dingbat

yup, and since Sen. Manchin took credit for bringing them in and giving them tons of public money, doubtful he'll be up for that crusade

Vallee is a serious person worth paying attention to, a rarity in that field. Spielberg used him as the model for that French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Another good book of his is "Messengers of Deception", expands greatly on the non-extraterrestrial idea.

Holiday as a "public intellectual"? he's always struck me as a marketer, retweeter of self-help quotes, and curator of other people's ideas, at best. something about him tells me there's nothing there.

might be slightly off-topic, but what are your thoughts on those air purifiers that people can get for their office/home?

amusing that a comment designed to mock the irrationality and simple-mindedness of "Americans", itself provides a strong example of overgeneralizing entire populations, society and culture into simple, easy-to-understand tropes suitable for simpletons.

> If we actually understood that people literally died of not having enough money, or of lack of willpower to deal with a bureaucracy, or of homelessness, or of their mental state, there’s every chance that something might change.

if you actually understood the implications of following your logic, please take a moment to explain:

why do people not have enough money?

do some people waste away whatever time and money they have?

do some people fail to develop any marketable skills?

are some people just incapable of rendering valuable labor or service to anyone?

what percentage of those without money fit into that hopeless category?

what should be done about those people?

why does money exist in the first place?

how do we ensure that everybody will "have enough money"?

why do people lack willpower?

why do bureaucracies exist and what is the alternative?

why does homelessness exist?

do people in dire straits often reject help?

do people in dire straits often make things worse for themselves?

how do we force people to stop doing that?

why do people have differing mental states?

that's just for a start. then answer those questions in context of each individual life and death. but that won't be necessary if one thinks that all homeless are just "the homeless", or that all poor people are just "the poor".

but that would be oversimplification and "heavily missing information" in many cases, don't you think?

assumes there is a singular root cause. "he died lonely of a broken heart?" but why was he lonely? "he died because in his entire life he failed to develop relationships with people" or "he died of loneliness because he was a terrible human being" etc.

and "he died of being homeless"? why was he homeless? because society was so cruel and uncaring? sure, he had nothing to do with it himself.

the other comment is right, this path inevitably leads to judgment and speculation.

no thanks, when you go would you really want your last statement of who you were to be created by some random medical practitioner who decides on your behalf that the sum of your life was "he died a sad lonely man".

> he died because he was homeless and couldn't find his way to the help he needed.

taking your approach, you'd also have to allow at least some of those death certificates to list cause of death as: "he died because he was homeless, and he was homeless because he was a drunkard and an addict who was horrible to his family and most everyone he dealt with."

or is the intent to permit maudlin sentiments only?

i hope the undeniable pleasure that cop took in playing this lethal game of Simon Says was worth it.

ah thanks for that bit of info. still, even pre-Vegas, i think it is reasonable to label pointing a rifle outside a hotel room window as "careless", which is the point i was responding to.

the commentor seemed to conflate the questions of "was it not completely legal for him to possess that item?" and "was it careless (legal or not) to show it off in that manner?"

it was called in because he was pointing the rifle out of his hotel room window.

i guess it's up to you to decide for yourself whether or not that could be called "careless". or whether it would be reasonable for a passerby to call in a report of someone pointing a rifle outside of a hotel room window, a couple months after Las Vegas.

if i recall correctly Shaver was not wearing pjs, he was wearing shorts. but yes, he appeared to pull up his shorts which were being dragged down because he was being forced to crawl on his hands and knees.

i would bet that almost everyone being in such a position, or standing at their front door in front of their neighbors, who felt their bottom falling down, would instinctively reach down without thinking.

some points to note about that incident -

a) he had the pellet gun as part of his job as an exterminator, even if he was careless in demonstrating how he used it to shoot birds for pest control

b) think about how easily the officers could have gone to the wrong hotel room; you, me or anyone random could've been in the room next door to Shaver and been treated the same (and probably wouldve reacted the same), even if we'd just poked out head outside our room to see what the heck was going on

do you personally sleep while wearing form-fitting pants with a belt?

and being woken in the middle of the night, wearing boxers or pajamas with hands in the air, better pray that they don't happen to slip down causing you to instinctively "reach for your waistband" in order to hitch them up

on a related note, i recall Peter Drucker writing about how many people, executives in particular, often talk about volunteering or "giving back to the community" once they retire.

