The problem is that there is nothing your own body camera would help you with in the case under discussion, because the cop would actually be entirely within their rights (some might even suggest it was their duty) to enforce those other charges if they can.
There are many minor things a cop can cite you for that they generally overlook because its hard to prove and not a good use of their time to try. They may be nitpicky things, but they wouldn't be trumped up charges. Your citizen body camera wouldn't help you in the slightest because it wouldn't be misconduct, they'd simply be enforcing more of the law.
That's the danger. When it becomes super easy to enforce certain laws that have been mostly ignored due to the difficulty of prosecution, those laws will be enforced to the benefit of the public coffers due to extra fine revenue. If body cameras not only make that easier, but also make it harder for cops to exercise their discretion to *not* charge you, that could be an uncomfortable scenario because many cops actually do give you a break, but if there's proof they ignored something, they may no longer be able to be nice about it.
The abundance of mass in the center of a galaxy is pretty much the reason that there is a black hole in the center to begin with. It would be odd for all of that mass to have either been hoovered in or stripped away normally. Generally it would be much like a planetary system, most mass makes up the central object, but there's always leftover mass that becomes planets or asteroids, or in the case of this much matter, becomes stars in stable orbit around a central black hole.
Once in established orbits, there wouldn't be a way for that extra orbiting matter to be removed without some external influence on the system. This usually happens in planetary systems when another star transits (relatively) close to the planetary system and perturbs the orbits of the orbiting matter.
While that same sort of thing could happen for a central black hole, note that the amount of gravitational attraction that a central black hole would have is significantly higher than any one star would have (since central black holes are always many, many times the mass of any one star), so you'd need something bigger, like a passing or colliding galaxy or dense star cluster to really do much to the mass orbiting the galactic core.
You're right about competition, but in combination with aggressive attacks on blood suckers, you could aid the non-bloodsuckers in filling in the niche. Much the same way that they try and kill bad gut flora and replace it with good (or harmless) gut flora to fill the niche where the bad gut flora would otherwise crowd out the good flora due to being established.
You don't want to end mosquitoes or something like them, because they're a big prey species up the food chain, but their particular blood sucking traits are very bad news for the spread of disease. If we could support the good breeds in crowding out the pest breeds, it would help the good breeds effectively compete, despite their natural disadvantage.
Just about everyone is guilty of some crime, including some very odd felonies. You're mostly not in jail because even the cops and the balance of the legal system realize what sort of bullshit most of them are and don't enforce them.
Nevertheless, with sufficient inducement, those laws can be used on you by those who are literally minded or corrupt enough. And because they are legitimate laws, your only recourse is either unconstitutionality or pure public backlash. The second being the reason that free speech and the right to protest and even to look threatening is a necessary check on governments who are quite capable of passing masses of laws that fail to reflect fairness or reality.
Agreed. CP/M was a popular system for its time. There should be little difficulty in recovering the data from CP/M floppies, particularly if there is sufficient monetary inducement or even hobbyist interest.
Human intelligence as determined by IQ is designed to generate a normal distribution. If you were talking about IQ tests, then your scenario will only hold if you're selecting a subset of a greater set, where the distribution of intelligence was calculated on the superset. If that is the case, you could take a random subset of values and have the odd scores you suggest. However, if IQ was calculated on the subset again, then the normal distribution would apply because new scores would be calculated to ensure a normal distribution.
I will agree that loosely, there is no need to accept the physical resurrection to be a Christian, although you would have to have at least a symbolic acceptance of it. The resurrection is a pretty central part of the canon, and the alternatives to that were sidelined very early on.
However, Christ himself was pretty specific about his submission to the will of the Jewish Creator. Whether or not he was God himself, he submitted to his "Father", and that particular entity accepts no other gods but himself.
Based on the UU people I know and what I understand, you can be a Unitarian Universalist and have a reasonable argument for qualifying as a Christian.
That said, there are UU folk who subscribe to certain notions of Christ's teachings, but would probably not meet the primary criteria for even being loosely Christian due to a number of conflicting beliefs in regard to paganism or humanism.
