Slashdot Mirror

"Democrat Party" is generally accepted to be derogatory, by the people who use it and the Democrats themselves. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/07/060807ta_talk_hertzberg I remember that Joe McCarthy used it.

Oh - I suddenly believe the new story.

"The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress,"

What does "proper legal authorization" mean? Weasel words... you're right about propaganda. You're wrong about making it partisan... both parties are complicit in this.

I still believe the NSA is wiretapping at will without warrants specifically identifying individuals and cause. Even seizing just metadata is wrong.

We see the same thing over and over - some whistleblower reveals evidence, the claim is denied. But the evidence is still there. They've already started demonizing Snowden:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-nsa-leaker-is-no-hero.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/dick-cheney-blasts-nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-traitor-chinese-spy-article-1.1374229

They even got to his dad:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/17/exclusive-father-edward-snowden-urges-son-to-stop-leaking-come-home/

the NSA is filled with professionals that fully understand rights and freedoms,

Oh, they understand the rights they're violating on a routine basis? That makes it all better. Sure it does.

Actually, you're both right. The people (Thomas Drake and Bill Binney) who created the algorithm and application that is behind the current NSA trawling program, pre-911, to solve the data overloading problem that the NSA had in the 90's recognised its legal violations when it collected US domestic end point data and added an effective "privacy module" that would encrypt the data and flag a court order need. Post-911 that module was stripped out and data was fed to the beast from everything the NSA/FBI could source - including *all* US domestic phone records. The original authors of that algorithm and program learned of this nightmare outcome in 2006, so they tried to leak the NSA scheme to the Baltimore Sun in 2007, where they were arrested (because the NSA realised that they were collecting information internally, to leak). But you guys know all this, because Slashdot reported that already;

    The Secret Sharer
    Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
    by Jane Mayer May 23, 2011
    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

So if truly you believe that the NSA is filled with professionals that fully understand rights and freedoms then when even the designers and authors of the tools tried to leak its illegality and immorality, its worth paying attention to, no?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2013/04/the-day-coffee-stopped-working.html

The New Yorker

This is a succinct satire in the form of a F.A.Q. that pretty much sums up the attitude our current government has. I wrote up a little better of an article submission but the editors ate it in fury (nah it probably just wasn't good enough or to much of a dupe compared to all these NSA articles).

So I figured I would share it with you guys here. Notice how Obama dresses in a very similar fashion to the Turkish Prime Minister (compare to resent Reuters photo). Tiny flag on the same lapel in a very uniform fashion. I think the New Yoker picked that picture for a reason.

I read to the first answer than hit the floor laughing my ass off. It is good to know that some Journalists still have a head on their shoulders and a good sense of humor about this.

Really? Because of network effects. That's it. Everyone else is communicating on it.

It's purely a predatory play- they capture people who are at a time in their lives when they're well known to be indiscreet. They then record all that indiscretion. Then they monetize it.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is taking the results of that monetization and campaigning -hard - for XL Keystone pipeline.

http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_23151754/keystone-xl-foes-rally-front-facebook-protest-zuckerbergs

a fact he's aggressively trying to lie about:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/04/30/1943091/facebook-rejects-ad-highlighting-zuckerberg-groups-support-for-keystone-xl/

because like all other deniers,. he's first and foremost a narcissist:

http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/narcissistic-personality-disorder/

who relishes the idea that he's smarter and more knowledgeable across a highly technical domain than are the the world's scientists who have spent their lives disciplined in and mastering that domain.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm

But one thing he doesn't have in common with other deniers

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

is he's going to be around long enough to be forced by society to bear, without reserve, the consequences of his actions today, which depending on how bad things get, could range anywhere from total dissolution of his personal wealth to fund emergency, remedial action against global warming - an outcome that is now a virtually certainty- to extended torture at the hands of enraged mobs / quasi-civilization, should we reach five degrees of warming and real civilization just breaks down.:

http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nRf2RTqANg

I beg your fucking pardon? The evidence that hand hygiene is a major transmission route for nosocomial infection is extensively documented and not just a marketing survey. I put that link up so that you could see some of the evidence for yourself. Are you going to bleat on about the survey, or are you going to look at the actual evidence about hand hygiene? You are sounding like a complete prat, arguing that there is no link between hand washing and lowered rates of HCAIs. It's on a par with arguing there's no link between smoking and lung cancer.

