Look up at the night sky (if you live in an urban/suburban area, you might need to head out for a brief vacation in the wilderness for this to have the proper effect). Now, tell me, are billion-trillion-to-one odds against coincidences happening around any one star in the universe particularly a barrier to those things happening somewhere (or many many somewheres) in the universe? And, by "anthropic principle" arguments, the only intelligent observers capable of understanding the rarity of coincidences leading to life and intelligence are also going to be "extraordinarily lucky" to live right where those coincidences happened. I say this as both a scientist and a Christian: the "it's trillions to one, so there's lots of uncertainty about naturalistic explanations" line is complete crap, since "trillions to one" means "virtually certain to happen a zillion times" in this big universe.
This paper wouldn't pass peer review (at least in any not-completely-flaky-pseudodcience-field; there's probably a "genetic semiotics and wild-ass futurism" journal where this would fit right in). One key thing that immediately entirely disqualifies it: there is absolutely no discussion of how/why they selected the six data point categories on their main plot ("prokaryotes," "eukaryotes," "worms," "fish," and "mammals"), or even what the points specifically refer to (what the hell are "worms"? there's a dozen phyla colloquially called that). In other words, "we pulled 6 random data points out of our ass that roughly lie on the log-linear line we want, and extrapolated conclusions from them."
Aside from the evidence (via gravitational lensing measurements) for dark-matter halos with distinctly different spatial distributions from known-matter galactic disks (loose "blobs" indicating different, extremely-weakly-interacting types of matter than the normal stuff that accretes into galactic disks). So, your "Occam's Razor" solution is that observed mass distributions (consistent with two types of matter, visible/interacting and "dark"/non-interacting except through gravity) are due to super-advanced civilizations Dyson-sphering a few times the observable mass of the universe, motoring out of the galactic disk, and conspiring to re-position themselves in distributions mimicking dark matter. How elegantly minimalistic.
So, lets see, in your examples, there's one big case (the UBS trader), another guy caught after *losing* giant chunks of money. The rest are "insider trading" cases, unrelated to the problem of policing crazy risky "unauthorized" trades within investment firms (and the associated types of fraud that the guy in the article got nailed for). Yes, the SEC can nail particularly stupid company insiders who tell their country club pals to buy right before the big corporate press release. However (and maybe I'm missing some in the giant laundry list of irrelevant examples you've provided), I don't see much evidence of ability to regulate (either by audits or firms turning in their own traders) against events like the one in this article (except where the gambler wins).
The critical "plot" in the article from which the age estimate is derived has 6 data points: "prokaryotes," "eukaryotes," "worms," "fish," and "mammals." Nowhere in the article is the selection criteria for these 6 particular categories explained. In other words, out of the hundreds of major categories of life which the authors might have chosen to plot, they arbitrarily pick 6 that vaguely fall on a log-linear line (with a bit of fudging for "functional, non-redundant genome"). Give me a big scattery cloud of hundreds of potential data points, and I can reach whatever conclusion you want with the proper selection of a half dozen.
The assumptions in the article are especially suspect, given the large number of quite well documented "explosions" of genetic diversity in Earth's history (see, e.g., the Cambrian Explosion for the biggest example, though there are plenty of lesser events), where gigantic leaps in genetic diversity appeared over (geologically) short timescales. An extrapolation assuming a generally smooth growth rate is simply untenable.
"just with no attendant publicity," i.e. with no one getting arrested, and no troublesome SEC scrutiny. The perpetrator just gets a nice wad of shut-up money, and a glowing recommendation letter for a job at his boss' most hated competitor firm. Or, perhaps a new job as a congressional staffer advising on financial regulation.
The fool is the one who thinks the SEC is capable of uniformly and comprehensively enforcing their rules, while being crippled by massive political pressure against regulation and managed by revolving-door Wall Street industry insiders. The fool also thinks that the "political people voted in by the masses" ever make it onto the election ballot without solid approval from the 1% (even if the 1% is divided on whether the (R) or (D) faction of the Oligopoly Capitalist party should win), or that their un-elected political appointees survive the confirmation process without passing the Disciples of Mammon religious tests.
That's the rule according to the SEC, but the SEC has largely been gutted of power to closely monitor and regulate what actually goes on. This guy is going to jail because his own investment firm outed him. If you're an investment firm boss, and one of your employees just lost you millions, you'll gladly blame the loss on a rogue employee (not standard firm operating procedures). But what if you just made millions? Is this when you announce to the world "no, we're not an especially clever investment firm, we just have dangerous loose cannons at our trading desks who got lucky this time."? Or, do you cover for your employee's actions; give him a nice bonus to keep quiet, and retire from the firm to a nice island mansion; and shuffle paperwork to keep the trading off the SEC's radar?
