LOL. I noticed none of you answered my questions. None of you can while holding to your description of socialism, and you know it.
I also can show you current dictionaries which agree with me, and all you provided were assertions. Merriam-Webster has been an acknowledged authority for many decades. They aren't politically correct, but they are accurate.
Go read Marx and Engels for yourselves and get the truth of what socialism is for yourselves.
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods 2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state 3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
You're a damned fool if you think the last 50 years of decline in the American economy is prosperity.
Inflation and debt are not prosperity. Fifty years ago a single income household was the norm, and there were two cars in the garage, appliances in the house, and a far larger proportion of savings in the bank. The government paid down our WWII debt, and we basically financed the all of the Allies, among whom only Finland paid off its debt, in less than a decade.
Now our government is loaded with debt it cannot pay back in our lifetimes. If it is paid off it will be paid off by our great grandchildren. We are now running larger deficits every year than all Obama's predecessors spent in total. Add to that our unfunded liabilities and our debt load is, according to many who keep track of these numbers between $74 and $114+ trillion. Soon just the interest on our debt will be equal to the gdp. That's a completely unsustainable debt load.
Most families are now two-income families. That means it takes two people working to sustain the same level of lifestyle that one person sustained 50 years ago.
And you call looming, inevitable, bankruptcy, if we continue our current political and economic course, prosperity? Since when did being flat broke become the equivalent of being prosperous?
That you do not understand what socialism is comes through loud and clear from your description of it.
You can claim whatever you want, but it doesn't make your claims true. Someone may have given you that description of socialism, but it is not a true description. Socialism is a form of government. That means it affects every part of the individual's life.
You want to get rid of capitalism and the republic form of government of the US and replace it with individual groups of people(who are not politicians in any meaning of the word) who control the transportation, water and firefighting infrastructure. Really? What kind of stupidity is that? I'd say you haven't thought these ideas through at all. It is very obvious that you have never considered the "unexpected consequences" of what you have accepted as true. How is your view of control over transportation, water and firefighting not government, no matter who does it, come about? Just how do you accomplish this without taking over many businesses? You know, nationalization, because you cannot run these services on a local level with things like national airlines and railroads? Where will you get the power to do this? Do you just expect these companies to roll over and let you take over? Or, do you think you'll need a change in the form of national government that will give you the power to do this? Just what does that mean? Does the national government will now only control water, firefighting, and transportation?
Just how do you propose to get rid of what you see as the evils of capitalism, or do you see the "evils of capitalism" as only the way transportation, firefighting, and water distribution are done in a republic in which capitalism is practiced? I find you to have a very poorly thought out political philosophy.
Capitalism isn't the problem, and the problem cannot be cured by the central planning required by socialism. The problem is greed and a lack of morality and caring about our fellow citizens/neighbors. Free enterprise hurts no one, and denies no freedom if it is engaged in by honest, moral people.
Socialism, by its very design, requires servitude on the part of the individual and cannot control greed. It requires servitude because it puts all control into the power of the government and has no controls built into it to control greed, ambition, and corruption by politicians.
So, if given a choice between the two, I'll take the first choice every time. Both systems are susceptible to greed and dishonest politicians, but one literally cedes individual freedom to the government and the other does not.
The reason our republic is failing is because socialists have placed legislative rules in place that make certain areas of our government and businesses fail, and then point to that failure as the failure of our type of government. It's classic misdirection.
You mistake socialism for solid principles of government.
Socialism is central planning of everything. It means a faceless bureaucrat in Washington, who cannot be voted out of office, makes all decisions that affect every aspect of your life, rather than you making them. It means a model that everyone has to mold themselves into, not a form of government that allows the individual the freedom to choose for themselves how they will live their life. This second form of government is why people have been leaving their homelands and immigrating to the US ever since we became a nation.
The US has always had one part of the government or another take care of utilities to a certain extent. However, until the progressives came into power this was all done at the local level. For example, counties and townships were responsible for roads and education so the people paying the taxes to support these services also had a direct control over how the money was spent as if they didn't like what was being done they voted the individual out. Since both the politician and the voters lived in the same area it was much easier to hold the politician accountable. As you can see this is exactly the opposite of socialism. It's decentralized control of major factors that affect the individual and cedes control to the individual.
Read Democracy in America to see how American government used to work and see how far we have moved away from the system of government that made us prosperous and allowed great individual freedom.
And this is what makes socialism 100% unworkable, for those who push it think they know better the individual what is right for the individual. That's why Alexis de Toqueville said it's "equality in servitude" not "equality in liberty".
I'll take "equality in liberty" over "equality in servitude" every time.
I could care less if you want to destroy yourself. I think it's stupid, but that's beside the point. I've been there and done that, so for me to condemn you for what I've done myself would be pure hypocrisy. I'm just glad I came to understand what a waste it is, and how little real enjoyment there is in licentiousness. Why little "real enjoyment"? Because if a person has to use mind altering substances to think they're happy and enjoying life they're actually a very miserable, unhappy person. They just don't know themselves well enough to realize it yet.
