Few people in the world can play baseball like Barry Bonds
I already demonstrated that every person with a functional body can play baseball like Barry Bonds. I also highlighted the physiological differences which support or hamper performance. Take any person with the same or better athletic advantages and don't give him the procedural training (even baseball has strategy and execution technique) and you will get someone not-as-good; take someone who is not physically capable of performing at or above the level of Barry Bonds and train him correctly and you still have a star baseball player--and a bunch of peanut-gallery idiots talking about how said star baseball player has some special, innate talent they could never have, even though he's not quit the next Babe Ruth or Cal Ripken. A team of such people would hold their own against a team of Barry Bondses, although they might not *win* (at least not consistently).
You are very firmly maintaining a counter-intuitive claim.
That the earth is not flat is counter-intuitive.
It's intuitively obvious that some people are better at other things than others.
We have words like "Expertise" and "Practice".
You say that everyone has the same brain anatomy, but that's about as true as saying that everyone has the same skeletal anatomy, so that doesn't support your claim.
Except it does. You aren't doomed to be a 1/1000th fraction of the athlete some super-stall basketball player is; maybe 998/1000, if you put some effort into becoming a well-trained basketball player. There have been professional sports teams built out of the cheap, lower-tier players, coached to operate as an effective team, trained to be the best players they can be, and competitive enough to win national series once in a while. Not quite as good as the purified, distilled structure of a rigorously-selected set of runners with 1.5cm longer legs, but serviceable as *almost* there.
Let's put this back in perspective: You're claiming some people are just bad at maths, others are just good at maths, and no amount of studying nor application of technique will ever make a person bad at maths into a person able to grasp and operate mathematical concepts well above the average population. That's simply not true.
So, what support do you have for your claim?
The research of K. Anders Ericsson into the study of expertise; the general study on the subject of skill development in the field of cognitive science; the generally higher performance of students sent into high-performance private school programs and given private tutors.
We could try your way: education is a farce, it can't be improved, and the best way to educate is to throw material at students. No study methods will ever improve retention or material grasp; people are either born programmers, chemists, or burger flippers. That would, of course, be ludicrous.
You make a logical proposition that education isn't a technology and cannot be improved. You also make a proposition that humans have evolved (or been granted by God) to genetically be predisposed to things like computers, machines, and nuclear engineering. It's plain backwards.
I read a paper claiming that anyone can become a memorist (i.e., one with a really really good memory), and the experimenter concluded that anyone could, based on careful training of a group of subjects, precisely one of whom met the standards, and disregarding the ones that didn't.
I've read similar papers, except they've done this with tens of thousands of people, with arbitrary classrooms, with children, with adults, with different fields of study, and so forth. They've found that certain techniques do, in fact, produce results not just above what's expected, but above the field average or even the field maximum.
That's a damaged human. You could also say all passenger cars have 4 wheels (true), and then point out that some idiot unbolted his wheels and put the car on blocks.
People vary tremendously in their natural talents
Talent is a myth. A child exposed to watercolor at a young age and then not discouraged will develop into an artist.
I almost went that route, but my teachers flipped out on me in first grade when I was drawing multi-element scenes (background, multiple foreground actors, action) during class and told me to never draw. They instilled that academics are good and arts are bad, and I stopped. I'm now not artistically inclined at all; I keep trying to learn, but drawing is hard and I've never bothered with it enough to get anywhere near what my 6-year-old self could do with pencils or watercolor.
While we're laying out anecdote: I also used to be an expert mathematician, in high school. I got good grades in math because I would look at the math people gave me and intuit further math, rather than reading ahead in the book; I solidly understood the material because I *invented* most of it independently instead of paying attention in class. The fact that I never did homework and never got anything wrong on my tests frustrated my second statistics teacher; the first was fired after our class argued with him enough (he was wrong--a lot). I also correctly intuited that three lines of the same magnitude are a single, specific triangle, and so used direct trigonometry to solve tension problems in physics rather than going through all the vector analysis bullshit; my physics teacher still doesn't know why that works, and won't teach that method because he's never seen it used anywhere else.
I swore off math 12 years ago and I am now bad at math. Very bad at math. I'm trying to fix that; and I'm only slowly making progress. The good news is I'm also finding the triggers: I like theory. Computer science theory, mathematics theory, neurology theory... I put less effort into practical skills and more into having the answer for *everything*, hence why I can ramble on about compiler design, OS design, CPU architecture, programming design, and the like, and I'm a useless programmer despite knowing more about programming than *actual* *programmers*. I'm using that for some reframing; ultimately I want to get good at math and programming. (I'm rolling a lot of my project management knowledge into the study of programming as well; there's much overlap.)
If you can find a reason I differ from general population, you can classify all of my behaviors and identify if there's a pattern with people who differ in the same way as I do. Funny enough, retarded kids in a certain class--the educable retarded--are known to be fixable in large part. We have a huge variation of special education programs in the United States. Some of them, unfortunately, just babysit your retarded child; a few are honestly dedicated to maximizing success, and they go well beyond giving special attention to each child, instead determining how to interact with the child well, and how to motivate them to self-improvement, and then fill in the gaps in their natural abilities. A lot of those kids come out *normal*; often they have to rely so much on structuring their thought processes and interactions that they come out appearing more intelligent than normal kids, simply because normal kids don't have the benefit of a well-trained, structured thought process.
Of course we have the severely autistic, the kids we just can't reach; and we have kids whose brains never developed, and are missing entire neurological organs. If you're missing the hipocampus, you're not physically capable of using your memory effectively--new memories aren't directly accessible, and there's *some* evidence that long-term habits form while facts and events get kind of lost. If your language center grew in deformed, you're not going to learn to speak well unless your brain repurposes anoth
Are they all removed from their parents at birth and put into the same environment to face the same stimulus?
Athletics are different. Your anatomy is tall, short, long-legged, prone to more fatty or more muscular development, and so forth. Every single person in the world can play baseball like Barry Bonds: we can all swing a bat and run; some of us will expend more or less energy to reach the same training state, or to perform more or less well. If you have a long stride (which is controlled by skeletal structure), you're going to run fast with less energy.
Just as all humans have arms, legs, eyes, and the ability to physically coordinate themselves and develop strength, they all have the same brain anatomy. Do you honestly think you're using the most efficient mathematical computation algorithms your brain can deploy? Have you internalized the mechanical act of computation? Can you rapidly perform arithmetic calculations while playing word games?
Do you really think normal people can't learn to do this?
Your brain has to conceive a non-default action in the prefrontal cortex, then direct the midbrain by expending energy (ATP) and neurotransmitters (notably, acetylcholine) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The fatigue limit of the dlPFX is called "willpower" in scientific papers, and the reduction of load is called "motivation". Motivation is affected by interests, reframing, and so forth.
So if you're *interested* in math, you need less energy to study it well, because passing mathematical theory in front of you triggers a distraction response: you respond to it like most people respond to food, sex, or video games. Same with music, art, biology, cooking, and so forth.
