The GP was pointing out the absurdity in the summary, and he was right. Anonymous doesn't have morals, and suggesting that they wouldn't attack charity sites is silly. Anonymous can and will attack anyone, because it's just a name people use when they want to do something without it coming back to them.
Ack, I accidentally deleted a couple of the budget lines when reformatting.
Roll back estate & capital gains taxes to Clinton era levels. Don't claim it will discourage investment, as there was plenty of investment back then: $80B Eliminate corporate tax loopholes, while reducing the overall rates. Added benefit of making business a heck of a lot simpler: $80B
The numbers are mostly from the NY Times budget deficit "puzzle" from a couple years back, rounded to the nearest $10B.
How about the families that have 5-10 children because of the EIC?
Doesn't happen. It's a complete fabrication by right wing demagogues. For starters, EIC only pays for the first three kids. Secondly, the ~$5k you get won't even come close to paying for those kids.
What about people moving here and claiming all their children and all the children who do not live in this country?
Again, max of three kids makes this a non-issue. Besides, how often does it happen that parents legally immigrate to America while leaving all their children behind? That can't possibly account for more than one part per million of the budget.
What about the drug dealers who pull in thousands of dollars a week yet are on welfare because they technically do not make anything?
If the government knew they were drug dealers, they'd be in jail. Are you seriously proposing we not take care of anyone because of the chance they might be a criminal? That's just awful.
What about people who take drugs and then get gov assistance?
What about them? Should we just kill all the addicts? Or should we cast them out on to the streets so they have to choose between starvation and a life of crime?
People gaming the system isn't a problem. It's noise around the edges.
You want to see a balanced budget? Piece of cake:
Cut the military in half. It'll still be bigger than the next three combined. $400B Restrict Social Security to the bottom 80%, since the top 20% don't need it: $130B Let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire: $70B Adjust the FICA tax cap with inflation: $50B
That's almost a trillion dollars right there. Not quite enough to close the deficit, but we're still recovering from a pretty deep recession. As unemployment claims drop and tax receipts rise, that'll cover the rest. And unlike your plan, my plan doesn't involve millions of starving drug addicts stabbing people to death in the streets.
All of our budget problems come from overspending on the military, and unwise tax cuts in the Bush years.
All of the people griping about how "bad" the opening ceremony was have two things in common: 1 they're American, and 2 They watched it on NBC.
It started great, but that entire sequence with the cell phones was absolutely terrible. Since it came towards the end, I think it colored people's views and led them to forget some of the high points.
And NBC did not leave it to the audience to google Tim Berners Lee. They definitely mentioned him as the inventor of the web. I remember it distinctly, because I was waiting for them to screw up and claim he invented the internet. They never made that mistake, but it appears that Mr. Boyle did, since he had his lovestruck teens thanking him for their cell phones.
I sincerely doubt that anyone thinks that way, excepting of course the caricatures you've built in your own mind.
People don't care so much about discovering life on other planets because the only planets we'll ever reach are the ones in the solar system, and at most those might have a few bacteria on them. You will never live to see contact with so much as an extraterrestrial blade of grass. Nor will I, nor anyone else alive today, nor any of our children or grandchildren. Depressing, maybe, but it's the truth.
People (yes, even the religious ones) used to get excited about the prospect of finding civilizations on other worlds. Then reality kicked in, people realized they were more likely to find bigfoot hiding under their bed, and everyone stopped caring.
Even leaving aside the marketing campaign, there was nothing about Daikatana that should lead anyone to believe that Mr. Romero is particular competent. It was repeatedly delayed, ugly, buggy, and all-around uninspired. Basically the ur-DNF.
So, how big is the iCrime wave? In New York City alone, there were more than 26,000 incidents of electronics theft in the first 10 months of 2011 — 81% involving mobile phones — according to an internal NYPD document.
So only ~20k thefts "involving a phone". How many involved an iPhone? How many of those were actually targeting the iPhone and not just a targeting a random person who happened to be carrying one?
The number of robberies in NYC has been declining steadily since the early nineties. Where the city used to experience 100k robberies a year, they're now down to around 20k. In short, there is no "iCrime Wave". Just the same robberies that have always been happening, only now victims happen to carry more valuables.
