The article seems to suggest it may *only* print parts from the catalog in their custom software though, and may not allow you to print random parts. Which to my mind removes most of what makes 3D-printing good in the first place.
The archeologists who discovered the bones said it had all the hallmarks of a distinct homo species right from when they first discovered it. They published papers to that effect 10 years ago. This was however controversial due to the very young age of the bones. No other homo species except us is known to have survived past the last ice age, the claim that these did - and were not the same species as us - was very controversial. Especially since the fossils were so recent that it is entirely possible that humans could have encountered them (remember - most dead bodies don't leave fossils - if the fossils we have is a mere 15-thousand years old, they could have been alive as recently as 5000 or even 1000 years ago). So a lot of scientists were understandably skeptical about their conclusions even though they were seriously thorough, they didn't publish their findings for almost two years after the discovery as they spent all that time checking and rechecking to test every likely counter-theory and only published it when all those tests were negative and they could find no other possible explanation.
That it remained controversial despite that just shows that contradicting pet theories can upset people - and sometimes, the pet theories are wrong. Interestingly, if any homo species was going to survive the ice age without our technology these guys had about the best shot. Living on a small tropical island - they probably barely even noticed it happened.
>No; global warming may be disruptive, but that's going a bit too far. It's not going go cause extinction.
You are probably partly right - but only probably and definitely only partly. Partly because we aren't the only species around and it will cause lots of others to go extinct, much smaller climate shifts than this have caused mass extinctions before - and those happened SLOWLY. Probably because you may be overestimating our ability, and speed, of adaptation. 97% of all species that ever existed are extinct (at least), we have no idea what our breaking point may be. We are far more dependent on other species than we realize and any of THEIR extinctions could prove to be the end of us, there are other impacts which could prove to be more than we can deal with. We have no real defense against virusses right now and one major aspect of climate change is to seriously shift the distribution of insects - which means spreading diseases to new areas. A disease that only existed in a sparsely populated place where the rare cases that got it always died but weren't very many... could be the plague that takes us out if climate change moves it to a highly populous area.
There were dozens of homo species on this planet not so long ago (we're still discovering new ones). Only two of those survived the last major climate change. Just two - and the other survivor was confined to a tiny tropical island and probably never experienced it. They were around until 18-thousands years ago at least, that's the age of the most recent fossils we have - but most dead bodies don't fossilize, it's entirely possible they were actually around until as recently as 10 or even 5 thousand years ago, hell it could be 1000 years ago or less. The may have survived right until *we* arrived on their island !
Either way - the fact is, while we as a species probably would not go extinct - it is a possibility. It's a very remote and absolute worst-case-scenario possibility, but it's not non-existent (and frankly the risk of an asteroid taking us out is quite a lot bigger). But billions of dead bodies, maybe half of us gone, maybe 3 quarters... that's the MODERATE risk. That's the hedging your bets on the MIDDLE of the picture outcome. That's hardly a shocking outcome, killing 25% of the world's population is so easy we've done that TO EACH OTHER... TWICE in a single century ! And make no mistake, in a bad climate scenario, whatever number of people are killed by crop failures and diseases and floods and storms... we would kill 10 times as many ourselves. Every crop failure won't just cause a famine, everyone of them will also cause a war as hungry people fight their neighbours for food.
That's what the "nah, we'll just adapt like we've always done" crowd never mentions... our history is full of evidence of just HOW humans adapt to calamities - we do it by killing each other in droves.
Nobody is profiting from global warming more than coal and oil companies. Hell ExonMobil actually scheduled the start of their arctic drilling to be delayed by well over a decade from when they first decided to do it - to take ADVANTAGE of global warming. See glaciers melting makes arctic drilling cheaper and more profitable. There are places they now drill 8 months a year which, in 1990, was only accessible for 3 months a year. So back in 1990 - they said "If we wait until after 2010 - we can make a lot more money from arctic drilling" - which is exactly what they did.
You may not believe in man made climate change, but those who profit from the cause of it most certainly DO believe in it - and what's more, they caused the problem and they are now profiting FROM the problem, at least in part enabled by the fact that their constant lies to the public (i.e. the flat out 180 contradiction between what they knew and disccussed internally and what they said publicly) has allowed them to keep their plans for profiting from the effects quite secret as well. The fact that this is profit from misery for everybody else does not bother them in the least.