As I said above my, post wasn't about condemnation. I was pointing out that you are confused when you think license to sin is liberty. It isn't. Read the entire Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, and you will find nothing encouraging license, or licentiousness. Instead, if you will read the writings of all of our founding fathers, you will find no support for those who would destroy themselves with licentiousness, not because of a feeling of superiority on their part, but because they scorned the idea that life is best spent in wasting it. All of them advocated exactly the opposite type of life that you think, and I once thought, of as wonderful.
You can read the writings of men such as John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc... online. A great deal of their writings available through different organizations, some public, some private, but regardless of organization type they make the material available at no cost.
Read the Federalist Papers, the anti-Federalist papers, Democracy in America, and old books, pre 1900, on our founding fathers. Much that is written today(since 1900 when progressives first came into real power: Woodrow Wilson) is nothing but socialist propaganda, and reading what the actual men wrote exposes as completely false.
The Gutenberg project has quite a bit of material written by our founders, as does libertyfund.org. Google is your friend when looking for info. Just start searching for our founding fathers or the published papers, such as the Federalist Papers, by name. You'll find them complete, and non-edited.
And you both mistakenly think liberty is the same thing as license, and that freedom is the equivalent of licentiousness. Neither license, nor licentiousness, lead to a better, more successful society. They lead, in fact, to the loss of liberty and freedom.
In the Northwest every community college has technical degree programs, from agriculture to building maintenance, to automotive mechanics and body work to heavy equipment, carpentry, etc.... Not all cc's have every program, but there are enough cc's and enough programs to give anyone who wants a chance at that kind of degree the opportunity to enter that kind of program.
I got a degree in Industrial Maintenance Technology in 1980 from a cc and turned it into a 20 year career as an HVAC/R service tech. The program was actually focused on hospital maintenance but those job openings are rare and usually filled by word of mouth. However, the training it gave in refrigeration and electrical theory, along with hands-on training with refrigeration equipment, was enough to get me in the door of an HVAC shop.
A good non-union tech in a small town where the average family makes $40K/year earns $25-$30/hour, and along with the overtime and on-call pay a tech gets during weather changes or extremes you can make a decent living. During weather extremes my take-home pay from wages alone would go up 30%. Some employers will add a commission on equipment and parts sales too. I averaged $600/week in commissions working in a small town shop on the Oregon coast back in the early 90's so it can create some decent income. In bigger cities union HVAC/R techs easily make twice that as they were making more than the small-town tech makes now about 15 years ago.
Being a tech is a decent job. You meet all kinds of people, run into a wide variety of technical issues on a daily basis, get paid for quite a bit of "windshield" time, and normally get a really good benefit package including a 401K, medical, dental and optical benefits as well as 2-4 weeks paid vacation a year depending on how long you've worked for an employer.
You're also very independent as no one is looking over your shoulder. You take your list of calls for the day and go do them. If something else comes in during the day that requires a tech right then you get a phone call telling you where you need to go. Other than that, you just do your thing, maybe call in orders for parts you need, and drive your van home at the end of the day. You turn in your paperwork the next morning when you pick up your calls for that day and restock your van. If you live in a rural area it's not unusual to get paid your regular wage for driving a 150 miles in a 10-11 hour day. At $25/hour that's a $300 day in wages, plus any commission on parts, which at 10% could easily be anywhere from $50-$150 depending on the repairs you had to make. Not every day would be that good, but then there would be days which would even be better. Sell a high efficiency heat pump to replace an old system with major problems and you would easily have a $300 day in commissions alone....
Not bad for a job requiring a high school education and 2 years of technical schooling plus 3-4 years experience and a few technical licenses.
If someone wrote a WindowsHater's Handbook highlighting all of Window's weaknesses you'd be accusing them of mindlessly hating on MS, and be using any slur you could think of to discredit the book. Of course that book would of necessity be a few thousand pages long, but that's besides the point. I bet you wouldn't be regretting the fact that MS wouldn't be reading it and responding to it by making changes in their priorities.
Me? I have to laugh at both the Unixhater's handbook and at Linuxhaters.com. A lot of the Unixhater's Handbook is tongue-in-cheek. Many of the supposed problems with Linux are nothing more than the unrealistic expectation that when a user changes operating systems they shouldn't have learn anything new to administer their system, or pretending the Unixhater's Handbook is 100% serious and so hating on Linux for the same reasons, as if MS is the only entity to ever do computing the "right way", and ignoring that fact that a lot of the "problems" with both Unix and Linux have been fixed years, if not more than a decade, ago.
Well, I guess you could figure MS's way is the only way if you agree with the idea that security vulnerabilities should be built into the system and called "features", as that's what MS did for decades and their software still suffers from that beginning vision. (Don't complain about this being from the past as you point to Linuxhater.com as valid and it contains problems fixed long ago.) It still suffers from Gate's idea that the only reason people will buy new software is if it has bloat, err, I mean new features, and so bugs and security are historically relegated to secondary priorities.
This is not insightful at all. Appeals to mob mentality and extending from "it has a lot of users" to "it must be good" is a major logical fallacy that is repeated far too often here.
