dhfhduk's comments

This is the tip of the iceberg with John Deere. They're squeezing sales franchises hard too, punishing sellers for doing business with anyone but Deere. Deere is basically trying to get complete control over the chain from sales to use to repair, and push out any and all competition anywhere along that chain.

I die a little bit inside when I see stuff like this, I mean, what sort of cowards are afraid of free speech? Geez.

As long as everyone is consenting, it's all fair. In fact, my guess is this crap does more harm than good by pathologizing sex. There's enough people out there shamed by their sexuality. We don't need more.

And how did they come up with such a weird list? Caning, female ejaculation, and facesitting in the same list? ???

I would disagree about professional licensure, and think the same arguments apply there as in other areas, although maybe in different ways. In fact, I think the problem in licensed professions is even worse, because assumptions are never questioned, to avoid being called reckless, and have the weight of law.

In fact, I think this is a prime problem with healthcare in the US in the moment.

The problem James outlines is the same with professional fields: we assume that license X, which often requires degree A, is necessary for competence in an area, and that competence cannot be achieved in an area in any other way. As a result, we stop actually paying attention to competency per se, and focus on licensure, which is not the same. As a result of that, we lose choice: any other way of meeting a demand is assumed to be illegitimate and unsafe, which is untrue. Competition is lost, and monopoly is gained.

In your example, for instance, you suggest a hypothetical case where someone doesn't have a dental degree. But in reality, it's almost certainly not that that person would have no degree at all, and no experience, it's that they would have a different sort of degree, with a different sort of experience.

Dentists are maybe a poor example, because if anything, their profession is an example of one that is being stifled by current practice. I suspect that they are in a position to learn to do a lot more than they are, and are held back by professional licensing laws relative to MDs.

The appropriate example isn't "would you hire someone without a dental degree to treat your cavity?" It's "would you hire a dentist with appropriate surgical training to do jaw surgery?" Would you hire an optometrist with years of opthomological surgery training to do LASIK surgery? Would you hire a psychologist with pharmacology training to prescribe you lithium, or a psychologist with appropriate training to do TMS treatment of your depression? Would you trust your pharmacist to pick the right antibiotic for your infection, that has been precisely characterized by a lab already? What about a neuroscientist with clinical training to interpret your MRI scan?

Licenses, although well-intended, have become hindrances to lower cost and better choice. The tail is wagging the dog in professional fields exactly the way James suggested over a century ago.

"Mr. Trump, in a telephone interview moments after the bill was pulled, blamed Democrats and predicted that they would seek a deal within a year after, he asserted, “Obamacare explodes” because of higher premiums."

Of course, the explosion has nothing to do with the GOP either (speaking as someone who identifies with neither party).

I think Kate is sort of underappreciated. I keep going back to it on Linux after using other editors.

It seems to be available for Windows and OSX, but I haven't tried it on those platforms. Does anyone have any experience with that?

I suspect it's perceived as KDE-specific, which might be part of the reason it doesn't get more attention.

FWIW, there are services in the US that allow you to do this. I've done it with Wells Fargo, for instance. It might not be as standardized as in some other places, though, and I agree with your general frustration over the state of banking and financial transaction practices in the US.

To me, Go and Rust are about equally appealing. Rust is more complex to me because it's a lower-level language; Go looks like a higher-level cousin.

I learned from Rust that I dislike curly braces. The language itself seems great conceptually, but I prefer the appearance of languages like Python that drop curly braces. If Rust was developed without curly braces I'd probably be [more] obsessed with it.

Strangely enough, parentheses and square brackets are also appealing. I also dislike writing code where whitespace is meaningful, even though I prefer to read it.

It's just the appearance of curly braces that bothers me.

I'm not sure about their implementation of pi in particular. To me it seems elegant, and as someone who has needed arbitrary precision arithmetic, I can see the appeal for how they are handling pi, and appreciate this attention to detail.

As for your broader question, Julia definitely fills a gap that I have been pained by for years. I've used R since it was in beta, and it is slow, which is a pain when you are discussing numerical needs. Yes, you can program in something like C/C++, but that is painful because of its overhead and dependency complexity (although it's surprisingly become less painful over time). Python could be used too, and probably is better at this point in that regard, but it has many of the same problems as R.