And unlike YOUR crazy conspiracy theory - this is not a matter of conjecture, we have physical documentary PROOF of everything I just said - including the original internal Enron planning documents relating to Arctic Drilling that advised waiting until global warming had melted the glaciers more so they can make more money doing it.
Re: Hammerheads in Vermont
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>Note: That's the means of production out of private hands version of socialism
There is no such version of socialism. Such systems have existed but they sure as hell were not socialist - indeed they outright admitted to not being socialist, they were supposed to be a transitional state toward it. Socialism's proper meaning is the means of production in the hands of WORKERS. That' STILL private, the state as a proxy for workers certainly didn't work - if anything it was even *worse* than private bosses because now the entity that is supposed to regulate industry and reign in the excesses off business owners WAS the business owner. But worker-owned coops have been a resounding success everywhere they have been tried, they actually decentralize power MORE than capitalism does - and they are economically more successful than either.
Argentina's capitalist economy collapsed in 2007. Workers took over the abandoned factories and businesses where capitalists were not able to make a profit, and ran them as coops. Despite the same economic conditions that killed the capitalist industries, the worker owned socialist industries flourished. Today there are more than 20-thousand such worker-owned coops in Argentina, they make up over 85% of the country's GDP, they employ more than all other businesses and government combined. Part of why it worked so well is that they all shared the profits, so all those workers suddenly earned rather more than they did when an "owner" was skimming most of it, which meant they had money to spend - which meant there was demand and markets for the OTHER coops, whose workers then made more profit, which they spent in turn, creating a massive race-to-the-top economy that saved argentina from the brink of a depression.
That's how you do "worker owner" socialism that works.
What policy exactly are they promoting except perhaps "good fucking is fun" - in which case thats just one more way their society is more free than America.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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You think a libertarian could vote for a man who, as a state prosecutor, went before the state supreme court to fight to keep a man whose innocence had been indisputably proven from being released from prison ?!??!?!
A man who seriously tried to argue that a prison sentence given in an unjust trial to an innocent man, should not be overturned when the proof of his innocence emerges ! You want an agent of the state being COMPLETELY totalitarian - the candidate in the polls who has actually ACTED like a totalitarian dictator during his career is the far right's darling. Ted Cruz.
That guy is everything libertarians ARE and NONE of what they SAY they are, so they probably shouldn't vote for him.
Re: Hammerheads in Vermont
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I don't think you know anything at all about Sander's economic policy.
Unless you think Denmark is a totalitarian state that has made money illegal - just like Canada and Sweden and Norway and EVERY OTHER MAJOR COUNTRY ON EARTH.
Re: Hammerheads in Vermont
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>The best thing about Sanders's economic policy is that it's utterly fantastic, impossible thinking, entirely ungrounded in reality.
Reality, apparently, is a place where Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Canada, New Zeeland and a few dozen other countries simply don't exist.
After all - if as another poster declared, socialist economic views can ONLY lead to totalitarianism then those countries basically eradicating all poverty with "socialist" policies like strong labour unions, free education, high minimum wage, strong regulations, free healthcare and great social safety netts are all totalitarian now - some of the most free and happy societies on earth CANNOT have resulted from that.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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Actually - Euro-style social democracy is significantly closer to classical libertarianism than American capitalist Libertarianism.
The original libertarian philosophy states that the excercise of power over another brutalizes both the wielder and the victim and that economic power is even more damaging than political power.
They have a point to. In the end your boss can generally inflict far more damaging results on you for saying unpopular things than your government can. The government may imprison you - but you'll have a roof over your head and food in your belly, your boss can take THOSE away. Even in those places where the government will kill you for saying something unpopular, the methods of execution are still generally far less painful, slow and horrifying than starving to death.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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>. I happen to think fiscal conservatism is at the moment more important than social liberalism,
There is not now, nor has there in all of human history *ever* been such a moment and it's logically impossible for it to ever happen since your next statement is the exact opposite of the truth.
>because the fastest, most effective way to take away people's choices is to take away their fiscal discretion
False - and any truth it actually had would actually be an argument FOR socialism - since if this is true - then having money more evenly distributed would make all of society more free. If money is a requirement for liberty then it's logically impossible to support anything but egalitarianism and still say you support liberty.
