Anyone can have their own Stratum 1 NTP server for about $25 dollars in parts, a GPS receiver, an ESP8266 and some code. I have one setup here for my home network as well.
I've been looking into this periodically for years now, in hopes of getting a packaged solution that eliminates the $25 in parts part. Last I looked into it, it was starting to sound reasonable. Seems there are now GPS receivers with built-in serial ports.
Single-payer or Socialized medicine is something I just can't accept, even though I accept that it's ONE solution that basically works for other countries. If we stick to our core values and principles that defined America, I think we have to conclude it's unfair to demand medical professionals all get paid a fixed salary, as dictated by Federal government. I think we have to conclude that no, healthcare is NOT a right in America. You have every right to pursue better health for yourself, obviously. But as soon as you need medical care, you're demanding the services of another person or group of people who invested many years into education and training to be good enough to perform those services. They aren't your slaves, nor do you have a right to force other American citizens to pay their fees to treat you. We DO need to stop the collusion/ Corporatism that allows big pharma to get protectionist treatment by government for exclusive rights to sell medications, and to prevent competitors in other countries from importing their offerings here as legal alternatives.
Yes you can. Your last sentence betrays you. As soon as you said "big pharma", you gave up the game. You're not only for socialized medicine, you're in favor of price controls.
Aside from that, the medical personnel in single-payer countries are not slaves. They can quit. They can choose never to go into the field as young adults. When they choose to go into the field, they know up front that the fees they earn are set by the government. It may come as a shock to you, but they go into the field for reasons besides money. A good many of them want to help people. This is true of every country in North America and Europe that has single-payer healthcare. No doctor or nurse or surgeon in Canada is a slave. But they have single-payer.
Single-payer works in those countries because they don't even pretend to let it be capitalist. Not only do other citizens help everyone pay the fees, including themselves, by paying taxes, but the government also sets rates as to what those fees can be, and controls the system right down to the ground so no one sneaks in and exploits it by jacking up prices for this or that product or service. That includes everything from the price of scalpels to the price of educating a nurse. (Zero euros out of pocket, by the way. Education is tax-supported as well.) The end result, in a system that's being run honestly and with good intent, is better health outcomes, longer lifespans, and less worry than the US system.
I suppose I just put my finger on the problem for the US. Americans are reverting to the world mean where honesty is rare and good intent even more rare. Third world shitholes are third world shitholes because the whole society's attitude is "I'm going to cheat everyone around me just as hard as I can because I know they're going to try to cheat me just as hard as they can." Americans were notable the world over for being trusting. To use the parlance of yesteryear, Americans believed in giving everyone a fair shake. Americans solved the Prisoner's Dilemma by not betraying each other, on a national scale. That attitude is fading, eaten away by the philosophy of sociopaths. If the US doesn't get a handle on its sociopaths, it's going to end up a third world shithole too.
You might be a sociopath. Working for the government is not slavery. Taxes are not theft. Framing either of them in those terms is inherently dishonest legally, intellectually, philosophically, and religiously. Stop it.
I loved it the time my mother went to bed early and let me play her hand with Board Walk and Park Place. I don't understand why everyone wouldn't want to join a game 3 hours in. With hard work and careful strategy, you can win the game!
Translation: "I was born rich into this world. Fuck you, I got mine!"
Congratulations, you understood the allegory. Here's a cookie.
Yes, lucky. You were lucky you didn't end up on crack, lucky your piece of shit dad didn't sell you into prostitution at 12 because heroin, lucky you DIDN'T STARVE TO DEATH AT 27. Go be part of the poor class in India or Somalia and then tell me that luck ain't shit.
That wasn't luck either. My great grandparents emigrated for good reasons.
Geez, compare yourself to the children that are born in today's Libya or Syria, destroyed just a few years ago by the US and tell me how unprivileged and hard life you've had.
There is no comparison. Nor was this article about them. Nor was my response about them. Nor are they relevant.
How many of your family members were shot? Gang-raped? Taken as child soldiers, or sex slaves? How many of your siblings died of easily treatable diseases, or were maimed by simple injuries? You were on food stamps? Boo hoo - go complain to the millions that are actually starving to death in the world.
You went to college? Spoiled brat, you went to a frickin' public school first! That automatically puts you a hell of a lot better off than at least 100 million children your age. There are more than 1 BILLION people that cannot read or write in any language.
You whine about owning a house? Fucker, that alone puts you in the top 1-2% of the wealthiest people in the world. You are so spoiled, so privileged, you don't even know what hardship looks like.
