General CE Chat

There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading papers from Sci-Hub.) But just how enormous is its repository? That is the question biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues recently set out to answer, after an assist from Sci-Hub.

Their findings, published in a preprint on the PeerJ journal site on 20 July, indicate that Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is “even higher” than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub’s reach is greater still, with instant access to 85% of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97% of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub’s servers—meaning they can be accessed there for free.

Given that Sci-Hub has access to almost every paper a scientist would ever want to read, and can quickly obtain requested papers it doesn’t have, could the website truly topple traditional publishing? In a chat with ScienceInsider, Himmelstein concludes that the results of his study could mark “the beginning of the end” for paywalled research. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...subscription-journals-are-doomed-data-analyst
 
rcoobc said:
Interesting.

What about riots?
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You'd need to define riot a bit more closely. I doubt that there is any good data to really answer that question. So it comes to anecdotes, circumstantial evidence and motivated reasoning.
Personally I don't see any reason to believe that there is a substantial connection between riots and inequality.
 
PedroMendez said:
I suspected this. That's your right, but can you provide any data at all to support this theory? Even if you find now flimsy evidence to support this idea, wouldn't that be the definition of motivated reasoning?
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Data like this is had to quantify and easy to dismiss. Besides which, you can prove anything with statistics, 60% of people know that.

But first I'd like to say the most famous riots have happened in impoverished areas. LA 1992. 2011 London riots. Detroit 1967. Brixton 1981. These are areas with social-economic problems.

Secondly, I'd say that rich people rioting doesn't make much sense. The poorest have literally nothing to lose. If you are in and out of prison anyway, or seen much of your family go to prison, or have no job, or have a crap job that badly pays and have friends and family who are out of work... I can kinda see why you are perhaps a little more likely to riot. To be in the top economic bracket and riot... that seems very strange.

That being said, riots happen for many reasons. Usually there is a spark, such an instance of perceived police brutality giving an apparent salient example of the wider injustice.

Rich people rioting makes no sense. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but inequality surely is normally a factor.
 
Did you actually read the initial link? It is well established that poverty (and stagnating economic growth) are root-causes for many conflict. I don't know a single person who'd doubt that. Quantitive and qualities research support this view. That's why everyone agrees that economic prosperity matters (a lot).
Inequality is something different. Most people would nowadays claim that inequality itself is also a driver for (intrastate) conflict. Even very accomplished and smart people make this a-priori assumption without rigorously assessing it. There is very little evidence to support this view. I am not saying the there is never any causal connection between those two things (inequality-conflict), but it shouldn't be a general unchallenged assumptions.
It's on those who claim that inequality creates intrastate conflict to provide solid evidence before anyone should accept it.
 
PedroMendez said:
Did you actually read the initial link? It is well established that poverty (and stagnating economic growth) are root-causes for many conflict. I don't know a single person who'd doubt that. Quantitive and qualities research support this view. That's why everyone agrees that economic prosperity matters (a lot).
Inequality is something different. Most people would nowadays claim that inequality itself is also a driver for (intrastate) conflict. Even very accomplished and smart people make this a-priori assumption without rigorously assessing it. There is very little evidence to support this view. I am not saying the there is never any causal connection between those two things (inequality-conflict), but it shouldn't be a general unchallenged assumptions.
It's on those who claim that inequality creates intrastate conflict to provide solid evidence before anyone should accept it.
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I did read it. I'm a bit suspicious of anything written on TUMBLR

But that isnt relevent to the question anyway
 
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/bjprcpsych/205/4/286.full.pdf


I haven't fully understood what this study is exactly about and how it works. So I need to have another look at some point. As far as I can tell it says that childhood family income is a predictor of increased crime rate but not a cause for it. That would discredit a very common narrative and question some assumptions that are usually made between poverty and crime.
 
berbatrick said:
'Inconvenient' Fact: Morgan Stanley Says Electric Cars Create More CO2 Than They Save


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-...-says-electric-cars-create-more-co2-they-save
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That's been known for a long time. It requires a massive amount of energy to extract the lithium for the batteries and to recharge the cars over their lifetimes. It really depends on where you are asking the question. In some countries, the Norway for example, energy generation is clean enough that electric cars are on the right side of CO2 emissions. The car saves more CO2 than it costs to build/run. In places like China where they rely heavily on old coal fired power plants electric cars are huge polluters.
 
Brazil abolishes huge Amazon reserve in 'biggest attack' in 50 years
Brazilian president has dissolved Renca to attract investment in region thought to contain gold, with critics warning of irreversible damage

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-amazon-reserve-in-biggest-attack-in-50-years

Completely unelected government, deciding the fate of the world.

The Brazilian president Michel Temer has abolished an Amazonian reserve the size of Denmark, prompting concerns of an influx of mineral companies, road-builders and workers into the species-rich forest.

The dissolution of the Renca reserve – which spans 46,000 sq km on the border of the Amapa and Para states – was described by one opposition senator Randolfe Rodrigues of the Sustainability Network party, as the “biggest attack on the Amazon of the last 50 years”.