If you haven't notices, most arguments here are one form of logical fallacy or another. The ad hominen fallacy is the most popular.
Defragging a Linux hard drive is only necessary under certain conditions. One is if you shrink a partition by a fair amount. Another is if you run your partitions at more than 80% full. The last one I know of is related to very odd file usage in which you regularly replace thousands of small files with very large files, something that doesn't happen very often in real life usage. That said, in 7 years of running Linux I've never found it necessary to defrag a hard drive.
Quite the opposite was true for NTFS drives under Windows. Even though fragmentation wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as it was under FAT, it still needed to be done occasionally, even with partitions with plenty of extra capacity.
Here's a good explanation of why Linux drives don't need to be defragged regularly. It's a little dated and is an overview, not a technical explanation, but it makes the subject understandable.
I had a long post all written out and somehow it just disappeared when hitting enter for a new paragraph, so the following will just have to do.
I'm not hypothesizing. You are.
I went to school with 2 sisters whose mother lost a restaurant due to them getting busted. A popular place to eat suddenly lost all its customers. That hamburger joint went from being busy all the time to closed within a year, and it was a great hamburger joint. They had good food. BTW, both sisters worked in that restaurant.
A guy I went to school with inherited a well-established, thriving nursery located on a busy 4 lane highway. If you wanted anything from flowers, to seedlings, to mature trees, to mulch, to lawn ornaments of all kinds, they had it. His father had been running the place for 30 years before he inherited it, and he ran it for more than a decade with no slowdown in business until he got busted for drugs. He closed his business and sold the property 2 years later because he had no customers left.
Another guy I went to school with got busted in his mid-twenties a couple of times and his father's dental practice of about 40 years went down the drain within 2 years.
There's three businesses I know of ruined because someone in a small town/rural area got busted for drugs. Any time you have someone in a lead position in a company busted for drugs it definitely affects that business. Now maybe if one of the peons doing manual labor gets busted it won't hurt the company, but anyone who holds a pivotal position in a company getting busted most certainly will affect it.
In high school, I was dropping my mom off at the doctor's in the nearby city one afternoon, when I broke one of my blinker covers. (Was squeezing into a narrow space, going about 0 mph because I was worried about hitting the bumper of the SUV next to me. Damn thing was *higher* than my bumper, so instead of touching, the SUV bumper cleared mine and took out the plastic covering my blinker.) At 8:30am the next morning, a kid in my school said to me, "so I heard you got into an accident last night..."
I grew up in one of those sorts of towns. And really, nothing reflected poorly on the local companies. Because anything YOU did was tied to YOU. Not to your company. Nobody decided not to go to the store I worked at because their employee had an accident. When a local guy got into an accident and got a DUI, everyone knew the lawyer he was going to hire, because he was one of the three in town. When he got off with a misdemeanor, everyone knew he was a drunk who got into an accident. But nobody boycotted his company. They might go in an harass him, but that was about it.
Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
It's true. but I've never seen the sort of "punish the company for bad employees" mentality of you and a couple other people in this thread. Did I just grow up in sensible towns, or is everyone just making up shit that doesn't happen in the real world?
You're looking at this from an unrealistic point-of-view. You're taking a fender bender and generalizing it to a drug bust. That's not a rational generalization.
Just imagine if you had been the head of IT at a local hospital, a manager at a local bank, a police dispatcher, or any other kind of position of responsibility that directly affects the public, and gotten busted for illegal drugs. The response to both you and your employer would have been a lot different. People would call into the question the ability of your employer to accurately judge the character of the people they hire to put in positions of responsibility, and thus lose faith in that business.
It's not punishing the business, per se, it's losing faith in the business owner's judgment and taking their business elsewhere because of that lost faith. Honor and character are words that still have meaning in small towns, and that's good thing. It means small towns are still reasonable places to live, and you can normally trust your neighbor. However, if you break that trust the small town can be a very uncomfortable place to live. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. People should hold each other accountable. Society benefits when they do.
as for company image, i haven't seen too many cases where people getting busted for drugs listed the company they worked for and what not, not unless the person was a high ranking official in the company that people otherwise knew anyway...
In small towns you don't have to post the name of the company you work for. People know who you work for and if your name gets posted in the newspaper it will get talked about by a lot of people and will reflect on the company you work for if you have a job with a lot of responsibility or one that requires strict integrity. Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
I'm not for drug testing, but only because of the personal privacy implications. Someone addicted enough to not be able to stop using long enough for the drugs to get out of their system, or not smart enough to use masking agents, will have a spotty employment record. There will be red flags in their history that will make it very difficult for them to get a job in which drug usage would affect their performance in critical situations. Thus, I don't believe that the loss of privacy involved in pre-employment drug testing is worth the insignificant benefit gained.
Drug testing by employers has had no measurable impact on drug use overall. Drug use has increased right along with drug testing, so drug testing is of no real value. It's just another feel-good "security" measure that does no real world good, but does help create in people more of the "sheeple" effect in which personal independence and liberty is extinguished more every day.