On the point about whether the use of video cameras to influence hand hygiene behaviours is the right or wrong approach, you're also being a complete tosser. You have assumed that this is seen as some kind of Orwellian view. But it's the implementation that counts. It turns out that actually, most hospitals using this technology are using it to help staff learn how they actually behave, compared to how they think they behave. Because most staff tend to believe they wash their hands consistently, and most staff don't, due to cognitive overload and other factors. So it is in fact a *learning* tool, not a coercive tool. As well as reading the Checklist Manifesto, you need to read Gawande's article on spreading innovation, which talks about the use of remote coaching in healthcare.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_gawande

This isn't about bad micro management, it's about putting systems in place to help humans achieve 100% reliability, which is innately difficult for us.

I patronised you because you acted as though you had all the answers, when you clearly haven't remotely researched the topic. This isn't about malicious compliance. It's about you having a preset narrative that you wanted to impose on the story, even when the facts do not support your narrative.

> "And now the "Justice" Department is telling us that they consider him an accomplice to espionage."

And...

"The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/how-justice-fought-to-keep-rosens-warrant-secret.html

Yeah, that's the reason Obama fought to keep this hidden. Because Rosen might be some kind of super-spy.

Nigga please.

I think we do go overboard on expensive testing done only as a CYA for malpractice suits, which is certainly inefficient and wasteful,

I used to believe that until a few years ago when a handful of states like Texas did "tort reform" to limit liability to something rather small, like $100K. It had barely any affect on the cost of healthcare in those states.

Since then I've come to believe that the problem is money - all the healthcare companies in the business to make a profit. It is in their interest to go overboard on procedures and diagnostics, especially when they have been able to move a significant part of those diagnostics in house. I've seen it myself when I went to the doctor with a sore throat with symptoms that clearly contra-indicated strep but they wanted to test for strep anyway - I later found out they had recently bought the equipment to do strep testing in house.

Here is a good article that examines massive health care costs in a town adjacent to one with normal health care costs.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

Historically, whatever tech is in the public view, there's usually much more advanced stuff that's classified. Considering the U.S. government has been pounding the anti-terrorism drums for a dozen years now, it's not beyond reason to think they've developed some incredible stuff we have no clue about. Years ago, they already had a lot of this capability. There's also Duqu/Stuxnet, which the public only found out about after it was active for a few years. So I'm sure they've found enough storage space, perhaps even using companies like Facebook & Google to help them keep it. The real question is, what's their reaction time? How quickly is the gov't capable of responding to what's being said digitally. There's a ton of data every day, but it doesn't matter if you can cache it all if it'd still take you a couple days to detect what you need/want to find in it and react to it.

Also, make sure you buy a watch that supports setting alarms a year in advance because that's a mostly useless feature that doesn't actually exist in 99.999% of watches ever made. Maybe you can find one of those old Seiko Memory Bank Calendar watches and show off what a hipster you are.

There's a nice New Yorker podcast from a couple of years ago that discusses what went into picking the name: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/10/03/111003on_audio_colapinto . It was done by Lexicon Branding, who actually write code to break up words into phonems and then remix those sounds into new words. The program spits out lists of candidates that are then vetted by the linguists at Lexicon. I found it a really interesting discussion.

Don't worry, China is on track to outpace the US in military expenditures by 2023. I'm sure that's all for "peaceful regional defense" and will have no impact on the US.

