Arlen Specter is one of the worst, most soul-less, most belief-free individuals in politics. The moment most vividly illustrating what Specter is: prior to the vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he went to the floor of the Senate and said what the bill "seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years" and is "patently unconstitutional on its face." He then proceeded to vote YES on the bill's passage.
Considering how many planets we have looked at and that we can't find life on any of them this makes Earth very extraordinary.
You are wrong about this. From the hundreds of planets we have found, we can easily extrapolate that there are many, many more planets (and many more rocky planets, as well) in the solar system than we have thought (maybe even 1 per star!). That makes the fact that we haven't found life yet on the planets we've searched for irrelevant. If there are a billion planets out there, we have to search a lot more before we can say definitively that life is rare in the galaxy.
The cult boss-rush game will be adapted by Justin Marks, who also wrote the recent Chun-Li movie.
You mean the movie which has a metacritic score of 17% (tied for 89th on their bottom 100) and a rotten tomatoes score of 4%? The only way we'll ever see a proper screen adaptation of a video game is if we stop hiring talentless hacks to write the scripts.
Yes, it won't be huge profit, but come on, for such violent and anti-mainstream experiment they got nice cash back. It is 165m (costed 120m), and it is only third week.
Pretty much everything you've posted there is wrong.
First off, it has only made 160 million dollars. Secondly, the production budget alone was 150 million, not 120. That number doesn't include an advertising budget that was certainly well north of 20 million dollars (30 seconds of tv advertising costs about one hundred thousand dollars during prime-time. And they had a lot of tv spots). On top of that, they had to settle a lawsuit with Fox over distribution rights that cost them 10 million dollars plus their own legal fees, plus between 5% and 8.5% of the worldwide gross. There is no way this movie is going to make money unless it crosses the 200 million dollar mark, which it won't do at home, since domestic audience attendance has been dropping by more than 60% each week (right now it is on pace to make less than 5 million this week). They will be lucky to make 10 million dollars more in the US, which means they will have to make 30 million more in international markets.
anything better than a "HAHA WE STOLE YOUR TAX DOLLARS" is at the very least appreciated.
I believe that was the website for the Bush stimulus plan.
Seriously, though it looks like they are just getting started, and I'm not surprised that there isn't much up there, since I bet very little of the stimulus has been spent. The money is going to be doled out over the course of two years, and there are a number of bureaucratic hurdles to go through first, I bet.
And people have been doing what DJ Shadow did for a while before that.
DJ Shadow was, however, the first person to create an entire album using only mixed samples from other works. If you like this kind of music, here are some other albums you might want to check out:
Re:A good review from a non fanboi
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Congratulations, you've discovered hyperbole. Try not to take every single word everyone says literally. Obviously, I meant that many of his movie reviews are more positive than they used to be. That he gave a shit movie like Fired Up 1/4 doesn't refute that. And that review is not even close to the worst I've seen for that movie. You want to see his inflation in action look at his review of 'Notorious',
'Che', etc. There are plenty of recent reviews out there which validate my point. Don't bother with any more cherry picking.
The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton [imdb.com] or Paul Verhoeven [imdb.com] to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it.
From what I understand, Snyder put his own fingerprints on the movie by including his 300-style incredibly annoying slow-mo shots everywhere he could.
Re:A good review from a non fanboi
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And a bad review from a non-fanboy, whichever suits your preference.
Ebert, since his unfortunate brush with death, seems to have had an spiritual awakening and realized that every movie is beautiful in its own way. A great outlook perhaps, but not very useful for a critic.
There are plenty of other reviews out there, both kind and unkind, if you wish to read them (be warned: many have spoilers).
Colbert is amusing now (though I find him annoying, to be truthful) but what happens if in 5 years he runs over a group of children in a drunk driving incident?
My god, you're right! We should throw him in prison now on manslaughter charges, just to be safe.
Or, you know, we could maybe think for a second and realize that honouring someone doesn't mean that we automatically approve of every future action taken by that person.
How much does it have to suck to die, with your observations being discredited, and your claims laughed at? Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
You obviously didn't read the actual paper. This is in no way a rigorous theoretical argument that Weber saw gravitational waves. It's nothing more than a rough order of magnitude calculation. A second look should be taken, but we should not start handing out posthumous awards right away.
And who was laughing at him? Weber was regarded as a pioneer of gravitational wave experiments. You can find a discussion of his work in standard textbooks. You seem to assume that anyone who doesn't succeed in every one of their experiments is summarily drummed out of the scientific community. If that were so, we'd have no scientists left.
