Posts by tussock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Steve Kroft: “You don't believe that Senator Obama's a Muslim?”
tussock: “I find the whole notion of questioning people's religion to be insulting, but the Senator has made unequivocal public statements regarding his Christian faith and I'm not here to call him a liar.”
Steve Kroft: “You'd take Senator Obama at his word that he's not a Muslim. You don't believe that he's a Muslim and... or imply, right?”
tussock: “What are you trying to say, Steve?”
-
First: being greater than -4% doesn't override being greater than 0%, you're quite correct. They are not in contradiction.
Second: please don't do that with the equivocation, it's rude. A scientific theory is an explanation correctly tying together all known facts about a part of reality, normally (though not always) making testable predictions about related things as yet unknown.
By definition, evolution and gravity theories cannot be wrong, even though they are necessarily incomplete in terms of explaining the things they didn't seek to explain.
-
No Ben, you can't really disagree with established math any more than you can disagree with gravity or evolution.
You're just looking at it the wrong way. This isn't some sort of distribution curve, it's just a couple of limits. It doesn't override the other limits, like the natural minimum of 0.000001% (the guy who answered for UF) and maximum of 99.9999% (all the people who didn't answer at all, plus that one guy).
-
There's a high level of irony in a post critiquing someone else's statistics, while making the claim that 115%, 156%, and -2.6% (!) of a group of people want something.
That the error bars cross the limits of reason just shows the sample size wasn't big enough to be useful. 0.1% +-4% is meaningless, other than showing the result to be very likely somewhere under 4%, assuming the sample set is random, which it isn't.
Really, these tiny samples in the MMP environment are all a bit of a joke, or would be if the media didn't promote it as being so accurate to the public all the time. They barely even mention error margins these days, and have never shown them clearly in the numbers. -
The odd thing about the loopier conspiracy theorists is that they [...]
Don't exist. I've met hundreds of people who think there's large groups of people out there who believe in grand conspiracy theories, and none who actually do. What would there be, a hundred in the whole country?
The media, OTOH, like to suggest, again and again, about how people who don't parrot the standard media line are completely insane. Yes, you heard me, "the media"; industry interests that don't happen to be in the common good.
-
I thought the Scott Watson case turned on the judges determined acceptance and promotion of the planted evidence, rather than an emotive atmosphere.
Super delegates you say. Wouldn't surprise me at all if they'd deliberately run senator Clin-ton to lose and let McCain keep the war machine grinding away another eight years. They have the party donations to think of, after all, and it'd be politically impossible to keep the masses in line if they couldn't pretend to be fighting the president on the matter. Ditto with doing something about global warming. -
I can go off meds for up to six months at a time but when I start not coping I can go back on them to mediate the extremes. They help me live my life when stress pushes me over the edge.
Spooky, dude. That's the exact line my alcoholic uncle used about his drinking. Timeline, symptoms, spot on. Mind, he was likely living with PTSD, so there may be some common cause.
SSRIs? Damned if I know. Made me act like a crazy person, which scared the shit out of me on top of not really wanting to be on them in the first place, so I chucked them.
Still, a handful of choice words from the shrink means I've never have really fallen back into that cycle of feeling bad about how bad I'm feeling. Though I'm still a little stuck on not doing stuff because of the stuff I don't do. -
Out here, beyond city margins, the hobby of yoof, aside from testing their body's tolerance for alcohol, is to disrupt the orientation of ones mailbox. We don't have fences to mark, you see.
My old man tells me it's been going on at least 60 years, and that the police have always had better things to do than worry about it. The usual solution is to all figure out who's doing it and tell their parents.
Though I suppose it's a bit harder for city folk to know everyone who lives nearby; what with the fences and everything. You all know there's city's that ban them, eh.
Still, in a country where police can't respond to the persistent and organised theft of $12k farm bikes, worrying about a bent mailbox, or a marked wall, seems to be a skewed priority.One would imagine laws regarding truancy, rights of school access, and public drunkenness might need more of a tinker than the laws around the sale and use of spray cans.
-
Re: banks and such.
Easier loans (amongst other thing) drive house prices up. Higher house prices result in more borrowing, fairly logical given the easier loans.
More borrowing, even say an extra $20k on a 15 year mortgage, at current rates adds about $60k to total repayments (the extra being in effect the last part you pay off, few people realise how much a little more mortgage ultimately costs them, on a 25 year mortgage it's $135k extra).
This rise in house prices causes people to borrow more still, thinking they'll pay their mortgage with capital gains. The banks loan more, as the law says it's secured by the (newly inflated) house price.
Of course, the capital gains in such times are really just the next person's inflated mortgage, each ultimately paid for with ever larger debts on someone's part, until the system collapses.
Folk that get out of debt before the collapse get to keep all the real money in the system, everyone else gets left with the debt.
But it's not the bank's fault, it's government. They set the rules around debt creation, and our government choose to use a set of rules that can't control debt powered inflation of capital value. -
If National does become government later this year, they should be worried about having to meet the expectations of the raving nutter vote.
Isn't it everyone else who should worry? You know, that they might. I'm sure they'll give us a couple weeks to pick at their policy before the big day, but will the hollow men be honest with it anyway?