I think it's probably seen as "stuff that matters" because of heightened paranoia following the Boston Marathon bombings, even though there is no apparent evidence that this was deliberate.
People have also mentioned the Waco "connection" here too. I think the US psyche is in a bit of a frazzled state at the moment.
These conspiracy theories would be slightly more plausible if this had actually happened on the anniversary, not the day before. As it is, it's not even really a coincidence, is it?
Wasn't that when some crazy hick religious cult led by some loser child molester got righteously bitch-slapped by the federal government, right before I pretty much forgot about it and went about my day? Yeah, what about then?
He had lots of guns and opposed the Federal government, so he's probably pretty much a hero to many Americans on slashdot. Being a religious nut and not an evil materialist socialist is just an added bonus.
Austerity means cutting government spending so that expenditures are = tax revenues. Something that should be a total no-brainer. Only fools think that
deficit spending is a solution to a debt problem.
That would make sense if the economy was only ever going to stay at the same level or decline.
Unfortunately for your childish argument, there is such a thing as economic growth.
You know that Germany has relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of Europe because many youth learn trades instead of being jobless? Same for Austria and Switzerland.
Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research and long term investments. There are no good aspects to austerity, except that at the top you fall less than those at the bottom so you are comparatively better off. But to rejoice in that makes you a horrible person.
Extreme rightwingers/libertarians would prefer as unequal a society as possible, even if the average of wealth was reduced. Just as long as they can be significantly richer than the plebs, they will keep their power.
Austerity is a rightwinger's dream. It squashes the hoi polloi down and makes them grateful for any sort of crumbs the rich fuckers allow them.
Thank you for using your brain, far too many around here don't bother.
Doesn't anyone who supports big government socialism see that the people encouraging all the debt and deficit spending are *not* the same people paying the taxes, ever? Anyone? Hello?
Good grief.
In a society we are all the same people.
What rightwingers won't generally admit (although there are exceptions like The Witch Thatcher) is that they don't care about society as a whole, and in fact are repelled by the whole idea of anything that interferes with their own selfish little goals. But they will try to claim that once government has been abolished, everybody will be free to act in the selfless, charitable way that government prevents them from doing now. It's ridiculous, and also cynically false.
So they like to pretend that they can just get rid of anything that smacks of society, starting with government. Essentially, they want the world to be one big market place, with just enough law enforcement to protect their property. Concepts such as universal sufferage, universal healthcare, universal entitlement to unemployment relief, laws to prevent slavery or child abuse, and the rest are just things that get in the way of free trade.
Countries just roll over the debt, same as corporations. As long as you are generating enough GDP/profit to afford the interest payments and over the long run can cover the repayments, what's the problem?
All the rightwing "libertarian" fuckbags here seem to think that running a country's economy or a large corporation's finances are just bigger versions of running a market stall. They're not.
No smart person anywhere will ever argue that you should use borrowed money on what basically amount to luxuries.
Anything apart from food, water and shelter is a fucking luxury. I know libertarians love the idea of a post-apolalyptic wasteland where they and their gun-chums carve out a position of strength over the sheeple, but meanwhile in the real world, we quite enjoy having things like roads, schools and hospitals.
We've tried organising society with the rich few doling out charity to the needy majority. That's pretty much how things were done in the Nineteenth Century.
At some point, the majority get fed up with crumbs from the rich man's table and pull the fucking tablecloth off. Sensible rich people rreach a compromise before it gets that far.
The point about democracy isn't whether it's right or wrong. The majority simply have more power once they realise the reality of the world and aren't cramped by the mind-forged manacles of religion or "the natural order of things".
Nice things would be (and this is a classic example libertarians point out) things like national endowment of the arts. If any given artwork isn't worth anything to anybody, then why on earth are we paying somebody to make it? I really don't know if any nice things have come of it, but in the end that is all it is - just a nice thing that we don't actually need in the classical sense, and that money should be going towards paying back debts.
Yes, art should only be available to a few super-rich ubermenschen. Culture is just something that gets in the way of you making money.
So somehow the evil government forced the authors of the report to get the facts wrong about the relationship between debt levels and economic growth even though they got them wrong in a way that made high debt levels seem worse than they really are?
I don't know about not reading TFA, you can't even understand TFS.
Yes, but that error wouldn't've been possible in a spreadsheet which forces the user to interact only w/ named data / ranges as Lotus Improv did.
So? I'm sure a user could define name data ranges incorrectly just as easily as they could fail to copy a formula.
Since every country didn't have exactly the same amount of data in exactly the same format to start with, I can think of loads of ways you could miss out or double-count data, or apply the wrong formula to different named ranges, or whatever.
If you don't have some system of checks in place, any system that handles even a modest amount of data is likely to produce errors.
