Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 November 22

= November 22 =

Stolen goods in the retail industry
The FBI agent who was Donnie Brasco wrote that his view of the retail industry took a huge knock during his undercover assignment. He saw how stolen goods were desired by even the nicest stores. Is that true? Has it changed? Thanks. 69.22.242.15 (talk) 01:29, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Age of majority vs. voting age
I'm curious about places where the age of majority is higher than the voting age. In Alabama, for instance, the voting age is 18, and the age of majority is 19. Do situations ever pop up where parents try to force their kids to vote a certain way, or punish them because of the candidate they voted for? Do parents even have the authority in these jurisdictions to go so far as to dictate whom their minor kids will vote for? What id your parents tell you you can't vote at all? 2601:644:101:84B2:2CC8:DDB6:6C6B:2AF1 (talk) 07:36, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * There are laws for protecting children from different kinds of adult abuses. My guess is the right to vote is protected as well, otherwise a vote which would depend on parents will, we couldn't call it democratic rights and freedom of vote within a democracy? Akseli9 (talk) 10:14, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The whole reason behind the widespread use of the secret ballot is that, since nobody can tell how someone voted, no one can tell whether they've successfully forced/bribed/persuaded/etc. them to vote in a certain way; and therefore it doesn't make sense for them to try to. (If we didn't have secret ballots, various things would be easier, but this one reason is generally considered more important than those.) --70.49.170.168 (talk) 16:23, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, secret ballot guarantees freedom of vote thus freedom of conscience. This is what Democracy is about. Akseli9 (talk) 17:52, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Still doesn't help if you are grounded by your parents on the election week (maybe because you disagree with the political view of your parents, or another reason). Anyone heard of case that say that grounding is illegal on election day for an 18 yo? --Lgriot (talk) 15:17, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Grounding doesn't have to be illegal, simply stopping the person from voting. I strongly suspect in many places parents can't forbid a child from going to school or some educational institution for curricular activities. They probably can't stop the child seeking medical help or go to work. Whether there are specific laws for these, or it's down to interpretation may vary. They may however be able to ground them and forbid them from going to the cinema or mall or use computers for entertainment. Nil Einne (talk) 16:09, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Getting data on number of U.S. troops stationed at military bases in the Continental U.S.
I am trying to find data on the number of active/reserve troops (and civilian contractors) that are stationed at every military base in the U.S (I'm not interested in overseas installations).

I am trying to import this data into a GIS program, so ideally it would be in a format that can be directly imported into GIS software with minimal editing (spreadsheets, CSV, shape-files, etc). But even if it is not available in one of these formats, I would still be interested in knowing where I could find this kind of information.

The only thing I've been able to find so far is the DOD's annual Base Structure Reports e.g. --> 2015 BSR

This has a lot of the data I'm looking for, but it's not in a format that is going to be helpful for what I'm trying to do. Any ideas where I could just download this data directly, instead of having to try to extract it from a PDF file?

Thanks! Mesoderm (talk) 09:41, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * You can wade through the government bureaucracy, or simply pick up the phone. From p. 18 (DoD-17) of the above-linked report:
 * V. Personnel Assigned by Military Installations
 * This section is the result of our partnership with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense/Personnel and Readiness (OUSD (P&R)) to provide a section in the BSR identifying assigned military and civilian personnel by installation. ...
 * The source of the personnel data is the Defense Management Data Center (DMDC), a field activity of the OUSD (P&R). Questions on this section of the BSR should be addressed directly to the providers of the data at DMDC, Mr. Kit Tong or Mr. Tim Powers, at (831)583-2400.
 * Not readily found in quick glance at DMDC (at least not on page offering spreadsheet downloads of DoD Personnel, Workforce Reports & Publications) - I would simply call and ask for these guys by name. I'm sure they'll ask for yours! -- Paulscrawl (talk) 00:33, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * - 16 pages of PDF Personnel tables in report (PERS-1 - PERS-16; PDF pp. 188-203) converted to Excel easily enough. A very minor bit of cleanup needed to merge 11 worksheets on US deployments (one worksheet per PDF page; remaining 5 worksheets in workbook for foreign deployment kept to double check final row's calculated Grand Totals), but column breaks for all numbers look perfectly accurate. Most columns need width correction for headers and conversion of data from text to number format for alignment and computation, but looks usable within minutes without DHS background check.
 * File waiting for you till ~24 hours from this timestamp at Zamzar for your download. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 03:07, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Ammon
Our article on Ammon (Ammonites of the human variety) says that the word means "people". A variety of Phoenician, so far as I understood, east of Israel they worshipped Moloch, who is identified with Baal Hammon. There is also Amun, said there to be originally a wind deity before being recast as a creator god at Thebes, a.k.a. Amon Ra as an Egyptian, Zeus Ammon as a Greek. There is the Temple of Ammon, a.k.a. Ammonium (one of the 'three great oracles of ancient times', pity we don't have an article; its ruins are at Siwa Oasis).

