Communications and rhetoric courses talk about this -- and they have a specific name for the tactic, but I can't remember it right now. Anyway, they invariably discuss the most famous case of this: Watergate, where the initial proposal by Liddy and Haldeman sounded, to them, likely to be shot down, so instead they came up with an elaborate proposal that involved ferrying people around in helicopters and speedboats, and when they presented it, Nixon argued that it was stupid, and they ended up compromising on a simple burglary. It's a good argumentation technique for people who cheat at rhetoric (and are prepared.)
Multidimensional, between entities that appear, disappear, and change location without notice, where the links between the clouds are mostly fictional because they might go through a wholly different cloud, but it could be useful to consider them connected. And, most of all, uncontrollable and largely imaginary: most of the patterns reflect the mind of the observer, not reality.
They might, but I'm completely overwhelmed right now at work, so I don't have time to search for the article(s). The discussion was interesting, and depressing, because basically what it said was that every time the US would make some sort of pro-peace/cooperation overture, Iran would be in a bad mood and respond very, very negatively, and then a little while later something in Iran would change and they'd make some sort of diplomatic gesture towards the US, who would then respond extremely badly. It looks like an example of hysteresis, tit-for-tat, with two players who both have very good reason to start out distrusting the other player. I'm not, by the way, any fan of Iran: everything I've read indicates it's an awful place, and much of its leadership is seriously dangerous to the world as a whole. But the impression I've gotten was that A: there are good historical reasons why it is where it is, and B: from their viewpoint, their attitude has some justification. One thing I found significantly weird, for instance, was another article -- now this one, I can find, but again not from work right now -- about how, in the 1960's and '70's the US had a federally subsidized grant-and-loan program directed at Iranian physics students to come to the US and get advanced degrees in nuclear engineering, to encourage Iran to start a (peaceful, was the assumption) domestic nuclear program. Many of the people currently running the Iranian research groups got their education and degrees from big US universities. That doesn't change the magnitude or danger of what they're doing, but it does make the whole situation more complex and nuanced. It's like the butterfly effect for politics.
The problem is that I know exactly where the reference was: from a New Yorker article about five months ago. So A: it's dead-tree and B: the NY is weekly so that's a *lot* of searching, especially inasmuch as I don't have any at work, and don't have any that old at home. If/when I find anything, I'll post it.
I've been looking for references, but haven't yet found any. However, it's my recollection that following 9/11, Iran was one of the extremely few countries in the Mideast that offered the use of harbors and a small bit of infrastructure for the use of the US Navy against Afghanistan, although they declined (like most of the rest of the Mideast) to allow us to use their airfields.
Gotta say, I suck at math, and every time I meet a math major, I tell them that I suck at it, but it's never with any sense of pride whatsoever. I *hate* it that I suck at math. It's held me back in jobs. I use math, a lot, and have at almost every job I've ever had, and I'm envious of people who are good at it. There's such a thing as perverse pride -- witness every redneck everywhere -- and that might be what you're seeing: envy that's disguised. People who aren't very secure in their knowledge of themselves tend to do that. I know I'm lousy at math and have no problem admitting it, but that's not a very common characteristic, apparently.
I tried to let this pass, to not reply to such an 1890's mindset, but I can't help myself, especially when I see people modding it up.
The line between great goals and being stupid is pretty fine. The guy who builds a set of wings and jumps off a cliff to his doom while flapping *as hard as he can* is still stupid, even if he did the hard work to accomplish his great goals. Let me illustrate, using your examples. When those planes were hijacked, there was a protocol in place, that officials knew and most people were aware of: you comply with the hijacker's demands, and eventually he -- note 'he', coz in every one of your examples it was a *man*, not a woman or girly man, who was killing people recklessly -- gets tired and gives up. That's the way it had been for a very long time, with a few practically unknown exceptions. So, the people on those planes were doing the smart thing -- if they'd started a fight, someone might get killed, and then they'd be worse off, given their reasonable assumptions, than they would have if they just stayed put. As soon as news got to them that this wasn't a standard hijacking, on flight 93, they changed their plan. Both are examples of intelligent behavior: you don't get yourself killed for nothing. Likewise, as much as I hate to say this, the dumbass with a gun at VT. Those athletes, who jumped out windows? Most of them are still alive. The professor who blocked the window? Dead. Yeah, he's a hero, but they're still alive. Not as romantic and ivory-tower as your idyllic world, but a lot more satisfying to each individual not-dead person.
