Why do you have to charge a fee for the services you provide?
Can't they set up some kind of certification system...[?]
Last time I checked, "setting up" and "systems" involves time, effort, and material resources; i.e., it costs money. Sounds like a job for Fee-Charging Guy to me.
This just looks like a way for AOL to make $$$.
It's not "just" a way to make money. It's a way to make money by investing some of your resources to provide a service people want at a price they're willing to pay, with a profit margin thrown in so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.
It's exactly the same thing you do every time you go in to the office, or cash your paycheck. Should we now start questioning why you demand payment for your services--payment above and beyond the cost you incur in providing those services? It just looks like a way for you to make $$$, to me.
It may not add anything to either activity, but it does recover some of the time you'd lose engaging in both activities sequentially rather than in parallel.
Whenever you can do two different tasks at once, without losing significantly on either one, you gain value in terms of time saved.
You write quite well for someone whose reading comprehension seems to be so fundamentally lacking.
Also, six year olds are not masters of English grammar. Or do you have a statistically-valid sample of six year olds who can correctly describe the rules for making contrafactual statements in the past tense? And if they're going to demonstrate true grammatical mastery, they should be able to describe and use the various future tenses correctly. Oh, and of course they'll need to use apostrophes correctly in various situations.
So if you REALLY need to be in touch you can be, but without annoying people around you. And you have to leave the theater to actually talk.
Right, because having some on-call asshat get up in the middle of the movie and climb over me, stepping on my feet and mumbling apologies during the big fight scene/car chase/lover's reunion isn't annoying at all.
This kinda sounds like an excuse to be ignorant. "Sure I could learn proper grammar and spelling, and develop a large and useful vocabulary, but why bother? If I can convince enough people to keep fucking up the language, y'all'll just make a rule that the fuckup is the right way."
The evolution of language over time may be an interesting phenomenon for smarty men to study, but I would prefer that children were required to learn, respect, and apply the standards of clear communication in effect today.
Only people who have mastered the current ruleset should be given a free pass to break the rules.
That has got to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever read on/.
How many opportunities to read things do you pass up, every day, simply because you're not interested?
Do you consider yourself to be engaging in human stupidity because you don't watch every movie that Hollywood puts out, just because of a few stupid movies (although admittedly Hollywood has put out more than just a few stupid movies)?
Do you consider yourself to be engaging in human stupidity because you don't rent every single movie on the shelf at your local Blockbuster video?
Do you consider yourself to be engaging in human stupidity because you don't read every single LiveJournal post ever?
Next you're going to try to tell us that all censorship is wrong.
Maybe he's like me, and prefers to teach both ideas as interpretations of as-yet unproven claims, along with some description of the reasoning behind the interpretations being taught.
I mean, evolutionary theory's explanation of every specific characteristic is always "it arose from a random mutation, and was then selected for".
This amounts to nothing more than a fictional narrative that conveniently fits the observed facts, but does not actually prove that the facts came into being in the way described in the narrative.
How this amounts to something more scientifically compelling than what I learned in Sunday School is beyond me.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for teaching the "evolutionary interpretation" of the origin of species. I just wish that Textual Criticism were also taught, in the context of scientific foundations for scriptural interpretation.
Did you never stop to consider that maybe the evolution of two major parties, opposing each other around the gravity of a centrist position, is a natural and healthy--and therefore desireable--outcome of democratic rule?
In a system where a majority is needed to effect real change, why are you so shocked that the real changes always seem to reflect the centrist position?
Here, "moderate" is simply the thing that most reasonable people can agree on.
Wake me up when your "real alternative" can come up with a platform most reasonable people can agree on.
Well, for starters I would liked to have seen George Bush try and get back in power if he hadn't managed to scare the whole country into thinking all 300 million people were going to be killed by evil terrorists if they didn't re-elect him.
I rather think that seeing several thousand Americans slaughtered by 19 hijackers in under an hour was motivation enough for most of us. As I recall, Bush got reelected mainly on account of he projected confidence that something was being done about that.
I don't think the US economy would have had its remarkable turnaround either when it should have gone into recession (like half of Europe did or verged on) after the dot-com crash.
Half of Europe went into recession because half of Europe has no sound economic foundation and no strong work ethic anymore. America stayed out of recession not out of fear of the terrorist boogeyman--are you seriously saying we all worked harder because we were afraid OBL was going to steal our lunch?!--but because that's just how we roll, playa. We're a rich, hardworking, hard-playing people, and we just naturally get shit done.
