If people feel that libertarians are dogmatically anti-government, it's because they run into a lot of libertarians who are, in fact, dogmatically anti-government. Far more often, I might add, than libertarians who are actually interested in offering real, detailed solutions for problems that aren't just "deregulate and privatize, because that always works."
Why is the onus on us to offer "real, detailed solutions for problems"? We just want freedom, regardless if it works or not. It's the only moral option.
Your society doesn't even grant us basic freedom, nevermind the freedom to practice some of the grander ideals of a libertarian society. Come back to us when you're open to allowing competition for your form of governance, then we can talk about "detailed solutions".
There are lots of problems the free market cannot solve, just like there are lots of problems collective rule cannot solve. That's why it is important to choose the right solution for every problem. People who think there is only one true path will end up with lots of bad and inefficient solutions that often just make the problems worse.
We're not out to make a perfect society, or the most efficient one. What we're out to do is to make a society that is free for all. Everything else is just a compromise reeking of a utilitarian argument.
I just love it when an arrogant statist get's schooled. How about you grow up, and leave the rest of us alone and out of your shitty little world view.
YOU have got to be joking. Have you not been paying attention to Iraq, Afghanistan, Balkans, Gitmo and Syria?! Or countless other minor skirmishes that the US has been involved in. You can cry "joking" all you want, but the joke is on you and your war-mongering statist apologetics.
So you'd rather those people are homeless or relegated to massive crime ghettos of poverty requiring expensive policemen?
I want them to live in a place that they can afford. No one is forcing them to live in the expensive city. It's just a case of them wanting their cake and eating it. Meanwhile, the rest of society pays for their cake in the noble name of "social good". Look, jack ass, we don't want poor people to suffer. Just because other members of society are fortunate enough to have made/accumulated money, doesn't mean that they deserve it less. Or that that poor person next to him deserves it more by virtue of his lack of wealth.
Freedom equality is akin to freedom of speech. You can't only allow the freedom of speech you like. Just like you can't only allow the freedoms you like. Freedom is absolute, and the only line you can draw when it comes to it is the one of personal safety. You don't infringe my personal safety and that of my belongings, and I won't infringe yours.
Yes, rants are the only way I know how to show what utter non-sense most of this feel-good law-making hysteria is.
So the OP explains to you clearly how government regulations are bad in terms of creating monopolies. Your solution to the problem? "More government". Government, you know, is the single most pervasive, abusive and unavoidable monopoly of them all.
You give common, thug criminals way too much credit. The only way they'll stop is if they've heard stories about undercover cops so many times that when they even think/want to assault a lone foreign-looking person they won't be sure if it's a cop with his backup nearby.
Honestly, I like the idea and think it might work, and instill a sense of fear in criminals. Too bad cops are not in the business of fixing crime, but in the business of arresting "criminals".
Well, from the comments I've read, there seems to be a much higher proportion of AC's in this discussion than all the other ones I've participated in and/or read.
I find that movie quite hilarious for it's naivety and childishness. However, if the way things have been going is anything to go by, it may very well end up being a prophetic movie.
The affluent and/or "stay-out-of-trouble" citizens keep retreating away from these bad areas. They avoid the risk and dangers that are inherent in certain neighbourhoods. To call it racist just because a certain minority happens to be the only group that stays/moves in to that neighbourhood is pretty disengenuous. Currently, in the city where I live, there are tensions occurring because the local city council has in the works a project to use taxpayer money to "buy" land in affluent areas, so that the poor can move in. And this is all in the misguided, and well-meaning attempt to equalize what they perceive as a social injustice. All that bill will end up doing is forcing the really affluent to move even farther away from the inner city, and to enclose themselves into even larger, more exclusive living complexes. To me, the orbiting city sounds quite likely to be the distant end-result of all these things we're seeing.
The poor will always want what the rich have. To give them the power to act on that basic human desire is just a recipe for disaster.
This article, and the topic reminds me of a quote by Thomas Sowell: "The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'"
I find it quite a fair bit telling that the majority of posts currently visible on this article are written by AC's. Even completely non-racist and innocuous posts. To me, that says a lot.
