Anybody above the level of "unconscious incompetence" will sometimes feel like a fraud.
I don't agree.
Many of us define ourselves in terms of process, which does not require having all the right answers, all the time, but rather a general-purpose methodology to move in the right direction.
Some of us don't demand the very last dollar in salary we can reasonably justify on our best day.
Furthermore, this is largely a scholastic effect: the 100% benchmark that defined your life through to the end of graduate school.
Ever since I learned, back in my grade-12 school year, that exp(-x^2) had no closed-form integral (damn!) I've seen the light: problems with hard solutions are a barely measurable set, compared to the set of all problems we might like to solve.
It's very, very easy to fall off the barely measurable set of hard, analytic solutions.
In real life, a 0.010 batting average is rock star territory; the only way anyone gets to a 0.400 batting average is by ignoring roughly 98% of all the ludicrous pitches life throws at you.
The fear of consequences is a very real deterrent to many types of crime and abuse,...
How do you prove that?
Do we still have one foot firmly planted in the (inaptly named) wives' tale era? Or is this merely a handy tautology from the "starvation leads to reliable weight loss" school of inapplicable insight?
I agree that most people don't wish to have an orange jumpsuit in their employment history. Beyond that, the dose-response relationship to incarceration is anyone's guess. Sure, you can produce a short-term ripple in the crime rate with an aggressive tough-on-crime throw-away-the-key campaign. But whether this budges the long term equilibrium—in a good way—also remains open to debate.
Robert Sapolsky's book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (for my money, easily the best science book of 2017) argues layer after layer after layer that humanity has systematically overvalued the punitive signal for behaviour modification since more or less the beginning of time. (Cutting off hands, however, has effects that extend well beyond mere behaviour modification, so our primal desire to disfigure and dismember has a incontestable survival foundation.)
My present calibration on this issue is that about 80% of our punitive desire (in the realm of behavioural deterrents) is rooted in the fact that it simply feels good to be a self-righteous asshole. The wheel of fortune spun, and pointed to some other scalawag; make hay while the sun shines (if circumstance were reversed, he or she would likely do the same to you).
Gradually, modern societies have discovered that precipitous, preemptive reciprocation generally produces more harm than good. (Whenever the needle hangs in the balance, assholes rule the earth. Writ large, this reflexive "make accusatory hay while the sun shines" policy is tantamount to an asshole breeding ground.)
One of the cognitive biases lately much in the news is our tendency to presume that our present circumstance derives more from good management than blind luck (thus the fortunate have always claimed). The recent gist is that having a fully developed capacity for good management (and hard work) already depends on considerable life fortune.
The fear of consequences is a very real deterrent to many types of crime and abuse,...
Perhaps one can also observe that this kind of trite, timeless, baby-kissing adage is a very real deterrent to the hard thinking these difficult problems properly deserve, with all the modern tools of the 21st century now in hand.
I wish I could outsource the listening of music to a clone of me.
Let me guess: you've already outsourced clear thinking to a clone of yourself, and this was the result: now your clone-you is really smart, and you aren't.
I suspect this, because somehow you seem not know the first thing about neurology—what wires together fires together—or you would realize that your immersed clone would immediately develop tastes deeper and more sophisticated than your own.
Or did you really mean a "snapshot" clone: a clone to experience music deprived of the capacity to be changed by the process of listening to music , in any way whatsoever?
Unless you have no such capacity to change yourself, this wouldn't precisely be an accurate proxy. And its growth-clipped recommendations might prove to be as stultifying in the long run as they are pleasurable in the short run.
I suppose you still think a regular stream of lobbyists and geeks (counted in public view) and generals and policy wonks (not counted in public view) into Obama's White House was situation irregular during his eight-year tenure?
Here's another seismic view of the Obama presidency:
National long distance service reached San Francisco with the First transcontinental telephone call in 1915.
Transatlantic services started in 1927 using two-way radio, but the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable did not arrive until Sept. 25, 1956, with TAT-1.
Of course, you'll normalize your baseline for the 90-year difference taking into account the relative ability of people to visit Washington, and the pace at which the world now runs. You'll of course factor in the Snowden revelations of 2013 on Obama's rush for close contact with two central players in the larger drama—including technical staff to answer pointed questions about technical capabilities and postures. You'll also have read Michael Hayden's view of the momentous issues going on the behind the scenes between the intelligence community and the behemoths of modern social media (not as if they were actively reshaping the world, or anything like that; not as if they were principle driving engines of the lethargic post-Bush American recovery).
President Obama held the first-ever White House Maker Faire in June 2014 to celebrate the Maker Movement.
He also issued a "call to action" to Federal agencies, mayors, companies, universities, schools, libraries, museums, foundations, and non-profit organizations to expand opportunities to participate in Making.
The Maker Movement has the potential to inspire more young people to create and invent, and to promote entrepreneurship in hardware and manufacturing.
There's no shortage of reminders of Obama's soft spot for tech.
Upon being elected, he fought to keep his Blackberry. (Presidents traditionally hadn't been allowed to use email.) The Obama administration has hosted an annual global entrepreneurship summit since 2010.
(Continue reading, the article soon partially supports your side of this.)
You'll also take into account that pretty much the entirety of the net neutrality debate transpired during Obama's term. (I can't recommend Tim Wu's books highly enough.)
