Playing my Tank/DPS characters, the only healers I've seen that fail are the ones who spam their big-healing-but-huge-mana-cost spells and go OOM halfway into the fight.
This. Oh man, this. All the healers (including my alt) in my guild are in the same boat. The only exception I've seen is when a brand-new very-poorly-geared tank tries to do content that he's not yet ready for. Encounters -should- be challenging enough so that greatly-undergeared or underprepared players just can't do them. The game still has folks who want to shortcut it.:-)
And yeah, healing was made incredibly painful and punishing - they made my enjoyment of healing subject to the fact that half the bads in my group don't know what fire is, much less that you shouldn't stand in it. So yeah, "you stood in fire, you died, working as intended," is the official reason for the wipe, but everybody sits there going, "Is the healer sandbagging? Could he have saved us? Why didn't he save us? Maybe he's bad." And mana management is absolutely retarded for healers - if anybody in my group is a little slow, I have to burn all my resources keeping them alive, and once again, Blizz is punishing the healer for the bad connection and/or bad awareness of the other players.
When healing, I don't see it as punishment. I long ago stopped feeling bad for not being able to save someone when they do something bad. I've done a number of late night pugs, and surprisingly, I almost never never get into a group which is filled entirely with idiots. When someone asks "why did I die?" and the answer is, "you gotta get out of that fire," most just take that on faith because everyone's now used to the fact that many instances of fire (or poison, or whatever) will damage you beyond most healers' ability to rescue you.
running out of mana playing with good players with good gear who knew what they were doing means "what the hell bliz".
Actually, I think that's good healer design. A healer should not have infinite resources, that necessitated horrible, HORRIBLE fight mechanics for Wrath. Well-geared tanks were getting nearly one-shot on many high-end heroic encounters. Without the threat of low mana, tanks had to be in great risk of being two-shot for healing to be challenging.
However, I think at least in raids, there should be much much faster ways to restore mana when you're out of combat than currently exist. Why do healers have to sit and drink for 20 seconds? How does that increase gameplay value? It seems like an artifact from a time when healers rarely ran out of mana, so sitting and drinking was an unusual situation.
Whoops, memory is a little hazy. Sethekk could be skipped if anyone in the group had a Shadow Lab key. Also, I had some guildies who were, honestly, lazy. They "couldn't afford" the gold required to purchase a flying mount that you needed to get to Arcatraz. That was always fun.
And yes, the dungeon / raid system has been fucked up for ages. Back in the burning crusade, our nice friendly guild worked our asses of to get attuned to Karazhan, and then had our sunday night raid. Karazhan was epic and we had a great time slowly working our way through it and getting the rewards that came with it.
While I remember the attunement was a total pain in the ass. Hey, we have a Karazhan raid coming up. Player X is signed up, he's never been to Karazhan before (note: this happened almost every week). We need to run Mana Tombs, Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labyrinth, Steamvaults, Botanica, Mechanar, Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad Foothills, and Black Morass. And yes they have to be done in that order (mostly -- you have to do prerequisite dungeons just so you can get attuned to Shadow Lab, Arcatraz, and Black Morass. If you've done the prereqs (lots of new 70s haven't) you can skip some of those dungeons).
Tier 5 raiding had a lot of huge problems that were mostly fixed by Tier 6. Bleugh.
My poor lock and mage end up pretty much on the wayside waiting 30-45 minutes until something pops up, and when it does, DPS gets treated like crap when it comes to player interaction.
Eh? I play characters who collectively fill all three roles, and I have to say DPS might be treated poorly.. but not as poorly as healers, and almost no one gets treated as poorly as a tank. Pick-up groups are full of people who think they know it all and have absolutely no tolerance at all of 'bads' or anyone trying to learn their class.
It becomes no fun to play a class when you know that you have wasted all your time levelling it to 85 and gearing it out, while someone who spent the same time with a dual/triple purpose class will always have a raid spot...
