Most of the ones I see contain tetracycline, which is the problem. I don't care if people put alcohol washes or gels everywhere. I hate it if they put antibacterial soaps everywhere.
Uh, just to be specific, you're talking about the chirality of neutrinos. The way you phrase it, it sounds like an electron is a type of neutrino. It isn't. There are electron neutrinos, but they have no charge. They are merely part of the same family of leptons as the electron, hence the name. You probably knew that, but I had to do a re-read to figure out that that's not necessarily what you meant.
the essential difference between religion and science is that religion puts articles of faith before observed data. Which is exactly what the post he was responding to was doing.
For God's sake (har), no. That's not what the initial post was doing.
Not all data is equal. I can set up an experiment where the data collected conclusively shows that gravity repeals two objects rather than attracts. It will be rightfully so met with incredulity, with most people choosing to ignore it outright. Why? Because I'm a nobody in the field of gravitational research, and it is far more likely that I screwed up my experiment than that I found a new interaction mode for gravity. In this case, a bad grounding caused my metal balls to be electrically charged with the same polarity. My data might be right, but the conclusion is still wrong.
Even superstars in applied Physics can screw up their experiments. What we're currently seeing is Science in action: one group publishes an experiment, and people are disagreeing with it, dissecting it, creating their own versions of the experiment, with everything being very noisy. People are drawing on past experiments with well verified data to figure out what the current experiment means, how it can be refined, changed and prodded at to confirm or refute the initial conclusion. When the dust has settled, a consensus will emerge that either yes, the experiment's data was not influenced by systemic factors outside of the proposed theory, and that yes, the new theory does a better job explaining the entire set of accumulated data and our general understanding of the universe, or it doesn't.
New experiments should never, ever be taken either at face value, or outside the context of the current knowledge of Physics. One of the fundamental axioms of Physics is that at the core, the laws of Physics don't change on us. Constants are constant. F=MA doesn't undergo decay. This means that if a new experiment contradicts the results of an existing, well-established experiment, it is absolutely right to first look for problems in the methodology and setup of the new experiment. Otherwise, you'd try to rediscover all rules of the new universe with each experiment.
TLDR: Not all data is created equal, and not all theories are created equal. Ergo, not all data gets the same attention, nor should it.
Wait wait wait - you're asking why everyone has a problem with corporate-sponsored political ads, then go through the laundry list of issues of information sources that can't possibly be more biased, but are at least nominally supposed to be less biased?
Here's the second part: when they're putting out ads that are 100% match of a candidates position, it doesn't matter whether that they're not directly giving to a candidates campaign. They might as well, because the result is 100% the same.
Good idea. I happen to have lived there, have friends and family there and still read the news regularly about it.
It exports a bit more than the US and imports buckets of goods - you can't say that a German has less access to goods than someone in America.
Until you actually go abroad, you have no idea how rich the US is, and how flooded it is with goods. Walking through Target or any strip mall is a surreal exercise after going shopping in any European country. The amount of money slushing around in the US is astounding, and is better spent (i.e., can buy cheaper goods of the same quality) on products being imported. That's where the trade imbalance is coming from.
Not to mention that that trade surplus is not what's keeping them afloat - it's a banking system and a mentality that frowns on risk and high debt. yes, they have their issues, but the scale is entirely different from that found in any other European country.
Uh, you're not following the Euro crisis very closely, are you? Everyone is looking at austerity measures, and the Germans are particularly pissed because they would like to invest the money they're handing to Greece into their own economy. The entire reason there's a massive crisis is that no one knows if there's enough money in the entire Euro zone to bail out Greece, nevermind all the other countries that are having issues.
Yes, because it takes special skills to realize that connecting a GPS enabled device to the Internet instead of a proprietary network to retrieve related information. I mean, you didn't patent it, so obviously it was beyond your grasp.
What people are complaining about is that just putting something "on the internet" is about as trivial as it gets, and merely serves to create an artificial monopoly.
Using the last few years, the US is literally giving other countries around five hundred billion dollars each year more than it is taking from them.
And in return, the US is getting goods worth around $500 billion more than other countries. That's how trade works. If you want to export more than you take in, you end up with less goods in your market than elsewhere.
There's always two things I find amusing in these discussions: * the idea that Americans are more deserving of running the world than others, and that if they can't run it, they'll take the entire construct down * the idea that the US trading with Mexico and Canada is somehow different than Texas trading with California, or Sacramento trading with Santa Clara.
Furthermore, with the amount of money those foreign governments hold, it's the US that owns them, not the other way around. The same way that if I owe a bank 100 grand, the bank owns me, but if I owe the bank 50 billion, I own the bank.