And after considering all these base-rate factors, you'll decide whether you need to pile yet another agenda on top of this (subtype: nefarious) to explain the Obama White House visitor log.
But only if you really give a shit about the coefficient of narrative baloney.
So there may be a little confirmation bias in their work, regardless of their standing as scientists.
Did you spot the incumbency bias in your own words?
Because what they are arguing against (the glorious status quo) surely also has a dollop of confirmation bias baked in.
No person has ever been so impartial as to have been calibrated to neutral in all dimensions of human conflict simultaneously. Being calibrated to neutral in any small domain (or close to it) is a remarkable human achievement. Many scientists aspire to this condition in their professional sphere, whereas Wall St mainly worships alpha.
Neither is a natural leadership model on an ever-shrinking marble.
I mean, you always could arrange a dozen sheet music stands around the old four-poster, and use that to display a panoply of two dozen interrelated positions (in the Kama Sutra Unbound all leaves are perforated)—but the net effect was a bit intimidating.
Some technologies really do improve on the old state of the art.
You can still despise him perfectly well without labeling him a murderer.
At the VERY least, he was guilty of owning with undue care and attention. (I know that's not a terribly American crime category at this point in time, but history will one day judge differently.)
If he's a hair-trigger rage monkey (and what teenager doesn't know this about himself or herself?) he never should have bought that car—a car whose very premise for existing begs you to break the law.
I had a great time binge watching most of the first three seasons, despite recognizing all its faults right away. Sure, the original Penny was a vaguely slutty, nondescript door matt, and Howard was creep, and Raj was a head case, and Sheldon was a vegetarian Jeffery Dahmer, and Leonard—what the fuck was Leonard, anyway?
After my happy binge, I've never watched another episode, since (though I do know the modern characters, mainly from YouTube outtake reels).
Before Leonard, it was mainly Raj that made me frequently avert my gaze. But I knew that stupid premise (mutism) simply couldn't last much longer. (First they invented alcohol as a clumsy, but temporary off switch, in a truly kill-me-now "it was all a dream" micro reversal.)
Maybe you can argue that Leonard stayed for the girl. But it was played without the oppressive bars of captivity confining Leonard inside a crazy-making zoo full of insecure-yet-egocentric middle-schoolers with PhDs.
I managed to ignore these problems long enough to really enjoy many moments from the first three seasons, especially as Penny became less nondescript, and actually managed to worm her way inside Sheldon's grill.
All in all, it was not so different than watching The West Wing, which is not that much closer to reality than TBBT, though you have to dig further under the surface to see this.
But Leonard... he became harder to comprehend as a real person than Trump-loving Manafort juror Paula Duncan.
News flash: people don't drink alcohol for the same reason they consume acai berries, as a net health benefit.
This hasn't always been true.
Before anaesthetics, I'd be shocked if a few people hadn't died holding off amputation for an extra 12 hours in a lethal arm wrestle between death and suffering.
Back in the elective surgery dark ages, I'm sure more than one person got seriously gin-faced, and then either limped home a few weeks later to tell about it, or scrawled a few nearly unreadable letters to lovers and friends, alt-handed.
So don't tell me there's no net health benefit, as if there never has been.
Part of Microsoft's illegal business model of the past was being the only solution—by hook or by crook (usually both)—was also being a cheap(ish) solution.
The heavy users of the Windows OS and the office suite were implicitly subsidized by the rare and casual users. Because it was ubiquitous (by hook and by crook), the heavy users would get into a habit of sending Office documents without even asking if the other party had purchased the software (hence many reticent, casual users paying the same amount as the heavy users, just to open other people's documents to make one-line edits).
Microsoft always had the rental model up their sleeve as the end-game to ubiquitous cross-subsidization. (Anyone with a brain could see this coming twenty years ago.)
Now that Microsoft is on a rental model, many organizations choose to license the fewest possible number of seats possible, or to switch to Open/Libre Office instead (or even a completely different solution, such as many development shops which manage to somehow get it done with simple Markdown).
The heavy users (these days mostly at least somewhat voluntary) are now paying full price (by the monthly installment) in a post cross-subsidy world (and I bet you do miss that old, implicit subsidy you never in the first place deserved).
The people still getting fucked over a barrel by Microsoft (it's an old, familiar barrel) are the ones who only buy Microsoft to avoid stupid portability issues (not because the software is easier to use, or more robust, or better supported, or more performant, or more fully fleshed out with productivity wizards/templates).
And that's entirely due to this GD travesty: Office Open XML
Part 1. Fundamentals & Markup Language Reference Consisting of 5560 pages, this part contains: * herpes * genital warts * leprosy * Ebola
Not that you could necessarily find any of these things on short notice (not even using the fine index, which must run to 200 dense pages—just guessing).
But if you flip through one page at time, reading carefully, I guarantee that you'll find all of the above.
2) The social media sites have always pushed a liberal agenda.
People who excel at the use of language have always pushed a liberal agenda.
FTFY.
It's not a 100% correlation, but people who work primarily with the written word always lean to the left within their own political group.
Less use of the written word: resource sector jobs (agriculture, mining, forestry, fisheries), service jobs (front line), and joyous singalongs in giant barns with stained glass windows.
