Here's the really strange thing. The denominations that use unfermented grape juice for communion are using something that 'doesn't have the spirit in it'. Alcoholic spirits are called that because they were thought to at least symbolize something in common with the holy spirit.
Now, what do the Satanists use? LaVey and some other modern versions aside, the alleged early Satanists were accused of such things as using unfermented juice so their communion took place without the holy spirit entering in. That's it - there are modern stories about satanists using stolen wine and communion wafers that had been 'defiled' by first placing them in a woman's vagina or contaminating them with disgusting substances, but the older accounts, at least as kept by the Roman Catholics, mostly just claim the Satanists cults used unfermented juice and bread with no yeast.
Whether this proves your former denomination is a strange cult or not, that's a guess - the connection between alcoholic spirits and divine ones is at most a bit of symbolism. I was raised Episcopal/Anglican, and the way communion is explaned there is that in the service, people are fed with the holy spirit by having three parts of the Bible read to them and then the priest (hopefully) bases his sermon on one or more of those teachings. The communion is explained as a physical reminder that you have already received 'spiritual food', with the real spiritual food being knowledge. Obviously the Baptists and others are not trying to symbolize anything like the same things as the original Satanic rituals were.
Why does someone have to prove Microsoft benefited?
Let's say hypothetically that I shoot my very rich uncle, get caught, and in the middle of the trial it turns out I'm not in his will after all. I couldn't argue that I didn't actually benefit so I should get off. No one is going to conclude that If I knew about the will, that proves I had no other reason to shoot dear old uncle Fred, or that if I didn't know, I definitely did it for the money. If the state proves I did it based on solid eye witnesses, ballistic evidence and such, they may not bother much with my motives at all.
If Microsoft did something with the goal of benefiting, why does it have to have been successful before they are culpable? If Microsoft did something, and it didn't work as well as they thought, what relevance does that have to the question of whether what they did was itself right or wrong?
Back in Win 95 days, Microsoft could have required all 3rd party software to use.ini files located in that software's main directory, or they could have required them to all use the registry, and use it in specified ways. Microsoft could have told every 3rd party company wanting that valuable Windows compatible logo on their box to use some method that would have directly helped MS's security and/or indirectly helped intelligent users who were concerned enough about security to want policy level control even then, and even then MS had enough market share to make it stick. Instead, they definitely let some companies ignore the usual rules and apparently relaxed them further whenever MS's marketing wanted to brag about how much software was windows compatible. (The first is something some of Microsoft's key people have admitted to, the second is an outsider's inference, and I'm sure there are people who would disagree with me on it.)
I'm hoping Microsoft has actually made all 3rd party sources write to some standards this time, and true support for multiple users under Microsoft's long standing model dictates, as you imply, that this should be under the user profile rather than in the install directory. What worries me is that Microsoft may still give some companies, such as Norton, favored status at bending the rules. I'm waiting to adopt 7 in part because I don't know how firm Microsoft has been on security. Microsoft had certainly transitioned from the Win 95-98 first ed. days of having a big market share but with room to grow, to one that had 95% of the market and no place to go but stagnate, well before Vista came out, but they didn't seem to have learned the lesson at all by then, which may be why I doubt they have fully learned it just yet.
At this point, US society seems increasingly divided into a class structure, and some classes can expect only token punishments at most, while others are seeing serious oppression. We have cases where minors are charged with sex related offenses for being each other's victims, 12 year old girls arrested for coloring on desktops, and people are still in prisons years after DNA testing has proved they were wrongly convicted.
So what's proportionate? Here, the main suspects draw several times the average pay for American workers, and are given special trust and authority by law. They falsely accused someone of something which could in turn be treated as a felony, one that has mandatory minimum prison time as part of the sentencing, if some DA had acted no more unfairly than they did. If it's just to give two 15 year old minors lifetime on a sex offender's list for sending nude pictures of each other back and forth, then proportionate justice in this case is feeding the mature adults involved into a chipper-shredder, barbaric and inhuman as that would be. Any penalty that would be sufficient to make these people stop thinking they are specially entitled would also be draconian.
