Aengeuad
In a purely private healthcare system (which doesn't exist in the developed world) the politics are firstly whether you can pay and secondly how much you can pay. No point offering free dieting and lifestyle advice when risky weight loss surgery (which has a notoriously low success rate) offers instant success, got a bad back or knee? Try out this risk free* (*not actually risk free) surgery! It wasn't that long ago in the US that getting cancer without health insurance was a death sentence, and that again is a political choice, one that the US government reneged on.
>1. What is the criminal conviction rate in Japan?
>2. Is there penal labour in Japan?
If I'm reading this argument correctly, it's that because Japan has a high (>99%) conviction rate and uses mandatory penal labour, Japan, therefore, has a modern slavery problem.
There's a few issues with this, the generally accepted consensus for Japan's high conviction rate is that it can be explained almost entirely by the fact that Japan's prosecutors are underemployed and overworked and this is something that can be trivially seen, e.g., while the 42% of US felony arrests result in prosecution the figure in Japan is only 17%, or while the US prosecutes 75% arrested for murder Japan only tries 43%. The implication is that the conviction rate is a result of prosecutors being incredibly selective of which cases they bring to trial, only selecting cases with strong evidence of wrongdoing with a high likelihood of a guilty plea in exchange for a more lenient sentence, rather than any nefarious corruption or underhanded tactics like wrongful confessions.
The second issue is that if the high conviction rate is a result of a need or desire for prison labour then it would also be visible in the incarceration rate, however this is not the case. Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. To emphasise just how few people Japan actually jails, let's look at some other countries countries. Incarceration rates are per 100k population: US: 639, England and Wales: 130, China: 122, Spain: 122, South Korea: 105, Canada: 104, France: 93, Hong Kong: 90, Italy: 89, Germany: 69, Japan: 38. Japan has half the prison population that the UK does while having twice the population, if they are jailing people with the intention of using them for slave labour they are doing a terrible job at it.
The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that the conviction rate is irrelevant to the discussion, and while it's still entirely possible to argue that Japan has an unintentional modern slavery problem as a result of prison labour it seems less of an argument against Japan specifically and more of an issue with prison labour in general. But if the problem is with Japan specifically, just how big of a problem is it? Using the globalslaveryindex[0] mentioned in a parent comment we can take a ham fisted approach and simply assume that all Japanese prisoners are slaves, add the Japanese prison population (around 50k) to the estimated number of modern slaves, and, well, Japan still has an incredibly low number of modern slaves, lower than the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and South Korea despite being roughly twice the population of any of these countries, and a quarter of the number of modern slaves that the US has despite being half the population. While I don't agree with prison labour I also don't think it's modern slavery, but even assuming that it is it's incredibly hard to come to a conclusion where Japan looks worse than any other comparable country.
[0] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc...
>> The redshift hypothesised in the Big Bang model [...]
>Doesn't sound to me like it's more than a hypothesis, but I could be wrong.
The way the Big Bang theory resolves the paradox is similar to that of how Poe resolved it, with a finite cap on the age of the universe there's only a finite amount of observable universe, and similar to Poe's explanation it presents a problem in that a younger universe would have been immensely bright. However this new issue is resolved through the explanation of the expansion of space which can be observed through the redshift of distant galaxies.
As we do observe a dark sky we know the hypothesis that led to the paradox can't be true, namely that the universe is both infinite and eternal, so the question is less about why we have a dark sky and more about what possible alternate hypotheses resolve the paradox. While the Big Bang theory is just a theory it's important to remember that proof is reserved for maths, a theory is a hypothesis backed up by observational data. General relativity led to the hypothesis of an expanding universe and this was something that was later observed from redshift measurements and from it we derive the Hubble–Lemaître law, that galaxies are moving away from earth with speeds proportional to their distance, in some cases faster than the speed of light, this alone fully resolves the paradox and crucially the Big Bang theory is not incompatible with this observation.
If one were to put on a tinfoil hat it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that the plan was to have a follow up video to settle the controversy with the gist of the video being about transmission line theory and concluding with a practical demonstration of the effect.
