I knew I would get modded troll for it, but like Carlin I feel a need to express my non-PC opinions. You don't break down politically correct boundaries by keeping quiet about it. I also knew someone out there would share my opinion and appreciate it. Thanks.
I love showing Carlin stand-ups to my ultra-PC friends. They always act like he's just joking about this shit, that he doesn't really mean it. They laugh because they think it's absurdly untrue. I laugh because I think it's absurdly true.
Why is it a good thing? If people want to commit suicide, then we should let them rather than try and talk them out of it.
If suicide has ever crossed your mind then I wholeheartedly encourage you to go through with it. You're not special, you're not unique, you're not important; and if you require someone lying to you saying that you are to motivate you to keep living then just blow you fucking brains out already. I've known hobos who have nothing to live for but they keep living anyway because they appreciate life. If some prick has such a low appreciation for life that they want to off themselves, then that's probably what's best for them and everyone else.
And yes, I've known people who have committed suicide. Known people who attempted and later regretted it. That doesn't change anything (I know someone is going to give me some cry-baby reply about how their loved one committed suicide before I get modded down to -1 for pissing all over the stupid ass 'life-is precious' values so many cling to). To paraphrase George Carlin: I've got too much shit to do to commit suicide.
Bay has received five MTV Movie Awards: Best Movie and Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet for Transformers, Best Action Scene for Pearl Harbor, Best Action Scene for Bad Boys II, and Best Action Scene for The Rock.[citation needed] In 1994, Bay was honored by the Directors Guild of America with an award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials.[61] Michael Bay received the ShoWest 2009 Vanguard Award for excellence in filmmaking at the confab of theater owners.[62]
Don't you know, quality is all about how realistic it sounds when one Transformer crashes into another. They say the voice of God can be heard in the sound of 7.1 Michael Bay explosions.
You make it sound like a good story and good acting matter. You clearly don't know what 'quality' means. Read some Pirsig, he'll school you and when you understand 'quality' you'll realize that the greatest movie ever made is a tie between The Island, Bad Boys II, and Pearl Harbor.
For someone like me, without an HD TV, surround sound, or cable; Netflix is great.
Furthermore, I would much rather forego your 'quality' media experience considering it cost you thousands of dollars that I can spend that money on things like my car or next semester. Even if I could afford the hardware, there's no way I could afford to buy every movie on Blu-Ray (or pay for an HD cable subscription). Between Netflix and TheDailyShow.com, I get what I want.
Speaking of quality vs. convenience, don't you just find it abominable that anyone would own any car other than a Mazarati? Just disgusting, I tell you. When did we as a people lower our standards so low? To think that people are driving cars without built-in seat warmers makes me want to puke.
Isn't the whole point of science to make the impossible possible?
The Wright Brothers with your attitude: 'It's never been done before, even if in theory it could work. It's dangerous and costly, so we better stick with bicycles.'
I find it hard to believe that harvesting oceanic energy efficiently is impossible just because there are many challenges associated with it and it has yet to be done successfully. It'll never happen if no one tries.
Actually Robin didn't steal from anyone, he was fictitious. The real men that the bard songs based Robin Hood off of stole from the rich and gave to themselves.
Sometime over the past few decades, people have forgotten that major cultural changes were preceded by essays, speeches, and persuasive arguments, endorsed by displays of public support. Now, "protesting" has turned into an orgy of destruction and disruption, in the hopes of extorting change.
I think you've forgotten all the major cultural changes that occurred through riots and revolutions conducted by illiterate masses. I'm not saying that the written word hasn't brought about its fair share of cultural change throughout history, but you're kind of guilty of a 'good old days' fallacy. One of the greatest cultural changes in history was the hellenistic period, which was a result of Alexander the Great conquering every piece of land he ever saw through bloody warfare.
Sure, Voltaire's writings preceded the French Revolution. But it was the unwashed masses who made the revolution happen by causing utter chaos and violently overthrowing the government. Voltaire's writings would have amounted to doodley squat without a famine to make the illiterate masses desperate (bread and circuses fail when you run out of bread).
Another example: Josef Stalin, a career criminal, joined the Bolsheviks because he was a criminal; not because he had a special place in his heart for the writings of Karl Marx. We all know how that turned out.
I could go on with many more examples, but the point is that none of what's going on with Anonymous is historically unprecedented. Cultural change is rarely, if ever, a civil and clean process. Maybe they are doing more harm than good, I dunno, I disagree with a lot of what they do. But I do know that social change won't occur by writing about it.