You can otherwise decrease the energy required to study math, computers, or anything else by adjusting the brain's habitual impulses. Studying on a schedule works by making you impulsively study at a particular time--even if you hate the material, it feels like what you're supposed to do, and it takes effort to *not* do it. Setting a schedule is hard (you have to force yourself to do it for weeks before it sticks); repeatedly setting schedules as your requirements change causes your brain to rewire itself to change schedules more efficiently. This is why many highly-successful people have strong time management skills: developing those skills gives you the ability to more-readily develop other skills.
You observe that things are easier for some people than others; that doesn't mean people aren't capable of learning and doing. Life isn't that simple.
All humans are basically interchangeable; and the spread of environments and the needs of economics carves them into different refined tools. A computer scientist is not a doctor of internal medicine; however, given the demand for one or the other over long time scales, the stock of humans produces both in appropriate quantities.
At a time, 90% of humans were farmers; farming is complex and relies on an enormous amount of technical skill and experience (the practical effect of which is often interpreted as intuition), and a computer scientist or rocket surgeon is not a very good farmer. Today, we have many more doctors, lawyers, and IT workers than farmers; even the proportion of our population performing high-level scientific research is enormous compared to the 1800s.
Note that these people get where they are by exposure to environment. They develop social interests, and attach to ideals. The needs of the world changes what ideals are exposed, and how those ideals progress: a person interested in animals may become a dog trainer, a veterinary technician, or a genetic biologist. We like to think our interests demonstrate our intelligence, but often we find overfilled markets and IT workers as french fry technicians.
You should also notice the inherent mechanism in the original proposition: we need grocery baggers, burger flippers, and automechanics (although automechanics are more highly-skilled than baggers; we just don't like getting our hands dirty, and so like to look down on people whose work involves digging around in a grimy, oily engine instead of thinking up how to design said engine in a computer simulation for someone else to manufacture). Demand comes from buying power, which ultimately comes from labor and the ability to trade that labor--and from efficient labor (this is why technology makes societies richer). That means whatever we can buy is what we need, and what we *can't* buy is what we don't get--meaning there are rich, poor, middle-class, the unemployed, and so forth.
We can improve society's hierarchy; we can't raise everyone to an identical state, or an identical standard of living, or any other such nonsense. Welfare became possible at a certain wealth level in 19th-century Europe; today, some highly-developed countries are exceeding diminishing returns from welfare and minimum-wage strategies, and can establish a stronger and more stable economy (and outright eliminate homelessness and hunger) with newer strategies; but no current or future incremental progress is going to create the strange Marxist-Utopian dream of a society with no work and great abundance of wealth for all. Each technical increment divides work further, allowing men to produce more in the same time, allowing us to pay a smaller fraction of their (and our) wages for each thing, and to afford many more things with our wage; this requires the continuous repurposing of labor, and both causes and makes possible (and relatively harmless) the growth of an income gap.
Most people react to change with fear (running backwards) or immature excitement (diving over the edge). Society is always changing, so you always have a modern, overstimulated, liberal idealism competing with an archaic, backwards, conservative idealism. You also get centrists who are deluded (or dishonest) in the belief that an average between the extremes is automatically better; *very* few actually analyze the current state and determine if a changing paradigm is appropriate.
You might find your field easier if you move to a silicone compound. Some silicones have good deformation characteristics and will seal with minimal contact pressure; they don't degrade with (reasonable) temperature changes or wet-dry cycling, and they hold up to abrading pretty well. Teflon-coated rubber or silicone is also an option for high-temperature seals.
The adapter would add a thin, weak connection point which, if leaned on, would experience high torque and damage either the phone port or the connector. The greatest length of a 3.5mm connector is *inside* the phone body.
An adapter would need to decode a digital signal, which requires first processing the packet-encoded signal to a line-digital signal, then feeding it through a DAC. You need the equivalent of an Arduino minimal model, packed in a small case. It needs to negotiate power, control noise (EMI shielding and grounding topologies), and clock itself. To put this into perspective: a YMF289 and YAC512 (OPL3 and DAC) cost about $3.25 together; to couple the digital output on the YMF289 to the digital input of the YAC512, you need about $39 of discrete components. It all starts with a quartz crystal coupled using a resistor and a capacitor into the YMF; the YMF has a pin that emits the same signal at 1/2 frequency, which is unstable if not properly coupled to the YAC.
So think £6 of chips (a DAC and a microcontroller) and £10-£12 of discrete components (SMT capacitors, resistors, a crystal to provide a timing signal for the uC and DAC, and inductors in the power supply chain), circuit boards, and plastic casing. With bulk ordering of rolls of SMT, they might get it down to £12 overall. It's still going to break off or damage your phone.
This is only so if all human brains are identical -- which is demonstrably not so even with regard to basics like total mass.
So all humans being able to operate tools is only true if all humans have identical hands?
Hint: a Zilog Z80 can 100% perfectly emulate an AMD Athlon 64, but very slowly.
As to poverty==dumb, I have probably known more smart poor people than smart rich people. And economic stats indicate that at least in America, poverty is not a permanent condition; most "poor" people rise above it at some point (and some "rich" people descend to it); if poverty dictated low intelligence, this couldn't happen.
I invite you to go take a first-year community college program in statistics and probability and come back and say something not-stupid.
Seriously. Let's try this tactic: I've known girls who suck a lot of cocks, therefore all girls are sluts and there is no such thing as rape. That follows the same logical reasoning you just used.
I took an IQ test and scored 135, failing every single abstract question but absolutely nailing every clearly-proposed logical question. I took another one a few years later, after learning analogical thinking; abstract concepts are now broken down and compared to other concepts, and then the common functions are treated as familiar. 150. In practice, hitting 160 isn't hard; you just have to get every single question right.
IQ tests often rely on subtlety, time pressure, and complexity. They're designed to require careful, direct analysis of propositions with a time limit. That means multiple failure points: you fail to apply the right mental strategy, you get a question wrong; you fail to recognize the subtle details of the proposition, you analyze it incorrectly; you fail to keep track of multiple propositions and several interdependent variables, you mis-analyze; you get stressed over time, you make more mistakes; you hyperfocus, you run out of time. Even Culture Fair 3 uses things like pattern matching and distorted geometric shapes (which box is biggest? Hint: it's an optical illusion; if you're not familiar with optical illusions as a concept, you won't recognize that the seemingly-simple question is checking to see if you're dumb enough to pick the obvious, wrong answer, because why would you think that?).
I've been on and off studying the style of tests Mensa uses. I can't, by default, beat Mensa scores; or at least I couldn't when I was 16. I've now come to understand more about how IQ tests work, and can recognize and classify many of the questions as familiar, and so my scores have improved. Interestingly, I've gotten dumber over time due to allowing my executive functions to slip.
While there is informed disagreement about how heritable intelligence is, there is no reasonable argument that it is not heritable at all.
The grandparent poster claimed IQ is dominated by heredity and only a small portion is environmental.
I've thought this about the general Internet, too. I've often proposed a thought experiment about Facebook charging $1/year and having no ads (seriously, it's like 1.65 billion users; that's revenue equivalent to 1/38 of Warren Buffet's net worth, every year), and people often gripe that nobody would buy it (I think this is a case of the customer not knowing what he wants--they bought What'sApp).