The most telling part of the paper comes at the end: "It would also be necessary to check that the predictions of this proposal do not violate
the absence of observed gravitational waves from other sources." To me, this 10^4 enhancement factor is probably enough that we'd have seen GW from a variety of sources by now in our more sophisticated detectors (which are interferometers, and are unrelated to Weber's setup), which leads me to be dubious about the claims of enhancement.
Go check the national debt (in any country) for the last couple of centuries. It's an exponential growth curve.
Are you looking at debt in real dollars or debt/GDP? Because if not, even a tiny constant deficit in real dollars would look like an exponential growth curve thanks to inflation. Here's what my country's debt looks like when you plot it as a percentage of GDP over the last 15 years. Hardly an exponential curve.
If your state does this, and they have less than 1 million votes, the state will almost certainly be passed over in the election.
I've got news for you: they already are.
With the electoral system, candidates focus on areas that would have close elections one way or the other based on electoral votes that the state provides.
I think the last election showed that you can win without doing that.
Rhode Island and Vermont? Hah they'll be lucky to ever see a Presidential candidate with such a system.
When's the last time a candidate spent more than 2 days in Vermont as it is?
If this happened in only one state I might agree with you, but in all seven states where the legislation got to the governor's desk, it was signed by democratic governors, and vetoed by republican governors (including in Hawaii, where the legislature had enough votes to override the veto). That's more than just coincidence, it's partisanship.
I am unaffiliated, but even I know why the electoral college is a good thing.
Please explain to me why we should keep a system where more than 50% of voters can vote for one candidate and still see him lose. That's certainly not what I call democracy.
It's also passed both houses in California, Rhode Island and Vermont, but was vetoed by the Republican governor in each state. Do Republicans think that they could never lose the election while winning the popular vote? I see no reason why this should be a partisan issue.
Oddly enough, most so-called "conservatives" today are actually from what, classically, is the center of the political spectrum. It just doesn't look that way because so much of the major media outlets are hard-core lefties claiming that they are the "center."
Actually, both American political parties are what most of the rest of the world would call right wing parties. Just a few examples: neither party argues against unfettered capitalism (although you're starting to hear some from the public after the events of the last six months), neither party argues against massive military spending, neither party argues for gay marriage, and neither party argues for more liberal drug laws.
You may honestly believe that the country is in the hands of left wing lunatics, but let me assure you that, by international standards, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are left wing.
Wegman had been tasked solely to evaluate whether the McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05) criticism of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) (MBH) had statistical merit. That is, was their narrow point on the impacts of centering on the first principal component (PC) correct? He was pointedly not asked whether it made any difference to the final MBH reconstruction and so he did not attempt to evaluate that. Since no one has ever disputed MM05's arithmetic (only their inferences), he along with the everyone else found that, yes, centering conventions make a difference to the first PC. This was acknowledged way back when and so should not come as a surprise.
But, and this is where the missing piece comes in, no-one (with sole and impressive exception of Hans von Storch during the Q&A) went on to mention what the effect of the PC centering changes would have had on the final reconstruction - that is, after all the N. American PCs had been put in with the other data and used to make the hemispheric mean temperature estimate. Beacuse, let's face it, it was the final reconstruction that got everyone's attention.Von Storch got it absolutely right - it would make no practical difference at all.
Oh and this was laughable:
Also, while McIntyre may not be a mathematician, Ross McKitrick, the other side of the MM team, is a professor of environmental economics - and economists spend a lot of time dealing with mathematical models.
Yeah, those economists are great at modeling! Just look at how they predicted the last 6 months!
Oh, and McIntyre isn't a mathematician. He only holds a Bachelor's in mathematics. I fucking hold a bachelor's in mathematics, but I don't go around calling myself a mathematician.
I think it's fair to go a little farther and estimate that a 109k household will pay on the order of 2/3 the tax of a 154k household, so we're talking around $8K rather than $13K.
Your estimate is almost exactly right. A couple earning 109K pays 20K in taxes. A couple earning 154K pays 32K in taxes, or 62.6%. 62.6% of 13K is just over 8K. However, since most of the spending is going to be over a two year period, you can reduce that to 4K a year. I think a married couple can make enough cutbacks to get by on 85K instead of 89K after taxes, don't you? Especially if it's only for a couple of years, and it helps the economy recover.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised.
Let's not. Where, exactly, do you think it comes from?
