The ozone hole is still there, but it's better mostly because we actually did something about it. "Global cooling" had nowhere near the scientific backing that climate change does. Overpopulation, the jury's still out on. It's a bad problem and it's getting far worse, but it's probably not going to amount to "kill us all" in our lifetime.
Yeah, but you're just buying time. What happens when Slashdot shuts down the current live site and beta is all that's left? I'd kindof like a scraper tool that scrapes an entire story and puts it into classic-slashdot, but I'm pretty sure that would never work in reality..
I'm remembering reading a review for an American Idol episode where a contestant grumbled that drama follows her wherever she goes. The review point was that if drama follows, it's often created by you, and it's like getting roommates -- if you have several bad roommates in a row, then YOU are the bad roommate.
Amusingly, Jon Snow learned this lesson when he reached the Wall in Game of Thrones. He was a better fighter than most of them and showed them up, and earned a lot of enmity for it. It doesn't matter whether you really are better than everyone else -- if you make a habit of embarrassing and showing them up, they will bear that grudge and you will be treated poorly for it.
Which is why I would nevere allow a union in my company, because there is nothing civilized about government destroying my individual right to own and operate private property the way I see fit and interfere with my hiring and firing decisions
What if it was an open shop? Would you not then be guilty of interfering with your employees' rights of free association?
if your posts are at all accurate, there is more of a parallel with Lions (and likely many other large mammals), where the females are the hunter-gatherers by nature
Birds too, especially raptors. In fact, female hawks and eagles are larger and more muscular than the males since not only do they hunt the same amount, they have to lay eggs as well. This difference lets them catch larger prey than the males can, which benefits the family since the pair can hunt and catch a wider variety of animals.
Appeal to nature is certainly a logical fallacy, but that's what what the grandparent was doing.
It's a mistake to appeal to nature, but it's also a mistake to pretend that nature and natural processes don't exist, or that we have somehow entirely separated ourselves from them.
So you are saying the man should have kept better control of his woman?
It is his job as a company executive not to let his non-employee wife interfere, not his role as her husband. Maybe if she were head of HR the discussion of whether this was appropriate or not would be different.
I'd say overdraft fees for one, where any charge made when you have zero (or less) means you get a $35 fine. This is a problem for really poor people because they are constantly riding the line close to broke. They don't have the ability to maintain a balance because they don't have the money to outstrip basic expenditures. So say they want to just use cash? That's great, businesses charge $8 or more to cash a check with no account. It's called a poverty tax. So many, so many things feed into this. Say, your car has a flat tire. You don't have cash on hand to fix it. You can't drive to work. Now you're out both the cost of the tire and a day's wages.
Payday loan stores profit by giving you advances on paychecks. Sometimes, when you're dirt poor and so you have nothing in your checking account, you -really- need a payday loan. And if you can't pay it back in the 14 days, expect to pay triple your loan amount in a few months.
There are tons of things like this scattered throughout our society that people with means don't think about.
(I have to credit John Cheese on this. He's been there)
Considering 50 million American out of work. One wonders that American corporations can't invest in American workforces.
Mostly because those corporations are interested in the BEST workers, not simply workers. They wants the ones with the best training, the ones with the best work ethic, the cream of the crop. "A worker," is not good enough, to compete globally you want the best. Oh, and it helps if the workers don't get cream-of-the-crop wages, don't unionize, and are more beholden to the company, naturally.
Developers of course would prefer to work on 'sexy' things like new features; maintaining older versions and backporting security updates and bugfixes is decidedly 'unsexy' in comparison.
It's not just "unsexy," it's downright annoying to try to dig through an old codebase written poorly by people who have since left the company/community and has since been replaced in newer versions. It'd be one thing if that was free, but trying to maintain that abandoned code requires real work, often far more work than in your current codebase. The more effort you have to expend to maintain the old code, the more complicated and bug-ridden complimentary servers (like online servers and database servers) have to become in order to interact with multiple versions of the app, and the more resources are siphoned away from working on the future. Eventually your project will grind to a halt the more old versions you have to support so obviously you have to draw a line somewhere.
When my iPhone 3G stopped being able to run new iOS versions, I was still able to run the old versions of my apps, even though newer ones were available. Actually, it simply didn't even tell me there were newer versions available; it just continued to run the newest versions supported by the OS.
Of course, I made the mistake of wiping my phone, and then I was no longer able to install any version of some apps since the iTunes store only offers the newest. That simply encouraged me to get off my ass and get the larger Android phone I'd been eyeing.
Why? You want to cease to exist? You hate yourself that much
I don't hate myself, but I do believe that as years turn into millennia, mere existence and consciousness will become a burden. Eternal life will be horrifying as after a time nothing will be new, nothing will be interesting, everything will be done. Even "paradise" will be boring, given time. Eventually you'll also want to find out what's happening on Earth, and that is enough to depress anyone for eternity.
