No, actually. A democracy (direct or representative) uses "voting" to collectively decide things. Which is what we are doing when we go to the polls in November 2016. We'll never get 100% agreement, so you or I may decide that our opinions were ignored, but this is how democracy works. Non-collective agreements are what you get with dictators of various stripes who cannot be removed from office.
I'd be happier if the results were less skewed by billions of dollars of legal bribery (AKA campaign funding), but we've decided that we're okay with that, unfortunately.
Sure it has; in the late 1800s and early 1900s there were almost no taxes and few subsidies. Everyone (but mostly the very rich) kept their money and spent it however they liked. The results were so unpleasant that the country decided that unions and OSHA, for all of their problems, were preferable to that state.
The problem with "spending our money as we see fit" is that we ignore externalities. I live in PA; our cheapest power comes from coal plants. Coal causes really bad health problems once it is burned and released into the air; modern exhaust scrubbers help but we still end up with lots of crud entering our lungs. But the health costs are an externality to the coal plants, so coal power's price is artificially low. I still pay the total cost in higher health care costs and a shorter working life, but it doesn't appear as a line item anywhere. By subsidizing solar panels and other less-polluting energies, the hope is to spend money now to reduce medicare and health insurance costs for the next 50 years. You may believe that this will not same you money overall, or that there is a better way to go about this, but it's not an illogical or crazy plan.
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't know. Malware authors tend to have ads that link to non-malware sites at first, and change to malware after the ads have been vetted. They know how to detect when Google/Microsoft/etc checks up on them and serve innocent data at those times.
There are ways to detect this, and ways to avoid the detection; it's an arms race. Google is better at this than Microsoft, so studies have shown that you are safer on Google than on Bing. But nothing is 100%, and sometimes people slip malware past Google too.
So it's not malice on Microsoft's part, as you seem to imply. Less competence maybe, or a lack of resources thrown at the problem, or a lack of corporate will; I don't know.
That's a very good point, though it doesn't disprove the GP. People consider a source trustworthy if the source agrees with them. Most news agencies know this but still try to be accurate or at least not inaccurate (though always with some bias). Some news agencies, Fox being a notable example, have instead decided to use this trait to gain loyal viewers.
Google's personalized search results may have the same effect; if its results confirm your biases, you'll be happier with the results. I don't know if this actually happens with Google; when I want to know the distance to geostationary orbit I don't have much of a bias to confirm.
Was this a five pound or a hundred pound drone? Both are available and it's hard to put them on the scale when they're a few hundred yards away and flying.
Even a five pound hunk of metal and batteries seems like a bad thing to go into a propeller or a jet engine. A hundred pound hunk of metal? Ouch.
Good idea. Enforce public safety by firing guns high in the air when there are firefighters, houses, cars, civilians on the ground all within a few miles of the fire. What could possibly go wrong?
So we agree: nobody believed this before the ACA was passed in 2010. It would have been easier if you had just admitted this, though, instead of producing quotes from years later.
Also, Gruber is a "key architect" only in the minds of those who want to inflate the importance of his comments (look, they lied about this too!). He was heavily involved in some of the economic models underlying the bill, but hardly key or an architect. (He has called himself a "key architect of Romneycare", but since Romneycare is a model of conservative values from the Heritage Foundation while Obamacare is a socialist takeover of health care, I don't see how that matters.:-) ) I think he's also said he was mistaken in those comments, but whatever; he believed it enough at that time to say it even if he was the only one.
What? Nobody interpreted it that way. Hell, originally nobody thought that any state wouldn't set up their own exchange; the federal exchange was mostly for "what if some moronic state thinks they'll protest by not setting up an exchange, we better cover that loophole".
Seriously, find a news story from before the ACA was passed which has that interpretation. Show, don't tell. It was invented after the fact by folks who found that democracy wasn't getting them their way so they tried judicial activism instead.
If you actually believe that people interpreted it that way, then I assume that you've been listening to pundits who have been lying to you. I suggest you verify this, then find some people to listen to who don't lie to you. There are a lot of lies about the ACA out there, and you cannot make a good decision if you believe lies instead of truths.
Agreed. The government should just stay out of regulating marriage. And that's what the SCOTUS said today, that the government cannot regulate who you can marry (except in the cases of non-consent). Not the federal government, not the state, not any.
I assume that you are happy that the government is, in this case, more out of our lives?
