I've got nothing against some Microsoft software, especially back when the Microsoft mantra was 'cheap and adequate'. The problem is that PowerPoint is too easy to use stupidly and now costs your first born and your right testicle, even when you don't have a right testicle. General consumption software should be informed by expert knowledge and best practices. PowerPoint is the equivalent of a HTML editor that doesn't make using CSS the default behaviour.
Well I'm glad you've come up with a realistic solution to the problem of millions of under qualified people having to give presentations. Getting all of them to be experts in communication is certainly a more realistic solution than either changing the defaults in the most widely used piece of software or displacing said software in the market. Why we can apply this solution to the healthcare market as well! Everyone gets medical complaints, so lets just make everyone learn to be Doctors! And we don't need sensible conventions when it comes to wiring a plug because everyone can just become expert electricians! As for the rest of your post, TLDR and RTFM in one post? Wow, I'm impressed, you really don't care that people think you are an arrogant jackass do you.
Perhaps there is a better way to phrase my objection. There exists software which while requiring no extra effort on the part of the user, would enable them to give better presentations (for example Beamer and Latex). In an ideal world users would be taught how to give sensible presentations and it wouldn't matter what program they use, heck WordPad is perfectly adequate for most presentations. The thing is that PowerPoint isn't trying to be a general purpose piece of software, it is designed for presentations. It is designed for presentations and it gets it's backside handed to it by bloody typesetting software! Using your analogy, PowerPoint is a bad hammer. We don't ship hammers with sharp spiky grips by default, and being able to replace these grips wouldn't make a hammer that ships this way good. Is it the users 'fault'? I'm not really concerned with blame. There exists a simple way to make most presentations I have to sit through better and that really is all I care about.
The problem is that Powerpoint, like Word, defaults to making it very easy for the user to do stupid things or does stupid things by default. Changing the font size on a slide should be difficult because you should very rarely if ever do it. Fitting more than 4 bullet points on a slide should be hard because you should very rarely if ever do it. There shouldn't be any templates that let you put half a billion graphs and a picture on one slide. Backgrounds shouldn't be complicated and busy by default. There shouldn't be default colour schemes that make Egyptian Hieroglyphs easy to read or reminds people of the good old days of green on black monitors. Transitions shouldn't be something one picks out of a line up, they should be something you look up how to do because you have a good reason. Unless you are trying to emulate the wipes from Star Wars then you have no good reason to go wiping slides from left to right distracting your entire audience. The default font for body text on a slide should be big enough that it is not only easy to read but also makes it impossible to write an essay on the slide. Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them? It's a piece of shit that just cant compete with something like Beamer for sensible defaults. It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes, animations, walls of text, half a billion shitty Excel graphs with crappy hard to understand axes, stupid colour schemes, shitty backgrounds and walls of text and then rush through the presentation like your morning coffee was laced with methamphetamine.
Oh I agree to an extent and as I said above in response to another comment there probably wasn't a good way to slice up the former territory of the Ottoman Empire, a way that would please everyone or even most people. With all that said it is pretty clear that the colonial powers were not overly concerned with dividing the territory in a way that would best serve the local population. I would suggest they were more concerned with their own interests. The Kurds were completely ignored and little effort was made to take into account severely different religious identities. We incited the Arabs to fight on our side in the Great War then effectively stabbed them in the back at the first opportunity. The British didn't exactly do a stellar job in Palestine either. I think most people would agree that the Shi'ites in the south of Iraq and Iranians both have plenty of reasons to be less than enamoured with the West, and particularly the US and Britain.
Oh that the Sunni's ended up in control of Iraq certainly wasn't an accident. There were no good ways to divide up the Middle East with the fall of the Ottomans, that doesn't mean that the British and French did a particularly good job of it. Al Kut and Al Basrah certainly don't belong in a Persian state but putting them in a nation of Kurds and Sunni was not particularly sensible either.
Unfortunately when the Ottoman Empire collapsed the West redrew the map of the Middle East without much attention being paid to ethnic or religious divides. Iraq under the Ba'athist was dominated to an extent by the Sunni minority. The regions bordering Iran are majority Shi'ite. With the fall of Saddam's Ba'athist regime solidarity among Shi'ites complicates matters of security, especially when you consider that during the first Gulf War the allied forces incited a primarily Shi'ite rebellion inside the South of Iraq only to abandon it once Kuwait was liberated. The West's past conduct hasn't exactly endeared us to the Shi'ites in the south of Iraq, and Iran is certainly a natural ally after all we screwed them over as well by installing the Shah and generally interfering where we weren't wanted. The whole situation is a messy series of botch-ups by everyone involved.
