a $200 bill isn't legal tender, this taped-together bill was clearly marked as a 'moral reserve note' and featured George W. Bush's portrait.
When Reagan was inaugurated, I took a $1 bill, photocopied it, added "N"s in front of all the "one"s, put zeroes wherever there was a "1", made the serial numbers all zeroes and put Reagan's picture instead of George W.'s. The result was a nice NONE DOLLAR bill, just as worthy as that "president" was...
TV gets turned on when we have friends over for the purpose of watching a movie, or we're too brain drained to do anything but sit and watch pretty colors.
TV is eye-candy for the brain
- Frank Lloyd Wright
Actually, no. Since the customers would be the viewers instead of the advertisers, programming would be what the viewer want, and not what brings the most eyeballs to the advertisers.
Countries with State broadcasters (Canada, Britain, France, etc.) have extremely high-quality programming, compared to the inexistant quality of american private broadcasters.
Funny how you say the French trust the state when in my experience the French are the first to break the rules, and French state workers are the first to go on strike! Let's not mention the recent air traffic controller's strike that shut down air traffic over France, shall we? Damned cheese-eating, wine swilling surrender monkeys!
That's precisely why the french trust the State: if the State tries to screw them (such as now, with their pensions), the State workers arise in defense of the public service (such as in 1995 with the huge rail strikes). And if things go to far, they simply have a revolution.
As for surrendering, just in case you didn't know, Roosevelt supported the collaborationist Vichy régime over Charles de Gaulle's Free French who kept on fighting along with Britain.
unfortunately I can't figure out my nephew... A Philosiphy major with an Ethics minor... Yay, he'll learn new ways to contemplate.... "You want fries with that?"
I think you mean "have you considered the metaphysical implications of not having fries with that???"...
So tell me... if this electricity company is so amazingly successful, why aren't private companies doing the same thing? Your argument begins with the assumption that the government can do something better than a private company, which is in error. There are plenty of companies that weren't profitable for several years (thus, the creation of Venture Capitalists, who provide money to run a company that they believe will one day pay them back).
Private companies do not do it because the very short-term return on investment is not attractive enough.
Your "argument" is nothing else than dogmatic bourgeois drivel that only aims to eliminate the State to insure a free hand to screw the helpless people.
I think the roads and highways should be either localized or privatized, along with almost everything else the government does. There's a simple concept that you either don't understand, or refuse to acknowledge, and that is that the government takes your money in the form of taxes, and that money is used for whatever service the government supplies. The difference between government and private companies is that the government can forcibly take your money (and if you refuse, they will throw you in jail). If the private company tries to take your money (by way of raising their prices) the public backlash can be, and has been in many cases, so great that the company goes out of business.
The Government is the source of your very bourgeois existence. It is the Government which provides for the legal environment where your private property can exist. You exist because the Government grants you the legal possibility to exist, and that existence is made possible by the taxes levied on people. Without taxes, there can be no Government, and without Government, only the most powerful thugs can exist.
Your bourgeois rethoric is very self-destructive, because you won't last long without a State committed to protect your interests (and your interests are also the rest of the people).
Every experiment in Socialism or Communism that has ever existed has failed. France, Canada, etc. won't be any different. The US is on a downward spiral, but only because certain political powers want the US to become a socialist country. Socialism and Communism looks great on paper (arguably), but just doesn't work in practice. Remember the USSR?
Communism failed, but Socialism thrives. Canada is socialist, and has a very strong economy (stronger than the US, as a matter of fact - witness the plumetting US dollar and the rising US unemployment rate). Socialism means that the States watches closely what goes on (the opposite of laissez-faire) and takes IN TIME whatever measure is necessary to corrects problems as they happens.
The idea of Socialism is to make sure that no one can deprive others of wealth and ressources. Your ranting is nothing than clueless bourgeois FUD; the only State bourgeois want is a state that look after THEIR narrow self-interests, but not the general public (so they can enrich themselves at the public's expense).
The first hurdle was trying to acquire the plastic box to put the meter in. We went to the Manx Electricity Authority shop and asked for one. We were told to fill in a confetti-like shower of forms, and we'd have to wait a couple of weeks for it to show up. The guy behind the desk wouldn't budge. He had them in stock, and available, but no, he couldn't give us one. He terminated the argument by announcing, "Well, we ARE the government, you know".
That's because you are in England. England, you know, is populated by english people, and english people have that collective neurosis about the State being bad (this comes directly from the Magna Carta). It's a vicious circle: people believe that the State is bad, so no one wants to be associated with the State, so smart people don't go work for the State, and the State does stupid things, which reinforces the perception.
