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anonymous

Question of Pakistani Cooperation in bin Laden Strike - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...i-cooperation-bin-laden-strike

geopolitics pakistan

shared by anonymous on 02 May 11 - Cached
  • The detailed version of what led to the hit and the extent of U.S.-Pakistani cooperation in the strike is not yet publicly known, but reports so far claim that bin Laden and his son were hiding in a massive compound with heavy security and no communications access when they were attacked.
  • Two key questions thus emerge. How long was the Pakistani government and military-security apparatus aware of bin Laden’s refuge deep in Pakistani territory? Did the United States withhold information from Pakistan until the hit was executed, fearing the operation would be compromised?
  • anonymous on 02 May 11
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama announced late May 1 that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead and that the body of the jihadist leader is in U.S. custody. Obama said bin Laden was killed in a firefight with U.S. special operations forces in Abbottabad, about 56 kilometers (35 miles) north of Islamabad. Prior to Obama's announcement, Pakistani intelligence officials were leaking to U.S. media that their assets were involved in the killing of bin Laden. Obama said, "Over the years, I've repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we've done. But it's important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding." Obama said he had called Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and that his team had also spoken to their counterparts. He said Islamabad agreed it is "a good and historic day for both of our nations and going forward it's essential for Pakistan to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates." "
anonymous

Wall Street Isn't Winning It's Cheating - 1 views

www.rollingstone.com/...-winning-its-cheating-20111025

shared by anonymous on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • "Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street." "Whatever," he said, shrugging.
  • Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy.
  • Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?
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  • At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.
  • And we hate the rich? Come on.
  • Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.
  • All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:
  • FREE MONEY.
  • Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve.
  • Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income.
  • Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
  • CREDIT AMNESTY
  • This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.
  • STUPIDITY INSURANCE.
  • Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's they're own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back
  • Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts.
  • When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.
  • But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
  • UNGRADUATED TAXES
  • I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics.
  • Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion.
  • Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.
  • GET OUT OF JAIL FREE
  • One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.
  • Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.
  • That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.
  • The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars  -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.
  • The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries. But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.  These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.
  • anonymous on 28 Oct 11
     
    Oh, Christ, I thought. He's saying the protesters are hypocrites because they're using banks. I sighed. "Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"
anonymous

Seeking the Future of Europe in the Ancient Hanseatic League - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...urope-ancient-hanseatic-league

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 14 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Dec 14
     
    "A bargain, forged in the fires of 2012's economic emergency, has defined the European Union for the past two years. It was an agreement made between two sides that can be defined in several terms - the center and the periphery, the north and the south, the producers and the consumers - but essentially one side, led by Germany, provided finance, while the other, fronted by Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece, promised change. In order to gauge this arrangement's chances of ultimately succeeding, it is important to understand what Germany was hoping to achieve with its conditional financing. The answer to that question lies in Germany's own history. "
anonymous

Arsenic in Rice: of Baby and Bath Water - 0 views

health.usnews.com/...in-rice-of-baby-and-bath-water

health arsenic

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Arsenic is an element present in the earth's crust. There would likely be some of it in ground water even without the human activities that traumatize that crust in a variety of ways, but not enough to threaten health. Our various activities that have moved both rocks and water, from mining to drilling wells into aquifers, have resulted in significant mobilization of arsenic from rock into ground water.
  • Arsenic comes in two forms, organic and inorganic.
  • Organic arsenic, which is present in foods in very small amounts, is probably non-toxic, and may even be an essential trace element.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Inorganic arsenic is certainly a toxin, as was made famous in the movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. It is the primary variety released from rocks into water, and the main concern for human health.
  • Attention to arsenic in the environment by the Environmental Protection Agency, and in our food by the FDA, can only be a good thing, advancing food safety. Eating a variety of whole grains, for those without reasons to avoid them such as gluten sensitivity, is good for health in general—and may also reduce arsenic intake.
  • But inevitably, when a peril in our food or medicine cabinet or environment is pointed out to us, it invites the hyperbole of concentrated media attention, an inclination to invoke conspiracy theories, and at least some temptation to panic. When we do give in to panic, we tend to jettison the baby along with the bath water, resulting in net harm.
  • 1. Don't make perfect the enemy of good.
  • since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available choices are best for health?
  • The presence of a contaminant in food does not reliably indicate that eating the food is harmful.
  • Similarly, there is more arsenic in brown rice than white, but the health benefits of eating a whole grain may outweigh that.
  • 2. Don't exaggerate a risk just because you don't control it.
  • We have known for decades that the four leading causes of chronic disease and premature death in industrialized countries are smoking, poor dietary pattern, lack of physical activity, and obesity. Yet these four are routinely ignored or neglected by people who get very worked up over the latest chemical threat in our food or environment.
  • We should not ignore big risks just because they are under our control, nor exaggerate much smaller ones simply because they are not.
  • 3. New in the news is not new in the world.
  • The tendency when a chemical threat is highlighted in the news is to think the threat itself is new, and the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if arsenic in rice or other foods does actually contribute to cancer risk, it has been doing so for years.
  • the notion that there is a spike in cancer or other disease rates looming around the next bend is misguided; we are already around that bend, and any harms of arsenic are already part of the epidemiologic landscape we know.
  • Perfectly pure food is, alas, not available on this planet. So those of us living here should focus on net health effects rather than the media hype du jour, and do the best we can with the food supply we've got.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 12
     
    "Predictably, there was widespread media attention to a recent release by Consumer Reports highlighting contamination of rice by arsenic. In customary "consumer watchdog" fashion, Consumer Reports presented a long list of popular consumer products, from cooking rice, to rice cakes, to breakfast cereal, and most worrisome, baby food, with arsenic levels in each. The story was covered extensively by the major network news programs."
anonymous

The Future Is Not Accelerating - 0 views

io9.com/...the-future-is-not-accelerating

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Unlike computers, which we invented, the Earth's processes are something we can only understand through observation. And we need time to do it. Maybe not millions of years, but certainly not just a century either.
  • There is another kind of slow time that we often ignore in our rush to hurtle into tomorrow at light speed. This is called species time. It is the amont of time that a species, like say Homo sapiens, is likely to exist.
  • This is particularly important when you start to think about a reasonable timeframe for the development of space travel and solar system colonization.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What if our space probes and the Curiosity rover are the equivalent of those reed boats thousands of years ago? It's worth pondering. We may be at the start of a long, slow journey whose climactic moment comes thousands of years from now.
  • Let's return to the one timeframe that we can all grasp easily: the length of a human lifespan, which under ideal circumstances is around 75-85 years.
  • I think it's obvious why we want to measure the pace of the future using technology, and make computer scientists our guides. Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. We want to believe that other scientific and cultural changes can happen in similarly observable way because generally we think in human time, not species or geological time. Put another way: We all live in a hyper-accelerated timeframe. Slow time is essentially inhuman time. It is what exists before and after each of our individual lives.
  • That said, it's undeniable that technological change and fast human time can profoundly affect events unfolding in slow time.
  • Still, we can't expect all the efforts we make in our short lifetimes to pay off in our lifetimes, too. You will not live to be 200 years old. I repeat: You will not live to be 200 years old.
  • Maybe our grandchildren will have a chance to take a life-extension pill. But not us. And that has to be OK. Making scientific promises we can't keep will do a lot of harm. Ultimately it undermines the public's trust in both science and people who prognosticate about it.
  • We need to think about the future as a set of overlapping timelines. Some events take place in human time. Others exist in the slow time of Homo sapiens or the planet's carbon cycle — or even the Milky Way's collision course with Andromeda.
  • In a sense, we are trapped in accelerated time.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 12
     
