Are you fucking kidding me? you think it is OK for anyone to abuse the public power to prevent academics from doing their job?
Also, well done for the Godwin point. Calling climate scientists nazis "just doing their job". Great.
The way it works is that you, as part of the state's coercive apparatus has a duty to be a decent human being. Thus it was found at Nuremberg. Also known as "you don't get to get away scott-free from crimes committed in the name of the state".
A university professor is basically only responsible for coercing student to give back their papers on time...
No, there was no evidence. Had there been evidence, the Mann would have been condemned. This is just your average jackbooted terror tactics, to tyranically threaten those who testify the truth against treacherous dogma.
Of course it's not the only reason! They also have a shiny logo. I never denied the existence of the shiny logo. But I was thinking about the ip?ds when I said "product". There is much to be said about the laptop hardware (except Linux support is bad, making them useless to me).
I am personally partial to desktops for work (and yes I pick the parts), and for laptops, well, it turns out asus netbooks are fine for my needs ('cause no laptop I can actually move around is going to do anything else than display stuff anyway) If I needed a good laptop, I'd go for Lenovo -- the high end models, mind you.
But this is not relevant to my point: look at how the apple shops are laid out! look at the adds! apple markets its wares as luxury goods. It is not me making this point, it is apple.
As an aside, I don't understand this laptop thing, or rather, I completely understand laptops, but I don't understand this laptop-as-a-desktop-replacement thing. Is the economy so bad people don't get desks anymore? Or is everybody else spending their life on the road?
As an aside to the aside, what is wrong with remote connections? why would I need power locally?
Fact: iphones are a positional good: they cost more and do less than the competition. You buy them because they are shiny and make you look good. This is exactly like a Louis Vuitton bag. I hate that humans fall for that: it is a reality of life, however.
You also seem to be completely ignorant of the concept of positional good. A Cheval Blanc from a good year is a very good wine. It may even be actually better than the competition. However, what justifies its price is that by being expensive, people buying it advertise their wealth. The iphone is the same and the essential reason it is successful.
FFS, Apple knows that: look at how it is marketed: beautiful, sleek, elegant. This is not how a phone is marketed... This is a fashion accessory, and there is much more money to be made in fashion accessories than in phones. If Nokia had understood that, they would not be in the dire straits they are in.
You, on the other hand, seem very defensive about your money and how you spend it. It is your money. You are free to spend it as you want. But don't think for a single second that you get any respect/admiration/status from technically minded people by waving around a luxury good.
I find interesting you feel guilty about owning a mac computer in a discussion about phones...
Bullshit. This is after-the-fact rationalising. Apple products are positional goods the same way a Gucci bag is.
Also, what people do with their money matters. And Americans living this electoral season should, of all people, be aware of that. Spending money on a conspicuous good which has no particular intrinsic value is not admirable. It is crass and should be looked down upon.
And for the record, I don't want an iPhone nor any other mobile phone: I refuse to give the telcos a single cent more than I strictly need to.
Apple is clever (and evil). At this point it is completely clear that they are not in the technology business. They are a luxury brand selling positional goods. If apple reduced its price, it would likely sell much less. If you are not an apple customer, you can smugly look down on apple victims as fashionistas with more money than sense.
And don't give me crap that there is some crucial software which you need which only runs on macs: this exists but is completely negligible in terms of number of units sold -- and that doesn't even apply to phones.
It is one of the sorriest traits that I see in my fellow human to value things accordingly to their price.
Oh, inventing, there is still plenty off. "innovating", maybe not so much. The great benefits from electric motors and machining tools came from having a workforce with a higher education baseline. There is a lot of productivity gain still from the computing revolution, but it would require, say, that scripting be considered a basic skill.
This is a requirement on the average student/school kid, and needs a system which is favourable to the average student/school kid.
The French have their idiosyncrasies, but calling them a failure is ignorant. They have one of the highest hourly productivity in the world. It is a very rich country with a very high quality of life.
Their education system is just... unique. It makes internal sense, but its two main fault is that it does not value research enough, and it is wasteful in that many very capable individuals don't make it through. Those that do are pretty good, though.
