There was a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts going on forever long before nuclear weapons were ever invented.
Wait what am I talking about? I mean it's not like any Western power ever invaded and had a long drawn-out conflict in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan before the US came along, right?
Everything I do is pointless, so I spend my life passing time until I eventually die. Everything's temporary to make more of my life vanish out from under me without me noticing too much; the time in between is horribly empty, and nothing really completes me in a worthwhile way.
They have tools like no one else for looking through vast amounts of data to find what they want. As such, they could, if they wished, very easily dig in to our data for company secrets. Now, they say they won't, but all you have is their word on that.
You have their 'word' but it would also ruin their reputation if they were caught, and unless you're emailing around the Minuteman launch codes, I'm pretty confident that Google's reputation is worth more than your data. If you get a security system for your house, the security company would have a very easy time robbing you, but their reputation is worth a lot more to them than whatever is in your house.
If you think about it that way, Google has more incentive to keep your data safe than your own IT people do.
Re:This is how economics is supposed to work!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Not via regulation or per-category taxes that artificially manipulate, but by consumers adjusting their buying habits as costs change. The problem with your idealization of market capitalsm is the problem that gas-guzzling and dangerous SUV's create externalities in terms of environmental destruction, dependence on foreign oil, and injury to others on the road, which the buyers don't pay for. Except for the latter which might be paid for in insurance costs, none of these elements factor into the price or operation of the vehicle. They weren't then and they're not now.
I get suspicious too when I hear about targeted taxes and subsidies. It's dangerous ground on which to tread. I always hope for economically sensible policies, and of course am usually disappointed. But reasonable policies that take advantage of natural market forces by making users pay for their externalities do have a place.
Thanks for this response! Before reading this I was astonished at the number of bitter men not getting laid.
But master p has it right on: women approach men in the way that makes them feel most comfortable. Girls send intentionally ambiguous signals because if they actually like a man, they don't want to take any risks associated with moving too fast. They're trying to move in slowly and assess the situation. If a woman likes you and you start to become friends, that's an extremely positive development as far as getting things going, and it's just a matter of time before stuff starts happening. If you start having obnoxiously long conversations with them or they start going out of their way to see you or whatnot, then you know they're hooked. This takes maybe a week or two, but pretty soon it will be really obvious that a woman takes more interest in you than would be explained by, say, office cordiality.
I don't really know how to pick a girl up in one night, if that's what all the interest is in. In that case, it's all up to the man to create that interest, and it's a skill I don't have, but also one I don't particularly want. Move slowly, relate to women like they're normal human beings, and you'll never have to miss out on a woman that likes you. If women just don't like you, that's a completely different problem, and picking up on signals isn't going to make a lick of difference.
In social science.5 is huuge! they don't even usually square r-scores in social science because it's so depressing..5 is a MASSIVE correlation in social science. Consider how many factors are involved in research success: luck, competence, etc. So if these findings actually show causation (which, admittedly,l they might not), that would mean that beer results in 50% of success or failure, and all the luck and technical skill and social factors that go into success combined can only match beer, with another 50% of the variance. I would go so far as to say that such a high correlation actually makes causation almost impossible; there must be a lot of poor scientists drowning their sorrows and whatnot that this is also taking into account.
Actually our health system has completely ballooning costs relative to other countries and is really more of an example of the opposite phenomenon, where insurance must pay for all possible treatment or be sued. Our system without a doubt provides the most care of any system in the world, even though it's pretty obvious that returns diminish dramatically after about 10% of GDP (we are at 15% of GDP, 2nd runner up is Switzerland at 11 or 12%).
Returns diminish because, essentially, more care doesn't actually make people healthier past a certain point. 99% if people just need a GP (cheap), immunizations (dirt cheap), antibiotics when they get an bacterial infection (dirt cheap), and surgeons to sew them up when they get in a car crash (expensive-ish but hopefully uncommon and only rarely protracted). The problem is whenever anybody gets anything terminal, there's the potential for basically infinite spending, and the more successful treatment is, the more money goes in because treatment is prolonged. In this case our system is not "barely good enough", it's more way too good, or at least, way too generous.
Just for clarity, the average survival rate for individuals properly treated with HAART is well over 5 years after AIDS diagnosis. 6-24 months is the prognosis for untreated patients. Also many patients with AIDS do not die from it, although it is often difficult to determine whether AIDS is implicated in their deaths... I'm just saying, for perspective's sake, that life itself is a death sentence, so you're right but you're also wrong in saying it's not a chronic condition; there do exist individuals who are able to almost completely control it for very many years using drugs and who die of relatively natural causes.
