That's pretty funny, but I think it's true that lawsuits (or the fear of them) played a role in this disaster too.
The city of New Orleans had 400 municipal buses and 2500 school buses, enough to take 100,000 people to Baton Rouge in a day and a half. The only one that was used was commandeered by a 20-year-old civilian, Jabbar Gibson (bless his soul), and driven to Houston with 70 strangers aboard. The rest were not only unused, but now lie destroyed by the flood waters. Why?
The answer could be simple ignorance and incompetence on the part of local Democrat politicians (at the risk of being redundant). However, the buses were part of the official State of Louisiana Emergency Operations Plan: see page 13, paragraph 5:
'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...
I have a more likely theory to explain this appalling failure on the part of the local pols: I bet the Mayor and Governor were afraid there would be a traffic boo-boo, and everyone aboard would sue the city for millions.
Democrat leaning Louisiana and overwhelmingly Democrat New Orleans was dead last on their partisan priority list and it showed.
Then what explains Bill Clinton's failure to fix these problems? He had eight years of peace and prosperity, even budget surpluses. It would have been much easier to fix the problems then, than after 9/11 and several years of recession.
Does Bill Clinton hate black people too? By the logic of the arguments I've heard put forward against Bush, there can be no other conclusion.
New Orleans itself is in the same situation, living "paycheck to paycheck". They've been begging for federal funds for years before this happened to upgrade the levees. Those funds got redirected to Iraq for the past two years.
Actually, those funds were to be disbursed for fiscal year 2006. Iraq or no Iraq, the work would not have been done. And supposedly the levees that were breached last week were not on the list for improvement anyway.
If you can set aside your anti-Bush venom for a few moments, you might ask why Bill Clinton did not fix this problem back in the days of wine and roses. Nobody ever had a more fortunate time in the Presidency than his two terms in the 90's, what with all the budget surpIuses and peace and relatively minor terrorist problems. But he did fuck-all about it. Too distracted getting his dick sucked, I guess.
Does Clinton hate black people too? That's the logical corollary to all the accusations flying around about Bush.
It creates sleeper towns which are deserted and hence easily robbed during the day, and commercial districts which are deserted and easily robbed during the night.
you get rich liberals like Teddy Kennedy blocking their construction because they would spoil the view from his luxurious oceanside compound.
The alcoholic murderer is just another example of the Gulfstream Liberal hypocrites, sneering down at flyover country from 35,000 feet, clucking their tongues at all those selfish SUV drivers below.
Teddy, his nephew RFK Jr., Michael Moore, Al Gore, Laurie David, Ariana Huffington, Barbara Streisand, and the list goes on and on and on. They live lives dripping with decadence and luxury. They live in 10,000 sq. ft. Malibu mansions with six or eight air conditioning subsystems. They go hither and yon in their Gulfstreams and Learjets. They drive around town in their limousines and Maybachs and S600 Mercs. I have two kids, but Al Gore has four, and the Kennedys breed useless mouths like rats. Their footprint on Mother Earth's limited resources is ten or twenty times my own. Yet these pampered hypocrites have the gall to criticize me for driving a Jeep? Fuck them. Fuck them hard.
Would the Phoenix-Tucson area support the current population if not for large western dams?
Something like 80% of Arizona's water usage goes to farms. The way water is used on these farms is shockingly inefficient.
Arizona could sustain two or three times its current population with surface water sources if not for agricultural usage.
The farmers and other big water users have always held a great deal of political power in the arid West, but that is changing. When housewives in Scottsdale see the grass in their yards dying off because of mandatory water restrictions, the current allocations will be changed in the blink of an eye.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, or a bad thing. It just is.
Hey, those states are full of liberals who routinely vote for income redistribution schemes. Well, these statistics show they've got what they asked for. Wealthy blue states are ponying up big dollars to poorer places out here in Jesusland.
Rich liberals shouldn't talk the talk if they can't walk the walk.
Our military could not handle fighting both the Iraqi war and a war in the Korean peninsula at the same time.
Oh, indeed we could. The Iraqi resistance could be crushed in day or two if the US really were as bad as the Chomskyites say we are. The problem is that most of the rest of Iraq would be crushed along with them.