By contrast, look at France where people TRUST the State. Working for the State is not demeaned, and people see it as an honour, and there are those prestigious Grandes Écoles (great schools) who turn-out nothing but extremely competent bureaucrats (those schools skim the cream of the crop of each schools in France - they accept only the best of the best students). The result is extremely efficient and well-run public corporations and utilities, say like the SNCF which operates the largest network of the fastests trains in the known universe.
Instead of whining against filling forms, why don't you do something positive like trying to fix those problems by, say, bringing more smartness to their process???
As long as the anglo-saxons will have that shit-for-brains attitude against the State, you will get the shitty public service you rightfully deserve.
A government-owned utility is of course more efficient. It is not burdened by the need for a short-term profit; hence it can invest revenues in a way that's conductive to long-term planning. Claims of inefficiency coming from the private sector is, of course, more FUD.
The best example is the electric power generation and distribution in Québec (Canada). Since the early 1960's, electric power generation has been nationalized in Québec, and the result is the lowest electricity rates in the world, all the while paying-off the northern native communities on whose land the dams have been erected so well that, on the whole continent, they are the better-off natives (that's "indians" for you non-PC types).
Even with all this, it manages to pour billions of dollars in the government's coffers (that's so much taxes we won't have to pay).
Much of the revenue is made through exportation, and this is thanks to the hydroelectric nature of the generation system: unlike a thermic or nuclear power plant, a dam can be turned-off during off-peak times. So, during the night, we close the dams, and buy surplus power from the US at 2, while during the day, we open the whole shebang and sell our surplus at 4...
By contrast, Hydro-Ontario (which had been owned by the province for a century) has been privatized and the market "opened-up", just like in California. The result is a complete fiasco, as small businesses face 500% electric power cost increases (for electoral reasons, consumers have been guaranteed - at government expense - a lower fixed rate).
Come have a look up here, and whenever someone says that government-ownership is bad, you can safely answer back "bullshit", and then ask him why the roads and highways aren't owned by private entreprise to see him bumble...
Rather skimpy article.
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Can someone in the audience shed more light into the matter?
25 years ago, I started diddling on bitty-boxen (PET, APPLE, Exidy Sorcerer, Cromemco). During that time, often you had no OS to speak of, and much less applications.
You had to write your own apps, and to do so, you had to know the hardware inside out and how to drive the devices directly.
20 years ago, after bitty-boxing for a big company, I was told that I had 3 months to learn how to program the big IBM mainframe.
So, the first thing I did was to show up in the girl-who-was-in-charge-of-the-big-iron's office and ask her for the hardware reference manuals. I might as well asked her to strip naked and go dance on the boardroom table. Why do you want to know that??? she asked me, blinking in disbelief. It took me three weeks to learn that it was a 16 bit machine.
Those people have no imagination; they have been carefully promoted from the ranks of the typing pool so that they don't represent any kind of threat to upper-management, so it's no wonder that they didn't find any problem with punch cards. Why would one want to have an interactive session with a computer is totally beyond them, and I'm not surprised that they'd think the idea quite subversive.
Heck, 3 years before, when I came to work for that company (in R&D), the coders were working on PAPER forms, which were sent to TYPISTS who PUNCHED CARDS (that was 1980, people!!!) so the program changes could be fed the dinosaur. There was only one guy with a terminal on his desk - we (in the R&D) figured that he must have been an important analyst - he had a TERMINAL!!!
Nope. The guy was the FILE MANAGER. Yup! The guy's job was to manage the files on the computer; in 1980 they still used DOS, which let your programs write directly to the sectors on the disks; he was MANUALLY allocating disk spaces for the files!!! But I disgress. (Fortunately, by the time I was asked to move on the mainframe, they had upgraded to VM and the lowly programmers had their own terminals (imagine the revolution!).
As I said, it was hard to learn anything valuable from those drones; however, what little information I was able to scrap together left me absolutely flabberghasted at the power and the cleverness of the hardware organization of the machine.
Then I also went on to diddle around with CMS, which I found absolutely rocking as a shell. And after three months of being paid diddling around with the big iron, I came one morning to work to find that my HP terminal (through which I accessed the IBM through a gateway) had been replaced by one of those real slick and huge IBM terminals with the huge 18 inch screen and the green phosphor and the clickety-click keyboard (with a solenoid clicker for good measure -and- to let you know that the keyboard repeated).
I was not working on the mainframe, maintaining garbage COBOL programs written 20 years before, or worse, changing ASSEMBLER programs. At least, there were a bit of PL/1 programs to change. It's a good thing that I was in the first of several huge layoffs batches that started to happen soon, because I would have quit anyways...
