> My comments were not elitist, nor am I an egomaniac.
Lesson #3: don't be so defensive; a disagreement is not a personal attack.:)
(Not that I'm saying you do so often, but you'd be surprised how frequently I see it happen. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, just with being unable to admit it and learn from it.)
> Shit...At the University of Chicago I dont feel like they are
> just handing the degrees out, I feel like they are fabricating
> my degree from the fingernails they torturously pull out.
And that's how you know you're learning!
(Only partly facetious - you get out of a degree what you put into it, and that hard work will serve you in good stead later.
Which is good, because prosthetic fingernails aren't cheap...)
> I remember seeing a poster in college stating that about 1% of the
> world's population has a four year degree. That impressed me. I
> realized that I was becoming part of an elite.
Lesson #1: don't be so easily impressed.
Lesson #2: always question the raw numbers behind statistics.
Getting a four-year degree is dead common in the US - about a third of people aged 25-29 in the US have finished a four-year degree (scroll down to "College Completion").
Apropos to the subject, though, just because someone can learn to use a complex piece of software doesn't mean they want to. For plenty of people, a computer is no more than a tool; they want it to perform a few functions without giving them a lot of hassle, and they couldn't give a damn why or how it does that.
And that's fine.
Most of you don't understand the cars you drive in anything more than an abstract sense, or the planes you fly in, or the processes required to get you the food you eat, or the shoes you wear, or the chemistry involved in your antiperspirant, or any of a million other things that we simply don't have the time or mental energy to learn the detailed working of due to the specialized nature of modern society. Most of those things are just black-box tools---they just work.
And computers are one of those black-box tools for most people.
Accept that fact, or not - I don't care, and neither do they. But pointing out that most people have more important things to spend their time and energy on than computers is hardly "trolling". It's a necessary consideration if you want to make computers that most people will have any interest in using.
> if you practice martial arts you get a black belt afer doing so
> for 3 to 4 years. Some rare exceptions need longer
Back when I was young, my sensei referred to this as the McDojo attitude---the idea that black belts were given out willy-nilly without regard to the level of skill a person had actually attained. He complained that it cheapened the attainment of a black belt, unfairly granting what is intended to be merely a symbol signifying a high level of skill. Black belts mean nothing when they're not earned
Talking to others, my sensei certainly wasn't alone in this view, and was easier than some. If the dojos you've been to hand out black belts to anyone who hangs around consistently for 3-4 years, I have doubts about the quality of their training.
(I'm also vexed at how this mentality has seeped into the granting of university degrees to some extent. Kids these days need to learn to earn achievements, not merely feel entitled to them. And by "kids", I mean anyone who didn't live through the Great Depression.
> I think you'll find the same proportion of girl-who-picks-buxom-redhead to guy-who-picks-muscular-heman
Which, I believe, was the poster's point. It was argued that the female characters are attractive only to fulfill male desire fantasies, but that male characters are attractive to fulfill male self-image fantasies. The poster pointed out that one very-present reason that female characters are attractive is that women use them to fulfill their own self-image fantasies, acting just like men in that regard. Accordingly, the original argument is---at best---hopelessly naive.
Considering that significant amounts of porn (both F/M and M/M) are consumed by women, I would be surprised if one of the reasons for attractive male characters was not to allow women to fulfill their desire fantasies. Honestly, video games are no different that way than Hollywood movies---it's well-known that sticking a shirtless Brad Pitt in a movie is partly to increase female viewership, just as a tight-clad Angelina Jolie is for attracting the men. That people think things are totally different in a different segment of the entertainment industry is laughable.
> That's a silly statement. If you look at the whole wide range of range of books...
...you find that half of them are romance novels (PDF). (Among paperbacks, at least, but those represent the majority of books sold.)
Moreover, there is a serious problem in the effective literacy of men lagging behind that of women, with a substantial portion of the difference attributed to the fact that women read more.
Considering that "literacy" is rather more valuable than "l33t gaming skillz", the slant of the video gaming industry away from girls pales in importance compared to the slant of the publishing industry away from boys. (Although both may be due to innate differences, of course.)
Do you dispute the mathematical definition of the arithmetic mean? Plenty of more authoritative sources, such as MathWorld or a 4th-grade textbook, would be more than happy to show you quite how wrong you are.
