False premise. People who do something wrong are generally forgiven after they've "paid their debt to society". There are some people who choose never to forgive anyone for anything, but those people are sanctimonious assholes who want the world to think that they're perfect little saints.
If you had, say, stolen a car, gone to jail, and done your time, do you really think it would be fair for others to treat you as a social pariah and refer to you as a car thief in every conversation even twenty years later?
And there are people who made 1000% gains investing in real estate in the mid 2000s. That doesn't mean its a good investment, it just means that some people will always be the lucky ones.
It's the height of irony, by the way, that you would tout 1000% gains and end by mocking the "stupid speculative bets" of others.
A) The limits on withdrawals on your debit card are for your own protection. You don't want someone cleaning you out because they stole your card. If bitcoin were to catch on (big if), it would need something equivalent to a debit card, and such cards would have limits. There are likewise good reasons to be suspicious of people carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash across national borders.
B) "Government reporting" is pretty vague. What exactly is the problem?
C) Bitcoin can collapse just like any other currency. I'm not sure what could lead you to think otherwise.
D) Inflation affects bitcoin just like everything else. You're right that the GP is silly for thinking that his "fractions of a percent a year" is at all meaningful, but that 2-3% loss each year is a constant, and it will hit you regardless of whether or not you're investing your money. So it's always a guaranteed loss. It should be treated as a sunk cost, and investing versus not investing should be looked at separately.
Hahaha, man, you take yourself way too seriously. The Republican Southern Strategy is racist. The whole point of it is to get the racist vote. That doesn't mean that all Republicans are racist.
I assume that's what you're talking about, because I didn't make any other posts that could be construed as "Republicans are racist". I also assume that you're the one who ran through and modded down all my posts over the past day as overrated, all modded down within seconds of each other, which is pretty pitiful. But no worries, I have karma to burn. All you're going to accomplish is getting your alt accounts banned from moderation. Enjoy:-)
I think you're the one who doesn't understand it. To quote the man who helped invent it:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats
The guy literally said, in no uncertain terms, that the Republican party was giving up on black people in order to cater to "Negrophobes". You've got to applaud his honesty. No modern politician would be so forthright in their scheming.
You deserve to have your karma absolutely trashed for spreading that misleading crap. The whole point of the moderation is that shitty posters who spread lies (such as yourself) get downmodded and start at a lower level, thus helping prevent the spread of their lies.
Black people always overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic candidate. Might have something to do with Republicans openly pandering to racists every since the inception of their Southern Strategy. They made a conscious decision to give up on the black vote in order to get the racist vote, and it has worked extremely well for them.
So that's a 13-16 point bump, among a demographic that makes up ~10% of the electorate. At best, Obama would have gotten an extra 2% in the total popular vote. Meanwhile, the summary found 3-5% voting against him because he's black. So it clearly worked against him.
And that's assuming the black people voted that way because Obama was black, and not because they were sick of the racist crap that they heard throughout the election season. They lean heavily against Republicans (gee, why could that be?). Hearing endlessly about Jeremiah White, hearing Michele Obama referred to as "Obama's baby mama", hearing Rush singing "Barack the magic negro", hearing all the birther nonsense (I actually forget when exactly that started) etc., probably just made them trust Republicans even less.
But go on, keep thinking of all the black people in America as some barely sentient hive mind that just votes for people who look like them, and never consider issues on an individual basis. That's not racist at all. Nosiree.
Whoops, you messed up. By saying the billboard owner should be prosecuted for obscenity, you're agreeing with the GP that there should be some common sense limitations on free speech.
Running stop signs is illegal. Any competent driver will take steps to minimize running stop signs. But odds are you will still do it on occasion, purely by accident.
This isn't hard to understand, unless you are actively trying not to understand it.
There's no way Ray Bradbury would write something so hackish. I suspect you just spewed that all out yourself and signed someone else's name to it to make it look legitimate. Even the first sentence is a trainwreck... "...the early 21st century nation state once referred to as 'America' but now classified as the Dark Age." Really? In the future they're going to stop using the name of the country and instead refer to the country as the Dark Age?
