Let's face it. Obama's tax increases also affect US. I'll be paying about $600 more under Obama's plan versus what I paid under Bush II, and I'm just a middle class employee (less than 100K). If Obama really, truly wants to tax the rich, then why am I paying more taxes? I'm not rich.
Really? Where did you come up with that number? According to this chart, the average taxpayer in the $66k-$112k income bracket will pay $1,290 less taxes for 2009 under Obama's tax plan than they will pay for 2008 under G. W. Bush. The lowest bracket that would see a tax increase is the $227k-$603k bracket, which would see an average increase of a whopping $12. That wasn't a typo -- their annual taxes would go up by twelve dollars.
So, I ask again, where did you get your numbers? The chart on the Wikipedia page I linked has these citations, among others:
Yes because bleeding someone to deathâ"on purpose mind youâ"was "rarely harmful."
That's one technique that was usually harmful -- I explicitly allowed that there were some harmful techniques, so you've not proven me wrong in any way. It's like if I said "cars usually have effective safety systems" and then you found a single carmaker whose cars usually don't. That doesn't prove me wrong, because I was talking about the whole picture, while you were talking about a single part of it.
Most folk remedies that were in use for extended periods of time were neither harmful nor helpful, but there were more that were helpful than harmful. Some were even quite sophisticated. There's a strong cultural selective pressure against severely harmful remedies -- if most of the time, the folk remedy consisted of "bleeding someone to death", people would have noticed. They were ignorant, not stupid.
Don't potentially block a call that may be to (or from) the emergency services or another life or death communication.
It's remarkable that the world managed to function at all before the age of cellular communication.
It's remarkable that the world managed to function at all before the age of modern medicine.
Just because humanity survived through it doesn't mean it is responsible or ethical to strip it away in circumstances when you don't understand the consequences.
The truth is, people before modern medicine might stand a better chance of dealing with a given health issue because they knew folk remedies which may have helped (though they didn't always help, they were rarely harmful). Today, most of us have an almost total lack of ability to deal with major health issues without modern medicine. The same is true with cellular communication -- people were fine without it at the time, but they (we) have grown fairly dependent on it today. Take it away unexpectedly, and they're worse off than when it didn't exist.
Note that I don't say this as if it were a good thing -- I think it's a horrible thing. But that doesn't make it any less true.
What with humans being rather complex, mentally, Information may not be stored only once, or it could be fragmented.
The only way to selectively destroy memory would be to track down all instances of it, which I would say is pretty unlikely in the human brain. Same goes for most other primates.
While I agree with the spirit of your conclusion (that in general, this will be much harder to pull off than with their test), I don't think I agree that it is "not applicable to humans". Memory is a stimulus-response (in humans as well as mice). The problem is not so much in tracking down instances of the memory, it is in tracking down (and reproducing) the set of stimuli which trigger the memory.
In the test, they trigger overproduction of a certain protein while the target memory is stimulated -- they are essentially "deleting" the memory response to the current stimulus. In the case of a very strong and singular stimulus (like the tests described in the article), I would expect this will work similarly on humans as on mice. Perhaps it will be a little harder to make a human perceive the reproduced situation as exactly the same, but I would expect fairly decent results.
The problem I foresee is triggering an arbitrary memory -- one that isn't so strongly or uniquely responsive to particular stimuli. For example, context makes a huge difference in memory recall (see state-dependent learning) -- if you can't generate the same context as when the memory was created, it seems likely you couldn't fully erase it. In their test, triggering the exact memory would have been easy to do, because they could easily replicate the (important) circumstances under which it occurred. In reality, if you were to erase a memory based on a partially-duplicated stimulus, I'm guessing the non-duplicated parts might still trigger the memory. I think this problem will exist for mice as well as humans, though I would expect humans to have more complex stimulus sets than mice, which would make the problem significantly more pronounced when using the technique on humans.
Very close. To be 100% correct though, Goedel proved that any such endeavor would either be incomplete, or self-contradictory. In other words, for any sufficiently advanced system, there will be some things that are true but which can't be proven to be true within the system, or else there will be some things which can be proven to be true within the system but which can also be proven to be false within the system.
Coerce? Does that mean we can say, stop killing Palestinians, arresting them, torturing them, and taking their land with the guns, tanks, helicopters, and jets that we give you, accept UN resolution 242 and go back to your 1967 borders. ..
Israel will stop killing so-called "Palestinians" when they stop making war and committing terrorism against Israel. [...]
(Note that I am not the poster you were responding to, and thus I don't necessary agree with any of the things that poster said.)
You know, you illustrate very well the reason it's so hard to get a working peace negotiation over there. Both sides say "You stop killing me, then I'll stop killing you." Guess what? That never, never, never works. There are quite a few Israelis who will tell you the same thing, if you bother to listen to them. In fact, recently-resigned-but-still-in-power Israeli Prime Minister Olmert is now saying exactly that (emphasis mine):
"We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories," said Olmert, who now heads an interim government following his September 21 resignation. "We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace," he told the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "Including in Jerusalem," he said in reference to the predominently Arab eastern part of the Holy City which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 war and which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state. His comments are expected to stir deep controversy. Israel officially considers Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided" capital, a view Olmert -- a former mayor of the city -- said he shared for many years. "I am not trying to justify retroactively what I did for 35 years. For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth," said Olmert.