There's nothing wrong with making a foolish comment based on a misunderstanding and being corrected - misunderstandings happen. Continuing to defend a literally-elementary mistake, though, shows willful ignorance or malice. Don't be that jerk.
> the "best" (i.e. most efficient) solution for society would be
> to execute the unproductive members.
Not necessarily. The fear created by such a policy could potentially lower the productivity of society by increasing the number of stress-related diseases, not to mention the damaging effects of societal unrest.
Humans simply do not function as purely rational production machines, and any approach which does not take our humanity into account is likely to fail.
What's odd, though, is that 2 of the variant-guys had 160 IQs. While 2 of 40 is pretty noisy data, the chance of finding even one is about 1-in-30,000, making the odds of finding 2 in a group of 40 about 1 in a million (assuming random kids, of course). While it's rampant speculation on my part, I'm curious if that's a statistical anomaly or whether the variant group has a low mean but an unusual number of extremely high values.
It also means (again, assuming 40 variant boys) that those two kids personally accounted for almost 10% of the summed IQ in the group, meaning that if they are just a statistical anomaly, the group mean would be about 4 points lower than measured, increasing the difference between them and non-variant boys by 25%.
Hmm - with the standard distribution of intelligence in the population (same link), 25% of people have an IQ 10% or more below the population mean. If that's true for this group, they alone would account for 50% of 25% of 25% or 3% of the overall population with an IQ below ~74, but the given frequency for an IQ below 74 is only about 5% for the entire population, and about 2/5 are female (link), leaving only about 0% of the total population, or suggesting that non-variant males have IQ below 74 only a miniscule fraction of the time. Since 20-25% of mental retardation is due to some kind of damage (i.e., should be roughly equally distributed), that seems implausible. So it kinda seems likely that either (a) the difference between means isn't as large as this study suggests, or (b) the IQs of this group don't follow the normal distribution that overall IQs (and, with tweaks, most other human traits) follow.
Based on that, in my largely ignorant opinion, I suspect that any actual difference between the means is less than is suggested by this study. FWLTW.
> anyone know offhand what the population variance for IQ is?
The standard deviation of IQ is 15 or 16 in most scales. A difference of 1.25 standard deviations is not small.
However, without knowing the frequency of the gene in the tested population, it's impossible to know if the difference is statistically significant. If the group was 50% male and 50% had the gene, it almost certainly represents a real difference; if only 5% had the gene, that's only 7-8 guys, and the "difference" is pretty likely to be random chance.
It's also worth noting that the difference could be in developmental speed rather than in level---i.e., the guys with the gene could just take longer to develop, but be just as smart by age 25, or could be associated with some other factor that is merely correlated with intelligence (such as, say, alcoholism which can lead to poverty which can lead to a less intellectually-nurturing home life).
Basically, this article gives us a sound bite with almost no useful information---shoddy reporting.
I would guess he stands in the "control of the internet by any single body is bad" camp, that being (a) the obvious one, and (b) an obvious way to reconcile the two articles.
Really, you seem to be desperately reaching for something to complain about---"bad when they do it" and "bad when we do it" does not necessarily mean "hypocritical"; sometimes it just means "it's bad for anyone to do it".
> I like to think of governments as particularly firmly established and powerful insurance companies.
Interesting, but fundamentally flawed.
That comparison misses the key notion of intent---the stated intent of an insurance company is to maximize profit; the stated intent of a government is to serve the people. If you don't believe that key ideological difference radically changes the functioning of the body, I would humbly suggest you haven't thought about it long enough.
(Now, that being said, one could argue the stated intent of a government is different from its actual intent. That is quite possible; however, with periodic elections and public oversight, I would argue that governments will tend to shift back towards their stated intentions over time.
People have already started leaping to attack national healthcare systems, even though evidence shows they really do cost less money for a superior product.
Everycomparativestudy done on healthcare puts the mostly-public healthcare of Canada and Western Europe as equal to or better than that found in the US, despite the US spending a much larger fraction of its total GDP (13.6% vs. 9.5% of American vs. Canadian GDP goes to healthcare, vs. 6.8% ot 10.7% of GDP for major Western European nations).
(Before you complain about the link sites, the first study was done by the World Health Organization, the second by Johns Hopkins, the third by an author formerly from the conservative Fraser Institute. And before anyone complains that this is a Canada-vs-US thing, read especially the first study - most countries in Western Europe get better healthcare results for less money than the US, and many are better that way than Canada.)