I've also thought about a delivery method for shared paywall access akin to Spotify for the Internet: you pay $10/month and all partnered sites cross-check via OAUTH2; the site gets a valid log-in and no tracking information, while the service gets to notate what you access. All site operators receive a share of that $10/month weighted based on their viewership per day. No more WSJ/NYT paywalls.
We like to think a lot of things about business profit, and the truth is businesses are expensive to run and make little profit (even Comcast makes barely over 10% as a 5-year running average; the Adidas shoe company makes 4% as a 10-year average, and takes as much as a 7% loss every 2-3 years). I know running a Web site to support 1 user does *not* cost $10/month; the entire DigitalOcean server to service 50,000 requests per second costs $6/month with backups. I don't know the cost of content generation; however, I've seen news teams of 26 people managing national and regional *Web* content, handling big projects for campaigns, and so forth, and they make a good $60k or more each--that's over $1.5 million. At $10/month per user, that's 13 million viewers required to support the jobs of not even 30 people. WSJ has 2.4 million and USA Today has 1.7 million subscribers, and WSJ laid off ~40 employees in 2014, so chew on that for a while.
Youtube is a user-generated content site. It's impossible to police all user-generated content without adding massive costs--just running the site at a given capacity is a drop in the bucket compared to policing the site at that capacity. Perhaps this is why the content creators aren't doing so themselves. Any open platform granting individual access on such a large scale--the entire Internet itself, for example--will have these problems; we can see this in peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire or Gnutella, which require no central authority, and will probe the Internet or use a shipped, pre-discovered list of known Gnutella peers to discover *other* peers.
On the other side, people are now unwilling to pay high mark-ups for music. They're consuming through streaming services, which are shipping more music at decreased revenues. The cost of distribution itself is lower, and the IP holders pay almost no cost--not to press CDs, not to ship the product, not to handle logistics. They handle production and licensing, and the per-customer costs are offloaded and *minimal*. That means scaling, which used to be expensive, is now free; and licensing fees are pure revenue. It also means a huge revenue stream is now facing market pressure driving prices down, converting lower costs into lower prices rather than massive profits.
The point was more that Wikipedia doesn't say IQ is most-strongly driven by genetics; it says there's a correlation, and the impact appears indirect, and the degree of direct vs indirect impact is not well-understood.
I've been passively interested in learning and intelligence for a while, and my understanding is each animal brain has a certain set of facilities. Cats have different intelligence than dogs because their brains are physically capable of perceiving and analyzing spatial and semantic data in different ways; likewise, humans have much-stronger spatial and semantic processing, including a well-developed language center that can associate semantic information (e.g. verbal information analyzed from speech) with spatial and conceptual information (concrete objects or abstract ideas), allowing for things like analogical thinking. Raccoons and octopuses can perform spatial analysis rivaling even humans. These are attributes of the brain's structure and anatomy; it's not a mass of arbitrary intelligence.
Consequentially, all humans with the same facilities are capable of the same understanding. As well, performance of the brain is mainly moderated by usage: the brain will restructure itself to minimize energy consumption of common thought processes, and certain processes of thought are more efficient than others for a given problem set. For example: memorizing multiplication tables and addition complements will let you perform arithmetic computations more quickly; learning special techniques leveraging these memorized values will reduce the number of steps and, thus, the effort (and time) required to perform such calculations; and repeatedly practicing these calculations for 15-30 minutes per day for several months will adjust the brain to automatically and reliably perform those computations with those techniques, meaning mental arithmetic becomes easy and rapid. All humans are capable of this to the same degree of success.
How inclined any given human is to put in effort to develop a mental skill is a different matter. Human willpower is limited by the energy capacity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which allows the forebrain to direct the midbrain to perform non-default actions. Under stress, humans have a lower capacity for intelligence and learning. Poverty is a form of such stress. As well, without the basic interest and motivation, and with easier alternatives, humans are to varying degrees remiss to expend energy learning and developing. Humans expend less energy learning in pursuit of a concrete goal (e.g. a human will become good at something which provides a recognized reward for the effort, as their default behavior is to *pursue* that reward), and so a human's basic, self-perceived interest in learning something has an enormous impact on the individual's ability to learn. Similarly, given a difficult alternative (not a punishment) and a less-difficult alternative, a human will take the negative-reinforcement path; if avoiding learning and education requires active effort, a human becomes more inclined to learn even with no direct motivation.
Because of all of this, environmental and genetic impacts are the subject of hot debate. The above should make it clear why highly-developed civilizations with strong educational facilities tend to have higher baseline intelligence than lower-developed civilizations: it's hard to *avoid* education in one, and hard to *get* an education in another. If you're inclined to be an idiot in one case, there are limits on that; and if you're inclined to be a genius in another case, there's no support for that.
This is why I tell people genius is just technique: any idiot is physically capable of rendering himself blindingly intelligent. Whether he wants to--and whether it's worth bothering--is a different matter.
Moral? MORAL?! You're talking about a situation where the person doing the copying is *incapable* of paying for the work, but where their access to the work doesn't incur a cost to the creator. The *moral* thing to do is called "charity", since in this case it costs you literally nothing.
We can talk about the very real costs of developing and maintaining software all day, and the delusions of people who think they're not impacting anyone by not buying software; and we also have to acknowledge that people who think they're somehow losing something because someone with $5 downloaded a $600 copy of Photoshop off BIttorrent are *also* delusional. Legality is a different matter, as are secondary effects.
Intellectual property is an enormously complex topic. Every piece of physical property requires the direct labor of its creator, and so is produced by time (and effort, but effort can only be spent in strict units of time; it cannot be stocked), and so is definitively the property of *someone*. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is also the direct product of somebody's labor; its distribution requires so little labor that it can be shared for minimal cost and garner a hugely-efficient return, so much so that *other* *people* can share your intellectual property without outlaying much of any effort on their part (sometimes none: turning your radio up *performs* a song in public--an intellectual property liability!). The original creator deserves compensation; broad distribution at a low cost *easily* overcompensates the creator for their IP, meaning most compensation is economic rent; and a lack of intellectual property controls tends to lead to second-hand distribution of IP, depriving the creator of their rightful compensation entirely. This creates *tons* of concrete economic and fluffy philosophical points of contention, and not a lot of good answers.
Mixed in with that mess is the obvious value proposition: a person incapable of paying for intellectual property is not capable of depriving the IP creator of anything by making personal use of the IP creator's IP, as that person can gain access to the IP without costing the creator anything *and* would be incapable of rightfully compensating the IP creator. That, again, still leaves legal issues and secondary effects (it's okay for him, so it's okay for me--culture of piracy), and this line of reasoning only applies to the original user of the IP.
Wikipedia says the genetic basis of IQ is a huge subject of debate. Everything it cites for genetic influence of IQ says that IQ appears as if it should be heritable, and suggests a mechanism of inheritance of environment--that people inherit genetics that cause them to zombie-walk into a certain type of environment, which then has its environmental impacts on IQ.
Denying access to a low-IQ environment would, by that logic, cause high IQ development. That means a strong school system would produce high-IQ individuals; and that technically-poor countries with no environment conducive to a high IQ would only develop low-IQ individuals.