No, you can always use your free speech to campaign for lower taxes, but if you argue for using the money from lower taxes to *buy* the right to campaign - you just created a complete oligarchy. And that's exactly why sane people aren't libertarians. Those who can follow a train of thought past the first station can see that logically, it must lead to complete plutocracy, which in turn MUST lead to complete economic collapse, the rule of authoritarian warlords and a population resorting to piracy and robbery in order to survive. True libertarian states can only end up like that, because fundamental to libertarianism is removing absolutely every defense society has ever invented to prevent that from happening.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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Carly Is Out
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I've always held that it's not "might" so much as "must". Anybody who would choose economic policy as primacy over civil liberties doesn't deserve the title "libertarian". Anybody who claims "economic liberties" are equal to, or even remotely comparable in importance to, civil liberties is no libertarian at all.
If libertarians care about freedom they MUST accept that their economic policies ought to be secondary to civil liberties and align with the most socially liberal party. They can then use their greater civil liberty to campaign for the economic policies they like if they think they can convince any sane people to support those.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Except of course that the republican party was the original social democrats of America. The progressive movement was started by the republicans, probably the most progressive president America ever had (and in terms of domestic policy - the closest to Sanders) was Teddy "The Trustbuster" Rooseveldt - a republican.
The republican party only really went far-right in the goldwater years, and the democrats didn't go left -at at least no more than to pass the civil rights act (which I would call centrist at best). By the early 1990s America had two right wing parties - and the democrats was the more rightwing one in policy (if not in rhetoric), Clinton expanded the drug war and racist incarceration laws in ways that Nixon, Reagan and Bush could only have dreamt about. He gutted the welfare system in a way that they would never have dared to !
The progressive voters moved to the democrat party in the 2000s only - and they were a minority. Even in 2008 during the Obama campaign only 23% of Democrats identified as liberal, 47% identified as "moderate" and the remaining small bit as "conservative". That shifted sharply since then. Today 45% or more democrats identify as liberal - and they are finally pulling the supposedly leftwing party towards actual leftwing policies. Bernie is riding that wave - and it may just mean you get another example of one of your strong contenders for best president ever (T. Rooseveldt). The top two competitors for that title would be Lincoln and FDR.
Funny how, as a devoted and hardline liberal - I nevertheless consider two of the best presidents America ever had to have been republicans. But this was before the republican party became literally the exact opposite of everything it was created as.
Taking the HP business model to government.
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Well, that's probably a good thing. Could you imagine Carly's Tax Code ?
"You only pay 1% in income tax. But you have to file monthly returns with a 50%-of-your-income filing fee".
>hence does not help with the lack of freedom of speech in Europe.
Aaah, American Exceptionalism at work -the average European citizen has for more, and more practical capacity to make use of, freedom of speech than the US does. Talk to me again when you can watch golden-shower fetish porn on national TV at 1pm in the Afternoon in America ! A few places ban specific forms of hatespeech - but so does the US (just not quite as stringently) and I would never be convinced that hatespeech against a minority is legitimate free speech anyway. All hatespeech IS incitement to violence. No, there is not an exception to that, even if you don't say the words "kill the" they are ALWAYS in the sentence before the racial slur. Somebody WILL hear them there and nobody says it without already know that.
Of course, America only accepts that one way. One of the biggest news stories here in South Africa over the past few months was the strong possibility that AGOA would not be renewed. AGOA is a law Obama signed to help African economies grow by giving them tax-free imports into the US. A good idea in principle - but, as always, good ideas get corrupted when US corporations get involved. AGOA is now *also* used to blackmail African countries to change laws that have nothing to do with competitiveness for American exporters. In South Africa's case, the threat is that AGOA would not be renewed unless we agree to no longer require sanitary standards for chicken. Our own chicken farmers have been living with these standards for years and sell chicken quite competitively but US chicken is notoriously low quality and notoriously high risk for disease spreading - risks that are amplified by exporting, and they come nowhere near the (common sense) standards we've had for decades to prevent outbreaks of diseases like Salmonella.
So US sourced chicken has been very rare in our stores since so few US chicken exporters complied with the regulations. This safety law will probably be lost, to secure US companies the ability to export here - because we cannot afford to lose the cheap export markets to the US (that's a pretty significant percentage of our GDP). Despite most South Africans pragmatically accepting the laxer standards as something we simply have to do - nobody is happy about it, South Africans right now feel extremely bullied by America and feel that our public health is being traded for American profits.
