Hate to pick a nit, but they don't cease to be state actors just because they've lost their authority. Otherwise you'd have no constitutional remedy (where the remedy is only available against state actors).
Well yes, but what's interesting about it is that there is no authority from the top at all. The bureaucrats are acting without authority from an elected government, or from an unelected dictator, or anyone really. I suppose technically that means the authority is currently residing in the top bureaucrat, making Belgium a true Bureaucratic state. But you could also say that the whole system continues to run on no authority at all, especially if the top bureaucrats are acting on the basis that they are maintaining the status quo until someone comes along and takes authority. If the latter proposition most closely resembles reality, then one could surmise that the Government is in fact headless, and the bureaucrats (who are after all just ordinary people) at all levels are acting collectively for the people while the head figures out where it is. This could in fact signal the very beginnings of a workable anarchic state, especially if the situation persists for a long time. It's an interesting situation.
Forget it, you're not going to win a rational argument with someone on a subject they can't be rational about. The indoctrination since childbirth to believe that no ID cards and easy access to weapons makes a free society runs too deep.
The economy was good, but the poor were still getting poorer, and the middle class were getting increasingly more self-centred and scared of their own shadows.
But don't worry, in a year or two, if we don't reverse the trend toward a more community-oriented attitude, you might even get to experience what it's like to have to sleep in a park yourself, along with me and the rest of the middle class. See you there.
Junkies and drug dealers can be gotten rid of by families actually using the parks; nobody wants to do a deal or shoot up where there are a dozen respectable folk with cell phones hanging around.
As for the homeless and crazy, maybe it's not such a bad thing to expose your children to these people, even encourage your kids to talk to them; might make your kids wonder why the richest country in the world even has homeless and crazy people wandering around. It might even make them wonder if there's anything they can do about it.
Well let's see: when I was a little boy we went unsupervised all the time. Violent crime has gone steadily down since I was a kid so why are people are more afraid of letting their kids play unsupervised? Just because we've been trained to fear danger more and more doesn't mean that we or our kids are actually in more danger.
And also, one of the perks of living in a neighbourhood where the families are acquainted with each other is that even when your eyes are not on your kid, other neighbours' eyes are, and if something goes wrong you can count on them to help your kid if needed (with the understanding that you do the same for your neighbour's kid). I'm not a Christian by any means, but "love thy neighbour" was a good practical piece of advice.
The people using the parks will act much less like assholes if they know each other. This is what community is all about. People behave better to those they know than those they don't know. It's the Golden Rule in action.
As for the condition of your parks, might I suggest a modest tax increase, sufficient to allow the municipality to maintain the parks? And failing that, a neighbourhood park maintenance co-op group?
Using your shitty parks as an excuse not to get to know your neighbours, when getting to know them is the best, cheapest solution to your shitty-park problem betrays a shocking lack of reasoning on your part. And yet you're not stupid (presumably). Have we come so far in our hyper-individualistic culture that we can't even see neighbourliness as a possible solution to our problems? Even the problems that were created by hyper-individualism in the first place?
The association may go away, but the muscle memory does not. I installed Lion, took a few days to get used to the new scrolling direction. Despite the lack of scroll bars my natural habit was to scroll against the direction of the content, the way I've been doing it for years. Note also that I have an iPhone, so it's not as if the "pull-down" style is unfamiliar to me -- just in the context of my laptop. What felt natural on my phone felt bizarre on my laptop trackpad, even without the scroll bars.
When I got my hands re-trained on the laptop, I found that they re-trained on scroll-wheels on mice too. Now at work, where I use a Win7 machine, I constantly try to scroll in the "wrong" direction. Major pain in my ass. Needless to say, I've switched the laptop back to the previous scrolling direction, and am again re-training my hands to accept that.
As far as I'm concerned, changing the default scroll behaviour in Lion was a bad decision. Thankfully I can still reverse it, but who the hell thought it'd be a good idea in the first place?
Real. I'm using it right now. The guy who wrote it is pretty good at keeping on top of bug-fixes and whatnot. There are extensions for chrome, ff, and I think Safari, but the chrome one is naturally the most up-to-date.
You sure? I see the $599 iPhone selling for $50. I guess it depends on how long you hold onto your gear.
That's a first generation iPhone you've linked to. I'd bet money that other hardware companies can't even give away, brand new, the phones they made that were contemporaneous with the iPhone 1st Gen.
The surprise with Apple gear isn't that it has a higher resale value than the competition; it's that unlike the competition, Apple products have a resale value at all.
