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Comment Re:It's BIAS, stupid. (Score 1) 619

I assume you have never had an Intro to Stats class. If you have, you didn't deserve to pass it. I suggest you look up a difference between two means test and categorical variables in regression.

I'm assuming here that you misunderstood this part. Though you quoted the entire post. Slashdot Beta?

Also, East-West bias can be noted in the stats measured and stats assumed.
No regression calculation was reported for West German family, while t-test values were always fixed (i.e. assumed) for East Germans and always calculated for West Germans.
And there's that thing of "East German family background" being marked with a 0 and "West German family background" being marked with a 1.
Someone seems to like West Germans better.

I am not talking about a single issue nor am I conflating their t-tests with their probit regressions.
I'm talking about several separate cases in the survey and in the paper where the language and variables used indicate either a pro-West or anti-East bias.
Which is basically code for "NOT-socialist" in this case, as seen below.

By the end of the paper they simply decide that doing calculations for "West German family" variable isn't needed.
"Meh, we found nothing there.
But look! We got this one point in a very small cherry picked sample that PROVES East Germans are cheaters!"

Nor am I misunderstanding surveying for dichotomous, binary, values.
I'm pointing out that the way the values are set up (i.e. a West German family which is a positive 1 and a NOT West German family - a 0) indicates a pro-West bias.
Which alone, doesn't mean much. But when you take in account the the rest of the paper...

Stuff like this:

As an interaction
term of age and family background is not informative in a non-linear model like Probit
we decided to investigate the exposure to socialism by
examining these distinct age cohorts separately.5 In line with the theory that exposure to
socialism impacts dishonesty, differences in cheating are greater in older cohorts. While East
German subjects born after socialism are 19 percent more likely to report the high side of the
die than their West German counterparts, subjects who lived less than 10 years in socialism
were 28 percent more likely, and subjects who lived for 20 years or more in socialism are 65
percent more likely.

I.e. "Because we can't find any proof for our original hypothesis, here's another cherry picked proof for an unrelated hypothesis - never mind the ignoratio elenchi taking place.
Wasn't it obvious we were gunning for a "proof" that socialism promotes cheating and not that a more general definition of East or West German family heritage does?
Why not just jump on another hypothesis as if we were proving that all the time, cause we can't find enough data to back up our claims for the original hypothesis? How about that?"

They had to get the sample down to 41 people (from a sample of 110, from a population of 259 - note how they only had 90 East Germans a table ago) in order to get ANY significant result regarding the age - cause that's what they are proving now.
Literally, that's the ONLY SIGNIFICANT RESULT IN THEIR ENTIRE REGRESSION CALCULATION.
That AGE of the subject matters and NOT his/her family heritage they've been talking about the whole time.

AND there is NO (zero, zip, nada, keine...) data presented for West Germans in that same period.
Apparently, there were no West Germans in 1970s but there were at least 41 East Germans.

That's cherry picking and replacing of the original argument with a different one, which though it sounds similar is ultimately irrelevant to the original hypothesis.

Plus they are misrepresenting results for other marginal effects of their probit regression - quoting them THOUGH they are not statistically significant for the p-value they've set up.
The link to the paper is in the summary. Go look it up.

Comment It's BIAS, stupid. (Score 4, Insightful) 619

But thanks for showing it.

Study was done on 259 Germans.
Out of which "90 subjects reported having an East German family background and 98 subjects having a West German family background."

Too small a sample size to be of any use? Indeed.
They are way out in the "our numbers mean diddly-squat" territory, as their margins of error are 7.82% (WGFB) and 8.36% (EGFB).
http://www.raosoft.com/samples...

I.e. when they report 9% and 19% average cheating that's actually 9 +/- 7.82% and 19 +/- 8.36%.
It could just as well be that WGFB are cheating 16% of the time while EGFB are cheating only 11% of the time.
Oh damn! Now it means that "because democracy, stupid", levels of interpersonal trust are lowered in the west.

Also...
They all rolled the dice only 40 times. A fair dice should give an average mean of 3.5.
They report average mean for "East German family background" (90 people) to be 3.83.
For "West German family background" (98 people) they report an average mean of 3.68.
But when you sample those same Germans whether they CONSIDER THEMSELVES East, West or just Germans - simply Germans (141 people) have an average mean of 3.70 while East/West Germans (73 people) have an average of 3.83.