Just watch what happens when a Baton Rouge conservative acquires too much gift of gab:
During one New Year's visit, Dreher made bouillabaisse for his parents and his sister; they watched him cook the stew and let him serve it, then declined to eat any: they preferred meals made by a "country cook."
I'm liberal, I guess, judging by how I read the whole damn thing—as I tend to do most of the time.
Intel could have had a monopoly if they didn't make the Pentium bug math error.
Computers are supposed to be "perfect" at computations, but the Intel bug threw some court cases in the wrong direction. I'm not sure they can be trusted anymore.
Good lord, you can't be serious. The road to silicon nirvana is paved with errata sheets. (And always has been.)
Furthermore, the division bug is a terrible example to bolster your cause, because the algorithm was correct in the first place, and the implementation of the algorithm in digital logic was correct in the first place, and then they dropped a very small stitch in the transfer to silicon layout. Had the stitch been any larger, they would have easily caught it during silicon validation. Hint: on randomized inputs, the bug is only triggered about once in 9 billion cases.
Achieving 100% test coverage for all 3.1 million transistors is non-trivial, especially given the processing power available in 1990 three years before the Pentium was first released (what with cheap-ass PC memory costing $60,000/GB in 1990 dollars; double that for server-grade ECC).
The only shitty thing Intel did in this chapter was try to sweep it under the run after the horse bolted the barn.
And the truth of this is that back then, not a lot of software used the FP unit (most people had previously saved a few bucks by purchasing the 486SX castrato, which lacked the hardware floating point unit altogether, and most development shops pretty much assumed this was the defacto situation on the ground, so integer math was almost always preferred).
It really was true that 90% of the people purchasing these chips were at low risk of any real consequence (the two-frame bump in the night right as you're closing in for the money shot in Falcon 3.0 possibly excepted—Falcon 3.0 was legendary for actually using the hardware floating point unit to actually compute a (mildly degraded) military-calibre flight model back in the 486 era (when nothing else did). The accurate inertial momentum effects when rolling hard simply blew everyone's mind. It was so good, you almost felt it through your feet (if you had been wise enough to invest in the 486DX).
Poof! VERTIGO! VERTIGO! as the conspicuous fourth wall universally present in every kinetic 3-space simulator up until then suddenly vanished without a trace.
There was just no way to point this recall at only those who needed it (proof of a previous 486DX purchase order would have been a not-bad fence; hard to believe if you had previously purchased the 486SX that just now you suddenly gave a shit, though wankers are gonna wank).
So it's either pay to recall 9 processors causing a problem for every 1 processor that really needs to be replaced (at an enormous, globally unproductive expense), or panic and do a fatally stupid PR snow job. Intel picked door #2.
"Daddy, daddy, where does CO2 come from?"
"Well, son, it comes from flushing $500 million worth of almost perfectly good CPUs down the crapper practically unused, and then baking up a fresh set."
Guess what? I'm old as fuck, and still sharp as a tack. So if your asbestos underpants are in any kind of mild disrepair, I'd stick to spinning mythical stories about the 1970s or the 1960s, if I were you.
(Hint: I was already reading the 8008 data sheet to pass the time in my grade eight literature classroom. I would have had to mow my weekends to smithereens to actual own one at the price back in the day—not the very first version from 1972—but right around the time they came up with a simplified version reducing the number of mandatory voltage supplies from -12, +12, +5 to just +5. So even the mid-seventies are not quite free and clear for mythical reconstruction, wherever my lawn is found.)
You just expended several hundred words on what could have been entered into Google calculator in under 30 s (both area calculations).
If you were determined to expend all these words, you might have instead used them to pontificate about mean thermal conduction distances, which depends on how things are bonded internally, and whether the One True Diabolical Material (air) is present inside (as opposed to potting the drive with molten copper, yielding a superb embodiment of the simplified surface-area approximation).
A bias-free human being is like a coffee table, where, when you spill water, the water stays exactly where it first lands: it doesn't preferentially dribble down one side, or pool in an (almost) invisible declivity, or find itself attracted by surface tension to a sticky area.
Do you own such a coffee table? I don't. But I consider mine flat enough. My mugs don't rock, and I don't even need a soft coaster to achieve this. But my soup does ride a little higher at one end of the bowl, so perhaps what I need is new living room floor, or a new house, or a new yard, or a new city, or even a new country—one where things are generally more rectilinear that anyone I know has ever achieved hereabouts.
* a small amount of bias is inevitable in every system other than LIGO (1m40s) * human bias contains several terms; one important term was formerly known as "intuition" * cultural affinities would still exist if everyone on planet earth was clone Adonis or clone Aphrodite (with the alluring ability to match skin colour to the surrounding light like a chameleon) * affinity groups slightly larger than the nuclear family are not the automatic ruination of Liberal Nirvana * stochastic bias is a mixed bag: in some cases annoying, though diversity is itself a systemic virtue * systemic bias against a visibly identifiable ethnic underclass is exactly as bad as we've all been socialized to ward against
There's no point shoving someone down, if—like water on a coffee table—they just pop up again in a less disadvantaged group the next day. You really need something rough and ready, universal and immutable upon which to anchor your arbitrary prejudice—something so natural to human perception that your children will learn how to mimic this before reaching the school yard as eight-year olds—without even having to give the big "talk"—"look, son, Nigeria, smigerea", because, later: "well, my Dad says 'Nigeria, smigeria!'" Out of the mouths of babes will fall smoking guns.
