I liked the concept behind Ventura, but the actual execution demonstrates several key problems that Ventura-like candidates have.
Specific to Ventura, he's just not that bright of a guy. While this does add some everyman quality to him, his lack of formal education and lack of political savvy hurt him, even if the hurt was largely from a "he's a nutjob" public relations perspective, he still was forced to rely heavily on more seasoned pols who have a long-term career (and loyalty!) investment in the existing system.
More generally, when a party of Ventura's small size gains executive office, the major parties undermine him as much as possible in the legislature. And his lack of legislative standing often forces him to either ally with or work with a major party to accomplish anything, spoiling much of the promise of a third-party victory. In some situations you can work both sides to your benefit, but real-world experience shows that generally the parties will react to the threat to their power.
And given the fairly broad ideological umbrellas of both major parties, even third party candidates tend to be caught in the gravitational pull of at least one of them. Ventura was accused by many of being a closet Democrat and was fairly closely linked with a number of Democrats.
Amazon is about as bad, although I think accessories and related items are allowed, just no receivers, barrels, cylinders or other "gun parts."
I think if you could somehow clone Craigslist but as "BrowningsList" that allowed guns, you'd have a real success that would probably bankrupt GunsAmerica and GunBroker, especially for those states that allow person-person transfers between residents.
The biggest problem I have anymore are totally automated systems that play a recorded message. I don't know why, but I get these more than anything else from all comers (lowlifes who really ought not be calling, charities, politicians, etc), and I thought they were illegal in Minnesota, too.
What's even more irritating is that the people behind this technology have it mastered to leave a perfect message on your answering machine, and if you do pick up the phone there's no way to challenge them and tell them to take you off their list (which pre-DNC was actually pretty successful for me). If they leave a phone number, I call back and demand to be removed from their list and if I get any static ("That's another department" or "we can't process that request") I contact the AG's office with the company name and tell them they are not honoring DNC requests.
The charities are really the worst, probably since they are using pro fund raisers who pass on a small percentage for the privilege of shilling under a "charitable" name.
I thought it was funny that Windows Mobile doesn't have C&P either.
Regardless of what the iPhone can do, it doesn't have a physical keyboard, so I'm not interested. The on-screen keyboard doesn't accomodate me very well from the versions I've tried.
The nonsense about clean burning, etc may be some refined byproduct, like say LP gas which is generally clean burning enough that it can be used for engines used in indoors environments where gasoline would be a problem, like fork lifts.
The question is whether their process is net positive in energy creation vs. energy usage.
And a neighbor who has has a history of military misadventures in Scandinavia.
The current Russian mafia/intelligence/government mash-up in power in Russia is a little scary.
I'd like to believe its just a matter of a little sort-of-useful nationalism to get the country back on track after the fairly rough post-communist era, but part of me also thinks its a government with the guiding spirit of nationalism, the abilities of the KGB/FSA and the morality and tolerance of organized crime.
I know lots of Russians are enjoying a sense of national pride and an improved personal financial picture, but I also think that the governments totalitarian instincts aren't exactly reassuring.
....is a businessman, and any confusion that he has or supports a political ideology other than Rupert Murdoch is entirely misguided. IIRC, he was more than flexible with one of his satellite operations in order to win support/backing from the Chinese Communist government.
Murdoch would have supported Stalin if it got his TV networks watched in the gulag!
Attention all DJB software fans, here's another chance to champion the superiority of DJB's software. Don't forget to include positive commentary on the licensing and patch status.
...up until recently, generations of police officers learned how to use physical force to gain compliance. And generally speaking they knew how to do it with minimal force and maximal compliance -- a friend who is a 2nd generation police officer had his father demonstrate some of the techniques, and it was fairly amazing how well he could hurt me without actually "hurting" me (ie, leaving lasting marks, breaking bones, bruising, etc.)
The gripe my friend the cop has is that with all the touchy-feely policing (and the expensive court payouts) they have, you really can't gain compliance through physical force the way you used to be able to, so they are largely left with their guns and their tasers. And since the tasers aren't lethal, they're somehow considered "OK" to use for any problem solving short of killing someone.