Note how, smaller the sample the more extreme the result gets? That's because the overall sample size is too small.
A couple of people misreporting the results could be throwing the whole thing off.
AND they have a really strange sample of "German family heritage" (37 people), whatever that should mean as East-West was set as a 0-1 choice, who are practically not cheating at all, giving the average of 3.57.
While "others" (i.e. immigrants) cheat the most. 3.85. And yes, they are the smallest sample of only 30 people.

On the other hand... the incentive to cheat was simply not there.
At best, rolling a 6 all the time (i.e. cheating 100%), they'd get 6 Euros in the end. A cup of coffee costs about 4.2 Euros.
So people were supposedly cheating in order to get between 0.07 and 0.35 Euros?

After agreeing to participate, each subject received an envelope with six single 1 EUR coins,
the maximal possible payout on the die task we used to measure cheating. Subjects were then
asked to throw a physical die 40 times.

  ...
 
The payout that subjects ultimately received was determined by selecting one of their
rolls at random, by having the experimenter draw a number from 1 to 40 out of an envelope.
Subjects earned 1 EUR for each dot on this particular roll. If subjects were completely honest,
they would be expected to report deciding on the high side of the die in 50 percent of cases,
and the expected value of the average payout would be 3.50 EUR.

But there was plenty room for false positives as they used physical dice they ASSUMED were fair.
When IRL a dice shorter by 3% on one side gives 6% more results on that side.
And low quality, toy store bought, dice are even worse.

Also, East-West bias can be noted in the stats measured and stats assumed.
No regression calculation was reported for West German family, while t-test values were always fixed (i.e. assumed) for East Germans and always calculated for West Germans.
And there's that thing of "East German family background" being marked with a 0 and "West German family background" being marked with a 1.
Someone seems to like West Germans better.

Science

Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More 619

An anonymous reader writes The Economist reports, "'UNDER capitalism', ran the old Soviet-era joke, 'man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.' In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity. Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last year to test Germans' willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to €6 ($8). ... The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers ... when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
Programming

Normal Humans Effectively Excluded From Developing Software 608

theodp (442580) writes Over at Alarming Development, Jonathan Edwards has an interesting rant entitled Developer Inequality and the Technical Debt Crisis. The heated complaints that the culture of programming unfairly excludes some groups, Edwards feels, is a distraction from a bigger issue with far greater importance to society.

"The bigger injustice," Edwards writes, "is that programming has become an elite: a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication. The way things are today if you want to be a programmer you had best be someone like me on the autism spectrum who has spent their entire life mastering vast realms of arcane knowledge — and enjoys it. Normal humans are effectively excluded from developing software. The real injustice of developer inequality is that it doesn't have to be this way." Edwards concludes with a call to action, "The web triumphalists love to talk about changing the world. Well if you really want to change the world, empower regular people to build web apps. Disrupt web programming! Who's with me?" Ed Finkler, who worries about his own future as a developer in The Developer's Dystopian Future, seconds that emotion. "I think about how I used to fill my time with coding," Finkler writes. "So much coding. I was willing to dive so deep into a library or framework or technology to learn it. My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles. I'm less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives. I value stability and clarity."

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 468

It ain't "loss of vision". There is no vision to lose. They don't see anything and drive around using instruments and maps.

Also, "fatal scenarios" under water involve being crushed by pressure or drowning, while "fatal scenarios" in the air involve crashing and burning instantly.
Not really much of a difference, but at least it is quicker. Panic beforehand being about the same.

Besides... the point, AGAIN, is not about what happens to the passengers or the pilots.
It's that lovely radioactive propulsion and cargo in the water tubes and how everyone is OK with that being chauffeured around in a tube with no windows.

Comment Re:Nope... Still irrelevant... But thx for the str (Score 1) 468

Wow... You really got your head so far up your ass that you REPEAT the same straw men you just got pointed out and called on? While adding some more...

So it's no longer just putting numbers in my mouth, ranting about irrelevant trivia and ignoring the points of conversation, it's distorting my words too...

