Here (section "Why we are blind"):
"[...] the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"
I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?
It's just possible to read it as a poorly written attempt to say that the Left ignores science on biological IQ differences (perhaps, as is quite popular to point to on the Right, those associated with race) and also biological sex differences, rather than it being intended to refer to biological, sex-linked, IQ differences.
The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.
This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.
He isn't talking about who is better just that there are differences.
What is it you don't get?
He is referencing the people (mostly feminists on the left) who claim there are no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs.
You're taking that way out of context. He's not saying that the left denies IQ differences between the sexes, and it's sloppy to quote half a sentence. If you read that section, he's analyzing the psychology of the left and the right.
The full sentence, which you clipped is:
Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans
> environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change), the Left tends to deny science
concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ8 and sex differences).
That is, that the left likes to pretend there are no IQ differences (between any two groups), nor that there are any psychology differences between the sexes [because it undermines their ideology, just as global warming undermines conservative ideology].
Though this may seem ambiguous, it's clear if you consider his footnote. [8]
The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.
This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.
He says there are IQ differences between people. Who are these "people" if not men and women? He either means men are smarter or he just randomly went on a tangent.
Let me ask you, when he says there are IQ differences between people, which groups of people do you think he means?
He's referring to a group that is selected based on their intelligence. In that case, it doesn't really matter what the distribution of the larger population is, because you're only talking about a group that is selected for their favorable attributes.
For someone to say that people who are already in a career, that is, already selected for their ability, are less suited because of their sex is kind of absurd.
No he is referring to the claims by the left who claim that there is little biological difference and mostly social constructional. Read the whole thing and the whole sentence.
He's arguing "the left" would never say group A has a higher average IQ than group B, regardless of the groups.
That tidbit is a paranthetical in a sentence about the psychology of left vs right. His thrust is an illustration of how ideology and science are conflated.
This idea encrypts your ballot with your voter ID + some secret key that you know and creates encrypted data E. It, then, publishes a (E, your ballot) pair. Since only you can decrypt E, others won't know how you vote.
A third party can now pressure you to produce your secrets to verify who you voted for. This is not possible in the current system: as long as the final tally reports at least 1 vote for the person you claim to have voted for, no one can prove your claim wrong.
"$5 off your next purchase if you can produce a receipt for candidate X!"
"You must vote for X if you wish to join my organization."
Some states in US allow you to take a photo of your ballot. This means they can already do the things you mention. But they don't, because it is illegal. It will continue to remain illegal.
If you are very worried about such a scenario, verify that your vote is on the blockchain, then destroy your receipt.
The fact that a receipt exists means that you can be pressured to provide it. If my boss wants me to vote for pro-business-owner anti-union candidates, he's not going to take "Yeah I promise I voted for your guy, but I destroyed my receipt" for an answer.
I don't really buy "it's illegal" as a counterargument. There are a lot of things employers pressure their employees to do that are illegal, but the employees don't really have the ability to do anything about it, because they're taking a risk on the legal system working out for them, and in the meantime they'll probably lose their job and be known as an employee who litigates against their employers. As a wise man once said, if you're a single-digit millionaire, you have no effective access to our legal system.
But doesn't this protocol make it impossible to prove what your secret key is? i.e. there are multiple (user-derivable) keys that look valid, as in deniable encryption?
(And I'm sure everyone's in agreement with the importance of making the ballot secret.)
I don't get how your code works. Why do you decrement first, then increment?
Regardless, your explanation is mostly correct. There will be an incref/decref pair for most accesses. However, LLVM (and Apple's refcount implementation) does 2 very important optimizations:
- LLVM can recognize (via static code analysis) redundant incref/decref pairs and take them out.
- I can't find the link for it right now, but Objective-C usually stores refcount inside the pointer (in other words, the memory address) itself. So as long as your refcount is small enough (which it will be 99% of the time), incref and decrefs don't thrash caches but work on the value already in register.
My code doesn't work under race conditions. You're right the increment should be done before and the decrement after to avoid races. I just banged out the logic without giving it too much thought.
On removing redundant incref/decref pairs - this is nice, but it seems mostly a benefit because of the "automatic" part, not the refcounting part. Developers dealing with manual refcounting would probably recognize places where refcount manipulation is redundant and just elide them. A naive automation ends up inserting them everywhere, and this helps bring that back to what a "smart developer" would have written anyway.
On your second point, I've heard about this trick - in particular in smalltalk implementations. It's something I haven't fully looked into. It seems like the in-pointer refcount would only be valid if the pointer never escaped the function frame. More generally, you'd have to be able to guarantee that a particular pointer is the only reference to an object before the refcount could be stored in the pointer bits itself.
If you have more insight into the implementation of this, I'd be interested in hearing it. This "small refcount pointer tagging" thing is something I've been meaning to understand better but haven't gotten around to.
They store it in isa field. Still, as long as you also call any virtual method of the object (or due to cache lines, use any field), it will still be pretty fast.
I'm just an armchair economist, but I have read real economist argue that a strong US dollar limits the US's ability to repatriate it's manufacturing base. Also, I don't think China so much increases the dollar as it limits the growth of the Yuan in measure with technological and capital improvements that allow it to keep its export market strong and keep manufacturing business in China.
And to link it back to the outer conversation... Since google is using PFS for gmail, for the NSA to read those conversations, google would either need to (a) give them the email unencrypted directly (cheating) or (b) give them the specific key negotiated for each conversation.
It strikes me that once PFS is in place, google would, in theory, be able to keep everything private except those conversations that a court forced them to give up the keys for.
As long as the rule of law were upheld (i.e., warrants/judicial involvement), it seems to me that this model could work and be generalizable for all web traffic. Maybe it's the way forward...
