Crime-prone areas are cheaper: poor people live there as a result. Thus they have a tendency to die early and often as well. Rich people aren't murdered randomly in the street at age 14, they're murdered at 60 by their 20-year old trophy wife and her boyfriend, after they've already had kids with 4 other wives. Mix and match gender roles as you wish. Still adds up to an 'it could go either way' on a population front.
The fact taht you actually gave this joker a full reply cracks me up. You, sir, have far too much time on your hands. Nice post, though, except for the bit about Newton's Laws. Newton's laws are not wrong. They are inexact, i.e. they lost their reliability on extremely fine scales. Pretty much any mathematical model you can think of is similar. Quantum mechanics is only acceptably precise to a scale of about 10^-13 angstroms at its best (so far as we know, that's all we can measure to verify, and no, I have no clue how they measure anything that small). Likewise, anything involving gas modelling is inherently imprecise, since everything is statistical, and thus inexact (to use a generallization like 'pressure' is to invite inaccuracy, as at a certain scale it's no longer accurate to model individual particles hitting a surface as a continuous force). Yet neither quantum mechanics nor chemistry in general is 'wrong'. As with any model, you just have to work within the context for which the model was designed. At attainable speeds for macroscale objects, the error of Newton's laws is miniscule beyond being worth worrying about for most applications. Ok, I'm done ranting now.
There's still a threshold which is selected. I don't have hard evidence or statistics here, but how many people that are officially pronounced mentally retarded beyond hope of recovery do you know that have wives and children? Whereas you've probably met plenty of people judged exceptionally smart by the standard intelligence testing metrics and have children. So in this case it's the outliers driving the process, as it often is.
A bit more anecdotal nonsense, most antidepressants and other mood-affecting drugs are both ridiculously overdiagnosed and have the side effect of reducing sex drive. I hypothesize some selection going on there, too, even if it's more social than chemical. We keep it up for a few generations, the stoics might be the only ones left;)
The essence of civil disobedience is being willing to pay the penalty for breaking the bad law, and to do it in such large numbers that authority figures realize the problems in the law. So if this journalist's arrest is supposed to be a case of such, then waht are you complaining about? It's going exactly as it's supposed to.
It doesn't matter if they're french law, argentinian law, or martian law. The two countries involved here are the US and China. When did staying on-topic become egocentrism?
Wow, I didn't realize that the UN charter was designed so deliberately open-ended to allow them to impose sanctions on whoever the hell they want. Damn, I really hope they never gain any actual political influence, that could really suck.
Clearly, this new machine is not 1/1000000000 the size, mass, length, width, or depth of an iPod. Damn you, Steve Jobs, you were all good until you decided to pervert a perfectly good system of nomenclature to no apparent purpose!
Re:I for one welcome our new corporate overlords
on
Microsoft Sues EU
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· Score: 1
Eh, they don't have it bad. Being poor can screw you over a good bit in the old US of A, but being black makes practically no difference anymore. Even being poor here just means you can only afford 2 packs of cigarettes a day instead of 5, a 36-inch TV instead of a 20-foot projector system, and a car that's five years old instead of 6 months old. Of course, being black means you would have to put up with annoying activist organizations insisting that you can't make it on your own and need a handout, which I know would annoy the hell out of me if I was its target...
Oh, wait, this is/.. Yes, clearly America is a totally facist country that hates black people and females, and it has been ever since Bush went back in time with the help of the lich-king of the illuminati to use a mind-control beam powered by the blood of dead iraqui orphans to coerce the founding fathers into basing the nation on personal responsi^W^W corporate hedgemony. Vive la Revolucion!
Meh, I wouldn't pick any alignment that's not at least half-neutral to align yourself with. Consider:
Lawful Evil: We do the wrong thing on purpose, bacause it benefits someone. Screw the rest.
Chaotic Good: We do the wrong thing by accident or excuse our evil acts by redefining morality. No one benefits, but we can at least whine that it's not our fault.
Chaotic Evil: I'm charmingly straightforward in my ethics, but can't see past the end of my nose.
Lawful Good: Paladins are this alignment. Anyone that's ever played with a habitual paladin-type knows what I'm saying here.
