But.. it has really come to irritate me over the last few years that females can wear a vneck open down to the below their breasts yet MEN get in trouble for looking at their cleavage.
If I wore my shirt open to below my chest, I better expect people to look at all that bare flesh.
Yet another place where it is distinctly uneven.
It's supposed to be playing the sex appeal angle but these days all it does is piss me off at them.
So a plane has three engines out and the last one is on fire and you are given control of the plain and it crashes 30 seconds later and it is your fault.
God republicans are so pathetic these days.
Democrats are pathetic for completely different reasons but republicans have been complete tools for about the last 16 years. Owned by the corporations and kowtowing to the extreme religious wing (while never... "quite" succeeding-- all the better to keep the religious wing on the hook).
Pathetic! Completely pathetic.
Both parties created this problem. It's clear to the independents that both parties created this problem.
And then some republican posts "It's all obama's fault" after a combined 20 years for republicans spending like drunken sailors. REAL republicans would have shrunk government. REAL republicans would have *lead* and made hard decisions to cut difficult programs and cut taxes only if it didn't result in destroying the dollar.
Even Reagan, who I voted for twice, contributed mightily to the destruction of this country.
And greenspan putting interest rates at 1% and holding them there for so long is a primary cause of the housing bubble.
The other cause, red herrings about the anti-redlining loans aside, was that the Bush administration didn't enforce the law on businesses, it gutted the SEC, it let businesses run completely wild because they were "his base".
However, this writer will discuss just a few of the inventions and ideas by the best known scientists. Milton (1996) explained how the invention of what is now considered a very ordinary object, the light bulb, was initially mired in controversy and disbelief. When Thomas Edison was finally successful in finding a light bulb filament which could glow while sustaining the heat of electrical conduction, he invited members of the scientific community to observe his demonstration (Milton 1996). Although the general public traveled to witness his electric lamp, the noted scientists of the day refused to and claimed the following about Edison:
"Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress." -Sir William Siemens, England's most distinguished engineer (Milton, 1996 p.18)
Unless you do the work your self, you have faith that they are not falsifying data.
We had enough of falsified data, suppressed data, and highly selective funding during the Bush administration.
When a body of work involves hundreds and thousands of scientists over a long period of time, it becomes very credible because someone would have probably disproved it.
I'm in Texas and the religious types here when I was growing up with take after you with "spare the rod spoil the child" in a heartbeat while the liberal dr. spocky types were all "that only teaches the child that violence is the answer".
I think spankings are appropriate in a very few cases- they never came up with my daughter thank goodness. If I had a boy, I probably would have had to tho.
i.e. as are people of all manner, especially those engaging in casual conversation and not writing a formal logical argument.
Because, if you can emotionally sway someone to your point of view, they will self-select facts to support your position.
It is *extremely* difficult for people to be honestly neutral. In fact, it is quite unpleasant for most. It's just easier to imagine what they want the outcome to be and then make the facts fit.
It is hard to tell from a post- but it seems to me that you assumed I was religious because anyone who sees any benefit to religion must be religious.
The fact is, tribes with proper religious beliefs did better than tribes without those beliefs. It doesn't mean those beliefs are accurate- only that they allowed their adherents to prosper.
---
As for the non-sequester bit. Guilty as charged. My friends all talk about "conversational whiplash" when talking to me. My brain deals with strategic patterns very well but it is not very linear at times. Perhaps because all the facts are equally weighted I can see the patterns easier but I highlight facts that have connections they do think are important.
---
In my experience- secular types lack the steel to ostracize someone because they don't think you should mix two kinds of material or have premarital sex or other things. I've known several religious types who were in love with somoene but when that person wouldn't convert to their particular idiocy, the relationship was over. In two cases, it involved marriage propositions after years of being together. Crazy. But logical to those religious people.
And you are *completely* correct on the double blind thing.
Trying to think why I said that.
I find a lot of scientists (and doctors) are naturally so biased against certain concepts that when they think they are being neutral, they still are not. Sort of like "Fox" is fair and unbiased (yea right) and the old network news was fair and unbiased (yea right).
Even the way they frame "neutral" questions contains bias.
The entire experiment may be set up in a way that is biased and presupposes or eliminates certain possibilities from even being considered.
Also, science doesn't work well holistically some times. It works well with bits and sub parts but by the time it finishes cutting the monkey into component parts, it is reasonable to conclude the monkey could have never been a feasible living animal to start with.
