
Unsurprising finding. Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
73 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2017
"No, technically it 'massed' 1.73 kg on the Moon as well, since kg is the SI unit of mass."
True, however it also 'weighed' 3.8lbs since, as everyone knows, a pound is a measure of force (like the Newton) and the actual imperial unit of mass is the slug.
Hmmmm... I sense an opportunity. El reg should add the slug as a unit of mass (e.g., 1 adult badger == 130.4347 banana slugs).
However, I note that el reg has also intermixed measures of weight and mass. We need a purifying revamp of the standards!
"All taxes are paid from the wallet of the customer."
That's a fallacy. It's a cycle; pinning the exact source is very, very difficult. Remember that the customer gets their money from their employer-- and if prices for the customer go up, they demand more from their employer. "All taxes are paid by the producer" has exactly equal validity, logic, and provability as your statement.
"I just wish all these companies would actually realise its what *customers* want, not what they want.which is important."
There's the problem. If you're not paying for something, you're the *product*, not the customer. The customers are the purchasers of your data.
Icon because it's the best I could do without a late-stage capitalist kleptocracy icon.
Sorry, but a sample of 48 tests, roughly half-and-half control and treatment, can most certainly show statistically significant effects. Mind you, it would have been *much* better if there were at least 30 in each case, due to the central limit theorem, but having fewer largely biases the mean, not the standard deviation (until you get to very small numbers, e.g. around 4-5 in each case).
In fact, that they showed a statistically significant difference (a term of art, by the way) with a small sample, that means the effect is quite large. I'm more impressed with a study this size that shows a statiistically significant result than one with 1000 in each case. With a large sample like that, you find a statistically significant difference for *anything* pretty much. Which is why we don't use the chi-square test as definiitive with large sample sizes (in structural equation modeling, for example).
(Icon more for my field than for the mic-drop moment)
This is a straw man (albeit one I fell for for a long time). True, the customers pay the tax in the form of price. However, the parallel also holds:
Who actually pays individual tax? Does the individual "magic" money out of the aether to pay their taxes, or does their employer pay the tax (built into the salary)?
It's a cycle. My income is your expense, your income is my expense.
Y = C + I + G + (X − M) = COE + GOS + GMI + T(P & M) – S(P & M) = sum(all sales) + sum(delta(all savings))
(note that for practical purposes, each of these sums come out slightly differently, due to measurement error and estimation. However, if they could all be measured perfectly, they would all produce the same number. The gross product can be seen as the summation of all income, the summation of all sales, or the summation of all production.
You can't take one of those and analyze a tax based on that. A very progressive tax at all transaction points is the only fair way to cover it. Thus: VAT should be progressive (sales transaction, percentage goes up with price), individual income tax should be progressive (salary transaction), corporate income tax should be progressive (sales to profit transaction), dividends are another name for personal income, etc. etc.
You need to study macroeconomics more closely.
Part of the EULA you agree to when you sign up gives the company a perpetual, transferable, regenerative, license to use your content in any way they wish. Effectively, you assign them copyright to anything you write. Not quite, because technically you still have the same rights you had, and can theoretically compete with them on monetizing your creation; but, really, who's gonna be more effective, you, or facebook? They have all the power.
Whether this is ethical or legal is another question. There is significant question as to the validity and enforcability of EULAS as they currently exist. But, on its face, and for all practical considerations[1], you gave away that right long ago. Just as I have in making this comment.
This is one of the reasons that copyright law, and the concept of "intellectual property" generally, desparately needs a major overhaul. And I say this as someone who basically makes his living as a creator of "intellectual property", so I'm goring my own ox.
[1] I don't have pockets deep enough to sue and win on this, do you?
Nash indeed, along with a companion stanza from SWMBO:
This wombat lives in the computer room
Among the disks and dark and gloom.
He may exist on take-out lunches,
Or Apple salesmen fried in bunches.
His lofty mental state precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage this wombat
In any form of on-line combat.
"If it's such a fustercluck, though, why isn't anyone LEAVING?"
Most of us with half a brain saw this coming as a result of George III (aka G. W. Bush) and left while the getting was good.
The US has been going down the tubes since the Nixon campaign (first to really target white supremacists as a base). Reagan accelerated the decline (destroying union power, tax cuts for the rich, tax hikes for the poor), as did the Bushes (more tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts for the poor), and now so-called "president" Trump has pushed the pedal to the metal...
(To be fair, Clinton was also a problem, allowing the gutting of welfare under his watch.)
BTW: I'm old enough to remember Nixon, and voted against Reagan twice because I could see how bad for the country he was. If you weren't there, and can't see how what they did harmed the country, you aren't qualified to wax poetic about their brilliance.
"...has been vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas,"
Yep. Yet another proof that legal != ethical.
The villification is entirely justified when the "victim" is, in fact, a villain.
Let's see where this logic gets us...
People who bought Pintos should have known that they had flaws in the gas tank protection. Therefore, when getting into an rear-end accident, the resulting fireball was entirely their fault, and Ford had no blame.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
Unethical data creation / protection / use is still unethical, even if the provider of the initial data is an idiot. It can be argued that the company is not 100% to blame, but not that it is 0% to blame.
Plus, this ignores those of us who *were* aware of possible consequences, created accounts because we basically *had* to (I am a university professor; my students don't communicate via email, they do it via fb), gave it as little information as possible, and *still* had our data weaponized.
We really need to stop the neo-liberal "companies don't do anything unethical, since you knowingly agreed to the terms of service and information flow is symmetric, instantaneous, and cost-free, and consumers are entirely rational" mindset in its tracks. The very existence of advertising companies denies the premises.