Besides, perhaps a little fear of terrorism might be a good thing, if it were to help France develop an economy that doesn't suck...
I live in the UK where the government did also try to tell us time and time again how all 60 million of us were going to be killed by evil terrorists. The UK happened to be one of the few other countries who avoided recession (or verging on it). They also got themselves re-elected by scaring everyone into thinking the opposition party would start to dismantle the free national health system.
If you say so. I guess you know more about the UK than you do about the US. It's a safe bet you don't know any less, anyway.
Maybe for the USA it would be more correct to say "Its the President's job to keep the public scared..." due to Senators as you say being more interested in their own constituancy.
People have concerns. In a democracy, they elect officials to address those concerns. I'm not convinced that addressing the people's concerns counts as "keeping them scared". Sometimes we have to talk about scary things, in order to deal with them. Besides, how much more scared than "three thousand Americans dead in a gruesome act of terrorism, of which many more are promised by the perpetrators," did Bush really need anybody to be? Like I said, most of his efforts have been in projecting confidence. OBL brought the scary, remember?
Do remeber though, just as the threat of being fired will often get an individual putting that little bit more effort in,
The world is a cruel, heartless place. The threat of starving to death will often get an individual out of his cave and hunting the damn wooly mammoth. I work harder because I'm afraid of starving to death, not because my boss threatens me with the facts of life every day. I already know those facts, which is why I'm working in the first place. Perhaps, living in the land of the dole, you don't fully understand this attitude.
there is nothing like a good war or disaster to get general worker productivity shooting up through the roof
No doubt. But that's a far cry from saying it's the government's job to produce such events.
(as happened in Word War 2, especially in Russia. My god did they build tanks quickly).
They built tanks quickly because the Nazis had invaded their land in force, and were well on their way to obliterating the Russian people. What are you trying to say, here? That Stalin engineered World War 2 in order to keep his people sufficiently frightened? That it was Hitler's job to scare the Russians?
In fact, Stalin and Hitler both did rule through fear; it's about the only method that works, in totalitarian dictatorships. However, it's not necessarily true that all governments operate this way.
So doesn't this pretty much rule out Chernobyl as an example of how dangerous nuclear power could be?
I mean, it's a little like claiming that tennis is unacceptably dangerous, and justifying that claim by telling the story of the guy who killed someone with a tennis racket on purpose because he "wanted to see how many times you could hit someone on the head with a tennis racket before it broke".
Its the government's job to keep the public scared, otherwise the public stop working as hard
What country are you from? I ask, because your country's system of government seems similar, but much simpler than my country's system of government.
In my country, a representative republic (commonly considered to be a type of "democracy", broadly defined), things work like this:
1. The government is elected by the public, and therefore scared of the public, and therefore works really hard. Politicians spend most of their time pandering to their constituencies.
2. Special interest groups try to scare the public, so that the public will both fund their special interests, and so that the public will pressure the politicians who are already scared and willing to do just about anything the public demands.
3. The special interest groups also use the funding they receive from the public they've frightened to finance their own power plays directly.
I imagine things are very different in your country, though. What kind of a government do you have? A totalitarian dictatorship?
Actually, if they exported less oil, they'd decrease supply and increase cost.
Plus, if they used more of their own oil, they'd have to spend less money trying to develop alternatives.
But I'm pretty sure the real problem with Iran's economy is gross mismanagement, not fine manipulation of the tradeoff point between export and domestic consumption.
I imagine that if we ever got to the point, as a civilization, that our heat output became problematic, we'd almost immediately reach the point where our heat output was our primary source of energy, with alternate sources being used to fill the gaps left in the system by entropy.
All of which argues in favor of the Apollo Project being real. After all, NASA didn't just "spread a rumor that the footage is real". They actually produced huge amounts of the footage itself, along with mountains of other evidence from eyewitness accounts to physical samples.
Probably they mean "simulated with regard to terrain".
Unless the people putting in all of this intense thought and effort into the prospect of moon landings are so completely stupid that they seriously thought they were going to invent anti-gravity just to simulate the moon's mass for their contest.
Although I have to admit that it would be a pretty big ego boost for you, if they did happen to overlook that particularly obvious problem, while you were able to pick up on it right away without giving the matter much thought at all. You should look into it.
