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The Great Depression followed the excesses of the Gilded Age.

Before you can blame the problems of the Great Depression on the Gilded Age, you have to explain why it never happened before. The NBER reports eight recessions on or after 1900 (one ended in late 1900) and before the Great Depression. So there had to be something more than just "excess" to explain the Great Depression's unusual depth and duration.

There was at least one depression of similar severity to the Great Depression (which was also known at the time as the "Great Depression", but is now called the "Long Depression").

As it turns out, there are two presidential administrations that do explain the Great Depression. First, the remarkably clueless machinations of the Hoover administration (Republican BTW), culminating in years long counterproductive Fed actions and the Smoot-Hawley Act (a law which started a global tariff war). Then there's the FDR administration. Somehow we supposed to fix the economy by creating vast economic inefficiencies, such as industrial oligopolies and overpowered labor unions. And FDR never got around to reversing Smoot-Hawley.

The important thing here is that the Great Depression was particularly long and severe due to government interference in the economy.

Republican trickle-down economics doesn't trickle down water.

Because it's either that or the nanny state, amirite? There are other choices than just trickle-down just as there are other choices than the worst possible caricature of regulation in a state.

Now, now, you're talking about the Real Life Teap Party, not the Fantasy Tea Party that stands for each and every cartoon caricature of the right by the left. The two are unrelated,

Galileo had a problem because he was a jerk. He had a scientific dispute with another scientist over his findings. Galileo was rude and insulting to his rival. His rival had the backing of the Jesuit order and threatened Galileo with them. Galileo trumped that by calling on his friendship with the Pope. The Pope decided to resolve the issue by asking/ordering Galileo to produce a pamphlet presenting the best arguments for both the geocentric centered view and the heliocentric view. Galileo's response was to write a pamphlet which put the arguments for geocentrism is the mouth of "Simplicio" (which had the implication of "simpleton"). Simplicio appeared to be a caricature of the Pope. Thus Galileo offended his friend and defender at a time when the Pope was facing increasing threats to his power (and life). This was not a case of religion supressing science. This was a case of a politically connected scientist using his connections to get another scientist's findings suppressed (an equally connected scientist who ridiculed his connections at the moment he needed thier support).

The analogous warmist canards would probably be, CO2 is air pollution, it's a terrible thing, and it's such a powerful gas that it will completely kill off all the polar bears, drown Florida and the Maldives, and make the world a permanently hot and sweaty place :)

The difference would be that these are caricatures of the science whereas denialists really say that more CO2 in the atmosphere will help plant life, so repeating that canard is not a strawman.

The really sad thing is that there are probably many things deniers and warmists agree on, but we always end up skipping to the part where if I drive my car I'm going to kill the world with melting glaciers, and if you tell me not to drive my car you're a communist hippie bent on world domination.

You seem to be suggesting that there is a need to arrive at a mutually acceptable understanding - that if the objective facts and measures are not acceptable, some reality between the fantasy world of denial and the objective facts and probabilities defined by observation should be a common meeting point. That is, of course, complete nonsense. For one, what is the advantage of appeasement or compromise in this case? What do we have to gain? And for two, the objective facts stubbornly refuse to change, even if we don't like them.

The truth of the matter is that the science is not really in dispute. Some people do not like the consequences, either because the science contradicts long held ideologies, or because the notion of the planned restraint required to reduce our emissions scares them. They then project backwards to dispute the science, when what they should truthfully say is: screw 'em. We know we are destroying the world for future generations, but we don't give a crack. Let's live like hogs at the trough!. It's the consequence. If this were happening somewhere else, say Venus, nobody would dispute it. If the science said that an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere caused a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, no layman would dispute it.

I'm not claiming that anybody is wrong, but that this "consensus", as of my current knowledge, is not really substantiated by comprehensible, verifiable arguments, but mostly through rethorical tricks.