The very first black person I ever saw up close in a white, white, white area of rural Canada, was a professional CFL football player—almost certainly American (few CFL teams wasted their precious import slots on white Americans)—and he was (by physique) either a fullback or a defensive lineman. This was when I attended a bone clinic after breaking my arm (turns out, my doctor was the team's orthopedic specialist). Every human brain builds a model of what is normal in the environment and what is abnormal in the environment. To a young child, abnormal is regular fare: you just don't know much about the world yet. This quadrant is associated primarily with tentative curiosity. I wasn't especially freaked out, even though my eyes were as wide as saucers. For one thing, his shoulders were a good bit wider than his chair, and these were not small chairs (this is the lounge area of an orthopedic specialist for a professional football franchise), so he was obligated to sit leaning slightly to one side, away from the chair beside him, that was also occupied—but otherwise, he had superb posture. He was clearly genial and set on his business at hand, though he carried a perceptible tension from being a very, very visible minority who all too often has had to suddenly reach for "oh, no, what shit is this, this time?" (perhaps more in American, than Canada, I couldn't say—there weren't enough black people around these parts to get racism properly off the ground, even if we had wanted to—we'd have probably had to treat black people as honorary injuns to even make a good show of launching a racist parade float).
I remember this because I got the "shush" look from the parental unit, even though I hadn't said anything yet. So now I have in my mental file the sharp association: "black people":: "getting preemptively shushed for no good reason".
In addition to the grand (quibble) passive voice, the whole question of "since when has it (apparently) been known?" was stuffed into a long, cold drawer and is presently awaiting identification from dental records.
... exist for obscure anime, video games, and various other things that are kind of useless, but often have large fan bases without anything better to do.
Your argument practically writes itself:
Wikipedia lacks articles about important subjects because Wikipedia itself isn't important enough to have them (contributions accruing only from editors "without anything better to do").
This is the most juvenile behaviour known to the human species: pointing to something you find unimportant and screeching "why is that in there, when huge amount of work no-one apparently wants to doisn't in there?" or "why does she get to do it (presumably your sister), when I don't?" WAAAAAAA.
Wikipedia is a volunteer culture, each to their own. It's a bad idea to encourage someone who lives and breathes Power Rangers to contribute to any article concerning planet earth. People on planet earth need to write about planet earth, and those articles will accumulate at a pace dictated by the willingness of those people to contribute their time and expertise (modulo the many momentous distractions of self-importance...)
Here's another effect: low-importance articles are much easier to write and contribute. BLP is a comparative war zone. Anthology of international border disputes is Hamburger Hill (largely the exclusive domain of Seal Team Six wannabees).
But, but, but—you blubber—the mouth-breathers are terraforming planet Power Ranger at an ungodly speed!
News flash: space is large. Their petty enthusiasms aren't harming anyone else (not very much). And perhaps some of them later grow a life, and become important contributors to important things. I wouldn't be quick to shut down our sandbox half-way houses. Unintended consequences, right?
Bottom line: if you weren't going out of your way to snoop in your older sister's bedroom, none of these shocking parental inequities would have become an issue, in the first place.
The phrase "as important as" has never be spotted in a document at a reading level above sophomoric.
True story: if 2 g of beta cells in your pancreas die, without extreme intervention, you die too. Gram for gram, the most important cells in your entire body? (Everything is better with the Betteridge treatment.)
Selenium is a good bet here, punching way above its weight class: just 2 mg in the body is considered essential for life. Good lord, that makes selenium a THOUSAND TIMES more important than beta cells.
So that's my haul from 5 minutes of pinhead masturbation. Was it as good for you, too?
Yes, tactile books, because they print Braille along the page edges which imparts important subliminal messages as the unwary child flips though the pages.
It's amazing how much nuance subliminal Braille can communicate with a limited vocabulary of family members (your mother, your father, your sister, your brother), a few sexual acts, some poo words, one or two items of military apparel, and the ubiquitous "hot lead".
On the other side of this, it is actually true that the visual system programs its object model in the first years of life by correlation through the tactile system.
That said, by age nine, the printed world should start to open up whole new worlds, entirely on its own. Even without the supplemental playground Braille.
If Android didn't have its security model completely inside out and upside down, the rule from on high would be that military personnel on sensitive assignment aren't allowed to enable the gather-location API altogether.
Then the apps would need to decide whether to limp along without those services available on that particular installation, or pull the chute with a feeble dog-ate-my-programming-skills excuse in the mold of "Javascript required" as if 90% of the site's functionality (99% of the site's useful functionality) didn't map onto static HTML with a straight-edge and compass.
Because it's so much easier to screen every app you install, rather than just clicking one time on "keep my freaking address book private, all the damn time".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree.
Many of us define ourselves in terms of process, which does not require having all the right answers, all the time, but rather a general-purpose methodology to move in the right direction.
Some of us don't demand the very last dollar in salary we can reasonably justify on our best day.
Furthermore, this is largely a scholastic effect: the 100% benchmark that defined your life through to the end of graduate school.
Ever since I learned, back in my grade-12 school year, that exp(-x^2) had no closed-form integral (damn!) I've seen the light: problems with hard solutions are a barely measurable set, compared to the set of all problems we might like to solve.