China's military rise
http://www.economist.com/node/21552212

The dragon's new teeth: A rare look inside the world's biggest military expansion
http://www.economist.com/node/21552193

Essential reading on China cyber:

The Online Threat: Should we be worried about a cyber war? (The first page of this is a must read wrt China.)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh

Great snippet: ""The N.S.A. would ask, 'Can the Chinese be that good?' " the former official told me. "My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I'd say, 'Can you read Chinese?' We don't even know the Chinese pictograph for 'Happy hour.'"

To say nothing of the more recent news.

But yes, yes...this is all about "false flag" attacks, because naturally the US is always the evil aggressor, and there has never been any oppression or tyranny in the world, save for what the US has foisted upon it. The principles of freedom for which the US stands are just an illusion force fed to a compliant public by the lapdog mainstream press. In fact, we probably have secret time machines so we could extend this evil beyond our nation's short existence in this world. That explains all the bad things that happened before we were around.

and doctors demanding unnecessary and conservative (because they get paid for doing it).

Fixed That For You. (Seriously, read the article. Malpractice lawsuits basically stopped in Texas, costs keep going up. tl;dr: "You need to get this done, here is a hospital that I just happen to own and profit from which can do it." but don't take my word for it.)

Maybe you guys could start by putting that self-appointed "arson analysis specialist" who is responsible for the death of at least one innocent man behind bars? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

I'm also tempted to suggest this cold case team work on the couple hundred thousand murders allegedly perpetrated by a former TX governor, but that might be flamebait (duh).

The US wants to meddle deeply in the affairs of its neighbors, maybe assassinate those who don't play along, support those who strike at Iran and the like.

If the shoe fits...

I'm not comparing the actions of Sabu with Swartz and I know far less about the details of the Sabu case than I do about Swartz. I was only pointing out that the heavy handed treatment from the prosecution was pretty much the same in both cases.

Who knows, had Sabu and Swartz not been intimidated by the prosecution telling them they were going to throw them away for the rest of their lives they might have chosen different courses of action than becoming a snitch and suicide. The system sucks and until that is fixed it's hard to blame people for their actions when they are being mentally tortured by draconian prosecution tactics without any real recourse to defend themselves. This sort of thing never happens to people who have millions to defend themselves with and that simply is not equal justice under the law.

I agree with you on Swartz because Swartz did the sort of stuff that any of us could have done and been charged with. He wasn't some sort of malicious black hat. Also Swartz ultimately killed himself but you're right they probably were trying to get him to turn into an informant which explains why they charged him with everything they could. So on that token I agree the system is corrupt but it's been corrupt for a long time now so why are we acting surprised it's corrupt? The war on drugs has put hundreds of thousands of people in prison. During the 60s there were informants just like Sabu getting people put in prison sometimes for stuff they didn't even do. This is just how it is and informants are used to destroy the organizations they were part of through use of entrapment.

An informant can legally entrap a person while an undercover police officer or FBI agent might not be able to get away with that. This is why guys like Sabu are useful but they are also considered throwaways. Once they have entrapped as many people as they can, they are thrown away. The FBI does not care about their quality of life or what happens to them and these people lose all their friends, can't trust anyone, and have to worry about retaliation for their entire life. In Sabu's case who could care? But in some instances the people involved who get caught up in this are just innocent kids who didn't know better. Here is an example http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman

Sorry, the assumption that pure democracy (or pure representative democracy) is better than a republic is completely at odds with the facts of modern psychology, brain science and marketing research. In a democracy we let the mass speak with their advertisement-besotted understanding of issues that are far too complex to fit into 30-second video bits. In a republic we let the mass pick representatives who then act in the best interests of the highly paid lobbyists (who are paid by rent-seekers (definition)) and activists (who spend time the rest of us cannot or will not). The rent-seekers and activists count on the fact that the losers in their transactions (the taxpayers) see small marginal costs while the focusing of those small marginal costs into the winners pockets becomes a very attractive cash flow (just think, if you could get a penny for each credit card transaction, you'd be able to retire, but which of the millions using credit cards would have the will and the incentive to fight back?). As for forming large coalitions (in a sort of fully realized "at -large", well just look at how well that is working in the countries that have the parliamentary systems. I think that Europe's inability to address their fiscal nightmare lines up quit nicely with the US inability to address their own fiscal problem. And reactions of people like Depardieu just serve to remind us that talent and money are mobile in ways that the run-of-the-mill rest are not. Any strongly formed effort to prevent rent-seeking will have to deal with that mobility or face turning their country into the next "place to be from." The real solution for the truly conscientious might be as simple as "dropping out" the way the hippies in the 60's wanted to, leaving the salarymen and wage-slaves to support the rent-seekers.