The short version for people: when your credit card (or the information on it) is stolen and charges are racked up, the bank owes that money, not you. It's part of their advertisements.
I don't think the complaint is against Apple or the low number of jobs the data center is providing. The complaint is against politicians who make incorrect claim that this is a sustainable economy for the future. I've heard Obama boast about how Facebook represents the corporate America of the future on more than more than one occasion. But when you look at the amount of wealth created by Facebook it greatly differs from other big industries like the automotive companies because Facebook requires far less employees to generate a comparable level of income. And this applies to many tech companies. Another thing I remember reading is how Steve Jobs, when he returned to Apple, one of the first things he did to lower costs was attempt to mechanize the manufacturing process as much as possible. Not that it really mattered, because only a few years after that Apple exported those manufacturing jobs to China . . .
Personally, I don't see how a socialist state that supports people who do nothing isn't inevitable. People rail against welfare and whine about how unfair it is that someone should be rewarded for doing nothing, but someone has to do nothing when there's only so much to do. What other options do we have? Become luddites so it takes twenty men with shovels to dig a hole rather than one man with a machine?
At the very least maximum work weeks should be shortened drastically. Not only will this require companies to hire more people to do the same amount of work, but it will also give people more free time in which they can spend more money on recreation, thus creating a greater market for recreation. Our economic model is completely unsustainable for the future.
Actually, you bring up an interesting point. My biggest problem with/. isn't the moderation. I like that. My eyes jump to anything modded 'informative' as I've learned so much from those posts throughout the years. My problem is with the freakin' summaries and article selection process. Something needs to be done about that because it's only gotten worse throughout the years. I have a feeling a lot of it is from publications trolling us - trying to get/.ed on purpose. I bet every online publication has at least an intern who is tasked with trying to get their stories on the front page of/., Digg, and all the other article repositories. As they've gotten better at this, the quality of/. has degraded. Then there's the issue of moronic summaries. "New study finds blah blah blah." Click the article, "New study suggests blah blah blah. Evidence is weak, further testing required."
When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us. We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders, change our laws, and shape our own destiny.
I disagree. The biggest problem is that there's no -1 uninformative, -1 ignorant, or -1 fallacy mod, so people use 'troll,' 'flamebait,' and 'overrated' as replacements. I'll admit, I'm guilty of doing that, but people who post fallacious arguments need to be downmodded, in my opinion (I usually hand out 'overrated').
And here you are, guilty of it: I'll admit, I've downmodded people (probably you) for the "keep drugs banned" comments in discussions about marijuana and then they cry about it. But don't tell me that marijuana is bad for people, that's incorrect. Don't tell me that marijuana causes greater social harm than its prohibition, that's ignorant. Almost any anti-marijuana stance is founded on fallacy, ignorance, or hatred (of the poor, minorities, hippies, etc.). If you believe that further research is required to make conclusions about marijuana then you're not looking at the research that's already been done. Furthermore, I'm anything but a libertarian, I'm a socialist. I would agree with you that cocaine should not be legal - and there's no amount of research on that subject that could sway my opinion one way or the other. It's physically, mentally, and socially detrimental. Yes, some libertarians would disagree with that opinion (they may say that a person should be free to make detrimental choices) but I don't worry about them downmodding me for expressing it because I'll do so in an informed manner without fallacy.
But by saying "there might be good reasons to keep drugs banned" you've committed a huge fallacy and, like I've said, fallacies deserve to be downmodded. You've just put cocaine and marijuana in the same category. To get pedantic about it, you've actually just claimed that there's good reason to ban caffeine, aspirin, and a whole plethora of other substances (perhaps you meant illicit drugs?).
Perhaps it should occur to you that you're being downmodded for good reasons that are unknown to you.
Again, this sentence: "Probably the second worst would be the pro-legalization libertarians that can't fathom that there might be good reasons to keep drugs banned pending further research." -- that contains enough for me to downmod your otherwise decent post. It's fallacious, it makes assumptions about your opponents (that they're libertarians), and you call them ignorant ("they can't fathom").
btw - I have mod points right now and I chose to chew you out rather than use them on you. Another pro-tip: use of the word "fanboy" anywhere in a post is likely to attract my downmod and deservedly so - it's a cheap shot attack on another's views. Spelling it 'fanboi,' unless in jest, results in an automatic downmod.
Wow. So what you're saying is that you work for Microsoft? If not it sounds like you desperately want to.