I don't give a fuck. About one word you said. Not one tiny little fuck. All that happens somewhere else and is totally irrelevant to me, my family, my neighbors, my state, my nation, and... I'm betting you too.
At an 800,000 year scale, a "sudden" change takes thousands of years.
Only the ones we can see. The proxies available have no finer resolution than thousands of years.
We have reduced that to decades...
You have zero data that's true. There are no temperature proxies from 1000+ years ago with resolution of 10 years, let alone 1 year. Many datasets have on the order of one proxy per century, and the further back you go, the worse it gets. By the time you get back to the time of the dinosaurs, climate estimates consist of "warm and wet". That's the sum total of what we know, and that's by inference. There had to be enormous amounts of vegetation to feed the enormous animals. Beyond that, we have no idea. We have reasoning by analogy with modern rainforests. We have fossils of giant ferns. And we have no calibrated proxies at all for what the temperatures really were at any given time, let alone a short term series of years.
On the contrary, in the last thousand years, we have evidence that rapid temperature change has already happened. The onset of the Little Ice Age changed average annual temperatures from their high in the Medieval Warm Period to 1.5C cooler in barely a century, for the entire northern hemisphere without massive fossil fuel burning. This was 1300-1400, pre-Industrial Age. And by the way, Professor Bruce Campbell of Queens University Belfast has evidence that periods of depressed temperatures allow the Black Death to spread far more rapidly than normal.
Let's see, the economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than any other, young people aren't sure about.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Let me repeat, nobody gives a fuck.
In the developed world, that happened to the grandparents, great-grandparents, even great-great-grandparents of today's youth. "Raising out of poverty" is the goal of the last century, not this one. If the system was still working, today's youth would see a path towards a future more prosperous than that of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, et al. They don't see one. They see all of the myriad new roadblocks instead. They see that they are objectively worse off than their parents. This is not a myth or a fluke or a manipulated statistic. This is the real world. Look around, asshole. Unless you live in a gated community, you'll see the evidence with your own eyes.
Nobody gives a fuck about the "raise out of poverty" talking point. That was 100 years ago, or on the other side of the world, and either way, totally irrelevant to the life experience of people answering this poll. What matters is what has that economic system done for them lately. And the answer is, failed.
All of you here on Slashdot came from privileged backgrounds.
Really? My parents qualified for foodstamps when I was a child. I qualified for foodstamps twice as an adult. I got a college education, but I lived at home, worked a job, and paid 100% of my tuition myself (it was possible because I did it before the massive tuition inflation took hold). I didn't even get any grants. Just student loans, which took the full 10 years to pay off thanks to the DotBomb.
I know, everyone thinks that got where they are by 100% of their own efforts but if you were truly honest with yourselves, you'd realize how lucky you are.
Lucky? If I was lucky, I'd be a rockstar, live in hilltop houses, drivin' fifteen cars, and the girls would come easy and the drugs would come cheap.
Instead I live in suburbia. I have the suburban lawn and the two car garage my parents had (most of the time).
Having said all that, I'll respond to the GGP post. People are not liberal at 25. People are what their parents were when they're 25. You get your politics from your parents as assuredly as you get your religion from them. It takes time to shuck either one of them off and learn enough to know better. Me, I'm over 40 now, and like the sibling post, my house is paid off. And I'm fairly liberal too, especially because I know damn well social services are good and useful because I used them, for a while, and if the hard-scrabble all-consequences-are-yours-alone-to-deal-with "conservative" assholes had their way, I'd have starved to death at 27. It's a stupid fucking philosophy that would result in enormous amounts of preventable tragedy, for no benefit whatsoever, and humanity has never ever pursued it, in all of history, because humans have empathy, and these sociopathic little shits should stop wishing for people to get what they deserve—they just might get theirs.
You forget the third option -- removing those failures from our society.
If you're too busy trying to emulate the Jersey Shore to learn anything useful to society you should be voted off the island.
Ah yes. Eugenics. The end game of every sanctimonious prick.
Eugenics is a fantastically stupid idea because that's not how genetics works. Albert Einstein's parents were unremarkable people. Isaac Newton's parents were unremarkable people. Pick any genius you care to name, and you will typically find the bemused average people who birthed them standing behind them, completely unable to understand what their child has created, but proud nonetheless.
The culture of Jersey Shore is almost assuredly completely worthless. Feel free to denigrate it all you like, discourage your own children from embracing it, shun people in it, and make snide comments on Slashdot about it. But you do not get to "vote them off the island." One of them may birth the genius that extends quantum theory far enough to render relativity obsolete. The odds are against it, but then, the odds are always against it.
