http://www.dbskeptic.com Skepticism. Critical thinking. Podcast. Community. Sun, 11 Sep 2011 01:30:05 +0000 en-us hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Digital Bits Skeptic brings skepticism and critical thinking to a world of new age, religion and credulous pop culture. Andy Kaiser clean Andy Kaiser skeptic@dbskeptic.com skeptic@dbskeptic.com (Andy Kaiser) 2009 Skepticism and critical thinking in a world of new age, religion and credulous pop culture skeptic, skepticism, critical thinking, new age, religion, pop culture, skeptical articles, critical thinking articles, philosophy http://www.dbskeptic.com/images/dbskeptic-logo-144.jpg http://www.dbskeptic.com/category/politics/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2011/02/09/defaulting-to-ignorance-what-bill-oreilly-and-the-insane-clown-posse-have-in-common/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2011/02/09/defaulting-to-ignorance-what-bill-oreilly-and-the-insane-clown-posse-have-in-common/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:57:18 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=2137 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2011/02/09/defaulting-to-ignorance-what-bill-oreilly-and-the-insane-clown-posse-have-in-common/feed/ 4 Andy Kaiser By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 154 - Bill O'Reilly is a conservative political commentator who is best known for his TV show "The O'Reilly Factor" and its many associated books. Recently, he got into some hot water over comments he made about life, By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 154 Bill O'Reilly is a conservative political commentator who is best known for his TV show "The O'Reilly Factor" and its many associated books. Recently, he got into some hot water over comments he made about life, the universe and everything. This is the quote you'll hear often regarding this issue: "Okay, how did the moon get there? How'd the moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How'd the moon get there? How'd the sun get there? ...Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn't have it? Venus doesn't have it. How come? Why not? How'd it get here?" Here's the video of the above: This comment was made in response to viewer feedback, after an earlier broadcast had him claiming that the Earth's tides were proof God created the Universe - since we didn't know how the tides worked, O'Reilly claimed, that was proof of the existence of God. Every commentary I've read on this issue so far addressed the point that O'Reilly is factually wrong: Yes, we do know how the tides work. We know how the moon and sun "got there". These issues have been addressed in plenty of detail by people much smarter than I. So I'm not going to tackle them here. Most criticism of this issue misses a more important point than O'Reilly being factually wrong. Yes, he didn't know some basic science. He then proceeded to plant himself deeper in his hole by backing up his claim with more examples of Stuff We Don't Know, although it turns out We Do. O'Reilly's problem is not in knowing specific answers. His problem is in assuming that because we don't know something, then "God did it". In his response to scientific criticism, O'Reilly moved from talking about the tides to talking about the moon and the sun. I see where he's going with this. If we then tell him how the moon and sun are formed, he'll pull back the camera to encompass an even bigger picture. He might say something like: "Okay, pinhead, then how'd the solar system get here? How'd the Universe get here? Why is there anything at all?" O'Reilly claims that because we don't know something, God (presumably the Christian god) is the answer, because if something exists, it must have had a creator. That sounds nice on the surface, until we use his technique and pull back the viewpoint. We might respond with something like this: "Okay, Bill, then how'd the Universe get here? You say your god made it? How did your god get here? Why is there anything at all?" The answer to this question: God always existed. He exists outside of time and space. However: 1) How is it that a god can always have existed, but the Universe can not? It's frustrating to me that, when religious people claim that their god created the Universe, they don't worry about the creation of their god, who supposedly has always existed. If you can accept a god that always existed, why can't you accept a Universe that always existed? 