If you're invited to the wedding, you should post your response on facebook. When his fiancee nags him about your response card, he'll get the point (maybe). Even better, send him (and his fiancee) an email asking why the invites weren't done online, it would be so much easier.
Maybe I'm becoming an old fart, but some things need to be done in person. Others you can do over the phone if necessary. But it seems to me your buddy should have invited all the guys out for a "very special beer night" and told everyone then. Or, at the very least, make sure you all knew before switching his staus on Facebook. On the other hand, maybe his fiancee would have gone ballistic if he didn't update his Facebook status:) Every once in a while I read about some stabbing or something because of that.
Sorry, I wasn't referring to the mortgage brokers. The stood to gain some, but the people who stood to gain the most were the people dealing in securitized mortgage derivatives. These are the people with the $50 mil bonuses. As long as they weren't left holding the bag when it came tumbling down (and they weren't -- their employers were), then their best choice was to keep the cash flowing.
As for your friend, there's more there than meets the eye, and definitely more than what you stated.. Almost all lenders offered both conforming and non-conforming loans, with different fees, rates, etc. I spoke with several lenders who only offered conforming loans (ended up going with one of them), and they weren't sued out of business. Requiring substantiated income is a prerequisite for conforming loans.
Congress dropped the ball on this one. They wanted everyone to be able to buy a house, whether or not they could pay for it.
I think if you do a little deeper research you'll find that that myth has been debunked. I'm not sure how well read-up you are on the issue, from your post it seems like you have some understanding, but are missing important pieces... I don't mean to be mean or condescending, please don't take it the wrong way... but there were a lot of deregulatory actions that affected the mess. Effective repeal of Glass-Steagal, etc.
I don;t think Congress wanted everyone to be able to buy a home... they wanted (1) a place where the bubble money from the dot-com boom could be put to delay the burst and (2) to make their buddies in the financial industry happy.
But I'd say it's also likely that there are more people in general spending time on social networking sites.
I'm not fond of them, in general, but now I need to spend 2-3 hours weekly on them in order to stay up to date with my family and distant friends (time I used to spend emailing them).
I think there's a grain of truth to the idea that they really are becoming more ubiquitous as centers of communication.
It appears that you must have rented out your brain (and thus your nick is no longer apt) because you're still missing the original point. Your red herring does not change this.
I do believe the ends justify the means. That is not up for debate. What is up for debate is whether you believe inequal opportunity is just.
Apparently, you believe it is fine.
I do believe it is just to discriminate against individuals based on their gender in order to ensure an equal playing field.
Finally, let me guess some things. You are a white male under the age of 24, with a conservative father, who had a stay-at-home mother, or a mother with a very low-end job. You grew up in either suburbia or a small-town setting with a smallish but significant minority population, but then went to (or are attending) a mostly-white college. The area you grew up in likely has a below-national-average education level. Am I right?
Re:The Sims, SimCity... and Utopia is menioned whe
on
Vintage Games
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· Score: 1
I know it still exists, but it seems few and few between titles.
There have been discussions, newspieces, even books written on the subject of casual gaming.
You might try one of the flash game sites out there... personally, I prefer Kongregate for my casual gaming fix, since it adds in the devilish achievements angle to keep me interested in some of the games.
Just to note, though... a lot of casual games seem to have been poorly playtested during development, and have issues with balance, difficulty, etc... but then again, a lot are developed by amateurs.
No reason to dust off the Intellivision, when you can just go to a web site for your fix, and avoid 'intellivision thumb'.
No, this is not an ends vs. means situation. This is an individual benefit vs. societal benefit situation.
Let's flip the tables. Is it fair that a set of individuals has no opportunity for advancement due to discrimination?
Start by answering that question.
Now, the second question, which is really what this is all about. Do we have a societal responsibility to address the extant discrimination against individuals?
And finally, the analysis. If your answer to (1) is NO, and your answer to (2) is NO, then now I know that you do not share my values to any extent, and arguing with you is useless -- but I am saddened that you do not believe in fundamental equality.
If your answers to one is (1) YES, then I'll write you off as a self-interested bigot.