I find this whole attitude of yours to be downright disgusting. "ME ME ME!" That's a good summary of your post. This is the whole reason corporations like Microsoft become the evil behemoths they are, it's the reason so few people are willing to become whistleblowers when they have a moral obligation to do so, and the reason government bureaucracies are so broken and inefficient. Because sometimes doing the right thing requires sacrifices and there are people like you who say, "I'm not going to be the martyr of this world."
What's so disgusting about your worldview isn't that you comply (or wish to, you didn't make it clear) in immoral activities. It's the fact that you do so well aware that it's immoral, and well aware that you only do so because of your own selfishness. You'd make Ayn Rand proud.
btw - the mafia can use the same justifications you just used. "So what if extortion shouldn't exist, I make my bread and butter off extortion so extortion should continue to exist."
Microsoft can hire all the engineers they want and sue every company they want, but that doesn't change the fact that any kid with a computer can write software, too. It doesn't change the fact that, with the internet, distribution costs for software are essentially zero. It doesn't change the fact that one of the major cornerstones of the Microsoft monopoly, Office, is losing ground to FOSS alternatives and won't be able to hold out much longer. Windows is the next pillar to fall.
I'm no luddite, but I find it hard to deny that technology in general kills jobs. Secretaries still exist, for example, but not as many (%-wise). Computers (and interns, har har) make them pretty pointless. A PC for a file cabinet, a smartphone/laptop to access that file cabinet from anywhere, voice-mail to take messages. There are many professions where a secretary was once essential - but technology has supplanted this job in most cases.
When it comes to manufacturing, a one-word explanation works: robots.
I think in the late 90s we hit the top of a bell curve. Up until that point more technology meant more jobs. But now we're the victims of our own success, and it's ridiculous to think that our old economic models will continue to be relevant. Labor is usually a business' most costly expense. A high efficiency business minimizes labor costs. In the past this was often achieved by exploiting labor in some way. Now it's being done by eliminating labor.
I'll address this before someone brings it up: I understand that car vs. horse and buggy analogy. That's not relevant to the current situation. Jobs are being replaced by machines on a broad scale across a broad range of markets: From mechanical jobs such as manufacturing to intellectual jobs such as analyzing stocks. This isn't one technology supplanting another. This is technology supplanting people.
Clinging to proprietary software to keep software jobs around is futile. It's like imposing tariffs to keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S. It may have some short-term effect but open source will eventually take over just as robots will eventually finish taking over the manufacturing sector. Not to mention, even with proprietary software, once it attains a certain level of functionality and stability the programmers are no longer necessary. You don't need a programmer to click 'copy.'
Ten years ago a lot of geeks scoffed at Bill Joy, called him a luddite or at the very least a pessimist. His manifesto was inspired by Kurzweil and The Unabomber, a couple of crazies, fer god's sake. But every year the reality of our situation becomes more clear, the future really doesn't need us.
Fascist totalitarianism controls the market through fear and blatant corruption. Socialist totalitarianism controls the market through ownership. In the fascist system the market is 'free' because it's privately owned. 'Free' has many meanings.
You cite Mussolini and that's all well and good, but I cite the original Mr. Fascism, Machiavelli. Of course, you probably knew I could easily retort your weak sauce argument and that's why you posted AC. I didn't claim that Orwell was a socialist because that was my interpretation of his fiction. I made that claim because Orwell himself made it:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.
What's more ironic is that Orwell was a socialist himself. Interpreting 1984 as an attack on socialism is a gross misunderstanding - one that's taught by many teachers in the U.S. It's an attack on totalitarianism. Fascism, for example, is a free-market totalitarian system. Oceania was socialist because it represented Soviet Communism, the good intentions of Lenin warped into the totalitarianism of Stalin. It's important to note that Emmanuel Goldstein represented Trotsky, an opponent of Stalin's totalitarianism and Hitler's fascism.
"So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice to laugh or cry. No animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need." - Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
This cognitive scientist seems to me to be only looking at a specific type of joke - the sleight of hand ones. He doesn't seem to account for the dark humorists - guys like Kurt Vonnegut, Danny DeVito, Bobcat Goldthwait or Woody Allen - who confront their audience with things that are so sad that all you can do is laugh so you don't cry. He also doesn't account for why people laugh for joy (or cry tears of joy). In Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction A Man Without a Country, he does a great job of analyzing humor and it doesn't require cognitive science (I went to grab it but realized I loaned it to a friend).
