vixin

Lots of self-congratulation all round with no sample questions to provide the merest smidgeon of 'reason to believe that this is that significant'.

Has anyone ever attempted even the very roughest estimate of the indirect wealth created worldwide by communicative technologies like Google and Facebook - in other words, aside from that directly generated for those companies?

Evidently Seattle businesses are very productive and able to readily achieve profits over and above the $600+ a week (8h/d) cost of employing someone ( "+" means that I don't know what the overhead costs are). Rather tough on those whose energy and skills do not warrant employing them at that rate. The alternative for borderline businesses is to find ways of not employing anyone at all.

And algorithms now work better than humans at face detection. https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/2c567adbf7fc

They don't even have to snoop.

So we just change passive to active in the following and adjust to required level of truth: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs "I did not have sexual relations with that woman")

"People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."

Orwell's 1984

For planet Earth, can we please get models that work properly and predict the actual observed climate data first before we start fantasizing?

"Is not crazy to say that the internet wouldn't work as efficient ".

'Efficient' qualifies the noun (to) work. It is therefore an adverb and is written as in '... work as efficiently'

We don't even know the truth about something as engrained in the health-conscious public as omega-3 fats.

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Omega-3s-have-no-be...

Yes, 'There is a lot we don't understand about how food and human nutrition works' pretty much sums it up.

Worth noting that in some reports, multivitamin preparations have been associated with adverse health outcomes. Popping pills of whatever kind can be dicey.

Scientific American used to be a respected publication.

As pointed out here http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/05/why-didnt-p...

"Perhaps the idea of one’s instincts being proving empirically correct is rather intoxicating, which partly explains the success of his book. Perhaps Piketty gave the left intelligentsia a story which (as tabloid hacks say) was “too good to check”.

We spend billions on supposedly averting a crisis predicted by lousy models but appear to ignore grotesque pollution of the oceans of which this is one example. Mercury and other nasties being another. But the list goes on and on.

Yes, correct. It's a big concern. Trivially we all remember the student arrested (though later released) for jovially referring to a policeman's horse as 'gay'. As if calling someone or something 'gay' is an insult! How do they work that out? But away from the EU we can find ways of getting this nonsense out of our system and maybe slowly return to sanity.

And what about my personal records of anything I see that looks interesting?

'But the line between dystopia and utopia is a thin one' (in this case). Nope, I can't detect it at all. A nightmare propelled along by politically correct nonsense.

Great link!

While HN is probably not the place for this discussion but the thesis could not be clearer. You're merely objecting to the color scheme. Average educational standards in the US are pitiful but I think it's too late. The Chinese understand this very well.

That you're satisfied with the definition supplied astounds me. The words are loose as can be. Amoebae integrate information and produce behavior reflecting the actions of a unified singular system insofar as those undefined words mean anything.

Somehow unknowable indeed. "While neuroscience might shed light on the input and output functions of the brain, the quantification for integrated information we have presented here implies that it will be unable to shed light on the complex tangle that is core consciousness."

"Global climate change is here". I'm confused. "The RSS satellite record shows a zero trend for 210 months". 17 years, 6 months.

Excellent first rate presentation. Those giving technical talks might want to take note.

The blog banner "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." means absolutely nothing beyond saying what we all trivially accept (though the latter half is true), that anyone can say what they like within the law's limits.

Entitlement implies a right and a right demands an obligation on the part of others. There is no obligation at all in respect of someone's opinion so what can the statement possibly mean? We should stop talking about entitlement in this loose way.

Your honesty is to be applauded.

Apparently these sensitive snails are dissolving p <because> they are in an alkaline ocean of around pH 8.14. Amazing. The paper does not point out that some parts of the ocean naturally vary in pH by 1.4 units. Of course none of the massive amounts of chemical junk dumped into the oceans and poisoning the fish we eat, has any effect on these snails. Did they check?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

“This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions””

Models working well? Frankly laughable. Global temperature rising for almost 25 years at half the central rate predicted by the IPCC in 1990 and no global warming at all for half the RSS satellite record.

Since you mention consensus (is that how to do science? Maybe we should introduce elections for new theories) - but still let's proceed; only 64 (or 0.5%) of 11,944 scientific abstracts published since 1991 state that most of the global warming since 1950 is manmade.

Why pretend life does not have a price. We price it everyday. A 100,000 people have died in Syria, mostly under horrific circumstances. Cost/benefit analysis dictates that no one should intervene and indeed, no one will in spite of the alleged chlorine attacks.

Meanwhile the taxpayer shells out a lot of money to keep dysfunctional killers alive, preserving that which they denied to their victims and thus a necessary link between action and consequence is broken.

That said, I reluctantly conclude that the death penalty should go because the greater evil is the possible death of an innocent.

Your 2nd paragraph: merely your assertion ('freaking out' suggests you're not dispassionate about this). Plenty of rebuttals. A short one to be going on with here: http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/thomas-pikettys-late...

I may be wrong but somehow I don't think creators/artists read social comment like this and say to themselves "Gosh, he's absolutely right, from now on I'll give irony a miss and head off in a new direction". If they do then I would guess they're pretty derivative and unlikely to produce work deemed to be outstandingly original.

You haven't ignored it. You prefer to name call without explanation.

Yes indeed! Beautiful countryside and really excellent internet connections.

For example: "Based on Net Index report at the end of first half of 2013, Timișoara has become the city with the highest download speed in the world. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania

In the UK, try to defend any of the points you make here bar in some publication nobody reads and you're likely in for a bucketful of trouble and a visit from the police. Best keep quiet.