If your answers are (1) NO and (2) YES, then please explain your position more clearly, for there is a fundamental logical problem.
And your fable? I've read it before, and it makes no more sense in a societal context now as it ever has. And linking it to excuses for tyranny is laughable... you are substituting potential tyranny for extant tyranny.
They are saying that the deepest part of the trench is 1.2 miles farther from sea level than the tip of Mt Everest. Your math confirms this.
Not sure what the problem is, other than the fact that they used m and km in the same sentence (which is the nice thing about metric units... you can easily interpret between m and km, unlike feet and miles).
Currently lots of people are discriminated against. If this is the land of opportunity, then we need to counterbalance that discrimination to provide equal opportunity.
It's equally depressing to see that there are plenty of bigots like yourself who refuse to see inequal opportunity as a problem.
I know we'll never agree on the subject, but it saddens me that a supposedly just society can produce people who choose to ignore the impact of systemic discrimination.
Of course, you have to wonder if it could have been used to predict our current economic difficulties.
No, you don't have to wonder that. The current economic difficulties were easily predicted by many.
The problem was that the people with any kind of ability to stop the conditions that led to the current situation were those who profited most from those conditions. Not a good recipe for prevention.
Yes, it is right. Because the effects of that prior discrimination are not gone... they still exist. Glass ceilings, race-based (or gender-based) hiring and promotions... it's still there.
If we really want to be a land of equal opportunity, we've got to counter the residual discrimination that still exists.
I know, it's not fair to some individuals. But that's the price of living in a land of opportunity -- and not allowing equal opportunity pretty much shatters any possibility of the American ideal.
The problem is that "niche" and "morphology" are two perfectly good words in current use, and his meshing of the two doesn't work because the roots describe different systems.
This is very similar to when non-techies refer to the CPU as the "hard drive". People without knowledge in a field, using real words from that field incorrectly, confuse the issue.
In this example, "niche" is the role an organism fills in an ecology; this is a function of the ecology. Morphology is the form or structure of an organism. This is a function of the organism. There is no "morphoniche" -- that assumes that there must be a place for a morphology in a given ecosystem; this is not a true assumption. Ecosystems are defined by functionality, not by morphology of the organisms (and yes, while morphology definitely impacts the niche an organism is capable of fulfilling, they are still terms that can't really be combined without distorting them ridiculously).
Finally, there is a different word he should have used, which is morphospace. This is the actual term used by people who know what they are talking about, and it refers to the possible forms and structures of an organism. He should have stated that we do not have an extant examples of organisms which have similar morphospaces as the giant sauropods.
FWIW, the Valley is a small place. One of Arrington's first interviews was Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora.
There doesn't need to be any fiduciary interest on Arrington's part, familiarity with Pandora might be all it takes to make him favor Pandora.
And also, not sure where you're getting the concept of a big rivalry between Pandora and Last.fm. I've observed no such thing... just that people use what they are comfortable with. Maybe there're fanboys sprouting up, but I think you're overanalyzing.
IMO, Arrington's just a twit. Twits exist independently of financial arrangements.
I think it's dangerous to try to compare a two legged winged creature to a four legged creature
Yes, I know it's dangerous, which is why I only make that comparison in a hardened secret laboratory. Last time I tried it, the explosion nearly blew through the 2nd-level blast enclosure.
Seriously, though, modern birds may be the closes living relatives to dinosaurs. And while I'd very strongly suspect that the long neck of geese evolved independently of the long necks of sauropods, it may be relevant.
(As the article notes) it's probably a lot harder to have the blood pressure to pump blood all the way up that column to the head.
Yes, this is an ongoing issue, and one of the primary reasons the position du jour has been lowered-head. But there is a ton we don't know about dino biology, and it is quite possible there are alternate means of pumping blood up the column (such as smooth-muscled vasculature that could help pump, especially in concert with valves like those in giraffes and other animals used to cut off blood flow temporarily. Or perhaps blood demands are low, and periodic lowering of the head could supply enough oxygen et al for survival. It's all conjecture... but it still makes me wonder if the net energy demands of maintaining a horizontal position would be greater than the demands of pumping blood and keeping the vertebrae vertical.