From the sound of things, I think Olmert would say that your statements above are also a result of being "unwilling to look at reality in all its depth".
I don't buy #3 -- if abolition seemed as inevitable as you claim in #1, then I really fail to see what would be gained by allowing loyal Union states to keep their slaves for the time being (since they would know it was coming sooner or later).
You make some good points in #1, but I don't quite see how those other issues centralized around slavery. Maybe I'm just missing something there.
#2 in your analysis above is the first thoroughly convincing argument I've heard. Thank you for not acting like I'm an idiot, as other responders have. I would mod you Insightful through the roof except that clearly I'm already part of this thread.
the reason for the war was the southern states breaking away from the union BECAUSE they were going to abolish slavery. [...] everyone knew that after the war, existing assemblies were going to abolish slavery. it was a due process.
If the 13th Amendment (which freed slaves in the entire US) was an inevitable consequence of the Union winning the war, why was the Emancipation Proclamation worded the way it was? Were they hoping to trick the few people who didn't know that would happen? Oh wait, you said "everyone knew". So, why didn't the Emancipation Proclamation free slaves in all states? Why did it give Southern states the chance to keep their slaves if they came back to the Union? Wouldn't that have been an empty offer?
The North didn't have slaves and was against their use.
And yet the North essentially said "You can keep your slaves if you you come back to the Union." I'm willing to bet the situation was complicated. Our history books tend to say it wasn't, and that the ones who won the war were fighting for the moral high ground. Pardon me for doubting the veracity of that in the face of evidence to the contrary. I'll admit, I could be wrong. However, you seem to think the issue is clear-cut and obvious, and it seems anything but to me.
I would argue that it is completely revisionist to claim that the war was not about freeing the slaves. [...] The usual reason given for why the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the border states that allowed slavery was that Lincoln could not afford to alienate them too much since they might also choose to secede.
So let me paraphrase what you just said... the war was about freeing the slaves, except that in order to keep some border states on the side of the Union, those states would be allowed to keep their slaves.
Doesn't that imply the war had to be about other things too, if the Union was willing to concede slavery to states "on their side"? Why wouldn't all the southern states just say "Ok, great, we'll come back to the Union and keep our slaves, just like you said we could." if that was "the cause of the war"? It sure *looks* like there had to be more going on that was considered more important than slavery.
The fact is, the winners write the history books. Maybe there's a lot I just don't understand about the context, but so far I'm not convinced. I could very well be wrong about this, maybe the Union really was fighting the good fight, sacrificing themselves for the good of others, but I suspect the truth is less black-and-white (and FAR less morally uplifting) than most people think.
That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves.
Wrong. Take a look at the Emancipation Proclamation sometime, and you'll see that it was much more of an economic attack than a declaration of the right of men and women to be free of slavery. From Wikipedia:
The Emancipation Proclamation consists of two executive orders issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. The first one, issued September 22, 1862, declared the freedom of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. The second order, issued January 1, 1863, named the specific states where it applied.
If the Union had been so interested in declaring all men and women to be free, why did it only apply to states that didn't toe the line? I'm fairly sure it wasn't until after the American Civil War that slavery was completely abolished by federal/Constitutional law, which means (from a federal standpoint, at least) Union states were still allowed to have slavery throughout the war. It's completely revisionist to claim the war was "about" freeing slaves (though I admit that's what you'll typically be taught in school as a child here in the US).
These prions are single molecules that have a harmful effect on the host. I believe the word 'toxin' is a better description.
Prions don't self replicate, it's a substance that catalyzes (speeds up) the reaction of refolding an existing protein into another shape, not the formation of a protein out of other substances. If it catalyzed a different kind of reaction, you'd call it a toxic enzyme, not something on the continuum of life.
I would agree that they are a type of toxic enzyme, but I would also say they are a grey area in the spectrum of life. Prions don't self-replicate, but then neither do viruses. The key thing that (in my mind) makes prions something more than other toxic enzymes is the fact that their presence catalyzes a reaction that forms more of itself. I don't think most toxins actually increase concentration in the body over time (when left to their own devices), while this is indeed what we expect to see from diseases. Thus, prions seem to be somewhere between a toxin and a disease.
I don't understand the term "karma whore", whouldn't a karma whore be someone selling karma by modding people up for money? If you're trying to gain karma wouldn't that make you a karma john?
I think you've got it wrong. If you're a crack whore, you're not someone who sells crack (that would be a crack dealer). A normal whore is someone who will do sexual things for money; a crack whore is someone who will do just about whatever it takes to get crack, including doing sexual things for money (which is then used to buy crack). The term strays further from the typical meaning of the term "whore" in other contexts, such as the attention whore, who will do things (often sexual or at least sensual, but not necessarily) for attention. Similarly, a karma whore on/. will make posts designed to acquire karma.
