kapitza

11 ms·

31.
by kapitza 10y ago
To be fair, if I had a solution to this problem, I would offer one. Well, okay: one solution, if there's no practical way around the asymmetry, would be to make it explicit in the guidelines. You could say: when expressing unpopular
32.
by kapitza 10y ago
I think this thread is actually a great example, though maybe not in the way you intend it. When I look at the tone of the downvoted/flagged "dissident" comments (not a value judgment, just an objective description of perspec
33.
by kapitza 10y ago
Crime isn't force? Withholding protection from crime isn't systematic? When Milosevic went to cleanse Kosovo, he didn't send the Yugoslav Army to put people in cattle cars. He just let Arkan's Tigers do whatever. Arka
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by kapitza 10y ago
I believe we have a right to a government that does everything possible to support, cherish, protect and uplift its citizens -- whether by defending them from crime, or preserving their livelihoods. Yes, I'm aware that this makes me a
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by kapitza 10y ago
Uh, no, if several hundred thousand people were murdered , that would be a massacre . If they left because they were afraid of being murdered (or otherwise violated in their physical safety), that would be ethnic cleansing . Do you not
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by kapitza 10y ago
You jump straight from the condition "America makes worse cars" to "America should stop making cars and buy Japanese and German cars." A mercantilist or protectionist would jump straight to "Americans drive worse ca
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by kapitza 10y ago
Wow. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about Marxism. But at least it's an ethos. I don't know this, but let's suppose that by your use of this term "exercise of economic power", you imply some moral
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by kapitza 10y ago
Version 1 (unless broadened) does not explain why exactly the same symptoms (if not always as extreme) appeared in many other American cities, not specializing in auto production, at the same time. "Due to foreign competition" is
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by kapitza 10y ago
You illustrate the point exactly. Maybe it would be clearer with a little more detail on the "potato blight" analogy. Here are two kinds of statement: "Potato blight" has no single cause -- it results from combinations
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by kapitza 10y ago
No -- what's strange is that a monumental historical event, which happened in the lives of those now living, and caused immense destruction and immense sorrow to many human beings, is not attributed to any clear cause, or human institu
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by kapitza 10y ago
From your link: Urban decay (also known as urban rot and urban blight) is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or chang
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by kapitza 10y ago
What's so remarkable about this piece is that it says nothing at all about this "disease of blight." What is blight? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight The article reads as if everyone was expected to
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Genocide prevention by one condottiere(iwp.edu)
1 points by kapitza 10y ago|0 comments
44.
by kapitza 10y ago
As Jennings Wise (a legitimate historian from the '30s, his Wilson biography is quite good) said: "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson, despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to e
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by kapitza 10y ago
My word, no! When you go trawling in the swamp of uncanonical information, you actually have to perform the filtering work yourself. If you're not interested in judging sources yourself, by all means stick to the Economist! It's
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by kapitza 10y ago
Mr. Zuckerberg was even more optimistic about the possibility of using the same tool to suppress fake news in the US. "China is a beta-test with a billion users," he said.
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by kapitza 10y ago
What's great is that they can use the same exact tool in the US, to weed out "fake news"! It's like the end of _Animal Farm_. Only more perfect...
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by kapitza 10y ago
I suspect most of the CS researchers in the room were, in a sense, lying. I'm going to guess (a) they could all understand the notation if they tried; (b) they were in fact taught the notation in some undergraduate class, math camp, e
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by kapitza 10y ago
This is inconsistent with Hausfather's numbers, which you can see at the link above. Net global and US temps are both adjusted lower. I can't explain the discrepancy. Someone is being clever, that's for sure.
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by kapitza 10y ago
The data quality in natural "experiments" like ice ages are as dubious as the GCMs, in the sense that you're simplifying very complex systems into single numbers. You'd never take this data set seriously next to the dat
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by kapitza 10y ago
That's a good point. On the other hand, the SST measurements are a lot lower impact (in terms of the number of times they're used in graphs that get into your newspaper) than air temperatures. Which may be not be logical. But hu
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by kapitza 10y ago
I don't know how they came up with this sentence. I'm sure it is true in some sense of the word "true." But just look at the data: https://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustm
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by kapitza 10y ago
I think you're missing the point. The negative adjustments of past temperatures are neither the work of one scientist, nor even one scientific organization. Let's say for simplicity that they're the result of ten entirely se
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by kapitza 10y ago
You don't need dishonest researchers to see this effect. You just need researchers who care, personally and/or professionally, about the impact of their work. I'm sure Mr. Spock is a professor somewhere. If you talk to real
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by kapitza 10y ago
This is actually an excellent illustration of how organizational incentives seep into data. Imagine you have a historical temperature series record. You have an bureaucratic incentive to find and justify an argument as to why past temperat
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by kapitza 10y ago
This is slightly misleading. What we've understood for a century is the thermal forcing due to CO2, which is a logarithmic function of the CO2 concentration (ie, forcing == O(log n) in CO2 concentration). What we don't understand
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by kapitza 10y ago
That's actually the point. You've defined "being a dick" as "supporting Emmanuel Goldstein, who wants to reverse all the great work the Party has done for the proles." I understand how you get there, logically
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by kapitza 10y ago
Usually when people make this argument they're wrong, but not in this case. I'm disturbed by OP's low-quality trolling. When you're a dissident or ideological minority in any context, it's absolutely essential at a
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by kapitza 10y ago
Some of the confidence of this article (which one could describe as a remarkably, um, self-confident explanation of basic accounting identities in international trade) seems a little misplaced 20 years later. Especially if you've spen
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by kapitza 10y ago
Here's a great picture of "families who have understood that the press is a civic calling" (what is this supposed to be, the Venetian Republic?) in action: When bloomberg was having problems w the times he called Arthur [Sul

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