And Christ wasn't an alien, he was quite specifically born a Jew and Jews are born Jews because of who their mothers are. Which means that he was no more than 50% alien, and definitely not an illegal one.:)
As for sex, he may have simply been an asexual or even just too busy to get busy. It's also possible that he was married and even had plenty of sex, and that was left out, but I find that to be mere anachronistic speculation on the part of people living in an age were sex has never been more free, or more insisted upon as part of the social experience. Sex and marriage used to be serious business, and still is in many places.
If you pull together the known writings, even the writings outside the orthodox (small 'o') canon, you can derive a few lowest common denominator items.
For instance, belief in, and submission to the monotheistic Creator is one.
If you are an atheist or agnostic, you can count yourself out. Even if you subscribe to certain specific teachings of Christ. The teachings of non-violence come to mind.
There are a few others, which many people appear to easily subscribe to, but they fail at when they are tested.
For instance, ordering a Crusade is not a Christian act, even if the pope does it. If Christ himself didn't storm Jerusalem when he had the chance for a popular rising, or even allow his person to be defended from unjust arrest, how can *anyone* suggest that it is Christian to attack someone to take Jerusalem?
Being an actual Christian, as opposed to labeling yourself one, is pretty damned hard to qualify for. Being a member of say, Anonymous, is specifically open to everyone, no matter what you believe and no one can contradict you by definition.
It's not anecdotal. Gas engines can last quite awhile, particularly under good maintenance. I know many people who have bought the more reliable Japanese cars who drive them into the ground and all of those people have gasoline engines in their vehicles.
While it is probably true that given identical quality of maintenance that diesels will last longer, in reality it's less about the type of engine, and more about how it is used and maintained.
I don't really see how you made your point with your example. You see, you've already done the math. You're ready to pay more in taxes. You've determined that whatever Bernie wants from you, you're going to be a-ok with it. If that wasn't a pocketbook calculation, I don't know what would be.
If you're prepared to pay 150% more, then you've always had the power to simply give your money to the Federal government. They do take donations.
Honestly, you're not asking, "how can I help?", you're really saying, "I want Bernie's policies and I've made sure they don't hurt me too much."
You're not discussing charity here. This is pure politics. Your vote for Sanders is a vote for policies, which might well be enforced against people who didn't or couldn't make the same calculation as you have. You aren't sacrificing anything at all except whatever excuse kept you from allocating that money previously and giving it away.
Since this is Christmas, let me suggest something. Vote for Sanders all you want, but don't wait for him to take your money from you. Set it aside and give it to people who need it *now*. If more people with your mindset did that, perhaps we wouldn't even need Bernie Sanders.
There are predictions out there that will need to be made. If string theory predicts them, then it is (up to that point) accurate. If it doesn't do a better job than some other theory or model, then it's still accurate (to that point) but then a decision needs to be made about what is the better model or theory to move forward with.
In the end, most competing theories are either going to be wrong or exposed as a more complicated way of saying the same thing. In practical terms, if we really believe that we're wasting time and effort on String Theory, then perhaps we decide the most simple means of moving forward practically, and then maintain String Theory (or others) in reserve if the path we decide on reaches a dead end later.
The real problem here is not the proper way to go forward, it is the egos and more to the point, the careers of the people who have been working on String Theory. Mothballing or maintaining string theory in maintenance mode until we hit a testable point, is a practical solution in the big picture, but it does have real implications for the lives of certain researchers and mathematicians. This is where the scientific method and the profession of scientific researcher is going to have inevitable friction.
I don't disagree with the idea that we should be more educated and vote.
However, we have a real problem and that problem is that there are going to be two people on the ballot come November 2016. Hillary Clinton and some Republican who may well be Donald Trump. Or Ted Cruz (which the very thought of before Trump came around seemed remote).
Those will be our choices. We can pick corrupt or insane. Sure, there are other people out there running, but by our very argument that people need to become educated, there's not really enough of a record on those people for anyone to become educated *about*.