It's no fun when you play and are geared as a certain spec in your class, and then you have to play something different in that class to get a group. I play a dps warrior, but if I need to do heroics, what do I queue as? Well, both tanking and dps, but of course I only ever get selected for tanking. I don't particularly want to tank, but someone has to. A big part of that reluctance is due to the above attitudes in PuGs. I don't really mind tanking five-mans for my guildies.
You mentioned DPSers being able to do things in EQ2, and it's not like aren't debuff/other things DPSers can frequently do in WoW as well, but I've noticed something that in encounters that call for that sort of thing, a lot of people don't want to have to be the person to do it. Everyone wants the biggest numbers, everyone wants to get top spot on the damage meters, and debuffing and such (mildly) impacts that. As a DPS warrior, again there are few fights where I do absolutely nothing but DPS. It's my job to make sure sunder armor stays up at three stacks, increasing all raid physical dps. In several fights it's also my job to AoE slow mobs that are running around (say, obsidian oozes on Heroic Rhyolith). There are alternate things that many classes and specs, even the pure ones, can do, but many people don't want to be bothered.
WoW had the catbird seat when it came to MMO gaming. However what is killing the game are above mentioned items as well as the lock-step progress of levelling, the fact that healing is a PITA compared to BC or WotLK, and the fact that people with pure DPS classes strongly feel that their time has been wasted, as opposed to playing a druid or paladin which can do just as much DPS (if not more), and can do other roles to ensure they do more in WoW than just wait for queue openings.
I'd say I actually enjoy healing in five-man PuGs in Cataclysm, far more than during Wrath, which was frankly brain-numbingly boring. Now, it's interesting, dare I even say, fun. However, healing in general, especially in pvp, is a pita (one of the many reasons why I haven't pvped in years).
and the fact that people with pure DPS classes strongly feel that their time has been wasted, as opposed to playing a druid or paladin which can do just as much DPS (if not more), and can do other roles to ensure they do more in WoW than just wait for queue openings.
I'll address the dps issue last, and say that, in general, the "pure" dps classes are still overall superior in DPS to the hybrids, and the intelligent raid leaders will covet them, especially since the raid that overstacks hybrids will have a lot of balance problems and likely not do as well as they'd thought. The exceptions would be shadow priests who are still a little crazy in terms of overall damage, and balance druids are close to that. Also, rogues need a little love at the moment. I don't think your paladin example is a great one though, as retribution is still pretty down in the dumps, and that's the paladin's best damage class. In terms of best-of-class dps, they only beat out rogues and shaman. That's now, though. Next month? Who knows? The very best classes in terms of dps? Arcane mages. M
Most of this is due to the cast speed reduction of the deadzone mechanic in phase 1,
Are you sitting in the deadzone the entire time it's up? You don't have to, you only need to be in it when Jin'do is channeling his AoE. But the Jin'do fight is a very gimmicky fight anyway, and I'm generally not a fan of that sort of thing.
Just let me join a game and play whenever I feel like it, when I have time, and then leave as I see fit.
But teamwork is very important for high-end cooperative play no matter what type of game you're playing. People who play together often will be better as a team than people put together for the first time.
To me my friends list is more critical than guild membership - don't care what guild someone is in, or even what faction they are (as a horde player, let me team up with alli; wtf do I care about the lame 2p mythology they've invented).
While you still can't team up with someone of the opposite faction, you can chat with friends across faction or cross-server.
Create a raid finder. Lobbies. Raid browsers.
That's being introduced in the next patch. It'd be interesting to see how it shakes out, I wouldn't mind taking an alt through a pick-up T11 dungeon some time.
Make the content slightly malleable so a 10-man raid can be 9 or even 8-manned by scaling the environment slightly - so as people leave and join the game can continue.
Man, I don't know, it's extremely challenging to properly tune a 10-man! Reduce the number of players enough and you might have to sacrifice the mechanics of the encounter since there aren't enough physical bodies to handle them.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
They can find it tomorrow and it won't change anything... because they too make more money TREATING CANCER than they EVER COULD from a cure.