Take the US for example where capital accumulation continues indefinitely leading to higher and higher concentrations of wealth. One obvious issue here is this then shifts social power to the wealthy through governmental manipulation.
Shifts? This presupposes that social power was ever out of the hands of the wealthy. I'm not entirely sure it was.
From ancient times to medieval times, people in power were rich and rich people were in power. They were practically inextricably linked.
In the Age of Mercantilism, rich people were so powerful they owned private armies. The Dutch West India Company managed to capture the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, stealing their entire cargo. (Among many other similar things of that era.)
In the Gilded Age in North America, a dozen men controlled the industry of the entire continent.
In the 1940s and 50s, television was such a fantastically powerful propaganda tool that Boomers were effectively controlled by a few dozen people.
Today, a handful of major websites are so influential that Congress holds hearings about it.
Control has been getting less overt and somewhat more diffuse, but it still rests with rich people. They're having to work harder to maintain it, but they are maintaining it. Tax law benefits them, not me. The courts benefit them, not me. Congress represents them, not me, except by accident.
When was this mythical time when society was controlled by anything other than rich people?
It's quite obvious people aren't happy with the current social contract because most citizens are falling further and further into losing their half, so to speak. As such, they're rightfully upset.
Rich people back through the Gilded Age knew to allow more than mere crumbs to fall from their table. Modern rich people seem to have forgotten that. They have far more medieval attitudes than we've been accustomed to for the past century and a half.
It's gotten so bad that we're no longer better off than our parents. That's when we really noticed things not going well. I personally am, but my brother isn't. Going down the list of my cousins, only one of them is doing better than his parents, because he married well. The rest are either hanging on, or doing markedly worse than their parents. Looking around my neighborhood, the number of houses with 3 and 4 and 5 cars parked at them is higher than it ever was when I was young, as Millennials either fail to launch and boomerang home, or launch much much later than was previously the norm, because they simply can't afford the real estate to move out. What I see jives with the statistics I hear about.
The Libertarian Lunatic fringe of Slashdot will be quick to point out that young Americans are being heavily propagandized at their universities about socialism and communism, so it's all their fault. I contend that universities have been propagandizing since the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. It's gaining traction again now because capitalism is failing to make young people's lives better, for the first time in quite a while. If capitalism was working better for the masses, they would go on ignoring university propaganda just as they did for most of the last 170 years.
I'm not so sure that there's a generation of people who don't blindly accept what they're told and question, or apply logic and reason. Reading Youtube comments for an hour is enough to disabuse you of that notion. What I am sure of is there's a generation of people looking up from their empty plates and saying, "I was promised cake. Where's the cake?"
Wildfires are only possible when three factors are present: fuel, ignition sources, and dry weather.
You neglected a detail: the fuel is only present after a sufficiency of wet weather. Without wet weather, the vegetation doesn't grow enough to become a fire hazard when it dries out.
Ah yes, the troubles of adolescent acme: the condition wherein large round black bombs with fuses sticking out of them appear by courier service every day. Not to mention the anvils. Can't forget the anvils. Also an odd prevalence of skis, for a desert climate. Not sure what that's about. Definitely a terrible affliction, acme.
Me being too lazy to type "Revelation of Saint John the Divine" twice, and unwilling to call it "Apocalypse", which would be its traditional name, that being the first word of the original text in Koine Greek. Most people don't recognize it by that name anymore.
But I do have a question, have you ever visited such churches? I'm really (genuinely) curious about this attitude as I've never, ever encountered it before.
Megachurches aren't all that closely identified with Prosperity Doctrine, though some preach it. I've seen it in tiny shitty storefronts in the ass end of Detroit too. You don't have to actually go to a church to see it, either. Just watch any television evangelist, particularly those who appear on Trinity Broadcasting Network satellite programming. It's been around since the 50s. Benny Hinn, Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, and Robert Tilton are all Prosperity Doctrine proponents. Two of those achieved prominence specifically because of their appearance on TBN. TBN has been the biggest source of Prosperity Doctrine since the 80s.
It only happens if the US issues formal notice that it is withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty. The Outer Space Treaty forbids weapons of mass destruction anywhere above the Earth, to include installations on other celestial bodies. Warmongers like to try to claim this only forbids nuclear bombs, and therefore allows kinetic bombardment. This is some bullshit of the highest order. A megaton explosion is mass destruction regardless of how it was initiated. More to the point, anything in orbit capable of military operations is by definition a potential kinetic impactor. Unfortunately this interpretation is unlikely to win outside of states with no power at all to enforce it, economically or militarily.