So what you're saying is that they end up thinking critically, except for the conspiracy theorists who end up thinking everything is critical.
No. That wasn't his point.
His point is that many people, both educated and uneducated, think being critical is critical thinking. This leads to arrogance on the part of many educated people who cannot accept that someone who is self-educated may very well have much better critical thinking skills than they do. In fact, that is often true, for the person who is self-educated had to learn to think things through on his own or else he would have learned nothing. He didn't have an authority figure there telling him what to think, he had to learn to think things through for himself..
Is DMZ the only border with mines? Because we all know of escapees via China (I don't know if you do). So if they manage to do it there... you never know.
"Cool killer robots" is still a nonsense. But the fact alone is to be expected in a cold war.
Oh, I see. You write what you consider to be inanities here?
Most escapees from China do so via water. Add to that the fact that the entire Chinese border isn't mined to the same extent that the entire border between SK and NK is. The NK side of the border alone has at least 1 million mines on a border only 155 miles long. That's more than 6400 mines/mile to go along with the approximately 1 million soldiers and fortified positions with few if any blind spots between them on the NK side of the border. That's a formidable gauntlet to run in addition to having a police state in which you have to document your permission to be present anywhere near the border at all times.
If I were a North Korean wanting to escape I'd be much more inclined to escape by water than I would be to run the gauntlet of mines and patrols on their side of the border. If I did escape that way, I wouldn't even see a robot. Besides, these are not autonomous robots. Someone is controlling them and my bet is that it has both a speaker and a microphone as well as an on board camera so it would be no different for someone who made it across the border to meet it than it would be for them to meet a human soldier. Both sides could still communicate.
Couple of boxing lessons (to learn how to properly punch/defend/move) and learning from MMA fighters in UFC (submitions and how to get out of them) is all you should really need.
I think you just lost your nerd card due to your inability to spell, use a spellchecker, and use a dictionary.
The act of submitting is called submission. Submition is not even a word.
If you were truly insightful as your mods say, you'd think about an occasional North Korean disedant that's trying to escape the oppressive regime that's perhaps making his life hell in say... worst gulags on the face of the earth. If you think truly that this is going to be a robot vs robot war, that's sad.
And if you were half as insightful as you think you are, you would realize that the NK's would kill him long before he got to SK's side of the DMZ. If they didn't shoot him after their sensors or one of their patrols found him, his chances of getting through the mine fields on the NK side of the border are nil.
The NK DMZ is designed to keep their own people in, as well as keep people out.
Now only civilians will die. Glad we are protecting the soldiers who are supposed to be protecting cvilians.
Are you ignorant with respect to what a DMZ is, stupid, or do you have some kind of political agenda? A DMZ in a civilian-free zone.... Civilians and military personnel of both sides are both banned from that zone. The robots are used to patrol on the SK side of the DMZ where US or SK troops patrol to make sure NK infiltrators aren't coming across the DMZ.
Neither side actually enters the DMZ unless they want to get shot at. They both patrol their respective sides of it though. Any civilian stupid enough to try to cross the DMZ will get blown up by a mine if they are able to actually enter it, and the DMZ is very well-marked with warning signs as well as having a chain link fence topped by razor wire along its entire length, so any civilian killed in the DMZ has to be extremely stupid, as well as strongly determined to go where they know they shouldn't. A civilian isn't going to be violating the DMZ accidentally no matter what is written in the news. It will be a deliberate act on their part and they will have had to ignore multiple levels of warnings and overcome many obstacles getting there.
I would suspect that the South Koreans have good reason for not wanting to allow Kim Jong-il access to more resources than he already has. Even though you've taught there for some time you still can't understand things from the Korean perspective and don't have access to all the info that they have. You've never suffered like they did at the hands of Kim Jong-il or had your relatives in the North starved to death by his policies.
Asking for a peace treaty to end the war you illiterate
And Kim Jong-il is asking for terms that cannot be tolerated, you illiterate idiot. Let him surrender unconditionally and the North Korean people will have food, water, and clothing in greater quantity and quality than they have had since Kim Jong-il came into power within weeks of their surrender. The only one to lose will be the heads of the government. The rest of the country will have freedom and a far greater standard of living than they have ever known.
Trust isn't necessary to start. We've got enough surveillance to see if they've taken a peaceful stance before signing a treaty. If it works, trust will grow and perhaps the country will stop being so paranoid and abusive.
Certainly the current strategy isn't doing any good for anyone but the military.
And if it doesn't, what do we have on our hands? A madman with greater military and financial resources to fulfill his dreams of personal aggrandizement and power. He won't use those resources to help his own people as he's never used what he has to help them. He'll just build his army up more in hopes of crushing South Korea.
Opening up the possibility of him having greater access to resources will do nothing more than increase the possibility of open warfare. That's something no sane person will do without at least a 95% chance of success, and Kim Jong-il has proven over the decades that the chances of success in doing something like are more like less than 5%. His character practically guarantees a 0% chance of success.
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LOL. I noticed none of you answered my questions. None of you can while holding to your description of socialism, and you know it.
