>The same one that dictated the IRS to audit and kill off as many tea party people and groups as it can while not doing the same to leftist orgs.
Actually, I never got why that was an issue. Republicans mostly support profiling by law enforcement when it's based on race and religion. Why should it not be based on publicly stated philosophical beliefs then ? Tea-party groups were vocally anti-taxation, this makes them prime profiling targets for the tax-man to double-check, by their own public statements they are highly likely to have cheated on their taxes.
Much more so than the leftwing organisations who tend to defend the services that taxes pay for.
Why is it okay to do extra checks on Muslims at airports, or to stop cars driven by black people 6 times more often than white people - but not to check anti-tax-lobby-groups' tax records more thoroughly ?
Of course, the leftwing VOTERS who oppose all profiling would agree that tax-man profiling is bad too, but I don't get why rightwingers think they have a right to complain about that at all. They DEFENDED profiling, until it happened to them - and they they continued to defend it for everybody EXCEPT them. Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it to. If you back off from the idea (which to my mind flows logically from "equal before the law") that NOBODY should be under additional suspicion based on their race or religion, then you have ALSO backed of from the idea that they shouldn't be under additional suspicion based on the political beliefs.
1) BECAUSE Obamacare was such a long drawn out fight which they ultimately lost. I think that's gotta be a bit demotivational. 2) They want to focus on the immigration fight right now, because their voters actually understand that one. 3) It is just possible that opposing net neutrality is so stupid even Republicans could figure out it was stupid.
Oh I know, I'm a long-time slashdotter and have read your comments over the years - and they were mostly good, I just couldn't resist going offtopic for once to make that joke. Especially since I think those books are terrible. They are about as representative of BDSM as the average Pentecostal service is and the writing is terrible too. Seriously the sentences read like the comments on a facebook post about a middle-school cheerleading competition, only with more spelling errors.
Yet many people receive long term treatment on heroine and similar substances (like the highly addictive morphine) for extended periods and then, after leaving the hospital, the vast majority of them just... stop.
No addiction.
The evidence is growing ever more that addiction is not primarily a biological but a psychological phenomenon. It has biological symptoms and they get more severe (heroine withdrawal is ugly) but there seems to be a growing scientific consensus that the chemistry is not the major factor. The reality of people getting addicted to activities like gambling supports this too.
And the high success rate of Portugal's drug rehab programs (coupled with full decriminilization) can be partly attributed to those programs being based around fullfilling unmet psychological needs (such as the need for human connection) which is more likely the true cause.
I did say that some exceptions would be acceptable, those may indeed qualify - but I wouldn't universally say "asks for help" there needs to be some checks. For a start, a government asking for protection from it's own citizens should probably be denied. Which considering US history of being major trade partners with some pretty evil governments is not an unlikely scenario.
But yes, those are not examples I would be particularly opposed to. Those genuine "defending" scenarios, also interestingly involves very little actual violence.
That may well be true, I'm not an expert on the US constitution - but surely that would be an obvious side effect either way ? It's a lot harder to be an aggressor if you have to CREATE an army just for the purpose every time ?
I would have taken it a step further and actually made it unconstitutional for US military personnel to ever cross the border. Maybe make one or two exceptions (with modern day knowledge) like - maybe you can send a peacekeeping force if requested by the UN to assist other governments trying to intervene in a bad situation but other than that. Lock them down at home, so the defence force HAS to actually limit itself to DEFENDING.
Many would argue that this has already happened. America hasn't had a proper military attack on their own soil since Pearl Harbour (no, the odd terrorist bombing or 911 do not count as a proper military attack) and they haven't had a proper war at home since the civil war.
American warfare is something that happens far away and now America - a country that used to say it's against their constitution to even HAVE a standing military (one can be RAISED in times of war but should not be kept in peace-time - to discourage ever being the attacker) is not only the owners of the world's largest military but also pretty much constantly in a state of war with *somebody*.
A large part of why is because war is something that happens far away and the only American's really affected are the soldiers on the ground, the only time it hits home is if one of the soldiers who don't come back is a family member. The rest of the time - wars are distant, so there is no deterrent for the voters to seriously oppose even completely needless wars like Iraq. Of course, ISIS is a direct consequence of the Iraq war and now there may well be ANOTHER war... and again, it's because the bad things all happen far, far away. If the drone program eventually unleashes a full-scale war in Pakistan - it will be because the killing was too easy, too clean and too far away.
American's don't feel war on their skin anymore, so they no longer appreciate it's horror and it becomes a first rather than a last resort. The last war that there was significant protest against was Vietnam and that was only because of the draft - when people were being FORCED to go fight... suddenly, the war was a little closer to home, and even a tiny bit closer was enough to unleash massive protests.
It's easy to be pro-war if you have never SEEN war. On the other hand, I live in a country that was in a massive war for the majority of my youth. I've seen the horrors first hand... and I am pretty much a pacifist as a result. If you attack us, I'll join up to fight you back, but I will ALWAYS and WITHOUT EXCEPTION oppose a war on foreign soil by my government. Wars should be close to home - it's the only way people will actually treat them as a last resort.