Regardless, Trump can withdraw the US from the Outer Space Treaty unilaterally, without the approval of Congress. Jimmy Carter terminated a treaty with China in 1979 and George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the US from the ABM Treaty in 2002, and neither action was successfully challenged. The US Constitution is completely silent on the subject of how treaties are broken, so it's merely custom how it happens. For the first 200 years of the US, it was done by a President at the behest of Congress. Nowadays a president can just do it.
However if there were laws passed implementing the treaty independently of the treaty text itself (unnecessary, since treaties have the force of law, but it happens), then Congress would have to repeal those laws to actually change the behavior of the government. Someone more knowledgeable of the US Code will have to render an opinion about whether or not any of the Outer Space Treaty exists in federal law independent of the treaty text.
Dominionist is the wrong term, more like apocalyptic.
You seem to be unaware of what Dominionists want. A significant percentage of Dominionists interpret Biblical version, in particular Revelations, to mean that it is their duty to intentionally induce an apocalypse in order to precipitate the Second Coming of Christ. They're the Dominionists who grew out of Pentecostalism, and sometimes self-identify as adherents of "Kingdom Now" theology. Their goal is a global Christian theocracy, and they think the sole path that gets them what they want is a global holocaust, because they interpret Revelations as prophecy, and believe the prophecy demands it. These people are properly called Dominionists because they self-identify as such, in writing.
Why is it so difficult for economists to acknowledge that people may and do derive value from things other than money?
The do acknowledge non-monetary incentives, and this is a fashionable focus of economic research. They just have difficulty building models that accurately predict behavior.
Considering their models around money don't accurately predict behavior either, I think they're out of luck.
I can still hear in my head the Chinese TA saying "opportunity cost", as if anyone chooses to spend most of their money after making conscious trade-off decisions...
... if you pay attention to closing credits; lots of Hollywood blockbusters have European centres involved. It's nothing new.
If anything, it's getting more and more prevalent as Hollywood weaves ever more elaborate tax dodges, and sucks in ever more distant tax subsidies.
If there's one thing that offends me more than anything about modern copyright, it's the fact that movies are being made with motherfucking government funding and yet somehow all the profits are privately owned in a byzantine corporate tangle that pays neither taxes nor profit-sharing to actors and production workers. THAT chaps my ass.
I want to forbid government funding of for-profit entertainment works. You take free tax money, your results are public domain, just like NASA or USDA, even if it's not all or even most of your funding. I want a GPL-type virus for government tax money in entertainment, at the very least, and probably a good deal more outside of entertainment. You want to use my money to make a movie, then it's my movie.
It's not even a new idea, we had all this decades ago in Star Trek with Trill characters. And they often did focus on their relationships. Maybe it's because the internet was less of a thing back then, but I don't remember the backlash against it at the time.
It helped that Terry Farrell was both super hot and a decent actress. It also helped that it was an occasional side plot with not-incompetent writing, and that the male version of the character had not previously appeared in any Star Trek show, rather than being a replacement of the title character. Whether or not the BBC's writing will be competent remains to be seen.
Stargate SG-1 also had a species that body-swapped, more parasitic than symbiotic, but still the same concept. The Goa'uld apparently had a marked preference for same-sex hosts, I think mostly to cater to being a 44 minute TV show, where changing of hosts (actors) is already difficult enough to keep track of, but it was also built into the back-story. When the Goa'uld were impersonating Egyptian gods, they had to take multiple hosts as old hosts aged and died, and apparently most of them stuck with the same sex, as for instance Ra is definitely a male god, and Bast definitely isn't.
Sex fluid characters are a very old concept. In ancient times, they mostly appeared in religious fantasies, with dozens of deities that changed sex in the various pantheons of the world. In the modern era, they mostly appeared in science fiction and fantasy, and the subject treatment ranged from excellent to execrable. Now that the mainstream has started seeing it, somehow it's all new and controversial—and the writing is getting much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone can have their own Stratum 1 NTP server for about $25 dollars in parts, a GPS receiver, an ESP8266 and some code. I have one setup here for my home network as well.
I've been looking into this periodically for years now, in hopes of getting a packaged solution that eliminates the $25 in parts part. Last I looked into it, it was starting to sound reasonable. Seems there are now GPS receivers with built-in serial ports.
