Is this the way to cure it in soccer?
Speaking of performative injuries, the intersection of South Baldwin and Williamson streets is blocked off by protestors who need space to "mourn." They've managed to get the last and penultimate Concerts on the Square canceled too. For "mourning."
The same reasons for not doing it at all circulate again: Benefits are speculative, We've got great needs (wars, the poor, etc) that all need dealing with and this is a mere distraction, and so on. There's a new reason too: Why not use robots for exploration since they work so well now.
Of course the benefits of using low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit are not speculative at all anymore, but we have a better handle on what we can find on the Moon and Mars and a better appreciation for how hard work there will be.
The "How can we spend money on this when we have so many poor/etc" sounds very noble-minded, but that argument has no boundaries or limits. Why did Beethoven waste his time composing music when he could have been agitating for peace and trying to relieve poverty?
No. There are things worth doing, things that make life better, that have nothing to do with the usual list of desperate needs. I judge exploration (physical and scientific research) to be among those, along with arts. "We can put a man on the Moon but we can't fix homelessness." Well, we can carve a Pieta but we can't cure drug addiction--and probably never will. I don't believe the societal-problem advocates should have an automatic veto on the work of the rest of us.
The question comes down to balance. You can overdo anything. And there are several kind of costs to consider: money of course, but enthusiasm and good will too. Thanks to the intervening years of development some effects can be had for much less (in constant dollars) than they could for the Apollo program. Enthusiasm seems harder to come by, for pretty much anything. A certain decadence set in in society, and NASA turned rather sclerotic. Private rockets pack a lot more enthusiasm now.
If you argue that the Artemis program lacks vision--that we're just doing what our ancestors did, just a little bigger; a little larger pyramid this time--I admit there's justice to the argument.
If you complain that it's inefficient to try to loft people instead of robots--granted.
If you complain that the Constitution doesn't mandate research spending like this--well, it doesn't mandate poverty spending either. And several decades of the latter have shown some stubborn problems with poverty elimination and a moral hazard or two as well--the programs are not an unmitigated good.
You could argue that private firms should take up the torch of space travel. I like the idea, though we have a tragedy of the commons problem already.
Where should the balance be--this year? I don't know. Existential problems, such as war or overwhelming debt, may demand cuts to the bone and beyond. We don't have a good track record of facing up to problems and making hard decisions either.
Nor do I know on what scales you weigh conflicting desires: smaller classes or more to teach about?
I do know that if I had funding authority, I'd want to keep trying to explore.
I don't remember who pointed me at the link--perhaps AVI--but the author brought up an aspect I hadn't considered, which seems convincing. Presuming that Epstein was cooperating/coordinating with other intelligence agencies(*), the lists could have included people those other agencies were working with and didn't want to give up on yet. We do rely on sharing information with other country's agencies, and if e.g. France says "Ne divulguez pas ces informations si vous vous attendez à ce que nous coopérions avec vous" or something like that, I think we'd consider cooperation with France as a national security issue. A little bit of bare-face lying is merely a small political price. And it doesn't matter what political party is involved. Everybody will hide the lists.
And, of course, the other country's real objections might be trivial, but if they dig in their heels to protect somebody, what are you going to do?
I wish I remembered the author's name: credit where due.
(*) I don't think blackmail was key; helpful people who keep your image clean seems more likely. If he'd been blackmailing people word would have gotten around and he'd have been out of business. Just provide fresh-looking pliable girls at the island and the opportunity for conversations with famous people and let the real agents work.
Are the proposed bans on dyes based on solid risk analysis that was just held up for some reason? If so, what caused the delay?
Or are they subject to discretion--in which case, why does one man have that kind of discretion? It seems a bit arbitrary.
The parallel is closer than he suggests, for politics is a religion for many of us.
I posted about Solon's counterintuitive law that punished people who refused to take sides in a civil strife. The paper linked at the top begins with a little history of arguments about Solon's law--quite a number of people living 2600 years after the event are certain that a report written only 200 years later must be mistaken. Would a wise lawgiver put in a clause that might cause his laws to be overthrown?