I actually think that polygamy would be mostly accepted now, except that most widespread cases of it in the US (see the Mormans) have been about rewarding powerful older men with new pretty young wives, generally without considering the opinion of any of the women. For some reason that has turned public opinion against polygamy, but I expect that to change over the next few decades.
Also, property rights are tightly tied to marriage and would need some major rewriting if you could transfer property tax-free by "marrying", transfer, "divorcing". I'm actually surprised nobody has tried this yet.
Actually, the ACA opinion basically said "if a law has an unclear section, then it should be read as agreeing with every other section of that law, rather than completely on its own". Scalia's dissent was "no, you must interpret the law exactly! No changes!"
As opposed to his Hobby Lobby opinion, which was "the law says this, but clearly we should interpret it to mean all this other stuff too!".
I don't usually agree with Roberts, but he seems mostly willing to rule based on the law, as opposed to Scalia and Alito who seem to bend the law to fit their politics. I mean, changing the meaning of the ACA would have been the very definition of "activist judges", making laws from the bench.
"Okay" is relative. I often wish the world were different, but given how the Internet works and how HTTP works, privacy is really hard. Given that, I don't waste time trying to put genies back in bottles.
So I'm trying to make a world where I don't have to be ashamed of (and cannot be fired from my job for) a diaper fetish. Where I cannot be refused insurance if someone finds out I have an expensive illness. Where I can be any gender (or no gender) I want. Cameras on phones and on streets are never going away, so I want just as many cameras pointed at police and at corporations as they have pointed at us.
Ads are not going away, so I'd rather the money they generate helps support the websites I like.
You mean that advertising companies that put ads on both Facebook and eBay know how to look at referrer links? So they're sending you ads for something that you are interested in, rather than personal lube and adult diapers? (Unless that's what you searched for on eBay, of course.) Seems like a relative win. Sure, facebook without ads would be better, but then you'd have... no facebook, so as much as I personally dislike facebook, that would not be a win.
I have fuck all money and so buy very little of anything apart from food. Will my local supermarket be Googlified in some way? Will I find myself suddenly drawn to a different aisle?
Not unless you've had wifi implanted in your spinal cord. (Maybe that's after the self-driving car is released?)
I take the subway back and forth to and from the same stops. Will Google influence how I do this?
Only if you use google maps to determine which subways stops to use. Which I did last time I was in NYC; it worked great! Rather than worrying about how I would get from hotel -> dinner -> entertainment -> hotel, I just followed the directions to the appropriate station; the only difficulty was figuring out which direction train I should take.
I would like to stop seeing irrelevant & useless ads, and I would like the websites I use to continue getting enough money to operate.
If I see no ads, then I get one wish but not the other (more important) one.
If I see relevant & useful ads, I get both wishes. Sure, I'd rather see no ads, but if the cost is "lose many websites I like", then the price is way too high.
I am curious why you think that getting rid of google would decrease the number of ads you see? It seems like on google sites I see a few ads and a lot of content, while on other sites I cannot find the content behind the flashing, auto-playing, screen-covering ads.
That is not enough; you also need to stop people from changing lanes into you or driving into your rear when you stop. Teslas cannot help with that; that is why we need fully autonomous cars.
No, but just because someone doesn't want to learn doesn't mean you should give up trying to teach them. Fact-checking sites will never stop politicians and businesspeople from lying, but that doesn't mean we should stop calling out lies. Doctors cannot save everyone's lives, but that doesn't mean they should stop trying.
Oh, in that case, I regularly fly in airplanes that are faster than military fighter jets. I board, fall asleep, the plane flies across the country, I wake up. Using my own subjective time and the objective distance the plane has travelled, I've moved at about mach 10.
In terms of someone else (not moving that fast), you moved 100 ly in 101 years.
So you only moved faster than light if you use your time with someone else's distance. I mean, you can divide anything by anything else, but that doesn't mean the resulting number means anything.:-)
Nah. Truly ignorant cunts (your word) quote that line without ever realizing that it doesn't mean what they want it to mean. That is ignorance in the true meaning of the word.
And also use sexist "insults" because they are threatened by females, but always deny that.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, because if you're not 100% guaranteed success, you should never even try?
No, actually. A democracy (direct or representative) uses "voting" to collectively decide things. Which is what we are doing when we go to the polls in November 2016. We'll never get 100% agreement, so you or I may decide that our opinions were ignored, but this is how democracy works. Non-collective agreements are what you get with dictators of various stripes who cannot be removed from office.