Strangely, even today our CGI technology is not up to the task of producing footage of the extent and nature of the Apollo footage, with high enough quality to fool both the human visual senses and the most advanced forensic analysis, and certainly not for less than it would cost to just conduct the damn project for real.
...the problem with the comparison is that it compares nominal nuclear power plant operation (i.e., no accidents) with coal power.
So basically what you're saying is, it takes a major failure of all the safety and security protocols at a nuclear power plant to match the normal daily operation of a coal plant?
Regarding the WMD thing, I too would be impressed if they could be found.
Certainly there used to be a lot of evidence, including testimony of the weapons inspectors and the IAEA, and the analysis of several of the world's leading intelligence agencies.
And certainly the Hussein regime had ample time before the invasion to hide, destroy, or shift out of the country the evidence of its WMD programs.
At this point, I doubt that any new evidence will surface. There have been rumors of Iraqi WMD components and manufacturing systems being found in Syrian and Dutch scrapyards, but little seems to have been made of these developments.
It's my belief that the allged WMD programs did exist, and that evidence of their existence remains, but that this evidence will not be conclusive.
Luckily for me, I always regarded the WMD argument as a sideshow; what really interested me were the long-term geostrategic aspects of the invasion.
The reason I didn't address the WMD issue earlier in our conversation is because I don't actually see it as a good example of a well-proven thing. In the context of learning how you came to believe certain things about Rove, it seemed much more reasonable to focus on the Holocaust, which really is a good example of a well-proven thing.
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Why does AOL have to charge a fee at all?
Why do you have to charge a fee for the services you provide?
Can't they set up some kind of certification system...[?]
Last time I checked, "setting up" and "systems" involves time, effort, and material resources; i.e., it costs money. Sounds like a job for Fee-Charging Guy to me.
This just looks like a way for AOL to make $$$.
It's not "just" a way to make money. It's a way to make money by investing some of your resources to provide a service people want at a price they're willing to pay, with a profit margin thrown in so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.
It's exactly the same thing you do every time you go in to the office, or cash your paycheck. Should we now start questioning why you demand payment for your services--payment above and beyond the cost you incur in providing those services? It just looks like a way for you to make $$$, to me.
It may not add anything to either activity, but it does recover some of the time you'd lose engaging in both activities sequentially rather than in parallel.
Whenever you can do two different tasks at once, without losing significantly on either one, you gain value in terms of time saved.
Where did I say it was a grammatical error?
You write quite well for someone whose reading comprehension seems to be so fundamentally lacking.
Also, six year olds are not masters of English grammar. Or do you have a statistically-valid sample of six year olds who can correctly describe the rules for making contrafactual statements in the past tense? And if they're going to demonstrate true grammatical mastery, they should be able to describe and use the various future tenses correctly. Oh, and of course they'll need to use apostrophes correctly in various situations.
Oh, I totally would, except that apparently that's not something private citizens are allowed to do.
Believe me, if it weren't for the long arm of the law, I'd be delivering beatings to asshats on a daily basis.
So if you REALLY need to be in touch you can be, but without annoying people around you. And you have to leave the theater to actually talk.
Right, because having some on-call asshat get up in the middle of the movie and climb over me, stepping on my feet and mumbling apologies during the big fight scene/car chase/lover's reunion isn't annoying at all.
This kinda sounds like an excuse to be ignorant. "Sure I could learn proper grammar and spelling, and develop a large and useful vocabulary, but why bother? If I can convince enough people to keep fucking up the language, y'all'll just make a rule that the fuckup is the right way."
The evolution of language over time may be an interesting phenomenon for smarty men to study, but I would prefer that children were required to learn, respect, and apply the standards of clear communication in effect today.
Only people who have mastered the current ruleset should be given a free pass to break the rules.
That has got to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever read on /.
How many opportunities to read things do you pass up, every day, simply because you're not interested?
Do you consider yourself to be engaging in human stupidity because you don't watch every movie that Hollywood puts out, just because of a few stupid movies (although admittedly Hollywood has put out more than just a few stupid movies)?
Do you consider yourself to be engaging in human stupidity because you don't rent every single movie on the shelf at your local Blockbuster video?
Do you consider yourself to be engaging in human stupidity because you don't read every single LiveJournal post ever?
Next you're going to try to tell us that all censorship is wrong.
Maybe he's like me, and prefers to teach both ideas as interpretations of as-yet unproven claims, along with some description of the reasoning behind the interpretations being taught.