I mostly agree with you... I have "faith" that "crystal power" is a dead science issue because the literature I read on it seemed sound.
Feng Shui, my mind is still open on a bit. In part because emotions are not easy for science to work with and Feng Shui is really dealing with how your environment affects you emotionally and may have some bits of knowledge buried in the mud.
Astrology I've had a couple very spooky experiences in my life- not western astrology but chinese astrology. It may involve things such as what your personality is like based on the season of the year you were born in, what your generational personality is like based on the prior generational personality (conservative follows liberal follows conservative perhaps?). My mind is mostly closed that western astrology is bunk but remains open on the chinese front.
I also have the following problem.
Say that 99% of crystal power knowledge is false but 1% is true. Science would test it many times and find it to be false and throw away the tiny bit of real knowledge there. Instead of saying "ALL crystal power knowledge is false" we should say, "These aspects of crystal power knowledge have been tested and found to be false. The work continues on the rest".
What I have found is that in some cases, the science was flawed / horribly biased / asked the wrong questions.
The scientific method is solid. But science itself can be as much a religion as religion. It can take decades or generations to root bad ideas out because people actively suppress facts that do not fit the model.
But you are completely correct- at some point we have to trust (have faith) that in general scientists use the scientific method and scientific facts have been verified by multiple people and found to be true. We can't all replicate all work done to date. We'd have no time to do anything new.
I had several good teachers. They made a difference in my life. At least a couple recognized I was brighter than average and slotted me for advanced classes and mentored me.
A reasonable salary for teachers will help.
The problem is not their pay so much tho.
The problem is that we are grossly overpaying a few select segments of society (executives, sports figures, wall street types) and that is demeaning every other job. If these "wealthy" segments made 10x a teacher, it wouldn't be so bad. But when they make more in a year than teachers would make in 15 generations, then teachers lose all ability to compete for nice things like vail vacations, and premium cruises.
Back in the 50's, a normal person could do really nice things if it was their focus over other things. Today, there are many things where you can't even participate without dropping 20 to 30 thousand dollars.
Religious memes often capture practices that are successful for the group while painful for the individual.
It may be very painful to spank your child, or fail them, but the result is that your group succeeds relative to others because it has good work values, stable relationships, families for children, and a next generation of children instead of hoodlums.
Secular types lack a blind faith in an external morality and tend to be a lot wimpier. It seems nice "I never spank my child" and "do what feels good" but the outcome after a couple generations is bad (Loss of shared cultural base-- living in a community where any individual does what they want like playing loud music at 2am, stabbing people, etc.).
However- the root problem in my view is the population.
There are too many people for religion to work, for secular humanism to work, for any thing we have thought of so far to work.
When you have 100 people and 1 person is bad, then you have a minor problem you can deal with, and folks are pretty clear where the problem is. When you have 6 billion people and there are 600,000 sociopaths (probably) alone, along with a huge number of amoral types, the ability to travel 50 miles in an hour and engage in adultery or homosexuality and then return to your own community and act normal, to steal things far from home so they can't determine who the thief was, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold society together.
Part of the problem with wall-street is it essentially formed its own monkey tribe and didn't give a damn about its clients, the country, or anything else. Bernie Madoff destroyed thousands of peoples lives. And he was just one of many.
As a science type, I encourage you to not turn off your brain to astrology, Feng Shui, crystal power, and other crap.
Instead, test it formally, with double blinds, hoping that it works (so you don't subconsciously suppress data). Then if you find something, have others duplicate your work. That's the scientific method.
Blindly assuming something is false is not.
IMHO, having a science degree and then getting a massage license, I found that some things are very real and they are surrounded with mysticism so that is the way to learn them- but there is still something real in there-- that could be dug out. And it's surrounded by a ton of crap that isn't real.
Recently in Houston, the teachers got 3,000 to 7,000 bonuses... meanwhile the supervisor got something like a 70,000 bonus. On top of a multi-hundred thousand dollar base pay.
Any system will be gamed.
The only way that science will take a front seat is for scientists and engineers to have high value to society so parents push their kids and then high school and college students push themselves because of the salary and prestige of the position.
Now-- realistically-- how likely is that? The wall street boom killed engineering and sciences. Layoffs and ghetto pay for science types buried them.
And that's not even considering that an indian or chinese student can get their degrees at a fraction of the price and who charge a fraction of the price for their labor.