They were close colleagues. This is from the New Yorker in 2010:

As a rising politician with Ivy League connections, Obama had financial backing from all over, including from a class of young black entrepreneurs. But he has had Jewish mentors throughout his career. Philanthropists like Bettylu Saltzman, Penny Pritzker, and Lester Crown were crucial to his campaigns. His friend and neighbor the late Arnold Jacob Wolf was a rabbi. Michelle Obama’s cousin Capers C. Funnye, Jr., is the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and the spiritual leader of Beth Shalom, a congregation on the South Side. One of Obama’s closest colleagues in Springfield was Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew, with whom he shared an office suite in the Capitol building; Obama acted as Silverstein’s shabbos goy, turning on lights and pushing elevator buttons for him on Saturdays.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/03/29/100329taco_talk_remnick#ixzz2LZl8gLSJ [newyorker.com]

Senator Ira Silversteen, the man behind the bill, is the Illinois majority caucus whip - effectively third in line in the IL senate. He shared an office suite with Obama. They were close colleagues. This is from the New Yorker in 2010:

As a rising politician with Ivy League connections, Obama had financial backing from all over, including from a class of young black entrepreneurs. But he has had Jewish mentors throughout his career. Philanthropists like Bettylu Saltzman, Penny Pritzker, and Lester Crown were crucial to his campaigns. His friend and neighbor the late Arnold Jacob Wolf was a rabbi. Michelle Obama’s cousin Capers C. Funnye, Jr., is the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and the spiritual leader of Beth Shalom, a congregation on the South Side. One of Obama’s closest colleagues in Springfield was Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew, with whom he shared an office suite in the Capitol building; Obama acted as Silverstein’s shabbos goy, turning on lights and pushing elevator buttons for him on Saturdays.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/03/29/100329taco_talk_remnick#ixzz2LZl8gLSJ

Unlike the previous one who was only a jury and executioner thats actually a step up!

Uhhh, no.

Obama's gone above and beyond ANYTHING the most rabid BOOOSH IS TEH EVIL!!!! foaming-at-the-mouth twit ever dreamed up BOOOSH! might do.

Seriously.

Summary execution of US citizens.

Can you IMAGINE the uproar from the /sheep had BOOOSH!!! done that?

Yet, Obama's been doing it for YEARS.

...no one knew who Assange was when D started working with him.

That's not true.

In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around.

- http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all

They just didn't have a name for 'that guy'.

Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker a while back opining that it is the iterative inventions rather than the "breakthroughs" that are most important. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
He is riffing on another article that claims that the industrial revolution started in Britain because "it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work."

It seems that TFA is misled by the fact that nobody remembers the long history of tweaking and engineering that results in a popular product. For example, everyone thinks that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but he was just one of many engineers improving on a concept.

The crappy little superficial one-page MIT Technology Review article has a link to another, similarly crappy article on the same site, but if you click through one more layer you actually get to this much more substantial piece in the New Yorker.