Coming down hard does not mean making something a federal crime, unless you want to create a straw man. The government could simply publicize the known failure rates for different software, and take those numbers into account in its own purchases. Alternately, what if the average civil judge knew that company X chose to stay with IE6, knew what the security problems with it are, and knew that those numbers made sticking with IE6 to the present a wild gamble, metaphorically on a par with leaving the client's data in open public view with only a sign saying "worth millions, but please don't steal it" for security? How big would the court awarded settlements for data theft become?
Calling an anarchist a radical communist is like when Rush or beck says that the Nazis were really leftists because they had the word socialist in their name. The more you resort to that kind of double-think, the more I start wondering if this nut just maybe really was a Libertarian.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
1/2 of self employment taxes are used as an adjustment between the reported gross income and the reported AGI (Adjusted Gross Income), if you are filing a normal 1040 with Schedule C reporting the income.
The effect is generally much less than getting a straight 50% off:
Let's assume a $ 50,000 base income, all from self employed sources, and the filer, for one reason or another, falls in the 15% bracket. Self employment tax of 15.2% means the tax is $ 7,600. The adjustment means $ 3,800 is credited back to the taxpayer, and subtracted from the raw income, so the AGI becomes only 46,200. That still puts the filer in the same bracket (for my example, not invariably), so the tax benefit is actually 15% of that $ 3,800, or $ 570.
That works out a little differently than the way a standard or itemized deduction is used, and a lot differently than the way a refundable credit would apply.
Asimov worked specfically as a Munitions Chemist in WW2, alongside several other SF authors, including E. E. "Doc" Smith. Some of Isaac's war era work was classified well beyond that time (T.S. - 50 year to review at one time, according to Freedom of Information Act requests) and now seems to have become a matter of rumor and fallen from the official records, part of an interesting bunch of mostly unconfirmable claims suggesting that he, R A Heinlein, Jack Williamson, and maybe several other SF authors were consulted with regard to the Manhattan project just before Truman was informed. While that appears to be undocumented, There are Heinlein's own printed remarks about having two positions in the war, one of which he could talk about, and Larry Niven's comparison of what he and Jerry Pournelle did in advising the Bush administration after 9/11 to what a group of unspecified SF writers did in WW2, to make the rumors at least a trifle plausible.
For example, if somebody published a phonebook that color coded different businesses by how long they had been in the area, that particular system of color coding would be copyrightable. Anyone could still print a table that had the names, phone numbers, and number of years in the area, using black and white, or make up a system where different fonts or type sizes or italics conveyed the same information.
What's not clear from such decisions is what happens when the 'creative' portion inspires someone else to do something different with regard to the facts portion. For example, someone could make a phonebook that used color to show all the businesses that were currently in litigation, or were minority owned, or some such - would the first phonebook maker's copyright restrict that someone? Once people start linking more than two groups of facts, or bring in different groups than tradition supports, is there significant creativity just from inclusion? (Everybody knows the standard business phonebook includes street addresses as well as names and numbers - is it significantly creative to also include e-addresses? Is it not sufficiently creative to include whether or not they are better business bureau members?).
He's thinking of Pascal, and he's using the simplified version of Pascal's wager, as the whole argument is more about whether you can still calculate probabilities if some of the terms are infinite than it's just about heaven and hell. Pascal practically invented the standard probability theorems, and explored the extremes of them pretty well for his era. Trivialising his accomplishments there is like explaining relativity as "Einstein proved everything's relative.".
You not only didn't get it, you're really proud of how you didn't get it.
Spirituality isn't about feelings at all, just like whether you're actually competent at something isn't about whether you feel competent. You wouldn't argue that intelligence isn't real just because some people think they are highly intelligent but are actually average at best, but you're apparently comfortable with claiming just that when it comes to spirit.
Accepting that there may not be any correlation between people's claims and their actual spiritual level means also accepting that there may be an objective dimension to spirit to cause that lack of correlation. If spirituality is an 'invisible unicorn', then Charles Manson is more spiritual than Mother Teresa - just read how each person rated themselves.
