If you actually calculate surface areas, the black letters are a small portion of the text image, and most of it is the white background. Digital dusting may eventually cause the white to age to a sort of yellow or even brown shade, and the crisp black to dark reddish brown, but since, as everyone knows, most digital artifacts tend to cluster in isolaterally unique bydirectional tone areas (sometimes called 'tone zones'), the discoloration occurs chiefly in the margins (since they are all white). Changing fonts or font sizes, or editing text, tends to "shake the dust off" of those areas, again onto the margins. This is also why the basic word processor that comes with Windows has fixed text width (or did back when I used Windows). Microsoft, in its infinite compassion for computer novices, was trying to preserve the dust catching properties of the 'tone zones' so users documents would last as long as possible. Microsoft even tried to use this as a selling point once, but since that was in the ads for Windows Me, no one noticed.
Remember too, we're talking about a digital medium here. Because of the high brightness and contrast of modern monitors, display of increasingly dust laden margins on a monitor is almost invisible - only a highly skilled eye can spot the traces, by long staring at the margins. (Try it for a few minutes, and you will see how much dust is accumulating in your documents).
It's not bankrupt, the existing comparison you are trying to enforce is. It's one of the basic facts of the two industrys that a whole hell of a lot less people are killed mining uranium or transporting either raw ores or processed fuels than are killed mining coal or transporting it. It's admittedly sloppy of the parent poster to compare US and Japanese deaths, but unless the Japanese are doing 10 times better on everything from mine safety to particulate scrubbing, you could total all the indirect deaths from both Coal and Nuclear and, excluding none of either, get the OPs numbers. Adding those indirect deaths for nuclear you claim he's left out might not change things at all. In the U.S. alone, more than 100,000 coal miners were killed in accidents over the past century. Modern mining in the U.S. is safer than that average, but still results in approximately 30 deaths per year. Transportation related deaths from coal, again for the US, vary more significantly than mine fatalities so I'll calculate and give a high year/low year range (as of the last 28 years): 3 to 45 occupational deaths from coal transportation and 60 to 250 public deaths from coal transportation.
Deaths from medical conditions related to coal chemicals exposure - I could give you a number, but it's enormously higher than those two indirect death types above and you obviously wouldn't believe it. You may not believe these people either, but I've found you a source that isn't just wikipedia and isn't behind a pay firewall, and has numbers about as current as possible (2010) - anyone wanting to argue these numbers, you'd better at least meet those three criteria, or expect to be called an industry shill.
Now that some people have clicked the link, here's their most important numbers: 13,200 premature deaths in 2010, as well as 9,700 additional hospitalizations and 20,000 heart attacks.
Disclosure: I live in appalachia - I've buried some of those fatalities. I could drive less than fifty miles from my home and be in a community which lost every adult male of working age in the same day once. I also have lived near enough Oak Ridge, TN, in the past that I've seen DOE's trucks and trains hauling nuclear material to compare to the many coal trucks I see on the road, and trains on the railroads. I'm a degree holding engineer and can make a pretty good estimate of the relative maintenance and safety systems of those various trucks and train cars, and I have actually been a legally recognised expert witness as an accident inspector. All that I could personally say is still anecdotal, but my anecdotal opinion is coal is a vicious killer of thousands and the people who can overlook it are only able to do so because the deaths happen disproportionately to a class of people they have been trained to ignore or simply not care about. I dislike Nuclear because it is bad in some of the same ways, but have to admit it is on a significantly smaller scale.
When the 'climategate' memos first came up, most of us noticed that they were about tree ring data, which was secondary to actual measured temperatures and such things in the 'man-made global warming' debate. Then some of us noticed that it was about a small percentage of trees growing at high altitudes, which made it all of tertiary significance at best. People started arguing over whether the researchers were bending the rules of science or not, was it a political conspiracy or not, and endless arguments about who was deliberately eeeeville, when they should have been looking more at how much difference it made. It all seemed analogous to people finding out that some government type had paid 20,000 dollars to put a neon light covered statue of Elvis in front of the town hall. People got to arguing over whether it was tasteful or not, whether the government had authority to do it or not, and so on, but then one side said "And it really, really matters, because we could have eliminated the federal deficit and even funded a whole extra war with what was left over from that 20,000 dollars." and somehow, that claim was never questioned by a great many. I see this same sort of thing now in so many areas. Casey Anthony's trial. A forensic pathologist with an exceptionally good reputation testifies, and since he is making a machine that can identify traces of human remains decay, the defence argues that he is biased towards saying anything that might help possible sales of that machine. Never mind that his working for a national laboratory, developing just such devices, is some sort of evidence he is an exceptionally good expert witness - try to make it so a mark of his high quality instead becomes a reason to distrust his testimony, and see if the jury will bite. Or John Kerry gets three purple hearts. Raise questions about one of them, and see how many of the public will automatically believe that all three were tainted. The more military medals a person gets, the easier it is to find one that sounds a little fishy, so any time somebody runs for office with a Medal of Honor and half a dozen other awards for extreme valor, it will be a piece of cake to find something about at least one, relentlessly attack whichever award sounds weakest, and prove the public should vote for your candidate, who maybe next time this trick is tried, doesn't have a record of this type at all to be challenged. Turn what should normally be an asset into a liability.
There's long distance transmission losses - electricity used to push more electricity along high tension wires for hundreds or even thousands of miles. When a plant in western Pennsylvania or even southern Georgia is sending power to meet peak demand in New York, those transmission losses can be over 50% of what's produced. When the north-eastern grid failed a few years ago, TVA plants in Tennessee and even South Carolina were sending power all the way to Arizona and New Mexico to stabilise the western grid, at up to 85% losses. (And if they hadn't, that blackout would have been nationwide and probably lasted a couple of days minimum for everyone). So yes, "dumping massive amounts of power into a hole" sometimes describes it quite nicely.
Interestingly, it was a locally smart* power grid, built and managed mostly by the government, that basically became a rock solid line against the cascading failures and then started helping everybody else recover.
