"Getting into" the industry is relative. Some dumbass who learns how to use FrontPage and manages to con a few people on Craigslist to pay for webpages that look like what a teenager might do in their spare time in 1996 on Geocities is not, by the measure of most rational people, "in the industry". (I also don't get what, in the context of the parent, the antecedent for "problem" is in your first statement... the commoditization of computers?)
Hierarchies exist in every industry for a reason. Of course it's easy to become entry level tech support gopher. If entry level wasn't easy our economy would be in an even shittier state or collapse than it is at present. If there is a problem with experience in IT, it is with paper techs who memorize a bunch of multiple choice bullshit and then get some impressive-sounding certs. They bullshit their way into roles they can't handle, and pretend to develop products they ultimately can't deliver.
And I know knee-jerk anti-corporatism is really in fashion lately, but where does this demonization of VC come from? Investments should be protected and paid back where possible, that's, you know, the whole goddamn point of an investment. If the punks selling the idea don't have a good enough business plan to make it work after the first round is over, that's not the VC's fault, except to make sure that they, the VC, are covered. Grown-ups need to take responsibility for themselves and not blame others for their respective rational self-interests. If you can't cover yourself, don't blame your creditors for doing the due diligence to cover themselves. Fucking nonsense. And people wonder why damn near the entire world's economy is breaking down.
Terrible analogy. A car will not, except for prodigy reverse engineers, be enough in itself to provide an education on rebuilding engines. Unlike cars, computers can, in themselves + internet, provide all or nearly all the information necessary to build them (even from a circuit level), program them, network them, whatever. When I was 12 years old I learned QBASIC from the internet. If I had walked out to my garage at 12 and tried to learn how to replace a transmission with nothing more than the car in front of me, I'd probably have nothing more to show for it than a fucked up car.
Japan isn't exactly crumbling into violent oblivion, so in other words it will be a bump in the road that a few people will bemoan and then get back to life as usual?
The problem with China isn't construction projects or lending per se, it's that farmer Wang is having his land seized by corrupt officials for said projects. More and more peasant farmers in China are being driven off of their land with minimal compensation, and it's sowing unrest. Rural unrest among farmers is where every popular uprising in China has ever originated. If they keep it up there could be a civil war, especially if the world economic crisis negates the growth that China has come to rely on.
In order to gain freedom, one has first to not have it. That cost the Chinese are still paying. Conversely in order to lose freedom one first has to have it. If you're not fighting for it, you're the problem. I didn't vote for any incumbents last Tuesday. Vote for third party candidates, vote for people who will actually repeal and reform instead of adding more and more layers of bullshit legislation and regulation that nobody needs, that our once successful society used to do very well without. We're becoming sclerotic at our own hands, pissing away everything we ever had for some false shadow of 'security'.
You failed at RTFS. It said the engine created by Tufts was 18 atoms, the 'car' created by Twente was not described by atom count in the summary. Fuck your shitpost.
Re:The next new airplane to get axed...
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
F-35 was kept at F-22's expense because unlike F-22 (which is too awesome to share with anybody else for any reason) the F-35 is as much a diplomatic tool as it is military vehicle. The US obligated itself to its allies to produce this aircraft for mutual use, and not delivering it would cause a lot more international face loss than cancelling F-22.
It's really pathetic that we are more concerned with playing political games with our allies than fielding the best equipment for our armed forces.
Profit motive is universal, it becomes problematic when a group with a monopoly on force, AKA the government, has a stake. Where communism is the popular ownership of the means of production, communism is in fact directly responsible. If these were wholly private companies there would less of a conflict of interest for separate government agencies to prosecute breaches of existing regulation. You and others commenting on this keep closing your eyes to the similarities and dissimilarities because it undermines your ideological belief. Both the US and China have regulations and regulatory bodies, but China has a far greater problem with government being both the offender and the prosecutor. This is a systemic problem that occurs here as well, not because of that evil, evil capitalism, but the simple and more direct matter that it remains a conflict of interest for government to police itself.