I also can show you current dictionaries which agree with me, and all you provided were assertions. Merriam-Webster has been an acknowledged authority for many decades. They aren't politically correct, but they are accurate.
Go read Marx and Engels for yourselves and get the truth of what socialism is for yourselves.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
I make no mistake in describing socialism.
You're a damned fool if you think the last 50 years of decline in the American economy is prosperity.
Inflation and debt are not prosperity. Fifty years ago a single income household was the norm, and there were two cars in the garage, appliances in the house, and a far larger proportion of savings in the bank. The government paid down our WWII debt, and we basically financed the all of the Allies, among whom only Finland paid off its debt, in less than a decade.
Now our government is loaded with debt it cannot pay back in our lifetimes. If it is paid off it will be paid off by our great grandchildren. We are now running larger deficits every year than all Obama's predecessors spent in total. Add to that our unfunded liabilities and our debt load is, according to many who keep track of these numbers between $74 and $114+ trillion. Soon just the interest on our debt will be equal to the gdp. That's a completely unsustainable debt load.
Most families are now two-income families. That means it takes two people working to sustain the same level of lifestyle that one person sustained 50 years ago.
And you call looming, inevitable, bankruptcy, if we continue our current political and economic course, prosperity? Since when did being flat broke become the equivalent of being prosperous?
That you do not understand what socialism is comes through loud and clear from your description of it.
You can claim whatever you want, but it doesn't make your claims true. Someone may have given you that description of socialism, but it is not a true description. Socialism is a form of government. That means it affects every part of the individual's life.
You want to get rid of capitalism and the republic form of government of the US and replace it with individual groups of people(who are not politicians in any meaning of the word) who control the transportation, water and firefighting infrastructure. Really? What kind of stupidity is that? I'd say you haven't thought these ideas through at all. It is very obvious that you have never considered the "unexpected consequences" of what you have accepted as true. How is your view of control over transportation, water and firefighting not government, no matter who does it, come about? Just how do you accomplish this without taking over many businesses? You know, nationalization, because you cannot run these services on a local level with things like national airlines and railroads? Where will you get the power to do this? Do you just expect these companies to roll over and let you take over? Or, do you think you'll need a change in the form of national government that will give you the power to do this? Just what does that mean? Does the national government will now only control water, firefighting, and transportation?
Just how do you propose to get rid of what you see as the evils of capitalism, or do you see the "evils of capitalism" as only the way transportation, firefighting, and water distribution are done in a republic in which capitalism is practiced? I find you to have a very poorly thought out political philosophy.
Capitalism isn't the problem, and the problem cannot be cured by the central planning required by socialism. The problem is greed and a lack of morality and caring about our fellow citizens/neighbors. Free enterprise hurts no one, and denies no freedom if it is engaged in by honest, moral people.
Socialism, by its very design, requires servitude on the part of the individual and cannot control greed. It requires servitude because it puts all control into the power of the government and has no controls built into it to control greed, ambition, and corruption by politicians.
So, if given a choice between the two, I'll take the first choice every time. Both systems are susceptible to greed and dishonest politicians, but one literally cedes individual freedom to the government and the other does not.
The reason our republic is failing is because socialists have placed legislative rules in place that make certain areas of our government and businesses fail, and then point to that failure as the failure of our type of government. It's classic misdirection.
You mistake socialism for solid principles of government.
Socialism is central planning of everything. It means a faceless bureaucrat in Washington, who cannot be voted out of office, makes all decisions that affect every aspect of your life, rather than you making them. It means a model that everyone has to mold themselves into, not a form of government that allows the individual the freedom to choose for themselves how they will live their life. This second form of government is why people have been leaving their homelands and immigrating to the US ever since we became a nation.
The US has always had one part of the government or another take care of utilities to a certain extent. However, until the progressives came into power this was all done at the local level. For example, counties and townships were responsible for roads and education so the people paying the taxes to support these services also had a direct control over how the money was spent as if they didn't like what was being done they voted the individual out. Since both the politician and the voters lived in the same area it was much easier to hold the politician accountable. As you can see this is exactly the opposite of socialism. It's decentralized control of major factors that affect the individual and cedes control to the individual.
Read Democracy in America to see how American government used to work and see how far we have moved away from the system of government that made us prosperous and allowed great individual freedom.
And this is what makes socialism 100% unworkable, for those who push it think they know better the individual what is right for the individual. That's why Alexis de Toqueville said it's "equality in servitude" not "equality in liberty".
I'll take "equality in liberty" over "equality in servitude" every time.
I could care less if you want to destroy yourself. I think it's stupid, but that's beside the point. I've been there and done that, so for me to condemn you for what I've done myself would be pure hypocrisy. I'm just glad I came to understand what a waste it is, and how little real enjoyment there is in licentiousness. Why little "real enjoyment"? Because if a person has to use mind altering substances to think they're happy and enjoying life they're actually a very miserable, unhappy person. They just don't know themselves well enough to realize it yet.