*TVA's not all that smart - built mostly during the 30s and 40s, but it has upgraded control networks several times since then, notably when the nuclear plant at Watt's Bar became part of the grid. Basically, TVA control is 1970s tech, but the north-eastern grid from Niagara on down includes a lot of incompatible privately implemented control systems dating back, in some cases, to the 1920s.
The British have a perfectly cromulent plan to deal with zombie invasion, involving possibly activating the 'white elephants' of squadron 666, and definitely loading the SCORPION STARE software in all enabled CCTV surveillance systems in zombie plagued areas. Playing an electric violin arrangement of Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' at them may also be needed in a few cases, but really we're saving that for the plague's masters.
Oh, you're not cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN? Nevermind - I seem to have misspoken. The British have absolutely no plans to deal with zombie invasions.
You really can't know that there's even a single mathematical model that fits reality. Yes, it looks that way so far, but it's a starting axiom of science that there will be one and only one. It would be a very odd universe indeed if there were zero or more than one, but science doesn't reason its way to proving there is only one, science starts from that as a default assumption. Reasoning this to be true is a matter of philosophy, which can argue from axioms completely outside of science that math is not just pragmatically useful but fundamentally a requirement of all true science.
What would count as good evidence that the standard model has a big flaw in it? When people started thinking the epicycle model was wrong, it happened for several reasons (paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn for much of this):
By Copernicus' time, 1) there were a lot of accumulated observations that no one had during the first few hundred years, and new tools made those latter observations more accurate. 2) The formulas to calculate epicycles grew more and more complex to account for those observations, and people could point to the history of the model to show what that trend implied for its future. People lost confidence that the next tweak would be the last. 3) the epicycle model still didn't predict some basic things, such as the exact start time of some planets appearing to precess, accurately enough.
So, for 1), the standard model hasn't been around for hundreds of years. In the time it has been around, we have developed much more powerful accelerators, but we haven't invented a significantly new class of tools (such as the Galilean or Newtonian telescope, or reasonably accurate to a few seconds a day clocks, all of which came in as epicycle models were being rejected). Progress on the observational side has all been evolutionary, not revolutionary, so progress on the theoretical side will tend to mirror that, rightly or wrongly. For 2), The Higgs is one of a very few testable predictions which could add some math to the rest of the standard model. It makes the math a little more complex to include it, but by itself, it doesn't suggest that every 20 years or so, we will again have to add some more complexity. Evidence for condition 2) would have to come from more than just Higgs Boson research, i.e. finding some other unexplained particle that definitely isn't the Higgs to suggest we are seeing ever mounting complexity. A possible Higgs candidate slightly outside the projected ranges, or something which seemed mostly Higgslike but for some odd property (say, a cluster of related particles all with no spin or color, but slightly varying energies), wouldn't make most theoreticians rethink the whole model so much as try to tweak it a little. 3) We could argue that 3) is being met, in the form of the gravity related incompatibilities of QM and General Relativity. If we still face that question in 100 or 200 years, more and more working scientists will regard it as a situation like 1), and arguments that the change needed is major will gradually gain traction.
Toppling capstones would be seen by many of the established classes as an obvious euphemism for classically political, revolutionary action, your tongue in cheek response not-withstanding. There are probably people who really would sincerely manifest both that gasp of surprise and a nee-jerk tendency to classify all of this as socialism.
However, one of Friedman's points in this book seems to be that if we push either population or environmental destruction far enough 'Natural' principles will impose restrictions that will look every bit as bad from an individualist point of view as any that a Socialist political system might threaten to impose. Yeah, Taibbi's critique shows that Friedman isn't doing a very coherent job of developing this point, and I put nature in quotes above because Friedman isn't really very clear about whether he means 'Biological Law', 'Natural Laws in a more general sense' (such as Thermodynamic efficiency laws, maybe), or perhaps 'Mother nature' in some highly metaphorical or even semi-literal sense. I don't think Friedman is going to start dispensing a literal Gaia-worship spiel, but just how far he may be from that is hard to extract from the text. Still, the point is, even a guy like this can see that some things are objective circumstances and that rushing to apply a political spin to them is a mistake.
I think of it much like the USSR. A lot of people there were quick to point out any remark that might be interpreted as insufficiently pro socialist, but at times there were people, particularly in the military, who invoked 'objective circumstances' to say, in effect "Don't worry about classifying the political content of this section just yet, until you have grasped the pragmatic points." Friedman is doing the equivalent for the mainline fiscal conservatives of saying "Don't let the Zampolits read this until you have figured out a way to spin it so they don't call us all Trotskites, but for Mother Russia's sake, read it!"
You are correct, but there are two groups which disagree. Some people think you are wrong about the necessity of war in such circumstances. I don't think they are assessing the risks rationally, but there's room for differences of opinion there. The larger problem of perception seems to lie with those who think such wars will exist, but will not be exceptionally violent, particularly towards the losers. There is no real difference between deciding to kill all the enemy and deciding to take a resource so fundamental the enemy will die without it. In fact, the chance of success is better for a nation-state that doesn't lie to itself about whether the resource is truly vital. One problem western democracies face is that the average member of the public already thinks war is generally all about killing the enemy, whereas their political and military structures think normally in therms of defeating the enemy instead of necessarily killing them. The two are not normally conflated by the people who have to actually implement one or another option, but we are looking at the very situation where they are one and the same.
All law, civil and criminal has some tie to rights, but this is about more than the general principle that such rights exist. As copyright was originally set up, it was all tort law, with no criminal penalties. As more and more copyright law has become criminal law, the ex-post facto situation applies as it always does in criminal law. It's a two step process - first bring some works back under copyright, and only then criminalise some actions involving those works, and by splitting it up into steps, law enforcement has found a way around the ex-post-facto clause in the constitution. IP law has become a wedge area for chipping away at one of the United States most fundamental protections against bad government.
And while we're at it, there are ways a person's writing style might change and ways it simply never will.