I don't think 'originally' applies. I'm old enough to remember the first movie premier, and the talk about sequels and such started in the press after the film proved to be an unexpected hit. The mention of multiple trilogies began after quite a few other rumors had circulated in the press for a few weeks, in a way that suggested, to me at least, that it wasn't really the plan all along but something the studio now wanted to claim. As Episode 5's pre-release hype built up, the line about 9 films was pushed a lot, maybe because the public would accept a whole film where the good guys mostly lose better, if it was seen as a smaller part of the whole.
I know the scrolling bit at the start of the original said Episode 4, but as Raiders of the Lost Ark proves, there was much interest at the time in recapturing some of the old Republic serial feel for films, and it builds dramatic tension by suggesting the film is part of a larger whole set in the same fictiverse. That doesn't prove much else in the fictiverse was even roughed out, let alone developed. Lucas's mental notes for the rest, at the time Episode 4 was released may have been just "It's a place where a lot of wars between whole planets have happened."
In the same way, lines from the first film, such as the reference to Obi-Wan knowing Luke's father from the Clone Wars, sound like throw away lines - where the writer in effect says to themselves "Let's see, I can't say they met in Nam, because it's Sci-Fi, and just saying they met in the war sounds too generic, so what do I call the frelling war?" Probably, when Lucas wrote the line, he had no particular idea why the war was called the Clone Wars, or which side the Clones were on, or any of that - it was just to present a surface gloss of verisimilitude. Writers do that when they don't plan on needing more detailed answers, then an unexpected demand for sequils leaves them looking back through the original script for things they can develop.
A good example of this might be the point in the original Matrix where Trinity tells Neo he's been down that road before. That line could have been used to spin off a matrix sequel very different from the ones we got, and the studio would doubtless have claimed that it was the plan all along if that had happened.
Star Wars veered away from 'dark and nasty' when they shied from the Midiclorian stuff. If Jedi were 'superior' because of an innate biological feature, the struggle became one where both sides were feeding the common people a mass of propaganda, and moral issues would be a mix of gray tones at best. It would still be possible to show one side as having better reasons to justify the propaganda than the other, and even to create audience empathy for the Jedi - after all, even if both sides were manipulating the general populace, only one side ended up blowing up whole planets. Still, the idea of Jedi who don't like to admit it's all about the Midiclorians even to themselves, and who take the 'controlling your emotions' philosophy to dangerous extremes as a result, would be a great basis for dense, nuanced scripts that would give good actors a chance to shine and, it's hoped, be remembered come Emmy time.
Not gonna happen, of course.
1. We have boundaries set on things such as tornado and hurricane seasons. That's a climate prediction. Total numbers of tornadoes and hurricanes fall inside certain limits - that's another one. Various parts of the world have similar rules for typhoons, noreasters, or whatever weather they have. Hurricane season coming at the same time every year is climate prediction. Calling some part of the US Tornado Alley is a climate prediction. Charts showing where the 100 year flood boundaries lie are climate predictions. 2. Climate prediction is also what we are doing when, for one example, we claim a season is an El Nino or La Nina in California. We don't have high reliability at predicting in advance what will come in a given year there, but we certainly do make a predicton that if we have certain conditions at the start of a season, they will persist for much more than just a couple of days, and equally, we predict a lot of interrelated results and they generally come in a strongly correlated bundle - i.e. El Ninos just about invariably mean more forest fires months after they begin, and have a fairly strong correlation with mudslide chances months after those fires, as well. 3. Farmers, foresters and the like in general rely on climate following established predictions, and those work well enough. Those predictions aren't of the form "Year X will be a drought", but nobody could cultivate a crop such as apples unless the prediction that, in a given locale, there won't be enough droughts in the next 30 years to kill off all the young apple trees, held up with very high reliability.
Why either/or? As in Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands..." series: Everyone lounges by the pool discussing philosophy and eating peeled grapes because the robots won the war and won't let the people do anything more active.
"No! No mountain-climbing for you! Too Risky! Eat your peeled grapes!"