Almost -- I'm saying that, if an oil company expects the price of oil to go up over time, it seems they have little incentive to drill as much as they can right now. Rather, they have greater incentive to drill only enough to cover their various costs (including exploration and research), and then save what oil they can for later when the price point has gone up on its own. (In other words, to speculate on the future oil market.) But on the other hand, maybe for various business reasons shorter-term profits would be more appealing -- I don't know enough about stockholders and such to know which way it would go.
You bring up an interesting point though, that if the oil companies intentionally decrease supply, they can drive prices up at the cost of additional sales in the short term. The risk there would be driving people away from oil use, such as we've seen in the reduction of driving in the US over the past year.
Because eating the first piece does prevent you from getting the bigger piece. (I could have said "he'll get a slice twice as big instead" to be more clear.) The oil companies can't sell their oil twice; they either sell it now for profit, or wait until later when they think they can sell it for more profit.
To say an oil company won't drill for oil if it would grant them large profits is like saying a fat kid wouldn't eat the cake sitting in front of him if he could.
I'm not sure about your counter-analysis. Wouldn't a better analogy for the GP's argument be a fat kid who won't eat the large slice of cake sitting in front of him (even though he can) because he knows if he waits a while he'll get a slice twice as big?
Yeah, yeah, I know Ubuntu uses a Linux kernel and gnu tools, but it has established a brand which is seen as friendlier to non technical users than the Linux brand. The fact that one is an essential part of the other doesn't matter to people who don't no any better or care.
So you're saying that Ubuntu doesn't count as Linux because anything Linux can't be friendly to non-technical users? Sorry, Ubuntu is still a Linux distribution -- the fact that it breaks your stereotypes about Linux just means you need to drop or alter the stereotypes, not exclude Ubuntu from the category.
You may think people are being callous ass holes, but frankly, your own carelessness got you into the situation.
Rule #1 of Contracts:
NEVER sign a contract without having your own lawyer review it for legal or financial pitfalls.
Ok, great, so everyone who signs a mortgage is supposed to be able to afford their own personal lawyer to check over it? Please... That would only be practical if lawyers were much cheaper. I bet 99% of people don't get a lawyer involved when they sign a mortgage.
Plus, did you know there are actually 2 contracts generally involved in buying a house? You make one contract (with the seller) just to become the sole person with the option of buying the house for a certain period of time, then you make another contract (with the mortgage lender) to get your loan so you can pay the seller. You want to have a lawyer look over every offer you make on every house? That's what it would take to do what you say.
Rule #2 of Contracts:
Never commit to terms or financial obligations before the final signing of a contract.
Um, not gonna work either... As I said, there are 2 contracts involved. To make the first, you have to put money into escrow. If you later back out before closing the deal on the house, the seller gets to keep that escrowed money except for very specific situations outlined in the first contract. So, you already have to make a certain commitment before you ever get to the point where you're ready to actually get your mortgage and buy the house.
Rule #3 of Contracts:
NEVER sign a contract that is ammended from previously agreed terms without having your own lawyer review.
So if you make an offer on a house, and they make a counter-offer, now you've got to get your lawyer to look at it again? Have you ever purchased a house? You can easily go back and forth negotiating several times before settling on something -- or deciding it won't work and moving on to the next house, where the process begins again. Do you have any idea how many hours you're going to have to pay that lawyer for?
Rule #4 of Contracts:
NEVER sign a contract that you are unsure/uneasy about for what ever reason! It is easier to not enter a bad contract than it is to exit one.
While I agree with you here, it is still true that backing out at that point will cause you to lose that escrowed money, so it is not quite as easy as you make it sound.
While may think others are callous, you were foolish and failed to do your own due dilligence. The bank may have been greedy/preditory/whatever but YOU ultimately signed a bad contract without complete understanding of it. That fault is YOURS not the banks.
I agree with your conclusion, but your rules are crap when it comes to the process of buying a house.
Why, again, does this need to be something you carry on your back instead of something you step into?
Well, it doesn't *need* to be, but it would generally be a easier to transport if it's small enough to go on your back rather than something which requires a pickup truck or car with a hitch and a trailer to move around in town.
To turn the question around, why not have something you can carry on your back? A parafan (also known as a powered paraglider) can't take off or land vertically, but doesn't require a whole lot of horizontal space either. They're probably not as fuel efficient, but have the advantage of maintaining a fully-deployed parachute during flight -- it's probably the safest amateur flying machine out there in terms of "what if my engine dies while I'm flying?".
They also make PPGs mounted on bikes and trikes, so the flying bicycle is already here. In once sense this is bigger and thus harder to transport, but on the other hand you can peddle around (or even use the fan for a power assist) to get around in town, so these don't need anything else for transport.
Meh - if you shift 3 billion units/month, and still can't turn a profit, then you deserve to go out of business.