I just deliberately shifted to a more casual mode, by using the opening phrase "And while we're at it", as though I was standing physically next to 'Richard_at_work' and just adding my two cents without much reflection, immediately after he had finished. As part of giving my post that slightly more casual flavor, I used the contraction "we're". I might have been more formal than to presume acquaintance with 'Richard_at_work' just because I find myself in agreement with him on this point, but I'd feel pretty silly going to casual mode and then turning around and insisting on "we are".
OTOH, I know the difference between the contraction 'it's' and the possessive 'its'. If for some reason I'm more concerned over getting an answer off quickly than writing well, I would still try to avoid mangling those two. I might write more run on sentences. I might fail to spot a case where I had a singular/plural mismatch. But, If all those things are happening many times as often as I usually make such mistakes, it's not a stylistic change, it's a cerebral haemorrhage. There are things that have become real pet peeves of mine - such as people using the word 'between' when there are less than three things implied in their statements. (an object has to be between at least two other objects - if there is only one other object, the first object is beside it, not between it). I'm never going to write 'for all intensive purposes', or call a porpoise a fish, or think a light year is a unit of time, and if I use etcetera more than once in a row, I'm channelling the King of Siam. My writing style simply won't change in such ways.
I'll save time abbreviating On The Other Hand to a ETLA if I think the typical person I'm posting to will understand it. I'll push the envelope and use ETLA in a place such as Slashdot where some readers will recognise the joke. I'll ignore the English standard spell checker that wants me to go back up and ad a 'u' to 'flavor' in my second paragraph, and If I'd spelled 'recognise' with a z in common American fashion, I would have left it. However, when I caught myself writing "like Slashdot", I couldn't relax until I corrected that mistake.
It's very unlikely anyone learns to write properly, in even the most modest degree, and doesn't pick up some pet peeves. They get worse, not better, with time.
What you wrote was a simplification - if it had been an oversimplification, that little prefix, 'over', would mean you had gone too far in simplifying and there was no truth left in your statement. There's still plenty of truth in your two examples - the real contracts Google and Facebook use have proportionate and analogous differences in both just what they offer to do for a customer and how they treat the third party data they hold. You are making a good point - don't bury your own light under a bushel basket.
See, you were making a pretty good argument, and then you threw in this:
Is anyone willing to *personally* take a good working-over by government thugs in exchange for another social program? (emphasis mine).
It's not the social programs that empower the goon squads. The US government currently has 17 civilian agencies that have agents empowered to carry fully automatic weapons. There is a line item in the federal budget equal to about half the overall FBI budget, and it goes just to pay for the FBI running rifle, grenade launcher, and even rocket launcher training ranges for all the other security related agencies. Those are not the social services agencies that have the police like powers. A person from the department of health and human resources may be able to take one of your kids away, but at least he or she can't shoot you in the head to stop you from getting a lawyer and fighting it. The BATF, DEA, and 15 other police/security related agencies most definitely can.
Right now, you can take the amount that goes to Israel out of the foreign aid budget, and half the rest is directed by the DEA. For example, we give multiple squadrons of assault helicopters to Columbia to 'help stamp out Cocaine trafficking, add attack helicopters and air to ground Hellfire missiles to protect them, current elite grade scrambling to keep the drug lords from overhearing their communications, and many other forms of support, and then all their neighbors worry about what happens if Columbia uses all those neat toys for something besides the war on drugs, so we have to give the rest of Central America weapons too. If they don't have enough Cocaine growers to justify putting it in the DEA budget, we put it in foreign aid, earmarked to be spent only buying weapons from US based corporations. Then we have right wing radio show hosts frequently stress how foreign aid is all a liberal waste of money. (Yeah, because the Liberals are the ones who support a huge war on drugs.). Many of us strongly suspect there's still funding for covert ops hidden in the social services side of the budget, but it's a pretty safe bet nobody in, say, the National Endowment for the Arts is hiding money in the Military/Security part of the budget. The reverse however, is false - it has now been openly admitted that the CIA funneled money through the Nat. Endowment for the Arts for covert ops in the 1950s and 60s.
Please don't fall for the idea that we have to cut social services to control the government - the power and arrogance they contribute to the whole is so trivial compared to the effects of all those agencies grouped under homeland security that eliminating all social spending would probably have less effect on the nation's slide into fascism than finding out why anyone else in the Treasury department, besides the Secret Service, needs full auto weapons training. (I'm willing to grant we need something like a Secret Service to protect various officials from nutcases - but why does a guy who's full time job description is to investigate insider trading, a guy who is required to be a CPA before qualifying for the job, but need have absolutely no military or law enforcement background, need to qualify on a M16-A4 assault rifle with under-mounted M203 grenade launcher?). Multiply that by all the agents for BATF that are not investigating firearms or even the few remaining old fashioned stills in the Kentucky hills, but need them for all those cases where someone is smuggling cigarettes without tax stamps - surely a few pistols or assistance from a federal marshall or two would be enough to handle such cases. Multiply by all the small towns that now have used federal grants for SWAT teams even if the most serious crime in a typical year there is likely to be a bar fight.
It's been a long time since I've seen it, but I don't remember the kids from Lord of the Flies being crucified at the end, at all. They probably deserved it after stabbing Janet Leigh in the shower, but 'Lord of the Flies' ends with the first bomber getting through to Moscow so the president has to order another bomber to nuke New York, right?
A study is not required for me to tell my children...
Don't eat things harder than your teeth, they aren't good for you.
The American Dental Association has determined that chocolate covered manhole covers are bad for your teeth. (Thanks to Larry Niven for pointing this out).
Your last example (wash hands), is a great example of what isn't common sense. It's good advice because of the Germ Theory of Disease. Before Louis Pasteur and a few others developed this, the prevailing 'common sense' observation was that bad smelling air caused diseases. Bad smells could be detected, bacteria and such couldn't (yet), and common sense told people that something you could observe was a real cause, and if you didn't observe anything, there was nothing there to cause anything else. Common sense made three generations of doctors reluctant to accept that they should wash their hands after handling garbage (or sick patients, used surgical instruments, and many other sources of infection).
