You really think news organizations' reputations are baseless and that journalism has been rendered obsolete because the president-to-be lets us know everything we ought to know in his manic bursts of communication through Twitter and YouTube?
You seem to suffer from a strange combination of cynicism and credulousness.
This is some random joker with a blog who simply listed all major news organizations as fake because they "told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction". He provides no sources to back up this claim. These news sites did not, in reality, tell us this; they told us that this was claimed by the US government, which was true.
538 simply performed a statistical analysis of the polls. They gave Trump around a 30% chance of winning and wrote multiple stories emphasizing that it wasn't a done deal. They were not "wrong".
None of your links or story titles lead to any real news site from any country. The subtext of your post is that we should believe you and other random people and sites on the internet instead of recognizable news organizations from around the world. This is silly.
It does seem stupid at first glance, but I have found a number of songs available on YouTube which are not available for (legal) streaming or download anywhere else. The video typically consists of a still image of the album artwork, so the extra bandwidth is negligible. And with YouTube Red (the paid service that also gets rid of ads and comes bundled with Google Play Music), you can download videos instead of streaming, so there's no hit to your data plan.
Then, for good measure you have words that sound the same but, of course, are spelled differently, like knight and night or were and where.
"Were"/"where" don't sound the same in any English pronunciation I'm aware of. "Where"/"wear"/"ware" do sound the same, as do "were"/"whir", at least in most accents where the "h" in "wh" is silent.
Your general point that English spelling is madness is correct, though.
I'd say most native English speakers are well aware of this. It's why hardly anyone can write a sizable amount of text without spelling errors except insufferable pedants, and even then only when sober and with a couple of rounds of proofreading.
It is the American people who continue to elect stupid, lazy, and evil politicians..
I may post sometimes as an Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't mean I don't go back later to see what has come of what I have wrought.
Are you a citizen of the U.S.? It's not clear from your comment, but let me tell you: I voted for Obama, after 16 years of the Bush family of traitors and thieves in the White House, but not because I bought into Obama's hype, but because there were no other alternatives. Romney? Worse than the Bush traitors ever were. Third-party candidate? May as well stay away from the polls.
Yes, I'm a U.S. citizen and voted for Obama (and Democrats in general) for similar reasons, though I can't agree that Romney would have been worse than Bush Jr.
You see, I see it now: Our system of government is, in many ways, no better than the bullshit pseudo-democracies we see in some countries of the world, where there may be elections, but there's one candidate on the ballot, and it doesn't matter if you vote for them or not, they still get elected.
This is where you're going off the rails and stating rampant hyperbole as if it were reality. Anyone here is free to run as a candidate and candidates win on the basis of votes. We have democratic elections with minimal outright voter fraud or intimidation. People are free to gather and say pretty much whatever they want on the street corner and in print. In pseudo-democratic countries, candidates of other parties are imprisoned on false charges, organization of opposition parties is outlawed and their members intimidated with violence, and elections are outright rigged.
YOU go try to convince middle America to vote Libertarian, or Peace and Freedom, or Green, or any of the other non-GOP, non-Democrat parties. At best you'll get laughed at, at worst you'll get a gun pointed in your face.
It's a constant refrain on Slashdot that third parties are the answer, buy why should anyone vote for these third parties? They are generally ideological extremists even less likely to run the government effectively than either of the two leading parties, and are doomed to lose in our first-past-the-post system. I don't see that parliamentary systems with strong third parties elsewhere have led to better government. In such systems, third parties often abandon their platforms just to get into a coalition and get some seats, and those that don't abandon their platforms generally negotiate advantages for their own small constituencies at the expense of the country at large.
This is absurd overstatement. Nazi Germany directed its full state apparatus and much of its population towards robbing, enslaving, and murdering vast swathes of Europe. That's in a literal sense, as in gunning down women, and children in the millions, forcing millions of others to work at gunpoint, and taking their property - and all of this sanctioned by law - not in a figurative sense of robbing/enslaving/murdering people, e.g. through unequal trade deals or encouragement of environmental degradation. The USSR, Red China, and North Korea executed and starved huge swathes of their own and neighboring populations. All of these countries executed most of their intellectual classes as well as regular citizens who expressed an opposing view.