No, the US has pretty terrible standard of living: source. Americans tend to think about success as a checklist. The big house, the 3 cars, the 6 figures salary, the "good neighbourhood", etc. Those things are frequently impossible in Europe (no space for the big house, no such strong separation between rich and poor), but what Europeans consider a good life is similarly hard to impossible to get in the US: good public transport, guaranteed health care, holidays.
I am not convinced most American would in fact prefer the American way if given a choice.
Inequality-adjusted HDI puts the US between Italy and Estonia. Not very far from Greece. Also cost of living comparison are shit: a German citizen will have better retirement and has access to a generous system of socialised medicine throughout their life. Basically, a random German will in general have a better life than a random American.
But the topic is innovation and schools. And something must be said in favour of the US system: it has a remarkably high proportion of very highly achieving students. This seems to be at the cost of a pretty poor average. There is a reason for that: it give a greater emphasis on creativity, at the cost of structure, and this benefits the brightest.
In turn, this is could be good idea from the point of view of the economy: when progress is fast, the winner takes it all, and generating more winners is a good strategy. However, the computing revolution is finishing, and there might not be much innovating left to do. If it turns out that a well-educated workforce (on average) is paramount in the future (as opposed to highest proportion of geniuses), then America's strategy will be a losing bet.
Personally, I think that the US is a terrible case to study the value of education right now: it has been propped up for a large part of the 20th century by massive immigration of very highly qualified immigrants from Europe, and now from China and India. These fluxes are drying up, and the current political mood is set against immigration. So we will know with some certainty only in 20 or so years whether the US system of education is a disaster or a great design.
I agree with that. But the linux community has grown considerably (the computer market has grown, and the proportion of linux users has grown slightly). This has brought benefits in the form of more focus on usability and esthetics.
I mean, I like the command line, but there is something to be said about a good file manager with does previews. I think that the evolutions in desktop linux we are seeing are a consequence of the growth in the community. Some of which is not so good (I'm looking at you, GNOME and unity), and some of which is better (yay better openoffice, yay firefox, yay KDE four point whichever version you feel stopped sucking).
So it is a worthwile goal that we all benefit from to grow the community.
KDE keeps binary compatibility through all releases with the same major number. And in practice, source compatibility is broken in major ways only once every two major releases (happened between 1 and 2 and between 3 and 4).
So many articles about "linux failing on the desktop" which should be "GNOME failed as the linux desktop". People forget history, and they should read the kde mailing lists rachives from 1999, from the KDE list. The mother of all flamewars is easy to spot by the extreme number of posts.
You will see how de Icaza basically started GNOME to troll KDE. Indeed, there was at the time a project to duplicate Qt without the license problem. But Red Hat wanted control, and NIH is always strong in the FOSS world. So GNOME started, and somehow prospered as the other linux desktop.
Thus killing forever the notion of THE linux desktop, and in practice, of linux on the desktop. That is in wide distribution: amongst developers, I guess it is not far from OSX (at least according to the w3schools stats). There is a very good linux desktop: opensuse with KDE. I hear Mageia, arch and mint are fine too. Technically, there is a linux desktop, it is there, and better than osx or windows, or whatever.
But redhat is enamored with GNOME, and will rather have linux on the desktop fail than give up, and ubuntu, well ubuntu chases after a mythical linux user who also knows nothing of computers. I think it succeeded because it was so good at recognising and setting up hardware, but they thought it was because people loved the interface.
Sorry for the rant, but there you go: there are two linux desktops, one has a long history of always making the wrong technical decision (remember CORBA ?), and for some reason it always get more publicity. The other is KDE. Eventually, it'll win.
The shots have clear, well understood benefits which are maximised by having a large number of people vaccinated. Foreskin removal meant to prevent STDs is going to help people in the kindergarten how ?
I agree with your position, but you are wrong about the studies. The results are likely real and significant. And if you think about it, you will realise that there is even a mechanism: the skin of the glans is probably thicker, due to it being not protected by the foreskin, and thus less susceptible to micro-cuts, which are the main avenue for blood-borne STDs.