I'd be happier if the results were less skewed by billions of dollars of legal bribery (AKA campaign funding), but we've decided that we're okay with that, unfortunately.
Sure it has; in the late 1800s and early 1900s there were almost no taxes and few subsidies. Everyone (but mostly the very rich) kept their money and spent it however they liked. The results were so unpleasant that the country decided that unions and OSHA, for all of their problems, were preferable to that state.
The problem with "spending our money as we see fit" is that we ignore externalities. I live in PA; our cheapest power comes from coal plants. Coal causes really bad health problems once it is burned and released into the air; modern exhaust scrubbers help but we still end up with lots of crud entering our lungs. But the health costs are an externality to the coal plants, so coal power's price is artificially low. I still pay the total cost in higher health care costs and a shorter working life, but it doesn't appear as a line item anywhere. By subsidizing solar panels and other less-polluting energies, the hope is to spend money now to reduce medicare and health insurance costs for the next 50 years. You may believe that this will not same you money overall, or that there is a better way to go about this, but it's not an illogical or crazy plan.
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't know. Malware authors tend to have ads that link to non-malware sites at first, and change to malware after the ads have been vetted. They know how to detect when Google/Microsoft/etc checks up on them and serve innocent data at those times.
There are ways to detect this, and ways to avoid the detection; it's an arms race. Google is better at this than Microsoft, so studies have shown that you are safer on Google than on Bing. But nothing is 100%, and sometimes people slip malware past Google too.
So it's not malice on Microsoft's part, as you seem to imply. Less competence maybe, or a lack of resources thrown at the problem, or a lack of corporate will; I don't know.
That's a very good point, though it doesn't disprove the GP. People consider a source trustworthy if the source agrees with them. Most news agencies know this but still try to be accurate or at least not inaccurate (though always with some bias). Some news agencies, Fox being a notable example, have instead decided to use this trait to gain loyal viewers.
Google's personalized search results may have the same effect; if its results confirm your biases, you'll be happier with the results. I don't know if this actually happens with Google; when I want to know the distance to geostationary orbit I don't have much of a bias to confirm.
Was this a five pound or a hundred pound drone? Both are available and it's hard to put them on the scale when they're a few hundred yards away and flying.
Even a five pound hunk of metal and batteries seems like a bad thing to go into a propeller or a jet engine. A hundred pound hunk of metal? Ouch.
Good idea. Enforce public safety by firing guns high in the air when there are firefighters, houses, cars, civilians on the ground all within a few miles of the fire. What could possibly go wrong?
So we agree: nobody believed this before the ACA was passed in 2010. It would have been easier if you had just admitted this, though, instead of producing quotes from years later.
Also, Gruber is a "key architect" only in the minds of those who want to inflate the importance of his comments (look, they lied about this too!). He was heavily involved in some of the economic models underlying the bill, but hardly key or an architect. (He has called himself a "key architect of Romneycare", but since Romneycare is a model of conservative values from the Heritage Foundation while Obamacare is a socialist takeover of health care, I don't see how that matters. :-) ) I think he's also said he was mistaken in those comments, but whatever; he believed it enough at that time to say it even if he was the only one.
What? Nobody interpreted it that way. Hell, originally nobody thought that any state wouldn't set up their own exchange; the federal exchange was mostly for "what if some moronic state thinks they'll protest by not setting up an exchange, we better cover that loophole".
Seriously, find a news story from before the ACA was passed which has that interpretation. Show, don't tell. It was invented after the fact by folks who found that democracy wasn't getting them their way so they tried judicial activism instead.
If you actually believe that people interpreted it that way, then I assume that you've been listening to pundits who have been lying to you. I suggest you verify this, then find some people to listen to who don't lie to you. There are a lot of lies about the ACA out there, and you cannot make a good decision if you believe lies instead of truths.
Agreed. The government should just stay out of regulating marriage. And that's what the SCOTUS said today, that the government cannot regulate who you can marry (except in the cases of non-consent). Not the federal government, not the state, not any.
I assume that you are happy that the government is, in this case, more out of our lives?
And Scalia voted against that too. It's a bit creepy how much he cares about what other people do in their bedrooms.
I actually think that polygamy would be mostly accepted now, except that most widespread cases of it in the US (see the Mormans) have been about rewarding powerful older men with new pretty young wives, generally without considering the opinion of any of the women. For some reason that has turned public opinion against polygamy, but I expect that to change over the next few decades.
