I wonder why Apple is seen as a threat more? Their network of friends? Number of potential users can't be it - many more Android phones than iPhone 6s.
My understanding is that even on NFC-equipped Android phones, Google never had a proper deployment strategy; they only partnered with a few card issuers, they didn't really work with any merchants to get them on board, Verizon blocked their app on their phones, it was only limited to the US, etc.
Over that first weekend, we know now that ApplePay adoption was in the millions, and in those first few days CVS probably saw this deluge of NFC transactions and were like, the jig is up, the train is leaving the station, and if we continue to allow NFC transactions through the 2014 Christmas season the Payments War will be over and CurrenC won't have even been a contender.
A credit card isn't cash, credit cards emit a very long paper trail. Imagine how easy the police's job would be if criminals actually used credit cards in the manner you describe.
They add 3% to all prices, give you a 0.5% kickback and you're so happy for the money you "saved" that you act as their pro bono salesman too.
There's really no "playing" involved. If you are consumer, credit cards are simply better than store loyalty programs, on the merits.
BankAxept is better than credit cards, but Americans don't have BankAxept. Scandinavians have BankAxept, because the company that clears effectively every financial transaction in northern Europe, Nets Group, is a tolerated monopoly with a protected market, and banking regulations in Denmark clearly delineate transactions fees to be paid by the consumer.
Can you construct a falsifiable hypothesis involving -human- design, bearing in mind that present-day design is -fact-?
You don't have to, you just ask the guy that did it. I don't think you can actually falsifiably prove that something is designed, but falsifiability isn't the only way we know things. Science isn't the only way of knowing things, and things can be true even if science cannot establish their truth.
In this way, we can say that aliens probably exist, and it's plausible that they have visited here in the last billion years, but if you wanna make it scientific, you do have to show me how you know this happened. The problem is, you can't hypothesize that aliens participated in evolution without first establishing that aliens exist. Without any particular clue as to what the properties of aliens are, their actual existence becomes an ontological question that science alone cannot resolve. You have to establish the physical properties and nature of aliens empirically before you can actually do any inferences with them, otherwise they could do anything, they could have the power to rewrite your brain to make you think they created us when they didn't. You have to have an account of aliens that's epistemologically grounded, and inferential science cannot supply that, that's beyond science.
Then, as now, inferential support for entities from empirical knowns is science. Witness the Higgs boson.
Here's the question though. What are the empirical knowns pertaining to alien or trans-dimensional beings, or their interference in evolution?
Can you construct a falsifiable hypothesis involving trans-dimensional beings, or ETs, or something else, and Earth's natural history? Or any hypothesis of any kind? What experiments would we run? What observations can we make? I'm not sure that this counterproposal is actually scientific. Just because it doesn't require a deity doesn't mean it's "science."
You're getting way ahead of yourself, what you have to do first is find the aliens, and then when we meet them you'll be able to make some hypotheses. People believed atoms existed for thousands of years. But atoms weren't actually science until people in the 19th century devised experiments to observe them; until then there was "Atomism," a branch of philosophy, and atoms were mystical, pseudoscientific entities.
If Lavoisier, or Leibniz, had proposed a bomb that could destroy entire cities with the power of millions of tons of gunpowder, everyone would have called him a crank, and they'd have been right. Where would his evidence have been? And sure, they were entitled to guess or make prognostications, but should those have been taught in school as science? Should the King of France have spent millions of francs trying to invent Leibniz's bomb?
Your position is pseudoscience. This may only be for the time being, but its condition today is the issue.
Even here, in both instances Dawkins is saying that evolution is sufficient, but just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it's the only answer, or that we'd ever find something completely different. You're original contention was that people say "only evolution happens," and I asked for a quote that gave it as "the only explanation," neither of your quotes actually say this.
So you're not really saying anything about evolution, you're only beef is with how some people talk about evolution? It's just a rhetorical argument?
That it is false across the scope of the topic isn't in question.
Hmm, I don't know, most people expect that when talking about this sort of thing we're only talking about natural occurrence. When you're talking about animal breeding or genetic engineering, we usually treat these as separate because they're not natural, we know at some point a person did it. If you wanted to propose some kind of non-evolutionary mechanism that didn't involve people, that would actually make your argument make sense, otherwise it seems completely semantic.