Trouble is there is a fallacy here. If Hitler had won the war there would have been a revisionist canpaign to expunge his sins or to mitigate them somewhat, consider Stalin?
I'm not sure about that, not that long after Stalin died, premieres rolled back or undid a number of his policies and didn't want to talk about him anymore. Sure, they don't publicly vilify him like the Germans do Hitler, but he's not treated with the reverence like Washington and Lincoln are in the US. Everyone realizes the man had big personal problems with paranoia and revisionism (certainly more than Nixon did!) that overshadowed his accomplishments.
Even Putin, who still considers the dissolution of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, does not talk about Stalin. Mention of him was absent during the history of Russia segment in the Olympics, for example.
I disagree entirely with your subject line, but think the following is important:
I'm not saying critical thinking is undesirable in general, but what runs under this label nowadays clearly is
What passes for "critical thinking" among conspiracy theorists really isn't. Critical thinking is not merely about challenging only the commonly held assumptions.
Actually... no it can't. Example: There are some bleak facts about existence. You and everyone you care for - love - will die. Be annihilated. All that you care about will crumble away to dust.
So?
Again, it doesn't require religion per se to be comfortable with that. Though that can help. On the other hand many of us who think it through can also be quite horrified with the notion of "everlasting life."
The only freeloaders are those who don't pay the bill when they get treatment
The vast, vast, vast majority of people in this country (including a chunk of the upper 1%, I'll wager) do not have the money to pay for a serious condition, especially if it requires life-long treatment.
The real issue with the ACA is that it is unconstitutional
Until there is a change in the Supreme Court and they rule that it is unconstitutional, then it is constitutional. There is no higher voice in the land for determining the constitutionality of a law.
If I have to deal with Citizen's United and David Souter's fucked up Kelo vs New London being constitutional, then you have to deal with the Affordable Care Act being constitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
The ozone hole is still there, but it's better mostly because we actually did something about it.
"Global cooling" had nowhere near the scientific backing that climate change does.
Overpopulation, the jury's still out on. It's a bad problem and it's getting far worse, but it's probably not going to amount to "kill us all" in our lifetime.
Yeah, but you're just buying time. What happens when Slashdot shuts down the current live site and beta is all that's left?
I'd kindof like a scraper tool that scrapes an entire story and puts it into classic-slashdot, but I'm pretty sure that would never work in reality..
I'm remembering reading a review for an American Idol episode where a contestant grumbled that drama follows her wherever she goes.
The review point was that if drama follows, it's often created by you, and it's like getting roommates -- if you have several bad roommates in a row, then YOU are the bad roommate.
Amusingly, Jon Snow learned this lesson when he reached the Wall in Game of Thrones. He was a better fighter than most of them and showed them up, and earned a lot of enmity for it. It doesn't matter whether you really are better than everyone else -- if you make a habit of embarrassing and showing them up, they will bear that grudge and you will be treated poorly for it.
Which is why I would nevere allow a union in my company, because there is nothing civilized about government destroying my individual right to own and operate private property the way I see fit and interfere with my hiring and firing decisions
What if it was an open shop? Would you not then be guilty of interfering with your employees' rights of free association?
you know WHY those women used the hula hoop AT A PARTY? TO GET FUCKING ATTENTION AND GUYS TO LOOK AT THEM
Geez, and I liked the rest of your post so much too. But that conclusion is a terrible one. Awful.
if your posts are at all accurate, there is more of a parallel with Lions (and likely many other large mammals), where the females are the hunter-gatherers by nature
Birds too, especially raptors. In fact, female hawks and eagles are larger and more muscular than the males since not only do they hunt the same amount, they have to lay eggs as well. This difference lets them catch larger prey than the males can, which benefits the family since the pair can hunt and catch a wider variety of animals.
Appeal to nature is certainly a logical fallacy, but that's what what the grandparent was doing.
It's a mistake to appeal to nature, but it's also a mistake to pretend that nature and natural processes don't exist, or that we have somehow entirely separated ourselves from them.
"And the founder let her."
So you are saying the man should have kept better control of his woman?
It is his job as a company executive not to let his non-employee wife interfere, not his role as her husband. Maybe if she were head of HR the discussion of whether this was appropriate or not would be different.
I'd say overdraft fees for one, where any charge made when you have zero (or less) means you get a $35 fine. This is a problem for really poor people because they are constantly riding the line close to broke. They don't have the ability to maintain a balance because they don't have the money to outstrip basic expenditures. So say they want to just use cash? That's great, businesses charge $8 or more to cash a check with no account. It's called a poverty tax. So many, so many things feed into this. Say, your car has a flat tire. You don't have cash on hand to fix it. You can't drive to work. Now you're out both the cost of the tire and a day's wages.
Payday loan stores profit by giving you advances on paychecks. Sometimes, when you're dirt poor and so you have nothing in your checking account, you -really- need a payday loan. And if you can't pay it back in the 14 days, expect to pay triple your loan amount in a few months.