    "H. sapiens evolved about 200 thousand years ago. So we're pretty early in our species life cycle. I know we like to think of ourselves as special creatures, and to be fair it does seem like we are the only superintelligent life that's ever existed on Earth. But it's worth keeping in mind that despite all our accomplishments, like electric blankets and cities and videogames, that we are still part of a species whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years."
anonymous

Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...shootings-in-the-united-states

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it. 
  • Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not.
  • “Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
  • Lots of guns don’t necessarily mean lots of shootings, as you can see in Israel and Switzerland.*
  • *Correction: The info is out-of-date, if not completely wrong. Israel and Switzerland have tightened their gun laws substantially, and now pursue an entirely different approach than the United States. More details here. I apologize for the error.
  • Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened from 2007 onward.
  • Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier.
  • “The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.”
  • In a subsequent post, Healy drilled further into the numbers and looked at deaths due to assault in different regions of the country. Just as the United States is a clear outlier in the international context, the South is a clear outlier in the national context:
  • “For all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,” writes political scientist Patrick Egan. The decline is most evident on the General Social Survey, though it also shows up on polling from Gallup, as you can see on this graph:
  • The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states. Citations here.
  • Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive:
  • Since 1990, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think gun control laws should be stricter. The answer, increasingly, is that they don’t. “The percentage in favor of making the laws governing the sale of firearms ‘more strict’ fell from 78% in 1990 to 62% in 1995, and 51% in 2007,” reports Gallup. “In the most recent reading, Gallup in 2010 found 44% in favor of stricter laws. In fact, in 2009 and again last year, the slight majority said gun laws should either remain the same or be made less strict.”
  • An August CNN/ORC poll asked respondents whether they favor or oppose a number of specific policies to restrict gun ownership. And when you drill down to that level, many policies, including banning the manufacture and possession of semi-automatic rifles, are popular.
  • Shootings don’t tend to substantially affect views on gun control. That, at least, is what the Pew Research Center found:
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "When we first collected much of this data, it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid "politicizing" the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for "don't talk about reforming our gun control laws." Let's be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It's just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws."
anonymous

Nigerian Characteristics - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nigerian-characteristics

shared by anonymous on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
  • To talk about an individual's personality and tendencies is easy for those who know the person well; to talk about the personality and tendencies of millions of people who form a nation is much trickier and fraught with moral risk.
  • For the result is often simplistic stereotyping of what are often very complex identities.
  • national traits are the product of a people's experience of living on a singular terrain for centuries and longer, leading to an identifiable national or ethnic culture and thus to specific characteristics.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • To deny this altogether is to immobilize observation, which, in turn, leads to analysis that is both unrealistic and naive.
  • Thus, we come to Nigeria, a country of more than 166 million people with severe overcrowding due to the fact that much of the country is desert and swamps where few people can live.
  • For too many Nigerians, life is a Hobbesian, zero-sum game that adds up to an aggressive, predatory system of survival of the fittest. Nigeria is a place where life is too often a matter of who can intimidate whom. Indeed, war, crime and thuggery are the province of young males, and Nigeria's population is composed of many of them.
  • Nigeria is an assemblage of several British-ruled territories: specifically a Muslim north that the British governed indirectly through traditional rulers and a non-Muslim south that the British ruled directly. The tension between the different parts of Nigeria has dominated political life for decades, leading to coups and counter-coups and significant periods of democracy characterized by exceedingly high levels of corruption, which is, in turn, part of the spoils system that staves off civil war.
  • For Nigerian politics at the highest levels is as predatory as life on the street.
  • There are essentially three geographical parts to Nigeria:
  • a Muslim-dominated north of desert and semi-desert, which produces the Hausa officers' corps that for decades has dominated the military and, by association, politics for significant periods
  • a southwestern region dominated by the Yoruba people, which contains the commercial capital of Lagos
  • and the southeast where much of the oil is located, dominated by the Igbo tribe.
  • Abuja, to no one's surprise, is less the capital city than the point of arbitration for a weak and sprawling empire otherwise known as the state of Nigeria. Abuja is where the economic spoils are distributed -- the benefit of upwards of 2.5 million barrels of oil pumped daily.
  • Ignored for decades and violently intimidated during the 1990s, the Ijaw in the 2000s waged an increasingly militant campaign to assert their presence. Pipeline sabotage and bombings of oil facilities effectively held the country's economy for ransom. The Ijaw were accommodated in 2007 and were rewarded with the vice presidency, in exchange for curtailing the sponsorship of militant groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND.
  • Indeed, Nigeria attests to the triumph of naked power and geography over the realm of ideas. Nigeria's strength is evinced in the fact that its peacekeepers have successfully led intervention forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and in the fact that Nigerian businessmen are all over West Africa playing pivotal roles in local economies.
  • Nigerians can be found as captains of continental and even global industry, if the black market sectors of business scams and drug, human, car and crude oil smuggling rackets are included. But Nigeria is weak in the sense that its own condition of semi-anarchy makes it impossible for Nigeria to police the region the way a great regional power should.
  • Nigeria and South Africa both should be imperial powers in West Africa and southern African respectively, helping to stabilize places like Mali and the Congo. But they clearly are not due to their own internal weaknesses.
  • Nigeria will totter onwards. It will not descend into civil war because all the regional and ethnic groups understand limits -- and how they can all, at one point or another, benefit from a flagrant system of spoils and kickbacks. Corruption, make no mistake, while it contributes to misrule, is also a pacifying force in Nigeria. But neither will there be the emergence of a strong state.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Mar 13
       
      Corruption = Semi-stability. Depressing.
  • It is a maxim of Western elites that economic development and global integration will lead to civil societies in places like Nigeria. There is an important element of truth in that, but such a truth has severe limits. Economic growth also leads to wider disparities as well as more spoils to fight over.
  • In the case of Nigeria, there is effectively one spoil: those 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. And global society has sunk roots mainly among the elites, not among the tens of millions of people in a place like Nigeria for whom life is a constant, predatory struggle. Nigeria should keep us humble about the human condition and the persistence of national characteristics.
  • anonymous on 06 Mar 13
     