After reading it, the article's not as great as you think.
Hey, I never made a value judgment on the quality of the article.:) I just meant that typically the article being available for perusal guides the discussion somewhat... without TFA, the discussion tends to be more freeform and devolve into inanity quicker. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But I'd like to add that the pace of societal change has, IMO, increased rapidly since the advent of mass media and the internet.
The Cosby show probably did more to help reduce racism against blacks in the US than any other single thing in the last 2-3 decades. Numerous shows depicting women in positions of power have done the same for women.
But, in the end, I think we're very limited in how fast change can happen... it's a generational process. I find it amazing that some of the people in the highest positions of political power now, basically formulated their prejudices before the end of segregation in the US. I wonder what the US will look like re: racism when today's kids are 70 years old? How much would the R&B/Hip-hop movement to rural areas & the burbs affect their ideas of race?
I see. So suddenly, "morphoniche" is equivalent to "morphospace".
'Niche' is a generally-used term, which means something quite different -- it refers to a "place" in an ecology, as I'm sure you are aware.
Morphospace refers to a possible forms of an organism. Morphospace is a function of the organism, not of the ecology.
Since the organism in question does not currently exist in living form, it is a tautology that therefore the morphospace is unfilled.
So now, in addition to my assumption that you've made up words to sound like you know what you're talking about, you seem to be confused as to what the actual words mean.
The nearby gradstudent seemed to understand me just fine. So.
I understood what you were trying to say. That was not the issue I had. The issue is that you don't really know what you're talking about, and tried to use big words to compensate.
As for usage of the word theory... no, I meant it as defined. I did not mean hypothesis, although a hypothesis would also fit that criteria.
How about showcasing the widening gender gap in BA/BS degrees in Western culture? Women are earning more degrees almost across the board, and yet there is almost no measures being taken to call attention to that disparity.
There are more moderately-high paying jobs not requiring a BA/BS degree that men traditionally hold, rather than women. Building trades, for instance.
And since women tend to work less than men (as a whole, due to traditional family roles), some of them have the luxury of more time for education.
FWIW, since this is a relatively recent development, I think it's fine... it'll help undo centuries/millenia of male domination in Western culture.
Well, I've read about this theory before, and while it is certainly possible, I think it's unlikely...
No other vertebrates are observed to have multiple hearts. IIRC, the giraffe does have a mechanism to deal with the BP in the head (I think they can block off blood flow or something), and maybe a valve system would provide what's necessary...
What if the major artery in the neck was capable of waves of constriction to force blood upwards, like milking a cow in reverse?
As you say, lots of possibilities since we don't have the soft tissue.
A lawyer who takes jobs on both sides of an ethical issue has either compromised their ethics for one client or the other, or they have no ethics at all.
Or they have a different set of ethics than you.
Really. The my-ethics-are-the-only-valid-ethics theme is getting old.
Let's look at how a professional can ethically act for both sides in an ethical issue. Perhaps, since the issue is complicated and not easily decided, the professional's ethics demand that he use his personal skills to the best of his ability, and by advocating on both sides, he is better able to bring about an equitable solution.
Here's my biggest issue, though -- ethics are complicated, situations and problems are complicated. Reducing them to a simple single ethical issue is often wildly inaccurate. At the core of the issue, you weigh personal freedom as more important than the ability of a person to make a living from their creations, which have value to society. I do not; however, I do value personal freedoms to a large extent. So very easily, I could see myself on either "side" of this issue (to reduce it to sides, which is inaccurate). And there is no ethical conflict there, as balance is required.
I think you misread. The inefficient way of bearing the weight is to hold the head low away from the body. The efficient way is high up, so that the skeletal structure can bear a lot of the weight.
Down low for traveling to avoid blood pressure problems and up high for brief states of alert or reaching high food sources?
That was the status quo that the authors of this piece are disputing. Down low is default, up high as needed.
