No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

did-you-kno

In Finland, speeding tickets are calculated based on your income - causing some Finnish millionaires to pay fines of over $100,000. Source

redbloodedamerica

This is what “equality” looks like in that liberal fairy tale land of Finland. They punish you proportionately to how successful you are. Sounds really “fair.”

alternian-neverland

Except… it is fair? Because it’s proportionate. I don’t get what’s difficult about that. An impoverished person paying $400 dollar fine isn’t the same as a millionaire paying the same amount. For the poor person, $400 dollars could mean starving. Would you really claim it would have the same consequence for a rich man? Would it even be noticeable to him, while the absence of food in their stomach would be glaring to a poorer man? Would it be fair for a man to starve for the same crime as a man that would be having a three course meal?

By taking income into account, it allows the impoverished able to still survive while paying any fines they may incur. And, ultimately, while $100,000 dollars would be noticeable to a millionaire, they would still get by. And, assuming the law is properly implemented, they would be paying the same equivalent of their yearly income that a poorer person would. That’s what makes it fair. They would be impacted the same way - but you are looking at the amount rather than the equation.

Also, it’s important to make sure that even the rich would pause at the cost of a fine. They need to fear the law just as a poor man does.

prochoice-or-gtfo

Oh no… rich people facing fines that might actually make them consider not doing illegal things because the punishments might actually hurt them… how unfair…
-V

lewmzi

Finnish person here. Our speeding ticket system owns and only people who bitch about them are people who wanna break the laws - the loudest whiners are the rich people who think they can just pay their way out of trouble and that’s why we have laws like that.

thespectacularspider-girl

400 dollar ticket.

Person making 10 dollars an hour: “Fuck, I better slow down”

Millionaire driving a Jaguar: “LOL 400 DOLLARS, FUCK THAT, NYOOM”

Compared to a proportional ticket.

Person making 10 dollars an hour and must pay 400 dollar ticket: “Fuck, I better slow down.”

Millionaire who must pay 100,000 dollar ticket: “Fuck, I better slow down.”

futureevilscientist

Like wtf. Some people have been so brainwashed by capitalism and worship of the rich that they literally can’t tell the difference between fairness and unfairness anymore.

It IS fair. The fact that it flies in the status quo so much should make you think about that status quo.

neurosciencestuff

(Image caption: The ganglion cell layer of the retina is labelled with red to show the presence of a cell sensitive to motion in the upward direction. In low light, these cells pick up the faintest signals of any kind of motion. Credit: Duke, Univ. of Victoria)

Eyes Have a Natural Version of Night Vision

To see under starlight and moonlight, the retina of the eye changes both the software and hardware of its light-sensing cells to create a kind of night vision. Retinal circuits that were thought to be unchanging and programmed for specific tasks are adaptable to different light conditions, say the Duke scientists who identified how the retina reprograms itself for low light.

“To see under starlight, biology has had to reach the limit of seeing an elementary particle from the universe, a single photon,” said Greg Field, an assistant professor of neurobiology and biomedical engineering at Duke University. “It’s remarkable at night how few photons there are.”

The findings, which appear in Neuron, show that the reprogramming happens in retinal cells that are sensitive to motion.

Even in the best lighting, identifying the presence and direction of a moving object is key to survival for most animals. But detecting motion with a single point of reference doesn’t work very well. So, the retinas of vertebrates have four kinds of motion-sensitive cells, each specifically responsive to a motion that is up, down, right or left.

When an object is moving in precisely one of those directions, that population of neurons will fire strongly, Field said. However, if the motion is halfway between up and left, both populations of cells will fire, but not quite as strongly. The brain interprets that kind of signal as motion going both up and left.

“For complex tasks, the brain uses large populations of neurons, because there’s only so much a single neuron can accomplish,” Field said.

In humans, these directional neurons account for about 4 percent of the cells that send signals from the retina to the brain. In rodents, it’s more like 20 to 30 percent, Field said, because motion detection is vitally important for an animal that other animals really like to eat.

In a study with mouse retinas conducted under a microscope equipped with night vision eye pieces in a very dark room, graduate student Xiaoyang Yao in Field’s lab found that the retinal cells sensitive to upward movement change their behavior in low light. The “up” neurons will fire upon detecting any kind of movement, not just upward.

A small sample of mouse retina was placed on an electrode array that can measure the individual firing of hundreds of neurons at once “and then we show it movies,” Field said. “Xiaoyang’s insight was to go and look at what these cells do in day and night,” Field said. “She noticed a difference and wondered why.”

When there is much less light available, a weak signal of motion from the ‘up’ neurons, coupled with a weak signal from any of the other directional cells can help the brain sense movement, similar to the way it interprets two directional signals as being a motion that is something in between.

The loss of motion perception is a common complaint in human patients with severe vision loss. Field said this finding about the adaptability of retinal neurons may help the design of implantable retinal prosthetics in the future.

“A lot of animals choose to forage at night, presumably because it’s harder for predators to see,” Field said. “But of course, nature is an arms race. Owls and cats have developed highly specialized eyes to see at night. The prey have altered what they have to survive.”

For reasons that aren’t yet clear, it’s only the “up” cells that become motion generalists in low light. Field suspects that up is the most important direction for a prey animal to spot a predator that looms upward as it approaches its prey, but he doesn’t have that data yet.

What’s important for now is that the eye and brain alter their computation of motion in low-light. “We’ve learned that large populations of retinal neurons can adapt their function to compensate for different conditions,” Field said.

The retina consists of many circuits working in parallel, said Jeffrey Diamond, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke who also studies visual processing in the retina. “We’re learning that these circuits are doing different things at different times of day,” said Diamond, who was not involved with Field’s paper.

Now that Field has found this one adaptation to low light that is driven by changes in both the circuitry and the chemical signals between cells, it begs the question of how many other adaptations are going to be found, Diamond said.

“There are 50 kinds of amacrine cells, the drug cabinets of the retina, and most of them likely release multiple neurotransmitters that can influence the retinal circuit,” Diamond said. “We only know something about only 20 percent of those cells.”

Mind games

There are two circles, one of them is blue one is red. What if I told you one of them was bigger? Which one would you think is bigger? The blue one? No, you are wrong. The red one? No again. Actually none of them are bigger. They are the same size. You just thought that because I told you so. This proves that humans are easily manipulated.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Good Omens on Twitter

Mind games