Also, property rights are tightly tied to marriage and would need some major rewriting if you could transfer property tax-free by "marrying", transfer, "divorcing". I'm actually surprised nobody has tried this yet.
Actually, the ACA opinion basically said "if a law has an unclear section, then it should be read as agreeing with every other section of that law, rather than completely on its own". Scalia's dissent was "no, you must interpret the law exactly! No changes!"
As opposed to his Hobby Lobby opinion, which was "the law says this, but clearly we should interpret it to mean all this other stuff too!".
Scalia: strict textualism always ALWAYS unless it's inconvenient.
I don't usually agree with Roberts, but he seems mostly willing to rule based on the law, as opposed to Scalia and Alito who seem to bend the law to fit their politics. I mean, changing the meaning of the ACA would have been the very definition of "activist judges", making laws from the bench.
"Okay" is relative. I often wish the world were different, but given how the Internet works and how HTTP works, privacy is really hard. Given that, I don't waste time trying to put genies back in bottles.
So I'm trying to make a world where I don't have to be ashamed of (and cannot be fired from my job for) a diaper fetish. Where I cannot be refused insurance if someone finds out I have an expensive illness. Where I can be any gender (or no gender) I want. Cameras on phones and on streets are never going away, so I want just as many cameras pointed at police and at corporations as they have pointed at us.
Ads are not going away, so I'd rather the money they generate helps support the websites I like.
You mean that advertising companies that put ads on both Facebook and eBay know how to look at referrer links? So they're sending you ads for something that you are interested in, rather than personal lube and adult diapers? (Unless that's what you searched for on eBay, of course.) Seems like a relative win. Sure, facebook without ads would be better, but then you'd have... no facebook, so as much as I personally dislike facebook, that would not be a win.
I have fuck all money and so buy very little of anything apart from food. Will my local supermarket be Googlified in some way? Will I find myself suddenly drawn to a different aisle?
Not unless you've had wifi implanted in your spinal cord. (Maybe that's after the self-driving car is released?)
I take the subway back and forth to and from the same stops. Will Google influence how I do this?
Only if you use google maps to determine which subways stops to use. Which I did last time I was in NYC; it worked great! Rather than worrying about how I would get from hotel -> dinner -> entertainment -> hotel, I just followed the directions to the appropriate station; the only difficulty was figuring out which direction train I should take.
I would like to stop seeing irrelevant & useless ads, and I would like the websites I use to continue getting enough money to operate.
If I see no ads, then I get one wish but not the other (more important) one.
If I see relevant & useful ads, I get both wishes. Sure, I'd rather see no ads, but if the cost is "lose many websites I like", then the price is way too high.
I am curious why you think that getting rid of google would decrease the number of ads you see? It seems like on google sites I see a few ads and a lot of content, while on other sites I cannot find the content behind the flashing, auto-playing, screen-covering ads.
That is not enough; you also need to stop people from changing lanes into you or driving into your rear when you stop. Teslas cannot help with that; that is why we need fully autonomous cars.
No, but just because someone doesn't want to learn doesn't mean you should give up trying to teach them. Fact-checking sites will never stop politicians and businesspeople from lying, but that doesn't mean we should stop calling out lies. Doctors cannot save everyone's lives, but that doesn't mean they should stop trying.
You may have a different idea of "free" than I do, unless you consider your labor free. In which case, I have some arable land...
Oh, in that case, I regularly fly in airplanes that are faster than military fighter jets. I board, fall asleep, the plane flies across the country, I wake up. Using my own subjective time and the objective distance the plane has travelled, I've moved at about mach 10.
In your terms, you travelled 10 ly in 10.1 years.
In terms of someone else (not moving that fast), you moved 100 ly in 101 years.
So you only moved faster than light if you use your time with someone else's distance. I mean, you can divide anything by anything else, but that doesn't mean the resulting number means anything. :-)
people can have perfectly fine private systems to deal with criminals, with murder, theft, breaches of contract and any type of harm.
So, the best justice money can buy.
Our system is not perfect, but a system where only the rich can get justice does not seem an improvement.
Nah. Truly ignorant cunts (your word) quote that line without ever realizing that it doesn't mean what they want it to mean. That is ignorance in the true meaning of the word.
And also use sexist "insults" because they are threatened by females, but always deny that.
More to the point, they who make the profits should also get the risks.