I think they should start allowing the police to carry saps and clubs again as well as teach them physical force and stop letting them use a taser as a universal problem solver.
You can already get the Linux flavor of your choice and install Wine on it.
Which is kind of like saying you can buy a Shelby Cobra kit and drop any engine you want in it. Sure you *can*, but when the competition is factory-built Ford that works out the door, who's going to do it outside of hardcore hobbyists who always had choices anyway?
Yes, there are desktop Linux distros that ship with it ready to go (more or less), but the fact that they *still* haven't supplanted Windows in any meaningful way means that it must not be as good a solution as advocates have made it out to be.
Right, at what point did Ian Smith -- regardless of his racial politics -- have thugs beat and rape the supporters of his opposition as Mugabe has done? At what point did the French decide to massacre 800,000 Tutsis?
It's easy to parrot a litany of colonial misery, partly because so much of it took place in less enlightened times and we forget how badly even the native citizens of the colonial powers homelands fared; "Dickensian" isn't just a description that applies to a book. It furthers the disingenuousness of the argument to use Afrikaans apartheid as if it was the sole standard by which Colonial governments were judged by.
Yet at the same time, Western liberals are far too willing to give the governments of Africa a pass on oppression and behavior, especially with comments like but that's the choice the people in some African countries have made; under apartheid they had no such choices. Would you give the Serbians that same slack as they made the "choices" to empower thugs like Radovan Karadzic?
Independence day and the focus on the military gets me a little riled up.
Maybe you should pull your head from your ass and realize we wouldn't have Independence day if it wasn't for military force. Building houses for poor people wouldn't have chased Cornwallis back across the Atlantic, but raising an army and killing British soldiers sure did.
And if your dipshit friend really can make $6000 a month, he should apply his talents where they're needed and donate the difference to his favorite charity. He is economically underutilized, which actually generates less overall wealth than the work he does now, regardless of its perceived moral quality. In the long run he will be far more valuable economically and thus morally working for that $6k a month and giving it away.
they give them "money for the poor" with the condition of investing in birth control (because we can't have poor people have many kids, think of the poor single mothers with 10 children!).
Have you paid any fucking attention the political situation in Africa? I don't care if Bill Gates spends every red cent he's ever earned and then pimps Melinda out on the side to earn more, you can't fix Africa's problems by throwing money the *symptoms* there so long as populations run unchecked and the governments are run by thugs and liars like Mugabe and Mbeki and the many others ensconced in luxury and propped up by the military and tribal loyalists.
Long-term improvements in public health cannot take place with deeply corrupted governments and periodic and/or never ending civil wars. Yet this is exactly what you get when you add 2 parts tribal economics and 1 part overpopulation and shake violently. Rural agriculture is highly dominated by tribal social structures and as population increases (often due to well-intentioned and up-front beneficial health campaigns), the land system cannot produce any more farms to match the growth in population.
So you end up with mass migrations to urban areas, where, surprise-surprise, there are no jobs, housing or any other infrastructure and you end up with vast slums and shantytowns which become the fertile ground in which militias are recruited from, either to suppress their fellow citizen or to join in arms against whatever leadership is in power this time.
The long-derided missionary culture that aimed to save Africans from themselves through the word of God is as misguided and counter-productive as the current crop of do-gooders also looking to save Africans from their misery. The sad and painful irony is that most Zimbabweans would have been better off with Ian Smith's government than Mugabe's, yet we continue to vilify colonial governments.
That's the key thing right there -- if its so core that you use it constantly, its always a better bet to buy it versus renting it.
I mentioned CS3 because as a home wanker who uses it for stupid stuff and junk I upload to Cafe Press, $1200 or whatever they want for it is just ridiculous. But fortunately I qualified for an academic discount that made it worthwhile to buy.
Except you can't save your money and buy everything, unless you regularly spend $$$$ a year on software.
If I only have 10-20 hours a year of use out of a piece of software, it's totally foolish to buy a $1200 app that gets revved every 18 months, including no more bugfixes after the new release.
...as long as they figure out reasonable, flexible and innovative rental terms that don't end up being way more than buying outright.
