ignirtoq

Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.

“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”

The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.

This is three-quarters into the article and should be at the top. The instructor took care to establish that the grade was not punitive based on the student’s belief but reflective of failing to meet objective criteria established as the requirement for the assignment.

Are we there yet? Is the bubble popping? Do we need the Ron Paul gif (or am I showing my age)?

That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to “exist” (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that “therefore the inflation metric is wrong,” but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that’s a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.

This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.

With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.

The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.

It always bothered me in class that they said the magnetic field of light was just too weak to have any significant effect compared to the electric field, but I just accepted it because I was still learning. Good to know my intuition wasn’t too far off.

Well the snake oil salesmen have taken over the health department. It was only a matter of time.

Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

How much you want to bet SCOTUS blocks California’s redistricting but greenlights Missouri and North Carolina maps, each through tortured logic?

TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.

One catch is that they are only forced to release “unclassified” files. Guess who decides what files are classified?

And they’re being redeployed to Charlotte, NC, and New Orleans, LA. They’re continuing the tactic of blitzing whatever they want to do somewhere, and when the courts start to catch up, they pull out and start to do something else somewhere else. They can do whatever they want, legality be damned, if they accomplish their goals before the courts wake up. This is guerrilla warfare applied to the legal checks and balances between the branches of government.

If this Supreme Court were considering the issue for the very first time today, it would almost certainly hold that the Constitution does not protect same-sex marriage by a 6–3 vote. But now that Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans, they’ve shown no appetite for spending down their political capital to issue an unpopular ruling that could only hurt the Republican Party.

This seems like a really naive thing to say about this court. They have shown no qualms about striking down much older cases with a stronger history of precedent than Obergefell on the most specious of reasoning. They struck down Chevron Deference last year, which was in place since 1984 and had come to form the backbone of judicial handling about highly technical aspects of government regulation of virtually every industry.

And they have no hesitation about making unpopular rulings. Several justices have a habit of lecturing the public in a way that’s essentially talking down to the people they are supposed to serve and say they simply know what’s better for the people than… the people. Their egos couldn’t care less about their public image; Chief Justice John Roberts has spoken out multiple times that people need to basically shut up and respect the court’s decisions no matter if they like them or not.

It’s a higher level of infuriating that the court is so obviously corrupt, and then the most corrupt among them present themselves as fundamentally more deserving of respect and deference than the common rabble.

The problem is that some small but non-zero fraction of these bugs may be exploitable security flaws with the software, and these bug reports are on the open internet. So if they just ignore them all, they risk overlooking a genuine vulnerability that a bad actor can then more easily find and use. Then the FOSS project gets the blame, because the bug report was there, they should have fixed it!

If the court rules against the president, it will nullify a major tool in Mr. Trump’s trade agenda. He has used the law under question, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose tariffs on an estimated 29 percent of all U.S. imports, the Times analysis found. So far this year, these emergency tariffs have hit more than $300 billion in imported goods.

Not that I expect it to happen, but if they rule against him, what happens to the money the government has collected from illegal tariffs so far? Do they just keep it? Do they have to go through the books and return it to the importers? The costs were often absorbed by vendors at the start, but there’s no question a large fraction have already been passed on to consumers.

I didn’t say benefits were not cut off. I’m challenging the assertion that the mere fact that the government is shutdown is the cause of funding being cut off, like the phrase I quoted implicitly assets. The shutdown alone is not the reason funds for SNAP were cut off, and my proof of my assertion is the fact that funding has never been cut off in previous shutdowns.

This means someone must have chosen to execute this shutdown differently on purpose. Republicans are in charge of all branches of government, so they are the most likely culprit.

federal food benefits were cut off due to the government shutdown.

No, they were not cut off due to the shutdown. Payments had not been stopped in any prior shutdown and didn’t have to be stopped in this one. Trump and Republicans specifically chose for this to happen to put more pressure on Democrats. They don’t care if Americans starve to death, while Democrats do. They are starving Americans because Democrats are trying to stop Americans from losing healthcare.

It’s much worse than that. He’s a proponent of the “prosperity gospel,” which says God directly rewards a person’s faithfulness and adherence to scripture with worldly success. So if you need help, that means you have not been a good enough Christian, so it would be against God’s will for his church to help.