For those not from the Great White North, or not near it's southern border, "timmies" is slang for Tim Horton's, a chain of shitty donut and scorched coffee stores. Named after a hockey player: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Horton
Easiest solution short of genocide or mass sterilization:
-- Make everything artificially more expensive, and don't subsidize children. Literately make the cost of having more than 2 children prohibitive so we stop getting welfare whores popping out babies so they don't have to work. --
Overpopulation isn't a problem in nations that can afford a welfare state: those countries are running negative population growth rates, and most of them are bringing in immigrants to make up the difference and encourage economic growth. Where the population is still growing, the governments don't much go in for welfare.
Having 8 children probably means you have to buy huge land yachts for automobiles, and go through thousands of dollars in food per month.
For most people in the world, having eight children means you're probably already starving or malnourished, and you consider the children to be assets. The first few can be put to work to increase the family income, the next few are around in case the first ones die, and any remaining can be sold into slavery (this seems terribly cold and brutal, but hunger can make people do terribly cold and brutal things). A big part of the current problem is that people in the developing world are having lots of kids as a response to their dire conditions, but at the same time those conditions are getting better (less kids dying early). The prediction is that as things continue to get better in the developing world, people will have less kids, and the population will level off. The problem is that by the time this happens, there will be 8 or 9 billion people in the world all living a first-world lifestyle.
In theory (just like communisim) it could work, but in practice what will more likely happen is that governments won't have the balls to eliminate to cut entitlements on child tax credits.
Maybe true, but not for the reasons you think. It'll be the "Them dirty immigrunts took ar jerbs!" contingent that will push politicians to maintain policies favourable to increasing the numbers of children born in Western countries. Any government could end child tax benefits right now and ramp up immigration, but I'm not holding my breath.
"I honestly don't understand the belief system which posits humans are not only not animals, but are somehow worse than animals, and that animals are all wholesome and pure, with winning personalities to boot."
Slashdot Mirror
And while you're at it, can you find one that isn't full of ferocious nerds arguing about the semantics of Relativity?
A newt?
Hate to pick a nit, but they don't cease to be state actors just because they've lost their authority. Otherwise you'd have no constitutional remedy (where the remedy is only available against state actors).
Well yes, but what's interesting about it is that there is no authority from the top at all. The bureaucrats are acting without authority from an elected government, or from an unelected dictator, or anyone really. I suppose technically that means the authority is currently residing in the top bureaucrat, making Belgium a true Bureaucratic state. But you could also say that the whole system continues to run on no authority at all, especially if the top bureaucrats are acting on the basis that they are maintaining the status quo until someone comes along and takes authority. If the latter proposition most closely resembles reality, then one could surmise that the Government is in fact headless, and the bureaucrats (who are after all just ordinary people) at all levels are acting collectively for the people while the head figures out where it is. This could in fact signal the very beginnings of a workable anarchic state, especially if the situation persists for a long time. It's an interesting situation.
Canada?
Indeed, why aren't libertarians holding up Belgium as a shining model of Anarchy in action?
Forget it, you're not going to win a rational argument with someone on a subject they can't be rational about. The indoctrination since childbirth to believe that no ID cards and easy access to weapons makes a free society runs too deep.
The economy was good, but the poor were still getting poorer, and the middle class were getting increasingly more self-centred and scared of their own shadows.
But don't worry, in a year or two, if we don't reverse the trend toward a more community-oriented attitude, you might even get to experience what it's like to have to sleep in a park yourself, along with me and the rest of the middle class. See you there.
Junkies and drug dealers can be gotten rid of by families actually using the parks; nobody wants to do a deal or shoot up where there are a dozen respectable folk with cell phones hanging around.
As for the homeless and crazy, maybe it's not such a bad thing to expose your children to these people, even encourage your kids to talk to them; might make your kids wonder why the richest country in the world even has homeless and crazy people wandering around. It might even make them wonder if there's anything they can do about it.
Well let's see: when I was a little boy we went unsupervised all the time. Violent crime has gone steadily down since I was a kid so why are people are more afraid of letting their kids play unsupervised? Just because we've been trained to fear danger more and more doesn't mean that we or our kids are actually in more danger.
And also, one of the perks of living in a neighbourhood where the families are acquainted with each other is that even when your eyes are not on your kid, other neighbours' eyes are, and if something goes wrong you can count on them to help your kid if needed (with the understanding that you do the same for your neighbour's kid). I'm not a Christian by any means, but "love thy neighbour" was a good practical piece of advice.