And I'm not even talking about nuclear weapons. We have conventional weapons that could wipe small cities from the face of the earth. We don't use them, because we are in fact good guys.
Excruciatingly scrupulous rules of engagement should not be mistaken for weakness or overextension of our military.
I normally have little sympathy for the anti-corporate ravings of the Left. I think the benefits we have gained from private enterprise far outweight the detriments.
That said, I can't think how this specific situation is defensible by anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. It reminds me of the case in which a record label sued a singer because he sounded too much like himself, thus infringing on the copyright of his old songs that the record company owned.
This path leads to indentured servitude. We have got to put a stop to corporate-lawyer chicanery of this type. Let us not forget that the original purpose of the limited-liability corporation was to protect individuals, i.e. investors, from being ruined by the acts of others. When the corporation is not just made equal to a natural person, but elevated above him, it's time for a change.
Here's a suggestion: warn people when you sell them a drug that might kill them, ok?
I have another suggestion. Society needs to recognize that ANY drug can kill you. Aspirin and Tylenol kill thousands of people every year. So do a lot of herbal remedies.
All drugs have side effects. The art of medicine is in balancing the risks and benefits to come to some kind of compromise that will benefit patient the most while doing the least possible harm.
Vioxx saved the lives of a lot of people with intractable pain, who would have otherwise taken too much Motrin or Tylenol and died of bleeding ulcers, or would have gotten hooked on opiates. Now it's gone.
The medical system is coming apart at the seams. I lay half or more of the blame on trial lawyers.
That's great for this doctor and for his patients. There was a time when similar improvisation and experimentation was done in the medical clinics of the U.S. Those days are long since past.
Over here, the first time one of this guy's patients had an upset tummy after the procedure, he'd be sued for everything he owns. Medical progress now depends on large corporations with good legal departments and expensive insurance-- but even the big boys are now in jeopardy from a legal system run amok.
Now those environmentatlists that you are so scathing of - what is their motivation to fund "bad" science exactly?
That's not the point. I'm talking about the scientists, not the sponsors, and the temptation for bias that exists no matter the source of funds.
There is no objective reason to think that scientists who get money from corporations are any more or less biased than those who get it from foundations. In each case, there is at least the potential that the scientist may bias the results to please his patron, even if only subconsciously.
Please note, I am not talking here about deliberate, knowing falsification. But even in this case, when most people would expect such behavior from an evil corporate drone far sooner than from a noble public servant or detached academic, the myth does not always match reality. Plenty of "unbiased" professors getting not a penny from corporate sources have been caught fudging the data.
As to the motivation of an environmentalist group to fund bad science-- I agree most environmentalists are well meaning and honest people with no desire to seek anything but the unvarnished truth. However, there are at least two possible motivations for such behavior that I can think of:
1) the paid staff of such a non-profit group depends on contributions for their paycheck, just as much as soulless corporate salarymen depend on filthy profits. Contributions to do-good outfits dry up if problems are solved or there turns out to be no problem at all.
2) After the collapse of communism and the decay of socialism in the last quarter century or so, there were certain people on the authoritarian Left who perceived environmentalism as a convenient means to collectivist ends. I am certainly not saying this is typical of environmentalists in general, but the disciples of Gramsci have made a long march through many other influential institutions and they do exist in the environmental movement.
Not being able to see the stars has nothing to do with particulate pollution, rather it has to do with those horrible sodium (the orange ones) lamps that started popping up in the 70's.
I seem to recall that the sodium lamps actually came into use in part to help astronomers. IIRC, they have a very narrow spectrum that is easily filtered, unlike broad spectrum white lights.
Actually, there's another question besides who is actually paying. How much extra they paid the "scientists" under the table (beyond the wager itself)?
Do you mean the pro-warming scientists or the anti-warming scientists?
Grants from the Sierra Club spend just as well as grants from Exxon, and carry the same risk of biasing a scientist to report what he thinks his patron wants to hear.
I'd be interested in an analysis of the source of funds for climate scientists. How much is coming from the evil corporations, how much from scaremongering environmentalists, and how much from supposedly apolitical government agencies?