What you are missing is that it doesn't matter all that much that you're right and you didn't actually steal. With enough money and competent lawyers, you can tie someone up in court for so long that they just fold. At that point, theft is indeed defined by who has more lawyers. It is bullshit, it is no laughing matter, and there is nothing you can do about it, short of reforming the current legal system. Furthermore, quite a few people do equate competition with stealing.
I really wish that PETA would change its top leadership. For some reason, they think that any publicity is good publicity. It isn't when the name of your organization has "Ethics" in it. I expect an organization that talks about the ethics of animal treatment to also have high ethical standards when it comes to debating the ethics of animal treatment. If they want to talk about Chinese fur farms, fine, then please talk about Chinese fur farms. Don't bring a videogame into the discussion where the main character dons a fucking costume of the animal in question.
It's stunts like these that turn me off of organizations in which I should theoretically have a great interest. Greenpeace, the same goes for you. I wish I would donate to more than three non-profits, but publicity stunts like these make it really hard to do so.
Good point, but one of two things happen: either the monopolist tries to abuse their monopoly by raising prices, or they keep them level. In the first case, a free market with perfect competition will immediately have competitors jump in and undercut the monopolist, bringing the system back to the status quo. In the second case - who cares? The price and service are as optimal as they can be, and there is no need for competitors.
For your last point, you're confusing free markets with monopolies. The two are distinct. While they are related, they are not identical.
No, it's the understanding that we all have limited time available to us, most of it being spent either sleeping or working in an area other than politics. It's not a question of caring, it's a question of resources. And most people in a democracy don't have the resources to lobby someone long enough to change their mind. Corporations, on the other hand, do.
That's because people don't understand why the classic free market is good: it isn't good just because, it is good because when combined with the theoretical characteristics of perfect competition, it will lead to the lowest prices and the best service. Most people, especially Americans, have completely lost track of this requirement, and instead have elevated the free market to a religion. It is now the Free Market, and anyone who questions the Free Market is a heretic, to be burned at a stake.
Democracy needs an educated voting population. The US is doomed.
Bullshit. As others said, that's not how it works. I don't think you are necessarily a shill, but you certainly have no clue about the labor laws in CA. Getting fired for cause is hard and requires solid documentation, but it is possible, and the employer won't have to pay out unemployment. If they are, I suggest getting a new HR person and boning up on labor law.
American slavery would NOT have existed without the government decreeing that you can have a property right over people.
Considering that slavery existed long before central governments decreed it as the natural order of things, I think you might be overstating your case just a bit there. Or do you really think that without government, there would be no slaves? I'd then like to introduce you to the business side of my firestick while I ask you to do a bit of work for me.
This a the big ticket, but you only hit the smallest piece of it. Some other examples: ISPs could change advertisements on pages. Imagine a mom and pop advertises their local toy shop, but WalMart pays an ISP to remove those ads and replace them with ads for WalMart. Or an ISP alters pages that are critical critical about the ISP. Or perhaps they redirect websites that are critical of their political agenda to sites that are in favor of their view. Or even if they don't go this far, they could slow down sites that they don't like.
Based on your statements, I think that you believe Network Neutrality places rules on how fast internet is, and how much ISPs can charge for it. I've heard that version of it a lot on various anti-network-neutrality sites. I can assure that that it does not mean that, except to those lobbyists who are trying to redefine the term to make it sound bad. The politicians have made it look like a debate between two approaches, when it isn't a debate, it is simply hijacking a common sense rule.
This. This. This. I have no idea why people think that ISPs without the constraint of Net Neutrality will simply stick to a little bit of bandwidth shaping and differential bandwidth pricing.
Good point. To some extent, I see it as a combination of the two: the current telecoms are monopolies both through the nature of their market and through government fiat. My main beef is that people who don't have a clue about how telecoms operate think that all it would take is to remove the government from the market, and everything will be rainbows and unicorn farts. Instead, it will be even worse, because the government would then have officially said that it has no business regulating telecoms.
But that's what i wonder : why is there no competition ? You would think that, if a company screws it's customers for long enough, someone would see a the market opportunity to do things differently. Why is this not the case ?
Clearly no one explained natural monopolies to you. Here's how it goes: in certain markets, barriers to entry are so high that one of two things happen. One, people just don't bother entering it. Two, if they do enter it, the start-up costs are so high that they pretty much have to take out loans to enter it, which adds significantly to the initial running cost. During that time, the incumbent simply drops prices to their operating cost - or lower, depending on their cash reserves - waits until the competitor runs out of cash due to their inability to attract enough new customers, and then gobbles up the competitor for pennies on the dollar.