Apple has been steadily growing at a rate that keeps the investors happy. When they inevitably hit a ceiling and level off, they'll suddenly find themselves under huge pressure to cut, cut, cut! Just like every other company.
Stop reveling in your ignorance. Technical terms exist to differentiate between similar ideas that have important differences. That you don't know what those differences are does not mean that they're not important.
Most insightful comment so far. This is exactly what it will be used for.
And the middle class will die some more, and quality of life will decline some more, and the rich will become that much richer and better off by comparison. Which is, ultimately, what it's all about.
He understood it this time. But if you make a habit of using the wrong word, you will at times confuse people. The fact that it doesn't always confuse people is no excuse, particularly considering how little effort it takes to use the right word.
Typos are fine. They happen.
Mistakes are also fine. No one knows everything. If you had read his response, and silently noted "oops, I never knew rote and wrote were spelled differently," you could have improved your writing in the future.
But coming back and arguing that proper spelling is "counter-productive"? That's just reveling in ignorance.
Police do have special powers, and I'm not sure why you would claim otherwise. I can't arrest someone with the same leeway given to cops (note that your example had to specify an officer out of his jurisdiction). I can't get a warrant to bust down someone's door. I can't pull a car over for speeding. I can't own certain weapons.
And that's how it should be. We want law enforcement officers to have an edge over the regular civilians, because that means they'll also have an edge over criminals. But since we're giving them extra powers, we need to hold them to an extra high standard. Unfortunately, we tend to fall short on that last part.
Maybe we exist in a massive computer simulation, which is programmed to simulate an afterlife for us. Maybe there are infinitely many worlds, and we live on in the other ones (i.e. quantum immortality). Maybe we're all part of a distributed hivemind that lives as long as humanity lives. Maybe the universe is on loop and we'll all re-exist in the next one. Maybe some religion got it right, and we'll end up in heaven or nirvana or get reincarnated. Maybe there is a right religion that has since been abandoned, and we'll all be surprised to end up in Elysium/Hades. Who the heck knows?
And what does it matter? None of them suggest you ought to do anything short of live life to the fullest, because, to steal from Shakespeare:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause
We don't know what comes next, so it's better to stick with the devil we know -- life.
It seems to me that you're the only here who has a problem with that, going off on your woe-is-me tirades, insisting that it's all for naught. If you really believe that, why not off yourself? Perhaps because you too fear "what dreams may come"?
And you base that on... what, exactly? Because I suspect it's based entirely on your need to feel smarter than other people.
The truth is, we have no understanding of what makes up the mind/spirit/soul/consciousness/free-choice-widget. Maybe you choose to believe there's no such thing, but I doubt it. I've yet to meet someone who honestly believed that they had no free will, and lived their life that way.
So, the people behind the law claim that it is effective enough to have been justified, but not effective enough to remove the need for even more industry-friendly laws.
That's up to them. Countries have the right to determine whether or not to extradite someone accused of a particular crime. I don't know how else you could expect it to work.
Chess will never be solved in a meaningful way. Sure, it may be solved for computers, but I don't need to play against computers, and the solution will be too complex for humans to memorize. So while a team of scientists and mathematicians, working diligently for years, may reliably outperform a single person choosing their moves on the fly, that fact shouldn't surprise anyone, and does nothing to diminish the enjoyment of the game.
And every single one of those government officials was a psychopath, or sociopath, or similar. Maybe if we were better at recognizing the symptoms, they could have been helped when they were young, instead of letting their disease fester.
Google hasn't patented the very idea of having a search algorithm. Anyone can make their own algorithm to try to compete with Google.
Apple has patented several core concepts of smart phones. Not implementations, but the very idea. If they get their way, no one will be allowed to compete with them, at all.
You're (intentionally) equivocating. The Socratic method is to ask pointed questions as a means of testing a philosophy. Polemics, such as those written by Dawkins, make facile, feel-good arguments to make their readers happy. Both are confrontational, but one is constructive, while the other is all about running the other guy down.
Religions are just a source of philosophy for people without the time or inclination to ponder all of life's questions themselves. If you have the time to read over the works of philosophers and come up with a consistent viewpoint, more power to you. Most people don't, and those people can therefore either live without any self-consistent views on morality, or they can adopt a ready-made set in the form of a religion.