The following paper reports a 25% mortality after 5 years for patients treated with contemporary HAART methodology:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16260908
Actually unless I'm very much mistaken (and this is not to contradict any of your main points), almost every music act makes far more money touring than in CD sales. album sales are marketing for them, they split $2 an album four ways, so if they go Gold that's 500k *.50, so 250k, about enough to live one year with their typical lifestyles, and they often don't even make an album every year, much less a successful one.
Albums get artists famous, but touring is their day job. It's what reliably pays the bills.
Also, although I agree with you, I sort of think Zeppelin's not really a representative example of the typical band.
The nice thing about municipalities though, is unlike things done by the federal government, or to a lesser extent the state government, it's real easy to vote with your feet. Municipalities have to compete with each other. If you don't like the way Seattle runs things, it's real easy to move to Bellevue (will be especially once they build the stupid train across Lake Washington so you wouldn't have to slog across the 520 everyday). But if the state has a policy you don't like, you'd have to probably get a transfer or a new job to get away, and if the US government did something you didn't like, you'd have to file your Canadian immigration papers and start waiting.
My point is only, that municipalities are more like private companies. They have to compete. They know this, and that's why the City of Tacoma has advertisements up in Seatac airport.
In Canada (where i tend to live), the Conservative government struggles to fight the popularity and outspokenness of the Green lobby (partly because it consists of all 3 opposition parties), and I'd say they're the most global warming skeptical 1st-world country besides the US.
I'm in Germany and you might as well speak sanskrit here as deny global warming. Remember this is the Christian Democratic party leader Angela Merkel that's trying to coax Bush into accepting emissions reductions; the Europeans are already competing amongst themselves for who can reduce the most.
So. ahem. the US is the only bubble on earth where people don't take this seriously.
Your condition is kind of a case in point about the american suburban lifestyle (sorry that other guy was a jerk to you btw, I'ma try and be nicer). But there is NOWHERE on earth where 50 miles is not a miserable/ridiculous commute. There was an article in the New Yorker about how miserable long commutes make people, but people have a tough time makign the cost/benefit analysis that it's probably worth taking a major quality of life hit if you can significantly shorten your commute, but nobody wants to take it.
I don't personally even understand why it's a tradeoff, cus I live in a huge 3-bedroom apt w/ all amenities (except a dishwasher, which we've got plenty of room for) 3 miles/5 minute subway ride from downtown montreal where my school is, for which I split $1290/mo with 3 roomates. The gas here is well over $4/gallon (1.30ish per liter is how they actually sell it), and all i can do is feel bad for the suckers that have to buy it.
Then when I moved back with my parents last summer and worked in Seattle (25 miles away), I had a 100 minute bike/bus commute and was utterly miserable for 3 months (the train would have been even longer, btw, your train sounds a lot better than transit in Seattle). I know being away from college and whatnot had a lot to do with my misery, but I have pretty much never hated anything as much as that commute.
Anway I don't know why you live where you live, but if I was you I'd be seeeeriously considering moving, if it's not some kind of pleasure palace where servants fan you with palm fronds as you sit at the poolside and devise elaborate but easily escapable death sequences for James Bond. I mean, the way it sounds, it's not like you see much of the place anyway.
I agree with you about centrism.... I just wish the American center was about where the Canadian center is....and as a Canadian resident, to me that doesn't mean left wing so much as just not retarded.
-3/4 parties agree (except the ruling one) to meet the kyoto accords so as not to destroy ourselves
-screw Iraq pullout, just don't go there to begin with
-if you sign a free trade agreement, DON'T BREAK IT.
-don't charge people money for health care (that's just kinda sick).
-permit gay marriage (aka human rights) and don't spend all your time whining about it.
-balance the damn budget.
-aand uh, if you're the leader's right hand man, don't shoot people.
I mean, there's problems up north too, but American politics makes them look like subtleties.
How did this guy get a 5?
Alaska is a big place. On the map of the ring of fire, southern Alaska and the Aleutians are clearly in it. The Bering Strait is clearly far north of it. This is like saying, "Eastern Washington isn't desert-like! There's a rain forest in Washington!" Yeah. On the Western coast.
I have absolutely no idea what jury you're waiting on.
Also, I'm sorry about your irritated lungs, but there's gonna be a good couple billion people a little irritated that they've got no water and their house is underwater, whether humans caused it or not.