I'd love to be able to install $Expensive_Application and then buy blocks of hours that I could use the program. There's no way I can ever pay off the cost of, say, Adobe Design Suite CS3 bought outright, but if $100 would buy me 10 hours of use of the most current version, it'd totally be worth it versus spending $89 on some crippled version or a knockoff that bombs out or doesn't work right.
It happens here in Minneapolis, but the bonus for us is since we are a cold weather climate and natural gas is the predominate heating method and even foreclosed houses are nominally heated to keep the pipes from freezing, we get houses that BLOW UP because there's often soft copper used to plumb the gas to hot water heaters and the dumb tweakers stealing the pipe don't know and leave the gas open.
A 3 day hold period is a great idea, even better would be 7 day jail sentences for owners, officer or other officials of recycling companies on a per-offense basis for accepting stolen copper. I have a hard time seeing how they "don't know its stolen" when 2 tweakers in a '93 Pontiac show up with 400 lbs of brand-new 3/0 copper wire. I think they just don't care.
My dad's 73 and retired, but his part-time-get-out-of-the-house job is being the lead driver on auto convoys to/from Kingman, AZ. Dad says "average" speeds are about 80 mph (which in my experience is only slightly about the average for the stretch of 53 between Kingman and the Hoover Dam).
He's also just finished 8 months of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and still has so much strength in his hands that if he grasps my wrists I can't get out (and I'm 6'1, 225 lbs).
So what's this about 70 year olds that are weak and infirm and can't drive to boot?
I keep hearing "McCain is too old" and then read other age-relative statements about VP selection and wonder who age really matters to. Yes, at the extreme, I worry about the ages of the candidates but only to the extent that it is extreme and has other impacts (eg, health or lack of experience).
But are there people out there who are like "Gee, he's too old" even when the candidate's age has no bona fide health impact? Do the same people think "Gee, he's too young" about someone younger? Obviously there's no health issue, but experience could matter a lot.
I don't think of age outside of physical health, but I worry from the way the media portrays McCain's age that we're falling a little victim to the cult of youth.
But In-N-Out is successful not because they offer limited choices, but because they do such a good job with the choices they offer. I'm not sure if not offering chicken, salads, etc makes their burgers better, but I know they do what they do better.
...did it a couple of times and realized that (a) snooping was largely a waste of time, there wasn't much to snoop for, and that (b) the risks were high and if they got caught, it'd be all over.
It's been said that "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail" except of course when they do.
Solar only works when the sun shines and the water is in the Pacific ocean, not in the Arizona desert. We're talking producing and distributing hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water, derived from sea water, per day.
I had read somewhere (Wired?) that transmission and generation losses were close to 50%, although it appears that its actually closer to 10% for pure transmission losses. But a nuclear power plant could use the steam as a direct drive energy source for pumping and a direct heat source for distillation, eliminating many of the conversion losses (admittedly gaining back the other 40% may not be in the cards), with leftover steam capacity used for electricity generation.
I like the concept of solar (and wind), but its just not reliable 24/7, is highly energy intensive to make devices for (ie, solar cells, windmills, etc) and advocates tend to make up for the lack of baseload generation and geographic reach with what end up being large-scale lifestyle/standard of living changes, which aren't really possible without the concomitant socialist/totalitarian ideology.
Furthermore, we really ought to be advancing our knowledge of nuclear power generation systems. Its like free energy in many ways and evaluating nuclear as an option by evaluating our 40 year old nuclear technology is foolish.
Nuclear power could provide a lot of benefits outside of its low carbon footprint for electricity generation.
How about a 2 gigawatt plant dedicated to pumping and desalianting seawater for the Southwest's water supply? Not only could this provide a primary source for drinking water, it would provide the immense environmental benefit of stopping the drain-to-dry on the rivers and aquifers.
How about a 2 gigawatt plant dedicated to producing hydrogen from seawater and allowing a bulk source of hydrogen? The hydrogen could be shipped elsewhere and used for electricity generation, fuel for more mobile vehicles, etc.
Building the plants and using the majority of the power on site has big benefits, too, since you won't lose half your power to transmission loss -- it's like getting a free power plant.
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I liked the concept behind Ventura, but the actual execution demonstrates several key problems that Ventura-like candidates have.