The grand irony: laws or no laws, we have a thriving industrial scale chicken farming industry (which is a nett exporter) - there is almost no way that American companies could compete anyway since local farmers don't have expensive international shipping to pay for. Only a few truly massive factory-farm companies may even bother to enter the market, where they won't sell well because of being more expensive- so American companies are deluded if they think they will actually GET profit from this - but local chicken will also go down in quality if the standards are relaxed. It's a nett harm for South African consumers - of a meat product that is dietary stable (and often the only proteine source) for the most poor and vulnerable people in our country. And the people who demanded it, will make only a tiny bit of money from it. The only thing that pisses somebody off more than being killed so a billionaire can make another billion - is being killed so a billionaire can make another penny.
I remember hacking the code for GORILLA.BAS to make it behave differently, like increasing or decreasing gravity - which could make Bananas go to orbit... or hit the building immediately beneath you like a stinger missile..
I'm sure the vast majority of nerds are decent human beings - but misogynistic assholes like him make me doubt that some times... must be the significant minority of libertarian-leaning randroids among the nerd community. Nothing guarantees turning into a terrible person quite like thinking Ayn Rand was right about something. Frankly - her belief that smoking is proof of man's superiority over fire and that scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer is a "communist conspiracy" was exactly typical of the level of her insight into anything at all. And I have utterly digressed - I'm sorry, I just really *hope* it's the randroids who breed that part of the community and not representative of a deeper undercurrent of misogyny and lack of respect for women and other marginalized peoples.
The flames are about to start, bring it on. Flaming this opinion - only proves it right. I'm also pretty sure I'll get a flamebait or a troll mod or two - I am just as certain they are not deserved so I'll accept it as the price of integrity. At least it's not off-topic for the specific thread:P
Microsoft used to have a proper BASIC interpreter/editor in DOS - which worked well under windows 95. I think it was called MSBasic. I wrote my first post-LOGO programs using MSBasic and the user's manual from a long-discarded commodore-64. Peek and Poke stuff were not useful (completely different memory layout) but the rest was - and there were other ways to do graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
The article seems to suggest it may *only* print parts from the catalog in their custom software though, and may not allow you to print random parts. Which to my mind removes most of what makes 3D-printing good in the first place.
The archeologists who discovered the bones said it had all the hallmarks of a distinct homo species right from when they first discovered it. They published papers to that effect 10 years ago. This was however controversial due to the very young age of the bones. No other homo species except us is known to have survived past the last ice age, the claim that these did - and were not the same species as us - was very controversial. Especially since the fossils were so recent that it is entirely possible that humans could have encountered them (remember - most dead bodies don't leave fossils - if the fossils we have is a mere 15-thousand years old, they could have been alive as recently as 5000 or even 1000 years ago).
So a lot of scientists were understandably skeptical about their conclusions even though they were seriously thorough, they didn't publish their findings for almost two years after the discovery as they spent all that time checking and rechecking to test every likely counter-theory and only published it when all those tests were negative and they could find no other possible explanation.
That it remained controversial despite that just shows that contradicting pet theories can upset people - and sometimes, the pet theories are wrong. Interestingly, if any homo species was going to survive the ice age without our technology these guys had about the best shot. Living on a small tropical island - they probably barely even noticed it happened.
>No; global warming may be disruptive, but that's going a bit too far. It's not going go cause extinction.
You are probably partly right - but only probably and definitely only partly.
Partly because we aren't the only species around and it will cause lots of others to go extinct, much smaller climate shifts than this have caused mass extinctions before - and those happened SLOWLY.
Probably because you may be overestimating our ability, and speed, of adaptation. 97% of all species that ever existed are extinct (at least), we have no idea what our breaking point may be. We are far more dependent on other species than we realize and any of THEIR extinctions could prove to be the end of us, there are other impacts which could prove to be more than we can deal with. We have no real defense against virusses right now and one major aspect of climate change is to seriously shift the distribution of insects - which means spreading diseases to new areas. A disease that only existed in a sparsely populated place where the rare cases that got it always died but weren't very many... could be the plague that takes us out if climate change moves it to a highly populous area.