They don't want to find it either, it means the same loss of profit for everyone.
Do you guys have no clue what a cartel is?
The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they would require EVERYONE involved to maintain perfect silence, and that never happens in large organizations.
The instant that some source leaked proof to the media that Drugco had a cure for cancer that they sat on because it was more profitable to keep cancer active in the population, every executive would have his ass hauled in front of a very irate Congress immediately.
The actor in the story is not willing to kill his son for an imaginary friend, he's willing to kill his son for a real presence speaking directly to him. Do the fictional works of any author that make a philosophical point all equate to imaginary friends dictating philosophy? No, no they do not. Use some logic when attacking religion, isn't it the only thing you can claim you have over it? Well... logic and fun.
The lines are blurred when you're talking to people who claim that the events of this book are not exaggerated, are not made up, and happened exactly as they are written. At that point you're not talking about book characters but real people and real situations. I can understand your point when talking about works described as fiction, and the disconnect comes when one group thinks of it as fiction and the other as total fact.
which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan
That is meaningless statement. You always must adjust for inflation, it's pointless to ever compare numbers otherwise.
The TEA Party, rather than being a cause, was prescient in warning that such negative consequences were on the way, and did their best with their limited power to stave the downgrade off.
NO. That is an untrue whitewashing of history. Even S&P, hardly the bastions of reliability now, disagrees with that assertion. They put, as one of their primary reasons for the lack of faith in the government, the inability of the US government to increase revenues.
The money had been spent -- of course you raise the debt ceiling. The time to have the debate over how much money to spend (and those are very good arguments to have) is when you're putting the budget together. You make those decisions when you consider whether to buy something and charge it on the card. It's too late when you buy and then see your credit card bill.
This was an entirely artificial crisis, and that we came close to defaulting on our debt is why the ratings agencies are a bit leery of whether the US Government can keep its financial obligations.
There was VASTLY more spending during the previous 8 years, yet no peep from these so called 'patriots'. They started complaining about spending the moment Obama came into office
I first noticed the Tea Party gaining steam when George Bush signed in the banking industry bailout, and it arose out of the Tax Day protests and events that have gone on for years. They didn't have a lot of power yet though, and had pretty much no clout in the 2008 elections, since most of the country didn't want to hear from the conservatives they blamed for the recession at that point. They gained more power and more attention with the passage of the stimulus program and they really took off with the passage of the health care overhaul.
Back in.. oh, I suppose 2009 they WERE pretty hard on Republicans and their spending, which is why I was actually a bit hopeful on them as a group -- I actually thought they could supplant the Republican or at the least seriously reform it, but silly me, I was so naive. Instead the Republican Party absorbed only the negative aspects of the Tea Party, without having to reform the negative aspects of the Republican Party.
Do you know that anybody can play that game? Any economist can say that his theory is correct because no country ever followed exactly what he proposed.
I wouldn't say this is a No True Scotsman situation. We've been able to spend ourselves out of recessions before. Does that give you debt? Yes it does, debt that you pay off when the money comes in. I'd like to see the "pay off debt" part actually happen someday.
Regardless of what Bush II did, the spending under Obama [wikipedia.org] stuck up in that level. If it were really Bush's fault Obama could have simply got the spending to the levels they were when Clinton left office. The reason why he didn't do that is because his Administration seems to have an unlimited belief in keynesianism. Obama's policy seems to be to spend his way out of debt [wikipedia.org].
Keynesianism gets a bit of a bad rap because people think the federal government follows Keynesian rules, which it hasn't for many decades. According to Keynes, the -only- way Keynesianism can ever work is if you increase spending during recessions and reduce it during non-recessionary periods. Unfortunately, what we see instead is "increase spending in good times, and increase it even more in bad times." That's not Keynesian.
I'd like to see actual Keynesian policies, but I don't think the Federal Government will ever have the discipline.
Higher taxes - combined with cheap and effective mass transit - does indeed reduce fuel use. Raising taxes is easy, providing the alternative to driving is the hard part.
