BugBrother

Israel do have everything on a different scale; multiples of times more terror against its civilians than what the rest of the western world have -- combined.

Afaik, despite this the courts in Israel seems to better keep up rule of law than the US ones, re terrorism... Which is sad.

But I think that without terror problems, the situation would be very different in Israel. And you probably agree.

Edit: I think you missed my point a little. I didn't discuss if it is right to throw out freedoms or not, I noted that empirically democracies seems to be very likely to do that in a certain situation.

Yes, it is a common excuse in e.g. non-democracies to call democracy activists for terrorists (often combined with claims that all the democratic countries are in a conspiracy against them, because we hate Russia/Pakistan/Iran/etc.)

And no, if there is a terrorism problem scaring voters the politicians are empirically motivated to fix it -- see my examples of throwing out the law book -- or it isn't a democracy. [Edit: To be clear, I think the Drug War etc are different; propaganda -- not really about scared voters.]

Most every democracy with serious and continuing problems with terrorism throw out the law book and human rights.

Afaik, this goes for USA, Britain, Israel, Germany, Spain and Italy. And probably more cases. (Note "continuing problems". e.g. Breivik was a lone crazy.)

The reason is shown by the grandparent comment; terrorism is optimized to scare voters. And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to fix that to keep their jobs.

A discussion of Unit 8200 I read today: http://strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20140923.aspx

(I read other sources because my Swedish media is like some inverse of Fox News. Stories like that Hamas had admitted murdering the three teens that started the last war is not... emphasized. The biggest morning newspaper didn't even mention that the accused murders of those teens died in a firefight today. Pallywood was never mentioned. Neither torture between Palestinian groups. Etc.)

Just one question: How is the weather? :-)

That said, I've been to Ireland lots of times for vacation. (I should go check the job sites.)

The first response to Chernobyl was heroic. Fire fighters later died from acute radiation poisoning.

But would it really surprise you if the Soviet leaders did as "pilsetnieks" wrote and forced people to get high radiation doses without telling them?

Russia have outstanding traditions in e.g. math, literature, art and engineering. That is not diminished by Russian leaders' traditions of enslaving Russians (and others).

I am from Sweden. We do trust the state and each others. The society comes really high on the sociological metric of "trust".

That said, it is just ... naive... to argue that "Some instances of X have done good, so let's trust (all?) X".

Especially since these X evolve surprisingly over time, sometimes quickly.

(The whole of Europe demilitarised totally after the cold war and are now surprised we have something like a Hitler as a neighbour.)

Edit: Hmm... that comment was about internal US politics? OK... Living in a country with trusting idiots which believe what they are told to believe, I do know that politics for internal consumption can seem weird from the outside! Both the US extreme left/right seems crazy (say, Chomsky and Fox).

Despite three comments I see no motivation for your claim that the paper is obviously utter garbage.

Edit: Removed the rest. Not needed. Bye.

Edit 2: A general discussion of the quality of papers (which everyone with some time at U ought to know about) and a discussion of me personally is as typical a "changing the subject" strategy as it can be.

That is easy -- parasites are relatively rare (or the ones they prey on will be gone and the parasites would starve).

So when those Dark Triad people are tired, they are tired mostly with the sheep -- not with other Dark Triad people.

You find bad papers in every area. To criticize a paper's hypothesis which the authors explicitly show they didn't get good correlation for (and was surprised by), seems... well, a bit weird.

Can you SHOW they are incompetent idiots? [Edit: At least that the paper is garbage, as you write?] You must have gotten that really quick, without reading their references?

This is the end of the paper's discussion: "We proposed and tested a relatively new hypothesis to account for the presence of the Dark Triad as indicators of an evolved psychosocial strategy directed towards [...] We have provided a unique test, arguing and showing that those high on the Dark Triad may be characterized by cognitive biases that [..]"

I agree that the paper is likely wrong -- but I see no proof the authors are a pack of incompetent f-ckwits, as you describe them as. As I wrote, they put forward a hypothesis and tried to test it.

Scientists aren't idiots. Well, except for evolutionary biologists as described by Gould. :-)

It is a hypothesis, to be tested. (I already wrote a comment arguing it is an unlikely hypothesis.)

Edit: I might add, evol biologists routinely generate and test if e.g. genetic drift can be involved when they write papers.

So people are night owls to abuse the tiredness of the early risers? It sounds a little to pat. What use is it to be manipulative of people that say "Talk about that tomorrow. <Yawn>"?!

For instance, what is cause and effect? Many people become night owls when they get disconnected from normal society (studying/working alone for more than a few days). And the Dark Triad people are disconnected from other people emotionally, by definition.

(Another question -- is it only Machiavellian people that think sick people should have a right to their own lives and be allowed assisted suicide?! I call that bravely showing mercy, despite having to face horrible facts about the situation? Or is that what Machiavellian people do?)

Edit: I am aware of the definition of Machiavellian, 6d0debc071. The example I took up in parentheses was from the article.

>> White flight is entirely about anti-blackness and racial oppression. [...] These have been studied in such great detail.

Does international research really support that middle class people leave areas where the crime levels go up only where crime is from people of a different colour?

Not American. I can tell you that the "white flight" efects in Sweden is at least hard to distinguish from flight from bad areas; I lived in a couple of those areas (Gottsunda and Akalla). The main differences were the food prices and the crime levels. Not close to the US ghettos -- yet.

I can't find any info on how quick the page turns are? No A4 size?

(The reader MaysonL mentions doesn't seem to be on sale yet? I don't see review from 2014, at least?)