Poor people are dumber. This is because poor people have not been exposed to the environmental factors which cultivate intelligence. Poor people can't afford to buy expensive software. Countries in which the highest rate of survival goes to rape gangs and drug smuggling networks would have the highest rate of software piracy.
Of course it's not a zero-sum game. Some actions cut back on accessibility of tradable labor (reducing jobs), others improve output. Technical progress, for example, increases output per labor-hour, thus increasing consumer buying power (you work the same hours, but make twice as much stuff; you take your pay for working 40 hours and go to buy from the other guy, who also works 40 hours, and makes twice as much stuff; you only have to pay him for *half* as many of his working hours to buy the same stuff from him, so you can buy twice as much stuff).
Yeah, I like the law--short-term renting of apartments as such drives up the spot value of housing and creates an opportunity for economic rent seeking behavior--but I hate the reasoning. Community? Who the fuck cares about community? You live in an apartment a) to listen in on your neighbors having sex; or b) to have girls come in without the whole neighborhood seeing whose door they're going to. If you wanted peace and quiet or a neon sign above your back door that says "Yes it's the fifth girl this week!", you'd live in a house--unless you're too poor for that, although I've found ghetto rent often has a security deposit the size of the mortgage down payment, and rent twice or more the 15-year mortgage ($421/mo mortgage here, rent for the same house and others on the block was $1150/mo).
Also we had a girl on the first floor who would moan differently depending on which guy was banging her, and she had 4 guys in the same week. The neighbors got like 40 noise violations on her; she was sort of a building celebrity. Welcome to apartment life, where you don't know your neighbors, but you know when they're gone.
The one big thing here no one is mentioning so far: how do the scalpers have a market? If people are willing to pay "many times over face value" then the scalpers are just recognizing what the market will bear.
That's called "economic rent". It has a few impacts.
With the lessened consumer buying power, fewer jobs are available. Tickets become more expensive, and so your average consumer now has less money to spend. That money, when spent on goods, creates a need to produce those goods, which creates employment; when the cost-per-good increases, the proportion of all incomes spent on that good increases, and diverts away from other goods. Because income is both made and spent over time (e.g. per year), the enrichment of one person at the expense of ten others doesn't translate to that one person then creating ten more jobs.
This effect is likely less-pronounced in specific markets because there's more of a spreading effect, e.g. a minimum-wage increase raises the cost of a great many goods (by a *tiny* individual amount--think paying 8 cents more at McDonalds for your whole order, not the Conservative apocalypse of a $20 hamburger or the Liberal utopia of businesses just paying the wages out of profits), and the wage recipients must pay that additional cost on almost everything they buy, thus there is a direct loss of buying power; by contrast, *most* of the income gained by ticket scalping is likely spent on a broad set of goods, concert tickets being a minimum proportion of that, and thus in isolation the scalpers are basically making *someone* poorer but not degrading the general buying power of the economy to as great a degree. It would be different if 40% of the income in the cycle of spending of those moved dollars went to buying scalped concert tickets.
(The same basic argument applies to taxes: the people involved in making goods must get paid, and part of that pay goes to taxes; thus the consumer's take-home buying power is less than the total cost of his employment, and his ability to pay the proportional wages of anything he buys is diminished by as much. There is valid reasoning behind both taxes and minimum wages, although I continue to argue that minimum wages are outdated. This discussion of economic rent is a large stretch beyond my normal territory, and the same rules don't apply nearly as firmly.)
In a more direct sense, those concerned with the concert may consider scalping as a form of theft. Concert-goers have less money, and so can't spend it on t-shirts, mugs, signed CDs, and other paraphernalia they'd normally buy. The concert's total revenue is reduced, and the scalper receives the proceeds.
Depends on how you structure it. That up there is a lot to read; it's not a lot to say. You can abridge some of the numbers, let Trump try to call your bluff, then dump more numbers (that happens when you just say something like, "Over the past 15 years with millions of Muslim immigrants, all we've found is that any given American is twenty times as likely to murder you as the next Muslim immigrant!"). Taking the bait on a bluff like that gets the audience smiling and waiting to see what ridiculous shit your opponent pulls out... unless they pull out something concrete.
As for making a funny comeback, well... that works equally as well both ways. If Trump draws up this mean dialogue about how Mexicans will rape your 8-year-old daughter and then stuff her full of cocaine to traffic over the border, a silly quip about how Trump seems disturbingly obsessed with sticking things in third-grade girls will come off as flippant and uncaring. It belittles the audience, because it's a blatant grab for their attention and support; you need some kind of substance. Part of it also relies on how well you can show, and a couple jokers doesn't work too well; the risk of being *the* joker is your opponent might just call you on it, pointing out that you're showing a lack of real concern for real issues--in other words, claiming that you don't really care about the things the audience finds important, and thus that you don't stand with them.
I've dealt with a lot of people who argue that the checklist is the only thing important. I've brought up the concept of identifying our assets, determining their importance, and creating trust zones and access controls based on that; people just roll their eyes and point out that the general NAS only allows finance to access the high-sensitivity finance share, and marketing to access marketing shares, etc. Put the finance NAS behind an ASA that does subnet and domain logon checking so that only certain groups in certain subnets can access it? Rubbish.
Yes, modern ASAs will do this: a server can be in some subnet and firewalled based on that, and the firewall can also ask a nearby Domain Controller who is logged into that PC. If it's not someone in Finance, it's also firewalled. Strict firewalls and inline malware protections such as Fortigate's firewall-AV or Sourcefire AMP reduce the risk of malware spread across the network; and, more simply, if Finance has its own NAS, then a malware infection spreading to the NAS used by Sales (as in: physically becoming an active process on the Windows server host) won't be able to use any elevated privileges to write to all other shares (Finance, Accounting, Marketing) and replace document files with malware! That's a scenario I've seen in real life: a worm got admin privileges, uploaded itself to a file share, and replaced every.docx and.pdf with a.docx.exe that infected the client and opened the original file as expected--and the same share storing all of Finance and Accounting's data also stored the roaming profile for the people at the front reception desk!
You'll notice these things aren't unbreachable; they're damned inconvenient to breach, and slow down (or halt) automated spreads. An active hacker can wiggle his way through if he can get domain admin credentials. The scope of blunt port scanning and network service (and client) discovery is sharply reduced; actually *finding* resources to attack is hard; and you gain some time and efficiency at stopping malware spread or closing the hole an active adversary used to gain primary access. It makes a huge difference in the scope of damage left after a breach, and generates additional information during an on-going breach so that you can detect and react to the event more rapidly.
Everybody just wants to say, "Oh, we had some trouble with Trend Micro, so we installed Sophos!" It sounds like they're doing something, even though they have production finance databases running on the same VMware host as DMZ public-facing services with public IPs, with just some VNICs having a public, unfirewalled IP address and other VNICs being in an internal VLAN--there's no way a blunt, unfiltered, bare Internet port connected to a VMware server could pose a threat, right? Physically-separate trust zones are just work.
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If Comcast ran at zero profit and reduced the cost of all their services proportionally, the $80/mo internet service would be $72/month.