As I said above my, post wasn't about condemnation. I was pointing out that you are confused when you think license to sin is liberty. It isn't. Read the entire Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, and you will find nothing encouraging license, or licentiousness. Instead, if you will read the writings of all of our founding fathers, you will find no support for those who would destroy themselves with licentiousness, not because of a feeling of superiority on their part, but because they scorned the idea that life is best spent in wasting it. All of them advocated exactly the opposite type of life that you think, and I once thought, of as wonderful.
You can read the writings of men such as John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc... online. A great deal of their writings available through different organizations, some public, some private, but regardless of organization type they make the material available at no cost.
Read the Federalist Papers, the anti-Federalist papers, Democracy in America, and old books, pre 1900, on our founding fathers. Much that is written today(since 1900 when progressives first came into real power: Woodrow Wilson) is nothing but socialist propaganda, and reading what the actual men wrote exposes as completely false.
The Gutenberg project has quite a bit of material written by our founders, as does libertyfund.org. Google is your friend when looking for info. Just start searching for our founding fathers or the published papers, such as the Federalist Papers, by name. You'll find them complete, and non-edited.
And you both mistakenly think liberty is the same thing as license, and that freedom is the equivalent of licentiousness. Neither license, nor licentiousness, lead to a better, more successful society. They lead, in fact, to the loss of liberty and freedom.
In the Northwest every community college has technical degree programs, from agriculture to building maintenance, to automotive mechanics and body work to heavy equipment, carpentry, etc.... Not all cc's have every program, but there are enough cc's and enough programs to give anyone who wants a chance at that kind of degree the opportunity to enter that kind of program.
I got a degree in Industrial Maintenance Technology in 1980 from a cc and turned it into a 20 year career as an HVAC/R service tech. The program was actually focused on hospital maintenance but those job openings are rare and usually filled by word of mouth. However, the training it gave in refrigeration and electrical theory, along with hands-on training with refrigeration equipment, was enough to get me in the door of an HVAC shop.
A good non-union tech in a small town where the average family makes $40K/year earns $25-$30/hour, and along with the overtime and on-call pay a tech gets during weather changes or extremes you can make a decent living. During weather extremes my take-home pay from wages alone would go up 30%. Some employers will add a commission on equipment and parts sales too. I averaged $600/week in commissions working in a small town shop on the Oregon coast back in the early 90's so it can create some decent income. In bigger cities union HVAC/R techs easily make twice that as they were making more than the small-town tech makes now about 15 years ago.
Being a tech is a decent job. You meet all kinds of people, run into a wide variety of technical issues on a daily basis, get paid for quite a bit of "windshield" time, and normally get a really good benefit package including a 401K, medical, dental and optical benefits as well as 2-4 weeks paid vacation a year depending on how long you've worked for an employer.
You're also very independent as no one is looking over your shoulder. You take your list of calls for the day and go do them. If something else comes in during the day that requires a tech right then you get a phone call telling you where you need to go. Other than that, you just do your thing, maybe call in orders for parts you need, and drive your van home at the end of the day. You turn in your paperwork the next morning when you pick up your calls for that day and restock your van. If you live in a rural area it's not unusual to get paid your regular wage for driving a 150 miles in a 10-11 hour day. At $25/hour that's a $300 day in wages, plus any commission on parts, which at 10% could easily be anywhere from $50-$150 depending on the repairs you had to make. Not every day would be that good, but then there would be days which would even be better. Sell a high efficiency heat pump to replace an old system with major problems and you would easily have a $300 day in commissions alone....
Not bad for a job requiring a high school education and 2 years of technical schooling plus 3-4 years experience and a few technical licenses.
Wow. Can anyone say, Microsoft Shill?
If someone wrote a WindowsHater's Handbook highlighting all of Window's weaknesses you'd be accusing them of mindlessly hating on MS, and be using any slur you could think of to discredit the book. Of course that book would of necessity be a few thousand pages long, but that's besides the point. I bet you wouldn't be regretting the fact that MS wouldn't be reading it and responding to it by making changes in their priorities.
Me? I have to laugh at both the Unixhater's handbook and at Linuxhaters.com. A lot of the Unixhater's Handbook is tongue-in-cheek. Many of the supposed problems with Linux are nothing more than the unrealistic expectation that when a user changes operating systems they shouldn't have learn anything new to administer their system, or pretending the Unixhater's Handbook is 100% serious and so hating on Linux for the same reasons, as if MS is the only entity to ever do computing the "right way", and ignoring that fact that a lot of the "problems" with both Unix and Linux have been fixed years, if not more than a decade, ago.
Well, I guess you could figure MS's way is the only way if you agree with the idea that security vulnerabilities should be built into the system and called "features", as that's what MS did for decades and their software still suffers from that beginning vision. (Don't complain about this being from the past as you point to Linuxhater.com as valid and it contains problems fixed long ago.) It still suffers from Gate's idea that the only reason people will buy new software is if it has bloat, err, I mean new features, and so bugs and security are historically relegated to secondary priorities.
This is not insightful at all. Appeals to mob mentality and extending from "it has a lot of users" to "it must be good" is a major logical fallacy that is repeated far too often here.