So go for neutral: it's the only alignment set that actually stands some chance of benefitting society rather than destroying the universe.
As Hook once said, rules are made to be broken. Realistic physics make the exceptions WAY more entertaining. The fairly realistic jump height in Ocarina of time made the completely ridiculous hook-jumps that much more awesome.
On the other hand, nintendo is exploiting the fact that there has yet to be a bad Zelda game to screw around with their style, which is fine by me. Wind Waker was different from ocarina and ocarina 1.1 (Majora's mask), and those in turn were different from the sidescrollers, which were, further, often stylistically distinct from each other. It's noce to play games that are varied in style, otherwise it would feel like playing the same game for 1000 hours straight, which would be boring.
Re:And yet Europe seems to be doing fine
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
My impression was that he was arguing that there was no actual correlation, not that there was a link in the reverse direction.
Holland has a natural shield from large storms. It's called europe. Are you suggesting we steal europe and put it in front of New Orleans? It would be effective, but i'm not so sure the suropeans would like it.
Yeah, poor people in the US tend to be two-pack-a-day smokers with televisions in their apartment, a cell phone, and several sets of clothing. In other words, there really aren't that many people in this country that are actually at the level of existence you imply. You have to somehow manage to not get government aid, for one thing, which is really bloody hard...
1. Not so much 'rage' as 'putter along unsteadily'
2. If you get all your news from the TV, expect nothing but crap. The newspapers are also mostly crap, but occasionally they take a break from Bush-Is-Evil articles to actually report something.
3. The national guard is primarily a military/peacekeeping organization with more additional expertise at infrastructure repair than your average battalion... I assume that's why they were put into a military/peacekeeping situation that requires infrastructure repair. but yeah, they're kind of supposed to stay near the borders.
4. Um... so? It's a sad fact of american politics that all the competent people have real jobs. It's plagues our nation since day one. The only people with enough free time for public office without sacrificing their normal important activities are the politician types.
5. Most of the cries are for smaller federal government. Emergency services are primarily state or local level. And, admittedly, if the mayor of NO hadn't waited around for a federal handout to repair the city's levies, the place would probably be slightly less wet right now... so they might have a point.
I would attribute it more to overconfidence. "Hey, we've been hit by hurricanes before, it's not like it's going to destroy the city completely."
Oops.
And don't give me that 'they were warned' nonsense. Laymen trust their own experience beyond any amount of expert advice (especially advice from people like climatologists, who habitually hyperbolize), and you know it. Hubris, pure and simple. Also, stupidity. Probably no one in a position to act on it thought of the school busses at the time.
Never attribute to malice what can be more easily laid at the feed of stupidity-- the old saying is as relevant now as it was yesterday.
If you think there are better places to live, you're always free to move there. If you're planning on moving to a socialist country, though, I'd advise leaving yourself a decade or so, governments of that type have even worse red tape than the US. I'm going to stay here, though, where I get to vote for the actual individuals that will hold office rather than the juvenile clubhouses they belong to. Also, if you're looking for a party that wants to socailize the nation's economy, there are several, I think. The american Communist party springs to mind, you're welcome to vote for their candidates, as well.
You seem to have some confusion about politics in the US because you are putting it exclusively in terms of political parties. Recall that, from the constitution up, the country has been all about interactions between individuals (not gangs or mobs of people), and the spread of political sentiments makes a lot more sense. You can't make the kind of comparison you're trying to make because the fundamental framework in which politics takes place is different in the US and most European countries, which are what I assume you're referring to. Now, if you're referring to China, North Korea, or another partly-socialist country in that region, I'll freely admit I don't have enough knowledge of those places to know wether your grounds for comparison is valid or not. Also, your 'quality of life' argument is a crock, as are all 'quality of life' arguments, because the speaker always simply defines the term to mean what he wants.
They were poor, but the problem is not so much that they were poor as that louisiana is poor in general. No real resources to evacuate people that can't evacuate themselves. There's also a very low level of family spread in Louisiana. Rich or poor, very few people in the state have relatives 300 miles away that they can go off and stay with for a week, whereas there's probably not a single person in, say, Houston, that doesn't have an aunt or old buddy in Dallas or El Paso. So families are more likely to be screwed over en masse, and thus unable to support each other in the way they might in many other states. I do wish that cities would take public works projects like 'repairing the levees that keep your city hall from becoming a swimming pool' a little more seriously, though. Going the long way and relying on federal aid is not the way to go.
