Example: he revealed that we had an active tap on the office phone of the German Chancellor.
...That's illegal. Having an active tap on the office phone of the German chancellor is most certainly internationally illegal, and domestically illegal. We've agree not to do these sort of things and we were found out to be doing them anyway.
What do we call someone exposing a criminal activity? And what if he needs to violate some privacy concerns in order to do so?
Germany is not a military or political enemy but all countries are economic opponents.
That's some mighty fine double-think right there.
Had he just stuck to revealing the unconstitutional NSA Surveillance of US citizens he would be a hero and would have been protected by Whistleblower status
And THAT'S delusional. Do you really think Hilary would let that slide?
Yeah, the guy committed crimes to accomplish what he did. He rode roughshod all over the privacy rights of the US government. Ideally he'd be put on trial and we'd have a court determine what a just punishment would be. But sadly I do not trust my government to give him a fair trial. Indeed, there is a risk that he'd simply have an accident somewhere along the way.
And due to the overwhelming good achieved for the USA by heroic actions from a patriot, I'd like to see any convictions be pardoned. It might have been a kick in the pants for the US government, but it was a great win for the nation and the ideals it stands for.
putting lives at risk.
Who? What lives? Is the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, going to bust into the surveillance van parked outside her office and shoot the spooks with an MP7? That's an "economic opponent" as you said. No lives are at risk, just money. If that. What's really at risk is power. And we're supposed to have checks on that.
The US military could have wiped out all the "goat farmers" in record time had they been allowed to.
The Us military, if sent against local rebellion or uprising or militia or any other form of armed US citizens, would most certainly not be allowed to simply wipe out everyone.
But yes, a couple ICBMs sending nuclear bombs could most certainly have wiped out everyone in record time if we wanted to use them. But we don't.
Collateral damage should be avoided if possible but it should not be an obstacle to killing the enemy. The terrorists use the US ROE's to survive. Remove those ROE's and watch what happens.
We win a few battles. The US generals and politicians are brought before an international tribunal for war-crimes, terrorism surges, and you're far more likely to see some of that US citizenry uprising we were talking about. Oh, and probably a few dead generals shot by their underlings if their vows mean a god-damned thing.
Collateral damage is a part of war.
Yeah, a terrible part of war. Something to be minimized. How do we minimize it? By having rules of engagement which keep our forces from shooting innocent civilians.
The last large scale conflict between great powers was before nuclear bombs make such things infeasible. All our conflict since then has been a super-power kicking the shit out of poor third-world countries where killing them all was most certainly not the goal, nor desirable. Which is why we've operated with higher moral standards than the typical terrorist. At least while we weren't condoning torture. Bit of a black mark there. Blowback is a bitch.
... You took a sentence mid-way through the wiki article that kinda-sorta jived with what's in your head. That specific sentence was actually talking about how capital is a stock. Kind of like the stock market, but actually talking about Stock and Flow. Jesus, if you want to throw quotation marks around anything from that page how about the one defining it right smack at the top:
In economics, capital goods, real capital, or capital assets are already-produced durable goods or any non-financial asset that is used in production of goods or services.[1]
But let's beat up your idea about how capital, since it can have it's value estimated at a point in time, somehow means that capital and money are interchangeable.
The value of Trump's NAME can be estimated at a point in time. Sure it's not an accurate estimate, but then again that's built into the definition of estimate.
Let's talk about two companies. One has a lot of capital, like it owns a tunnel boring machine worth a million bucks. Another company has a lot of money. Let's say a million bucks, and nothing else. It's just an account with a number in it. Unfortunately for the first company, it's machine is currently located in the middle of the Amazon where there are no tunnels that need boring. Do you think these two companies are equal? Since capital and money are fungible concepts and can be used interchangeably? What do you think these companies are going to do with their capital? Do you think the SEC would question someone trying to trade that first company for the second? I mean, they're both worth a million dollars, what's the difference?
Sigh, and financial capital IS a form of capital. Set, met subset. It's not that hard of a concept. Seriously, don't nitpick me when you're wrong.
My first encounter would be that one lawyer guy from Great Expectations who suggest the main character invest in some capital, ie, gold rings.
Capital gains tax is a tax on something you sold which increased in value, which applies to stock, cars, and Mt:G cards.
There's all sorts of capital-This or That-capital like capital punishment or capital goods. The "capital" in capital punishment refers to "the head" as in beheading, so that doesn't help us much. And the "capital" in capital goods specifically means tangible physical things as opposed to money.
So that's adorable that you have your own personal bubble of reality where words have special and exclusive meaning, but it doesn't help the debate much.
My uncle inherited the family farm by Carrol Iowa. Pigs, corn, and soybeans. He's had to get out of the pig business as 20,000 pigs wasn't a large enough operation to compete with the big boys. He's had to buy up a lot of land as the tools have gotten bigger and the overhead is getting slimmer. There's been a lot of consolidation and there are certainly large corporate megafarms, but don't imagine every farm in the midwest is that way.
Get some perspective. Most farms are family owned. But the ones that aren't are HUUUUGE....it'd be interesting to see what percentage of US farmland is corporate.
Anyway, the fucking point is that small boutique farms can own their equipment, while the bulk of our food is grown by people who don't. And this issue with property ownership, right-to-repair, and license agreements is more tricky where the status quo is that most farmers lease their equipment and don't actually own it.
Regardless of what type of farm it is, how big it is, or if the vehicle isn't even associated with farming, I would say that this system of selling/renting with attached strings and license agreements is fucking bullshit. They're selling you a piece of luggage with a locked container inside that you don't have the right to open. Fuck that noise. And if the big name players get into the habit of preferring to rent and control their walled garden of equipment, then that sort of rent-seeking needs to be shot down.