    "Individuals are more concrete than the national or ethnic group of which they form a part. To talk about an individual's personality and tendencies is easy for those who know the person well; to talk about the personality and tendencies of millions of people who form a nation is much trickier and fraught with moral risk. For the result is often simplistic stereotyping of what are often very complex identities. Nevertheless, to assume Danes harbor the same national characteristics as, say, Chinese, is absurd. The fact is, national traits are the product of a people's experience of living on a singular terrain for centuries and longer, leading to an identifiable national or ethnic culture and thus to specific characteristics. To deny this altogether is to immobilize observation, which, in turn, leads to analysis that is both unrealistic and naive."
anonymous

U.S.: What the Sequester Will Do to the Military - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...hat-sequester-will-do-military

shared by anonymous on 01 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The current continuing resolution that Congress is using to fund the entire government until March 27 has already affected U.S. forces.
  • Although Stratfor typically does not examine domestic U.S. issues, this one is geopolitically significant.
  • The U.S. military, and particularly the Navy, is the most powerful force projection instrument in the world. When the sequester takes effect, it will immediately reduce military spending by 8 percent, with more than $500 billion in cuts to defense spending over 10 years divided equally among the military branches.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It is not the overall amount of the reductions that is damaging, necessarily; it is the way in which the cuts will be implemented. The across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration coupled with the limits set by the continuing resolution are constraining budget planners' options in how to absorb the spending reductions and thus are damaging all the military branches, programs, training, deployments and procurement.
  • Just the threat of continued budget reductions has had an immediate effect on the military's readiness. The Navy decided not to deploy a second carrier to the Persian Gulf, backing down from its standard of two carriers in the region. Instead, the second carrier will serve in a surge capacity for the immediate future. The other branches have extended the deployments of units already in theaters and delayed others from rotating in as replacements since it is relatively less expensive to have units stay in place than move them and their equipment intercontinentally.
  • Maintenance budgets across the forces have been reduced or suspended in anticipation of cuts. Training of all non-deploying forces who are not critical to the national strategic forces is also being heavily curtailed.
  • These options were chosen because they are immediate cost-saving measures that can be reversed quickly as opposed to the big-budget procurement programs, in which changes can cause delays for years.
  • Any given military platform, from a Stryker armored vehicle to an aircraft carrier, requires a lot of money in order to be ready for use at any time at its intended level of performance. These platforms require consistent use to maintain a certain readiness level because machines cannot sit idle for months to years and then operate effectively, if at all, especially if called on for immediate action.
  • Moreover, the people that operate this equipment need to maintain their working knowledge and operational skill through continued use. This use causes wear and tear on the platform and requires consistent maintenance. All of this is necessary just to maintain the status quo. In the end, there must be a balance between a platform's readiness level and the amount of funding required for operations and maintenance, but if the money is no longer available there is no choice but to reduce readiness.
  • For example, the Navy has said it is considering suspending operations of four of its nine carrier air wings while shutting down four of its carriers in various stages of the operations and maintenance process. This would essentially give the United States one carrier deployed with one on call for years. This will be sufficient if the world remains relatively quiet, but one large emergency or multiple small ones would leave the United States able to project limited force compared to previous levels.
  • Procurement cycles are very slow and take decades to implement; for instance, the Navy that the United States wants to have in 20 years is being planned now.
  • The U.S. military has a global presence, and sequestration would have appreciable effects on this in certain areas. Potentially, the hardest hit region will be the Pacific, which has been the focus of the United States' new strategy.
  • The single biggest capability gap that will develop will be the U.S. military's surge capacity. If the Syria-Iraq-Lebanon corridor were to become more unstable, the United States will not be able to respond with the same force structure it had in the past. The U.S. military can still shift its assets to different regions to attain its strategic goals, but those assets will come from a smaller resource pool, and shifting them will lessen the presence in some other region. The military's ability to use one of its softer political tools -- joint military exercises -- will also be at risk.
  • This is not to say that the U.S. military will be wrecked immediately or that its condition is anywhere near that of the Russian military in the 1990s. A military's effectiveness is measured against its potential opponents, and the United States has enjoyed a large gap for decades.
  • Funding cuts are not necessarily abnormal for the United States while winding down into a postwar stance. Historically, the pattern has been a reduction in spending and retrenchment of a large volume of forces from abroad. However, Pentagon planners typically go into a postwar period with the stated goal of not damaging the force through these cuts and reductions. 
  • anonymous on 01 Mar 13
     
    "Sequestration, the automatic spending reductions scheduled to take effect March 1, will affect the U.S. military's ability to project force around the world. The current continuing resolution that Congress is using to fund the entire government until March 27 has already affected U.S. forces. The longer these funding cuts continue, the more degradation the U.S. military will incur, with longer-lasting effects. "
anonymous

Science-Based Medicine » It's a part of my paleo fantasy, it's a part of my p... - 0 views

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...y-its-a-part-of-my-paleo-dream

