Note to self: Devin Lott, of 1056 Arbor Way, 89120, is one of those holier-than-thou charitable types. Don't hire him, he'll make the rest of us look bad.
You know that place with the really high resolution, that you sometime see when you come up from your parents' basement and look through a window? Also known as "outside"? Well, sunlight is the backlighting for that.
It must be comfy under that rock you've been living under! The issue is with Google's "Street View", which is achieved by people driving around the streets with cameras, taking street-level photos of buildings and houses.
You have that backwards. The term "heavens" originally referred to the sky and all it contains, including planets, stars, etc. ("heavenly bodies"). The religious meaning followed from that.
In addition, an unusually large amount of space in Wolfram's brain is devoted to running a single recursive loop, which can be expressed in Haskell as follows:
aNewKindOfGenius = "My genius is unsurpassed!" : aNewKindOfGenius
Conservative projections indicate that this loop will cause his brain to explode from sheer self-congratulatoriness, sometime around 2012.
This is clearly the first step in shipping the marketing guys and telephone sanitizers off to another planet: separate "distribution" from "sourcing".
At least, that would be the case in a sane universe. In our universe, what'll probably happen is that sourcing will be sold off to the highest bidder, probably a Chinese company, then dismantled for parts, while the distribution division will focus on selling truly popular medications such as Head-On, that don't require so much R&D.
So your day job supports people who are learning some of the things they need to know for jobs in... advertising, and worse. How do you sleep at night?
Luckily it's not like this guy *needs* a lot of sympathy. He seems to have handled it pretty well. But man, there are some people seriously in need of some perspective here. I guess the world can go to hell as long as we put those damn advertisers in their place, huh? You're really sticking it to the man! No really, how *do* you sleep at night?
(For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been in advertising. I just find this hypocritical whiny bitchiness astonishing.)
You're just kneejerking about a trivial issue that annoys you (and one which happens to pay for a lot of free content you consume). If you work for a reasonably large corporation you can bet that somewhere, someone is doing something officially in the name of the corporation which is screwing someone else out of their money, health, etc., and you're supporting that by working for the company. That's why I asked for an example: it's easy to spot the bad stuff that companies do if you look. If nothing else, your employer probably advertises, so where does that leave you?
Getting on a high horse about what someone else does for a living doesn't make much sense unless you're talking about really bad stuff. Even if you're a waiter in a diner, some of the people you feed are going out and screwing other people over. Talking about withholding sympathy from someone just because they work in advertising makes about as much sense as doing the same for waiters, trash collectors, plumbers, computer programmers, or sysadmins.
Are you serious? He's an artist and a VJ who was doing an advertising gig. Assuming you actually work for a living, what kind of morally superior day job do *you* have?
With your incredible mental acuity, you have a promising career ahead of you in the Boston Police Department, or perhaps the Department of Homeland Security.
Well, one `advantage' of that is that blame dilutes itself to homeopathic levels...
Yes, but that's the exact problem! If our problems were really all caused by a single person or country, or even just a clearly identifiable group of people or countries, we could just get rid of the offenders and live in utopia. Of course, people persist in believing that we can do something like that, which explains the big emphasis on neutralizing the alleged organization "Al Quaeda", and explains the appeal of identifying an "Axis of Evil". It similarly explains the appeal of pointing to the U.S., or the Bush administration, as the cause of so many problems - and they are undeniably the cause of many problems. But these various "evil" actors, like Bin Laden and Bush, are just puppets: representatives of much larger masses of people who support them, one way or another. If you eliminate these visible causes of the problem, they will just be replaced by someone else who will represent the same constituents, and nothing will really change. Real change has to involve combining our individual homeopathic levels of strength into a much larger collective strength, which requires agreement among people with competing interests.
What am I saying, we're all screwed.:-{
Just consider my country and the three or four countries neighboring it, where dictatorships were organized, backed and staged by the US, which resulted in more suffering than any argument even Kissinger could advance to justify...
Well, if you'll forgive some black humor, at least this prompted some good stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
For my part, I grew up in apartheid South Africa, where young men, such as myself at the time, were required to serve two years in the army, ostensibly to help fight the "communist threat" in places like Angola, but more realistically to help enforce order inside South Africa, in the black townships. Very many of South Africa's voting citizens opposed this situation, but extremely few were willing to make any personal sacrifices to change it. It was the first time I encountered the tyranny of denial exerted by ordinary people, who allow their labor to be exploited to serve all sorts of evil ends, because it would be inconvenient to do anything about it. But I've lived in three other countries since then, and I've concluded it's the same everywhere, just with varying stakes. One of the functions of government is to do the dirty work of the people, and indemnify the people from blame for that.
Ah, right. The good ol' argument whereby battered spouses are to be blamed.
It's not comparable. Or if it is, it's comparable to someone choosing to marry a known batterer.
You have to ponder, too, the way in which people accept to be `influenced'. It is mostly through corrupt (even when they are legal) practices,
This sounds like an excuse to me. Every time someone outside the US turns on the TV and watches a US TV show or movie, they're choosing to be influenced. Same goes for buying products, and many other choices that people make that perpetuate the status quo. The real problem is that people around the world have all the same qualities of greed, sloth, aggression etc. that people in the US have.
not infrequently (and quite frequently in a non-distant past) fostered by the main entertainer.