Also, you must not underestimate the power of peer review and tenure decisions to bias scientific research. The academic world is tough on people who undermine articles of "progressive" faith.
Since C is also one of the most widely understood low level languages, the argument for any other low level language is weak.
I must be getting old. When I was learning programming years ago, C was a high level language-- though, to be certain, on the lower end of the scale of HLLs. Has the definition shifted so much among CS professionals?
The first problem I encountered switching from QB to C++ was that all variables are passed by reference by default in QB, while in C++ all variables are passed by value by defaut and by reference & is rarely used.
I'm sure this has appeared before on Slashdot, but after reading your post I couldn't resist:
Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal, used to tell this joke on himself: Europeans usually pronounce his name properly, "Nick-louse Veert", while Americans invariably mangle it to ""Nickles Worth". Which is to say, Europeans reference him by name, and Americans by value.
Let the 40 year old father of 2 keep daydreaming he is fucking Claudia Schiffer when he bangs his 30k in plastic surgery trophy wife, drinking his canned swill in his A/C half a million dollar McMansion so that he can get up in the morning and do a job that none of us could dream doing, being middle management.
Today, the AG is attacking the corrupt executives like Bernie Ebbers, handing them enough years in prison to make sure that they die in prison.
That is correct. World Com, Tyco, Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, etc. The former executives of all these famous corporate pirates are in real deep shit. Many of them are going to prison, and the rest will be ruined by fines and legal fees.
And I want it noted for the record:
These scandals took place primarily in the go-go late 90's, on the watch of party-boy Bill Clinton, who must have been too distracted chasing pussy to notice or care.
These companies were heavy donors to Democrats and Republicans alike. DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe was up to his eyeballs in Global Crossing and looted tens of millions of dollars from it. Democrats who think their politicos are somehow less greedy or venal than the Republicans are so wrong.
The mess is being cleaned up by the Justice Department of George W. Bush. Thanks George! Drop the hammer on them.
I'd rather see ten guilty go free than to falsely convict one innocent!
How far are you willing to carry this? Would a hundred or a thousand or a million guilty men going free still be worth the liberty of one innocent man?
If you let the guilty go free, many of them will prey on innocent people in the future. At some point, you will be causing far more suffering than you could possibly prevent. If such a policy were carried to its logical extreme, we would have to close our jails and courts, lest one innocent man among millions be convicted wrongly.
If we are to have a civil society, we have to accept the possibility of a tiny fraction of innocent people being convicted and punished for crimes they did not commit. We should make every reasonable effort to safeguard against this, but not paralyze ourselves with doubt. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
If we fail, and an innocent man is executed, well then, he died for his country.
They may have been purchased "legally" but they weren't sold legally.
The contract between the publisher and the book store almost certainly states that the books remain the property of the publisher until 12:01 am Saturday, despite being placed in the custody of the store. If so, then whoever broke the seal on the crate and took the book out committed an act of theft.
Thus the book is now stolen goods, and you can't keep stolen goods even if you paid for them in good faith. The rightful owner may reclaim your book, and your only recourse is with the store that sold it to you.
It's like you pawned a watch, and went back to reclaim it according to the terms of the pawn ticket (a binding contract), but the pawn broker had already sold it. He stole it from you and you could go and take it back, if you found out who it went to. Or suppose you rented an apartment, and before your lease expired, the landlord broke into your place and sold all your shit on eBay. Same thing, you could take it back, and all the buyer could do would be to sue your landlord for the purchase price.
Now, assuming the goods are stolen, any use of the goods to commit theft of trade secrets or copyright violation would also be forbidden. Again, there are other parallels for this; you can't trade stocks on the basis of a confidential internal company memo faxed to you by mistake, or you'll be busted by the SEC for insider trading.
I think that strictly speaking, this could be prosecuted either for trafficking in stolen goods, or revealing trade secrets. Whether the jury would convict is another question, but who would want to be the test case?
You assume that: 1) all Muslims are cultural imperialists, keen to impose a particular set of rules on everyone
2) their children and their children's children will be, too
Neither of these ludicrous assumptions is supportable.