2) Saying 'I don't know' does not mean 'I give up'. O'Reilly's attitude indicates that a sensible person must respond to him with, "because I can't answer your question, God must be the answer". Listen to the rest of his commentary - he seems to believe this himself, and expects his audience to follow this same logic. However, I don't have a problem saying 'I don't know'. But I do have a problem with people who explain their ignorance by defaulting to an even more unknowable and complex explanation. They shrug their mental shoulders and default to a "god did it" explanation. To me, this is the same as saying, "Because I do not have an answer myself, there must be a supernatural answer and I will not search further. I see no need to learn about this or research it. I won't evolve and life will not improve." This is the refusal to explore our world's many mysteries. Even worse, it's to state that you have no interest in doing so. This is willful ignorance. This is mental stagnation. Andy Kaiser clean 8:20 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2010/08/13/the-veil-of-ignorance-dont-confuse-tools-with-the-buildings-they-create/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2010/08/13/the-veil-of-ignorance-dont-confuse-tools-with-the-buildings-they-create/#comments Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:54:54 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=2052 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2010/08/13/the-veil-of-ignorance-dont-confuse-tools-with-the-buildings-they-create/feed/ 4 Navin Kumar By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1413 - The "veil of ignorance" is a thought experiment: Imagine you have to design a society. You have to decide if slavery will be permitted or not. Are women supposed to stay at home? Are they allowed to work? By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1413 The "veil of ignorance" is a thought experiment: Imagine you have to design a society. You have to decide if slavery will be permitted or not. Are women supposed to stay at home? Are they allowed to work? Or must they do a bit of both? How high are income taxes? How are they applied? After you design your society, you become one of the positions in that society. Here’s the kicker: you aren’t allowed to choose your position. You get one at random. So you could end up male or female, rich or poor, black or white, slave or owner, scientist or secretary. Since you don’t know what position you will occupy, you are said to be designing this society from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. How would you design such a society? What would it look like? You could end up as a coal miner or a CEO. Will the CEO be heavily taxed to subsidize the coal miner’s healthcare? Most people are risk-averse: they would rather have a million dollars guaranteed rather than a 50% chance of having 2 million dollars and a 50% chance of having nothing. This is fairly logical: with the first million you will buy what’s important: a house, a decent car, a retirement fund, et cetera. The second million will get you a fancier car, a holiday house and maybe some nice suits but the happiness (in economic terms, the utility) you get out of the second million is less than the happiness you get out of the first million. (Mathematically, let’s say the first million gets you a utility of 50, while the second million gets you a utility of 40. If you just take the million your utility is 50. Winning gives you a utility of 90, while losing gets you zero. Therefore, if you take the gamble, you have an expected utility of (.5 x 90) + (.5 x 0) = 45. Thus taking the gamble will, on average, give a lower overall utility and less happiness.) John Rawls, the philosopher who invented the concept of the veil of ignorance, concluded that because people are risk-averse, they would construct a society where everyone is equal rather than one where there are rich as well as poor people. Since this is the kind of society that we would choose if we didn’t know our positions, this is the kind of society which we must try to create in the real world. Right? To use the example above, you’d want to hedge your bets and tax the CEO if you weren’t sure if you’d become him. Rawls took this idea one step further. He argued that people would want a society where there is equality of outcome: everyone ends up in the same place, regardless of intelligence, talent or strength, because even these things are randomly distributed at birth. You might be born stupid, weak or talentless. Wouldn’t you want to hedge your bets against that affecting you? This equality of outcome hasn’t really caught on in a big way. Even egalitarians accept you’d need some degree of inequality to convince people to put in a decade of work to become a doctor instead of a jazz musician. Even so, Rawls’ conclusions about an equal society being a just one are very influential. These conclusions have been subject to a variety of criticisms. Are people really that risk-averse? What about those thousands of ‘actors’ who end up doing bit roles for tiny amounts of money their entire lives so they have a one-in-ten-thousand shot at becoming Tom Cruise? And how do you decide the best ratio of security versus liberty? Let’s focus on one criticism, that of Rawls’ society where a fixed amount of wealth must be distributed. Everything else being equal, a person would prefer a society where incomes were $10, $4 and $4 to one where the distributions were $3, $3, $3 because in the first example all incomes are higher in all cases. To simplify the analysis, assume that all people are risk-averse, and we’ll use the Veil of Ignorance as our tool of choice. But rather than designing a society, let’s say that the person behind the Veil is designing a civilization. Andy Kaiser clean 8:34 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/11/01/ieds-and-the-futility-of-increased-armor/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/11/01/ieds-and-the-futility-of-increased-armor/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:43:33 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1601 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/11/01/ieds-and-the-futility-of-increased-armor/feed/ 2 James Lochbaum By James Lochbaum Article ID: 1343 - For the United States, there is probably no other weapon as symbolic of today’s conflicts as the Improvised Explosive Device, or IED. Up until 2007, IEDs were responsible for 63% of U.S. By James Lochbaum Article ID: 1343 For the United States, there is probably no other weapon as symbolic of today’s conflicts as the Improvised Explosive Device, or IED. Up until 2007, IEDs were responsible for 63% of U.S. casualties in Operation Iraqi Freedom (1).  