Comment Look a distraction (Score 1) 818
This whole Confederate flag business is definitely not a distraction from the recent Senate vote to fast track things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Look, a squirrel!
This whole Confederate flag business is definitely not a distraction from the recent Senate vote to fast track things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Look, a squirrel!
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
But synthetic blood is so much more convenient.
What’s often referred to as the “Western diet,” or foods that are high in fat, sugars and simple carbohydrates, has been linked to a range of chronic illnesses in the United States,
I seem to recall also that eating excessive amounts of protein is also bad for you.
I guess it's time to start avoiding foods that are high in food.
One of many big lies that politicians tell is "we want more affordable housing". Nonsense. Whenever we get affordable housing, everybody panics. That's what 2008 was--a very brief spate of affordable housing, and as soon as we got it, almost everybody was in a tizzy.
Why? Leverage.
Very few can buy a house for cash. Most of them are financed. By their very nature, such purchases are financially damaging to you unless the asset you finance goes up. The damage is usually bearable for smaller items such as a car, or appliances. It's too much to bear for a house, which became the overweight item in most middle-class investment portfolios.
So. We encouraged most of the country to have an investment strategy that could be summed up as "overweight leveraged real estate" and this is the natural result--everybody wants housing to keep going up in price.
Furthermore, governments rely on property tax revenue which is... proportional to assessed value. The government wants housing to go up too. Then the people that run the show have the gall to say, "we're going to create affordable housing". Nonsense.
What they call "affordable housing" usually requires you to be in some kind of welfare program to qualify. Being on welfare is, in some sense, actually a high price to pay for housing.
Another thing they called "affordable housing" was the shoddy loans that caused the 2008 crisis. Once again, that's not affordable housing. It's affordable *credit*, ie, cheap money, used to buy expensive housing.
REITs are one way for people to buy real estate without having an over-weight portfolio. They're still leveraged though, because it's too difficult to make money in this system without leverage. It's like an arms race. If we took the leverage out, it might be possible to run the system using non-leveraged REITs. You'd put a significant portion of your savings in a non-leveraged REIT. Instead of earning interest, you'd earn dividends. The possibility of the REIT going to zero wouldn't be there like it is with today's leveraged REITs. In other words, we could make housing something like a regulated utility.
Needless to say, this is a huge leap and I've been made fun of for suggesting it before. Debt finance is very, Very, VERY entrenched in this market. It'd be revolutionary to do it any other way.
I'm not afraid of a giant forest fire, but I'm terrified of drones.
The Presidential Candidate With a Plan To Run the US On 100% Clean Energy
They misspelled non-candidate.
My favorite IQ test works like this: 1. Throw imaginary stick. 2. IQ is inversely proportional to distance run.
That test is just for dogs though... usually.
I'd rather have Undo beta.
That feature is still in beta.
As you may recall, after the whole Thailand flood, either for real or imaginary (for profit), there was a shortage of drives, and the prices doubled, then tripled. It would be VERY hard for any company to not cheat a bit in the binning process when the profit is triple what they used to make.
If the price tripled, then the profit (price - cost) probably increased by far more than that.
TIL that if I want to know something, I can just ask this praxis guy who will look it up for me.
It's important to clarify obscure terminology that wouldn't be recognized by a large portion of the Slashdot members.
We can invent mathematical theories that come close to describing a multiverse where such an event is possible, but we have no proof that those theories are actually correct.
Science doesn't care one bit about proof that something is actually correct. Science is about prediction, not proof.
In short, such a "law of nature" is as much a human invention as a story of an extradimensional intelligence that likes to create sentient creatures in his spare time. For the purpose of satisfying the human desire to know everything, both are sufficient tales.
Science doesn't deal in tales for satisfying the human desire to know everything. It deals in prediction, which is what makes science better at making motors and computers than religion.
It's kind of like this: http://ih0.redbubble.net/image...
If such beliefs do not conflict with empirical evidence, then what is your SCIENTIFIC basis for discounting them or declaring them antithetical to science? At worst, they show wishful thinking.
Faith and wishful thinking are the opposite of the scientific method. Try using faith instead of an independently verifiable double-blind study, and see if your paper gets published. Religion asks you to suspend the usual scientific skepticism for a certain set of beliefs. Fortunately, people are very good at compartmentalizing so this doesn't result in the horrors some people would expect.
It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of premises lead you to assign an equal estimated probability for a universe to be created by an otherwise hidden powerful sentient being, as a law of nature? And more importantly, how would you make verifiable predictions concerning how the world would look like if it were created by a powerful sentient being as compared to by a law of nature? Finally, if you can make verifiable predictions of the actions of a mysterious sentient being, why bother including the sentient being in the theory since you could just include the rules on how it would act instead?
If they do this simple and obvious thing, the homeopathic industry in the US will vanish over night,
Not really -- it will just be diluted until not a single homeopathy vendor remains, but the market will retain the essence of the original vendors and the effect will be even more potent.
Garbage In -- Gospel Out.