Some other things that need to be accounted for: Why people with Asperger's syndrome tend to lack humor or have very strange senses of humor. Why does my friend's wife consider all my favorite comedians to be offensive and unfunny (how can anyone not enjoy Robin Williams' stand-up?) and I consider her sources of comedy to be banal and unfunny? We were watching Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, for instance, and my friend and I were laughing so hard we had to pause the movie a couple times until we could compose ourselves. During that same scene his wife was on the verge of tears, calling us sick fucks for laughing. She thought the movie was a very sad drama! She couldn't even sit through Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Some questions are best left for philosophy and the question of humor is definitely one of them. Understanding what the brain does when a person is confronted with a humorous situation doesn't really explain why people have a sense of humor and what humor really is. All the examples here are the sleight of hand jokes, and his conclusion that they're funny because they're basically brain farts was something that Vonnegut already concluded about these jokes without studying the human brain. Then there's also toilet humor - completely unaccounted for in this guy's examples.
Vonnegut claimed this to be the funniest joke in the world, which is one of the sleight of hand type jokes this guy is focussing on:
"Last night I had this crazy dream where I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up, the blanket was gone!"
That might work in a big city where multiple options exist, but rural customers don't have that luxury. Often there is only one option available, or very few; usually the cable company and the phone company - neither of which will be reasonable on price unless you bundle with their other services (that you often don't need/want).
So basically, the options for "stop being their customers" include:
1. Don't use the internet at home. That just isn't feasible for most, or they wouldn't be shopping for an ISP in the first place.
2. Move. Again, just not feasible for most, especially considering the state of the housing market and the fact that most people who live in rural areas don't want to live in a city.
Not to mention the fact boycotting a cable/telephone monopoly isn't going to hurt their business in the least bit. And this isn't exclusive to the countryside - suburban areas are also often limited by monopolies on telecommunication services.
Don't you love it when a sentences starts with "Using the same logic. .." and then continues with a false analogy?
One of the many reasons that logic should be taught in elementary school. I find it sad that we expect kids to learn mathematics and to write argumentative essays but we never teach them the structure these tasks depend on. It's like teaching someone who doesn't understand algebra a programming language. Most people don't even know what 'logic' means but they use the term all the time.
When will people stop blaming slavery for the current status of African-Americans?
Ascending the social hierarchy isn't easy. Sometimes it's impossible. I wasn't blaming the plight of the black man on slavery - I was blaming all the barriers they have faced on this continent, including slavery. Others include Jim Crow laws, competing with established wealth, lack of educational opportunities, cultural issues (some poor people, regardless of race, don't want to ascend the social hierarchy b/c they view it as not worth it or they would feel out of place in wealthy society), and just plain economics (concerning social mobility: currently more young people are failing to achieve the economic success of their parents than ones that are matching/exceeding it - so the trend is downward, making any upward mobility an extreme outlier). There's also just plain old fashioned racism at play.
A summation of my original post: There are few black entrepreneurs because few black people come from wealthy families. African-American roots as slaves do play into this, but that's much to far in the past to throw all the blame at it. Had it not been for the fact that blacks were second class citizens - a status supported by culture and governance - until the 1960s, then they probably wouldn't be so disproportionately poor. The 1960s weren't very long ago.
Anyway, I would never place blame for something so historically and socially complex on a single event. Your ramblings about single parent families are irrelevant to everything I said b/c I covered that:
This is a very important point that you make. Everyone I know who is into tech had a computer in the home from a very young age. Most black people I know aren't into the inner workings of technology. I know one black guy who's a bit of a computer geek and he's had a computer in his home since a very young age. When I was a kid - the 80s/90s - having a computer wasn't exactly common unless your family had money.
I'm not going to bother to look up the statistics b/c everyone knows it's true: black families in America tend to live in poverty. It's a result of how they got here in the first place and the fact that they haven't had legal equality until the 1960s. I would be willing to bet that tech entrepreneurs by and large were raised in middle class or upper class families - that they tend to have parents who went to college. It's not black or white, it's rich or poor. Thus it looks black/white because a disproportionate amount of blacks are poor. I'm sure somebody can find an example of some rag-to-riches tech entrepreneur, but that's the exception, not the rule. And why does tech have anything to do with it? There aren't many black entrepreneurs in general (no, I don't consider LeBron James an entrepreneur, no matter how many companies he starts up).
Slashdot Mirror
I knew I would get modded troll for it, but like Carlin I feel a need to express my non-PC opinions. You don't break down politically correct boundaries by keeping quiet about it. I also knew someone out there would share my opinion and appreciate it. Thanks.