I mean, evolutionary theory's explanation of every specific characteristic is always "it arose from a random mutation, and was then selected for".
This amounts to nothing more than a fictional narrative that conveniently fits the observed facts, but does not actually prove that the facts came into being in the way described in the narrative.
How this amounts to something more scientifically compelling than what I learned in Sunday School is beyond me.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for teaching the "evolutionary interpretation" of the origin of species. I just wish that Textual Criticism were also taught, in the context of scientific foundations for scriptural interpretation.
Did you never stop to consider that maybe the evolution of two major parties, opposing each other around the gravity of a centrist position, is a natural and healthy--and therefore desireable--outcome of democratic rule?
In a system where a majority is needed to effect real change, why are you so shocked that the real changes always seem to reflect the centrist position?
Here, "moderate" is simply the thing that most reasonable people can agree on.
Wake me up when your "real alternative" can come up with a platform most reasonable people can agree on.
You're welcome! HTH, HAND, etc.
It seems like your core argument is that the regime keeps us too free to realize that we're actually slaves.
So I'm having a hard time seeing the problem.
I have to say, this has got to be the feeblest fucking totalitarian dictatorship in the history of the world.
I mean, half the country openly dissents from the ruling party.
You can't turn around without bumping into somebody voicing their opposition to the regime.
It's getting to be so that a guy has to re-read The Gulag Archipelago, just to get a feel for the real thing anymore.
Huh.
Learn something new every day, I guess.
Still, there must be something that can be done with waste heat.
Updrafts for gliders, maybe, or grates to keep bums warm...
Well, for starters I would liked to have seen George Bush try and get back in power if he hadn't managed to scare the whole country into thinking all 300 million people were going to be killed by evil terrorists if they didn't re-elect him.
I rather think that seeing several thousand Americans slaughtered by 19 hijackers in under an hour was motivation enough for most of us. As I recall, Bush got reelected mainly on account of he projected confidence that something was being done about that.
I don't think the US economy would have had its remarkable turnaround either when it should have gone into recession (like half of Europe did or verged on) after the dot-com crash.
Half of Europe went into recession because half of Europe has no sound economic foundation and no strong work ethic anymore. America stayed out of recession not out of fear of the terrorist boogeyman--are you seriously saying we all worked harder because we were afraid OBL was going to steal our lunch?!--but because that's just how we roll, playa. We're a rich, hardworking, hard-playing people, and we just naturally get shit done.
Besides, perhaps a little fear of terrorism might be a good thing, if it were to help France develop an economy that doesn't suck...
I live in the UK where the government did also try to tell us time and time again how all 60 million of us were going to be killed by evil terrorists. The UK happened to be one of the few other countries who avoided recession (or verging on it). They also got themselves re-elected by scaring everyone into thinking the opposition party would start to dismantle the free national health system.
If you say so. I guess you know more about the UK than you do about the US. It's a safe bet you don't know any less, anyway.
Maybe for the USA it would be more correct to say "Its the President's job to keep the public scared..." due to Senators as you say being more interested in their own constituancy.
People have concerns. In a democracy, they elect officials to address those concerns. I'm not convinced that addressing the people's concerns counts as "keeping them scared". Sometimes we have to talk about scary things, in order to deal with them. Besides, how much more scared than "three thousand Americans dead in a gruesome act of terrorism, of which many more are promised by the perpetrators," did Bush really need anybody to be? Like I said, most of his efforts have been in projecting confidence. OBL brought the scary, remember?
Do remeber though, just as the threat of being fired will often get an individual putting that little bit more effort in,
The world is a cruel, heartless place. The threat of starving to death will often get an individual out of his cave and hunting the damn wooly mammoth. I work harder because I'm afraid of starving to death, not because my boss threatens me with the facts of life every day. I already know those facts, which is why I'm working in the first place. Perhaps, living in the land of the dole, you don't fully understand this attitude.
there is nothing like a good war or disaster to get general worker productivity shooting up through the roof
No doubt. But that's a far cry from saying it's the government's job to produce such events.
(as happened in Word War 2, especially in Russia. My god did they build tanks quickly).
They built tanks quickly because the Nazis had invaded their land in force, and were well on their way to obliterating the Russian people. What are you trying to say, here? That Stalin engineered World War 2 in order to keep his people sufficiently frightened? That it was Hitler's job to scare the Russians?
In fact, Stalin and Hitler both did rule through fear; it's about the only method that works, in totalitarian dictatorships. However, it's not necessarily true that all governments operate this way.