If you haven't notices, most arguments here are one form of logical fallacy or another. The ad hominen fallacy is the most popular.
Defragging a Linux hard drive is only necessary under certain conditions. One is if you shrink a partition by a fair amount. Another is if you run your partitions at more than 80% full. The last one I know of is related to very odd file usage in which you regularly replace thousands of small files with very large files, something that doesn't happen very often in real life usage. That said, in 7 years of running Linux I've never found it necessary to defrag a hard drive.
Quite the opposite was true for NTFS drives under Windows. Even though fragmentation wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as it was under FAT, it still needed to be done occasionally, even with partitions with plenty of extra capacity.
Here's a good explanation of why Linux drives don't need to be defragged regularly. It's a little dated and is an overview, not a technical explanation, but it makes the subject understandable.
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting
Just what is it of his that is a little confused?
I had a long post all written out and somehow it just disappeared when hitting enter for a new paragraph, so the following will just have to do.
I'm not hypothesizing. You are.
I went to school with 2 sisters whose mother lost a restaurant due to them getting busted. A popular place to eat suddenly lost all its customers. That hamburger joint went from being busy all the time to closed within a year, and it was a great hamburger joint. They had good food. BTW, both sisters worked in that restaurant.
A guy I went to school with inherited a well-established, thriving nursery located on a busy 4 lane highway. If you wanted anything from flowers, to seedlings, to mature trees, to mulch, to lawn ornaments of all kinds, they had it. His father had been running the place for 30 years before he inherited it, and he ran it for more than a decade with no slowdown in business until he got busted for drugs. He closed his business and sold the property 2 years later because he had no customers left.
Another guy I went to school with got busted in his mid-twenties a couple of times and his father's dental practice of about 40 years went down the drain within 2 years.
There's three businesses I know of ruined because someone in a small town/rural area got busted for drugs. Any time you have someone in a lead position in a company busted for drugs it definitely affects that business. Now maybe if one of the peons doing manual labor gets busted it won't hurt the company, but anyone who holds a pivotal position in a company getting busted most certainly will affect it.
Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
In high school, I was dropping my mom off at the doctor's in the nearby city one afternoon, when I broke one of my blinker covers. (Was squeezing into a narrow space, going about 0 mph because I was worried about hitting the bumper of the SUV next to me. Damn thing was *higher* than my bumper, so instead of touching, the SUV bumper cleared mine and took out the plastic covering my blinker.) At 8:30am the next morning, a kid in my school said to me, "so I heard you got into an accident last night..."
I grew up in one of those sorts of towns. And really, nothing reflected poorly on the local companies. Because anything YOU did was tied to YOU. Not to your company. Nobody decided not to go to the store I worked at because their employee had an accident. When a local guy got into an accident and got a DUI, everyone knew the lawyer he was going to hire, because he was one of the three in town. When he got off with a misdemeanor, everyone knew he was a drunk who got into an accident. But nobody boycotted his company. They might go in an harass him, but that was about it.
Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
It's true. but I've never seen the sort of "punish the company for bad employees" mentality of you and a couple other people in this thread. Did I just grow up in sensible towns, or is everyone just making up shit that doesn't happen in the real world?
You're looking at this from an unrealistic point-of-view. You're taking a fender bender and generalizing it to a drug bust. That's not a rational generalization.
Just imagine if you had been the head of IT at a local hospital, a manager at a local bank, a police dispatcher, or any other kind of position of responsibility that directly affects the public, and gotten busted for illegal drugs. The response to both you and your employer would have been a lot different. People would call into the question the ability of your employer to accurately judge the character of the people they hire to put in positions of responsibility, and thus lose faith in that business.
It's not punishing the business, per se, it's losing faith in the business owner's judgment and taking their business elsewhere because of that lost faith. Honor and character are words that still have meaning in small towns, and that's good thing. It means small towns are still reasonable places to live, and you can normally trust your neighbor. However, if you break that trust the small town can be a very uncomfortable place to live. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. People should hold each other accountable. Society benefits when they do.
as for company image, i haven't seen too many cases where people getting busted for drugs listed the company they worked for and what not, not unless the person was a high ranking official in the company that people otherwise knew anyway...
In small towns you don't have to post the name of the company you work for. People know who you work for and if your name gets posted in the newspaper it will get talked about by a lot of people and will reflect on the company you work for if you have a job with a lot of responsibility or one that requires strict integrity. Big city anonymity does not exist in small towns.
I'm not for drug testing, but only because of the personal privacy implications. Someone addicted enough to not be able to stop using long enough for the drugs to get out of their system, or not smart enough to use masking agents, will have a spotty employment record. There will be red flags in their history that will make it very difficult for them to get a job in which drug usage would affect their performance in critical situations. Thus, I don't believe that the loss of privacy involved in pre-employment drug testing is worth the insignificant benefit gained.
Drug testing by employers has had no measurable impact on drug use overall. Drug use has increased right along with drug testing, so drug testing is of no real value. It's just another feel-good "security" measure that does no real world good, but does help create in people more of the "sheeple" effect in which personal independence and liberty is extinguished more every day.