Few people in the world can play baseball like Barry Bonds
I already demonstrated that every person with a functional body can play baseball like Barry Bonds. I also highlighted the physiological differences which support or hamper performance. Take any person with the same or better athletic advantages and don't give him the procedural training (even baseball has strategy and execution technique) and you will get someone not-as-good; take someone who is not physically capable of performing at or above the level of Barry Bonds and train him correctly and you still have a star baseball player--and a bunch of peanut-gallery idiots talking about how said star baseball player has some special, innate talent they could never have, even though he's not quit the next Babe Ruth or Cal Ripken. A team of such people would hold their own against a team of Barry Bondses, although they might not *win* (at least not consistently).
You are very firmly maintaining a counter-intuitive claim.
That the earth is not flat is counter-intuitive.
It's intuitively obvious that some people are better at other things than others.
We have words like "Expertise" and "Practice".
You say that everyone has the same brain anatomy, but that's about as true as saying that everyone has the same skeletal anatomy, so that doesn't support your claim.
Except it does. You aren't doomed to be a 1/1000th fraction of the athlete some super-stall basketball player is; maybe 998/1000, if you put some effort into becoming a well-trained basketball player. There have been professional sports teams built out of the cheap, lower-tier players, coached to operate as an effective team, trained to be the best players they can be, and competitive enough to win national series once in a while. Not quite as good as the purified, distilled structure of a rigorously-selected set of runners with 1.5cm longer legs, but serviceable as *almost* there.
Let's put this back in perspective: You're claiming some people are just bad at maths, others are just good at maths, and no amount of studying nor application of technique will ever make a person bad at maths into a person able to grasp and operate mathematical concepts well above the average population. That's simply not true.
So, what support do you have for your claim?
The research of K. Anders Ericsson into the study of expertise; the general study on the subject of skill development in the field of cognitive science; the generally higher performance of students sent into high-performance private school programs and given private tutors.
We could try your way: education is a farce, it can't be improved, and the best way to educate is to throw material at students. No study methods will ever improve retention or material grasp; people are either born programmers, chemists, or burger flippers. That would, of course, be ludicrous.
You make a logical proposition that education isn't a technology and cannot be improved. You also make a proposition that humans have evolved (or been granted by God) to genetically be predisposed to things like computers, machines, and nuclear engineering. It's plain backwards.
I read a paper claiming that anyone can become a memorist (i.e., one with a really really good memory), and the experimenter concluded that anyone could, based on careful training of a group of subjects, precisely one of whom met the standards, and disregarding the ones that didn't.
I've read similar papers, except they've done this with tens of thousands of people, with arbitrary classrooms, with children, with adults, with different fields of study, and so forth. They've found that certain techniques do, in fact, produce results not just above what's expected, but above the field average or even the field maximum.
As for the field of memory t
That's a damaged human. You could also say all passenger cars have 4 wheels (true), and then point out that some idiot unbolted his wheels and put the car on blocks.
People vary tremendously in their natural talents
Talent is a myth. A child exposed to watercolor at a young age and then not discouraged will develop into an artist.
I almost went that route, but my teachers flipped out on me in first grade when I was drawing multi-element scenes (background, multiple foreground actors, action) during class and told me to never draw. They instilled that academics are good and arts are bad, and I stopped. I'm now not artistically inclined at all; I keep trying to learn, but drawing is hard and I've never bothered with it enough to get anywhere near what my 6-year-old self could do with pencils or watercolor.
While we're laying out anecdote: I also used to be an expert mathematician, in high school. I got good grades in math because I would look at the math people gave me and intuit further math, rather than reading ahead in the book; I solidly understood the material because I *invented* most of it independently instead of paying attention in class. The fact that I never did homework and never got anything wrong on my tests frustrated my second statistics teacher; the first was fired after our class argued with him enough (he was wrong--a lot). I also correctly intuited that three lines of the same magnitude are a single, specific triangle, and so used direct trigonometry to solve tension problems in physics rather than going through all the vector analysis bullshit; my physics teacher still doesn't know why that works, and won't teach that method because he's never seen it used anywhere else.
I swore off math 12 years ago and I am now bad at math. Very bad at math. I'm trying to fix that; and I'm only slowly making progress. The good news is I'm also finding the triggers: I like theory. Computer science theory, mathematics theory, neurology theory... I put less effort into practical skills and more into having the answer for *everything*, hence why I can ramble on about compiler design, OS design, CPU architecture, programming design, and the like, and I'm a useless programmer despite knowing more about programming than *actual* *programmers*. I'm using that for some reframing; ultimately I want to get good at math and programming. (I'm rolling a lot of my project management knowledge into the study of programming as well; there's much overlap.)
If you can find a reason I differ from general population, you can classify all of my behaviors and identify if there's a pattern with people who differ in the same way as I do. Funny enough, retarded kids in a certain class--the educable retarded--are known to be fixable in large part. We have a huge variation of special education programs in the United States. Some of them, unfortunately, just babysit your retarded child; a few are honestly dedicated to maximizing success, and they go well beyond giving special attention to each child, instead determining how to interact with the child well, and how to motivate them to self-improvement, and then fill in the gaps in their natural abilities. A lot of those kids come out *normal*; often they have to rely so much on structuring their thought processes and interactions that they come out appearing more intelligent than normal kids, simply because normal kids don't have the benefit of a well-trained, structured thought process.
Of course we have the severely autistic, the kids we just can't reach; and we have kids whose brains never developed, and are missing entire neurological organs. If you're missing the hipocampus, you're not physically capable of using your memory effectively--new memories aren't directly accessible, and there's *some* evidence that long-term habits form while facts and events get kind of lost. If your language center grew in deformed, you're not going to learn to speak well unless your brain repurposes anoth
I summarized the argument you made.
Are they all removed from their parents at birth and put into the same environment to face the same stimulus?
Athletics are different. Your anatomy is tall, short, long-legged, prone to more fatty or more muscular development, and so forth. Every single person in the world can play baseball like Barry Bonds: we can all swing a bat and run; some of us will expend more or less energy to reach the same training state, or to perform more or less well. If you have a long stride (which is controlled by skeletal structure), you're going to run fast with less energy.
Just as all humans have arms, legs, eyes, and the ability to physically coordinate themselves and develop strength, they all have the same brain anatomy. Do you honestly think you're using the most efficient mathematical computation algorithms your brain can deploy? Have you internalized the mechanical act of computation? Can you rapidly perform arithmetic calculations while playing word games?
Do you really think normal people can't learn to do this?
Your brain has to conceive a non-default action in the prefrontal cortex, then direct the midbrain by expending energy (ATP) and neurotransmitters (notably, acetylcholine) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The fatigue limit of the dlPFX is called "willpower" in scientific papers, and the reduction of load is called "motivation". Motivation is affected by interests, reframing, and so forth.
So if you're *interested* in math, you need less energy to study it well, because passing mathematical theory in front of you triggers a distraction response: you respond to it like most people respond to food, sex, or video games. Same with music, art, biology, cooking, and so forth.
You can otherwise decrease the energy required to study math, computers, or anything else by adjusting the brain's habitual impulses. Studying on a schedule works by making you impulsively study at a particular time--even if you hate the material, it feels like what you're supposed to do, and it takes effort to *not* do it. Setting a schedule is hard (you have to force yourself to do it for weeks before it sticks); repeatedly setting schedules as your requirements change causes your brain to rewire itself to change schedules more efficiently. This is why many highly-successful people have strong time management skills: developing those skills gives you the ability to more-readily develop other skills.