Re: their blood and blood pressure... liquid is liquid. Gravity is gravity. Pressure required to overcome gravity is just that. If you're suggesting that their tissues were so significantly different that they could withstand ridiculously high pressures, then fine... but I doubt it would be a property of the blood so much as a property of their vasculature and heart.
... until you CLONE THEM!
Oh yeah? What if they are equally capable of either, and how they hold their heads is learned behavior? What has your cloning done for us then?!
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I'm with you 100% on that.
:) Every once in a while I read about some stabbing or something because of that.
If you're invited to the wedding, you should post your response on facebook. When his fiancee nags him about your response card, he'll get the point (maybe). Even better, send him (and his fiancee) an email asking why the invites weren't done online, it would be so much easier.
Maybe I'm becoming an old fart, but some things need to be done in person. Others you can do over the phone if necessary. But it seems to me your buddy should have invited all the guys out for a "very special beer night" and told everyone then. Or, at the very least, make sure you all knew before switching his staus on Facebook. On the other hand, maybe his fiancee would have gone ballistic if he didn't update his Facebook status
As for your friend, there's more there than meets the eye, and definitely more than what you stated.. Almost all lenders offered both conforming and non-conforming loans, with different fees, rates, etc. I spoke with several lenders who only offered conforming loans (ended up going with one of them), and they weren't sued out of business. Requiring substantiated income is a prerequisite for conforming loans.
I think if you do a little deeper research you'll find that that myth has been debunked. I'm not sure how well read-up you are on the issue, from your post it seems like you have some understanding, but are missing important pieces... I don't mean to be mean or condescending, please don't take it the wrong way... but there were a lot of deregulatory actions that affected the mess. Effective repeal of Glass-Steagal, etc.
I don;t think Congress wanted everyone to be able to buy a home... they wanted (1) a place where the bubble money from the dot-com boom could be put to delay the burst and (2) to make their buddies in the financial industry happy.
That was my first thought.
But I'd say it's also likely that there are more people in general spending time on social networking sites.
I'm not fond of them, in general, but now I need to spend 2-3 hours weekly on them in order to stay up to date with my family and distant friends (time I used to spend emailing them).
I think there's a grain of truth to the idea that they really are becoming more ubiquitous as centers of communication.
It appears that you must have rented out your brain (and thus your nick is no longer apt) because you're still missing the original point. Your red herring does not change this.
I do believe the ends justify the means. That is not up for debate. What is up for debate is whether you believe inequal opportunity is just.
Apparently, you believe it is fine.
I do believe it is just to discriminate against individuals based on their gender in order to ensure an equal playing field.
Finally, let me guess some things. You are a white male under the age of 24, with a conservative father, who had a stay-at-home mother, or a mother with a very low-end job. You grew up in either suburbia or a small-town setting with a smallish but significant minority population, but then went to (or are attending) a mostly-white college. The area you grew up in likely has a below-national-average education level. Am I right?
There have been discussions, newspieces, even books written on the subject of casual gaming.
You might try one of the flash game sites out there... personally, I prefer Kongregate for my casual gaming fix, since it adds in the devilish achievements angle to keep me interested in some of the games.
Just to note, though... a lot of casual games seem to have been poorly playtested during development, and have issues with balance, difficulty, etc... but then again, a lot are developed by amateurs.
No reason to dust off the Intellivision, when you can just go to a web site for your fix, and avoid 'intellivision thumb'.
No, this is not an ends vs. means situation. This is an individual benefit vs. societal benefit situation.
Let's flip the tables. Is it fair that a set of individuals has no opportunity for advancement due to discrimination?
Start by answering that question.
Now, the second question, which is really what this is all about. Do we have a societal responsibility to address the extant discrimination against individuals?
And finally, the analysis. If your answer to (1) is NO, and your answer to (2) is NO, then now I know that you do not share my values to any extent, and arguing with you is useless -- but I am saddened that you do not believe in fundamental equality.
If your answers to one is (1) YES, then I'll write you off as a self-interested bigot.
If your answers are (1) NO and (2) YES, then please explain your position more clearly, for there is a fundamental logical problem.