Conservationists said it will open the door for mining companies to enter Renca – the Portuguese acronym for the National Reserve of Copper and Associates – which was set up in 1984 and encompasses nine protected areas.

More than 20 domestic and multinational firms have expressed an interest in the region which is thought to contain deposits of gold, copper, tantalum, iron ore, nickel and manganese.

The government said the reserve is being abolished to attract foreign investment, improve exports and boost an economy that has been struggling to emerge from its deepest recession in decades.

It claimed the change of status would not affect conservation areas and indigenous territories in the region, but Amazon activists warned commercial exploitation by big companies in the past has been followed by illegal land grabbers, artisanal miners and road builders.
...
Since plotting the impeachment of his running mate Dilma Rousseff last year, Temer has moved rapidly to unravel environmental protections to please the powerful agricultural and mining lobbies. The only pause in this policy came earlier this year when Temer vetoed a bill that would have opened up swathes of forest to development. At the time, the president said he was responding to an appeal on Twitter by the supermodel, Gisele Bündchen.

But Temer has since approved several similar measures, including the latest one this week, which prompted an angry response from Bündchen. “SHAME! We are auctioning off our Amazon! We can’t destroy our protected areas for private interests,” she tweeted.
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berbatrick said:
Completely unelected government, deciding the fate of the world.
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:nono: Go ask Worker's Party why they had someone from another party on the ticket as VP... then go ask the millions of voters why they didn't vote for another ticket due to that, or why they didn't vote for more Worker's Party congressmen, which would have avoided impeachment.

But yeah, they're c*nts.
 
Lula always picked the mining+agribusiness over the environment. The Brazilian environmental movement thought they found an ally in the pt during the 90s and aligned themselves with the party. Yet the pt leadership played them like a fiddle. Their policies of government managed growth relied on the commodity sector and "forced" them to pick economic growth in this sectors over any other concerns. They always accommodated the expansionary land demand. The environment agenda turned into a pr exercise and the environmental movement acted as useful idiots.
 
PedroMendez said:
Lula always picked the mining+agribusiness over the environment. The Brazilian environmental movement thought they found an ally in the pt during the 90s and aligned themselves with the party. Yet the pt leadership played them like a fiddle. Their policies of government managed growth relied on the commodity sector and "forced" them to pick economic growth in this sectors over any other concerns. They always accommodated the expansionary land demand. The environment agenda turned into a pr exercise and the environmental movement acted as useful idiots.
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IIRC the 3rd opposition leader (Marina Silva?) portrayed herself as the environmental candidate against Dilma, but I read that she was as much in league with agro companies as Dilma herself...
 
berbatrick said:
IIRC the 3rd opposition leader (Marina Silva?) portrayed herself as the environmental candidate against Dilma, but I read that she was as much in league with agro companies as Dilma herself...
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Marina Silva was member of the pt and minister for the environment under Lula from 2003 to 2009. I am not en detail familiar with her. I think she is quite honest about her goals, but had very little power under Lula. My personal reading of the situation is that Lula used her as glorified figurehead to win the support of a certain section, but didn't give her any meaningful power to backup the rhetoric. One might argue that she played along for too long, but I don't find that convincing. She would have given up the little power she had to "stay pure". That wouldn't have helped either. Sometimes being pragmatic is the best one can do. When the choice is between economic growth and environmental protection, few countries chose the later. That's why nowadays every environmental initiative is sold as economic stimulus (regardless whether that's true or not. Usually it's not.).
 
Gold mining in the Amazon is such a huge problem. And it's inherently almost impossible to stop, especially now that the drug cartels are in on it.
 
@berbatrick
https://c4ss.org/content/49939
A long and information article about liberalism vs. illiberalism. A bit of a rant of a radical, nonetheless very well written and to the point.

Liberalism is the fearless embrace of the positive-sum, and the terrified rejection of the zero-sum. It is the view of life where both predatory forms of egoism and a cooperation requiring systemic self-sacrifice are incoherent.

At its most radical, liberalism insists that an injury to one is an injury to all, and proposes an oath of “I swear to never live for the sake of another, nor to ask another to live for mine.” It holds that those two principles are not only compatible, but complementary.

The Illiberal Vision: Antisocial Collectivism

Liberalism is made clearer by exposing its opposite.

For the most comprehensively illiberal political figure in recent American history, we need look no further than President Trump. If we peer through his eyes, both predatory forms of egoism and a cooperation built on sacrifice look all too coherent.
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Where are the Cafe's Cambodia experts?

DI0RwsZVAAAI-0R
 
:lol: that's brilliant. I like that she consulted him before climbing after her shit and apparently he thought that it's a good idea. Imo a match made in heaven. They are destined for marriage.
 
