Spoken like somebody who knows nothing and just spouts off on 'intuition'...
I'm not going to dig it up for you, but I recall that a study demonstrated that regular masturbation actually made all the sperm produced by the individual healthier (increased motility, decreased deformity) albeit at lower counts. Quality over quantity should be the order of the day anyway, considering it's only one in the end that gets the egg.
I messed up an HTML tag and so this ended up functionally omitted from the middle:
I know a guy personally who feigned compliance and then put holes in a mugger who pulled a gun on him at night in the street. (I could even reference the criminal case wherein the attacker was sentenced, since he lived, but I want to respect my acquaintance's privacy.) Fact is though that most defensive gun uses result in the attacker running off at the sight. Attackers want unarmed victims.
Compared the the millions of defensive uses, a few accidents are worth it, and the suicides will happen anyway.
If you really want case after case, go through the archives of keepandbeararms.com, they post stories of documented and verified defensive uses of guns all day every day. But I suppose all those people should be robbed, raped or killed just so you can have your sensitivities pandered to?
And MacOS, Linux, BSD, UNIX, BeOS, OS/2, FreeDOS etc. never existed? Dominating a market because your product is good is not the same as a monopoly. A monopoly *prevents* competition and maintains a lock on the market by means beyond being, you know, a good product (in the eyes of consumers relative to other options).
MS did not have the power to prevent substantial competition, especially in less consumer-oriented markets. While never popular on the desktop, Linux has long been a major competitor for servers and embedded devices.
Not to mention that the supposed 'monopoly' of MS didn't come into question until Netscape whined about IE bundling. But here too, this was demonstrated to be no monopoly for several reasons: 1) Opera was contemporary and survived the paradigm shift while continuing to charge for its browser and 2) other free browsers eventually overtook IE. IE was not a 'problem' of the MS 'monopoly' it was both a better browser (in the opinion of many at the time) and had no cost. It fatally shifted the paradigm for Netscape, yes, but it didn't prevent other contemporary and future competitors from entering the market.
(Indeed, MS's strategy of bundling or subsidizing products to make market inroads has frequently backfired. Beyond IE, it has happened with their bids for the mobile market and the media market. It's only really been successful with their establishment in the console market, but I'm not sure how relevant that's even going to be long term.
Your narrow focus on easements and access vs. use is obtuse. Do you really think that if I bought the equipment and secured easements I could run a utility company? It's far more than that. Licenses, certifications, standards, permits, and other barriers of all kinds go far beyond, and all these things were drafted by existing players, either through lobbyists or through the appointment of "former" industrialists to drafting committees and regulatory agencies.
"Robber barons" is nothing but a catch-phrase, and the ones I know of fall mostly into category 2.
Somalia is also category 2 (insofar as it applies at all, I can't really think of any Somalian 'monopolies' and as such I wonder if you know what we're even talking about here), and isn't so much 'lack of government' as it is so frequently portrayed in the West (partly out of ignorance, partly out of a political agenda), as it is that Somalians hate being de facto ruled by Ethiopians and Kenyans. However every time they try to form a government that resists the Ethiopian et al 'peacekeeping' forces, the West says "No! Bad Somalia! No self-determination for you!" And topples said government in favor of some Ethiopian-friendly puppet the Somalians don't want... hence they don't recognize the puppet government and the cycle continues. The issue is really a lot different than it is portrayed in the West.
So, try again, and you need to be specific. X company monopolized Y thing during Z period. No buzzwords, no vague assertions--just a concrete specific case or go away.
I challenge you to name one instance in history where a monopoly has existed where government wasn't playing either or both of two roles:
1) Creating barriers to entry on behalf of corporate lobbyists that make competition illegal (as only government can do) except for the existing major players who coincidentally* are the only entities with the infrastructure to meet the arbitrary legal (government) requirements.
2) Looking the other way while corporations bribe government agents to allow criminal acts including intimidation and violence to prevent competition in an extrajudicial way.
Telecom is not a free market because even if I bought a ton of equipment and hired a bunch of people, I could not enter the market as an ISP, because the market is regulated. These regulations make competition illegal for any entity other than the players that "helped" draft the regulations in the first place.