I see no problem with it being all three. I'd bet that gentle, egalitarian trolls are rare, and the common troll is, by all accounts, a big believer in violence. Since troll encounters are invariably with the males (see Tolkien, J. R. R., where there are literally no female trolls (aka Trollops), in the entirety of Middle Earth*), it follows they are ALL using that violence to promote their masculinity. So, it's unlikely to be some either/or matter.
*Trolls were made in mockery of Ents, who had either lost the Entwives by then, or else Trollops once existed, but have doubtless wandered away just as the Entwives did.
I tend to rate PBS as pretty middle of the road myself, but this reminded me of a sad case; a conservative I know, who typically calls PBS things such as "a libtard conspiracy to manipulate all the stupid people who have never held an honest job".
He's explained how all sorts of PBS shows are leftist. Clifford the Big RED Dog's a commie, of course. Any Science show with Alan Alda narrating is obviously 'socialist' too. The cap came when he explained to me how the travel and cooking shows on PBS aren't showing the real Europe, since all those socialist European states are gray hellholes the USSR destroyed when we fought over them during WW2. He explained to me how, when the Russians occupied Italy and Spain, they treated them just like Yugoslavia and Hungary. Until Reagan finally won WW2, France was a Soviet satellite state. I told him the US and USSR fought together against Germany in WW2, and he said "That's what THEY want you to believe.".
While I wrote him off after this as simply crazy, it's interesting to me how his behaviour mirrors this situation. We could definitely claim the liberal side of American politics has more sympathy for Wikileaks than the right does. So, we have the left attacking the left, if that makes any sense. When a right wing publication reports it that way, surely cognitive dissonance should make at least a few of their loyal viewers say "But that doesn't make any sense!".
I think it's pretty obvious these hackers don't have a real, coherent, political opinion of any sort, and pretty likely they are just some batch of 4 Chan inspired script kiddies doing it for the LOLs. That's plenty to explain what's going on without any conspiracy theory. But, what I don't get is why a bunch of people who can and do buy into conspiracy theories about the President's birth certificate or how hot it got around the WTC elevators don't come up with similar conspiracy theories about why they are being told the left is attacking itself instead of the right. You'd think the paranoid nutcases would be all over things like this. We have people out there who every time a video broadcast gets glitchy, think they are seeing an alien lizardman's camouflage field slipping, but they hear "Hyper-leftist terrorists are attacking the organisation we told you yesterday was hyper-leftist too", and they can't get a good conspiracy theory started out of that?
I live in fear that a bunch of terrorists will destroy my genetically engineered potatoes! I don't worry that they will kill me or my family, burn down my house, blow up the nearby nuke plant or scatter land mines on my lawn, but I have nightmares about Al Quaida keying my car, the Talliban spray painting naughty words on my driveway, and Osama rising from the grave to call me and ask if I have Prince Albert in a can. Real terrorists kill people, not potatoes. A threat of property damage may be extortion, and actual property damage is criminal, but vandalism isn't terrorism by any stretch. No one, and certainly no large corporation, is really terrified that they will live through whatever the 'terrorists' are going to do, survive it in perfect health, and have to sue the 'terrorists' for purely economic damages.
If you can really draw a bow with 170 lbs of pull, then it doesn't really matter if you miss once or twice, unless the opponent is starting out at much less than your normal working ranges for a bow.: 1. Even a limb hit will probably result in instant crippling at that pull. Bows like that will shoot through cinderblocks. At ranges of less than 100 yards, you aren't really doing archery any more, because the arrow doesn't perceptibly arch, it's as straight a shot as with a rifle. 2. You can always rip the maniac in half with your bare hands if he gets too close.
Then there's Nautilus, which is increasingly popular for KDE, and has very accessible configuration controls. You can specify Icon size, spacing, whether text is present, whether text is underneath or beside icons, and even whether the same spacing as the largest icon and text needs should be used throughout or icons should be spaced minimally. You can decide what file types should be shown as thumbnails, and further specify what the maximums size files to trigger thumbnails are. You can even have it play samples from.MP3s on hover if you want. You can make a fast system with lots of real estate do tricks like Lassie, or tweak it to run in more minimalist mode on a slow, small monitor system you would have trouble running XP on at all, let alone Win 7. Admittedly, It probably won't really help get something useable on a slow, stupid machine if you want all the tricks and are trying to drive lots of screen real estate with no separate GPU, but then, what will.
It's been a common abbreviation for the US Defense Dept. to use for decades. The use of EU shows up in EUCOM (European Command (NATO)). EUMC (European Military Comity) and others.
If you had to pass particles around and wait until whatever received them sent them back to cause the action, it wouldn't be "spooky". The whole point of the word "spooky" there, as Einstein used it, is that the particles stay entangled from whenever they interacted, and some properties don't seem to be limited by time or distance (including the normal limit of the speed of light). With every breath you take, you breathe atoms once breathed by Marie Curie, Attilla the Hun, and me. If entanglement really has some effect on twin empathy, why not on total strangers, through many, many mechanisms such as that one that actually unite some things with just about everything else. If a Barium atom in you was the result of decay of a heavy radioactive atom in some early star, and it's sibling.Krypton atom ended up on the surface of Mars, there's theoretical potential for 'spooky action at a distance'. If that could somehow enable free will or psi powers or emotional empathy, then it becomes just as likely as the same effect enabling twin empathy, even if twin empathy seems more plausible. Our intuitive feelings of what's plausible here are not a very good guide.
Add Neurtonium to your list (unless you count all those electrons that have been combined with protons to make neutrons, but Quantum Chromodynamics tells us that they aren't just packed into neutrons, instead, for each one, a quark has changed flavor, so I think that counts as the electrons being quite sincerely gone.).