I mean, sure, non-evolutionary, non-artifical mechanisms are possible, but what exactly do you have in mind? I've asked this like three times now and you demur every time, I don't think you're being completely honest about your position. You clearly believe in intelligent design but refuse to say so, because you know you cannot mount an affirmative defense of it with evidence. So you snipe at other people's missteps and logical fallacies, and throw up smokescreens to confuse the actual points of contention, and hope to
Every assertion any of them has ever made connecting evolution with an argument for atheism is saying this. There would be thousands of such statements.
Then surely producing one would be easy. How is a belief in atheism consistent with a belief that neo-Darwinian evolution is the only explanation for the origin of species? I don't think these are bound by logical inference.
Now, if you wanted to assert that "designed" non-Darwinian adaptations/morphologies/whatever exist, and that their existence can only be due to the intervention of a God, then yes, atheism and neo-Darwinism would be related, but you haven't actually said that. So frankly I don't know what your position is, other than "sometime people say wrong things about evolution (but I can't find the quote)."
Fluorescent cats, spider-silk producing cows, to name a couple of popularized examples. They cannot be explained by evolutionary processes.
Who says they can be? Who thinks they must be? Nobody here would claim these are evolutionary. Did Dawkins?
It has become the default assertion, mainly because it is required for the worldview stance of atheism, particularly as popularized by Dawkins et al
Ok... when did Dawkins say this? Or Sam Harris? Or Darwin, for that matter? I must say I find this point of contention completely unproductive and querulous, you've beaten this strawman to death!
I'm contending that you have no way of differentiating morphological changes and similarities as a result of "evolutionary" processes from those of explicit genetic design.
Do you? What exactly is "explicit genetic design"? Does such a thing exist? If it does, does this dichotomy represent the, uh, "causally exhaustive" set of options? Is the existence of design falsifiable? It seems like you probably should have lead with your belief that this exists, and then your justifications for it, because this is your actual positive claim, instead of just trying to bait everyone into discrediting an unrelated negative claim.
I am in disagreement with the untestable assertion of "only evolution happens"
Who has made this assertion? Sure not TFA or really anyone else here. Or is this just your thing?
So, if the answer here is "evolution isn't falsifiable", that's a perfectly fine conclusion to me.
A lot of people including myself have given you examples of how it could be falsified, and you can only really get to the idea that it can't be by making categorically false assertions, such as "evolution demands that all change is evolution" or "evolution predicts that a species/a population/any arbitrary group of organisms will improve its fitness over time."
I mean if you don't like the evolutionary "worldview" with the blind watchmaker, the metaphysical naturalism, and the creeping utilitarian moral calculus, that's great. But not of that is required to accept the biological process as valid, nor does the biological process philosophically entail same.
Dogs giving birth to reptiles would be a start. The modern synthesis of genetics predicts that the phenotype of a child will be a combination of the parents, and many aspects of evolutionary theory and particularly sexual selection rely on this observation.
Something evolution implies is that it's path-dependent, so you might expect that traits emerge and are retained in some kind of chronological order, there's the old joke about Haldane looking for "bunny rabbits in the Cambrian epoch" that illustrates this. There seems to be certain prerequisites to get to mammals, for instance, such that you expect to see a long natural history of animals predating mammals, if you found a mammal with very little natural history, seemingly from nowhere and having completely distinct heritage from every other animal on Earth, that would probably be cited as something not evolutionary. We don't see this because most mammals on Earth can be morphologically or genetically related to each other, and no contrary explanation is compelling.
A population of animals that developed a set of persistent traits that had no purpose and seemed completely hazardous to survival would be hard to explain, evolution predicts that conserved traits contribute to survival, and the more they contribute, the more conserved they will be.
Evolution predicts that mutations are passed from one individual to the next through time, if we were to discover that this wasn't actually happening, and genetic inheritance was only an apparent phenomenon, then evolution wouldn't be an adequate explanation.
Christian (and Muslim) fundamentalists do not deny that evolution occurs. There is clear and obvious evidence that it does, and they accept that.
This statement does not reflect the broad diversity of doctrine on this issue, beliefs run the gamut from theistic evolution thought intelligent design to young-Eartherism.