To start off, God I wish I didn't need the internet. I'd get rid of it so fast. I'd kill to get back all the time I coulda spent doing real work, or reading, or being outside spent instead spent on Slashdot. Honestly, I have some envy for people that actually don't need it. You can do what you really have to do at work or the library. So I don't think lack of the internet is any sign of poverty in america or whatever.
BUT
There is honest-to-god food insecurity in the US. Yeah I mean that all those poor people living in the lap of luxury don't know where their next meal is coming from, or have to choose between food and rent. And just cus you don't see them from the freeway on your commute from suburbia to office park doesn't mean they don't exist. What's all the more fucked up about it is that the problem is about 10 times worse here than in every other industrialized country, because American politicians are far more interested in invading foreign countries and pork for their districts than giving a f--- about starving people.
Do you remember what Clemenceau once said on operating systems? He said operating systems were too important a matter to be left to executives. When he said it, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, operating systems are too important to be left to the consumers.
Mandrake, I will not sit idly by and watch virtual machine infiltration, virtual machine plots, and the international virtual machine conspiracy, to sap and impurify the fluid of our precious internet tubes!
Guns are a device for depriving someone else's liberty. It's one thing if you live in the woods and actualy need guns to defend your property from robbers and bears, because you are the law in that case. Everyone needs to be a tyrant.
In the city, everyone cedes their coercive rights to a central authority, because it is possible to have an arrangement where only the government can hold coercive power while individuals give theirs up. People gain the right not to be coerced, giving up their right to coerce, which they hopefully won't need if they won't need to defend themselves. That's the basis without which cities could not function.
My friend/roomate was in Chicago and gave this guy a couple bucks when the guy asked. The guy pulled him aside and said "between you and me, next week, I'ma get my gun. And I won't be ASKIN' anyone for money."
That guy will be exercising his alleged right to have a weapon of coercive violence. In exchange, others will lose their rights to private property, like their wallets. So whose liberty do you prefer in that case?
This IS a matter of freedom vs tyrranny. But it's not as clear-cut as you suggest.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts going on forever long before nuclear weapons were ever invented.
Wait what am I talking about? I mean it's not like any Western power ever invaded and had a long drawn-out conflict in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan before the US came along, right?
Everything I do is pointless, so I spend my life passing time until I eventually die. Everything's temporary to make more of my life vanish out from under me without me noticing too much; the time in between is horribly empty, and nothing really completes me in a worthwhile way.
Dude, you need to get laid.
You are obviously new here.
This just sounds like a bluetooth keyboard.
They have tools like no one else for looking through vast amounts of data to find what they want. As such, they could, if they wished, very easily dig in to our data for company secrets. Now, they say they won't, but all you have is their word on that.
You have their 'word' but it would also ruin their reputation if they were caught, and unless you're emailing around the Minuteman launch codes, I'm pretty confident that Google's reputation is worth more than your data. If you get a security system for your house, the security company would have a very easy time robbing you, but their reputation is worth a lot more to them than whatever is in your house. If you think about it that way, Google has more incentive to keep your data safe than your own IT people do.
I get suspicious too when I hear about targeted taxes and subsidies. It's dangerous ground on which to tread. I always hope for economically sensible policies, and of course am usually disappointed. But reasonable policies that take advantage of natural market forces by making users pay for their externalities do have a place.
Thanks for this response! Before reading this I was astonished at the number of bitter men not getting laid.
But master p has it right on: women approach men in the way that makes them feel most comfortable. Girls send intentionally ambiguous signals because if they actually like a man, they don't want to take any risks associated with moving too fast. They're trying to move in slowly and assess the situation. If a woman likes you and you start to become friends, that's an extremely positive development as far as getting things going, and it's just a matter of time before stuff starts happening. If you start having obnoxiously long conversations with them or they start going out of their way to see you or whatnot, then you know they're hooked. This takes maybe a week or two, but pretty soon it will be really obvious that a woman takes more interest in you than would be explained by, say, office cordiality.
I don't really know how to pick a girl up in one night, if that's what all the interest is in. In that case, it's all up to the man to create that interest, and it's a skill I don't have, but also one I don't particularly want. Move slowly, relate to women like they're normal human beings, and you'll never have to miss out on a woman that likes you. If women just don't like you, that's a completely different problem, and picking up on signals isn't going to make a lick of difference.