I love showing Carlin stand-ups to my ultra-PC friends. They always act like he's just joking about this shit, that he doesn't really mean it. They laugh because they think it's absurdly untrue. I laugh because I think it's absurdly true.
Why is it a good thing? If people want to commit suicide, then we should let them rather than try and talk them out of it.
If suicide has ever crossed your mind then I wholeheartedly encourage you to go through with it. You're not special, you're not unique, you're not important; and if you require someone lying to you saying that you are to motivate you to keep living then just blow you fucking brains out already. I've known hobos who have nothing to live for but they keep living anyway because they appreciate life. If some prick has such a low appreciation for life that they want to off themselves, then that's probably what's best for them and everyone else.
And yes, I've known people who have committed suicide. Known people who attempted and later regretted it. That doesn't change anything (I know someone is going to give me some cry-baby reply about how their loved one committed suicide before I get modded down to -1 for pissing all over the stupid ass 'life-is precious' values so many cling to). To paraphrase George Carlin: I've got too much shit to do to commit suicide.
Just to prove my point (from Wiki):
Bay has received five MTV Movie Awards: Best Movie and Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet for Transformers, Best Action Scene for Pearl Harbor, Best Action Scene for Bad Boys II, and Best Action Scene for The Rock.[citation needed] In 1994, Bay was honored by the Directors Guild of America with an award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials.[61]
Michael Bay received the ShoWest 2009 Vanguard Award for excellence in filmmaking at the confab of theater owners.[62]
GREATNESS INCARNATE
Don't you know, quality is all about how realistic it sounds when one Transformer crashes into another. They say the voice of God can be heard in the sound of 7.1 Michael Bay explosions.
You make it sound like a good story and good acting matter. You clearly don't know what 'quality' means. Read some Pirsig, he'll school you and when you understand 'quality' you'll realize that the greatest movie ever made is a tie between The Island, Bad Boys II, and Pearl Harbor.
For someone like me, without an HD TV, surround sound, or cable; Netflix is great.
Furthermore, I would much rather forego your 'quality' media experience considering it cost you thousands of dollars that I can spend that money on things like my car or next semester. Even if I could afford the hardware, there's no way I could afford to buy every movie on Blu-Ray (or pay for an HD cable subscription). Between Netflix and TheDailyShow.com, I get what I want.
Speaking of quality vs. convenience, don't you just find it abominable that anyone would own any car other than a Mazarati? Just disgusting, I tell you. When did we as a people lower our standards so low? To think that people are driving cars without built-in seat warmers makes me want to puke.
Isn't the whole point of science to make the impossible possible?
The Wright Brothers with your attitude: 'It's never been done before, even if in theory it could work. It's dangerous and costly, so we better stick with bicycles.'
I find it hard to believe that harvesting oceanic energy efficiently is impossible just because there are many challenges associated with it and it has yet to be done successfully. It'll never happen if no one tries.
Actually Robin didn't steal from anyone, he was fictitious. The real men that the bard songs based Robin Hood off of stole from the rich and gave to themselves.
Sometime over the past few decades, people have forgotten that major cultural changes were preceded by essays, speeches, and persuasive arguments, endorsed by displays of public support. Now, "protesting" has turned into an orgy of destruction and disruption, in the hopes of extorting change.
I think you've forgotten all the major cultural changes that occurred through riots and revolutions conducted by illiterate masses. I'm not saying that the written word hasn't brought about its fair share of cultural change throughout history, but you're kind of guilty of a 'good old days' fallacy. One of the greatest cultural changes in history was the hellenistic period, which was a result of Alexander the Great conquering every piece of land he ever saw through bloody warfare.
Sure, Voltaire's writings preceded the French Revolution. But it was the unwashed masses who made the revolution happen by causing utter chaos and violently overthrowing the government. Voltaire's writings would have amounted to doodley squat without a famine to make the illiterate masses desperate (bread and circuses fail when you run out of bread).
Another example: Josef Stalin, a career criminal, joined the Bolsheviks because he was a criminal; not because he had a special place in his heart for the writings of Karl Marx. We all know how that turned out.
I could go on with many more examples, but the point is that none of what's going on with Anonymous is historically unprecedented. Cultural change is rarely, if ever, a civil and clean process. Maybe they are doing more harm than good, I dunno, I disagree with a lot of what they do. But I do know that social change won't occur by writing about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YawagQ6lLrA&feature=related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrong_direction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)
Well, it was better than the Ridley Scott one with Russell Crowe. How that duo couldn't top the Kevin Costner disaster is beyond me.