They have also been implemented by belligerents in Afghanistan, a place previously devoid of these weapons. To counter IEDs, the U.S. and other coalition forces have turned to traditional Third Generation Warfare strategies.  New Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (or MRAPs) are designed and put into production, existing vehicles are upgraded with additional armor plating, troops are issued more ballistic vests and trauma plates, and electronic jammers are installed. While training and doctrine have been altered, the response to these devices has mainly been to field more heavily armored hardware. This approach seems to work. In 2004, when specially-designed MRAPs were first used by the U.S. Marine Corps, they reported no casualties in over 300 IED attacks involving the new vehicles (2).  But, the success of this "up-armor" approach has been severely distorted.  It is seen as a strategy for victory, when really it only treats a symptom of the conflicts we face. The IEDs are a symptom - and not the root cause - of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  An IED is simply a way for an insurgent or guerilla to attack a mechanized, first-world military. U.S. and NATO forces are vulnerable to IED attacks because of their mechanized nature, and their heavy logistics footprints.  (A logistics footprint refers to the amount of logistic support required in proportion to the size of the actual fighting force.) This is a vulnerability for developed nations involved in counter-insurgency (COIN) operations. Opponents in these types of conflicts rarely attack the "warfighter" directly. For example, the U.S. fields one of the world's most effective Main Battle tanks, the M1 Abrams. An insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan will have a hard time matching the firepower or armor that an Abrams brings to the fight, although an alarming number of tanks are being taken out of action by IEDs (4). A clever opponent can neutralize the tank's combat power by defeating its logistics footprint. How? The Abrams burns about 12 gallons of fuel an hour just with the engine idling. When moving, its gas mileage is measured in feet, not miles (3). For a company of tanks to conduct operations (that’s about 12 tanks), they must be supplied with at least 144 gallons of fuel per hour just to idle. Fuel must obviously be transported to the same place as the tanks. Fuel is just one resource required by the tank. We haven’t even mentioned spare parts, ammunition, lodgings and supplies for the crew. An opponent that seeks to neutralize the tank's combat effectiveness should strike its fuel supply (or any one of a dozen other logistics trains that delivers necessary supplies). This is where the “up-armor” doctrine begins to surface. As enemies attack the logistics train, the U.S. reaction has been to consistently apply more armor and more defensive systems to existing equipment, and to implement new, heavily armored vehicles. What has never taken place is a good hard look at what those logistics vehicles are delivering and why they are needed. Let's go back to the example of the tank. The Abrams Main Battle Tank has incredibly tough armor, a powerful main gun (105/120mm), and sophisticated optics and gear that allows it to do all kinds of ridiculous things that would have made it a Soviet General’s nightmare. But, the ability to engage targets with a gyroscopically stabilized main gun while moving isn't as effective when those targets are blending with the local population. This particular tank has severe limitations in the battle-spaces in which it’s currently employed. Yet, despite this, the U.S. Army deployed over 1,100 of the vehicles in Operation Iraqi Freedom (4). Andy Kaiser clean 9:02 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/10/25/enemies-closer-why-we-should-relocate-terror-suspects-to-the-united-states/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/10/25/enemies-closer-why-we-should-relocate-terror-suspects-to-the-united-states/#comments Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:23:25 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1587 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/10/25/enemies-closer-why-we-should-relocate-terror-suspects-to-the-united-states/feed/ 0 James Lochbaum By James Lochbaum Article ID: 1342 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a Naval base established at the end of the Spanish-American War. It has since become a sort of frontier outpost in a country that, while not openly hostile, is certainly not friendly. By James Lochbaum Article ID: 1342 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a Naval base established at the end of the Spanish-American War. It has since become a sort of frontier outpost in a country that, while not openly hostile, is certainly not friendly.  