A good example is the Wizard of Oz. When it was written, there was one word you obviously couldn't use as a rhyme for witch. So we end up with songwriters who use lots of alternates, working in hitch, pitch, twitch, ditch, itch,... and then come up with clever ways to make those words fit well. I suspect that if the writers had enjoyed the modern artistic freedom to use a word like bitch, it would have left us with a song that had fewer total rhymes and less effort put into making those rhymes fit the narrative, and the whole film might have suffered for it.
But like you, I'm speculating that the alternatives all simply had to be worse, and I could be wrong.
Yes there are, and it's regrettable they have yoked their business to a larger business that sucks at the public teat, but they have. No one can make money playing a game with only one team on the field, so their profits are entirely a result of public subsidies, whether they have collected anything personally or not. Let me stress that - there are not enough teams who have avoided public doles to play a decent season, and NO franchisee is in a position to make a yearly profit without remaining linked by contract to the ones that have.
If its unfair to them, what about all the people who are facing criminal charges because they accepted goods from the persons who actually stole them, or drove a car for the persons who actually held up the jewelry store, or whatever. If civil penalties or taxation should not apply to these businesses just because of their choice of partners, how can we justify criminal penalties against some other people for no more tangential acts?
In most locations, renters do have some codified rights that limit what the landlord can do. Those rights are legal under the constitution for states or municipalities to set.
For copyright, there are some normal rights (fair use) that have not been formally codified enough and so don't really offer protection. There are other rights (first sale), that can't be protected by states or smaller locales any more because the Supreme court has held all copyright related law is federal only. So it's not entirely similar.
No, his 'problem' is he recognizes there are good and bad regulations, so saying 'it's because there's a regulation' is relatively meaningless, while explaining the actual root cause is much more meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
Right after you explain the role of inviolate physical laws in your 'Non-authoritarian' Science.
What's that you say? Not every case where there are principles and consequences deserves to be compared to human political systems?
Here's the really strange thing. The denominations that use unfermented grape juice for communion are using something that 'doesn't have the spirit in it'. Alcoholic spirits are called that because they were thought to at least symbolize something in common with the holy spirit.
Now, what do the Satanists use? LaVey and some other modern versions aside, the alleged early Satanists were accused of such things as using unfermented juice so their communion took place without the holy spirit entering in. That's it - there are modern stories about satanists using stolen wine and communion wafers that had been 'defiled' by first placing them in a woman's vagina or contaminating them with disgusting substances, but the older accounts, at least as kept by the Roman Catholics, mostly just claim the Satanists cults used unfermented juice and bread with no yeast.
Whether this proves your former denomination is a strange cult or not, that's a guess - the connection between alcoholic spirits and divine ones is at most a bit of symbolism. I was raised Episcopal/Anglican, and the way communion is explaned there is that in the service, people are fed with the holy spirit by having three parts of the Bible read to them and then the priest (hopefully) bases his sermon on one or more of those teachings. The communion is explained as a physical reminder that you have already received 'spiritual food', with the real spiritual food being knowledge. Obviously the Baptists and others are not trying to symbolize anything like the same things as the original Satanic rituals were.
Why does someone have to prove Microsoft benefited?
Let's say hypothetically that I shoot my very rich uncle, get caught, and in the middle of the trial it turns out I'm not in his will after all. I couldn't argue that I didn't actually benefit so I should get off. No one is going to conclude that If I knew about the will, that proves I had no other reason to shoot dear old uncle Fred, or that if I didn't know, I definitely did it for the money. If the state proves I did it based on solid eye witnesses, ballistic evidence and such, they may not bother much with my motives at all.
If Microsoft did something with the goal of benefiting, why does it have to have been successful before they are culpable? If Microsoft did something, and it didn't work as well as they thought, what relevance does that have to the question of whether what they did was itself right or wrong?
Abolishment of religion won't solve all problems, but it has the highest ratio of simplicty-of-suggestion to worldwide-problems-solved.
Because, as we all know, the simplest solution is to be preferred, even when it is way to simple to account for the facts. Obvious Troll is Obvious.