Where the US has failed is in comparison to its promise as a large, culturally- and economically-unified country ostensibly committed to Enlightenment ideals, and in comparison to northern European countries that have passed it by in terms of providing general welfare to their citizens since the end of WWII. I don't understand this defense of the American people as opposed to the American government. The American government is elected democratically with minimal outright voter fraud. It is the American people who continue to elect stupid, lazy, and evil politicians with unsupportable claims and proposals. Corporate money can buy only advertising, not votes.
Americans are the most ignorant and easily led population on the planet. You need to look at the science. See here what science has discovered about the brain:
Really? There are scientific studies proving that Americans are more ignorant and easily-led than, say, North Koreans? The video you link to does not compare Americans against others.
But this only works for a short period until the person's body gets accustomed, leaving them unhappier than before and now addicted to an expensive drug, right? I haven't heard that anyone's invented Soma from Brave New World yet.
This is all true. However, the implication that the death penalty will discourage future crime doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Like suicides, almost all of the murders and rapes committed which lead to the death penalty are crimes of passion in which the perpetrator is not rationally weighing risk and reward. The marginal number of would-be criminals put off committing a crime due to capital punishment are more than counter-balanced by those encouraged to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't by the dramatic appeal of a violent end.
Just to support this: The BBC Horizon documentary "How to Kill a Human Being" (available in full on YouTube) asks what the most humane form of execution is and comes to the same conclusion. It seems that it shouldn't even be necessary to build a chamber, but rather that a snug mask would work.
It doesn't always hit the target the first time, and it's violent. Hypoxia through an inert gas such as nitrogen or argon is the most humane and sensible method of execution. See the BBC Horizon documentary on this exact question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlRFul216LM. Even animals for slaughter are often rendered unconscious through such gas before application of the bolt gun.
The President lives in the White House, not the Capitol building.
Anyway, the gunman should've known that they'd need to get elected or register as a lobbyist before they could get away with looting the federal government. There's a process!
Slashdot Mirror
You really think news organizations' reputations are baseless and that journalism has been rendered obsolete because the president-to-be lets us know everything we ought to know in his manic bursts of communication through Twitter and YouTube?
You seem to suffer from a strange combination of cynicism and credulousness.
This is some random joker with a blog who simply listed all major news organizations as fake because they "told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction". He provides no sources to back up this claim. These news sites did not, in reality, tell us this; they told us that this was claimed by the US government, which was true.
538 simply performed a statistical analysis of the polls. They gave Trump around a 30% chance of winning and wrote multiple stories emphasizing that it wasn't a done deal. They were not "wrong".
None of your links or story titles lead to any real news site from any country. The subtext of your post is that we should believe you and other random people and sites on the internet instead of recognizable news organizations from around the world. This is silly.
It does seem stupid at first glance, but I have found a number of songs available on YouTube which are not available for (legal) streaming or download anywhere else. The video typically consists of a still image of the album artwork, so the extra bandwidth is negligible. And with YouTube Red (the paid service that also gets rid of ads and comes bundled with Google Play Music), you can download videos instead of streaming, so there's no hit to your data plan.
Then, for good measure you have words that sound the same but, of course, are spelled differently, like knight and night or were and where.
"Were"/"where" don't sound the same in any English pronunciation I'm aware of. "Where"/"wear"/"ware" do sound the same, as do "were"/"whir", at least in most accents where the "h" in "wh" is silent.
Your general point that English spelling is madness is correct, though.
I'd say most native English speakers are well aware of this. It's why hardly anyone can write a sizable amount of text without spelling errors except insufferable pedants, and even then only when sober and with a couple of rounds of proofreading.
The Korea's are amongst the most educated ironically enough.
You're referring to South Korea, obviously, whereas I mentioned North Korea. I hope you're aware of the difference.
It is the American people who continue to elect stupid, lazy, and evil politicians..
I may post sometimes as an Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't mean I don't go back later to see what has come of what I have wrought.
Are you a citizen of the U.S.? It's not clear from your comment, but let me tell you: I voted for Obama, after 16 years of the Bush family of traitors and thieves in the White House, but not because I bought into Obama's hype, but because there were no other alternatives. Romney? Worse than the Bush traitors ever were. Third-party candidate? May as well stay away from the polls.