So what you're saying is that they end up thinking critically, except for the conspiracy theorists who end up thinking everything is critical.
No. That wasn't his point.
His point is that many people, both educated and uneducated, think being critical is critical thinking. This leads to arrogance on the part of many educated people who cannot accept that someone who is self-educated may very well have much better critical thinking skills than they do. In fact, that is often true, for the person who is self-educated had to learn to think things through on his own or else he would have learned nothing. He didn't have an authority figure there telling him what to think, he had to learn to think things through for himself..
When did I imply this was an insight?
Is DMZ the only border with mines? Because we all know of escapees via China (I don't know if you do). So if they manage to do it there... you never know.
"Cool killer robots" is still a nonsense. But the fact alone is to be expected in a cold war.
Oh, I see. You write what you consider to be inanities here?
Most escapees from China do so via water. Add to that the fact that the entire Chinese border isn't mined to the same extent that the entire border between SK and NK is. The NK side of the border alone has at least 1 million mines on a border only 155 miles long. That's more than 6400 mines/mile to go along with the approximately 1 million soldiers and fortified positions with few if any blind spots between them on the NK side of the border. That's a formidable gauntlet to run in addition to having a police state in which you have to document your permission to be present anywhere near the border at all times.
If I were a North Korean wanting to escape I'd be much more inclined to escape by water than I would be to run the gauntlet of mines and patrols on their side of the border. If I did escape that way, I wouldn't even see a robot. Besides, these are not autonomous robots. Someone is controlling them and my bet is that it has both a speaker and a microphone as well as an on board camera so it would be no different for someone who made it across the border to meet it than it would be for them to meet a human soldier. Both sides could still communicate.
Couple of boxing lessons (to learn how to properly punch/defend/move) and learning from MMA fighters in UFC (submitions and how to get out of them) is all you should really need.
I think you just lost your nerd card due to your inability to spell, use a spellchecker, and use a dictionary.
The act of submitting is called submission. Submition is not even a word.
If you were truly insightful as your mods say, you'd think about an occasional North Korean disedant that's trying to escape the oppressive regime that's perhaps making his life hell in say... worst gulags on the face of the earth. If you think truly that this is going to be a robot vs robot war, that's sad.
And if you were half as insightful as you think you are, you would realize that the NK's would kill him long before he got to SK's side of the DMZ. If they didn't shoot him after their sensors or one of their patrols found him, his chances of getting through the mine fields on the NK side of the border are nil.
The NK DMZ is designed to keep their own people in, as well as keep people out.
Now only civilians will die. Glad we are protecting the soldiers who are supposed to be protecting cvilians.
Are you ignorant with respect to what a DMZ is, stupid, or do you have some kind of political agenda? A DMZ in a civilian-free zone.... Civilians and military personnel of both sides are both banned from that zone. The robots are used to patrol on the SK side of the DMZ where US or SK troops patrol to make sure NK infiltrators aren't coming across the DMZ.
Neither side actually enters the DMZ unless they want to get shot at. They both patrol their respective sides of it though. Any civilian stupid enough to try to cross the DMZ will get blown up by a mine if they are able to actually enter it, and the DMZ is very well-marked with warning signs as well as having a chain link fence topped by razor wire along its entire length, so any civilian killed in the DMZ has to be extremely stupid, as well as strongly determined to go where they know they shouldn't. A civilian isn't going to be violating the DMZ accidentally no matter what is written in the news. It will be a deliberate act on their part and they will have had to ignore multiple levels of warnings and overcome many obstacles getting there.
I would suspect that the South Koreans have good reason for not wanting to allow Kim Jong-il access to more resources than he already has. Even though you've taught there for some time you still can't understand things from the Korean perspective and don't have access to all the info that they have. You've never suffered like they did at the hands of Kim Jong-il or had your relatives in the North starved to death by his policies.
Asking for a peace treaty to end the war you illiterate
And Kim Jong-il is asking for terms that cannot be tolerated, you illiterate idiot. Let him surrender unconditionally and the North Korean people will have food, water, and clothing in greater quantity and quality than they have had since Kim Jong-il came into power within weeks of their surrender. The only one to lose will be the heads of the government. The rest of the country will have freedom and a far greater standard of living than they have ever known.
Trust isn't necessary to start. We've got enough surveillance to see if they've taken a peaceful stance before signing a treaty. If it works, trust will grow and perhaps the country will stop being so paranoid and abusive.
Certainly the current strategy isn't doing any good for anyone but the military.
And if it doesn't, what do we have on our hands? A madman with greater military and financial resources to fulfill his dreams of personal aggrandizement and power. He won't use those resources to help his own people as he's never used what he has to help them. He'll just build his army up more in hopes of crushing South Korea.
Opening up the possibility of him having greater access to resources will do nothing more than increase the possibility of open warfare. That's something no sane person will do without at least a 95% chance of success, and Kim Jong-il has proven over the decades that the chances of success in doing something like are more like less than 5%. His character practically guarantees a 0% chance of success.