One of the problems with our primary system is we start with a reasonable stable of known politicians of varying positions, and then the primary weeds them out. This results in the two major candidates and then a whole bunch of (very) dark horses, college professors, and crackpots (sometimes all of them together). Oh and the occasional rich third party candidate. There is no in-between because the candidates that exist in both major parties who might offer even a modicum of a choice between experienced candidates who have a record of service are taken out before the election.
The other problem with democracy is that it rewards consensus (which is good), but often substitutes that for correctness. Most people don't know anything beyond what they work with everyday, and yet they need to elect representatives to somehow manage the largest bureaucracy that the world has ever known, covering topics from the (world's most powerful) military, environment, (the world's largest) economy, civil rights, all the way to health care and moral issues.
At this point, I think it is a losing battle to even suggest that we can avoid an oligarchy of this sort. The Federal government is a monster that can't be controlled by the people any more unless the "people" are the mass of party faithful whose strings are pulled by a few candidates.
I'm not suggesting that we necessarily give in and declare defeat, but well-functioning democracy does not scale well because it will always collapse into party structures when it gets too big. Effort needs to be made to ensure that democracy functions really well where it matters, but that means that there needs to be an understanding that we either accept that it is restricted, or make a serious change to the government so that it does not as easily defeat the voices of moderation.
I sometimes wonder if there is value in regulating the press. It's not clear to me if that is worse than letting it do what it is doing now.
Ultimately, school shootings or other random mass killings (as opposed to organized crime killings) are a relatively rare, albeit extremely emotionally charged scenario. If we are looking at the situation in a very cold-blooded way, these are still very rare occurrences that, based on impact to society, should not be driving a national debate.
If you have 900 schools in a system, and the threat to one school can close all of them, then all you need is threats to one third of your schools, and you won't have a school year in 2016. Obviously, they're not going to shut the LA schools down every time they get a threat, they simply can't. But now, this overreaction is the norm.
And what happens when someone does get killed in an LA school this next year? Will the school district now be blamed for not closing because a kid got killed?
In the end, I think the real problem is what you mentioned: the viewers. Which means that the problem is our society, and not really the news, not the guns, and quite possibly not even the shooters. All of those other things are enabled by our culture. Our murder rate has been decreasing for decades and yet we're apparently more afraid than ever. This fear is more likely to hurt us through overreaction in things like disruption of our lives, creation of a police state and a sense of fear in our lives when we shouldn't have any.
I did think about a scenario like your situation when I wrote my comment, and you certainly can make money on an upswing from news like hiring a hyped CEO like Mayer. I think I tend to think about longer term investment when talking about holding stock and that isn't the whole story.
However, there is a difference between buying up a fundamentally sound company like VW that just happens to be on a downswing, and a company like Yahoo who has shitty fundamentals and is teetering on the brink. People who buy companies like Yahoo on a downswing who aren't paying attention can easily lose their shirt.
In the first case, you can hold VW long term and you'll make your profit. With Yahoo, you have to make sure you aren't greedy and are still in there when it collapses.
I don't believe it was wrong to evacuate the threatened school. You do have to take a direct threat seriously. I do believe it was wrong to evacuate *every* school.
Also, this stuff is going to continue to happen while the news media shines a laser-like focus on these incidents. We're always going to have this sort of thing, but media attention is actually encouraging this activity.
Although I understand the need for a free press, I wish these media outlets would develop some ethics without some form of compulsion. Regulate guns all you want, but in the end, I blame the media more than the availability of guns for these specific types of incidents.
Wildly profitable companies aren't sold for peanuts. Or they aren't sold at all. It's not quite that easy.
M&As do sometimes turn out okay, but you need to know how to pick them. Berkshire Hathaway is one company that is well known for making M&As work very, very well.
I'm not sure who in their right mind would have held Yahoo, even before Mayer crashed and burned. Yahoo is a search engine that isn't Google with no entrepreneurial energy left to even sort of try to make a fight of it. They're basically a holding company for Alibaba stock. They need to resurrect Zombie Steve Jobs from the grave to save them. Marissa Mayer never had a chance. I'd almost feel sorry for her, except that she's making bank off this job. I just hope she didn't want to work as a CEO ever again of a company not bankrolled by herself.
