Aug. 12th, 2009

acroyear: (car1)
The Chevy Volt Gets 230 mpg? Only if you use bad math. : Good Math, Bad Math:
Here's a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link to the same story via CNN. It's yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.

Here's the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It's a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you're home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get low, and then it starts running a small gas motor to power a generator. It's a very cool idea. I'm honestly excited about cars like the volt - and Google helped develop the technology behind it, which biases me even more in its favor. So you'd expect me to be very supportive of the hype around it, right? I wish I could. But GM has decided that the best way to promote it is to use bad math to tell lies to make it look even better than it really is.
acroyear: (coyote1)
Do I Understand Correctly? : Dispatches from the Culture Wars:
When the president unilaterally suspends habeas corpus and imprisons American citizens indefinitely without charging them with any crimes, undermines the rule of law and ignores treaty obligations in order to justify torturing people, engages in wholesale data mining and records virtually every phone call, email and text message sent or received anywhere in the country without getting a warrant, thus negating the 4th amendment completely, and then argues that no court has the authority to even consider a challenge to that totally unbridled authority, and hires thousands of armed mercenary thugs to go kill Iraqi people in the name of God, that's protecting the country against terrorism.

But providing healthcare to the people who don't have it so they won't die or go bankrupt trying to stay alive in the event of serious illness? That reminds them of the Nazis!
BTW: on that first paragraph, while I'm not pissed at Obama for unconstitutionally suspending Habeas Corpus, I'm rather pissed off that he's kept it unconstitutionally suspended

Last I checked, Congress is the only branch with the power to suspend it.  PATRIOT and its relatives did many things, but suspend habeas is NOT one of them.  Our first amendment rights may be in (MUCH) better shape than they were before, but 4th, 5th, 6th, and the prosecution of those who violated 8th are all still in bad shape in spite of "Change".

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