I have waited impatiently since the 1990s for a functioning E-ink reader with fast enough page turns to browse documentation.

And the reason it isn't here is not technical problems -- it is because some shaved chimpanzee of an MBA thought high quality E-readers without colour (or a battery good "just" for a few days) was too small a market?!

I have vertigo.

Interesting point about scaling, thanks.

There are lots of people which do better jobs in my subjects than me, while only caring about the money.

Ideally, those guys should find something they had a real passion for instead. Because they/you might be really awesome doing something else.

I admire people that love something which won't pay them a salary, then do a job they don't care about so they are able to "waste" most of their time with (real examples) their board games, table tennis, etc. It isn't optimized for GNP, but people must decide [themselves] what they really want from life.

Edit: 'cauterized', note the word "Ideally". The last paragraph is even an impassioned argument that it is not a bad thing to live for something else than your profession. Sorry I wasn't clear.

>> Nowadays nobody barely thinks about their work before they start writing code, for the most part.

I am old enough to remember where this came from...

I used to do C for quite a while, then I made my hobby (Perl and scripting) my day job.

If given a certain size of a problem while working alone, I used to sit down and think for 1/2 a day or so, then develop (coding and also thinking more) for a week or two.

After I went scripting, this didn't work.

Since I could over an afternoon throw together a solution to the same size of problem which took a week in C, it was just not realistic to think first!

The best solution was to throw something together, look at it and then rewrite it if I didn't like it. The sheer development speed felt like I had gotten a sports car.

Just out of curiosity... you need four different iPhones to test?

How many different O/S and model variants do you need, to feel safe on Android? Or does your app not do anything complex with the graphics?

I'd argue that doing Google Maps in JavaScript was innovative. At the time, it blew me away that JS was usable for so complex use cases.

>> Here, have a strong cup of toughen-the-fuck-up.

You might have a point generally, but I think you miss some historical context.

A few hundred years ago, depending on location, if you made a "random snide comment" someone(s) might die. This used to be more serious stuff.

These days we have rule of law, but taking care of your reputation and social respect is certainly one of the things you find not only in the Western world but in all cultures, including among baboons. It is partly genetic.

(Consider all the muscles in your face to communicate and your language facilities; we have had lots of evolutionary pressure to be social with people. That is, if you failed in life or not was to a large degree decided by how you functioned with other people.)

The point is, it is normal, now and historically, to feel destroyed and be motivated by social respect and insults.

Nitpicking:

>> A teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage.

To be realistic, it makes a barrel of (maybe a bit cheaper) wine; alcohol kills bacteria.

(As someone that eats lunch at restaurants most of my life, I avoid reading about kitchen hygiene. Laws and sausages, etc.)

Edit: I didn't realize it, but I guess I am a typical example of cynical negativity. That alcoholic drinks are safe to drink is a feature, not a bug. And while not much of an oenophile, I do enjoy a glass of dry Spanish red. Just don't tell me about the sewage spoon.

Salary levels at that itjobswatch site look a bit different compared to e.g. cwjobs.co.uk?

(I've been considering England on and off, but am scared of the London commute.)

I don't know much about Guile, but can't it compile elisp too?

But you would need dynamic scope in Scheme to mix elisp/Guile code in Emacs?

Edit: Ah, this was discussed in your link at the top of this comment thread.

The amount of money involved is not really the problem.

I've seen arguments from the end of the 80s (sci.space.tech, Henry Spencer et al) that if the launch costs went down, the costs of building hardware would go down. From that, there should be elastic demands when e.g. universities can send their own probes. They also discussed how to do it (Big dumb booster etc).

The point was, not that much more money would be needed for this (just check the really expensive launcher being developed by NASA now!).

To lower launch costs is the key and it might be rocket science but, well, not rocket science. The reason this haven't happened until Space X seems to be mainly NASA's need to protect the shuttle (which was really, really expensive) and oligopolies in the launch business for military contracts.

So maybe not the military, but the military contractors are involved.

8) You advertise any chance you get. :-)

(That said, it worked on me.)

I have no problem with what you write here, but must have missed something? Or are you mixing up comment threads?

To me it seems that only you talk about libertarians, while jasonisalive talked about generic economic research.

(Wikipedia confirms my belief that libertarians are quite heterogeneous and it is more of a political philosophy/ideology than about economy anyway.)

If you know of a non-free market economy that works as well in a complex and dynamic society with many millions of people (e.g. communism seems to be ok up to about a village), we are all ears?

As far as I know, there are no successes. Most attempts couldn't have open borders, because everyone would leave.

(And yes, there are lots of other factors, like corruption and the natural resource curse.)

Without being an economist, I can tell you that the first few general books in most any education are simplified. I discussed economic models years ago with people writing code for them, it was interesting.

Subjects based on complex data sets without possibility of experiments are hard to verify for people external to the subject. (Famous other cases are climate science and evolution.)

From that, left wing extremists (I don't know anything about your position -- you might argue against "free market", which was the subject here or "libertarians" which you mention?) sometimes write conspiracy theories that all the academics in economy are idiots and/or in a conspiracy.

So let us skip this and instead look at practical results:

If you have a country with low corruption, competent state administration and a capitalist system you might get a good economic development. Otherwise, you will not.

Ok for the general area (Alaska, north of Scandinavia, etc) for stuff that needs chilling and stable geology/politics.

But don't put anything close to the seed bank, which a crazy with a nuke (IS, Putin, Iranian ayatollahs, etc) might want to target...

Edit: Maybe not Alaska for geological stability.