You observe that things are easier for some people than others; that doesn't mean people aren't capable of learning and doing. Life isn't that simple.
All humans are basically interchangeable; and the spread of environments and the needs of economics carves them into different refined tools. A computer scientist is not a doctor of internal medicine; however, given the demand for one or the other over long time scales, the stock of humans produces both in appropriate quantities.
At a time, 90% of humans were farmers; farming is complex and relies on an enormous amount of technical skill and experience (the practical effect of which is often interpreted as intuition), and a computer scientist or rocket surgeon is not a very good farmer. Today, we have many more doctors, lawyers, and IT workers than farmers; even the proportion of our population performing high-level scientific research is enormous compared to the 1800s.
Note that these people get where they are by exposure to environment. They develop social interests, and attach to ideals. The needs of the world changes what ideals are exposed, and how those ideals progress: a person interested in animals may become a dog trainer, a veterinary technician, or a genetic biologist. We like to think our interests demonstrate our intelligence, but often we find overfilled markets and IT workers as french fry technicians.
You should also notice the inherent mechanism in the original proposition: we need grocery baggers, burger flippers, and automechanics (although automechanics are more highly-skilled than baggers; we just don't like getting our hands dirty, and so like to look down on people whose work involves digging around in a grimy, oily engine instead of thinking up how to design said engine in a computer simulation for someone else to manufacture). Demand comes from buying power, which ultimately comes from labor and the ability to trade that labor--and from efficient labor (this is why technology makes societies richer). That means whatever we can buy is what we need, and what we *can't* buy is what we don't get--meaning there are rich, poor, middle-class, the unemployed, and so forth.
We can improve society's hierarchy; we can't raise everyone to an identical state, or an identical standard of living, or any other such nonsense. Welfare became possible at a certain wealth level in 19th-century Europe; today, some highly-developed countries are exceeding diminishing returns from welfare and minimum-wage strategies, and can establish a stronger and more stable economy (and outright eliminate homelessness and hunger) with newer strategies; but no current or future incremental progress is going to create the strange Marxist-Utopian dream of a society with no work and great abundance of wealth for all. Each technical increment divides work further, allowing men to produce more in the same time, allowing us to pay a smaller fraction of their (and our) wages for each thing, and to afford many more things with our wage; this requires the continuous repurposing of labor, and both causes and makes possible (and relatively harmless) the growth of an income gap.
Most people react to change with fear (running backwards) or immature excitement (diving over the edge). Society is always changing, so you always have a modern, overstimulated, liberal idealism competing with an archaic, backwards, conservative idealism. You also get centrists who are deluded (or dishonest) in the belief that an average between the extremes is automatically better; *very* few actually analyze the current state and determine if a changing paradigm is appropriate.
You might find your field easier if you move to a silicone compound. Some silicones have good deformation characteristics and will seal with minimal contact pressure; they don't degrade with (reasonable) temperature changes or wet-dry cycling, and they hold up to abrading pretty well. Teflon-coated rubber or silicone is also an option for high-temperature seals.
The adapter would add a thin, weak connection point which, if leaned on, would experience high torque and damage either the phone port or the connector. The greatest length of a 3.5mm connector is *inside* the phone body.
An adapter would need to decode a digital signal, which requires first processing the packet-encoded signal to a line-digital signal, then feeding it through a DAC. You need the equivalent of an Arduino minimal model, packed in a small case. It needs to negotiate power, control noise (EMI shielding and grounding topologies), and clock itself. To put this into perspective: a YMF289 and YAC512 (OPL3 and DAC) cost about $3.25 together; to couple the digital output on the YMF289 to the digital input of the YAC512, you need about $39 of discrete components. It all starts with a quartz crystal coupled using a resistor and a capacitor into the YMF; the YMF has a pin that emits the same signal at 1/2 frequency, which is unstable if not properly coupled to the YAC.
So think £6 of chips (a DAC and a microcontroller) and £10-£12 of discrete components (SMT capacitors, resistors, a crystal to provide a timing signal for the uC and DAC, and inductors in the power supply chain), circuit boards, and plastic casing. With bulk ordering of rolls of SMT, they might get it down to £12 overall. It's still going to break off or damage your phone.
This is only so if all human brains are identical -- which is demonstrably not so even with regard to basics like total mass.
So all humans being able to operate tools is only true if all humans have identical hands?
Hint: a Zilog Z80 can 100% perfectly emulate an AMD Athlon 64, but very slowly.
As to poverty==dumb, I have probably known more smart poor people than smart rich people. And economic stats indicate that at least in America, poverty is not a permanent condition; most "poor" people rise above it at some point (and some "rich" people descend to it); if poverty dictated low intelligence, this couldn't happen.
I invite you to go take a first-year community college program in statistics and probability and come back and say something not-stupid.
Seriously. Let's try this tactic: I've known girls who suck a lot of cocks, therefore all girls are sluts and there is no such thing as rape. That follows the same logical reasoning you just used.
I took an IQ test and scored 135, failing every single abstract question but absolutely nailing every clearly-proposed logical question. I took another one a few years later, after learning analogical thinking; abstract concepts are now broken down and compared to other concepts, and then the common functions are treated as familiar. 150. In practice, hitting 160 isn't hard; you just have to get every single question right.
IQ tests often rely on subtlety, time pressure, and complexity. They're designed to require careful, direct analysis of propositions with a time limit. That means multiple failure points: you fail to apply the right mental strategy, you get a question wrong; you fail to recognize the subtle details of the proposition, you analyze it incorrectly; you fail to keep track of multiple propositions and several interdependent variables, you mis-analyze; you get stressed over time, you make more mistakes; you hyperfocus, you run out of time. Even Culture Fair 3 uses things like pattern matching and distorted geometric shapes (which box is biggest? Hint: it's an optical illusion; if you're not familiar with optical illusions as a concept, you won't recognize that the seemingly-simple question is checking to see if you're dumb enough to pick the obvious, wrong answer, because why would you think that?).
I've been on and off studying the style of tests Mensa uses. I can't, by default, beat Mensa scores; or at least I couldn't when I was 16. I've now come to understand more about how IQ tests work, and can recognize and classify many of the questions as familiar, and so my scores have improved. Interestingly, I've gotten dumber over time due to allowing my executive functions to slip.
While there is informed disagreement about how heritable intelligence is, there is no reasonable argument that it is not heritable at all.
The grandparent poster claimed IQ is dominated by heredity and only a small portion is environmental.
Youtube has made an effort with some non-zero success, and that means Youtube has 100% success and any failure is malicious intent?
I've thought this about the general Internet, too. I've often proposed a thought experiment about Facebook charging $1/year and having no ads (seriously, it's like 1.65 billion users; that's revenue equivalent to 1/38 of Warren Buffet's net worth, every year), and people often gripe that nobody would buy it (I think this is a case of the customer not knowing what he wants--they bought What'sApp).