Au contraire, I think they are quite supportable. Before the Iraq invasion, every country in the Arab world was a squalid dictatorship. Amputations, beheadings, and honor killings are rampant. Women are treated as beasts of burden. The rest of the Muslim world is not much better.
On the rare occasion of democratic elections, the vote is usually for more jihad, more Islamist oppression, more hateful kill-the-Jews rhetoric. Look at Algeria in 1990, when the Islamic Salvation Front won and plunged the country into a decade of bloody civil war, or the recent elections in Iran.
And there are several studies showing that young Muslims born in Europe are far more radicalized than their parents.
I'll therefore have to ask you to shut the FUCK UP about Christianity.
Um. OK. Let's see, the only thing about Christianity I wrote in this whole thread was as follows: They planned the September 11 attacks long before Bush ever came to power, at a time when the American military was fighting Christian Serbs to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I'm not a bible thumper and I don't think the above is an example of "moaning about grievances that are 500 years old." I included it as an ironic counterpoint for those who think we are getting attacked because of anything George Bush did.
Did you perhaps mean to respond to someone else's comment?
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty funny, but I think it's true that lawsuits (or the fear of them) played a role in this disaster too.
The city of New Orleans had 400 municipal buses and 2500 school buses, enough to take 100,000 people to Baton Rouge in a day and a half. The only one that was used was commandeered by a 20-year-old civilian, Jabbar Gibson (bless his soul), and driven to Houston with 70 strangers aboard. The rest were not only unused, but now lie destroyed by the flood waters. Why?
The answer could be simple ignorance and incompetence on the part of local Democrat politicians (at the risk of being redundant). However, the buses were part of the official State of Louisiana Emergency Operations Plan: see page 13, paragraph 5:
I have a more likely theory to explain this appalling failure on the part of the local pols: I bet the Mayor and Governor were afraid there would be a traffic boo-boo, and everyone aboard would sue the city for millions.
(Especially if the evacuation turned out to be a false alarm. Which is why the incompetent Democrat schoolmarm of a Governor went out of her way at the Aug. 28 press conference to state that she and the Mayor were only evacuating the city at the express urging of none other than President George W. Bush.)
If you are a lawyer, you had better think long and hard about the damage your profession is doing to the American way of life.
-ccm
Then what explains Bill Clinton's failure to fix these problems? He had eight years of peace and prosperity, even budget surpluses. It would have been much easier to fix the problems then, than after 9/11 and several years of recession.
Does Bill Clinton hate black people too? By the logic of the arguments I've heard put forward against Bush, there can be no other conclusion.
-ccm
Actually, those funds were to be disbursed for fiscal year 2006. Iraq or no Iraq, the work would not have been done. And supposedly the levees that were breached last week were not on the list for improvement anyway.
If you can set aside your anti-Bush venom for a few moments, you might ask why Bill Clinton did not fix this problem back in the days of wine and roses. Nobody ever had a more fortunate time in the Presidency than his two terms in the 90's, what with all the budget surpIuses and peace and relatively minor terrorist problems. But he did fuck-all about it. Too distracted getting his dick sucked, I guess.
Does Clinton hate black people too? That's the logical corollary to all the accusations flying around about Bush.
-ccm
As opposed to those compact, bustling European cities where nobody ever gets robbed.
-ccm
The alcoholic murderer is just another example of the Gulfstream Liberal hypocrites, sneering down at flyover country from 35,000 feet, clucking their tongues at all those selfish SUV drivers below.
Teddy, his nephew RFK Jr., Michael Moore, Al Gore, Laurie David, Ariana Huffington, Barbara Streisand, and the list goes on and on and on. They live lives dripping with decadence and luxury. They live in 10,000 sq. ft. Malibu mansions with six or eight air conditioning subsystems. They go hither and yon in their Gulfstreams and Learjets. They drive around town in their limousines and Maybachs and S600 Mercs. I have two kids, but Al Gore has four, and the Kennedys breed useless mouths like rats. Their footprint on Mother Earth's limited resources is ten or twenty times my own. Yet these pampered hypocrites have the gall to criticize me for driving a Jeep? Fuck them. Fuck them hard.
-ccm
Something like 80% of Arizona's water usage goes to farms. The way water is used on these farms is shockingly inefficient.
