The stock market certainly is gambling. It is just a game that has historically had an average payout over 100%. It is always disheartening when I hear people claiming that the stock market isn't gambling. It is the same feeling I got when people would tell me that buying investment housing wasn't gambling. Saying that good investors do their research before buying stock certainly does not change whether stocks are a gamble or not. EVERY decent blackjack player does their research on every hand. They certainly don't just bet without looking at their cards.
The stack market MAY be a good bet, but it is definitely gambling.
Your parents decided that Utah was the kind of community that you would be born in. If you don't like it, you should take it up with them. You have to keep in mind. If all decisions are made federally, then the whole country could end up like Utah, and then what are you going to do? By keeping laws more local, we can have places like Utah for the people that like it, and for those of us that don't want to live that way, we have 49 other states we can move to.
Then I challenge you to prove your point. For the next year, ingest nothing but 2000 calories of alcohol. We will see if you survive the year. After all, you are claiming that your body uses all foods in the same way, and all we have to do is count the number of calories in and out.
There are thousands of data points all around us showing that you are wrong. You can keep your head in the sand all you want, but if all it took was eating less and exercising more, very few people would be fat.
Your are absolutely wrong. If your body was made of one substance, and deposited all calories into a single shared pool, you would be right. Of course, that is not how a human body is designed. It has thousands of parts, and the calories you take in go to different places. This means that it is possible to kill yourself by using your 'simple' equation for weight lose. It also makes the exercise increasingly difficult if your body is sequestering the calories as fat, and refusing to release the fat back out as energy to use for exercise. So, basically, your comment isn't even a half truth. More like a 10th truth, and thus just wrong.
While I don't have the time to read the whole paper, I read the first two pages, as well as the Method for the assessment of humor, and the designers of that study definitely overestimated their ability to perform a proper study. In fact every single respondent underestimated their ability to recognize what is funny. Why? Because what is funny is an OPINION. It is not a fact. Every single respondent was able to determine what was funny with 100% accuracy. They start off with a self selecting group of only 8 people to try to define opinion as fact. They then dismiss 12.5% of the respondents because they did not agree with them. They then ask 30 questions ("How funny do you find this joke?"), but use 30 different questions ("How funny does 87.5% of stand-up comedians that will respond to an email poll find this joke?") to rank the answers. They then came to the conclusion that the people that have a different opinion of what is funny than 87.5% of this small group where incompetent.
So, no they did not try to "rank how well they compared to comedians in evaluating the humor of various jokes.". They compared how funny people thought a joke was compared to a small subset of a specific type of comedian. What they TRIED to do, and CLAIMED to do was determine how funny a joke was, and how good people were at evaluating how funny the joke was compared to how funny it actually was. They failed miserably at what they TRIED to do, and what they did do was a pointless exercise that tells you nothing of value.
You see, it isn't an "I'm-cool-because-I'm-skeptical" attitude. It is an "I'm-cool-because-I-can-recognize-that-this-particular-study-is-B-S" attitude.
What we have is a group of individuals telling us that they are competent at judging competency, and that they have determined that people who think they are competent frequently aren't because they lack the competency to judge competency. Jeez, the irony of the entire exercise is profound.
That link is a riot. A 'study' that tries to rank in a 'scientific' way how funny someone is, and thus prove that people who think they know things, really don't.
It's hard to tell if the irony is intended or not.
It's not that Americans don't get enough physical activity either. The biggest problem is that one solution is trying to be assigned to every metabolism. A big one I see is that people are recommended to eat a 90% sugar diet. As you say, some people don't get enough exercise, but that certainly isn't THE reason people are fat. Then there is the skewed definition of "over weight" and "obese" by the BMI. The numbers shown in the BMI can be down right dangerous.
There are some people who's weight is primarily controlled by exercise. My wife is like that. It doesn't matter what she eats; a few days at the gym and she starts dropping weight. Some people's weight is primarily controlled by diet. This is how I am. When I get exercise, I don't burn up fat. I only build muscle. From a real health aspect, that is still good, but from an external view, as well as what is defined by the BMI, I become fatter, and thus more and more over weight. Even worse for the 'one true way' of weight loss, I pack on fat if I eat sugar. This include whole grains, fruits and many vegetables. For me, the only thing that makes me lose weight is to eat a primarily carnivorous high fat diet. That's right. If I don't get enough fat in my diet, I start putting on weight. Of course, there are also people that need a low fat diet, and people that need exercise and a change in diet.