In social science .5 is huuge! they don't even usually square r-scores in social science because it's so depressing. .5 is a MASSIVE correlation in social science. Consider how many factors are involved in research success: luck, competence, etc. So if these findings actually show causation (which, admittedly,l they might not), that would mean that beer results in 50% of success or failure, and all the luck and technical skill and social factors that go into success combined can only match beer, with another 50% of the variance. I would go so far as to say that such a high correlation actually makes causation almost impossible; there must be a lot of poor scientists drowning their sorrows and whatnot that this is also taking into account.
Actually our health system has completely ballooning costs relative to other countries and is really more of an example of the opposite phenomenon, where insurance must pay for all possible treatment or be sued. Our system without a doubt provides the most care of any system in the world, even though it's pretty obvious that returns diminish dramatically after about 10% of GDP (we are at 15% of GDP, 2nd runner up is Switzerland at 11 or 12%). Returns diminish because, essentially, more care doesn't actually make people healthier past a certain point. 99% if people just need a GP (cheap), immunizations (dirt cheap), antibiotics when they get an bacterial infection (dirt cheap), and surgeons to sew them up when they get in a car crash (expensive-ish but hopefully uncommon and only rarely protracted). The problem is whenever anybody gets anything terminal, there's the potential for basically infinite spending, and the more successful treatment is, the more money goes in because treatment is prolonged. In this case our system is not "barely good enough", it's more way too good, or at least, way too generous.
Just for clarity, the average survival rate for individuals properly treated with HAART is well over 5 years after AIDS diagnosis. 6-24 months is the prognosis for untreated patients. Also many patients with AIDS do not die from it, although it is often difficult to determine whether AIDS is implicated in their deaths... I'm just saying, for perspective's sake, that life itself is a death sentence, so you're right but you're also wrong in saying it's not a chronic condition; there do exist individuals who are able to almost completely control it for very many years using drugs and who die of relatively natural causes. The following paper reports a 25% mortality after 5 years for patients treated with contemporary HAART methodology: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16260908
Actually unless I'm very much mistaken (and this is not to contradict any of your main points), almost every music act makes far more money touring than in CD sales. album sales are marketing for them, they split $2 an album four ways, so if they go Gold that's 500k * .50, so 250k, about enough to live one year with their typical lifestyles, and they often don't even make an album every year, much less a successful one.
Albums get artists famous, but touring is their day job. It's what reliably pays the bills.
Also, although I agree with you, I sort of think Zeppelin's not really a representative example of the typical band.
The nice thing about municipalities though, is unlike things done by the federal government, or to a lesser extent the state government, it's real easy to vote with your feet. Municipalities have to compete with each other. If you don't like the way Seattle runs things, it's real easy to move to Bellevue (will be especially once they build the stupid train across Lake Washington so you wouldn't have to slog across the 520 everyday). But if the state has a policy you don't like, you'd have to probably get a transfer or a new job to get away, and if the US government did something you didn't like, you'd have to file your Canadian immigration papers and start waiting. My point is only, that municipalities are more like private companies. They have to compete. They know this, and that's why the City of Tacoma has advertisements up in Seatac airport.
1) This whole thing is old news (but then again, it is my school where this happened) 2) They do indeed claim to have inspired the movie: http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/spring2006/news/#4 Also on that page, my comp sci prof obsessively repeats how he did this: http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/spring2006/news/#2
In Canada (where i tend to live), the Conservative government struggles to fight the popularity and outspokenness of the Green lobby (partly because it consists of all 3 opposition parties), and I'd say they're the most global warming skeptical 1st-world country besides the US. I'm in Germany and you might as well speak sanskrit here as deny global warming. Remember this is the Christian Democratic party leader Angela Merkel that's trying to coax Bush into accepting emissions reductions; the Europeans are already competing amongst themselves for who can reduce the most. So. ahem. the US is the only bubble on earth where people don't take this seriously.