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 13 - Cached
  • If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it’s natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it’s really old, it must be better).
  • Basically, it’s a rejection of modernity, and from it flow the interest in herbalism, various religious practices rebranded as treatments
  • there is a definite belief underlying much of CAM that technology and pharmaceuticals are automatically bad and that “natural” must be better.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages than is the case today.
  • Even so, an implicit assumption among many CAM advocates is that cardiovascular disease is largely a disease of modern lifestyle and diet and that, if modern humans could somehow mimic preindustrial or, according to some, even preagricultural, lifestyles, that cardiovascular disease could be avoided.
  • Over the last decade, Cordain has become the most prominent promoter of the so-called “Paleo diet,” having written The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat and multiple other books advocating a paleolithic-mimetic diet as the cure for what ails modern humans.
  • But how does one determine what the prevalence of cardiovascular disease was in the ancient past?
  • there have been indications that the idea that ancient humans didn’t suffer from atherosclerosis is a comforting myth, the most recent of which is a study published a week ago online in The Lancet by Prof. Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and an international team of investigators entitled Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations.
  • Basically, it was a study of 137 different mummies from four different geographic locations spanning 4,000 years.
  • So, although there was a fair amount of evidence from studies of Egyptian mummies that atherosclerosis was not uncommon, in Egypt it was mainly the wealthy and powerful who were mummified after their deaths. Conceivably, they could have lived a very different lifestyle and consumed a very different diet than the average Egyptian living around that time.
  • So the authors obtained whole-body CT scans of the 137 mummies, either pre-existing scans or scans prospectively done, and analyzed them for calcifications.
  • The mummies to be included in the study were chosen primarily based on two factors, being in a good state of preservation with identifiable vascular tissue, and being adults.
  • The authors obtained identifying information from an extensive search of museum and other databases by a team of archeologists and experts in mummy restoration, and sex was determined by either analysis of the genitals and reproductive organs when present and by pelvic morphology when they were not present.
  • Age was estimated by standard analysis of architectural changes in the clavicle, femur, and humerus.
  • Finally, multiple anthropological and archeological sources were used in an attempt to estimate likely risk factors for the mummies.
  • Figure 2 summarizes the findings nicely: There’s also this video featured in a Nature report on the study showing the reconstructed scan of one of the mummies with atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries.
  • As expected, more atherosclerosis correlates with advanced age, and the amount of atherosclerosis in the young and middle-aged (although the times in which the people who became these mummies after death lived age 50 was old) was less.
  • Although the sample number was far too small to draw definitive conclusions (as is often the case in archeological research), the prevalence of atherosclerotic disease in these mummies did not appear to correlate with the cultures in which the mummies lived.
  • As is noted in Thompson’s article, ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were agricultural cultures with farms and domesticated animals, Ancestral Puebloans were forager-farmers, and the Unangans were hunter-gatherers without agriculture. Indeed, the Peruvians and Ancestral Puebloans predated the written word and were thus prehistoric cultures.
  • One notes that no one, including the authors of this study, is saying that lifestyle and diet are not important factors for the development of atherosclerotic heart disease.
  • What they are saying is that atherosclerosis appears to be associated with aging and that the claims that mimicking paleolithic diets (which, one notes, were definitely not vegan) are overblown. In other words, there is a certain inherent risk of atherosclerosis that is related to aging that is likely not possible to lower further
  • I actually think that the authors probably went too far with that last statement in that, while they might be correct that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging, it is quite well established that this inherent component of aging can at least be worsened by sedentary lifestyle and probably certain diets.
  • One notes that, although the Paleo Diet is not, strictly speaking, always sold as CAM/IM, the ideas behind it are popular among CAM advocates, and the diet is frequently included as part of “integrative medicine,” for example, here at the University of Connecticut website, where it’s under integrative nutrition.
  • In particular, the appeal to ancient wisdom and ancient civilizations as yet untouched by the evil of modernity is the same sort of arguments that are made in favor of various CAM modalities ranging from herbalism to vegan diets rebranded as being somehow CAM to the appeal to “natural” cures.
  • Indeed, the fetish for the “natural” in CAM is such that even a treatment like Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplaston therapy is represented as “natural” when in fact, if it were ever shown to work against cancer, it would be chemotherapy and has toxicities greater than that of some of our current chemotherapy drugs.
  • The book is by Marlene Zuk and entitled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist, and in particular she points out how the evolutionary arguments favored by advocates of the Paleo diet don’t stand up to scrutiny.
  • The interview begins with Zuk confronting Cordain at a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. At his lecture, Cordain pronounced several foods to be the cause of fatal conditions in people carrying certain genes.
  • These foods included, predictably, cultivated foods such as bread (made from grain), rice, and potatoes. Zuk couldn’t resist asking a question, namely why the inability to digest so many common foods would persist in the population, observing, “Surely it would have been selected out of the population.” Cordain’s response? That humans had not had time to adapt to these foods, to which Zuk retorted, “Plenty of time.” Apparently, in her book, Zuk produces numerous examples of evolution in humans occurring in a time frame of less than 10,000 years, including:
  • Blue eyes arose 6,000 to 10,000 years ago
  • Rapid selection for the CCR5-D gene variant that makes some people immune to HIV
  • Lactase persistence (production past the age of weening of the lactase enzyme that digests lactose in milk) probably dates back only around 7,500 to 10,000 years, around the time that cattle were domesticated
  • there is no one diet or climate that predominated among our Paleolithic ancestors:
  • Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.
  • For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”
  • Oh, and, as Zuk tells us, paleolithic people got cancer, too.
  • we humans have long been known to abuse and despoil our environment, even back in those “paleo” days. Indeed, when I took a prehistoric archeology course, which was largely dedicated to the period of time of the hunter-gatherers, one thing I remember my professor pointing out, and that was that what he did was largely the study of prehistoric garbage and that humans have always produced a lot of it.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 13
     
    "There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds.""
anonymous

Impacts of Missile Defense Cuts on U.S.-Russian Relations | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ense-cuts-us-russian-relations

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 19 Mar 13 - Cached
  • There are several possible reasons for the move, most notably U.S. hopes for a thaw in tensions with Russia, which fiercely opposes the entire missile defense plan. Washington needs Moscow to cooperate on a range of issues, and talks between the two countries have stalled in recent months. But while the decision to scrap the fourth phase of the plan could lead to progress in negotiations, the move will not assuage all of Russia's concerns about the U.S. missile shield in Europe. Various disputes will remain unresolved between Washington and Moscow and continue to preclude a long-elusive comprehensive reset in U.S.-Russian relations.
  • The original plan called for deployment of shorter- and medium-range interceptors in the first three phases and longer-range interceptors in the fourth phase.
  • The first phase, which involved radar stations in Turkey and ship-based missile defense systems in the Mediterranean, has already been implemented.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • During the second and third phases, more-advanced interceptors capable of targeting short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles would be deployed to Romania by 2015 and Poland by 2018.
  • In the fourth phase, the longer-range SM-3 Block IIB missiles would be deployed in Romania and Poland around 2022.
  • Compared to its predecessors in the Standard Missile-3 line, the SM-3 Block IIB would have enhanced seeking capabilities and a more powerful booster
  • This is why the SM-3 Block IIB faced fierce opposition from Russia, which sees the interceptor as a possible threat to its own strategic nuclear missile arsenal.
  • U.S. defense officials insist that the cancellation of the missile defense plan's final phase had nothing to do with Russia but was rather motivated by technological and budgetary factors.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Mar 13
       