I can understand the core points you're trying to make, but you're way too ham-fisted about them, and trying to pass it off as at all related to Bradbury is just shameful.
Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White House adviser recounted.
In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach [to counting militants] is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
Let's not pretend it's as black and white as you're trying to paint it. They are trying to minimize civilian casualties. But if there are five guys hanging out at a terrorist training camp, odds are they're all militants, even if we don't know each individual's background. Just like people who died on the battlefields of World War II are considered to have been soldiers, even though it's remotely possible that some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Cyberwarfare, drone attacks, assassinations... these things are a marked improvement in how war is fought. Ten years ago, war was fought by "shock and awe" -- a huge barrage of missiles and bombs intended to sap the enemy's will to fight. Fifty years ago, (e.g. Vietnam) it was fought with millions of boots on the ground, and millions of civilian casualties. A hundred years ago (e.g. the World Wars), it was fought with tens of millions of soldiers, and entire regions laid to waste through carpet bombing. Go back farther, and war was fought by sending a whole bunch of people into a town to literally rape and pillage.
We're moving in the direction of fewer civilian casualties and lower overall body counts. I know that some people will say that this removes reasons for avoiding war and makes war more likely. But the leaders haven't been on the front lines for centuries, and they've never particularly cared about getting their pawns killed. High body counts don't discourage them. If war is now fought with economic attacks and assassinations, well, maybe it will finally start hurting the leaders instead of the peasants. And that might make them think twice.
So, in other words, you lied when you said "laws were passed banning the use of synthetic diamonds in jewelry" and lied again when you said "by 'happy' coincidence, their use in industrial process [was banned] as well".
Just clarifying that your original post was pretty much a complete fabrication, and that you're a goddamned liar just trying to spread misinformation.
Historically, people have been willing to cross the aisle on important policies, especially if you meet them halfway. Obama's health care proposal, cap and trade, and the DREAM act (i.e. citizenship through military service) were all Republican ideas that they would have loved to support as recently as 2006. No one could have predicted the scorched earth tactic they'd employ to bring the president down.
Obama's greatest fault was how long it took him to realize what was going on. Most people had realized all the Republican "negotiations" were a stalling tactic by the summer of '09, the fall at the latest. Obama didn't seem to get it until after the 2010 elections.
Any source for that comment? Because I'm pretty sure it's extremely misleading.
Clooney held a fundraiser in which other people donated something like $40k a head. Now, that is a lot of money. But it's chump change compared to the amount raised by the Republican Super PACs. Romney's personal Super PAC has brought in around $52 million. Karl Rove's has brought in another $28 million. Newt Gingrich has another $24M. Santorum's got a little over $8M. There's another $30M among the smaller Republican Super PACs.
All told, that's around $142 million dollars. All the Democratic PACs have together brought in about $30M. It's pretty clear who the billionaires want to win.
The only reason there's even a chance of Obama being re-elected is because the small individual donors (under $5k) heavily favor Obama: $96M to $11M.
Governments create terrorists only in the sense that gay people create bigots.
I completely agree that the goal here is to create a system to simplify the censoring of unwanted ideas, but let's not pretend that there are not some very real people out there who would and do kill and maim others to spread their way of life.
Well, since the flagging is unlikely to be anonymous, that's an easy problem to fix. Just quietly ignore flags from people who cry wolf a lot. Of course, that would make the malware even worse, as anyone who gets infected would be removed from the system until there's essentially no one left in it. This really seems like a completely unworkable idea.
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False premise. People who do something wrong are generally forgiven after they've "paid their debt to society". There are some people who choose never to forgive anyone for anything, but those people are sanctimonious assholes who want the world to think that they're perfect little saints.
If you had, say, stolen a car, gone to jail, and done your time, do you really think it would be fair for others to treat you as a social pariah and refer to you as a car thief in every conversation even twenty years later?
How is it that all the comments thus far are nearly entirely made by people who don't know what they are talking about?
Welcome to Slashdot!