Void all warranties. Open all locks. Power to the people. You have the right to recycle. If you don't actually own your property, why did you buy it?
Ask for details instead of vague hate-mongering and I typically get two things: They run away like this coward, or they dive off the deep end of crazy.
"It's all the GAYS fault!"
"What's the gay's fault?"
*poof gone*
And very occasionally I get an insightful critic. I've come to accept that treating women like real people and equals is the cause for the raise in divorces. And this is a consequence of the sexual revolution and hippies and women's rights movement. A "casulty" would be an accurate description. And it's an acceptable one. It sucks, sure, but the alternative is to re-instate half the populace as second class citizens, which sucks MORE.
So far though, I'm really not seeing any negative consequence to treating gay people like people. It opens the way for the next even more fucked up group to get the limelight, but as long as it doesn't affect me, so what? And maybe we'll see rich dudes marrying each other not because they're gay or in love, but just for the legal purposes or tax benefits. We'll see.
You mean, back when creating the next generation of mankind was considered to have social value?
No, in the 1970's, there was neo-Malthusianism which worried about overpopulation. Creating too many of the next generation was a worry and all sorts of crazy people had crazy ideas about how to fix it. Except that there's no need. Educating women and developing the nation staves off the birth rates and all the developed nations without sizable immigration now actually have a worry about declining population.
When marriage was a mechanism by which society supported this valuable task?
That's still in effect. A lot of people still marry and have kids.
But go figure, treat women like they're people and you have more divorces.
Before the economic support of marriage became something people are simply entitled to?
Before the whatnow? People can still file jointly you shmuck.
Before the important role of wives and mothers was completely devalued,
Wow. What happened between you and your mum? Or was it something with your wife? How exactly has motherhood been devalued?
and treated as offering no more social value than a young man who takes it up the bum?
Lots of old guys take it up the bum too. But yes, gay couples should be treated the same as straight couples. How does that affect the worth of your wife at all? Did you read in a paper that some gay dudes were married and you looked over at your wife and declared that she was worthless now?
You know what? I think I will [rewatch the original Star Trek]
...You realize that it was, and IS, a raging hard-on for a liberal utopia. They had a russian, an Irishman, a jap, and a BLACK LADY on the bridge of a ship. Working together. What madness. It was a post-scarcity society, no more money. The Federation is an idealized United Nations. It was officially hands off towards pre-warp civilizations, ie, don't be colonial asshats to the natives. But OH NOES, gay people. That's just one step too far.
Right, that's the goal. But I don't think people really understand what what constitutes human "needs". Your "needs" aren't anything more than an efficiency apartment in a massive housing complex without heat or A/C, and 1500 calories a day via pasta, rice, or soybean paste plus a multi-vitamin. And all this is in a place that's cheap to house people. If you want the luxuries of flavor, entertainment, communications, or choosing what part of the country you live in, you're going to have to work for it.
$10K doesn't cover rent in San Francisco or New York. But you can buy a house in Detroit for $18,000. It might be real nice to be able to head out of town and walk in the mountains outside of Denver, but that's a nice thing that other people want and that raises the price of those homes. Hawaii is a great place. And while everything is more expensive, they still have a lot of bums.
If you take a look at that Maslow chart of needs, and price out the minimum, it's not that much. And it's REALLY not glorious.
And one of the arguments against UBI is that it will fail to encourage people to spend their money (and government money) on useful things like education and nutrition. It will be left to them to buy what they want. Because with UBI, pell grants, college subsidies, and all the other welfare programs go away. Individuals are smart, but maaaaaaan people can be dumb.
The USA taxes income, property, and sales. (And a special low rate for capital gains). And others, but the bulk is income tax. Wealth all by itself is not taxed. Although you can expect to lose a portion of it every year due to inflation. Since that's bloody stupid, most people with money have some sort of investment portfolio.
There's no reason to think that would change. The money you have in the bank has already been taxed. If your "asset" is a house, then sure, property taxes can go up. If it's all in Apple stock, then sure, capital gains taxes could go up.
Anyone talking about confiscating your money (or "the means of production") should probably be shown the door.
The lie inherent right from the get go[; that] money is a resource[. I]t is not, capital is an illusion,
First off, "money" and "capital" are separate concepts. You're talking about money. Capital actually DOES refer to real things. Goods, machines, roads, schools, and ALSO money. I get what you're saying, you're just technically wrong on this.
Second, yes, money is just a placeholder. A tool to help mange it all. The US$ is backed by nothing but hopes and dreams and 11 carriers and a bunch of nukes.
The resources are there, an administrative means of allocating and distributing those resources just needs to be found.
...We HAVE that. The "administrative means" we use to figure out who gets what is called "capitalism"*, with a healthy dose of taxes and socialism and welfare because we're not the monsters from the robber-baron era. You even mention this because you know that it's the
*The -ism portion is important. Capital and capitalism are two different things. Related, of course, but it's the difference between saying a friend is fucked up, and saying friendship is fucked up.
but wealth is only fun if it is based upon fairness and generosity
HohoHO! Said like someone who has never been wealthy. No kiddo, the vast majority of history shows us that most wealthy people have PLENTY of fun regardless of how fair and generous you'd consider their source of wealth.
Sweet jesus. ALL of that rant can be boiled down to "I don't like capitalism". The rest is a mad ranting of a laughable caricature of rich people. Even the actual robber-barons weren't that monstrous.
It's not constructive. Do you get that? This sort of stark-raving-mad soap-boxing doesn't help tear down capitalism. It doesn't support socialism. It doesn't feed the hungry or raise up the poor. (Poor as in actually physically poor. The group that don't have the resources they need and not some pseudo-intellectual "everything is a metaphor and the fault of capitalism" sort of poor). To be blunt, you're hurting the cause. The catch phrase "Eat the Rich" is supposed to be humorous.