It's all about the spin -- I actually RTFA(s), and nowhere I saw except in some blogger's analysis did it say that company can't turn a profit. From the article:
[Lookery] CEO Scott Rafer says the ad network is running at break even in terms of gross profits. But his plan is to use it to "bootstrap a data services business."
The analysis makes the assumption that Lookery can't turn a profit and thus is changing their business model. Maybe this is true, but from that quote it seems equally plausible that this is all part of the plan -- run ads as cheap as you can to get as much market share as possible (hopefully undercutting your competitors, who are trying to turn a profit), then use your position to make money in a different way. I've heard many gas stations do the same thing -- they pretty much break even on selling gasoline (in order to attract customers), and then make their profit on the snacks, beer, ice, etc that people buy while they're stopped.
This is not a new idea. Without further evidence, this does not mean the company is struggling -- even the fact that they've lowered their prices isn't evidence of this (what company wouldn't lower their costs if they thought they could get away with it?). It just means they're trying a different tack in a highly competitive market. No big deal.
It's a poorly written and shite article, but the box off to the side says:
One of two newly discovered exoplanets is nearly the size of Earth...
So, assuming they're talking about the same one, it should be roughly 5 times our gravity.
Not so. If the planet has twice the diameter of earth, that falls well within the category of "nearly the size of Earth" for astronomers. Since gravity decreases proportionally to the square of the distance, gravity would be only 5/(2^2) times as strong as on Earth, an increase of a mere 20%.
If it has approximately the same density as earth, then since volume of a sphere increases proportionally to the cube of the radius/diameter, it would have 5^(1/3) times as large a diameter as earth, which is about 1.71 -- even closer to the size of our Earth. It would also wind up with gravity 1.71 times as strong, since 5/((5^(1/3))^2) == 5/(5^(2/3)) == 5^(1/3).
Clearly, the solution to this problem is to have the US government develop sophisticated face-recognition software, then build a centralized database of people who opt-out of having their pictures posted online. The Internet will be continually spidered, and any time a picture online is found to match the identity of someone in the database, the website will get a takedown notice, and the opt-out person in the picture will also be contacted (since their contact information would of course be in the opt-out database as well) so that they can take further actions if they desire. That should take care of the problem.
Yes but those birds and the thunderstorm do have a very important connection : these events SHARE CAUSES. This is true for your second example as well.
Yes, exactly, that's what I was getting at.
They would never satisfy the second part of the causation demand : A correlates with B (with a timeshift) but B never decorrelates with A (with or without a timeshift).
You said "If correlation occurs with a temporal shift, it is trivially simple to separate cause and effect." If you were implying additional constraints, that was lost on me. However, that still doesn't refute my examples. (BTW, "decorrelate" doesn't seem to be a word I can find in an online dictionary. I'll assume "B never decorrelates with A" means "B never occurs without A".) Unfortunately, if there is an event that has multiple causes, then you can have the effect without the cause. Similarly, if there is an event with multiple observed effects (only one of which will occur for a given instance of the cause, based on other, possibly unobserved circumstances), then you can have the cause without the single effect we're investigating.
I'm not saying you don't understand all these things, I'm just pointing out that you have grossly oversimplified the situation. "Proving" causation through merely statistical techniques is much trickier than you make it sound, especially when you can't do tests of your own to control other variables -- which brings us back to the topic of the discussion: you still need the scientific method in order to gather the data necessary to draw proper conclusions, you can't just look at a data cloud and use whatever it gives you unless that's your only option.
If correlation occurs with a temporal shift, it is trivially simple to separate cause and effect.
I have to disagree with that -- it's kinda correct, but I think it oversimplifies and misses some situations. (Note that I'm talking about the general case, not your solar output example in particular.)
As one example, imagine someone without an understanding of the physics of weather discovered that, at least 10 minutes prior to the arrival of any major thunderstorm, all birds in a particular forest stopped chirping and sought shelter. And in fact, every observed time that the birds stopped chirping and sought shelter, a major thunderstorm occurred. A naive application of your statement implies that the storm could not have caused the birds to seek shelter, since they happened in the wrong order. In fact, might it be possible that birds are the cause of thunderstorms? Perhaps the immediate cessation of all flying by the birds in the forest somehow triggers the thunderstorm by changing the flow of air? This is the sort of mistake the ancients would make -- assuming that because the observed phenomena happen in a certain order, the earlier observed event is the cause. The problem here, of course, is that the pressure drop preceding a major thunderstorm happens before the birds seek shelter, but if that isn't observed, the order seems backwards.
Another place this breaks down is where 2 events are correlated, but neither causes the other; instead, it is possible both have a common cause. Imagine this (very contrived) example: every time Bob presses a certain button, a bell rings in Rover the dog's doghouse. Rover has been trained to go fetch the newspaper and bring it to you whenever that bell rings. However, whenever Bob presses his button, 5 minutes later there is another effect -- a light comes on in your room. If it takes Rover no more than 2-3 minutes to bring you the newspaper, you will observe that, 2-3 minutes after Rover brings you the newspaper every morning, a light comes on in your room. Does Rover bringing you the newspaper trigger the light? No, not at all.
