Greeks weren't all that into boners, with a few exceptions like Priapus. However the ancient Egyptians had tons of enormous murals full of guys with erections. When the puritanical European archaeologists found all these things during their early excavations during and after the Age of Enlightenment (ha!), with no respect for their historical value they immediately defaced most of them.
In effect, yes. While there are "positive" discriminations like filling quotas with and lowering standards for women and minorities in everything from school admissions to awarding government contracts, it is rather hard to be sympathetic about injustices, because at that point the injustices are balancing out the special privileges.
It amounts to a sort of social contact. Part of the reason that Western society evolved chivalrous behavior towards women was in compensation for their disenfranchisement. Men were expected to pay for everything because women were socially excluded from most of the workforce. Men were supposed to defer to women in most social situations because women were required to defer to men politically. I don't believe that this patriarchal society was right or good, but it was consistent and ethical (within its own standards, not objectively).
The problem is that people want to have their cakes and eat them too. They want to be treated like equals and yet still have the special privileges that were afforded them in previous compensation for their inequality, in the end extending the very inequality.
Frequently this common mindset is defended with the idea that "we" owe "them" for whatever previous injustices. This is flat out immoral. Each person can only be held accountable for what they do themselves. They are not their parents or grandparents or on back through eternity, and punishing them (even indirectly through unequal preferences) for the crimes of their ancestors is itself an injustice.
In the end, you are either against the preferential treatment of any person based on membership in any superficial class, or you're not. I support equality, real equality, where performance is the only measure of value academically, professionally, socially, and politically.
Most hospitals are not government but rather private in the US, and being an introvert is not a protected class anyway. So while I disagree with their methods, they are not, to my knowledge of the law, illegal.
I don't disagree. In fact elsewhere in these threads I recounted an anecdote about how female dominated industries discriminate against men in the exact same way they complain about being discriminated against in male dominated industries. There are bound to be hypocrisies and double standards when people feel some irrational loyalty to a shared property determined genetically before they were even born. I am staunchly opposed to any kind of gender loyalty. I don't care if it's 'bros before hos' or 'sisters need to stick together' or whatever. Each person needs to critically approach how they value themselves and others without blindly submitting to the tyranny of the opinions of their peers.
Boo hoo. I'd feel a lot worse about this if it wasn't being overtly done in the opposite direction in other industries. Who is complaining about the over representation of women and the active discrimination against men and masculinity in the health services industry eh? I once applied for a job at a hospital, and even though it was an IT support position they still ran me through a personality test. Apparently I failed it because I valued truth over compassion and was more inclined toward introspection than socialization. Clearly that invalidated my adequacy as candidate. Most ironically, while the test said something to the effect that the questions should be answered as honestly as possible, when the interviewer saw that I had 'failed' their test for suitability in their monolith, she asked if I wanted to change things. I said straight up that the test said it wanted the most honest answers possible, so if I changed anything I would either have been lying before or lying now, and what purpose would either serve? They didn't even value their own nonsense. They just want people to fit in or get out.
So yeah, I'll be more sympathetic when I see people trying to change unjust systems in both directions. Until then it's just sexist hypocrisy.
Yeah, because you know jocks aren't chauvinists. There is nothing endemic to geek culture which is necessarily negative toward gender equality or respect. Those negatives exhibited by males in geek culture or jock or metrosexual or what-have-you are endemic to the social values imprinted across the entire gender. It is wrapped up in what it means to be male and how men should value themselves vs. women, and the cultural context in which these are expressed, be it geek culture or some other, is really just a lens on that broader social deficiency.
It is credible to believe that the attack was expected. How does that change anything? Would a preemptive war started by the US been any better? The Pearl Harbor attack was pretty hard-hitting, but even if it had been less one-sided it wouldn't have mattered one bit to the underpowered forces in the Philippines or on Wake Island or the other US holdings that were quickly overrun in the aftermath of Pearl. Once again, yes, FDR and his administration were responsible, but what rational alternative was there, really?
If he signed a contract that says he won't work in the same field for x period of time, then they could say that getting paid to speak on an industry topic is working the same field, and go after him even if he does not discuss specific proprietary information.
The fact that he bowed out before things went further suggests that he was indeed going to break the terms of a contract he signed with the company, or at least be close enough to breaking them that the company legal team would have a fair chance in court.