>Note: It could actually be the proper course of action if huge amounts of the country's wealth is being held by a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. But I don't believe that's the case in Greece
Zimbabwe was a completely different scenario. More-over there is zero reason to suspect a similar outcome. The idea that government spending in a recession causes hyperinflation is bullshit, it comes from Austrian economics - the only school of economics that ignores empirical data (on purpose!) and there is literally not a single example anywhere in history of that *ever* happening.
I know you're about to say "Zimbabwe", "Rome under Nero" or any of the other examples of hyperinflation - which all did big money printing, but they really aren't valid. All of them had other factors too. Rome under Nero had just gone through a massive drought that destroyed their farming crops, and two civil wars. Zimbabwe had a major near-revolution first. In fact the ONLY example of hyperinflation in all of history that was NOT preceded by a massive social upheaval of NON-economic nature is Spain in the 15th century - and that was with gold-standard money (it turns out -the gold standard gets fucked if a few citizens discover a whole lot of gold on another continent and just keep bringing more).
A recession, by definition, is a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap inflation is very difficult to achieve at all - in fact you're at constant risk of DEFLATION - you WANT to cause inflation to counter that effect. The whole point of a recession is that nobody is spending (or able to spend) - so nobody is making money either. If SOMEBODY doesn't start spending, you stay in a recession for ever. Usually the only possible OPTION to BE that somebody is the government.
Actually - you can. Sticking a gun to somebody's head and demanding things from him is robbery. If the things happen to be illegal that's a seperate crime of which he is guilty, but it doesn't make YOUR crime okay.
That logic is a recipe for rampant vigilantism. Sure I shot twenty people down in the past year your honour, but they were all criminals, teenagers smoking doobies !
And of course there were attempts to recreate it as FOSS afterwards (projects like AtheOS) but they never took off - I suspect, in a large part, it was just too little too late.
That and BeOS's single biggest shortcoming of course, a terrible shortage of drivers.
>I don't think Google Cardboard does this, but it's an obvious incremental step.
It does, or rather, it CAN. If the phone supports NFC and you add an NFS coil to the cardboard, the apps can automatically trigger when it detects insertion based on that. Most of the premade cardboard kits on the market have NFS coils and most modern phones support it.
Apple is ONLY a contributor to webkit, it was not their code originally. Webkit was originally developed by the KDE project, it's the original renderer for the Konqueror browser, it was adopted by both Safari and Google chrome from that origin and both have contributed significantly back to the parent project.
Your mistake is that your forgetting that most people already OWN the cellphone for other uses. So it's only the surrounding container that needs to be bought.
That can be made a LOT cheaper than one with the display. Of course it's likely to offer slightly less value/features but it is probably good enough for a lot of people who can't afford yet another device but would be happy to use one they already paid for in another way that covers most of the functionality they need.
In the same way - no photographer would dream of using a cellphone camera to do a photoshoot. You can't swap lenses, the shutter is tiny, you can't shoot in raw. It's a terrible camera. Yet for millions of users, it's replaced buying any other kind since it's already there, in your pocket, and for taking a few holiday snaps it's "good enough".
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>You're honestly equating helping slaves escape with tax-dodging?
Libertarians always do. Their logic goes something like: If I am forced to pay taxes, and my taxes are used to fund a welfare state - then I am basically forced to labour for lazy people ergo I am enslaved by the lazy people.
I'm paraphrasing (accurately) - those are not my views, I think it's as brainfuck stupid as you do, but they really do believe that. It's pretty much Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard or Ludwig Von Mises in a nutshell. They really do believe that paying a single penny in taxes more than the bare minimum they arbitrarily made up is the same as what happened to actual slaves. Then they wonder why they have never managed to get more than 10% of the people to take them seriously.
>You're only 36. If she ever changes her mind you'll fnid yourself alone. Do not underestimate the power of the instinct to breed.
You do KNOW that vasectomy's are quite easy to reverse right ? If she really does change her mind, her first option is to try to convince him to change his. Only if this fails does "leaving him" become her best option.
Or simply the fact that if you help the unlucky guy tonight, tomorrow when YOU'RE unlucky - he'll help you.
Humans seem to be almost unique in imagining that our day to day welbeing is NOT largely determined by factors entirely out of our control (what we could, for short-hand, call "luck"). It's never actually true.
He's right though - the phrase does not exist anywhere in any of Darwin's works. Darwin hired a journalist by the name of Herbert Spencer and tasked him with explaining his theory to the public at large. While his book sold incredibly well (breaking several bestseller records -quite remarkable for a science book) Darwin was concerned it would not be well understood by people who lacked a science background. Spencer's job was to explain his theory of natural select - what we now call evolution - another term he never used to the public in layman's terms.
This had the major advantage that most people now thought they understood Darwin's theory. It had the major disadvantage that most people now thought they understood Darwin's theory.
Anyway, it was Spencer who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" to explain that aspect of the theory, Darwin never said it or anything like it.