The reason for this is, according to studies, wastefulbureaucracy in the US system. According to those who have analyzed the systems, this may be one place where a government program is actually more efficient than a collection of private programs. As plenty of posters in this thread have amply explained, that can, does, and should be expected to happen sometimes. Many governments run programs more efficiently than a collection of private companies could do; if a certain government never does so, that's a problem with that government, not with government programs in general.
The Vietnam War involved few troops from anyone other than the USA and Vietnam. That North Vietnam had advisors or equipment from the USSR does not change the basic fact that the USA was driven out primarily by the Vietnamese, much as the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan primarily by local soldiers.
> No one EVER says the Kuwaitis chased out Iraq
That's because the troops that chased Iraq out of Kuwait were not Kuwaiti troops!
What nationality were the majority of troops that chased Iraq out of Kuwait? American.
What nationality were the majority of troops that chased USSR out of Afghanistan? Afghani.
What nationality were the majority of troops that chased USA out of Vietnam? Vietnamese.
That's why we say the Iraqis were chased out by the Americans, the Soviets were chased out be the Afghanis, and the Americans were chased out by the Vietnamese---because that's who the troops were.
The Axis powers involved in the Battle of France had 3,350,000 men, as compared to the 2,862,000 the Allies had, or 17% more. Considering that the Allied army included significant numbers of British, Dutch, and Belgian troops (about 40 divisions, or roughly 20% of the total force), but the Axis side was purely German until after the Battle of France had been essentially won (June 10), there were far more German troops than French. Moreover, the French troops were often older than is ideal for conscripts, due to demographics (a smaller population than Germany and heavy losses in WWI).
> AND the French had better armour.
This part is true, and the French also had more armour; however, the Blitzkrieg was, essentially, a brilliant new tactic that caught everyone (even some of the German commanders...) off-guard. Combined with the large German advantage in air power, the Allied armies never really had a chance to recover.
> The Vietnamese did not defeat anyone. The Communists did.
You say "The Communists" like one would say "The Bogeyman".
Man up - the Vietnamese chased off France, and then they chased off the US. I'm continually amazed how many people have such fragile confidence in their country that they're unable to face that reality.
> When has France ever been hostile towards something and then come out on top?
It's interesting to examine recent history and see exactly why the French military is laughed at so much:
In the last hundred years, there have been three major military operations France was involved in. The first was WWI, where France (and its allies) stopped the invasion launched by Germany (and its allies), fought for a few years, and eventually won. So that's not the reason.
The second major war was WWII, where the French army was bulldozed by the most powerful military force on the planet at that time, Nazi Germany. While France and its allies eventually won that war, too, and their loss against a larger and more powerful force is hardly unreasonable, their reliance on the foolish Maginot Line was unwise, and is the source of a little bit of the scorn you so often hear.
It's France's most recent major military action, however, that is by far the most shameful and humbling, and makes their army a fair target for ridicule. Though France was still rebuilding after being all but destroyed ten years earlier in WWII, the sheer disparity between the power of France and the country they lost to is laughable. There is no excuse for a nation as large, powerful, rich, and advanced to lose to a nation as tiny, weak, poor, and backward as Vietnam.
One of the world's 10 most powerful countries, losing a war to one of the world's least powerful? Can you imagine?? No wonder we don't respect their military.
> If this thing kicks off at anywhere near this supposed 75%...
>
> Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%
From TFlink:
Global mortality rate from the influenza was estimated at 2.5%-5% of the population, with some 20% of the world population suffering from the disease to some extent.
i.e., the Spanish Flu was 12-25% fatal, not 2.5-5% as you suggest.
Moreover, mortality rates of an epidemic are often/usually lower than those of the source disease, thanks to mutation---forms less likely to disable their hosts spread more rapidly (more points of contact), so the mortality rate is likely to be lower than what's been observed.
Moreover, what's been observed is a biased measure of the true mortality rate---we're mostly counting the people who are so sick they get noticed for it, and those around them. Are we sure we've counted all the people who've contracted H5N1 but haven't died? How many didn't get very sick, and so weren't even considered by doctors as potential victims?
In all likelihood, a pandemic from H5N1 would be no worse than the Spanish Flu was.
Keep in mind, though - the Spanish Flu was bad, so this is still a serious issue. It's just not so apocalyptic as some would fear.