If all good traders knew this, then it wouldn't happen --- there'd be a rush to sell/short the stock, driving the price down *before* the earnings report. "Reliable rule of thumb" investment ideas like "Apple shares go down after earnings reports" always look great in hindsight --- until they don't.
Color me skeptical, but for some reason I doubt that a trader who recklessly threw a billion dollars on the stock market roulette table and *won* would be outed by his firm and sent to jail. Rather, he'd be the "ballsy financial genius" who'd be in charge of $10 billion next time. And of course, this type of perverse incentive system only encourages the next thrill-seeking gambling addict to try their own play. A few years in a minimum security white-collar slammer, versus the chance to take your cut of zillions in winnings gambling on others' money? Sounds like a gamble far too many "I earned my position by skill, not chance!" scamming scum would take.
Some people prepare for civilization's ultimate failure. Others prepare for civilization's ultimate success. Both groups make themselves helpless and terrified should the fantasy of the other come to fruition.
Shell shills' oil spills by the sea shore darken not Nantucket's back door; “green pow'r” of Jap bankers' billions melts the hearts of Hell's dark minions: Windfarms no longer pose an eyesore.
dontcha know, every bombing has taken place in a bomb-free zone? Make bombs illegal, and only criminals will have bombs. The only way to stop a bad guy with a bomb is a good guy with a bomb.
Maybe we'll catch the perps when someone makes a very angry call to Verizon customer service.
“What part of *instant* messaging don't you idiots understand! I had time-sensitive work-related business riding on that text! I demand my 15 cents back! Also, two other phones on my plan have suffered a bit of, umm, accidental damage; can I get the new iPhones now?”
Every Liberty-loving Real American Republican knows the right answer: require every able-bodied adult to carry bombs at all times. No whacko would think about bombing a crowd, if he knew everyone else would bomb him right back on the spot. A polite society is a bomb-throwing society!
Lay off the weed a bit, "ganjadude," it's making you paranoid but doing your analytical skills no favors. Benghazi was "never spoken about at all," except by just about every media pundit and political campaigner for months (whining on every prime-time TV media show about how there was no media coverage). Do you know anyone in this country who didn't hear endless re-hashes of the Benghazi attacks? So far as the Benghazi incident didn't prompt calls for immediate changes in domestic policy like Sandy Hook did, have you considered that might be because Benghazi isn't in the USA so there's fuck all changes to domestic policy that would be relevant to "preventing the next Benghazi"?
You're probably right about "unable to get their bombs to the location before this point". I suspect that access to finish line viewing locations when the winners are passing is indeed pretty hard to get --- probably reserved for VIPs and media, and only later accessible to the general public once the big excitement is over. Anyway, it indicates that the bombs weren't planted far in advance; probably not targeted at "somebody famous," either, since actual "VIP"s probably left hours ago before the general public could arrive to watch their friends/family cross the finish line.
Sounds like a safe bet for your half cent. What remotely likely explanations for this event wouldn't fit the description "crazed whackaloon"? Granted, there are all types of crazed whackaloons that this might be attributed to, but anyone who goes around blowing up random civilians is pretty much "crazed whackaloon" by definition (regardless of whatever other factors their motivations are also ascribed to).
It's several hours after the marathon winners have passed the finish line, so not timed to maximize "on air" publicity. However, the timing may be designed to maximize injury/death (since there will be a much denser crowd of slower runners a couple hours after the few top athletes trickle across the finish line).
My word choice of "sensibility" was selected for connotations both from ("incorrect") association with "common sense," but also with reference to care and compassion for impacts on the human subjects of the justice system. My concept of "justice" can ultimately not be abstracted from accountability to the pain and suffering of those oppressed by the cruelty of a "looks fine and just on paper" system.
Specifically, consider these definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:
3. Mental perception, awareness of something.
11b. Mindful of a person.
4a. Emotional consciousness; glad or sorrowful, grateful or resentful recognition of a person's conduct, or of a fact or a condition of things.
6. In the 18th and early 19th c. (afterwards somewhat rarely): Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art.
Let's set aside the fact that your response of "you don't need education because you're too stupid" is a complete non sequitur to the above argument about "you don't need education because you're already too damn smart," and focus on your point.
Some day, I'd like to live in a democracy, which means that *everyone* has the job of citizenship. That means every burger flipper should absolutely know way more about history, art, literature, mathematics, science, music, agriculture, and philosophy than they need to be a good wage slave who says "yes mastuh, would you like fries with that?". So long as burger flippers are necessary, I'd like to progress towards a world where they're *treated* as necessary (and are empowered by education to claim that victory). You remind me of the people who insisted that teaching slaves to read should be illegal, because it would be nothing but trouble. I want a world with more of that kind of trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up at the night sky (if you live in an urban/suburban area, you might need to head out for a brief vacation in the wilderness for this to have the proper effect). Now, tell me, are billion-trillion-to-one odds against coincidences happening around any one star in the universe particularly a barrier to those things happening somewhere (or many many somewheres) in the universe? And, by "anthropic principle" arguments, the only intelligent observers capable of understanding the rarity of coincidences leading to life and intelligence are also going to be "extraordinarily lucky" to live right where those coincidences happened. I say this as both a scientist and a Christian: the "it's trillions to one, so there's lots of uncertainty about naturalistic explanations" line is complete crap, since "trillions to one" means "virtually certain to happen a zillion times" in this big universe.