Correlation plus temporal shift does not equal causation.
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Let's face it. Obama's tax increases also affect US. I'll be paying about $600 more under Obama's plan versus what I paid under Bush II, and I'm just a middle class employee (less than 100K). If Obama really, truly wants to tax the rich, then why am I paying more taxes? I'm not rich.
Really? Where did you come up with that number? According to this chart, the average taxpayer in the $66k-$112k income bracket will pay $1,290 less taxes for 2009 under Obama's tax plan than they will pay for 2008 under G. W. Bush. The lowest bracket that would see a tax increase is the $227k-$603k bracket, which would see an average increase of a whopping $12. That wasn't a typo -- their annual taxes would go up by twelve dollars.
So, I ask again, where did you get your numbers? The chart on the Wikipedia page I linked has these citations, among others:
Feel free to double-check the calculations, if you want. Just let me check yours too.
Yes because bleeding someone to deathâ"on purpose mind youâ"was "rarely harmful."
That's one technique that was usually harmful -- I explicitly allowed that there were some harmful techniques, so you've not proven me wrong in any way. It's like if I said "cars usually have effective safety systems" and then you found a single carmaker whose cars usually don't. That doesn't prove me wrong, because I was talking about the whole picture, while you were talking about a single part of it.
Most folk remedies that were in use for extended periods of time were neither harmful nor helpful, but there were more that were helpful than harmful. Some were even quite sophisticated. There's a strong cultural selective pressure against severely harmful remedies -- if most of the time, the folk remedy consisted of "bleeding someone to death", people would have noticed. They were ignorant, not stupid.
Don't potentially block a call that may be to (or from) the emergency services or another life or death communication.
It's remarkable that the world managed to function at all before the age of cellular communication.
It's remarkable that the world managed to function at all before the age of modern medicine.
Just because humanity survived through it doesn't mean it is responsible or ethical to strip it away in circumstances when you don't understand the consequences.
The truth is, people before modern medicine might stand a better chance of dealing with a given health issue because they knew folk remedies which may have helped (though they didn't always help, they were rarely harmful). Today, most of us have an almost total lack of ability to deal with major health issues without modern medicine. The same is true with cellular communication -- people were fine without it at the time, but they (we) have grown fairly dependent on it today. Take it away unexpectedly, and they're worse off than when it didn't exist.
Note that I don't say this as if it were a good thing -- I think it's a horrible thing. But that doesn't make it any less true.
What with humans being rather complex, mentally, Information may not be stored only once, or it could be fragmented.
The only way to selectively destroy memory would be to track down all instances of it, which I would say is pretty unlikely in the human brain. Same goes for most other primates.
While I agree with the spirit of your conclusion (that in general, this will be much harder to pull off than with their test), I don't think I agree that it is "not applicable to humans". Memory is a stimulus-response (in humans as well as mice). The problem is not so much in tracking down instances of the memory, it is in tracking down (and reproducing) the set of stimuli which trigger the memory.
In the test, they trigger overproduction of a certain protein while the target memory is stimulated -- they are essentially "deleting" the memory response to the current stimulus. In the case of a very strong and singular stimulus (like the tests described in the article), I would expect this will work similarly on humans as on mice. Perhaps it will be a little harder to make a human perceive the reproduced situation as exactly the same, but I would expect fairly decent results.
The problem I foresee is triggering an arbitrary memory -- one that isn't so strongly or uniquely responsive to particular stimuli. For example, context makes a huge difference in memory recall (see state-dependent learning) -- if you can't generate the same context as when the memory was created, it seems likely you couldn't fully erase it. In their test, triggering the exact memory would have been easy to do, because they could easily replicate the (important) circumstances under which it occurred. In reality, if you were to erase a memory based on a partially-duplicated stimulus, I'm guessing the non-duplicated parts might still trigger the memory. I think this problem will exist for mice as well as humans, though I would expect humans to have more complex stimulus sets than mice, which would make the problem significantly more pronounced when using the technique on humans.
Very close. To be 100% correct though, Goedel proved that any such endeavor would either be incomplete, or self-contradictory. In other words, for any sufficiently advanced system, there will be some things that are true but which can't be proven to be true within the system, or else there will be some things which can be proven to be true within the system but which can also be proven to be false within the system.
Coerce? Does that mean we can say, stop killing Palestinians, arresting them, torturing them, and taking their land with the guns, tanks, helicopters, and jets that we give you, accept UN resolution 242 and go back to your 1967 borders. . .
Israel will stop killing so-called "Palestinians" when they stop making war and committing terrorism against Israel. [...]
(Note that I am not the poster you were responding to, and thus I don't necessary agree with any of the things that poster said.)