Higher fuel taxes just put the politicians who pushed for them out of office. Higher fuel taxes are one of the few things hated by both conservatives (they don't like taxes) and liberals (fuel taxes are regressive, disproportionately affecting the poor and middle class).
Side rant: Holy nepotism [wikipedia.org], Batman! Hey, Mark, did you ever think that maybe Facebook wouldn't be so hated and being thrashed so much in Public Relations if the person in charge of it actually earned that position by merit?
Side response: How do you know she isn't qualified? Just because she said something with which you disagree?
That's the problem with hiring family members. For quite awhile there will be suspicions around them, and they will have to work harder than a non-family member to prove themselves. It may be unfair, but it's hardly unjustified.
You say that but in practise anonymous comments are censored through obscurity on Slashdot - low-scoring posts are pushed off the first 50, and sit beneath the majority default browse level, coupled with almost nobody wishing to mod up an anonymous comment since there is no personal benefit in doing so.
I wonder how many are like me and browse with -all- comments loaded by default. I hate thinking that there are more responses that I might not be seeing.
Voting is anonymous to prevent coercion and bribery.
Okay, so that didn't work. Any other ideas?
It didn't?
We're talking about average voters, not congressional votes here. I can't remember the last time that, say, the voters in a company were coerced to vote for a specific candidate.
The former employee might be disgruntled enough to cause some trouble, but it's another thing to sign a false affidavit, which is perjury and a felony.
Maybe, but how can you prove that the statement was false, rather than, say, you quickly uninstall any offending software after the affadavit is filed?
Slashdot Mirror
Playing my Tank/DPS characters, the only healers I've seen that fail are the ones who spam their big-healing-but-huge-mana-cost spells and go OOM halfway into the fight.
This. Oh man, this. All the healers (including my alt) in my guild are in the same boat. :-)
The only exception I've seen is when a brand-new very-poorly-geared tank tries to do content that he's not yet ready for. Encounters -should- be challenging enough so that greatly-undergeared or underprepared players just can't do them. The game still has folks who want to shortcut it.
And yeah, healing was made incredibly painful and punishing - they made my enjoyment of healing subject to the fact that half the bads in my group don't know what fire is, much less that you shouldn't stand in it. So yeah, "you stood in fire, you died, working as intended," is the official reason for the wipe, but everybody sits there going, "Is the healer sandbagging? Could he have saved us? Why didn't he save us? Maybe he's bad." And mana management is absolutely retarded for healers - if anybody in my group is a little slow, I have to burn all my resources keeping them alive, and once again, Blizz is punishing the healer for the bad connection and/or bad awareness of the other players.
When healing, I don't see it as punishment. I long ago stopped feeling bad for not being able to save someone when they do something bad. I've done a number of late night pugs, and surprisingly, I almost never never get into a group which is filled entirely with idiots. When someone asks "why did I die?" and the answer is, "you gotta get out of that fire," most just take that on faith because everyone's now used to the fact that many instances of fire (or poison, or whatever) will damage you beyond most healers' ability to rescue you.
running out of mana playing with good players with good gear who knew what they were doing means "what the hell bliz".
Actually, I think that's good healer design. A healer should not have infinite resources, that necessitated horrible, HORRIBLE fight mechanics for Wrath. Well-geared tanks were getting nearly one-shot on many high-end heroic encounters. Without the threat of low mana, tanks had to be in great risk of being two-shot for healing to be challenging.
However, I think at least in raids, there should be much much faster ways to restore mana when you're out of combat than currently exist.
Why do healers have to sit and drink for 20 seconds? How does that increase gameplay value? It seems like an artifact from a time when healers rarely ran out of mana, so sitting and drinking was an unusual situation.
Whoops, memory is a little hazy. Sethekk could be skipped if anyone in the group had a Shadow Lab key.
Also, I had some guildies who were, honestly, lazy. They "couldn't afford" the gold required to purchase a flying mount that you needed to get to Arcatraz. That was always fun.