      "nothing to do with Russia" should be in quotes. :Clears throat:
  •  In an era of defense budget cuts, funding for the risky program became harder to justify. But regardless of Washington's exact reasons for the changes, they address at least some of Russia's concerns over the U.S. missile defense plans.
  • The White House would like to continue to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States beyond the limits imposed by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which places a ceiling on the number of deployed delivery systems and strategic warheads possessed by each country. To achieve this, the White House needs Russian participation in order to withstand opposition to the treaty from national security hawks in Congress.
  • Washington also wants Russian cooperation in a number of other issues, including the Iranian nuclear program and the conflict in Syria. The United States also needs to secure access to the Northern Distribution Network, the primary logistical route into Afghanistan, which will be critical to the U.S. withdrawal over the next two years.
  • Initial Russian reactions to the U.S. announcement have been less than optimistic. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, for example, said the move was not a concession, and Russia still objects to the parts of the overall plan that remain.
  • Moreover, the United States may decide to focus on a different intercontinental ballistic missile defense system that would still provoke objections from the Russians. On March 15, for example, Hagel also announced plans to deploy 14 additional ground-based interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, -- missiles theoretically capable of defending against intercontinental ballistic missiles, although the program's development and deployment have been marred by numerous failed tests. The apparent demise of the SM-3 Block IIB could also lead to the deployment of additional missile defense systems along the U.S. East Coast.
  • Hagel said that the U.S. commitment to defending Europe remains ironclad, and other U.S. officials have been quick to emphasize that the first three phases of the European Phased Adaptive Approach remain in place and on track to cover all European NATO members by 2018.
  • The U.S. military presence in Poland and Romania will continue to be an obstacle in U.S.-Russian relations.
  • So while the changes to the U.S. missile defense plan address a key issue for Russia, they do not resolve all of Moscow's concerns -- especially those related to developments in missile defense technology or the continued stationing of U.S. forces in Russia's near abroad.
  • anonymous on 19 Mar 13
     
    "The United States appears to be scaling back its ballistic missile shield efforts in Central Europe. On March 15, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the United States would cancel the fourth phase of its European Phased Adaptive Approach missile defense plan and "restructure" the Standard Missile-3 Block IIB program -- a highly advanced interceptor expected to shield against intercontinental ballistic missiles. Essentially, Hagel was announcing that development of the interceptor, a central component part of the fourth phase, would be scrapped."
anonymous

How the internet is making us poor - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...how-the-internet-made-us-poor

technology unemployment computing

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Sixty percent of the jobs in the US are information-processing jobs, notes Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of a recent book about this disruption, Race Against the Machine. It’s safe to assume that almost all of these jobs are aided by machines that perform routine tasks. These machines make some workers more productive. They make others less essential.
  • The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever.
  • Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?
  • To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)
  • Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)
  • Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.
  • For many years, the question of whether or not spending on information technology (IT) made companies more productive was highly controversial. Many studies found that IT spending either had no effect on productivity or was even counter-productive. But now a clear trend is emerging. More recent studies show that IT—and the organizational changes that go with it—are doing firms, especially multinationals (pdf), a great deal of good.
  • Winner-take-all and the power of capital to exacerbate inequality
  • One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.
  • But it can also exacerbate income inequality, says Brynjolfsson. This contributes to a phenomenon called “skill-biased technological [or technical] change.” “The idea is that technology in the past 30 years has tended to favor more skilled and educated workers versus less educated workers,” says Brynjolfsson. “It has been a complement for more skilled workers. It makes their labor more valuable. But for less skilled workers, it makes them less necessary—especially those who do routine, repetitive tasks.”
  • “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.
  • The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.”
  • Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.
  • “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.
  • In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.
  • This time it’s fasterHistory is littered with technological transitions. Many of them seemed at the time to threaten mass unemployment of one type of worker or another, whether it was buggy whip makers or, more recently, travel agents. But here’s what’s different about information-processing jobs: The takeover by technology is happening much faster.
  • From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.
  • Brynjolfsson thinks he knows why: More and more people were doing work aided by software. And during the great recession, employment growth didn’t just slow. As we saw above, in both manufacturing and information processing, the economy shed jobs, even as employment in the service sector and professional fields remained flat.
  • Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.
  • There are many reasons why the economy has reversed this “compression,” transforming into an “hourglass economy” with many fewer workers in the middle class and more at either the high or the low end of the income spectrum.
  • The hourglass represents an income distribution that has been more nearly the norm for most of the history of the US. That it’s coming back should worry anyone who believes that a healthy middle class is an inevitable outcome of economic progress, a mainstay of democracy and a healthy society, or a driver of further economic development.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is the meaty center. It's what I worry about. The "Middle Class" may just be an anomaly.
  • Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”
  • So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.
  • But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "Everyone knows the story of how robots replaced humans on the factory floor. But in the broader sweep of automation versus labor, a trend with far greater significance for the middle class-in rich countries, at any rate-has been relatively overlooked: the replacement of knowledge workers with software. One reason for the neglect is that this trend is at most thirty years old, and has become apparent in economic data only in perhaps the past ten years. The first all-in-one commercial microprocessor went on sale in 1971, and like all inventions, it took decades for it to become an ecosystem of technologies pervasive and powerful enough to have a measurable impact on the way we work."
anonymous

What Gay Marriage Polls Tells Us About Marijuana Legalization | TPMDC - 0 views

tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...litymarijuana-legalization.php

shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 13 - Cached
  • But if you were surprised at how quickly marriage equality happened, get ready for another shock: pot’s going to be legal too. The same demographic and cultural changes that propelled marriage equality to majority status are already pushing support for legal pot to the same place.
  • TPM analyzed all available, nationwide polling data on the questions of full marijuana legalization and marriage equality for the past 18 years and found public opinion on the two issues has taken a nearly identical trajectory.
  • Though marijuana legalization is slightly behind marriage equality in terms of public opinion, it has enjoyed a steadier climb along the way to earning the support of nearly half the country. As the accompanying chart shows, backing and opposition to marriage equality has undergone some dramatic dips and peaks over the last seventeen years. On the other hand, support for marijuana legalization has simply moved, pardon the pun, higher and higher each year. This could be an indication marijuana legalization may enjoy an even smoother ride to ultimate approval than marriage equality.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • TPM spoke with activists working on both issues and they identified several reasons marijuana legalization may have a less bumpy road along the way to earning nationwide support.
  • Erik Altieri, a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a pro-marijuana lobbying group, said a major factor behind this may be legalizations natural appeal among some conservatives and libertarians who see it as a civil liberties issue.
  • They also pointed out marriage equality has entrenched opposition among religious, social conservatives — something pot legalization lacks.
  • “The argument for legalization has really been sort of couched in medical usage. You still have to sell marriage. Not everyone knows a gay person or a gay person who wants to marry their same-sex partner. Everyone knows someone who smokes weed,” the consultant said.
  • In theory, support for pot legalization could stall at the current 50/50 split. But one key trend, the same driving the seemingly inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, makes that outcome highly unlikely. Young people overwhelmingly support legalization. And diehard opposition is heavily concentrated among older voters.
  • Between 2009 and 2012 support for marijuana legalization grew at nearly twice the rate it had at any time since 1995. Altieri attributes this rapid increase to the economic crisis.
  • “What I would really pinpoint as the source of this last four year nudge up where we jumped up 10 points is the economy,” Altieri said. “People always knew we shouldn’t be giving such harsh punishments to those arrested for marijuana offenses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in jail. It became much more imperative when we had the financial crisis and then we’re seeing the debt ceiling.”
  • In two dozen states there are forty or so marijuana reform bills in play ranging from simple decriminalization, to medicalization and full-on legalization. Where we’re also seeing the movement is on the federal level where we haven’t previously. There are six to seven federal marijuana bills in Congress and they span the scope like we haven’t seen before including a call for a presidential commission to look at medical marijuana and Jared Polis’ legislation to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, which would essentially end the federal government’s involvement in marijuana prohibition.”
  • While President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and a growing crowd of the most high-level national politicians has jumped on the bandwagon of marriage equality backers, the marijuana legalization movement hasn’t had a similar infusion of political star power.
  • “More politicians are going to come aboard as they are realizing that this is no longer a political third rail, that this is a political opportunity for them. They’re self interested creatures at heart, so that’s what theyre paying attention too,” Altieri said. “When Colorado and Washington did what they did, it took the issue to a new level of legitimacy that we’d never seen. This was no longer something that people could make snide comments about on cable news.” 
  • Washington and Colorado’s legalization law also set the stage for a pivotal moment where Attorney General Eric Holder will decide whether to intervene in those states and arrest those involved in the (still federally illegal) marijuana trade.
  • “History has shown that, once you hit 60 percent on an issue in this country, it gets really hard to go against it,” he said. At the average rate support for legalization has grown since 1995, public opinion will hit that magic 60 percent threshold by 2022. But based on the rate backing for legalization has grown between 2009 and 2012, we could see public support for the issue reach that number bey 2019.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Apr 13
       