> t's just such craptacular ignorance of the basic workings of
> law that makes our jury system so fail so spectacularly
Since your spectacular knowledge pegs this as craptacular ignorance, you must have demonstrable reasons to say so, right? You should be able to point to the legal statutes in question, or to case history, or to judicial opinions on the matter, or even to legal blogs discussing this, yes?
Or are you just giving another craptacular opinion based on craptacular ignorance and assumptions?
You might well be right; you just haven't given us any reason to believe you. In fact, given how you jumped right in there to start the insult train, history suggests you might not be all that believable after all.
> If it is not obvious from the code, it should be refactored.
If it is obvious from the code, your project is too simple.
(Flippant, but not totally false. I work on research code that does...significantly complicated things. It can be hard enough for me to keep track of the interactions of the algorithms even when I'm designing them on paper; translate them into code, and the result is not at all trivial.
What my code does can be hard to understand when I've made a serious effort to clearly explain what it does in prose; even then, I expect understanding what it's doing to require effort from other researchers in my subfield. To expect any of them---much less a more junior researcher---to understand what is going on from the code alone is simply nonsensical. They would dismiss it as a waste of their time, and rightly so.
If code were that easy to read and understand, it would be found in most computer science research papers; that such papers avoid it like the plague suggests that's not the case, even for less-complicated problems.)
Perhaps true. However, everycomparativestudy done on healthcare puts Canada's healthcare as equal to or better than that found in the US, despite the US spending a much larger fraction of its total GDP (13.6% vs. 9.5%).
(Before you complain about the link sites, the first study was done by the World Health Organization, the second by Johns Hopkins, the third by an author formerly from the conservative Fraser Institute. And before anyone complains that this is a Canada-vs-US thing, read especially the first study - most countries in Western Europe get better healthcare results for less money than the US, and many are better that way than Canada.)
The reason for this is, according to studies, wastefulbureaucracy in the US system. According to those who have analyzed the systems, this may be one place where a government program is actually more efficient than a collection of private programs. (The mind boggles, I know...)
In other words - ignore most of the data, and you can get any answer you're looking for. Study all of the data, and you'll find you're demonstrably wrong.
> In this case, the starting point could be P(G) = 0.5.
>
> But, you can then introduce quite a bit of evidence
Absolutely. And it's absolutely the case that, for many people, the evidence available to them makes P(G) seem very, very small. No argument from me; my point with bringing this up was simply threefold:
1) To demonstrate that a belief in a god is not necessarily arbitrary; evidence in its favour can and does exist.
2) To demonstrate that, since such evidence can and does exist, stating "God does not exist" as if it were known fact is itself no more than an article of faith; P(G) is not known to = 0.
3) To illustrate the notion that other people have different experiences than you do, and hence may have very different beliefs yet still be just as rational and logical as you. There is no a priori reason to believe that it is impossible for any person's experiences to be such that the preponderance of evidence is towards the existence of God, so dismissing all people who believe so as necessarily irrational or deluded is itself irrational.
My point is not about the content of the argument, but about its form. If one is going to claim the high ground in terms of logic and reason, one should actually adhere to the requirements of logic and rationality; some people who do, do not.
> If i asked you whether I am 20 year old , 25 or 30, just reading from
> this short paragraph , any choice you would make is arbitrary since you
> have not proof toward a way or another.
Here is your error: evidence is not proof. You declaim a choice as arbitrary if it lacks "proof", yet it is hardly arbitrary for me to choose to believe that Natalie Portman is female, even though I have no proof and base my choice only on the fallible evidence of having seen her.
Only if I have zero evidence is my choice entirely arbitrary. Even the vaguest of observations---such as your vocabulary and sentence structure---is likely to have an effect on the conditional probabilities, making the choice (if I choose the option with maximum probability) no longer arbitrary.
Accordingly, neither the choice "God exists" nor the choice "God does not exist" is arbitrary---either will necessarily be made by a person who has experienced an incomprehensibly vast number of observations which could affect the logically-reasoned probability of God existing.
The question is much like you asking yourself "does Dire Bonobo own a skateboard?" While you have no direct evidence one way or the other, you can, if you are clever, use inference reasoning (young people are more likely to use the internet, and young people are more likely to own skateboards, hence...) to make an informed (although still possibly wrong) guess about the truth or falsity of this question. Neither "his skateboard exists" nor "his skateboard does not exist" is somehow "more arbitrary" than the other; the only way either is an arbitrary selection is if you entirely fail to use your reasoning faculties to take into account the available evidence.