Of course this is exactly why this is genital mutilation and should not be done.
The foreskin, it has nerves. These are sensitive. No foreskin -> less nerves -> less sensations. I don't see how that is the cause of a debate.
In any case, the "benefits" are mostly for adults, and adults are free to get circumcised. Finding excuse to mutilate the genitalia of your kid is not a mark of high moral standing...
In fact good sex ed works: Europe has lower HIV infection rates than the US.
This whole thing is basically "genital mutilation of children is fine because we can cut on education". Amusing fact: female circumcision will similarly risk rates. Will you support it?
The benefits are tiny (and only for adults), and the risks significant (for the kids). Also, what about the right of children to bodily integrity? If an adult wants to be circumcised, this is fine, of course, but this decision, so soon on the back of the German court decision? That reeks of religious lobbying.
In Europe, the view about free speech is a bit different from the US perspective: we had terrible experiences with unchecked hate speech, so that is usually not covered by "free speech". There is a not-obvious trade-off between unchecked free speech and letting the government legislate what one can say.
In general, the European view is that if the speech causes harm -- and that is frequently the case of hate speech -- then it should be illegal: you have no legal right to cause harm to others.
Interestingly, in North America, I find that although the laws are much more permissive with respect to what can be said, society is much less so, and this is to me disturbing because outside the process of democratic checks and balances.
Yes to all! But for the fracking, heavy monitoring would be good, too. The point being that gas is bad, fracking dirty, but all in all a much better choice than coal.
But nuclear plants? Yes: it is the only carbon-free large-scale dense energy producing plant you can deploy anywhere. Feed-in tariffs for solar? Yes, you want as much solar as you can, because that forces the upgrading of the grid, and improves resilience. It is clean, too. Science funding? How can there be a debate. Is there any case of science funding which is a bad idea?
I don't understand how there is a disagreement: all of theses are possible, they don't contradict each other, and could be done simultaneously.
My point is not the people were worse there and then. They probably were the same as now. However, the regimes and the rhetoric leading to atrocities in democracies is something Europe had the misfortune to experience. Thus the look of disbelief towards US politics.
People are not responsible, but they should know how to identify the kind of phony arguments that only lead to Bad Things Happening.
It's not that we are better: just that we already made a great many mistakes, and it does no one any good that they get repeated.
This is true, but we are the only ones who did those things as industrial nations. Well, OK, not true, large parts of Asia did that too. We are the only ones who did that as industrial nations, as the continent was largely democratic. The democratic Weimar Republic turned bad. The democratic Italian republic turned bad, Spain and Portugal were democracies and turned bad. There were strong fascists parties in France and England and those countries could have turned bad. WWI was horrible, and democracies used combat gasses and sacrificed millions just like the central Empires. Colonisation by European powers was largely colonisation by democratic European powers.
Guilt for horrible things is not the same when you basically voted for them, rather than merely followed some deluded Great Leader. The point is that we know that good is not an intrinsic property of democracies, and evil a property of dictatorships. This is a lesson yet to be learnt by the US.
You are arguing that the GOP is in a magical place, left of the ultranationalists, but right of the Christian Democrats? How is the GOP left of, say, France's Front National?
No. US politics are truly and objectively fucked up. This is not a misunderstanding. The policies of the two US parties have counter-parties in Europe. Their philosophical underpinning and rhetoric are not alien, we get them too.
They just happen to map to "centre right" and "batshit nationalist with no social plank". This is because the consensus on social issues is mostly what the Democrats hold true in Europe, whereas the position of the GOP is identical to that of our fascists/ultracatholics/ultranationalists/ultraliberals. For the exact same reasons (our country is the best/illegal immigrants/God/business is always right).
That a large part of the US population thinks those reasons are OK those not make them so. Broken logic based on flawed morals is wrong independently of the flag on your passport.
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Are you fucking kidding me? you think it is OK for anyone to abuse the public power to prevent academics from doing their job?