That experience left me with a bitter sense of total waste of ressources; fantastic hardware given to totally moronic people who should never have had anything more complex than a pencil in their hands.
Haven't you people learned anything? The New York Times is obviously an untrusted news source. I mean, please, satelite imagery? Next thing you know, they'll tell us the Earth is round and the moon isn't made of cheese!
Or worse, that rockets can move in a vacuum with reaction engines - engines that need something better than a vacuum to react against...
Umm, assuming we're both living in the USA, driving is only a privilege because the states found a moderately clever way to get people to sign forms acknowledging it as such. The right to travel on public roads is guaranteed in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, IIRC. Note the *RIGHT*, not the privilege.
Nowhere in the US constitution do the words "driving a car" or "operating any kind of vehicle" appear. You can travel, for sure, but if the State decides that you can't drive, for whatever reason, be it you drive too sloppily, too fast or you just don't pay for your license, though noogie. But not being able to drive a car won't prevent you from walking, riding a bike or a bus on the public roads.
Whenever one operates a vehicle on a PUBLIC highway, one shall not expect any kind of privacy whatsoever; every one's moves as a driver is subject to public strutiny.
And, likewise, driving is a PRIVILEGE, that is, something that is not automatically granted but something that can be withdrawn by the authorities (just try running all the red lights you see, and check what happens to your license).
Therefore, if it is necessary for the public good to install mandatory car event-recorders that are downloadable at distance by law enforcement agencies in order to ticket faulty drivers, there shall be no argument against it.
With the increase in road-rage accidents, and the use of heavier, ill-balanced SUVs who tip over when driven like cars (hey, asshole, what you're driving is a truck, not a Lamborghini Countacci), public safety demands the strictest driver accountability.
Since law enforcement cannot be anywhere, and have better things to do than give speeding tickets, road laws enforcement shall be automated ("Welcome Korben Dallas, you have 5 points left on your license").
... but in other countries (like France or Canada, for example), where there is not a bourgeois-implanted widespread distrust of the State, the State endeavours in protecting the public interest in restricting the "freedom" of the most powerful to crush the lesser folks.
Slashdot Mirror
- Frank Lloyd Wright
Countries with State broadcasters (Canada, Britain, France, etc.) have extremely high-quality programming, compared to the inexistant quality of american private broadcasters.
... has NOT been brought to you with the letter " P ".
As for surrendering, just in case you didn't know, Roosevelt supported the collaborationist Vichy régime over Charles de Gaulle's Free French who kept on fighting along with Britain.
Your "argument" is nothing else than dogmatic bourgeois drivel that only aims to eliminate the State to insure a free hand to screw the helpless people.
The Government is the source of your very bourgeois existence. It is the Government which provides for the legal environment where your private property can exist. You exist because the Government grants you the legal possibility to exist, and that existence is made possible by the taxes levied on people. Without taxes, there can be no Government, and without Government, only the most powerful thugs can exist.Your bourgeois rethoric is very self-destructive, because you won't last long without a State committed to protect your interests (and your interests are also the rest of the people).
Communism failed, but Socialism thrives. Canada is socialist, and has a very strong economy (stronger than the US, as a matter of fact - witness the plumetting US dollar and the rising US unemployment rate). Socialism means that the States watches closely what goes on (the opposite of laissez-faire) and takes IN TIME whatever measure is necessary to corrects problems as they happens.The idea of Socialism is to make sure that no one can deprive others of wealth and ressources. Your ranting is nothing than clueless bourgeois FUD; the only State bourgeois want is a state that look after THEIR narrow self-interests, but not the general public (so they can enrich themselves at the public's expense).
By contrast, look at France where people TRUST the State. Working for the State is not demeaned, and people see it as an honour, and there are those prestigious Grandes Écoles (great schools) who turn-out nothing but extremely competent bureaucrats (those schools skim the cream of the crop of each schools in France - they accept only the best of the best students). The result is extremely efficient and well-run public corporations and utilities, say like the SNCF which operates the largest network of the fastests trains in the known universe.
Instead of whining against filling forms, why don't you do something positive like trying to fix those problems by, say, bringing more smartness to their process???
As long as the anglo-saxons will have that shit-for-brains attitude against the State, you will get the shitty public service you rightfully deserve.
The best example is the electric power generation and distribution in Québec (Canada). Since the early 1960's, electric power generation has been nationalized in Québec, and the result is the lowest electricity rates in the world, all the while paying-off the northern native communities on whose land the dams have been erected so well that, on the whole continent, they are the better-off natives (that's "indians" for you non-PC types).