"Arbitrary" is often not a property of the choice; instead, it's due to the ignorance of the chooser.
Slashdot Mirror
Lesson #3: don't be so defensive; a disagreement is not a personal attack. :)
(Not that I'm saying you do so often, but you'd be surprised how frequently I see it happen. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, just with being unable to admit it and learn from it.)
> just handing the degrees out, I feel like they are fabricating
> my degree from the fingernails they torturously pull out.
And that's how you know you're learning!
(Only partly facetious - you get out of a degree what you put into it, and that hard work will serve you in good stead later.
Which is good, because prosthetic fingernails aren't cheap...)
> world's population has a four year degree. That impressed me. I
> realized that I was becoming part of an elite.
Lesson #1: don't be so easily impressed.
Lesson #2: always question the raw numbers behind statistics.
Getting a four-year degree is dead common in the US - about a third of people aged 25-29 in the US have finished a four-year degree (scroll down to "College Completion").
Apropos to the subject, though, just because someone can learn to use a complex piece of software doesn't mean they want to. For plenty of people, a computer is no more than a tool; they want it to perform a few functions without giving them a lot of hassle, and they couldn't give a damn why or how it does that.
And that's fine.
Most of you don't understand the cars you drive in anything more than an abstract sense, or the planes you fly in, or the processes required to get you the food you eat, or the shoes you wear, or the chemistry involved in your antiperspirant, or any of a million other things that we simply don't have the time or mental energy to learn the detailed working of due to the specialized nature of modern society. Most of those things are just black-box tools---they just work.
And computers are one of those black-box tools for most people.
Accept that fact, or not - I don't care, and neither do they. But pointing out that most people have more important things to spend their time and energy on than computers is hardly "trolling". It's a necessary consideration if you want to make computers that most people will have any interest in using.
> for 3 to 4 years. Some rare exceptions need longer
Back when I was young, my sensei referred to this as the McDojo attitude---the idea that black belts were given out willy-nilly without regard to the level of skill a person had actually attained. He complained that it cheapened the attainment of a black belt, unfairly granting what is intended to be merely a symbol signifying a high level of skill. Black belts mean nothing when they're not earned
Talking to others, my sensei certainly wasn't alone in this view, and was easier than some. If the dojos you've been to hand out black belts to anyone who hangs around consistently for 3-4 years, I have doubts about the quality of their training.
(I'm also vexed at how this mentality has seeped into the granting of university degrees to some extent. Kids these days need to learn to earn achievements, not merely feel entitled to them. And by "kids", I mean anyone who didn't live through the Great Depression.
Now get off my lawn...)
Which, I believe, was the poster's point. It was argued that the female characters are attractive only to fulfill male desire fantasies, but that male characters are attractive to fulfill male self-image fantasies. The poster pointed out that one very-present reason that female characters are attractive is that women use them to fulfill their own self-image fantasies, acting just like men in that regard. Accordingly, the original argument is---at best---hopelessly naive.
Considering that significant amounts of porn (both F/M and M/M) are consumed by women, I would be surprised if one of the reasons for attractive male characters was not to allow women to fulfill their desire fantasies. Honestly, video games are no different that way than Hollywood movies---it's well-known that sticking a shirtless Brad Pitt in a movie is partly to increase female viewership, just as a tight-clad Angelina Jolie is for attracting the men. That people think things are totally different in a different segment of the entertainment industry is laughable.
Moreover, there is a serious problem in the effective literacy of men lagging behind that of women, with a substantial portion of the difference attributed to the fact that women read more.
Considering that "literacy" is rather more valuable than "l33t gaming skillz", the slant of the video gaming industry away from girls pales in importance compared to the slant of the publishing industry away from boys. (Although both may be due to innate differences, of course.)
Do you dispute the mathematical definition of the arithmetic mean? Plenty of more authoritative sources, such as MathWorld or a 4th-grade textbook, would be more than happy to show you quite how wrong you are.
There's nothing wrong with making a foolish comment based on a misunderstanding and being corrected - misunderstandings happen. Continuing to defend a literally-elementary mistake, though, shows willful ignorance or malice. Don't be that jerk.