Single-payer or Socialized medicine is something I just can't accept, even though I accept that it's ONE solution that basically works for other countries. If we stick to our core values and principles that defined America, I think we have to conclude it's unfair to demand medical professionals all get paid a fixed salary, as dictated by Federal government. I think we have to conclude that no, healthcare is NOT a right in America. You have every right to pursue better health for yourself, obviously. But as soon as you need medical care, you're demanding the services of another person or group of people who invested many years into education and training to be good enough to perform those services. They aren't your slaves, nor do you have a right to force other American citizens to pay their fees to treat you. We DO need to stop the collusion/ Corporatism that allows big pharma to get protectionist treatment by government for exclusive rights to sell medications, and to prevent competitors in other countries from importing their offerings here as legal alternatives.
Yes you can. Your last sentence betrays you. As soon as you said "big pharma", you gave up the game. You're not only for socialized medicine, you're in favor of price controls.
Aside from that, the medical personnel in single-payer countries are not slaves. They can quit. They can choose never to go into the field as young adults. When they choose to go into the field, they know up front that the fees they earn are set by the government. It may come as a shock to you, but they go into the field for reasons besides money. A good many of them want to help people. This is true of every country in North America and Europe that has single-payer healthcare. No doctor or nurse or surgeon in Canada is a slave. But they have single-payer.
Single-payer works in those countries because they don't even pretend to let it be capitalist. Not only do other citizens help everyone pay the fees, including themselves, by paying taxes, but the government also sets rates as to what those fees can be, and controls the system right down to the ground so no one sneaks in and exploits it by jacking up prices for this or that product or service. That includes everything from the price of scalpels to the price of educating a nurse. (Zero euros out of pocket, by the way. Education is tax-supported as well.) The end result, in a system that's being run honestly and with good intent, is better health outcomes, longer lifespans, and less worry than the US system.
I suppose I just put my finger on the problem for the US. Americans are reverting to the world mean where honesty is rare and good intent even more rare. Third world shitholes are third world shitholes because the whole society's attitude is "I'm going to cheat everyone around me just as hard as I can because I know they're going to try to cheat me just as hard as they can." Americans were notable the world over for being trusting. To use the parlance of yesteryear, Americans believed in giving everyone a fair shake. Americans solved the Prisoner's Dilemma by not betraying each other, on a national scale. That attitude is fading, eaten away by the philosophy of sociopaths. If the US doesn't get a handle on its sociopaths, it's going to end up a third world shithole too.
You might be a sociopath. Working for the government is not slavery. Taxes are not theft. Framing either of them in those terms is inherently dishonest legally, intellectually, philosophically, and religiously. Stop it.
... 3 hours in.
I loved it the time my mother went to bed early and let me play her hand with Board Walk and Park Place. I don't understand why everyone wouldn't want to join a game 3 hours in. With hard work and careful strategy, you can win the game!
Translation: "I was born rich into this world. Fuck you, I got mine!"
Congratulations, you understood the allegory. Here's a cookie.
Yes, lucky. You were lucky you didn't end up on crack, lucky your piece of shit dad didn't sell you into prostitution at 12 because heroin, lucky you DIDN'T STARVE TO DEATH AT 27. Go be part of the poor class in India or Somalia and then tell me that luck ain't shit.
That wasn't luck either. My great grandparents emigrated for good reasons.
Geez, compare yourself to the children that are born in today's Libya or Syria, destroyed just a few years ago by the US and tell me how unprivileged and hard life you've had.
There is no comparison. Nor was this article about them. Nor was my response about them. Nor are they relevant.
How many of your family members were shot? Gang-raped? Taken as child soldiers, or sex slaves? How many of your siblings died of easily treatable diseases, or were maimed by simple injuries?
You were on food stamps? Boo hoo - go complain to the millions that are actually starving to death in the world.
You went to college? Spoiled brat, you went to a frickin' public school first! That automatically puts you a hell of a lot better off than at least 100 million children your age. There are more than 1 BILLION people that cannot read or write in any language.
You whine about owning a house? Fucker, that alone puts you in the top 1-2% of the wealthiest people in the world. You are so spoiled, so privileged, you don't even know what hardship looks like.
I don't give a fuck. About one word you said. Not one tiny little fuck. All that happens somewhere else and is totally irrelevant to me, my family, my neighbors, my state, my nation, and... I'm betting you too.
Take your white guilt and shove it up your ass.
The word you want is "jibes", not "jives", turkey.
Yes, it was. Thank you, chicken.
At an 800,000 year scale, a "sudden" change takes thousands of years.