>so far the trend has been long term increase in both wealth AND welfare
Until 1903 the trend had been that attempts to build heavier-than-air-flight were failures - so much so that one of the greatest mathematicians on the 19th century declared it a law of nature just 5 years before the trend stopped being true !
Until 1776 the trend had been that colonial revolutions failed consistently. Then one country won a revolution and became independent and ever since then the trend has been that they were won consistently - until about 50 years ago when the trend became "that they were given independence by the colonists voluntarily leaving" in most of the remaining cases.
Until the 20th century the trend was that building cities made plagues worse and cities got hit hardest (Black death fatalities in London were massive in every major outbreak England ever had, far more per capita than surrounding rural areas), during the 20th century that trend reversed and now when major plagues happen they mostly kill people in rural areas far from good hospitals (initial spreading patterns haven't changed - but our ability to TREAT disease has - and people close to major hospitals which are common in cities get the best odds - and that combined with quarantine means that lots of people living in close proximity is no longer a guaranteed vector of infection like it once was). As a result - in West Africa we had thousands killed by Ebola, mostly in rural villages. Meantime in wealthier countries you had maybe one or two infections and few if any deaths. South Africa - on the same continent, which is only a little wealthier hasn't had a single case - the USA had 3 cases, all non-fatal.
Until 1998 the trend was for every generation to have higher vaccination rates than the one before. Since then the rates have gone ever further down - and that was done by nothing more revolutionary than human stupidity.
Until 1908 the trend was that the Chicago Cubs won the world series more often than not (twice in a row in 1907 and 1908) SINCE 1908 the trend was that the Cubs NEVER win the World Series.
Trends are incredibly fragile things, so fragile that it's almost always safer to bet on "end of trend" than "trend continues" if you have to bet. The sensible and rationalist approach however is to do neither - assume that trends have no bearing on what's likely to happen and does not aid prediction at all - because they don't.
>Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones
I know you think you just made a logical point but you really did not. Extrapolating from past events is inductive logic, not deductive, and one of the main differences between them is that inductive logic has no guarantee of truth. If all my premises are true, and I follow the rules of deductive logic properly, it's impossible for my conclusion to be false. With inductive logic that is simply not true - even if I do the same experiment a hundred billion times - I STILL can't be absolutely CERTAIN that it won't fail on the hundred billion and first time. Inductive logic can be reliable, but it's never guaranteed.
It gets worse, what you did wasn't EVEN inductive logic, it just LOOKS like it - so the above is a best-case scenario you don't qualify for. To have ACTUAL inductive logic absolutely ALL factors must be controlled during each test. Any factor that changes, ANY factor - and the reliability plummets, with every subsequent factor it gets less reliable.
You can't MAKE a statement like "what technology always does" - you're talking about a bunch of events where, at every run, almost EVERY factor was different. So there is absolutely ZERO reason to believe the pattern you think you spotted will hold true, there is no evidence whatsoever to support your extrapolation. The last time we had a major technological revolution there was less than half as many people on the planet - so less than half as many people wanting jobs (technically - wanting a way to earn a living, for which "sell your labour" is the only viable option most people have). Even if next generation automation and software does generate new jobs in other sectors it would need to do so at almost 8 times the rate any previous revolution did to satisfy the demand that now exists, there's no evidence to suggest it would and the data so far suggests the opposite -it's creating far fewer new jobs than previous revolutions did. Secondly you have to consider the requirements for GETTING those new jobs. This revolution is NOT creating new low-skilled jobs, because it's very essence is to destroy low-skilled jobs from every sector up to and including itself. All the jobs it IS creating require enormous technical training - robotics designers, electronic engineers and programmers. The simple truth is most people lack the skills to do these jobs and even if that changed - you just don't need a lot of these people even for massive automation. A 20-man co-op in Texas is one of the largest automation robotics companies on earth - supplying hundreds of industries. That's not new job growth.
So your pattern is already breaking down and this is still the dawn of it, who knows how much worse it will get. It also spells a major problem for the industries automating. They won't feel it YET - but if they automate too much, and enough other companies do it, they'll reach a point where they can make ultra-cheap goods - but nobody can buy them because they've put all their own customers out of work.
Destroying your own demand is bad economics - while fostering it is the path to wealth (as Henry Ford understood - on the other hand he was a Nazi sympathiser so take his ideas with a grain of salt).
Where does that leave the future ? There are many options - but it's fairly obvious that the current concept of "you must earn your right to live by working" is simply not going to be practically feasible much longer (in fact- I would argue it hasn't BEEN feasible for over 3 decades ALREADY - it's just not been bad ENOUGH for most people to figure it out yet). Buckminster-Fuller saw this coming and I've seen no evidence that he was wrong and a lot of evidence he was right. Either way - whatever the future holds - I'm damn sure it won't resemble 20th-century capitalism much if at all. The fact that phycisists are saying the ONLY way to maintain economic growth for more than 50 years (assuming we could use 100% of all energy from the sun which we can't) would be for over 90% of the population to be in pure service jobs - which are of course, being automated away.
