I know the suffering of dial-up (dirty phone lines in rural areas) or other means (e.g. GRPS) - it is awful.
Isn't there an EDGE or 3G network available? Maybe something like CDMA2000?
228 karma · joined February 6, 2009
Isn't there an EDGE or 3G network available? Maybe something like CDMA2000?
Firstly, culture is not equal to race - it has nothing to do with race. The criticism against racism is usually because it is immutable (a person can not change his race) and race does not have any bearing on how a person acts (i.e. your personality is effected by the environment) or his intelligence.
Culture is the opposite of race - culture will determine how a person will react in certain situations. Culture can also be changed. People of all creeds can have “western” culture – i.e. democracy and respect for human rights. Other cultures have aspects that is undoubtedly perpendicular to western cultures (e.g. in its treatment of women). To each his own.
Not allowing someone to enter the US (which undoubtedly have a western culture) because he will not fit in (based on his own culture) is doing both the USA and the particular individual a favour.
I'm getting kinda sick of all accusations of racism. It is like a proverbial universal stick with which you can hit everyone with (even with just an accusation).
> B. Therefore, smartness and success must have something to do with being from India.
The smartness have to do with culture. People coming from a fairly poor country will work harder and will generally be more driven to achieve than a privileged person (in some countries your status is determined by the position you work in).
Also – the education level of most countries differ widely. It is no secret that the education (both at tertiary and other levels) in Africa is a giant step behind other developing nations (such as China or Brazil). So it would make sense to allow immigration from countries which have a good education system.
> C. Therefore, if a person is from India, we should give them a preferred immigration status over someone from another country.
If other immigrants from a country integrates well and is successful they should be given preference over another country - it is simply common sense. The immigration services of the USA should act in the interest of American citizens – thus it should select people that have the highest probability of making a positive contribution.
Also, people coming from countries where English is widely spoken has a much better change of integrating (e.g. common wealth countries).
> That Indian-Americans living in the United States are successful "on average" because the "average" person of Indian descent lives in India and can't afford to move to the United States.
Several countries work on a quota system. In this, the immigration quotas are designated for each country. It only makes sense to make the immigration quotas larger for groups who more easily integrate into the country – whether they are more successful based on work home education systems, work ethic, culture, etc..
> Another problem with the "model minority" label is: Who designs this "model"?
As far as I know most of the “model” minority is ascribed based on positive outcomes (e.g. university admission, SAT scores, unemployment rate, income) and negative outcomes (incarceration rate, welfare dependency, etc...)
Also, once a minority is a "model minority" things such as affirmative action can be changed to only apply to struggling minorities.
> Oh you should be so proud - you're not like how most other dark skinned people are!
Aren't most "model minorities" in the USA far more successful than white people?
Why? Do the mosquitoes only bite black people? Are they racist?
> Too dangerous to protect African children from wasting death, but perfectly safe to prevent casual nuisance at your next barbecue?
Treatment of malaria is usually effective. The biggest hindrance in the prevention and treatment of malaria is corrupt and despotic African governments - not white people who never visited the continent.If he wants a thing that shoots skeeters at his barbecue he will not hurt anybody.
> Psst: what is the size of the average American backyard relative to the average African dwelling?
The size of many African backyards is about the same size as that of Americans homes - it depends. In rural areas (where malaria is the biggest problem) the are around the home can be much bigger.
People (at least in my country) spend a longer time outdoors - and the use of other areas (non yard) is higher.
The are of only the home (kitchen/rooms) is however smaller (flat size).
Just taking money is wrong. The usual argument is that the government takes money from people to provide a service. If the government takes more money from you and provides less of a service (i.e. it is busy with wealth redistribution) it is wrong - it is simple theft by the masses.
> As an argument ad absurdum, imagine that instead of taking away a flat percentage (1% of annual income for both), a flat absolute amount were taken instead ($500).
The argument for flat tax is usually that in order to make money a person uses the infrastructure (roads, ect...). If he makes more money the argument is that he used the public services more. While this is not correct (lower income groups disproportionately use public services) it can be argued as such. There is however no defence for progressive taxation - other than wealth redistribution.
Replace the word “secrecy” with “privacy”. I think there are a lot of good reasons to keep your personal banking details private. For example – in my country there is a law that the bank have to inform a government department if there is any deposit above about $1000. Thinking of donating to a political party?