Because, you know, engineers doing analyses of civic infrastructure definityl file reports directly to the commander-in chief of the american armed forces... stop being an ass, man, Bush has said a lot of stupid shit, but it is the responsibility of a political figurehead to say comforting things like "we all feel the loss" and "No one could have seen it coming". Any other president, regardless of political leanings, would say the same. Except maybe Coolidge, who would have come up with a pithy one-liner off the cuff. Man, Coolidge was awesome.
Yes, because dropping gas prices would defeinitely help people in a region where THE BLOODY ROADS ARE UNDERWATER OR SWEPT INTO THE BOTTOM OF THE GULF OF MEXICO.
They key is "under the circumstances". The reactions of Bush and the Mayor are 'holy shit, this is bad. No way we're doing enough." This is true in the absolute. It's also true that the response has been about as good as it can possibly be under the circumstances. Ever driven on a Louisiana road? I can tell you, after a hurricane and a flood, there are probably no roads left in the entire southern half of the state, much less passable ones. Considering this, our government-run relief efforts have been doing a damned good job. However, in the absolute sense, the loss of a single American life under any circumstance other than "90 years old in a bed surrounded by firends and family" is (rightly, I'd think) a tragedy in context of our national morality. So, yeah, in the absolute sense that your political figureheads are coming from, a single death means we're not doing well enough. In the realistic sense that the, you know, trained rescue teams that do rescues in disaster areas constantly use, yeah, it's going as smoothly as possible.
And posting any comment about 'selective use of evidence' in a complaint about another news site posted to/. cannot really be taken seriously. Have you ever read an article summary and compared it to the actual article, or an actual article and compared it to the actual study the article references? Pot and kettle, man.
1. Most large cities were placed before anyone had a real understanding of the occurrence of natural disasters in an area. Sometimes it was sailors from france who couldn't tell one big storm from another, and pretty much expected bad weather wherever they went occasionally. That's New Orleans. In other cases, the cities sprung up too fast for anyone to notice the patterns of natural disasters. That would be your fault-line cities and old gold-towns.
The second reason is that people like to eat. Farmers are going to build their cities in the middle of giant fields used for corn farming, which may happen to have tornados. Shippers and traders are going to set up shop by large bodies of water, because otherwise they'll lose business to people who do so, since those that are located on the water can ship much cheaper than anyone else. In both cases, the ability to feed and clothe your family will drive cities to be placed according to resource distribution rather than safety. Generally, people consider the continued survival of themselves and their children a long-term interest, you know;).
Anyhow, sure, NOW we have the technology to transport food all the way across the country without spoiling it, and we have the technology to commute several hours to our jobs on the coast. (Note, of course, that both options come at a considerable increase in the cost of necessary materials for survival.) But have you ever tried to move a city that's already established? It's not even clear that the loss of lives (not death, necessarily, but complete loss of resources, which amounts to the same thing, really) is even any improvement over the corresponding loss due to natural disasters.
So the cities are located in, in modern context, really damned bad places, and they aren't going anywhere. Service technologies and institutions (museums and servers, etc) because... well, why would you put them anywhere else? It's simple cost minimization. And, logically, people will attempt to secure their living area, and protect your valuable whatever in the process.
...Or maybe they'll decide not to repair their faulty levy system despite numerous warnings, and their city will end up underwater. And then crazy/.ers will blame the current administration despite the fact that many of the warnings (and we're talking official engineering analyses, not crackpots in wolfskins-- Louisiana doesn't lack competent engineers, just money) were made a decade before the current executive administration, which isn't necessarily responsible for city infrastructures ANYWAY, took office. And then I'll bitch about them bitching, and make a relentlessly meta-post that references itself a billion times, but get bored and tell you to finish the cycle yourself... and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Crime-prone areas are cheaper: poor people live there as a result. Thus they have a tendency to die early and often as well. Rich people aren't murdered randomly in the street at age 14, they're murdered at 60 by their 20-year old trophy wife and her boyfriend, after they've already had kids with 4 other wives. Mix and match gender roles as you wish. Still adds up to an 'it could go either way' on a population front.
