I contest that every human being is either inherently ENTIRELY selfish,
I think I see where you're coming from, but I think most of the reaction to your post revolves around the word "entirely". I think you may be exaggerating a bit. Perhaps you meant is "selfish behavior is always a factor in decisions". There is a subtle difference between that and "entirely".
I use the concepts of primary and secondary motivators to describe how people make decisions. A primary motivator is one that, in and of itself, provides sufficient justification for a decision. In contrast, a secondary motivator is not quite sufficient to make a decision. However, secondary motivators can help improve the justifications of primary motivators by being so called "icing on the cake". In the absence of a primary motivator, multiple secondary motivators can combine to create sufficient justification. (potential "tertiary motivators", while positive, could not create sufficient justification in the absence of primary/secondary motivators)
Now, if you're an "ends justify the means" type of guy, all this primary/secondary motivator stuff is just a rant. But I like to look at what a person's primary and secondary motivations are, because I think it reveals something about someone's character.
Therein lies the subtle difference between "entirely" and "always a factor". "Entirely" implies that every decision is provided sufficient justification by a primary motivator composed of selfishness, and there are no secondary motivators. However, "always a factor" implies that selfishness may be either a primary or secondary motivator, depending on the person, and that other motivators may be present and may even be stronger than selfishness.
Samsung Galaxy SIII. Running on battery for 26 hours, 10 minutes. 61% charge remaining.
Cell Standby 59% (battery used by cell radio) Android System 20% (battery used by apps) Device idle 7% Screen 6% (time on 45m 32s) Exchange 4% Android OS 4%
So in my case, for the past 24 hours, the radio has consumed ~10x as much battery power as the screen (which was on 3% of the day, a not insignificant amount)
I expect it to hold until cell phones have IR cameras.
The reason being that just because it's *possible* to buy IR equipment doesn't mean that the general public has it. If only, say, one in a thousand people have this equipment, you still have a reasonable expectation of privacy, IMO. That said, the cost is still about 10% of the median household income for an el-cheap-o version, which is pretty significant.
However, once it crosses into territory such as wifi, where you're now greater than one in ten and the equipment costs less than 2% of the median household income, you can say that a private citizen is likely to have such equipment in their possession.
Wait, so the only time "fruit of the poisonous tree" has any effect is when there was a 4th amendment violation somewhere along the line?
So in essence, the police can break any law they want, and as long as it wasn't a 4th amendment violation, any evidence that was collected in the process of breaking the law is still admissible?
There are two factors here. One is whether the act is legal or illegal. The other is the punishment.
I will agree with you that violating the law brings consequences. However, these consequences need to be rational. You can murder someone in the first degree - END A HUMAN BEING'S LIFE - and you probably serve 20 years (on average, depending on jurisdiction).
Contrast that to growing plants and getting life in prison. Are you seriously telling me that you're okay with that outcome vis-a-vis 20 years for murder? Do you really believe that people growing plants is more dangerous to our society than someone who ends another human's life?
The question I have is, if the government agents in question had to engage in illegal trespassing in order to place the cameras, wouldn't any surveillance collected from such cameras be fruit of the poisonous tree?
Now, if they didn't have to trespass in order to place the cameras, it's a different story.
There are bad cops, there are asshole cops, and there are cops who look the other way when they see the bad asshole cops. They refuse to testify against their fellow cops. They refuse to turn them in for breaking the law. Hell, even after their fellow cops get caught violating the law, they still turn out en-masse to protest the fact that they are not above the law!
In my mind, this is how it should go. You're found out to be a bad cop? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You're found to have known about a bad cop and do nothing? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You turn a bad cop in? His pension is added to yours.
Hit people where the wallet is and watch how fast the cops start policing themselves.
I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the police would need to get PERMISSION to use IR gear in public to find grow houses (as if the IR signature of your house has some kind of right to privacy)
Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), held that the use of a thermal imaging device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant.
Note that the majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia. Feel free to read it, I'm sure it's rather convincing. The gist is that IR equipment is not generally available to public citizens and therefore you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the IR emitted from your home. This is much different than, say, wifi, because laptops with integrated wifi are generally available to the public.
how about if they are only visible/audible if using advanced equipment and manipulation (to for example filter sound)
Kyllo vs. United States. You need a warrant to use thermal imaging equipment to scan for grow houses. The reason is that since the general public does not have typically have access to equipment that can see infrared, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your infrared signal.
From what I gather, it's not just the hurricane that's the problem. It's the fact that the hurricane is slamming into a nor'easter, and the pressures in the area mean the storm is moving more slowly than normal.