And like another poster below mentioned. Why are people getting so uppity, when the app and it's users are just trying to make the best possible decisions for their own livelihood based on the best/only available data on the matter. If anything, such data would probably be less likely to be racist as it removes peoples' biases and interpretations (assuming the data isn't tainted by the stats, but then you're just opening up a can of worms).
You're nothing but a paid murderer. "Defence", "honour", and "protection" are just excuses. It's even painfully obvious from your choice in wording.
The really sad part about it is that you are actively not protecting your family. You're doing them a disservice by being involved and serving a morally corrupt institution. That enemy combatant that you so wantonly wish to kill? He has his own family and friends. And guess what, he wants to KILL YOU to protect his family and friends, because in his eyes, you are the evil enemy soldier that's out to get his family.
Protect your actually family first, from real and immediate harm. Instead of from the fictional boogey-man that the government tells you is out to harm your loved ones. In reality, war is between governments. And if you choose to be a decent human being, you'll realize that the only real war you need to fight is the one against those who will take your freedom to be a good human, and turn you on your fellow man.
First of all, you can't just present two options and say that they're the only possible solutions. You preach about us "forgetting the lessons of old", yet the irony is that you learnt wrong, and you're now complaining to the rest of us because we supposedly forgot, when in fact, we learnt the right lesson from those horrible periods in our past.
I don't know how you've deluded yourself into somehow blaming the "people looking out only for themselves" as the cause for any of the world wars, or most wars. It was was evil people, combined with the absolute power of a state that caused those horrible periods in our history. We collectively gave those evil people power by virtue of the state, and they used it to wage wars and atrocities against our fellow man. Shame on you for using such horrible events in our past as some sort of argument for further violence towards your fellow man; because that is precisely what a state represents, no matter how noble your goals and laws are.
From what I can tell, you've got some sort of twisted "lesser of two evils" argument thing going. Good for you, but I choose absolute good, which is achievable only with freedom. Remember, we want equal rights and equal opportunity at life, not equal results.
Is how you lose the argument. Everyone but python groupies agrees that any programming language worth considering MUST have its programs represented as plaintext files, with no proprietary / binary stuff that can only be accessed with specialized tools. Requiring an IDE is the sign of a bad language.
I don't think you understood what I was trying to say here. The IDE is there to teach you the boundaries when it comes to whitespace in python. Bad indentation, mismatching brackets and overall bad syntax gets picked up immediately and you are warned. Just like you get syntax error highlighting in other languages. Python's usage of whitespace scares a lot of people and keeps them from experimenting. The IDE is what I think would help them overcome their fear/uncertainty. If anything, Python is one of the languages where it's explicitly less required to have an IDE and still be proficient in it.
As I recall, the comments in that thread pointed out that no sane coder would be transferring code using such a medium as html that mangles white space.
Although, I have been bitten many times when copy-pasting python code between a text file and the command line. Though I've mostly gotten around that problem by working with files rather than trying to use the CLI to input arbitrary python code as every single console does it slightly differently.
it might have an advantage in forcing lazy programmers with no concept of 'code etiquette' to write semi-readable code as indentation is forced by syntax.
on the other hand, making indentation part of the language creates all sorts of other readability problems.
You'd be surprised at how much syntax in python actively ignores whitespace. As soon as you open up any brackets, it's a veritable free-for-all when it comes to whitespace and indentation. In such a scenario, a proper coding standard document is imperative for readable code.
But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
This is one thing I never quite get about python criticism. Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say. Then again, I don't go past 2 or 3 levels of nesting, class nesting included. And all my units of work are in separate methods/functions instead of being child blocks inside a giant function which I've regularly seen done. Perhaps the use of whitespace isn't the real issue many people have with python, but rather delineating blocks using whitespace exposes a bit of an inherent flaw in the way they structure their program's flow.
Either way, having a proper IDE when writing python code will go a long way to making you comfortable with using whitespace instead of braces. Initially it was weird and unsettling for me, because I didn't understand all the consequences that whitespace could have. But a little fluid and constant coding in a IDE will rid you of that quick enough.
Ah yes, the fallacy of "everyone is born equal". It openly spits in the face of reality, and serves only one function: to give those who had privileged life an absolution of guilty conscience.