The short version for people: when your credit card (or the information on it) is stolen and charges are racked up, the bank owes that money, not you. It's part of their advertisements.
I don't think the complaint is against Apple or the low number of jobs the data center is providing. The complaint is against politicians who make incorrect claim that this is a sustainable economy for the future. I've heard Obama boast about how Facebook represents the corporate America of the future on more than more than one occasion. But when you look at the amount of wealth created by Facebook it greatly differs from other big industries like the automotive companies because Facebook requires far less employees to generate a comparable level of income. And this applies to many tech companies. Another thing I remember reading is how Steve Jobs, when he returned to Apple, one of the first things he did to lower costs was attempt to mechanize the manufacturing process as much as possible. Not that it really mattered, because only a few years after that Apple exported those manufacturing jobs to China . . .
Personally, I don't see how a socialist state that supports people who do nothing isn't inevitable. People rail against welfare and whine about how unfair it is that someone should be rewarded for doing nothing, but someone has to do nothing when there's only so much to do. What other options do we have? Become luddites so it takes twenty men with shovels to dig a hole rather than one man with a machine?
At the very least maximum work weeks should be shortened drastically. Not only will this require companies to hire more people to do the same amount of work, but it will also give people more free time in which they can spend more money on recreation, thus creating a greater market for recreation. Our economic model is completely unsustainable for the future.
Actually, you bring up an interesting point. My biggest problem with /. isn't the moderation. I like that. My eyes jump to anything modded 'informative' as I've learned so much from those posts throughout the years. My problem is with the freakin' summaries and article selection process. Something needs to be done about that because it's only gotten worse throughout the years. I have a feeling a lot of it is from publications trolling us - trying to get /.ed on purpose. I bet every online publication has at least an intern who is tasked with trying to get their stories on the front page of /., Digg, and all the other article repositories. As they've gotten better at this, the quality of /. has degraded. Then there's the issue of moronic summaries. "New study finds blah blah blah." Click the article, "New study suggests blah blah blah. Evidence is weak, further testing required."
When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us. We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders, change our laws, and shape our own destiny.
-- President Barack Obama
I disagree. The biggest problem is that there's no -1 uninformative, -1 ignorant, or -1 fallacy mod, so people use 'troll,' 'flamebait,' and 'overrated' as replacements. I'll admit, I'm guilty of doing that, but people who post fallacious arguments need to be downmodded, in my opinion (I usually hand out 'overrated').
And here you are, guilty of it: I'll admit, I've downmodded people (probably you) for the "keep drugs banned" comments in discussions about marijuana and then they cry about it. But don't tell me that marijuana is bad for people, that's incorrect. Don't tell me that marijuana causes greater social harm than its prohibition, that's ignorant. Almost any anti-marijuana stance is founded on fallacy, ignorance, or hatred (of the poor, minorities, hippies, etc.). If you believe that further research is required to make conclusions about marijuana then you're not looking at the research that's already been done. Furthermore, I'm anything but a libertarian, I'm a socialist. I would agree with you that cocaine should not be legal - and there's no amount of research on that subject that could sway my opinion one way or the other. It's physically, mentally, and socially detrimental. Yes, some libertarians would disagree with that opinion (they may say that a person should be free to make detrimental choices) but I don't worry about them downmodding me for expressing it because I'll do so in an informed manner without fallacy.
But by saying "there might be good reasons to keep drugs banned" you've committed a huge fallacy and, like I've said, fallacies deserve to be downmodded. You've just put cocaine and marijuana in the same category. To get pedantic about it, you've actually just claimed that there's good reason to ban caffeine, aspirin, and a whole plethora of other substances (perhaps you meant illicit drugs?).
Perhaps it should occur to you that you're being downmodded for good reasons that are unknown to you.
Again, this sentence: "Probably the second worst would be the pro-legalization libertarians that can't fathom that there might be good reasons to keep drugs banned pending further research." -- that contains enough for me to downmod your otherwise decent post. It's fallacious, it makes assumptions about your opponents (that they're libertarians), and you call them ignorant ("they can't fathom").
btw - I have mod points right now and I chose to chew you out rather than use them on you. Another pro-tip: use of the word "fanboy" anywhere in a post is likely to attract my downmod and deservedly so - it's a cheap shot attack on another's views. Spelling it 'fanboi,' unless in jest, results in an automatic downmod.
Wow. So what you're saying is that you work for Microsoft? If not it sounds like you desperately want to.
