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Comment Re:Protip: (Score 1) 667

What does the US and England have to do with anything?

It's the Netherlands and Malaysia that are most directly harmed, and the US is merely voicing opinions on the matter. It's people from the Netherlands who are being kept from the bodies of their relatives. I don't recall the dutch shooting down any airliners.

All this focus on Iran Air is just blatant deflection.

Comment Re:Gots to find more ways to avoid taxes (Score 2) 533

You can vote for a different government. The fact that people aren't coming to bulldoze your house right now, is because people have voted for a government that does not allow it. It's not because of your personal fighting prowess.

Power is always gonna exist. All you are actually asking for is a change from one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote.

Comment Re:bullshit (Score 2) 533

Locationally smaller government just hands an advantage to those who can manipulate geographic legal differences, ranging from rich people easily capable of moving themselves and their assets around, to companies that can exist whereever they want instantly and perhaps simultaneously.

In comparison, poor people and smaller businesses suffer because they are unable to physically move, and so there is no actual inter-state competition for legislation that affects them. Thus, a race to the bottom is created where policy shifts to be extremely favourable to mobile populations and corporate entities, and extremely unfavourable to ordinary people.

Comment Re:bullshit (Score 1) 533

Yeah, exactly. Ron Paul should answer this: why is it that those states that are fucking over Tesla also in general states run by the party he is a member of?

"Small government" is a slogan. Actual republican policy is to manipulate political power to favor their sponsors. Rand Paul is just a fig leaf for that.

Comment Re:They've got a lot of catching up to do... (Score 1) 431

Personally, I think the evidence, as far as I have seen *is* ambiguous and scant. I'm not sufficiently interested in this argument to go digging for sources to back up the opposing point of view, since I'm not sure I even hold it - at least to any great extent.

My bone in this debate (as a professional statistician) is simply to point out that the specific data source you quoted is not what you presented it as. Thus it's deeply offensive to me that you misrepresent a statistical estimate and then have the temerity to go:

It is a tragedy of this era that so many read statistics without understanding how to read them.

Assert as you wish. But without actual evidence, your claim is a mere assertion. I don't have to prove the opposite of your assertion to show that.

Comment Re:They've got a lot of catching up to do... (Score 2) 431

Careful there.

Those values you quoted are *not* education statistics. They are estimates from a model built on national data, only a very small number of which actually came from Montana. In short, these are *specifically* driven by demographic data, and for especially low population, unusual demographic states like Montana, can potentially give very inaccurate results.

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estima...

Specifically, the estimate for 2003 uses the following set of predictors:

- Percentage of the county population who were foreign-born and who had stayed in the United States for 20 years or less years;
- Percentage of county population age 25 and older with only a high school education or less;
- Percentage of the county population who were Black or Hispanic;
- Percentage of the county population in households with incomes below 150 percent of poverty level;
- Indicator variable identifying the New England and North Central census divisions; and
- Indicator variable identifying the SAAL states.

Comment Re:Top survival skill: Making friends and allies. (Score 1) 737

Seriously yes. Most of the above skills are nice and all, but the likelihood is that not any one person will have all of the above. Which means you need to work with other people. In fact if one guy has a particular skill, you need to be able to educate the rest of the group in it. It's no use building a group where if one guy dies everyone is fucked.

Comment Re:Soldier (Score 1) 737

Yeah, if you had cattle, the last thing you would want to do is shoot them, anyway. You have there an animal that converts useless grass into all sorta of diary products. Turning that into a steak will probably fuck you in the long term, and you'd better be thinking in the long term.

Comment Re:Soldier (Score 1) 737

In most parts of the civilised world, there's very little to hunt. Whole herds of wild animals are not going to magically appear, and in terms of land area hunting would require far greater an area of decent unpolluted soil than agriculture to feed any given population.

Comment Re:not a crock of shit. (Score 1) 49

This kid didn't do this...the kid's parent gave him step by step directions. I had an awesome dad who was a cryptographer in the Navy in the 70s and he taught me **all kinds** of awesome shit. That's awesome and I'm thankful. He sure as shit didn't help me write an Orthogonal Time-Division Multiplexing algorythm for my science fair projects though...because that would have been **cheating**...he helped me make a few things but obviously this kid had all kinds of help and most importantly, the article seems to purposely not mention how the kid made all this happen just his step by step.

It's about accuracy in reporting **WHAT IT TAKES TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THE TECH WORLD**

if we present this mindless crap as examples of young people doing science...well, we're cheating **them** and **ourselves**

there are **real** kids out there doing stuff at this level with only basic guidance & procurement help

Wow, you sure know a lot about this random kid, to assert all this with so much confidence. Modded insightful too! I'm convinced.

Do tell, how do you determine if something is done by a "**real**" kid, and not a FAKE KID like this one?

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