On the subject of women running things: my ex-gf was 13 when she started college, and 23 when she got her first PhD in engineering. Plus she could probably kick your butt in akido and certainly in a bike race, unless you're secretly a CatI USCF. So don't go insulting half the human race unless you can back it up.
I had an interesting lesson in that a while back, when my then-gf wanted a newer car. We went car shopping and found something she liked, and started talking about funding. She had a bankruptcy and two credit card settlement records on her credit record. I had one series of on-time car payments but nothing else. They refused to give me a loan because they said there was insufficent material on my credit report to create a credit history, but they were *glad* to give her a loan, at 11% interest. (So we went to my credit union, who promptly gave me a loan at 5%.) They knew they were going to make three times as much money from her, if not more, than they'd ever make from me, so they refused to grant a loan unless it went to her. We could've played dumb and then paid it off in full immediately, but that wouldn't've been as satisfying, somehow, because they still would've gotten some money. It was much nicer to do in a way that gave them nothing at all.
sparkfun will crank out custom pcb's for $10 setup plus $2.50 per square inch. I design and contract out PCB's for a living and can't find anyone that can beat that price. I use circuit express for my boards, but they cost a *lot* more (although their quality is superb.)
My point being that it's much easier to get those sorts of weapons in Caracas than in, say, Hamburg. Consider with which country Venezuela shares its longest border, a border that is, to the best of my knowledge, largely unpoliced.
I wonder who has the contract for patching bullet holes in these things? Or, given that Venezuela's adjacent to some places with significant political instability, ground-to-air missiles? I don't even think it'd have to be for cause: just, hey, look, I wonder what will happen if we shoot at that?
The thing that I found interesting was that their proposed mechanism is fairly HIV-specific -- or at least, it is fairly specific to a receptor group that HIV uses. I am not doing research in this area, but I'm curious whether this receptor is commonly targetted by other viral particles, coz if not, it would indicate that maybe we've gone some rounds with something very like this before. The CCR5 stuff is interesting: I'm familiar with some HIV-resistant populations. One thing I haven't seen (or might just not remember) is whether these populations show the same resistance in different tissues, since HIV seems to target a number of different tissues during both initial and (to a much greater extent) subsequent infection. Another way of asking what I'm wondering is: does the defective CCR5 occur throughout the body, or are these isomers that show up in some tissues but not others? I know many cell-surface receptors are pretty tissue-specific.
1 Samuel 15:2-3 "Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
If ordering your chosen people to kill *all* the women and *all* the children isn't promoting violence targeting women, I'm not sure what is. (Want to make a pro-life person crabby? point out that there's Biblical support for killing babies. Warning: you won't make friends or influence people this way.)
The NT's pretty clean. Paul's edict that women aren't allowed to speak in church can't really be called explicit violence, merely misogyny.
That sounds to me like maybe humans, or apes, have faced something like this before and still have low-level semi-functional stuff in place to deal with it, and in a couple generations the descendents of people with the best expression of this would become tolerant or immune to HIV.
It takes careful research, evidence, and police work to go after corporate misbehavior, which is slow, tedious, non-flashy, and most importantly, completely removes any chance of that company or similar ones providing lobbying funds. In contrast, proposing a law that sounds good to uneducated voters is quick, great for popularity, and costs the legislator nothing. Even better if it fails, because then the legislator can A: decry interference and claim to be an underdog fighting against big business, and B: re-propose it with accrual of all benefits thereunto. This works until the legislator proposes something so stupid that even uneducated voters realise it's junk, at which point legislators give media more leeway to consolidate and provide distracting entertainment to reduce the voter oversight. It's not a fast process, but it seems to work.
I have a similar story. My friend's spending 4 consecutive life terms in a federal prison based on testimony of a foster child who had falsely accused every previous foster house he'd been placed with of molesting him (which information was not admitted as evidence to the trial) and accused my friend of doing stuff he's physically incapable of doing (which is why he was being a foster parent, not a biological one.) Unfortunately, my friend A: got a bad lawyer, and B: showed up visibly inebriated one day of the trial, which factors overwhelmed the positive testimony of over fifty other previous foster children on his behalf. So he's locked up for the rest of his life for something I'm 97% sure was completely fabricated.
It taught me something, though: I have nothing whatsoever to do with children, and actively avoid being in a room with them unless their parents are there. I used to work in science education for primary students, as a volunteer and tutor, but never again.
You actually, personally witnessed this? That's awesome. The comedian Steve Martin wrote The Cruel Shoes sketch about this, but I figured it was hyperbole.