Indeed, what people are blind to in this matter is that China is demonstrating what happens when government is doing everything. People are so ignorant they think there are no environmental regulations in China, but China has regulations and equivalent of the EPA (even mentioned in the summary, the Environmental Ministry).
The problem is that because China's industries are still significantly state-owned there is an insurmountable conflict of interest. The state is effectively asked to prosecute itself, and in a one-party authoritarian system where all dissent is violently crushed, the motive to protect profitable state industries is higher than the motivation to protect citizens from harm. The Chinese regime is not sufficiently accountable to its people which it more profitably subjugates than protects.
Tariffs create artificial markets completely divorced from reality, and the cost of that is passed on to the consumer. Purchasing power parity in this country would zoom straight into the sewer, and we'd end up paying 10x as much for basically everything, which would destroy the middle class.
This is quite absurd. It doesn't matter if there is debate or not. Muslims debate about whether it's ok to fuck nine year olds. That doesn't validate anything. I say Pascal's Wager is invalidated, and you say that because there is debate it must be at least potentially valid or people wouldn't debate it. Ridiculous. Defend the wager or get out. Defending some abstraction of arguments about the wager was never the issue, and I will not accept this pathetic attempt to change the subject as the issue.
I presented the youtube videos as representations or proxies of my own opinion, instead of wasting time redundantly restating the case. (And attacking the source and not the argument is clear argument from authority.) You presented two things as evidence that there is a debate (which is self evident and a waste of time, if not an outright attempt at misdirection), and a third thing which could have been a serious proxy argument, so I picked its weakest point and attacked it. Your defense was a mere repetition of the point I attacked, so apparently there is no defense.
You make some half-assed claims about the nature or definition of the wager, saying it's just 'faith' regardless of the language Pascal himself used, and further regardless that all of Pascal's supporting context was exclusively Christian. Pascal specifically denounced deism, which would be an example the organization-less 'faith' you want to pretend he was advocating in the wager. Even if one does allow all of Pascal's own explicit Christian context to be magically poofed away, the double edge of that doth bite the wielder since such an interpretation of the wager would be essentially exclusive of Yahweh. The whole point to the dismissal of the wager is that rather than there being no potential loss as stated, the potential losses are infinite in nature and number. If you eliminate potential losses inherent in most organized religions, you eliminate Christianity too. (This restriction is also baldly arbitrary and attempts to define reality into existence instead of explain anything real or knowable.)
'There is a debate' is not an argument. If you can't defend the wager, say so and stop wasting my time.
That's cute, two pay-walled abstracts (the fact that books exist does not in itself prove anything) and an essay which concludes in part that who cares if something is true if the placebo effect works positively for people. I'm sorry but while a complete disregard for the truth keeps with the spirit of Pascal's and James' wagers, it shouldn't satisfy anybody who is averse to being stupefied.
Did you even watch the videos? How do you personally rebut them, if you can?
Palestinians did hijack Pan Am Flight 73 and did kill several American citizens during the standoff. I'm fairly certain that's not the only case, but I'm not sufficiently motivated to dig them all up to pander to your disingenuous feigned ignorance.
It wouldn't be the first country to violate such sovereignty, but honestly if you've paid any attention to history in the last century or two, you'll have noticed that when a country wants to fuck up an embassy, they don't do it in uniform. The Qing wanted to use anti-foreign sentiment to galvanize its citizens, so it supported the Boxer Rebellion which attacked the foreign embassies in several Chinese cities. When the foreign governments got upset, the Qing pointed the finger at the Boxers like they didn't know each other.
As a more modern example you can look at what happens in the Middle East every other month. Angry mobs attack embassies, and there is often no retribution because these mobs are not officially state-sanctioned actors, even if state officials might be working with them behind the scenes.
If in some bizarro future where things ever got so bad that the US wanted an embassy on its soil fucked up without much international backlash, it could adopt the same sort of tactics. The undercover feds in the militias in VA & WV and environs could manipulate them in some way to plot against the evil foreign terrorists or whatever, and after the plot executes the militia take the fall. Win-win for the feds, though realistically I can't imagine a political scenario that would precipitate such ridiculous measures.