No, not all rich people are psychopathic monsters. There are certainly monsters out there. Real-deal psychopaths that are so focused on climbing that corporate ladder that they don't pause to think about what the thousands of unemployed will do when they liquidate. There is a sector of business where those people excel. But they do not represent all rich people any more than dirty hippies strung out on heroin represent all socialists. The vast bulk of all of us want a stable functioning society. A good swath of them, they vote republican, they don't want to hand out money to people who aren't working for it. Another good swath of people, like you and I, see that we are really wealthy as a whole and there's no real reason people should be so screwed by technological improvements and shipping jobs overseas, and helping people down on their luck will end up helping all of us in the long run. There's currently a debate about which group is more correct and what kind of society we want to be.
But the answer is not to tear it all down. We've seen how that goes in the communist states. But the current system of welfare and subsidies and grants and scholarships and services are CERTAINLY not in the philosophical camp of capitalism. We've ALSO tried a more pure form of capitalism in the late 1800's. It sucked for most people. Dear god man, we've got to learn from the big lessons of the past. Take a look at the Nordic countries. Very socialist, but they STILL HAVE MONEY and they still operate by people working and getting paid in cash. MONEY, as a placeholder for wealth, WORKS.
Get your shit together. You're making us look bad.
"The US space program.. inspires... white supremacy" - DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )
Ah, there's a good reminder that some people are simply crazy and disconnected from reality.
Frankly it's good to have these sort of people. Imagine if we censored him. Every post you'd see would have SOME semblance of truth. It's like that sanitary paradox. Kids gotta get a little dirty to develop an immune system. People have to come into contact with sheer balls-in-the-blender levels of crazy just so they maintain a certain level of skepticism.
how President Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle program.
I like Carter. But I guess no one is perfect.
tl;dr: They told Carter that the shuttle would help spy on and verify Russia's compliance with arms treaties.
President Carter was not all that enthused about human space flight to begin with, adhering to the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe.
...what? Robotic space probes are most certainly adequate for exploring the universe. At least they are now. In 1978, they had just launched Voyager 1, which was a huge success, right? So it was looking pretty true THEN as well. Jimmy was right on the ball. Just how and when was this crazy notion of sending tools into space discredited?
But ANYWAY, the space shuttle program was a bit of a boondogle. It wasn't worthless, and it achieved a great many things. But all in all, there were better solutions and it never delivered on it's big selling points:
- It wasn't cheaper and faster
- It never captured Russian satellites and brought them back to earth for reverse engineering
Back in 1970, to win Department of Defense support at the program’s outset, NASA had redesigned the shuttle to launch national security payloads. Now, that decision paid off
...Why put the payload inside of the shuttle on top of rocket and not just put the payload on top of a rocket like before and after the shuttle?
The *only* advantage to object oriented design is more intuitive code organization,
Code modules are.c and.h files in a folder. As packaged and organized as C++ classes. The namespace collision issue never seemed that big to me. If they collide, your naming scheme sucks. For the love of god don't name anything as generic as Init(). Names are important, in any language.
There is no problem that one can solve with object oriented design that cannot also be solved with structs and function pointers.
Yeah, that's called a Turing Tarpit. It's definitely possible, but you probably shouldn't do it.
C is pretty terrible at making GUIs. The GTK can do it, but MAAAAAAN is it more of a chore than the C++ GUI makers. Which is so far the only place I've really seen OO shine. I've heard the mantra that it can be useful all over the place, but so far all I've seen is clusterfuck after clusterfuck.
Inside the Democratic Party? He's barely a member himself. He only registered as a democrat in 2015 so he could run on the ticket. The 30 years before that he was an independent.
And I highly doubt he's going to try and fracture the Democrats by forming a new party. I mean, that's turned out SO WELL for the GOP and the TEA partiers.
I've little doubt that once Hilary gets into power, she'll simply ignore him. Hell, now that she has his endorsement, and the primaries are all but over, it's the traditional time to flip your party the bird and move yourself on over to the moderate center to appeal to the swing voters.
What I want to know is what does a political mover and shaker do once they reach the top? When there's no longer anyone you have to kiss up to.
It's big business that's in the business simply because they're big and locked into a lot of big clients that can't conceive of doing without them. Why would they innovate? That's hardly part of their business model. Let me put that another way: Their sales team is more important than their engineers. But at least they're not SAP.
It was a death knell for Java when Oracle bought Sun.
new software languages (Pascal, C, C++, Objective C),
...None of those are new. In the least.
new programming models and notation (flow-charts, data-flow diagrams, UML)
No one actually gives a fuck if you use a dotted line or a dashed line. UML, while marginally useful, is overblown. (And all of those are UML diagrams).
"Staying current" is essentially like doing the final year of university non-stop.
Eh, more like doing a final year of uni every 5-10 years.
And yeah... Do it at work. "Hey boss, remember $THATHORRIBLEPROBLEMWEHAD? How about we try $NEWTHING to fix/avoid it?" Get paid to learn.
What kind of tyrannical sweatshop doesn't let you talk to people outside of work?
Do you know what "Primary School" is? Because in the USA, it means grades K-8. Secondary education is the last 4 years of compulsory school. "High school".
My high school was doing alright in 1998 before new math, when it offered AP calculus... to SENIORS.
No, there was no calculus in 6th grade. What the fuck are you smoking?
Should he feel sorry that he thought the murder/rape of a jogger in a public park merited the death penalty?
YES! This is a perfect example of why the death penalty is a bad idea. The justice system is imperfect and death is not revoke-able.
He advocated that 5 kids be put to death. He did that even before they were found guilty. It turns out that they were innocent and Trump was simply wrong. If he had his way, 5 innocents would have been killed.
Damn straight that's the sort of thing you apologize for.