There are tons of things like this scattered throughout our society that people with means don't think about.
(I have to credit John Cheese on this. He's been there)
Considering 50 million American out of work. One wonders that American corporations can't invest in American workforces.
Mostly because those corporations are interested in the BEST workers, not simply workers. They wants the ones with the best training, the ones with the best work ethic, the cream of the crop. "A worker," is not good enough, to compete globally you want the best. Oh, and it helps if the workers don't get cream-of-the-crop wages, don't unionize, and are more beholden to the company, naturally.
So exactly what did Rand say about imported labor?.......nothing.
She did however say it was totally fine to screw over other people as long as it benefited yourself, so it fits.
Developers of course would prefer to work on 'sexy' things like new features; maintaining older versions and backporting security updates and bugfixes is decidedly 'unsexy' in comparison.
It's not just "unsexy," it's downright annoying to try to dig through an old codebase written poorly by people who have since left the company/community and has since been replaced in newer versions. It'd be one thing if that was free, but trying to maintain that abandoned code requires real work, often far more work than in your current codebase. The more effort you have to expend to maintain the old code, the more complicated and bug-ridden complimentary servers (like online servers and database servers) have to become in order to interact with multiple versions of the app, and the more resources are siphoned away from working on the future. Eventually your project will grind to a halt the more old versions you have to support so obviously you have to draw a line somewhere.
When my iPhone 3G stopped being able to run new iOS versions, I was still able to run the old versions of my apps, even though newer ones were available. Actually, it simply didn't even tell me there were newer versions available; it just continued to run the newest versions supported by the OS.
Of course, I made the mistake of wiping my phone, and then I was no longer able to install any version of some apps since the iTunes store only offers the newest.
That simply encouraged me to get off my ass and get the larger Android phone I'd been eyeing.
The enforcement of #1 and #2 together are a big reason why computer password security is so shitty.
Why? You want to cease to exist? You hate yourself that much
I don't hate myself, but I do believe that as years turn into millennia, mere existence and consciousness will become a burden. Eternal life will be horrifying as after a time nothing will be new, nothing will be interesting, everything will be done. Even "paradise" will be boring, given time. Eventually you'll also want to find out what's happening on Earth, and that is enough to depress anyone for eternity.
Trouble is there is a fallacy here. If Hitler had won the war there would have been a revisionist canpaign to expunge his sins or to mitigate them somewhat, consider Stalin?
I'm not sure about that, not that long after Stalin died, premieres rolled back or undid a number of his policies and didn't want to talk about him anymore. Sure, they don't publicly vilify him like the Germans do Hitler, but he's not treated with the reverence like Washington and Lincoln are in the US. Everyone realizes the man had big personal problems with paranoia and revisionism (certainly more than Nixon did!) that overshadowed his accomplishments.
Even Putin, who still considers the dissolution of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, does not talk about Stalin. Mention of him was absent during the history of Russia segment in the Olympics, for example.
I disagree entirely with your subject line, but think the following is important:
I'm not saying critical thinking is undesirable in general, but what runs under this label nowadays clearly is
What passes for "critical thinking" among conspiracy theorists really isn't. Critical thinking is not merely about challenging only the commonly held assumptions.
And people say Slashdot is declining. This is just as foul as anything back to the old days!
Yes. Libel laws in the UK. What a joke.
"I'll sue you in England!"
A FAR worse alternative. Is that the best you could come up with? At least propose Switzerland or something like that.
"Isreal will be reborn" should have come as a shocker to no one. You didn't need a prophecy for that.
Actually... no it can't. Example: There are some bleak facts about existence. You and everyone you care for - love - will die. Be annihilated. All that you care about will crumble away to dust.
So?
Again, it doesn't require religion per se to be comfortable with that. Though that can help.
On the other hand many of us who think it through can also be quite horrified with the notion of "everlasting life."
Its a reduction in stress, not a lesson in tact.
Hitler meditated daily.
I think you proved his point.
The only freeloaders are those who don't pay the bill when they get treatment
The vast, vast, vast majority of people in this country (including a chunk of the upper 1%, I'll wager) do not have the money to pay for a serious condition, especially if it requires life-long treatment.
The real issue with the ACA is that it is unconstitutional
Until there is a change in the Supreme Court and they rule that it is unconstitutional, then it is constitutional. There is no higher voice in the land for determining the constitutionality of a law.
If I have to deal with Citizen's United and David Souter's fucked up Kelo vs New London being constitutional, then you have to deal with the Affordable Care Act being constitutional.
Thats why they all come to America for all their surgeries (at least the ones that can afford it).
If you have unlimited resources, the very top-end provides the best care in the world.
Now do we measure the effectiveness of our health care system by the treatment of that upper echelon, or by the care that everyone else gets?