We will never seen the weight 'problem' disappear until we stop using a crappy 19th century mathematician's chart to determine proper health, and stop thinking that everyone's body functions in the exact same way. We don't prescribe the same medicine to everyone. Ingesting the same medication can save one mans life, while the same medicine can kill another. Why would we think that the same diet and exercise plan would work exactly the same on everybody?
Make fun of the AC if you want, but the AC's post describes the whole point of Protestantism. So, if he is a "backs away without making eye contact" kind of loon, then you must place all Protestants either into the same category as the AC, or into the "Too stupid to even know their own religion" category.
I agree. It is amazing how many people I have met that had a college education, and not only had a very poor general education, but had a very poor understanding of the subject they majored in in college.
Besides it being more durable, a multi-'disk' changer would be dramatically cheaper. You can put up to 256 devices on a usb port. Now, I understand that nobody does this because there isn't enough bandwidth to handle 256 devices, but since we are talking about movies on a single device, it seems reasonable to assume that you would only play from one at a time. So, if players were built to play movies from USB, then you could convert your single 'disk' player into a 4 'disk' player by just adding a small hub. If the player included say, 6 USB ports, you could have more movies installed than most people will ever have.
Don't take this as an endorsement of a DRM encumbered format. Just a note on the benefit of USB vs. DVD.
Bing! That is the right answer. There is no excuse for anything less. It should work just like the phone company. They have a box outside that is the delimiter between their responsibility and yours. If they have to come out to check the line, they will plug into the outside box with their own phone. If they get a dial tone, they will place an outgoing call, and have an incoming call placed to your number. At that point, there is no question as to who's problem it is.
4) Violence commited BY women is very common in part because of comments like "If a middle aged woman with no weapon threatens you, *and you feel threatened*, it's time to hit the weight room, take a martial arts course, and probably both and more."
Personally, I have found that honesty is the best policy. The trick is that you have to be honest from the get go. If she asks you if the outfit looks good, and it doesn't, say 'No'. If she gets upset, you just challenge her with 'What? You want me to lie to you about your outfit?'
Of course, if you do lie to your wife about stuff, then you have already screwed yourself, because she will rightfully assume that you are just trying to be an ass. After all, if you don't have any problems lying to her, why would you choose now to be honest?
Except that home schooled kids are not primarily from overly wealthy families. They run from very wealthy to very poor, just like their public schooled counterparts. Well, as poor as you can get in a place like the US. The "Home schooled kids only come from rich families" is simply wrong.
Actually, what you WANT is irrelevant. Which is more likely to produce the most offspring that are the most likely to reproduce in great numbers, the monogamist that sticks around to raise his 10 children, or the polygamist that has 20 children, and lets the state support them.
You mean INCORRECT and unnecessarily harsh. You can be pissed all you want that homeschooling is more successful than public schools at giving kids a good education, but that doesn't change the fact that it regularly does so. You can also be pissed that someone suggest that teachers live up to their claims. If they are as good as they claim at educating, they should be able to write a decent text book. After all, according to most, they spend every night weekend and 3 months solid during the summer writing curriculum anyway.
Even in those extreme cases, it is naive to claim that the video games killed them, or even their behavior. While 7 days of gaming with no sleep might be considered unusual, having only two reported case of death after a 2-3 day stints in front of video games show absolutely no correlation. Spending 2-3 days straight on gaming is common enough that to show a correlation, you would have 1 or 2 every month or two in just about every city in America. A few day awake and playing video games is simply not going to kill people.
The parent poster wasn't saying that the gaming will make you obese. He was using morbidly obese, bed bound people as an example of how someone who claims to care can be the one that is funding the problem.
If you got that, and were just going on off on a tangent, please disregard this post.
Slashdot Mirror
The stock market certainly is gambling. It is just a game that has historically had an average payout over 100%. It is always disheartening when I hear people claiming that the stock market isn't gambling. It is the same feeling I got when people would tell me that buying investment housing wasn't gambling. Saying that good investors do their research before buying stock certainly does not change whether stocks are a gamble or not. EVERY decent blackjack player does their research on every hand. They certainly don't just bet without looking at their cards.