That is precisely why we should allow people to raise children any way they please instead of enacting immoral laws to force them to all go to the same schools and to fit the same mould. Not only that, but you and the woman in this article claim that it's somehow immoral for us to NOT send our kids to your public schools.
Talking about the greater good is all fine and dandy, and you can proclaim your morality on the matter till you're blue in the face. But at the heart of it all "greater good" is incompatible with morality. It's a fictional construct, and is un-achievable without being immoral towards some, or most. The only truly moral way is freedom. Freedom to not have to be forced to abide to laws that ass holes like you think is required for our society to survive. We don't want society to survive, we want freedom. And if that makes me a special little snowflake, then so be it. We're all fucking special snowflakes, because we all deserve to live our lives the way we each choose, without coersion and interference from people like you.
The real problem in america is that corporations and money have corrupted every single institution in america to such an extent people are grasping at anything to solve problems.
Your noble democracy and interest-group pandering has done that. And now you're back-tracking and expecting the free-market, which somehow manages to still work despite your pesky meddling, to fix the problems you created. Not only do most of them pay quite substantial taxes, but your government keeps sucking it out of them, and the rest of us. And you somehow NEVER seem to fix any of the problems you promise you will. By "you" I mean the state and statists like you that think that you have the moral authority to tell the rest of us how we should live because somehow you're magically "right" and the rest of us are "wrong".
Public schools are all basically little liberal factories, especially in LAUSD.
You mean the place where you recite the "Pledge of allegiance", and where you have "civics" class to teach you to be a good member of society, and where you are told to memorize for standardized tests instead of cultivating your sense of intrigue and individualism? Yeah, I don't know what crack pipe you're smoking, but public schooling, at least in the US, is the antithesis of anything even remotely resembling a "liberal factory". And that's not even taking into account how people in the US have bastardized the term "liberal", you included no doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
If people feel that libertarians are dogmatically anti-government, it's because they run into a lot of libertarians who are, in fact, dogmatically anti-government. Far more often, I might add, than libertarians who are actually interested in offering real, detailed solutions for problems that aren't just "deregulate and privatize, because that always works."
Why is the onus on us to offer "real, detailed solutions for problems"? We just want freedom, regardless if it works or not. It's the only moral option.
Your society doesn't even grant us basic freedom, nevermind the freedom to practice some of the grander ideals of a libertarian society. Come back to us when you're open to allowing competition for your form of governance, then we can talk about "detailed solutions".
There are lots of problems the free market cannot solve, just like there are lots of problems collective rule cannot solve. That's why it is important to choose the right solution for every problem. People who think there is only one true path will end up with lots of bad and inefficient solutions that often just make the problems worse.
We're not out to make a perfect society, or the most efficient one. What we're out to do is to make a society that is free for all. Everything else is just a compromise reeking of a utilitarian argument.
I just love it when an arrogant statist get's schooled. How about you grow up, and leave the rest of us alone and out of your shitty little world view.
Lol, dude... You just got "F'd in the A", as South Park would put it.
It's more than capable... It has already done real damage. A lot of it.
YOU have got to be joking. Have you not been paying attention to Iraq, Afghanistan, Balkans, Gitmo and Syria?! Or countless other minor skirmishes that the US has been involved in. You can cry "joking" all you want, but the joke is on you and your war-mongering statist apologetics.
So you'd rather those people are homeless or relegated to massive crime ghettos of poverty requiring expensive policemen?
I want them to live in a place that they can afford. No one is forcing them to live in the expensive city. It's just a case of them wanting their cake and eating it. Meanwhile, the rest of society pays for their cake in the noble name of "social good". Look, jack ass, we don't want poor people to suffer. Just because other members of society are fortunate enough to have made/accumulated money, doesn't mean that they deserve it less. Or that that poor person next to him deserves it more by virtue of his lack of wealth.
Freedom equality is akin to freedom of speech. You can't only allow the freedom of speech you like. Just like you can't only allow the freedoms you like. Freedom is absolute, and the only line you can draw when it comes to it is the one of personal safety. You don't infringe my personal safety and that of my belongings, and I won't infringe yours.