Try Zen Buddhism. For the novice, Moutains are Mountains.(naive realism). With progress, Mountains are not Mountains (our current universe is an illusion). With enlightnment, Mountains are again Mountains - only the one who sought the Way has changed (Our current universe is conscious(ness)). I'm not claiming to have personally made the journey that begins and ends on the Zeroeth step, mind you, just that that seems to be the theory.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually calculate surface areas, the black letters are a small portion of the text image, and most of it is the white background. Digital dusting may eventually cause the white to age to a sort of yellow or even brown shade, and the crisp black to dark reddish brown, but since, as everyone knows, most digital artifacts tend to cluster in isolaterally unique bydirectional tone areas (sometimes called 'tone zones'), the discoloration occurs chiefly in the margins (since they are all white). Changing fonts or font sizes, or editing text, tends to "shake the dust off" of those areas, again onto the margins. This is also why the basic word processor that comes with Windows has fixed text width (or did back when I used Windows). Microsoft, in its infinite compassion for computer novices, was trying to preserve the dust catching properties of the 'tone zones' so users documents would last as long as possible. Microsoft even tried to use this as a selling point once, but since that was in the ads for Windows Me, no one noticed.
Remember too, we're talking about a digital medium here. Because of the high brightness and contrast of modern monitors, display of increasingly dust laden margins on a monitor is almost invisible - only a highly skilled eye can spot the traces, by long staring at the margins. (Try it for a few minutes, and you will see how much dust is accumulating in your documents).
It's not bankrupt, the existing comparison you are trying to enforce is. It's one of the basic facts of the two industrys that a whole hell of a lot less people are killed mining uranium or transporting either raw ores or processed fuels than are killed mining coal or transporting it. It's admittedly sloppy of the parent poster to compare US and Japanese deaths, but unless the Japanese are doing 10 times better on everything from mine safety to particulate scrubbing, you could total all the indirect deaths from both Coal and Nuclear and, excluding none of either, get the OPs numbers. Adding those indirect deaths for nuclear you claim he's left out might not change things at all.
In the U.S. alone, more than 100,000 coal miners were killed in accidents over the past century. Modern mining in the U.S. is safer than that average, but still results in approximately 30 deaths per year. Transportation related deaths from coal, again for the US, vary more significantly than mine fatalities so I'll calculate and give a high year/low year range (as of the last 28 years): 3 to 45 occupational deaths from coal transportation and 60 to 250 public deaths from coal transportation.
Deaths from medical conditions related to coal chemicals exposure - I could give you a number, but it's enormously higher than those two indirect death types above and you obviously wouldn't believe it. You may not believe these people either, but I've found you a source that isn't just wikipedia and isn't behind a pay firewall, and has numbers about as current as possible (2010) - anyone wanting to argue these numbers, you'd better at least meet those three criteria, or expect to be called an industry shill.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=External_costs_of_coal
|
SPOILER WARNING - SITE RESULTS BELOW
|
Now that some people have clicked the link, here's their most important numbers: 13,200 premature deaths in 2010, as well as 9,700 additional hospitalizations and 20,000 heart attacks.
Disclosure: I live in appalachia - I've buried some of those fatalities. I could drive less than fifty miles from my home and be in a community which lost every adult male of working age in the same day once. I also have lived near enough Oak Ridge, TN, in the past that I've seen DOE's trucks and trains hauling nuclear material to compare to the many coal trucks I see on the road, and trains on the railroads. I'm a degree holding engineer and can make a pretty good estimate of the relative maintenance and safety systems of those various trucks and train cars, and I have actually been a legally recognised expert witness as an accident inspector. All that I could personally say is still anecdotal, but my anecdotal opinion is coal is a vicious killer of thousands and the people who can overlook it are only able to do so because the deaths happen disproportionately to a class of people they have been trained to ignore or simply not care about. I dislike Nuclear because it is bad in some of the same ways, but have to admit it is on a significantly smaller scale.
When the 'climategate' memos first came up, most of us noticed that they were about tree ring data, which was secondary to actual measured temperatures and such things in the 'man-made global warming' debate. Then some of us noticed that it was about a small percentage of trees growing at high altitudes, which made it all of tertiary significance at best.
People started arguing over whether the researchers were bending the rules of science or not, was it a political conspiracy or not, and endless arguments about who was deliberately eeeeville, when they should have been looking more at how much difference it made.
It all seemed analogous to people finding out that some government type had paid 20,000 dollars to put a neon light covered statue of Elvis in front of the town hall. People got to arguing over whether it was tasteful or not, whether the government had authority to do it or not, and so on, but then one side said "And it really, really matters, because we could have eliminated the federal deficit and even funded a whole extra war with what was left over from that 20,000 dollars." and somehow, that claim was never questioned by a great many.
I see this same sort of thing now in so many areas. Casey Anthony's trial. A forensic pathologist with an exceptionally good reputation testifies, and since he is making a machine that can identify traces of human remains decay, the defence argues that he is biased towards saying anything that might help possible sales of that machine. Never mind that his working for a national laboratory, developing just such devices, is some sort of evidence he is an exceptionally good expert witness - try to make it so a mark of his high quality instead becomes a reason to distrust his testimony, and see if the jury will bite.
Or John Kerry gets three purple hearts. Raise questions about one of them, and see how many of the public will automatically believe that all three were tainted. The more military medals a person gets, the easier it is to find one that sounds a little fishy, so any time somebody runs for office with a Medal of Honor and half a dozen other awards for extreme valor, it will be a piece of cake to find something about at least one, relentlessly attack whichever award sounds weakest, and prove the public should vote for your candidate, who maybe next time this trick is tried, doesn't have a record of this type at all to be challenged. Turn what should normally be an asset into a liability.
There's long distance transmission losses - electricity used to push more electricity along high tension wires for hundreds or even thousands of miles. When a plant in western Pennsylvania or even southern Georgia is sending power to meet peak demand in New York, those transmission losses can be over 50% of what's produced. When the north-eastern grid failed a few years ago, TVA plants in Tennessee and even South Carolina were sending power all the way to Arizona and New Mexico to stabilise the western grid, at up to 85% losses. (And if they hadn't, that blackout would have been nationwide and probably lasted a couple of days minimum for everyone). So yes, "dumping massive amounts of power into a hole" sometimes describes it quite nicely.
Interestingly, it was a locally smart* power grid, built and managed mostly by the government, that basically became a rock solid line against the cascading failures and then started helping everybody else recover.