It depends. Wider is more stable, but wider *greatly* increases the minimum turn radius that the track can make, as well as (obviously) requiring more physical space. In Colorado, narrow-gauge railroads, at 3' wide, were standard through the Rockies, with the 'normal' 4'8 1/2" gauge going eastwards into the plains. The narrow-gauge railroads could stand 5% up and down grades (standard could only go to maybe 3 1/2%) and could be snaked up crazy narrow canyons, and tunnels and roadcuts were less expensive because they were narrower. The narrow-gauge engines had drivers maybe 2' in diameter, max, which is why they could handle the steeper grades. Some engines, like the massive Union Pacific Big Boy freight haulers, could only operate in some parts of the US because 'standard' standard-gauge turns were too tight for them, and only especially straight roadbeds could accommodate them.
The Colorado version of the same bumper sticker said "Welcome to Colorado. Now spend all your money and go away." We've had about a million Californians and Texans move here in the last ten years. I think your PR campaign must be better.
>It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only.
Australia? New Zealand? Hawaii? Greenland? Iceland? Sri Lanka? Madagascar? I don't know, but is it even possible to drive/train to/between the various islands of Japan?
What I found funny about that was that when Cosby drove through the mountain he was wearing this Futuristic Space Helmet that was actually a Bell Stratos bicycle helmet intended for time trial racers. I had one just like it only mine didn't have funny stuff painted on it. (Or at least not the same funny stuff that he had.)
You might read "To Engineer Is Human" by Henry Petrowski, at some point. He talks about this at length. Basically, his argument is that, aside from the business/accounting demands for lower prices, it is an emergent characteristic of engineering that iterative development is done to optimize a system until it breaks. It always ends up breaking. Then, the engineers have a better idea of the breaking point, so they use that data for the next series of iterations, until something else breaks. It's not just the price that drives this: it's the very process of engineering itself.
Maybe I'm too much of a rationalist but there's lots of legislation that I agree with, that I know is a bad idea for the world at large, and there's a fair bit of legislation I disagree with but I vote for because I know the community will benefit from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Communications and rhetoric courses talk about this -- and they have a specific name for the tactic, but I can't remember it right now. Anyway, they invariably discuss the most famous case of this: Watergate, where the initial proposal by Liddy and Haldeman sounded, to them, likely to be shot down, so instead they came up with an elaborate proposal that involved ferrying people around in helicopters and speedboats, and when they presented it, Nixon argued that it was stupid, and they ended up compromising on a simple burglary. It's a good argumentation technique for people who cheat at rhetoric (and are prepared.)
Multidimensional, between entities that appear, disappear, and change location without notice, where the links between the clouds are mostly fictional because they might go through a wholly different cloud, but it could be useful to consider them connected. And, most of all, uncontrollable and largely imaginary: most of the patterns reflect the mind of the observer, not reality.
They might, but I'm completely overwhelmed right now at work, so I don't have time to search for the article(s). The discussion was interesting, and depressing, because basically what it said was that every time the US would make some sort of pro-peace/cooperation overture, Iran would be in a bad mood and respond very, very negatively, and then a little while later something in Iran would change and they'd make some sort of diplomatic gesture towards the US, who would then respond extremely badly. It looks like an example of hysteresis, tit-for-tat, with two players who both have very good reason to start out distrusting the other player. I'm not, by the way, any fan of Iran: everything I've read indicates it's an awful place, and much of its leadership is seriously dangerous to the world as a whole. But the impression I've gotten was that A: there are good historical reasons why it is where it is, and B: from their viewpoint, their attitude has some justification. One thing I found significantly weird, for instance, was another article -- now this one, I can find, but again not from work right now -- about how, in the 1960's and '70's the US had a federally subsidized grant-and-loan program directed at Iranian physics students to come to the US and get advanced degrees in nuclear engineering, to encourage Iran to start a (peaceful, was the assumption) domestic nuclear program. Many of the people currently running the Iranian research groups got their education and degrees from big US universities. That doesn't change the magnitude or danger of what they're doing, but it does make the whole situation more complex and nuanced. It's like the butterfly effect for politics.
The problem is that I know exactly where the reference was: from a New Yorker article about five months ago. So A: it's dead-tree and B: the NY is weekly so that's a *lot* of searching, especially inasmuch as I don't have any at work, and don't have any that old at home. If/when I find anything, I'll post it.