PedroMendez said:
Radical but nonetheless interesting explanation of the cost disease. I agree with some of the arguments while not with others. You might actually like it. :)

https://c4ss.org/content/48039
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To further follow up on this: a big study found that profitability and markups increased a lot during the last 30years. That's consistent with the previous explanation. I haven't read the study itself yet. In general Promarket is a very good blog.

https://promarket.org/rise-market-power-decline-labors-share/

The Rise of Market Power and the Decline of Labor’s Share
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http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.de/2017/08/the-market-power-story.html?m=1
Here is another link that looks at the issue and links to many interesting comments
 
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Know your place, smelly peasant people!:

Duchy of Cornwall residents fight 'unfair' freehold ban
Villagers on Prince Charles’s estate submit response to government consultation on leasehold abuses in effort to overturn ban

'Prince Charles is the sole beneficiary of the duchy’s property and investment portfolio, which among other things funds the upkeep of his Gloucestershire mansion, Highgrove, the lifestyles of Princes William and Harry and even Prince George’s £18,000 school fees.'

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...l-residents-fight-freehold-ban-prince-charles
 
DEFINING VIOLENCE
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/defining-violence

Speech might cause an effect that violence causes, but that means that speech shares a quality with violence, not that it thereby becomes violence. Things can share qualities while being incredibly qualitatively different. (As a lawyer, I share a quality with Alan Dershowitz, but I am not—thank God—Alan Dershowitz.) And if we accept this pattern of inference as legitimate, anything can become anything. Exams cause stress, bullying causes stress, therefore exams are form of bullying. (Though in honesty they kind of are.) On the left, there is a tendency to let concepts bleed into each other, especially when concepts are given abstract and imprecise definitions (such as the Gender Equality Institute’s incomprehensible definition of “structural violence” above). Eventually, every bad thing is every other bad thing. Neoliberalism is white supremacism is erasure is gentrification.
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The whole thing is worth it, these are the highlights:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n01/eliot-weinberger/what-i-heard-about-iraq-in-2005

In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs. I heard that the ruins of the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were completely destroyed and were now landscapes of craters.

I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’

I heard that Iraq was now ranked with Haiti and Senegal as one of the poorest nations on earth. I heard the United Nations Human Rights Commission report that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled since the war began. I heard that only 5 per cent of the money Congress had allocated for reconstruction had actually been spent. I heard that in Fallujah people were living in tents pitched on the ruins of their houses.

I heard that the private security firm Custer Battles had been paid $15 million to provide security for civilian flights at Baghdad airport at a time when no planes were flying. I heard that US forces were still unable to secure the two-mile highway from the airport to the Green Zone.

I heard a US soldier talk about his photographs of the 12 prisoners he had shot with a machine-gun: ‘I shot this guy in the face. See, his head is split open. I shot this guy in the groin. He took three days to bleed to death.’ I heard him say he was a devout Christian: ‘Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up, and gunned them all down.’

I heard a man who had been in Abu Ghraib prison say: ‘The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.’

I heard that the State Department refused to release its annual report on terrorism, which would have shown that the number of ‘significant’ attacks outside Iraq had grown from 175 in 2003 to 655 in 2004. I heard Karen Aguilar, acting co-ordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, explain that ‘statistics are not relevant’ to ‘trends in global terrorism’.

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Last throes could be a violent last throe, or a placid and calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary.’

I heard that in Baghdad 92 per cent of the people did not have stable electricity, 33 per cent did not have safe drinking water, and 25 per cent of children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. I heard that there were two or three car bombings a day, on some days killing a hundred people and wounding many hundreds more.

In 2005 I heard about 2001. I heard that on 21 September 2001, the PDB (President’s Daily Brief), prepared by the CIA, reported that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the September 11 attacks.

I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaida and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaida. Or we could take a bolder approach.’

In 2005 I heard about 2002. I heard that on 23 July 2002, eight months before the invasion, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, reported in a secret memo to Tony Blair that he was told in Washington that the US was going to ‘remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’. However, because ‘the case was thin, Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran … the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

I heard that unemployment for young men in Sunni areas was now 40 per cent. I heard that the annual per capita income was $77, half of what it was the year before; and that only 37 per cent of families had homes connected to a sewage system, half of what it was before the war.

I heard that John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, had said: ‘There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power in the world – and that is the United States – when it suits our interest and when we can get others to go along.’ I heard that he keeps a bronze hand grenade on his desk.

As riots broke out in Baghdad over the lack of electricity, I heard Nadeem Haki, a shop-owner in Baghdad, say: ‘We thank God that the air we breathe is not in the hands of the government. Otherwise they would have cut it off for a few hours each day.’

As the administration celebrated the approval of the long-delayed constitution, I heard Safia Taleb al-Suhail – the daughter of a man who was executed by Saddam Hussein and who, in a staged moment during the State of the Union address, embraced the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq – say: ‘When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened – we have lost all the gains we made over the last 30 years. It’s a big disappointment.’

I heard Congresswoman Jean Schmidt say: ‘The big picture is that these Islamic insurgents want to destroy us. They don’t like us. They don’t like us because we’re black, we’re white, we’re Christian, we’re Jew, we’re educated, we’re free, we’re not Islamic. We can never be Islamic because we were not born Islamic. Now, this isn’t the Islamic citizens. These are the insurgents. And it is their desire for us to leave so they can take over the whole Middle East and then take over the world. And I didn’t learn this just in the last few weeks or the last few months. I learned this when I was at the University of Cincinnati in 1970, studying Middle Eastern history.’
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