Why do you think that a 'true' democracy is inherently going to "honor immutable individual rights" anyway? Democracy is tyranny of the majority, and the prop 8 debacle in California demonstrated exactly what happens when majorities (democracies) decide what rights minorities have. Which is to say whatever the majority wants.
Basically no matter what kind of government you have, somebody is deciding what is right for somebody else, and government provides the theater by which force is used to make that decision apply. The only thing that prevents complete authoritarian tyranny are constitutions, which in the last century have become weaker and weaker due to unscrupulous and negligent judiciary proceedings.
I can see how you would wager that I know little of the subject, because the things I mentioned are such common knowledge./sarcasm
I studied the Bible (and analyses of it) virtually every day for nine years for nine years before my apostasy. In fact, like many literate apostates, it was that in-depth study that made me apostate. Beyond simple Biblical knowledge, history has long been my pet subject in the humanities, and I can tell you more than you'd likely be comfortable knowing about the baldly political nature of the canonization of Christian doctrines and the corollary excommunications of early Christians who fell too far on the periphery of proto-orthodoxy (namely but not exclusively the polarization along the Ebionite-Marcionite axis).
If you'd like to start something beyond your casual and baseless imputations of my supposed ignorance, be my guest.
I would also say it's ludicrous to say that "science" has tens of thousands of discrete positions on one subject, just as Christianity is one subject. Furthermore, when certain scientific positions are demonstrably falsified, most abandon them quite readily, and the ones that don't are considered harmless cranks and left alone. When a sect of Christianity broke away, it would be ruthlessly persecuted and the leadership often summarily executed (as happened to the Paulicians, Manicheans, Cathars, etc. etc.).
Puritans weren't fans of Christmas either (it was even banned in Boston for several decades in the 17th century), I suppose you're going to tell me they were not Christian? That's the point... Christianity is actually rather nebulous, which is why there have been so many schisms and heresies, and there are tens of thousands of sects. The fact remains that Hitler spoke of things like 'doing God's work' and the NSDAP colluded with Catholic hierarchies. In fact, after the war was over, the primary conduit for German war criminals to escape the Allies was the Catholic church, whose agents concealed, protected and ferried such criminals to South America.
Oh bullshit. Let me guess, somebody decided that legalizing prostitution as well as reforming child labor laws must necessarily mean an explicit and positive call for child prostitutes? It's this kind of intellectual dishonesty and disingenuity that makes me loathe the mainstream left.
I know that/. has been sold to Dice, but isn't the HQ still in Virginia? And Yet the only party in VA is in the middle of nowhere and nobody's going. What gives? I'm going to have to go to DC... bleh.
Except climate science... there is complete consensus there and the debate is over and closed forever, and even if a career, credentialed climate scientist like Dr. Timothy Ball or whomever disagrees, they're just denialists!
Even though I personally think that there is a real warming trend, I think it's disgusting how many people have made that a dogmatic if not wholly political ideology that doesn't even resemble the open, questioning spirit of real science. If you look at the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit, they openly discuss and advocate subverting the peer review process to bar any theory which doesn't conform to their opinions on no other grounds than that disagreement and deliberately irrespective of a scientific reason that would normally bar publishing (methodological questions or whatever).
Class 3 NFA weapons are usually a lot harder to get than that, since I don't know of any jurisdiction where the Federal process is the only one you have to go through. The last place I researched you had to get the chief of police to sign off on each and every one. Not to mention that only weapons manufactured before 1986 are even eligible, and that crimp on supply vs. demand makes them about as expensive as cars. So yeah, the next time I have a chief of police as a golf buddy and a dozen grand just lying around, I'll be sure to pick one up.
You would do well to research the 'Fast and Furious' background more before you peddle your ideological tripe. The fact is that gun shop owners are not the unscrupulous enablers or pathetic imbeciles you make them out to be. They were actually reporting this suspicious activity to the BATFE, and they wanted to stop selling guns to certain people, but as part of the 'Fast and Furious' operation, the BATFE instructed them to continue the sales. Several gun sellers were deliberately acting irresponsibly under the advisement of BATFE agents!
Somesources.