Also, well done for the Godwin point. Calling climate scientists nazis "just doing their job". Great.
The way it works is that you, as part of the state's coercive apparatus has a duty to be a decent human being. Thus it was found at Nuremberg. Also known as "you don't get to get away scott-free from crimes committed in the name of the state".
A university professor is basically only responsible for coercing student to give back their papers on time...
No, there was no evidence. Had there been evidence, the Mann would have been condemned. This is just your average jackbooted terror tactics, to tyranically threaten those who testify the truth against treacherous dogma.
Of course it's not the only reason! They also have a shiny logo. I never denied the existence of the shiny logo. But I was thinking about the ip?ds when I said "product". There is much to be said about the laptop hardware (except Linux support is bad, making them useless to me).
I am personally partial to desktops for work (and yes I pick the parts), and for laptops, well, it turns out asus netbooks are fine for my needs ('cause no laptop I can actually move around is going to do anything else than display stuff anyway) If I needed a good laptop, I'd go for Lenovo -- the high end models, mind you.
But this is not relevant to my point: look at how the apple shops are laid out! look at the adds! apple markets its wares as luxury goods. It is not me making this point, it is apple.
As an aside, I don't understand this laptop thing, or rather, I completely understand laptops, but I don't understand this laptop-as-a-desktop-replacement thing. Is the economy so bad people don't get desks anymore? Or is everybody else spending their life on the road?
As an aside to the aside, what is wrong with remote connections? why would I need power locally?
You are a sad person who thinks phones and laptops are the same. What can I do?
Fact: iphones are a positional good: they cost more and do less than the competition. You buy them because they are shiny and make you look good. This is exactly like a Louis Vuitton bag. I hate that humans fall for that: it is a reality of life, however.
You also seem to be completely ignorant of the concept of positional good. A Cheval Blanc from a good year is a very good wine. It may even be actually better than the competition. However, what justifies its price is that by being expensive, people buying it advertise their wealth. The iphone is the same and the essential reason it is successful.
FFS, Apple knows that: look at how it is marketed: beautiful, sleek, elegant. This is not how a phone is marketed... This is a fashion accessory, and there is much more money to be made in fashion accessories than in phones. If Nokia had understood that, they would not be in the dire straits they are in.
You, on the other hand, seem very defensive about your money and how you spend it. It is your money. You are free to spend it as you want. But don't think for a single second that you get any respect/admiration/status from technically minded people by waving around a luxury good.
I find interesting you feel guilty about owning a mac computer in a discussion about phones...
Bullshit. This is after-the-fact rationalising. Apple products are positional goods the same way a Gucci bag is.
Also, what people do with their money matters. And Americans living this electoral season should, of all people, be aware of that. Spending money on a conspicuous good which has no particular intrinsic value is not admirable. It is crass and should be looked down upon.
And for the record, I don't want an iPhone nor any other mobile phone: I refuse to give the telcos a single cent more than I strictly need to.
Apple is clever (and evil). At this point it is completely clear that they are not in the technology business. They are a luxury brand selling positional goods. If apple reduced its price, it would likely sell much less. If you are not an apple customer, you can smugly look down on apple victims as fashionistas with more money than sense.
And don't give me crap that there is some crucial software which you need which only runs on macs: this exists but is completely negligible in terms of number of units sold -- and that doesn't even apply to phones.
It is one of the sorriest traits that I see in my fellow human to value things accordingly to their price.
Oh, inventing, there is still plenty off. "innovating", maybe not so much. The great benefits from electric motors and machining tools came from having a workforce with a higher education baseline. There is a lot of productivity gain still from the computing revolution, but it would require, say, that scripting be considered a basic skill.
This is a requirement on the average student/school kid, and needs a system which is favourable to the average student/school kid.
The French have their idiosyncrasies, but calling them a failure is ignorant. They have one of the highest hourly productivity in the world. It is a very rich country with a very high quality of life.
Their education system is just... unique. It makes internal sense, but its two main fault is that it does not value research enough, and it is wasteful in that many very capable individuals don't make it through. Those that do are pretty good, though.