Back in Win 95 days, Microsoft could have required all 3rd party software to use .ini files located in that software's main directory, or they could have required them to all use the registry, and use it in specified ways. Microsoft could have told every 3rd party company wanting that valuable Windows compatible logo on their box to use some method that would have directly helped MS's security and/or indirectly helped intelligent users who were concerned enough about security to want policy level control even then, and even then MS had enough market share to make it stick. Instead, they definitely let some companies ignore the usual rules and apparently relaxed them further whenever MS's marketing wanted to brag about how much software was windows compatible. (The first is something some of Microsoft's key people have admitted to, the second is an outsider's inference, and I'm sure there are people who would disagree with me on it.)
I'm hoping Microsoft has actually made all 3rd party sources write to some standards this time, and true support for multiple users under Microsoft's long standing model dictates, as you imply, that this should be under the user profile rather than in the install directory. What worries me is that Microsoft may still give some companies, such as Norton, favored status at bending the rules. I'm waiting to adopt 7 in part because I don't know how firm Microsoft has been on security. Microsoft had certainly transitioned from the Win 95-98 first ed. days of having a big market share but with room to grow, to one that had 95% of the market and no place to go but stagnate, well before Vista came out, but they didn't seem to have learned the lesson at all by then, which may be why I doubt they have fully learned it just yet.
At this point, US society seems increasingly divided into a class structure, and some classes can expect only token punishments at most, while others are seeing serious oppression. We have cases where minors are charged with sex related offenses for being each other's victims, 12 year old girls arrested for coloring on desktops, and people are still in prisons years after DNA testing has proved they were wrongly convicted.
So what's proportionate? Here, the main suspects draw several times the average pay for American workers, and are given special trust and authority by law. They falsely accused someone of something which could in turn be treated as a felony, one that has mandatory minimum prison time as part of the sentencing, if some DA had acted no more unfairly than they did. If it's just to give two 15 year old minors lifetime on a sex offender's list for sending nude pictures of each other back and forth, then proportionate justice in this case is feeding the mature adults involved into a chipper-shredder, barbaric and inhuman as that would be. Any penalty that would be sufficient to make these people stop thinking they are specially entitled would also be draconian.
Coming down hard does not mean making something a federal crime, unless you want to create a straw man. The government could simply publicize the known failure rates for different software, and take those numbers into account in its own purchases. Alternately, what if the average civil judge knew that company X chose to stay with IE6, knew what the security problems with it are, and knew that those numbers made sticking with IE6 to the present a wild gamble, metaphorically on a par with leaving the client's data in open public view with only a sign saying "worth millions, but please don't steal it" for security? How big would the court awarded settlements for data theft become?
Calling an anarchist a radical communist is like when Rush or beck says that the Nazis were really leftists because they had the word socialist in their name. The more you resort to that kind of double-think, the more I start wondering if this nut just maybe really was a Libertarian.
1/2 of self employment taxes are used as an adjustment between the reported gross income and the reported AGI (Adjusted Gross Income), if you are filing a normal 1040 with Schedule C reporting the income.
The effect is generally much less than getting a straight 50% off:
Let's assume a $ 50,000 base income, all from self employed sources, and the filer, for one reason or another, falls in the 15% bracket. Self employment tax of 15.2% means the tax is $ 7,600. The adjustment means $ 3,800 is credited back to the taxpayer, and subtracted from the raw income, so the AGI becomes only 46,200. That still puts the filer in the same bracket (for my example, not invariably), so the tax benefit is actually 15% of that $ 3,800, or $ 570.
That works out a little differently than the way a standard or itemized deduction is used, and a lot differently than the way a refundable credit would apply.
Asimov worked specfically as a Munitions Chemist in WW2, alongside several other SF authors, including E. E. "Doc" Smith. Some of Isaac's war era work was classified well beyond that time (T.S. - 50 year to review at one time, according to Freedom of Information Act requests) and now seems to have become a matter of rumor and fallen from the official records, part of an interesting bunch of mostly unconfirmable claims suggesting that he, R A Heinlein, Jack Williamson, and maybe several other SF authors were consulted with regard to the Manhattan project just before Truman was informed. While that appears to be undocumented, There are Heinlein's own printed remarks about having two positions in the war, one of which he could talk about, and Larry Niven's comparison of what he and Jerry Pournelle did in advising the Bush administration after 9/11 to what a group of unspecified SF writers did in WW2, to make the rumors at least a trifle plausible.