[0] I don't have the time to carefully watch a 15 minute video to verify this, and demonstrating a lack of evidence seems difficult, but the subtitles for the video can easily be downloaded with youtube-dl and then grepped or opened with a regular text editor. Note that these subtitles are manually written and not auto-generated by youtube, and while it's possible there's some differences in the script and what is said it seems unlikely.
youtube-dl --write-sub --sub-lang en --skip-download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY
grep -i 'transmission' 'The Big Misconception About Electricity-bHIhgxav9LY.en.vtt'
[1] https://youtu.be/VQsoG45Y_00?t=1013 (16:53)
I realise this comment is a nitpick but it's something that needs to be brought up any time suppressors are brought up. The only relevance suppressors have on the gun control argument is that their use and sale means that gun operators have less risk of suffering from hearing loss (especially when shooting indoors in a range) and people living near shooting ranges are less likely to complain about noise, i.e., there's no public safety argument here, it's purely ideological, and that's fine if it's what you're going for but it's not a compelling argument or one that holds up to scrutiny. As a point of comparison, there's very little controversy over suppressors in Europe and typically no additional regulations are placed on their ownership beyond the regulations necessary to own the guns that they're used with.
On the rationality of having locks when criminals can very easily break a window, the old saying that locks keep honest people out rings true. Locks do serve a purpose even if they do very little to slow criminals down. To bring the analogy full circle fingerprint readers always seemed like windows to me in how easy they are to bypass, luckily they're more of a luxury than a necessity. :-)
One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
(0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds
(1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf
(2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)' https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/p...
(3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.690...
When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word.
Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
>So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors?
Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat envious of the differentiation after having been told numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue they're not really 'blue'.
After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
In terms of nutritional value let's start with 100g of cooked kale, you're getting vitamin a/c/k and some manganese but not much else. Broccoli has vitamin a/c/k/folate. Bell peppers vitamin a/c/k/b6. Potatoes vitamin c/b6, potassium/manganese. Tomatoes vitamin a/c. Avocados have vitamin c/e/k/b6/folate/pantothenic acid and some potassium. Olives have iron and copper.
At this point a pattern is emerging, significant amounts of vitamins a/c/k, some folate, some b vitamins if you're lucky, and mineral wise it's mostly manganese and potassium. Spinach and mushrooms are much more interesting, with spinach having vitamins a/e/k/riboflavin/b6/folate, calcium/iron/magnesium/potassium/manganese. White mushrooms have vitamin riboflavin/niacin/pantothenic acid, iron/potassium/copper/selenium.
It should be noted that these are all 100g servings (cooked where appropriate) which might not be ideal. So while kale is indeed incredibly rich in vitamins a and k (1021% of your daily value in just 100g of kale!) it's really, really not useful to you if you're already eating even just reasonable amounts of vegetables, as leafy greens especially usually contain lots of vitamins a/c/k. Something that is lacking in most of these is minerals in any significant quantity, nuts in general do a lot better with a 100g serving of most types of nuts providing 15-85%~ of your DV in minerals, but it shouldn't need to be explained that eating 500 kcal of nuts to get close to your DV in minerals isn't ideal.
When compared to meat or animal products liver would be the gold standard, with 100g of beef liver containing significant amounts of vitamin a and all of the b vitamins as well as folate, along with large quantities of iron/phosphorus/zinc/copper/selenium along with some manganese and potassium. With just 100g of liver and 100g of kale you're going to get roughly >85% of your DV vitamin and mineral needs with the exception of vitamins d/e and magnesium/potassium. Other cuts of meat (beef/chicken/pork) or animal products aren't quite as good but you'll still be getting decent amounts of b vitamins (sans folate) and iron/phosphorus/zinc/selenium and calcium from cheese specifically. With fish/seafood it depends on the type but sardines are a particularly good example providing lots of vitamin d/niacin/b12 and reasonable amounts of calcium/iron/phosphorus/potassium/copper/manganese/selnium.
This comment is all over the place so to try to conclude and put it more succinctly, the common deficiencies that vegetarians face (vitamins d/b12, calcium, iron, zinc, omega-3) shouldn't be dismissed so easily especially when trying to make the point that meat contains 'minimal' nutritional value. Even nutrients that are commonly used to fortify foods (calcium, iron, thiamine, niacin, folate, vitamin d, iodine) are all readily found in meat/animal products with the exception of folate (it's abundant in liver but common in vegetables).
