I failed to include support for curl when 5.2.1 came out and just spent close to an hour waiting for PHP 5.2.1 to compile, yesterday. Guess it's time to run./configure again.
To the parent and all the siblings: This is not a one-dimensional argument. Some epistemology:
The term "left" actually started because people who held these views sat on the *left side* of the room in (IIRC) the French Legislative Assembly. The ideas themselves weren't polar opposites, they were just people who happened to be sitting on different sides of the room.
In modern politics, there are two axes of freedom: personal freedom, and economic freedom. From some standpoints of economic study, one could say that these are one in the same, but let personal freedom be "moral issues" (including but not limited to: sex, speech, politics, and religion), and economic freedom be "money issues".
On these two criteria, let's label some modern political movements:
Democrats might be (1, 0.1) -- Personal Freedom, but economic freedom is severely limited.
Republicans (neocons) would be (0.1, 1) -- Economic Freedom, but severe restrictions on sex, drugs, free speech, religion, etc.
Libertarians might be (1, 0.95) -- Just enough taxation to cover the common defense, courts, and roads, with Personal Freedom.
Communist Russia would be (.05, 0) -- No economic freedom, and personal freedom only because the didn't have the tech to watch everyone 24/7.
The current policy in the US might be (0.7, 0.4) -- Some economic freedom, but lots of pork and high taxes. Lots of personal freedom, but you can't take drugs or marry your gay partner, and you might be locked up for protesting.
Someone actually "in-between" the Left and the Right would be a person who thinks we should have fewer personal freedoms, but lower taxes, and that the government should still restrict any behavior they personally think is undesirable.
Umm. That's not a centrist. You've given almost the dictionary definition of a libertarian. Try the age-old political quiz.
A centrist beleives that government should control people and restrict their rights, just not completely. They believe that government should be big enough to do many unnecessary things, but it should strike a "balance" between liberty and socialism.
If you have a graph, where the x-axis is increasing personal freedom and the y-axis is increasing economic freedom, the libertarian is the furthest from the origin. A centrist would want a moderate amount of economic freedom and a moderate amount of personal freedom (for example, perhaps they have an agenda of being pro-life and anti-drugs, and want the government to control interest rates and feed the poor).
Right. I'm not being snarky in saying this, but completely forthright. When technology does change the game so dramatically, we'll revisit the subject. Grey goo would definitely be a rule-changer, provided we could supply ourselves with enough energy to use it without consideration for energy or raw materials.
And BTW, I think *all* of us already enjoy a lifestyle that medieval kings would envy, and it's hard to argue that capitalism didn't have a hand in it. A monarch's life was no more leisure than a white-collar worker's is today. But air conditioning, clean food, reliable fast transportation that is comfortable, television, and healthcare put us head-and-shoulders above. The only things the kings of old had on us were polygamy and slaves, which most of us are morally opposed to anyway.
What is more subject to mankind's whims: A commodity money, or a fiat currency? There are rarely any noticable fluctuations in the supply of gold, and the business cycles you refer to resulted when governments printed paper money substitutes (since commodity-backed paper money is basically "warehouse receipts") that exceeded the actual quantity of gold in existence. People's perceptions changed, and investments that had seemed good on the assumed value of currency were now horrible ideas, considering the value that currency is now known to have.
People cooperate because money, or some other quality of the real world, gives them a way to keep each other honest. Efficiency in cooperation, and comparative advantage in production -- because I can make this better, and you can make that better, why don't we cooperate to create a larger corpus of goods? -- forms the basis of all modes of exchange, communal or captial-based alike.
What are the "fundamental principles of economics" that I am ignoring?
Funadmental Principles of Economics
Man performs first, those functions which he values the most. Man obtains first, that from which he derives the greatest satisfaction.
People prefer idleness to labor, and the percieved benefit of work must outweigh the benefit of leisure to induce work.
People prefer consumption now to consumption in an uncertain future.
People, resources, and technology vary with geography and time.
People are willing to trade that which they value less for that which they value more.
Since the cost of production and benefit of consuming goods and services vary from person to person, mutually beneficial exchange is possible.
People engage voluntarily in what they perceive to be mutually beneficial exchanges of goods and services.
Over time, a currency (be it commodity money or some intangible such as 'respect') develops so that individuals can assess whether a certain economic exchange is beneficial to them.
Currencies which reduce the burden of economic calculation (ie, make it easy to decide whether to engage in some activity or exchange, and allow the development of stable heuristics to aid in the same) are generally preferred to others.
Other economic principles of markets and interaction follow logically. Clearly refute a point above, to claim I have a false understanding. Or logically deduce from these axioms, a contrary position.
Considering this as a resource-allocation problem, Communist resource allocation doesn't work -- it is like trying to do an optimization problem where, because of changing conditions and resources, you always reach a local maxima and have no way to "leap out" over time as other opportunities dwarf it. Capitalism is analogous in this sense to simulated annealing; The more homogeneous a group of people's economic activity becomes, the more likely the crazies and the crackpots are to take one-in-a-million chances that eventually pan out and change the paradigm, especially if nobody beleives they will be profitable for society as a whole (meaning that the resources they needed would have been denied them in the first place).