I've also thought about a delivery method for shared paywall access akin to Spotify for the Internet: you pay $10/month and all partnered sites cross-check via OAUTH2; the site gets a valid log-in and no tracking information, while the service gets to notate what you access. All site operators receive a share of that $10/month weighted based on their viewership per day. No more WSJ/NYT paywalls.
We like to think a lot of things about business profit, and the truth is businesses are expensive to run and make little profit (even Comcast makes barely over 10% as a 5-year running average; the Adidas shoe company makes 4% as a 10-year average, and takes as much as a 7% loss every 2-3 years). I know running a Web site to support 1 user does *not* cost $10/month; the entire DigitalOcean server to service 50,000 requests per second costs $6/month with backups. I don't know the cost of content generation; however, I've seen news teams of 26 people managing national and regional *Web* content, handling big projects for campaigns, and so forth, and they make a good $60k or more each--that's over $1.5 million. At $10/month per user, that's 13 million viewers required to support the jobs of not even 30 people. WSJ has 2.4 million and USA Today has 1.7 million subscribers, and WSJ laid off ~40 employees in 2014, so chew on that for a while.
Youtube is a user-generated content site. It's impossible to police all user-generated content without adding massive costs--just running the site at a given capacity is a drop in the bucket compared to policing the site at that capacity. Perhaps this is why the content creators aren't doing so themselves. Any open platform granting individual access on such a large scale--the entire Internet itself, for example--will have these problems; we can see this in peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire or Gnutella, which require no central authority, and will probe the Internet or use a shipped, pre-discovered list of known Gnutella peers to discover *other* peers.
On the other side, people are now unwilling to pay high mark-ups for music. They're consuming through streaming services, which are shipping more music at decreased revenues. The cost of distribution itself is lower, and the IP holders pay almost no cost--not to press CDs, not to ship the product, not to handle logistics. They handle production and licensing, and the per-customer costs are offloaded and *minimal*. That means scaling, which used to be expensive, is now free; and licensing fees are pure revenue. It also means a huge revenue stream is now facing market pressure driving prices down, converting lower costs into lower prices rather than massive profits.
Everyone hates not being billionaires.
All that sausage and the germans still have a low tolerance for this kind of shit.
The point was more that Wikipedia doesn't say IQ is most-strongly driven by genetics; it says there's a correlation, and the impact appears indirect, and the degree of direct vs indirect impact is not well-understood.
I've been passively interested in learning and intelligence for a while, and my understanding is each animal brain has a certain set of facilities. Cats have different intelligence than dogs because their brains are physically capable of perceiving and analyzing spatial and semantic data in different ways; likewise, humans have much-stronger spatial and semantic processing, including a well-developed language center that can associate semantic information (e.g. verbal information analyzed from speech) with spatial and conceptual information (concrete objects or abstract ideas), allowing for things like analogical thinking. Raccoons and octopuses can perform spatial analysis rivaling even humans. These are attributes of the brain's structure and anatomy; it's not a mass of arbitrary intelligence.
Consequentially, all humans with the same facilities are capable of the same understanding. As well, performance of the brain is mainly moderated by usage: the brain will restructure itself to minimize energy consumption of common thought processes, and certain processes of thought are more efficient than others for a given problem set. For example: memorizing multiplication tables and addition complements will let you perform arithmetic computations more quickly; learning special techniques leveraging these memorized values will reduce the number of steps and, thus, the effort (and time) required to perform such calculations; and repeatedly practicing these calculations for 15-30 minutes per day for several months will adjust the brain to automatically and reliably perform those computations with those techniques, meaning mental arithmetic becomes easy and rapid. All humans are capable of this to the same degree of success.
How inclined any given human is to put in effort to develop a mental skill is a different matter. Human willpower is limited by the energy capacity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which allows the forebrain to direct the midbrain to perform non-default actions. Under stress, humans have a lower capacity for intelligence and learning. Poverty is a form of such stress. As well, without the basic interest and motivation, and with easier alternatives, humans are to varying degrees remiss to expend energy learning and developing. Humans expend less energy learning in pursuit of a concrete goal (e.g. a human will become good at something which provides a recognized reward for the effort, as their default behavior is to *pursue* that reward), and so a human's basic, self-perceived interest in learning something has an enormous impact on the individual's ability to learn. Similarly, given a difficult alternative (not a punishment) and a less-difficult alternative, a human will take the negative-reinforcement path; if avoiding learning and education requires active effort, a human becomes more inclined to learn even with no direct motivation.
Because of all of this, environmental and genetic impacts are the subject of hot debate. The above should make it clear why highly-developed civilizations with strong educational facilities tend to have higher baseline intelligence than lower-developed civilizations: it's hard to *avoid* education in one, and hard to *get* an education in another. If you're inclined to be an idiot in one case, there are limits on that; and if you're inclined to be a genius in another case, there's no support for that.
This is why I tell people genius is just technique: any idiot is physically capable of rendering himself blindingly intelligent. Whether he wants to--and whether it's worth bothering--is a different matter.
Moral? MORAL?! You're talking about a situation where the person doing the copying is *incapable* of paying for the work, but where their access to the work doesn't incur a cost to the creator. The *moral* thing to do is called "charity", since in this case it costs you literally nothing.
We can talk about the very real costs of developing and maintaining software all day, and the delusions of people who think they're not impacting anyone by not buying software; and we also have to acknowledge that people who think they're somehow losing something because someone with $5 downloaded a $600 copy of Photoshop off BIttorrent are *also* delusional. Legality is a different matter, as are secondary effects.
Intellectual property is an enormously complex topic. Every piece of physical property requires the direct labor of its creator, and so is produced by time (and effort, but effort can only be spent in strict units of time; it cannot be stocked), and so is definitively the property of *someone*. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is also the direct product of somebody's labor; its distribution requires so little labor that it can be shared for minimal cost and garner a hugely-efficient return, so much so that *other* *people* can share your intellectual property without outlaying much of any effort on their part (sometimes none: turning your radio up *performs* a song in public--an intellectual property liability!). The original creator deserves compensation; broad distribution at a low cost *easily* overcompensates the creator for their IP, meaning most compensation is economic rent; and a lack of intellectual property controls tends to lead to second-hand distribution of IP, depriving the creator of their rightful compensation entirely. This creates *tons* of concrete economic and fluffy philosophical points of contention, and not a lot of good answers.
Mixed in with that mess is the obvious value proposition: a person incapable of paying for intellectual property is not capable of depriving the IP creator of anything by making personal use of the IP creator's IP, as that person can gain access to the IP without costing the creator anything *and* would be incapable of rightfully compensating the IP creator. That, again, still leaves legal issues and secondary effects (it's okay for him, so it's okay for me--culture of piracy), and this line of reasoning only applies to the original user of the IP.
Maybe the inherent personal quality is a myth.
Wikipedia says the genetic basis of IQ is a huge subject of debate. Everything it cites for genetic influence of IQ says that IQ appears as if it should be heritable, and suggests a mechanism of inheritance of environment--that people inherit genetics that cause them to zombie-walk into a certain type of environment, which then has its environmental impacts on IQ.