The stack market MAY be a good bet, but it is definitely gambling.
Your parents decided that Utah was the kind of community that you would be born in. If you don't like it, you should take it up with them. You have to keep in mind. If all decisions are made federally, then the whole country could end up like Utah, and then what are you going to do? By keeping laws more local, we can have places like Utah for the people that like it, and for those of us that don't want to live that way, we have 49 other states we can move to.
Sorry, make that 2000 calories of alcohol a day.
Then I challenge you to prove your point. For the next year, ingest nothing but 2000 calories of alcohol. We will see if you survive the year. After all, you are claiming that your body uses all foods in the same way, and all we have to do is count the number of calories in and out.
There are thousands of data points all around us showing that you are wrong. You can keep your head in the sand all you want, but if all it took was eating less and exercising more, very few people would be fat.
Your are absolutely wrong. If your body was made of one substance, and deposited all calories into a single shared pool, you would be right. Of course, that is not how a human body is designed. It has thousands of parts, and the calories you take in go to different places. This means that it is possible to kill yourself by using your 'simple' equation for weight lose. It also makes the exercise increasingly difficult if your body is sequestering the calories as fat, and refusing to release the fat back out as energy to use for exercise. So, basically, your comment isn't even a half truth. More like a 10th truth, and thus just wrong.
I am always baffled by the difference in reaction that this gets over this. Well, not really, but I really want to have more faith in humanity.
While I don't have the time to read the whole paper, I read the first two pages, as well as the Method for the assessment of humor, and the designers of that study definitely overestimated their ability to perform a proper study. In fact every single respondent underestimated their ability to recognize what is funny. Why? Because what is funny is an OPINION. It is not a fact. Every single respondent was able to determine what was funny with 100% accuracy. They start off with a self selecting group of only 8 people to try to define opinion as fact. They then dismiss 12.5% of the respondents because they did not agree with them. They then ask 30 questions ("How funny do you find this joke?"), but use 30 different questions ("How funny does 87.5% of stand-up comedians that will respond to an email poll find this joke?") to rank the answers. They then came to the conclusion that the people that have a different opinion of what is funny than 87.5% of this small group where incompetent.
So, no they did not try to "rank how well they compared to comedians in evaluating the humor of various jokes.". They compared how funny people thought a joke was compared to a small subset of a specific type of comedian. What they TRIED to do, and CLAIMED to do was determine how funny a joke was, and how good people were at evaluating how funny the joke was compared to how funny it actually was. They failed miserably at what they TRIED to do, and what they did do was a pointless exercise that tells you nothing of value.
You see, it isn't an "I'm-cool-because-I'm-skeptical" attitude. It is an "I'm-cool-because-I-can-recognize-that-this-particular-study-is-B-S" attitude.
What we have is a group of individuals telling us that they are competent at judging competency, and that they have determined that people who think they are competent frequently aren't because they lack the competency to judge competency. Jeez, the irony of the entire exercise is profound.
That link is a riot. A 'study' that tries to rank in a 'scientific' way how funny someone is, and thus prove that people who think they know things, really don't.
It's hard to tell if the irony is intended or not.
Ahh... The irony....
It's not that Americans don't get enough physical activity either. The biggest problem is that one solution is trying to be assigned to every metabolism. A big one I see is that people are recommended to eat a 90% sugar diet. As you say, some people don't get enough exercise, but that certainly isn't THE reason people are fat. Then there is the skewed definition of "over weight" and "obese" by the BMI. The numbers shown in the BMI can be down right dangerous.
There are some people who's weight is primarily controlled by exercise. My wife is like that. It doesn't matter what she eats; a few days at the gym and she starts dropping weight. Some people's weight is primarily controlled by diet. This is how I am. When I get exercise, I don't burn up fat. I only build muscle. From a real health aspect, that is still good, but from an external view, as well as what is defined by the BMI, I become fatter, and thus more and more over weight. Even worse for the 'one true way' of weight loss, I pack on fat if I eat sugar. This include whole grains, fruits and many vegetables. For me, the only thing that makes me lose weight is to eat a primarily carnivorous high fat diet. That's right. If I don't get enough fat in my diet, I start putting on weight. Of course, there are also people that need a low fat diet, and people that need exercise and a change in diet.