Honestly, I can't argue with an agreement, but I still think it's mostly worthless.
Stopping this at two degrees is a pipe dream. It's worse than that, it's delusional. We need to certainly halt the increase of CO2 emissions, but the reality is that everything bad that will happen at over two degrees *going to happen*.
We need to start preparing for evacuations and projects to deal with rising sea levels. We need to consider "superdroughts" and how to cope with them.
Those people in the Marshall Islands who are trying to stop having their country become part of the ocean? Already too late. Find them somewhere to go.
I think we need a realistic plan to control CO2 emissions which does not set ridiculous feel-good targets that no one will ever meet, and instead understand that if there is going to be change, we can adapt to it.
This is not to say that we should stop trying to switch to better sources of energy production. That needs to keep moving forward. No one really wants to keep burning using fossil fuels forever and there will continue to be steady progress on that front, but steady will not be revolutionary.
Perhaps a bad way of putting it. They worked very hard at production, but the pace of the war itself was pokey. War was intense, but a lot slower paced than a modern war. A four year war in the 40's against an enemy at parity would probably be over in a few months today.
Popping out an already designed B-24 isn't want I'm talking about. Certainly your total war production is going to let you produce materiel faster using already researched designs on proven assembly lines. Although I do wonder if the war would even last long enough to bring the factories up to speed in this day and age.
And variants are variants. They aren't new designs. They were using Shermans all the way up to the end, and were able to up-rate their guns and everything, but they were still merely uprated Shermans with all of the other deficiencies of an older Sherman with the exception of the things that got upgraded.
Today, a variant on a bomber would have to be a tweaked B-52 or B-1. You're not going to be able to wait until the war starts to design and then put into full production the XB-3 or whatever unless that plane is already in testing before the war starts.
A poor example. The Catholic Church was never in the business of exploration or investigation. It got involved in science as far as it did because it had some political and social implications. Not to mention that science and every other pursuit would be subordinated to the revelation of God.
Of course, as other people pointed out, the scientific method, in the West, was in large part was pioneered by Catholic clerics. So, perhaps the answer to your question is that it took approximately 1,875 years for the Catholic Church to invent the light bulb. And 1,945 years to invent the Atomic Bomb.
Or perhaps comparing a serious philosopher interested in science to the meddling of the Catholic hierarchy is silly. Religion may contain philosophy, but philosophy is not confined to religion.
And you could certainly invent light bulbs even if you had an imperfect, even fallacious understanding of electricity. All you have to do is manage to replicate the rules allowing a light bulb to work, often through brute force observation and trial and error. Your backing theory doesn't have to be right if you blunder into the correct implementation.
Anyway, science clearly has legitimacy because it does manage to produce things. That much is true.
However, the investigation of science has gone far beyond what we could experiment on directly with the energies available to us. So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
Having worked at a place kind of like that, I can tell you that ultimately, they considered the functions of the sysadmins and particularly security, to be "in their way", or they simply didn't understand it.
There were some smart guys who worked there, but they thought that they could automate away the job of Operations. I was impressed by some of the things they achieved with automation, but ultimately they didn't understand operating an application or security. It was probably for the best that their app failed, although I admit, it was probably not due to operation failure, but it might have been due to them not actually focusing on good app development, and instead spending all of their time attempting to automate the operation of an application that had an incomplete feature set and a horrendous UX (which they should have been spending their time on, instead of making life of the Operations people miserable).
Sadly, I found out after I left that Ops people were canned en masse when the app failed and went on life support, but they kept the people who made the terrible decisions. They are apparently trying their hand at having developers manage everything for real now. God help them.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that there is nothing your own body camera would help you with in the case under discussion, because the cop would actually be entirely within their rights (some might even suggest it was their duty) to enforce those other charges if they can.