The authors apply some game theory to the Athenian situation (whose population was legally divided into classes by wealth), assuming that revolts would be driven by rent-seeking high-status leaders. They find that the rule requiring everybody to join the melee tends to suppress the inclination of the wealthy to try to corner the whole pie.
It isn't obvious, and I suspect the origin of Solon's law might have been more emotional, driven by exasperation, instead of decided by calculation.
It might be instructive to game this out in modern America. We have had fringe revolutionists for a very long time, with such luminaries as Charles Manson, Bill Ayers, and the current pro-Hamas occupiers. The sociopolitical system we have works for most of the people. In a conflict with no neutrality, the revolutionists would be terribly outnumbered by the people with something to lose. The only way for the revolutionists to survive would be to battle from underground, robbing banks to get funding (as many of them did), and hope for the "best" (aka chaos they could exploit). It seems Solon's rule wouldn't change much.
OTOH, powerful and better-connected people who want more power and more complient plebs (you can think of a few on the opposite side from you, and an opponent think of a few on your side, and both of you be right) are able, now perhaps even more easily than in Solon's time, to persuade masses that their cause is existential. Without neutrality, they'd have to persuade more than a plurality. Would that reduce the risk of civil war?
No. The powerful aren't any wiser than you or I, and self-deception is just as popular a pastime with them as with us. And once a war gets rolling (or even just the pre-war posturing heats up), especially if it involves populations larger and more diverse than a mere city-state like Athens, there's no predicting the direction.
It doesn't look like a silver bullet to me. It might help with the fringe revolutionaries, but they're arguably cultists, and game theory considerations don't enter when you're talking about ultimate values.
UPDATE: Of course, forbidding neutrality is stunningly arrogant. Looking at warring factions, a legitimate option is "A plague o' both your houses!"
When I was in high school I remember reading of Russian course on Soviet Mathematics, where the focus was on the victory of the proletariat and not on theorems. I thought the notion obscene. I still do. I hope somebody with a sense of the absurd is playing pranks. If not, I have to question the integrity of those running their chemistry department. A scientist needs some smarts, but without integrity that's worthless.
"Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me."
I notice that Jesus doesn't bother to refute the devil's claim that he has the power to give the kingdoms of the world to whoever he pleases. We are confident that God can work everything for good for those who love Him, of course (well, we're supposed to be confident).
The supposition that the devil has a hand in selecting rulers and officials has a certain explanatory power for understanding history and current events.
UPDATE: Note that this applies to your guys as well as the ones that don't like you.
One could easily list other examples.
On what grounds does the state decide that some belief is a religion, worthy of respect by others even if those others do not believe it? Because this represents noble beliefs of some large group of people who try to live their lives by it, benefitting all of us thereby? Because a lot of people give money to the founders to be purified using primitive lie detectors? Because I had a dream and really really believe that the First Potato is the sacred source of all existence?
We're remarkably generous in defining religions in the US. Some places are more skeptical.
There was never a reason to put the shrine up in the first place. A religion defines what is the most important thing in the universe--the thing from which all else depends. Perhaps it is a god; sometimes it is a principle (e.g. Theravada Buddhism). The emblems are of the "most important thing" or aspects of its action (e.g. no images in Islam, but words are OK). If you're polytheist you might have a problem picking one, but generally there's something believed to be behind them all.
If the group actually worshipped Satan--Satan doesn't make sense outside of a Christian context, in which Satan is not the most important thing (though he may be the most important thing in your life). In that case the image is not of the most important thing in the universe, and there's no reason for non-co-religionists to offer it any respect.
If, as this group claims, they don't believe in god and use Satan as a symbol of their rejection of religious rules--once again, there has to be a something for Satan to reject, and the symbol again fails to specify something primal.