Your condition is kind of a case in point about the american suburban lifestyle (sorry that other guy was a jerk to you btw, I'ma try and be nicer). But there is NOWHERE on earth where 50 miles is not a miserable/ridiculous commute. There was an article in the New Yorker about how miserable long commutes make people, but people have a tough time makign the cost/benefit analysis that it's probably worth taking a major quality of life hit if you can significantly shorten your commute, but nobody wants to take it. I don't personally even understand why it's a tradeoff, cus I live in a huge 3-bedroom apt w/ all amenities (except a dishwasher, which we've got plenty of room for) 3 miles/5 minute subway ride from downtown montreal where my school is, for which I split $1290/mo with 3 roomates. The gas here is well over $4/gallon (1.30ish per liter is how they actually sell it), and all i can do is feel bad for the suckers that have to buy it. Then when I moved back with my parents last summer and worked in Seattle (25 miles away), I had a 100 minute bike/bus commute and was utterly miserable for 3 months (the train would have been even longer, btw, your train sounds a lot better than transit in Seattle). I know being away from college and whatnot had a lot to do with my misery, but I have pretty much never hated anything as much as that commute. Anway I don't know why you live where you live, but if I was you I'd be seeeeriously considering moving, if it's not some kind of pleasure palace where servants fan you with palm fronds as you sit at the poolside and devise elaborate but easily escapable death sequences for James Bond. I mean, the way it sounds, it's not like you see much of the place anyway.
To be fair, Pawlow is the German orthography, and Pavlov is in English. You're both wrong though cus the guy's name is actually ??????.
I wonder if it has to do with testosterone: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/1 5/2026249
>:-(
There you go buddies!
I can't really interpret those Japanese ones in the least.
I agree with you about centrism.... I just wish the American center was about where the Canadian center is. ...and as a Canadian resident, to me that doesn't mean left wing so much as just not retarded.
-3/4 parties agree (except the ruling one) to meet the kyoto accords so as not to destroy ourselves
-screw Iraq pullout, just don't go there to begin with
-if you sign a free trade agreement, DON'T BREAK IT.
-don't charge people money for health care (that's just kinda sick).
-permit gay marriage (aka human rights) and don't spend all your time whining about it.
-balance the damn budget.
-aand uh, if you're the leader's right hand man, don't shoot people.
I mean, there's problems up north too, but American politics makes them look like subtleties.
How did this guy get a 5? Alaska is a big place. On the map of the ring of fire, southern Alaska and the Aleutians are clearly in it. The Bering Strait is clearly far north of it. This is like saying, "Eastern Washington isn't desert-like! There's a rain forest in Washington!" Yeah. On the Western coast.
I have absolutely no idea what jury you're waiting on.
Also, I'm sorry about your irritated lungs, but there's gonna be a good couple billion people a little irritated that they've got no water and their house is underwater, whether humans caused it or not.
To start off, God I wish I didn't need the internet. I'd get rid of it so fast. I'd kill to get back all the time I coulda spent doing real work, or reading, or being outside spent instead spent on Slashdot. Honestly, I have some envy for people that actually don't need it. You can do what you really have to do at work or the library. So I don't think lack of the internet is any sign of poverty in america or whatever.
e wsid=32800
BUT
There is honest-to-god food insecurity in the US. Yeah I mean that all those poor people living in the lap of luxury don't know where their next meal is coming from, or have to choose between food and rent. And just cus you don't see them from the freeway on your commute from suburbia to office park doesn't mean they don't exist. What's all the more fucked up about it is that the problem is about 10 times worse here than in every other industrialized country, because American politicians are far more interested in invading foreign countries and pork for their districts than giving a f--- about starving people.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err11/
Do you remember what Clemenceau once said on operating systems? He said operating systems were too important a matter to be left to executives. When he said it, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, operating systems are too important to be left to the consumers.
Mandrake, I will not sit idly by and watch virtual machine infiltration, virtual machine plots, and the international virtual machine conspiracy, to sap and impurify the fluid of our precious internet tubes!
Guns are a device for depriving someone else's liberty. It's one thing if you live in the woods and actualy need guns to defend your property from robbers and bears, because you are the law in that case. Everyone needs to be a tyrant. In the city, everyone cedes their coercive rights to a central authority, because it is possible to have an arrangement where only the government can hold coercive power while individuals give theirs up. People gain the right not to be coerced, giving up their right to coerce, which they hopefully won't need if they won't need to defend themselves. That's the basis without which cities could not function. My friend/roomate was in Chicago and gave this guy a couple bucks when the guy asked. The guy pulled him aside and said "between you and me, next week, I'ma get my gun. And I won't be ASKIN' anyone for money." That guy will be exercising his alleged right to have a weapon of coercive violence. In exchange, others will lose their rights to private property, like their wallets. So whose liberty do you prefer in that case? This IS a matter of freedom vs tyrranny. But it's not as clear-cut as you suggest.
How many Hadamard gates does it take to tell if a light is connected to a light switch? Wait... that's actually gonna be on my CompSci exam.
In the Middle Ages, only the court jester was allowed to criticize the ruler. Perhaps some part of this has not changed.