Your feelings about these things are not borne out by facts. Thirty years ago concealed carry was illegal in most of the US. One by one states started to enable concealed carry, most setting up 'shall issue' systems that would give licenses to anybody without a criminal record without question. Despite the gun control lobby whinging in every state about how this would cause 'shootouts in the streets!' it never happened. Now the US allows concealed carry in more than 80% of states, and in EVERY state with shall issue concealed carry, violent crime has either stayed the same or gone down since the law went into effect.
Turns out, people aren't the impulsive idiots you take them to be. There are more people carrying guns regularly in the US than ever before, and violent crime has been on a fairly steady down slope for the better part of the last half century. Reality just doesn't agree with the paranoid intuition of gun control advocates.
I think it's rather misguided to characterize early Republicans in such a way. The Republican Party was founded to offer a stronger abolitionist response to the power vacuum left by the implosion of the Whig Party and North/South divisions within the Democratic Party. That it would end up advocating 'big government infrastructure' was incidental and wholly predicated on the fact that its rise was concurrent with the Civil War. Those circumstances necessitated a consolidation of Federal power as well as the reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed by the war, especially in the South.
For starters, how about that the government claims to have evidence and that people have confessed to doing it? I don't particularly trust the Afghan government either, but people are in custody for this right now.
Furthermore, as I already alluded to, the society in Afghanistan is already so rife with the abuse of women and girls that it has one of the highest rates of female suicide and attempted suicide in the world. And it's not the quiet, comfortable type that girls usually go for like ODing on sleeping pills, they're routinely lighting themselves on fire, for fuck's sake. They want to be damn sure they're really dead, and they don't care anymore how much it hurts because that care has been savagely beaten out of them systematically by the men who control every aspect of their lives.
Like I said, if you go to Afghanistan looking for abuse and you don't find it, something is wrong with your eyes at a minimum.
It was not historically a problem (virtually every culture was permissive of polygamy in the past), mainly because supporting large families is expensive. Only a small percentage of households could bother with polygamy.
The other thing you need to realize is that we're already on a collision course with a society where gender can be chosen by the parents. In China it already happens routinely, which is why their gender balance is one of the most skewed in the world. You might think this is further evidence against modern polygamy (though it would actually argue in favor of polyandry, which, despite misinformed conflations, is a subset of polygamy), but it reflects the momentum of social norms in the culture. Things are and are becoming radically different in the West, and specifically the US, where more women are getting degrees than men. In another 2-4 generations, women necessarily will edge out men numerically in the upper echelons of business and politics, which, aside from being a historical first in the history of human civilization, will actually create a pressure to have female children instead of male ones.
If we did nothing but trust names and reputations, we'd never uncover corruption or negligence. Such low standards enable the erosion of responsibility.
It's especially amazing in a place where many women have in fact immolated themselves rather than face further abuse from their husbands. There are so many real, systemic abuses of women in that society that honestly if somebody is looking for abuse and doesn't find it, I smell cover-up. What was the methodology? Who was doing the sampling, the analysis? What was the chain of custody?
Reader is totally lame. When I heard this news, I thought to myself, 'well, time to take another look at Reader, maybe they made it not lame in time to retire iGoogle....' Nope. Nothing but a mash of items with some useless numbers next to them about how many things you haven't read. Most of the screen real estate is completely wasted and there's no setting to improve it.
The whole reason that iGoogle's RSS widgets were so awesome is that you could pile tons of them on top of each other four columns deep. I could see, in an organized way, like two hundred headlines at once and not have to click on anything except what I cared about. Reader is too manual. I don't want to click on a dozen different things just to get huge bloated summaries of things I might not even want to read. It's inefficient, and I'm just not doing it. Bye Google, you sure know how to break people of a habit.
Guess I'll look into this netvibes thing everybody is talking about.
In the first place, you're talking about anthropology, not archaeology. In the second place, that's how science works. If you have a hundred artifacts, you try to find a pattern from them, and then if somebody finds a hundred more that invalidate all or part of the previous hypothesized pattern, so be it. You come up with a new one that fits the available data.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like somebody who knows nothing and just spouts off on 'intuition' ...