For example, if somebody published a phonebook that color coded different businesses by how long they had been in the area, that particular system of color coding would be copyrightable. Anyone could still print a table that had the names, phone numbers, and number of years in the area, using black and white, or make up a system where different fonts or type sizes or italics conveyed the same information.
What's not clear from such decisions is what happens when the 'creative' portion inspires someone else to do something different with regard to the facts portion. For example, someone could make a phonebook that used color to show all the businesses that were currently in litigation, or were minority owned, or some such - would the first phonebook maker's copyright restrict that someone? Once people start linking more than two groups of facts, or bring in different groups than tradition supports, is there significant creativity just from inclusion? (Everybody knows the standard business phonebook includes street addresses as well as names and numbers - is it significantly creative to also include e-addresses? Is it not sufficiently creative to include whether or not they are better business bureau members?).
He's thinking of Pascal, and he's using the simplified version of Pascal's wager, as the whole argument is more about whether you can still calculate probabilities if some of the terms are infinite than it's just about heaven and hell. Pascal practically invented the standard probability theorems, and explored the extremes of them pretty well for his era. Trivialising his accomplishments there is like explaining relativity as "Einstein proved everything's relative.".
You not only didn't get it, you're really proud of how you didn't get it.
Spirituality isn't about feelings at all, just like whether you're actually competent at something isn't about whether you feel competent. You wouldn't argue that intelligence isn't real just because some people think they are highly intelligent but are actually average at best, but you're apparently comfortable with claiming just that when it comes to spirit.
Accepting that there may not be any correlation between people's claims and their actual spiritual level means also accepting that there may be an objective dimension to spirit to cause that lack of correlation. If spirituality is an 'invisible unicorn', then Charles Manson is more spiritual than Mother Teresa - just read how each person rated themselves.
I don't think 'originally' applies. I'm old enough to remember the first movie premier, and the talk about sequels and such started in the press after the film proved to be an unexpected hit. The mention of multiple trilogies began after quite a few other rumors had circulated in the press for a few weeks, in a way that suggested, to me at least, that it wasn't really the plan all along but something the studio now wanted to claim. As Episode 5's pre-release hype built up, the line about 9 films was pushed a lot, maybe because the public would accept a whole film where the good guys mostly lose better, if it was seen as a smaller part of the whole.
I know the scrolling bit at the start of the original said Episode 4, but as Raiders of the Lost Ark proves, there was much interest at the time in recapturing some of the old Republic serial feel for films, and it builds dramatic tension by suggesting the film is part of a larger whole set in the same fictiverse. That doesn't prove much else in the fictiverse was even roughed out, let alone developed. Lucas's mental notes for the rest, at the time Episode 4 was released may have been just "It's a place where a lot of wars between whole planets have happened."
In the same way, lines from the first film, such as the reference to Obi-Wan knowing Luke's father from the Clone Wars, sound like throw away lines - where the writer in effect says to themselves "Let's see, I can't say they met in Nam, because it's Sci-Fi, and just saying they met in the war sounds too generic, so what do I call the frelling war?" Probably, when Lucas wrote the line, he had no particular idea why the war was called the Clone Wars, or which side the Clones were on, or any of that - it was just to present a surface gloss of verisimilitude. Writers do that when they don't plan on needing more detailed answers, then an unexpected demand for sequils leaves them looking back through the original script for things they can develop.
A good example of this might be the point in the original Matrix where Trinity tells Neo he's been down that road before. That line could have been used to spin off a matrix sequel very different from the ones we got, and the studio would doubtless have claimed that it was the plan all along if that had happened.