What they do NOT accept is that evolution can lead to the emergence of new species, and (more importantly) is the sole explanation for the existence of humans. There is strong evidence that they are wrong, but there is not any absolute proof.
And given that much of their arguments center on metaphysics and the nature of proof, there never will be.
There is nothing that we know "beyond the shadow of a doubt".
I'm generally a lot less concerned with epistemological certainty than "What are you going to teach the kids in school?", and does this thing respect freedom of conscience and critical thinking, or simply kowtows to politics, mysticism and dilettante pseudoscience, in the interests of "fairness" and "sensitivity to all worldviews."
Sometimes organisms adapt to selection pressure, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they go extinct.
I don't think the modern synthesis makes the claim that this process needs to be successful on a species basis, or needs to "save" or preserve certain populations or not in order to be true, which sounds like what you're proposing. Really all evolution claims is that (1) organisms change through generations, (2) these changes are subject to challenges from the environment and competition, and (3) changes that increase survivability in the face of these challenges will be conserved -- the changes are conserved, not the organisms themselves, the population or the species; these may all be lost in the process. The idea that this process must be "successful" or produce "better" or "more adapted" beings is not a necessary part of the synthesis.
I think the issue is you're seeing it teleologically. Wether something is "adapted" or not is to a large extent subjective, and in the context of evolution and natural history it's basically tautological. Evolution says, if it's alive, it's "adapted."
the mainline factors proposed are causally exhaustive, because that assumption, often driven by worldview bias, is both untestable and unfalsifiable.
I'm not sure the claim that evolution is "causally exhaustive" is true, or even necessary in order to accept that evolution happens. Also I'm not sure where all this emphasis on "falsifiablity" comes from, Karl Popper is by no means considered the "exhaustive" authority on the philosophy of science. We can roll back and establish the evolution is a completely valid scientific concept, say, from a Baconian perspective, due to its practical insight and applicability.
Furthermore, you think that you're sticking it to the employer if you force them to pay higher wages, but they are simply going to raise their prices and pass the costs on to the rest of us.
This isn't actually how it works, sometimes it works this way, but only by degrees. A minimum wage is a form of price control and the difference between the equilibrium price and the fixed price can be treated as a form of tax or subsidy (in this case a tax), so this makes the question a tax incidence problem.
If McDonalds is operating in an environment where their food can be replaced with many different supplementary goods below their menu price, they actually, in the limit, cannot raise their prices because they would lose demand as people switched to the supplementary goods. If McDonalds offers a good that cannot be easily supplemented, then they have some liberty to raise prices -- but they have little control over this, their ability to raise their prices is constrained by the price elasticity of demand for their goods.
You can go a little further, and we can argue that McDonalds was paying their employees below the equilibrium wage for the work, because McDs was benefiting from either regulatory capture or some externality (an illiquid labor market, for instance), and the amount they were keeping was a pure economic rent. In this case, raising the minimum wage is a form of Pigovian regulation, and is a "perfect" pareto-optimal tax with no deadweight loss.
"Innovation" mostly has to do with getting people to buy or use something -- actually being the first person to invent or market the thing doesn't really carry any intrinsic benefit, follow-through and execution always trump good ideas. Ideas are cheap.
--- Signed, Ignaz Semmelweiss, Elija Gray, the Lumiere Brothers, Preston Tucker, Douglas Engelbart, Xerox PARC, inter alia
It doesn't to you? "Well, they have to take off those contaminated suits, and some will get infected while doing that. Shit happens." really isn't the right approach here.
Do you even know how this case of infection occurred? I made no claims along these lines, you're the one who says he knows, or rather knows enough to know there was a systemic problem and not one merely attributable to failure to follow established protocols.
Huh? Plane flights? Are we still talking about a controlled clinical environment in a big American city?
There are only about a dozen BSL-4 facilities in the US; if you want to establish the principle that patients must be treated in such a facility, you will be moving A LOT of them. Also, none of these facilities are equipped to handle patients. The first requirement of a BSL-4 lab is that it's a separate building purpose-built for containment.
You're losing me here.
I sure am, because you seem to think every metro in the US has a world-class biohazard facility and infrastructure, and has plenty to spare on a wild goose chase of isolating minimally-virulent ebola patients, and you can't seem to understand that your fears are based completely on your own speculation and snap judgement. Your conceptualization of this disease, and the means required to contain it, constitute the textbook definition of cargo cult science.