I'm not going to dig it up for you, but I recall that a study demonstrated that regular masturbation actually made all the sperm produced by the individual healthier (increased motility, decreased deformity) albeit at lower counts. Quality over quantity should be the order of the day anyway, considering it's only one in the end that gets the egg.
I messed up an HTML tag and so this ended up functionally omitted from the middle:
I know a guy personally who feigned compliance and then put holes in a mugger who pulled a gun on him at night in the street. (I could even reference the criminal case wherein the attacker was sentenced, since he lived, but I want to respect my acquaintance's privacy.) Fact is though that most defensive gun uses result in the attacker running off at the sight. Attackers want unarmed victims.
Compared the the millions of defensive uses, a few accidents are worth it, and the suicides will happen anyway.
If you really want case after case, go through the archives of keepandbeararms.com, they post stories of documented and verified defensive uses of guns all day every day. But I suppose all those people should be robbed, raped or killed just so you can have your sensitivities pandered to?
And MacOS, Linux, BSD, UNIX, BeOS, OS/2, FreeDOS etc. never existed? Dominating a market because your product is good is not the same as a monopoly. A monopoly *prevents* competition and maintains a lock on the market by means beyond being, you know, a good product (in the eyes of consumers relative to other options).
MS did not have the power to prevent substantial competition, especially in less consumer-oriented markets. While never popular on the desktop, Linux has long been a major competitor for servers and embedded devices.
Not to mention that the supposed 'monopoly' of MS didn't come into question until Netscape whined about IE bundling. But here too, this was demonstrated to be no monopoly for several reasons: 1) Opera was contemporary and survived the paradigm shift while continuing to charge for its browser and 2) other free browsers eventually overtook IE. IE was not a 'problem' of the MS 'monopoly' it was both a better browser (in the opinion of many at the time) and had no cost. It fatally shifted the paradigm for Netscape, yes, but it didn't prevent other contemporary and future competitors from entering the market.
(Indeed, MS's strategy of bundling or subsidizing products to make market inroads has frequently backfired. Beyond IE, it has happened with their bids for the mobile market and the media market. It's only really been successful with their establishment in the console market, but I'm not sure how relevant that's even going to be long term.
Your narrow focus on easements and access vs. use is obtuse. Do you really think that if I bought the equipment and secured easements I could run a utility company? It's far more than that. Licenses, certifications, standards, permits, and other barriers of all kinds go far beyond, and all these things were drafted by existing players, either through lobbyists or through the appointment of "former" industrialists to drafting committees and regulatory agencies.
"Robber barons" is nothing but a catch-phrase, and the ones I know of fall mostly into category 2.
Somalia is also category 2 (insofar as it applies at all, I can't really think of any Somalian 'monopolies' and as such I wonder if you know what we're even talking about here), and isn't so much 'lack of government' as it is so frequently portrayed in the West (partly out of ignorance, partly out of a political agenda), as it is that Somalians hate being de facto ruled by Ethiopians and Kenyans. However every time they try to form a government that resists the Ethiopian et al 'peacekeeping' forces, the West says "No! Bad Somalia! No self-determination for you!" And topples said government in favor of some Ethiopian-friendly puppet the Somalians don't want... hence they don't recognize the puppet government and the cycle continues. The issue is really a lot different than it is portrayed in the West.
So, try again, and you need to be specific. X company monopolized Y thing during Z period. No buzzwords, no vague assertions--just a concrete specific case or go away.
I challenge you to name one instance in history where a monopoly has existed where government wasn't playing either or both of two roles:
1) Creating barriers to entry on behalf of corporate lobbyists that make competition illegal (as only government can do) except for the existing major players who coincidentally* are the only entities with the infrastructure to meet the arbitrary legal (government) requirements.
2) Looking the other way while corporations bribe government agents to allow criminal acts including intimidation and violence to prevent competition in an extrajudicial way.
Telecom is not a free market because even if I bought a ton of equipment and hired a bunch of people, I could not enter the market as an ISP, because the market is regulated. These regulations make competition illegal for any entity other than the players that "helped" draft the regulations in the first place.
*Sarcasm
Why do you think that a 'true' democracy is inherently going to "honor immutable individual rights" anyway? Democracy is tyranny of the majority, and the prop 8 debacle in California demonstrated exactly what happens when majorities (democracies) decide what rights minorities have. Which is to say whatever the majority wants.