Remember that in a Communist (or socialist, fascist, etc.) society, there is no reliable way to make economic calculations -- you're missing the only viable feedback mechanism about what the people want to do with their resources. In Soviet Russia, the economic planning board had to "cheat" by using Sears Catalogs from the US to determine what they should order produced. It would require nothing short of an omniscient deity to maximize resource allocation, but since technology changes and not all men are equal, you would still have inequality and job instability. Requiring people to express their preferences with money is not only much easier, it doesn't require a bureaucracy or a deity to enforce its preference on the masses.
Your comment about the paintbrush and canvas is a straw man. Exactly to what are you alluding? I don't know of a legal position where licensing a tool gives the tool's vendor rights in perpetuity to the work produced therewith. Unless you refer to patent licensing agreements, which are a product of government, this is a pretty clearly unattainable situation -- Economic systems route around players like this all the time. Can you produce a concrete example of this happening without government interference in a capitalist system?
So, logically, the universe is powered by photons? Or reality as we perceive it is the interaction of particles, rather than the particles themselves? I'm not seeing much of a reason to panic and start worrying that the great turtle might awaken from his dream, but maybe it's just me.
You actually do need government intervention to support the rules of capitalism. For one, ultimately governments enforce contract laws.
Umm, actually violence, or threat thereof, in any form, encourage compliance.
Governments also provide and stabilize the medium of exchange (barter isn't particularly good for capitalism).
Shenanigans. History has provided us with countless independent evolutions of stable mediums of echange. None involve government.
They provide rules and enforcement about raving mobs looting your business, and in exchange they put up certain protections against businesses looting their employee's retirement funds.
Again, violence or threats of violence. If employee X will shoot you for robbing him like this, then... well, you're not likely to raid the fund. How's that government regulation working in this regard, BTW?
Governments ensure that interstate commerce is possible over well lit, well-maintained roads.
Roads, which were largely built without government, and were lit in its absence. Look around you; Are cost-plus, no-bid, and lowest-price contracts really serving our needs for transportation?
The EPA ensures that the mill up the river doesn't pollute it so much that it's useless to your mill, and in exchange that you adhere to the same rules for the mill south of you.
Bullshit. The reason pollution is even a problem is because the first lawsuits against gross polluters were thrown out by big government, who wanted to promote industrialism. After this landmark in the US, it was illegal -- either as a citizen or a class -- to sue polluters. Allow the aggreived to file suits against polluters, and this will be fixed in extremely short order.
It ensures that the products you are delivered meet the spirit of the agreement you entered into.
Umm, I thought that was your own job as a consumer. Demand a damned refund, boycott, and badmouth. Don't waste billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours on inferior protections. The government actually doesn't do this as well as consumers in a free market.
It ensures that unfair non-competition practices, like Walmart saying to its suppliers not to work with small businesses like yours, don't happen. Or at least it happens less often than it otherwise would.
Back that up with some evidence, if you wouldn't mind.
It ensures that people don't run around selling cheap knock-off products under your name and trademark symbol, and that you can extract some value from your original ideas and work before someone else copies it.
Again, through exercising the threat of violence, which is rightfully yours, to its own benefit.
Violence is the last resort in any system. No matter if it is Communist or Capitalist, the natural order of human beings is to be logical and live peaceably with other men. Your assertion is nothing more than an insistence that government, and only government, should be allowed to use violence to achieve its ends. That these ends are very seldom, if ever, beneficial to you, and are often harmful, follows easily and should be regarded as sufficient proof against.
And always remember, somebody can make a business out of replacing any government agency. ANY agency. And, they will know that they have to serve their customer well to keep getting paid. Is your government serving you with respect and a smile?
True communism, for example, rewards those who work hard and make good choices as well. How?
Communism does not reward the industrious and intelligent relative to their peers, which is not only how the human mind works anyway, it is the only thing that demonstrably produces industry. Otherwise, everyone is a freeloader, and nobody works. Period. It doesn't matter what you claim your ideology is, why would you put up with the disutility of labor to receive the same benefit in return, as those who did not undergo the unpleasantness of working hard?
If you reduce government to its most basic level (that of the family), would you still argue that interference by the decision-makers cannot solve problems?
This is a fallacious argument, because government did not develop from the family unit. Modern governments descended from various gangs of bandits, who settled in the areas they oppressed. Additionally, the use of an arbiter to settle disputes is not only not unique to government, it has historically been both a threat to government, and better provided by free markets under capitalism (aka, "What people decide for themselves").
Not so. Cooperation (the basis of communism) happens without government intervention -- capitalism is a system dependent upon a stable money supply, which does not exist without government interference. One could say that totalitarianism is what is most likely to happen without government intervention -- but then at what point is the totalitarian become the government?