Denying access to a low-IQ environment would, by that logic, cause high IQ development. That means a strong school system would produce high-IQ individuals; and that technically-poor countries with no environment conducive to a high IQ would only develop low-IQ individuals.
All humans have the same facilities and are technically capable of the same intelligence. Education *is* intelligence.
Poor people are dumber. This is because poor people have not been exposed to the environmental factors which cultivate intelligence. Poor people can't afford to buy expensive software. Countries in which the highest rate of survival goes to rape gangs and drug smuggling networks would have the highest rate of software piracy.
Of course it's not a zero-sum game. Some actions cut back on accessibility of tradable labor (reducing jobs), others improve output. Technical progress, for example, increases output per labor-hour, thus increasing consumer buying power (you work the same hours, but make twice as much stuff; you take your pay for working 40 hours and go to buy from the other guy, who also works 40 hours, and makes twice as much stuff; you only have to pay him for *half* as many of his working hours to buy the same stuff from him, so you can buy twice as much stuff).
Yeah, I like the law--short-term renting of apartments as such drives up the spot value of housing and creates an opportunity for economic rent seeking behavior--but I hate the reasoning. Community? Who the fuck cares about community? You live in an apartment a) to listen in on your neighbors having sex; or b) to have girls come in without the whole neighborhood seeing whose door they're going to. If you wanted peace and quiet or a neon sign above your back door that says "Yes it's the fifth girl this week!", you'd live in a house--unless you're too poor for that, although I've found ghetto rent often has a security deposit the size of the mortgage down payment, and rent twice or more the 15-year mortgage ($421/mo mortgage here, rent for the same house and others on the block was $1150/mo).
Also we had a girl on the first floor who would moan differently depending on which guy was banging her, and she had 4 guys in the same week. The neighbors got like 40 noise violations on her; she was sort of a building celebrity. Welcome to apartment life, where you don't know your neighbors, but you know when they're gone.
The one big thing here no one is mentioning so far: how do the scalpers have a market? If people are willing to pay "many times over face value" then the scalpers are just recognizing what the market will bear.
That's called "economic rent". It has a few impacts.
With the lessened consumer buying power, fewer jobs are available. Tickets become more expensive, and so your average consumer now has less money to spend. That money, when spent on goods, creates a need to produce those goods, which creates employment; when the cost-per-good increases, the proportion of all incomes spent on that good increases, and diverts away from other goods. Because income is both made and spent over time (e.g. per year), the enrichment of one person at the expense of ten others doesn't translate to that one person then creating ten more jobs.
This effect is likely less-pronounced in specific markets because there's more of a spreading effect, e.g. a minimum-wage increase raises the cost of a great many goods (by a *tiny* individual amount--think paying 8 cents more at McDonalds for your whole order, not the Conservative apocalypse of a $20 hamburger or the Liberal utopia of businesses just paying the wages out of profits), and the wage recipients must pay that additional cost on almost everything they buy, thus there is a direct loss of buying power; by contrast, *most* of the income gained by ticket scalping is likely spent on a broad set of goods, concert tickets being a minimum proportion of that, and thus in isolation the scalpers are basically making *someone* poorer but not degrading the general buying power of the economy to as great a degree. It would be different if 40% of the income in the cycle of spending of those moved dollars went to buying scalped concert tickets.
(The same basic argument applies to taxes: the people involved in making goods must get paid, and part of that pay goes to taxes; thus the consumer's take-home buying power is less than the total cost of his employment, and his ability to pay the proportional wages of anything he buys is diminished by as much. There is valid reasoning behind both taxes and minimum wages, although I continue to argue that minimum wages are outdated. This discussion of economic rent is a large stretch beyond my normal territory, and the same rules don't apply nearly as firmly.)
In a more direct sense, those concerned with the concert may consider scalping as a form of theft. Concert-goers have less money, and so can't spend it on t-shirts, mugs, signed CDs, and other paraphernalia they'd normally buy. The concert's total revenue is reduced, and the scalper receives the proceeds.
Depends on how you structure it. That up there is a lot to read; it's not a lot to say. You can abridge some of the numbers, let Trump try to call your bluff, then dump more numbers (that happens when you just say something like, "Over the past 15 years with millions of Muslim immigrants, all we've found is that any given American is twenty times as likely to murder you as the next Muslim immigrant!"). Taking the bait on a bluff like that gets the audience smiling and waiting to see what ridiculous shit your opponent pulls out... unless they pull out something concrete.
As for making a funny comeback, well... that works equally as well both ways. If Trump draws up this mean dialogue about how Mexicans will rape your 8-year-old daughter and then stuff her full of cocaine to traffic over the border, a silly quip about how Trump seems disturbingly obsessed with sticking things in third-grade girls will come off as flippant and uncaring. It belittles the audience, because it's a blatant grab for their attention and support; you need some kind of substance. Part of it also relies on how well you can show, and a couple jokers doesn't work too well; the risk of being *the* joker is your opponent might just call you on it, pointing out that you're showing a lack of real concern for real issues--in other words, claiming that you don't really care about the things the audience finds important, and thus that you don't stand with them.
I've dealt with a lot of people who argue that the checklist is the only thing important. I've brought up the concept of identifying our assets, determining their importance, and creating trust zones and access controls based on that; people just roll their eyes and point out that the general NAS only allows finance to access the high-sensitivity finance share, and marketing to access marketing shares, etc. Put the finance NAS behind an ASA that does subnet and domain logon checking so that only certain groups in certain subnets can access it? Rubbish.
Yes, modern ASAs will do this: a server can be in some subnet and firewalled based on that, and the firewall can also ask a nearby Domain Controller who is logged into that PC. If it's not someone in Finance, it's also firewalled. Strict firewalls and inline malware protections such as Fortigate's firewall-AV or Sourcefire AMP reduce the risk of malware spread across the network; and, more simply, if Finance has its own NAS, then a malware infection spreading to the NAS used by Sales (as in: physically becoming an active process on the Windows server host) won't be able to use any elevated privileges to write to all other shares (Finance, Accounting, Marketing) and replace document files with malware! That's a scenario I've seen in real life: a worm got admin privileges, uploaded itself to a file share, and replaced every .docx and .pdf with a .docx.exe that infected the client and opened the original file as expected--and the same share storing all of Finance and Accounting's data also stored the roaming profile for the people at the front reception desk!
You'll notice these things aren't unbreachable; they're damned inconvenient to breach, and slow down (or halt) automated spreads. An active hacker can wiggle his way through if he can get domain admin credentials. The scope of blunt port scanning and network service (and client) discovery is sharply reduced; actually *finding* resources to attack is hard; and you gain some time and efficiency at stopping malware spread or closing the hole an active adversary used to gain primary access. It makes a huge difference in the scope of damage left after a breach, and generates additional information during an on-going breach so that you can detect and react to the event more rapidly.
Everybody just wants to say, "Oh, we had some trouble with Trend Micro, so we installed Sophos!" It sounds like they're doing something, even though they have production finance databases running on the same VMware host as DMZ public-facing services with public IPs, with just some VNICs having a public, unfirewalled IP address and other VNICs being in an internal VLAN--there's no way a blunt, unfiltered, bare Internet port connected to a VMware server could pose a threat, right? Physically-separate trust zones are just work.