You're right, more gun laws would just turn America into a police state.

which resonated with me.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html

The biggest thing about this article is it shows how quickly something taught in science textbooks for decades like the notion of "absolute zero" is slowly realized to be, if not 100% false, then at least a gross oversimplification. We may someday say the same about things like LENR (Cold Fusion) or even deep issues like consciousness and spirituality (Charles Tart's work, for example). Examples:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/
http://web.archive.org/web/20090308132014/http://suppressedscience.net/physics.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Elaborating on my previous posts, as I wrote about in a term paper project for a 1980s college undergraduate course run by Prof. Steve Slaby, called "The Technological Imperative of the Arms Race", technology is an amplifier -- the question is, what sorts of things do we want to amplify?

The book "Descartes' Error" makes the point that we can't "reason" without emotions. This seems obvious to me now, but back in college it did not seem so in a philosophical sense. Modern psychology can show us how our emotions drive our reasoning process (even as reasoning can provide feedback that may affect our emotions and again our reasoning etc.). And our emotions are generally first determined by our values (including psycho-physiologically values, like perhaps a instinctive reaction to a snake or a bad smell). And those values in turn are generally determined by our personal biology, our family upbringing, our friends and neighbors, our personal history, and our culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

Albert Einstein talks about aspects of that in an essay at this link where he says that science can perhaps tell us something about what seems to be, but science can never tell us what should be. And our thoughts on what should be are the basis of our actions (including how we direct our thoughts). The essay:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

I haven't finished reading it yet, but there is a recent New Yorker article (still available as full text) about a scientist and his feelings about the ethics about his past research on weapons of mass confusion derived from nerve gas:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all

One discussion of it here:
http://incunabula.org/2012/12/the-doctor-behind-the-armys-psychedelic-manhattan-project-has-some-regrets-weed-isnt-one-of-them/

I was thinking as I read the New Yorker article (around the part I stopped at), that these scientists, or at least the scientific enterprise in general, had other choices than to make the next weapon or the next defense for a theoretical attack. They could have focused on using science to make the world work better for everyone (or at least most people) and thus reduce conflicts, like Bucky Fuller did with his focus on "Livingry". They also could have researched the social and organizational issues behind war and other conflicts, like Morton Deutsch did or Alfie Kohn did. Thus this essay by me mentioning such people:

Apparently Thin Thread is not dead, and not only that, the civil liberties and oversight protections have been cheerfully scrapped, and the rest has been expanded to bring abuse of civil liberties not to a foreign audience, but rather, to a domestic one. Why bother having elections when the director of the NSA has all the powers of the worst of the worst police states of the last 100 years. No judicial, political or civilian oversight, unlimited powers, unlimited budget (in the name of national security you can expand it to consume the entire budget of the state). How much did that mini-shuttle cost and what is it for again? On whose behalf are the British police keeping such a tight lid on Julian Assange? I've seen cops have two officers at the front and back of the house of a wanted murderer. They have hundreds of police around the embassy in London. It must cost a fortune. I don't think its the British taxpayer. Who is footing the bill? Over the years, Echelon has cost billions. Its not that they are targeting domestic computers, its just that its investigating fully all transmissions originating or arriving at foreign computers from domestic computers, and likewise checking other domestic computers to see if they are connecting with foreign computers (and doing a bit of fishing at the time). Their coverage is a mere 200% of all computers in the US. And that's it!

There have many suppositions expressed here that I don't entirely buy. However, interpersonal dynamics can quickly become so rancorous that it's simpler to comply to Mao's dress code than stand apart as an artisan.

The most important aspect of code is the thought process involving in convincing yourself that the code is correct. It hardly matters a whit is the person reading the code reads the code but fails to read the argument embedded in the subtext within the presentation about why the code actually works.

C++ is a multiparadigmatic language. Some people hate that. Nevertheless, it can be heavily object oriented in one place, and completely generic in another. I don't find myself that any single formatting standard best emphasizes what matters to code correctness across these styles. Scope in generic code is mainly lexical. Scope in algorithms is mainly flow control. Should one automatically format the braces in the same way? Isn't that kind of like insisting that every knife has the same grip? You know, the standard rubber handle that everyone expects to feel the same way, no matter if it's a sushi knife or a steak knife or a bowie knife?