But don't let facts stand in the way of your ranting. It takes time to bring a fork to release-ready state. It would also be a lot better NOT to have to fork the whole distro just to avoid one package you don't like.
I don't have to switch distros if I would rather use nginx than apache for a specific job. There should be no reason I have to switch distros if I would rather dhcpcd than systemd's dhcp client, or indeed if I would rather use upstart than systemd. Ironically debian has had support for different init systems and switching between them for years - systemd is UNIQUE in being the first and only time they added another init system option which removed the ability to choose NOT to use it and use one of the others instead.
Erm... there is so much untruth in your post it's scary.
Stallman chose to write a unix-like OS not out of love for Unix is all you got right, why he DID choose it you got dead wrong. Which is weird since he clearly and simply explained it long ago. He knew that his old MIT project ITS had died because it was tied to a specific hardware platform, he didn't want that to happen again. So he needed to create his OS in such a way that it was portable to new hardware. Unix was the ONLY portable OS that existed at the time, replicating it was the best way to ensure GNU would keep working on new generations of computer (and just look at how many platforms GNU/Linux actually supports today - look how quickly we had full ARM support - the decision paid off). Stallman himself stated he didn't think Unix was particularly elegant a design and certainly not as nice as the stuff he'd worked at the AI lab - but it was portable, and he wanted to write a portable OS, the easiest way to do that was to base his design on the only existing portable OS design.
Now personally I think the Unix design WAS elegant, "do one thing and do it well" and then let all the bits that "do one thing well" be able to be chained together in any way you like to construct things that do really complicated stuff and do them well - it is, in fact, a very sound way to engineer an operating system that gives you tremendous power, tremendous flexibility and tremendous flexibility. Stallman may no have agreed at the time but I think even he started changing his mind later. The fact is, losing that is harmful to Linux in the extreme, it damages it's ability to cash in on this solid engineering approach.
You hated init scripts ? I loved them. I loved the flexibility and power they gave me. If I wanted my webserver to start later, or I wanted to tweak the way it got started to fit some localized need - I could do that, with no risk of breaking anything else. How exactly would I do this with systemd ? It's opague and hard to figure out and badly documented and I can't pipe the stuff between a thousand disparate commands to construct whatever I need on the fly as and when I need it - those are the REASONS to use Linux (technical reasons). Why deprive me of that.
Now it's true that sysv init was long in the tooth, we've been saying we need parallel init (that understands which things need to wait for which other things) for a long, long time - hell the developer of DevFS (the kernel-space forerunner to udev) wrote a make-based init system to do that back in 1999 ! Along the way we had a few attempts to get there, of which upstart was one of the best.
Hell at my previous job I wrote something very similar to an init system (though it didn't replace init, it sat on top of it and was started by an init script and then took over for second-stage startup). It was parallel, yet dependency aware, it would automatically restart failed services yet it could also tell if a service was in a bad state and failing to start (and stop trying to restart it), it could report the state of all services in simple language, could be extended or modified in simple unix terms using simple commands with simple options, new service registrations were simply a single command. All the things we actually WANTED out of an init system - and it was done in about 20 lines of python and 30 lines of bash.
Now that wasn't intended to be an init system, it was meant to handle the startup of a series of containerized services with interdependencies in the fastest possible way - but it proved that you don't NEED systemd to achieve everything that we DID want, and more. Maybe writing it in C would make it a tiny bit faster, on the other hand it would make what was simple and transparent into something opague and complicated - which was simply an unacceptable trade-off for us, as it ought to be for distributions.
You're forgetting the other major player of the time: BeOS. Well I say major in terms of technical achievement, not market share sadly.
BeOS was able to play an MP3 while browsing the web and chatting on IRC and still burn a CD without making a coaster (which, at the time, even on Linux you could usually only ensure by never doing ANYTHING else if you were burning disks because buffer underruns were fatal).
BeOS achieved this incredible feat not by magic, hell it didn't even have significantly better performance than Linux - what it DID have was a massively better PERCEPTION of performance due to a few things. Firstly - it was a true microkernel, much like what HURD had wanted to be, but less ambitious and actually completed and these tasks were all being handled by very well threaded processes managed through that kernel. Secondly it's scheduler was tuned perfectly for desktop use, including the ability to interrupt kernel IO tasks to maintain reactivity on the desktop and mark some threads uninterruptible (like the CD burning thread so you wouldn't get underruns).
The latter factor - a scheduler tweaked around desktop performance with interruptible kernel threads did make it into linux but not until several years later. I remember the difference it made when I first compiled a kernel the, then still experimental, new scheduler and for the first time I could copy a large directory full of files in KDE without the entire desktop basically freezing until the kernel had finished the file IO operation I just kicked off.
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>The same one that dictated the IRS to audit and kill off as many tea party people and groups as it can while not doing the same to leftist orgs.
Actually, I never got why that was an issue. Republicans mostly support profiling by law enforcement when it's based on race and religion. Why should it not be based on publicly stated philosophical beliefs then ?