You must show proof of fixed residence to open an account (even if you always have a positive balance). How would a poor person without a fixed address (as defined by government) open an account?
> and drug trade.
Because people voluntary give money to buy drugs and people voluntary sells drugs. What is the problem?
> at its worst enables terrorism
It is a stretch to blame private banking for terrorism. Terrorism will occur regardless of banking laws.
> At "best" it enables the very wealthy to not pay their fair share.
If there was a flat tax regime you can (maybe) try to make that believable. Why is it that rich people pay a higher percentage of their income in tax? It is simple – ten wolves and a sheep deciding who is for dinner. The whole idea of progressive taxation is the mob taking what it wants because of its majority – there is no inherit “fairness” in it.
A politician buys the vote of the poor with the money from the rich (coerced through taxation).
> If you have a problem with being overtaxed, the only respectful approach is to be active in managing how your government works.
In my country there are 4 million tax payers and about 14 million people receiving government “grants” (this will probably quadruple in a year's time in a plan to give everyone a “basic income grant” (BIG)). Is it fair that 4 million productive people subsidise 14 million unproductive people? Is it fair that a young tax-paying couple puts off having a child – yet their tax dollars is used for other peoples' child grants?
> And a "good" lawyer should never cover for crimes.
A “good lawyer should always act in their clients' best interest – whatever it may be.
In summary my argument is as follows:
1.There are plenty of reasons why banking should be private. 2.IMHO tax evasion by overtaxed people (i.e. when the tax percentage is progressive) is not morally wrong.
EDIT: Downmod all you want.
Every conversation between you and your lawyer, doctor or priest is confidential – and none of them will rat you out.
Banks (in my country at least) will hand over details of your bank statements without your knowledge to the government.
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It is only one part of my problem with banks. Banks generally act in their own interest. When you discuss a contract with a lawyer he will act in your interest. Your doctor will also act in your interest when he prescribes you medicine. A banker is the only entity that will give you "advice" that is more in his interest than yours. A good example is contracts with banks - their "standard" contract is extremely one sided.
All interaction between your lawyer and you or your doctor and you is private? Why not the same for you and your banker?
I doubt that. Further more a person with a degree has on the average a higher intelligence than a person without. Also, most degrees have language requirements and subjects that at least ensures that the person has a basic grasp of grammar and spelling.
> Typing seems even odder. Doubly so where I live as they don't teach folks in school here to touch-type.
You should at least check if a person can type. There are a lot of so called "programmers" that can not even type properly.
> Really, if your hiring requirements are "a guy with a degree that types quickly" you're going to find yourself pretty quickly up shit creek.
You constructed a straw man – no where did I suggest you should only use these metrics – my suggestion was that it made sense to hire/contract a programmer to help you make the hiring decision.
"Formal Qualifications This is more a of non-indicator than a counter-indicator. The key point to outline here is that formal qualifications don’t mean squat when you’re trying to recognise a good programmer."
Qualifications is an effective way to limit at least some of the people. Most 4 year university degrees require at least a basic level of intelligence and commitment. It is true that there are a lot of professional Comp. Science bullshitters out there with degrees (I know quite a few) but on the average you will be luckier with a university guy. This does not just mean that you should look for Computer Science – applied mathematicians are also a good bet (based on other qualifications). (Of course there are also excellent programmers without degrees – but it is extremely difficult to find).
Another thing – something as simple as a typing test may help you. There are people out there that claim to be programmers (esp. freshly out of college) but do not really program (further than the task at hand). People who programs a lot for a long time will generally type faster than people who do not really program.
Also I think that to hire someone is fairly expensive (at least $50,000 a year in the states). If you make a bad decision it is a lot of money down the drain and one bad guy can ruin the atmosphere of a whole company. Why not hire a programmer (that you know to be competent) to help you with the interview? I am sure that a $1000 expense is less than the risk of wasting $50,000.
Maybe try and mention your name on the front page of your website?
The NYT article only mentions your name and jellyfish. Searching for "Alex Andon jellyfish" does not show your webpage in the first result - I think that the NYT article can be a pretty good advertisement.
Looks nice.
If you feel that these views are outmoded – give me peer reviewed research articles (not books). I do not have immediate access to books and books are not peer reviewed. The article that I referenced above was written in 2004 – you can find more recent articles in Google Scholar if you want to. I did not see that the above article (or any of the others) have been refuted. I doubt that you can refute thousands of research articles (a lot of them recent) and a discovery that is probably the hallmark of modern psychometrics with a simple reference to a book (calling anything that you oppose “outmoded”).