And yes, the dungeon / raid system has been fucked up for ages. Back in the burning crusade, our nice friendly guild worked our asses of to get attuned to Karazhan, and then had our sunday night raid. Karazhan was epic and we had a great time slowly working our way through it and getting the rewards that came with it.
While I remember the attunement was a total pain in the ass. Hey, we have a Karazhan raid coming up. Player X is signed up, he's never been to Karazhan before (note: this happened almost every week). We need to run Mana Tombs, Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labyrinth, Steamvaults, Botanica, Mechanar, Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad Foothills, and Black Morass. And yes they have to be done in that order (mostly -- you have to do prerequisite dungeons just so you can get attuned to Shadow Lab, Arcatraz, and Black Morass. If you've done the prereqs (lots of new 70s haven't) you can skip some of those dungeons).
Tier 5 raiding had a lot of huge problems that were mostly fixed by Tier 6. Bleugh.
My poor lock and mage end up pretty much on the wayside waiting 30-45 minutes until something pops up, and when it does, DPS gets treated like crap when it comes to player interaction.
Eh? I play characters who collectively fill all three roles, and I have to say DPS might be treated poorly.. but not as poorly as healers, and almost no one gets treated as poorly as a tank. Pick-up groups are full of people who think they know it all and have absolutely no tolerance at all of 'bads' or anyone trying to learn their class.
It becomes no fun to play a class when you know that you have wasted all your time levelling it to 85 and gearing it out, while someone who spent the same time with a dual/triple purpose class will always have a raid spot...
It's no fun when you play and are geared as a certain spec in your class, and then you have to play something different in that class to get a group. I play a dps warrior, but if I need to do heroics, what do I queue as? Well, both tanking and dps, but of course I only ever get selected for tanking. I don't particularly want to tank, but someone has to. A big part of that reluctance is due to the above attitudes in PuGs. I don't really mind tanking five-mans for my guildies.
You mentioned DPSers being able to do things in EQ2, and it's not like aren't debuff/other things DPSers can frequently do in WoW as well, but I've noticed something that in encounters that call for that sort of thing, a lot of people don't want to have to be the person to do it. Everyone wants the biggest numbers, everyone wants to get top spot on the damage meters, and debuffing and such (mildly) impacts that. As a DPS warrior, again there are few fights where I do absolutely nothing but DPS. It's my job to make sure sunder armor stays up at three stacks, increasing all raid physical dps. In several fights it's also my job to AoE slow mobs that are running around (say, obsidian oozes on Heroic Rhyolith). There are alternate things that many classes and specs, even the pure ones, can do, but many people don't want to be bothered.
WoW had the catbird seat when it came to MMO gaming. However what is killing the game are above mentioned items as well as the lock-step progress of levelling, the fact that healing is a PITA compared to BC or WotLK, and the fact that people with pure DPS classes strongly feel that their time has been wasted, as opposed to playing a druid or paladin which can do just as much DPS (if not more), and can do other roles to ensure they do more in WoW than just wait for queue openings.
I'd say I actually enjoy healing in five-man PuGs in Cataclysm, far more than during Wrath, which was frankly brain-numbingly boring. Now, it's interesting, dare I even say, fun. However, healing in general, especially in pvp, is a pita (one of the many reasons why I haven't pvped in years).
and the fact that people with pure DPS classes strongly feel that their time has been wasted, as opposed to playing a druid or paladin which can do just as much DPS (if not more), and can do other roles to ensure they do more in WoW than just wait for queue openings.
I'll address the dps issue last, and say that, in general, the "pure" dps classes are still overall superior in DPS to the hybrids, and the intelligent raid leaders will covet them, especially since the raid that overstacks hybrids will have a lot of balance problems and likely not do as well as they'd thought. The exceptions would be shadow priests who are still a little crazy in terms of overall damage, and balance druids are close to that. Also, rogues need a little love at the moment. I don't think your paladin example is a great one though, as retribution is still pretty down in the dumps, and that's the paladin's best damage class. In terms of best-of-class dps, they only beat out rogues and shaman. That's now, though. Next month? Who knows? The very best classes in terms of dps? Arcane mages. M
Most of this is due to the cast speed reduction of the deadzone mechanic in phase 1,
Are you sitting in the deadzone the entire time it's up? You don't have to, you only need to be in it when Jin'do is channeling his AoE. But the Jin'do fight is a very gimmicky fight anyway, and I'm generally not a fan of that sort of thing.