Tea-party groups were vocally anti-taxation, this makes them prime profiling targets for the tax-man to double-check, by their own public statements they are highly likely to have cheated on their taxes.
Much more so than the leftwing organisations who tend to defend the services that taxes pay for.
Why is it okay to do extra checks on Muslims at airports, or to stop cars driven by black people 6 times more often than white people - but not to check anti-tax-lobby-groups' tax records more thoroughly ?
Of course, the leftwing VOTERS who oppose all profiling would agree that tax-man profiling is bad too, but I don't get why rightwingers think they have a right to complain about that at all. They DEFENDED profiling, until it happened to them - and they they continued to defend it for everybody EXCEPT them.
Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it to. If you back off from the idea (which to my mind flows logically from "equal before the law") that NOBODY should be under additional suspicion based on their race or religion, then you have ALSO backed of from the idea that they shouldn't be under additional suspicion based on the political beliefs.
I see a few main reasons:
1) BECAUSE Obamacare was such a long drawn out fight which they ultimately lost. I think that's gotta be a bit demotivational.
2) They want to focus on the immigration fight right now, because their voters actually understand that one.
3) It is just possible that opposing net neutrality is so stupid even Republicans could figure out it was stupid.
Oh I know, I'm a long-time slashdotter and have read your comments over the years - and they were mostly good, I just couldn't resist going offtopic for once to make that joke.
Especially since I think those books are terrible. They are about as representative of BDSM as the average Pentecostal service is and the writing is terrible too. Seriously the sentences read like the comments on a facebook post about a middle-school cheerleading competition, only with more spelling errors.
>I like your black & white world; mine has too many shades of gray.
50 of them ?
Yet many people receive long term treatment on heroine and similar substances (like the highly addictive morphine) for extended periods and then, after leaving the hospital, the vast majority of them just... stop.
No addiction.
The evidence is growing ever more that addiction is not primarily a biological but a psychological phenomenon. It has biological symptoms and they get more severe (heroine withdrawal is ugly) but there seems to be a growing scientific consensus that the chemistry is not the major factor. The reality of people getting addicted to activities like gambling supports this too.
And the high success rate of Portugal's drug rehab programs (coupled with full decriminilization) can be partly attributed to those programs being based around fullfilling unmet psychological needs (such as the need for human connection) which is more likely the true cause.
I did say that some exceptions would be acceptable, those may indeed qualify - but I wouldn't universally say "asks for help" there needs to be some checks.
For a start, a government asking for protection from it's own citizens should probably be denied. Which considering US history of being major trade partners with some pretty evil governments is not an unlikely scenario.
But yes, those are not examples I would be particularly opposed to. Those genuine "defending" scenarios, also interestingly involves very little actual violence.
That may well be true, I'm not an expert on the US constitution - but surely that would be an obvious side effect either way ? It's a lot harder to be an aggressor if you have to CREATE an army just for the purpose every time ?
I would have taken it a step further and actually made it unconstitutional for US military personnel to ever cross the border. Maybe make one or two exceptions (with modern day knowledge) like - maybe you can send a peacekeeping force if requested by the UN to assist other governments trying to intervene in a bad situation but other than that. Lock them down at home, so the defence force HAS to actually limit itself to DEFENDING.
Many would argue that this has already happened. America hasn't had a proper military attack on their own soil since Pearl Harbour (no, the odd terrorist bombing or 911 do not count as a proper military attack) and they haven't had a proper war at home since the civil war.
American warfare is something that happens far away and now America - a country that used to say it's against their constitution to even HAVE a standing military (one can be RAISED in times of war but should not be kept in peace-time - to discourage ever being the attacker) is not only the owners of the world's largest military but also pretty much constantly in a state of war with *somebody*.
A large part of why is because war is something that happens far away and the only American's really affected are the soldiers on the ground, the only time it hits home is if one of the soldiers who don't come back is a family member.
The rest of the time - wars are distant, so there is no deterrent for the voters to seriously oppose even completely needless wars like Iraq.
Of course, ISIS is a direct consequence of the Iraq war and now there may well be ANOTHER war... and again, it's because the bad things all happen far, far away.
If the drone program eventually unleashes a full-scale war in Pakistan - it will be because the killing was too easy, too clean and too far away.
American's don't feel war on their skin anymore, so they no longer appreciate it's horror and it becomes a first rather than a last resort.
The last war that there was significant protest against was Vietnam and that was only because of the draft - when people were being FORCED to go fight... suddenly, the war was a little closer to home, and even a tiny bit closer was enough to unleash massive protests.
It's easy to be pro-war if you have never SEEN war.
On the other hand, I live in a country that was in a massive war for the majority of my youth. I've seen the horrors first hand... and I am pretty much a pacifist as a result.
If you attack us, I'll join up to fight you back, but I will ALWAYS and WITHOUT EXCEPTION oppose a war on foreign soil by my government.
Wars should be close to home - it's the only way people will actually treat them as a last resort.