You know, you illustrate very well the reason it's so hard to get a working peace negotiation over there. Both sides say "You stop killing me, then I'll stop killing you." Guess what? That never, never, never works. There are quite a few Israelis who will tell you the same thing, if you bother to listen to them. In fact, recently-resigned-but-still-in-power Israeli Prime Minister Olmert is now saying exactly that (emphasis mine):
"We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories," said Olmert, who now heads an interim government following his September 21 resignation. "We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace," he told the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "Including in Jerusalem," he said in reference to the predominently Arab eastern part of the Holy City which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 war and which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state. His comments are expected to stir deep controversy. Israel officially considers Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided" capital, a view Olmert -- a former mayor of the city -- said he shared for many years. "I am not trying to justify retroactively what I did for 35 years. For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth," said Olmert.
From the sound of things, I think Olmert would say that your statements above are also a result of being "unwilling to look at reality in all its depth".
I don't buy #3 -- if abolition seemed as inevitable as you claim in #1, then I really fail to see what would be gained by allowing loyal Union states to keep their slaves for the time being (since they would know it was coming sooner or later).
You make some good points in #1, but I don't quite see how those other issues centralized around slavery. Maybe I'm just missing something there.
#2 in your analysis above is the first thoroughly convincing argument I've heard. Thank you for not acting like I'm an idiot, as other responders have. I would mod you Insightful through the roof except that clearly I'm already part of this thread.
the reason for the war was the southern states breaking away from the union BECAUSE they were going to abolish slavery. [...] everyone knew that after the war, existing assemblies were going to abolish slavery. it was a due process.
If the 13th Amendment (which freed slaves in the entire US) was an inevitable consequence of the Union winning the war, why was the Emancipation Proclamation worded the way it was? Were they hoping to trick the few people who didn't know that would happen? Oh wait, you said "everyone knew". So, why didn't the Emancipation Proclamation free slaves in all states? Why did it give Southern states the chance to keep their slaves if they came back to the Union? Wouldn't that have been an empty offer?
The North didn't have slaves and was against their use.
And yet the North essentially said "You can keep your slaves if you you come back to the Union." I'm willing to bet the situation was complicated. Our history books tend to say it wasn't, and that the ones who won the war were fighting for the moral high ground. Pardon me for doubting the veracity of that in the face of evidence to the contrary. I'll admit, I could be wrong. However, you seem to think the issue is clear-cut and obvious, and it seems anything but to me.
I would argue that it is completely revisionist to claim that the war was not about freeing the slaves. [...] The usual reason given for why the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the border states that allowed slavery was that Lincoln could not afford to alienate them too much since they might also choose to secede.
So let me paraphrase what you just said... the war was about freeing the slaves, except that in order to keep some border states on the side of the Union, those states would be allowed to keep their slaves.
Doesn't that imply the war had to be about other things too, if the Union was willing to concede slavery to states "on their side"? Why wouldn't all the southern states just say "Ok, great, we'll come back to the Union and keep our slaves, just like you said we could." if that was "the cause of the war"? It sure *looks* like there had to be more going on that was considered more important than slavery.
The fact is, the winners write the history books. Maybe there's a lot I just don't understand about the context, but so far I'm not convinced. I could very well be wrong about this, maybe the Union really was fighting the good fight, sacrificing themselves for the good of others, but I suspect the truth is less black-and-white (and FAR less morally uplifting) than most people think.
That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves.
Wrong. Take a look at the Emancipation Proclamation sometime, and you'll see that it was much more of an economic attack than a declaration of the right of men and women to be free of slavery. From Wikipedia:
If the Union had been so interested in declaring all men and women to be free, why did it only apply to states that didn't toe the line? I'm fairly sure it wasn't until after the American Civil War that slavery was completely abolished by federal/Constitutional law, which means (from a federal standpoint, at least) Union states were still allowed to have slavery throughout the war. It's completely revisionist to claim the war was "about" freeing slaves (though I admit that's what you'll typically be taught in school as a child here in the US).
These prions are single molecules that have a harmful effect on the host. I believe the word 'toxin' is a better description.
Prions don't self replicate, it's a substance that catalyzes (speeds up) the reaction of refolding an existing protein into another shape, not the formation of a protein out of other substances. If it catalyzed a different kind of reaction, you'd call it a toxic enzyme, not something on the continuum of life.
I would agree that they are a type of toxic enzyme, but I would also say they are a grey area in the spectrum of life. Prions don't self-replicate, but then neither do viruses. The key thing that (in my mind) makes prions something more than other toxic enzymes is the fact that their presence catalyzes a reaction that forms more of itself. I don't think most toxins actually increase concentration in the body over time (when left to their own devices), while this is indeed what we expect to see from diseases. Thus, prions seem to be somewhere between a toxin and a disease.
I don't understand the term "karma whore", whouldn't a karma whore be someone selling karma by modding people up for money? If you're trying to gain karma wouldn't that make you a karma john?
I think you've got it wrong. If you're a crack whore, you're not someone who sells crack (that would be a crack dealer). A normal whore is someone who will do sexual things for money; a crack whore is someone who will do just about whatever it takes to get crack, including doing sexual things for money (which is then used to buy crack). The term strays further from the typical meaning of the term "whore" in other contexts, such as the attention whore, who will do things (often sexual or at least sensual, but not necessarily) for attention. Similarly, a karma whore on /. will make posts designed to acquire karma.