Yes, rants are the only way I know how to show what utter non-sense most of this feel-good law-making hysteria is.
So the OP explains to you clearly how government regulations are bad in terms of creating monopolies. Your solution to the problem? "More government". Government, you know, is the single most pervasive, abusive and unavoidable monopoly of them all.
You give common, thug criminals way too much credit. The only way they'll stop is if they've heard stories about undercover cops so many times that when they even think/want to assault a lone foreign-looking person they won't be sure if it's a cop with his backup nearby.
Honestly, I like the idea and think it might work, and instill a sense of fear in criminals. Too bad cops are not in the business of fixing crime, but in the business of arresting "criminals".
Well, from the comments I've read, there seems to be a much higher proportion of AC's in this discussion than all the other ones I've participated in and/or read.
I find that movie quite hilarious for it's naivety and childishness. However, if the way things have been going is anything to go by, it may very well end up being a prophetic movie.
The affluent and/or "stay-out-of-trouble" citizens keep retreating away from these bad areas. They avoid the risk and dangers that are inherent in certain neighbourhoods. To call it racist just because a certain minority happens to be the only group that stays/moves in to that neighbourhood is pretty disengenuous. Currently, in the city where I live, there are tensions occurring because the local city council has in the works a project to use taxpayer money to "buy" land in affluent areas, so that the poor can move in. And this is all in the misguided, and well-meaning attempt to equalize what they perceive as a social injustice. All that bill will end up doing is forcing the really affluent to move even farther away from the inner city, and to enclose themselves into even larger, more exclusive living complexes. To me, the orbiting city sounds quite likely to be the distant end-result of all these things we're seeing.
The poor will always want what the rich have. To give them the power to act on that basic human desire is just a recipe for disaster.
This article, and the topic reminds me of a quote by Thomas Sowell: "The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'"
I find it quite a fair bit telling that the majority of posts currently visible on this article are written by AC's. Even completely non-racist and innocuous posts. To me, that says a lot.
And like another poster below mentioned. Why are people getting so uppity, when the app and it's users are just trying to make the best possible decisions for their own livelihood based on the best/only available data on the matter. If anything, such data would probably be less likely to be racist as it removes peoples' biases and interpretations (assuming the data isn't tainted by the stats, but then you're just opening up a can of worms).
Ah yes, your true colors show now. How easy it is to pull back the thin veil of patriotism and honour to find an angry little mind.
You're nothing but a paid murderer. "Defence", "honour", and "protection" are just excuses. It's even painfully obvious from your choice in wording.
The really sad part about it is that you are actively not protecting your family. You're doing them a disservice by being involved and serving a morally corrupt institution. That enemy combatant that you so wantonly wish to kill? He has his own family and friends. And guess what, he wants to KILL YOU to protect his family and friends, because in his eyes, you are the evil enemy soldier that's out to get his family.
Protect your actually family first, from real and immediate harm. Instead of from the fictional boogey-man that the government tells you is out to harm your loved ones. In reality, war is between governments. And if you choose to be a decent human being, you'll realize that the only real war you need to fight is the one against those who will take your freedom to be a good human, and turn you on your fellow man.
No contact details could be found for either the owner, or the observatory, but at least here is their Facebook page: linkie
linkie
First of all, you can't just present two options and say that they're the only possible solutions. You preach about us "forgetting the lessons of old", yet the irony is that you learnt wrong, and you're now complaining to the rest of us because we supposedly forgot, when in fact, we learnt the right lesson from those horrible periods in our past.
I don't know how you've deluded yourself into somehow blaming the "people looking out only for themselves" as the cause for any of the world wars, or most wars. It was was evil people, combined with the absolute power of a state that caused those horrible periods in our history. We collectively gave those evil people power by virtue of the state, and they used it to wage wars and atrocities against our fellow man. Shame on you for using such horrible events in our past as some sort of argument for further violence towards your fellow man; because that is precisely what a state represents, no matter how noble your goals and laws are.
From what I can tell, you've got some sort of twisted "lesser of two evils" argument thing going. Good for you, but I choose absolute good, which is achievable only with freedom. Remember, we want equal rights and equal opportunity at life, not equal results.