>Note: It could actually be the proper course of action if huge amounts of the country's wealth is being held by a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. But I don't believe that's the case in Greece
Actually - it kind of is the case in Greece.
>That worked well for Zimbabwe, hasn't it?
Zimbabwe was a completely different scenario. More-over there is zero reason to suspect a similar outcome.
The idea that government spending in a recession causes hyperinflation is bullshit, it comes from Austrian economics - the only school of economics that ignores empirical data (on purpose!) and there is literally not a single example anywhere in history of that *ever* happening.
I know you're about to say "Zimbabwe", "Rome under Nero" or any of the other examples of hyperinflation - which all did big money printing, but they really aren't valid. All of them had other factors too. Rome under Nero had just gone through a massive drought that destroyed their farming crops, and two civil wars. Zimbabwe had a major near-revolution first.
In fact the ONLY example of hyperinflation in all of history that was NOT preceded by a massive social upheaval of NON-economic nature is Spain in the 15th century - and that was with gold-standard money (it turns out -the gold standard gets fucked if a few citizens discover a whole lot of gold on another continent and just keep bringing more).
A recession, by definition, is a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap inflation is very difficult to achieve at all - in fact you're at constant risk of DEFLATION - you WANT to cause inflation to counter that effect. The whole point of a recession is that nobody is spending (or able to spend) - so nobody is making money either. If SOMEBODY doesn't start spending, you stay in a recession for ever. Usually the only possible OPTION to BE that somebody is the government.
Actually - you can.
Sticking a gun to somebody's head and demanding things from him is robbery. If the things happen to be illegal that's a seperate crime of which he is guilty, but it doesn't make YOUR crime okay.
That logic is a recipe for rampant vigilantism. Sure I shot twenty people down in the past year your honour, but they were all criminals, teenagers smoking doobies !
And of course there were attempts to recreate it as FOSS afterwards (projects like AtheOS) but they never took off - I suspect, in a large part, it was just too little too late.
That and BeOS's single biggest shortcoming of course, a terrible shortage of drivers.
>I don't think Google Cardboard does this, but it's an obvious incremental step.
It does, or rather, it CAN. If the phone supports NFC and you add an NFS coil to the cardboard, the apps can automatically trigger when it detects insertion based on that.
Most of the premade cardboard kits on the market have NFS coils and most modern phones support it.
>Webkit.
Apple is ONLY a contributor to webkit, it was not their code originally. Webkit was originally developed by the KDE project, it's the original renderer for the Konqueror browser, it was adopted by both Safari and Google chrome from that origin and both have contributed significantly back to the parent project.
Your mistake is that your forgetting that most people already OWN the cellphone for other uses.
So it's only the surrounding container that needs to be bought.
That can be made a LOT cheaper than one with the display. Of course it's likely to offer slightly less value/features but it is probably good enough for a lot of people who can't afford yet another device but would be happy to use one they already paid for in another way that covers most of the functionality they need.
In the same way - no photographer would dream of using a cellphone camera to do a photoshoot. You can't swap lenses, the shutter is tiny, you can't shoot in raw. It's a terrible camera. Yet for millions of users, it's replaced buying any other kind since it's already there, in your pocket, and for taking a few holiday snaps it's "good enough".
>You're honestly equating helping slaves escape with tax-dodging?
Libertarians always do. Their logic goes something like:
If I am forced to pay taxes, and my taxes are used to fund a welfare state - then I am basically forced to labour for lazy people ergo I am enslaved by the lazy people.
I'm paraphrasing (accurately) - those are not my views, I think it's as brainfuck stupid as you do, but they really do believe that. It's pretty much Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard or Ludwig Von Mises in a nutshell.
They really do believe that paying a single penny in taxes more than the bare minimum they arbitrarily made up is the same as what happened to actual slaves.
Then they wonder why they have never managed to get more than 10% of the people to take them seriously.
>You're only 36. If she ever changes her mind you'll fnid yourself alone. Do not underestimate the power of the instinct to breed.
You do KNOW that vasectomy's are quite easy to reverse right ?
If she really does change her mind, her first option is to try to convince him to change his. Only if this fails does "leaving him" become her best option.
Or simply the fact that if you help the unlucky guy tonight, tomorrow when YOU'RE unlucky - he'll help you.
Humans seem to be almost unique in imagining that our day to day welbeing is NOT largely determined by factors entirely out of our control (what we could, for short-hand, call "luck").
It's never actually true.
He's right though - the phrase does not exist anywhere in any of Darwin's works.
Darwin hired a journalist by the name of Herbert Spencer and tasked him with explaining his theory to the public at large. While his book sold incredibly well (breaking several bestseller records -quite remarkable for a science book) Darwin was concerned it would not be well understood by people who lacked a science background. Spencer's job was to explain his theory of natural select - what we now call evolution - another term he never used to the public in layman's terms.
This had the major advantage that most people now thought they understood Darwin's theory.
It had the major disadvantage that most people now thought they understood Darwin's theory.