Consistent morality is important. Without it, people will just come up with a rationalization for whatever benefits them at this moment, with no regard for the long term implications. That path gets you state-endorsed torture, it gets you anti-death penalty people supporting drone strikes and assassinations, it gets you anti-homosexual pundits demonizing people when the very same Biblical verse against homosexuality also lists publicly denouncing someone as equally sinful, and so on.
But hey, religious people are behind all of those examples! Yeah, that was on purpose. Did you notice how as soon as a "Christian" leader decided torture was okay, all his supporters went along with it? It's because they aren't truly religious, they just like belonging to a special club. They don't actually care about the morality aspect. I don't want to specifically pick on Christians either. The Muslim suicide bombers and their leaders are in the same camp. They don't actually care about the faith, they just care about their special club -- the leaders like the power, the followers like the sense of purpose. Take away the religion, and they'll just come up with something else to rally behind... maybe race, maybe economic policy, maybe whether they eat their bread butter side up or down. Atheism doesn't solve anything. What we need is people to care more about finding a consistent moral basis.
Now, of course, organized religion is a problem, particularly when accepted without question. Any time that you accept a ready-made philosophy from a powerful organization, you have to assume that the organization has designed that philosophy to protect its interests. For example, contrast the core tenets of Judeo-Christian religions (don't kill, don't steal, etc.) with some of the lesser points (e.g. tithing). It's pretty clear that certain ideas are important, while others are just there so that some old men in Rome can live comfortably.
In short, what people should do, for the good of all humanity, is learn the good lessons, throw away the bad ones, and stop treating it as a team sport. This goes for atheists too. There have been great philosophers who didn't believe in a God, but people like Dawkins just make things worse by making everything so damn confrontational. Instead of providing readers with a consistent moral viewpoint, he just strokes their egos and gets rich doing it. No different from the priest who tells his flock their God's chosen people right before passing the hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Blindly disobeying the law is even worse. Most laws are pretty good. Vigilantism might feel good, but when adopted at a wide scale, it's terrible.
Disobeying the law just because you're a mental teenager wanting to "fight the man" is stupid and harmful.
The GP was pointing out the absurdity in the summary, and he was right. Anonymous doesn't have morals, and suggesting that they wouldn't attack charity sites is silly. Anonymous can and will attack anyone, because it's just a name people use when they want to do something without it coming back to them.
Ack, I accidentally deleted a couple of the budget lines when reformatting.
Roll back estate & capital gains taxes to Clinton era levels. Don't claim it will discourage investment, as there was plenty of investment back then: $80B
Eliminate corporate tax loopholes, while reducing the overall rates. Added benefit of making business a heck of a lot simpler: $80B
The numbers are mostly from the NY Times budget deficit "puzzle" from a couple years back, rounded to the nearest $10B.
How about the families that have 5-10 children because of the EIC?
Doesn't happen. It's a complete fabrication by right wing demagogues. For starters, EIC only pays for the first three kids. Secondly, the ~$5k you get won't even come close to paying for those kids.
What about people moving here and claiming all their children and all the children who do not live in this country?
Again, max of three kids makes this a non-issue. Besides, how often does it happen that parents legally immigrate to America while leaving all their children behind? That can't possibly account for more than one part per million of the budget.
What about the drug dealers who pull in thousands of dollars a week yet are on welfare because they technically do not make anything?
If the government knew they were drug dealers, they'd be in jail. Are you seriously proposing we not take care of anyone because of the chance they might be a criminal? That's just awful.
What about people who take drugs and then get gov assistance?
What about them? Should we just kill all the addicts? Or should we cast them out on to the streets so they have to choose between starvation and a life of crime?
People gaming the system isn't a problem. It's noise around the edges.
You want to see a balanced budget? Piece of cake:
Cut the military in half. It'll still be bigger than the next three combined. $400B
Restrict Social Security to the bottom 80%, since the top 20% don't need it: $130B
Let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire: $70B
Adjust the FICA tax cap with inflation: $50B
That's almost a trillion dollars right there. Not quite enough to close the deficit, but we're still recovering from a pretty deep recession. As unemployment claims drop and tax receipts rise, that'll cover the rest. And unlike your plan, my plan doesn't involve millions of starving drug addicts stabbing people to death in the streets.
All of our budget problems come from overspending on the military, and unwise tax cuts in the Bush years.