There are many minor things a cop can cite you for that they generally overlook because its hard to prove and not a good use of their time to try. They may be nitpicky things, but they wouldn't be trumped up charges. Your citizen body camera wouldn't help you in the slightest because it wouldn't be misconduct, they'd simply be enforcing more of the law.
That's the danger. When it becomes super easy to enforce certain laws that have been mostly ignored due to the difficulty of prosecution, those laws will be enforced to the benefit of the public coffers due to extra fine revenue. If body cameras not only make that easier, but also make it harder for cops to exercise their discretion to *not* charge you, that could be an uncomfortable scenario because many cops actually do give you a break, but if there's proof they ignored something, they may no longer be able to be nice about it.
The abundance of mass in the center of a galaxy is pretty much the reason that there is a black hole in the center to begin with. It would be odd for all of that mass to have either been hoovered in or stripped away normally. Generally it would be much like a planetary system, most mass makes up the central object, but there's always leftover mass that becomes planets or asteroids, or in the case of this much matter, becomes stars in stable orbit around a central black hole.
Once in established orbits, there wouldn't be a way for that extra orbiting matter to be removed without some external influence on the system. This usually happens in planetary systems when another star transits (relatively) close to the planetary system and perturbs the orbits of the orbiting matter.
While that same sort of thing could happen for a central black hole, note that the amount of gravitational attraction that a central black hole would have is significantly higher than any one star would have (since central black holes are always many, many times the mass of any one star), so you'd need something bigger, like a passing or colliding galaxy or dense star cluster to really do much to the mass orbiting the galactic core.
You're right about competition, but in combination with aggressive attacks on blood suckers, you could aid the non-bloodsuckers in filling in the niche. Much the same way that they try and kill bad gut flora and replace it with good (or harmless) gut flora to fill the niche where the bad gut flora would otherwise crowd out the good flora due to being established.
You don't want to end mosquitoes or something like them, because they're a big prey species up the food chain, but their particular blood sucking traits are very bad news for the spread of disease. If we could support the good breeds in crowding out the pest breeds, it would help the good breeds effectively compete, despite their natural disadvantage.
Perhaps he's just moo-ved on?
That's actually marginally funny. You could improve the redneck joke a little by calling it a Yeehawd. You see what I did there?
Just about everyone is guilty of some crime, including some very odd felonies. You're mostly not in jail because even the cops and the balance of the legal system realize what sort of bullshit most of them are and don't enforce them.
Nevertheless, with sufficient inducement, those laws can be used on you by those who are literally minded or corrupt enough. And because they are legitimate laws, your only recourse is either unconstitutionality or pure public backlash. The second being the reason that free speech and the right to protest and even to look threatening is a necessary check on governments who are quite capable of passing masses of laws that fail to reflect fairness or reality.
Agreed. CP/M was a popular system for its time. There should be little difficulty in recovering the data from CP/M floppies, particularly if there is sufficient monetary inducement or even hobbyist interest.
Human intelligence as determined by IQ is designed to generate a normal distribution. If you were talking about IQ tests, then your scenario will only hold if you're selecting a subset of a greater set, where the distribution of intelligence was calculated on the superset. If that is the case, you could take a random subset of values and have the odd scores you suggest. However, if IQ was calculated on the subset again, then the normal distribution would apply because new scores would be calculated to ensure a normal distribution.
I will agree that loosely, there is no need to accept the physical resurrection to be a Christian, although you would have to have at least a symbolic acceptance of it. The resurrection is a pretty central part of the canon, and the alternatives to that were sidelined very early on.
However, Christ himself was pretty specific about his submission to the will of the Jewish Creator. Whether or not he was God himself, he submitted to his "Father", and that particular entity accepts no other gods but himself.
Based on the UU people I know and what I understand, you can be a Unitarian Universalist and have a reasonable argument for qualifying as a Christian.
That said, there are UU folk who subscribe to certain notions of Christ's teachings, but would probably not meet the primary criteria for even being loosely Christian due to a number of conflicting beliefs in regard to paganism or humanism.