And your fable? I've read it before, and it makes no more sense in a societal context now as it ever has. And linking it to excuses for tyranny is laughable... you are substituting potential tyranny for extant tyranny.
You sure you parsed the statement correctly?
They are saying that the deepest part of the trench is 1.2 miles farther from sea level than the tip of Mt Everest. Your math confirms this.
Not sure what the problem is, other than the fact that they used m and km in the same sentence (which is the nice thing about metric units... you can easily interpret between m and km, unlike feet and miles).
You're missing the basic point.
Currently lots of people are discriminated against. If this is the land of opportunity, then we need to counterbalance that discrimination to provide equal opportunity.
It's equally depressing to see that there are plenty of bigots like yourself who refuse to see inequal opportunity as a problem.
I know we'll never agree on the subject, but it saddens me that a supposedly just society can produce people who choose to ignore the impact of systemic discrimination.
No, you don't have to wonder that. The current economic difficulties were easily predicted by many.
The problem was that the people with any kind of ability to stop the conditions that led to the current situation were those who profited most from those conditions. Not a good recipe for prevention.
Now, now... he looked at the pictures, which is an accomplishment. Let's not get greedy by asking that people actually RTFA.
Yes, it is right. Because the effects of that prior discrimination are not gone... they still exist. Glass ceilings, race-based (or gender-based) hiring and promotions... it's still there.
If we really want to be a land of equal opportunity, we've got to counter the residual discrimination that still exists.
I know, it's not fair to some individuals. But that's the price of living in a land of opportunity -- and not allowing equal opportunity pretty much shatters any possibility of the American ideal.
Thanks. I didn't know emo kids held their heads low. I don't understand a lot of the newfangled slang in my dotage.
The problem is that "niche" and "morphology" are two perfectly good words in current use, and his meshing of the two doesn't work because the roots describe different systems.
This is very similar to when non-techies refer to the CPU as the "hard drive". People without knowledge in a field, using real words from that field incorrectly, confuse the issue.
In this example, "niche" is the role an organism fills in an ecology; this is a function of the ecology. Morphology is the form or structure of an organism. This is a function of the organism. There is no "morphoniche" -- that assumes that there must be a place for a morphology in a given ecosystem; this is not a true assumption. Ecosystems are defined by functionality, not by morphology of the organisms (and yes, while morphology definitely impacts the niche an organism is capable of fulfilling, they are still terms that can't really be combined without distorting them ridiculously).
Finally, there is a different word he should have used, which is morphospace. This is the actual term used by people who know what they are talking about, and it refers to the possible forms and structures of an organism. He should have stated that we do not have an extant examples of organisms which have similar morphospaces as the giant sauropods.
FWIW, the Valley is a small place. One of Arrington's first interviews was Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora.
There doesn't need to be any fiduciary interest on Arrington's part, familiarity with Pandora might be all it takes to make him favor Pandora.
And also, not sure where you're getting the concept of a big rivalry between Pandora and Last.fm. I've observed no such thing... just that people use what they are comfortable with. Maybe there're fanboys sprouting up, but I think you're overanalyzing.
IMO, Arrington's just a twit. Twits exist independently of financial arrangements.
Yes, I know it's dangerous, which is why I only make that comparison in a hardened secret laboratory. Last time I tried it, the explosion nearly blew through the 2nd-level blast enclosure.
Seriously, though, modern birds may be the closes living relatives to dinosaurs. And while I'd very strongly suspect that the long neck of geese evolved independently of the long necks of sauropods, it may be relevant.
Yes, this is an ongoing issue, and one of the primary reasons the position du jour has been lowered-head. But there is a ton we don't know about dino biology, and it is quite possible there are alternate means of pumping blood up the column (such as smooth-muscled vasculature that could help pump, especially in concert with valves like those in giraffes and other animals used to cut off blood flow temporarily. Or perhaps blood demands are low, and periodic lowering of the head could supply enough oxygen et al for survival. It's all conjecture... but it still makes me wonder if the net energy demands of maintaining a horizontal position would be greater than the demands of pumping blood and keeping the vertebrae vertical.