Almost -- I'm saying that, if an oil company expects the price of oil to go up over time, it seems they have little incentive to drill as much as they can right now. Rather, they have greater incentive to drill only enough to cover their various costs (including exploration and research), and then save what oil they can for later when the price point has gone up on its own. (In other words, to speculate on the future oil market.) But on the other hand, maybe for various business reasons shorter-term profits would be more appealing -- I don't know enough about stockholders and such to know which way it would go.
You bring up an interesting point though, that if the oil companies intentionally decrease supply, they can drive prices up at the cost of additional sales in the short term. The risk there would be driving people away from oil use, such as we've seen in the reduction of driving in the US over the past year.
Because eating the first piece does prevent you from getting the bigger piece. (I could have said "he'll get a slice twice as big instead" to be more clear.) The oil companies can't sell their oil twice; they either sell it now for profit, or wait until later when they think they can sell it for more profit.
To say an oil company won't drill for oil if it would grant them large profits is like saying a fat kid wouldn't eat the cake sitting in front of him if he could.
I'm not sure about your counter-analysis. Wouldn't a better analogy for the GP's argument be a fat kid who won't eat the large slice of cake sitting in front of him (even though he can) because he knows if he waits a while he'll get a slice twice as big?
Yeah, yeah, I know Ubuntu uses a Linux kernel and gnu tools, but it has established a brand which is seen as friendlier to non technical users than the Linux brand. The fact that one is an essential part of the other doesn't matter to people who don't no any better or care.
So you're saying that Ubuntu doesn't count as Linux because anything Linux can't be friendly to non-technical users? Sorry, Ubuntu is still a Linux distribution -- the fact that it breaks your stereotypes about Linux just means you need to drop or alter the stereotypes, not exclude Ubuntu from the category.
You may think people are being callous ass holes, but frankly, your own carelessness got you into the situation.
Rule #1 of Contracts: NEVER sign a contract without having your own lawyer review it for legal or financial pitfalls.
Ok, great, so everyone who signs a mortgage is supposed to be able to afford their own personal lawyer to check over it? Please... That would only be practical if lawyers were much cheaper. I bet 99% of people don't get a lawyer involved when they sign a mortgage.
Plus, did you know there are actually 2 contracts generally involved in buying a house? You make one contract (with the seller) just to become the sole person with the option of buying the house for a certain period of time, then you make another contract (with the mortgage lender) to get your loan so you can pay the seller. You want to have a lawyer look over every offer you make on every house? That's what it would take to do what you say.
Rule #2 of Contracts: Never commit to terms or financial obligations before the final signing of a contract.
Um, not gonna work either... As I said, there are 2 contracts involved. To make the first, you have to put money into escrow. If you later back out before closing the deal on the house, the seller gets to keep that escrowed money except for very specific situations outlined in the first contract. So, you already have to make a certain commitment before you ever get to the point where you're ready to actually get your mortgage and buy the house.
Rule #3 of Contracts: NEVER sign a contract that is ammended from previously agreed terms without having your own lawyer review.
So if you make an offer on a house, and they make a counter-offer, now you've got to get your lawyer to look at it again? Have you ever purchased a house? You can easily go back and forth negotiating several times before settling on something -- or deciding it won't work and moving on to the next house, where the process begins again. Do you have any idea how many hours you're going to have to pay that lawyer for?
Rule #4 of Contracts: NEVER sign a contract that you are unsure/uneasy about for what ever reason! It is easier to not enter a bad contract than it is to exit one.
While I agree with you here, it is still true that backing out at that point will cause you to lose that escrowed money, so it is not quite as easy as you make it sound.
While may think others are callous, you were foolish and failed to do your own due dilligence. The bank may have been greedy/preditory/whatever but YOU ultimately signed a bad contract without complete understanding of it. That fault is YOURS not the banks.
I agree with your conclusion, but your rules are crap when it comes to the process of buying a house.
Why, again, does this need to be something you carry on your back instead of something you step into?
Well, it doesn't *need* to be, but it would generally be a easier to transport if it's small enough to go on your back rather than something which requires a pickup truck or car with a hitch and a trailer to move around in town.
To turn the question around, why not have something you can carry on your back? A parafan (also known as a powered paraglider) can't take off or land vertically, but doesn't require a whole lot of horizontal space either. They're probably not as fuel efficient, but have the advantage of maintaining a fully-deployed parachute during flight -- it's probably the safest amateur flying machine out there in terms of "what if my engine dies while I'm flying?".
They also make PPGs mounted on bikes and trikes, so the flying bicycle is already here. In once sense this is bigger and thus harder to transport, but on the other hand you can peddle around (or even use the fan for a power assist) to get around in town, so these don't need anything else for transport.
Meh - if you shift 3 billion units/month, and still can't turn a profit, then you deserve to go out of business.
