A plumber working on my pipes is upset, his wages are suppressed by competition from illegals getting paid under the table, while his rent has skyrocketed, and his taxes are paying for his illegal competitors food and rent and healthcare.
I'm not from the US, so forgive me for what is probably a dumb question, but how is an illegal receiving money for food, rent, and healthcare? Don't you need documents (aka be legal in the country) for that?
It would be interesting to see how that works. Even here in Europe where we usually have a strong(er) social net, the state wouldn't give me a benefit without going through a process requiring documents to prove who I am, my nationality, etc.
There are food banks and stuff like that, but that's usually from charities.
They are not receiving any benefits. They are not legal literally. Work for cash. No safety net except peers who are often abusive. There are lot of this in EU, just not this visible.
I don't think "illegals" means "people receiving money under the table", especially in the context of this thread. It sounds like they're referring to people living illegally in the country. Hence my question about "illegals" receiving benefits when usually we need to have documents to receive any state/government benefit.
I was referring to the same people. The reason I said that is that employing someone who’s undocumented exposes the employer to enforcement risk, so many choose to keep the relationship hidden.
That’s how most undocumented people in the country survive: by working for employers who are breaking the law.
In terms of undocumented individuals benefits, that’s a common and almost entirely false claim.
While it is a complicated space (because of State vs Federal), the vast majority of “Illegals” are not eligible for the vast majority of benefits in the United States, with the exception of some emergency services.
There are some exceptions for victims of human trafficking and there like.
tell your plumber he's an idiot because his taxes are not paying for that, and his rent is not skyrocketing because of "illegals" (other than the illegal collusion of rental prices via price algorithm fixing).
I wouldn't be surprised if there is something to it, but I suspected they didn't use legitimate coin flips (because it seems like a large amount of people can't really flip a coin), and looking at the videos confirms it, at least for the flips done by Bartos:
That's not tossing a coin, that's barely throwing it in the air.
To me this kills the credibility of the entire study and of the authors.
Sure, there may be something to it, but people will have a very different thing on their mind unless they check the video, which I wouldn't have done without your prompting.
It's unlikely they don't understand how misleading it is.
And somehow I have the intuition a proper coin toss will not exhibit the same properties.
Is it unlikely? If I didn't read your comment I wouldn't see any problem there. I never saw anyone flipping a coin in a different way. It's just not done much around me.
I think it's still noteworthy that what many people consider a "fair toss" is not in fact a fair toss. In other words it's interesting from an applied psychology perspective even if the physics of the phenomenon isn't particularly interesting.
This was my first objection as well. However, if most people flip coins like that, then the measurements are valid -- the conclusions are about what average people will do, not a perfect mechanical coin flip. Otherwise you're falling in the no true coin flip fallacy.
Yeah, if I'm actually forced to use a coin instead of a computer system, I try to ping the thing off the ceiling and at least one wall (not in that order). Hitting various other things is a benefit, not a downside.
Your point about the coin hitting other things to be more unpredictable reminded me of an interesting blog post[1] about generating cryptographically secure random numbers. The memorable part for me is the suggestion of using five coins of different shapes and sizes so they get shaken a consistent number of times in a large cup.
The guy in the grandparent YouTube video suggests shaking the coin in a closed hand (or better, a box) to randomize the starting side and then transferring it unseen to someone else to flip it
Craps is also brought to mind where the dice have to bump the back wall
This makes me feel like, similar to everything else, even science is actually a spectrum. Based on how much insanity to put into the testing.
Even if the testing was as many flips as possible over years and years of automated means, with a flipping machine that varies flipping power and angle, and detecting sub-millimeter wearing on the surface of a coin, and every single coin style/size in existence, of every single wear level possible from all positions and angles, through every different combination of typical earth-based air percentages... What does the result really mean? It doesn't actually come up with a "conclusion", its just an accounting of an exact series of events. You will still never use that into the future, you will still describe the act as having a probability of outcome.
```
You will be given a name of an object (such as Car, Chair, Elephant) and a letter in the alphabet. Your
goal is to first produce a 1-line description of how that object can be combined with the letter in an
image (for example, for an elephant and the letter J, the trunk of the elephant can have a J shape, and
for the letter A and a house, the house can have an A shape with the upper triangle of the A being the
roof). Following the short description, please create SVG code to produce this (in the SVG use shapes
like ellipses, triangles etc and polygons but try to defer from using quadratic curves).
```
```
Round 5: A car and the letter E.
Description: The car has an E shape on its front bumper, with the horizontal lines
of the E being lights and the vertical line being the license plate.
```
How does it "just" predict the letter E could be used in such a way to draw a car? How does it just text predict working SVG code that draws the car made out of basic shapes and the letter E?
I don't know how anyone could suggest there are no conceptual models embedded in there.
My friend showed me a cool series of photography books he'd backed on Kickstarter called Vanishing Asia. Only after we'd finished flipping through them did I realize they were by Kevin Kelly. I just looked up the campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kk-org/vanishing-asia): 2,348 backers pledged $603,420 to help bring this project to life.
I agree, and people should probably ignore advice from people who haven't reached it, unless they'd be content with being b2, which is a lower level than I think people realize.
Anyone who learns enough vocabulary to be something resembling fluent (say, can comfortably watch tv shows or read books in that language), will be good at grammar far before they learn the 10k+ words they need to know. You can't consume enough of the language to acquire that kind of vocabulary and not have a decent intuition for the grammar.
I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or filling in blanks.
What really jumped out at me in your comment is that its definition of fluency (watch tv shows, read books) focuses on comprehension and appears to completely ignore being able to produce anything in the target language.
I feel like I once heard of Jay Rubin say something like, if you don't know japanese, you've never read a word of Murakami, you've read Rubin. I suppose it's obvious but it did make me stop and think about how distant japanese actually is from English.
I can't actually find any reference to him saying this though.