The state is a human institution, no matter what delusions of grandeur its directors may develop. It won't always recognize truth, and there are not infrequently good reasons to oppose some aspects of its mandates. But rule rejection as a principle isn't good, and should not be honored with a shrine in a public building.
You are at liberty to believe the consequences were accidental.
Parsing out who's who can be complicated. BLM was nominally about blacks, but if you looked at who was running it, and what sorts of materials they offered to schools, it was clearly more about changing sexual mores. (I read their web info about dismantling the family before they realized it was bad PR and scrubbed it, read the resumes of their local leaders, and read and skimmed the materials they offered last year.)
It feels like conspiracy theorizing. I like having clean data to work with. But lockstep reporting, questions that are answered with "Shut up you epithet-du-jour", and the obvious lies leave me wondering what's left out. Whether coordinated or emergent, the reporting has direction and shape. So, I don't know, but...
Perhaps the struggle is within BLM--it always seemed a strange marriage. Homosexuality wasn't widely applauded in the black community--though maybe that changed in recent years.
a reputation hardened around Hoenig as the man who got it wrong. He is remembered as something like a cranky Old Testament prophet who warned incessantly, and incorrectly, about one thing: the threat of coming inflation.But this version of history isn’t true. While Hoenig was concerned about inflation, that isn’t what solely what drove him to lodge his string of dissents. The historical record shows that Hoenig was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else. He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.
Asset inflation enriches the already rich. Read the article. Is the author missing something?
It has seemed, though I haven't done statistics on the matter, that these are preferentially of great figures of the War of Independence and the Civil War. True, those are the most common, so perhaps there's nothing to see here, but one commonality of both the Confederate and early American figures is that they were both revolutionaries. One set won and the other lost (thankfully), but both believed it was legitimate to rebel against what they saw as usurpation.
I'd have thought that a revolutionary movement would try to claim the honor of their revolutionary predecessors for their own: "We're just like them!" Not this time. Whether as enforcers, or as brownshirts in internal power struggles, it smells as though they represent the elites. Do BLM's gender goals reflect average black american concerns? Hint: not that I've ever heard
Attendance was high because of a petition to change the way school board members are elected. Currently all 7 are at large; the proposal said 1 at large and 3 each from the two new high school districts. The attorney was asked several times about what would happen next year, when 3 of the 6 West-ers are up for re-election. Apparently the clerk has to sort that out--which gives a little more power to the clerk than would seem reasonable.
To support the petition the partisans brought up the arguments that the diversity would be increased, that "the community" has a different reality, and that the school board was "stale" with little turnover.
The petition has nothing to do with the third point, the second isn't very relevant either, and the first fell to the floor when it was pointed out that the high school boundaries had been crafted to equalize ethnic, racial, and economic diversity on both sides. The partisans didn't notice, though. And, to make matters more interesting, the high school boundaries were drawn to equalize the number of high-school students, not the number of households or voters, which aren't equalized.
They'd have done better to argue that in smaller districts you are more likely to actually know your representatives, rather than just know their names.
I guess there'd been a lot of debate already, and people knew each other, because the pro-change speakers had a clapping section in the back right, and the no-change speakers' clappers were in the middle left. We went to find out, though I admit I have a "if it ain't broke" bias. Was the system broken? Not in a way they would fix. You aren't going to get people who don't have time to attend meetings to run for school board just by changing district boundaries.
The elephant in the room sat silently. Spring elections have low turnout, and the largest voting block is the teachers. I figured there was no point in opening that can of worms. This was the largest turnout at an elector's meeting that I've ever seen, and the first where teachers and administrators weren't the majority.
It lost 52 to 114. I did my part.
From Parkinson's Law, Chapter 8: Injelititis, or Palsied Parlysis:
If the head of the organization is second-rate, he will see to it that his immediate staff are all third-rate; and they will, in turn, see to it that their subordinates are fourth-rate. There will soon be an actual competition in stupidity, people pretending to be even more brainless than they are.
Religious relationships aren't exempted from this claim. Nothing can have a higher claim than the political. It's a religious slogan too.