Basically no matter what kind of government you have, somebody is deciding what is right for somebody else, and government provides the theater by which force is used to make that decision apply. The only thing that prevents complete authoritarian tyranny are constitutions, which in the last century have become weaker and weaker due to unscrupulous and negligent judiciary proceedings.
The repetition of 'for nine years' is a typographical error.
I can see how you would wager that I know little of the subject, because the things I mentioned are such common knowledge. /sarcasm
I studied the Bible (and analyses of it) virtually every day for nine years for nine years before my apostasy. In fact, like many literate apostates, it was that in-depth study that made me apostate. Beyond simple Biblical knowledge, history has long been my pet subject in the humanities, and I can tell you more than you'd likely be comfortable knowing about the baldly political nature of the canonization of Christian doctrines and the corollary excommunications of early Christians who fell too far on the periphery of proto-orthodoxy (namely but not exclusively the polarization along the Ebionite-Marcionite axis).
If you'd like to start something beyond your casual and baseless imputations of my supposed ignorance, be my guest.
I would also say it's ludicrous to say that "science" has tens of thousands of discrete positions on one subject, just as Christianity is one subject. Furthermore, when certain scientific positions are demonstrably falsified, most abandon them quite readily, and the ones that don't are considered harmless cranks and left alone. When a sect of Christianity broke away, it would be ruthlessly persecuted and the leadership often summarily executed (as happened to the Paulicians, Manicheans, Cathars, etc. etc.).
Puritans weren't fans of Christmas either (it was even banned in Boston for several decades in the 17th century), I suppose you're going to tell me they were not Christian? That's the point... Christianity is actually rather nebulous, which is why there have been so many schisms and heresies, and there are tens of thousands of sects. The fact remains that Hitler spoke of things like 'doing God's work' and the NSDAP colluded with Catholic hierarchies. In fact, after the war was over, the primary conduit for German war criminals to escape the Allies was the Catholic church, whose agents concealed, protected and ferried such criminals to South America.
Oh bullshit. Let me guess, somebody decided that legalizing prostitution as well as reforming child labor laws must necessarily mean an explicit and positive call for child prostitutes? It's this kind of intellectual dishonesty and disingenuity that makes me loathe the mainstream left.
I know that /. has been sold to Dice, but isn't the HQ still in Virginia? And Yet the only party in VA is in the middle of nowhere and nobody's going. What gives? I'm going to have to go to DC... bleh.
Except climate science... there is complete consensus there and the debate is over and closed forever, and even if a career, credentialed climate scientist like Dr. Timothy Ball or whomever disagrees, they're just denialists!
Even though I personally think that there is a real warming trend, I think it's disgusting how many people have made that a dogmatic if not wholly political ideology that doesn't even resemble the open, questioning spirit of real science. If you look at the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit, they openly discuss and advocate subverting the peer review process to bar any theory which doesn't conform to their opinions on no other grounds than that disagreement and deliberately irrespective of a scientific reason that would normally bar publishing (methodological questions or whatever).
Class 3 NFA weapons are usually a lot harder to get than that, since I don't know of any jurisdiction where the Federal process is the only one you have to go through. The last place I researched you had to get the chief of police to sign off on each and every one. Not to mention that only weapons manufactured before 1986 are even eligible, and that crimp on supply vs. demand makes them about as expensive as cars. So yeah, the next time I have a chief of police as a golf buddy and a dozen grand just lying around, I'll be sure to pick one up.
You would do well to research the 'Fast and Furious' background more before you peddle your ideological tripe. The fact is that gun shop owners are not the unscrupulous enablers or pathetic imbeciles you make them out to be. They were actually reporting this suspicious activity to the BATFE, and they wanted to stop selling guns to certain people, but as part of the 'Fast and Furious' operation, the BATFE instructed them to continue the sales. Several gun sellers were deliberately acting irresponsibly under the advisement of BATFE agents! Some sources.