Bagra... Andy Kaiser clean 11:26 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/09/24/modeling-population-and-technology-why-havent-you-starved-to-death/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/09/24/modeling-population-and-technology-why-havent-you-starved-to-death/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:38:12 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1539 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/09/24/modeling-population-and-technology-why-havent-you-starved-to-death/feed/ 8 Navin Kumar By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1338 - Of all the interesting, insightful models produced in the last two or three hundred years of economics existence (I’m not including the models of financial markets: those are neither interesting nor insightful) few h... By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1338 Of all the interesting, insightful models produced in the last two or three hundred years of economics existence (I’m not including the models of financial markets: those are neither interesting nor insightful) few h... Andy Kaiser clean 8:58 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/07/19/ice-cubes-cornflakes-inflation-and-what-caused-the-sub-prime-lending-crisis-why-theories-are-so-hard-to-get-right/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/07/19/ice-cubes-cornflakes-inflation-and-what-caused-the-sub-prime-lending-crisis-why-theories-are-so-hard-to-get-right/#comments Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:51:30 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1380 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/07/19/ice-cubes-cornflakes-inflation-and-what-caused-the-sub-prime-lending-crisis-why-theories-are-so-hard-to-get-right/feed/ 3 Navin Kumar By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1331 - The Phillips Curve is possibly the biggest blow-up in economics that ever happened. Economists - and just about every class of social scientists - are frequently (and rightly) accused of being so infatuated with a th... By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1331 The Phillips Curve is possibly the biggest blow-up in economics that ever happened. Economists - and just about every class of social scientists - are frequently (and rightly) accused of being so infatuated with a theory, that they ignore data if it doesn't fit in with their model. The Phillips Curve is a wonderful example of rigorous empiricism. In 1958, A.W. Phillips discovered a striking relationship between inflation and unemployment: periods of high inflation coincided with periods of low employment. Subsequent studies found this result held true across countries and time periods. This led to the belief that there was a "trade-off" between employment and inflation which could be exploited by policy makers: a government could reduce unemployment if it was willing to increase inflation and vice-versa. The theory behind the data was fairly simple: if unemployment was low, businessses found it hard to hire workers and to increase wages. Higher wages causes goods to be more expensive to produce, so firms increase prices, and this causes inflation. Conversely, if the government caused inflation, there would be a gap in which wages are low in comparison with the price of goods. This is because the workers have not yet negotiated higher wages to compensate for higher prices. During this period, businesses take advantage of low wages by hiring more workers and stepping up production, reducing unemployment. Higher inflation means increased production and lower unemployment. The empirical evidence and theory were flawless. Policies based on the Phillips Curve enjoyed some initial success. So why is it that in the 1970s the Phillips Curve collapsed, and the world saw "stagflation": a bizarre situation which combined reduced production with inflation? An answer came from American economist Milton Friedman: low unemployment, he explained, is the result of unanticipated inflation. If the government started intentionally causing inflation, inflation becomes regular and predictable. If it is predictable, employees started negotiating contracts in which wages increased in tune with inflation and there is no point at which wages are "cheap". This is an incredibly subtle difference. Note that the explanation hasn't changed: the relationship is still the result of wages not keeping up with prices. The only difference is that the second uses a more sophisticated system than the first. To illustrate what happened, consider the following example (used by Landsburg in his excellent book The Armchair Economist): "Imagine an economist noticed that people purchased two boxes of cereal per week. Excited, he publishes a paper on the subject and it comes to the governments' attention. The government - for whatever reason - decides that people should eat four boxes of cereal per week. People already buy two boxes, so if the government sends them [an additional] two boxes every week - yay! - they will eat four boxes a week!" But that's not how it plays in real life. After getting the two boxes, this won't suddenly change consumer habits to four boxes - they'll instead stick with two. Since the government just gave them two, they'll buy no boxes at all! These are the perils of not including  people's behavior when formulating an idea. But it's even worse when we get a theory wrong. Imagine two economists bumped into the "two boxes a week" fact. One says, "People will always buy two boxes of cereal per week," while the other says, "People will always eat two boxes of cereal per week." How can you tell which one of them is right? From the data, you can't.  