> to execute the unproductive members.
Not necessarily. The fear created by such a policy could potentially lower the productivity of society by increasing the number of stress-related diseases, not to mention the damaging effects of societal unrest.
Humans simply do not function as purely rational production machines, and any approach which does not take our humanity into account is likely to fail.
> IQ is a quantification of variance within a population. It does not sum.
It does when you're finding its mean value. By definition, mean = sum/count.
What's odd, though, is that 2 of the variant-guys had 160 IQs. While 2 of 40 is pretty noisy data, the chance of finding even one is about 1-in-30,000, making the odds of finding 2 in a group of 40 about 1 in a million (assuming random kids, of course). While it's rampant speculation on my part, I'm curious if that's a statistical anomaly or whether the variant group has a low mean but an unusual number of extremely high values.
It also means (again, assuming 40 variant boys) that those two kids personally accounted for almost 10% of the summed IQ in the group, meaning that if they are just a statistical anomaly, the group mean would be about 4 points lower than measured, increasing the difference between them and non-variant boys by 25%.
Hmm - with the standard distribution of intelligence in the population (same link), 25% of people have an IQ 10% or more below the population mean. If that's true for this group, they alone would account for 50% of 25% of 25% or 3% of the overall population with an IQ below ~74, but the given frequency for an IQ below 74 is only about 5% for the entire population, and about 2/5 are female (link), leaving only about 0% of the total population, or suggesting that non-variant males have IQ below 74 only a miniscule fraction of the time. Since 20-25% of mental retardation is due to some kind of damage (i.e., should be roughly equally distributed), that seems implausible. So it kinda seems likely that either (a) the difference between means isn't as large as this study suggests, or (b) the IQs of this group don't follow the normal distribution that overall IQs (and, with tweaks, most other human traits) follow.
Based on that, in my largely ignorant opinion, I suspect that any actual difference between the means is less than is suggested by this study. FWLTW.
The standard deviation of IQ is 15 or 16 in most scales. A difference of 1.25 standard deviations is not small.
However, without knowing the frequency of the gene in the tested population, it's impossible to know if the difference is statistically significant. If the group was 50% male and 50% had the gene, it almost certainly represents a real difference; if only 5% had the gene, that's only 7-8 guys, and the "difference" is pretty likely to be random chance.
It's also worth noting that the difference could be in developmental speed rather than in level---i.e., the guys with the gene could just take longer to develop, but be just as smart by age 25, or could be associated with some other factor that is merely correlated with intelligence (such as, say, alcoholism which can lead to poverty which can lead to a less intellectually-nurturing home life).
Basically, this article gives us a sound bite with almost no useful information---shoddy reporting.
I would guess he stands in the "control of the internet by any single body is bad" camp, that being (a) the obvious one, and (b) an obvious way to reconcile the two articles.
Really, you seem to be desperately reaching for something to complain about---"bad when they do it" and "bad when we do it" does not necessarily mean "hypocritical"; sometimes it just means "it's bad for anyone to do it".
> I like to think of governments as particularly firmly established and powerful insurance companies.
Interesting, but fundamentally flawed.
That comparison misses the key notion of intent---the stated intent of an insurance company is to maximize profit; the stated intent of a government is to serve the people. If you don't believe that key ideological difference radically changes the functioning of the body, I would humbly suggest you haven't thought about it long enough.
(Now, that being said, one could argue the stated intent of a government is different from its actual intent. That is quite possible; however, with periodic elections and public oversight, I would argue that governments will tend to shift back towards their stated intentions over time.
Every comparative study done on healthcare puts the mostly-public healthcare of Canada and Western Europe as equal to or better than that found in the US, despite the US spending a much larger fraction of its total GDP (13.6% vs. 9.5% of American vs. Canadian GDP goes to healthcare, vs. 6.8% ot 10.7% of GDP for major Western European nations).
(Before you complain about the link sites, the first study was done by the World Health Organization, the second by Johns Hopkins, the third by an author formerly from the conservative Fraser Institute. And before anyone complains that this is a Canada-vs-US thing, read especially the first study - most countries in Western Europe get better healthcare results for less money than the US, and many are better that way than Canada.)