No, the US has pretty terrible standard of living: source. Americans tend to think about success as a checklist. The big house, the 3 cars, the 6 figures salary, the "good neighbourhood", etc. Those things are frequently impossible in Europe (no space for the big house, no such strong separation between rich and poor), but what Europeans consider a good life is similarly hard to impossible to get in the US: good public transport, guaranteed health care, holidays.
I am not convinced most American would in fact prefer the American way if given a choice.
Inequality-adjusted HDI puts the US between Italy and Estonia. Not very far from Greece. Also cost of living comparison are shit: a German citizen will have better retirement and has access to a generous system of socialised medicine throughout their life. Basically, a random German will in general have a better life than a random American.
But the topic is innovation and schools. And something must be said in favour of the US system: it has a remarkably high proportion of very highly achieving students. This seems to be at the cost of a pretty poor average. There is a reason for that: it give a greater emphasis on creativity, at the cost of structure, and this benefits the brightest.
In turn, this is could be good idea from the point of view of the economy: when progress is fast, the winner takes it all, and generating more winners is a good strategy. However, the computing revolution is finishing, and there might not be much innovating left to do. If it turns out that a well-educated workforce (on average) is paramount in the future (as opposed to highest proportion of geniuses), then America's strategy will be a losing bet.
Personally, I think that the US is a terrible case to study the value of education right now: it has been propped up for a large part of the 20th century by massive immigration of very highly qualified immigrants from Europe, and now from China and India. These fluxes are drying up, and the current political mood is set against immigration. So we will know with some certainty only in 20 or so years whether the US system of education is a disaster or a great design.
I agree with that. But the linux community has grown considerably (the computer market has grown, and the proportion of linux users has grown slightly). This has brought benefits in the form of more focus on usability and esthetics.
I mean, I like the command line, but there is something to be said about a good file manager with does previews. I think that the evolutions in desktop linux we are seeing are a consequence of the growth in the community. Some of which is not so good (I'm looking at you, GNOME and unity), and some of which is better (yay better openoffice, yay firefox, yay KDE four point whichever version you feel stopped sucking).
So it is a worthwile goal that we all benefit from to grow the community.
The internet before those hordes was the internet without wikipedia.
There are immense benefits to growing your community.
KDE keeps binary compatibility through all releases with the same major number. And in practice, source compatibility is broken in major ways only once every two major releases (happened between 1 and 2 and between 3 and 4).
So many articles about "linux failing on the desktop" which should be "GNOME failed as the linux desktop". People forget history, and they should read the kde mailing lists rachives from 1999, from the KDE list. The mother of all flamewars is easy to spot by the extreme number of posts.
You will see how de Icaza basically started GNOME to troll KDE. Indeed, there was at the time a project to duplicate Qt without the license problem. But Red Hat wanted control, and NIH is always strong in the FOSS world. So GNOME started, and somehow prospered as the other linux desktop.
Thus killing forever the notion of THE linux desktop, and in practice, of linux on the desktop. That is in wide distribution: amongst developers, I guess it is not far from OSX (at least according to the w3schools stats). There is a very good linux desktop: opensuse with KDE. I hear Mageia, arch and mint are fine too. Technically, there is a linux desktop, it is there, and better than osx or windows, or whatever.
But redhat is enamored with GNOME, and will rather have linux on the desktop fail than give up, and ubuntu, well ubuntu chases after a mythical linux user who also knows nothing of computers. I think it succeeded because it was so good at recognising and setting up hardware, but they thought it was because people loved the interface.
Sorry for the rant, but there you go: there are two linux desktops, one has a long history of always making the wrong technical decision (remember CORBA ?), and for some reason it always get more publicity. The other is KDE. Eventually, it'll win.
The shots have clear, well understood benefits which are maximised by having a large number of people vaccinated. Foreskin removal meant to prevent STDs is going to help people in the kindergarten how ?