This thing isn't being built by philosophers, it's being built by engineers. Any oh shit scenario results in the car decreasing speed and coming to a stop. No swerving. No leaping off bridges. No moral dilemmas between measuring the value of a bus full of nuns over the value of it's passengers. The policy is straight forward: Something goes wrong, hit the brakes. This is what they teach everyone outside of California. And because there's also some pedantic asshole who thinks he knows how to drive better than everyone else, it's not going to slam on the brakes, it's going to try and stop in a controlled manner. Stop, just stop. Unjerk the knee. You don't have to comment on it. If someone or something is in your fully legal right of way, then they'd be fucked just as much as if a human were driving. The car will hopefully see it and stop. Just like a real boy.
The one exception I've found is rail-road tracks. Oh shit still means slow down and stop. But if you find yourself on tracks, creep off. If there's an accident and you can't get off the tracks, hell, that warrants a call to 911.
Who are these people that keep trying to desperately insert some moral/philosophical/AI dilemma into self-driving cars?
A reminder that the penal system serves several purposes and has several goals: Punishing people who break the law. Reforming law-breakers into upstanding citizens. Protecting upstanding citizens from dangerous elements. Threatening upstanding citizens with dire consequences if they break the law. For way too long, prisons were all about punishment, which doesn't serve much purpose, especially if the general populous doesn't know of it. Reforming criminals is much better. But you can't forget it's other goals. Some won't be reformed for long. Some people don't need reforming, but can't be let off scot-free. Some people will never be reformed. Some people we simply need to remove from society, one way or another. Like those Columbine kids. The psychology report said one could have been reformed, but the other was simply a psycho. So if you have someone who did something wrong, really wrong, and he's completely unrepentant and the professionals tell you that he'll never get better. What do you do with him? You remove him from the society which he would harm.
Personally, I'd like to see a stronger mental health program. Yeah, the asylums were rife with abuse and tales of horror, but the alternative is throwing them back into society or into prison, which is hardly better.
You dodge a great deal by announcing that only one of the 200+ was on Kerry's small boat.
Your talking point is: " the testimony of the people who actually were there".
Were these people "actually there"? Only one was in his boat, and he wasn't present for the events which SBVT dispute, and even he claims Kerry earned it fair and square. You stress how closely the guys in the boat know each other. THREE people in the boat who SAW Kerry earn his medal say that all these people who WEREN'T in the boat are full of shit.
They're free to have their opinions about how soldiers should talk about the war they were in. Their views on nationalism, patriots, and duty are as valid as anyone else's. But these fuckers claimed Kerry wasn't a war hero, just as you've done, and none of them were there. And they spouted lies just as much as you did when you tried to claim the swift-boaters were "actually there".
If SBVT claimed only "We disagree with his actions after the war", then they would not be liars. But that's not their story.
and then blasted all the other men in uniform as vile war criminals
I believe you'll find the bulk of his rhetoric at the time was directed against the policies of the vietnam war, and the leadership that send young men to die instead of painting all soldiers as war criminals.
He helped run the Winter Soldier Investigation. America didn't know the brutality that was happening over there. They asked soldiers to recount the tales of horror:
They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
—John Kerry testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1971
...Are you going to tell me these things didn't happen? That all these veterans are all liars?
John Kerry IS a war hero. He fought heroically. He earned a medal for it. You can argue whether or not he deserved to get it, but you weren't there and you don't know jack shit. Neither were any of these folk in the SBVT. And then Kerry came back from the war and tried his damned best to stop the war. To show how wrong it was. He didn't try and prosecute any soldiers, he didn't throw his superiors under the bus, he wanted the leaders to stop the war. To withdraw. To end the policies which caused this sort of terror. That's not hypocrisy.
Support our troops, bring them home.
You would have preferred he engage in "quieter" activities in DC. Pft. He wasn't allowed in DC at the time. He wasn't a politician, he was a protester. But what got us out of the war? Was it a backroom deal between high-ranking muckity mucks? Or was it the unpopularity of the war? Who made it unpopular? Which was a more effective way of getting the USA out of Vietnam. (Which, sadly, lead to a whole fuckton of atrocities. We left our allies to get slaughtered.)
THEY are criticized with claims they were not all close personal associates with first-hand experience with Kerry
They are criticized for making claims about him not deserving his silver star, not being a war hero, and exaggerating events to which they did not witness. They were in the war. They saw parts of it. Many claim they never saw any war-crimes. And that's a very believable story. Many of them probably didn't. But Kerry compiled a very well sourced report tha
the testimony of the people who actually were there
Of the ~250 swift boat sailors who were part of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", exactly ONE actually served on Kerry's boat, Stephen Gardner, who wasn't there when Kerry earned his medals.
His other crew members disputed SBVT's allegations, calling them "totally false" (Drew Whitlow), "garbage" (Gene Thorson), and "a pack of lies" (Del Sandusky).
One other SBVT member, Larry Clayton Lee, was present when Kerry earned his silver star. Here's the interview with him. Even he admits that Kerry earned that medal, but he doesn't like what he said after the war.
Now, Kerry DID come back and he said it was a terrible war. And that pissed off a lot of people and earned him praise from other people. And that's the crux of the matter. It's politics. I think fighting Vietnam was a terrible idea, start to finish. But this group of SBVT group was funded, organized, and pushed by republican party insiders, and they spouted totally false garbage and lies.
Now stop spewing your partisan bullshit you coward.
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Example: he revealed that we had an active tap on the office phone of the German Chancellor.
...That's illegal. Having an active tap on the office phone of the German chancellor is most certainly internationally illegal, and domestically illegal. We've agree not to do these sort of things and we were found out to be doing them anyway.
What do we call someone exposing a criminal activity? And what if he needs to violate some privacy concerns in order to do so?
