Occupy Wall Street vs Tea Party, in 3 sentences:
[via: Cato]
Updates from October, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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mazsa
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mazsa
I’ll believe corporations are people when…
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mazsa
Turing test: http://cleverbot.com/human
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admin
Planets with Stabilizing Moons May Be Common: “The Earth’s comparatively massive moon, formed via a giant impact on the proto-Earth, has played an important role in the development of life on our planet, both in the history and strength of the ocean tides and in stabilizing the chaotic spin of our planet. Here we show that massive moons orbiting terrestrial planets are not rare. A large set of simulations by Morishima et al. (Morishima, R., Stadel, J., Moore, B. [2010]. Icarus. 207, 517–535 [cf. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.0579 ]), where Earth-like planets in the habitable zone form, provides the raw simulation data for our study. We use limits on the collision parameters that may guarantee the formation of a circumplanetary disk after a protoplanet collision that could form a satellite and study the collision history and the long term evolution of the satellites qualitatively. In addition, we estimate and quantify the uncertainties in each step of our study. We find that giant impacts with the required energy and orbital parameters for producing a binary planetary system do occur with more than 1 in 12 terrestrial planets hosting a massive moon, with a low-end estimate of 1 in 45 and a high-end estimate of 1 in 4.” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.4616
Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planetary-anthropic-selection
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admin
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mazsa
National Strategy for Counterterrorism http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/counterterrorism_strategy.pdf
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mazsa
“[...] the US government’s dollar position is short, not long — its dollar-denominated debts are greater than its dollar-denominated assets. In financial terms, a short position is a way to bet against the value of the underlying commodity. The US government is currently about $7 million million dollars “short”.
An illustration may help to clarify. Suppose you are a private in the Zimbabwean military in September 2007. Suppose your monthly pay is about US$180, but you are paid in Zimbabwean dollars, so your pay packet is actually Z$5.4 million for the month. The Zimbabwean dollar has been hyperinflating, and you expect it to continue to lose value. You don’t currently need to pay any expenses. Consider the following options:
A. Keep the Z$5.4 million in cash.
B. Immediately buy other commodities with it; for example, buy 300 kilograms of rice and store it in Tupperware in the pantry.
C. Immediately buy other commodities with it, and also borrow an additional Z$10 million some poor sucker is willing to lend you at an extortionate 20% APR, and use that to buy rice too.
Option “A” is maintaining a “long” position in the Zimbabwean dollar. This amounts to a bet that the Z$ will retain its value. If you had taken this option, you would have lost 90% of your salary within a few weeks.
Option “B” is maintaining no position in the Zimbabwean dollar. It doesn’t matter what the Zimbabwean dollar does thereafter; you still have the same amount of rice. (Practically speaking, in situations like this, there tend to be price controls on most things you can buy with the collapsing currency.)
Option “C” is maintaining a “short” position in the Zimbabwean dollar. If you had somehow found such a sucker, then within a few weeks, you could have paid them back by selling off a tiny percentage of the rice you bought, as the Zimbabwean dollar continued to inflate.
This is the position the US government has taken relative to the US dollar.”
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mazsa
So What If Corporations Aren’t People? “Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873158
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mazsa
Government internet control increases online radicalisation – LulzSec is not an isolated phenomenon http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/28/radical-hackers-lulzsec-governments
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mazsa
A Fusion Thruster for Space Travel – Clean, highly energetic reaction delivers a lot of drive from a drop of fuel “[...] improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today’s ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. [...]” http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/a-fusion-thruster-for-space-travel/0
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mazsa
Beyond Darwin: Ways to Evolve New Functions – At a recent Kavli Futures Symposium, nineteen experts from a diverse range of fields discussed the promise of using the lab to understand and exploit the evolution of organisms — an advance that may one day be used to develop new vaccines or other biotechnology products. https://www.kavlifoundation.org/kavli-futures-symposium-evolution-new-functions-main
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mazsa
Policing the Police: Apps That Let You Spy on the Cops http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/policing-the-police-the-apps-that-let-you-spy-on-the-cops/240916/
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mazsa
High Technology, Not Low Taxes, May Drive US States’ Economic Growth http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110623130751.htm
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mazsa
“[...] Feeling satisfied as I enjoyed my lunch, I remembered how many people I’ve heard continue to call Bitcoin imaginary, or a pyramid scheme. But I used it in a retail point-of-sale transaction and got a tasty meal, with nothing more than a cryptographic signature asking everyone whom it might concern to consider the Meze Grill the new owner of my half an imaginary coin. [...]
I find it incredible that people are so captivated by the notion of Bitcoin as Ponzi scheme that they would simply overlook the potential appeal of these properties: of cash that we can spend on-line. [...]
The idea that a bank’s responsibility to its customers might sometimes be useful is becoming increasingly concrete in the Bitcoin world as the scandals about Bitcoin thefts unfold and we see that, much of the time, Bitcoins really do work like cash: if someone steals them from you, there’s a real chance that they’re just gone. Keeping thousands of coins under your digital mattress is a great thing for financial privacy, but it raises the possibility that your mattress might not be the safest place for them. Hence the prediction that many of the financial intermediaries we use with traditional currencies may get reinvented in some form for cryptocurrencies and may even get regulated the way the weary giants of flesh and steel did.