but Drucker noted that in his observation, executives who did not volunteer earlier in life were just fooling themselves, they rarely followed through with that "promise" once they retired, they failed to contribute much of anything after their career.

yes i understand decoherence at different scales, but my point is that the Arrow of Time exists for both a real physical object, such as someone falling off a cliff, but also a non-real object, such as someone dreaming of falling off a cliff. decoherence can explain the first, but since there is no physical cliff or object in a dream (at either the micro- or macro- scale), how can it explain Arrow of Time that is observed in interactions between non-physical imaginary objects?

has anyone gone down the list of most popular TED Talks and run similar replications of the claims made in other presentations? itd be interesting if there were some ratio that scored most-popular TED Talk vs. "B.S." content. i wonder if there'd be a link between popularity and amount of B.S.?

would note that near the end of the article its noted that Cuddy has conceded that the specific cortisol effects touted have not been borne out.

she is "still fighting" for power posing but only as a useful technique which sometimes works for some people in some cases, as even the replicated studies seem to show improvements in subjective measures of "confidence", whatever that means.

the article discusses that in detail, but the article is not really about the merits, or lack thereof, of that study, its about something else.

if it's exactly the same, that would imply that quantum mechanics and decoherence effects are equivalent for both internally generated imaginary stimuli, and external stimuli based on "real" physical objects. but it seems like a stretch to suggest that if i dream that i am flying, that the same quantum mechanical effects that contribute to Time's Arrow in that dream are in play in the "real world", where such a thing would be impossible physically.

so how does quantum mechanics explain the continuous and coherent (more or less) sequence that is perceived even in a non-physical dream?

whether its about decoherence or "observer time", I wonder how either explanation can explain why Times Arrow seems to exist in dream. ie. if decoherence was the basis, what is being "decohered" in a dream?

even aside from the billable hours issue, there is the less obvious problem that in many cases, it is in the interest of the client that there be less transparency and more obfuscation of material that might be unfavorable. improving processes and making it easier to analyze data is not necessarily aligned with the incentives of large company who has been named as a defendant in a class action suit, for example.

i wouldnt put that much meaning into reasons for the misleading headline choice. simplest explanation is "Opioid Use Explains..." is better clickbait than "Not Sure if Opioid Use is Causal or Symptom"

i see you deleted your previous comment saying that the way this 20-year-old passage has suddenly been noticed is "banal" and passage itself is not newsworthy, because HRC was not newsworthy anymore until she ran for president.

the point of my observation is that this passage only became a widespread topic AFTER the recent election, after a sharp-eyed and thoughtful reader commented on it via Twitter and it went viral last week.

to me one of the most interesting things about this issue is how it trended recently because someone actually read and thought for a moment about what Hillary Clinton wrote about in her best-selling book "It Takes a Village", about how they used prison labor during her time in the Arkansas governors mansion:

http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-prison-labor-african...

the fact that this was only widely noticed 20 years after publication is amazing

> If Amazon was smart

its one thing to have alternative opinions about their strategy, but im not too sure about judging Amazon / Jeff Bezos as lacking in business smarts

> Badass gay character, humanized gangsters, contra-Reaganesque attitude to drugs, aim at corruption and money, etc.

you must be pretty young to think these themes were revolutionary in the early 00's, and that the "media has caught up" to those concepts.

you are correct that this show doesnt care about either leftist or liberal ideologies, but that doesnt mean its propaganda either way. its about depicting an arguably valid interpretation of reality wherein the individual cannot "win" vs. the system, no matter what system or institution or ideology that may be.

i thought it was brilliant at an even more meta level: McNulty made up a fictional but fact-based story about a series of killings, with a dramatic flourish of "the Red Ribbon Killer", in order to get resources and attention on what was happening in his city, even if it was at the cost of exploiting real individual suffering.

then, consider what the writers of the Wire did throughout the entire series, especially in the previous season's story arc about the "Nailgun" serial killings of Marlo's enforcers Chris and Snoop in the city's vacant buildings.

> Taleb believes that this is true of markets and he may very well have a similar strategy (consistently buy out of the money puts).

im not sure that statement is an accurate description of Taleb's barbell strategy; for one thing it ignores one half of the barbell