"Yeap, but this is independent of whether the banks are people grouped together in corporations or not."
The incentive here is directed towards people in large corporate structures. The bailout was not by and large going to mom-and-pop shop banks. Sure lots of individuals acted unethically but the new incentive to behave unethically is not independent of the corporate structures in place.
Sure people will act unethically with or without corporate structures in place, but the question here is does being in a large corporations either encourage people to be more unethical or make it possible to behave more unethically (when compared to the alternatives)?
Yeah I don't dislike the FDIC guarantees, but they do represent massive government intervention in the market which causes very big distortions and perverse incentives. Obama's regulations were very weak and are inviting the exact same problem again. That said the bailouts (which both Obama and Bush supported) have created serious perverse incentives in the banking industry. I don't know enough about banking to say how things should be regulated but I do know enough about basic market economics to know what wont work. Now there exists incentives for every bank to keep increasing the risk it takes on at a commensurate rate to the amount other banks take on. That is not good. This ties in nicely with what we were discussing before. It is very likely given the regulation we have in place and given the way corporations like banks are structured that the collective action of the banks employees will be very detrimental to society. The banks employees with behave in a highly unempathetic manner. Sociopathic behaviour isn't always a bad thing by the way. If you have properly functioning markets with government regulation in place to minimise perverse incentives and align corporate interests with social interests then it doesn't really matter how much responsibility is diffused within an organisation, it will act for the collective good in exactly the same way that someone with APD can be made to behave for the collective good. In fact if you want to talk about where the analogy breaks down I think this is a good place to start (there are plenty of problems with the analogy). Large corporations can act for the collective good, even if most of the time it is incidentally. People with APD are rarely able to do so most of the time because we have little means to incentivise them. This isn't the only way this analogy breaks down by the way (other problems I can think of are with corporations essentially under the complete control of a very small number of individuals, when one stock holder has sufficient power over the corporation, Google is a good example of this and it's behaviour is far more nuanced than most large corporate entities). Understanding a system by analogy can lead to faulty reasoning if you don't know the limitations of the analogy. If I were trying to convince people that an analogy was flawed I would try to think of ways in which it breaks down and give examples of that rather than simply dismissing said reasoning. Ultimately all reasoning is just layers of imprecise analogies anyway.
I take your point but the problem I have is the value they quote on the balance sheet. What Lone Star is doing represents a great deal for them because some of these toxic assets they are buying are probably worth more than they are paying and the ones that are not they wont take a hit on. M-L on the other hand are claiming that the asset they have just sold is worth far less than the market is prepared to pay for it (they are claiming it is basically worth the value of the deal they have just made where any idiot can see that Lone Star are far smarter than that). If I was asked to value my house for the purposes of a home loan and claimed it was worth 20% more than the market rate I would be in trouble later. Sure if the banks investigated they might catch me, but if they didn't I'd be in hot water if I later couldn't pay. I agree with you about breaking up the banks, but the real problem is the way we have structured our fractional reserve banking system. I don't have a problem with having a banking system where banks essentially abuse the yield curve, but if we are going to make them de facto extensions of the state (not just by bailing them out but by protecting certain assets with cheap government backed insurance) then they should all be heavily regulated, or government operated corporations. Better yet make them co-operatives so that their interests are commensurate with the people taking the risk while keeping the idiot government out as much as possible. An alternative would be to reform the banking system so the banks were not protected by government backing. I have no idea how to do this without introducing worse perverse incentives than exist right now or forcing people incapable of sensibly calculating risk to do exactly that.
Lone Star have done nothing particularly wrong in this deal but Merrill Lynch's write down would be considered out and out fraud on top of previous out and out fraud if an individual did it. Ignoring the questionable legality of the original valuation of the CDO the value Merrill Lynch quote this deal as on their balance sheet is a complete fabrication as one look at the deal will tell you. They are hiding the fact that these CDOs are almost certainly worthless by loaning Lone Star the money to buy them from them and then using the CDOs they are buying as collateral for the loan (and making them the only collateral)! If I told people I was good for a debt (which is what a stock basically is) by shifting money around in a similar way I would never get away with it.