It's very, very easy to fall off the barely measurable set of hard, analytic solutions.
In real life, a 0.010 batting average is rock star territory; the only way anyone gets to a 0.400 batting average is by ignoring roughly 98% of all the ludicrous pitches life throws at you.
How do you prove that?
Do we still have one foot firmly planted in the (inaptly named) wives' tale era? Or is this merely a handy tautology from the "starvation leads to reliable weight loss" school of inapplicable insight?
I agree that most people don't wish to have an orange jumpsuit in their employment history. Beyond that, the dose-response relationship to incarceration is anyone's guess. Sure, you can produce a short-term ripple in the crime rate with an aggressive tough-on-crime throw-away-the-key campaign. But whether this budges the long term equilibrium—in a good way—also remains open to debate.
Robert Sapolsky's book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (for my money, easily the best science book of 2017) argues layer after layer after layer that humanity has systematically overvalued the punitive signal for behaviour modification since more or less the beginning of time. (Cutting off hands, however, has effects that extend well beyond mere behaviour modification, so our primal desire to disfigure and dismember has a incontestable survival foundation.)
My present calibration on this issue is that about 80% of our punitive desire (in the realm of behavioural deterrents) is rooted in the fact that it simply feels good to be a self-righteous asshole. The wheel of fortune spun, and pointed to some other scalawag; make hay while the sun shines (if circumstance were reversed, he or she would likely do the same to you).
Gradually, modern societies have discovered that precipitous, preemptive reciprocation generally produces more harm than good. (Whenever the needle hangs in the balance, assholes rule the earth. Writ large, this reflexive "make accusatory hay while the sun shines" policy is tantamount to an asshole breeding ground.)
One of the cognitive biases lately much in the news is our tendency to presume that our present circumstance derives more from good management than blind luck (thus the fortunate have always claimed). The recent gist is that having a fully developed capacity for good management (and hard work) already depends on considerable life fortune.
Perhaps one can also observe that this kind of trite, timeless, baby-kissing adage is a very real deterrent to the hard thinking these difficult problems properly deserve, with all the modern tools of the 21st century now in hand.
Let me guess: you've already outsourced clear thinking to a clone of yourself, and this was the result: now your clone-you is really smart, and you aren't.
I suspect this, because somehow you seem not know the first thing about neurology—what wires together fires together—or you would realize that your immersed clone would immediately develop tastes deeper and more sophisticated than your own.
Or did you really mean a "snapshot" clone: a clone to experience music deprived of the capacity to be changed by the process of listening to music , in any way whatsoever?
Unless you have no such capacity to change yourself, this wouldn't precisely be an accurate proxy. And its growth-clipped recommendations might prove to be as stultifying in the long run as they are pleasurable in the short run.
But suit yourself.
site:slashdot.org "net neutrality"
9,520 results
site:slashdot.org "Snowden"
8,340 results
site:slashdot.org "NSA"
7,070 results
site:slashdot.org "Google"
50,900 results
site:slashdot.org "Facebook"
61,700 results
I suppose you still think a regular stream of lobbyists and geeks (counted in public view) and generals and policy wonks (not counted in public view) into Obama's White House was situation irregular during his eight-year tenure?
Here's another seismic view of the Obama presidency:
Global Apple iPhone sales from 3rd quarter 2007 to 3rd quarter 2018
Odd that such a busy man would be paying more than normal attention to this sleepy industry.
Yeah, so what? You can't draw any conclusions from anything without first estimating the base rate.
Not a bad baseline for comparison—not if you compare Google in the 2010s with AT&T from the 1920s.
History of AT&T
Of course, you'll normalize your baseline for the 90-year difference taking into account the relative ability of people to visit Washington, and the pace at which the world now runs. You'll of course factor in the Snowden revelations of 2013 on Obama's rush for close contact with two central players in the larger drama—including technical staff to answer pointed questions about technical capabilities and postures. You'll also have read Michael Hayden's view of the momentous issues going on the behind the scenes between the intelligence community and the behemoths of modern social media (not as if they were actively reshaping the world, or anything like that; not as if they were principle driving engines of the lethargic post-Bush American recovery).
Playing to the Edge, by Michael V. Hayden — 6 March 2016
You'll take into account that Obama was one of the few technology-savvy president of living memory:
OSTP Initiatives
Obama was an innovation junkie. Will Trump follow in his footsteps? — 16 November 2016
(Continue reading, the article soon partially supports your side of this.)
You'll also take into account that pretty much the entirety of the net neutrality debate transpired during Obama's term. (I can't recommend Tim Wu's books highly enough.)
And after considering all these base-rate factors, you'll decide whether you need to pile yet another agenda on top of this (subtype: nefarious) to explain the Obama White House visitor log.
But only if you really give a shit about the coefficient of narrative baloney.
Did you spot the incumbency bias in your own words?
Because what they are arguing against (the glorious status quo) surely also has a dollop of confirmation bias baked in.
No person has ever been so impartial as to have been calibrated to neutral in all dimensions of human conflict simultaneously. Being calibrated to neutral in any small domain (or close to it) is a remarkable human achievement. Many scientists aspire to this condition in their professional sphere, whereas Wall St mainly worships alpha.
Neither is a natural leadership model on an ever-shrinking marble.
Closet exhibitionists, rejoice!