It's not just a cultural problem on the job-seekers' side. Ever hear of the phrase "over-qualified"?
If someone with a PhD applies for an entry level job in engineering, their resume is likely to get round filed.
Yes, but that doesn't matter to the sort of people who have turned hatred of a particular company into a sort of religion.
And there are people who made 1000% gains investing in real estate in the mid 2000s. That doesn't mean its a good investment, it just means that some people will always be the lucky ones.
It's the height of irony, by the way, that you would tout 1000% gains and end by mocking the "stupid speculative bets" of others.
A) The limits on withdrawals on your debit card are for your own protection. You don't want someone cleaning you out because they stole your card. If bitcoin were to catch on (big if), it would need something equivalent to a debit card, and such cards would have limits. There are likewise good reasons to be suspicious of people carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash across national borders.
B) "Government reporting" is pretty vague. What exactly is the problem?
C) Bitcoin can collapse just like any other currency. I'm not sure what could lead you to think otherwise.
D) Inflation affects bitcoin just like everything else. You're right that the GP is silly for thinking that his "fractions of a percent a year" is at all meaningful, but that 2-3% loss each year is a constant, and it will hit you regardless of whether or not you're investing your money. So it's always a guaranteed loss. It should be treated as a sunk cost, and investing versus not investing should be looked at separately.
Hahaha, man, you take yourself way too seriously. The Republican Southern Strategy is racist. The whole point of it is to get the racist vote. That doesn't mean that all Republicans are racist.
I assume that's what you're talking about, because I didn't make any other posts that could be construed as "Republicans are racist". I also assume that you're the one who ran through and modded down all my posts over the past day as overrated, all modded down within seconds of each other, which is pretty pitiful. But no worries, I have karma to burn. All you're going to accomplish is getting your alt accounts banned from moderation. Enjoy :-)
I would love to see a 450 mm die. More than that, I'd love to see the probe card used to test it.
I think you're the one who doesn't understand it. To quote the man who helped invent it:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats
The guy literally said, in no uncertain terms, that the Republican party was giving up on black people in order to cater to "Negrophobes". You've got to applaud his honesty. No modern politician would be so forthright in their scheming.
You deserve to have your karma absolutely trashed for spreading that misleading crap. The whole point of the moderation is that shitty posters who spread lies (such as yourself) get downmodded and start at a lower level, thus helping prevent the spread of their lies.
Black people always overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic candidate. Might have something to do with Republicans openly pandering to racists every since the inception of their Southern Strategy. They made a conscious decision to give up on the black vote in order to get the racist vote, and it has worked extremely well for them.
Black people voted for Democrats by...
+91 points in 2008
+77 points in 2004
+81 points in 2000
+72/+76 points in 1996 (depends how you count Perot)
+73/+80 points in 1992 (Perot, again)
So that's a 13-16 point bump, among a demographic that makes up ~10% of the electorate. At best, Obama would have gotten an extra 2% in the total popular vote. Meanwhile, the summary found 3-5% voting against him because he's black. So it clearly worked against him.
And that's assuming the black people voted that way because Obama was black, and not because they were sick of the racist crap that they heard throughout the election season. They lean heavily against Republicans (gee, why could that be?). Hearing endlessly about Jeremiah White, hearing Michele Obama referred to as "Obama's baby mama", hearing Rush singing "Barack the magic negro", hearing all the birther nonsense (I actually forget when exactly that started) etc., probably just made them trust Republicans even less.
But go on, keep thinking of all the black people in America as some barely sentient hive mind that just votes for people who look like them, and never consider issues on an individual basis. That's not racist at all. Nosiree.
Whoops, you messed up. By saying the billboard owner should be prosecuted for obscenity, you're agreeing with the GP that there should be some common sense limitations on free speech.
Running stop signs is illegal. Any competent driver will take steps to minimize running stop signs. But odds are you will still do it on occasion, purely by accident.
This isn't hard to understand, unless you are actively trying not to understand it.