Specific to Ventura, he's just not that bright of a guy. While this does add some everyman quality to him, his lack of formal education and lack of political savvy hurt him, even if the hurt was largely from a "he's a nutjob" public relations perspective, he still was forced to rely heavily on more seasoned pols who have a long-term career (and loyalty!) investment in the existing system.
More generally, when a party of Ventura's small size gains executive office, the major parties undermine him as much as possible in the legislature. And his lack of legislative standing often forces him to either ally with or work with a major party to accomplish anything, spoiling much of the promise of a third-party victory. In some situations you can work both sides to your benefit, but real-world experience shows that generally the parties will react to the threat to their power.
And given the fairly broad ideological umbrellas of both major parties, even third party candidates tend to be caught in the gravitational pull of at least one of them. Ventura was accused by many of being a closet Democrat and was fairly closely linked with a number of Democrats.
Amazon is about as bad, although I think accessories and related items are allowed, just no receivers, barrels, cylinders or other "gun parts."
I think if you could somehow clone Craigslist but as "BrowningsList" that allowed guns, you'd have a real success that would probably bankrupt GunsAmerica and GunBroker, especially for those states that allow person-person transfers between residents.
Then I'll be real interested.
My Black Mototola Q doesn't. Although I think its stuck on WM5 due to Verizon.
The biggest problem I have anymore are totally automated systems that play a recorded message. I don't know why, but I get these more than anything else from all comers (lowlifes who really ought not be calling, charities, politicians, etc), and I thought they were illegal in Minnesota, too.
What's even more irritating is that the people behind this technology have it mastered to leave a perfect message on your answering machine, and if you do pick up the phone there's no way to challenge them and tell them to take you off their list (which pre-DNC was actually pretty successful for me). If they leave a phone number, I call back and demand to be removed from their list and if I get any static ("That's another department" or "we can't process that request") I contact the AG's office with the company name and tell them they are not honoring DNC requests.
The charities are really the worst, probably since they are using pro fund raisers who pass on a small percentage for the privilege of shilling under a "charitable" name.
I thought it was funny that Windows Mobile doesn't have C&P either.
Regardless of what the iPhone can do, it doesn't have a physical keyboard, so I'm not interested. The on-screen keyboard doesn't accomodate me very well from the versions I've tried.
That's what it sounds like to me.
The nonsense about clean burning, etc may be some refined byproduct, like say LP gas which is generally clean burning enough that it can be used for engines used in indoors environments where gasoline would be a problem, like fork lifts.
The question is whether their process is net positive in energy creation vs. energy usage.
And a neighbor who has has a history of military misadventures in Scandinavia.
The current Russian mafia/intelligence/government mash-up in power in Russia is a little scary.
I'd like to believe its just a matter of a little sort-of-useful nationalism to get the country back on track after the fairly rough post-communist era, but part of me also thinks its a government with the guiding spirit of nationalism, the abilities of the KGB/FSA and the morality and tolerance of organized crime.
I know lots of Russians are enjoying a sense of national pride and an improved personal financial picture, but I also think that the governments totalitarian instincts aren't exactly reassuring.
....is a businessman, and any confusion that he has or supports a political ideology other than Rupert Murdoch is entirely misguided. IIRC, he was more than flexible with one of his satellite operations in order to win support/backing from the Chinese Communist government.
Murdoch would have supported Stalin if it got his TV networks watched in the gulag!
Attention all DJB software fans, here's another chance to champion the superiority of DJB's software. Don't forget to include positive commentary on the licensing and patch status.
Thanks!
...up until recently, generations of police officers learned how to use physical force to gain compliance. And generally speaking they knew how to do it with minimal force and maximal compliance -- a friend who is a 2nd generation police officer had his father demonstrate some of the techniques, and it was fairly amazing how well he could hurt me without actually "hurting" me (ie, leaving lasting marks, breaking bones, bruising, etc.)
The gripe my friend the cop has is that with all the touchy-feely policing (and the expensive court payouts) they have, you really can't gain compliance through physical force the way you used to be able to, so they are largely left with their guns and their tasers. And since the tasers aren't lethal, they're somehow considered "OK" to use for any problem solving short of killing someone.