The real news to me is that academic, world-famous, policy-influencing researchers use Excel instead of, say, R or SPSS, etc.
Excel is perfectly capable of adding up a few hundred numbers and making a basic chart out of the results.
Anyway, do you really think that someone who can't copy and paste numbers/formulas on a spreadhseet properly (or, more relevantly, build a model that incorporates some sort of checking of the results to the base data) is going to learn a programming language?
I agree it is user error, but I feel very strongly that this is the fault of Excel, not the user. My job is effectively being a professional spreadsheet driver and you eventually learn to become rigid about range checking, row counting, balancing totals, etc, because the structure of Excel makes these errors inevitable.
No, that's a user error. I don't see how Excel can be blamed. If it came with a fixed, uneditable series of templates, I suppose you could moan if one of them was wrong. But the whole point is flexibility. If you are designing complicated spreadsheets for other people, that's a different matter, you're moving towards something more like basic (pun intended) programming, and the problems really start when non-programmers write half-cocked VB macros that users neither understand nor can easily correct.
When I read the title, I expected a calculation or rounding issue, or an internal range issue from built in components and not "dumb ass user didn't set the range correctly when averaging". That's not an Excel error, that's a user error - Excel did exactly what it was told to do.
Quite so, and that is pretty much the end of the thread. I'm surprised the headline wasn't "M$ Ex$el error".
If there's an actual war, no one is going to be on Germany's side. Not France, Spain, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Poland or anyone else. Some of the former USSR satellite-states may be forced to side with Germany, but at that point I imagine Russia will invade anyway.
Germany is strong economically, but not militarily.
And I really can't see the US stepping in on Germany's side against the UK et al.
We could, however, grade where the facts aren't in despute. Is the person in an interview what the media describes them as? Is he really the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, or is he just an assistant professor at stamford? Is person X really a psychiatrist or does she really just have a bachelors in psychology? Is the disgraced politician really a (R), a (D), or an (I)? Various studies from sources such as the Columbia School of Journalism have shown some news sources are much less reliable on such points than others. What about the many cases where there's no real disagreement over the facts, where both 'official from the current government' sources and respected private sources, plus public records going back to previous administrations and such all generally agree?
But unless things get stupid, minor errors like those you mention don't really matter, certainly not when compared with the overall editorial tone of a news outlet.
If Person X talks bollocks about psychiatry, I don't care whether they've got an O level in psychology or they're Sigmund Freud.
Slashdot Mirror
What's a payphone, grandpa?
And yet every year... ~40,000 people will die from aspirin overdose...
The only cure for that is to make suicide (or extreme stupidity) illegal.
People have also mentioned the Waco "connection" here too. I think the US psyche is in a bit of a frazzled state at the moment.
These conspiracy theories would be slightly more plausible if this had actually happened on the anniversary, not the day before. As it is, it's not even really a coincidence, is it?
Wasn't that when some crazy hick religious cult led by some loser child molester got righteously bitch-slapped by the federal government, right before I pretty much forgot about it and went about my day? Yeah, what about then?
He had lots of guns and opposed the Federal government, so he's probably pretty much a hero to many Americans on slashdot. Being a religious nut and not an evil materialist socialist is just an added bonus.
Austerity means cutting government spending so that expenditures are = tax revenues. Something that should be a total no-brainer. Only fools think that deficit spending is a solution to a debt problem.
That would make sense if the economy was only ever going to stay at the same level or decline.
Unfortunately for your childish argument, there is such a thing as economic growth.
You know that Germany has relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of Europe because many youth learn trades instead of being jobless? Same for Austria and Switzerland.
Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research and long term investments. There are no good aspects to austerity, except that at the top you fall less than those at the bottom so you are comparatively better off. But to rejoice in that makes you a horrible person.
Extreme rightwingers/libertarians would prefer as unequal a society as possible, even if the average of wealth was reduced. Just as long as they can be significantly richer than the plebs, they will keep their power.
Austerity is a rightwinger's dream. It squashes the hoi polloi down and makes them grateful for any sort of crumbs the rich fuckers allow them.
Thank you for using your brain, far too many around here don't bother.
Doesn't anyone who supports big government socialism see that the people encouraging all the debt and deficit spending are *not* the same people paying the taxes, ever? Anyone? Hello?
Good grief.
In a society we are all the same people.
What rightwingers won't generally admit (although there are exceptions like The Witch Thatcher) is that they don't care about society as a whole, and in fact are repelled by the whole idea of anything that interferes with their own selfish little goals. But they will try to claim that once government has been abolished, everybody will be free to act in the selfless, charitable way that government prevents them from doing now. It's ridiculous, and also cynically false.
So they like to pretend that they can just get rid of anything that smacks of society, starting with government. Essentially, they want the world to be one big market place, with just enough law enforcement to protect their property. Concepts such as universal sufferage, universal healthcare, universal entitlement to unemployment relief, laws to prevent slavery or child abuse, and the rest are just things that get in the way of free trade.