Anyway, it was Spencer who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" to explain that aspect of the theory, Darwin never said it or anything like it.
>so far the trend has been long term increase in both wealth AND welfare
Until 1903 the trend had been that attempts to build heavier-than-air-flight were failures - so much so that one of the greatest mathematicians on the 19th century declared it a law of nature just 5 years before the trend stopped being true !
Until 1776 the trend had been that colonial revolutions failed consistently. Then one country won a revolution and became independent and ever since then the trend has been that they were won consistently - until about 50 years ago when the trend became "that they were given independence by the colonists voluntarily leaving" in most of the remaining cases.
Until the 20th century the trend was that building cities made plagues worse and cities got hit hardest (Black death fatalities in London were massive in every major outbreak England ever had, far more per capita than surrounding rural areas), during the 20th century that trend reversed and now when major plagues happen they mostly kill people in rural areas far from good hospitals (initial spreading patterns haven't changed - but our ability to TREAT disease has - and people close to major hospitals which are common in cities get the best odds - and that combined with quarantine means that lots of people living in close proximity is no longer a guaranteed vector of infection like it once was).
As a result - in West Africa we had thousands killed by Ebola, mostly in rural villages. Meantime in wealthier countries you had maybe one or two infections and few if any deaths.
South Africa - on the same continent, which is only a little wealthier hasn't had a single case - the USA had 3 cases, all non-fatal.
Until 1998 the trend was for every generation to have higher vaccination rates than the one before. Since then the rates have gone ever further down - and that was done by nothing more revolutionary than human stupidity.
Until 1908 the trend was that the Chicago Cubs won the world series more often than not (twice in a row in 1907 and 1908) SINCE 1908 the trend was that the Cubs NEVER win the World Series.
Trends are incredibly fragile things, so fragile that it's almost always safer to bet on "end of trend" than "trend continues" if you have to bet. The sensible and rationalist approach however is to do neither - assume that trends have no bearing on what's likely to happen and does not aid prediction at all - because they don't.
>Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones
I know you think you just made a logical point but you really did not. Extrapolating from past events is inductive logic, not deductive, and one of the main differences between them is that inductive logic has no guarantee of truth.
If all my premises are true, and I follow the rules of deductive logic properly, it's impossible for my conclusion to be false.
With inductive logic that is simply not true - even if I do the same experiment a hundred billion times - I STILL can't be absolutely CERTAIN that it won't fail on the hundred billion and first time.
Inductive logic can be reliable, but it's never guaranteed.
It gets worse, what you did wasn't EVEN inductive logic, it just LOOKS like it - so the above is a best-case scenario you don't qualify for. To have ACTUAL inductive logic absolutely ALL factors must be controlled during each test. Any factor that changes, ANY factor - and the reliability plummets, with every subsequent factor it gets less reliable.
You can't MAKE a statement like "what technology always does" - you're talking about a bunch of events where, at every run, almost EVERY factor was different.
So there is absolutely ZERO reason to believe the pattern you think you spotted will hold true, there is no evidence whatsoever to support your extrapolation.
The last time we had a major technological revolution there was less than half as many people on the planet - so less than half as many people wanting jobs (technically - wanting a way to earn a living, for which "sell your labour" is the only viable option most people have).
Even if next generation automation and software does generate new jobs in other sectors it would need to do so at almost 8 times the rate any previous revolution did to satisfy the demand that now exists, there's no evidence to suggest it would and the data so far suggests the opposite -it's creating far fewer new jobs than previous revolutions did.
Secondly you have to consider the requirements for GETTING those new jobs. This revolution is NOT creating new low-skilled jobs, because it's very essence is to destroy low-skilled jobs from every sector up to and including itself.
All the jobs it IS creating require enormous technical training - robotics designers, electronic engineers and programmers. The simple truth is most people lack the skills to do these jobs and even if that changed - you just don't need a lot of these people even for massive automation.
A 20-man co-op in Texas is one of the largest automation robotics companies on earth - supplying hundreds of industries. That's not new job growth.
So your pattern is already breaking down and this is still the dawn of it, who knows how much worse it will get. It also spells a major problem for the industries automating. They won't feel it YET - but if they automate too much, and enough other companies do it, they'll reach a point where they can make ultra-cheap goods - but nobody can buy them because they've put all their own customers out of work.
Destroying your own demand is bad economics - while fostering it is the path to wealth (as Henry Ford understood - on the other hand he was a Nazi sympathiser so take his ideas with a grain of salt).
Where does that leave the future ? There are many options - but it's fairly obvious that the current concept of "you must earn your right to live by working" is simply not going to be practically feasible much longer (in fact- I would argue it hasn't BEEN feasible for over 3 decades ALREADY - it's just not been bad ENOUGH for most people to figure it out yet). Buckminster-Fuller saw this coming and I've seen no evidence that he was wrong and a lot of evidence he was right.
Either way - whatever the future holds - I'm damn sure it won't resemble 20th-century capitalism much if at all.