I mean, you always could arrange a dozen sheet music stands around the old four-poster, and use that to display a panoply of two dozen interrelated positions (in the Kama Sutra Unbound all leaves are perforated)—but the net effect was a bit intimidating.
Some technologies really do improve on the old state of the art.
At the VERY least, he was guilty of owning with undue care and attention. (I know that's not a terribly American crime category at this point in time, but history will one day judge differently.)
If he's a hair-trigger rage monkey (and what teenager doesn't know this about himself or herself?) he never should have bought that car—a car whose very premise for existing begs you to break the law.
I seem to be in the minority here.
I had a great time binge watching most of the first three seasons, despite recognizing all its faults right away. Sure, the original Penny was a vaguely slutty, nondescript door matt, and Howard was creep, and Raj was a head case, and Sheldon was a vegetarian Jeffery Dahmer, and Leonard—what the fuck was Leonard, anyway?
Extreme Doormat
Heterosexual Life-Partners
Butt-Monkey
Translator Buddy
With Friends Like These...
—but there was plenty of meta-humour and the delivery was lively and offbeat.
Before the series started shipping glue, it was Leonard that finally the series unwatchable for me.
Shipping
After my happy binge, I've never watched another episode, since (though I do know the modern characters, mainly from YouTube outtake reels).
Before Leonard, it was mainly Raj that made me frequently avert my gaze. But I knew that stupid premise (mutism) simply couldn't last much longer. (First they invented alcohol as a clumsy, but temporary off switch, in a truly kill-me-now "it was all a dream" micro reversal.)
Maybe you can argue that Leonard stayed for the girl. But it was played without the oppressive bars of captivity confining Leonard inside a crazy-making zoo full of insecure-yet-egocentric middle-schoolers with PhDs.
I managed to ignore these problems long enough to really enjoy many moments from the first three seasons, especially as Penny became less nondescript, and actually managed to worm her way inside Sheldon's grill.
All in all, it was not so different than watching The West Wing, which is not that much closer to reality than TBBT, though you have to dig further under the surface to see this.
But Leonard ... he became harder to comprehend as a real person than Trump-loving Manafort juror Paula Duncan.
Manafort Jury Holdout Blocked Guilty Verdicts on 10 of 18 Charges, Juror Says
Do not pardon Paul Manafort, says Trump-supporting juror who convicted him
'I did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty, but he was,' says juror who supports Trump
I can almost understand Paula, but ultimately not Leonard.
News flash: people don't drink alcohol for the same reason they consume acai berries, as a net health benefit.
This hasn't always been true.
Before anaesthetics, I'd be shocked if a few people hadn't died holding off amputation for an extra 12 hours in a lethal arm wrestle between death and suffering.
Back in the elective surgery dark ages, I'm sure more than one person got seriously gin-faced, and then either limped home a few weeks later to tell about it, or scrawled a few nearly unreadable letters to lovers and friends, alt-handed.
So don't tell me there's no net health benefit, as if there never has been.
Well then, you've been paying undue attention to those who came out on top, because it's not being pounded into your skull by any of the rest of us.
Do I smell envy? Or is that just burnt toast?
Part of Microsoft's illegal business model of the past was being the only solution—by hook or by crook (usually both)—was also being a cheap(ish) solution.
The heavy users of the Windows OS and the office suite were implicitly subsidized by the rare and casual users. Because it was ubiquitous (by hook and by crook), the heavy users would get into a habit of sending Office documents without even asking if the other party had purchased the software (hence many reticent, casual users paying the same amount as the heavy users, just to open other people's documents to make one-line edits).
Microsoft always had the rental model up their sleeve as the end-game to ubiquitous cross-subsidization. (Anyone with a brain could see this coming twenty years ago.)
Now that Microsoft is on a rental model, many organizations choose to license the fewest possible number of seats possible, or to switch to Open/Libre Office instead (or even a completely different solution, such as many development shops which manage to somehow get it done with simple Markdown).
The heavy users (these days mostly at least somewhat voluntary) are now paying full price (by the monthly installment) in a post cross-subsidy world (and I bet you do miss that old, implicit subsidy you never in the first place deserved).
The people still getting fucked over a barrel by Microsoft (it's an old, familiar barrel) are the ones who only buy Microsoft to avoid stupid portability issues (not because the software is easier to use, or more robust, or better supported, or more performant, or more fully fleshed out with productivity wizards/templates).
And that's entirely due to this GD travesty: Office Open XML
Part 1. Fundamentals & Markup Language Reference
Consisting of 5560 pages, this part contains:
* herpes
* genital warts
* leprosy
* Ebola
Not that you could necessarily find any of these things on short notice (not even using the fine index, which must run to 200 dense pages—just guessing).
But if you flip through one page at time, reading carefully, I guarantee that you'll find all of the above.
People who excel at the use of language have always pushed a liberal agenda.
FTFY.
It's not a 100% correlation, but people who work primarily with the written word always lean to the left within their own political group.
Less use of the written word: resource sector jobs (agriculture, mining, forestry, fisheries), service jobs (front line), and joyous singalongs in giant barns with stained glass windows.
Just watch what happens when a Baton Rouge conservative acquires too much gift of gab:
Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision — May 2017
I'm liberal, I guess, judging by how I read the whole damn thing—as I tend to do most of the time.
First law of futurology: never predict what and when at the same time.