I'm talking about airplanes the size of an airplane this system was designed for.
I.e. It's an AIRBUS.

By the way, you first claimed you were talking about an Airbus, now you say you were talking about a 747. You do realize that Boeing makes the 747 and not Airbus, right?

That... that makes no sense. It's too simple to pretend that you missed the meaning.
And you can't be able to spell words like "talking" and not be able to comprehend 4- and 2-letter words like "size", "of" and "an".
It's too lame to be a troll...

So you ARE insane!
Words get read but don't register properly cause you live in a delusional state of comprehension of the world around you.
Phew! Glad we got that out of the way.

I do wonder if you're actually allowed to fly planes, or is that just your delusion too?

Comment Nope... Still irrelevant... But thx for the straw. (Score 2) 468

I'm talking about airplanes the size of an airplane this system was designed for.
I.e. It's an AIRBUS.

While you rant on about "single engine GA aircraft", "airport departure" and ILS and VOR conditions under which you WON'T attempt landing - though I clearly talk about LANDING AN AIRPLANE THE SIZE OF A 747.
You're straw-mening.

I say:

A 747 lands at 172-207 mph. That's about 276-333 kph. Or 76-92 meters per second.
Meaning that they need AT LEAST 100 meters of visibility in order to see the ground 1 second before touchdown.

To which you reply:

There is no "1 second" rule. And your 100m == 1 second puts the aircraft at 194 knots. That's faster than landing speed. That's more than twice what a single engine GA aircraft will be going.

So take your pick.
You are either an idiot who thinks that 747 is a "single engine GA aircraft", landing is same as taking off, and the process of landing is the same as NOT landing, and who has difficulty reading or remembering numbers (note the speeds listed and the speed that you claim I listed)...
OR you are trying to push your limited experience in one field as an appeal to authority argument against logic by setting up a straw man or few.
Which makes you a liar and an asshole.

All your "I fly air-o-plains" talk means squat. But nice of you to share that.
I could never on my own present so adequately how fundamentally wrong your understanding of the situation being discussed really is.
Nor how self-righteous and smug you are about it.

Comment But of course it's not... just keep repeating that (Score 1) 249

They just want to eliminate paroles, abolish insanity and diminished capacity pleas, and trial kids as adults.
While privatizing prisons.

How did you put that?

NOT LIBERTARIAN to allow private organizations COMPLETE CONTROL of the freedom of an individual, whether that individual is a child or not.

Well shit... You better start informing those people that they are not real Scotsmen.

http://www.lp.org/the-libertar...

3. Get Tough on Real Crime

In part because of the diversion of resources to fight victimless crime (see above), real criminals increasingly escape punishment. As Figure 2. shows, the cost a criminal can expect to pay for committing a crime has declined for 20 years, while crime rates have steadily increased.

The Libertarian Party believes that individuals should be held responsible for their actions. This includes swift and certain punishment for those guilty of committing violence or fraud against others.

But today, criminal sentences seldom mean what they say. On average, a criminal will serve only 37% of any sentence imposed. As a result, 51% of all violent offenders are released from jail after serving two years or less, and 76% were released after serving four years or less.

When a Judge imposes a sentence, the criminal should serve that sentence. Parole and other forms of early release should be severely restricted. Virtually every study on the subject has shown that parolees have a high recidivism rate. For example, one 1987 study found that 69% of parolees were rearrested within six years of their release.

One deeply disturbing trend is the increasing tendency to excuse individuals from responsibility for the crimes they commit. From the "Twinkie defense" to the Menendez and Bobbitt trials, juries have been too willing to excuse a defendant's guilt. Insanity and diminished capacity defenses should be abolished or severely restricted. The insanity defense can be replaced by a plea of "guilty but mentally ill," which would enable the offender to receive medical help, but would still require him to serve the appropriate sentence for his crime. The use of alcohol or drugs should never constitute an excuse for criminal conduct.

The juvenile justice system should be radically revised to ensure that juveniles are held fully accountable for the crimes they commit. Juveniles commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. From 1982-1991, the number of juveniles arrested for murder or manslaughter increased by 93%. In 1990, individuals under the age of 21 were responsible for one-third of all murders. Yet, only 5% of violent juvenile offenders are tried as adults. In some states a juvenile offender cannot be sentenced to serve a term past the age of 25 -- no matter how serious the offense. Juveniles who commit adult crimes should be tried as adults and pay adult penalties.