The fact taht you actually gave this joker a full reply cracks me up. You, sir, have far too much time on your hands. Nice post, though, except for the bit about Newton's Laws. Newton's laws are not wrong. They are inexact, i.e. they lost their reliability on extremely fine scales. Pretty much any mathematical model you can think of is similar. Quantum mechanics is only acceptably precise to a scale of about 10^-13 angstroms at its best (so far as we know, that's all we can measure to verify, and no, I have no clue how they measure anything that small). Likewise, anything involving gas modelling is inherently imprecise, since everything is statistical, and thus inexact (to use a generallization like 'pressure' is to invite inaccuracy, as at a certain scale it's no longer accurate to model individual particles hitting a surface as a continuous force). Yet neither quantum mechanics nor chemistry in general is 'wrong'. As with any model, you just have to work within the context for which the model was designed. At attainable speeds for macroscale objects, the error of Newton's laws is miniscule beyond being worth worrying about for most applications. Ok, I'm done ranting now.
There's still a threshold which is selected. I don't have hard evidence or statistics here, but how many people that are officially pronounced mentally retarded beyond hope of recovery do you know that have wives and children? Whereas you've probably met plenty of people judged exceptionally smart by the standard intelligence testing metrics and have children. So in this case it's the outliers driving the process, as it often is.
;)
A bit more anecdotal nonsense, most antidepressants and other mood-affecting drugs are both ridiculously overdiagnosed and have the side effect of reducing sex drive. I hypothesize some selection going on there, too, even if it's more social than chemical. We keep it up for a few generations, the stoics might be the only ones left
The essence of civil disobedience is being willing to pay the penalty for breaking the bad law, and to do it in such large numbers that authority figures realize the problems in the law. So if this journalist's arrest is supposed to be a case of such, then waht are you complaining about? It's going exactly as it's supposed to.
It doesn't matter if they're french law, argentinian law, or martian law. The two countries involved here are the US and China. When did staying on-topic become egocentrism?
Wow, I didn't realize that the UN charter was designed so deliberately open-ended to allow them to impose sanctions on whoever the hell they want. Damn, I really hope they never gain any actual political influence, that could really suck.
It's not that hard.
Murderer: "Let's kill this specific person."(does so)
Non-murderer: "This action might kill someone, but I think it's worth it." (does whatever, some people die)
Clear enough? All your examples, except for killing dissenters, are at worst manslaughter.
Clearly, this new machine is not 1/1000000000 the size, mass, length, width, or depth of an iPod. Damn you, Steve Jobs, you were all good until you decided to pervert a perfectly good system of nomenclature to no apparent purpose!
Eh, they don't have it bad. Being poor can screw you over a good bit in the old US of A, but being black makes practically no difference anymore. Even being poor here just means you can only afford 2 packs of cigarettes a day instead of 5, a 36-inch TV instead of a 20-foot projector system, and a car that's five years old instead of 6 months old. Of course, being black means you would have to put up with annoying activist organizations insisting that you can't make it on your own and need a handout, which I know would annoy the hell out of me if I was its target...
/.. Yes, clearly America is a totally facist country that hates black people and females, and it has been ever since Bush went back in time with the help of the lich-king of the illuminati to use a mind-control beam powered by the blood of dead iraqui orphans to coerce the founding fathers into basing the nation on personal responsi^W^W corporate hedgemony. Vive la Revolucion!
Oh, wait, this is
It is. Good thing that has absolutely nothing to do with the case the article is discussing.
Meh, I wouldn't pick any alignment that's not at least half-neutral to align yourself with. Consider:
Lawful Evil: We do the wrong thing on purpose, bacause it benefits someone. Screw the rest.
Chaotic Good: We do the wrong thing by accident or excuse our evil acts by redefining morality. No one benefits, but we can at least whine that it's not our fault.
Chaotic Evil: I'm charmingly straightforward in my ethics, but can't see past the end of my nose.