I bet it would be too hard to attach a can of spray paint (and a remote actuator) to a quad-rotor. If you're caught the legal fallout from vandalism is significantly less than from the unlawful discharge of a firearm.
Dual speed limits already exist for trucks on many roads, precisely because such vehicles handle completely differently from smaller vehicles. It is not a stretch to have different parameters for other vehicles and/or drivers, especially as augmented reality will allow each person to view the same place with different perspectives. A person with a higher grade vehicle or license might, through augmented reality, see a different speed limit sign than a person with a lower grade vehicle or license. I would wholly support such a meritocratic system, so long as there were some provisions to have different roads or lanes for different average speeds.
From my own experience I've found that I drive with more awareness when I'm speeding because I'm constantly scanning for LEOs. Whereas when I'm at or below the limit I sometimes enter an almost zombie-like state because I'm not worried about the aforesaid LEOs.
So why isn't New Hampshire a third world hell hole? Your assumptions are not borne out by the facts. There are also other options (mandatory insurance vs. no insurance is a false dichotomy). Continuing with NH as an example, if you have a shitty driving record but don't want insurance, NH requires that you effectively insure yourself by demonstrating that you have the money/credit to pay your own liability.
This is incredibly valuable because it does not penalize responsible people for what they 'might' do until they actually do it, and further if people are irresponsible and do end up doing actual damage, they at least have the option (if they have the money) to cover themselves rather than be forced by the state to pay higher rates to some arbitrary company.
New Hampshire does not have compulsory insurance, and they do fine without it. Therefore your hypothetical negatives are at a minimum not universally true, and more probably just plain bullshit.
They won't fail because there is not a real free market. One example of a company with the 'threshold benefits' problem is Geico. The government mandates that people buy car insurance whether they think it is useful or valuable to them or not (except in NH, because they are awesome). In the absence of proper market pressures, most if not all insurance companies suck, because they are 'competing' over a captive audience. This is also why I oppose mandatory health insurance.
Until the government stops passing and repeals laws that force people to be companies' customers and that set up arbitrary barriers to entry to prevent legal competition within many industries there is no hope of any market correction. Every legislative session makes the US more and more a planned/command economy, but people don't notice because it stops short of outright nationalization. Who needs nationalization when you can just regulate everything so tight that the only freedom companies have is to move down the narrow corridor established by law? It stifles innovation and growth.
If you incorporate, try to find a woman who is a military veteran and racial minority to take a 51% percent stake and act as the front. Then ride the politically correct white guilt contracts quota to the moon!
There is competition for all jobs at all levels. If somebody is actually an asset (reliable, competent), it doesn't matter what their pay grade is, managers would rather keep them at a bit of a premium than train an unknown quantity from zero. The mistake people make is that they half-ass their work and then wonder why they're expendable.
The really bad situation for otherwise good workers is where upper management decides to implement threshold benefits that encourage dismissal for bullshit reasons, e.g. benefit x kicks in after y years with the company, so managers try to trim senior people without good cause to save money. This is terrible for morale and retention (duh) and leads to poor quality work.
Yup, people won't see it because any dissent from credentialed researchers invalidates the drum-beat of 'consensus!' The argument is closed forever, and any challenge makes you an ignorant redneck 'denialist'!
Whenever questions and dissent are not welcome you have dogma, not science.
I hate the duopoly as much or more than the next guy, but disapproval of Congress is really just a fact of representation. A majority of voters in a given district like "their" candidate, but they hate many of the candidates that other districts like.
"Randian libertarianism" is an oxymoron. Ayn Rand wrote over and over how she despised libertarianism because she felt it was amoral. She couldn't grasp that it was not a 'philosophy' of life like her Objectivism, and it cannot by its nature provide "moral guidance" because it is a political view only.