I think they should start allowing the police to carry saps and clubs again as well as teach them physical force and stop letting them use a taser as a universal problem solver.
You can already get the Linux flavor of your choice and install Wine on it.
Which is kind of like saying you can buy a Shelby Cobra kit and drop any engine you want in it. Sure you *can*, but when the competition is factory-built Ford that works out the door, who's going to do it outside of hardcore hobbyists who always had choices anyway?
Yes, there are desktop Linux distros that ship with it ready to go (more or less), but the fact that they *still* haven't supplanted Windows in any meaningful way means that it must not be as good a solution as advocates have made it out to be.
Right, at what point did Ian Smith -- regardless of his racial politics -- have thugs beat and rape the supporters of his opposition as Mugabe has done? At what point did the French decide to massacre 800,000 Tutsis?
It's easy to parrot a litany of colonial misery, partly because so much of it took place in less enlightened times and we forget how badly even the native citizens of the colonial powers homelands fared; "Dickensian" isn't just a description that applies to a book. It furthers the disingenuousness of the argument to use Afrikaans apartheid as if it was the sole standard by which Colonial governments were judged by.
Yet at the same time, Western liberals are far too willing to give the governments of Africa a pass on oppression and behavior, especially with comments like but that's the choice the people in some African countries have made; under apartheid they had no such choices. Would you give the Serbians that same slack as they made the "choices" to empower thugs like Radovan Karadzic?
Independence day and the focus on the military gets me a little riled up.
Maybe you should pull your head from your ass and realize we wouldn't have Independence day if it wasn't for military force. Building houses for poor people wouldn't have chased Cornwallis back across the Atlantic, but raising an army and killing British soldiers sure did.
And if your dipshit friend really can make $6000 a month, he should apply his talents where they're needed and donate the difference to his favorite charity. He is economically underutilized, which actually generates less overall wealth than the work he does now, regardless of its perceived moral quality. In the long run he will be far more valuable economically and thus morally working for that $6k a month and giving it away.
they give them "money for the poor" with the condition of investing in birth control (because we can't have poor people have many kids, think of the poor single mothers with 10 children!).
Have you paid any fucking attention the political situation in Africa? I don't care if Bill Gates spends every red cent he's ever earned and then pimps Melinda out on the side to earn more, you can't fix Africa's problems by throwing money the *symptoms* there so long as populations run unchecked and the governments are run by thugs and liars like Mugabe and Mbeki and the many others ensconced in luxury and propped up by the military and tribal loyalists.
Long-term improvements in public health cannot take place with deeply corrupted governments and periodic and/or never ending civil wars. Yet this is exactly what you get when you add 2 parts tribal economics and 1 part overpopulation and shake violently. Rural agriculture is highly dominated by tribal social structures and as population increases (often due to well-intentioned and up-front beneficial health campaigns), the land system cannot produce any more farms to match the growth in population.
So you end up with mass migrations to urban areas, where, surprise-surprise, there are no jobs, housing or any other infrastructure and you end up with vast slums and shantytowns which become the fertile ground in which militias are recruited from, either to suppress their fellow citizen or to join in arms against whatever leadership is in power this time.
The long-derided missionary culture that aimed to save Africans from themselves through the word of God is as misguided and counter-productive as the current crop of do-gooders also looking to save Africans from their misery. The sad and painful irony is that most Zimbabweans would have been better off with Ian Smith's government than Mugabe's, yet we continue to vilify colonial governments.
The suite is such an integral part of my business
That's the key thing right there -- if its so core that you use it constantly, its always a better bet to buy it versus renting it.
I mentioned CS3 because as a home wanker who uses it for stupid stuff and junk I upload to Cafe Press, $1200 or whatever they want for it is just ridiculous. But fortunately I qualified for an academic discount that made it worthwhile to buy.
Except you can't save your money and buy everything, unless you regularly spend $$$$ a year on software.
If I only have 10-20 hours a year of use out of a piece of software, it's totally foolish to buy a $1200 app that gets revved every 18 months, including no more bugfixes after the new release.
...as long as they figure out reasonable, flexible and innovative rental terms that don't end up being way more than buying outright.