Hey, I never made a value judgment on the quality of the article. :) I just meant that typically the article being available for perusal guides the discussion somewhat... without TFA, the discussion tends to be more freeform and devolve into inanity quicker. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I meant on Slashdot.
But America works just as well.
Good point.
But I'd like to add that the pace of societal change has, IMO, increased rapidly since the advent of mass media and the internet.
The Cosby show probably did more to help reduce racism against blacks in the US than any other single thing in the last 2-3 decades. Numerous shows depicting women in positions of power have done the same for women.
But, in the end, I think we're very limited in how fast change can happen... it's a generational process. I find it amazing that some of the people in the highest positions of political power now, basically formulated their prejudices before the end of segregation in the US. I wonder what the US will look like re: racism when today's kids are 70 years old? How much would the R&B/Hip-hop movement to rural areas & the burbs affect their ideas of race?
'Niche' is a generally-used term, which means something quite different -- it refers to a "place" in an ecology, as I'm sure you are aware.
Morphospace refers to a possible forms of an organism. Morphospace is a function of the organism, not of the ecology.
Since the organism in question does not currently exist in living form, it is a tautology that therefore the morphospace is unfilled.
So now, in addition to my assumption that you've made up words to sound like you know what you're talking about, you seem to be confused as to what the actual words mean.
I understood what you were trying to say. That was not the issue I had. The issue is that you don't really know what you're talking about, and tried to use big words to compensate.
As for usage of the word theory... no, I meant it as defined. I did not mean hypothesis, although a hypothesis would also fit that criteria.
Oh please.
You googled "morphoniche" and came up with a single result?
And if you actually follow the link, the word doesn't even appear in the pdf document?
You, sir, are either lacking in sincerity or intelligence.
There are more moderately-high paying jobs not requiring a BA/BS degree that men traditionally hold, rather than women. Building trades, for instance.
And since women tend to work less than men (as a whole, due to traditional family roles), some of them have the luxury of more time for education.
FWIW, since this is a relatively recent development, I think it's fine... it'll help undo centuries/millenia of male domination in Western culture.
Well, I've read about this theory before, and while it is certainly possible, I think it's unlikely...
No other vertebrates are observed to have multiple hearts. IIRC, the giraffe does have a mechanism to deal with the BP in the head (I think they can block off blood flow or something), and maybe a valve system would provide what's necessary...
What if the major artery in the neck was capable of waves of constriction to force blood upwards, like milking a cow in reverse?
As you say, lots of possibilities since we don't have the soft tissue.
Or they have a different set of ethics than you.
Really. The my-ethics-are-the-only-valid-ethics theme is getting old.
Let's look at how a professional can ethically act for both sides in an ethical issue. Perhaps, since the issue is complicated and not easily decided, the professional's ethics demand that he use his personal skills to the best of his ability, and by advocating on both sides, he is better able to bring about an equitable solution.
Here's my biggest issue, though -- ethics are complicated, situations and problems are complicated. Reducing them to a simple single ethical issue is often wildly inaccurate. At the core of the issue, you weigh personal freedom as more important than the ability of a person to make a living from their creations, which have value to society. I do not; however, I do value personal freedoms to a large extent. So very easily, I could see myself on either "side" of this issue (to reduce it to sides, which is inaccurate). And there is no ethical conflict there, as balance is required.
Aren't all theories?
Please, stop making up words. We don't seen any morphoniche filled, because there is simply no such thing.
Thanks for the link, BTW, but the rest of your post is garbage.
I think you misread. The inefficient way of bearing the weight is to hold the head low away from the body. The efficient way is high up, so that the skeletal structure can bear a lot of the weight.
That was the status quo that the authors of this piece are disputing. Down low is default, up high as needed.
Re: their blood and blood pressure... liquid is liquid. Gravity is gravity. Pressure required to overcome gravity is just that. If you're suggesting that their tissues were so significantly different that they could withstand ridiculously high pressures, then fine... but I doubt it would be a property of the blood so much as a property of their vasculature and heart.
Oh yeah? What if they are equally capable of either, and how they hold their heads is learned behavior? What has your cloning done for us then?!