Slashdot Mirror
"Getting into" the industry is relative. Some dumbass who learns how to use FrontPage and manages to con a few people on Craigslist to pay for webpages that look like what a teenager might do in their spare time in 1996 on Geocities is not, by the measure of most rational people, "in the industry". (I also don't get what, in the context of the parent, the antecedent for "problem" is in your first statement... the commoditization of computers?)
Hierarchies exist in every industry for a reason. Of course it's easy to become entry level tech support gopher. If entry level wasn't easy our economy would be in an even shittier state or collapse than it is at present. If there is a problem with experience in IT, it is with paper techs who memorize a bunch of multiple choice bullshit and then get some impressive-sounding certs. They bullshit their way into roles they can't handle, and pretend to develop products they ultimately can't deliver.
And I know knee-jerk anti-corporatism is really in fashion lately, but where does this demonization of VC come from? Investments should be protected and paid back where possible, that's, you know, the whole goddamn point of an investment. If the punks selling the idea don't have a good enough business plan to make it work after the first round is over, that's not the VC's fault, except to make sure that they, the VC, are covered. Grown-ups need to take responsibility for themselves and not blame others for their respective rational self-interests. If you can't cover yourself, don't blame your creditors for doing the due diligence to cover themselves. Fucking nonsense. And people wonder why damn near the entire world's economy is breaking down.
Terrible analogy. A car will not, except for prodigy reverse engineers, be enough in itself to provide an education on rebuilding engines. Unlike cars, computers can, in themselves + internet, provide all or nearly all the information necessary to build them (even from a circuit level), program them, network them, whatever. When I was 12 years old I learned QBASIC from the internet. If I had walked out to my garage at 12 and tried to learn how to replace a transmission with nothing more than the car in front of me, I'd probably have nothing more to show for it than a fucked up car.
Japan isn't exactly crumbling into violent oblivion, so in other words it will be a bump in the road that a few people will bemoan and then get back to life as usual?
The problem with China isn't construction projects or lending per se, it's that farmer Wang is having his land seized by corrupt officials for said projects. More and more peasant farmers in China are being driven off of their land with minimal compensation, and it's sowing unrest. Rural unrest among farmers is where every popular uprising in China has ever originated. If they keep it up there could be a civil war, especially if the world economic crisis negates the growth that China has come to rely on.
In order to gain freedom, one has first to not have it. That cost the Chinese are still paying. Conversely in order to lose freedom one first has to have it. If you're not fighting for it, you're the problem. I didn't vote for any incumbents last Tuesday. Vote for third party candidates, vote for people who will actually repeal and reform instead of adding more and more layers of bullshit legislation and regulation that nobody needs, that our once successful society used to do very well without. We're becoming sclerotic at our own hands, pissing away everything we ever had for some false shadow of 'security'.
You failed at RTFS. It said the engine created by Tufts was 18 atoms, the 'car' created by Twente was not described by atom count in the summary. Fuck your shitpost.
F-35 was kept at F-22's expense because unlike F-22 (which is too awesome to share with anybody else for any reason) the F-35 is as much a diplomatic tool as it is military vehicle. The US obligated itself to its allies to produce this aircraft for mutual use, and not delivering it would cause a lot more international face loss than cancelling F-22.
It's really pathetic that we are more concerned with playing political games with our allies than fielding the best equipment for our armed forces.
Profit motive is universal, it becomes problematic when a group with a monopoly on force, AKA the government, has a stake. Where communism is the popular ownership of the means of production, communism is in fact directly responsible. If these were wholly private companies there would less of a conflict of interest for separate government agencies to prosecute breaches of existing regulation. You and others commenting on this keep closing your eyes to the similarities and dissimilarities because it undermines your ideological belief. Both the US and China have regulations and regulatory bodies, but China has a far greater problem with government being both the offender and the prosecutor. This is a systemic problem that occurs here as well, not because of that evil, evil capitalism, but the simple and more direct matter that it remains a conflict of interest for government to police itself.