But once you change the rules of the game - by sending them boxes - you can. The first theory implies they will continue buying two boxes per week while the second predicts they will buy none at all. The second will be proven right. Similarly, in 1958, if you had two theories which stated, "Inflation reduces unemployment, Andy Kaiser clean 11:04 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/06/21/can-safety-regulations-kill-you-how-safe-are-seabelts-and-seatbelt-laws/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/06/21/can-safety-regulations-kill-you-how-safe-are-seabelts-and-seatbelt-laws/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:39:44 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1145 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/06/21/can-safety-regulations-kill-you-how-safe-are-seabelts-and-seatbelt-laws/feed/ 13 Navin Kumar By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1327 - Seatbelts save lives, right? - They secure people to the vehicle so that if an accident occurs, passengers are prevented from being thrown around and hitting interiors of the car and breaking their necks. By Navin Kumar Article ID: 1327 Seatbelts save lives, right? They secure people to the vehicle so that if an accident occurs, passengers are prevented from being thrown around and hitting interiors of the car and breaking their necks. They preve... Andy Kaiser clean 9:21 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/02/22/anti-republican-sentiment-and-not-barack-obama-gave-the-democrats-the-presidency/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/02/22/anti-republican-sentiment-and-not-barack-obama-gave-the-democrats-the-presidency/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:43:27 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=741 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/02/22/anti-republican-sentiment-and-not-barack-obama-gave-the-democrats-the-presidency/feed/ 7 Navin Kumar By Navin Kumar Article ID: 139 - Barack Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. He won by an impressive margin. But a question is worth asking: why did he win? - Finding the cause is an unusually difficult task: people ar... By Navin Kumar Article ID: 139 Barack Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. He won by an impressive margin. But a question is worth asking: why did he win? Finding the cause is an unusually difficult task: people are emotionally invested in Obama and really, really want to believe that he won because of his message of hope and change. But as economists and social scientists, it's our job to separate the wheat from the chaff.  But how? Surveys are useless: if you simply ask someone why they voted for Obama, they may choose the most comforting answer (like "I want to heal America's racial divide") instead of the most honest one (like "I think Sarah Palin's a bimbo"). So you need a source that's objective and non-partisan. Fortunately there is one: money. Even if you want Obama to win, if you were asked to put your money on him in a bet, you'd start asking yourself: do I think he's actually going to win? That's where intrade.com comes in. Intrade is an online "futures market" which is a rather fancy name for what is essentially a gambling parlor. How it works is this: an event (like "Obama.President.2008") is selling for - say - 48. This means the market believes that there is a 48% chance of the event happening. If you think the likelihood is higher: buy the contract. If you think the likelihood is lower: sell the contract. Thus the prices move up and down - just like a stock exchange. Since these are serious people playing with real money, they don't care whether of not Obama is better than McCain: they only care which one going to win. So looking at these numbers - and seeing what happens to them when certain events take place - tells us a lot about why the public went for Obama. He won with 52.9% of the popular vote and 349 electoral votes. In the United States, that's arguably a landslide victory. Obama wasn't always poised to win: at the beginning of 2008, his Intrade price was running under 15%, one third of Hillary Clinton's 45%. The total odds for the Democratic Party were over 60%. This basically means that it was far more likely that a democrat - but not necessarily Obama - was likely to be the next President of the United States. This might be an emotional damper for those who believe that Obama was essential to the Democratic Party's revival: without him, the Democrats were actually doing quite