There were dozens of homo species on this planet not so long ago (we're still discovering new ones). Only two of those survived the last major climate change. Just two - and the other survivor was confined to a tiny tropical island and probably never experienced it. They were around until 18-thousands years ago at least, that's the age of the most recent fossils we have - but most dead bodies don't fossilize, it's entirely possible they were actually around until as recently as 10 or even 5 thousand years ago, hell it could be 1000 years ago or less. The may have survived right until *we* arrived on their island !
Either way - the fact is, while we as a species probably would not go extinct - it is a possibility. It's a very remote and absolute worst-case-scenario possibility, but it's not non-existent (and frankly the risk of an asteroid taking us out is quite a lot bigger). But billions of dead bodies, maybe half of us gone, maybe 3 quarters ... that's the MODERATE risk. That's the hedging your bets on the MIDDLE of the picture outcome.
That's hardly a shocking outcome, killing 25% of the world's population is so easy we've done that TO EACH OTHER... TWICE in a single century ! And make no mistake, in a bad climate scenario, whatever number of people are killed by crop failures and diseases and floods and storms... we would kill 10 times as many ourselves.
Every crop failure won't just cause a famine, everyone of them will also cause a war as hungry people fight their neighbours for food.
That's what the "nah, we'll just adapt like we've always done" crowd never mentions... our history is full of evidence of just HOW humans adapt to calamities - we do it by killing each other in droves.
>who exactly IS profiting.
Nobody is profiting from global warming more than coal and oil companies. Hell ExonMobil actually scheduled the start of their arctic drilling to be delayed by well over a decade from when they first decided to do it - to take ADVANTAGE of global warming. See glaciers melting makes arctic drilling cheaper and more profitable. There are places they now drill 8 months a year which, in 1990, was only accessible for 3 months a year.
So back in 1990 - they said "If we wait until after 2010 - we can make a lot more money from arctic drilling" - which is exactly what they did.
You may not believe in man made climate change, but those who profit from the cause of it most certainly DO believe in it - and what's more, they caused the problem and they are now profiting FROM the problem, at least in part enabled by the fact that their constant lies to the public (i.e. the flat out 180 contradiction between what they knew and disccussed internally and what they said publicly) has allowed them to keep their plans for profiting from the effects quite secret as well. The fact that this is profit from misery for everybody else does not bother them in the least.
And unlike YOUR crazy conspiracy theory - this is not a matter of conjecture, we have physical documentary PROOF of everything I just said - including the original internal Enron planning documents relating to Arctic Drilling that advised waiting until global warming had melted the glaciers more so they can make more money doing it.
Wolves... or possibly foxes.
>Note: That's the means of production out of private hands version of socialism
There is no such version of socialism. Such systems have existed but they sure as hell were not socialist - indeed they outright admitted to not being socialist, they were supposed to be a transitional state toward it.
Socialism's proper meaning is the means of production in the hands of WORKERS. That' STILL private, the state as a proxy for workers certainly didn't work - if anything it was even *worse* than private bosses because now the entity that is supposed to regulate industry and reign in the excesses off business owners WAS the business owner.
But worker-owned coops have been a resounding success everywhere they have been tried, they actually decentralize power MORE than capitalism does - and they are economically more successful than either.
Argentina's capitalist economy collapsed in 2007. Workers took over the abandoned factories and businesses where capitalists were not able to make a profit, and ran them as coops. Despite the same economic conditions that killed the capitalist industries, the worker owned socialist industries flourished. Today there are more than 20-thousand such worker-owned coops in Argentina, they make up over 85% of the country's GDP, they employ more than all other businesses and government combined.
Part of why it worked so well is that they all shared the profits, so all those workers suddenly earned rather more than they did when an "owner" was skimming most of it, which meant they had money to spend - which meant there was demand and markets for the OTHER coops, whose workers then made more profit, which they spent in turn, creating a massive race-to-the-top economy that saved argentina from the brink of a depression.
That's how you do "worker owner" socialism that works.
I wish you were wrong
Who needs ed when you have cat ?
He just realized to his shock that not *all* servers are webservers or DB servers and there are more stacks than LAMP.
What policy exactly are they promoting except perhaps "good fucking is fun" - in which case thats just one more way their society is more free than America.
You think a libertarian could vote for a man who, as a state prosecutor, went before the state supreme court to fight to keep a man whose innocence had been indisputably proven from being released from prison ?!??!?!
A man who seriously tried to argue that a prison sentence given in an unjust trial to an innocent man, should not be overturned when the proof of his innocence emerges !