What the hell are you smoking? Stable money supplies exist exclusively in the absence of government interference. To understand what government does to the money supply, picture yourself at an auction. You brought money, and you know what you intend to bid on, and what you can afford. Then, a counterfeiter arrives. Even if he doesn't bid on anything you personally wanted, now you have to bid against everyone else who has extra money (since they didn't win the items the counterfeiter got). Ad infinitum.
Communism, by definition, is based on government intervention, to produce the conspicuous and unnatural absence of a money supply, or to cause it to function differently. Meaningful cooperation is the basis of a Capitalist economy, and derives directly from the notion of private property and the division of labor. If you would prefer to live in a state of abject poverty, owning nothing (including your own body/mind/thoughts), be my guest. Give communism a shot.
In a primitive state, even solitarily, as a single individual with no society (read: other people) with which to live, man is still a capitalist. He produces capital, ie shelter and tools, and in doing so he saves his labor in expectation of a future return on his investment.
I'd write more, but it's not worth my time. It just seems stupid to even be talking about this crap a hundred and fifty years later. If only yours were a logical position, this logic would be useful in debating you.
Don't forget that we, thanks to our bigger brains, and the social/religious order that allows us to participate in, have something that allows us to completely wipe out huge amounts of variation in a single generation: War. Especially if it involves genocide, or produces racist or nationalistic tendencies, we train massive groups of our people to exterminate other humans based on specific, visible genetic differences.
Plus, we have a relatively recent event in recorded history that removed a significant chunk of our population from the planet; The Bubonic Plague. Even if Chimps have had their share of deadly viruses, we are a much more likely target because we are spread out worldwide, and there is a much greater chance that such a virus would spread among human populations, since we have frequent inter-tribal contact.
I think the apathy comes from disappointment as much as anything. We all wanted FTL and Hyperspace and Warp drives. Phooey on that now, eh? Looks like stargate is our only remaining option for interstellar travel and exploration. That, or put our consciousnesses in robot bodies and suffer through thousands or millions of years of boredom / deactivation in transit ("Are we there yet?")
In essence, this is an experiment that strongly suggests your car can't get you to MegaCon, and you'll probably die alone in your apartment.
If I were in the position to give the kid a job, I would.
No offense, but that's probably why you aren't in a position to do so.
And if the kid's behavior is actually an outgrowth of the qualities it seems to suggest, he should be making his own way instead of working for someone else.
the US lead should come as no surprise, considering the capitalist way of life and the high level of technical knowledge
Um, what? Perhaps he means that since we have food to eat and our basic needs are taken care of, that we naturally spend our time writing malware. Apparently people should never have liberty and prosperity, since they obviously lead to (or are intrinsically) vice!
How about reporting what percentage of a country's total software output is malware? Or at the very least, acknowledging that instead of some "capitalist way of life", the problem is a doublethink one for social do-gooders: that our citizens, poor and criminal included, have access to technology and electricity. Don't think for a second that if rural China had electricity, not to mention uncensored Internet access, they wouldn't shoot straight past us on whatever yardstick this bozo is using.
As Wendell Phillips said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." This is true for all values of liberty, and includes the liberty of running software of your own choice on your own hardware of choice. The market will produce, and already has produced, better systems that aren't (as) suceptible to malware. That's the capitalist way of life. All this guy is doing is hand-wringing and finger-pointing.
By this logic, then, shouldn't most of the bugs for Linux and OSX have been rated as "relatively unsafe", while the Windows bugs were almost universally labeled "Über-pWnz0r3d"?
It seems like he wants this just so he can compare turds to turds, boosting the sales of Vista by saying the Windows 98 and 2000/XP bugs of yesteryear were worse because the same bug is arguably less severe under Vista. It may be true, but he should hope that if anyone takes him seriously, they don't start rating severity relative to similar bugs in competing products.
So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods.
It should be mentioned here that, experimentally, there is little to no difference between "complex" and "simple" carbohydrates. They BOTH pass almost completely into the blood stream within seconds/minutes of consumption as glucose. The difference is how those carbohydrates are bound up with fiber, protein, or fat -- which can all slow absorption.
Even if you want to bash Atkins, of which I am enamored, you'll be well served by a glycemic impact chart and some common sense. If you're grinding up grains or juicing fruit, then the hard part of the digestion process is done before you even put the food in your mouth. Don't expect there to be a huge difference between apple juice, white bread, pasta, and a mouthful of sucrose. Do expect a significant difference between brown rice and white rice, or the apple and its juice.
I did the same thing, losing about 40 pounds over the summer break between my junior and senior years of high school. I got up to a total of almost 65 pounds lost during the school year, and weighed only 167 pounds at graduation. Lifting was the biggest part of this routine, but diet was also a very significant factor.