Your feelings about these things are not borne out by facts. Thirty years ago concealed carry was illegal in most of the US. One by one states started to enable concealed carry, most setting up 'shall issue' systems that would give licenses to anybody without a criminal record without question. Despite the gun control lobby whinging in every state about how this would cause 'shootouts in the streets!' it never happened. Now the US allows concealed carry in more than 80% of states, and in EVERY state with shall issue concealed carry, violent crime has either stayed the same or gone down since the law went into effect.
Turns out, people aren't the impulsive idiots you take them to be. There are more people carrying guns regularly in the US than ever before, and violent crime has been on a fairly steady down slope for the better part of the last half century. Reality just doesn't agree with the paranoid intuition of gun control advocates.
I think it's rather misguided to characterize early Republicans in such a way. The Republican Party was founded to offer a stronger abolitionist response to the power vacuum left by the implosion of the Whig Party and North/South divisions within the Democratic Party. That it would end up advocating 'big government infrastructure' was incidental and wholly predicated on the fact that its rise was concurrent with the Civil War. Those circumstances necessitated a consolidation of Federal power as well as the reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed by the war, especially in the South.
For starters, how about that the government claims to have evidence and that people have confessed to doing it? I don't particularly trust the Afghan government either, but people are in custody for this right now.
Furthermore, as I already alluded to, the society in Afghanistan is already so rife with the abuse of women and girls that it has one of the highest rates of female suicide and attempted suicide in the world. And it's not the quiet, comfortable type that girls usually go for like ODing on sleeping pills, they're routinely lighting themselves on fire, for fuck's sake. They want to be damn sure they're really dead, and they don't care anymore how much it hurts because that care has been savagely beaten out of them systematically by the men who control every aspect of their lives.
Like I said, if you go to Afghanistan looking for abuse and you don't find it, something is wrong with your eyes at a minimum.
It was not historically a problem (virtually every culture was permissive of polygamy in the past), mainly because supporting large families is expensive. Only a small percentage of households could bother with polygamy.
The other thing you need to realize is that we're already on a collision course with a society where gender can be chosen by the parents. In China it already happens routinely, which is why their gender balance is one of the most skewed in the world. You might think this is further evidence against modern polygamy (though it would actually argue in favor of polyandry, which, despite misinformed conflations, is a subset of polygamy), but it reflects the momentum of social norms in the culture. Things are and are becoming radically different in the West, and specifically the US, where more women are getting degrees than men. In another 2-4 generations, women necessarily will edge out men numerically in the upper echelons of business and politics, which, aside from being a historical first in the history of human civilization, will actually create a pressure to have female children instead of male ones.
I see 'polygamy' has been used so much in contexts that contain no polyandry that people are indeed starting to confuse it with 'polygyny'.
If we did nothing but trust names and reputations, we'd never uncover corruption or negligence. Such low standards enable the erosion of responsibility.
It's especially amazing in a place where many women have in fact immolated themselves rather than face further abuse from their husbands. There are so many real, systemic abuses of women in that society that honestly if somebody is looking for abuse and doesn't find it, I smell cover-up. What was the methodology? Who was doing the sampling, the analysis? What was the chain of custody?
Reader is totally lame. When I heard this news, I thought to myself, 'well, time to take another look at Reader, maybe they made it not lame in time to retire iGoogle....' Nope. Nothing but a mash of items with some useless numbers next to them about how many things you haven't read. Most of the screen real estate is completely wasted and there's no setting to improve it.
The whole reason that iGoogle's RSS widgets were so awesome is that you could pile tons of them on top of each other four columns deep. I could see, in an organized way, like two hundred headlines at once and not have to click on anything except what I cared about. Reader is too manual. I don't want to click on a dozen different things just to get huge bloated summaries of things I might not even want to read. It's inefficient, and I'm just not doing it. Bye Google, you sure know how to break people of a habit.
Guess I'll look into this netvibes thing everybody is talking about.
In the first place, you're talking about anthropology, not archaeology. In the second place, that's how science works. If you have a hundred artifacts, you try to find a pattern from them, and then if somebody finds a hundred more that invalidate all or part of the previous hypothesized pattern, so be it. You come up with a new one that fits the available data.
False. If that were true, Hong Kong would have one of the worst crime rates on Earth, and it doesn't.