Which is exactly what is happening in the telcom industry. Even Google can't do a nationwide roll-out without bankrupting itself. ATT and Comcast, on the other hand, are operating on pure profit by now. So there's no incentive for anyone to enter the market, because the chances of even surviving long enough to make a profit are slim to none. The only reason Google is even marginally in it is because they understand the existential threat that the telecoms pose to it. Google only exists for as long as the telecoms, for whatever reason, cannot discriminate between their service and Google's service. As soon as they can, it's game over for Google.
Now it comes down to surrendering your Internet connection to either a large corporation ( no net neutrality ) , or to the government ( net neutrality ).
You really ought to not take your talking points from organizations that are actively lying to you. Net Neutrality explicitly means that no one, not even the government, has control over what services you can and cannot access through your Internet connection. The government regulating ISPs is not the same as the government telling you what you can do with your connection. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.
Have you ever dealt with a carrier who uses ATT lines? It sucks. Any line problem - and there are many - will get fixed when ATT thinks it will help THEM. Which means basically never. Cost is entirely dependent on what ATT thinks it should charge resellers - in other words, it is guaranteed to be more expensive than the ATT offering, even if the service is exactly the same.
The only thing you can hope for is that the reseller is actually good, and you get something extra for paying substantially more for the same bandwidth. I use Speakeasy, and at least I get outstanding service.
But you're kidding yourself if you think that Speakeasy is actually in competition with ATT. Speakeasy exists at the mercy of ATT, and will be killed off in many ways if it ever becomes a threat to ATT's residential service. Which it kinda has, because you actually can't get residential-class DSL from Speakeasy anymore: I'm only around because they haven't canceled my contract yet. But my terms don't exist anymore, and the terms that are available are fundamentally different.
So from a technical offering, I don't have a choice - it's ATT only. From a service choice, I could get Sonic, but they're significantly more expensive. And that's it. Not even Comcast is offering anything in my area. Beats me why, but they don't.
So go suck on your choice, because it doesn't exist for a lot of people. And the choices that do exist are far too small to create anything resembling market pressures.
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Dismissal is just a lot of skepticism. Depending on what is being said, dismissal can be quite appropriate.
Check their ingredients. Most often, it is tetracycline.
Most of the ones I see contain tetracycline, which is the problem. I don't care if people put alcohol washes or gels everywhere. I hate it if they put antibacterial soaps everywhere.
Uh, just to be specific, you're talking about the chirality of neutrinos. The way you phrase it, it sounds like an electron is a type of neutrino. It isn't. There are electron neutrinos, but they have no charge. They are merely part of the same family of leptons as the electron, hence the name. You probably knew that, but I had to do a re-read to figure out that that's not necessarily what you meant.
the essential difference between religion and science is that religion puts articles of faith before observed data. Which is exactly what the post he was responding to was doing.
For God's sake (har), no. That's not what the initial post was doing.
Not all data is equal. I can set up an experiment where the data collected conclusively shows that gravity repeals two objects rather than attracts. It will be rightfully so met with incredulity, with most people choosing to ignore it outright. Why? Because I'm a nobody in the field of gravitational research, and it is far more likely that I screwed up my experiment than that I found a new interaction mode for gravity. In this case, a bad grounding caused my metal balls to be electrically charged with the same polarity. My data might be right, but the conclusion is still wrong.
Even superstars in applied Physics can screw up their experiments. What we're currently seeing is Science in action: one group publishes an experiment, and people are disagreeing with it, dissecting it, creating their own versions of the experiment, with everything being very noisy. People are drawing on past experiments with well verified data to figure out what the current experiment means, how it can be refined, changed and prodded at to confirm or refute the initial conclusion. When the dust has settled, a consensus will emerge that either yes, the experiment's data was not influenced by systemic factors outside of the proposed theory, and that yes, the new theory does a better job explaining the entire set of accumulated data and our general understanding of the universe, or it doesn't.
New experiments should never, ever be taken either at face value, or outside the context of the current knowledge of Physics. One of the fundamental axioms of Physics is that at the core, the laws of Physics don't change on us. Constants are constant. F=MA doesn't undergo decay. This means that if a new experiment contradicts the results of an existing, well-established experiment, it is absolutely right to first look for problems in the methodology and setup of the new experiment. Otherwise, you'd try to rediscover all rules of the new universe with each experiment.
TLDR:
Not all data is created equal, and not all theories are created equal. Ergo, not all data gets the same attention, nor should it.
Wait wait wait - you're asking why everyone has a problem with corporate-sponsored political ads, then go through the laundry list of issues of information sources that can't possibly be more biased, but are at least nominally supposed to be less biased?