It's open source. Rip the fucking code out and build. Problem fixed.
To make it a little easier long term, save the change as a patch, apply to future releases.
May have to be tweaked occasionally, but this is one of the nice things about open source.
That said, I may switch to a fork myself. We'll see. Certainly not planning to watch any stupid ads.
= CTRL + Z was a control key to suspend the currently running process to the background in the C
= shell (csh) in the late 1970s BSD kernel, while CTRL + Z being used for undo was first done at
= Xerox PARC not Apple.
You know, I think you may be onto something here. Kieran may have been a little sharper than we realized. It is actually a ^Z in this sense; because the FCC obviously did not follow correct procedure, and this idiocy is going to be stop by the courts so fast it will make Pai's head spin. Plus, when the dems take congress back in 2018, it'll be passed in legislation if it is still being foughy over (which it probably will be). So it's just backgrounded for a bit, and the fg is coming soon. :-)
= And that is one of the more enlightening web sites. Are you making this up?
I'm a professor in a business school (ex-computer scientist for 20 years prior). It is a term that is used in economic circles. It is not well known outside those circles.
The very short version is that in a capitalist system, capital is equipment or tools. Not money. Money is just a short form token that allows you to convert one type of capital into another, or exchange capital for labor, or vice versa. It's an accounting trick, and nothing else.
The current American system has turned that onto its head, giving actual primary value to the money itself, not to the capital it theoretically represents.
Money doesn't do jack shit. Capital does. And yes, it does make a difference. You do know, for instance, that companies nothing from the stock market, right?
If that's news to you, then I suggest you do some reading up on real economics. And not just micro.
(Oh, and since your abiliity to do actual research seems to be wikipedia, go look at "financialism" and "finance capitalism" there.)
The "law of supply and demand" only applies in microeconomics, and only in a perfect world that does not, and can not, exist. It requires:
* Perfect competition
* Commodity non-distinguishable goods
* Perfect information flow
* No assymetric information
* No transaction costs
* Perfect mobility
* An infinite number of suppliers
* An infinite number of consumers
Break any one of these conditions, and it is an approximation, not a "law". Break a couple more, and you have complete market failure.
Raise it to the macroeconomic level (country wide or world wide), and it's completely useless and does not describe reality at all.
It is you who does not understand fundamental economics, whether capitalist or otherwise. (Oh, and a small hint: the US system hasn't been capitalist in a long, long time; since at least the 18th century, and quite possibly the 17th. It's actually financialist.)
Your analogy is wrong.
What anti-net neutrality want to do is charge you to enter the road AND to leave the road.
If I am downloading terabytes of stuff from netflix, sure, that implies a lot of data enters my ISPs network from netflix. But in order for me to RECEIVE those bytes, I will have had to pay my ISP to give me a big pipe.
So they have already been paid to carry those big trucks.
@Jonathan Schwartz:
= TBH, women like you are the reason feminism gets such a bad name.
I'm cis-male.
And men still don't get to decide how bad "grabbing an ass" is. The rest of your comments I'll ignore because you didn't understand the subtleties of the point that I was trying to make-- which is that Microsoft has a right and a duty to act based on suspicion. They are not a court of law. Just like Google was right to fire their jerk.
= I can definitely say that as an undersized 13-year-old girl, while I found having my butt & chest
= grabbed by the jocks as part of a bullying campaign was upsetting, it didn't freak me out half as
= much as their threats to rape me if they ever found me alone. (They weren't smart enough to
= threaten to do it if I told on them, or I might not have gotten the little asshats suspended.)
Okay, fair, enough, I was being extreme, but to try to make a point-- men don't get to decide that "grabbing a little ass" isn't serious. It's the grabee that gets to decide. "Boys will be boys" is not acceptable, and is legally actionable.
The "proven guilty" standard is for criminal cases in criminal court with criminal penalties. It applies nowhere else. In civil courts, it's "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond a reasonable doubt". In a company, the threshold is even lower.
So yes, Microsoft could have, and should have, done more. Offering to transfer her to a different department is not sufficient, nor is it appropriate (unless offered to her as a possibility to choose from). The accused should have been transferred; he, after all, was the alleged wrongdoer, not she.
Doing so is in Microsoft's best interests-- whether there was a crime or not, she perceived one, and that would cause problems in the department. Moving someone was necessary simply from a productivity point of view. Absent convincing evidence, the transfer for the accused should not itself be punitive; it should be to another useful experience (since he was an intern), but which involved no further contact with the woman.
And, finally: it is always men saying that there are "degrees"and "grabbing an ass is not as bad as forcible rape". I doubt the difference is so apparent to the victim. They are both equally invasive, and equally wrong. Yes, I think we should charge people grabbing an ass with rape.
You are not the one who gets to define how bad the crime is. It's the victim that gets to decide.
= So if America is so bad, why not move elsewhere?
I did. As soon as I got my PhD, I left the US permanently. It's a hideous place. And, FYI, I was born in the US, lived and worked in the US for 50 years. I am now in France, and am happier than I have ever been in my life.
Until Macron ruins it, of course. Vote Melenchon!
= And .... One Day .... A Fruit Fly will be elected President of the United States based on it's superior = looks and decision making skills ... Verily it will be Thus.
Too late, it already happened. Although it was its fruity-appearing looks and ability to appear crudely human rather than its decision-making skills that did it.
=It just so happens that you can't fire people over opinions.
Actually, in the US, in most states (though possibly not California), yes you can. You can also fire them for voting for the wrong candidate, being a Democrat, parting their hair on the wrong side of their head, or looking at you funny. See "employment at will" (typically a part of the doublespeak "right to work" laws).