Your diet must support the new muscle growth. A typical baseline training diet will be 40/30/30, by calories. This means that 30% of your calories must come from protein, a FAR cry from the government's published "typical" diet. If you're consuming only 2000 calories a day, you'll need 150 grams of protein to match the ratio, and chances are that since those 600 protein calories are going into your muscles, you will need more than that (or will drop weight dangerously quickly). A typical day's food when I was 17 might be 16oz of orange juice with protein powder for breakfast, a pouch of peanuts from the school's vending machine as a snack, a Whopper or tacos for lunch with my buddies, and a tub of cottage cheese with a bit of raspberry preserves for dinner while I was at work.
If you do Atkins, which works stunningly for me personally, you don't even have to worry about the ratio -- Your body will burn fat for energy, ignoring carbs for the most part, and you don't have to keep that razor-thin balance between the fats your body must have to function and the fats that insulin will banish to your stored fat reserves. In the absence of (excess) insulin, it is just as easy to burn that fat back off as it is to put on, and you'll find that your blood-energy levels are far more stable, resulting in some of the fats never being absorbed to begin with. Vitamins, however, are essential.
My father gave me some apparently good advice, that (at least for our genes) adding significant amounts of muscle mass before turning 18 was a much better idea than putting it on later. I tend to think that sooner is better for everyone, but his argument was that muscle added when I was a teenager would be much easier to pack on at that age and wouldn't be as easily reabsorbed later if I lapsed in my routine. If there are any overweight youngsters here, I would definitely recommend that you start lifting and work up to a good routine as soon as possible.
My workout history has been horrible over the past ten years, but the weight, for the most part, has stayed off, and the muscle has stayed on. In the second year of my marriage, through poor eating habits (white rice every day, sweets and breads) I got all the way up to 230 pounds -- still two pounds short of my record -- and felt absolutely wiped out, depressed, and moody. But, fixing my diet and working out for 30 minutes three times a week, 20 pounds came back off within six weeks. Having plenty of muscle mass on your body will be an asset for a long time, so don't underestimate it. Not to mention that it will help your self-esteem and appearance...
... And this has the following effect: NO MATTER how much you pay for a phone, you can't get any of the features you really want. The only way you can get the features you want, is by forgoing the carrier's subsidy (which you STILL have to pay as part of your mandatory contract) and getting an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer.
Which means that, in order to get out of paying for $4.00 MP3 ringtones and wallpapers, or $29.99 for a terminal/ssh client, you have to spend about $200.00 upfront -- plus, in some cases, currency conversion fees. And then there's the moral question that, since the carrier has actually made about $200.00 extra because you chose to get an un-crippled phone, it provides them with FURTHER incentive to cripple subsequent ones.
So, even if one operating system is a standout success, who gives a crap? You'll still have to pay so much for the privilege to own and use an unlocked phone, and run the risk of the carrier cutting off access to the applications you really want (it's an "unsupported" phone, after all; This recently happened to me). So many people just get free phones and give up any aspirations of doing useful things with their phone other than simple calling -- it just isn't economical when you look at the big picture.
There is no difference between the parents turning in their kid for "Internet Addiction", and the children turning in their parents in 1984 for thoughcrime. It's still 'reform' at the hands of the state, and in the most brutal possible way.
I'm only 27, but I've had a lot of the same fight. I've only known about my AS for about three years. When I did know for sure, I showed some of the literature to my mother. She immediately breathed a deep breath, her eyes kind of glazed over, and she said quite a number of things I won't repeat here. The gist was that, even as a schoolteacher trained in dealing with kids like me, she had never recognized it from my behavior and didn't suspect what some of the stranger symptoms meant (fear of physical contact, tiptoeing, echolalia, etc.) -- she just thought I was a sullen, introspective child.
I think more people could learn to deal with us. But for people with AS, the tendency is to take the burden on ourselves. We analyze social interaction as a rule-based system and learn enough, intuitively, to get by. But it's like the "Digital Divide" effect seen in CGI characters crafted to look human... The more closely we can approximate neurotypical reactions and behaviors, the 'creepier' we seem to get, because the subtle differences stand out in contrast. And some people, upon really realizing how different things are below the surface, react quite strongly, to wit: your post above.
People won't pity you, and they won't make concessions, because the very act of participating in society hides your differences. If they saw you in a mental institution, or a hospital, they might have some heartfelt reaction of pity or a desire to help. But if they talk to you on the street, you're a wierdo who won't look them in the eye, and sometimes silently repeats what he just said -- a crazy person dressed up to look like an intelligent, handsome, healthy, well-composed young man, and it scares them.
But for people to concede your difference and willingly interact with you, you must provide some overwhelmingly positive basis for that difference. If it is assumed that you are different because you are an artist, or a musician, or a genius, you can get a foot in the door. Many with AS, though, don't have an outstandingly positive trait, and they suffer greatly because their differences are never sanctioned, only condemned and punished. And no matter how hard they try, many will never be able to emulate neurotypical responses 100% -- they'll give off a "bad vibe" that nobody can qualify, all the worse as they try harder.