> Stanovich is very clear on the distinction between "intelligence" (he is a mainstream psychologist in calling "intelligence" what I would simply call "IQ")
Also I think you are confusing “intelligence” with the general intelligence factor (g) (also intelligence does not equal IQ. IQ is just a standardised intelligence test that is fairly well correlated with the g factor). The general intelligence factor is a factor that is common to almost all different tests on intelligence. While the general intelligence factor is immutable other parts of intelligence can be changed by training/learning (i.e. by the environment).
> "intelligence" (he is a mainstream psychologist in calling "intelligence" what I would simply call "IQ") and "rationality," an aspect of human cognition hardly tapped
The purpose of intelligence tests is to test intelligence – not factors such as rationality, emotion and inter-personal skills such as Stanovich's book suggest. The latter are all factors that is undoubtedly environmental and the value of such tests are doubtful to the intelligence debate.
> Anyway, scientific issues aren't decided by credentials, but by data.
This is true – but data in peer reviewed journals not books.
> In other words, what Jensen and others took as a "culture fair," "g-loaded" IQ test turns out to reflect modifiable educational experiences that children have or do not have.
The majority of psychologists believe that the g-factor is an innate and immutable property. The g-factor correlates with reaction times, glucose metallisation rate and is highly heritable. This indicates that the g-factor most likely have a neurobiological basis (see articles by Haier for example).
In a recent article the g-factor also appeared in a battery of 42 tests (Johnson,W Bouchard, TJ, “Just one g: consistent results form three test batteries”). Here is a quote from the abstract:
> The concept of a general intelligence factor or g is controversial in psychology. Although the controversy swirls at many levels, one of the most important involves g's identification and measurement in a group of individuals. If g is actually predictive of a range of intellectual performances, the factor identified in one battery of mental ability tests should be closely related to that identified in another dissimilar aggregation of abilities. We addressed the extent to which this prediction was true using three mental ability batteries administered to a heterogeneous sample of 436 adults. Though the particular tasks used in the batteries reflected varying conceptions of the range of human intellectual performance, the g factors identified by the batteries were completely correlated (correlations were .99, .99, and 1.00). This provides further evidence for the existence of a higher-level g factor and suggests that its measurement is not dependent on the use of specific mental ability tasks.
The race-IQ issue is separate from the issue of general intelligence and neuroscience of the brain. Even if he is a successful political scientist, it would not make him an educational psychologist or neuroscientist. Much of the popularity of Flynn is his opposition to certain views of Intelligence - not his research.
> one thing we certainly can't conclude is that it is not influenced by the cultural background of the test-taker
With language and cultural negativeness I meant that there is no cultural specific references. One of the main complaints of the IQ test was that it contained western concepts and examples and language (i.e. it was culturally loaded). For example – the pictures in RPM are the same and contains the same meaning from whatever culture you are. Here is a quote from “How Biased are Culture-Loaded Tests?” (Jensen, A):
> Probably the best known and most widely used of such tests s Raven's Progressive Matrices (citations). Such nonverbal tests are expressly designed to reduce item dependence on acquired knowledge and to keep cultural and scholastic content to a minimum while getting at basic processes of intellectual ability.
Also note that that study did not just use RPM but included a verbal section.
The study you gave me showed differences in RPM between what they labelled “cultures” - other authors used other “labels” to try and explain the difference between groups. Here is a quote from the study you gave me:
> On the one hand, the absence of cross-cultural differences in RPM scores between cultures which do differ on a variable
My dad is a reader - if there is a problem he will read everything on the screen over the telephone - even if it takes an hour. It is absolute torture to help him (or my mother). But then again, an hour of IT- waterboarding is a small price to pay for someone who changed your diapers.
I never said that he made that claim. Several other people compared RAPM and other intelligence tests to determine the g-loading. It was found by other people (not Dr. Raven) that RAPM has a high g loading. Testing for the general intelligence factor and the use of RAPM is widely accepted. Here is an example of a recent article: “Just one g: consistent results from three test batteries”, (Wendy Johnson, Thomas Bouchard, etc...) 2004. Using Google scholar you can find several other results. Even if you reject RAPM as a measure of g, there are less g-loaded tests (such as IQ) that can be used that predicts more or less the same thing (heritability of intelligence, etc...).