Julia is open-source, fast, and well-thought out with regard to modern numerical programming problems. I can write something in Julia and it performs essentially as well as something in C, which is a huge time saver in multiple respects.

I do wish Julia were more general-purpose in its orientation, or that the solutions it offers were coming from a more general-purpose language, but at the moment that doesn't seem to be in the cards. Maybe as it grows it will find use as a more general-purpose language, which is possible; maybe as languages like Rust or Go grow they will occupy this niche as well. Rust is interesting to me in this way, but currently it has little to offer in terms of simplification over C++ for numerics, and Go is not friendly to numerics. I personally like Stanza, but it's in its infancy, and no one probably even knows what I'm talking about.

For whatever reason, my experience has been that numerical programming has been a kind of isolate in programming. Numerical computing has always seemed slightly neglected in programming languages, and languages that have targeted numerical computing have often never been able to shake the "domain specific" label. I've just sort of come to see it as part of the territory.

There's nothing wrong with Python, C, or R. Also, languages change rapidly, so who knows what will happen. At the moment, though, Julia offers the best of all three and the only big downside is lack of libraries, which is becoming less and less of an issue every day (I wouldn't say there's a lack of libraries, more that there's fewer libraries). So I think it's deserving of its current attention.

I guess the question is, why would a systems programmer use C, or a web programmer use Javascript, or a network infrastructure programmer use Erlang, etc. etc. etc.?

Rules don't matter. Ethics do.

The former exist in the service of the latter. One problem we have with contemporary US culture is condoning a sort of twisted narcissistic, psychopathic assertion that because competently breaking the rules is sometimes ethical, breaking the rules is a sign of competence.

The theory you mention about additive noise, is clever but doesn't strike me as robust at all. It's been awhile since I looked at that literature, but when I did it seemed really unrealistic, that at some level it reduced to assuming that all deviations from normality are interpretable in terms of the desired causal inferences. There might be some scenarios where you could reduce the variables involved to the point where that idea is feasible, but otherwise it seemed really unbelievable to me.

Part of me wants to dive into this causality modeling, because it seems up my alley, but I'm very sceptical of it showing anything definitive. I do observational research, but short of a priori randomization, I'm sceptical of any claims to causality. Even then, with experiments, I'm deeply sceptical unless something has been replicated across various secondary conditions by multiple distinct groups.

Modern causality theory and modeling has definitely raised the bar in terms of what we say about data, and I love it, but sometimes I wonder if causality is a red herring. Even with hard experimental evidence, I'm tempted to not interpret it beyond "when someone does X, this tends to happen."

It's already going down:

http://www.frommers.com/tips/miscellaneous/the-travel-press-...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/seek-foreign-flights-nyc...

I had a similar thought, although my reaction was more along the lines of trying to soften the blow of some draconian backdoor policy.

That is, "well, what are you worried about with crippled encryption? We made it harder to get permission to access your email, so now it's ok if we require a backdoor for the government on all encryption."

I agree with you, although I think the problem is a focus on procedures rather than principles in general.

It took me a long time to realize that a principled reason for gaussian parametric distributions is the maximum entropy principle. Prior to that point, it had been presented as essentially arbitrary, even by established professors.

There seems to be an assumption that theoretical statistics is "too hard", and as a result there's a middle ground that gets left out. I haven't taught general stats courses in awhile (although I've taught advanced ones), but if I did, might start with Bregman divergences, and work down in the manner of your blog post.

I think there's an in-between that gets lost. You can teach principles without deriving long proofs of everything along the way.

Students don't get taught the underling principles and philosophies to choose from, and I think this leads to the "holy grail" issues you're referring to.

It seems to be changing a bit with new interest in Bayesian methods, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You might be right about things, but there's plenty of time.

Part of the issue, for me, isn't so much what Trump has done so far policy-wise, it's the environment this is all occurring in, and what Trump is setting up and what he has done in the past. If the legislature was in Democratic control, I wouldn't be so concerned. If Trump had actually divested his business, I might rest easier. If Trump weren't so much in the pockets of Russia for obvious reasons, it might not be so bad. And so forth and so on.

Instead, we have all of it happening simultaneously. To summarize:

1. You have a white supremacist in a central position in the white house.

2. There are concerns about Trump's vulnerability to Russia, with reports of his involvement in hacking, and evidence prior to the election that this is true.