Your ability to intentionally miss the point is matched only by your ability to sound patronising while doing it.
No I don't have this weird idea that forming a corporation somehow removes all personal responsibility, is there something wrong with your reading comprehension or do you just enjoy putting words in other peoples mouths. I believe forming a corporation reduces personal responsibility because that is precisely what they were created with the intention of doing, financially initially but now this extends to other areas as well.
Take the recent financial troubles. I can list a number of situations where corporate entities have taken bad debts off their books by setting up sham arrangements with other financial institutions to fool investors and wont get prosecuted for fraud. If I did the equivalent with my finances I would be facing serious consequences right now. You are totally naive if believe that people acting on behalf of large corporations are not protected from the consequences of a large subset of their actions.
Since we are analysing posting styles I will add that you come across as someone with an ideological and philosophical axe to grind who while admittedly not particularly poorly informed suffers from severe nuance blindness. This is nicely illustrated by your last post where your 'corporations cant murder' argument serves nicely as an archetypal straw man. I invite you to look back over my posts and tell me where I said corporations could get away with murder, you wont find any such suggestion. You are basically arguing with me like I'm some kind of amalgamation of every bad hippy stereotype.
As to your comment on my information gathering skills, I cant deny you do have a point. Right now I am wasting time that could be better spent learning something new, trying to explain simple concepts to a moronic ideologue with a fetish for stereotyping people who disagree with him.
No I want to point out that most large corporations are the same, because they are. For the same reason that most gases are the same in the sense that they have similar statistical properties. They have common emergent behaviour.
Sociopathic behaviour is something that will occur in any system with diffusion of responsibility, just look at most governments. Large limited liability corporations are particularly bad for this because they are designed precisely with the intent of dispersing and reducing responsibility and tend to operate on dangerously short time scales.
Get N people together where N is sufficiently large, put them in a structure where no one (or two, or some small number) are responsible for the actions the group decide to take collectively and watch as the group behave sociopathically.
You're now just a joke. Your reasoning amounts to a absurd form of reductionism where a single human is the atomic unit. If you really do think that humans don't have any emergent behaviour when organised into collectives then you are absolutely and completely insane.
So I take it you don't have an empirical case for why we wouldn't label the emergent behaviour of large corporations as sociopathic then? Because I ask you to point to empirical evidence that large corporations do not behave as though they were sociopathic and you have completely avoided the question.
There is a distinction between every human having some of the attributes of a sociopath and every large corporation behaving exactly like a person having every attribute of a sociopath. We get it, corporations aren't people, they are groups of people. Your argument makes as much sense as saying that the Russian Communist Party wasn't brutal and cruel because cruely and brutality are attributes of people not groups of people. Or are you going to claim that the KPSS was not also sociopathic?
Are you being intentionally dense? Do you simply not get what an analogy is?
At first I just assumed you were nitpicking so I went and reminded myself what the attributes of APD are. Please go ahead and name one of the major attributes of APD that large corporations fail to exhibit at least to some extent.
There is no such thing as people. People are groups of atoms that are group of... and so on.
In the real world we recognise when someone is making an analogy and don't assume that they mean literally what they say. If most larger corporations were a people we would class them as sociopathic.
Put another way, if we replaced the leadership structure of most larger corporations so that there was one person directing every action and those actions remained the same that person would have all the attributes of a sociopath.
"How is parroting what someone else has said - something you are not equipped to accurately evaluate yourself - a reasonable contribution to a conversation?"
Assuming it is a statement which you can back up with a peer reviewed citation or a statement by a reliable expert acting in their capacity as a reliable expert then it's perfectly reasonable. If I tell you my friends with medical qualifications think eating too much red meat is bad for you then that is a perfectly sensible thing to say in a conversation on diet.
And I agree with you that most people talking on this subject are morons and their contributions are meaningless. I was simply pointing out that presenting the considered views of experts was not. With that said virtually everyone who denies global warming makes no contribution to the conversation of any depth or meaning. For example very few denialists will present the view point of someone like Friis-Christensen. The reason for this is simple, he is a real skeptical scientist and his opinions are moderated by the evidence and have changed as the evidence has changed.