It's all about the spin -- I actually RTFA(s), and nowhere I saw except in some blogger's analysis did it say that company can't turn a profit. From the article:
The analysis makes the assumption that Lookery can't turn a profit and thus is changing their business model. Maybe this is true, but from that quote it seems equally plausible that this is all part of the plan -- run ads as cheap as you can to get as much market share as possible (hopefully undercutting your competitors, who are trying to turn a profit), then use your position to make money in a different way. I've heard many gas stations do the same thing -- they pretty much break even on selling gasoline (in order to attract customers), and then make their profit on the snacks, beer, ice, etc that people buy while they're stopped.
This is not a new idea. Without further evidence, this does not mean the company is struggling -- even the fact that they've lowered their prices isn't evidence of this (what company wouldn't lower their costs if they thought they could get away with it?). It just means they're trying a different tack in a highly competitive market. No big deal.
It's a poorly written and shite article, but the box off to the side says:
One of two newly discovered exoplanets is nearly the size of Earth...
So, assuming they're talking about the same one, it should be roughly 5 times our gravity.
Not so. If the planet has twice the diameter of earth, that falls well within the category of "nearly the size of Earth" for astronomers. Since gravity decreases proportionally to the square of the distance, gravity would be only 5/(2^2) times as strong as on Earth, an increase of a mere 20%.
If it has approximately the same density as earth, then since volume of a sphere increases proportionally to the cube of the radius/diameter, it would have 5^(1/3) times as large a diameter as earth, which is about 1.71 -- even closer to the size of our Earth. It would also wind up with gravity 1.71 times as strong, since 5/((5^(1/3))^2) == 5/(5^(2/3)) == 5^(1/3).
As to getting a 3rd party canidate in good l
Holy conspiracy theories, Batman! They got AC while he was in the middle of typing his post!
Clearly, the solution to this problem is to have the US government develop sophisticated face-recognition software, then build a centralized database of people who opt-out of having their pictures posted online. The Internet will be continually spidered, and any time a picture online is found to match the identity of someone in the database, the website will get a takedown notice, and the opt-out person in the picture will also be contacted (since their contact information would of course be in the opt-out database as well) so that they can take further actions if they desire. That should take care of the problem.
... What? Why are you looking at me like that?
Yes but those birds and the thunderstorm do have a very important connection : these events SHARE CAUSES. This is true for your second example as well.
Yes, exactly, that's what I was getting at.
They would never satisfy the second part of the causation demand : A correlates with B (with a timeshift) but B never decorrelates with A (with or without a timeshift).
You said "If correlation occurs with a temporal shift, it is trivially simple to separate cause and effect." If you were implying additional constraints, that was lost on me. However, that still doesn't refute my examples. (BTW, "decorrelate" doesn't seem to be a word I can find in an online dictionary. I'll assume "B never decorrelates with A" means "B never occurs without A".) Unfortunately, if there is an event that has multiple causes, then you can have the effect without the cause. Similarly, if there is an event with multiple observed effects (only one of which will occur for a given instance of the cause, based on other, possibly unobserved circumstances), then you can have the cause without the single effect we're investigating.
I'm not saying you don't understand all these things, I'm just pointing out that you have grossly oversimplified the situation. "Proving" causation through merely statistical techniques is much trickier than you make it sound, especially when you can't do tests of your own to control other variables -- which brings us back to the topic of the discussion: you still need the scientific method in order to gather the data necessary to draw proper conclusions, you can't just look at a data cloud and use whatever it gives you unless that's your only option.
If correlation occurs with a temporal shift, it is trivially simple to separate cause and effect.
I have to disagree with that -- it's kinda correct, but I think it oversimplifies and misses some situations. (Note that I'm talking about the general case, not your solar output example in particular.)
As one example, imagine someone without an understanding of the physics of weather discovered that, at least 10 minutes prior to the arrival of any major thunderstorm, all birds in a particular forest stopped chirping and sought shelter. And in fact, every observed time that the birds stopped chirping and sought shelter, a major thunderstorm occurred. A naive application of your statement implies that the storm could not have caused the birds to seek shelter, since they happened in the wrong order. In fact, might it be possible that birds are the cause of thunderstorms? Perhaps the immediate cessation of all flying by the birds in the forest somehow triggers the thunderstorm by changing the flow of air? This is the sort of mistake the ancients would make -- assuming that because the observed phenomena happen in a certain order, the earlier observed event is the cause. The problem here, of course, is that the pressure drop preceding a major thunderstorm happens before the birds seek shelter, but if that isn't observed, the order seems backwards.
Another place this breaks down is where 2 events are correlated, but neither causes the other; instead, it is possible both have a common cause. Imagine this (very contrived) example: every time Bob presses a certain button, a bell rings in Rover the dog's doghouse. Rover has been trained to go fetch the newspaper and bring it to you whenever that bell rings. However, whenever Bob presses his button, 5 minutes later there is another effect -- a light comes on in your room. If it takes Rover no more than 2-3 minutes to bring you the newspaper, you will observe that, 2-3 minutes after Rover brings you the newspaper every morning, a light comes on in your room. Does Rover bringing you the newspaper trigger the light? No, not at all.
Correlation plus temporal shift does not equal causation.