All of the people griping about how "bad" the opening ceremony was have two things in common: 1 they're American, and 2 They watched it on NBC.
It started great, but that entire sequence with the cell phones was absolutely terrible. Since it came towards the end, I think it colored people's views and led them to forget some of the high points.
And NBC did not leave it to the audience to google Tim Berners Lee. They definitely mentioned him as the inventor of the web. I remember it distinctly, because I was waiting for them to screw up and claim he invented the internet. They never made that mistake, but it appears that Mr. Boyle did, since he had his lovestruck teens thanking him for their cell phones.
I sincerely doubt that anyone thinks that way, excepting of course the caricatures you've built in your own mind.
People don't care so much about discovering life on other planets because the only planets we'll ever reach are the ones in the solar system, and at most those might have a few bacteria on them. You will never live to see contact with so much as an extraterrestrial blade of grass. Nor will I, nor anyone else alive today, nor any of our children or grandchildren. Depressing, maybe, but it's the truth.
People (yes, even the religious ones) used to get excited about the prospect of finding civilizations on other worlds. Then reality kicked in, people realized they were more likely to find bigfoot hiding under their bed, and everyone stopped caring.
Even leaving aside the marketing campaign, there was nothing about Daikatana that should lead anyone to believe that Mr. Romero is particular competent. It was repeatedly delayed, ugly, buggy, and all-around uninspired. Basically the ur-DNF.
So, how big is the iCrime wave? In New York City alone, there were more than 26,000 incidents of electronics theft in the first 10 months of 2011 — 81% involving mobile phones — according to an internal NYPD document.
So only ~20k thefts "involving a phone". How many involved an iPhone? How many of those were actually targeting the iPhone and not just a targeting a random person who happened to be carrying one?
The number of robberies in NYC has been declining steadily since the early nineties. Where the city used to experience 100k robberies a year, they're now down to around 20k. In short, there is no "iCrime Wave". Just the same robberies that have always been happening, only now victims happen to carry more valuables.
Apple has been steadily growing at a rate that keeps the investors happy. When they inevitably hit a ceiling and level off, they'll suddenly find themselves under huge pressure to cut, cut, cut! Just like every other company.
Stop reveling in your ignorance. Technical terms exist to differentiate between similar ideas that have important differences. That you don't know what those differences are does not mean that they're not important.
Most insightful comment so far. This is exactly what it will be used for.
And the middle class will die some more, and quality of life will decline some more, and the rich will become that much richer and better off by comparison. Which is, ultimately, what it's all about.
He understood it this time. But if you make a habit of using the wrong word, you will at times confuse people. The fact that it doesn't always confuse people is no excuse, particularly considering how little effort it takes to use the right word.
Typos are fine. They happen.
Mistakes are also fine. No one knows everything. If you had read his response, and silently noted "oops, I never knew rote and wrote were spelled differently," you could have improved your writing in the future.
But coming back and arguing that proper spelling is "counter-productive"? That's just reveling in ignorance.
Police do have special powers, and I'm not sure why you would claim otherwise. I can't arrest someone with the same leeway given to cops (note that your example had to specify an officer out of his jurisdiction). I can't get a warrant to bust down someone's door. I can't pull a car over for speeding. I can't own certain weapons.
And that's how it should be. We want law enforcement officers to have an edge over the regular civilians, because that means they'll also have an edge over criminals. But since we're giving them extra powers, we need to hold them to an extra high standard. Unfortunately, we tend to fall short on that last part.
Why does one need a god to believe in afterlife?
Maybe we exist in a massive computer simulation, which is programmed to simulate an afterlife for us. Maybe there are infinitely many worlds, and we live on in the other ones (i.e. quantum immortality). Maybe we're all part of a distributed hivemind that lives as long as humanity lives. Maybe the universe is on loop and we'll all re-exist in the next one. Maybe some religion got it right, and we'll end up in heaven or nirvana or get reincarnated. Maybe there is a right religion that has since been abandoned, and we'll all be surprised to end up in Elysium/Hades. Who the heck knows?
And what does it matter? None of them suggest you ought to do anything short of live life to the fullest, because, to steal from Shakespeare:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
We don't know what comes next, so it's better to stick with the devil we know -- life.