Calling something a proven fact is usually foolhardy when one is talking about science, especially something like climate science. But I hear denialists use this excuse to ignore the overwhelming amount of expert opinion and evidence that climate change is man made. They do this because they don't understand how science works.
The argument from authority informal fallacy is only a fallacy if the authority is unreliable. In this case repeating what you have heard qualified, credentialed climate scientists say is a perfectly reasonable contribution to the conversation. Repeating what Glen Beck, Al Gore, or Alex Jones have to say however...
At no point did I claim that a black hole will instantly evaporate if the event horizon is removed. What I claimed is that if through some fluke of physics there was a naked singularity exposed during the end of the lifetime of a black hole like the OP suggests (perhaps a result of quantum gravity although I doubt it) then we would have a very hard time seeing it through the multimegaton TNT equivalent outpouring of radiation.
Although no one knows what happens at the end point of black hole evaporation it is unlikely it would leave a naked singularity since the mass of the singularity is what is being 'evaporated'. Besides, even if there was a naked singularity around just before the thing evaporates it would be kicking out so much energy you wouldn't be able to get anywhere near it. A 1kg black hole evaporating would release the equivalent energy to a large thermonuclear weapon in a fraction of a second.
Yeah I mean the only real literature is on stone tablets! Shakespeare was a hack for using anything other than a chisel! Citizen Kane is a piece of crap! Welles should have known better than to make his work a moving picture rather than putting it down on good old fashioned marble.
The quote in question is actually very appropriate. It accompanies the secret project "The Planetary Datalinks", a Planet wide communication network which basically helps to spread ideas.
Would you have had the same reaction were I to quote Moby Dick is a thread where the central theme is revenge? Elitism is not a substitute for genuine intellectual prowess.
Expressing a preference for a reference frame is not being a pedant. At no point did you suggest the OP could not use his preferred choice, just that you liked one better. I was merely pointing out that the implicit choice of reference frame that the OP had made was perfectly acceptable and he didn't need (though there was no harm in including) the qualifier and that anyone who corrected him (something you have not done) is being a git.
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I've got nothing against some Microsoft software, especially back when the Microsoft mantra was 'cheap and adequate'. The problem is that PowerPoint is too easy to use stupidly and now costs your first born and your right testicle, even when you don't have a right testicle.
General consumption software should be informed by expert knowledge and best practices. PowerPoint is the equivalent of a HTML editor that doesn't make using CSS the default behaviour.
Well I'm glad you've come up with a realistic solution to the problem of millions of under qualified people having to give presentations. Getting all of them to be experts in communication is certainly a more realistic solution than either changing the defaults in the most widely used piece of software or displacing said software in the market.
Why we can apply this solution to the healthcare market as well! Everyone gets medical complaints, so lets just make everyone learn to be Doctors! And we don't need sensible conventions when it comes to wiring a plug because everyone can just become expert electricians!
As for the rest of your post, TLDR and RTFM in one post? Wow, I'm impressed, you really don't care that people think you are an arrogant jackass do you.
Perhaps there is a better way to phrase my objection. There exists software which while requiring no extra effort on the part of the user, would enable them to give better presentations (for example Beamer and Latex).
In an ideal world users would be taught how to give sensible presentations and it wouldn't matter what program they use, heck WordPad is perfectly adequate for most presentations.
The thing is that PowerPoint isn't trying to be a general purpose piece of software, it is designed for presentations. It is designed for presentations and it gets it's backside handed to it by bloody typesetting software!
Using your analogy, PowerPoint is a bad hammer. We don't ship hammers with sharp spiky grips by default, and being able to replace these grips wouldn't make a hammer that ships this way good.
Is it the users 'fault'? I'm not really concerned with blame. There exists a simple way to make most presentations I have to sit through better and that really is all I care about.
The problem is that Powerpoint, like Word, defaults to making it very easy for the user to do stupid things or does stupid things by default.
Changing the font size on a slide should be difficult because you should very rarely if ever do it. Fitting more than 4 bullet points on a slide should be hard because you should very rarely if ever do it. There shouldn't be any templates that let you put half a billion graphs and a picture on one slide. Backgrounds shouldn't be complicated and busy by default. There shouldn't be default colour schemes that make Egyptian Hieroglyphs easy to read or reminds people of the good old days of green on black monitors.