Is how you lose the argument. Everyone but python groupies agrees that any programming language worth considering MUST have its programs represented as plaintext files, with no proprietary / binary stuff that can only be accessed with specialized tools. Requiring an IDE is the sign of a bad language.
I don't think you understood what I was trying to say here. The IDE is there to teach you the boundaries when it comes to whitespace in python. Bad indentation, mismatching brackets and overall bad syntax gets picked up immediately and you are warned. Just like you get syntax error highlighting in other languages. Python's usage of whitespace scares a lot of people and keeps them from experimenting. The IDE is what I think would help them overcome their fear/uncertainty. If anything, Python is one of the languages where it's explicitly less required to have an IDE and still be proficient in it.
As I recall, the comments in that thread pointed out that no sane coder would be transferring code using such a medium as html that mangles white space.
Although, I have been bitten many times when copy-pasting python code between a text file and the command line. Though I've mostly gotten around that problem by working with files rather than trying to use the CLI to input arbitrary python code as every single console does it slightly differently.
it might have an advantage in forcing lazy programmers with no concept of 'code etiquette' to write semi-readable code as indentation is forced by syntax.
on the other hand, making indentation part of the language creates all sorts of other readability problems.
You'd be surprised at how much syntax in python actively ignores whitespace. As soon as you open up any brackets, it's a veritable free-for-all when it comes to whitespace and indentation. In such a scenario, a proper coding standard document is imperative for readable code.
But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
This is one thing I never quite get about python criticism. Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say. Then again, I don't go past 2 or 3 levels of nesting, class nesting included. And all my units of work are in separate methods/functions instead of being child blocks inside a giant function which I've regularly seen done. Perhaps the use of whitespace isn't the real issue many people have with python, but rather delineating blocks using whitespace exposes a bit of an inherent flaw in the way they structure their program's flow.
Either way, having a proper IDE when writing python code will go a long way to making you comfortable with using whitespace instead of braces. Initially it was weird and unsettling for me, because I didn't understand all the consequences that whitespace could have. But a little fluid and constant coding in a IDE will rid you of that quick enough.
It stands for SlashDot... I was also stumped at that one for a bit.
Ah yes, the fallacy of "everyone is born equal". It openly spits in the face of reality, and serves only one function: to give those who had privileged life an absolution of guilty conscience.
That is precisely why we should allow people to raise children any way they please instead of enacting immoral laws to force them to all go to the same schools and to fit the same mould. Not only that, but you and the woman in this article claim that it's somehow immoral for us to NOT send our kids to your public schools.
Talking about the greater good is all fine and dandy, and you can proclaim your morality on the matter till you're blue in the face. But at the heart of it all "greater good" is incompatible with morality. It's a fictional construct, and is un-achievable without being immoral towards some, or most. The only truly moral way is freedom. Freedom to not have to be forced to abide to laws that ass holes like you think is required for our society to survive. We don't want society to survive, we want freedom. And if that makes me a special little snowflake, then so be it. We're all fucking special snowflakes, because we all deserve to live our lives the way we each choose, without coersion and interference from people like you.
The real problem in america is that corporations and money have corrupted every single institution in america to such an extent people are grasping at anything to solve problems.
Your noble democracy and interest-group pandering has done that. And now you're back-tracking and expecting the free-market, which somehow manages to still work despite your pesky meddling, to fix the problems you created. Not only do most of them pay quite substantial taxes, but your government keeps sucking it out of them, and the rest of us. And you somehow NEVER seem to fix any of the problems you promise you will. By "you" I mean the state and statists like you that think that you have the moral authority to tell the rest of us how we should live because somehow you're magically "right" and the rest of us are "wrong".
Public schools are all basically little liberal factories, especially in LAUSD.
You mean the place where you recite the "Pledge of allegiance", and where you have "civics" class to teach you to be a good member of society, and where you are told to memorize for standardized tests instead of cultivating your sense of intrigue and individualism? Yeah, I don't know what crack pipe you're smoking, but public schooling, at least in the US, is the antithesis of anything even remotely resembling a "liberal factory". And that's not even taking into account how people in the US have bastardized the term "liberal", you included no doubt.