*TVA's not all that smart - built mostly during the 30s and 40s, but it has upgraded control networks several times since then, notably when the nuclear plant at Watt's Bar became part of the grid. Basically, TVA control is 1970s tech, but the north-eastern grid from Niagara on down includes a lot of incompatible privately implemented control systems dating back, in some cases, to the 1920s.
The British have a perfectly cromulent plan to deal with zombie invasion, involving possibly activating the 'white elephants' of squadron 666, and definitely loading the SCORPION STARE software in all enabled CCTV surveillance systems in zombie plagued areas. Playing an electric violin arrangement of Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' at them may also be needed in a few cases, but really we're saving that for the plague's masters.
Oh, you're not cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN? Nevermind - I seem to have misspoken. The British have absolutely no plans to deal with zombie invasions.
You really can't know that there's even a single mathematical model that fits reality. Yes, it looks that way so far, but it's a starting axiom of science that there will be one and only one. It would be a very odd universe indeed if there were zero or more than one, but science doesn't reason its way to proving there is only one, science starts from that as a default assumption. Reasoning this to be true is a matter of philosophy, which can argue from axioms completely outside of science that math is not just pragmatically useful but fundamentally a requirement of all true science.
What would count as good evidence that the standard model has a big flaw in it? When people started thinking the epicycle model was wrong, it happened for several reasons (paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn for much of this):
By Copernicus' time, 1) there were a lot of accumulated observations that no one had during the first few hundred years, and new tools made those latter observations more accurate. 2) The formulas to calculate epicycles grew more and more complex to account for those observations, and people could point to the history of the model to show what that trend implied for its future. People lost confidence that the next tweak would be the last. 3) the epicycle model still didn't predict some basic things, such as the exact start time of some planets appearing to precess, accurately enough.
So, for 1), the standard model hasn't been around for hundreds of years. In the time it has been around, we have developed much more powerful accelerators, but we haven't invented a significantly new class of tools (such as the Galilean or Newtonian telescope, or reasonably accurate to a few seconds a day clocks, all of which came in as epicycle models were being rejected). Progress on the observational side has all been evolutionary, not revolutionary, so progress on the theoretical side will tend to mirror that, rightly or wrongly.
For 2), The Higgs is one of a very few testable predictions which could add some math to the rest of the standard model. It makes the math a little more complex to include it, but by itself, it doesn't suggest that every 20 years or so, we will again have to add some more complexity. Evidence for condition 2) would have to come from more than just Higgs Boson research, i.e. finding some other unexplained particle that definitely isn't the Higgs to suggest we are seeing ever mounting complexity. A possible Higgs candidate slightly outside the projected ranges, or something which seemed mostly Higgslike but for some odd property (say, a cluster of related particles all with no spin or color, but slightly varying energies), wouldn't make most theoreticians rethink the whole model so much as try to tweak it a little.
3) We could argue that 3) is being met, in the form of the gravity related incompatibilities of QM and General Relativity. If we still face that question in 100 or 200 years, more and more working scientists will regard it as a situation like 1), and arguments that the change needed is major will gradually gain traction.
Toppling capstones would be seen by many of the established classes as an obvious euphemism for classically political, revolutionary action, your tongue in cheek response not-withstanding. There are probably people who really would sincerely manifest both that gasp of surprise and a nee-jerk tendency to classify all of this as socialism.
However, one of Friedman's points in this book seems to be that if we push either population or environmental destruction far enough 'Natural' principles will impose restrictions that will look every bit as bad from an individualist point of view as any that a Socialist political system might threaten to impose. Yeah, Taibbi's critique shows that Friedman isn't doing a very coherent job of developing this point, and I put nature in quotes above because Friedman isn't really very clear about whether he means 'Biological Law', 'Natural Laws in a more general sense' (such as Thermodynamic efficiency laws, maybe), or perhaps 'Mother nature' in some highly metaphorical or even semi-literal sense. I don't think Friedman is going to start dispensing a literal Gaia-worship spiel, but just how far he may be from that is hard to extract from the text. Still, the point is, even a guy like this can see that some things are objective circumstances and that rushing to apply a political spin to them is a mistake.
I think of it much like the USSR. A lot of people there were quick to point out any remark that might be interpreted as insufficiently pro socialist, but at times there were people, particularly in the military, who invoked 'objective circumstances' to say, in effect "Don't worry about classifying the political content of this section just yet, until you have grasped the pragmatic points." Friedman is doing the equivalent for the mainline fiscal conservatives of saying "Don't let the Zampolits read this until you have figured out a way to spin it so they don't call us all Trotskites, but for Mother Russia's sake, read it!"
You are correct, but there are two groups which disagree. Some people think you are wrong about the necessity of war in such circumstances. I don't think they are assessing the risks rationally, but there's room for differences of opinion there.
The larger problem of perception seems to lie with those who think such wars will exist, but will not be exceptionally violent, particularly towards the losers. There is no real difference between deciding to kill all the enemy and deciding to take a resource so fundamental the enemy will die without it. In fact, the chance of success is better for a nation-state that doesn't lie to itself about whether the resource is truly vital. One problem western democracies face is that the average member of the public already thinks war is generally all about killing the enemy, whereas their political and military structures think normally in therms of defeating the enemy instead of necessarily killing them. The two are not normally conflated by the people who have to actually implement one or another option, but we are looking at the very situation where they are one and the same.
All law, civil and criminal has some tie to rights, but this is about more than the general principle that such rights exist. As copyright was originally set up, it was all tort law, with no criminal penalties. As more and more copyright law has become criminal law, the ex-post facto situation applies as it always does in criminal law. It's a two step process - first bring some works back under copyright, and only then criminalise some actions involving those works, and by splitting it up into steps, law enforcement has found a way around the ex-post-facto clause in the constitution. IP law has become a wedge area for chipping away at one of the United States most fundamental protections against bad government.
But you didn't do it in official Wikipedia blue ... Does that still count?
And while we're at it, there are ways a person's writing style might change and ways it simply never will.