Lawful Good: Paladins are this alignment. Anyone that's ever played with a habitual paladin-type knows what I'm saying here.
So go for neutral: it's the only alignment set that actually stands some chance of benefitting society rather than destroying the universe.
As Hook once said, rules are made to be broken. Realistic physics make the exceptions WAY more entertaining. The fairly realistic jump height in Ocarina of time made the completely ridiculous hook-jumps that much more awesome.
On the other hand, nintendo is exploiting the fact that there has yet to be a bad Zelda game to screw around with their style, which is fine by me. Wind Waker was different from ocarina and ocarina 1.1 (Majora's mask), and those in turn were different from the sidescrollers, which were, further, often stylistically distinct from each other. It's noce to play games that are varied in style, otherwise it would feel like playing the same game for 1000 hours straight, which would be boring.
My impression was that he was arguing that there was no actual correlation, not that there was a link in the reverse direction.
Holland has a natural shield from large storms. It's called europe. Are you suggesting we steal europe and put it in front of New Orleans? It would be effective, but i'm not so sure the suropeans would like it.
Yeah, poor people in the US tend to be two-pack-a-day smokers with televisions in their apartment, a cell phone, and several sets of clothing. In other words, there really aren't that many people in this country that are actually at the level of existence you imply. You have to somehow manage to not get government aid, for one thing, which is really bloody hard...
Hm...
1. Not so much 'rage' as 'putter along unsteadily'
2. If you get all your news from the TV, expect nothing but crap. The newspapers are also mostly crap, but occasionally they take a break from Bush-Is-Evil articles to actually report something.
3. The national guard is primarily a military/peacekeeping organization with more additional expertise at infrastructure repair than your average battalion... I assume that's why they were put into a military/peacekeeping situation that requires infrastructure repair. but yeah, they're kind of supposed to stay near the borders.
4. Um... so? It's a sad fact of american politics that all the competent people have real jobs. It's plagues our nation since day one. The only people with enough free time for public office without sacrificing their normal important activities are the politician types.
5. Most of the cries are for smaller federal government. Emergency services are primarily state or local level. And, admittedly, if the mayor of NO hadn't waited around for a federal handout to repair the city's levies, the place would probably be slightly less wet right now... so they might have a point.
I would attribute it more to overconfidence. "Hey, we've been hit by hurricanes before, it's not like it's going to destroy the city completely."
Oops.
And don't give me that 'they were warned' nonsense. Laymen trust their own experience beyond any amount of expert advice (especially advice from people like climatologists, who habitually hyperbolize), and you know it. Hubris, pure and simple. Also, stupidity. Probably no one in a position to act on it thought of the school busses at the time.
Never attribute to malice what can be more easily laid at the feed of stupidity-- the old saying is as relevant now as it was yesterday.
If you think there are better places to live, you're always free to move there. If you're planning on moving to a socialist country, though, I'd advise leaving yourself a decade or so, governments of that type have even worse red tape than the US. I'm going to stay here, though, where I get to vote for the actual individuals that will hold office rather than the juvenile clubhouses they belong to. Also, if you're looking for a party that wants to socailize the nation's economy, there are several, I think. The american Communist party springs to mind, you're welcome to vote for their candidates, as well.
You seem to have some confusion about politics in the US because you are putting it exclusively in terms of political parties. Recall that, from the constitution up, the country has been all about interactions between individuals (not gangs or mobs of people), and the spread of political sentiments makes a lot more sense. You can't make the kind of comparison you're trying to make because the fundamental framework in which politics takes place is different in the US and most European countries, which are what I assume you're referring to. Now, if you're referring to China, North Korea, or another partly-socialist country in that region, I'll freely admit I don't have enough knowledge of those places to know wether your grounds for comparison is valid or not. Also, your 'quality of life' argument is a crock, as are all 'quality of life' arguments, because the speaker always simply defines the term to mean what he wants.