While scrapping welfare cause poor breed on it like rats. Eating, fucking and committing crimes all day.
 

5. Address the Root Causes of Crime

The root causes of crime are no mystery. As Peter Greenwood, a criminal justice expert with the RAND Corporation explains, "We know the risk factors for violence and what creates it. Kids being born into poverty, to parents who can't take care of them." It is our current social welfare system that has created the risk factors that breed crime.

Nearly all social scientists agree that there is a direct link between out-of-wedlock births and social problems such as crime and drug abuse. For example, one study found that children raised in single-parent families are one-third more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior. Another study found that, holding other variables constant, black children from single-parent households were twice as likely to commit crimes as black children from a family where the father was present. With the rate of out-of-wedlock births now over 22% among white women and over 60% among blacks, increased violence and crime is virtually inevitable.

At the same time, social scientists link the skyrocketing rate of out-of-wedlock births with the availability of welfare. The Department of Health and Human Services found that a 50% increase in welfare benefits led to a 43% increase in out-of-wedlock births. A second study found that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 per month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers by 150%.

This is not to say that a woman will choose pregnancy as a means to go on welfare. But, by removing the economic consequences of out-of-wedlock births, welfare has removed a major incentive to avoid pregnancy. A decade ago Charles Murray called for a radical solution to this problem, "scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structures." Time has shown Murray to be right.

But my comment was more along the ways of how libertarians tend to be sniveling, selfish, greedy cowards who will gladly take from the community wherever they can while refusing to reciprocate or share their own.
Also, they tend to be idiots.

Comment No. (Score 3, Interesting) 530

But then the problem is that there is no incentive for anyone to keep the factories running.

There is no MONETARY incentive for factory workers to create additional profit, above that which is needed for maintaining a monetary status quo, or a very slight profit above it.

There are plenty of other incentives though.
Ever tried to beat your own score in a game? How about collecting all the special items or unlocking achievements?
Anyone paid you for that? Did you get a badge? Or a shirt? How about a citation in front of your peers?
How about your grades in elementary school? Did you get monetary incentive according to your grades and was that your primary motivator?
Fucking? Do you get paid for that? How about eating?

From personal pride of one's work to various propaganda techniques appealing to various human prejudices, from "think of the children" to "Uncle Sam needs you".

Armies are the example of just such an arrangement.
They "belong directly to the public, with what is essentially a 100% "tax" on all profits".

Plus, the workers get a chance to be killed and/or maimed while making almost no money for themselves.
Who'd want to work at a place like that, right? No incentives will bring you back from the dead.
And yet...

Monetary motivation is just the cheapest and easiest to work with, giving the lowest results. Very few people would put their life on the line for "just money".
Millions of people put their lives in danger every day with no hope of monetary compensation.
Doing it "for their community".
Not "for their capital".

Comment It's not "Gotta be a Superman outfit or nothing".. (Score 1) 249

...deal.

It's "Why do they have to be dicks about it?" deal.
And no.
"Because copyright", "because trademark", "because association with death" or "cause everyone would be starving their children to death then just to get a Superman statue" is NOT a valid answer.

Being dicks about it is hurting them far more. They chose that. So be it...

Comment Re:Superman logo is a Trademark (Score 1) 249

What, then, did Reeve or Reeves ever do that was super?