Just let me join a game and play whenever I feel like it, when I have time, and then leave as I see fit.
But teamwork is very important for high-end cooperative play no matter what type of game you're playing. People who play together often will be better as a team than people put together for the first time.
To me my friends list is more critical than guild membership - don't care what guild someone is in, or even what faction they are (as a horde player, let me team up with alli; wtf do I care about the lame 2p mythology they've invented).
While you still can't team up with someone of the opposite faction, you can chat with friends across faction or cross-server.
Create a raid finder. Lobbies. Raid browsers.
That's being introduced in the next patch. It'd be interesting to see how it shakes out, I wouldn't mind taking an alt through a pick-up T11 dungeon some time.
Make the content slightly malleable so a 10-man raid can be 9 or even 8-manned by scaling the environment slightly - so as people leave and join the game can continue.
Man, I don't know, it's extremely challenging to properly tune a 10-man! Reduce the number of players enough and you might have to sacrifice the mechanics of the encounter since there aren't enough physical bodies to handle them.
They can find it tomorrow and it won't change anything ... because they too make more money TREATING CANCER than they EVER COULD from a cure.
They don't want to find it either, it means the same loss of profit for everyone.
Do you guys have no clue what a cartel is?
The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they would require EVERYONE involved to maintain perfect silence, and that never happens in large organizations.
The instant that some source leaked proof to the media that Drugco had a cure for cancer that they sat on because it was more profitable to keep cancer active in the population, every executive would have his ass hauled in front of a very irate Congress immediately.
The actor in the story is not willing to kill his son for an imaginary friend, he's willing to kill his son for a real presence speaking directly to him. Do the fictional works of any author that make a philosophical point all equate to imaginary friends dictating philosophy? No, no they do not. Use some logic when attacking religion, isn't it the only thing you can claim you have over it? Well... logic and fun.
The lines are blurred when you're talking to people who claim that the events of this book are not exaggerated, are not made up, and happened exactly as they are written. At that point you're not talking about book characters but real people and real situations. I can understand your point when talking about works described as fiction, and the disconnect comes when one group thinks of it as fiction and the other as total fact.
I'm sorry but such a level of irony - treating cancer with HIV - is the proof that God is a woman and named Eris.
Nowhere in the Bible did I see a lot of "Ahah, just kidding" coming from the christian God.
I thought that was the whole point of the story of Job (and Abraham).
(And of course, the original poster IS a spamming troll, like you said, but his homepage doesn't reflect that)
Don't mind him, he's a spamming troll. Read his Homepage URL (don't click).
What's wrong with sciencebasedmedicine.org? It's one of the more reasonable blogs on the subject.
which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan
That is meaningless statement. You always must adjust for inflation, it's pointless to ever compare numbers otherwise.
The TEA Party, rather than being a cause, was prescient in warning that such negative consequences were on the way, and did their best with their limited power to stave the downgrade off.
NO. That is an untrue whitewashing of history. Even S&P, hardly the bastions of reliability now, disagrees with that assertion. They put, as one of their primary reasons for the lack of faith in the government, the inability of the US government to increase revenues.
The money had been spent -- of course you raise the debt ceiling. The time to have the debate over how much money to spend (and those are very good arguments to have) is when you're putting the budget together. You make those decisions when you consider whether to buy something and charge it on the card. It's too late when you buy and then see your credit card bill.
This was an entirely artificial crisis, and that we came close to defaulting on our debt is why the ratings agencies are a bit leery of whether the US Government can keep its financial obligations.