Germany is not a military or political enemy but all countries are economic opponents.
That's some mighty fine double-think right there.
Had he just stuck to revealing the unconstitutional NSA Surveillance of US citizens he would be a hero and would have been protected by Whistleblower status
And THAT'S delusional. Do you really think Hilary would let that slide?
Yeah, the guy committed crimes to accomplish what he did. He rode roughshod all over the privacy rights of the US government. Ideally he'd be put on trial and we'd have a court determine what a just punishment would be. But sadly I do not trust my government to give him a fair trial. Indeed, there is a risk that he'd simply have an accident somewhere along the way.
And due to the overwhelming good achieved for the USA by heroic actions from a patriot, I'd like to see any convictions be pardoned. It might have been a kick in the pants for the US government, but it was a great win for the nation and the ideals it stands for.
putting lives at risk.
Who? What lives? Is the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, going to bust into the surveillance van parked outside her office and shoot the spooks with an MP7? That's an "economic opponent" as you said. No lives are at risk, just money. If that. What's really at risk is power. And we're supposed to have checks on that.
The US military could have wiped out all the "goat farmers" in record time had they been allowed to.
The Us military, if sent against local rebellion or uprising or militia or any other form of armed US citizens, would most certainly not be allowed to simply wipe out everyone.
But yes, a couple ICBMs sending nuclear bombs could most certainly have wiped out everyone in record time if we wanted to use them. But we don't.
Collateral damage should be avoided if possible but it should not be an obstacle to killing the enemy. The terrorists use the US ROE's to survive. Remove those ROE's and watch what happens.
We win a few battles. The US generals and politicians are brought before an international tribunal for war-crimes, terrorism surges, and you're far more likely to see some of that US citizenry uprising we were talking about. Oh, and probably a few dead generals shot by their underlings if their vows mean a god-damned thing.
Collateral damage is a part of war.
Yeah, a terrible part of war. Something to be minimized. How do we minimize it? By having rules of engagement which keep our forces from shooting innocent civilians.
The last large scale conflict between great powers was before nuclear bombs make such things infeasible. All our conflict since then has been a super-power kicking the shit out of poor third-world countries where killing them all was most certainly not the goal, nor desirable. Which is why we've operated with higher moral standards than the typical terrorist. At least while we weren't condoning torture. Bit of a black mark there. Blowback is a bitch.
... You took a sentence mid-way through the wiki article that kinda-sorta jived with what's in your head. That specific sentence was actually talking about how capital is a stock. Kind of like the stock market, but actually talking about Stock and Flow. Jesus, if you want to throw quotation marks around anything from that page how about the one defining it right smack at the top:
In economics, capital goods, real capital, or capital assets are already-produced durable goods or any non-financial asset that is used in production of goods or services.[1]
But let's beat up your idea about how capital, since it can have it's value estimated at a point in time, somehow means that capital and money are interchangeable.
The value of Trump's NAME can be estimated at a point in time. Sure it's not an accurate estimate, but then again that's built into the definition of estimate.
Let's talk about two companies. One has a lot of capital, like it owns a tunnel boring machine worth a million bucks. Another company has a lot of money. Let's say a million bucks, and nothing else. It's just an account with a number in it. Unfortunately for the first company, it's machine is currently located in the middle of the Amazon where there are no tunnels that need boring. Do you think these two companies are equal? Since capital and money are fungible concepts and can be used interchangeably? What do you think these companies are going to do with their capital? Do you think the SEC would question someone trying to trade that first company for the second? I mean, they're both worth a million dollars, what's the difference?
Sigh, and financial capital IS a form of capital. Set, met subset. It's not that hard of a concept. Seriously, don't nitpick me when you're wrong.
Feel free to correct the record.
My first encounter would be that one lawyer guy from Great Expectations who suggest the main character invest in some capital, ie, gold rings.
Capital gains tax is a tax on something you sold which increased in value, which applies to stock, cars, and Mt:G cards.
There's all sorts of capital-This or That-capital like capital punishment or capital goods. The "capital" in capital punishment refers to "the head" as in beheading, so that doesn't help us much. And the "capital" in capital goods specifically means tangible physical things as opposed to money.
So that's adorable that you have your own personal bubble of reality where words have special and exclusive meaning, but it doesn't help the debate much.
My uncle inherited the family farm by Carrol Iowa. Pigs, corn, and soybeans. He's had to get out of the pig business as 20,000 pigs wasn't a large enough operation to compete with the big boys. He's had to buy up a lot of land as the tools have gotten bigger and the overhead is getting slimmer. There's been a lot of consolidation and there are certainly large corporate megafarms, but don't imagine every farm in the midwest is that way.
Get some perspective. Most farms are family owned. But the ones that aren't are HUUUUGE. ...it'd be interesting to see what percentage of US farmland is corporate.
Anyway, the fucking point is that small boutique farms can own their equipment, while the bulk of our food is grown by people who don't. And this issue with property ownership, right-to-repair, and license agreements is more tricky where the status quo is that most farmers lease their equipment and don't actually own it.
Regardless of what type of farm it is, how big it is, or if the vehicle isn't even associated with farming, I would say that this system of selling/renting with attached strings and license agreements is fucking bullshit. They're selling you a piece of luggage with a locked container inside that you don't have the right to open. Fuck that noise. And if the big name players get into the habit of preferring to rent and control their walled garden of equipment, then that sort of rent-seeking needs to be shot down.
Void all warranties. Open all locks. Power to the people. You have the right to recycle. If you don't actually own your property, why did you buy it?
Ask for details instead of vague hate-mongering and I typically get two things: They run away like this coward, or they dive off the deep end of crazy.
"It's all the GAYS fault!"
"What's the gay's fault?"