A more severe coding standard might go all the way to specifying that every knife is sharpened with the same bevel (either double or single sided; if single sided, either left or right handed) and to the same bevel angle. Steal is steal, ya know. German, Japanese. WTF, who cares? Ditch all the bread knives. Those are just weird.

I'd desperately like to see a study into whether rigid consistency leads to certain classes of bugs, because all eyeballs nod in agreement over the dress code. It's certainly true that people working on the code base who get used to the style will have a nice comfortable feeling. That could have good effects on code quality. But it could certainly also have bad effects that are harder to notice. Heaven forbid anyone rains on the cozy picnic with actual data.

Utopian for Beginners

This article is interesting but belongs to the TL;IRRO category (too long, I'd rather remain oblivious).

Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible.

Why don't we regiment thought, too? The ideas expressed in code would be so much more transparent if we all though about the world in the same categories.

Many of the the superstitious, ill-educated tribesmen that U.S. ground troops regularly encounter already think the Americans are witches.

Given that the US is about the most superstitious, ill-educated nation on the face of the Earth, that's a bit ripe. But then, of course, you famously don't do irony.

...by Sarah Stillman, I've come to the conclusion that cops are basically stupid.

Further, the liberal side is mostly women, minorities, homosexuals/transgenders and college students. The conservative side is mostly white men.

No, actually. A solid majority of white women voted for Romney. Also, while virtually nobody black voted for Romney, a very large number of other non-white citizens did - each category, it was around 1/3rd.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/11/why-white-women-voted-for-romney.html
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll

I'm not sure about the parent poster ...but provided we actually gave adequate legal resources for people to defend themselves, and the cops were not just out to frame anyone who looked good and they thought was guilty...well if one could assume the above then I'd be reasonably for the death-penalty.

When we have prosecutors and the various states arguing that "it wasn't a problem your lawyer slept through substantial portions of your defense" or "no, we object to any DNA testing, since it wasn't done during the first trial. etc...

When that kind of stuff is going on, and people like Todd Willingham were almost certainly put to death while being innocent of the crimes charged...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

Well, yes, in those cases, I think the death-penalty is a problem.

And that leaves out the issues over abortion you seem to ignore - so I'll just leave it there.

It is already in the bag

http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily/sipress#slide=2

Well, if your friend told you so, then by all means you're right to be modded "informative"

Oh give me a break, it's not like this is something unheard of, it IS an accepted fact that tax evasion in Greece is a huge problem for the government. And of course it's not just the taxpayers fault, nor is everyone doing it (if you have been following American politics at all "47%" of the US doesn't effectively pay any taxes - "the minority" of people doesn't mean it's a small amount of tax revenue - the wealthy in Greece have higher tax bills, and are doing most of the evading). But blaming "the government" for everything (hello, ALL governments spend money on stupid things and are corrupt to some extent) is such a cop out.

And just in case for some bizarre reason you want to pretend it's something I just "heard from one person", here are a few of the thousands of articles written on the topic:

[Some of my favorite quotes - and I'm pretty sure "only the stupid pay tax" would be considering evasion "as an obligation"...]

    * Cash provides a convenient escape route for lawyers, accountants and builders. The government has published the names of almost 70 doctors it says have cheated the taxman and some surgeons are said to be earning €900,000 a year and not declaring tax.

    * “Only the stupid pay tax,” one eye surgeon told a Greek state radio.

    * Helicopters have been hovering over plush suburbs in northern Athens in the search for swimming pools in the homes of professional people who claim they are living on only €35,000-€43,000 a year. ... The swimming pool fraternity are also responding by using nets to cover the pools to avoid detection.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8585593/Greece-loses-15bn-a-year-to-tax-evasion.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_and_corruption_in_Greece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/09/greece-tax-evasion-professional-classes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/09/how-greek-tax-evasion-sunk-the-global-economy/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/business/global/greece-warns-of-going-broke-as-taxes-dry-up.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/09/tax-evasion-greece

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203937004578076801161935378.html

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/07/11/110711ta_talk_surowiecki

> When teenage indiscretions become commonly known,
> society will adapt to what level of indiscretion is acceptable.