We will never seen the weight 'problem' disappear until we stop using a crappy 19th century mathematician's chart to determine proper health, and stop thinking that everyone's body functions in the exact same way. We don't prescribe the same medicine to everyone. Ingesting the same medication can save one mans life, while the same medicine can kill another. Why would we think that the same diet and exercise plan would work exactly the same on everybody?
Well, I guess we know which group you belong to then...
Make fun of the AC if you want, but the AC's post describes the whole point of Protestantism. So, if he is a "backs away without making eye contact" kind of loon, then you must place all Protestants either into the same category as the AC, or into the "Too stupid to even know their own religion" category.
I agree. It is amazing how many people I have met that had a college education, and not only had a very poor general education, but had a very poor understanding of the subject they majored in in college.
Besides it being more durable, a multi-'disk' changer would be dramatically cheaper. You can put up to 256 devices on a usb port. Now, I understand that nobody does this because there isn't enough bandwidth to handle 256 devices, but since we are talking about movies on a single device, it seems reasonable to assume that you would only play from one at a time. So, if players were built to play movies from USB, then you could convert your single 'disk' player into a 4 'disk' player by just adding a small hub. If the player included say, 6 USB ports, you could have more movies installed than most people will ever have.
Don't take this as an endorsement of a DRM encumbered format. Just a note on the benefit of USB vs. DVD.
Bing! That is the right answer. There is no excuse for anything less. It should work just like the phone company. They have a box outside that is the delimiter between their responsibility and yours. If they have to come out to check the line, they will plug into the outside box with their own phone. If they get a dial tone, they will place an outgoing call, and have an incoming call placed to your number. At that point, there is no question as to who's problem it is.
4) Violence commited BY women is very common in part because of comments like "If a middle aged woman with no weapon threatens you, *and you feel threatened*, it's time to hit the weight room, take a martial arts course, and probably both and more."
Yep, a 12:30pm appointment is so that they can waste an entire day. You know with the 4 hour window on either side of the appointment.
Personally, I have found that honesty is the best policy. The trick is that you have to be honest from the get go. If she asks you if the outfit looks good, and it doesn't, say 'No'. If she gets upset, you just challenge her with 'What? You want me to lie to you about your outfit?'
Of course, if you do lie to your wife about stuff, then you have already screwed yourself, because she will rightfully assume that you are just trying to be an ass. After all, if you don't have any problems lying to her, why would you choose now to be honest?
Except that home schooled kids are not primarily from overly wealthy families. They run from very wealthy to very poor, just like their public schooled counterparts. Well, as poor as you can get in a place like the US. The "Home schooled kids only come from rich families" is simply wrong.
Actually, what you WANT is irrelevant. Which is more likely to produce the most offspring that are the most likely to reproduce in great numbers, the monogamist that sticks around to raise his 10 children, or the polygamist that has 20 children, and lets the state support them.
You mean INCORRECT and unnecessarily harsh. You can be pissed all you want that homeschooling is more successful than public schools at giving kids a good education, but that doesn't change the fact that it regularly does so. You can also be pissed that someone suggest that teachers live up to their claims. If they are as good as they claim at educating, they should be able to write a decent text book. After all, according to most, they spend every night weekend and 3 months solid during the summer writing curriculum anyway.
Even in those extreme cases, it is naive to claim that the video games killed them, or even their behavior. While 7 days of gaming with no sleep might be considered unusual, having only two reported case of death after a 2-3 day stints in front of video games show absolutely no correlation. Spending 2-3 days straight on gaming is common enough that to show a correlation, you would have 1 or 2 every month or two in just about every city in America. A few day awake and playing video games is simply not going to kill people.
The parent poster wasn't saying that the gaming will make you obese. He was using morbidly obese, bed bound people as an example of how someone who claims to care can be the one that is funding the problem.
If you got that, and were just going on off on a tangent, please disregard this post.
If he writes that many checks a month, the cost of hiring someone to go line by line through the statement would be trivial.
You should just be afraid of publicly funded research if the private corps get to patent the outcome of that research.