You want an agent of the state being COMPLETELY totalitarian - the candidate in the polls who has actually ACTED like a totalitarian dictator during his career is the far right's darling. Ted Cruz.
That guy is everything libertarians ARE and NONE of what they SAY they are, so they probably shouldn't vote for him.
I don't think you know anything at all about Sander's economic policy.
Unless you think Denmark is a totalitarian state that has made money illegal - just like Canada and Sweden and Norway and EVERY OTHER MAJOR COUNTRY ON EARTH.
>The best thing about Sanders's economic policy is that it's utterly fantastic, impossible thinking, entirely ungrounded in reality.
Reality, apparently, is a place where Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Canada, New Zeeland and a few dozen other countries simply don't exist.
After all - if as another poster declared, socialist economic views can ONLY lead to totalitarianism then those countries basically eradicating all poverty with "socialist" policies like strong labour unions, free education, high minimum wage, strong regulations, free healthcare and great social safety netts are all totalitarian now - some of the most free and happy societies on earth CANNOT have resulted from that.
Actually - Euro-style social democracy is significantly closer to classical libertarianism than American capitalist Libertarianism.
The original libertarian philosophy states that the excercise of power over another brutalizes both the wielder and the victim and that economic power is even more damaging than political power.
They have a point to. In the end your boss can generally inflict far more damaging results on you for saying unpopular things than your government can. The government may imprison you - but you'll have a roof over your head and food in your belly, your boss can take THOSE away. Even in those places where the government will kill you for saying something unpopular, the methods of execution are still generally far less painful, slow and horrifying than starving to death.
>. I happen to think fiscal conservatism is at the moment more important than social liberalism,
There is not now, nor has there in all of human history *ever* been such a moment and it's logically impossible for it to ever happen since your next statement is the exact opposite of the truth.
>because the fastest, most effective way to take away people's choices is to take away their fiscal discretion
False - and any truth it actually had would actually be an argument FOR socialism - since if this is true - then having money more evenly distributed would make all of society more free. If money is a requirement for liberty then it's logically impossible to support anything but egalitarianism and still say you support liberty.
No, you can always use your free speech to campaign for lower taxes, but if you argue for using the money from lower taxes to *buy* the right to campaign - you just created a complete oligarchy. And that's exactly why sane people aren't libertarians. Those who can follow a train of thought past the first station can see that logically, it must lead to complete plutocracy, which in turn MUST lead to complete economic collapse, the rule of authoritarian warlords and a population resorting to piracy and robbery in order to survive. True libertarian states can only end up like that, because fundamental to libertarianism is removing absolutely every defense society has ever invented to prevent that from happening.
I've always held that it's not "might" so much as "must". Anybody who would choose economic policy as primacy over civil liberties doesn't deserve the title "libertarian". Anybody who claims "economic liberties" are equal to, or even remotely comparable in importance to, civil liberties is no libertarian at all.
If libertarians care about freedom they MUST accept that their economic policies ought to be secondary to civil liberties and align with the most socially liberal party. They can then use their greater civil liberty to campaign for the economic policies they like if they think they can convince any sane people to support those.
Except of course that the republican party was the original social democrats of America. The progressive movement was started by the republicans, probably the most progressive president America ever had (and in terms of domestic policy - the closest to Sanders) was Teddy "The Trustbuster" Rooseveldt - a republican.
The republican party only really went far-right in the goldwater years, and the democrats didn't go left -at at least no more than to pass the civil rights act (which I would call centrist at best). By the early 1990s America had two right wing parties - and the democrats was the more rightwing one in policy (if not in rhetoric), Clinton expanded the drug war and racist incarceration laws in ways that Nixon, Reagan and Bush could only have dreamt about. He gutted the welfare system in a way that they would never have dared to !
The progressive voters moved to the democrat party in the 2000s only - and they were a minority. Even in 2008 during the Obama campaign only 23% of Democrats identified as liberal, 47% identified as "moderate" and the remaining small bit as "conservative". That shifted sharply since then. Today 45% or more democrats identify as liberal - and they are finally pulling the supposedly leftwing party towards actual leftwing policies. Bernie is riding that wave - and it may just mean you get another example of one of your strong contenders for best president ever (T. Rooseveldt). The top two competitors for that title would be Lincoln and FDR.