What makes you so confident that you would be able to understand and rightly evaluate the arguments? I'm not knocking your intelligence. I'm saying that since you are (probably) a layperson, you know comparatively little not only about the "raw data" of history, but about the methods of historical research. You don't think like a historian. It takes more than 5 years of full time work to get a PhD in most areas. Most of what's happening during that time is not anything as concrete as memorization. It's practice at being a competent independent researcher under the guidance of people who already are. It's learning (for example) why certain kinds of arguments which might appear to be very convincing to an uneducated person actually don't make any sense if examined closely, and conversely, why certain kinds of arguments that would seem hopelessly intricate and esoteric are no more complicated than they need to be.

So, in response to your claim that "Even Ehrman doesnt just straightly answer the asked question why he does believe Jesus existed, but knocks The infidel guy out by questioning his standards of proof and in the end dodges the answer completely," I'm proposing (again) that there's probably not that much that he could have done differently that would have been responsible. What good would it have done for Ehrman to directly argue with this guy if the only arguments he could have presented would have been highly distilled caricatures of the real thing? The reaction would have been (indeed appears to be to some extent, in your case), "Is that the best this Ehrman guy has to offer? These historians must really have no convincing evidence at all!" Instead, what Ehrman appeared to be doing is a little hasty brush-clearing to try to knock some sense into this guy. What I hear in this "debate" is that the Internet Infidel Guy is not just mistaken, but clueless about where to even start.

The whole case you present is still facts-free and still amounts to nothing more than "Intelligent people have put N hours into investigating this, and I believe them blindly without ever trying to check how they came to their conclusion, therefore Jesus existed."

Not quite. I stated part of my point of view in a reply to someone else. I'll just quote it here.

Nothing prevents you from coming to your "own" conclusions about Jesus' existence. But, from my perspective, since I acknowledge that I am not trained to fairly evalulate (or even to know all of) the evidence myself, it ultimately boils down to who I'm going to believe, either working scholars who subscribe to the consensus view, or (what appears to be) mostly screwballs on the internet who don't.

I would add to that the fact that said internet screwballs are for the most part not that much different from me in terms of their training and susceptibility to bad historical reasoning. We are liable to fall into the same kinds of traps. So even if I find the case they make convincing (on some level), I have an additional reason to be highly skeptical of it. That is, chances are, if we all find an argument convincing that the experts don't, it's probably because we're missing something, making a common beginner's mistake, or have fallen prey to our biases in some way.

That strikes at the heart of what we'd like to believe about ourselves, especially as "nerds", but I think it's right. We really want to think that we are not one of the sheep who blindly believes what it's told. Instead, we like to think, we believe things based on "the evidence." But the only way to do that, to really evaluate the evidence and arguments and personally come to the best conclusion we can based on what's currently known, is to become experts ourselves. If

Why do tech-minded people always seem to need to create obtuse and obviously false exaggerations for the purpose of conveying their point? Use your words and say what you mean.

Posts like this don't make you look clever, they make you look like a caricature.

There are plenty of ways to administer the free version of MySQL to get very good performance and options. Just because you have not been able to do that does not mean it cannot be done.

I think the point that was being made, however, was that if you want to put in that much effort, why wouldn't you use a database like Postgres that actually was built for you to do that?

It was advice, not an offer.

Trying to represent the point of view of the dimwitted caricature that you think the world needs to be fair to really isn't as interesting as you think it is.

Your ignorant rant annoys me. The fact that the state is almost 40% Hispanic doesn't play well with your caricature of the uneducated inbred racist Texan voter, and does little to bring any useful discussion of ideas to the table. What is needed is a government composed of individuals that can be trusted, as it's the well placed fear of government screw ups that feeds this anti-government sentiment.

My experience with liberals in general is they're extremely defensive and oppressive;

Are you sure you aren't projecting? Hey, maybe it's just my interpretation (what do I know, I'm just an AC, right?), but that would go to show that whatever you interpret about "liberals" may not be right either

First, you're replying to somebody's own anecdotal experience with your own. That's a rather defensive move, as it looks like you're trying to assert your reality over theirs. Also seems rather oppressive, as you just can't let somebody else go for having a different anecdotal experience.