Only the ones we can see. The proxies available have no finer resolution than thousands of years.
We have reduced that to decades...
You have zero data that's true. There are no temperature proxies from 1000+ years ago with resolution of 10 years, let alone 1 year. Many datasets have on the order of one proxy per century, and the further back you go, the worse it gets. By the time you get back to the time of the dinosaurs, climate estimates consist of "warm and wet". That's the sum total of what we know, and that's by inference. There had to be enormous amounts of vegetation to feed the enormous animals. Beyond that, we have no idea. We have reasoning by analogy with modern rainforests. We have fossils of giant ferns. And we have no calibrated proxies at all for what the temperatures really were at any given time, let alone a short term series of years.
On the contrary, in the last thousand years, we have evidence that rapid temperature change has already happened. The onset of the Little Ice Age changed average annual temperatures from their high in the Medieval Warm Period to 1.5C cooler in barely a century, for the entire northern hemisphere without massive fossil fuel burning. This was 1300-1400, pre-Industrial Age. And by the way, Professor Bruce Campbell of Queens University Belfast has evidence that periods of depressed temperatures allow the Black Death to spread far more rapidly than normal.
Be careful what you wish for.
It definitely does, but rich people like to play with rockets instead of solving real problems.
If Elon Musk solved Flint's water problems, you'd accuse him of grandstanding.
Let's see, the economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than any other, young people aren't sure about.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Let me repeat, nobody gives a fuck.
In the developed world, that happened to the grandparents, great-grandparents, even great-great-grandparents of today's youth. "Raising out of poverty" is the goal of the last century, not this one. If the system was still working, today's youth would see a path towards a future more prosperous than that of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, et al. They don't see one. They see all of the myriad new roadblocks instead. They see that they are objectively worse off than their parents. This is not a myth or a fluke or a manipulated statistic. This is the real world. Look around, asshole. Unless you live in a gated community, you'll see the evidence with your own eyes.
Nobody gives a fuck about the "raise out of poverty" talking point. That was 100 years ago, or on the other side of the world, and either way, totally irrelevant to the life experience of people answering this poll. What matters is what has that economic system done for them lately. And the answer is, failed.
All of you here on Slashdot came from privileged backgrounds.
Really? My parents qualified for foodstamps when I was a child. I qualified for foodstamps twice as an adult. I got a college education, but I lived at home, worked a job, and paid 100% of my tuition myself (it was possible because I did it before the massive tuition inflation took hold). I didn't even get any grants. Just student loans, which took the full 10 years to pay off thanks to the DotBomb.
I know, everyone thinks that got where they are by 100% of their own efforts but if you were truly honest with yourselves, you'd realize how lucky you are.
Lucky? If I was lucky, I'd be a rockstar, live in hilltop houses, drivin' fifteen cars, and the girls would come easy and the drugs would come cheap.
Instead I live in suburbia. I have the suburban lawn and the two car garage my parents had (most of the time).
Having said all that, I'll respond to the GGP post. People are not liberal at 25. People are what their parents were when they're 25. You get your politics from your parents as assuredly as you get your religion from them. It takes time to shuck either one of them off and learn enough to know better. Me, I'm over 40 now, and like the sibling post, my house is paid off. And I'm fairly liberal too, especially because I know damn well social services are good and useful because I used them, for a while, and if the hard-scrabble all-consequences-are-yours-alone-to-deal-with "conservative" assholes had their way, I'd have starved to death at 27. It's a stupid fucking philosophy that would result in enormous amounts of preventable tragedy, for no benefit whatsoever, and humanity has never ever pursued it, in all of history, because humans have empathy, and these sociopathic little shits should stop wishing for people to get what they deserve—they just might get theirs.
You forget the third option -- removing those failures from our society.
If you're too busy trying to emulate the Jersey Shore to learn anything useful to society you should be voted off the island.
Ah yes. Eugenics. The end game of every sanctimonious prick.
Eugenics is a fantastically stupid idea because that's not how genetics works. Albert Einstein's parents were unremarkable people. Isaac Newton's parents were unremarkable people. Pick any genius you care to name, and you will typically find the bemused average people who birthed them standing behind them, completely unable to understand what their child has created, but proud nonetheless.
The culture of Jersey Shore is almost assuredly completely worthless. Feel free to denigrate it all you like, discourage your own children from embracing it, shun people in it, and make snide comments on Slashdot about it. But you do not get to "vote them off the island." One of them may birth the genius that extends quantum theory far enough to render relativity obsolete. The odds are against it, but then, the odds are always against it.