*poof gone*
And very occasionally I get an insightful critic. I've come to accept that treating women like real people and equals is the cause for the raise in divorces. And this is a consequence of the sexual revolution and hippies and women's rights movement. A "casulty" would be an accurate description. And it's an acceptable one. It sucks, sure, but the alternative is to re-instate half the populace as second class citizens, which sucks MORE.
So far though, I'm really not seeing any negative consequence to treating gay people like people. It opens the way for the next even more fucked up group to get the limelight, but as long as it doesn't affect me, so what? And maybe we'll see rich dudes marrying each other not because they're gay or in love, but just for the legal purposes or tax benefits. We'll see.
You mean, back when creating the next generation of mankind was considered to have social value?
No, in the 1970's, there was neo-Malthusianism which worried about overpopulation. Creating too many of the next generation was a worry and all sorts of crazy people had crazy ideas about how to fix it. Except that there's no need. Educating women and developing the nation staves off the birth rates and all the developed nations without sizable immigration now actually have a worry about declining population.
When marriage was a mechanism by which society supported this valuable task?
That's still in effect. A lot of people still marry and have kids.
And the divorce rate shot up and peaked by the end of the 70's. So if you were trying to appeal to some sort of "death of marriage" vibe, you need to back BEFORE the release of the Star Trek TOS.
But go figure, treat women like they're people and you have more divorces.
Before the economic support of marriage became something people are simply entitled to?
Before the whatnow? People can still file jointly you shmuck.
Before the important role of wives and mothers was completely devalued,
Wow. What happened between you and your mum? Or was it something with your wife? How exactly has motherhood been devalued?
and treated as offering no more social value than a young man who takes it up the bum?
Lots of old guys take it up the bum too. But yes, gay couples should be treated the same as straight couples. How does that affect the worth of your wife at all? Did you read in a paper that some gay dudes were married and you looked over at your wife and declared that she was worthless now?
You know what? I think I will [rewatch the original Star Trek]
...You realize that it was, and IS, a raging hard-on for a liberal utopia. They had a russian, an Irishman, a jap, and a BLACK LADY on the bridge of a ship. Working together. What madness. It was a post-scarcity society, no more money. The Federation is an idealized United Nations. It was officially hands off towards pre-warp civilizations, ie, don't be colonial asshats to the natives. But OH NOES, gay people. That's just one step too far.
Well now you're definitely an idiot for making an appeal to THAT particular authority.
UBI should cover your needs
Right, that's the goal. But I don't think people really understand what what constitutes human "needs". Your "needs" aren't anything more than an efficiency apartment in a massive housing complex without heat or A/C, and 1500 calories a day via pasta, rice, or soybean paste plus a multi-vitamin. And all this is in a place that's cheap to house people. If you want the luxuries of flavor, entertainment, communications, or choosing what part of the country you live in, you're going to have to work for it.
$10K doesn't cover rent in San Francisco or New York. But you can buy a house in Detroit for $18,000. It might be real nice to be able to head out of town and walk in the mountains outside of Denver, but that's a nice thing that other people want and that raises the price of those homes. Hawaii is a great place. And while everything is more expensive, they still have a lot of bums.
If you take a look at that Maslow chart of needs, and price out the minimum, it's not that much. And it's REALLY not glorious.
And one of the arguments against UBI is that it will fail to encourage people to spend their money (and government money) on useful things like education and nutrition. It will be left to them to buy what they want. Because with UBI, pell grants, college subsidies, and all the other welfare programs go away. Individuals are smart, but maaaaaaan people can be dumb.
The USA taxes income, property, and sales. (And a special low rate for capital gains). And others, but the bulk is income tax. Wealth all by itself is not taxed. Although you can expect to lose a portion of it every year due to inflation. Since that's bloody stupid, most people with money have some sort of investment portfolio.
There's no reason to think that would change. The money you have in the bank has already been taxed. If your "asset" is a house, then sure, property taxes can go up. If it's all in Apple stock, then sure, capital gains taxes could go up.
Anyone talking about confiscating your money (or "the means of production") should probably be shown the door.
What the fuck are you smoking?
The lie inherent right from the get go[; that] money is a resource[. I]t is not, capital is an illusion,
First off, "money" and "capital" are separate concepts. You're talking about money. Capital actually DOES refer to real things. Goods, machines, roads, schools, and ALSO money. I get what you're saying, you're just technically wrong on this.
Second, yes, money is just a placeholder. A tool to help mange it all. The US$ is backed by nothing but hopes and dreams and 11 carriers and a bunch of nukes.
The resources are there, an administrative means of allocating and distributing those resources just needs to be found.
...We HAVE that. The "administrative means" we use to figure out who gets what is called "capitalism"*, with a healthy dose of taxes and socialism and welfare because we're not the monsters from the robber-baron era. You even mention this because you know that it's the
*The -ism portion is important. Capital and capitalism are two different things. Related, of course, but it's the difference between saying a friend is fucked up, and saying friendship is fucked up.
but wealth is only fun if it is based upon fairness and generosity
HohoHO! Said like someone who has never been wealthy. No kiddo, the vast majority of history shows us that most wealthy people have PLENTY of fun regardless of how fair and generous you'd consider their source of wealth.
Sweet jesus. ALL of that rant can be boiled down to "I don't like capitalism". The rest is a mad ranting of a laughable caricature of rich people. Even the actual robber-barons weren't that monstrous.
It's not constructive. Do you get that? This sort of stark-raving-mad soap-boxing doesn't help tear down capitalism. It doesn't support socialism. It doesn't feed the hungry or raise up the poor. (Poor as in actually physically poor. The group that don't have the resources they need and not some pseudo-intellectual "everything is a metaphor and the fault of capitalism" sort of poor). To be blunt, you're hurting the cause. The catch phrase "Eat the Rich" is supposed to be humorous.