It seems to me that you're the only here who has a problem with that, going off on your woe-is-me tirades, insisting that it's all for naught. If you really believe that, why not off yourself? Perhaps because you too fear "what dreams may come"?
And you base that on... what, exactly? Because I suspect it's based entirely on your need to feel smarter than other people.
The truth is, we have no understanding of what makes up the mind/spirit/soul/consciousness/free-choice-widget. Maybe you choose to believe there's no such thing, but I doubt it. I've yet to meet someone who honestly believed that they had no free will, and lived their life that way.
So, the people behind the law claim that it is effective enough to have been justified, but not effective enough to remove the need for even more industry-friendly laws.
How convenient.
This is why we need more unions and more workers rights.
and they should be able to use contractors and subcontractors to get out being liable.
Actually, in the US, this kind of ridiculously dangerous behavior would be covered by OSHA laws.
OSHA laws which only exist thanks to unions.
That's up to them. Countries have the right to determine whether or not to extradite someone accused of a particular crime. I don't know how else you could expect it to work.
It's legalese for a stolen credit card.
Chess will never be solved in a meaningful way. Sure, it may be solved for computers, but I don't need to play against computers, and the solution will be too complex for humans to memorize. So while a team of scientists and mathematicians, working diligently for years, may reliably outperform a single person choosing their moves on the fly, that fact shouldn't surprise anyone, and does nothing to diminish the enjoyment of the game.
No, they're not implying anything of the sort. You just made up the part about getting arrested to feed your own victim complex.
And every single one of those government officials was a psychopath, or sociopath, or similar. Maybe if we were better at recognizing the symptoms, they could have been helped when they were young, instead of letting their disease fester.
Google hasn't patented the very idea of having a search algorithm. Anyone can make their own algorithm to try to compete with Google.
Apple has patented several core concepts of smart phones. Not implementations, but the very idea. If they get their way, no one will be allowed to compete with them, at all.
Can you really not see the difference?
You're (intentionally) equivocating. The Socratic method is to ask pointed questions as a means of testing a philosophy. Polemics, such as those written by Dawkins, make facile, feel-good arguments to make their readers happy. Both are confrontational, but one is constructive, while the other is all about running the other guy down.
Religions are just a source of philosophy for people without the time or inclination to ponder all of life's questions themselves. If you have the time to read over the works of philosophers and come up with a consistent viewpoint, more power to you. Most people don't, and those people can therefore either live without any self-consistent views on morality, or they can adopt a ready-made set in the form of a religion.
Consistent morality is important. Without it, people will just come up with a rationalization for whatever benefits them at this moment, with no regard for the long term implications. That path gets you state-endorsed torture, it gets you anti-death penalty people supporting drone strikes and assassinations, it gets you anti-homosexual pundits demonizing people when the very same Biblical verse against homosexuality also lists publicly denouncing someone as equally sinful, and so on.
But hey, religious people are behind all of those examples! Yeah, that was on purpose. Did you notice how as soon as a "Christian" leader decided torture was okay, all his supporters went along with it? It's because they aren't truly religious, they just like belonging to a special club. They don't actually care about the morality aspect. I don't want to specifically pick on Christians either. The Muslim suicide bombers and their leaders are in the same camp. They don't actually care about the faith, they just care about their special club -- the leaders like the power, the followers like the sense of purpose. Take away the religion, and they'll just come up with something else to rally behind... maybe race, maybe economic policy, maybe whether they eat their bread butter side up or down. Atheism doesn't solve anything. What we need is people to care more about finding a consistent moral basis.
Now, of course, organized religion is a problem, particularly when accepted without question. Any time that you accept a ready-made philosophy from a powerful organization, you have to assume that the organization has designed that philosophy to protect its interests. For example, contrast the core tenets of Judeo-Christian religions (don't kill, don't steal, etc.) with some of the lesser points (e.g. tithing). It's pretty clear that certain ideas are important, while others are just there so that some old men in Rome can live comfortably.
In short, what people should do, for the good of all humanity, is learn the good lessons, throw away the bad ones, and stop treating it as a team sport. This goes for atheists too. There have been great philosophers who didn't believe in a God, but people like Dawkins just make things worse by making everything so damn confrontational. Instead of providing readers with a consistent moral viewpoint, he just strokes their egos and gets rich doing it. No different from the priest who tells his flock their God's chosen people right before passing the hat.