Interesting Links for 11-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• A Strange Form of Social Collapse (i.e. one where life is getting steadily better)
  (tags: society usa crime pregnancy )
• About my 'spilled semen' amendment to Oklahoma's Personhood bill
  (tags: politics women usa viaZornhau )
• What does new glacier data mean for the climate debate?
  (tags: globalwarming glaciers )
• IT guy answers daughter's

Comments

[andrewducker]

There may, of course, be a link between the fourth and last items there.

[bohemiancoast]

Though I am pretty sure that the child in question is not delinquent and the father only moderately controlling. I don't suppose there's a parent in history who hasn't considered destroying, permanently confiscating, or giving away, the toy that a child has persisted in using in a way that they've been repeatedly told not too.

Sometime in his 6m YouTube hits, social services popped round to make sure that the kids were ok; which they are of course.

Oh, yes, and the best comment I've seen so far: "he should be ashamed of himself. That's appalling grouping for shots at that range".

[andrewducker]

There's a big difference between considering destroying a child's toy, and putting several rounds into it and then posting a video of it online.

And I don't think the child is delinquent either. If there are teenagers that have never said bad things about their parents when upset then there' probably something wrong with them.

[skreidle]

Response from the family here: http://www.litefm.com/pages/news-story.html?feed=421220&article=9744152

[bart_calendar]

You could sort of put up a link that says "The Internet is drowning in (insert any word here) arguments."

[andrewducker]

Yeah, but I don't care that much if there are crazy people out there espousing the idea that the earth was made in 4004BC. ACTA misinformation is getting traction, and I want people to argue against copyright idiocy on facts, not on misunderstandings. Otherwise when the next one comes around nobody will listen to them.

[matgb]

On top of what Andrew says, from a policy making point of view, I know exactly what the politicos I work with do when they find out the lobbying they've received on an issue turns out to be hysterical scaremongering.

The best way to persaude a politician to support something is to couch your arguments against in hyperbole, half truth and nonsense. Because if the best you can do is untrue, then you don't have a real case. It's how they react.

There are damn good reasons to be worried about that treaty, but the hyperbolic nonsense drowns out the legit critique and makes the anti lobby a lot easier to dismiss.

[doubtingmichael]

I nodded at the "There is no single root cause of your problems" link. We have to deal with a lot of bugs, and we try to work out why they happen. In my view, the second biggest cause is someone made a mistake somewhere. It is much more common that two or more people, working on completely different pieces of functionality, had slightly different expectations which were incompatible.

We don't have bugs in our files. We have bugs where different files touch.

(Please: nobody post about the importance of test harnesses etc. We know. There are reasons they aren't a universal fix for us.)

[danieldwilliam]

The article on root cause analysis reminds me of a section of Gleick’s book on Chaos where he discusses AT&T’s attempts and failure to find the single cause, the guy with the screwdriver in the wrong place, which was making their system less than perfect.

[danieldwilliam]

The article on the Swedish model has I think helped me name a large part of my discomfort with the idea of the Big Society.

It shifts the power to decide who gets what assistance from the community from a disinterested civil service controlled by democratically elected politicians to self appointed and self regulated private actors. These private actors are not necessarily neutral.

When I was about 13 my family and I spent some time living in a small rural town in Austalia. We were, for a short time, significantly unrich.

One of the local priests would drop round with food parcels on the condition that he was allowed to hit us children when we swore. So food in exchange for a certain narrow view of morality and the acceptance of someone else’s right to control you through violence.