I imagine it would be very much like that scene in Takedown where Tsutomu Shimomura is giving a talk somewhere, and Alex Lowe asks what was copied from his systems when they were breached, and Tsutomu says 'I'm sorry, but that's classified.' And Alex Lowe says, 'Not anymore! BAH HA HA HA!'
This. I don't need a bunch of doodles covering the view of my blindspots. Besides which kids would rather have some kind of handheld gaming platform like a DS than doodle on car windows. Or, you know, they could read goddamn books like everybody else did in cars before the dawn of lithium ion batteries.
Slavery was much higher in the past, so why don't we reinstitute it too? Argumentum ad antiquitatem is a pretty sad fallacy. Just because it was done before does not make it right or good. As far as I'm concerned, lowering the extortions of previous ages has been a good first step. I don't care who is involved, whether "ultra-rich oligarchs" or unskilled laborers, each individual is entitled to as much of the product of their own labor and intellect as is feasible.
That's the sort of thinking that got us into this mess. More debt is not income, and will not solve the problem of debt. (The analogy further doesn't work in the absence of addition employment or investment.)
The argument that government 'can't just cut things' because that would be politically unpopular is a non-starter when one is trying to argue that they can just raise taxes even though that is politically unpopular. There are a lot of worthless mandates that could be cut without even significantly impacting government employment. For one, all foreign aid should be wiped off the budget immediately. There is no excuse to subsidizing other countries when we can't pay our own bills. Yeah, you can argue that a couple dozen billion isn't a significant part of the budget, but it adds up.
The government can overhaul its assets. Did you know that the Obama administration has presided over a 70+% increase in government acquisition, deployment and maintenance of limousines for bureaucrats? Sell that shit and let them drive economy cars. Sell government land and buildings that are no longer worth the upkeep. There are a lot of things that can be done that don't involve cutting benefits, but those things don't make for good grandstanding so they are being ignored. The fact is that governments at every level always try to leverage important programs as a tool to raise taxes while also trying to sweep the egregious waste under the carpet. They know people don't want to cut schools and police, etc. but they would probably cut arts funding or landscaping or funding for team-building retreats or whatever, but those oddly enough are never on the table, never discussed. It's always 'cut important things that you like or raise taxes'. It's a false dichotomy, and I'm not getting on any 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas' bandwagon.
Because if any person or organization could just 'increase income' to balance their budgets, they would have done it before the budget needed balancing. If I could simply 'raise my income' right now, I'd do it, as would any organization, but growth is not that simple. Only the government by way of monopoly on force has the magical ability to hand wave some legislation and suddenly there is more income, at the cost of citizens having less money.
When just about every other person or organization needs to balance a budget, they tighten belts and cut things, because they don't have a magical ability to pass laws and get other people's money.
Tell me, if raising income is so easy, why aren't you doing it right now? Why aren't you doing it all the time? Why isn't everybody? Raising income is hard, and in almost every case the bulk of what can be done is already done.
It sure is easy to raise income though when you can throw people in jail who don't pay you.
While I too have a dim view of FDR, and I agree that on the face of it he did precipitate our entry into WW2 by active policy decisions, at the same time do you really support the alternative? Japan attacked the US because the FDR administration would not budge on their efforts to coordinate sanctions against Japan for their activities in China, which were indeed heinous crimes against humanity. Would you rather the US did nothing? Should we have continued to trade with and supply a nation known to be committing a wanton genocide?
FDR was guilty of many detrimental acts toward the American people, things which were so blatantly unconstitutional that he had to threaten to pack the Supreme Court with his own men to get the justices to reach such atrocious decisions as Wickard v. Filburn. However, objectively I'm not sure that many other Presidents would have been able to justify taking a different position toward Japan in terms of trade and diplomacy with conditions being what they were, and as such I cannot fault FDR personally for what more or less anybody would have done.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of these sales were before PSN screwed the pooch. I'll be more impressed if Sony can keep this momentum next year now that many people look at them as high risk.
This whole thing is tautological. It amounts to little more than "ideas that don't exceed 10% don't exceed 10%" and "ideas that exceed 10% exceed 10%". It's worthless drivel really, since all ideas must necessarily begin under 10% it cannot be said that ideas that don't exceed 10% won't exceed 10%.