I've been looking for references, but haven't yet found any. However, it's my recollection that following 9/11, Iran was one of the extremely few countries in the Mideast that offered the use of harbors and a small bit of infrastructure for the use of the US Navy against Afghanistan, although they declined (like most of the rest of the Mideast) to allow us to use their airfields.
Gotta say, I suck at math, and every time I meet a math major, I tell them that I suck at it, but it's never with any sense of pride whatsoever. I *hate* it that I suck at math. It's held me back in jobs. I use math, a lot, and have at almost every job I've ever had, and I'm envious of people who are good at it. There's such a thing as perverse pride -- witness every redneck everywhere -- and that might be what you're seeing: envy that's disguised. People who aren't very secure in their knowledge of themselves tend to do that. I know I'm lousy at math and have no problem admitting it, but that's not a very common characteristic, apparently.
I tried to let this pass, to not reply to such an 1890's mindset, but I can't help myself, especially when I see people modding it up.
The line between great goals and being stupid is pretty fine. The guy who builds a set of wings and jumps off a cliff to his doom while flapping *as hard as he can* is still stupid, even if he did the hard work to accomplish his great goals. Let me illustrate, using your examples. When those planes were hijacked, there was a protocol in place, that officials knew and most people were aware of: you comply with the hijacker's demands, and eventually he -- note 'he', coz in every one of your examples it was a *man*, not a woman or girly man, who was killing people recklessly -- gets tired and gives up. That's the way it had been for a very long time, with a few practically unknown exceptions. So, the people on those planes were doing the smart thing -- if they'd started a fight, someone might get killed, and then they'd be worse off, given their reasonable assumptions, than they would have if they just stayed put. As soon as news got to them that this wasn't a standard hijacking, on flight 93, they changed their plan. Both are examples of intelligent behavior: you don't get yourself killed for nothing. Likewise, as much as I hate to say this, the dumbass with a gun at VT. Those athletes, who jumped out windows? Most of them are still alive. The professor who blocked the window? Dead. Yeah, he's a hero, but they're still alive. Not as romantic and ivory-tower as your idyllic world, but a lot more satisfying to each individual not-dead person.
On the subject of women running things: my ex-gf was 13 when she started college, and 23 when she got her first PhD in engineering. Plus she could probably kick your butt in akido and certainly in a bike race, unless you're secretly a CatI USCF. So don't go insulting half the human race unless you can back it up.
I had an interesting lesson in that a while back, when my then-gf wanted a newer car. We went car shopping and found something she liked, and started talking about funding. She had a bankruptcy and two credit card settlement records on her credit record. I had one series of on-time car payments but nothing else. They refused to give me a loan because they said there was insufficent material on my credit report to create a credit history, but they were *glad* to give her a loan, at 11% interest. (So we went to my credit union, who promptly gave me a loan at 5%.) They knew they were going to make three times as much money from her, if not more, than they'd ever make from me, so they refused to grant a loan unless it went to her. We could've played dumb and then paid it off in full immediately, but that wouldn't've been as satisfying, somehow, because they still would've gotten some money. It was much nicer to do in a way that gave them nothing at all.
Damn, I'm glad I'm not her manicurist.
sparkfun will crank out custom pcb's for $10 setup plus $2.50 per square inch. I design and contract out PCB's for a living and can't find anyone that can beat that price. I use circuit express for my boards, but they cost a *lot* more (although their quality is superb.)
My point being that it's much easier to get those sorts of weapons in Caracas than in, say, Hamburg. Consider with which country Venezuela shares its longest border, a border that is, to the best of my knowledge, largely unpoliced.
I wonder who has the contract for patching bullet holes in these things? Or, given that Venezuela's adjacent to some places with significant political instability, ground-to-air missiles? I don't even think it'd have to be for cause: just, hey, look, I wonder what will happen if we shoot at that?
The thing that I found interesting was that their proposed mechanism is fairly HIV-specific -- or at least, it is fairly specific to a receptor group that HIV uses. I am not doing research in this area, but I'm curious whether this receptor is commonly targetted by other viral particles, coz if not, it would indicate that maybe we've gone some rounds with something very like this before.
The CCR5 stuff is interesting: I'm familiar with some HIV-resistant populations. One thing I haven't seen (or might just not remember) is whether these populations show the same resistance in different tissues, since HIV seems to target a number of different tissues during both initial and (to a much greater extent) subsequent infection. Another way of asking what I'm wondering is: does the defective CCR5 occur throughout the body, or are these isomers that show up in some tissues but not others? I know many cell-surface receptors are pretty tissue-specific.