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1998068#p...
If the FSF goes rogue and changes the GPL to be incredibly restrictive (i.e., allowing proprietary redistribution, and I realise this can be considered permissive..) it might be possible to get it to be ruled invalid defaulting to the more permissive licence, especially if you have deep pockets, or if the FSF change the licence to be ridiculously permissive like 0BSD then it's not going to be legal in countries like Germany, either way any major change is likely to result in an international enforcement nightmare.
>The blame is pretty clearly on the people who editted the license text to be GPL2 only.
They edited the licence, yes, but the FSF explicitly wants you to do this to make your intention clear(1). When you licence software under the GPLv2 (or 3, etc) you have a choice of 'GPLv2 only' or 'GPLv2, or any later version', however since the licence text only states 'Version 2' with the old short labels being just 'GPL-2.0' there's some ambiguity on whether you mean GPL-2.0-only or GPL-2.0-or-later.
The default assumption should always be v2-only, however as (at the time) the FSF were still recommending the short label of GPL-2.0 and the issue of using v2-only or v2-or-later wasn't really an issue you had a lot of v2 licenced software and patches using the default unedited licence with the FSF short label of GPL-2.0 and this is purely the fault of the FSF. It wasn't until the GPLv3 came around which some people didn't like (notably the Linux kernel, which is probably why perf is v2-only) that you got people editing their licences to make the intention clear, although for many projects they had no choice in the matter as changing to v2-or-later would require permission from every copyright holder that had contributed code to that project, again this is partially the fault of the FSF for not having enough foresight or making the choice of -only or -or-later more explicit and clear.
P.S. if you already know the history and context here this post probably seems a little patronising and I apologise for that.
(1) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/identify-licenses-clearly.html
In England and Wales guns are heavily restricted but aren't outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain. Effectively every adult that isn't disqualified from owning a gun (medical reasons, >3 years in prison, etc) should be able to obtain a smoothbore shotgun licence provided the security/storage requirements can be met, this may be very difficult for younger people living in shared accommodation or in very developed city centres but still. Once a shotgun licence is obtained you can effectively own as many shotguns as you can securely store.
The firearms licence in comparison is much harder to obtain, you need to demonstrate a legitimate reason to own each specific firearm (i.e., land you have permission to hunt on, sports shooting at a club), the local police issuing the licence have a lot more say on whether they issue licences or allow amendments to the licences (i.e., owning more firearms), etc, but it's in principle not much different to a shotgun licence and if you already hold a shotgun licence you very likely can obtain a firearms licence for a very limited number of firearms. In American terminology a shotgun licence is shall-issue where a firearms licence (and amendments) are may-issue.
When it comes to stats on whether a licence is granted(2), in 2019 98% of shotgun licences that were applied for were issued and 97% of firearms licences that were applied for were issued.
This is a very different story to guns being outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain, gun ownership in the UK is low partially because of these restrictions but also because there's no gun culture to speak of. In comparison to countries like Iran, China, Japan, much of Asia and Africa, etc, we're extremely liberal with gun ownership, private gun ownership in Japan is almost unheard of and it's effectively prohibited for the general population for example.
These things have to be taken into account when talking about whether a country restricts/bans guns, because otherwise there's only a handful of countries that have no restrictions on guns. Gun ownership may not be trivial in the countries you've lived in but it's at least legal for the general population.
(1) We can get into the semantics of how restricted guns are in the USA and how this changes between cities/counties/states but as private sale/transfer of guns are effectively unrestricted and the right to gun ownership is constitutionally protected we can say that the USA (and Yemen, arguably South Sudan and Greenland as well) may as well not restrict private gun ownership
(2) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
When it comes to how difficult a language is to learn it depends greatly on what languages you already know and how distantly related (if at all) the new language you want to learn is from a language you already speak, shared language features or phonology or vocabulary also help out as well, etc.
For example while Polish may be difficult for an English speaker it does share some mutual intelligibility with Slovak and Czech, likewise with Finnish and Estonian. Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages but Japanese makes extensive use of Kanji/Hanzi, being fluent in one of these will help you understand the written language of the other faster and knowing either will give you a significant leg up in learning the other over somebody who only speaks English.