There's no way Ray Bradbury would write something so hackish. I suspect you just spewed that all out yourself and signed someone else's name to it to make it look legitimate. Even the first sentence is a trainwreck... "...the early 21st century nation state once referred to as 'America' but now classified as the Dark Age." Really? In the future they're going to stop using the name of the country and instead refer to the country as the Dark Age?
I can understand the core points you're trying to make, but you're way too ham-fisted about them, and trying to pass it off as at all related to Bradbury is just shameful.
Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White House adviser recounted.
In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach [to counting militants] is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
Let's not pretend it's as black and white as you're trying to paint it. They are trying to minimize civilian casualties. But if there are five guys hanging out at a terrorist training camp, odds are they're all militants, even if we don't know each individual's background. Just like people who died on the battlefields of World War II are considered to have been soldiers, even though it's remotely possible that some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Cyberwarfare, drone attacks, assassinations... these things are a marked improvement in how war is fought. Ten years ago, war was fought by "shock and awe" -- a huge barrage of missiles and bombs intended to sap the enemy's will to fight. Fifty years ago, (e.g. Vietnam) it was fought with millions of boots on the ground, and millions of civilian casualties. A hundred years ago (e.g. the World Wars), it was fought with tens of millions of soldiers, and entire regions laid to waste through carpet bombing. Go back farther, and war was fought by sending a whole bunch of people into a town to literally rape and pillage.
We're moving in the direction of fewer civilian casualties and lower overall body counts. I know that some people will say that this removes reasons for avoiding war and makes war more likely. But the leaders haven't been on the front lines for centuries, and they've never particularly cared about getting their pawns killed. High body counts don't discourage them. If war is now fought with economic attacks and assassinations, well, maybe it will finally start hurting the leaders instead of the peasants. And that might make them think twice.
So, in other words, you lied when you said "laws were passed banning the use of synthetic diamonds in jewelry" and lied again when you said "by 'happy' coincidence, their use in industrial process [was banned] as well".
Just clarifying that your original post was pretty much a complete fabrication, and that you're a goddamned liar just trying to spread misinformation.
Gasp! Next you're going to tell me that the Stig actually knows more than two facts about ducks!
Sure, based on the completely unsubstantiated assumption that you'll double your sales by cutting $30 from the price.
It's a lot more understandable when you remember that it's someone else's future being sacrificed.
Historically, people have been willing to cross the aisle on important policies, especially if you meet them halfway. Obama's health care proposal, cap and trade, and the DREAM act (i.e. citizenship through military service) were all Republican ideas that they would have loved to support as recently as 2006. No one could have predicted the scorched earth tactic they'd employ to bring the president down.
Obama's greatest fault was how long it took him to realize what was going on. Most people had realized all the Republican "negotiations" were a stalling tactic by the summer of '09, the fall at the latest. Obama didn't seem to get it until after the 2010 elections.
Any source for that comment? Because I'm pretty sure it's extremely misleading.
Clooney held a fundraiser in which other people donated something like $40k a head. Now, that is a lot of money. But it's chump change compared to the amount raised by the Republican Super PACs. Romney's personal Super PAC has brought in around $52 million. Karl Rove's has brought in another $28 million. Newt Gingrich has another $24M. Santorum's got a little over $8M. There's another $30M among the smaller Republican Super PACs.
All told, that's around $142 million dollars. All the Democratic PACs have together brought in about $30M. It's pretty clear who the billionaires want to win.
The only reason there's even a chance of Obama being re-elected is because the small individual donors (under $5k) heavily favor Obama: $96M to $11M.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/31/us/politics/super-pac-donors.html
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/index.php
Governments create terrorists only in the sense that gay people create bigots.
I completely agree that the goal here is to create a system to simplify the censoring of unwanted ideas, but let's not pretend that there are not some very real people out there who would and do kill and maim others to spread their way of life.
Well, since the flagging is unlikely to be anonymous, that's an easy problem to fix. Just quietly ignore flags from people who cry wolf a lot. Of course, that would make the malware even worse, as anyone who gets infected would be removed from the system until there's essentially no one left in it. This really seems like a completely unworkable idea.