And Christ wasn't an alien, he was quite specifically born a Jew and Jews are born Jews because of who their mothers are. Which means that he was no more than 50% alien, and definitely not an illegal one. :)
As for sex, he may have simply been an asexual or even just too busy to get busy. It's also possible that he was married and even had plenty of sex, and that was left out, but I find that to be mere anachronistic speculation on the part of people living in an age were sex has never been more free, or more insisted upon as part of the social experience. Sex and marriage used to be serious business, and still is in many places.
If you pull together the known writings, even the writings outside the orthodox (small 'o') canon, you can derive a few lowest common denominator items.
For instance, belief in, and submission to the monotheistic Creator is one.
If you are an atheist or agnostic, you can count yourself out. Even if you subscribe to certain specific teachings of Christ. The teachings of non-violence come to mind.
There are a few others, which many people appear to easily subscribe to, but they fail at when they are tested.
For instance, ordering a Crusade is not a Christian act, even if the pope does it. If Christ himself didn't storm Jerusalem when he had the chance for a popular rising, or even allow his person to be defended from unjust arrest, how can *anyone* suggest that it is Christian to attack someone to take Jerusalem?
Being an actual Christian, as opposed to labeling yourself one, is pretty damned hard to qualify for. Being a member of say, Anonymous, is specifically open to everyone, no matter what you believe and no one can contradict you by definition.
It's not anecdotal. Gas engines can last quite awhile, particularly under good maintenance. I know many people who have bought the more reliable Japanese cars who drive them into the ground and all of those people have gasoline engines in their vehicles.
While it is probably true that given identical quality of maintenance that diesels will last longer, in reality it's less about the type of engine, and more about how it is used and maintained.
Considering that they should have had him at 21 or 30, depending on your source, they seem to have had quite a time of it. :)
I don't really see how you made your point with your example. You see, you've already done the math. You're ready to pay more in taxes. You've determined that whatever Bernie wants from you, you're going to be a-ok with it. If that wasn't a pocketbook calculation, I don't know what would be.
If you're prepared to pay 150% more, then you've always had the power to simply give your money to the Federal government. They do take donations.
Honestly, you're not asking, "how can I help?", you're really saying, "I want Bernie's policies and I've made sure they don't hurt me too much."
You're not discussing charity here. This is pure politics. Your vote for Sanders is a vote for policies, which might well be enforced against people who didn't or couldn't make the same calculation as you have. You aren't sacrificing anything at all except whatever excuse kept you from allocating that money previously and giving it away.
Since this is Christmas, let me suggest something. Vote for Sanders all you want, but don't wait for him to take your money from you. Set it aside and give it to people who need it *now*. If more people with your mindset did that, perhaps we wouldn't even need Bernie Sanders.
There are predictions out there that will need to be made. If string theory predicts them, then it is (up to that point) accurate. If it doesn't do a better job than some other theory or model, then it's still accurate (to that point) but then a decision needs to be made about what is the better model or theory to move forward with.
In the end, most competing theories are either going to be wrong or exposed as a more complicated way of saying the same thing. In practical terms, if we really believe that we're wasting time and effort on String Theory, then perhaps we decide the most simple means of moving forward practically, and then maintain String Theory (or others) in reserve if the path we decide on reaches a dead end later.
The real problem here is not the proper way to go forward, it is the egos and more to the point, the careers of the people who have been working on String Theory. Mothballing or maintaining string theory in maintenance mode until we hit a testable point, is a practical solution in the big picture, but it does have real implications for the lives of certain researchers and mathematicians. This is where the scientific method and the profession of scientific researcher is going to have inevitable friction.
I don't disagree with the idea that we should be more educated and vote.
However, we have a real problem and that problem is that there are going to be two people on the ballot come November 2016. Hillary Clinton and some Republican who may well be Donald Trump. Or Ted Cruz (which the very thought of before Trump came around seemed remote).
Those will be our choices. We can pick corrupt or insane. Sure, there are other people out there running, but by our very argument that people need to become educated, there's not really enough of a record on those people for anyone to become educated *about*.