Anyway, you're still giving examples s
Why didn't you use all that waste heat to do work? Spin turbines, maybe, as it convected away from the outer surface of the cube?
One system's waste heat is another system's heat-energy source, is what I was trying to point out.
Wow.
So doesn't this pretty much rule out Chernobyl as an example of how dangerous nuclear power could be?
I mean, it's a little like claiming that tennis is unacceptably dangerous, and justifying that claim by telling the story of the guy who killed someone with a tennis racket on purpose because he "wanted to see how many times you could hit someone on the head with a tennis racket before it broke".
What country are you from? I ask, because your country's system of government seems similar, but much simpler than my country's system of government.
In my country, a representative republic (commonly considered to be a type of "democracy", broadly defined), things work like this:
1. The government is elected by the public, and therefore scared of the public, and therefore works really hard. Politicians spend most of their time pandering to their constituencies.
2. Special interest groups try to scare the public, so that the public will both fund their special interests, and so that the public will pressure the politicians who are already scared and willing to do just about anything the public demands.
3. The special interest groups also use the funding they receive from the public they've frightened to finance their own power plays directly.
I imagine things are very different in your country, though. What kind of a government do you have? A totalitarian dictatorship?
Actually, if they exported less oil, they'd decrease supply and increase cost.
Plus, if they used more of their own oil, they'd have to spend less money trying to develop alternatives.
But I'm pretty sure the real problem with Iran's economy is gross mismanagement, not fine manipulation of the tradeoff point between export and domestic consumption.
If they use it, they can't sell it.
So what happens when they do sell it, and use the money to buy nuclear reactor technology?
Net effect is less money for Iran.
Exactly.
Well, that and a savage beating from their ideological, geopolitical, and geostrategic enemies.
All told, it certainly seems to me it'd be cheaper just to use some of their own oil--especially since they already have the infrastructure for that.
Yeah, heat is a problem.
But a solvable one.
If nothing else, heat is a source of energy.
I imagine that if we ever got to the point, as a civilization, that our heat output became problematic, we'd almost immediately reach the point where our heat output was our primary source of energy, with alternate sources being used to fill the gaps left in the system by entropy.
All of which argues in favor of the Apollo Project being real. After all, NASA didn't just "spread a rumor that the footage is real". They actually produced huge amounts of the footage itself, along with mountains of other evidence from eyewitness accounts to physical samples.
Probably they mean "simulated with regard to terrain".
Unless the people putting in all of this intense thought and effort into the prospect of moon landings are so completely stupid that they seriously thought they were going to invent anti-gravity just to simulate the moon's mass for their contest.
Although I have to admit that it would be a pretty big ego boost for you, if they did happen to overlook that particularly obvious problem, while you were able to pick up on it right away without giving the matter much thought at all. You should look into it.
Strangely, even today our CGI technology is not up to the task of producing footage of the extent and nature of the Apollo footage, with high enough quality to fool both the human visual senses and the most advanced forensic analysis, and certainly not for less than it would cost to just conduct the damn project for real.
...the problem with the comparison is that it compares nominal nuclear power plant operation (i.e., no accidents) with coal power.
So basically what you're saying is, it takes a major failure of all the safety and security protocols at a nuclear power plant to match the normal daily operation of a coal plant?
I think you've just sold me on nuclear power!
No worries; I know it's mainstream thought.
Regarding the WMD thing, I too would be impressed if they could be found.
Certainly there used to be a lot of evidence, including testimony of the weapons inspectors and the IAEA, and the analysis of several of the world's leading intelligence agencies.
And certainly the Hussein regime had ample time before the invasion to hide, destroy, or shift out of the country the evidence of its WMD programs.
At this point, I doubt that any new evidence will surface. There have been rumors of Iraqi WMD components and manufacturing systems being found in Syrian and Dutch scrapyards, but little seems to have been made of these developments.
It's my belief that the allged WMD programs did exist, and that evidence of their existence remains, but that this evidence will not be conclusive.
Luckily for me, I always regarded the WMD argument as a sideshow; what really interested me were the long-term geostrategic aspects of the invasion.
The reason I didn't address the WMD issue earlier in our conversation is because I don't actually see it as a good example of a well-proven thing. In the context of learning how you came to believe certain things about Rove, it seemed much more reasonable to focus on the Holocaust, which really is a good example of a well-proven thing.