      That's entertainingly close to the two dates (from non-related sources) that point to our cyclical/structural socio-economic realignment. On thing is certain (to me): Pot legalization will suddenly become a non-issue as states (and eventually, the feds) see it as a much needed source of revenue (along with cutting a few legs out of the prison-industrial complex).
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 13
     
    "With the Supreme Court now at least considering a definitive statement in favor of gay marriage and support for marriage equality now practically a litmus test issue for Democratic politicians, Americans across the political spectrum are expressing surprise at how rapidly this once marginalized idea became something like a national consensus."
anonymous

How Bayes' Rule Can Make You A Better Thinker - 1 views

io9.com/you-a-better-thinker-471233405

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • To find out more about this topic, we spoke to mathematician Spencer Greenberg, co-founder of Rebellion Research and a contributing member of AskAMathematician where he answers questions on math and physics. He has also created a free Bayesian thinking module that's available online.
  • Bayes’s Rule is a theorem in probability theory that answers the question, "When you encounter new information, how much should it change your confidence in a belief?" It’s essentially about making decisions under uncertainty, and how we should update or revise our theories as new evidence emerges. It can also be used to help us reach decisions in those circumstances when very few observations or pieces of evidence are available. And it can also be used to help us avoid common mistakes and fallacies in our thinking.
  • The key to Bayesianism is in understanding the power of probabilistic reasoning. But unlike games of chance, in which there’s no ambiguity and everyone agrees on what’s going on (like the roll of die), Bayesians use probability to express their degree of belief about something.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • When it comes to the confidence we have in our beliefs — what can be expressed in terms of probability — we can’t just make up any number we want. There’s only one consistent way to handle those degrees in beliefs.
  • In the strictest sense, of course, this requires a bit of mathematical knowledge. But Greenberg says there’s still an easy way to use this principle in daily life — and one that can be converted to plain English.
  • Greenberg says it’s the question of evidence which he should apply, which goes like this:: Assuming that our hypothesis is true, how much more plausible, or likely, is the evidence compared to the hypothesis if it was not true?
  • “It’s important to note that the idea here is not to answer the question in a precise way — like saying that it’s 3.2 times more likely — rather, it’s to get a rough sense. Is it a high number, a modest number, or a small number?”
  • To make Bayes practical, we have to start with the belief of how likely something is. Then we need to ask the question of evidence, and whether or not we should increase the confidence in our beliefs by a lot, a little, and so on.
  • “Much of the time people will automatically try to shoot down evidence, but you can get evidence for things that are not true. Just because you have evidence doesn’t mean you should change your mind. But it does mean that you should change your degree of belief.”
  • Greenberg also describes Representativeness Heuristic in which people tend to look at how similar things are.
  • Greenberg also says that we should shy away from phrases like, “I believe,” or “I don’t believe.” “That’s the wrong way to frame it,” he says. “We should think about things in terms of how probable they are. You almost never have anything close to perfect certainty.”
  • “Let’s say you believe that your nutrition supplement works,” he told us, “Then you get a small amount of evidence against it working, and you completely write that evidence off because you say, ‘well, I still believe it works because it’s just a small amount of evidence.’ But then you get more evidence that it doesn’t work. If you were an ideal reasoner, you’d see that accumulation of evidence, and every time you get that evidence, you should believe less and less that the nutritional supplements are actually working.” Eventually, says Greenberg, you end up tipping things so that you no longer believe. But instead, we end up never changing our mind.
  • “You should never say that you have absolute certainty, because it closes the door to being able to revise your certainty in light of new information,” Greenberg told io9. “And the same thing can be said for having zero percent certainty about something happening. If you’re at 100% certainty, then the correct way of updating is to stay at 100% forever, and no amount of evidence can tip you.”
  • Lastly, he also says that probabilities can depend on the observer — what is a kind of probability relativity. We all have access to different information, so different people should assign different rates of probability to different things based on different sets of evidence.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "Having a strong opinion about an issue can make it hard to take in new information about it, or to consider other options when they're presented. Thankfully, there's an old rule that can help us avoid this problem - and even help us make good decisions when we're uncertain. Here's how Bayesian Reasoning works, and why it can make you a better thinker."
anonymous

The question libertarians just can't answer - 1 views

www.salon.com/..._libertarians_just_cant_answer

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 13 - Cached
  • There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
  • Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.
  • Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
  • If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?
  • Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
  • But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise.
  • Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries.
  • With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire.
  • Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.
  • These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade.
  • Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S.
  • The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?
  • According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010.
  • In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S.
  • Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 13
     
    A most cogent argument. I don't think it's the author's job to balance itself out (as was suggested in G+). Against what, exactly? The piece had nothing to do with the two-party system. I completely agree that our two party system is a joke, but I fail to see how inserting an additional joke adds anything. The LP serves a vote-getting purpose for the GOP. That is all. Once the GOP gets enough votes, they reserve the right to kick the LP ideas/candidates to the curb - and often do. That's been the cycle for decades. Years back, it made me angry. I'm pretty ambivalent now. Circle of political life. The official LP positions on a whole host of issues is beyond unpalatable even for our heavily right-leaning electorate. Abolishing the WoD is a great policy idea, but it needs to be accompanied by more great ideas before Americans do more than pay lip service and pretend to Go Galt. Oh, and they have to rip out their Objectivist-center and hurl it into the sun.
anonymous

