You're half right. Serious wine people are routinely unable to distinguish $8/bottle wine from $800/bottle wine in double-blind tests.

Yeah yeah, I know that part of the wine/stereo experience is knowing that the thing cost a grand... but luckily for me, my brain is sufficiently well-programmed that I do not enjoy that sort of experience.

They may have supposed the war would be short, but the desired effects of the war were (presumably) long-term. I don't know all of the goals, and neither do you, since we don't have access to the classified information that would give a full understanding of the situation. Single facts can greatly change our evaluation of a decision.

I do know that the publicly available facts are misleadingly deficient; my husband was there.

In any case, we can be certain that the warhawks' goals included: Iran, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its planned oil bourse; Iraq, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its pipelines; Afghanistan; Kuwait; OPEC; Israel; al Qaida; Syria; the black market in military hardware; the US, its unemployment rate (re: enlistment), its economy, and its recently sallied reputation as somebody you don't want to mess with; and all the unknown unknowns. There are so many variables, so many political figures, and so much non-public information, you just sound like a child when you assert that the deciders were "stupid and flat out wrong".

Yep, I'm moving too. Looks like HostGator is a good choice for where to move. I'm looking forward to my "Cancel my accounts, I think your organization is evil" phone call to GoDaddy, those are always fun.

If you conclude that your opponents are "crazy" or "evil", you *probably* don't understand their time horizon.

In fact it usually does. I'm a subversive libertarian, but I readily admit that most behaviors that garner disapproval -- shoplifting, profanity, physical intimidation, dangerous driving, theft, vandalism, cheating, tresspassing -- do in fact deserve it, in the sense that our society is more efficient at producing safety, comfort, and pleasure without such behaviors occurring.

Absolutely. Me too. My .sig used to say something like "Privacy allows you to behave morally, when those around you would judge you by an irrational moral code." But it is nevertheless the case that MOST gauche behaviors really are destructive to all concerned.

Well sure. We're social creatures, and so we look to our fellow tribesmen for cues on what behavior is acceptable. Having others cheating gives us a sense of permission to do likewise.

Add to this the fact that online interactions do not carry the normal risk of disapproving looks, shame attacks, and damaging the reputation of one's name. Such things are vital in maintaining a society's integrity, and they are almost completely missing online.

Alas, such programs are based on three assumptions, all incorrect:

• people prefer truth over cognitive consonance
• parents want their children's beliefs to be true
• parents want their children to be smarter and live better than they are

So naturally the program was cancelled.

When I realized this about our society, I pulled my kids out of school and now we homeschool.

Fascinating. The youtube video is now marked 'private'.

I'm hardly surprised to learn that the OWS leaders are no more honest than those they want us to hate.

And in the end, it's all about money. OWS's fundamental and unstated goal, of which all stated goals are outgrowths, is "We want more financial equality in our society." And their opponents obviously represent the opposite side. In no case it is obvious that our society's current level of financial equality is wrong. It is somewhere between feudalism (zero equality) and socialism (total equality), hopefully in the area where the incentives are right.

The problem with this simplification is that it is rarely obvious that one's belief is incorrect.

Certainly, we may encounter a piece of data or an anecdote that appears to contradict our belief... but the new bit of information is rarely the whole story, especially these days when we are only ever told half the story. (The whole story is rarely sensational, whereas half the story makes the subject's decisions seem unwise or "it's just crazy".) When I hear that someone clings to their belief even in the face of a new piece of data, I consider it as likely as not that the believer is simply being appropriately cynical, living as he does in a world of venal liars.

As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.

The atmosphere is the problem with cannon-style launches as Bull proposed. The higher up you can position the muzzle of your launcher, the less muzzle velocity you need, and therefore the less energy you need, and the less accelleration the payload must endure, and the less heat the projectile must resist. So an island at sea level is the very worst place to position your laucher (save perhaps for Death Valley).

Inside a mountain in the Himalayas or Rockies would be a far better choice, with the muzzle emerging at the peak which is already halfway out of the atmosphere (and completely out of the dense, dusty, insect-filled, and humid part of the atmosphere).

The launch accelleration is a more serious constraint than probably any other aspect of the project.

Useless knowledge -- the era of meathauler fighters is already over, at least here in the West.

I experienced a form of this phenomenon just this afternoon, albeit not in an IT environment...

I went to Bank of America to (proudly) close my accounts, having moved to a smaller and thoroughly more moral bank. The customer service rep figured it out right away when he saw that my six ~18-year-old accounts now all had zero balance, and zero activity for the past month. So we start closing. He is doing the keyboarding and mousing while I am watching the screen.

At a certain point in the process of closing each account, the rep is required to give the reason for account closure. In the popup list of reasons are some very relevant choices: 'Service' and 'Competition' sprang out as the correct choices. He chose 'Misc', and for the sub-reason chose 'Bank of America Consolidation', whatever the hell THAT meant.

It was then that I knew there had been a memo from headquarters, probably last month, that said "We know people are closing their accounts. Management wants to make sure that the reason is NOT people leaving in disgust, headed to our competitors." And so now the CEO can stand up and say "We've only lost 1% of our accounts to the competition!"

Just this afternoon that happened, right in front of me. I almost laughed out loud.

It is deliciously ironic that you would take a swipe at "middle managers" in this conversation about metrics.

The only way to eliminate middle management, is for upper management to utilize metrics in order to evaluate lower management. There is no time for hands-on management and evaluation with a keen eye in one of these vaunted "flat organizations" with no middle management. And so lower management quickly realizes that their jobs and bonuses depend on the metric, rather than on quality or long-ranged action.

After that, the company is humped... but by then, the "aggressive VP" who wiped out middle management has collected his bonus and moved on.

It's not just IT. Our entire society has converted over to metrics. An easy example comes to mind: the stock market versus a company's quarterly performance. Another set of particularly nasty examples is found in our justice system: police officers evaluated by their number of citations, prosecutors by their number of convictions, prisons by their dollars per inmate per day.

I get the financial impetus to switch to metrics. Where it used to be one skilled manager overseeing per 5-7 employees, it can now be one schmuck manager with an Excel spreadsheet overseeing 30 employees.

I even get the psychological impetus. Numbers give us that all-important feeling of certainty, and at low cost too... while the traditional alternative requires legwork, mindwork, judgment, contemplation, and mistakes.

But it's wrecking our society.

Meh. Just switch to a security-conscious web browser like Opera. It lets me browse with plugins (acrobat, flash, java, etc.) disabled, cookies disabled, javascript disabled, and send-referrer disabled. I enable them on a site-by-site basis. Opera handles it natively and beautifully.

You people still using 20th-century web browsers are in serious peril.