It reminds me of the earthquake that happened recently. The eastern US isn't used to earthquakes, and sure there was hardly any damage, but then again none of our buildings and bridges are actually spec'd for any significant earthquake.
What bothers me the most about the hurricane is the high winds. There are a lot of trees with limbs that are growing around power lines in my area, and high winds are almost certainly going to knock out the power for lots of people...
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers
They're still accountable to their customers. We can choose to walk away with our money any time we want. Has customer accountability influenced their decisions at all? Well, we've got Goldman Sachs over there, selling Mortgage Backed Securities that are designed to fail to their customers, and then shorting those very same securities. And yet Goldman still has customers...
Libertarians believe that companies who "doctor" their drugs will fail by popular opinion.
After killing people, like the fungal meningitis outbreak. Note that compounding pharmacies are outside of FDA's authority. This allowed them to circumvent regulations that probably would have stopped this outbreak from spreading across half the nation. Yes, circumventing regulations resulted in lower prices, but I think more expensive drugs is worth the lower risk of death.
Sure, this particular pharmacy is going to fail "by popular opinion". But without regulations, it's only a matter of time until the next pharmacy fails...and the next one...and the next one...and with each one comes another group of people who needlessly died.
And if the two biggest companies in a field colluded, in a Libertarian society, they wouldn't be able to collude for long. Number three would wipe its' arse with their remains, in very short order.
Sounds like wishful thinking. How exactly is a smaller company going to take down two bigger companies that are colluding? The two bigger companies can start selling their product at below cost to drive the smaller company out of business, using their cash reserves to out-live the smaller competitor.
There are two problems with the libertarian philosophy. First, it assumes perfect knowledge of all markets, which just isn't happening ever. Without perfect knowledge, consumers lose significant power. Second, it has no solutions to the issue of corporations becoming more powerful than consumers.
But: the bottom line in the end is - whose 4-year-old get killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.
So you're exactly right, a 4-year old American deserves protection but a 4-year old Pakistani? Oh well, that's what you get for having a terrorist neighbor or relative.
Just like that 16 year old American boy who was assassinated without any sort of due process, far away from any battlefield...merely for having a terrorist for a father. When Robert Gibbs was asked to justify how we can kill an American citizen like that, his reply was...
during the latter debates the two names were switched (anecdotal) around half the time.
Highly probably, in psychology this is called counter balancing. Basically you're switching the order of options and even tasks so that you can remove "order effects" like everyone choosing the first option.
You can also see this on the Steam store, the order of the games that are presented in the Midweek Madness column are counter balanced.
Like you said, it's all about "good guys" and "bad guys". It's so pathetically clear who is good and bad that it doesn't generate any cognitive dissonance in the player when they're killing bad guys.
That's one of the reasons why I liked playing The Witcher so much. In that game, the two fighting factions (Scoia'tael and Order of the Flaming Rose) are not clearly good or bad. Most players can identify a little bit with both of them, and most players can see that both of them do some good and some bad. The Scoia'tael suffer from racism that the Order helps to impose on them, yet the Scoia'tael also engage in terrorism against the humans that the Order protects.
You can choose which of the two you want to align with (personally, I went Scoia'tael because the Order was too religious for my taste), and you can even choose "none of the above", and each of the three story arcs has different consequences, none of which are clearly good or evil. Truly, The Witcher is the greyest game I have ever played.
Yeah, but what do you do when someone who is patently, provably wrong gets modded up to score 5? If you aren't allowed to mod that post down, it sorta defeats the purpose of moderation...
FWIW I don't want the guy to be modded down to -1 or 0 because he seems like he actually believes the stuff he's saying. I just don't think he should be above a score of 1, personally.
I think you missed the "some high-latitude locations" part. Tree rings altogether are not suspect, only those ones at high latitude, and even then only *some* of the ones at a high latitude, and even then only *after* 1960. I fail to see the contradiction.
I'm also not sure how you can say "sure the experts were debating it" and yet "the evidence was hidden". What more do you want? The evidence is right out there in the open, being discussed in peer-reviewed literature publicly available for 17 years. It was in the IPCC report. What definition of "hidden" involves reports that can be read by anyone with a web browser and a PDF reader?
Anxiously awaiting your rebuttal, especially given the fact that the decline which you claim isn't being talked about has in fact been talked about for over a decade.
Also wondering whether you agree with the fact that I was modded down to -1 for providing evidence contrary to your post.