Can someone verify that all these Ammons are of common origin, and lay out a sort of phylogenetic tree of the uses? Was Ammon originally seen as a god, or as the people? Wnt (talk) 13:07, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * What makes you think that all those names are etymologically related? Ammon and Amun are spelled in Hebrew as and  respectively, suggesting that they are unrelated, and the lexicons I looked at (Koehler-Baumgartner and Brown–Driver–Briggs) do not make any connection. The former states that Ammon (the people) is of Semitic origin and probably meant "little uncle" originally. The article for Amun on the other hand claims that the meaning is "the hidden one" and is Egyptian in origin. - Lindert (talk) 14:43, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * There's some variety in the former at Amman, and the latter in harmoniac, etc... I don't have the linguistic background to know when it matters and when it doesn't. It surprises me that a race of people who in many places called their god Hammon or Amun would, by coincidence, be called "Ammon" as their native word for "people" in one place further east, and call their version of their god as Moloch.  But your sources go some way toward convincing me it's at least not a trivial error in Wikipedia. Wnt (talk) 17:19, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Note that "Molech" is an edition of a word for "king"; other forms of the M-L-K triliteral root include "Milcom" (alternate name for Molech) and the latter half of Ebed-Melech's name. "Baal" is an edition of a word for "lord" and is often applied to other humans; if I remember rightly, it's the term rendered "lord" in some translations of Genesis 18.12.  The Baal Hammon article that you cite says that the latter word's root is H-M-N, not A-M-N or ʿ-M-N, so it's maybe unrelated.  Nyttend (talk) 04:58, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Fwiw, the Bible's own version of the etymology of Ammonite, is explained in Genesis chapter 19. See Lot_(biblical_person). Lot's daughters both had the same idea of flagging up their child's incestuous origins in their names, but younger daughter's choice ("son of my people" ->Ammonite) was rather more subtle version than that of her sister ("from the father" ->Moabite) --Dweller (talk) 13:18, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

How could the price of oil fall more than 50% that fast?
An oil barrel costs around $50 now, although it was prices at more than $100 not long ago.

Even considering that some economies, like the Chinese or Indian, are not growing as much as in the past, they are still growing at a rate of 7% (hence consuming more oil). Europe and the US might only dream about such economic growth, but their economies are not plummeting (hence consuming around the same amount of oil).

I also don't believe that the supply could have doubled in the short amount of time.