Second, you think "everyone hates" you, and you're just holding - defending - your own ground/position... ... but then you claim to be capable of "destroying" other people in an argument. That's a rather competitive and aggressive attitude, and you seem rather eager to go about "destroying" people, as you seem rather upset when people wishes to give you the time of day. Sounds like you would really like to (op)press your views and beliefs upon others

You even admit to have once went "revisionary" -- "re-examined prior conversations, answered all the questions, and one day kept up and destroyed" some guy. Just who is this guy? What's it worth to you to "destroy" him? Without further details, it sounds as if you're just an awfully pushy (oppressive) person, and just won't let things go unless you've beaten the other guy into submission and agree that he's wrong, and/or you right, and things should go your way

You claim at the end that your views fluctuated wildly, and yet you're making rather strong views on these "liberals", climaxing in a caricature of their believes on Obama, displaying none of the humbleness and restraint of someone who understands that they might be wrong, as you said others are afraid of. Me? I'm not afraid of being wrong. I'm more afraid of what YOU might do to me if we met IRL

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, as the more I read your blasting on the liberals, the more you sound just like what you describe, only perhaps on the other side of the spectrum.

But hey, I see in your other post that you want to get into politics. Makes sense. You'd fit right in (but are you sure that these posts on /. would help you in your political career? Those damn liberals are sure to pick up and use them against you!)

Cheers with love
Your friendly neighborhood AC

Sure they are different, but Star Wars isn't about the technology anyway. It's space fantasy. It's just an entertaining story that happens to be set in a more technologically advanced setting, but could have been told without the advanced technology. It doesn't really ask particularly interesting questions about how technology and contact with other civilizations will change cultures.

But that's ok! I can still enjoy it!

In the same way, Doctor Who often gives a pretty unrealistic view of science, but yet it deal with not only characters, but human nature. But it still can be interesting and fun.

And Eureeka is closer to a caricature of sci-fi, but it still is amusing.

I also love old episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, and more. It's ok not to pick sides and just appreciate shows for what they are, rather than deriding them for what they aren't.

From your caricature of those who think AGW is happening, I see that you are a denialist.

I agree about Arab citizens (even though there are disturbing calls from even the mainstream parties to strip them of their citizenship or trade land where they live). People like their foreign minister who openly hates Arab citizens would have no place in mainstream American or European politics. However by apartheid people usually mean the currently implemented de-facto one state solution that includes the disputed territories. Millions of Arabs living their are limited in their basic civil and economic rights not unlike blacks of late Apartheid South Africa.

And judging by Israeli plans for a two state solution their vision of a future Palestinian state is similar to South Africa's Bantustans, a caricature of a state designed to strip blacks South African's of their citizenship and provide whites in power with cheap controlled labor.

I've been following the politics of ME for years, it's quite clear that Israel believes that they can keep the current status quo forever while bullshitting the rest of the world with half-hearted peace talks where they behave with barely hidden contempt for their negotiation partners. But the way things have been developing I think they are wrong and neither the International community nor their Arab neighbors are going to tolerate the stalling much longer.

What a pathetic strawman. "warming is bad mkay"? Are you for real? Go read some actual literature from climate scientists, not the caricature offered up by propaganda machines funded by parties with undisclosed conflicts of interest.

A true climate scientist would not say "warming is bad", but instead might say something more like there is a very narrow range of global climates in which humanity has prospered, and climates which are too hot or too cold could have devastating consequences on human societies around the globe.

For that matter, you seem to think that global warming is the only effect of climate change. I have another, much better example of climate change - ocean acidification.

It's perplexing to see in the parent post and it's replies a the failure to differentiate between a physical assault on your property (faeces on lawn) and a purely intellectual endeavour, someone saying things about you online, in the newspaper, etc.

You could argue that some forms of harassment are by their nature an assault on your property, like someone shouting insults through a megaphone in front of your house or defacing you website - no doubt that's antisocial behaviour. But allowing people to comment on a public board is not defacement, it's an invitation for the public to post their thoughts. You are by all means free to censor those thoughts but you have no basis to claim you are harassed by thoughts you don't like.