IE is so fast at getting a machine infected with virus, trojans, spyware, etc. that I never use it unless it is my bank or credit card site and they frikking require it. And then I'm hesitant- because a fair amount of attacks have come from infected "trusted" sites.
I don't care if a web page loads in 1.2 seconds vs 1.8 seconds. I care a lot if I'm going to spend the next 6 hours reinstalling my machine.
Yea the fundamental problem with libertarian philosophy is that it requires a benign yet extremely powerful government to keep the wealthy and powerful companies and individuals in check.
Re:Faithful representation of source material
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
Yea, the TV had 1980's things on it. The Mac commercial was the most noticable.
Except for the fact that the executive level is controlled by a toxic culture of interlinking board directors.
Companies from other countries were the only answer. But it didn't make any difference- the executive answer to profitability was to cut more american workers and hire more indian and chinese workers.
Hell they have companies whose entire business is telling corporations how to advertise for jobs so that an american can't qualify for a position.
American's responded appropriately-- leaving fields that are hard but no longer paid well in droves.
The end result tho is this nasty service economy which is not sustainable. The next step is very bad things that we try to prevent by keeping society fair.
The wealthy seem to have forgotten that if you end up being 1% of society, you are going to be violated by the rest.
Hard left and Hard right both want power and control over how (other) people think.
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
Completely agree with you.
And recognize that sometimes, the only thing they keep is the name of the book and a couple characters. Sometimes a clueless but powerful executive idiot absolutely ruins the story.
There is an art to it-- being faithful- but respecting the pacing and framing differences of the differing mediums.
LoTR cut a lot- but felt great. Ralph Bakshi's LoTR movie was also faithful- and put me to sleep (the ONLY movie ever to do that to me).
Watchmen is true to the characters, recognizes movies are different than comics.
as a side note, anyone pointing out that Alan Moore wouldn't participate should know that's his standard behavior so far. God could be directing the movie and he would not support it.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is we are selectively breeding for high breeding populations.
And those are usually wacko religious populations too.
But.. it has really come to irritate me over the last few years that females can wear a vneck open down to the below their breasts yet MEN get in trouble for looking at their cleavage.
If I wore my shirt open to below my chest, I better expect people to look at all that bare flesh.
Yet another place where it is distinctly uneven.
It's supposed to be playing the sex appeal angle but these days all it does is piss me off at them.
So a plane has three engines out and the last one is on fire and you are given control of the plain and it crashes 30 seconds later and it is your fault.
God republicans are so pathetic these days.
Democrats are pathetic for completely different reasons but republicans have been complete tools for about the last 16 years. Owned by the corporations and kowtowing to the extreme religious wing (while never... "quite" succeeding-- all the better to keep the religious wing on the hook).
Pathetic! Completely pathetic.
Both parties created this problem. It's clear to the independents that both parties created this problem.
And then some republican posts "It's all obama's fault" after a combined 20 years for republicans spending like drunken sailors. REAL republicans would have shrunk government. REAL republicans would have *lead* and made hard decisions to cut difficult programs and cut taxes only if it didn't result in destroying the dollar.
Even Reagan, who I voted for twice, contributed mightily to the destruction of this country.
And greenspan putting interest rates at 1% and holding them there for so long is a primary cause of the housing bubble.
The other cause, red herrings about the anti-redlining loans aside, was that the Bush administration didn't enforce the law on businesses, it gutted the SEC, it let businesses run completely wild because they were "his base".
It's pathetic.
lol... carter to clinton.
Nice way to completely ignore 16 years of republican rule in that period.
No. I'm saying science suppresses a lot of good ideas.
Today it happens less because of hidebound thought and more because of funding.
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/supress1.html
Among other things...we have the lightbulb.
However, this writer will discuss just a few of the inventions and ideas by the best known scientists. Milton (1996) explained how the invention of what is now considered a very ordinary object, the light bulb, was initially mired in controversy and disbelief. When Thomas Edison was finally successful in finding a light bulb filament which could glow while sustaining the heat of electrical conduction, he invited members of the scientific community to observe his demonstration (Milton 1996). Although the general public traveled to witness his electric lamp, the noted scientists of the day refused to and claimed the following about Edison:
"Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress." -Sir William Siemens, England's most distinguished engineer (Milton, 1996 p.18)
We have faith in scientists too.
Unless you do the work your self, you have faith that they are not falsifying data.
We had enough of falsified data, suppressed data, and highly selective funding during the Bush administration.
When a body of work involves hundreds and thousands of scientists over a long period of time, it becomes very credible because someone would have probably disproved it.