All fiat currency is imaginary sub specie (hee hee) aeternitatis and gets its value from psychology and various institutional arrangements. And that’s true of the currency in your wallet right now. It’s fair enough to point at the tremendous resources that might be brought to bear to defend the value of the U.S. dollar. Not much will defend the value of a Bitcoin once anything at all goes awry, and as Adam Smith might have said, there is a great deal of ruin in a currency. But I have no patience for theories that say that I couldn’t possibly have bought lunch with my half a Bitcoin or that the restaurant was crazy to accept it. It was a delicious thrill; I suggest you go down to Columbus Circle and try it for yourself while we watch to see what else this experiment has to teach us.” http://starburst.hackerfriendly.com/?p=1530
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mazsa
“[...] the only way to get objective data is to have institutions that assume objectivity doesn’t exist. It’s not enough to force scientists and doctors to declare conflicts of interest, because our biases seep in anyway. Rather, we need to do a better job of funding truly independent studies and approaching with extra skepticism those that are not. We should also encourage researchers to make their raw data public, as Samuel Morton did, so that others can check it. As Stephen Jay Gould proved all too well, men are inveterate mismeasurers.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576397771567839728.html
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admin
Detecting bias http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/detecting-bias/
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mazsa
“Imagine life on an Earth-like moon, one so close to its gas giant host that its landscape is bathed in a dusklike planetary glow. Such places are not only possible but also probable, according to a new study, which finds that as many as 5% of gas giant planets orbiting their stars at Earth-like distances may harbor habitable “exomoons.”
For the past decade or so, planet hunters have been scanning the skies, hoping to detect an Earth-like planet in a habitable orbit around its sunlike star. NASA’s Kepler observatory, currently orbiting Earth, is expected to detect dozens of such planets as they make their way across the face of their parent stars. But so far, most of the discoveries have been giant planets in Earth-like orbits, which are much easier to spot but too hot and gaseous to harbor life. The new study provides them with the possibility of life-supporting satellites.
Simon Porter, a predoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and colleagues created computer models of 12,000 hypothetical planets about the size of Earth that had been gravitationally captured by gas giants like Jupiter. The simulated gas giants orbited their stars at just the right distance for life to be possible on these planets-turned-moons.
All of the simulated satellites started out on very elliptical orbits around their gas giants, the team will report in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Over hundreds of thousands of years, half of them crashed into their planets or were spat out of orbit. But the other half evolved steady orbits, allowing them to develop stable climates over billions of years. Such climates are thought to be necessary for the evolution of complex life. [...]” http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/does-life-exist-on-distant-moons.html
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/are-we-unlikely-to-ever-leave-the-solar-system
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planetary-anthropic-selection
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mazsa
Parfit: On What Matters (Volume I) is out! http://www.amazon.com/What-Matters-I-Derek-Parfit/dp/0199572801
Cf. Derek Parfit, 1984: Reasons and Persons http://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Persons-Oxford-Paperbacks-Parfit/product-reviews/019824908X
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admin
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mazsa
The Ideological Turing Test “[...] Mill states it well: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct. And if ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct. (See free trade). It’s not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views. But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests – to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents – is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom. [...]” http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html
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admin
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mazsa
The Destruction of Economic Facts – Financial crisis wasn’t just about finance, but about the lack of knowledge http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_19/b4227060634112.htm
Cf. Reader comments http://app.businessweek.com/UserComments/combo_review;jsessionid=FA242695A0DC6ACABD095E9280C13911.ny04tls?action=all&style=wide&productId=127293&productCode=spec-
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mazsa
Quantum Mysteries Disentangled: “This paper attempts to dispel some of the “essential mystery” of quantum mechanics (QM) by describing some recent (as of 2001) results in quantum
information theory at a level accessible to the layman. The discussion is motivated by first showing how informal accounts of QM’s mysteries (specifically, entanglement and quantum erasers) lead to a contradiction of relativity. The apparent contradiction is resolved with an elementary mathematical analysis. Finally, I engage in wild philosophical speculation in order to allay fears that a better understanding of QM runs the risk of taking all of the fun out of it.” http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf -
mazsa
Lulz #AntiSec Manifesto http://pastebin.com/9KyA0E5v & http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/1000th_tweet_press_release.txt
“Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes.” https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/82841336683831296
Cf. http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/2011/06/operation-security.html
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mazsa
4strategies that American companies use 2reduce their taxes (Video 3:35) http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/06/19/business/100000000870844/inside-the-accountants-playbook.html
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mazsa
Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/translation-technology-may-let-humans-speak-with-dolphins/
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mazsa
“The Leader of LulzSec is Doxed. Game Over for you Guys !!!” http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/2011/06/sabu-doxed.html
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admin
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admin
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mazsa
How we come to know our bodies as our own http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/cp-hwc061411.php
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mazsa
Yes, It Is a Police State – A line has been crossed http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/yes-this-is-a-police-state/
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mazsa
BBC: LulzSec opens hack request line so its fans can suggest potential targets http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13777129
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mazsa
Eavesdropper that illustrates a loophole in quantum cryptography http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/cfqt-mqc061011.php
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mazsa
“Internet in a Suitcase”: A Detour Around Censors http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
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mazsa
Why we secretly love LulzSec: “So for the last ten years I’ve been working in media, trying to raise awareness of the idea that maybe, just maybe, using insecure computers to hold your secrets, conduct your commerce and run your infrastructure is a shitty idea.
No one who mattered listened. Executives think it’s FUD. They honestly think that if they keep paying their annual AV subscriptions they’ll be shielded by Mr. Norton’s magic cloak.
Security types like LulzSec because they’re proving what a mess we’re in. They’re pointing at the elephant in the room and saying “LOOK AT THE GIGANTIC FUCKING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM ZOMG WHY CAN’T YOU SEE IT??? ITS TRUNK IS IN YR COFFEE FFS!!!” [...]” http://risky.biz/lulzsec
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mazsa
Are we unlikely to ever leave the solar system? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456
admin is discussing. 
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12/10/1335245/is-the-earth-special