Unless you think I'm a moron, it should have been obvious to you that I meant no one's taxes will be raised by the stimulus bill. The GP had said "Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes", despite the fact that there was no tax increase in the stimulus bill (in fact there are tax cuts). My reply was limited to refuting his claim that people will have to come up with the money to pay for the bill immediately. But if you're worried about the impact of the debt on your taxes, I have news for you. The US government hasn't paid down the debt in over 30 years (with the exception of a very small reduction in the late 90s, paid for by the Social Security surplus). US Politicians, idiots that they are, don't care if the debt grows unchecked. Far down the road, maybe a rational government will come in and start raising taxes to pay down the debt, but by then, most people who benefited from the stimulus will be retired, and no longer earning income. Oh, and they don't print money (your case B) to finance deficit spending either, it is always funded by debt instruments. So there will be no 'hidden tax'.
So complain if you want about the effect of this spending on the next generation, but don't pretend that you will be paying for this bill.
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised. You still fail at simple math. A couple making 109K would only owe 40K in taxes if EVERYONE in the top 10% earned EXACTLY 40K, which is patently false. Many people earn more, and would thus shoulder more of the cost. Let me use your own numbers to prove you wrong.
- there are 138 million taxpayers in the US
- 5% of the population earns between 109K and 154K.
- This 5% pays 11% of the taxes.
So AT MOST, your couple would owe 13K, and to get a number that high, I'm still making the false assumption that everyone in that bracket earns the base of 109K (not because it's plausible, but because your link doesn't give a better breakdown). That's a far cry from your 40K.
Scientists who study climate are in agreement. Some non-experts who study unrelated fields disagree. I'll stand with the people who know what they're talking about, and whose arguments I find sensible.
Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
You moderators are truly pathetic, modding me flamebait for posting a polite reply. By the way, here's a paper which confirms exactly what I said, but I doubt you'll read it since you only care about silencing anyone who disagrees with you.
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Arlen Specter is one of the worst, most soul-less, most belief-free individuals in politics. The moment most vividly illustrating what Specter is: prior to the vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he went to the floor of the Senate and said what the bill "seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years" and is "patently unconstitutional on its face." He then proceeded to vote YES on the bill's passage.
Considering how many planets we have looked at and that we can't find life on any of them this makes Earth very extraordinary.
You are wrong about this. From the hundreds of planets we have found, we can easily extrapolate that there are many, many more planets (and many more rocky planets, as well) in the solar system than we have thought (maybe even 1 per star!). That makes the fact that we haven't found life yet on the planets we've searched for irrelevant. If there are a billion planets out there, we have to search a lot more before we can say definitively that life is rare in the galaxy.
The cult boss-rush game will be adapted by Justin Marks, who also wrote the recent Chun-Li movie.
You mean the movie which has a metacritic score of 17% (tied for 89th on their bottom 100) and a rotten tomatoes score of 4%? The only way we'll ever see a proper screen adaptation of a video game is if we stop hiring talentless hacks to write the scripts.
Yes, it won't be huge profit, but come on, for such violent and anti-mainstream experiment they got nice cash back. It is 165m (costed 120m), and it is only third week.
Pretty much everything you've posted there is wrong.
First off, it has only made 160 million dollars. Secondly, the production budget alone was 150 million, not 120. That number doesn't include an advertising budget that was certainly well north of 20 million dollars (30 seconds of tv advertising costs about one hundred thousand dollars during prime-time. And they had a lot of tv spots). On top of that, they had to settle a lawsuit with Fox over distribution rights that cost them 10 million dollars plus their own legal fees, plus between 5% and 8.5% of the worldwide gross. There is no way this movie is going to make money unless it crosses the 200 million dollar mark, which it won't do at home, since domestic audience attendance has been dropping by more than 60% each week (right now it is on pace to make less than 5 million this week). They will be lucky to make 10 million dollars more in the US, which means they will have to make 30 million more in international markets.
anything better than a "HAHA WE STOLE YOUR TAX DOLLARS" is at the very least appreciated.
I believe that was the website for the Bush stimulus plan.
Seriously, though it looks like they are just getting started, and I'm not surprised that there isn't much up there, since I bet very little of the stimulus has been spent. The money is going to be doled out over the course of two years, and there are a number of bureaucratic hurdles to go through first, I bet.
And people have been doing what DJ Shadow did for a while before that.