Are you in a position to hire people? If you found out that a job applicant had previously offered to give away customer data at another company (emails, pictures, addresses, sns), would you hire him? Especially if he admitted the charges were true? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all

> ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
> ZUCK: just ask
> ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
> FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
> ZUCK: people just submitted it
> ZUCK: i don't know why
> ZUCK: they "trust me"
> ZUCK: dumb fucks

Reminds me of this article I read a while back: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html Oh and this one too: http://lifehacker.com/5944221/you-cant-be-effective-when-youre-too-smart-for-your-own-good?utm_source=io9.com&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=recirculation

Enough of this "copying" BS. All companies "copy". Steve jobs built Apple on taking other companies' designs and tweaking them. So how's this less acceptable?

It's less acceptable because they're spreading themselves thin and loosing focus on the OS and Office suite that make them real bank.

This is the ultimate outcome of a Corporate life cycle: The stock holders demand growth. They expand and diversify hoping to stave off death, but the reality is newer more nimble entities will evolve to take their place as new niches form. It's a fight till the end for relevance, and it's only really just beginning for MS, but I've seen it in Big Iron, Arcades -> Consoles -> General purpose devices (PC's & portable), it's happening in Media... You can't replicate the success of others, you are not them. You have to focus on what you're really good at, but the stage is already set -- Both barrels are loaded and aimed at their feet.

When a human's pituitary gland is over active, demanding unlimited growth of the person, they grow until they die instead of leading a long life. The business world is just like that.

Enough of this "copying" BS.

All companies "copy". Steve jobs built Apple on taking other companies' designs and tweaking them. So how's this less acceptable?

Enough of the who copies whom stuff already.

They all copy. Here's a good read for you: The Tweaker.

Malpractice lawsuit trolls raise the cost of health care, which is bad for the economy.

Keep repeating it, maybe it'll turn true someday. While you wait for that day to come, read about how the state with the harshest anti-tort rules still has expensive healthcare (in McAllen, TX, healthcare spending per capita was higher than income per capita at the time of the article).

tl;dr: When a doctor says "I have to run these tests or else I'll be sued if I miss something!" what they really mean is "I get $50 for each test I order. Ka-CHING!!" Yeah, Texas's doctors' malpractice insurance premiums went way down. What did they do with the savings? They bought X-Ray machines and other testing equipment so they could run MORE tests.

Haven't read the article you linked to (relax, it's in another tab, and I'll get to it in a moment) but if that is the takeaway, it's hardly worth the effort. An internist ordering a $50 test doesn't get the money for the test. He also doesn't buy X-Ray machines. There's more, but I'll save the balance for after a read of the New Yorker article.

Malpractice lawsuit trolls raise the cost of health care, which is bad for the economy.

Keep repeating it, maybe it'll turn true someday. While you wait for that day to come, read about how the state with the harshest anti-tort rules still has expensive healthcare (in McAllen, TX, healthcare spending per capita was higher than income per capita at the time of the article).

tl;dr: When a doctor says "I have to run these tests or else I'll be sued if I miss something!" what they really mean is "I get $50 for each test I order. Ka-CHING!!" Yeah, Texas's doctors' malpractice insurance premiums went way down. What did they do with the savings? They bought X-Ray machines and other testing equipment so they could run MORE tests.

They link to the New Yorker's article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all Corruption is continuing in China, but it will take a major reform/progressive movement to stop it all. The New Yorker is mainly on the railroad budget and you will have to go elsewhere to find dirt on the PLA's progress/threat.

Where's the scandal?!

$100B divided by 2 million employees equals $50,000 per employee -- high for China, maybe, but matches the MEDIAN male income in the U.S.