You, sir, are a jerk. You can empathize with an animal because you concede that they will behave differently. By making no concessions for differing behavior from other human beings, you will find yourself unable to interact with a tremendous number of people. In fact, I will go so far as to say that, while the barriers erected against individuals with AS may be insurmountable, it is you who has the greater social disorder by far.
No, the corporations are supposed to be liable for their crimes, and the government is too. See, originally, the people who did these jobs were rightly afraid of *us*. Then, we let the federal government have enough power that they could protect the corporations from us, then the corporations protected the government from us, and so on. Or maybe it was the other way around, but after enough iterations, it becomes mere pedantry.
Finally, you end up in the stupefying situation where we now need to be protected from both of them. Except that they're entirely composed of us. Right now, it's the *idea* of power, not some actual power, that you fight.
People are convinced that both corporations and the government are necessary, when neither are. Nobody can remember when roads and healthcare and police services and public transportation and courts and everything else ad nauseam was a private enterprise, or when the law didn't shield participants in business from responsibility for their actions. Nobody remembers that once the government assumes a responsibility, all the incentives for them to produce what you need are perverted. All the world has been brought up to be statist slaves, with night terrors of capitalist robber barons with their stovetop hats and a boot-heel to the throat of the common man.
Here's hoping that watching abuse like this can turn a few more heads to the real issue.
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I failed to include support for curl when 5.2.1 came out and just spent close to an hour waiting for PHP 5.2.1 to compile, yesterday. Guess it's time to run ./configure again.
To the parent and all the siblings: This is not a one-dimensional argument. Some epistemology:
The term "left" actually started because people who held these views sat on the *left side* of the room in (IIRC) the French Legislative Assembly. The ideas themselves weren't polar opposites, they were just people who happened to be sitting on different sides of the room.
In modern politics, there are two axes of freedom: personal freedom, and economic freedom. From some standpoints of economic study, one could say that these are one in the same, but let personal freedom be "moral issues" (including but not limited to: sex, speech, politics, and religion), and economic freedom be "money issues".
On these two criteria, let's label some modern political movements:
Someone actually "in-between" the Left and the Right would be a person who thinks we should have fewer personal freedoms, but lower taxes, and that the government should still restrict any behavior they personally think is undesirable.
Umm. That's not a centrist. You've given almost the dictionary definition of a libertarian. Try the age-old political quiz.
A centrist beleives that government should control people and restrict their rights, just not completely. They believe that government should be big enough to do many unnecessary things, but it should strike a "balance" between liberty and socialism.
If you have a graph, where the x-axis is increasing personal freedom and the y-axis is increasing economic freedom, the libertarian is the furthest from the origin. A centrist would want a moderate amount of economic freedom and a moderate amount of personal freedom (for example, perhaps they have an agenda of being pro-life and anti-drugs, and want the government to control interest rates and feed the poor).
Right. I'm not being snarky in saying this, but completely forthright. When technology does change the game so dramatically, we'll revisit the subject. Grey goo would definitely be a rule-changer, provided we could supply ourselves with enough energy to use it without consideration for energy or raw materials.
And BTW, I think *all* of us already enjoy a lifestyle that medieval kings would envy, and it's hard to argue that capitalism didn't have a hand in it. A monarch's life was no more leisure than a white-collar worker's is today. But air conditioning, clean food, reliable fast transportation that is comfortable, television, and healthcare put us head-and-shoulders above. The only things the kings of old had on us were polygamy and slaves, which most of us are morally opposed to anyway.
What is more subject to mankind's whims: A commodity money, or a fiat currency? There are rarely any noticable fluctuations in the supply of gold, and the business cycles you refer to resulted when governments printed paper money substitutes (since commodity-backed paper money is basically "warehouse receipts") that exceeded the actual quantity of gold in existence. People's perceptions changed, and investments that had seemed good on the assumed value of currency were now horrible ideas, considering the value that currency is now known to have.
People cooperate because money, or some other quality of the real world, gives them a way to keep each other honest. Efficiency in cooperation, and comparative advantage in production -- because I can make this better, and you can make that better, why don't we cooperate to create a larger corpus of goods? -- forms the basis of all modes of exchange, communal or captial-based alike.
What are the "fundamental principles of economics" that I am ignoring?
Funadmental Principles of EconomicsOther economic principles of markets and interaction follow logically. Clearly refute a point above, to claim I have a false understanding. Or logically deduce from these axioms, a contrary position.
Considering this as a resource-allocation problem, Communist resource allocation doesn't work -- it is like trying to do an optimization problem where, because of changing conditions and resources, you always reach a local maxima and have no way to "leap out" over time as other opportunities dwarf it. Capitalism is analogous in this sense to simulated annealing; The more homogeneous a group of people's economic activity becomes, the more likely the crazies and the crackpots are to take one-in-a-million chances that eventually pan out and change the paradigm, especially if nobody beleives they will be profitable for society as a whole (meaning that the resources they needed would have been denied them in the first place).