I don't see that, either. I see "there is a scientific consensus". The only people who might say remarks such as "peer review = beyond debate" or "science is settled" are people with an agenda, and I don't consider them to be reasonable.
Strawman alert...reasonable people don't say "it's peer reviewed so it's proven beyond debate". Reasonable people say "look this paper isn't even peer reviewed so it is worth extra scrutiny".
Phil Jones' email is often cited as evidence of an attempt to "hide the decline in global temperatures". This claim is patently false and demonstrates ignorance of the science discussed. The decline actually refers to a decline in tree growth at certain high-latitude locations since 1960.
Tree-ring growth has been found to match well with temperature and hence tree-rings are used to plot temperature going back hundreds of years. However, tree-rings in some high-latitude locations diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem". Consequently, tree-ring data in these high-latitude locations are not considered reliable after 1960 and should not be used to represent temperature in recent decades.
The divergence problem has been openly discussed in the peer-reviewed literature since 1995 when it was noticed that Alaskan trees were showing a weakened temperature signal in recent decades (Jacoby 1995). This work was broadened in 1998 using a network of over 300 tree-ring records across high northern latitudes (Briffa 1998). From 1880 to 1960, tree growth closely matches temperature measurements. However, the correlation drops sharply after 1960 for certain trees at high latitudes.
Mods, feel free to mod parent down not because you think he's wrong, but because he is wrong.
Son of BOSS is a real tax shelter, believe it or not. BOSS stands for Bond and Options Sales Strategy. Son of BOSS cost the US treasury billions in taxes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Boss
And Mr. Romney's IRA is something I'd like to know more about, too. Did you know IRA contributions such as his are limited to $30,000 a year? His IRA has at least 20 million and as much as 100 million, but let's be conservative and go with 20 million. It would take over six hundred years for 30k contributions to add up to 20 million. But Romney only worked at Bain for 15 years. This means his contributions cannot exceed $450,000. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/the-secret-behind-romney-s-magical-ira.html
That means Mr. Romney got a return of at least 44 times his initial investment. If you don't think that's suspicious, maybe you're the one wearing a tinfoil hat...
Don't get me wrong, I approve of a lot of Gary Johnson's platform, but the idea of eliminating the IRS, income taxes, corporate income taxes...I'm sorry but I think that's insane. Not even Ireland has 0% corporate income tax, and consumption (sorry, "expenditure") taxes are regressive.
I'd love to support Mr. Johnson but I rather like the civilized society that we live in and I know that taxes are the price we pay for such a society.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I see where you're coming from, but I think most of the reaction to your post revolves around the word "entirely". I think you may be exaggerating a bit. Perhaps you meant is "selfish behavior is always a factor in decisions". There is a subtle difference between that and "entirely".
I use the concepts of primary and secondary motivators to describe how people make decisions. A primary motivator is one that, in and of itself, provides sufficient justification for a decision. In contrast, a secondary motivator is not quite sufficient to make a decision. However, secondary motivators can help improve the justifications of primary motivators by being so called "icing on the cake". In the absence of a primary motivator, multiple secondary motivators can combine to create sufficient justification. (potential "tertiary motivators", while positive, could not create sufficient justification in the absence of primary/secondary motivators)
Now, if you're an "ends justify the means" type of guy, all this primary/secondary motivator stuff is just a rant. But I like to look at what a person's primary and secondary motivations are, because I think it reveals something about someone's character.
Therein lies the subtle difference between "entirely" and "always a factor". "Entirely" implies that every decision is provided sufficient justification by a primary motivator composed of selfishness, and there are no secondary motivators. However, "always a factor" implies that selfishness may be either a primary or secondary motivator, depending on the person, and that other motivators may be present and may even be stronger than selfishness.
Samsung Galaxy SIII. Running on battery for 26 hours, 10 minutes. 61% charge remaining.
Cell Standby 59% (battery used by cell radio)
Android System 20% (battery used by apps)
Device idle 7%
Screen 6% (time on 45m 32s)
Exchange 4%
Android OS 4%
So in my case, for the past 24 hours, the radio has consumed ~10x as much battery power as the screen (which was on 3% of the day, a not insignificant amount)
I expect it to hold until cell phones have IR cameras.
The reason being that just because it's *possible* to buy IR equipment doesn't mean that the general public has it. If only, say, one in a thousand people have this equipment, you still have a reasonable expectation of privacy, IMO. That said, the cost is still about 10% of the median household income for an el-cheap-o version, which is pretty significant.