Take the US for example where capital accumulation continues indefinitely leading to higher and higher concentrations of wealth. One obvious issue here is this then shifts social power to the wealthy through governmental manipulation.
Shifts? This presupposes that social power was ever out of the hands of the wealthy. I'm not entirely sure it was.
From ancient times to medieval times, people in power were rich and rich people were in power. They were practically inextricably linked.
In the Age of Mercantilism, rich people were so powerful they owned private armies. The Dutch West India Company managed to capture the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, stealing their entire cargo. (Among many other similar things of that era.)
In the Gilded Age in North America, a dozen men controlled the industry of the entire continent.
In the 1940s and 50s, television was such a fantastically powerful propaganda tool that Boomers were effectively controlled by a few dozen people.
Today, a handful of major websites are so influential that Congress holds hearings about it.
Control has been getting less overt and somewhat more diffuse, but it still rests with rich people. They're having to work harder to maintain it, but they are maintaining it. Tax law benefits them, not me. The courts benefit them, not me. Congress represents them, not me, except by accident.
When was this mythical time when society was controlled by anything other than rich people?
It's quite obvious people aren't happy with the current social contract because most citizens are falling further and further into losing their half, so to speak. As such, they're rightfully upset.
Rich people back through the Gilded Age knew to allow more than mere crumbs to fall from their table. Modern rich people seem to have forgotten that. They have far more medieval attitudes than we've been accustomed to for the past century and a half.
It's gotten so bad that we're no longer better off than our parents. That's when we really noticed things not going well. I personally am, but my brother isn't. Going down the list of my cousins, only one of them is doing better than his parents, because he married well. The rest are either hanging on, or doing markedly worse than their parents. Looking around my neighborhood, the number of houses with 3 and 4 and 5 cars parked at them is higher than it ever was when I was young, as Millennials either fail to launch and boomerang home, or launch much much later than was previously the norm, because they simply can't afford the real estate to move out. What I see jives with the statistics I hear about.
The Libertarian Lunatic fringe of Slashdot will be quick to point out that young Americans are being heavily propagandized at their universities about socialism and communism, so it's all their fault. I contend that universities have been propagandizing since the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. It's gaining traction again now because capitalism is failing to make young people's lives better, for the first time in quite a while. If capitalism was working better for the masses, they would go on ignoring university propaganda just as they did for most of the last 170 years.
I'm not so sure that there's a generation of people who don't blindly accept what they're told and question, or apply logic and reason. Reading Youtube comments for an hour is enough to disabuse you of that notion. What I am sure of is there's a generation of people looking up from their empty plates and saying, "I was promised cake. Where's the cake?"
Wildfires are only possible when three factors are present: fuel, ignition sources, and dry weather.
You neglected a detail: the fuel is only present after a sufficiency of wet weather. Without wet weather, the vegetation doesn't grow enough to become a fire hazard when it dries out.
Hangnails, scar tissue, acme.
Ah yes, the troubles of adolescent acme: the condition wherein large round black bombs with fuses sticking out of them appear by courier service every day. Not to mention the anvils. Can't forget the anvils. Also an odd prevalence of skis, for a desert climate. Not sure what that's about. Definitely a terrible affliction, acme.
It's like complaining that birds are playing God by flying.
What about the pigs? What are they playing?
*oink* *flap* *oink* *flap* *oink* *flap*
I've yet to see any such people. Most Christians believe they will end up being persecuted until Jesus shows up and saves them.
Your ignorance does not make them cease to exist.
Hey bro, what is Revelations?
Me being too lazy to type "Revelation of Saint John the Divine" twice, and unwilling to call it "Apocalypse", which would be its traditional name, that being the first word of the original text in Koine Greek. Most people don't recognize it by that name anymore.
But I do have a question, have you ever visited such churches? I'm really (genuinely) curious about this attitude as I've never, ever encountered it before.
Megachurches aren't all that closely identified with Prosperity Doctrine, though some preach it. I've seen it in tiny shitty storefronts in the ass end of Detroit too. You don't have to actually go to a church to see it, either. Just watch any television evangelist, particularly those who appear on Trinity Broadcasting Network satellite programming. It's been around since the 50s. Benny Hinn, Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, and Robert Tilton are all Prosperity Doctrine proponents. Two of those achieved prominence specifically because of their appearance on TBN. TBN has been the biggest source of Prosperity Doctrine since the 80s.