> The long, careful examination of what the Raven tests show, in conjunction with other evidence, can be found in James R. Flynn's excellent book What Is Intelligence?, which is about to come out in a new, expanded edition.
My problem with most of Flynn's books is that he is a political scientist and a passionate left-wing campaigner. He is basically a Gould-light – distorting science to fit his own world view.
I usually prefer to read papers or books on intelligence matters from people with a PhD in areas such as educational psychology or neurology when it concerns brain structure (e.g. prof. Haier).
Intelligence measured by the general intelligence factor is highly heritable. The general intelligence factor is a factor analysis of intelligence and is a measure of “innate” intelligence and attempts at “boosting” this fails. The test that measures this the best is Raven's progressive matrices which is culture and language negative. The general intelligence factor is highly correlated with IQ and highly correlated with future success. The performance of a person in these tests has to do with the physical make-up of the brain (there are a lot of online articles by (dr/prof) Haider that is fairly readable that sheds light on this subject.)
> Here is a list I have compiled. IQ scores may be disputed, but the intelligence of these people generally are not.
A note about your cited IQs – it is probably not correct. The popular press like to “guesstimate” the IQ of historic persons – but this is of little value. Rigorous intelligence tests (such as IQ tests) is a 20th century phenomenon. Leibniz lived in the 17th century – well before these tests. So to try and determine any IQ or measure of intelligence from him is a waste of time.
Also – you collected only a point sample - I bet someone could get the same example with selecting a different group of famous persons. You also only selected the top 1% and not the general populations – so to draw assumptions of this sample to the general population would be wrong.
I do agree with you that the study is somewhat worthless. Here are several conflating factors:
People involved in menial labour (i.e. without tertiary qualifications) generally get children at a younger age. A lot of older financially secure men would generally marry younger less intelligent women (trade-up/Russian bride phenomenon). The age of child bearing of different social classes differs significantly.
Also - a three point IQ difference with all these conflating factors would probably fall under the heading "not statistically significant".
That is because only the economically active persons generate wealth (and they would have to eventually pay the stimulus).
How does your data center look like? What is your web crawler written in?
I assume that your startup is fairly small - how difficult is/was it to get enough resources (funding) to scale up? (esp. datacenter wise)
I see that you do not just cover English and other (co.?? org.??) domains are covered fairly well.
In other societies risk taking are discouraged (through various means). You should also take into account the difficulty of starting a business when you do not have access to capital.
The USA is one of the few countries that almost seems to reward risk taking and is not over-regulated (thereby cancelling out small companies). This is fairly unique and is probably a part of what make the USA great.
haha.. I just used one of his papers in a completely unrelated thing. What are the odds?
Can you give some examples?
> And how many press organizations will do that?
Not all papers - but some do. In my country there are 2 good English newspapers and one magazine that does excellent investigative reporting.
> More important, that's irrelevant because corruption investigations rarely involve lawsuits.
Corruption cases are full of lawsuits! My favourite investigative magazine (http://www.noseweek.co.za/) was closed for almost a year because the person running it was sued for libel. He won that lawsuit - but he had to stop publishing that year while defending himself in court.
In 2007 he was sued by a bank to prevent him from naming a list of clients that the bank helped with tax evasion - he won again and published the list of names.
- The arms deal (in which half of the ANC had a share).
- Corruption by the National Police Commisioner and head of Interpol (Jackie Selebi) and his links to organised crime.
- The Fidentia financial fraud scheme by Athur Brown
- A tax evasion scheme by RMB (a private bank for rich individuals)
- Tokyo Sexwale's (a businessman with links to the ANC) involvement in Iraq oil-for-food fraud.
- Fraud by state owned oil company PetroSA who passed on R15 million before an election to an ANC financier.
- Links between the ANC investment vehicle Chancellor House and government contracts (i.e. conflict of interest)
I am pretty sure you can make the same list for your own country.
As for the case of the government covertly starting a newspaper, I have not heard about it (but read about it in history books). They did this with the express purpose to change public opinion - since the current English newspapers were too critical of the government (with good reason). That really is before my time (20+ years or more).
I do not recall a single instance in my country where journalists were found guilty of corruption. Yet for politicians the list of the non-corrupt would probably be shorter.