You should read the linked article (not the link from the story, but one linked from it.) The scale of the corruption seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. The story lists the yearly salary of the #2 official in the railway ministry as being $19k/yr and yet had a fortune over $100m. Another associate of the head of the railway ministry built a ~$700m business through bribes and kickbacks. The workers are, no doubt, being paid less than $1k/yr. Redo your calculations based on that and you'll find just how much money has gone missing. It's very common for officials that have been caught to have been found with tens of millions of dollars worth of bribes. One of the biggest impediments for these officials isn't actually accepting the bribes but, instead, finding a place to store all the cash since the largest bill in circulation is a 100 yuan note worth ~$16. It's gotten so bad that bribes are now commonly made in gift cards since they're able to store value more densely.

Read the story...it's really shocking.

This New Yorker article might add to the context of corruption and where the money is going.

The solution is to make you purchase your half pound of sugar in 3 cups. If making giving yourself diabetes slightly inconvenient is "government tyranny" then we probably need more of it.

Mod parent insightful.

Here's a great New Yorker article about why the law will probably work very well.

Your idea of torture is that he was stuck in a cell for 23 hours a day and they made him sleep naked for a few nights?

Um, Yes?

Dear God, will the horrors never end?

I believe, for the record, the article also shows that Manning is also still alive. No death. No torture. Try harder.

Hmm, could the torture be worse? yes. I would suggest contemplating your own empathy. Since you do seem to be lacking in one of empathy or imagination, you would probably have to sit in a 6x12 chamber all by yourself, day after day, for 9 months to have any idea what that isolation would be like. I can certaily imagine worse tortures, but if that happened to me, I would call it torture.

While googling solitary confinement and torture or mental health would certainly give you more info, this link seems pretty informative.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

after Obama yesterday's utopian freedom of speech speech at the UN.

Future quote from Obama:

"I did not order the military entities involved to make this decision, nor act on it. I do not believe this is right. Now, with more change comes more delayed response time, and with more delayed response times comes more speculation. I, when re-elected, will definitely move this matter from an actionable item to a point of discussion to implement change; change that will reverse this unfair decision before..... [delay... looks at papers] Julian Assange is harmed in any official way, as long as my opinions and actions are not taken into consideration with this change of change that changes...................."

after Obama yesterday's utopian freedom of speech speech at the UN.

As someone who tries to balance use of both sides of his brain, I understand your quandry. It seems a lot of the thinking types seem to have a disdain for these "Designers" and degrade them as useless, or even harmful, perhaps.

Well, think of it this way: Art students I've taken classes recognize the importance of the thinkers, they use a computer and photoshop, so they recognize it as a needed thing. However, they don't switch their major to one in computer science. Why? Because, well, it's not interesting or fulfilling, there's no feeling in it perhaps. Well that's what feelers feed off of, creativity. And while some thinking has creativity in an abstract sense, the arts have the more aesthetic visual appeal, so artists feel more fulfilled in that.

Well, try to flip that. Thinkers feed on precisely the opposite: preciseness, concreteness, definability and ability to discern more quantitatively and not just qualitatively.The thing is that the more feeling/creative stuff doesn't make any sense (unless you are a psychologist and understand how it affects choices, I guess). This is, however, a parrallel to how the thinking stuff doesn't have any soul in the eyes of the artists, I guess.

The only difference is that they are thinkers so they can rationalize their dislike while feelers can't do as well perhaps--at least in an argument on the internet--and not in as consistent a way. (Thinkers, remember, a logical system can be consistent and correct even when its axioms can be junk-full shit!).

I think part of the problem is there is no photoshop for the thinkers: the thing that makes them realize how important design and aesthetics is. I mean, there are examples(exhibit A: Apple. Whether or not you like them, their market share is undeniable; Good design is profitable), but may be they just choose to ignore it. I may be a little cynical here, but it might be that rationalizing process again that can help them ignore those examples. Remember, smarter people can be susceptible to biases, so I guess it is no surprise.