I agree with your position, but you are wrong about the studies. The results are likely real and significant. And if you think about it, you will realise that there is even a mechanism: the skin of the glans is probably thicker, due to it being not protected by the foreskin, and thus less susceptible to micro-cuts, which are the main avenue for blood-borne STDs.
Of course this is exactly why this is genital mutilation and should not be done.
The foreskin, it has nerves. These are sensitive. No foreskin -> less nerves -> less sensations. I don't see how that is the cause of a debate.
In any case, the "benefits" are mostly for adults, and adults are free to get circumcised. Finding excuse to mutilate the genitalia of your kid is not a mark of high moral standing...
In fact good sex ed works: Europe has lower HIV infection rates than the US.
This whole thing is basically "genital mutilation of children is fine because we can cut on education". Amusing fact: female circumcision will similarly risk rates. Will you support it?
The benefits are tiny (and only for adults), and the risks significant (for the kids). Also, what about the right of children to bodily integrity? If an adult wants to be circumcised, this is fine, of course, but this decision, so soon on the back of the German court decision? That reeks of religious lobbying.
Enshrined in the Paris Panthéon.
In Europe, the view about free speech is a bit different from the US perspective: we had terrible experiences with unchecked hate speech, so that is usually not covered by "free speech". There is a not-obvious trade-off between unchecked free speech and letting the government legislate what one can say.
In general, the European view is that if the speech causes harm -- and that is frequently the case of hate speech -- then it should be illegal: you have no legal right to cause harm to others.
Interestingly, in North America, I find that although the laws are much more permissive with respect to what can be said, society is much less so, and this is to me disturbing because outside the process of democratic checks and balances.
Yes to all! But for the fracking, heavy monitoring would be good, too. The point being that gas is bad, fracking dirty, but all in all a much better choice than coal.
But nuclear plants? Yes: it is the only carbon-free large-scale dense energy producing plant you can deploy anywhere. Feed-in tariffs for solar? Yes, you want as much solar as you can, because that forces the upgrading of the grid, and improves resilience. It is clean, too. Science funding? How can there be a debate. Is there any case of science funding which is a bad idea?
I don't understand how there is a disagreement: all of theses are possible, they don't contradict each other, and could be done simultaneously.
My point is not the people were worse there and then. They probably were the same as now. However, the regimes and the rhetoric leading to atrocities in democracies is something Europe had the misfortune to experience. Thus the look of disbelief towards US politics.
People are not responsible, but they should know how to identify the kind of phony arguments that only lead to Bad Things Happening.
It's not that we are better: just that we already made a great many mistakes, and it does no one any good that they get repeated.
This is true, but we are the only ones who did those things as industrial nations. Well, OK, not true, large parts of Asia did that too. We are the only ones who did that as industrial nations, as the continent was largely democratic. The democratic Weimar Republic turned bad. The democratic Italian republic turned bad, Spain and Portugal were democracies and turned bad. There were strong fascists parties in France and England and those countries could have turned bad. WWI was horrible, and democracies used combat gasses and sacrificed millions just like the central Empires. Colonisation by European powers was largely colonisation by democratic European powers.
Guilt for horrible things is not the same when you basically voted for them, rather than merely followed some deluded Great Leader. The point is that we know that good is not an intrinsic property of democracies, and evil a property of dictatorships. This is a lesson yet to be learnt by the US.
You are arguing that the GOP is in a magical place, left of the ultranationalists, but right of the Christian Democrats? How is the GOP left of, say, France's Front National?
There is actual data for that...
No. US politics are truly and objectively fucked up. This is not a misunderstanding. The policies of the two US parties have counter-parties in Europe. Their philosophical underpinning and rhetoric are not alien, we get them too.
They just happen to map to "centre right" and "batshit nationalist with no social plank". This is because the consensus on social issues is mostly what the Democrats hold true in Europe, whereas the position of the GOP is identical to that of our fascists/ultracatholics/ultranationalists/ultraliberals. For the exact same reasons (our country is the best/illegal immigrants/God/business is always right).
That a large part of the US population thinks those reasons are OK those not make them so. Broken logic based on flawed morals is wrong independently of the flag on your passport.