So basically you're just anxious, because none of this "seems right" in complete absence of empirical evidence? And in your sample of 10 (or 20, who knows!) one person became ill, because, we dunno, but it sounds fishy.
What recommendations would you make, if you were, say, a public health official? Everyone who develops illness has to be treated in something akin to a BSL-4 facility? Have you any idea how many plane flights that would require, just to cite one small aspect of the logistics? And all this to protect from a disease vector that's completely unsubstantiated in the literature?
Or do you do like Judge Clay Jenkins, and personally go to the family's house in shirt-sleeves and drive them to a new home? Which approach is more appropriate? Which one balances our available resources against the actual concrete threat of the disease? Which one is actually workable?
The evidence is continued exponential growth of Ebola to recent past.
This is why Africa was finally made barren of human inhabitants in 1980...
Also this is what, two cases in the US, three? Maybe 5 total outside of Africa, and almost all of them among health workers collateral to treating confirmed Ebola-suffering patients?
I had brunch with my friend this morning, who is an MD PhD in infectious disease and works in a BSL-4 laboratory from time to time, so I asked about this.
BSL-4 is a standard that only applies to laboratories, the same standards aren't necessarily applied to clinical environments, and in the case of Ebola are major overkill. Ebola can't travel through the air, so positive pressure suits aren't appropriate, and they still have to be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected. People who "test positive" for Ebola are not contagious, only people who have symptoms are, and they can only pass the disease through contact with bodily fluids -- this usually implies touch, since hemorrhagic fevers cause people to give off all kinds of gross effluent, but it's just not like a "virus" one gets from casual contact, like, say, rubella.
The fact is, Ebola isn't that contagious -- HIV is more virulent, and these two are nothing compared to the influenza or SARS. It's bad that health workers can get it, but this is still one person, so on a completely epidemiological basis it's really not a big deal. Characterizing a single case as somehow indicative of the safety of these procedures is sensationalism.
It looks like you don't have to learn a gesture alphabet like Graffiti. I also recall that, even if you were quite fast and accurate, graffiti's WPM just couldn't compete with keyboard, even a touch one. And even then it still has to compete with the various speech-to-text solutions.
And then the iWatch thing is altogether a different thing -- Siri and "Ok Google" are meant for speedy text entry, at the expense of discretion; this finger writing thing seems to be meant to be still text-based but more discreet, but this makes it much slower; and the iWatch drawing seems to emphasize speed and minimize distraction at the expense of precision -- it can't send text, but you can send messages without anyone casually noticing you have a smart watch.
The user is happily using their iWhatever. The government sends a Nation Security letter to Apple forcing them to put a backdoor into the phone of the target, such that this app can read whatever data it wants on the phone.
It's impossible to cut a hardware vendor out of the trust system, unless you audit the hardware of your device. But set this aside.
This won't work because apps never see your password or have access to the decryption keys. The CPU itself doesn't have access to the decryption keys and doesn't even do the crypto algorithms. When the CPU needs to access some data that's encrypted in memory or on the Flash drive, it tells the secure enclave and writes the data to its input. The enclave then decrypts the data, with keys it keeps in its own non-volatile storage, and writes the decrypted data back to the CPU. In the case of the fulll-disk encryption or the fingerprint encryption, at no time do any keys pass into the CPU, let alone get written to RAM. The CPU can order the enclave to create new keys or keypairs, it can enumerate and name them, and associate them with metadata outside the enclave, but it can't actually read the keys themselves.
The truth is if you don't let a dirty needle or an AIDS-infected male penetrate you, you're pretty safe from AIDS
Ah, a male can get AIDS from a woman, particularly if one or the other of you has another STD. More to the point, the whole issue with "AIDS-infected" people is that you generally can't tell them from normal people for years after they become contagious, this doesn't have much use for married people who's partner strays -- or even for most Americans who's courtships average from 6 to 18 months (get tested everybody).