3. To make (2) worse, you have a visible schism developing between Trump and the people who would know about those things, the intelligence and military communities. The president is actually essentially siding with Russia and distancing himself from US military and intelligence.

4. At the same time, he's bringing the FBI, who is in charge of domestic enforcement, more under his control, and eliminating segments of it that disagree with him. He rewards Comey, who arguably was complicit in using his position to sway the election.

5. The FBI itself reports concerns about white supremacy in law enforcement. So now you have white supremacists cuddling up to the people who are supposed to do something about white supremacy.

6. The other person who might be in a position to do something, the AG, also has a history of white supremacist positions.

7. Trump refuses to actually divest of himself of his business interests, creating huge conflicts of interests.

8. He places people with massive financial conflicts of interest in certain cabinet posts, essentially letting foxes run the henhouses.

9. He's actively hostile toward the press, who are simply doing what they should be doing and holding public officials to the high standard of scrutiny they should be held to.

Do I need to go on?

Essentially, there's no checks and balances anymore. At all. The person in the white house, who lost the popular vote, is behaving as if he's an organized crime boss. And the GOP is acting as if the ends always justifies the means, even if it means dismantling democratic processes. See NC for an example of this playing out.

This is why some people are freaking out. Because even if it's not currently fascism nationally, it's feeling very similar to it. I know those terms were used by those on the hard right about Obama, and maybe diluted the meaning of the term, but at the moment there's too much unchecked power. Way too much.

My political beliefs actually don't align well with either major party, but to me this is a very very very bad situation.

We shouldn't have to worry about whether or not we're jumping the gun. That's the point.

Honestly, I'm not sure why there aren't calls to boycott the US airline system until this sort of thing is put to a stop.

I'm horrified by Trump, but see this as just one step in a direction things have been headed for years.

I doubt anything will change it until people speak with their wallets because that seems to be the only thing that gets the attention of those in power anymore.

Thank you, Peter, for clearing that up. We were all waiting for your rational and level-headed insight to know what to think about these sorts of matters. The language of the EO mentioned religion, but obviously if you think that's not what was meant, that's not what was meant. Now we can all sigh a breath of relief and go about our lives. What would we do without people like Peter?

I voted libertarian in part because of the concerns you're mentioning about Clinton, but I think it's disingenuous to somehow imply that Trump isn't worse, or that this didn't start with the Bush administration's response to 9/11, or that unbridled GOP power concentrated in the executive and legislature isn't a horrifying thing.

I (1) don't think Clinton would have been worse policy-wise, (2) think Clinton would have been more psychologically stable and competent, and (3) the GOP in Congress would have actually criticized and raised concerns about what she was doing to score party points.

The current situation is terrifying to me. I'm tired of being labeled a liberal or conservative, because I don't fit in to either camp, and get accused of being one by the other, and am tired of these arguments about who's at fault. It just needs to stop.

Earlier in my life, I always ended up buying Dells, mostly because they were the best purchases for me.

Then at one point I needed a new laptop, and the 11-inch Air was the only one that really fit the bill hardware-wise. There was the Yoga, which I almost purchased, but I didn't quite trust it despite its appeal and positive reviews.

After about about a year or so, it seemed like Apple abandoned that small laptop market, and multiple other vendors started releasing really competitive products in that space, especially HP and Dell.

If I was purchasing a new laptop, it would almost certainly be an XPS 13. This sales news isn't anything new.

These things seem to go in cycles--I suspect in 7 years or so we'll be talking about how Dell isn't keeping up with Apple again.

I heard a news report that what happened at DHHS was normal. What happened at the EPA was not.

The USDA has since released some statement that there was some confusion, and the gag order email should not have gone out and was incorrect.

FWIW, I have a lot more faith in a company that allows its engineers to communicate directly with the public. If there's something in particular that should remain quiet, then that should be handled as such on a case-by-case basis.

Moreover, as others have noted, the EPA is a public institution, and should be answerable to the public.

This is authoritarianism, and nothing else. Control, intimidation, and fear.

The EPA functioned fine with Obama. Trump just doesn't want to be answerable for what he knows are unpopular policies.

He didn't win a majority of the vote, it's on his mind (he feels obliged to explain this with paranoid conspiracies regarding immigrants). He knows that what he does is going to get pushback from the public, and he doesn't want it.