He served as a board member for the Charles Lindbergh Fund, which promotes environmentally safe technologies. He lent support to causes such as Amnesty International, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and People for the American Way. He joined the Environmental Air Force, and used his Cheyenne II turboprop plane to take government officials and journalists over areas of environmental damage. In the fall of 1987, 77 actors in Santiago, Chile were threatened with execution by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Reeve was asked by Ariel Dorfman to help save their lives. Reeve flew to Chile and helped lead a protest march. A cartoon then ran in a newspaper showing him carrying Pinochet by the collar with the caption, "Where will you take him, Superman?" For his heroics, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Bernardo O'Higgins Order, the highest Chilean distinction for foreigners. He also received the Obie Prize and the Annual Walter Brielh Human Rights Foundation award.[44] Reeve's friend Ron Silver later started the Creative Coalition, an organization designed to teach celebrities how to speak knowledgeably about political issues. Reeve was an early member of the group, along with Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and Blythe Danner.[45]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Reeve left Kessler feeling inspired by the other patients he had met. Because he was constantly being covered by the media, he decided to use his name to put focus on spinal cord injuries. In 1996, he appeared at the Academy Awards to a long standing ovation and gave a speech about Hollywood's duty to make movies that face the world's most important issues head-on. He also hosted the Paralympics in Atlanta and spoke at the Democratic National Convention. He traveled across the country to make speeches, never needing a teleprompter or a script. For these efforts, he was placed on the cover of TIME on August 26, 1996.[69] In the same year, he narrated the HBO film Without Pity: A Film About Abilities. The film won the Emmy Award for "Outstanding Informational Special." He then acted in a small role in the film A Step Towards Tomorrow.[70]

Reeve was elected Chairman of the American Paralysis Association and Vice Chairman of the National Organization on Disability. He co-founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, which is now one of the leading spinal cord research centers in the world.[citation needed] He created the Christopher Reeve Foundation (currently known as the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation) to speed up research through funding, and to use grants to improve the quality of the lives of people with disabilities. The Foundation to date has given more than $65 million for research, and more than $8.5 million in quality-of-life grants.[71][72] The Foundation has funded a new technology called "Locomotor Training" that uses a treadmill to mimic the movements of walking to help develop neural connections, in effect re-teaching the spinal cord how to send signals to the legs to walk. This technology has helped several paralyzed patients walk again.[73] Of Christopher Reeve, UC Irvine said, "in the years following his injury, Christopher did more to promote research on spinal cord injury and other neurological disorders than any other person before or since."[74]

In 1997, Reeve made his directorial debut with the HBO film In the Gloaming with Robert Sean Leonard, Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Bridget Fonda and David Strathairn. The film won four Cable Ace Awards and was nominated for five Emmy Awards including "Outstanding Director for a Miniseries or Special." Dana Reeve said, "There's such a difference in his outlook, his health, his overall sense of well-being when he's working at what he loves, which is creative work."[75] In 1998, Reeve produced and starred in Rear Window, a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film. He was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance. On April 25, 1998, Random House published Reeve's autobiography, Still Me. The book spent eleven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and Reeve won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.[76]

Throughout this time, Reeve kept his body as physically strong as possible by using specialized exercise machines. He did this both because he believed that the nervous system could be regenerated through intense physical therapy, and because he wanted his body to be strong enough to support itself if a cure was found. In 2000, he began to regain some motor function, and was able to sense hot and cold temperatures on his body. His doctor, John McDonald of Washington University in St. Louis, asked him if anything was new with his recovery. Reeve then moved his left index finger on command. "I don't think Dr. McDonald would have been more surprised if I had just walked on water," said Reeve in an interview.[77] Also during that year, he made guest appearances on the long-running PBS series Sesame Street.

In 2001, Reeve was elected to serve on the board of directors for the company TechHealth, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, which provided products and services for severely injured patients. While serving on the TechHealth board, Reeve participated in board meetings and advised the company on strategic direction. He refused compensation. He made phone calls to the company's catastrophically injured patients to cheer them up. Reeve served on TechHealth's board until his death in 2004. After his death, Dana Reeve took his board seat with TechHealth until her death in March 2006.

In 2002, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center, a federal government facility created through a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention non-compete grant,[78] was opened in Short Hills, New Jersey. Its mission is to teach paralyzed people to live more independently. Reeve said, "When somebody is first injured or as a disease progresses into paralysis, people don't know where to turn. Dana and I wanted a facility that could give support and information to people. With this new Center, we're off to an amazing start."[70]
Reeve discussing stem cell research at a conference at MIT, March 2, 2003.