Odd. What area of the world are you in?
I'm in Texas and the religious types here when I was growing up with take after you with "spare the rod spoil the child" in a heartbeat while the liberal dr. spocky types were all "that only teaches the child that violence is the answer".
I think spankings are appropriate in a very few cases- they never came up with my daughter thank goodness. If I had a boy, I probably would have had to tho.
As are secular types like myself.
i.e. as are people of all manner, especially those engaging in casual conversation and not writing a formal logical argument.
Because, if you can emotionally sway someone to your point of view, they will self-select facts to support your position.
It is *extremely* difficult for people to be honestly neutral. In fact, it is quite unpleasant for most. It's just easier to imagine what they want the outcome to be and then make the facts fit.
It is hard to tell from a post- but it seems to me that you assumed I was religious because anyone who sees any benefit to religion must be religious.
The fact is, tribes with proper religious beliefs did better than tribes without those beliefs. It doesn't mean those beliefs are accurate- only that they allowed their adherents to prosper.
---
As for the non-sequester bit. Guilty as charged. My friends all talk about "conversational whiplash" when talking to me. My brain deals with strategic patterns very well but it is not very linear at times. Perhaps because all the facts are equally weighted I can see the patterns easier but I highlight facts that have connections they do think are important.
---
In my experience- secular types lack the steel to ostracize someone because they don't think you should mix two kinds of material or have premarital sex or other things. I've known several religious types who were in love with somoene but when that person wouldn't convert to their particular idiocy, the relationship was over. In two cases, it involved marriage propositions after years of being together. Crazy. But logical to those religious people.
And you are *completely* correct on the double blind thing.
Trying to think why I said that.
I find a lot of scientists (and doctors) are naturally so biased against certain concepts that when they think they are being neutral, they still are not. Sort of like "Fox" is fair and unbiased (yea right) and the old network news was fair and unbiased (yea right).
Even the way they frame "neutral" questions contains bias.
The entire experiment may be set up in a way that is biased and presupposes or eliminates certain possibilities from even being considered.
Also, science doesn't work well holistically some times. It works well with bits and sub parts but by the time it finishes cutting the monkey into component parts, it is reasonable to conclude the monkey could have never been a feasible living animal to start with.
I mostly agree with you...
I have "faith" that "crystal power" is a dead science issue because the literature I read on it seemed sound.
Feng Shui, my mind is still open on a bit. In part because emotions are not easy for science to work with and Feng Shui is really dealing with how your environment affects you emotionally and may have some bits of knowledge buried in the mud.
Astrology I've had a couple very spooky experiences in my life- not western astrology but chinese astrology. It may involve things such as what your personality is like based on the season of the year you were born in, what your generational personality is like based on the prior generational personality (conservative follows liberal follows conservative perhaps?). My mind is mostly closed that western astrology is bunk but remains open on the chinese front.
I also have the following problem.
Say that 99% of crystal power knowledge is false but 1% is true. Science would test it many times and find it to be false and throw away the tiny bit of real knowledge there. Instead of saying "ALL crystal power knowledge is false" we should say, "These aspects of crystal power knowledge have been tested and found to be false. The work continues on the rest".
What an odd downmod. /shrug
I agree.
What I have found is that in some cases, the science was flawed / horribly biased / asked the wrong questions.
The scientific method is solid. But science itself can be as much a religion as religion. It can take decades or generations to root bad ideas out because people actively suppress facts that do not fit the model.
But you are completely correct- at some point we have to trust (have faith) that in general scientists use the scientific method and scientific facts have been verified by multiple people and found to be true. We can't all replicate all work done to date. We'd have no time to do anything new.
I had several good teachers. They made a difference in my life. At least a couple recognized I was brighter than average and slotted me for advanced classes and mentored me.
A reasonable salary for teachers will help.
The problem is not their pay so much tho.
The problem is that we are grossly overpaying a few select segments of society (executives, sports figures, wall street types) and that is demeaning every other job. If these "wealthy" segments made 10x a teacher, it wouldn't be so bad. But when they make more in a year than teachers would make in 15 generations, then teachers lose all ability to compete for nice things like vail vacations, and premium cruises.
Back in the 50's, a normal person could do really nice things if it was their focus over other things. Today, there are many things where you can't even participate without dropping 20 to 30 thousand dollars.
I agree to this point.
Religious memes often capture practices that are successful for the group while painful for the individual.