The Technium: Bootstrapping the Industrial Age - 0 views

www.kk.org/...bootstrapping_t.php

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 13 - Cached
  • In February 1942, R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food.
  • But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe.
  • It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful.
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  • The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more sophisticated items.
  • During the two years of their interment the lathe remade the tools -- like taps and dies -- which were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive qualities.
  • Over years of tinkering, Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make real stuff.
  • Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. This was a small 5-gallon bucket packed with sand.
  • In its center was a coffee can of smoldering BBQ charcoal. Inside the can of charcoal was a small ceramic crucible into which he threw scrap aluminum – cans, etc. Gingery forced air into this crude furnace via a fan, burning the charcoal with enough heat to melt the aluminum. He poured the molten metal into a mold of wet sand carved out in the shape he wanted. When the cast was cool he had a workable metal holding plate, which became the heart of a homemade lathe. Other lathe parts were cast. He finished these rough parts with hand tools. His one “cheat” was adding a used electric motor – although it is not impossible to imagine a wind or water powered version.
  • When the rough lathe was up and running he used it to turn out the parts for a drill press. With the drill press and lathe operating he constantly reworked pieces of the lathe itself, replacing parts with improved versions. In this way, his tiny machine shop was an upcreation device, capable of generating higher a machine of precision than itself.
  • Gingery recapitulated the evolution of technology, the great pattern by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on infinitum. This expansion of upcreation power is the means by which an entire culture lifts itself out of mud by pulling up on its bootstraps.
  • Yet is it obvious this little demonstration is not pure. As a way to make your own machine tools, Gingerys’ plans are fine and dandy. He uses cast off washing machine motors and other junkyard scrap parts to grow a fairly robust machine shop. But as an example of relaunching a technological society in a kind of Robinson Crusoe maneuver – landing somewhere and starting civilization up -- it’s a cheat because in this latter game you don’t get to start with discarded aluminum cans, scavenged nuts and bolts, old electric motors and waste sheet metal.
  • To really navigate the minimum bootstrap path through the industrial web, you’d have to start with finding your own ore, mining and refining it with primitive tools, firing up bricks, rolling out sheet metal, developing screws and bolts by hand – all just to get you to the point where you’d have enough tools and materials to make the simple 5-gallon bucket foundry that Dave Gingery started with.
  • Select at random any one of the many thousands items within the reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.
  • Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
  • This is why restarting a sophisticated society after a devastating setback is so hard. Without all the adjacent items in a given ecological bundle, a single technology can have no effect
  • you need them all working to get one working
  • The conundrum of disaster relief is a testimony to this deep interdependency: one needs roads to bring petrol but petrol to clear roads, medicines to heal people, but healthy people to dispense medicines, communications to enable organization but organization to restore communications. We see the interdependent platform of technology primarily when it breaks down.
  • This is also the explanation of why we should not confuse a good clear view of the future with a short distance. We can see the perfect outlines of where technology is going, but we tend to overestimate how soon it will come. Usually the delay (in our eager eyes) is due to the invisible ecology of other needed technologies that aren’t ready yet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 13
       
      Classic example that's relatable to nerds: Virtual Reality. In the '90's, the graphics tech wasn't close to where it needed to be. Also, ram prices and other hardware limitations (speed) made implementing it in any serious way a joke. Now, of course, the Oculus Rift is a consumer good. We don't call stuff "VR" anymore (as a buzzword), we just know we can buy a cool attachment that makes everything 3D.
  • The invention will hang suspended in the future for many years, not coming any closer the now. Then when the ignored co-technologies are in place it will appear in our lives in a sudden, with much surprise and applause for its unexpected appearance.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 13
     
    "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?"
anonymous

Tapeworm Logic - 0 views

www.antipope.org/...tapeworm-logic.html

shared by anonymous on 10 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • A mature tapeworm has a very simple lifestyle. It lives in the gut of a host animal, anchoring itself to the wall of the intestine with its scolex (or head), from which trails a long string of segments (proglottids) that contain reproductive structures. The tapeworm absorbs nutrients through its skin and gradually extrudes more proglottids, from the head down; as they reach the end of the tape they mature into a sac of fertilized eggs and break off.
  • The adult tapeworm has no knowledge of what happens to its egg sacs after they detach; nor does it know where it came from. It simply finds itself attached to a warm, pulsing wall, surrounded by a rich nutrient flow. Its experience of the human being is limited to this: that the human surrounds it and provides it with a constant stream of nutrients and energy.
  • Welcome to the Fermi paradox, mired in shit. Shall we itemize the errors that the tapeworm is making in its analysis?
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The first and most grievous offense our tapeworm logician has committed is that of anthropocentrism (or rather, of cestodacentrism); it thinks everything revolves around tapeworms.
  • In reality, the human is unaware of the existence of the tapeworm. This would be a good thing, from the worm's point of view, if it had any grasp of the broader context of its existence: it ought by rights to be doing the wormy equivalent of hiding under the bed covers, gibbering in fear.
  • There are vast, ancient, alien intellects in the macrocosm beyond the well-known human, and they are unsympathetic to tapeworms.
  • Some of the tapeworm's descendants might be able to find another new human to claim as their home, but the same constraints will apply. Only if the tapeworm transcends its tapewormanity and grows legs, lungs, and other organs that essentially turn it into something other than a tapeworm will it be able to make itself at home outside the human.
  • anonymous on 10 Jan 13
     
    "What use is a human being - to a tapeworm?"
anonymous

Why Choosing to Make Less Money Is Easier Than Ever - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...less-money-is-easier-than-ever

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • If innovation has become increasingly marginal, then it’s less costly to choose to be a “threshold earner,” which Tyler Cowen defines as “someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more.”
  • If wages go up, Cowen says, a threshold earner will choose to work less or, I would add, choose work that’s so personally fulfilling that it’s indistinguishable from leisure.
  • As Andy Warhol said, What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
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  • The Internet and modern media make this truer than ever. The same music, sports, movies, and HBO miniseries are available to threshold earners that are available to their high-income counterparts. The only difference might be the size of the screen they watch it on.
  • If you choose to accept a lower income than you might otherwise be able to command in order to consume more leisure, then what you are likely going to have to give up is consuming positional goods.
  • For one thing, food trucks are “in,” and so are lots of other low-cost consumption made fashionable by threshold-earning hipsters—from no-brand plastic sunglasses and thrift store clothes, to Pabst Blue Ribbon and communal living.
  • In some ways a conspicuously anti-consumerist lifestyle has become a positional good in itself.
  • Trader Joe’s is the chief example of this trend.
  • It caters not to the average American, but to a more elite set interested in organic, gourmet, and ethnic foods. Nevertheless, it offers low prices through an ingenious mix of limited selection and price discrimination (many Trader-Joe’s-branded items are the same high-end brands you’d get at Whole Foods, just repackaged.)
  • The company seems to be directly targeting educated threshold earners. One retail consultant that studied the chain has said that Trader Joe’s typical customer is a “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.” Indeed, the chain sites stores in university-dense areas brimming with bargain-hunting elites.
  • “The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.” The threshold earning elite gets the high-end shopping experience and trendy clothes at low prices.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "The "great stagnation" presents us with a great opportunity. It's easier than ever to opt-out of the income-maximizing rat-race and enjoy more leisure. If innovation has become increasingly marginal, then it's less costly to choose to be a "threshold earner," which Tyler Cowen defines as "someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more." If wages go up, Cowen says, a threshold earner will choose to work less or, I would add, choose work that's so personally fulfilling that it's indistinguishable from leisure."
anonymous