A lot of Keynesian economists are arguing that now is not the time for austerity. The government's current mission should be to lower employment even if it means higher deficits (and debt) _for now_. Once we are out of this slump, the argument is that most of the deficit will take care of itself (since some of the deficit is lower tax revenue because of unemployment + cost of automatic stabilizers such as unemployment benefits). We still need to fix the rest of the deficit/debt problem after the crisis, though.
The second important argument is that (again, right now), this emphasis on austerity is actively making things worse.
government's current mission should be to lower employment
Well since we've exploded our debt to supposedly lower unemployment and the meter has barely moved, maybe we're doing it wrong? We've indulged the Keynesians quite enough over the last $6+ TRILLION dollars, tyvm.
I see people in this thread demanding evidence that more debt is bad for the country. Well where the hell is the evidence that shows that staggering debt is good for the country?
Maybe we should fall back on common sense "household" or "business" models until that evidence appears, huh?
this emphasis on austerity is actively making things worse.
What austerity? I've heard some talking about it, but we're not practicing it anywhere. Don't you dare use the word "sequester", because that was a joke.
The sequester is not a joke. A friend of mine knows postdocs whose NIH funded projects were cut 20%, immediately, when the sequester went into effect. Another friend of mine will be in next class to start with the FBI, but they've been put off until 2014. To be clear, the FBI is not training new agents right now.
The sequester is real, but it may take more time for the effects to reverberate throughout the country.
The sequestration has only been painful because the Administration wants to make an example of any efforts to reduce the size of the government. Funny how NIH projects could have a 20% cut when the $44 Billion reduction this year as a result of sequestration is 1% of the actual budget. Where did that other 19% come from? Further, the sequestration only reduced the increase on the baseline budget. We're still going to be spending more this year than we did last year.
Funny how NIH projects could have a 20% cut when the $44 Billion reduction this year as a result of sequestration is 1% of the actual budget. Where did that other 19% come from?
That is a complete non-sequitur. The amount a grant from one federal entity is reduced is not limited to the same percentage as the total federal budget.
Totally true, if as a politician you want to manipulate your power base into believing that a small reduction in your power is a really bad move, you should make every possible administrative move to maximise the direct pain they will feel from that reduction.
Keep the fat and cut the muscle makes great sense when you are commanded to drop 1.5% of mass and you want to make the case you're going to lose a ton of strength.
The idea that this pain is a joke is pretty unfounded. It is based upon the idea that there is waste and waste and waste everywhere. If that is the case, then it should be pretty easy to target such wasteful spending, but that isn't exactly the case at all.
Also, these cuts aren't even close to what are desired by a certain segment of law makers. If that desired austerity were to be put in place, and you think agencies at trying to make an examples now, their current examples would pale in comparison to what we would see.
If it is so easy to say an agency doesn't need to cut X when they can cut Y, then pass a bill cutting Y.
It is based upon the idea that there is waste and waste and waste everywhere
I don't know how educated people concerned about politics and the economic health of this country could not read these kinds of stories that come over the wire and know that there's an extraordinary amount of waste in the Federal government that could easily be cut.
Unfortunately, so many voters have their heads in the sand and don't know what's going on - or worse yet, they're doing like you are here and propagating misinformation.
And there's a large part of the problem - your team, my team politics. Democrat, Republican, doesn't really matter. What matters is people who not only understand economics but have our best interests in mind and don't create a mess.
Right. We blow a crater in our economy, and begin to listen to Keynes when he says that government dirt should be shoveled in as a land-filler of last resort. We shovel-in a fraction of what was lost and then freak out when the hole is not refilled and ready for pavement.
First, most of the debt racked up was not even remotely related to stimulus. So it's not like we have $6tn in stimulus. But mostly, even if it was, the hole we blew in our economy was much larger than even that $6tn.
> Well since we've exploded our debt to supposedly lower unemployment and the meter has barely moved, maybe we're doing it wrong?
Many, if not most, Keynesians agree with this -- that the current US policy has been all wrong, even while it some elements were correct in very broad outline. And they were saying that when the policies were proposed, not just when they failed to work.
> We've indulged the Keynesians quite enough over the last $6+ TRILLION dollars, tyvm.
No, what we've done is adopted incoherent policies that are driven by some impulse toward Keynesian with some directly contrary impulses (in part, this is a consequence of different branches of government having different preferences.)
You speak of a "meter [that] has barely moved," yet the economic consensus is that were it not for the stimulus, unemployment would be even worse than it is now.
Well since it's mostly the people who spent the money as well as the people who advised us to spend the money who are telling us this - are you surprised? When the press tends to not ask the masterminds of that spending uncomfortable questions, then why should we be confident in our knowledge based upon what they have told us so far?
Shouldn't we be instead be giving more credence to those who said that the stimulus wouldn't accomplish what the Administration was selling? Since those contrarians were right?
You say that it would have been "worse", but how much worse? The justification for adding such a huge amount to our debt was the big return. If the stimulus got us to 7.7% unemployment right now, but without it we'd be at 7.9%... then maybe we should have not incurred so much more debt?
This can't be overstated and I am loathe to admit it but I have a feeling that a large part of the panic today was the fact that it was widely reported that Apple's earnings were "flat" year over year. They weren't, they were up by about 7%, which isn't stellar but is a far cry from flat.
Goroutines are extremely lightweight. It is common to run hundreds of thousands of them on one machine. (The main reason for that is goroutines start off with a very small stack and extend it as necessary)
It is up to executorService to decide how many threads to use to execute those tasks. But they will be executed in threads. So you are unlikely to have more than a few hundred(maybe a few thousand?) of them around at any time.
I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?