Transitions shouldn't be something one picks out of a line up, they should be something you look up how to do because you have a good reason. Unless you are trying to emulate the wipes from Star Wars then you have no good reason to go wiping slides from left to right distracting your entire audience. The default font for body text on a slide should be big enough that it is not only easy to read but also makes it impossible to write an essay on the slide.
Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them? It's a piece of shit that just cant compete with something like Beamer for sensible defaults. It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes, animations, walls of text, half a billion shitty Excel graphs with crappy hard to understand axes, stupid colour schemes, shitty backgrounds and walls of text and then rush through the presentation like your morning coffee was laced with methamphetamine.
Oh I agree to an extent and as I said above in response to another comment there probably wasn't a good way to slice up the former territory of the Ottoman Empire, a way that would please everyone or even most people. With all that said it is pretty clear that the colonial powers were not overly concerned with dividing the territory in a way that would best serve the local population. I would suggest they were more concerned with their own interests. The Kurds were completely ignored and little effort was made to take into account severely different religious identities. We incited the Arabs to fight on our side in the Great War then effectively stabbed them in the back at the first opportunity. The British didn't exactly do a stellar job in Palestine either.
I think most people would agree that the Shi'ites in the south of Iraq and Iranians both have plenty of reasons to be less than enamoured with the West, and particularly the US and Britain.
Oh that the Sunni's ended up in control of Iraq certainly wasn't an accident. There were no good ways to divide up the Middle East with the fall of the Ottomans, that doesn't mean that the British and French did a particularly good job of it. Al Kut and Al Basrah certainly don't belong in a Persian state but putting them in a nation of Kurds and Sunni was not particularly sensible either.
Unfortunately when the Ottoman Empire collapsed the West redrew the map of the Middle East without much attention being paid to ethnic or religious divides. Iraq under the Ba'athist was dominated to an extent by the Sunni minority. The regions bordering Iran are majority Shi'ite. With the fall of Saddam's Ba'athist regime solidarity among Shi'ites complicates matters of security, especially when you consider that during the first Gulf War the allied forces incited a primarily Shi'ite rebellion inside the South of Iraq only to abandon it once Kuwait was liberated.
The West's past conduct hasn't exactly endeared us to the Shi'ites in the south of Iraq, and Iran is certainly a natural ally after all we screwed them over as well by installing the Shah and generally interfering where we weren't wanted. The whole situation is a messy series of botch-ups by everyone involved.
"Yeap, but this is independent of whether the banks are people grouped together in corporations or not."
The incentive here is directed towards people in large corporate structures. The bailout was not by and large going to mom-and-pop shop banks. Sure lots of individuals acted unethically but the new incentive to behave unethically is not independent of the corporate structures in place.
Sure people will act unethically with or without corporate structures in place, but the question here is does being in a large corporations either encourage people to be more unethical or make it possible to behave more unethically (when compared to the alternatives)?
Yeah I don't dislike the FDIC guarantees, but they do represent massive government intervention in the market which causes very big distortions and perverse incentives. Obama's regulations were very weak and are inviting the exact same problem again. That said the bailouts (which both Obama and Bush supported) have created serious perverse incentives in the banking industry. I don't know enough about banking to say how things should be regulated but I do know enough about basic market economics to know what wont work. Now there exists incentives for every bank to keep increasing the risk it takes on at a commensurate rate to the amount other banks take on. That is not good.
This ties in nicely with what we were discussing before. It is very likely given the regulation we have in place and given the way corporations like banks are structured that the collective action of the banks employees will be very detrimental to society. The banks employees with behave in a highly unempathetic manner.
Sociopathic behaviour isn't always a bad thing by the way. If you have properly functioning markets with government regulation in place to minimise perverse incentives and align corporate interests with social interests then it doesn't really matter how much responsibility is diffused within an organisation, it will act for the collective good in exactly the same way that someone with APD can be made to behave for the collective good.
In fact if you want to talk about where the analogy breaks down I think this is a good place to start (there are plenty of problems with the analogy). Large corporations can act for the collective good, even if most of the time it is incidentally. People with APD are rarely able to do so most of the time because we have little means to incentivise them. This isn't the only way this analogy breaks down by the way (other problems I can think of are with corporations essentially under the complete control of a very small number of individuals, when one stock holder has sufficient power over the corporation, Google is a good example of this and it's behaviour is far more nuanced than most large corporate entities).