First law of making a billion dollars (or shipping a billion systems): always predict what and when at the same time.
Why Futurist Ray Kurzweil Isn't Worried About Technology Stealing Your Job — 24 September 2017
Merely being right is no BFD. The other day, I made an inviolable personal commitment to shed 235 lbs of tired metabolic tissue by the year 2100.
Andrew and Raymond, not so much.
Good lord, you can't be serious. The road to silicon nirvana is paved with errata sheets. (And always has been.)
Furthermore, the division bug is a terrible example to bolster your cause, because the algorithm was correct in the first place, and the implementation of the algorithm in digital logic was correct in the first place, and then they dropped a very small stitch in the transfer to silicon layout. Had the stitch been any larger, they would have easily caught it during silicon validation. Hint: on randomized inputs, the bug is only triggered about once in 9 billion cases.
Achieving 100% test coverage for all 3.1 million transistors is non-trivial, especially given the processing power available in 1990 three years before the Pentium was first released (what with cheap-ass PC memory costing $60,000/GB in 1990 dollars; double that for server-grade ECC).
The only shitty thing Intel did in this chapter was try to sweep it under the run after the horse bolted the barn.
And the truth of this is that back then, not a lot of software used the FP unit (most people had previously saved a few bucks by purchasing the 486SX castrato, which lacked the hardware floating point unit altogether, and most development shops pretty much assumed this was the defacto situation on the ground, so integer math was almost always preferred).
It really was true that 90% of the people purchasing these chips were at low risk of any real consequence (the two-frame bump in the night right as you're closing in for the money shot in Falcon 3.0 possibly excepted—Falcon 3.0 was legendary for actually using the hardware floating point unit to actually compute a (mildly degraded) military-calibre flight model back in the 486 era (when nothing else did). The accurate inertial momentum effects when rolling hard simply blew everyone's mind. It was so good, you almost felt it through your feet (if you had been wise enough to invest in the 486DX).
Poof! VERTIGO! VERTIGO! as the conspicuous fourth wall universally present in every kinetic 3-space simulator up until then suddenly vanished without a trace.
There was just no way to point this recall at only those who needed it (proof of a previous 486DX purchase order would have been a not-bad fence; hard to believe if you had previously purchased the 486SX that just now you suddenly gave a shit, though wankers are gonna wank).
So it's either pay to recall 9 processors causing a problem for every 1 processor that really needs to be replaced (at an enormous, globally unproductive expense), or panic and do a fatally stupid PR snow job. Intel picked door #2.
"Daddy, daddy, where does CO2 come from?"
"Well, son, it comes from flushing $500 million worth of almost perfectly good CPUs down the crapper practically unused, and then baking up a fresh set."
Guess what? I'm old as fuck, and still sharp as a tack. So if your asbestos underpants are in any kind of mild disrepair, I'd stick to spinning mythical stories about the 1970s or the 1960s, if I were you.
(Hint: I was already reading the 8008 data sheet to pass the time in my grade eight literature classroom. I would have had to mow my weekends to smithereens to actual own one at the price back in the day—not the very first version from 1972—but right around the time they came up with a simplified version reducing the number of mandatory voltage supplies from -12, +12, +5 to just +5. So even the mid-seventies are not quite free and clear for mythical reconstruction, wherever my lawn is found.)
One of my favourite genres: where the people targeted by the chilling effect self-organize their own stampede toward compliance.
Grassroots cryptocurrency? #Fuggedaboutit.
I for one welcome our new overlord cult of bland, generic, anonymous, non-fraternal public personas.
This is, of course, assuming that the choir leaders of lemming compliance haven't secretly sold out to The Man.
Wheels within wheels. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.
Please enable: 1 m * 2 m * 3 m in m^2
And have it display:
Also:
You just expended several hundred words on what could have been entered into Google calculator in under 30 s (both area calculations).
If you were determined to expend all these words, you might have instead used them to pontificate about mean thermal conduction distances, which depends on how things are bonded internally, and whether the One True Diabolical Material (air) is present inside (as opposed to potting the drive with molten copper, yielding a superb embodiment of the simplified surface-area approximation).
A bias-free human being is like a coffee table, where, when you spill water, the water stays exactly where it first lands: it doesn't preferentially dribble down one side, or pool in an (almost) invisible declivity, or find itself attracted by surface tension to a sticky area.
Do you own such a coffee table? I don't. But I consider mine flat enough. My mugs don't rock, and I don't even need a soft coaster to achieve this. But my soup does ride a little higher at one end of the bowl, so perhaps what I need is new living room floor, or a new house, or a new yard, or a new city, or even a new country—one where things are generally more rectilinear that anyone I know has ever achieved hereabouts.
* a small amount of bias is inevitable in every system other than LIGO (1m40s)
* human bias contains several terms; one important term was formerly known as "intuition"
* cultural affinities would still exist if everyone on planet earth was clone Adonis or clone Aphrodite (with the alluring ability to match skin colour to the surrounding light like a chameleon)
* affinity groups slightly larger than the nuclear family are not the automatic ruination of Liberal Nirvana
* stochastic bias is a mixed bag: in some cases annoying, though diversity is itself a systemic virtue
* systemic bias against a visibly identifiable ethnic underclass is exactly as bad as we've all been socialized to ward against
There's no point shoving someone down, if—like water on a coffee table—they just pop up again in a less disadvantaged group the next day. You really need something rough and ready, universal and immutable upon which to anchor your arbitrary prejudice—something so natural to human perception that your children will learn how to mimic this before reaching the school yard as eight-year olds—without even having to give the big "talk"—"look, son, Nigeria, smigerea", because, later: "well, my Dad says 'Nigeria, smigeria!'" Out of the mouths of babes will fall smoking guns.