Arizona could sustain two or three times its current population with surface water sources if not for agricultural usage.
The farmers and other big water users have always held a great deal of political power in the arid West, but that is changing. When housewives in Scottsdale see the grass in their yards dying off because of mandatory water restrictions, the current allocations will be changed in the blink of an eye.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, or a bad thing. It just is.
-ccm
Rich liberals shouldn't talk the talk if they can't walk the walk.
-ccm
Oh, indeed we could. The Iraqi resistance could be crushed in day or two if the US really were as bad as the Chomskyites say we are. The problem is that most of the rest of Iraq would be crushed along with them.
And I'm not even talking about nuclear weapons. We have conventional weapons that could wipe small cities from the face of the earth. We don't use them, because we are in fact good guys.
Excruciatingly scrupulous rules of engagement should not be mistaken for weakness or overextension of our military.
-ccm
That said, I can't think how this specific situation is defensible by anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. It reminds me of the case in which a record label sued a singer because he sounded too much like himself, thus infringing on the copyright of his old songs that the record company owned.
This path leads to indentured servitude. We have got to put a stop to corporate-lawyer chicanery of this type. Let us not forget that the original purpose of the limited-liability corporation was to protect individuals, i.e. investors, from being ruined by the acts of others. When the corporation is not just made equal to a natural person, but elevated above him, it's time for a change.
-ccm
I have another suggestion. Society needs to recognize that ANY drug can kill you. Aspirin and Tylenol kill thousands of people every year. So do a lot of herbal remedies.
All drugs have side effects. The art of medicine is in balancing the risks and benefits to come to some kind of compromise that will benefit patient the most while doing the least possible harm.
Vioxx saved the lives of a lot of people with intractable pain, who would have otherwise taken too much Motrin or Tylenol and died of bleeding ulcers, or would have gotten hooked on opiates. Now it's gone.
The medical system is coming apart at the seams. I lay half or more of the blame on trial lawyers.
-ccm
Over here, the first time one of this guy's patients had an upset tummy after the procedure, he'd be sued for everything he owns. Medical progress now depends on large corporations with good legal departments and expensive insurance-- but even the big boys are now in jeopardy from a legal system run amok.
-ccm
That's not the point. I'm talking about the scientists, not the sponsors, and the temptation for bias that exists no matter the source of funds.
There is no objective reason to think that scientists who get money from corporations are any more or less biased than those who get it from foundations. In each case, there is at least the potential that the scientist may bias the results to please his patron, even if only subconsciously.
Please note, I am not talking here about deliberate, knowing falsification. But even in this case, when most people would expect such behavior from an evil corporate drone far sooner than from a noble public servant or detached academic, the myth does not always match reality. Plenty of "unbiased" professors getting not a penny from corporate sources have been caught fudging the data.
As to the motivation of an environmentalist group to fund bad science-- I agree most environmentalists are well meaning and honest people with no desire to seek anything but the unvarnished truth. However, there are at least two possible motivations for such behavior that I can think of:
1) the paid staff of such a non-profit group depends on contributions for their paycheck, just as much as soulless corporate salarymen depend on filthy profits. Contributions to do-good outfits dry up if problems are solved or there turns out to be no problem at all.
2) After the collapse of communism and the decay of socialism in the last quarter century or so, there were certain people on the authoritarian Left who perceived environmentalism as a convenient means to collectivist ends. I am certainly not saying this is typical of environmentalists in general, but the disciples of Gramsci have made a long march through many other influential institutions and they do exist in the environmental movement.
-ccm
I seem to recall that the sodium lamps actually came into use in part to help astronomers. IIRC, they have a very narrow spectrum that is easily filtered, unlike broad spectrum white lights.
--ccm
My post: +5 Insightful.
Yours: -1 Flamebait.
Who's the mindless driveler here?
-ccm
Do you mean the pro-warming scientists or the anti-warming scientists?
Grants from the Sierra Club spend just as well as grants from Exxon, and carry the same risk of biasing a scientist to report what he thinks his patron wants to hear.
I'd be interested in an analysis of the source of funds for climate scientists. How much is coming from the evil corporations, how much from scaremongering environmentalists, and how much from supposedly apolitical government agencies?