No, not all rich people are psychopathic monsters. There are certainly monsters out there. Real-deal psychopaths that are so focused on climbing that corporate ladder that they don't pause to think about what the thousands of unemployed will do when they liquidate. There is a sector of business where those people excel. But they do not represent all rich people any more than dirty hippies strung out on heroin represent all socialists. The vast bulk of all of us want a stable functioning society. A good swath of them, they vote republican, they don't want to hand out money to people who aren't working for it. Another good swath of people, like you and I, see that we are really wealthy as a whole and there's no real reason people should be so screwed by technological improvements and shipping jobs overseas, and helping people down on their luck will end up helping all of us in the long run. There's currently a debate about which group is more correct and what kind of society we want to be.
But the answer is not to tear it all down. We've seen how that goes in the communist states. But the current system of welfare and subsidies and grants and scholarships and services are CERTAINLY not in the philosophical camp of capitalism. We've ALSO tried a more pure form of capitalism in the late 1800's. It sucked for most people. Dear god man, we've got to learn from the big lessons of the past. Take a look at the Nordic countries. Very socialist, but they STILL HAVE MONEY and they still operate by people working and getting paid in cash. MONEY, as a placeholder for wealth, WORKS.
Get your shit together. You're making us look bad.
"The US space program.. inspires ... white supremacy" - DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )
Ah, there's a good reminder that some people are simply crazy and disconnected from reality.
Frankly it's good to have these sort of people. Imagine if we censored him. Every post you'd see would have SOME semblance of truth. It's like that sanitary paradox. Kids gotta get a little dirty to develop an immune system. People have to come into contact with sheer balls-in-the-blender levels of crazy just so they maintain a certain level of skepticism.
how President Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle program.
I like Carter. But I guess no one is perfect.
tl;dr: They told Carter that the shuttle would help spy on and verify Russia's compliance with arms treaties.
President Carter was not all that enthused about human space flight to begin with, adhering to the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe.
...what? Robotic space probes are most certainly adequate for exploring the universe. At least they are now. In 1978, they had just launched Voyager 1, which was a huge success, right? So it was looking pretty true THEN as well. Jimmy was right on the ball. Just how and when was this crazy notion of sending tools into space discredited?
But ANYWAY, the space shuttle program was a bit of a boondogle. It wasn't worthless, and it achieved a great many things. But all in all, there were better solutions and it never delivered on it's big selling points:
- It wasn't cheaper and faster
- It never captured Russian satellites and brought them back to earth for reverse engineering
Back in 1970, to win Department of Defense support at the program’s outset, NASA had redesigned the shuttle to launch national security payloads. Now, that decision paid off
...Why put the payload inside of the shuttle on top of rocket and not just put the payload on top of a rocket like before and after the shuttle?
The *only* advantage to object oriented design is more intuitive code organization,
Code modules are .c and .h files in a folder. As packaged and organized as C++ classes. The namespace collision issue never seemed that big to me. If they collide, your naming scheme sucks. For the love of god don't name anything as generic as Init(). Names are important, in any language.
There is no problem that one can solve with object oriented design that cannot also be solved with structs and function pointers.
Yeah, that's called a Turing Tarpit. It's definitely possible, but you probably shouldn't do it.
C is pretty terrible at making GUIs. The GTK can do it, but MAAAAAAN is it more of a chore than the C++ GUI makers. Which is so far the only place I've really seen OO shine. I've heard the mantra that it can be useful all over the place, but so far all I've seen is clusterfuck after clusterfuck.
Inside the Democratic Party? He's barely a member himself. He only registered as a democrat in 2015 so he could run on the ticket. The 30 years before that he was an independent.
And I highly doubt he's going to try and fracture the Democrats by forming a new party. I mean, that's turned out SO WELL for the GOP and the TEA partiers.
I've little doubt that once Hilary gets into power, she'll simply ignore him. Hell, now that she has his endorsement, and the primaries are all but over, it's the traditional time to flip your party the bird and move yourself on over to the moderate center to appeal to the swing voters.
What I want to know is what does a political mover and shaker do once they reach the top? When there's no longer anyone you have to kiss up to.
Oracle, where tech goes to die.
It's big business that's in the business simply because they're big and locked into a lot of big clients that can't conceive of doing without them. Why would they innovate? That's hardly part of their business model. Let me put that another way: Their sales team is more important than their engineers. But at least they're not SAP.
It was a death knell for Java when Oracle bought Sun.
new software languages (Pascal, C, C++, Objective C),
...None of those are new. In the least.
new programming models and notation (flow-charts, data-flow diagrams, UML)
No one actually gives a fuck if you use a dotted line or a dashed line. UML, while marginally useful, is overblown. (And all of those are UML diagrams).
"Staying current" is essentially like doing the final year of university non-stop.
Eh, more like doing a final year of uni every 5-10 years.
And yeah... Do it at work. "Hey boss, remember $THATHORRIBLEPROBLEMWEHAD? How about we try $NEWTHING to fix/avoid it?" Get paid to learn.
What kind of tyrannical sweatshop doesn't let you talk to people outside of work?
Do you know what "Primary School" is? Because in the USA, it means grades K-8. Secondary education is the last 4 years of compulsory school. "High school".
My high school was doing alright in 1998 before new math, when it offered AP calculus... to SENIORS.
No, there was no calculus in 6th grade. What the fuck are you smoking?
Also,
Should he feel sorry that he thought the murder/rape of a jogger in a public park merited the death penalty?
YES! This is a perfect example of why the death penalty is a bad idea. The justice system is imperfect and death is not revoke-able.
He advocated that 5 kids be put to death. He did that even before they were found guilty. It turns out that they were innocent and Trump was simply wrong. If he had his way, 5 innocents would have been killed.