There are always going to be some influencers that are much stronger than others. Similarly, the strongest influencers are not usually going to be nice, peaceful, and truly benevolent, certainly not to the point of ignoring self-interest.
I'm not defending the US, or saying that it couldn't, or shouldn't, be a better world citizen. But I'm pointing out that it's hypocritical and pointless to blame the world's problems on it, just as it's hypocritical and pointless to blame a country's problems on its politicians. The problems start at home, in such microcosmic situations as the competition between siblings, friends, and rivals. Everything else is just extrapolation from these sorts of basic human behaviors.
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Now, if only the creationists would adjust their fucking theory...
Creationists don't have a theory. They have a conjecture which they haven't even tried to validate scientifically.
Note to self: Devin Lott, of 1056 Arbor Way, 89120, is one of those holier-than-thou charitable types. Don't hire him, he'll make the rest of us look bad.
No, I think you nailed it. Now could you explain the Baroque Cycle?
I always thought that had to be a satire on happy endings. Taken that way, you can almost forgive him for it.
So that's why this concrete won't set!
You know that place with the really high resolution, that you sometime see when you come up from your parents' basement and look through a window? Also known as "outside"? Well, sunlight is the backlighting for that.
It must be comfy under that rock you've been living under! The issue is with Google's "Street View", which is achieved by people driving around the streets with cameras, taking street-level photos of buildings and houses.
Meh. :)
Yes, I understood the references, that's why I said it was brilliant. (Can hardly imagine someone thinking it brilliant otherwise...)
Added to my quote file!
You have that backwards. The term "heavens" originally referred to the sky and all it contains, including planets, stars, etc. ("heavenly bodies"). The religious meaning followed from that.
Could you check those details, please? My purchase of a 62" HDTV is being declined, and I need it to watch Stargate reruns tomorrow night.
This is clearly the first step in shipping the marketing guys and telephone sanitizers off to another planet: separate "distribution" from "sourcing". At least, that would be the case in a sane universe. In our universe, what'll probably happen is that sourcing will be sold off to the highest bidder, probably a Chinese company, then dismantled for parts, while the distribution division will focus on selling truly popular medications such as Head-On, that don't require so much R&D.
The technical term is "troll".
Asking politely for politicians to stop being corrupt - you must be Canadian, eh?
Welcome to the United Puritan States of America.
So your day job supports people who are learning some of the things they need to know for jobs in... advertising, and worse. How do you sleep at night?
Luckily it's not like this guy *needs* a lot of sympathy. He seems to have handled it pretty well. But man, there are some people seriously in need of some perspective here. I guess the world can go to hell as long as we put those damn advertisers in their place, huh? You're really sticking it to the man! No really, how *do* you sleep at night?
(For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been in advertising. I just find this hypocritical whiny bitchiness astonishing.)
You're just kneejerking about a trivial issue that annoys you (and one which happens to pay for a lot of free content you consume). If you work for a reasonably large corporation you can bet that somewhere, someone is doing something officially in the name of the corporation which is screwing someone else out of their money, health, etc., and you're supporting that by working for the company. That's why I asked for an example: it's easy to spot the bad stuff that companies do if you look. If nothing else, your employer probably advertises, so where does that leave you?
Getting on a high horse about what someone else does for a living doesn't make much sense unless you're talking about really bad stuff. Even if you're a waiter in a diner, some of the people you feed are going out and screwing other people over. Talking about withholding sympathy from someone just because they work in advertising makes about as much sense as doing the same for waiters, trash collectors, plumbers, computer programmers, or sysadmins.
Are you serious? He's an artist and a VJ who was doing an advertising gig. Assuming you actually work for a living, what kind of morally superior day job do *you* have?
With your incredible mental acuity, you have a promising career ahead of you in the Boston Police Department, or perhaps the Department of Homeland Security.
What am I saying, we're all screwed.
For my part, I grew up in apartheid South Africa, where young men, such as myself at the time, were required to serve two years in the army, ostensibly to help fight the "communist threat" in places like Angola, but more realistically to help enforce order inside South Africa, in the black townships. Very many of South Africa's voting citizens opposed this situation, but extremely few were willing to make any personal sacrifices to change it. It was the first time I encountered the tyranny of denial exerted by ordinary people, who allow their labor to be exploited to serve all sorts of evil ends, because it would be inconvenient to do anything about it. But I've lived in three other countries since then, and I've concluded it's the same everywhere, just with varying stakes. One of the functions of government is to do the dirty work of the people, and indemnify the people from blame for that.
I'm not defending the US, or saying that it couldn't, or shouldn't, be a better world citizen. But I'm pointing out that it's hypocritical and pointless to blame the world's problems on it, just as it's hypocritical and pointless to blame a country's problems on its politicians. The problems start at home, in such microcosmic situations as the competition between siblings, friends, and rivals. Everything else is just extrapolation from these sorts of basic human behaviors.