitable to hire out at, say, $9 per hour than at, say, $6 per hour.
That's not actually much of a "solution," unless the "problem" is too high of a standard of living. What trade restrictions do, in practice, is impoverish the nation that imposes them (in a relative sense). Trade increases wealth generally, which is why we don't have tarriffs for goods going from Alabama to California, despite the difference in wages and cost of living. That scales internationally as well. We'd be far better off with the removal of distortions to the market (much of the regulatory structure, and essentially all of the subsidies), coupled with tarriffs and trade restrictions only on countries impeding our trade with them (so that free trade doesn't become a one-way street).
He's a president, not a king; certainly not a god. He is not our ruler, but our leader. We do not serve him; he serves us. I realize that most of the world doesn't get this (at least, not the places in Europe and Asia where I've lived), but we Americans really do take the idea of citizenship and the republic quite seriously. And somehow, I doubt you were saying the same thing when Bush was president. (Not that he was great shakes either, but it's odd how so many people who had a real problem with Bush ostensibly on policy grounds are fine with those policies executed by Obama instead.)
The definition of tyranny was and remains a government that does not protect the natural rights of its people. The fact that people don't like a government which, like ours, routinely abrogates those rights does not mean that the abrogation is not tyrannical. So just to give one example, the President asserts the right to kill Americans without due process if he deems them to be a terrorist threat, even in America, on the theory that "the battlefield is everywhere." Is that, the utter abrogation of the right to life, not to be taken without due process of law (which doesn't simply mean making a law, or worse a regulation, or worst an executive order), not tyranny? And before you stalk off about this, yes, Bush was tyrannical, too, as witness the Padilla case.
I like Victor Davis Hanson's take:
He wrote that about the inaugural address, but frankly it also applies to the State of the Union, and pretty much every other public utterance by this President.
But NASA can't. If we do get to Mars in that time frame, it will be the Chinese or, more likely, one of the New Space companies like SpaceX.
I haven't read his argument, just the summary provided here, but it's not clear to me that he's that far off. Fundamentally, our economy, our education systems, our corporate structure, and most assuredly our laws and regulations are stuck in the industrial era. By that, I mean that those structures are reactions to the problems encountered in industrializing: jobs had become less secure, cities had become crowded and crime-ridden, even basic jobs required literate employees and the like. Right now we are in the midst of a dramatic change in social structure, as profound and deep as that which accompanied the industrial revolution.
Before the industrial revolution, livings were primarily made in agriculture, with a thin layer of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and professionals in the urban centers, which were quite small. After the industrial revolution, livings were primarily made in large urban centers, and in manufacturing, the bureacracies required by and mass-market retailing enabled by industrialization, with a thin layer of farmers in the country. It appears to me that we are heading for a point where livings are primarily made by independent workers creating goods and services in small organizations, and providing them either online and globally, or offline and hyperlocally. The bureaucracies and clerks required by industrialization will largely be replaced, I think, by a combination of customer-management tools online, and the ability of small companies locally to deal directly with their customers without high overhead in either information or regulation. This will mean that living patterns will shift again, because people can do most of this kind of work living anywhere. It will also mean that the legal and regulatory structures will change to meet the challenges of that way of living, as the support systems of the city and the bureaucracy break down in the face of changes in where people are and how they work and what they do.
So in the face of all of that, the structures that IT was built up to support and enable — big business and big government primarily — will become more and more rare, and more and more distributed and cooperative rather than centralized and hierarchical. In such a world, where do big IT departments fit? I suspect that hosting will become largely cloud-based, and regulations will arise to ensure privacy and security in such systems. I suspect that the front-end to cloud-based services will be largely through devices owned and controlled by those accessing the data, but through applications owned and controlled by those who provide the data. Sure, there will be a need for a lot of savvy IT workers in such an environment, but the traditional IT departments are not only unhelpful in such a condition, they are actively harmful. And so they will be reduced, and mostly survive in large organizations that cannot or will not downsize to become more nimble.