The reason for this is, according to studies, wasteful bureaucracy in the US system. According to those who have analyzed the systems, this may be one place where a government program is actually more efficient than a collection of private programs. As plenty of posters in this thread have amply explained, that can, does, and should be expected to happen sometimes. Many governments run programs more efficiently than a collection of private companies could do; if a certain government never does so, that's a problem with that government, not with government programs in general.
Wrong.
The Vietnam War involved few troops from anyone other than the USA and Vietnam. That North Vietnam had advisors or equipment from the USSR does not change the basic fact that the USA was driven out primarily by the Vietnamese, much as the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan primarily by local soldiers.
> No one EVER says the Kuwaitis chased out Iraq
That's because the troops that chased Iraq out of Kuwait were not Kuwaiti troops!
What nationality were the majority of troops that chased Iraq out of Kuwait? American.
What nationality were the majority of troops that chased USSR out of Afghanistan? Afghani.
What nationality were the majority of troops that chased USA out of Vietnam? Vietnamese.
That's why we say the Iraqis were chased out by the Americans, the Soviets were chased out be the Afghanis, and the Americans were chased out by the Vietnamese---because that's who the troops were.
Wrong.
The Axis powers involved in the Battle of France had 3,350,000 men, as compared to the 2,862,000 the Allies had, or 17% more. Considering that the Allied army included significant numbers of British, Dutch, and Belgian troops (about 40 divisions, or roughly 20% of the total force), but the Axis side was purely German until after the Battle of France had been essentially won (June 10), there were far more German troops than French. Moreover, the French troops were often older than is ideal for conscripts, due to demographics (a smaller population than Germany and heavy losses in WWI).
> AND the French had better armour.
This part is true, and the French also had more armour; however, the Blitzkrieg was, essentially, a brilliant new tactic that caught everyone (even some of the German commanders...) off-guard. Combined with the large German advantage in air power, the Allied armies never really had a chance to recover.
> The Vietnamese did not defeat anyone. The Communists did.
You say "The Communists" like one would say "The Bogeyman".
Man up - the Vietnamese chased off France, and then they chased off the US. I'm continually amazed how many people have such fragile confidence in their country that they're unable to face that reality.
It's interesting to examine recent history and see exactly why the French military is laughed at so much:
In the last hundred years, there have been three major military operations France was involved in. The first was WWI, where France (and its allies) stopped the invasion launched by Germany (and its allies), fought for a few years, and eventually won. So that's not the reason.
The second major war was WWII, where the French army was bulldozed by the most powerful military force on the planet at that time, Nazi Germany. While France and its allies eventually won that war, too, and their loss against a larger and more powerful force is hardly unreasonable, their reliance on the foolish Maginot Line was unwise, and is the source of a little bit of the scorn you so often hear.
It's France's most recent major military action, however, that is by far the most shameful and humbling, and makes their army a fair target for ridicule. Though France was still rebuilding after being all but destroyed ten years earlier in WWII, the sheer disparity between the power of France and the country they lost to is laughable. There is no excuse for a nation as large, powerful, rich, and advanced to lose to a nation as tiny, weak, poor, and backward as Vietnam .
One of the world's 10 most powerful countries, losing a war to one of the world's least powerful? Can you imagine?? No wonder we don't respect their military.
Then why is it usually better for less money than the US version?
(Links to multiple comprehensive studies demonstrating this in a previous post.)
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> Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%
From TFlink:
Global mortality rate from the influenza was estimated at 2.5%-5% of the population, with some 20% of the world population suffering from the disease to some extent.
i.e., the Spanish Flu was 12-25% fatal, not 2.5-5% as you suggest.
Moreover, mortality rates of an epidemic are often/usually lower than those of the source disease, thanks to mutation---forms less likely to disable their hosts spread more rapidly (more points of contact), so the mortality rate is likely to be lower than what's been observed.
Moreover, what's been observed is a biased measure of the true mortality rate---we're mostly counting the people who are so sick they get noticed for it, and those around them. Are we sure we've counted all the people who've contracted H5N1 but haven't died? How many didn't get very sick, and so weren't even considered by doctors as potential victims?
In all likelihood, a pandemic from H5N1 would be no worse than the Spanish Flu was.
Keep in mind, though - the Spanish Flu was bad, so this is still a serious issue. It's just not so apocalyptic as some would fear.
> law that makes our jury system so fail so spectacularly
Since your spectacular knowledge pegs this as craptacular ignorance, you must have demonstrable reasons to say so, right? You should be able to point to the legal statutes in question, or to case history, or to judicial opinions on the matter, or even to legal blogs discussing this, yes?