Wouldn't a drop this large imply a strong shift in the demand or supply side?--Scicurious (talk) 14:56, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * What we are seeing here is one of the paradoxes of capitalism. It often happens that when demand for a commodity drops, instead of reducing supply in order to maintain prices, producers actually increase production in a (futile) effort to maintain their income.  Everybody understands that production is too high, but everybody wants the burden of reducing production to fall on somebody else.  The result can easily be that prices go into a "death spiral".  This has happened many times.  A notorious case is the collapse in farm commodity prices during the Great Depression. Looie496 (talk) 15:26, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * It's not necessary to double supply to cause the price to drop by half. A fairly small over or under supply will cause a large price swing because demand is actually fairly constant and predictable. Motorists don't suddenly double or half the distance they travel daily just because the fuel price moved. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:14, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * It makes sense that the demand side is more or less stable. So, a swing in the supply must be the problem. Can you provide a source that a small change in supply would produce a large change in price? As far as I imagine it, a x% change would produce a smaller than x% change.--Scicurious (talk) 16:43, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Imagine there is some commodity where everybody needs exactly one, or they will die, but more than one does them no good at all, let's say they expire immediately (maybe an antidote for a fatal disease that quickly spoils). In such a case, if supply falls short of demand, then there will be a bidding war and prices will skyrocket.  If supply outstrips demand, then the reverse will happen and suppliers will keep slashing prices to try to sell off their supply before it spoils, and the price will plummet.  Even very small changes in supply and demand could thus cause massive changes in the price.  Of course, oil can be stored, although it's rather expensive to do so, considering the fire hazard.  And demand for oil products does somewhat rise, when prices fall, but it takes quite a bit of time for people to replace their gas-sipping cars with gas-guzzling SUVs (and the reverse is also true). StuRat (talk) 22:48, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Besides present-day supply and demand, future expectations also play a factor in commodity pricing. The Economist explains:Why the oil price is falling. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 16:37, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * See commodity market and commodity futures. These prices are subject to a huge amount of market speculation and are subject to news-based fluctuations in the way the stock market is.  Oil is not like milk, with a sell-by date, so much of the oil that was valued at $100/b a few years ago may be the same oil which is now valued much lower. μηδείς (talk) 19:00, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Running out of storage space would make the problem worse, as then they would need to immediately sell the oil for whatever price they could get, since they can't store it until prices rise. However, there is a price at which it becomes unprofitable to pump oil, in which case they will cap the wells and store it there until prices rise.  StuRat (talk) 22:42, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I take it you saw . Yet oil would seem to have plenty of storage space ... underground storage provided naturally whence it came.  If people are motivated to pump it up and get it to market, why stop when you have it somewhere that costs money to store it? Wnt (talk) 04:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Oil drilling is a big undertaking. A lot of people incorrectly visualize it as drilling into big underground caverns full of oil just sitting there, but really oil is embedded in the rock matrix underground. Getting it out takes effort. If you dump oil back down a well, it flows back into the rock, and now you've got to extract it all over again. And if it will cost more to extract the oil than you can sell it for, no one is going to bother. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 10:02, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * That's not what I was suggesting -- all I meant is, if all you're going to do is trade commodities, why not trade them in the ground? Similarly, I don't understand why countries keep gold sitting in vaults rather than just trading claims on well-characterized gold reserves.  It is very tragic that such large swaths of wilderness are ravaged just so that some suits can visualize the markers they're trading. Wnt (talk) 14:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Oil in the ground is difficult to measure precisely, or to determine exactly how much it will cost to extract it. Also, there's the risk somebody on a neighboring property could drain the oil field before you do.  All these uncertainties make it difficult to assign a value and thus trade it.  As for gold reserves, that's so, in the case of a total economic collapse, where our current fiat currency would lose all value, the government would hopefully be able to pay critical bills with gold, long enough to start a recovery. StuRat (talk) 21:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * US_Oil_Forecast_1990-2040.png the above answers are good, but I find it odd that there has been no mention yet of the elephant in the room -- fracking. It's odd because Hydraulic_fracturing_in_the_United_States has had a huge influence on oil prices. See also tight oil, and some news articles    . SemanticMantis (talk) 15:44, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * The chief economist at the European Central Bank, a noted dove, says that a quarter of the price decline was due to Saudi war on new supplies (fracking, Russia, etc.) and the rest due to demand. You don't want to see extreme volatility because it does suggest something is wrong. 69.22.242.15 (talk) 16:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

French Resistance, Nobel laureates, and cricket
As ne fule kno, Samuel Beckett is the only first-class cricketer to have been awarded a Nobel Prize. He was also a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. My question is twofold - were any other first-class cricketers members of the Resistance, and have any other Resistance members won a Nobel Prize? DuncanHill (talk) 23:03, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * For the latter: Albert Camus (who was no slouch at football either, by the way), and maybe you can count Sartre too. ---Sluzzelin talk  23:08, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Jacques Monod was also a member of the Resistance. No joy on cricketers as yet - Paddy Mayne played cricket (but not at a first-class level), and "assisted" (rather than being a member of) the Resistance. Tevildo (talk) 23:13, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * We can also add Georges Charpak to the Nobel prize list. Tevildo (talk) 23:18, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
 * And Frédéric Joliot-Curie. ---Sluzzelin talk  23:28, 22 November 2015 (UTC)


 * In what language does "As ne fule kno" have meaning? This happens to be the English language Wikipedia. Edison (talk) 04:02, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * ? --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  04:05, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Even better, we have a redirect WIZZ, as any fule kno. Tevildo (talk) 10:50, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Any fule kno that. Contact Basemetal   here  15:17, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Not sure, but Beckett is certainly the only Nobel Laureate who drove Andre the Giant to school. -- Jayron 32 15:38, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks everyone. DuncanHill (talk) 09:58, 26 November 2015 (UTC)