shirgall

Yeah, it's tantamount to saying that if you are hiding your communications you must be doing something shady.

The vote tally https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2014/h558 The actual bill is here: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr4681eas/pdf/BILLS-113hr4681eas.pdf Please note that the advice to "encrypt everything" means such communications can be stored indefinitely, but unencrypted communications can only be retained for five years unless "reasonably" expected to be part of a crime. Even so, they can retain anything they want for five years, from a quick glance... which has already been done legally since 1972. Regardless, I am bankrupt of trust in governments on this matter.

You are constructing a vast edifice that could easily be explained by something as simple as reaction formation. We've been trained by shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson to take race into account, because they will if we don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_formation

Anyone else have high hopes for this one? I'm sure the film club, peaceful parents, *and* the self-knowledge gurus are gonna have fun with this. (yeah, the title was an attempt to attract the reddit "cat" crowd for extra points)

There is a history here, that contracts which agree to, or compel someone to perform, illegal or immoral acts are invalid. In the case where someone sells you stolen goods, you give up the stolen goods, but you can sue the seller for your money back (you can imagine how successful this is).

Sure, but when you artificially raise the price of labor, what automation was cost-prohibitive might not be any longer.

Inflation. Look at the cost of labor in terms of of a timeless commodity (like ounces of silver) sometime. Peter Schiff has talked about this on his radio show occasionally. Admittedly most of the loss has come in the years since 1972. Check out http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi It has inflation figures that start in 1800. And...

The technology is being developed because of the cost of labor. The usual result is a higher standard of living as the really boring jobs get automated or at least there are better tools so fewer people have to do them, but it does raise the bar for people to do more complex things.

My hope is that modern education is so bad and boring that people seek alternative ways to learn things... and that they instill in themselves insatiable thirst for truth and knowledge. I found college to be incredibly behind the times in regards to my Computer Science degree at the time, so that put me on a path of constant exploration. I admit my Bachelor's Degree was simply a piece of paper to me... and this was back in the late 1980's. The stories I see out of Highed Education nowadays make me wonder if anyone learns anything useful at all.

No, but I've seen it happen to others. I took "PHIL 101" back in the 80s and I really enjoyed it. The "mind/body" problem was the first thing we talked about. What I did go through is that when I grabbed a book about Philosophy in the bookstore they were completely unreadable. This was a random walk down a shelf, not a curated experience. When I saw the posting I linked it struck a chord with me because I worked at a University and had an opportunity to teach some sections of what was called "Computer Science 101." What I taught was for people that did not want to go into Computer Science, so I needed to get some information across to make them successful as nursing students or engineering students that would have to use computers. I kinda felt like I was lighting a fire and needed to be careful not to blow out the spark. This whole thing is reminding me of John Allen Paulos's book, Innumeracy and also A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper. http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Its-Consequences-ebook/dp/B0058U7HTO http://www.amazon.com/Mathematician-Reads-Newspaper-Allen-Paulos-ebook/dp/B00BAH8HWU/ I bet the whole reason I'm thinking about this is the discussion late last week about ways to teach Logic. I learned more about logic in my Discrete Mathematics course in college than I did anywhere else.

They recognize your point. The BLS website has a number of postings about how they have to make a projection with the data they have. It almost comes across as apologetic. I agree that it's probably more interesting to talk about the trends than the raw numbers, but I think they made a valiant effort with resources I just don't have. Alan's posting was referring to a decline, and the trend has been strongly downward in the data that they do have. I don't this means there's a growing under-the-table or barter economy, but that's only based on my own experience. I think it's too soon to be an effect of labor price controls (such as minimum wage or licensing), either. It takes a while for that sort of thing to shake out. My point was that there are models and they have their quirks but we should use what data we can find. I was defending their use against people that were claiming that the concept of unemployment was flawed by saying something like "sure, it's flawed, but at least we have data about something. Here's some data that I think is less flawed or manipulated."

http://pgbovine.net/programmers-talking-to-beginners.htm We should crowdsource equivalent conversations for budding philosophers. Philosopher: Hey, I hear you're learning philosophy. Cool, what're you learning? Beginner: I've heard about the "mind/body problem" and I'm trying to wrap my head around it. Philosopher: Haha, psssh, "begging the question," no less. It's merely a problem with definitions. They're only separate in your mind because you've been conditioned by language and culture to believe they are different. You should get into something meaty like epistemological solipsism. Show the idealism that only new eyes can bring! Beginner: uhhhh, ok.

Not an argument. Poisoning the well. Quite of a few of the above choose areas for their crimes that are less likely to have armed defenders. Even the orange-haired assailant in Aurora, Colorado bypassed closer movie theaters to choose one with a "no guns" policy. If you have to deploy your deterrent then it has failed to deter. Sure, you have to back it up, but I think we'd all rather not. I would rather see my daughter unharmed because a rapist might think she would defend herself, than see her standing over the body of the rapist she just shot, and both are preferable to her being raped and strangled to death in an alley. I would certainly not tell her she is wrong for wanting to be able to defend herself if she had to. It is a force multiplier. It allows someone weaker to overcome someone who is otherwise stronger. Some have called a wide variety weapons "equalizers" for this reason. This is an unsupported assertion. I have on this board made several philosophical statements about violence that I'm perfectly happy to back up, for example, "the circumstance the justifies the use of lethal force is the immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent." Why does philosophy have go out the window? Because there is little time to decide? Not everything has to be decided in the moment. Just like parenting, you take the time to prepare. You figure out your route to your car. You figure out you responses to threats and figure out where those threats are likely to emerge. The people who don't plan are the ones the freeze or submit instead of fight or flee in stressful situations. This does not support your argument. It is ad hominem. The statement I responded to was that "we don't carry guns to protect or defend anything" and I disagreed. I thought I gave a reasonable structure as to why I disagreed, and I don't think your response has dismantled that structure.

