1st: It is possible for this to be completely imaginary and not imaginary at the same time... complex numbers. Life sucks. I had a fight over the offensive nature of Game of Thrones, the book. There are a couple of sexual scenes in the book. One party deemed those seems highly offensive. I on the other hand read them closely and wondered how anyone could consider consensual sex offensive. Not just consensual, but proactive consensual. Martin managed to demonstrate explicit consent by both parties inside a paragraph with almost 0 dialog. The entire dialog was "No?" I could not manage to get the other party to comprehend how brilliant that example was. All they could see was the colloquial words for the genitalia involved.

2nd: 1st step in any of this is for someone to say "STOP!". But then I remember the sexual assault video done by Popeye. He was doing the military press will Olive Oil as the bar bell. She kept saying "DON'T"... kiss... "STOP!" ... "Don't"... kiss ... "Stop!"

On one side, clearly Popeye should have stopped RIGHT? On the other side, it was also potentially clear to say that Olive Oil did not want him to stop. Both interpretations were left wide open. COMPLETELY OPEN. Both interpretations were correct. Both interpretation were completely correct. Had he stopped she would have wanted him to stop. Had he not stopped there is a good chance she didn't want hime to stop.

Unraveling this is not easy. Making the chain of evidence happen to a paint a company as 'evil' is actually pretty easy.

No matter what, there is an equation that makes it even harder...

Revenue > Expense. The people who keep revenue flowing into your system are granted a little more leeway than the people who aren't keeping revenue flowing into the system. Uber needs every dollar it can get flowing into its system.

I have been hearing about alternate reasons for such a pull back. We have the ghost cities that China built in the belief that "If you build it they will come". They were rolling in money and were spending it in that magnanimous Command style.

The money isn't quite so flush now and they have to make decisions. Blaming it on "changing to 'cleaner' methods" sounds like a way to distract from the real reason ... "We have a shortage of funds and had to change our priorities!"

The market doesn't give a flying fig about the rules you put in front of it. The market will always respond freely. Constrain it too much and "alternative" markets show up. The alternative market isn't really alternative, it is just freedom expressing itself.

Quick show of hands!

How many people use the tab key and how many use the space bar?

Wait I use both, except I don't use the space bar to line up my code.

It is time to turn around and walk the other way, unless you are entertained by stupid arguments.

Mac vs PC. Run the other way. I can get around in all of them. I swear less at Macs. I praise Microsoft for guaranteeing that I will continue to be employable till I die.

iPhone vs Android: Run the other way. I can get around in both. I swear at both of them equally for being moronic in different places.

Spaces vs Tabs: WTF? I don't worry about it... Sublime, textmate, etc do what they do. The only time I start crying is when Excel decides it cannot figure out quoted comma delimited content on text to column. (which I finally learned to paste, text to column, undo, undo, paste again and everything is fixed)...

Curly brace underneath function or to the right of the params parens? You can get me started on this in a meeting, but I will follow whatever the practice guidelines say for the company. I like to see the curly braces line up though.

Butter vs Margarine? Salted vs Unsalted? I prefer Butter. I prefer Unsalted.

It is now truly discriminating to the underprivileged because we are letting people who don't have the funds to pay for "same day", have the option to use it. Sort of like the Lottery.

Two thumbs up to the people who love to keep the poor man down..

You are winning the game.

This is going to backfire. Trump is only going to get more popular because of Anonymous.

How much free advertising can this guy generate?

I went to Germany in 1986. My host father taught me a lesson. When I got there the Mark traded 3 to 1 with the $. As the year went, it dropped to less than 2 to 1. German companies liked when the Mark was 3 to 1. That meant it was easier to sell product to America.

This is not new news. It has been know for REALLY long time.

China pegged itself to the $ to maximize its ability to do what it did.

BMI is useful for people that are the proper height. As soon as you get out of the proper height range, BMI becomes pretty much useless.

They are amuck these researchers. There is validity to the bias. The unfortunate problem for them is that they can't actually fix the problem without making the problem worse.

The problem is being fixed already. It will take at least a generation of teachers to fix. This generation cannot fix it. It may not get fixed next generation either. The tensors in the equation are too tight. Massage them and they blow back in your face.

In Orlando, Florida, before cell phones and texting were a problem at all (1992), I used to watch myself go through a dark yellow light and then watch the next 8 cars go through after me. It was so bad that Red lights were almost viewed as green lights because the people on the cross street had to wait for all the people going through red lights before starting, which was just about when their red light started.

Bad driving is everywhere. It doesn't need texting to make it worse. It was already worse.

They are only acting as the authority to point out the problems. There are huge problems in epidemiology. The really useful data gathered by epidemiology is not the positive correlations, it is the non correlations. This presents a rather ugly problem. The data that people find interesting are the positive correlations. With the exception of 1 or 2 studies, these are pretty much worthless. The data that shows a link isn't there is what is really useful. This is the source of all the bad research.

If you look at epidemiological studies, you find lots of RRs, HRs, and ORs (Relative Risk, Hazard Ratio, Odds Ratio). The confounding factor that is ignored is the Survival Ratio. The ratio of the survivors of doing something to the survivors of not doing that something. This number is almost always 99.99...% One exception is lung cancer and smoking. The survival ratio there is 92%. 92% of people who smoke their whole lives do not get lung cancer. (some simplification here).

Yet another bloke claiming settled.

Lovely RED chart at the top imbuing you with an overwhelming sense of overheating.

Then you find the "proof" of warming down at the bottom. A carefully excised anomalous temperature chart that. 0.5C total range with a tail pointing down.

Plot the temperature folks. It ain't hard. BEST has it available for free. http://berkeleyearth.org/data

All you have to do is parse and plot. I have been pawing through the data from each station. Temperature ranges everywhere. Some really cool ones in Eastern Russia. No where can you see increases over the last 150 years. Way to close to a flat line.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html

What the iowahawk talks about in the averages for schools is relevant to the discussion of temperatures.

Science, in studies like this, manages to forget science. Science is finding what is wrong with your idea.

These folks (and all people who practice epidemiology irrationally, which is most) get lost in death and forget life.

Way back in 1993, I visited an atomic laboratory in Pennsylvania. On the tour, they showed us the 30,000 core computing machine they had purchased several years before. "We still can't program it".

30 seconds later he pointed to the next piece of metal.

This is our 120,000 core computer.

I raised my hand "Why did you buy a 120,000 core machine when you can't even program the 30,000 core machine!"

"Well it's faster."

one of my early lessons in big companies attacking the wrong problem.