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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (775312)	3/17/2014 4:19:10 PM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Recommended By dave rose joseffy Respond to of 1573727

Paul Krugman’s Preposterous Statement Of The Day MARCH 17, 2014 By David Harsanyi In yet another column lamenting the imaginary dog-whistle politics that permeates the conservative movement, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offers what could be one of the most easily disprovable sentences he’s ever written – and that’s saying something. Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Let’s for a moment concede that roughly half the country is focused on punishing the poor. Let’s say they communicate this viewpoint via thinly-veiled racist rhetoric that apparently anyone can hear. Still, is it really “difficult” to find a Tea Party denunciation of bailouts? I guess asking your intern to type the words “bailout” and “Tea Party” into a Google search is problematic for a guy who insulates himself from the opposition’s arguments. Arduous as the work can be, though, Krugman would have first found a Wikipedia page that cited all larger 2009 Tea Party protests and found around a dozen of them were partly or explicitly aimed at denunciating Wall Street bailouts. Who knows? He might have pulled up the 2012 CBS poll that took a deep dive into the inclinations of the average Tea Partier, and found out that 74 percent of them opposed bank bailouts. Some argue, and with reason, that the Tea Party was spurred by Bush and Obama bank bailouts. I get it, not high profile enough. Will Rand Paul –the guy who wrote a book called “ The Tea Party Goes to Washington” — do? Because he said this: Federal bailouts reward inefficient and corrupt management, rob taxpayers, hurt smaller and more responsible private firms, exacerbate our budget problems, explode national debt, and destroy our US dollar. Even more importantly, any bailout of private industry is in direct violation of the Constitution. It is a transfer of wealth from those who have earned to those who have squandered. Actually, nearly every Tea Party-affiliated candidate had come out strongly against TARP, many of them making it the centerpiece of their runs against establishment Republicans — including Mike Lee and Marco Rubio. Is there no editor on the Times’ opinion page editor that can email the professor and ask him whether he wants to make such a ludicrous claim? (Hat tip: Russ Roberts) Update: As Joel Gehrke points out, Tea Party opposition to bailouts is still a live issue.

To: koan who wrote (775312)	3/17/2014 7:41:15 PM
From: i-node	3 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 FJB gamesmistress Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573727

>> We know nothing about quantum physics. And you know nothing about statistics. I think people who study quantum mechanics (not you, not me) know a lot about it. Perhaps not a substantial portion of what there is to know, but it isn't exactly unknown territory. As to statistics, I can guarantee you I know more about that subject than you do. >> For you to put it at 0.00000 (no probability) shows your ignorance right there. There is a probability for anything (the HUP!). There is a probability of occurrence for every event. It can be, and often IS, zero. There is zero probability of my phone ringing when it is unplugged. There is zero probability of federal government paying off its debt in your lifetime. There is zero probability of the broken glass in my car not being broken when I wake up in the morning. And there is zero probability we're all walking around in some kind of simulated world. >> Do you know how powerful quantum computers could get?? Do you have any idea how much distance there is between the Turing test and creating a virtual simulation with billions of people in it, all of which are creating their own realities? Obviously, you have no perspective about what is involved in a rudimentary simulation of a reasonably complex system.

To: koan who wrote (775312)	3/22/2014 2:20:33 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573727

Hi koan; Re: "There is a probability for anything (the HUP!)."; Not true. In QM, conservation principles exclude a lot of things. For example, while it's possible for the vacuum to create things of a given energy, that is only possible if their lifetime is sufficiently small. For measurements taken over long time, these can be excluded. And for things you'd like to imagine, for example, having a "10" supermodel, who's sexually attracted to you, appear in your bedroom for an hour, you can compute the probabilities for these happening. They're so low as to be excluded by the theory itself. That is, the total evidence that we have in favor of QM could be wrong. That's a very small probability but it's huge compared to the supermodel probability. Another way of saying the same thing is that QM could be wrong, but at a very small level. If that level is around the supermodel probability, you wouldn't be able to detect the difference. And so you really can't say that "anything" is possible according to QM. -- Carl