Understanding a system by analogy can lead to faulty reasoning if you don't know the limitations of the analogy. If I were trying to convince people that an analogy was flawed I would try to think of ways in which it breaks down and give examples of that rather than simply dismissing said reasoning. Ultimately all reasoning is just layers of imprecise analogies anyway.
I take your point but the problem I have is the value they quote on the balance sheet. What Lone Star is doing represents a great deal for them because some of these toxic assets they are buying are probably worth more than they are paying and the ones that are not they wont take a hit on. M-L on the other hand are claiming that the asset they have just sold is worth far less than the market is prepared to pay for it (they are claiming it is basically worth the value of the deal they have just made where any idiot can see that Lone Star are far smarter than that).
If I was asked to value my house for the purposes of a home loan and claimed it was worth 20% more than the market rate I would be in trouble later. Sure if the banks investigated they might catch me, but if they didn't I'd be in hot water if I later couldn't pay.
I agree with you about breaking up the banks, but the real problem is the way we have structured our fractional reserve banking system. I don't have a problem with having a banking system where banks essentially abuse the yield curve, but if we are going to make them de facto extensions of the state (not just by bailing them out but by protecting certain assets with cheap government backed insurance) then they should all be heavily regulated, or government operated corporations. Better yet make them co-operatives so that their interests are commensurate with the people taking the risk while keeping the idiot government out as much as possible.
An alternative would be to reform the banking system so the banks were not protected by government backing. I have no idea how to do this without introducing worse perverse incentives than exist right now or forcing people incapable of sensibly calculating risk to do exactly that.
Lets take as an example this little gem...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2936724320080729
Lone Star have done nothing particularly wrong in this deal but Merrill Lynch's write down would be considered out and out fraud on top of previous out and out fraud if an individual did it. Ignoring the questionable legality of the original valuation of the CDO the value Merrill Lynch quote this deal as on their balance sheet is a complete fabrication as one look at the deal will tell you. They are hiding the fact that these CDOs are almost certainly worthless by loaning Lone Star the money to buy them from them and then using the CDOs they are buying as collateral for the loan (and making them the only collateral)! If I told people I was good for a debt (which is what a stock basically is) by shifting money around in a similar way I would never get away with it.
Your ability to intentionally miss the point is matched only by your ability to sound patronising while doing it.
No I don't have this weird idea that forming a corporation somehow removes all personal responsibility, is there something wrong with your reading comprehension or do you just enjoy putting words in other peoples mouths. I believe forming a corporation reduces personal responsibility because that is precisely what they were created with the intention of doing, financially initially but now this extends to other areas as well.
Take the recent financial troubles. I can list a number of situations where corporate entities have taken bad debts off their books by setting up sham arrangements with other financial institutions to fool investors and wont get prosecuted for fraud. If I did the equivalent with my finances I would be facing serious consequences right now. You are totally naive if believe that people acting on behalf of large corporations are not protected from the consequences of a large subset of their actions.
Since we are analysing posting styles I will add that you come across as someone with an ideological and philosophical axe to grind who while admittedly not particularly poorly informed suffers from severe nuance blindness. This is nicely illustrated by your last post where your 'corporations cant murder' argument serves nicely as an archetypal straw man. I invite you to look back over my posts and tell me where I said corporations could get away with murder, you wont find any such suggestion. You are basically arguing with me like I'm some kind of amalgamation of every bad hippy stereotype.
As to your comment on my information gathering skills, I cant deny you do have a point. Right now I am wasting time that could be better spent learning something new, trying to explain simple concepts to a moronic ideologue with a fetish for stereotyping people who disagree with him.
No I want to point out that most large corporations are the same, because they are. For the same reason that most gases are the same in the sense that they have similar statistical properties. They have common emergent behaviour.
Sociopathic behaviour is something that will occur in any system with diffusion of responsibility, just look at most governments. Large limited liability corporations are particularly bad for this because they are designed precisely with the intent of dispersing and reducing responsibility and tend to operate on dangerously short time scales.
Get N people together where N is sufficiently large, put them in a structure where no one (or two, or some small number) are responsible for the actions the group decide to take collectively and watch as the group behave sociopathically.
You're now just a joke. Your reasoning amounts to a absurd form of reductionism where a single human is the atomic unit. If you really do think that humans don't have any emergent behaviour when organised into collectives then you are absolutely and completely insane.