Also, you must not underestimate the power of peer review and tenure decisions to bias scientific research. The academic world is tough on people who undermine articles of "progressive" faith.
-ccm
I must be getting old. When I was learning programming years ago, C was a high level language-- though, to be certain, on the lower end of the scale of HLLs. Has the definition shifted so much among CS professionals?
-ccm
I'm sure this has appeared before on Slashdot, but after reading your post I couldn't resist:
Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal, used to tell this joke on himself: Europeans usually pronounce his name properly, "Nick-louse Veert", while Americans invariably mangle it to ""Nickles Worth". Which is to say, Europeans reference him by name, and Americans by value.
-ccm
Sounds pretty good to me. Where do I sign up?
-ccm
That is correct. World Com, Tyco, Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, etc. The former executives of all these famous corporate pirates are in real deep shit. Many of them are going to prison, and the rest will be ruined by fines and legal fees.
And I want it noted for the record:
-ccm
-ccm
How far are you willing to carry this? Would a hundred or a thousand or a million guilty men going free still be worth the liberty of one innocent man?
If you let the guilty go free, many of them will prey on innocent people in the future. At some point, you will be causing far more suffering than you could possibly prevent. If such a policy were carried to its logical extreme, we would have to close our jails and courts, lest one innocent man among millions be convicted wrongly.
If we are to have a civil society, we have to accept the possibility of a tiny fraction of innocent people being convicted and punished for crimes they did not commit. We should make every reasonable effort to safeguard against this, but not paralyze ourselves with doubt. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
If we fail, and an innocent man is executed, well then, he died for his country.
-ccm
They may have been purchased "legally" but they weren't sold legally.
The contract between the publisher and the book store almost certainly states that the books remain the property of the publisher until 12:01 am Saturday, despite being placed in the custody of the store. If so, then whoever broke the seal on the crate and took the book out committed an act of theft.
Thus the book is now stolen goods, and you can't keep stolen goods even if you paid for them in good faith. The rightful owner may reclaim your book, and your only recourse is with the store that sold it to you.
It's like you pawned a watch, and went back to reclaim it according to the terms of the pawn ticket (a binding contract), but the pawn broker had already sold it. He stole it from you and you could go and take it back, if you found out who it went to. Or suppose you rented an apartment, and before your lease expired, the landlord broke into your place and sold all your shit on eBay. Same thing, you could take it back, and all the buyer could do would be to sue your landlord for the purchase price.
Now, assuming the goods are stolen, any use of the goods to commit theft of trade secrets or copyright violation would also be forbidden. Again, there are other parallels for this; you can't trade stocks on the basis of a confidential internal company memo faxed to you by mistake, or you'll be busted by the SEC for insider trading.
-ccm
I think that strictly speaking, this could be prosecuted either for trafficking in stolen goods, or revealing trade secrets. Whether the jury would convict is another question, but who would want to be the test case?
-ccm
1) all Muslims are cultural imperialists, keen to impose a particular set of rules on everyone
2) their children and their children's children will be, too
Neither of these ludicrous assumptions is supportable.
Au contraire, I think they are quite supportable. Before the Iraq invasion, every country in the Arab world was a squalid dictatorship. Amputations, beheadings, and honor killings are rampant. Women are treated as beasts of burden. The rest of the Muslim world is not much better.
On the rare occasion of democratic elections, the vote is usually for more jihad, more Islamist oppression, more hateful kill-the-Jews rhetoric. Look at Algeria in 1990, when the Islamic Salvation Front won and plunged the country into a decade of bloody civil war, or the recent elections in Iran.
And there are several studies showing that young Muslims born in Europe are far more radicalized than their parents.
-ccm
Um. OK. Let's see, the only thing about Christianity I wrote in this whole thread was as follows: They planned the September 11 attacks long before Bush ever came to power, at a time when the American military was fighting Christian Serbs to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I'm not a bible thumper and I don't think the above is an example of "moaning about grievances that are 500 years old." I included it as an ironic counterpoint for those who think we are getting attacked because of anything George Bush did.
Did you perhaps mean to respond to someone else's comment?
-ccm