It's important to understand that AIDS isn't virulent because it passes through "dirty" or "immoral" practices -- it's the sociological phenomenon of uncleanness an immorality that cause the spread of HIV. People don't talk about gay sex, in the US people hardly talk about sex at all -- it's freighted with taboos and superstitions. Our own prudishness makes it difficult for knowledgable people to talk about the disease and how its spread, it's virulence among "undesirables" cause all kinds of rumors and misconceptions that make the pandemic worse. People in the US have been contracting HIV since the 70s, straight people, gay people, everyone, but the misguided belief that it was a "gay" disease led people to believe that it wasn't a contagion, that it wasn't a public health problem of any kind -- think of how many people were killed by the lie that HIV is spread by sexual immorality.
And how many people continue to get HIV because they're convinced, as you say, that people with HIV will "probably have warning signs that they'll be a bad partner," that HIV comes from "bad" people and "bad" behavior, that it is necessarily shameful? Really honest people can make great partners and be infectious for years before having symptoms. All of these people fucking, all the time... AIDS is a disease that is spread by people being unwilling or too uncomfortable to talk about sex, what it is, how people do it, and who should or shouldn't be doing it, and this in turn is caused by boneheaded and dangerous cultural norms that serve no purpose.
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My understanding is that even on NFC-equipped Android phones, Google never had a proper deployment strategy; they only partnered with a few card issuers, they didn't really work with any merchants to get them on board, Verizon blocked their app on their phones, it was only limited to the US, etc.
Over that first weekend, we know now that ApplePay adoption was in the millions, and in those first few days CVS probably saw this deluge of NFC transactions and were like, the jig is up, the train is leaving the station, and if we continue to allow NFC transactions through the 2014 Christmas season the Payments War will be over and CurrenC won't have even been a contender.
A credit card isn't cash, credit cards emit a very long paper trail. Imagine how easy the police's job would be if criminals actually used credit cards in the manner you describe.
I remember it being quite pretty, and at the time wormhole effect was one of the first film visual effects created by scanning laser.
Also, beeeellllllaaaaaayyyy thhaaatt phaaaassseer ooooordderrr.
There's really no "playing" involved. If you are consumer, credit cards are simply better than store loyalty programs, on the merits.
BankAxept is better than credit cards, but Americans don't have BankAxept. Scandinavians have BankAxept, because the company that clears effectively every financial transaction in northern Europe, Nets Group, is a tolerated monopoly with a protected market, and banking regulations in Denmark clearly delineate transactions fees to be paid by the consumer.
You don't have to, you just ask the guy that did it. I don't think you can actually falsifiably prove that something is designed, but falsifiability isn't the only way we know things. Science isn't the only way of knowing things, and things can be true even if science cannot establish their truth.
In this way, we can say that aliens probably exist, and it's plausible that they have visited here in the last billion years, but if you wanna make it scientific, you do have to show me how you know this happened. The problem is, you can't hypothesize that aliens participated in evolution without first establishing that aliens exist. Without any particular clue as to what the properties of aliens are, their actual existence becomes an ontological question that science alone cannot resolve. You have to establish the physical properties and nature of aliens empirically before you can actually do any inferences with them, otherwise they could do anything, they could have the power to rewrite your brain to make you think they created us when they didn't. You have to have an account of aliens that's epistemologically grounded, and inferential science cannot supply that, that's beyond science.
Here's the question though. What are the empirical knowns pertaining to alien or trans-dimensional beings, or their interference in evolution?
Can you construct a falsifiable hypothesis involving trans-dimensional beings, or ETs, or something else, and Earth's natural history? Or any hypothesis of any kind? What experiments would we run? What observations can we make? I'm not sure that this counterproposal is actually scientific. Just because it doesn't require a deity doesn't mean it's "science."
You're getting way ahead of yourself, what you have to do first is find the aliens, and then when we meet them you'll be able to make some hypotheses. People believed atoms existed for thousands of years. But atoms weren't actually science until people in the 19th century devised experiments to observe them; until then there was "Atomism," a branch of philosophy, and atoms were mystical, pseudoscientific entities.
If Lavoisier, or Leibniz, had proposed a bomb that could destroy entire cities with the power of millions of tons of gunpowder, everyone would have called him a crank, and they'd have been right. Where would his evidence have been? And sure, they were entitled to guess or make prognostications, but should those have been taught in school as science? Should the King of France have spent millions of francs trying to invent Leibniz's bomb?
Your position is pseudoscience. This may only be for the time being, but its condition today is the issue.