well. In fact, since 2004, the odds of the Republicans winning in 2008 never crossed 50%. By the time Obama won the Democratic nomination, his Intrade price was 60% - exactly the same as the Democratic Party was at the beginning of the year. So what happened after that? There was a very brief period where his Intrade price fell below 50%: that was just after John McCain selected Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Called the "Palin Bounce", the choice briefly pulled Obama below 50%. But by the time the elections came around, his price was at 85. What caused that? In three words: the financial crisis. People quickly blamed - and voted against - Bush and the Republicans. Voters were primarily anti-Republican and pro-Democrat. They were not specifically for Obama. Other suitable Democrats would have won the election. Obama might be a great guy, he may bring about the change he's promised, but he didn't win because of his "fresh" treatment of Washington politics. Hillary Clinton's ratings were soaring before Obama took center stage. Obama won because a majority of Americans voted against Bush and the Republicans. Obama's unique message is just icing on the political cake. Andy Kaiser clean 6:21 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/01/18/drm-is-failure-in-action/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/01/18/drm-is-failure-in-action/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:57:54 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=615 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/01/18/drm-is-failure-in-action/feed/ 6 Andy Kaiser By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 133 - I was born in 1975. The media of my childhood consisted of cassette tapes and VHS tapes. Only years later did I get to play with CDs and DVDs. I was also born during that magical time when one could still find a funct... By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 133 I was born in 1975. The media of my childhood consisted of cassette tapes and VHS tapes. Only years later did I get to play with CDs and DVDs. I was also born during that magical time when one could still find a functioning 8-track cassette player, or cumbersome 8-inch reel-to-reel tape players. Convenient they were not. But with any of them you could still easily break copyright law. This certainly isn't just within my generation. My dad has told me stories from his college days, when he would illegally record someone's music on to his analog reel-to-reel tape recorder. Copyright violations have always been possible, even easy, but not until CDs brought us digital audio was copyright theft so fast. A copy and paste technique is all that's needed to give my music to you. Today, we can email music, download bittorrent collections, acquire illegal movies and software in minutes or even seconds. This speed advantage is a major reason why certain agencies are so upset. In particular are their legal representatives, the MPAA and the RIAA (these are the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America). DRM stands for "digital rights management". In the old days, this was called "copy protection". DRM is copy protection for digital products. It's often a software restriction or a type of encryption. It's intended to prevent the unauthorized copying of the music on your iPod, the movies in your DVD collection, the ebooks in your ebook reader, the programs on your computer, and any other digital media you've purchased. The big problem is that DRM doesn't work. Every mass-distributed DRM scheme has been compromised - every single one. If you want to copy one of your "uncopyable" DVDs or other media, yes, there are plenty of tools to do so. DRM hurts the consumer: it penalizes people who have legitimately purchased their media. And since DRM is compromised so easily and quickly, those who want to break the law can still easily do so. If this is a deterrent, it's a remarkably ineffectual one. You may accuse me of taking the side of the consumer because I don't stand to lose anything from having people steal copywritten material. Actually, I do stand to lose. I have multiple websites that make money from the content they provide. I've written some fiction ebooks and sell those online. And I have no DRM or limited-use mechanism in place. I made this decision intentionally, for three reasons: 1) Today's technology is beyond the point where DRM is practical. Content protection schemes inconvenience those who legitimately have a product, and are just a tiny speed bump to those who want an illegal copy. 2) The Internet has changed the availability and presentation of media, and copying (legally or illegally) is commonplace. The days of visiting a library to access a rare book are fading into the past. The previously rare books are now online for everyone to see. Everything is coming online. Everything is getting easier and easier to access. 