The fact that phycisists are saying the ONLY way to maintain economic growth for more than 50 years (assuming we could use 100% of all energy from the sun which we can't) would be for over 90% of the population to be in pure service jobs - which are of course, being automated away.
https://devuan.org/
But don't let facts stand in the way of your ranting.
It takes time to bring a fork to release-ready state. It would also be a lot better NOT to have to fork the whole distro just to avoid one package you don't like.
I don't have to switch distros if I would rather use nginx than apache for a specific job. There should be no reason I have to switch distros if I would rather dhcpcd than systemd's dhcp client, or indeed if I would rather use upstart than systemd.
Ironically debian has had support for different init systems and switching between them for years - systemd is UNIQUE in being the first and only time they added another init system option which removed the ability to choose NOT to use it and use one of the others instead.
Erm... there is so much untruth in your post it's scary.
Stallman chose to write a unix-like OS not out of love for Unix is all you got right, why he DID choose it you got dead wrong. Which is weird since he clearly and simply explained it long ago.
He knew that his old MIT project ITS had died because it was tied to a specific hardware platform, he didn't want that to happen again. So he needed to create his OS in such a way that it was portable to new hardware.
Unix was the ONLY portable OS that existed at the time, replicating it was the best way to ensure GNU would keep working on new generations of computer (and just look at how many platforms GNU/Linux actually supports today - look how quickly we had full ARM support - the decision paid off).
Stallman himself stated he didn't think Unix was particularly elegant a design and certainly not as nice as the stuff he'd worked at the AI lab - but it was portable, and he wanted to write a portable OS, the easiest way to do that was to base his design on the only existing portable OS design.
Now personally I think the Unix design WAS elegant, "do one thing and do it well" and then let all the bits that "do one thing well" be able to be chained together in any way you like to construct things that do really complicated stuff and do them well - it is, in fact, a very sound way to engineer an operating system that gives you tremendous power, tremendous flexibility and tremendous flexibility. Stallman may no have agreed at the time but I think even he started changing his mind later.
The fact is, losing that is harmful to Linux in the extreme, it damages it's ability to cash in on this solid engineering approach.
You hated init scripts ? I loved them. I loved the flexibility and power they gave me. If I wanted my webserver to start later, or I wanted to tweak the way it got started to fit some localized need - I could do that, with no risk of breaking anything else.
How exactly would I do this with systemd ? It's opague and hard to figure out and badly documented and I can't pipe the stuff between a thousand disparate commands to construct whatever I need on the fly as and when I need it - those are the REASONS to use Linux (technical reasons).
Why deprive me of that.
Now it's true that sysv init was long in the tooth, we've been saying we need parallel init (that understands which things need to wait for which other things) for a long, long time - hell the developer of DevFS (the kernel-space forerunner to udev) wrote a make-based init system to do that back in 1999 !
Along the way we had a few attempts to get there, of which upstart was one of the best.
Hell at my previous job I wrote something very similar to an init system (though it didn't replace init, it sat on top of it and was started by an init script and then took over for second-stage startup). It was parallel, yet dependency aware, it would automatically restart failed services yet it could also tell if a service was in a bad state and failing to start (and stop trying to restart it), it could report the state of all services in simple language, could be extended or modified in simple unix terms using simple commands with simple options, new service registrations were simply a single command.
All the things we actually WANTED out of an init system - and it was done in about 20 lines of python and 30 lines of bash.
Now that wasn't intended to be an init system, it was meant to handle the startup of a series of containerized services with interdependencies in the fastest possible way - but it proved that you don't NEED systemd to achieve everything that we DID want, and more.
Maybe writing it in C would make it a tiny bit faster, on the other hand it would make what was simple and transparent into something opague and complicated - which was simply an unacceptable trade-off for us, as it ought to be for distributions.
Oh, the machine on which I did that was a Celeron 266mhz for reference, rather slower than the P1 333 that the GP had.
You're forgetting the other major player of the time: BeOS. Well I say major in terms of technical achievement, not market share sadly.
BeOS was able to play an MP3 while browsing the web and chatting on IRC and still burn a CD without making a coaster (which, at the time, even on Linux you could usually only ensure by never doing ANYTHING else if you were burning disks because buffer underruns were fatal).
BeOS achieved this incredible feat not by magic, hell it didn't even have significantly better performance than Linux - what it DID have was a massively better PERCEPTION of performance due to a few things.
Firstly - it was a true microkernel, much like what HURD had wanted to be, but less ambitious and actually completed and these tasks were all being handled by very well threaded processes managed through that kernel.
Secondly it's scheduler was tuned perfectly for desktop use, including the ability to interrupt kernel IO tasks to maintain reactivity on the desktop and mark some threads uninterruptible (like the CD burning thread so you wouldn't get underruns).
The latter factor - a scheduler tweaked around desktop performance with interruptible kernel threads did make it into linux but not until several years later. I remember the difference it made when I first compiled a kernel the, then still experimental, new scheduler and for the first time I could copy a large directory full of files in KDE without the entire desktop basically freezing until the kernel had finished the file IO operation I just kicked off.