The very first black person I ever saw up close in a white, white, white area of rural Canada, was a professional CFL football player—almost certainly American (few CFL teams wasted their precious import slots on white Americans)—and he was (by physique) either a fullback or a defensive lineman. This was when I attended a bone clinic after breaking my arm (turns out, my doctor was the team's orthopedic specialist). Every human brain builds a model of what is normal in the environment and what is abnormal in the environment. To a young child, abnormal is regular fare: you just don't know much about the world yet. This quadrant is associated primarily with tentative curiosity. I wasn't especially freaked out, even though my eyes were as wide as saucers. For one thing, his shoulders were a good bit wider than his chair, and these were not small chairs (this is the lounge area of an orthopedic specialist for a professional football franchise), so he was obligated to sit leaning slightly to one side, away from the chair beside him, that was also occupied—but otherwise, he had superb posture. He was clearly genial and set on his business at hand, though he carried a perceptible tension from being a very, very visible minority who all too often has had to suddenly reach for "oh, no, what shit is this, this time?" (perhaps more in American, than Canada, I couldn't say—there weren't enough black people around these parts to get racism properly off the ground, even if we had wanted to—we'd have probably had to treat black people as honorary injuns to even make a good show of launching a racist parade float).
I remember this because I got the "shush" look from the parental unit, even though I hadn't said anything yet. So now I have in my mental file the sharp association: "black people" :: "getting preemptively shushed for no good reason".
Is this the Reese's Pieces of weasel words?
In addition to the grand (quibble) passive voice, the whole question of "since when has it (apparently) been known?" was stuffed into a long, cold drawer and is presently awaiting identification from dental records.
Belated subject line to my previous post: sibling-envy boo birds.
Your argument practically writes itself:
Wikipedia lacks articles about important subjects because Wikipedia itself isn't important enough to have them (contributions accruing only from editors "without anything better to do").
This is the most juvenile behaviour known to the human species: pointing to something you find unimportant and screeching "why is that in there, when huge amount of work no-one apparently wants to do isn't in there?" or "why does she get to do it (presumably your sister), when I don't?" WAAAAAAA.
Wikipedia is a volunteer culture, each to their own. It's a bad idea to encourage someone who lives and breathes Power Rangers to contribute to any article concerning planet earth. People on planet earth need to write about planet earth, and those articles will accumulate at a pace dictated by the willingness of those people to contribute their time and expertise (modulo the many momentous distractions of self-importance ...)
Here's another effect: low-importance articles are much easier to write and contribute. BLP is a comparative war zone. Anthology of international border disputes is Hamburger Hill (largely the exclusive domain of Seal Team Six wannabees).
But, but, but—you blubber—the mouth-breathers are terraforming planet Power Ranger at an ungodly speed!
News flash: space is large. Their petty enthusiasms aren't harming anyone else (not very much). And perhaps some of them later grow a life, and become important contributors to important things. I wouldn't be quick to shut down our sandbox half-way houses. Unintended consequences, right?
Bottom line: if you weren't going out of your way to snoop in your older sister's bedroom, none of these shocking parental inequities would have become an issue, in the first place.
The phrase "as important as" has never be spotted in a document at a reading level above sophomoric.
True story: if 2 g of beta cells in your pancreas die, without extreme intervention, you die too. Gram for gram, the most important cells in your entire body? (Everything is better with the Betteridge treatment.)
Quora: Which element is the most important for human survival?
Hint: if you're reading Quora, you're doing it wrong.
1.8: Essential Elements for Life
Selenium is a good bet here, punching way above its weight class: just 2 mg in the body is considered essential for life. Good lord, that makes selenium a THOUSAND TIMES more important than beta cells.
So that's my haul from 5 minutes of pinhead masturbation. Was it as good for you, too?
Yes, tactile books, because they print Braille along the page edges which imparts important subliminal messages as the unwary child flips though the pages.
It's amazing how much nuance subliminal Braille can communicate with a limited vocabulary of family members (your mother, your father, your sister, your brother), a few sexual acts, some poo words, one or two items of military apparel, and the ubiquitous "hot lead".
On the other side of this, it is actually true that the visual system programs its object model in the first years of life by correlation through the tactile system.
That said, by age nine, the printed world should start to open up whole new worlds, entirely on its own. Even without the supplemental playground Braille.
If Android didn't have its security model completely inside out and upside down, the rule from on high would be that military personnel on sensitive assignment aren't allowed to enable the gather-location API altogether.
Then the apps would need to decide whether to limp along without those services available on that particular installation, or pull the chute with a feeble dog-ate-my-programming-skills excuse in the mold of "Javascript required" as if 90% of the site's functionality (99% of the site's useful functionality) didn't map onto static HTML with a straight-edge and compass.
Because it's so much easier to screen every app you install, rather than just clicking one time on "keep my freaking address book private, all the damn time".