Yes, I'm a U.S. citizen and voted for Obama (and Democrats in general) for similar reasons, though I can't agree that Romney would have been worse than Bush Jr.
You see, I see it now: Our system of government is, in many ways, no better than the bullshit pseudo-democracies we see in some countries of the world, where there may be elections, but there's one candidate on the ballot, and it doesn't matter if you vote for them or not, they still get elected.
This is where you're going off the rails and stating rampant hyperbole as if it were reality. Anyone here is free to run as a candidate and candidates win on the basis of votes. We have democratic elections with minimal outright voter fraud or intimidation. People are free to gather and say pretty much whatever they want on the street corner and in print. In pseudo-democratic countries, candidates of other parties are imprisoned on false charges, organization of opposition parties is outlawed and their members intimidated with violence, and elections are outright rigged.
YOU go try to convince middle America to vote Libertarian, or Peace and Freedom, or Green, or any of the other non-GOP, non-Democrat parties. At best you'll get laughed at, at worst you'll get a gun pointed in your face.
It's a constant refrain on Slashdot that third parties are the answer, buy why should anyone vote for these third parties? They are generally ideological extremists even less likely to run the government effectively than either of the two leading parties, and are doomed to lose in our first-past-the-post system. I don't see that parliamentary systems with strong third parties elsewhere have led to better government. In such systems, third parties often abandon their platforms just to get into a coalition and get some seats, and those that don't abandon their platforms generally negotiate advantages for their own small constituencies at the expense of the country at large.
This is absurd overstatement. Nazi Germany directed its full state apparatus and much of its population towards robbing, enslaving, and murdering vast swathes of Europe. That's in a literal sense, as in gunning down women, and children in the millions, forcing millions of others to work at gunpoint, and taking their property - and all of this sanctioned by law - not in a figurative sense of robbing/enslaving/murdering people, e.g. through unequal trade deals or encouragement of environmental degradation. The USSR, Red China, and North Korea executed and starved huge swathes of their own and neighboring populations. All of these countries executed most of their intellectual classes as well as regular citizens who expressed an opposing view.
Where the US has failed is in comparison to its promise as a large, culturally- and economically-unified country ostensibly committed to Enlightenment ideals, and in comparison to northern European countries that have passed it by in terms of providing general welfare to their citizens since the end of WWII. I don't understand this defense of the American people as opposed to the American government. The American government is elected democratically with minimal outright voter fraud. It is the American people who continue to elect stupid, lazy, and evil politicians with unsupportable claims and proposals. Corporate money can buy only advertising, not votes.
Americans are the most ignorant and easily led population on the planet. You need to look at the science. See here what science has discovered about the brain:
Really? There are scientific studies proving that Americans are more ignorant and easily-led than, say, North Koreans? The video you link to does not compare Americans against others.
But this only works for a short period until the person's body gets accustomed, leaving them unhappier than before and now addicted to an expensive drug, right? I haven't heard that anyone's invented Soma from Brave New World yet.
This is all true. However, the implication that the death penalty will discourage future crime doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Like suicides, almost all of the murders and rapes committed which lead to the death penalty are crimes of passion in which the perpetrator is not rationally weighing risk and reward. The marginal number of would-be criminals put off committing a crime due to capital punishment are more than counter-balanced by those encouraged to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't by the dramatic appeal of a violent end.
Just to support this: The BBC Horizon documentary "How to Kill a Human Being" (available in full on YouTube) asks what the most humane form of execution is and comes to the same conclusion. It seems that it shouldn't even be necessary to build a chamber, but rather that a snug mask would work.
It doesn't always hit the target the first time, and it's violent. Hypoxia through an inert gas such as nitrogen or argon is the most humane and sensible method of execution. See the BBC Horizon documentary on this exact question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlRFul216LM. Even animals for slaughter are often rendered unconscious through such gas before application of the bolt gun.
The President lives in the White House, not the Capitol building.
Anyway, the gunman should've known that they'd need to get elected or register as a lobbyist before they could get away with looting the federal government. There's a process!