All the rightwing "libertarian" fuckbags here seem to think that running a country's economy or a large corporation's finances are just bigger versions of running a market stall. They're not.
No smart person anywhere will ever argue that you should use borrowed money on what basically amount to luxuries.
Anything apart from food, water and shelter is a fucking luxury. I know libertarians love the idea of a post-apolalyptic wasteland where they and their gun-chums carve out a position of strength over the sheeple, but meanwhile in the real world, we quite enjoy having things like roads, schools and hospitals.
At some point, the majority get fed up with crumbs from the rich man's table and pull the fucking tablecloth off. Sensible rich people rreach a compromise before it gets that far.
The point about democracy isn't whether it's right or wrong. The majority simply have more power once they realise the reality of the world and aren't cramped by the mind-forged manacles of religion or "the natural order of things".
Nice things would be (and this is a classic example libertarians point out) things like national endowment of the arts. If any given artwork isn't worth anything to anybody, then why on earth are we paying somebody to make it? I really don't know if any nice things have come of it, but in the end that is all it is - just a nice thing that we don't actually need in the classical sense, and that money should be going towards paying back debts.
Yes, art should only be available to a few super-rich ubermenschen. Culture is just something that gets in the way of you making money.
Libertarian=fascist, thanks for showing why.
I don't know about not reading TFA, you can't even understand TFS.
Yes, but that error wouldn't've been possible in a spreadsheet which forces the user to interact only w/ named data / ranges as Lotus Improv did.
So? I'm sure a user could define name data ranges incorrectly just as easily as they could fail to copy a formula.
Since every country didn't have exactly the same amount of data in exactly the same format to start with, I can think of loads of ways you could miss out or double-count data, or apply the wrong formula to different named ranges, or whatever.
If you don't have some system of checks in place, any system that handles even a modest amount of data is likely to produce errors.
The real news to me is that academic, world-famous, policy-influencing researchers use Excel instead of, say, R or SPSS, etc.
Excel is perfectly capable of adding up a few hundred numbers and making a basic chart out of the results.
Anyway, do you really think that someone who can't copy and paste numbers/formulas on a spreadhseet properly (or, more relevantly, build a model that incorporates some sort of checking of the results to the base data) is going to learn a programming language?
"The food in this restaurant is terrible. But at least the portions are big."
I agree it is user error, but I feel very strongly that this is the fault of Excel, not the user. My job is effectively being a professional spreadsheet driver and you eventually learn to become rigid about range checking, row counting, balancing totals, etc, because the structure of Excel makes these errors inevitable.
No, that's a user error. I don't see how Excel can be blamed. If it came with a fixed, uneditable series of templates, I suppose you could moan if one of them was wrong. But the whole point is flexibility. If you are designing complicated spreadsheets for other people, that's a different matter, you're moving towards something more like basic (pun intended) programming, and the problems really start when non-programmers write half-cocked VB macros that users neither understand nor can easily correct.
When I read the title, I expected a calculation or rounding issue, or an internal range issue from built in components and not "dumb ass user didn't set the range correctly when averaging". That's not an Excel error, that's a user error - Excel did exactly what it was told to do.
Quite so, and that is pretty much the end of the thread. I'm surprised the headline wasn't "M$ Ex$el error".
Germany is strong economically, but not militarily.
And I really can't see the US stepping in on Germany's side against the UK et al.
Mate, don't bother arguing with conspiracy theorists. It's like feeding trolls, but without the potential for humour.
In 2010 worldwide there were 1.24 road traffic deaths (wow!)
How can you have 0.24 of a death?
(Yes, I know what you meant to write...)
7k ppl die in US highway accidents daily
That's out by a factor of about 100, but thanks for trying to cheer us up.
We could, however, grade where the facts aren't in despute. Is the person in an interview what the media describes them as? Is he really the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, or is he just an assistant professor at stamford? Is person X really a psychiatrist or does she really just have a bachelors in psychology? Is the disgraced politician really a (R), a (D), or an (I)? Various studies from sources such as the Columbia School of Journalism have shown some news sources are much less reliable on such points than others. What about the many cases where there's no real disagreement over the facts, where both 'official from the current government' sources and respected private sources, plus public records going back to previous administrations and such all generally agree?
But unless things get stupid, minor errors like those you mention don't really matter, certainly not when compared with the overall editorial tone of a news outlet.
If Person X talks bollocks about psychiatry, I don't care whether they've got an O level in psychology or they're Sigmund Freud.
Amazing isn't it?
The same applies for internet news.
Among the patients discussing this in the doctor's office I was in today (that's why i got force-fed an hour of this crap)
I wasn't aware that it was compulsory to watch TV anywhere.