Even with all this, it manages to pour billions of dollars in the government's coffers (that's so much taxes we won't have to pay).
Much of the revenue is made through exportation, and this is thanks to the hydroelectric nature of the generation system: unlike a thermic or nuclear power plant, a dam can be turned-off during off-peak times. So, during the night, we close the dams, and buy surplus power from the US at 2, while during the day, we open the whole shebang and sell our surplus at 4...
By contrast, Hydro-Ontario (which had been owned by the province for a century) has been privatized and the market "opened-up", just like in California. The result is a complete fiasco, as small businesses face 500% electric power cost increases (for electoral reasons, consumers have been guaranteed - at government expense - a lower fixed rate).
Come have a look up here, and whenever someone says that government-ownership is bad, you can safely answer back "bullshit", and then ask him why the roads and highways aren't owned by private entreprise to see him bumble...
Can someone in the audience shed more light into the matter?
Will someone else shed more light into the matter???
You had to write your own apps, and to do so, you had to know the hardware inside out and how to drive the devices directly.
20 years ago, after bitty-boxing for a big company, I was told that I had 3 months to learn how to program the big IBM mainframe.
So, the first thing I did was to show up in the girl-who-was-in-charge-of-the-big-iron's office and ask her for the hardware reference manuals. I might as well asked her to strip naked and go dance on the boardroom table. Why do you want to know that??? she asked me, blinking in disbelief. It took me three weeks to learn that it was a 16 bit machine.
Those people have no imagination; they have been carefully promoted from the ranks of the typing pool so that they don't represent any kind of threat to upper-management, so it's no wonder that they didn't find any problem with punch cards. Why would one want to have an interactive session with a computer is totally beyond them, and I'm not surprised that they'd think the idea quite subversive.
Heck, 3 years before, when I came to work for that company (in R&D), the coders were working on PAPER forms, which were sent to TYPISTS who PUNCHED CARDS (that was 1980, people!!!) so the program changes could be fed the dinosaur. There was only one guy with a terminal on his desk - we (in the R&D) figured that he must have been an important analyst - he had a TERMINAL!!!
Nope. The guy was the FILE MANAGER. Yup! The guy's job was to manage the files on the computer; in 1980 they still used DOS, which let your programs write directly to the sectors on the disks; he was MANUALLY allocating disk spaces for the files!!! But I disgress. (Fortunately, by the time I was asked to move on the mainframe, they had upgraded to VM and the lowly programmers had their own terminals (imagine the revolution!).
As I said, it was hard to learn anything valuable from those drones; however, what little information I was able to scrap together left me absolutely flabberghasted at the power and the cleverness of the hardware organization of the machine.
Then I also went on to diddle around with CMS, which I found absolutely rocking as a shell. And after three months of being paid diddling around with the big iron, I came one morning to work to find that my HP terminal (through which I accessed the IBM through a gateway) had been replaced by one of those real slick and huge IBM terminals with the huge 18 inch screen and the green phosphor and the clickety-click keyboard (with a solenoid clicker for good measure -and- to let you know that the keyboard repeated).
I was not working on the mainframe, maintaining garbage COBOL programs written 20 years before, or worse, changing ASSEMBLER programs. At least, there were a bit of PL/1 programs to change. It's a good thing that I was in the first of several huge layoffs batches that started to happen soon, because I would have quit anyways...
That experience left me with a bitter sense of total waste of ressources; fantastic hardware given to totally moronic people who should never have had anything more complex than a pencil in their hands.
Ford Pinto thieves must be getting desperate if they have to turn to stealing Segways...
MICROSOFT!!!
And, likewise, driving is a PRIVILEGE, that is, something that is not automatically granted but something that can be withdrawn by the authorities (just try running all the red lights you see, and check what happens to your license).
Therefore, if it is necessary for the public good to install mandatory car event-recorders that are downloadable at distance by law enforcement agencies in order to ticket faulty drivers, there shall be no argument against it.
With the increase in road-rage accidents, and the use of heavier, ill-balanced SUVs who tip over when driven like cars (hey, asshole, what you're driving is a truck, not a Lamborghini Countacci), public safety demands the strictest driver accountability.
Since law enforcement cannot be anywhere, and have better things to do than give speeding tickets, road laws enforcement shall be automated ("Welcome Korben Dallas, you have 5 points left on your license").
... but in other countries (like France or Canada, for example), where there is not a bourgeois-implanted widespread distrust of the State, the State endeavours in protecting the public interest in restricting the "freedom" of the most powerful to crush the lesser folks.
NASA has been subverted! The terrorists have won!!!