However, once it crosses into territory such as wifi, where you're now greater than one in ten and the equipment costs less than 2% of the median household income, you can say that a private citizen is likely to have such equipment in their possession.
Wait, so the only time "fruit of the poisonous tree" has any effect is when there was a 4th amendment violation somewhere along the line?
So in essence, the police can break any law they want, and as long as it wasn't a 4th amendment violation, any evidence that was collected in the process of breaking the law is still admissible?
There are two factors here. One is whether the act is legal or illegal. The other is the punishment.
I will agree with you that violating the law brings consequences. However, these consequences need to be rational. You can murder someone in the first degree - END A HUMAN BEING'S LIFE - and you probably serve 20 years (on average, depending on jurisdiction).
Contrast that to growing plants and getting life in prison. Are you seriously telling me that you're okay with that outcome vis-a-vis 20 years for murder? Do you really believe that people growing plants is more dangerous to our society than someone who ends another human's life?
The question I have is, if the government agents in question had to engage in illegal trespassing in order to place the cameras, wouldn't any surveillance collected from such cameras be fruit of the poisonous tree?
Now, if they didn't have to trespass in order to place the cameras, it's a different story.
There are bad cops, there are asshole cops, and there are cops who look the other way when they see the bad asshole cops. They refuse to testify against their fellow cops. They refuse to turn them in for breaking the law. Hell, even after their fellow cops get caught violating the law, they still turn out en-masse to protest the fact that they are not above the law!
In my mind, this is how it should go. You're found out to be a bad cop? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You're found to have known about a bad cop and do nothing? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You turn a bad cop in? His pension is added to yours.
Hit people where the wallet is and watch how fast the cops start policing themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
Note that the majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia. Feel free to read it, I'm sure it's rather convincing. The gist is that IR equipment is not generally available to public citizens and therefore you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the IR emitted from your home. This is much different than, say, wifi, because laptops with integrated wifi are generally available to the public.
how about if they are only visible/audible if using advanced equipment and manipulation (to for example filter sound)
Kyllo vs. United States. You need a warrant to use thermal imaging equipment to scan for grow houses. The reason is that since the general public does not have typically have access to equipment that can see infrared, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your infrared signal.
From what I gather, it's not just the hurricane that's the problem. It's the fact that the hurricane is slamming into a nor'easter, and the pressures in the area mean the storm is moving more slowly than normal.
It reminds me of the earthquake that happened recently. The eastern US isn't used to earthquakes, and sure there was hardly any damage, but then again none of our buildings and bridges are actually spec'd for any significant earthquake.
What bothers me the most about the hurricane is the high winds. There are a lot of trees with limbs that are growing around power lines in my area, and high winds are almost certainly going to knock out the power for lots of people...
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers
They're still accountable to their customers. We can choose to walk away with our money any time we want. Has customer accountability influenced their decisions at all? Well, we've got Goldman Sachs over there, selling Mortgage Backed Securities that are designed to fail to their customers, and then shorting those very same securities. And yet Goldman still has customers...
Libertarians believe that companies who "doctor" their drugs will fail by popular opinion.
After killing people, like the fungal meningitis outbreak. Note that compounding pharmacies are outside of FDA's authority. This allowed them to circumvent regulations that probably would have stopped this outbreak from spreading across half the nation. Yes, circumventing regulations resulted in lower prices, but I think more expensive drugs is worth the lower risk of death.
Sure, this particular pharmacy is going to fail "by popular opinion". But without regulations, it's only a matter of time until the next pharmacy fails...and the next one...and the next one...and with each one comes another group of people who needlessly died.
And if the two biggest companies in a field colluded, in a Libertarian society, they wouldn't be able to collude for long. Number three would wipe its' arse with their remains, in very short order.
Sounds like wishful thinking. How exactly is a smaller company going to take down two bigger companies that are colluding? The two bigger companies can start selling their product at below cost to drive the smaller company out of business, using their cash reserves to out-live the smaller competitor.
There are two problems with the libertarian philosophy. First, it assumes perfect knowledge of all markets, which just isn't happening ever. Without perfect knowledge, consumers lose significant power. Second, it has no solutions to the issue of corporations becoming more powerful than consumers.
Joe Klein is a columnist for Time Magazine. He recently went on Morning Joe to discuss drones.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/klein-drones-morning-joe
So you're exactly right, a 4-year old American deserves protection but a 4-year old Pakistani? Oh well, that's what you get for having a terrorist neighbor or relative.