Remember that in a Communist (or socialist, fascist, etc.) society, there is no reliable way to make economic calculations -- you're missing the only viable feedback mechanism about what the people want to do with their resources. In Soviet Russia, the economic planning board had to "cheat" by using Sears Catalogs from the US to determine what they should order produced. It would require nothing short of an omniscient deity to maximize resource allocation, but since technology changes and not all men are equal, you would still have inequality and job instability. Requiring people to express their preferences with money is not only much easier, it doesn't require a bureaucracy or a deity to enforce its preference on the masses.
Your comment about the paintbrush and canvas is a straw man. Exactly to what are you alluding? I don't know of a legal position where licensing a tool gives the tool's vendor rights in perpetuity to the work produced therewith. Unless you refer to patent licensing agreements, which are a product of government, this is a pretty clearly unattainable situation -- Economic systems route around players like this all the time. Can you produce a concrete example of this happening without government interference in a capitalist system?
So, logically, the universe is powered by photons? Or reality as we perceive it is the interaction of particles, rather than the particles themselves? I'm not seeing much of a reason to panic and start worrying that the great turtle might awaken from his dream, but maybe it's just me.
And thus we have spyware, which conveniently creates the illusion of the above.
Umm, actually violence, or threat thereof, in any form, encourage compliance.
Shenanigans. History has provided us with countless independent evolutions of stable mediums of echange. None involve government.
Again, violence or threats of violence. If employee X will shoot you for robbing him like this, then ... well, you're not likely to raid the fund. How's that government regulation working in this regard, BTW?
Roads, which were largely built without government, and were lit in its absence. Look around you; Are cost-plus, no-bid, and lowest-price contracts really serving our needs for transportation?
Bullshit. The reason pollution is even a problem is because the first lawsuits against gross polluters were thrown out by big government, who wanted to promote industrialism. After this landmark in the US, it was illegal -- either as a citizen or a class -- to sue polluters. Allow the aggreived to file suits against polluters, and this will be fixed in extremely short order.
Umm, I thought that was your own job as a consumer. Demand a damned refund, boycott, and badmouth. Don't waste billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours on inferior protections. The government actually doesn't do this as well as consumers in a free market.
Back that up with some evidence, if you wouldn't mind.
Again, through exercising the threat of violence, which is rightfully yours, to its own benefit.
Violence is the last resort in any system. No matter if it is Communist or Capitalist, the natural order of human beings is to be logical and live peaceably with other men. Your assertion is nothing more than an insistence that government, and only government, should be allowed to use violence to achieve its ends. That these ends are very seldom, if ever, beneficial to you, and are often harmful, follows easily and should be regarded as sufficient proof against.
And always remember, somebody can make a business out of replacing any government agency. ANY agency. And, they will know that they have to serve their customer well to keep getting paid. Is your government serving you with respect and a smile?
Communism does not reward the industrious and intelligent relative to their peers, which is not only how the human mind works anyway, it is the only thing that demonstrably produces industry. Otherwise, everyone is a freeloader, and nobody works. Period. It doesn't matter what you claim your ideology is, why would you put up with the disutility of labor to receive the same benefit in return, as those who did not undergo the unpleasantness of working hard?
This is a fallacious argument, because government did not develop from the family unit. Modern governments descended from various gangs of bandits, who settled in the areas they oppressed. Additionally, the use of an arbiter to settle disputes is not only not unique to government, it has historically been both a threat to government, and better provided by free markets under capitalism (aka, "What people decide for themselves").
What the hell are you smoking? Stable money supplies exist exclusively in the absence of government interference. To understand what government does to the money supply, picture yourself at an auction. You brought money, and you know what you intend to bid on, and what you can afford. Then, a counterfeiter arrives. Even if he doesn't bid on anything you personally wanted, now you have to bid against everyone else who has extra money (since they didn't win the items the counterfeiter got). Ad infinitum.
Communism, by definition, is based on government intervention, to produce the conspicuous and unnatural absence of a money supply, or to cause it to function differently. Meaningful cooperation is the basis of a Capitalist economy, and derives directly from the notion of private property and the division of labor. If you would prefer to live in a state of abject poverty, owning nothing (including your own body/mind/thoughts), be my guest. Give communism a shot.
In a primitive state, even solitarily, as a single individual with no society (read: other people) with which to live, man is still a capitalist. He produces capital, ie shelter and tools, and in doing so he saves his labor in expectation of a future return on his investment.
I'd write more, but it's not worth my time. It just seems stupid to even be talking about this crap a hundred and fifty years later. If only yours were a logical position, this logic would be useful in debating you.
I wish I could put a <blink> tag in there.
Don't forget that we, thanks to our bigger brains, and the social/religious order that allows us to participate in, have something that allows us to completely wipe out huge amounts of variation in a single generation: War. Especially if it involves genocide, or produces racist or nationalistic tendencies, we train massive groups of our people to exterminate other humans based on specific, visible genetic differences.