One of the problems with our primary system is we start with a reasonable stable of known politicians of varying positions, and then the primary weeds them out. This results in the two major candidates and then a whole bunch of (very) dark horses, college professors, and crackpots (sometimes all of them together). Oh and the occasional rich third party candidate. There is no in-between because the candidates that exist in both major parties who might offer even a modicum of a choice between experienced candidates who have a record of service are taken out before the election.
The other problem with democracy is that it rewards consensus (which is good), but often substitutes that for correctness. Most people don't know anything beyond what they work with everyday, and yet they need to elect representatives to somehow manage the largest bureaucracy that the world has ever known, covering topics from the (world's most powerful) military, environment, (the world's largest) economy, civil rights, all the way to health care and moral issues.
At this point, I think it is a losing battle to even suggest that we can avoid an oligarchy of this sort. The Federal government is a monster that can't be controlled by the people any more unless the "people" are the mass of party faithful whose strings are pulled by a few candidates.
I'm not suggesting that we necessarily give in and declare defeat, but well-functioning democracy does not scale well because it will always collapse into party structures when it gets too big. Effort needs to be made to ensure that democracy functions really well where it matters, but that means that there needs to be an understanding that we either accept that it is restricted, or make a serious change to the government so that it does not as easily defeat the voices of moderation.
I sometimes wonder if there is value in regulating the press. It's not clear to me if that is worse than letting it do what it is doing now.
Ultimately, school shootings or other random mass killings (as opposed to organized crime killings) are a relatively rare, albeit extremely emotionally charged scenario. If we are looking at the situation in a very cold-blooded way, these are still very rare occurrences that, based on impact to society, should not be driving a national debate.
If you have 900 schools in a system, and the threat to one school can close all of them, then all you need is threats to one third of your schools, and you won't have a school year in 2016. Obviously, they're not going to shut the LA schools down every time they get a threat, they simply can't. But now, this overreaction is the norm.
And what happens when someone does get killed in an LA school this next year? Will the school district now be blamed for not closing because a kid got killed?
In the end, I think the real problem is what you mentioned: the viewers. Which means that the problem is our society, and not really the news, not the guns, and quite possibly not even the shooters. All of those other things are enabled by our culture. Our murder rate has been decreasing for decades and yet we're apparently more afraid than ever. This fear is more likely to hurt us through overreaction in things like disruption of our lives, creation of a police state and a sense of fear in our lives when we shouldn't have any.
I did think about a scenario like your situation when I wrote my comment, and you certainly can make money on an upswing from news like hiring a hyped CEO like Mayer. I think I tend to think about longer term investment when talking about holding stock and that isn't the whole story.
However, there is a difference between buying up a fundamentally sound company like VW that just happens to be on a downswing, and a company like Yahoo who has shitty fundamentals and is teetering on the brink. People who buy companies like Yahoo on a downswing who aren't paying attention can easily lose their shirt.
In the first case, you can hold VW long term and you'll make your profit. With Yahoo, you have to make sure you aren't greedy and are still in there when it collapses.
We are overreacting.
I don't believe it was wrong to evacuate the threatened school. You do have to take a direct threat seriously. I do believe it was wrong to evacuate *every* school.
Also, this stuff is going to continue to happen while the news media shines a laser-like focus on these incidents. We're always going to have this sort of thing, but media attention is actually encouraging this activity.
Although I understand the need for a free press, I wish these media outlets would develop some ethics without some form of compulsion. Regulate guns all you want, but in the end, I blame the media more than the availability of guns for these specific types of incidents.
If her job was get get PR for Yahoo, she'd be a big success. Unfortunately, since she's CEO, bad PR is not the PR she needs to make.
Wildly profitable companies aren't sold for peanuts. Or they aren't sold at all. It's not quite that easy.
M&As do sometimes turn out okay, but you need to know how to pick them. Berkshire Hathaway is one company that is well known for making M&As work very, very well.