Here's the second part: when they're putting out ads that are 100% match of a candidates position, it doesn't matter whether that they're not directly giving to a candidates campaign. They might as well, because the result is 100% the same.
Look at Germany for example.
Good idea. I happen to have lived there, have friends and family there and still read the news regularly about it.
It exports a bit more than the US and imports buckets of goods - you can't say that a German has less access to goods than someone in America.
Until you actually go abroad, you have no idea how rich the US is, and how flooded it is with goods. Walking through Target or any strip mall is a surreal exercise after going shopping in any European country. The amount of money slushing around in the US is astounding, and is better spent (i.e., can buy cheaper goods of the same quality) on products being imported. That's where the trade imbalance is coming from.
Not to mention that that trade surplus is not what's keeping them afloat - it's a banking system and a mentality that frowns on risk and high debt. yes, they have their issues, but the scale is entirely different from that found in any other European country.
Uh, you're not following the Euro crisis very closely, are you? Everyone is looking at austerity measures, and the Germans are particularly pissed because they would like to invest the money they're handing to Greece into their own economy. The entire reason there's a massive crisis is that no one knows if there's enough money in the entire Euro zone to bail out Greece, nevermind all the other countries that are having issues.
Yes, because it takes special skills to realize that connecting a GPS enabled device to the Internet instead of a proprietary network to retrieve related information. I mean, you didn't patent it, so obviously it was beyond your grasp.
What people are complaining about is that just putting something "on the internet" is about as trivial as it gets, and merely serves to create an artificial monopoly.
Using the last few years, the US is literally giving other countries around five hundred billion dollars each year more than it is taking from them.
And in return, the US is getting goods worth around $500 billion more than other countries. That's how trade works. If you want to export more than you take in, you end up with less goods in your market than elsewhere.
There's always two things I find amusing in these discussions:
* the idea that Americans are more deserving of running the world than others, and that if they can't run it, they'll take the entire construct down
* the idea that the US trading with Mexico and Canada is somehow different than Texas trading with California, or Sacramento trading with Santa Clara.
Furthermore, with the amount of money those foreign governments hold, it's the US that owns them, not the other way around. The same way that if I owe a bank 100 grand, the bank owns me, but if I owe the bank 50 billion, I own the bank.
What you are missing is that it doesn't matter all that much that you're right and you didn't actually steal. With enough money and competent lawyers, you can tie someone up in court for so long that they just fold. At that point, theft is indeed defined by who has more lawyers. It is bullshit, it is no laughing matter, and there is nothing you can do about it, short of reforming the current legal system. Furthermore, quite a few people do equate competition with stealing.
What, you want him to fly coach? And where the fuck were you when every other president went on vacation via Air Force One?
I really wish that PETA would change its top leadership. For some reason, they think that any publicity is good publicity. It isn't when the name of your organization has "Ethics" in it. I expect an organization that talks about the ethics of animal treatment to also have high ethical standards when it comes to debating the ethics of animal treatment. If they want to talk about Chinese fur farms, fine, then please talk about Chinese fur farms. Don't bring a videogame into the discussion where the main character dons a fucking costume of the animal in question.
It's stunts like these that turn me off of organizations in which I should theoretically have a great interest. Greenpeace, the same goes for you. I wish I would donate to more than three non-profits, but publicity stunts like these make it really hard to do so.
CH: Confederation Helvetique. F: Franc. No idea why the abbreviation was based on French, instead of German, Italian or old Swiss.
How so? It matches broadly with what I know from publicly available resources.
Good point, but one of two things happen: either the monopolist tries to abuse their monopoly by raising prices, or they keep them level. In the first case, a free market with perfect competition will immediately have competitors jump in and undercut the monopolist, bringing the system back to the status quo. In the second case - who cares? The price and service are as optimal as they can be, and there is no need for competitors.
For your last point, you're confusing free markets with monopolies. The two are distinct. While they are related, they are not identical.
No, it's the understanding that we all have limited time available to us, most of it being spent either sleeping or working in an area other than politics. It's not a question of caring, it's a question of resources. And most people in a democracy don't have the resources to lobby someone long enough to change their mind. Corporations, on the other hand, do.
That's because people don't understand why the classic free market is good: it isn't good just because, it is good because when combined with the theoretical characteristics of perfect competition, it will lead to the lowest prices and the best service. Most people, especially Americans, have completely lost track of this requirement, and instead have elevated the free market to a religion. It is now the Free Market, and anyone who questions the Free Market is a heretic, to be burned at a stake.
Democracy needs an educated voting population. The US is doomed.