I just deliberately shifted to a more casual mode, by using the opening phrase "And while we're at it", as though I was standing physically next to 'Richard_at_work' and just adding my two cents without much reflection, immediately after he had finished. As part of giving my post that slightly more casual flavor, I used the contraction "we're". I might have been more formal than to presume acquaintance with 'Richard_at_work' just because I find myself in agreement with him on this point, but I'd feel pretty silly going to casual mode and then turning around and insisting on "we are".
OTOH, I know the difference between the contraction 'it's' and the possessive 'its'. If for some reason I'm more concerned over getting an answer off quickly than writing well, I would still try to avoid mangling those two. I might write more run on sentences. I might fail to spot a case where I had a singular/plural mismatch. But, If all those things are happening many times as often as I usually make such mistakes, it's not a stylistic change, it's a cerebral haemorrhage. There are things that have become real pet peeves of mine - such as people using the word 'between' when there are less than three things implied in their statements. (an object has to be between at least two other objects - if there is only one other object, the first object is beside it, not between it). I'm never going to write 'for all intensive purposes', or call a porpoise a fish, or think a light year is a unit of time, and if I use etcetera more than once in a row, I'm channelling the King of Siam. My writing style simply won't change in such ways.
I'll save time abbreviating On The Other Hand to a ETLA if I think the typical person I'm posting to will understand it. I'll push the envelope and use ETLA in a place such as Slashdot where some readers will recognise the joke. I'll ignore the English standard spell checker that wants me to go back up and ad a 'u' to 'flavor' in my second paragraph, and If I'd spelled 'recognise' with a z in common American fashion, I would have left it. However, when I caught myself writing "like Slashdot", I couldn't relax until I corrected that mistake.
It's very unlikely anyone learns to write properly, in even the most modest degree, and doesn't pick up some pet peeves. They get worse, not better, with time.
What you wrote was a simplification - if it had been an oversimplification, that little prefix, 'over', would mean you had gone too far in simplifying and there was no truth left in your statement. There's still plenty of truth in your two examples - the real contracts Google and Facebook use have proportionate and analogous differences in both just what they offer to do for a customer and how they treat the third party data they hold. You are making a good point - don't bury your own light under a bushel basket.
See, you were making a pretty good argument, and then you threw in this:
Is anyone willing to *personally* take a good working-over by government thugs in exchange for another social program? (emphasis mine).
It's not the social programs that empower the goon squads. The US government currently has 17 civilian agencies that have agents empowered to carry fully automatic weapons. There is a line item in the federal budget equal to about half the overall FBI budget, and it goes just to pay for the FBI running rifle, grenade launcher, and even rocket launcher training ranges for all the other security related agencies. Those are not the social services agencies that have the police like powers. A person from the department of health and human resources may be able to take one of your kids away, but at least he or she can't shoot you in the head to stop you from getting a lawyer and fighting it. The BATF, DEA, and 15 other police/security related agencies most definitely can.
Right now, you can take the amount that goes to Israel out of the foreign aid budget, and half the rest is directed by the DEA. For example, we give multiple squadrons of assault helicopters to Columbia to 'help stamp out Cocaine trafficking, add attack helicopters and air to ground Hellfire missiles to protect them, current elite grade scrambling to keep the drug lords from overhearing their communications, and many other forms of support, and then all their neighbors worry about what happens if Columbia uses all those neat toys for something besides the war on drugs, so we have to give the rest of Central America weapons too. If they don't have enough Cocaine growers to justify putting it in the DEA budget, we put it in foreign aid, earmarked to be spent only buying weapons from US based corporations. Then we have right wing radio show hosts frequently stress how foreign aid is all a liberal waste of money. (Yeah, because the Liberals are the ones who support a huge war on drugs.). Many of us strongly suspect there's still funding for covert ops hidden in the social services side of the budget, but it's a pretty safe bet nobody in, say, the National Endowment for the Arts is hiding money in the Military/Security part of the budget. The reverse however, is false - it has now been openly admitted that the CIA funneled money through the Nat. Endowment for the Arts for covert ops in the 1950s and 60s.
Please don't fall for the idea that we have to cut social services to control the government - the power and arrogance they contribute to the whole is so trivial compared to the effects of all those agencies grouped under homeland security that eliminating all social spending would probably have less effect on the nation's slide into fascism than finding out why anyone else in the Treasury department, besides the Secret Service, needs full auto weapons training. (I'm willing to grant we need something like a Secret Service to protect various officials from nutcases - but why does a guy who's full time job description is to investigate insider trading, a guy who is required to be a CPA before qualifying for the job, but need have absolutely no military or law enforcement background, need to qualify on a M16-A4 assault rifle with under-mounted M203 grenade launcher?). Multiply that by all the agents for BATF that are not investigating firearms or even the few remaining old fashioned stills in the Kentucky hills, but need them for all those cases where someone is smuggling cigarettes without tax stamps - surely a few pistols or assistance from a federal marshall or two would be enough to handle such cases. Multiply by all the small towns that now have used federal grants for SWAT teams even if the most serious crime in a typical year there is likely to be a bar fight.
It's been a long time since I've seen it, but I don't remember the kids from Lord of the Flies being crucified at the end, at all. They probably deserved it after stabbing Janet Leigh in the shower, but 'Lord of the Flies' ends with the first bomber getting through to Moscow so the president has to order another bomber to nuke New York, right?
A study is not required for me to tell my children...
Don't eat things harder than your teeth, they aren't good for you.
The American Dental Association has determined that chocolate covered manhole covers are bad for your teeth. (Thanks to Larry Niven for pointing this out).
Your last example (wash hands), is a great example of what isn't common sense. It's good advice because of the Germ Theory of Disease. Before Louis Pasteur and a few others developed this, the prevailing 'common sense' observation was that bad smelling air caused diseases. Bad smells could be detected, bacteria and such couldn't (yet), and common sense told people that something you could observe was a real cause, and if you didn't observe anything, there was nothing there to cause anything else. Common sense made three generations of doctors reluctant to accept that they should wash their hands after handling garbage (or sick patients, used surgical instruments, and many other sources of infection).