Even here, in both instances Dawkins is saying that evolution is sufficient, but just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it's the only answer, or that we'd ever find something completely different. You're original contention was that people say "only evolution happens," and I asked for a quote that gave it as "the only explanation," neither of your quotes actually say this.
So you're not really saying anything about evolution, you're only beef is with how some people talk about evolution? It's just a rhetorical argument?
Hmm, I don't know, most people expect that when talking about this sort of thing we're only talking about natural occurrence. When you're talking about animal breeding or genetic engineering, we usually treat these as separate because they're not natural, we know at some point a person did it. If you wanted to propose some kind of non-evolutionary mechanism that didn't involve people, that would actually make your argument make sense, otherwise it seems completely semantic.
I mean, sure, non-evolutionary, non-artifical mechanisms are possible, but what exactly do you have in mind? I've asked this like three times now and you demur every time, I don't think you're being completely honest about your position. You clearly believe in intelligent design but refuse to say so, because you know you cannot mount an affirmative defense of it with evidence. So you snipe at other people's missteps and logical fallacies, and throw up smokescreens to confuse the actual points of contention, and hope to
Then surely producing one would be easy. How is a belief in atheism consistent with a belief that neo-Darwinian evolution is the only explanation for the origin of species? I don't think these are bound by logical inference.
Now, if you wanted to assert that "designed" non-Darwinian adaptations/morphologies/whatever exist, and that their existence can only be due to the intervention of a God, then yes, atheism and neo-Darwinism would be related, but you haven't actually said that. So frankly I don't know what your position is, other than "sometime people say wrong things about evolution (but I can't find the quote)."
Who says they can be? Who thinks they must be? Nobody here would claim these are evolutionary. Did Dawkins?
Ok... when did Dawkins say this? Or Sam Harris? Or Darwin, for that matter? I must say I find this point of contention completely unproductive and querulous, you've beaten this strawman to death!
Do you? What exactly is "explicit genetic design"? Does such a thing exist? If it does, does this dichotomy represent the, uh, "causally exhaustive" set of options? Is the existence of design falsifiable? It seems like you probably should have lead with your belief that this exists, and then your justifications for it, because this is your actual positive claim, instead of just trying to bait everyone into discrediting an unrelated negative claim.
Who has made this assertion? Sure not TFA or really anyone else here. Or is this just your thing?
A lot of people including myself have given you examples of how it could be falsified, and you can only really get to the idea that it can't be by making categorically false assertions, such as "evolution demands that all change is evolution" or "evolution predicts that a species/a population/any arbitrary group of organisms will improve its fitness over time."
I mean if you don't like the evolutionary "worldview" with the blind watchmaker, the metaphysical naturalism, and the creeping utilitarian moral calculus, that's great. But not of that is required to accept the biological process as valid, nor does the biological process philosophically entail same.
Dogs giving birth to reptiles would be a start. The modern synthesis of genetics predicts that the phenotype of a child will be a combination of the parents, and many aspects of evolutionary theory and particularly sexual selection rely on this observation.
Something evolution implies is that it's path-dependent, so you might expect that traits emerge and are retained in some kind of chronological order, there's the old joke about Haldane looking for "bunny rabbits in the Cambrian epoch" that illustrates this. There seems to be certain prerequisites to get to mammals, for instance, such that you expect to see a long natural history of animals predating mammals, if you found a mammal with very little natural history, seemingly from nowhere and having completely distinct heritage from every other animal on Earth, that would probably be cited as something not evolutionary. We don't see this because most mammals on Earth can be morphologically or genetically related to each other, and no contrary explanation is compelling.
A population of animals that developed a set of persistent traits that had no purpose and seemed completely hazardous to survival would be hard to explain, evolution predicts that conserved traits contribute to survival, and the more they contribute, the more conserved they will be.
Evolution predicts that mutations are passed from one individual to the next through time, if we were to discover that this wasn't actually happening, and genetic inheritance was only an apparent phenomenon, then evolution wouldn't be an adequate explanation.
This statement does not reflect the broad diversity of doctrine on this issue, beliefs run the gamut from theistic evolution thought intelligent design to young-Eartherism.
And given that much of their arguments center on metaphysics and the nature of proof, there never will be.