Star Wars veered away from 'dark and nasty' when they shied from the Midiclorian stuff. If Jedi were 'superior' because of an innate biological feature, the struggle became one where both sides were feeding the common people a mass of propaganda, and moral issues would be a mix of gray tones at best. It would still be possible to show one side as having better reasons to justify the propaganda than the other, and even to create audience empathy for the Jedi - after all, even if both sides were manipulating the general populace, only one side ended up blowing up whole planets. Still, the idea of Jedi who don't like to admit it's all about the Midiclorians even to themselves, and who take the 'controlling your emotions' philosophy to dangerous extremes as a result, would be a great basis for dense, nuanced scripts that would give good actors a chance to shine and, it's hoped, be remembered come Emmy time.
Not gonna happen, of course.
The bribes are big enough to keep the politician in hookers and blow perpetually.
Climate prediction generally works:
1. We have boundaries set on things such as tornado and hurricane seasons. That's a climate prediction. Total numbers of tornadoes and hurricanes fall inside certain limits - that's another one. Various parts of the world have similar rules for typhoons, noreasters, or whatever weather they have. Hurricane season coming at the same time every year is climate prediction. Calling some part of the US Tornado Alley is a climate prediction. Charts showing where the 100 year flood boundaries lie are climate predictions.
2. Climate prediction is also what we are doing when, for one example, we claim a season is an El Nino or La Nina in California. We don't have high reliability at predicting in advance what will come in a given year there, but we certainly do make a predicton that if we have certain conditions at the start of a season, they will persist for much more than just a couple of days, and equally, we predict a lot of interrelated results and they generally come in a strongly correlated bundle - i.e. El Ninos just about invariably mean more forest fires months after they begin, and have a fairly strong correlation with mudslide chances months after those fires, as well.
3. Farmers, foresters and the like in general rely on climate following established predictions, and those work well enough. Those predictions aren't of the form "Year X will be a drought", but nobody could cultivate a crop such as apples unless the prediction that, in a given locale, there won't be enough droughts in the next 30 years to kill off all the young apple trees, held up with very high reliability.
You realize, you've just been chewed out for not distinguishing what a distinguished scientist (Arthur C Clarke) said can't be distinguished.
Le Guin for the Win!
I think there will be demand for as many as six of them, worldwide.
Why either/or?
As in Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands..." series: Everyone lounges by the pool discussing philosophy and eating peeled grapes because the robots won the war and won't let the people do anything more active.
"No! No mountain-climbing for you! Too Risky! Eat your peeled grapes!"
A good example is the Wizard of Oz. When it was written, there was one word you obviously couldn't use as a rhyme for witch. So we end up with songwriters who use lots of alternates, working in hitch, pitch, twitch, ditch, itch, ... and then come up with clever ways to make those words fit well. I suspect that if the writers had enjoyed the modern artistic freedom to use a word like bitch, it would have left us with a song that had fewer total rhymes and less effort put into making those rhymes fit the narrative, and the whole film might have suffered for it.
But like you, I'm speculating that the alternatives all simply had to be worse, and I could be wrong.
Yes there are, and it's regrettable they have yoked their business to a larger business that sucks at the public teat, but they have. No one can make money playing a game with only one team on the field, so their profits are entirely a result of public subsidies, whether they have collected anything personally or not. Let me stress that - there are not enough teams who have avoided public doles to play a decent season, and NO franchisee is in a position to make a yearly profit without remaining linked by contract to the ones that have.
If its unfair to them, what about all the people who are facing criminal charges because they accepted goods from the persons who actually stole them, or drove a car for the persons who actually held up the jewelry store, or whatever. If civil penalties or taxation should not apply to these businesses just because of their choice of partners, how can we justify criminal penalties against some other people for no more tangential acts?
It's an OK analogy as far as it goes, but...
In most locations, renters do have some codified rights that limit what the landlord can do. Those rights are legal under the constitution for states or municipalities to set.
For copyright, there are some normal rights (fair use) that have not been formally codified enough and so don't really offer protection. There are other rights (first sale), that can't be protected by states or smaller locales any more because the Supreme court has held all copyright related law is federal only. So it's not entirely similar.
No, his 'problem' is he recognizes there are good and bad regulations, so saying 'it's because there's a regulation' is relatively meaningless, while explaining the actual root cause is much more meaningful.