I'll bite...
1 Samuel 15:2-3
"Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
If ordering your chosen people to kill *all* the women and *all* the children isn't promoting violence targeting women, I'm not sure what is. (Want to make a pro-life person crabby? point out that there's Biblical support for killing babies. Warning: you won't make friends or influence people this way.)
The NT's pretty clean. Paul's edict that women aren't allowed to speak in church can't really be called explicit violence, merely misogyny.
That sounds to me like maybe humans, or apes, have faced something like this before and still have low-level semi-functional stuff in place to deal with it, and in a couple generations the descendents of people with the best expression of this would become tolerant or immune to HIV.
It takes careful research, evidence, and police work to go after corporate misbehavior, which is slow, tedious, non-flashy, and most importantly, completely removes any chance of that company or similar ones providing lobbying funds. In contrast, proposing a law that sounds good to uneducated voters is quick, great for popularity, and costs the legislator nothing. Even better if it fails, because then the legislator can A: decry interference and claim to be an underdog fighting against big business, and B: re-propose it with accrual of all benefits thereunto. This works until the legislator proposes something so stupid that even uneducated voters realise it's junk, at which point legislators give media more leeway to consolidate and provide distracting entertainment to reduce the voter oversight. It's not a fast process, but it seems to work.
I have a similar story. My friend's spending 4 consecutive life terms in a federal prison based on testimony of a foster child who had falsely accused every previous foster house he'd been placed with of molesting him (which information was not admitted as evidence to the trial) and accused my friend of doing stuff he's physically incapable of doing (which is why he was being a foster parent, not a biological one.) Unfortunately, my friend A: got a bad lawyer, and B: showed up visibly inebriated one day of the trial, which factors overwhelmed the positive testimony of over fifty other previous foster children on his behalf. So he's locked up for the rest of his life for something I'm 97% sure was completely fabricated.
It taught me something, though: I have nothing whatsoever to do with children, and actively avoid being in a room with them unless their parents are there. I used to work in science education for primary students, as a volunteer and tutor, but never again.
You actually, personally witnessed this?
That's awesome.
The comedian Steve Martin wrote The Cruel Shoes sketch about this, but I figured it was hyperbole.
It depends. Wider is more stable, but wider *greatly* increases the minimum turn radius that the track can make, as well as (obviously) requiring more physical space. In Colorado, narrow-gauge railroads, at 3' wide, were standard through the Rockies, with the 'normal' 4'8 1/2" gauge going eastwards into the plains. The narrow-gauge railroads could stand 5% up and down grades (standard could only go to maybe 3 1/2%) and could be snaked up crazy narrow canyons, and tunnels and roadcuts were less expensive because they were narrower. The narrow-gauge engines had drivers maybe 2' in diameter, max, which is why they could handle the steeper grades. Some engines, like the massive Union Pacific Big Boy freight haulers, could only operate in some parts of the US because 'standard' standard-gauge turns were too tight for them, and only especially straight roadbeds could accommodate them.
The Colorado version of the same bumper sticker said "Welcome to Colorado. Now spend all your money and go away."
We've had about a million Californians and Texans move here in the last ten years.
I think your PR campaign must be better.
>It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only.
Australia? New Zealand? Hawaii? Greenland? Iceland? Sri Lanka? Madagascar? I don't know, but is it even possible to drive/train to/between the various islands of Japan?
I am reminded of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meeting at Yalta in 1945 as they start to pre-emptively divide up their mutual enemy, while declaring that they'll all cooperate in the future.
What I found funny about that was that when Cosby drove through the mountain he was wearing this Futuristic Space Helmet that was actually a Bell Stratos bicycle helmet intended for time trial racers. I had one just like it only mine didn't have funny stuff painted on it. (Or at least not the same funny stuff that he had.)
You might read "To Engineer Is Human" by Henry Petrowski, at some point. He talks about this at length. Basically, his argument is that, aside from the business/accounting demands for lower prices, it is an emergent characteristic of engineering that iterative development is done to optimize a system until it breaks. It always ends up breaking. Then, the engineers have a better idea of the breaking point, so they use that data for the next series of iterations, until something else breaks. It's not just the price that drives this: it's the very process of engineering itself.
Maybe I'm too much of a rationalist but there's lots of legislation that I agree with, that I know is a bad idea for the world at large, and there's a fair bit of legislation I disagree with but I vote for because I know the community will benefit from it.