It may be very painful to spank your child, or fail them, but the result is that your group succeeds relative to others because it has good work values, stable relationships, families for children, and a next generation of children instead of hoodlums.
Secular types lack a blind faith in an external morality and tend to be a lot wimpier. It seems nice "I never spank my child" and "do what feels good" but the outcome after a couple generations is bad (Loss of shared cultural base-- living in a community where any individual does what they want like playing loud music at 2am, stabbing people, etc.).
However- the root problem in my view is the population.
There are too many people for religion to work, for secular humanism to work, for any thing we have thought of so far to work.
When you have 100 people and 1 person is bad, then you have a minor problem you can deal with, and folks are pretty clear where the problem is. When you have 6 billion people and there are 600,000 sociopaths (probably) alone, along with a huge number of amoral types, the ability to travel 50 miles in an hour and engage in adultery or homosexuality and then return to your own community and act normal, to steal things far from home so they can't determine who the thief was, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold society together.
Part of the problem with wall-street is it essentially formed its own monkey tribe and didn't give a damn about its clients, the country, or anything else. Bernie Madoff destroyed thousands of peoples lives. And he was just one of many.
As a science type, I encourage you to not turn off your brain to astrology, Feng Shui, crystal power, and other crap.
Instead, test it formally, with double blinds, hoping that it works (so you don't subconsciously suppress data). Then if you find something, have others duplicate your work. That's the scientific method.
Blindly assuming something is false is not.
IMHO, having a science degree and then getting a massage license, I found that some things are very real and they are surrounded with mysticism so that is the way to learn them- but there is still something real in there-- that could be dug out. And it's surrounded by a ton of crap that isn't real.
Recently in Houston, the teachers got 3,000 to 7,000 bonuses... meanwhile the supervisor got something like a 70,000 bonus. On top of a multi-hundred thousand dollar base pay.
Any system will be gamed.
The only way that science will take a front seat is for scientists and engineers to have high value to society so parents push their kids and then high school and college students push themselves because of the salary and prestige of the position.
Now-- realistically-- how likely is that? The wall street boom killed engineering and sciences. Layoffs and ghetto pay for science types buried them.
And that's not even considering that an indian or chinese student can get their degrees at a fraction of the price and who charge a fraction of the price for their labor.
Staggering.
Essentially 500 jobs worth of money shipped to bill gates every year.
And that is just france.
IE is so fast at getting a machine infected with virus, trojans, spyware, etc. that I never use it unless it is my bank or credit card site and they frikking require it. And then I'm hesitant- because a fair amount of attacks have come from infected "trusted" sites.
I don't care if a web page loads in 1.2 seconds vs 1.8 seconds. I care a lot if I'm going to spend the next 6 hours reinstalling my machine.
Ah well... guess it would have taken a Real Genius to get the reference.
Or I'm getting too old for you young pups!
Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's perfectly designed.
Looks at the facts: very high power, portable, limited discharge time, unlimited capacity.
Yea the fundamental problem with libertarian philosophy is that it requires a benign yet extremely powerful government to keep the wealthy and powerful companies and individuals in check.
Yea, the TV had 1980's things on it. The Mac commercial was the most noticable.
Except for the fact that the executive level is controlled by a toxic culture of interlinking board directors.
Companies from other countries were the only answer. But it didn't make any difference- the executive answer to profitability was to cut more american workers and hire more indian and chinese workers.
Hell they have companies whose entire business is telling corporations how to advertise for jobs so that an american can't qualify for a position.
American's responded appropriately-- leaving fields that are hard but no longer paid well in droves.
The end result tho is this nasty service economy which is not sustainable. The next step is very bad things that we try to prevent by keeping society fair.
The wealthy seem to have forgotten that if you end up being 1% of society, you are going to be violated by the rest.
Sort of.
Hard left and Hard right both want power and control over how (other) people think.
Completely agree with you.
And recognize that sometimes, the only thing they keep is the name of the book and a couple characters.
Sometimes a clueless but powerful executive idiot absolutely ruins the story.
There is an art to it-- being faithful- but respecting the pacing and framing differences of the differing mediums.
LoTR cut a lot- but felt great.
Ralph Bakshi's LoTR movie was also faithful- and put me to sleep (the ONLY movie ever to do that to me).
Watchmen is true to the characters, recognizes movies are different than comics.
as a side note, anyone pointing out that Alan Moore wouldn't participate should know that's his standard behavior so far. God could be directing the movie and he would not support it.