I find this whole attitude of yours to be downright disgusting. "ME ME ME!" That's a good summary of your post. This is the whole reason corporations like Microsoft become the evil behemoths they are, it's the reason so few people are willing to become whistleblowers when they have a moral obligation to do so, and the reason government bureaucracies are so broken and inefficient. Because sometimes doing the right thing requires sacrifices and there are people like you who say, "I'm not going to be the martyr of this world."
What's so disgusting about your worldview isn't that you comply (or wish to, you didn't make it clear) in immoral activities. It's the fact that you do so well aware that it's immoral, and well aware that you only do so because of your own selfishness. You'd make Ayn Rand proud.
btw - the mafia can use the same justifications you just used. "So what if extortion shouldn't exist, I make my bread and butter off extortion so extortion should continue to exist."
Microsoft can hire all the engineers they want and sue every company they want, but that doesn't change the fact that any kid with a computer can write software, too. It doesn't change the fact that, with the internet, distribution costs for software are essentially zero. It doesn't change the fact that one of the major cornerstones of the Microsoft monopoly, Office, is losing ground to FOSS alternatives and won't be able to hold out much longer. Windows is the next pillar to fall.
I'm no luddite, but I find it hard to deny that technology in general kills jobs. Secretaries still exist, for example, but not as many (%-wise). Computers (and interns, har har) make them pretty pointless. A PC for a file cabinet, a smartphone/laptop to access that file cabinet from anywhere, voice-mail to take messages. There are many professions where a secretary was once essential - but technology has supplanted this job in most cases.
When it comes to manufacturing, a one-word explanation works: robots.
I think in the late 90s we hit the top of a bell curve. Up until that point more technology meant more jobs. But now we're the victims of our own success, and it's ridiculous to think that our old economic models will continue to be relevant. Labor is usually a business' most costly expense. A high efficiency business minimizes labor costs. In the past this was often achieved by exploiting labor in some way. Now it's being done by eliminating labor.
I'll address this before someone brings it up: I understand that car vs. horse and buggy analogy. That's not relevant to the current situation. Jobs are being replaced by machines on a broad scale across a broad range of markets: From mechanical jobs such as manufacturing to intellectual jobs such as analyzing stocks. This isn't one technology supplanting another. This is technology supplanting people.
Clinging to proprietary software to keep software jobs around is futile. It's like imposing tariffs to keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S. It may have some short-term effect but open source will eventually take over just as robots will eventually finish taking over the manufacturing sector. Not to mention, even with proprietary software, once it attains a certain level of functionality and stability the programmers are no longer necessary. You don't need a programmer to click 'copy.'
Ten years ago a lot of geeks scoffed at Bill Joy, called him a luddite or at the very least a pessimist. His manifesto was inspired by Kurzweil and The Unabomber, a couple of crazies, fer god's sake. But every year the reality of our situation becomes more clear, the future really doesn't need us.
Free market doesn't mean free society.
Fascist totalitarianism controls the market through fear and blatant corruption. Socialist totalitarianism controls the market through ownership. In the fascist system the market is 'free' because it's privately owned. 'Free' has many meanings.
You cite Mussolini and that's all well and good, but I cite the original Mr. Fascism, Machiavelli. Of course, you probably knew I could easily retort your weak sauce argument and that's why you posted AC. I didn't claim that Orwell was a socialist because that was my interpretation of his fiction. I made that claim because Orwell himself made it:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.
What's more ironic is that Orwell was a socialist himself. Interpreting 1984 as an attack on socialism is a gross misunderstanding - one that's taught by many teachers in the U.S. It's an attack on totalitarianism. Fascism, for example, is a free-market totalitarian system. Oceania was socialist because it represented Soviet Communism, the good intentions of Lenin warped into the totalitarianism of Stalin. It's important to note that Emmanuel Goldstein represented Trotsky, an opponent of Stalin's totalitarianism and Hitler's fascism.
"We laugh so we may not cry" - Roger Ebert
"So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice to laugh or cry. No animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need." - Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
This cognitive scientist seems to me to be only looking at a specific type of joke - the sleight of hand ones. He doesn't seem to account for the dark humorists - guys like Kurt Vonnegut, Danny DeVito, Bobcat Goldthwait or Woody Allen - who confront their audience with things that are so sad that all you can do is laugh so you don't cry. He also doesn't account for why people laugh for joy (or cry tears of joy). In Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction A Man Without a Country, he does a great job of analyzing humor and it doesn't require cognitive science (I went to grab it but realized I loaned it to a friend).