It is the capability for destruction that deters others from becoming enemies. Having to pull the trigger is failure. Being able to is not. Not being able to when it's necessary is tragedy. Forcing the virtuous to be unable is malice.

i did martial arts training as a way for mindfully control my anger (yeah, I drank the kool-aid). I started with Kempo and did eventually find Aikido as well. Then I discovered there are about lot of different schools of Aikido. Some are more spiritual but work on mindfulness. Some are about the forms. Some are more about falling down safely. Unfortunately I moved somewhere where practice wasn't easy and I let it all lapse. I moved over to the "gun fu" side of the house about two decades ago and have kinda stuck there. I got a big dose of philosophical, and legal, thinking when I focused on teaching others about self defense. To be fair, I learned a great deal more about anger from Stef and subsequent journeys into self-knowledge. Martial arts never increased my anger. It did make me respect it more. It also made it easier to spot it in others.

But the celebration of Christmas pre-dates Christ and Christianity... if we're going back to our roots it's not "Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas" but Io Saturnalia!

If a child, or an adult, throws a tantrum it's evidence that they did not grow up with peaceful parenting. One must understand the underlying causes before discussing remedies.

They define it as the percentage of civilian noninstitutional population (16 and up) working *or* looking for work. It's not a strict count, but a projection based on a decently sized basket of reporting institutions. It determines how many people are available based on census data, how many people are reporting work from tax and institutional data, how many people are applying for jobs (institutional data again), and how many people are claiming unemployment (and are therefore looking for work). Unlike the employment statistic, this one doesn't seem to be as controversial. I think the criticism laid the most is that it doesn't do much to computer underemployment (where people are capable and willing to work a higher paying job, or a job with more hours, but can't find one).

What's even more amusing is that girl gamers actually enjoy a number of benefits too. For example, finding groups to do the more difficult things in online games together is fairly hard, but the groups that I see set up on Facebook, for example, develop a clear pattern. If a girl asks for help she gets a ton of offers. If a guy asks for help the response is considerably less, leading to people posting, "maybe I should get my girlfriend to ask for help for me so I can get through this mission." I think it is a microcosm of the "catcall" offense mentality, where someone only wants attention from those she feels worthy of her gaze, and detests those that offer it unwanted. It reminds me of the bar scene, where a gal will complain that 50 guys offered to buy her a drink and only 1 is interesting, and a guy will complain that he'll approach 50 gals in a night to find 1 that accepts. Darn patriarchy!

Attention from betas is hostility. That's the bottom line. Kinda like the idea that gals don't want to friendzone a guy unless he presses too hard. "Couldn't you just leave it alone?"

Quick! Be ashamed of the choices you didn't get to make! I especially like the "I will never have my gaming ability judged..." ha ha ha ha ha!

Unemployment is supposed to track how many people *want* to work but cannot find a job. There are many ways to do this, but labor force participation is supposed to cover all the people that want to work. When the labor force participation rate decreases but standard of living does not there can be many reasons, however, it's not clear the reason is "opting out". http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm When we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, we see a drop in participation in younger people and an increase amongst older people. That seems to run counter to the "opting out" scenario. People who are starting families, looking for their own place to live, and making a mark for themselves are more likely to seek employment. People whose kids have grown and left are more likely to retire or dabble in entrepreneurship. The BLS narrative says baby boomers are retiring, but look at the participation rate of men aged 65 to 69, going from 26.0% in 1992 to 37.1% in 2012. Doesn't that sound like the opposite? in that same period, men aged 20 to 24 dropped from 83.3% to 74.5%.

This is a possibility for merely crowdsourcing the content, getting feedback, recording the content and editing it, getting feedback again, and publishing it. If there's an itch to scratch you might get a lot of help, and there's plenty of pieces to do. This is definitely an 'itch to scratch" kind of open source project. Everyone has one. For example, if material like this was made, I'd love to see a dialogue of someone teaching logic to someone very young with the young person asking the questions everyone learning logic has without being cutesy, but with an undertone that makes this journey not a lecture but a voyage of discovery. Do I have any talent for writing such a thing? Probably not. I'm better at memos and minutes. One of the reasons I like Stef's casts so much is that he doesn't armor his discussions in the terminology of the typical philosophy paper, but manages to be clear with more accessible words.

Right on! I should have explained what I meant, I admit. My criticism of Pascal's Wager has always been that it doesn't help us choose which religion to choose. It's not the simple matrix that the wikipedia article shows, but rather a system of equations representing a myriad of incompatible religious beliefs, even if you limit the case to just Christianity. Heck, you could limit it to just Christianity and limit it further to which of the seven sacraments you believe in and still get seven equations that must be solved simultaneously to get that infinite reward and avoid that infinite punishment.

Mechanical asphyxiation was what killed him. The choke hold may have contributed, but it was not the only factor. My understanding comes from my wife's evaluation of his speech (she's an emergency room nurse)... those haunting last words. My understanding is that the assault happened before the video started. I wasn't there, so I am relying on questionable information. Nowhere am I saying this was right... but it doesn't quite meet the requirements for criminal liability (that is, murder).