The people using the parks will act much less like assholes if they know each other. This is what community is all about. People behave better to those they know than those they don't know. It's the Golden Rule in action.
As for the condition of your parks, might I suggest a modest tax increase, sufficient to allow the municipality to maintain the parks? And failing that, a neighbourhood park maintenance co-op group?
Using your shitty parks as an excuse not to get to know your neighbours, when getting to know them is the best, cheapest solution to your shitty-park problem betrays a shocking lack of reasoning on your part. And yet you're not stupid (presumably). Have we come so far in our hyper-individualistic culture that we can't even see neighbourliness as a possible solution to our problems? Even the problems that were created by hyper-individualism in the first place?
Yeah, but then if Americans built parks, they'd have to get to know their neighbours.
The association may go away, but the muscle memory does not. I installed Lion, took a few days to get used to the new scrolling direction. Despite the lack of scroll bars my natural habit was to scroll against the direction of the content, the way I've been doing it for years. Note also that I have an iPhone, so it's not as if the "pull-down" style is unfamiliar to me -- just in the context of my laptop. What felt natural on my phone felt bizarre on my laptop trackpad, even without the scroll bars.
When I got my hands re-trained on the laptop, I found that they re-trained on scroll-wheels on mice too. Now at work, where I use a Win7 machine, I constantly try to scroll in the "wrong" direction. Major pain in my ass. Needless to say, I've switched the laptop back to the previous scrolling direction, and am again re-training my hands to accept that.
As far as I'm concerned, changing the default scroll behaviour in Lion was a bad decision. Thankfully I can still reverse it, but who the hell thought it'd be a good idea in the first place?
Real. I'm using it right now. The guy who wrote it is pretty good at keeping on top of bug-fixes and whatnot. There are extensions for chrome, ff, and I think Safari, but the chrome one is naturally the most up-to-date.
And is again working fine. Beta update is available, approximately one hour until it hits the store.
dr. ;-)
Yes. RTFA.
You sure? I see the $599 iPhone selling for $50. I guess it depends on how long you hold onto your gear.
That's a first generation iPhone you've linked to. I'd bet money that other hardware companies can't even give away, brand new, the phones they made that were contemporaneous with the iPhone 1st Gen.
The surprise with Apple gear isn't that it has a higher resale value than the competition; it's that unlike the competition, Apple products have a resale value at all.
Starbucks has better coffee, but is more pretentious. Tim Horton's is more working-class, though not exclusively so.
For those not from the Great White North, or not near it's southern border, "timmies" is slang for Tim Horton's, a chain of shitty donut and scorched coffee stores. Named after a hockey player: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Horton
FTFY
Easiest solution short of genocide or mass sterilization:
-- Make everything artificially more expensive, and don't subsidize children. Literately make the cost of having more than 2 children prohibitive so we stop getting welfare whores popping out babies so they don't have to work. --
Overpopulation isn't a problem in nations that can afford a welfare state: those countries are running negative population growth rates, and most of them are bringing in immigrants to make up the difference and encourage economic growth. Where the population is still growing, the governments don't much go in for welfare.
Having 8 children probably means you have to buy huge land yachts for automobiles, and go through thousands of dollars in food per month.
For most people in the world, having eight children means you're probably already starving or malnourished, and you consider the children to be assets. The first few can be put to work to increase the family income, the next few are around in case the first ones die, and any remaining can be sold into slavery (this seems terribly cold and brutal, but hunger can make people do terribly cold and brutal things). A big part of the current problem is that people in the developing world are having lots of kids as a response to their dire conditions, but at the same time those conditions are getting better (less kids dying early). The prediction is that as things continue to get better in the developing world, people will have less kids, and the population will level off. The problem is that by the time this happens, there will be 8 or 9 billion people in the world all living a first-world lifestyle.
In theory (just like communisim) it could work, but in practice what will more likely happen is that governments won't have the balls to eliminate to cut entitlements on child tax credits.
Maybe true, but not for the reasons you think. It'll be the "Them dirty immigrunts took ar jerbs!" contingent that will push politicians to maintain policies favourable to increasing the numbers of children born in Western countries. Any government could end child tax benefits right now and ramp up immigration, but I'm not holding my breath.
Could you provide some links? My Google-fu has failed me.
"I honestly don't understand the belief system which posits humans are not only not animals, but are somehow worse than animals, and that animals are all wholesome and pure, with winning personalities to boot."
I blame Disney. And the Bible.
By selling more of them.
So that's it! You've figured out how to tell if someone on the Internet is a dog! Well done, sir!
Amen.