Medical marijuana in California
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 07:06:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 06:49:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 06:46:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: drug laws, ethics, euthanasia, strange deaths
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 06:35:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: Arizona, economics, housing bubble
Deep in the Holland woods, D.J. Grothe wowed a group of kids at summer camp with a series of magic tricks. Seemingly impermeable steel rings were combined and separated again; rubber bands were melded into each other; coins vanished and returned in the unlikeliest of places.See the full article here. I'm glad to see it's not just a camp for atheists, but is open to theistic freethinkers as well:
Then, Grothe, national field director for the Council for Secular Humanism, did something even more amazing: He gave away the trick, detailing exactly how anyone can do magic.
It was another day at Camp Inquiry, where instead of swapping ghost tales or learning Bible stories, children take a critical look at claims of magic, the supernatural and even religion.
The camp's mission: Help young people "confront the challenges of living a nontheistic [or] secular lifestyle in a world dominated by religious belief and pseudoscience."
The unusual camp, now in its third year, brings together curious children from across the country to hone their skills as skeptics and critical thinkers.
Twenty-seven campers spent the past week following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, digging up fossils and learning how to face moral dilemmas.
Organizers don't specifically address faith or religion in their planned programming, which also includes a variety of art, music and leisure activities.Much better than Jesus Camp.
But the topics arise frequently in casual discussions among campers. Some profess to be atheists, others refer to themselves as secular humanists, and a few say they believe in a higher power.
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 06:29:00 PM 3 comments
Labels: rationality, skepticism
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 06:06:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: atheism, rationality, religion, science, skepticism
Posted by Lippard at 7/23/2008 05:54:00 PM 4 comments
Labels: Arizona
Foreclosures across metro Phoenix number 16,647 for the first half of the year compared with 9,966 during all of 2007 and 1,070 in 2006.The article also notes that the median resale price for a home in Phoenix is now $210,000, down 30% from the peak in 2006.
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"It has become more of an equity problem than a subprime problem," said Tom Ruff, a real-estate analyst with Information Market.
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Notice of trustee sales, or pre-foreclosures, also continue to climb. There were 35,111 pre-foreclosures filed in Maricopa County through July. That compares with 30,166 for all of 2007.
Posted by Lippard at 7/22/2008 07:46:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: Arizona, economics, housing bubble
Posted by Lippard at 7/20/2008 03:40:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: politics, security, technology
Massive telecom companies control virtually all of our voice and internet communications these days—and new evidence shows a near-total lack of commitment to our democracy. AT&T has proposed filtering all content traveling on its network. Verizon tried initially to block NARAL's pro-choice text messages. Most telecom companies are fighting net neutrality. Can democracy survive an assault by those who control the tubes?The panel members don't include anyone with any experience managing or operating an actual telecom network, but instead includes two people who have repeatedly demonstrated not only an ignorance of telecom law, technology, and policy, but who have misrepresented facts and failed to engage with the arguments of their critics, Matt Stoller and Timothy Karr (see posts on this blog in the "net neutrality" category). The closest person to a representative of a telecom is Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets, a company that is a reseller of long distance and wireless service on Sprint's network.
In the name of "network management," some companies want to throttle down the use of legal applications, like BitTorrent which may, coincidentally, provide competition in entertainment programming. They want to impose usage caps across the board on all customers which would stifle innovation and curb the use of video (there's that anti-competitive meme again) without actually solving the problem of the so-called "bandwidth hogs." The way caps are being discussed now, they would only lead to higher prices and less usage for an industry that already charges more for less than most broadband providers around the world. Parts of our broadband industry may be the only sector in the world that wants to cut down the amount of its product it wants customers to use.Brodsky's last sentence is clearly false--broadband is like a fixed-price all-you-can-eat buffet. All businesses want to maximize their profits by maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. When bandwidth is sold at a fixed cost in unlimited amounts, where a small number of users are consuming the majority of the service, it's in the business's interest to restrict those users or charge them more for what they consume in order to satisfy the rest in a cost-effective manner. The options are few--you can either restrict the "bandwidth hogs" in some way, charge them more so that they pay for what they use, or raise the price for everyone. These guys seem to advocate the latter approach, while I'm in favor of allowing all the options to be used in a competitive market. Where I disagree with Comcast's approach in issuing RST packets to block BitTorrent traffic is not that they did it, but that they were not transparent about what they were doing (and apparently didn't quite get it quite right--it should not have completely broken BitTorrent, but only slowed it down).
Posted by Lippard at 7/19/2008 02:31:00 PM 14 comments
Labels: copyright, FCC, net neutrality, NSA, security, technology, telemarketing, wiretapping