Indeed, what people are blind to in this matter is that China is demonstrating what happens when government is doing everything. People are so ignorant they think there are no environmental regulations in China, but China has regulations and equivalent of the EPA (even mentioned in the summary, the Environmental Ministry).
The problem is that because China's industries are still significantly state-owned there is an insurmountable conflict of interest. The state is effectively asked to prosecute itself, and in a one-party authoritarian system where all dissent is violently crushed, the motive to protect profitable state industries is higher than the motivation to protect citizens from harm. The Chinese regime is not sufficiently accountable to its people which it more profitably subjugates than protects.
Tariffs create artificial markets completely divorced from reality, and the cost of that is passed on to the consumer. Purchasing power parity in this country would zoom straight into the sewer, and we'd end up paying 10x as much for basically everything, which would destroy the middle class.
This is quite absurd. It doesn't matter if there is debate or not. Muslims debate about whether it's ok to fuck nine year olds. That doesn't validate anything. I say Pascal's Wager is invalidated, and you say that because there is debate it must be at least potentially valid or people wouldn't debate it. Ridiculous. Defend the wager or get out. Defending some abstraction of arguments about the wager was never the issue, and I will not accept this pathetic attempt to change the subject as the issue.
I presented the youtube videos as representations or proxies of my own opinion, instead of wasting time redundantly restating the case. (And attacking the source and not the argument is clear argument from authority.) You presented two things as evidence that there is a debate (which is self evident and a waste of time, if not an outright attempt at misdirection), and a third thing which could have been a serious proxy argument, so I picked its weakest point and attacked it. Your defense was a mere repetition of the point I attacked, so apparently there is no defense.
You make some half-assed claims about the nature or definition of the wager, saying it's just 'faith' regardless of the language Pascal himself used, and further regardless that all of Pascal's supporting context was exclusively Christian. Pascal specifically denounced deism, which would be an example the organization-less 'faith' you want to pretend he was advocating in the wager. Even if one does allow all of Pascal's own explicit Christian context to be magically poofed away, the double edge of that doth bite the wielder since such an interpretation of the wager would be essentially exclusive of Yahweh. The whole point to the dismissal of the wager is that rather than there being no potential loss as stated, the potential losses are infinite in nature and number. If you eliminate potential losses inherent in most organized religions, you eliminate Christianity too. (This restriction is also baldly arbitrary and attempts to define reality into existence instead of explain anything real or knowable.)
'There is a debate' is not an argument. If you can't defend the wager, say so and stop wasting my time.
That's cute, two pay-walled abstracts (the fact that books exist does not in itself prove anything) and an essay which concludes in part that who cares if something is true if the placebo effect works positively for people. I'm sorry but while a complete disregard for the truth keeps with the spirit of Pascal's and James' wagers, it shouldn't satisfy anybody who is averse to being stupefied.
Did you even watch the videos? How do you personally rebut them, if you can?
Pascal's Wager has been completely destroyed in many, many different ways. See here and here for a good summary.
Palestinians did hijack Pan Am Flight 73 and did kill several American citizens during the standoff. I'm fairly certain that's not the only case, but I'm not sufficiently motivated to dig them all up to pander to your disingenuous feigned ignorance.
It wouldn't be the first country to violate such sovereignty, but honestly if you've paid any attention to history in the last century or two, you'll have noticed that when a country wants to fuck up an embassy, they don't do it in uniform. The Qing wanted to use anti-foreign sentiment to galvanize its citizens, so it supported the Boxer Rebellion which attacked the foreign embassies in several Chinese cities. When the foreign governments got upset, the Qing pointed the finger at the Boxers like they didn't know each other.
As a more modern example you can look at what happens in the Middle East every other month. Angry mobs attack embassies, and there is often no retribution because these mobs are not officially state-sanctioned actors, even if state officials might be working with them behind the scenes.
If in some bizarro future where things ever got so bad that the US wanted an embassy on its soil fucked up without much international backlash, it could adopt the same sort of tactics. The undercover feds in the militias in VA & WV and environs could manipulate them in some way to plot against the evil foreign terrorists or whatever, and after the plot executes the militia take the fall. Win-win for the feds, though realistically I can't imagine a political scenario that would precipitate such ridiculous measures.