So I take it you don't have an empirical case for why we wouldn't label the emergent behaviour of large corporations as sociopathic then? Because I ask you to point to empirical evidence that large corporations do not behave as though they were sociopathic and you have completely avoided the question.
There is a distinction between every human having some of the attributes of a sociopath and every large corporation behaving exactly like a person having every attribute of a sociopath. We get it, corporations aren't people, they are groups of people. Your argument makes as much sense as saying that the Russian Communist Party wasn't brutal and cruel because cruely and brutality are attributes of people not groups of people. Or are you going to claim that the KPSS was not also sociopathic?
Are you being intentionally dense? Do you simply not get what an analogy is?
At first I just assumed you were nitpicking so I went and reminded myself what the attributes of APD are. Please go ahead and name one of the major attributes of APD that large corporations fail to exhibit at least to some extent.
There is no such thing as people. People are groups of atoms that are group of... and so on.
In the real world we recognise when someone is making an analogy and don't assume that they mean literally what they say. If most larger corporations were a people we would class them as sociopathic.
Put another way, if we replaced the leadership structure of most larger corporations so that there was one person directing every action and those actions remained the same that person would have all the attributes of a sociopath.
"How is parroting what someone else has said - something you are not equipped to accurately evaluate yourself - a reasonable contribution to a conversation?"
Assuming it is a statement which you can back up with a peer reviewed citation or a statement by a reliable expert acting in their capacity as a reliable expert then it's perfectly reasonable. If I tell you my friends with medical qualifications think eating too much red meat is bad for you then that is a perfectly sensible thing to say in a conversation on diet.
And I agree with you that most people talking on this subject are morons and their contributions are meaningless. I was simply pointing out that presenting the considered views of experts was not. With that said virtually everyone who denies global warming makes no contribution to the conversation of any depth or meaning. For example very few denialists will present the view point of someone like Friis-Christensen. The reason for this is simple, he is a real skeptical scientist and his opinions are moderated by the evidence and have changed as the evidence has changed.
Calling something a proven fact is usually foolhardy when one is talking about science, especially something like climate science. But I hear denialists use this excuse to ignore the overwhelming amount of expert opinion and evidence that climate change is man made. They do this because they don't understand how science works.
The argument from authority informal fallacy is only a fallacy if the authority is unreliable. In this case repeating what you have heard qualified, credentialed climate scientists say is a perfectly reasonable contribution to the conversation. Repeating what Glen Beck, Al Gore, or Alex Jones have to say however...
At no point did I claim that a black hole will instantly evaporate if the event horizon is removed. What I claimed is that if through some fluke of physics there was a naked singularity exposed during the end of the lifetime of a black hole like the OP suggests (perhaps a result of quantum gravity although I doubt it) then we would have a very hard time seeing it through the multimegaton TNT equivalent outpouring of radiation.
Although no one knows what happens at the end point of black hole evaporation it is unlikely it would leave a naked singularity since the mass of the singularity is what is being 'evaporated'. Besides, even if there was a naked singularity around just before the thing evaporates it would be kicking out so much energy you wouldn't be able to get anywhere near it. A 1kg black hole evaporating would release the equivalent energy to a large thermonuclear weapon in a fraction of a second.
Yeah I mean the only real literature is on stone tablets! Shakespeare was a hack for using anything other than a chisel! Citizen Kane is a piece of crap! Welles should have known better than to make his work a moving picture rather than putting it down on good old fashioned marble.
The quote in question is actually very appropriate. It accompanies the secret project "The Planetary Datalinks", a Planet wide communication network which basically helps to spread ideas.
Would you have had the same reaction were I to quote Moby Dick is a thread where the central theme is revenge? Elitism is not a substitute for genuine intellectual prowess.
Those two statements are not mutually incompatible.
Expressing a preference for a reference frame is not being a pedant. At no point did you suggest the OP could not use his preferred choice, just that you liked one better. I was merely pointing out that the implicit choice of reference frame that the OP had made was perfectly acceptable and he didn't need (though there was no harm in including) the qualifier and that anyone who corrected him (something you have not done) is being a git.
yes, yes - as in "the light from the event which sort of already happened will get here during..."
From the lights reference frame these events are concurrent, you do not require the qualifier and anyone who corrects you is a bad physics pedant.