I see no problem with it being all three. I'd bet that gentle, egalitarian trolls are rare, and the common troll is, by all accounts, a big believer in violence. Since troll encounters are invariably with the males (see Tolkien, J. R. R., where there are literally no female trolls (aka Trollops), in the entirety of Middle Earth*), it follows they are ALL using that violence to promote their masculinity. So, it's unlikely to be some either/or matter.
*Trolls were made in mockery of Ents, who had either lost the Entwives by then, or else Trollops once existed, but have doubtless wandered away just as the Entwives did.
I tend to rate PBS as pretty middle of the road myself, but this reminded me of a sad case; a conservative I know, who typically calls PBS things such as "a libtard conspiracy to manipulate all the stupid people who have never held an honest job".
He's explained how all sorts of PBS shows are leftist. Clifford the Big RED Dog's a commie, of course. Any Science show with Alan Alda narrating is obviously 'socialist' too. The cap came when he explained to me how the travel and cooking shows on PBS aren't showing the real Europe, since all those socialist European states are gray hellholes the USSR destroyed when we fought over them during WW2. He explained to me how, when the Russians occupied Italy and Spain, they treated them just like Yugoslavia and Hungary. Until Reagan finally won WW2, France was a Soviet satellite state. I told him the US and USSR fought together against Germany in WW2, and he said "That's what THEY want you to believe.".
While I wrote him off after this as simply crazy, it's interesting to me how his behaviour mirrors this situation. We could definitely claim the liberal side of American politics has more sympathy for Wikileaks than the right does. So, we have the left attacking the left, if that makes any sense. When a right wing publication reports it that way, surely cognitive dissonance should make at least a few of their loyal viewers say "But that doesn't make any sense!".
I think it's pretty obvious these hackers don't have a real, coherent, political opinion of any sort, and pretty likely they are just some batch of 4 Chan inspired script kiddies doing it for the LOLs. That's plenty to explain what's going on without any conspiracy theory. But, what I don't get is why a bunch of people who can and do buy into conspiracy theories about the President's birth certificate or how hot it got around the WTC elevators don't come up with similar conspiracy theories about why they are being told the left is attacking itself instead of the right. You'd think the paranoid nutcases would be all over things like this. We have people out there who every time a video broadcast gets glitchy, think they are seeing an alien lizardman's camouflage field slipping, but they hear "Hyper-leftist terrorists are attacking the organisation we told you yesterday was hyper-leftist too", and they can't get a good conspiracy theory started out of that?
I live in fear that a bunch of terrorists will destroy my genetically engineered potatoes! I don't worry that they will kill me or my family, burn down my house, blow up the nearby nuke plant or scatter land mines on my lawn, but I have nightmares about Al Quaida keying my car, the Talliban spray painting naughty words on my driveway, and Osama rising from the grave to call me and ask if I have Prince Albert in a can.
Real terrorists kill people, not potatoes. A threat of property damage may be extortion, and actual property damage is criminal, but vandalism isn't terrorism by any stretch. No one, and certainly no large corporation, is really terrified that they will live through whatever the 'terrorists' are going to do, survive it in perfect health, and have to sue the 'terrorists' for purely economic damages.
If you can really draw a bow with 170 lbs of pull, then it doesn't really matter if you miss once or twice, unless the opponent is starting out at much less than your normal working ranges for a bow.:
1. Even a limb hit will probably result in instant crippling at that pull. Bows like that will shoot through cinderblocks. At ranges of less than 100 yards, you aren't really doing archery any more, because the arrow doesn't perceptibly arch, it's as straight a shot as with a rifle.
2. You can always rip the maniac in half with your bare hands if he gets too close.
Then there's Nautilus, which is increasingly popular for KDE, and has very accessible configuration controls. You can specify Icon size, spacing, whether text is present, whether text is underneath or beside icons, and even whether the same spacing as the largest icon and text needs should be used throughout or icons should be spaced minimally. You can decide what file types should be shown as thumbnails, and further specify what the maximums size files to trigger thumbnails are. You can even have it play samples from.MP3s on hover if you want. You can make a fast system with lots of real estate do tricks like Lassie, or tweak it to run in more minimalist mode on a slow, small monitor system you would have trouble running XP on at all, let alone Win 7. Admittedly, It probably won't really help get something useable on a slow, stupid machine if you want all the tricks and are trying to drive lots of screen real estate with no separate GPU, but then, what will.
It's been a common abbreviation for the US Defense Dept. to use for decades. The use of EU shows up in EUCOM (European Command (NATO)). EUMC (European Military Comity) and others.
If you had to pass particles around and wait until whatever received them sent them back to cause the action, it wouldn't be "spooky". The whole point of the word "spooky" there, as Einstein used it, is that the particles stay entangled from whenever they interacted, and some properties don't seem to be limited by time or distance (including the normal limit of the speed of light). With every breath you take, you breathe atoms once breathed by Marie Curie, Attilla the Hun, and me. If entanglement really has some effect on twin empathy, why not on total strangers, through many, many mechanisms such as that one that actually unite some things with just about everything else. If a Barium atom in you was the result of decay of a heavy radioactive atom in some early star, and it's sibling.Krypton atom ended up on the surface of Mars, there's theoretical potential for 'spooky action at a distance'. If that could somehow enable free will or psi powers or emotional empathy, then it becomes just as likely as the same effect enabling twin empathy, even if twin empathy seems more plausible. Our intuitive feelings of what's plausible here are not a very good guide.
Add Neurtonium to your list (unless you count all those electrons that have been combined with protons to make neutrons, but Quantum Chromodynamics tells us that they aren't just packed into neutrons, instead, for each one, a quark has changed flavor, so I think that counts as the electrons being quite sincerely gone.).
Try Zen Buddhism. For the novice, Moutains are Mountains.(naive realism). With progress, Mountains are not Mountains (our current universe is an illusion). With enlightnment, Mountains are again Mountains - only the one who sought the Way has changed (Our current universe is conscious(ness)). I'm not claiming to have personally made the journey that begins and ends on the Zeroeth step, mind you, just that that seems to be the theory.