Just like that 16 year old American boy who was assassinated without any sort of due process, far away from any battlefield...merely for having a terrorist for a father. When Robert Gibbs was asked to justify how we can kill an American citizen like that, his reply was...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/robert-gibbs-anwar-al-awlaki_n_2012438.html
during the latter debates the two names were switched (anecdotal) around half the time.
Highly probably, in psychology this is called counter balancing. Basically you're switching the order of options and even tasks so that you can remove "order effects" like everyone choosing the first option.
You can also see this on the Steam store, the order of the games that are presented in the Midweek Madness column are counter balanced.
Like you said, it's all about "good guys" and "bad guys". It's so pathetically clear who is good and bad that it doesn't generate any cognitive dissonance in the player when they're killing bad guys.
That's one of the reasons why I liked playing The Witcher so much. In that game, the two fighting factions (Scoia'tael and Order of the Flaming Rose) are not clearly good or bad. Most players can identify a little bit with both of them, and most players can see that both of them do some good and some bad. The Scoia'tael suffer from racism that the Order helps to impose on them, yet the Scoia'tael also engage in terrorism against the humans that the Order protects.
You can choose which of the two you want to align with (personally, I went Scoia'tael because the Order was too religious for my taste), and you can even choose "none of the above", and each of the three story arcs has different consequences, none of which are clearly good or evil. Truly, The Witcher is the greyest game I have ever played.
Yeah, but what do you do when someone who is patently, provably wrong gets modded up to score 5? If you aren't allowed to mod that post down, it sorta defeats the purpose of moderation...
FWIW I don't want the guy to be modded down to -1 or 0 because he seems like he actually believes the stuff he's saying. I just don't think he should be above a score of 1, personally.
I think you missed the "some high-latitude locations" part. Tree rings altogether are not suspect, only those ones at high latitude, and even then only *some* of the ones at a high latitude, and even then only *after* 1960. I fail to see the contradiction.
I'm also not sure how you can say "sure the experts were debating it" and yet "the evidence was hidden". What more do you want? The evidence is right out there in the open, being discussed in peer-reviewed literature publicly available for 17 years. It was in the IPCC report. What definition of "hidden" involves reports that can be read by anyone with a web browser and a PDF reader?
I think you missed the "independently verified" part...
Anxiously awaiting your rebuttal, especially given the fact that the decline which you claim isn't being talked about has in fact been talked about for over a decade.
Also wondering whether you agree with the fact that I was modded down to -1 for providing evidence contrary to your post.
I don't see that, either. I see "there is a scientific consensus". The only people who might say remarks such as "peer review = beyond debate" or "science is settled" are people with an agenda, and I don't consider them to be reasonable.
Strawman alert...reasonable people don't say "it's peer reviewed so it's proven beyond debate". Reasonable people say "look this paper isn't even peer reviewed so it is worth extra scrutiny".
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline-advanced.htm
Mods, feel free to mod parent down not because you think he's wrong, but because he is wrong.
So you hack you're Wii, but are ethical about it and don't pirate.
Correct. I hack my Wii, and then I hack the video games to create cheat codes for them. http://www.geckocodes.org/
Chances are that it was rejected the first time. And the second time. And the third time...
You see, when Apple doesn't get a patent approved, they just change a few words and keep trying. Take for example the '604 patent. It was rejected twice in 2007, three times in 2008, once in 2009, twice in 2010 and once in 2011. (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all )
Finally it got approved (tenth time is the charm!).
Son of BOSS is a real tax shelter, believe it or not. BOSS stands for Bond and Options Sales Strategy. Son of BOSS cost the US treasury billions in taxes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Boss
And Mr. Romney's IRA is something I'd like to know more about, too. Did you know IRA contributions such as his are limited to $30,000 a year? His IRA has at least 20 million and as much as 100 million, but let's be conservative and go with 20 million. It would take over six hundred years for 30k contributions to add up to 20 million. But Romney only worked at Bain for 15 years. This means his contributions cannot exceed $450,000. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/the-secret-behind-romney-s-magical-ira.html
That means Mr. Romney got a return of at least 44 times his initial investment. If you don't think that's suspicious, maybe you're the one wearing a tinfoil hat...
Don't get me wrong, I approve of a lot of Gary Johnson's platform, but the idea of eliminating the IRS, income taxes, corporate income taxes...I'm sorry but I think that's insane. Not even Ireland has 0% corporate income tax, and consumption (sorry, "expenditure") taxes are regressive.
I'd love to support Mr. Johnson but I rather like the civilized society that we live in and I know that taxes are the price we pay for such a society.