I'd love to be able to install $Expensive_Application and then buy blocks of hours that I could use the program. There's no way I can ever pay off the cost of, say, Adobe Design Suite CS3 bought outright, but if $100 would buy me 10 hours of use of the most current version, it'd totally be worth it versus spending $89 on some crippled version or a knockoff that bombs out or doesn't work right.
It happens here in Minneapolis, but the bonus for us is since we are a cold weather climate and natural gas is the predominate heating method and even foreclosed houses are nominally heated to keep the pipes from freezing, we get houses that BLOW UP because there's often soft copper used to plumb the gas to hot water heaters and the dumb tweakers stealing the pipe don't know and leave the gas open.
A 3 day hold period is a great idea, even better would be 7 day jail sentences for owners, officer or other officials of recycling companies on a per-offense basis for accepting stolen copper. I have a hard time seeing how they "don't know its stolen" when 2 tweakers in a '93 Pontiac show up with 400 lbs of brand-new 3/0 copper wire. I think they just don't care.
My dad's 73 and retired, but his part-time-get-out-of-the-house job is being the lead driver on auto convoys to/from Kingman, AZ. Dad says "average" speeds are about 80 mph (which in my experience is only slightly about the average for the stretch of 53 between Kingman and the Hoover Dam).
He's also just finished 8 months of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and still has so much strength in his hands that if he grasps my wrists I can't get out (and I'm 6'1, 225 lbs).
So what's this about 70 year olds that are weak and infirm and can't drive to boot?
I keep hearing "McCain is too old" and then read other age-relative statements about VP selection and wonder who age really matters to. Yes, at the extreme, I worry about the ages of the candidates but only to the extent that it is extreme and has other impacts (eg, health or lack of experience).
But are there people out there who are like "Gee, he's too old" even when the candidate's age has no bona fide health impact? Do the same people think "Gee, he's too young" about someone younger? Obviously there's no health issue, but experience could matter a lot.
I don't think of age outside of physical health, but I worry from the way the media portrays McCain's age that we're falling a little victim to the cult of youth.
But In-N-Out is successful not because they offer limited choices, but because they do such a good job with the choices they offer. I'm not sure if not offering chicken, salads, etc makes their burgers better, but I know they do what they do better.
...did it a couple of times and realized that (a) snooping was largely a waste of time, there wasn't much to snoop for, and that (b) the risks were high and if they got caught, it'd be all over.
It's been said that "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail" except of course when they do.
Solar only works when the sun shines and the water is in the Pacific ocean, not in the Arizona desert. We're talking producing and distributing hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water, derived from sea water, per day.
I had read somewhere (Wired?) that transmission and generation losses were close to 50%, although it appears that its actually closer to 10% for pure transmission losses. But a nuclear power plant could use the steam as a direct drive energy source for pumping and a direct heat source for distillation, eliminating many of the conversion losses (admittedly gaining back the other 40% may not be in the cards), with leftover steam capacity used for electricity generation.
I like the concept of solar (and wind), but its just not reliable 24/7, is highly energy intensive to make devices for (ie, solar cells, windmills, etc) and advocates tend to make up for the lack of baseload generation and geographic reach with what end up being large-scale lifestyle/standard of living changes, which aren't really possible without the concomitant socialist/totalitarian ideology.
Furthermore, we really ought to be advancing our knowledge of nuclear power generation systems. Its like free energy in many ways and evaluating nuclear as an option by evaluating our 40 year old nuclear technology is foolish.
Nuclear power could provide a lot of benefits outside of its low carbon footprint for electricity generation.
How about a 2 gigawatt plant dedicated to pumping and desalianting seawater for the Southwest's water supply? Not only could this provide a primary source for drinking water, it would provide the immense environmental benefit of stopping the drain-to-dry on the rivers and aquifers.
How about a 2 gigawatt plant dedicated to producing hydrogen from seawater and allowing a bulk source of hydrogen? The hydrogen could be shipped elsewhere and used for electricity generation, fuel for more mobile vehicles, etc.
Building the plants and using the majority of the power on site has big benefits, too, since you won't lose half your power to transmission loss -- it's like getting a free power plant.