I bet it would be too hard to attach a can of spray paint (and a remote actuator) to a quad-rotor. If you're caught the legal fallout from vandalism is significantly less than from the unlawful discharge of a firearm.
That was the stated goal of Mayor Danny Crosby of Coopertown, TN. They then raised it again because that made things less safe.
Dual speed limits already exist for trucks on many roads, precisely because such vehicles handle completely differently from smaller vehicles. It is not a stretch to have different parameters for other vehicles and/or drivers, especially as augmented reality will allow each person to view the same place with different perspectives. A person with a higher grade vehicle or license might, through augmented reality, see a different speed limit sign than a person with a lower grade vehicle or license. I would wholly support such a meritocratic system, so long as there were some provisions to have different roads or lanes for different average speeds.
From my own experience I've found that I drive with more awareness when I'm speeding because I'm constantly scanning for LEOs. Whereas when I'm at or below the limit I sometimes enter an almost zombie-like state because I'm not worried about the aforesaid LEOs.
So why isn't New Hampshire a third world hell hole? Your assumptions are not borne out by the facts. There are also other options (mandatory insurance vs. no insurance is a false dichotomy). Continuing with NH as an example, if you have a shitty driving record but don't want insurance, NH requires that you effectively insure yourself by demonstrating that you have the money/credit to pay your own liability.
This is incredibly valuable because it does not penalize responsible people for what they 'might' do until they actually do it, and further if people are irresponsible and do end up doing actual damage, they at least have the option (if they have the money) to cover themselves rather than be forced by the state to pay higher rates to some arbitrary company.
New Hampshire does not have compulsory insurance, and they do fine without it. Therefore your hypothetical negatives are at a minimum not universally true, and more probably just plain bullshit.
They won't fail because there is not a real free market. One example of a company with the 'threshold benefits' problem is Geico. The government mandates that people buy car insurance whether they think it is useful or valuable to them or not (except in NH, because they are awesome). In the absence of proper market pressures, most if not all insurance companies suck, because they are 'competing' over a captive audience. This is also why I oppose mandatory health insurance.
Until the government stops passing and repeals laws that force people to be companies' customers and that set up arbitrary barriers to entry to prevent legal competition within many industries there is no hope of any market correction. Every legislative session makes the US more and more a planned/command economy, but people don't notice because it stops short of outright nationalization. Who needs nationalization when you can just regulate everything so tight that the only freedom companies have is to move down the narrow corridor established by law? It stifles innovation and growth.
If you incorporate, try to find a woman who is a military veteran and racial minority to take a 51% percent stake and act as the front. Then ride the politically correct white guilt contracts quota to the moon!
There is competition for all jobs at all levels. If somebody is actually an asset (reliable, competent), it doesn't matter what their pay grade is, managers would rather keep them at a bit of a premium than train an unknown quantity from zero. The mistake people make is that they half-ass their work and then wonder why they're expendable.
The really bad situation for otherwise good workers is where upper management decides to implement threshold benefits that encourage dismissal for bullshit reasons, e.g. benefit x kicks in after y years with the company, so managers try to trim senior people without good cause to save money. This is terrible for morale and retention (duh) and leads to poor quality work.
Yup, people won't see it because any dissent from credentialed researchers invalidates the drum-beat of 'consensus!' The argument is closed forever, and any challenge makes you an ignorant redneck 'denialist'!
Whenever questions and dissent are not welcome you have dogma, not science.
I hate the duopoly as much or more than the next guy, but disapproval of Congress is really just a fact of representation. A majority of voters in a given district like "their" candidate, but they hate many of the candidates that other districts like.
"Randian libertarianism" is an oxymoron. Ayn Rand wrote over and over how she despised libertarianism because she felt it was amoral. She couldn't grasp that it was not a 'philosophy' of life like her Objectivism, and it cannot by its nature provide "moral guidance" because it is a political view only.