3) The cost of digital media should be very low, and is therefore less likely to be pirated. Take ebooks as an example: when you purchase a traditional book, a part of that cost is for the creation of the book itself. The book has to be physically printed, bound, warehoused and distributed. This is a majority percentage of a book's price tag. Ebooks have a very low (or zero) cost for physical media. Yes, the artist and their representatives should get paid for their efforts. One reason piracy happens is because the cost of an object is perceived as unfair, and not worth the price. The actual production cost of digital media is very, very low. The final prices should reflect that. The intent of DRM - protecting the interests of copyright holders - is a noble idea. But it's also archaic and easily circumvented. Unfortunately, it will take time for those in power to recognize this. Andy Kaiser clean 8:35 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/11/30/party-politics-and-the-false-dilemma-logical-fallacy/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/11/30/party-politics-and-the-false-dilemma-logical-fallacy/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:40:39 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=499 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/11/30/party-politics-and-the-false-dilemma-logical-fallacy/feed/ 10 Joshua Walker By Joshua Walker Article ID: 1262 - I'm an American. Just a few weeks ago, the United States elected a new President for 2009. This is the first election that I decided to forgo party politics - I voted for the person I think was best for the job. By Joshua Walker Article ID: 1262 I'm an American. Just a few weeks ago, the United States elected a new President for 2009. This is the first election that I decided to forgo party politics - I voted for the person I think was best for the job. I voted based upon my political principles, instead of just voting "against" the "other guy". During this process, I've grown angrier and more frustrated at the "false dilemma" logical fallacy that is so prevalent in American politics. What is a false dilemma? A false dilemma is a logical fallacy where someone states that "either X is true or Y is true". The problem is that X and Y might both be false or both true.  In fact, there might be claims A, B, L, and Z that are also true and related to the topic.  Now, it is possible that X and Y might be the only options and that if one is true the other is false; we should, however, be very careful with such claims and determine if X and Y are really the only options. Republican or Democrat: You decide I am constantly astounded by those who claim a differing political ideology, such as Libertarianism or Constitutionalism, yet always vote for the two major parties.  The Republicans are usually considered conservatives and the Democrats are usually considered liberals, but even those ideologies have splintered into sub-ideologies, such as the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals.  Sometimes these new ideologies are directly contrary to their parent.  Yet even with these ever-evolving political philosophies, the individual is expected to sacrifice their ideals to the current party puppet- ...I mean party "candidate". Americans are constantly flooded with propaganda telling them that there are only two choices and that the third parties have no chance at winning an election.  This becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy.  If a man thinks he's going to die tomorrow, he'll find a way to make it happen, or die trying.  If a majority believes that voting for a third party candidate is useless, then the prophecy will fulfill itself.  If we all want change, but choose to vote for party sycophants simply because we are told to do so, then we are merely puppets and not free people. The example of false dilemma propaganda that inspired me to write this article came from this news article at Yahoo.com.  It begins by quoting a person saying that voting third party would be throwing their vote away.  Since this person is - of course - just like us, then we also should not throw our vote away on a third party.  Or is that more than a quote, and a recommendation from the article's author?  Later in the article, an "expert" is brought in to tell us that none of the third party candidates "resonate" with the American people, even though people constantly complain about the poor choice of candidates and the "vote for the lesser evil" strategy.  There are figures and statistics dissuading us from opposing the political power structure because no third party candidate has ever won high political office. Unfortunately, repeating this fact helps to ensure continued failure of the third party candidates. The major parties place themselves on opposite sides of every issue, even though many political positions have more than two sides.  Take, for example, the abortion debate.  You are either pro-life or pro-abortion.  Taking a position that the federal government has no authority in this issue and that it should be left to the states is never considered.  Consider the ANWR drilling controversy.  You're either for or against it.  You can't say that it's irrelevant because the government has banned alternative fuel options for years and more drilling is only a band-aid on an amputation.  The issues are always turned into yes or no options. This lets the parties take opposite sides and argue pointlessly, while ignoring any inconvenient facts. Take responsibility and free your mind Logical fallacies are dangerous. Andy Kaiser clean 7:42