I'm generally a lot less concerned with epistemological certainty than "What are you going to teach the kids in school?", and does this thing respect freedom of conscience and critical thinking, or simply kowtows to politics, mysticism and dilettante pseudoscience, in the interests of "fairness" and "sensitivity to all worldviews."
I don't think the modern synthesis makes the claim that this process needs to be successful on a species basis, or needs to "save" or preserve certain populations or not in order to be true, which sounds like what you're proposing. Really all evolution claims is that (1) organisms change through generations, (2) these changes are subject to challenges from the environment and competition, and (3) changes that increase survivability in the face of these challenges will be conserved -- the changes are conserved, not the organisms themselves, the population or the species; these may all be lost in the process. The idea that this process must be "successful" or produce "better" or "more adapted" beings is not a necessary part of the synthesis.
I think the issue is you're seeing it teleologically. Wether something is "adapted" or not is to a large extent subjective, and in the context of evolution and natural history it's basically tautological. Evolution says, if it's alive, it's "adapted."
I'm not sure the claim that evolution is "causally exhaustive" is true, or even necessary in order to accept that evolution happens. Also I'm not sure where all this emphasis on "falsifiablity" comes from, Karl Popper is by no means considered the "exhaustive" authority on the philosophy of science. We can roll back and establish the evolution is a completely valid scientific concept, say, from a Baconian perspective, due to its practical insight and applicability.
God I'm commenting at the bottom.
This isn't actually how it works, sometimes it works this way, but only by degrees. A minimum wage is a form of price control and the difference between the equilibrium price and the fixed price can be treated as a form of tax or subsidy (in this case a tax), so this makes the question a tax incidence problem.
If McDonalds is operating in an environment where their food can be replaced with many different supplementary goods below their menu price, they actually, in the limit, cannot raise their prices because they would lose demand as people switched to the supplementary goods. If McDonalds offers a good that cannot be easily supplemented, then they have some liberty to raise prices -- but they have little control over this, their ability to raise their prices is constrained by the price elasticity of demand for their goods.
You can go a little further, and we can argue that McDonalds was paying their employees below the equilibrium wage for the work, because McDs was benefiting from either regulatory capture or some externality (an illiquid labor market, for instance), and the amount they were keeping was a pure economic rent. In this case, raising the minimum wage is a form of Pigovian regulation, and is a "perfect" pareto-optimal tax with no deadweight loss.
Wasn't there a news story a few weeks ago that the loss of the sense of smell was strongly correlated with mortality within 5 years? It's apparently totally debilitating psychologically.
Her brother is the Kwisatz Haderach...
"Innovation" mostly has to do with getting people to buy or use something -- actually being the first person to invent or market the thing doesn't really carry any intrinsic benefit, follow-through and execution always trump good ideas. Ideas are cheap.
--- Signed, Ignaz Semmelweiss, Elija Gray, the Lumiere Brothers, Preston Tucker, Douglas Engelbart, Xerox PARC, inter alia
Do you even know how this case of infection occurred? I made no claims along these lines, you're the one who says he knows, or rather knows enough to know there was a systemic problem and not one merely attributable to failure to follow established protocols.
There are only about a dozen BSL-4 facilities in the US; if you want to establish the principle that patients must be treated in such a facility, you will be moving A LOT of them. Also, none of these facilities are equipped to handle patients. The first requirement of a BSL-4 lab is that it's a separate building purpose-built for containment.
I sure am, because you seem to think every metro in the US has a world-class biohazard facility and infrastructure, and has plenty to spare on a wild goose chase of isolating minimally-virulent ebola patients, and you can't seem to understand that your fears are based completely on your own speculation and snap judgement. Your conceptualization of this disease, and the means required to contain it, constitute the textbook definition of cargo cult science.
So basically you're just anxious, because none of this "seems right" in complete absence of empirical evidence? And in your sample of 10 (or 20, who knows!) one person became ill, because, we dunno, but it sounds fishy.
What recommendations would you make, if you were, say, a public health official? Everyone who develops illness has to be treated in something akin to a BSL-4 facility? Have you any idea how many plane flights that would require, just to cite one small aspect of the logistics? And all this to protect from a disease vector that's completely unsubstantiated in the literature?
Or do you do like Judge Clay Jenkins, and personally go to the family's house in shirt-sleeves and drive them to a new home? Which approach is more appropriate? Which one balances our available resources against the actual concrete threat of the disease? Which one is actually workable?