The crazier predictions are ones that didn't come to fruition line no more floating window managers or mice and people no longer building desktop pcs, or ones the author still thinks are going to happen like no more wired internet connections.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti...
The quotations on the OED are in a similar Middle English time period from 950 to 1325, and the forms the OED lists are as follows:
Forms: Old English–Middle English wǽpman, wǽpnman, wǽpen-, wépenmon, Middle English wepman, ( Orm. weppmann), weopmonne, wepmon(ne, wapmon, wapman.
Etymology: Old English wǽpnman , < wǽpn weapon n. (= membrum virile ) + man man n.1 Compare Old English wǽpned adjective, male.
So it likely comes from 'wæpnedmann' but I couldn't find anything explicitly for that (or variations on spelling), maybe OE is a little too old for the OED or as you say maybe it just isn't that well attested, the closest I could find was the following:
OE tr. Alexander's Let. to Aristotle (1995) §29. 242 Ða gesawe we þær ruge wifmen, & wæpned men wæron hie swa ruwe & swa gehære swa wildeor [L. pilosos in modo ferarum toto corpore].
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/229884 (woman): OE (Northumbrian) Lindisf. Gospels: Matt. xix. 4 Quia qui fecit ab initio masculum et feminam fecit eos : forðon seðe worohte from fruma woepenmonn & wifmonn geworhte hia.
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/225576 (wapman): 1123 Anglo-Saxon Chron. (Laud. MS.) Forbearn eall meast se burh of Lincolne & micel ungerime folces wæpmen & wimmen forburnon.
or here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/17/uk-plans-38m...
and this is on top of funding Oxford had received from the UK prior to the Oxford-AZ deal. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-03-24-oxfords-covid-19-resear...
Yet the publicly announced deal with the EU was on the 27th of August: https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/eu-pays-e3...
It should be noted at this point that France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had jointly negotiated a deal with AZ in June but my understanding is that after an EU27 vote the EC took over negotiations and you get the final (and first for the EU) deal in August.
Why the redacted UK agreement is dated 28th of August is anybodies guess but some things should be made clear, firstly that the UK started funding AZ in May and not late August, secondly that they did this a month before other EU countries had reached an agreement with AZ, and finally that the EC getting involved added a further 2 months to the negotiation.
Clicking through your second link you get to the article about the US deal on the 21st of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-scores-1b-fr...
and again for the UK deal on the 17th of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-signing-up-to-deli...
The trouble with the DPA was fines capped out at £500k and international enforcement was limited so large international companies like Google and Facebook could treat the law as an optional slap on the wrist while smaller international businesses effectively flew under the radar, the GDPR largely rectified both of these issues while modernising the laws in response to issues that generally didn't exist prior to the mid 2000s.
>It says what Google has done is like taking key parts of those books — chapter titles, character names, the first sentence of each paragraph — writing a new book, and selling it.
If you're reimplementing APIs as Google has done then at some point you _need_ to copy the structure of the existing API, the method signatures, the names of the methods, the descriptions of what they do, etc, and while you may be able to dig out a thesaurus to claim enough original creative work at some point it's all for moot because there's only so much you can do before you'll start infringing upon Oracles creative expression of their API which severely limits what you are able to do with it.
If Oracle wins this case it will have huge implications for any reverse engineered work like Wine or graphics drivers where such projects will cease to exist, because it won't actually matter if it's 100% your own implementation as any interface to existing APIs or hardware _will_ infringe upon other companies copyright.
As far as Youtube Content ID goes it doesn't actually matter if it's 3 seconds or 3 minutes of copyrighted work, if it's matched then Youtube will let those companies claim revenue from your video which may be an hour long. The alternative here is the legal system and courts which may absolutely agree that 3 seconds of use in an hour long video is fair use, but you're still going to end up in court to defend that usage. It's unlikely that Oracle has enough sway to force Github to implement a similar content matching system but if they did it doesn't really matter what threshold the courts set for fair use for reimplementing APIs just like it doesn't matter for Youtube, best make sure all your repos don't use something like XMLHttpRequest() or your repo may disappear, and of course if Oracle doesn't have the sway to force Github into implementing such a system you're still going to have to go check through all your your repos because if they feel you've infringed upon their creative work they'll be able to issue takedown requests and your only recourse will be through the courts.