There was VASTLY more spending during the previous 8 years, yet no peep from these so called 'patriots'. They started complaining about spending the moment Obama came into office
I first noticed the Tea Party gaining steam when George Bush signed in the banking industry bailout, and it arose out of the Tax Day protests and events that have gone on for years. They didn't have a lot of power yet though, and had pretty much no clout in the 2008 elections, since most of the country didn't want to hear from the conservatives they blamed for the recession at that point. They gained more power and more attention with the passage of the stimulus program and they really took off with the passage of the health care overhaul.
Back in.. oh, I suppose 2009 they WERE pretty hard on Republicans and their spending, which is why I was actually a bit hopeful on them as a group -- I actually thought they could supplant the Republican or at the least seriously reform it, but silly me, I was so naive. Instead the Republican Party absorbed only the negative aspects of the Tea Party, without having to reform the negative aspects of the Republican Party.
Ah, the good old No True Scotsman! Never fails.
Do you know that anybody can play that game? Any economist can say that his theory is correct because no country ever followed exactly what he proposed.
I wouldn't say this is a No True Scotsman situation. We've been able to spend ourselves out of recessions before. Does that give you debt? Yes it does, debt that you pay off when the money comes in. I'd like to see the "pay off debt" part actually happen someday.
1) are you calling the NATO actions in Libya a *war*?
Yes, yes I do. Misguided hands-tied war that will have little effect, but a war it is.
Regardless of what Bush II did, the spending under Obama [wikipedia.org] stuck up in that level. If it were really Bush's fault Obama could have simply got the spending to the levels they were when Clinton left office. The reason why he didn't do that is because his Administration seems to have an unlimited belief in keynesianism. Obama's policy seems to be to spend his way out of debt [wikipedia.org].
Keynesianism gets a bit of a bad rap because people think the federal government follows Keynesian rules, which it hasn't for many decades. According to Keynes, the -only- way Keynesianism can ever work is if you increase spending during recessions and reduce it during non-recessionary periods. Unfortunately, what we see instead is "increase spending in good times, and increase it even more in bad times." That's not Keynesian.
I'd like to see actual Keynesian policies, but I don't think the Federal Government will ever have the discipline.
Do you volunteer?
No?
Okay then.
Of course I don't volunteer to -die-.
Do I volunteer to drive a very fuel-efficient vehicle that might not come out well in an accident with an SUV? Yes I do, and more people should.
Higher taxes - combined with cheap and effective mass transit - does indeed reduce fuel use. Raising taxes is easy, providing the alternative to driving is the hard part.
Higher fuel taxes just put the politicians who pushed for them out of office. Higher fuel taxes are one of the few things hated by both conservatives (they don't like taxes) and liberals (fuel taxes are regressive, disproportionately affecting the poor and middle class).
Side rant: Holy nepotism [wikipedia.org], Batman! Hey, Mark, did you ever think that maybe Facebook wouldn't be so hated and being thrashed so much in Public Relations if the person in charge of it actually earned that position by merit?
Side response: How do you know she isn't qualified? Just because she said something with which you disagree?
That's the problem with hiring family members. For quite awhile there will be suspicions around them, and they will have to work harder than a non-family member to prove themselves. It may be unfair, but it's hardly unjustified.
You say that but in practise anonymous comments are censored through obscurity on Slashdot - low-scoring posts are pushed off the first 50, and sit beneath the majority default browse level, coupled with almost nobody wishing to mod up an anonymous comment since there is no personal benefit in doing so.
I wonder how many are like me and browse with -all- comments loaded by default. I hate thinking that there are more responses that I might not be seeing.
Voting is anonymous to prevent coercion and bribery.
Okay, so that didn't work. Any other ideas?
It didn't?
We're talking about average voters, not congressional votes here. I can't remember the last time that, say, the voters in a company were coerced to vote for a specific candidate.
The former employee might be disgruntled enough to cause some trouble, but it's another thing to sign a false affidavit, which is perjury and a felony.
Maybe, but how can you prove that the statement was false, rather than, say, you quickly uninstall any offending software after the affadavit is filed?