While it may be easy to spot "trolling" in this particular case, it basically boils down to saying unpopular things that the court finds apprehensible. Trouble is, no matter how unpopular some things are, they still might be right, truth is not decided by vote. And that's why we have freedom of speech ! It's easy to give a huge list of historical examples which would have easily earned you a death sentence a few hundred years ago. In some parts of the world they still do, for example suggestions of religious tolerance in ultra-orthodox theocracies. If I were to post caricatures of Prophet Muhammed on the Iranian govt.'s message board, should I also be jailed or killed ? I'm sure they would find it every bit as apprehensible as this troll here.

To say caricatures of Muhammed are OK but crude humour is not is simply moral relativism, "my truth is better than your truth". You either accept freedom of speech or you don't, there's no way to differentiate a priori "good" speech from "bad" speech. As always, the test case for freedom of speech is not pompous talk about liberty and equality (as this post here); rather, it's the most detested and despicable speech, those words that "clearly" serve no purpose other than insult.

All this is not to say that harassment does not exist. However, harassment is an issue of form not content. "Spreading rumours" is not harassment, is free speech, and the various anti-defamation laws are encroaching on a basic right to hold public opinions about other people. Mail threats or verbal insults are - the recipient is not actively seeking them, and there's little he can do to stop it.

Well, technically speaking, he was famous for saying "billions and billions" even though that was only a caricature of what he said.

So, what happens to that system when nobody works?

What happens to capitalism when nobody works? Yeah, same thing happens to socialism. I don't understand what your point is here. Perhaps you're implying that in socialism there is no incentive to work since you can just be a welfare queen, driving around in your cadillac. This is a myth perpetuated by certain elements of the American political landscape, and has nothing to do with socialism. At least, that's my opinion. I'm sorry, but I can't be any more specific than that -- you may choose to disregard my opinion as having no merit because I am unable to provide more facts on the matter, or you could consider the possibility that there is at least some truth to what I'm saying, and go from there. That's all I can offer.

people who are willing to work for low wages, because they aren't willing to do what it takes to be able to demand higher wages.

Ah I see, you subscribe to the "it's your fault if you're poor" philosophy. Well, certainly enough people seem to hold that view that I can't dismiss it as absurd, at least not without some very strong arguments, which I don't have. But this is kind of besides my point -- I was merely pointing out that "pure capitalism", in the sense that that the concept seems to be understood in American politics, would dictate that any and all means of collecting wealth should be legal, short of some minimal baseline (e.g. use of violence). For example, I don't see any reason why a contract where one person agrees to give away all rights for the rest of his or her life should be illegal, and yet it is. I don't see any reason why it should be illegal to buy a strip of land encircling an entire town, paying off whatever governing bodies one needs to do so, and threaten everyone inside with starvation unless they sign the contract described above. Do you think that should be legal? After all, once it is your private property, you should not be obligated to allow those people to cross it to get food.

Or, if that seems too outlandish to you, consider this scenario -- I gather up a huge amount of capital, do to some isolated county in, I don't know, Utah, and buy out/"outcompete" (i.e. bankrupt) all local industry. Now the stores are mine and the jobs are mine. Now, regardless of whether any contract is signed or not, those people are mine. I own them, because I own their livelihoods and their means of sustenance. Wait, this is starting to sound very familiar... You know what, I don't think I'm describing some hypothetical caricature of capitalism... I think I'm describing America. How the hell did that happen? I set out to argue just how absurd it would be to want to live in an "overly-capitalistic" country, and ended up using the US of A as an example. What do you make of that? (At this point, if you're thinking "they could just move somewhere else", please stop. We both know that's not how the real world works.)

Your use of the term "slavery" in that context is simply absurd.

Need I say more?

That ignorance is a carefully manufactured ignorance, true marxism is the single greatest threat to the "job creator" class. Soviet Communism was a bad caricature which more closely resembeled a corporate bureaucracy than anything else.

Android because the rallying cry for cross-armed, anti-social cynics standing in the corner of the party watching the iPhone users socialize.