Reeve lobbied for expanded federal funding on embryonic stem cell research to include all embryonic stem cell lines in existence and for open-ended scientific inquiry of the research by self-governance.[79] President George W. Bush limited the federal funding to research only on human embryonic stem cell lines created on or before August 9, 2001, the day he announced his policy, and allotted approximately $100 million for it. Reeve initially called this "a step in the right direction," admitting that he did not know about the existing lines and would look into them further. He fought against the limit when scientists revealed that most of the old lines were contaminated by an early research technique that involved mixing the human stem cells with mouse cells.[80] In 2002, Reeve lobbied for the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001,[81] which would allow somatic cell nuclear transfer research, but would ban reproductive cloning. He argued that stem cell implantation is unsafe unless the stem cells contain the patient's own DNA, and that because somatic cell nuclear transfer is done without fertilizing an egg, it can be fully regulated.[82] In June 2004, Reeve provided a videotaped message on behalf of the Genetics Policy Institute to the delegates of the United Nations in defense of somatic cell nuclear transfer, which was under consideration to be banned by world treaty.[83] In the final days of his life, Reeve urged California voters to vote yes on Proposition 71,[84] which would establish the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and allot $3 billion of state funds to stem cell research.[85] Proposition 71 was approved less than one month after Reeve's death.

Comment Nope. (Score 1) 249

Ironically, this incident was the result of nanny-state interference. The claim was that the boy's parents were abusive, but they don't say much about that other than some "allegations of shaking". So the state takes the kids away and sticks them with some truly evil monsters and apparently didn't do much of a job of checking up on them to see how it was all going.

Children's Aid Societies are NGOs who "receive funding from, and are under the supervision" of the government but their nannying is quite autonomous.

Also, they can operate without order or warrant.
http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/ht...

Apprehension without warrant

(7) A child protection worker who believes on reasonable and probable grounds that,

(a) a child is in need of protection; and

(b) there would be a substantial risk to the childâ(TM)s health or safety during the time necessary to bring the matter on for a hearing under subsection 47 (1) or obtain a warrant under subsection (2),

may without a warrant bring the child to a place of safety. R.S.O. 1990, c. C.11, s. 40 (7).

All they need is to believe.

One might say that CAS are private organizations who are given a lot of liberty and leeway with their work and in their judgement.
With obviously little control or oversight.
Sounds a bit libertarian to me.

Particularly the part where they take the money from the government but refuse ceding any control to the government even while acknowledging their own faults and that they would not have happened HAD there been more control.
While happily accepting even more money "for training" from the government.
And refusing government investigation into their work on account of it being "expensive".

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 468

One... make up your mind.
You can't argue both greater tolerance of accidents and fatalities AND have submarines built and handled in a way to make crashes more survivable.
One negates the other.
Either submarines are designed in such a way that the crashes are more survivable OR potential fatalities and accidents are ignored in the design.

Two... You're missing the point of the argument. FUCK THE PEOPLE ON THE SUBMARINE.
Take them outside on the deck, fuck each of them in the ass and kick them overboard to drown. OK?
Leave just the skeleton crew necessary to drive around a metal tube with no windows, which runs on a NUCLEAR REACTOR, while chauffeuring nuclear missiles around the globe.

Now... Does your average airplane passenger lose sleep due to THAT fact? It's probably been going on for his/her whole life.
Of course not! And why should he/she? I mean... it's just nuclear missiles.

Comment Re:Irrelevant points there... (Score 1) 468

As for fog, yes, in the daytime there is light, just a lack of visibility. Until you fly out of the fog and need to see to land.

Oh I get it! You're a bubble-boy!

You never actually saw fog in real life. You imagine it as some sort of thin layer of smoke.
You never walked along the street with people appearing and disappearing around you. At noon. In full daylight.
Or driven along the road at 10 km/h, fog lights on, and it looks like there are clouds rushing at you.
Or looked out of the 10th floor window not seeing anything below you but clouds.

Pilots never get to see the ground if there is fog. They are seated 9 meters off the ground in a, say, 747.
If the visibility is at 10 meters, they can MAYBE get a hint of it just before they touch the ground. Unless they blink.
A 747 lands at 172-207 mph. That's about 276-333 kph. Or 76-92 meters per second.

Meaning that they need AT LEAST 100 meters of visibility in order to see the ground 1 second before touchdown.
It's ALL on instruments.

Same goes for rain or snow. 100 meters of visibility - 1 second of space in front of them.

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