DJ Shadow was, however, the first person to create an entire album using only mixed samples from other works. If you like this kind of music, here are some other albums you might want to check out:
Since I Left You by The Avalanches
Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team (warning:flash and music)
Anything by Kid Koala, who is probably the world's best turntablist.
Congratulations, you've discovered hyperbole. Try not to take every single word everyone says literally. Obviously, I meant that many of his movie reviews are more positive than they used to be. That he gave a shit movie like Fired Up 1/4 doesn't refute that. And that review is not even close to the worst I've seen for that movie. You want to see his inflation in action look at his review of 'Notorious', 'Che', etc. There are plenty of recent reviews out there which validate my point. Don't bother with any more cherry picking.
The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton [imdb.com] or Paul Verhoeven [imdb.com] to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it.
From what I understand, Snyder put his own fingerprints on the movie by including his 300-style incredibly annoying slow-mo shots everywhere he could.
And a bad review from a non-fanboy, whichever suits your preference.
Ebert, since his unfortunate brush with death, seems to have had an spiritual awakening and realized that every movie is beautiful in its own way. A great outlook perhaps, but not very useful for a critic.
There are plenty of other reviews out there, both kind and unkind, if you wish to read them (be warned: many have spoilers).
Colbert is amusing now (though I find him annoying, to be truthful) but what happens if in 5 years he runs over a group of children in a drunk driving incident?
My god, you're right! We should throw him in prison now on manslaughter charges, just to be safe.
Or, you know, we could maybe think for a second and realize that honouring someone doesn't mean that we automatically approve of every future action taken by that person.
But I gather those aren't as sensitive to the second order effects in question, right?
Wrong. The supposed 10^4 enhancement factor is in the magnitude of the GW waves and would be seen by any detector.
How much does it have to suck to die, with your observations being discredited, and your claims laughed at? Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
You obviously didn't read the actual paper. This is in no way a rigorous theoretical argument that Weber saw gravitational waves. It's nothing more than a rough order of magnitude calculation. A second look should be taken, but we should not start handing out posthumous awards right away.
And who was laughing at him? Weber was regarded as a pioneer of gravitational wave experiments. You can find a discussion of his work in standard textbooks. You seem to assume that anyone who doesn't succeed in every one of their experiments is summarily drummed out of the scientific community. If that were so, we'd have no scientists left.
The most telling part of the paper comes at the end: "It would also be necessary to check that the predictions of this proposal do not violate the absence of observed gravitational waves from other sources." To me, this 10^4 enhancement factor is probably enough that we'd have seen GW from a variety of sources by now in our more sophisticated detectors (which are interferometers, and are unrelated to Weber's setup), which leads me to be dubious about the claims of enhancement.
Go check the national debt (in any country) for the last couple of centuries. It's an exponential growth curve.
Are you looking at debt in real dollars or debt/GDP? Because if not, even a tiny constant deficit in real dollars would look like an exponential growth curve thanks to inflation. Here's what my country's debt looks like when you plot it as a percentage of GDP over the last 15 years. Hardly an exponential curve.
Well of course they want to destroy us, we obstruct their view of Venus.
If your state does this, and they have less than 1 million votes, the state will almost certainly be passed over in the election.
I've got news for you: they already are.
With the electoral system, candidates focus on areas that would have close elections one way or the other based on electoral votes that the state provides.
I think the last election showed that you can win without doing that.
Rhode Island and Vermont? Hah they'll be lucky to ever see a Presidential candidate with such a system.
When's the last time a candidate spent more than 2 days in Vermont as it is?
I am unaffiliated, but even I know why the electoral college is a good thing.
Please explain to me why we should keep a system where more than 50% of voters can vote for one candidate and still see him lose. That's certainly not what I call democracy.
It's also passed both houses in California, Rhode Island and Vermont, but was vetoed by the Republican governor in each state. Do Republicans think that they could never lose the election while winning the popular vote? I see no reason why this should be a partisan issue.
Y not?
Oddly enough, most so-called "conservatives" today are actually from what, classically, is the center of the political spectrum. It just doesn't look that way because so much of the major media outlets are hard-core lefties claiming that they are the "center."
Actually, both American political parties are what most of the rest of the world would call right wing parties. Just a few examples: neither party argues against unfettered capitalism (although you're starting to hear some from the public after the events of the last six months), neither party argues against massive military spending, neither party argues for gay marriage, and neither party argues for more liberal drug laws.
You may honestly believe that the country is in the hands of left wing lunatics, but let me assure you that, by international standards, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are left wing.