This paper wouldn't pass peer review (at least in any not-completely-flaky-pseudodcience-field; there's probably a "genetic semiotics and wild-ass futurism" journal where this would fit right in). One key thing that immediately entirely disqualifies it: there is absolutely no discussion of how/why they selected the six data point categories on their main plot ("prokaryotes," "eukaryotes," "worms," "fish," and "mammals"), or even what the points specifically refer to (what the hell are "worms"? there's a dozen phyla colloquially called that). In other words, "we pulled 6 random data points out of our ass that roughly lie on the log-linear line we want, and extrapolated conclusions from them."
Aside from the evidence (via gravitational lensing measurements) for dark-matter halos with distinctly different spatial distributions from known-matter galactic disks (loose "blobs" indicating different, extremely-weakly-interacting types of matter than the normal stuff that accretes into galactic disks). So, your "Occam's Razor" solution is that observed mass distributions (consistent with two types of matter, visible/interacting and "dark"/non-interacting except through gravity) are due to super-advanced civilizations Dyson-sphering a few times the observable mass of the universe, motoring out of the galactic disk, and conspiring to re-position themselves in distributions mimicking dark matter. How elegantly minimalistic.
So, lets see, in your examples, there's one big case (the UBS trader), another guy caught after *losing* giant chunks of money. The rest are "insider trading" cases, unrelated to the problem of policing crazy risky "unauthorized" trades within investment firms (and the associated types of fraud that the guy in the article got nailed for). Yes, the SEC can nail particularly stupid company insiders who tell their country club pals to buy right before the big corporate press release. However (and maybe I'm missing some in the giant laundry list of irrelevant examples you've provided), I don't see much evidence of ability to regulate (either by audits or firms turning in their own traders) against events like the one in this article (except where the gambler wins).
The critical "plot" in the article from which the age estimate is derived has 6 data points: "prokaryotes," "eukaryotes," "worms," "fish," and "mammals." Nowhere in the article is the selection criteria for these 6 particular categories explained. In other words, out of the hundreds of major categories of life which the authors might have chosen to plot, they arbitrarily pick 6 that vaguely fall on a log-linear line (with a bit of fudging for "functional, non-redundant genome"). Give me a big scattery cloud of hundreds of potential data points, and I can reach whatever conclusion you want with the proper selection of a half dozen.
Hey, at least it's a step up from people who use "exponentially" to mean anything that changes "a whole lot, really fast!".
The assumptions in the article are especially suspect, given the large number of quite well documented "explosions" of genetic diversity in Earth's history (see, e.g., the Cambrian Explosion for the biggest example, though there are plenty of lesser events), where gigantic leaps in genetic diversity appeared over (geologically) short timescales. An extrapolation assuming a generally smooth growth rate is simply untenable.
"just with no attendant publicity," i.e. with no one getting arrested, and no troublesome SEC scrutiny. The perpetrator just gets a nice wad of shut-up money, and a glowing recommendation letter for a job at his boss' most hated competitor firm. Or, perhaps a new job as a congressional staffer advising on financial regulation.
The fool is the one who thinks the SEC is capable of uniformly and comprehensively enforcing their rules, while being crippled by massive political pressure against regulation and managed by revolving-door Wall Street industry insiders. The fool also thinks that the "political people voted in by the masses" ever make it onto the election ballot without solid approval from the 1% (even if the 1% is divided on whether the (R) or (D) faction of the Oligopoly Capitalist party should win), or that their un-elected political appointees survive the confirmation process without passing the Disciples of Mammon religious tests.
That's the rule according to the SEC, but the SEC has largely been gutted of power to closely monitor and regulate what actually goes on. This guy is going to jail because his own investment firm outed him. If you're an investment firm boss, and one of your employees just lost you millions, you'll gladly blame the loss on a rogue employee (not standard firm operating procedures). But what if you just made millions? Is this when you announce to the world "no, we're not an especially clever investment firm, we just have dangerous loose cannons at our trading desks who got lucky this time."? Or, do you cover for your employee's actions; give him a nice bonus to keep quiet, and retire from the firm to a nice island mansion; and shuffle paperwork to keep the trading off the SEC's radar?
If all good traders knew this, then it wouldn't happen --- there'd be a rush to sell/short the stock, driving the price down *before* the earnings report. "Reliable rule of thumb" investment ideas like "Apple shares go down after earnings reports" always look great in hindsight --- until they don't.