Some other things that need to be accounted for: Why people with Asperger's syndrome tend to lack humor or have very strange senses of humor. Why does my friend's wife consider all my favorite comedians to be offensive and unfunny (how can anyone not enjoy Robin Williams' stand-up?) and I consider her sources of comedy to be banal and unfunny? We were watching Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, for instance, and my friend and I were laughing so hard we had to pause the movie a couple times until we could compose ourselves. During that same scene his wife was on the verge of tears, calling us sick fucks for laughing. She thought the movie was a very sad drama! She couldn't even sit through Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Some questions are best left for philosophy and the question of humor is definitely one of them. Understanding what the brain does when a person is confronted with a humorous situation doesn't really explain why people have a sense of humor and what humor really is. All the examples here are the sleight of hand jokes, and his conclusion that they're funny because they're basically brain farts was something that Vonnegut already concluded about these jokes without studying the human brain. Then there's also toilet humor - completely unaccounted for in this guy's examples.
Vonnegut claimed this to be the funniest joke in the world, which is one of the sleight of hand type jokes this guy is focussing on:
"Last night I had this crazy dream where I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up, the blanket was gone!"
I read this on a bottle of Vitamin Water where they change the order of the letters and only keep the first and last ones correct.
That might work in a big city where multiple options exist, but rural customers don't have that luxury. Often there is only one option available, or very few; usually the cable company and the phone company - neither of which will be reasonable on price unless you bundle with their other services (that you often don't need/want).
So basically, the options for "stop being their customers" include:
1. Don't use the internet at home. That just isn't feasible for most, or they wouldn't be shopping for an ISP in the first place.
2. Move. Again, just not feasible for most, especially considering the state of the housing market and the fact that most people who live in rural areas don't want to live in a city.
Not to mention the fact boycotting a cable/telephone monopoly isn't going to hurt their business in the least bit. And this isn't exclusive to the countryside - suburban areas are also often limited by monopolies on telecommunication services.
Yeah, it's so long ago my parents remember it. . .
Don't you love it when a sentences starts with "Using the same logic. . ." and then continues with a false analogy?
One of the many reasons that logic should be taught in elementary school. I find it sad that we expect kids to learn mathematics and to write argumentative essays but we never teach them the structure these tasks depend on. It's like teaching someone who doesn't understand algebra a programming language. Most people don't even know what 'logic' means but they use the term all the time.
When will people stop blaming slavery for the current status of African-Americans?
Ascending the social hierarchy isn't easy. Sometimes it's impossible. I wasn't blaming the plight of the black man on slavery - I was blaming all the barriers they have faced on this continent, including slavery. Others include Jim Crow laws, competing with established wealth, lack of educational opportunities, cultural issues (some poor people, regardless of race, don't want to ascend the social hierarchy b/c they view it as not worth it or they would feel out of place in wealthy society), and just plain economics (concerning social mobility: currently more young people are failing to achieve the economic success of their parents than ones that are matching/exceeding it - so the trend is downward, making any upward mobility an extreme outlier). There's also just plain old fashioned racism at play.
A summation of my original post: There are few black entrepreneurs because few black people come from wealthy families. African-American roots as slaves do play into this, but that's much to far in the past to throw all the blame at it. Had it not been for the fact that blacks were second class citizens - a status supported by culture and governance - until the 1960s, then they probably wouldn't be so disproportionately poor. The 1960s weren't very long ago.
Anyway, I would never place blame for something so historically and socially complex on a single event. Your ramblings about single parent families are irrelevant to everything I said b/c I covered that:
It's not black or white, it's rich or poor.
This is a very important point that you make. Everyone I know who is into tech had a computer in the home from a very young age. Most black people I know aren't into the inner workings of technology. I know one black guy who's a bit of a computer geek and he's had a computer in his home since a very young age. When I was a kid - the 80s/90s - having a computer wasn't exactly common unless your family had money.
I'm not going to bother to look up the statistics b/c everyone knows it's true: black families in America tend to live in poverty. It's a result of how they got here in the first place and the fact that they haven't had legal equality until the 1960s. I would be willing to bet that tech entrepreneurs by and large were raised in middle class or upper class families - that they tend to have parents who went to college. It's not black or white, it's rich or poor. Thus it looks black/white because a disproportionate amount of blacks are poor. I'm sure somebody can find an example of some rag-to-riches tech entrepreneur, but that's the exception, not the rule. And why does tech have anything to do with it? There aren't many black entrepreneurs in general (no, I don't consider LeBron James an entrepreneur, no matter how many companies he starts up).