Wow wow... hold on fellow. You now are doing exactly what you object to in others, making an unrealistic caricature of groups of users. You do realize there are more Android phones sold every day then there iPhone's right? I don't know in which groups you hang of course, but with my friends, the "in" crowd is definitely not the iPhone user. But all of this is completely irrelevant because we should judge the products, not their users.

Finally, people have begun to wake up to the fact that Google is not what they perceived it to be. [various examples]

I'm sure there are some delusional Fandroids out there that think Google is God, but I'm pretty sure there are just as many delusional iFans and a significant portion of delusional Open Source / MS supporters (sorry I couldn't come up with anything clever to name those fans).

But please remember that's just the vocal minority on internet fora, most of the market just thinks: "Hey, this company has done pretty well. I'm not so sure about their privacy stuff that I sometimes read about, but their products are pretty nice.". There's no "Evil Google (TM)" or "Holy Google (TM)" for most people, and that's a good thing.

However, for so many years, mentioning any of this on tech sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News, and so on would get you voted down relentlessly by obsessive fans who could not accept any criticism of their hero. Google's purpose in appealing to those crowds--and I wouldn't be surprised if Google employees secretly post here and at other sites to help in this--is to win the support of techie communities, who will then defend them and give them a pass for things that companies like Microsoft could never get away with. It's free advertising.

Well now, this is getting up to the level of tinfoil hats mixed with an extremely selective world view. I'm sure there are Google employees on this and other sites, just as there are Microsoft employees here (probably even more), Apple employees here (probably less) and you know Slashdot has enough Open Source evangelists, even if it's a little less than it used to be. Besides, what is exactly the problem with Google (or any other company) trying to please the crowds? I'm a privacy advocate, so it stings me to say, that as far as delivering (decent) quality services to end-users for little-to-nothing (and unfortunately that's what people want - privacy be damned), I can't really think of any other company than Google that has done so well in the past years.

An unfortunate truth is that not all business models flourish through open-source. And not only open-source projects give the best end product, especially when it comes to user experience (which now is more important than ever). What Google has done better than any other (evil or not) is introduce and actively develop a legion of services and solutions (some better than others) that are free / freemium to use. Google's core business - Search - will never be opened because it would destroy their business. That Google isn't really quick on opening newest Android builds (whether for security or monetary concerns) is definitely unfortunate, and I'm sure there are many points to be made against other missteps, but the simple truth is that they are no more evil than MS or Apple or [fill in large corp]. I'm sure I don't have to list to you any of their missteps to prove that point. (Though to be fair Apple's recent patent trolling is really starting to bother me, especially because they violate so many of these so-called patents themselves, but that's a different story for another day.)

People get hung up on Google's openness, either in a too positive or too negative way. Judging by your signature, I'd say you are in the latter department. Chill, relax. The world is not coming to an end because of these companies. Your and my government (and the people that vote for them) are way ahead of them.

Quinn impersonates his recently deceased double on a world where the young dominate society and middle-aged people are prohibited from working and are subject to curfews.

Yeah - that's IMHO the true face of the "land of equal opportunity" (disclosure: I wasn't born here and thoughout my lifetime Americans have invariably snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of equality - we finally got rid of segregation (at least legally) in 1964, and now LGBT people have been deemed to be human so there has been some progress but legalized age discrimination based is just as abhorrent [and de facto age discrimination is virtually a legalization]) .

Just an aside here, I don't know how relevant it is.

I love how all the small-government types - the ones who think that the notions of commonwealth are somehow equivalent to boogieman socialism - get all righteously pro-State, when it comes to WikiLeaks. It is a curious kind of cognitive dissonance.

I propose that this psychological maladaptation is the expected outcome of an authoritarian personality forming in the context of what is, nominally, a republic.

George Orwell was impossibly subtle and perceptive in his fictional exposition of this as "DoubleThink". He demonstrates it as obvious, oxymoronic contradiction - a caricature of the actual mental state of those who enable and support totalitarian positions.

"Freedom isn't Free" Christ! That's the knee-jerk truism for "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength" in one, compact portmanteau!