You really think his trading firm would out him and send him to jail if he *made* money, instead of giving him a raise and a promotion?
Color me skeptical, but for some reason I doubt that a trader who recklessly threw a billion dollars on the stock market roulette table and *won* would be outed by his firm and sent to jail. Rather, he'd be the "ballsy financial genius" who'd be in charge of $10 billion next time. And of course, this type of perverse incentive system only encourages the next thrill-seeking gambling addict to try their own play. A few years in a minimum security white-collar slammer, versus the chance to take your cut of zillions in winnings gambling on others' money? Sounds like a gamble far too many "I earned my position by skill, not chance!" scamming scum would take.
Some people prepare for civilization's ultimate failure. Others prepare for civilization's ultimate success. Both groups make themselves helpless and terrified should the fantasy of the other come to fruition.
Shell shills' oil spills by the sea shore
darken not Nantucket's back door;
“green pow'r” of Jap bankers' billions
melts the hearts of Hell's dark minions:
Windfarms no longer pose an eyesore.
Burma Shave.
dontcha know, every bombing has taken place in a bomb-free zone? Make bombs illegal, and only criminals will have bombs. The only way to stop a bad guy with a bomb is a good guy with a bomb.
Maybe we'll catch the perps when someone makes a very angry call to Verizon customer service.
“What part of *instant* messaging don't you idiots understand! I had time-sensitive work-related business riding on that text! I demand my 15 cents back! Also, two other phones on my plan have suffered a bit of, umm, accidental damage; can I get the new iPhones now?”
Every Liberty-loving Real American Republican knows the right answer: require every able-bodied adult to carry bombs at all times. No whacko would think about bombing a crowd, if he knew everyone else would bomb him right back on the spot. A polite society is a bomb-throwing society!
Lay off the weed a bit, "ganjadude," it's making you paranoid but doing your analytical skills no favors. Benghazi was "never spoken about at all," except by just about every media pundit and political campaigner for months (whining on every prime-time TV media show about how there was no media coverage). Do you know anyone in this country who didn't hear endless re-hashes of the Benghazi attacks? So far as the Benghazi incident didn't prompt calls for immediate changes in domestic policy like Sandy Hook did, have you considered that might be because Benghazi isn't in the USA so there's fuck all changes to domestic policy that would be relevant to "preventing the next Benghazi"?
You're probably right about "unable to get their bombs to the location before this point". I suspect that access to finish line viewing locations when the winners are passing is indeed pretty hard to get --- probably reserved for VIPs and media, and only later accessible to the general public once the big excitement is over. Anyway, it indicates that the bombs weren't planted far in advance; probably not targeted at "somebody famous," either, since actual "VIP"s probably left hours ago before the general public could arrive to watch their friends/family cross the finish line.
Sounds like a safe bet for your half cent. What remotely likely explanations for this event wouldn't fit the description "crazed whackaloon"? Granted, there are all types of crazed whackaloons that this might be attributed to, but anyone who goes around blowing up random civilians is pretty much "crazed whackaloon" by definition (regardless of whatever other factors their motivations are also ascribed to).
It's several hours after the marathon winners have passed the finish line, so not timed to maximize "on air" publicity. However, the timing may be designed to maximize injury/death (since there will be a much denser crowd of slower runners a couple hours after the few top athletes trickle across the finish line).
My word choice of "sensibility" was selected for connotations both from ("incorrect") association with "common sense," but also with reference to care and compassion for impacts on the human subjects of the justice system. My concept of "justice" can ultimately not be abstracted from accountability to the pain and suffering of those oppressed by the cruelty of a "looks fine and just on paper" system.
Specifically, consider these definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:
3. Mental perception, awareness of something.
11b. Mindful of a person.
4a. Emotional consciousness; glad or sorrowful, grateful or resentful recognition of a person's conduct, or of a fact or a condition of things.
6. In the 18th and early 19th c. (afterwards somewhat rarely): Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art.
Let's set aside the fact that your response of "you don't need education because you're too stupid" is a complete non sequitur to the above argument about "you don't need education because you're already too damn smart," and focus on your point.
Some day, I'd like to live in a democracy, which means that *everyone* has the job of citizenship. That means every burger flipper should absolutely know way more about history, art, literature, mathematics, science, music, agriculture, and philosophy than they need to be a good wage slave who says "yes mastuh, would you like fries with that?". So long as burger flippers are necessary, I'd like to progress towards a world where they're *treated* as necessary (and are empowered by education to claim that victory). You remind me of the people who insisted that teaching slaves to read should be illegal, because it would be nothing but trouble. I want a world with more of that kind of trouble.
Casio F-91W FTW. $9, and comes with a coupon for one free admission to Guantanamo Bay.