This is why Africa was finally made barren of human inhabitants in 1980...
Also this is what, two cases in the US, three? Maybe 5 total outside of Africa, and almost all of them among health workers collateral to treating confirmed Ebola-suffering patients?
I had brunch with my friend this morning, who is an MD PhD in infectious disease and works in a BSL-4 laboratory from time to time, so I asked about this.
BSL-4 is a standard that only applies to laboratories, the same standards aren't necessarily applied to clinical environments, and in the case of Ebola are major overkill. Ebola can't travel through the air, so positive pressure suits aren't appropriate, and they still have to be taken on and off, and that's when health workers seem to get infected. People who "test positive" for Ebola are not contagious, only people who have symptoms are, and they can only pass the disease through contact with bodily fluids -- this usually implies touch, since hemorrhagic fevers cause people to give off all kinds of gross effluent, but it's just not like a "virus" one gets from casual contact, like, say, rubella.
The fact is, Ebola isn't that contagious -- HIV is more virulent, and these two are nothing compared to the influenza or SARS. It's bad that health workers can get it, but this is still one person, so on a completely epidemiological basis it's really not a big deal. Characterizing a single case as somehow indicative of the safety of these procedures is sensationalism.
It looks like you don't have to learn a gesture alphabet like Graffiti. I also recall that, even if you were quite fast and accurate, graffiti's WPM just couldn't compete with keyboard, even a touch one. And even then it still has to compete with the various speech-to-text solutions.
And then the iWatch thing is altogether a different thing -- Siri and "Ok Google" are meant for speedy text entry, at the expense of discretion; this finger writing thing seems to be meant to be still text-based but more discreet, but this makes it much slower; and the iWatch drawing seems to emphasize speed and minimize distraction at the expense of precision -- it can't send text, but you can send messages without anyone casually noticing you have a smart watch.
Defense in depth.
It's impossible to cut a hardware vendor out of the trust system, unless you audit the hardware of your device. But set this aside.
This won't work because apps never see your password or have access to the decryption keys. The CPU itself doesn't have access to the decryption keys and doesn't even do the crypto algorithms. When the CPU needs to access some data that's encrypted in memory or on the Flash drive, it tells the secure enclave and writes the data to its input. The enclave then decrypts the data, with keys it keeps in its own non-volatile storage, and writes the decrypted data back to the CPU. In the case of the fulll-disk encryption or the fingerprint encryption, at no time do any keys pass into the CPU, let alone get written to RAM. The CPU can order the enclave to create new keys or keypairs, it can enumerate and name them, and associate them with metadata outside the enclave, but it can't actually read the keys themselves.
Ah, a male can get AIDS from a woman, particularly if one or the other of you has another STD. More to the point, the whole issue with "AIDS-infected" people is that you generally can't tell them from normal people for years after they become contagious, this doesn't have much use for married people who's partner strays -- or even for most Americans who's courtships average from 6 to 18 months (get tested everybody).
It's important to understand that AIDS isn't virulent because it passes through "dirty" or "immoral" practices -- it's the sociological phenomenon of uncleanness an immorality that cause the spread of HIV. People don't talk about gay sex, in the US people hardly talk about sex at all -- it's freighted with taboos and superstitions. Our own prudishness makes it difficult for knowledgable people to talk about the disease and how its spread, it's virulence among "undesirables" cause all kinds of rumors and misconceptions that make the pandemic worse. People in the US have been contracting HIV since the 70s, straight people, gay people, everyone, but the misguided belief that it was a "gay" disease led people to believe that it wasn't a contagion, that it wasn't a public health problem of any kind -- think of how many people were killed by the lie that HIV is spread by sexual immorality.
And how many people continue to get HIV because they're convinced, as you say, that people with HIV will "probably have warning signs that they'll be a bad partner," that HIV comes from "bad" people and "bad" behavior, that it is necessarily shameful? Really honest people can make great partners and be infectious for years before having symptoms. All of these people fucking, all the time... AIDS is a disease that is spread by people being unwilling or too uncomfortable to talk about sex, what it is, how people do it, and who should or shouldn't be doing it, and this in turn is caused by boneheaded and dangerous cultural norms that serve no purpose.