Irrational. A monopoly on air is impossible, as is water (it comes from the sky, lol), and so, effectively, is food (unless you can dig up a historical monopoly thereof, for which I would be quite impressed).
So if impossible conditions suddenly came to pass whereby things which were necessary conditions for life were attached to unreasonable terms, then yes, that could be construed as coercion. When this hypothetical ever becomes true let me know, then we can figure out how to apply ethics therein.
And as for things being philosophically coherent, and whether free will is truly a fiction, are very, very much dependent on both assumptions and definitions.
If it was worth it to me to spend the money, I could buy the material necessary to generate my own power. (Some people do this so effectively that the utility company pays them for the power they are putting into the grid.) Ditto for food and water, any number of things. Just because ordering off the shelf is more convenient and more common doesn't mean there is no choice. Further, it might surprise you to learn that electricity is not actually required for you to live, and that a lot of people had healthy and full lives without it. Some still do.
It is also ridiculous to characterize a free market as one where sellers have all the power and buyers have none. If a seller's terms are truly unreasonable he won't be able to find a buyer.
Businesses are not people, but people own them and work in them. You cannot censor a business owner or employee from advocating their business's political interests without violating their rights. You want to pretend that as soon as somebody incorporates a business they surrender their right to speech as citizens, and then try to wrap yourself in the cloak of a crusader for people's rights, what bald hypocrisy. I'm sorry, but I don't support disenfranchising anybody , much less the people who are the foundation for employment and economic growth. Their interests are just as valid as anybody's in a free society, and if they want to buy airtime, they should be free to do so. That's the whole fucking point of "freedom" in the first place, that some douchebag(s) can't abuse the state's monopoly on force to silence whatever speech they happen not to like.
You don't understand contract law at all or the principle of caveat emptor. Fraud invalidates contracts. Period. Aside from puffery (subjective nonsense like 'ours is the best most wonderful widget since time began'), any material quantifiable misrepresentation of a good or service invalidates obligations set forth in a contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Greeks weren't all that into boners, with a few exceptions like Priapus. However the ancient Egyptians had tons of enormous murals full of guys with erections. When the puritanical European archaeologists found all these things during their early excavations during and after the Age of Enlightenment (ha!), with no respect for their historical value they immediately defaced most of them.
In effect, yes. While there are "positive" discriminations like filling quotas with and lowering standards for women and minorities in everything from school admissions to awarding government contracts, it is rather hard to be sympathetic about injustices, because at that point the injustices are balancing out the special privileges.
It amounts to a sort of social contact. Part of the reason that Western society evolved chivalrous behavior towards women was in compensation for their disenfranchisement. Men were expected to pay for everything because women were socially excluded from most of the workforce. Men were supposed to defer to women in most social situations because women were required to defer to men politically. I don't believe that this patriarchal society was right or good, but it was consistent and ethical (within its own standards, not objectively).
The problem is that people want to have their cakes and eat them too. They want to be treated like equals and yet still have the special privileges that were afforded them in previous compensation for their inequality, in the end extending the very inequality.
Frequently this common mindset is defended with the idea that "we" owe "them" for whatever previous injustices. This is flat out immoral. Each person can only be held accountable for what they do themselves. They are not their parents or grandparents or on back through eternity, and punishing them (even indirectly through unequal preferences) for the crimes of their ancestors is itself an injustice.
In the end, you are either against the preferential treatment of any person based on membership in any superficial class, or you're not. I support equality, real equality, where performance is the only measure of value academically, professionally, socially, and politically.
Most hospitals are not government but rather private in the US, and being an introvert is not a protected class anyway. So while I disagree with their methods, they are not, to my knowledge of the law, illegal.
Too many exclamation points is your problem... uh... dude...
I don't disagree. In fact elsewhere in these threads I recounted an anecdote about how female dominated industries discriminate against men in the exact same way they complain about being discriminated against in male dominated industries. There are bound to be hypocrisies and double standards when people feel some irrational loyalty to a shared property determined genetically before they were even born. I am staunchly opposed to any kind of gender loyalty. I don't care if it's 'bros before hos' or 'sisters need to stick together' or whatever. Each person needs to critically approach how they value themselves and others without blindly submitting to the tyranny of the opinions of their peers.
That got me to RTFA. Rawr.