Bullshit. As others said, that's not how it works. I don't think you are necessarily a shill, but you certainly have no clue about the labor laws in CA. Getting fired for cause is hard and requires solid documentation, but it is possible, and the employer won't have to pay out unemployment. If they are, I suggest getting a new HR person and boning up on labor law.
American slavery would NOT have existed without the government decreeing that you can have a property right over people.
Considering that slavery existed long before central governments decreed it as the natural order of things, I think you might be overstating your case just a bit there. Or do you really think that without government, there would be no slaves? I'd then like to introduce you to the business side of my firestick while I ask you to do a bit of work for me.
This a the big ticket, but you only hit the smallest piece of it. Some other examples: ISPs could change advertisements on pages. Imagine a mom and pop advertises their local toy shop, but WalMart pays an ISP to remove those ads and replace them with ads for WalMart. Or an ISP alters pages that are critical critical about the ISP. Or perhaps they redirect websites that are critical of their political agenda to sites that are in favor of their view. Or even if they don't go this far, they could slow down sites that they don't like.
Based on your statements, I think that you believe Network Neutrality places rules on how fast internet is, and how much ISPs can charge for it. I've heard that version of it a lot on various anti-network-neutrality sites. I can assure that that it does not mean that, except to those lobbyists who are trying to redefine the term to make it sound bad. The politicians have made it look like a debate between two approaches, when it isn't a debate, it is simply hijacking a common sense rule.
This. This. This. I have no idea why people think that ISPs without the constraint of Net Neutrality will simply stick to a little bit of bandwidth shaping and differential bandwidth pricing.
Good point. To some extent, I see it as a combination of the two: the current telecoms are monopolies both through the nature of their market and through government fiat. My main beef is that people who don't have a clue about how telecoms operate think that all it would take is to remove the government from the market, and everything will be rainbows and unicorn farts. Instead, it will be even worse, because the government would then have officially said that it has no business regulating telecoms.
But that's what i wonder : why is there no competition ? You would think that, if a company screws it's customers for long enough, someone would see a the market opportunity to do things differently. Why is this not the case ?
Clearly no one explained natural monopolies to you. Here's how it goes: in certain markets, barriers to entry are so high that one of two things happen. One, people just don't bother entering it. Two, if they do enter it, the start-up costs are so high that they pretty much have to take out loans to enter it, which adds significantly to the initial running cost. During that time, the incumbent simply drops prices to their operating cost - or lower, depending on their cash reserves - waits until the competitor runs out of cash due to their inability to attract enough new customers, and then gobbles up the competitor for pennies on the dollar.
Which is exactly what is happening in the telcom industry. Even Google can't do a nationwide roll-out without bankrupting itself. ATT and Comcast, on the other hand, are operating on pure profit by now. So there's no incentive for anyone to enter the market, because the chances of even surviving long enough to make a profit are slim to none. The only reason Google is even marginally in it is because they understand the existential threat that the telecoms pose to it. Google only exists for as long as the telecoms, for whatever reason, cannot discriminate between their service and Google's service. As soon as they can, it's game over for Google.
Now it comes down to surrendering your Internet connection to either a large corporation ( no net neutrality ) , or to the government ( net neutrality ).
You really ought to not take your talking points from organizations that are actively lying to you. Net Neutrality explicitly means that no one, not even the government, has control over what services you can and cannot access through your Internet connection. The government regulating ISPs is not the same as the government telling you what you can do with your connection. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.
Have you ever dealt with a carrier who uses ATT lines? It sucks. Any line problem - and there are many - will get fixed when ATT thinks it will help THEM. Which means basically never. Cost is entirely dependent on what ATT thinks it should charge resellers - in other words, it is guaranteed to be more expensive than the ATT offering, even if the service is exactly the same.
The only thing you can hope for is that the reseller is actually good, and you get something extra for paying substantially more for the same bandwidth. I use Speakeasy, and at least I get outstanding service.
But you're kidding yourself if you think that Speakeasy is actually in competition with ATT. Speakeasy exists at the mercy of ATT, and will be killed off in many ways if it ever becomes a threat to ATT's residential service. Which it kinda has, because you actually can't get residential-class DSL from Speakeasy anymore: I'm only around because they haven't canceled my contract yet. But my terms don't exist anymore, and the terms that are available are fundamentally different.
So from a technical offering, I don't have a choice - it's ATT only. From a service choice, I could get Sonic, but they're significantly more expensive. And that's it. Not even Comcast is offering anything in my area. Beats me why, but they don't.
So go suck on your choice, because it doesn't exist for a lot of people. And the choices that do exist are far too small to create anything resembling market pressures.
Interesting concept - I hadn't thought of it. I'll keep that in mind.