I'm not sure who in their right mind would have held Yahoo, even before Mayer crashed and burned. Yahoo is a search engine that isn't Google with no entrepreneurial energy left to even sort of try to make a fight of it. They're basically a holding company for Alibaba stock. They need to resurrect Zombie Steve Jobs from the grave to save them. Marissa Mayer never had a chance. I'd almost feel sorry for her, except that she's making bank off this job. I just hope she didn't want to work as a CEO ever again of a company not bankrolled by herself.
Honestly, I can't argue with an agreement, but I still think it's mostly worthless.
Stopping this at two degrees is a pipe dream. It's worse than that, it's delusional. We need to certainly halt the increase of CO2 emissions, but the reality is that everything bad that will happen at over two degrees *going to happen*.
We need to start preparing for evacuations and projects to deal with rising sea levels. We need to consider "superdroughts" and how to cope with them.
Those people in the Marshall Islands who are trying to stop having their country become part of the ocean? Already too late. Find them somewhere to go.
I think we need a realistic plan to control CO2 emissions which does not set ridiculous feel-good targets that no one will ever meet, and instead understand that if there is going to be change, we can adapt to it.
This is not to say that we should stop trying to switch to better sources of energy production. That needs to keep moving forward. No one really wants to keep burning using fossil fuels forever and there will continue to be steady progress on that front, but steady will not be revolutionary.
Perhaps a bad way of putting it. They worked very hard at production, but the pace of the war itself was pokey. War was intense, but a lot slower paced than a modern war. A four year war in the 40's against an enemy at parity would probably be over in a few months today.
Popping out an already designed B-24 isn't want I'm talking about. Certainly your total war production is going to let you produce materiel faster using already researched designs on proven assembly lines. Although I do wonder if the war would even last long enough to bring the factories up to speed in this day and age.
And variants are variants. They aren't new designs. They were using Shermans all the way up to the end, and were able to up-rate their guns and everything, but they were still merely uprated Shermans with all of the other deficiencies of an older Sherman with the exception of the things that got upgraded.
Today, a variant on a bomber would have to be a tweaked B-52 or B-1. You're not going to be able to wait until the war starts to design and then put into full production the XB-3 or whatever unless that plane is already in testing before the war starts.
A poor example. The Catholic Church was never in the business of exploration or investigation. It got involved in science as far as it did because it had some political and social implications. Not to mention that science and every other pursuit would be subordinated to the revelation of God.
Of course, as other people pointed out, the scientific method, in the West, was in large part was pioneered by Catholic clerics. So, perhaps the answer to your question is that it took approximately 1,875 years for the Catholic Church to invent the light bulb. And 1,945 years to invent the Atomic Bomb.
Or perhaps comparing a serious philosopher interested in science to the meddling of the Catholic hierarchy is silly. Religion may contain philosophy, but philosophy is not confined to religion.
And you could certainly invent light bulbs even if you had an imperfect, even fallacious understanding of electricity. All you have to do is manage to replicate the rules allowing a light bulb to work, often through brute force observation and trial and error. Your backing theory doesn't have to be right if you blunder into the correct implementation.
Anyway, science clearly has legitimacy because it does manage to produce things. That much is true.
However, the investigation of science has gone far beyond what we could experiment on directly with the energies available to us. So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
Having worked at a place kind of like that, I can tell you that ultimately, they considered the functions of the sysadmins and particularly security, to be "in their way", or they simply didn't understand it.
There were some smart guys who worked there, but they thought that they could automate away the job of Operations. I was impressed by some of the things they achieved with automation, but ultimately they didn't understand operating an application or security. It was probably for the best that their app failed, although I admit, it was probably not due to operation failure, but it might have been due to them not actually focusing on good app development, and instead spending all of their time attempting to automate the operation of an application that had an incomplete feature set and a horrendous UX (which they should have been spending their time on, instead of making life of the Operations people miserable).
Sadly, I found out after I left that Ops people were canned en masse when the app failed and went on life support, but they kept the people who made the terrible decisions. They are apparently trying their hand at having developers manage everything for real now. God help them.