Or are you just giving another craptacular opinion based on craptacular ignorance and assumptions?
You might well be right; you just haven't given us any reason to believe you. In fact, given how you jumped right in there to start the insult train, history suggests you might not be all that believable after all.
Moreover, your claim that malfunction needs to be willful is not entirely supported.
If it is obvious from the code, your project is too simple.
(Flippant, but not totally false. I work on research code that does...significantly complicated things. It can be hard enough for me to keep track of the interactions of the algorithms even when I'm designing them on paper; translate them into code, and the result is not at all trivial.
What my code does can be hard to understand when I've made a serious effort to clearly explain what it does in prose; even then, I expect understanding what it's doing to require effort from other researchers in my subfield. To expect any of them---much less a more junior researcher---to understand what is going on from the code alone is simply nonsensical. They would dismiss it as a waste of their time, and rightly so.
If code were that easy to read and understand, it would be found in most computer science research papers; that such papers avoid it like the plague suggests that's not the case, even for less-complicated problems.)
Perhaps true. However, every comparative study done on healthcare puts Canada's healthcare as equal to or better than that found in the US, despite the US spending a much larger fraction of its total GDP (13.6% vs. 9.5%).
(Before you complain about the link sites, the first study was done by the World Health Organization, the second by Johns Hopkins, the third by an author formerly from the conservative Fraser Institute. And before anyone complains that this is a Canada-vs-US thing, read especially the first study - most countries in Western Europe get better healthcare results for less money than the US, and many are better that way than Canada.)
The reason for this is, according to studies, wasteful bureaucracy in the US system. According to those who have analyzed the systems, this may be one place where a government program is actually more efficient than a collection of private programs. (The mind boggles, I know...)
In other words - ignore most of the data, and you can get any answer you're looking for. Study all of the data, and you'll find you're demonstrably wrong.
Photosynthesis is 3-6% efficient.
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> But, you can then introduce quite a bit of evidence
Absolutely. And it's absolutely the case that, for many people, the evidence available to them makes P(G) seem very, very small. No argument from me; my point with bringing this up was simply threefold:
1) To demonstrate that a belief in a god is not necessarily arbitrary; evidence in its favour can and does exist.
2) To demonstrate that, since such evidence can and does exist, stating "God does not exist" as if it were known fact is itself no more than an article of faith; P(G) is not known to = 0.
3) To illustrate the notion that other people have different experiences than you do, and hence may have very different beliefs yet still be just as rational and logical as you. There is no a priori reason to believe that it is impossible for any person's experiences to be such that the preponderance of evidence is towards the existence of God, so dismissing all people who believe so as necessarily irrational or deluded is itself irrational.
My point is not about the content of the argument, but about its form. If one is going to claim the high ground in terms of logic and reason, one should actually adhere to the requirements of logic and rationality; some people who do, do not.
> this short paragraph , any choice you would make is arbitrary since you
> have not proof toward a way or another.
Here is your error: evidence is not proof. You declaim a choice as arbitrary if it lacks "proof", yet it is hardly arbitrary for me to choose to believe that Natalie Portman is female, even though I have no proof and base my choice only on the fallible evidence of having seen her.
Only if I have zero evidence is my choice entirely arbitrary. Even the vaguest of observations---such as your vocabulary and sentence structure---is likely to have an effect on the conditional probabilities, making the choice (if I choose the option with maximum probability) no longer arbitrary.
Accordingly, neither the choice "God exists" nor the choice "God does not exist" is arbitrary---either will necessarily be made by a person who has experienced an incomprehensibly vast number of observations which could affect the logically-reasoned probability of God existing.
The question is much like you asking yourself "does Dire Bonobo own a skateboard?" While you have no direct evidence one way or the other, you can, if you are clever, use inference reasoning (young people are more likely to use the internet, and young people are more likely to own skateboards, hence...) to make an informed (although still possibly wrong) guess about the truth or falsity of this question. Neither "his skateboard exists" nor "his skateboard does not exist" is somehow "more arbitrary" than the other; the only way either is an arbitrary selection is if you entirely fail to use your reasoning faculties to take into account the available evidence.
"Arbitrary" is often not a property of the choice; instead, it's due to the ignorance of the chooser.