I suppose the fact that we are attracted to attractive women makes us sexist, objectifying pigs, too.
Boo hoo. I'd feel a lot worse about this if it wasn't being overtly done in the opposite direction in other industries. Who is complaining about the over representation of women and the active discrimination against men and masculinity in the health services industry eh? I once applied for a job at a hospital, and even though it was an IT support position they still ran me through a personality test. Apparently I failed it because I valued truth over compassion and was more inclined toward introspection than socialization. Clearly that invalidated my adequacy as candidate. Most ironically, while the test said something to the effect that the questions should be answered as honestly as possible, when the interviewer saw that I had 'failed' their test for suitability in their monolith, she asked if I wanted to change things. I said straight up that the test said it wanted the most honest answers possible, so if I changed anything I would either have been lying before or lying now, and what purpose would either serve? They didn't even value their own nonsense. They just want people to fit in or get out.
So yeah, I'll be more sympathetic when I see people trying to change unjust systems in both directions. Until then it's just sexist hypocrisy.
You, sir, are notably pithier than I am.
Yeah, because you know jocks aren't chauvinists. There is nothing endemic to geek culture which is necessarily negative toward gender equality or respect. Those negatives exhibited by males in geek culture or jock or metrosexual or what-have-you are endemic to the social values imprinted across the entire gender. It is wrapped up in what it means to be male and how men should value themselves vs. women, and the cultural context in which these are expressed, be it geek culture or some other, is really just a lens on that broader social deficiency.
It is credible to believe that the attack was expected. How does that change anything? Would a preemptive war started by the US been any better? The Pearl Harbor attack was pretty hard-hitting, but even if it had been less one-sided it wouldn't have mattered one bit to the underpowered forces in the Philippines or on Wake Island or the other US holdings that were quickly overrun in the aftermath of Pearl. Once again, yes, FDR and his administration were responsible, but what rational alternative was there, really?
If he signed a contract that says he won't work in the same field for x period of time, then they could say that getting paid to speak on an industry topic is working the same field, and go after him even if he does not discuss specific proprietary information.
The fact that he bowed out before things went further suggests that he was indeed going to break the terms of a contract he signed with the company, or at least be close enough to breaking them that the company legal team would have a fair chance in court.
I imagine it would be very much like that scene in Takedown where Tsutomu Shimomura is giving a talk somewhere, and Alex Lowe asks what was copied from his systems when they were breached, and Tsutomu says 'I'm sorry, but that's classified.' And Alex Lowe says, 'Not anymore! BAH HA HA HA!'
This. I don't need a bunch of doodles covering the view of my blindspots. Besides which kids would rather have some kind of handheld gaming platform like a DS than doodle on car windows. Or, you know, they could read goddamn books like everybody else did in cars before the dawn of lithium ion batteries.
It's an example you disingenuous fool. Things like that, added together, can equal billions across the various agencies.
Slavery was much higher in the past, so why don't we reinstitute it too? Argumentum ad antiquitatem is a pretty sad fallacy. Just because it was done before does not make it right or good. As far as I'm concerned, lowering the extortions of previous ages has been a good first step. I don't care who is involved, whether "ultra-rich oligarchs" or unskilled laborers, each individual is entitled to as much of the product of their own labor and intellect as is feasible.
Space hotel, duh.
It's actually not a bad idea.
That's the sort of thinking that got us into this mess. More debt is not income, and will not solve the problem of debt. (The analogy further doesn't work in the absence of addition employment or investment.)
The argument that government 'can't just cut things' because that would be politically unpopular is a non-starter when one is trying to argue that they can just raise taxes even though that is politically unpopular. There are a lot of worthless mandates that could be cut without even significantly impacting government employment. For one, all foreign aid should be wiped off the budget immediately. There is no excuse to subsidizing other countries when we can't pay our own bills. Yeah, you can argue that a couple dozen billion isn't a significant part of the budget, but it adds up.
The government can overhaul its assets. Did you know that the Obama administration has presided over a 70+% increase in government acquisition, deployment and maintenance of limousines for bureaucrats? Sell that shit and let them drive economy cars. Sell government land and buildings that are no longer worth the upkeep. There are a lot of things that can be done that don't involve cutting benefits, but those things don't make for good grandstanding so they are being ignored. The fact is that governments at every level always try to leverage important programs as a tool to raise taxes while also trying to sweep the egregious waste under the carpet. They know people don't want to cut schools and police, etc. but they would probably cut arts funding or landscaping or funding for team-building retreats or whatever, but those oddly enough are never on the table, never discussed. It's always 'cut important things that you like or raise taxes'. It's a false dichotomy, and I'm not getting on any 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas' bandwagon.