Funny how, as a devoted and hardline liberal - I nevertheless consider two of the best presidents America ever had to have been republicans. But this was before the republican party became literally the exact opposite of everything it was created as.
Well, that's probably a good thing. Could you imagine Carly's Tax Code ?
"You only pay 1% in income tax. But you have to file monthly returns with a 50%-of-your-income filing fee".
That's nothing, I can't write in at least 17 languages !
>hence does not help with the lack of freedom of speech in Europe.
Aaah, American Exceptionalism at work -the average European citizen has for more, and more practical capacity to make use of, freedom of speech than the US does. Talk to me again when you can watch golden-shower fetish porn on national TV at 1pm in the Afternoon in America ! A few places ban specific forms of hatespeech - but so does the US (just not quite as stringently) and I would never be convinced that hatespeech against a minority is legitimate free speech anyway. All hatespeech IS incitement to violence. No, there is not an exception to that, even if you don't say the words "kill the" they are ALWAYS in the sentence before the racial slur. Somebody WILL hear them there and nobody says it without already know that.
Of course, America only accepts that one way.
One of the biggest news stories here in South Africa over the past few months was the strong possibility that AGOA would not be renewed. AGOA is a law Obama signed to help African economies grow by giving them tax-free imports into the US. A good idea in principle - but, as always, good ideas get corrupted when US corporations get involved. AGOA is now *also* used to blackmail African countries to change laws that have nothing to do with competitiveness for American exporters. In South Africa's case, the threat is that AGOA would not be renewed unless we agree to no longer require sanitary standards for chicken. Our own chicken farmers have been living with these standards for years and sell chicken quite competitively but US chicken is notoriously low quality and notoriously high risk for disease spreading - risks that are amplified by exporting, and they come nowhere near the (common sense) standards we've had for decades to prevent outbreaks of diseases like Salmonella.
So US sourced chicken has been very rare in our stores since so few US chicken exporters complied with the regulations. This safety law will probably be lost, to secure US companies the ability to export here - because we cannot afford to lose the cheap export markets to the US (that's a pretty significant percentage of our GDP).
Despite most South Africans pragmatically accepting the laxer standards as something we simply have to do - nobody is happy about it, South Africans right now feel extremely bullied by America and feel that our public health is being traded for American profits.
The grand irony: laws or no laws, we have a thriving industrial scale chicken farming industry (which is a nett exporter) - there is almost no way that American companies could compete anyway since local farmers don't have expensive international shipping to pay for. Only a few truly massive factory-farm companies may even bother to enter the market, where they won't sell well because of being more expensive- so American companies are deluded if they think they will actually GET profit from this - but local chicken will also go down in quality if the standards are relaxed.
It's a nett harm for South African consumers - of a meat product that is dietary stable (and often the only proteine source) for the most poor and vulnerable people in our country. And the people who demanded it, will make only a tiny bit of money from it. The only thing that pisses somebody off more than being killed so a billionaire can make another billion - is being killed so a billionaire can make another penny.
Except of course that most of the other companies he mentioned are also... *gasp* US companies.
I remember hacking the code for GORILLA.BAS to make it behave differently, like increasing or decreasing gravity - which could make Bananas go to orbit... or hit the building immediately beneath you like a stinger missile..
This.
I'm sure the vast majority of nerds are decent human beings - but misogynistic assholes like him make me doubt that some times... must be the significant minority of libertarian-leaning randroids among the nerd community. Nothing guarantees turning into a terrible person quite like thinking Ayn Rand was right about something. Frankly - her belief that smoking is proof of man's superiority over fire and that scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer is a "communist conspiracy" was exactly typical of the level of her insight into anything at all. And I have utterly digressed - I'm sorry, I just really *hope* it's the randroids who breed that part of the community and not representative of a deeper undercurrent of misogyny and lack of respect for women and other marginalized peoples.
The flames are about to start, bring it on. Flaming this opinion - only proves it right. I'm also pretty sure I'll get a flamebait or a troll mod or two - I am just as certain they are not deserved so I'll accept it as the price of integrity. At least it's not off-topic for the specific thread :P
Microsoft used to have a proper BASIC interpreter/editor in DOS - which worked well under windows 95. I think it was called MSBasic. I wrote my first post-LOGO programs using MSBasic and the user's manual from a long-discarded commodore-64. Peek and Poke stuff were not useful (completely different memory layout) but the rest was - and there were other ways to do graphics.