They were poor, but the problem is not so much that they were poor as that louisiana is poor in general. No real resources to evacuate people that can't evacuate themselves. There's also a very low level of family spread in Louisiana. Rich or poor, very few people in the state have relatives 300 miles away that they can go off and stay with for a week, whereas there's probably not a single person in, say, Houston, that doesn't have an aunt or old buddy in Dallas or El Paso. So families are more likely to be screwed over en masse, and thus unable to support each other in the way they might in many other states. I do wish that cities would take public works projects like 'repairing the levees that keep your city hall from becoming a swimming pool' a little more seriously, though. Going the long way and relying on federal aid is not the way to go.
Because, you know, engineers doing analyses of civic infrastructure definityl file reports directly to the commander-in chief of the american armed forces... stop being an ass, man, Bush has said a lot of stupid shit, but it is the responsibility of a political figurehead to say comforting things like "we all feel the loss" and "No one could have seen it coming". Any other president, regardless of political leanings, would say the same. Except maybe Coolidge, who would have come up with a pithy one-liner off the cuff. Man, Coolidge was awesome.
Yes, because dropping gas prices would defeinitely help people in a region where THE BLOODY ROADS ARE UNDERWATER OR SWEPT INTO THE BOTTOM OF THE GULF OF MEXICO.
They key is "under the circumstances". The reactions of Bush and the Mayor are 'holy shit, this is bad. No way we're doing enough." This is true in the absolute. It's also true that the response has been about as good as it can possibly be under the circumstances. Ever driven on a Louisiana road? I can tell you, after a hurricane and a flood, there are probably no roads left in the entire southern half of the state, much less passable ones. Considering this, our government-run relief efforts have been doing a damned good job. However, in the absolute sense, the loss of a single American life under any circumstance other than "90 years old in a bed surrounded by firends and family" is (rightly, I'd think) a tragedy in context of our national morality. So, yeah, in the absolute sense that your political figureheads are coming from, a single death means we're not doing well enough. In the realistic sense that the, you know, trained rescue teams that do rescues in disaster areas constantly use, yeah, it's going as smoothly as possible.
/. cannot really be taken seriously. Have you ever read an article summary and compared it to the actual article, or an actual article and compared it to the actual study the article references? Pot and kettle, man.
And posting any comment about 'selective use of evidence' in a complaint about another news site posted to
There are two reasons:
;).
/.ers will blame the current administration despite the fact that many of the warnings (and we're talking official engineering analyses, not crackpots in wolfskins-- Louisiana doesn't lack competent engineers, just money) were made a decade before the current executive administration, which isn't necessarily responsible for city infrastructures ANYWAY, took office. And then I'll bitch about them bitching, and make a relentlessly meta-post that references itself a billion times, but get bored and tell you to finish the cycle yourself... and so on.
1. Most large cities were placed before anyone had a real understanding of the occurrence of natural disasters in an area. Sometimes it was sailors from france who couldn't tell one big storm from another, and pretty much expected bad weather wherever they went occasionally. That's New Orleans. In other cases, the cities sprung up too fast for anyone to notice the patterns of natural disasters. That would be your fault-line cities and old gold-towns.
The second reason is that people like to eat. Farmers are going to build their cities in the middle of giant fields used for corn farming, which may happen to have tornados. Shippers and traders are going to set up shop by large bodies of water, because otherwise they'll lose business to people who do so, since those that are located on the water can ship much cheaper than anyone else. In both cases, the ability to feed and clothe your family will drive cities to be placed according to resource distribution rather than safety. Generally, people consider the continued survival of themselves and their children a long-term interest, you know
Anyhow, sure, NOW we have the technology to transport food all the way across the country without spoiling it, and we have the technology to commute several hours to our jobs on the coast. (Note, of course, that both options come at a considerable increase in the cost of necessary materials for survival.) But have you ever tried to move a city that's already established? It's not even clear that the loss of lives (not death, necessarily, but complete loss of resources, which amounts to the same thing, really) is even any improvement over the corresponding loss due to natural disasters.
So the cities are located in, in modern context, really damned bad places, and they aren't going anywhere. Service technologies and institutions (museums and servers, etc) because... well, why would you put them anywhere else? It's simple cost minimization. And, logically, people will attempt to secure their living area, and protect your valuable whatever in the process.
...Or maybe they'll decide not to repair their faulty levy system despite numerous warnings, and their city will end up underwater. And then crazy
/salute