You mean Realclimate, the website run by, um, Michael Mann...the man who created the "hockey stick" graph in the first place?
Run? He's one of twelve different contributors. Here's what they had to say about Wegman's analysis, by the way. I'll just post the most important parts here:
Wegman had been tasked solely to evaluate whether the McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05) criticism of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) (MBH) had statistical merit. That is, was their narrow point on the impacts of centering on the first principal component (PC) correct? He was pointedly not asked whether it made any difference to the final MBH reconstruction and so he did not attempt to evaluate that. Since no one has ever disputed MM05's arithmetic (only their inferences), he along with the everyone else found that, yes, centering conventions make a difference to the first PC. This was acknowledged way back when and so should not come as a surprise.
But, and this is where the missing piece comes in, no-one (with sole and impressive exception of Hans von Storch during the Q&A) went on to mention what the effect of the PC centering changes would have had on the final reconstruction - that is, after all the N. American PCs had been put in with the other data and used to make the hemispheric mean temperature estimate. Beacuse, let's face it, it was the final reconstruction that got everyone's attention.Von Storch got it absolutely right - it would make no practical difference at all.
Oh and this was laughable:
Also, while McIntyre may not be a mathematician, Ross McKitrick, the other side of the MM team, is a professor of environmental economics - and economists spend a lot of time dealing with mathematical models.
Yeah, those economists are great at modeling! Just look at how they predicted the last 6 months!
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
Oh, and McIntyre isn't a mathematician. He only holds a Bachelor's in mathematics. I fucking hold a bachelor's in mathematics, but I don't go around calling myself a mathematician.
I think it's fair to go a little farther and estimate that a 109k household will pay on the order of 2/3 the tax of a 154k household, so we're talking around $8K rather than $13K.
Your estimate is almost exactly right. A couple earning 109K pays 20K in taxes. A couple earning 154K pays 32K in taxes, or 62.6%. 62.6% of 13K is just over 8K. However, since most of the spending is going to be over a two year period, you can reduce that to 4K a year. I think a married couple can make enough cutbacks to get by on 85K instead of 89K after taxes, don't you? Especially if it's only for a couple of years, and it helps the economy recover.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised.
Let's not. Where, exactly, do you think it comes from?
Unless you think I'm a moron, it should have been obvious to you that I meant no one's taxes will be raised by the stimulus bill. The GP had said "Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes", despite the fact that there was no tax increase in the stimulus bill (in fact there are tax cuts). My reply was limited to refuting his claim that people will have to come up with the money to pay for the bill immediately. But if you're worried about the impact of the debt on your taxes, I have news for you. The US government hasn't paid down the debt in over 30 years (with the exception of a very small reduction in the late 90s, paid for by the Social Security surplus). US Politicians, idiots that they are, don't care if the debt grows unchecked. Far down the road, maybe a rational government will come in and start raising taxes to pay down the debt, but by then, most people who benefited from the stimulus will be retired, and no longer earning income. Oh, and they don't print money (your case B) to finance deficit spending either, it is always funded by debt instruments. So there will be no 'hidden tax'.
So complain if you want about the effect of this spending on the next generation, but don't pretend that you will be paying for this bill.
A couple making 109K would only owe 40K in taxes if EVERYONE in the top 10% earned EXACTLY 40K, which is patently false
There's an obvious typo here. It should read
A couple making 109K would only owe 40K in taxes if EVERYONE in the top 10% earned EXACTLY 109K, which is patently false
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised. You still fail at simple math. A couple making 109K would only owe 40K in taxes if EVERYONE in the top 10% earned EXACTLY 40K, which is patently false. Many people earn more, and would thus shoulder more of the cost. Let me use your own numbers to prove you wrong.
- there are 138 million taxpayers in the US
- 5% of the population earns between 109K and 154K.
- This 5% pays 11% of the taxes.
So AT MOST, your couple would owe 13K, and to get a number that high, I'm still making the false assumption that everyone in that bracket earns the base of 109K (not because it's plausible, but because your link doesn't give a better breakdown). That's a far cry from your 40K.
Scientists who study climate are in agreement. Some non-experts who study unrelated fields disagree. I'll stand with the people who know what they're talking about, and whose arguments I find sensible. Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
You moderators are truly pathetic, modding me flamebait for posting a polite reply. By the way, here's a paper which confirms exactly what I said, but I doubt you'll read it since you only care about silencing anyone who disagrees with you.