Plus, we have a relatively recent event in recorded history that removed a significant chunk of our population from the planet; The Bubonic Plague. Even if Chimps have had their share of deadly viruses, we are a much more likely target because we are spread out worldwide, and there is a much greater chance that such a virus would spread among human populations, since we have frequent inter-tribal contact.
I think the apathy comes from disappointment as much as anything. We all wanted FTL and Hyperspace and Warp drives. Phooey on that now, eh? Looks like stargate is our only remaining option for interstellar travel and exploration. That, or put our consciousnesses in robot bodies and suffer through thousands or millions of years of boredom / deactivation in transit ("Are we there yet?")
In essence, this is an experiment that strongly suggests your car can't get you to MegaCon, and you'll probably die alone in your apartment.
No offense, but that's probably why you aren't in a position to do so.
And if the kid's behavior is actually an outgrowth of the qualities it seems to suggest, he should be making his own way instead of working for someone else.
And here I thought there was no possible way that a "Slashdot Tit" button would be relevant on a story. Just goes to prove my lack of foresight.
400 billion, FWIW. Javascript Ticker
Um, what? Perhaps he means that since we have food to eat and our basic needs are taken care of, that we naturally spend our time writing malware. Apparently people should never have liberty and prosperity, since they obviously lead to (or are intrinsically) vice!
How about reporting what percentage of a country's total software output is malware? Or at the very least, acknowledging that instead of some "capitalist way of life", the problem is a doublethink one for social do-gooders: that our citizens, poor and criminal included, have access to technology and electricity. Don't think for a second that if rural China had electricity, not to mention uncensored Internet access, they wouldn't shoot straight past us on whatever yardstick this bozo is using.
As Wendell Phillips said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." This is true for all values of liberty, and includes the liberty of running software of your own choice on your own hardware of choice. The market will produce, and already has produced, better systems that aren't (as) suceptible to malware. That's the capitalist way of life. All this guy is doing is hand-wringing and finger-pointing.
By this logic, then, shouldn't most of the bugs for Linux and OSX have been rated as "relatively unsafe", while the Windows bugs were almost universally labeled "Über-pWnz0r3d"?
It seems like he wants this just so he can compare turds to turds, boosting the sales of Vista by saying the Windows 98 and 2000/XP bugs of yesteryear were worse because the same bug is arguably less severe under Vista. It may be true, but he should hope that if anyone takes him seriously, they don't start rating severity relative to similar bugs in competing products.
Be careful what you wish for...
It should be mentioned here that, experimentally, there is little to no difference between "complex" and "simple" carbohydrates. They BOTH pass almost completely into the blood stream within seconds/minutes of consumption as glucose. The difference is how those carbohydrates are bound up with fiber, protein, or fat -- which can all slow absorption.
Even if you want to bash Atkins, of which I am enamored, you'll be well served by a glycemic impact chart and some common sense. If you're grinding up grains or juicing fruit, then the hard part of the digestion process is done before you even put the food in your mouth. Don't expect there to be a huge difference between apple juice, white bread, pasta, and a mouthful of sucrose. Do expect a significant difference between brown rice and white rice, or the apple and its juice.
I did the same thing, losing about 40 pounds over the summer break between my junior and senior years of high school. I got up to a total of almost 65 pounds lost during the school year, and weighed only 167 pounds at graduation. Lifting was the biggest part of this routine, but diet was also a very significant factor.
Your diet must support the new muscle growth. A typical baseline training diet will be 40/30/30, by calories. This means that 30% of your calories must come from protein, a FAR cry from the government's published "typical" diet. If you're consuming only 2000 calories a day, you'll need 150 grams of protein to match the ratio, and chances are that since those 600 protein calories are going into your muscles, you will need more than that (or will drop weight dangerously quickly). A typical day's food when I was 17 might be 16oz of orange juice with protein powder for breakfast, a pouch of peanuts from the school's vending machine as a snack, a Whopper or tacos for lunch with my buddies, and a tub of cottage cheese with a bit of raspberry preserves for dinner while I was at work.
If you do Atkins, which works stunningly for me personally, you don't even have to worry about the ratio -- Your body will burn fat for energy, ignoring carbs for the most part, and you don't have to keep that razor-thin balance between the fats your body must have to function and the fats that insulin will banish to your stored fat reserves. In the absence of (excess) insulin, it is just as easy to burn that fat back off as it is to put on, and you'll find that your blood-energy levels are far more stable, resulting in some of the fats never being absorbed to begin with. Vitamins, however, are essential.
My father gave me some apparently good advice, that (at least for our genes) adding significant amounts of muscle mass before turning 18 was a much better idea than putting it on later. I tend to think that sooner is better for everyone, but his argument was that muscle added when I was a teenager would be much easier to pack on at that age and wouldn't be as easily reabsorbed later if I lapsed in my routine. If there are any overweight youngsters here, I would definitely recommend that you start lifting and work up to a good routine as soon as possible.