Because if any person or organization could just 'increase income' to balance their budgets, they would have done it before the budget needed balancing. If I could simply 'raise my income' right now, I'd do it, as would any organization, but growth is not that simple. Only the government by way of monopoly on force has the magical ability to hand wave some legislation and suddenly there is more income, at the cost of citizens having less money.
When just about every other person or organization needs to balance a budget, they tighten belts and cut things, because they don't have a magical ability to pass laws and get other people's money.
Tell me, if raising income is so easy, why aren't you doing it right now? Why aren't you doing it all the time? Why isn't everybody? Raising income is hard, and in almost every case the bulk of what can be done is already done.
It sure is easy to raise income though when you can throw people in jail who don't pay you.
I wish I could mod you to the moon.
While I too have a dim view of FDR, and I agree that on the face of it he did precipitate our entry into WW2 by active policy decisions, at the same time do you really support the alternative? Japan attacked the US because the FDR administration would not budge on their efforts to coordinate sanctions against Japan for their activities in China, which were indeed heinous crimes against humanity. Would you rather the US did nothing? Should we have continued to trade with and supply a nation known to be committing a wanton genocide?
FDR was guilty of many detrimental acts toward the American people, things which were so blatantly unconstitutional that he had to threaten to pack the Supreme Court with his own men to get the justices to reach such atrocious decisions as Wickard v. Filburn. However, objectively I'm not sure that many other Presidents would have been able to justify taking a different position toward Japan in terms of trade and diplomacy with conditions being what they were, and as such I cannot fault FDR personally for what more or less anybody would have done.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of these sales were before PSN screwed the pooch. I'll be more impressed if Sony can keep this momentum next year now that many people look at them as high risk.
This whole thing is tautological. It amounts to little more than "ideas that don't exceed 10% don't exceed 10%" and "ideas that exceed 10% exceed 10%". It's worthless drivel really, since all ideas must necessarily begin under 10% it cannot be said that ideas that don't exceed 10% won't exceed 10%.
Irrational. A monopoly on air is impossible, as is water (it comes from the sky, lol), and so, effectively, is food (unless you can dig up a historical monopoly thereof, for which I would be quite impressed).
So if impossible conditions suddenly came to pass whereby things which were necessary conditions for life were attached to unreasonable terms, then yes, that could be construed as coercion. When this hypothetical ever becomes true let me know, then we can figure out how to apply ethics therein.
And as for things being philosophically coherent, and whether free will is truly a fiction, are very, very much dependent on both assumptions and definitions.
If it was worth it to me to spend the money, I could buy the material necessary to generate my own power. (Some people do this so effectively that the utility company pays them for the power they are putting into the grid.) Ditto for food and water, any number of things. Just because ordering off the shelf is more convenient and more common doesn't mean there is no choice. Further, it might surprise you to learn that electricity is not actually required for you to live, and that a lot of people had healthy and full lives without it. Some still do.
It is also ridiculous to characterize a free market as one where sellers have all the power and buyers have none. If a seller's terms are truly unreasonable he won't be able to find a buyer.
Businesses are not people, but people own them and work in them. You cannot censor a business owner or employee from advocating their business's political interests without violating their rights. You want to pretend that as soon as somebody incorporates a business they surrender their right to speech as citizens, and then try to wrap yourself in the cloak of a crusader for people's rights, what bald hypocrisy. I'm sorry, but I don't support disenfranchising anybody , much less the people who are the foundation for employment and economic growth. Their interests are just as valid as anybody's in a free society, and if they want to buy airtime, they should be free to do so. That's the whole fucking point of "freedom" in the first place, that some douchebag(s) can't abuse the state's monopoly on force to silence whatever speech they happen not to like.
You don't understand contract law at all or the principle of caveat emptor. Fraud invalidates contracts. Period. Aside from puffery (subjective nonsense like 'ours is the best most wonderful widget since time began'), any material quantifiable misrepresentation of a good or service invalidates obligations set forth in a contract.