Damn straight that's the sort of thing you apologize for.
Sweet Jesus, this again?
This thing isn't being built by philosophers, it's being built by engineers. Any oh shit scenario results in the car decreasing speed and coming to a stop. No swerving. No leaping off bridges. No moral dilemmas between measuring the value of a bus full of nuns over the value of it's passengers. The policy is straight forward: Something goes wrong, hit the brakes. This is what they teach everyone outside of California. And because there's also some pedantic asshole who thinks he knows how to drive better than everyone else, it's not going to slam on the brakes, it's going to try and stop in a controlled manner. Stop, just stop. Unjerk the knee. You don't have to comment on it. If someone or something is in your fully legal right of way, then they'd be fucked just as much as if a human were driving. The car will hopefully see it and stop. Just like a real boy.
The one exception I've found is rail-road tracks. Oh shit still means slow down and stop. But if you find yourself on tracks, creep off. If there's an accident and you can't get off the tracks, hell, that warrants a call to 911.
Who are these people that keep trying to desperately insert some moral/philosophical/AI dilemma into self-driving cars?
Public opinion certainly didn't help, despite how fair and impartial the court ties to be.
Trump had nothing to do with that or with convicting them or setting the sentence.
... He ran his advertisement on May 1st, 1989. The trials and convictions happened in August and December 1990.
A reminder that the penal system serves several purposes and has several goals: Punishing people who break the law. Reforming law-breakers into upstanding citizens. Protecting upstanding citizens from dangerous elements. Threatening upstanding citizens with dire consequences if they break the law. For way too long, prisons were all about punishment, which doesn't serve much purpose, especially if the general populous doesn't know of it. Reforming criminals is much better. But you can't forget it's other goals. Some won't be reformed for long. Some people don't need reforming, but can't be let off scot-free. Some people will never be reformed. Some people we simply need to remove from society, one way or another. Like those Columbine kids. The psychology report said one could have been reformed, but the other was simply a psycho. So if you have someone who did something wrong, really wrong, and he's completely unrepentant and the professionals tell you that he'll never get better. What do you do with him? You remove him from the society which he would harm.
Personally, I'd like to see a stronger mental health program. Yeah, the asylums were rife with abuse and tales of horror, but the alternative is throwing them back into society or into prison, which is hardly better.
You dodge a great deal by announcing that only one of the 200+ was on Kerry's small boat.
Your talking point is: " the testimony of the people who actually were there".
Were these people "actually there"? Only one was in his boat, and he wasn't present for the events which SBVT dispute, and even he claims Kerry earned it fair and square. You stress how closely the guys in the boat know each other. THREE people in the boat who SAW Kerry earn his medal say that all these people who WEREN'T in the boat are full of shit.
They're free to have their opinions about how soldiers should talk about the war they were in. Their views on nationalism, patriots, and duty are as valid as anyone else's. But these fuckers claimed Kerry wasn't a war hero, just as you've done, and none of them were there. And they spouted lies just as much as you did when you tried to claim the swift-boaters were "actually there".
If SBVT claimed only "We disagree with his actions after the war", then they would not be liars. But that's not their story.
and then blasted all the other men in uniform as vile war criminals
I believe you'll find the bulk of his rhetoric at the time was directed against the policies of the vietnam war, and the leadership that send young men to die instead of painting all soldiers as war criminals.
He helped run the Winter Soldier Investigation. America didn't know the brutality that was happening over there. They asked soldiers to recount the tales of horror:
They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
—John Kerry testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1971
...Are you going to tell me these things didn't happen? That all these veterans are all liars?
John Kerry IS a war hero. He fought heroically. He earned a medal for it. You can argue whether or not he deserved to get it, but you weren't there and you don't know jack shit. Neither were any of these folk in the SBVT. And then Kerry came back from the war and tried his damned best to stop the war. To show how wrong it was. He didn't try and prosecute any soldiers, he didn't throw his superiors under the bus, he wanted the leaders to stop the war. To withdraw. To end the policies which caused this sort of terror. That's not hypocrisy.
Support our troops, bring them home.
You would have preferred he engage in "quieter" activities in DC. Pft. He wasn't allowed in DC at the time. He wasn't a politician, he was a protester. But what got us out of the war? Was it a backroom deal between high-ranking muckity mucks? Or was it the unpopularity of the war? Who made it unpopular? Which was a more effective way of getting the USA out of Vietnam. (Which, sadly, lead to a whole fuckton of atrocities. We left our allies to get slaughtered.)
THEY are criticized with claims they were not all close personal associates with first-hand experience with Kerry
They are criticized for making claims about him not deserving his silver star, not being a war hero, and exaggerating events to which they did not witness. They were in the war. They saw parts of it. Many claim they never saw any war-crimes. And that's a very believable story. Many of them probably didn't. But Kerry compiled a very well sourced report tha
the testimony of the people who actually were there
Of the ~250 swift boat sailors who were part of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", exactly ONE actually served on Kerry's boat, Stephen Gardner, who wasn't there when Kerry earned his medals.
His other crew members disputed SBVT's allegations, calling them "totally false" (Drew Whitlow), "garbage" (Gene Thorson), and "a pack of lies" (Del Sandusky).
One other SBVT member, Larry Clayton Lee, was present when Kerry earned his silver star. Here's the interview with him. Even he admits that Kerry earned that medal, but he doesn't like what he said after the war.
Now, Kerry DID come back and he said it was a terrible war. And that pissed off a lot of people and earned him praise from other people. And that's the crux of the matter. It's politics. I think fighting Vietnam was a terrible idea, start to finish. But this group of SBVT group was funded, organized, and pushed by republican party insiders, and they spouted totally false garbage and lies.
Now stop spewing your partisan bullshit you coward.