Where criminals get their guns - 0 views

dailycaller.com/...where-criminals-get-their-guns

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Believe it or not I actually heard her say, “A lot of criminals get their guns from gun stores.” Really? Let’s look at the facts.
  • A 1997 Justice Department survey of more than 18,000 state and federal convicts revealed the truth: • 39.6% of criminals obtained a gun from a friend or family member • 39.2% of criminals obtained a gun on the street or from an illegal source • 0.7% of criminals purchased a gun at a gun show • 1% of criminals purchased a gun at a flea market • 3.8% of criminals purchased a gun from a pawn shop • 8.3% of criminals actually bought their guns from retail outlets
  • Note that less than 9 percent of all guns obtained by criminals in this survey came from retail outlets, hardly “a lot” compared to the almost 40 percent of convicts who obtained guns from friends or family or the almost 40 percent who obtained them illegally on the street.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The gun-show loophole? Less than 1 percent of criminal guns came from gun shows. Nothing there, either.
  • The survey data were analyzed and released in 2001 then revised in 2002, but while the eye-opening details are more than 10 years old it’s hard to believe criminal responses have changed much over the last decade.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Apr 13
       
      On the contrary, this is worth investigating with fresher data. The perception of a culture war against gun owners has caused sales to surge in *spite* of an overall decrease on the proportion of citizens who own guns. In other words: Gun owners are buying more guns while fewer people want to own then. My gut says that may have moved some statistical indicators. Still, the author's point stands. Even without fresh data, you can get a good snapshot of the rough picture.
  • “Universal” background checks won’t work. The fact is we have them now. Anytime a law-abiding citizen purchases a gun from a brick-and-mortar or online retailer, pawn shop owner or private dealer—essentially any licensed dealer who sells more than a handful of firearms per month—he or she must submit to a background examination via the National Instant Check System.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 13
     
    "Across all media these days the information is far from accurate when it comes to the culture war waged against gun owners. The topic the other day on a Fox News program was Chicago's "gun problem." Of course everyone knows Chicago's problem is crime committed by thugs who disobey the law, but that didn't stop one woman from insisting "universal" background checks would cut down the number of guns on the city's streets."
anonymous

Once Upon a Time in Syria - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...once-upon-time-syria

shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Though the term "Arabist" has been used far more broadly, during the Cold War in Washington it often came to refer to people at the State Department.
  • They tended to have come of age during World War II, were educated at the best private schools in New England, were in some cases descendants of American missionary families in the Middle East in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by mastering Arabic in their twenties and thirties, spent their entire foreign service careers in one Arab country after another.
  • Syria was often their lodestar: the essential Arab country.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Syria was the throbbing heart of Arabism, the most steadfast country in its refusal to compromise with what, in Syrian eyes, was the post-colonial monstrosity known as Israel.
  • For a U.S. State Department Arabist, a posting to Syria was, in a thematic sense, fundamental to a successful career.
  • Given the fact of almost two dozen Arabic-speaking countries and only one Hebrew-speaking country to which one could be posted, an American diplomat's professional lifetime might be spent among Arabs much more easily than among Israelis. Not to develop sympathies would be inhuman.
  • The Arabists knew that it was a myth that Syria did not experiment with democracy like Israel. Syria had held three relatively free elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954, and all broke down more or less along ethnic, sectarian, tribal or regional lines, with military rule resulting after each failure.
  • The Arabists understood better than anyone else (except, that is, for the locals) that Syria was an artificial state built on a mass of contradictions.
  • It is tempting to deride the old-time Arabists of the Cold War era from the vantage point of 20/20 hindsight. After all, they dutifully communicated the diplomatic positions of one Syrian dictator after another to Washington, and especially so during the three-decade-long rule of Hafez al Assad.
  • But one is forced to argue: What else were they supposed to do?
  • the Arabists dealt with the political reality as they found it.
  • The tragedy of al Assad family rule in Syria is not that it produced tyranny: That tyranny, remember, produced sustained domestic peace after 21 changes of government in the 24 years preceding the elder al Assad's coup.
  • The tragedy is that the al Assads did nothing useful with the domestic peace they had established.
  • Citizens rise above sectarianism, whereas subjects have only sectarianism to fall back on.
  • The Arabists were in Syria and other countries not to plan American grand strategy or to tell dictators how to behave in the midst of a titanic struggle with the Soviet Union (in which America, perforce, supported many dictatorships) but to report perceptively on what was going on in their parcel of the world.
  • The Middle East, wracked by clan, tribal, ethnic and sectarian unrest, will always require area specialists with years of experience living in the region to help Washington make sense of it all.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Apr 13
       
      See also: Internet friend Ed Webb.
  • Supporters of the Iraq War lauded Crocker's efforts to help stabilize Iraq, even as Crocker himself had warned in a 2002 memo that an American invasion of Iraq would unleash internal and regional chaos.
  • The 21st century, in other words, demands individuals with a 19th century sense of the world: people who think in terms of geography, indigenous cultures and local traditions.
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "Once upon a time, Syria was among the most enthralling and beautiful countries on earth, without the forest of hideous concrete architecture that came to deface the outskirts of its cities, without the pollution, and, of course, without the violence and lawless roads of today. Syria was a stage set for the merger of the Bible and the Mediterranean: wind-ransacked plains, littered with archaeological ruins in all the earthen colors of a rich palette, in places like Palmyra and Qala'at Samaan."
anonymous

Learning CSS - 1 views

www.w3.org/...learning.en.html

CSS javascript essential jobhacking

shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 13
     
    This is one user's CSS Bible. It has a lot of meat and very little fat (by the looks of it). Highly recommended "Starting with HTML + CSS teaches how to create a first style sheet. For a quick intro, try chapter 2 of Lie & Bos or Dave Raggett's intro to CSS. Or see examples of styling XML and CSS tips & tricks. W3C's Core Styles are simple style sheets ready for use. Two different self-study courses (under development) are CSS for beginners and Web Standards Curriculum. Also on this page: English and non-English articles, discussion fora, books, and secondary resources."
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