My workout history has been horrible over the past ten years, but the weight, for the most part, has stayed off, and the muscle has stayed on. In the second year of my marriage, through poor eating habits (white rice every day, sweets and breads) I got all the way up to 230 pounds -- still two pounds short of my record -- and felt absolutely wiped out, depressed, and moody. But, fixing my diet and working out for 30 minutes three times a week, 20 pounds came back off within six weeks. Having plenty of muscle mass on your body will be an asset for a long time, so don't underestimate it. Not to mention that it will help your self-esteem and appearance...
I think rather than prosecute, he should have said persecute.
... And this has the following effect: NO MATTER how much you pay for a phone, you can't get any of the features you really want. The only way you can get the features you want, is by forgoing the carrier's subsidy (which you STILL have to pay as part of your mandatory contract) and getting an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer.
Which means that, in order to get out of paying for $4.00 MP3 ringtones and wallpapers, or $29.99 for a terminal/ssh client, you have to spend about $200.00 upfront -- plus, in some cases, currency conversion fees. And then there's the moral question that, since the carrier has actually made about $200.00 extra because you chose to get an un-crippled phone, it provides them with FURTHER incentive to cripple subsequent ones.
So, even if one operating system is a standout success, who gives a crap? You'll still have to pay so much for the privilege to own and use an unlocked phone, and run the risk of the carrier cutting off access to the applications you really want (it's an "unsupported" phone, after all; This recently happened to me). So many people just get free phones and give up any aspirations of doing useful things with their phone other than simple calling -- it just isn't economical when you look at the big picture.
There is no difference between the parents turning in their kid for "Internet Addiction", and the children turning in their parents in 1984 for thoughcrime. It's still 'reform' at the hands of the state, and in the most brutal possible way.
I'm only 27, but I've had a lot of the same fight. I've only known about my AS for about three years. When I did know for sure, I showed some of the literature to my mother. She immediately breathed a deep breath, her eyes kind of glazed over, and she said quite a number of things I won't repeat here. The gist was that, even as a schoolteacher trained in dealing with kids like me, she had never recognized it from my behavior and didn't suspect what some of the stranger symptoms meant (fear of physical contact, tiptoeing, echolalia, etc.) -- she just thought I was a sullen, introspective child.
I think more people could learn to deal with us. But for people with AS, the tendency is to take the burden on ourselves. We analyze social interaction as a rule-based system and learn enough, intuitively, to get by. But it's like the "Digital Divide" effect seen in CGI characters crafted to look human... The more closely we can approximate neurotypical reactions and behaviors, the 'creepier' we seem to get, because the subtle differences stand out in contrast. And some people, upon really realizing how different things are below the surface, react quite strongly, to wit: your post above.
People won't pity you, and they won't make concessions, because the very act of participating in society hides your differences. If they saw you in a mental institution, or a hospital, they might have some heartfelt reaction of pity or a desire to help. But if they talk to you on the street, you're a wierdo who won't look them in the eye, and sometimes silently repeats what he just said -- a crazy person dressed up to look like an intelligent, handsome, healthy, well-composed young man, and it scares them.
But for people to concede your difference and willingly interact with you, you must provide some overwhelmingly positive basis for that difference. If it is assumed that you are different because you are an artist, or a musician, or a genius, you can get a foot in the door. Many with AS, though, don't have an outstandingly positive trait, and they suffer greatly because their differences are never sanctioned, only condemned and punished. And no matter how hard they try, many will never be able to emulate neurotypical responses 100% -- they'll give off a "bad vibe" that nobody can qualify, all the worse as they try harder.
You, sir, are a jerk. You can empathize with an animal because you concede that they will behave differently. By making no concessions for differing behavior from other human beings, you will find yourself unable to interact with a tremendous number of people. In fact, I will go so far as to say that, while the barriers erected against individuals with AS may be insurmountable, it is you who has the greater social disorder by far.
No, the corporations are supposed to be liable for their crimes, and the government is too. See, originally, the people who did these jobs were rightly afraid of *us*. Then, we let the federal government have enough power that they could protect the corporations from us, then the corporations protected the government from us, and so on. Or maybe it was the other way around, but after enough iterations, it becomes mere pedantry.
Finally, you end up in the stupefying situation where we now need to be protected from both of them. Except that they're entirely composed of us. Right now, it's the *idea* of power, not some actual power, that you fight.
People are convinced that both corporations and the government are necessary, when neither are. Nobody can remember when roads and healthcare and police services and public transportation and courts and everything else ad nauseam was a private enterprise, or when the law didn't shield participants in business from responsibility for their actions. Nobody remembers that once the government assumes a responsibility, all the incentives for them to produce what you need are perverted. All the world has been brought up to be statist slaves, with night terrors of capitalist robber barons with their stovetop hats and a boot-heel to the throat of the common man.
Here's hoping that watching abuse like this can turn a few more heads to the real issue.