It only happens if the US issues formal notice that it is withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty. The Outer Space Treaty forbids weapons of mass destruction anywhere above the Earth, to include installations on other celestial bodies. Warmongers like to try to claim this only forbids nuclear bombs, and therefore allows kinetic bombardment. This is some bullshit of the highest order. A megaton explosion is mass destruction regardless of how it was initiated. More to the point, anything in orbit capable of military operations is by definition a potential kinetic impactor. Unfortunately this interpretation is unlikely to win outside of states with no power at all to enforce it, economically or militarily.
Regardless, Trump can withdraw the US from the Outer Space Treaty unilaterally, without the approval of Congress. Jimmy Carter terminated a treaty with China in 1979 and George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the US from the ABM Treaty in 2002, and neither action was successfully challenged. The US Constitution is completely silent on the subject of how treaties are broken, so it's merely custom how it happens. For the first 200 years of the US, it was done by a President at the behest of Congress. Nowadays a president can just do it.
However if there were laws passed implementing the treaty independently of the treaty text itself (unnecessary, since treaties have the force of law, but it happens), then Congress would have to repeal those laws to actually change the behavior of the government. Someone more knowledgeable of the US Code will have to render an opinion about whether or not any of the Outer Space Treaty exists in federal law independent of the treaty text.
Dominionist is the wrong term, more like apocalyptic.
You seem to be unaware of what Dominionists want. A significant percentage of Dominionists interpret Biblical version, in particular Revelations, to mean that it is their duty to intentionally induce an apocalypse in order to precipitate the Second Coming of Christ. They're the Dominionists who grew out of Pentecostalism, and sometimes self-identify as adherents of "Kingdom Now" theology. Their goal is a global Christian theocracy, and they think the sole path that gets them what they want is a global holocaust, because they interpret Revelations as prophecy, and believe the prophecy demands it. These people are properly called Dominionists because they self-identify as such, in writing.
Why is it so difficult for economists to acknowledge that people may and do derive value from things other than money?
The do acknowledge non-monetary incentives, and this is a fashionable focus of economic research. They just have difficulty building models that accurately predict behavior.
Considering their models around money don't accurately predict behavior either, I think they're out of luck.
I can still hear in my head the Chinese TA saying "opportunity cost", as if anyone chooses to spend most of their money after making conscious trade-off decisions...
... if you pay attention to closing credits; lots of Hollywood blockbusters have European centres involved. It's nothing new.
If anything, it's getting more and more prevalent as Hollywood weaves ever more elaborate tax dodges, and sucks in ever more distant tax subsidies.
If there's one thing that offends me more than anything about modern copyright, it's the fact that movies are being made with motherfucking government funding and yet somehow all the profits are privately owned in a byzantine corporate tangle that pays neither taxes nor profit-sharing to actors and production workers. THAT chaps my ass.
I want to forbid government funding of for-profit entertainment works. You take free tax money, your results are public domain, just like NASA or USDA, even if it's not all or even most of your funding. I want a GPL-type virus for government tax money in entertainment, at the very least, and probably a good deal more outside of entertainment. You want to use my money to make a movie, then it's my movie.
It's not even a new idea, we had all this decades ago in Star Trek with Trill characters. And they often did focus on their relationships. Maybe it's because the internet was less of a thing back then, but I don't remember the backlash against it at the time.
It helped that Terry Farrell was both super hot and a decent actress. It also helped that it was an occasional side plot with not-incompetent writing, and that the male version of the character had not previously appeared in any Star Trek show, rather than being a replacement of the title character. Whether or not the BBC's writing will be competent remains to be seen.
Stargate SG-1 also had a species that body-swapped, more parasitic than symbiotic, but still the same concept. The Goa'uld apparently had a marked preference for same-sex hosts, I think mostly to cater to being a 44 minute TV show, where changing of hosts (actors) is already difficult enough to keep track of, but it was also built into the back-story. When the Goa'uld were impersonating Egyptian gods, they had to take multiple hosts as old hosts aged and died, and apparently most of them stuck with the same sex, as for instance Ra is definitely a male god, and Bast definitely isn't.
Sex fluid characters are a very old concept. In ancient times, they mostly appeared in religious fantasies, with dozens of deities that changed sex in the various pantheons of the world. In the modern era, they mostly appeared in science fiction and fantasy, and the subject treatment ranged from excellent to execrable. Now that the mainstream has started seeing it, somehow it's all new and controversial—and the writing is getting much worse.
The guys who install home theater speakers aren't acoustic engineers.
But they'll still bill you like they are...