YMMV, agreed. At my work I was in one building with an IT admin who only knew windows, so I "had to" run fedora in a VM. Now I am in a building with a linux geek as admin so i can run fedora with win7 in a vm. Truthfully, the same computer in both buildings (spec-wise anyway) and the fedora with win7 vm is much faster for everything
Actually, when I switched to linux it was because,with four computers in the house I was spending up to 8 hours a week checking, upgrading, re-installing etc, etc both our windows and mac computers. Those that say, or said, that macs didn't get infected have been wrong all along, and i could prove it. Nowadays, I have six computers ( actually more, but they are not active enough to worry about) all running linux, all with avast home edition, all with rkhunter and chkrootkit, all with strong passwords for root and user passwords for the....users. Since they don't download software outside the repo channels there are few worries there. Updating is automagic, I can ssh to my daughter's machines weeklyto make sure they are fine, it takes maybe ten minutes each (one in virginia, one in amsterdam) and then I am done.
My wife and daughters are not uber geeks, but my daughter said today that she actually knows more about computersthan her supervisors, they now (after one week) come toher when they need help.
oh well, the other fanbois will hate on me, i suppose, but in this family, even the users are able to care for their machines better than most. I think that a lot of the discussion is missing the real point: People are not educated about their tools. Think of it this way, many people own a hammer. But how many are really skilled enough to masterfully use it? can you hammer a nail perfectly, without the head sliding off the nail and bruising the wood? can you hammer with the head, the sides or even the claw? Most carpenters no lionger have these skills,just as almost none of you can program in machine code or assembler.
My point is that by mastering "high level" skills, involving use of our machines as tools, we are cutting ourselves off from the gritty reality of the levels that are the foundations of those skills. I argue that if those skills are dead, when you need those skills, and the thought processes that created those skills, they won't be there for you. Do you see the problem now?
To close the circle, our apple (it is completely blackbox automagic) and windows (Call tech support, it crashed again) friends are quite far from control and understanding of their machines. They actuually don't own them now, since they merely have a license to use them that can be revoked whenever the license holder chooses. So their future seems to be rather bleak as the virus writers (who have done the requisite work to fully understand at least some of the sub-systems of the machine will always be ahead of your protectors.
yeah, he is talking about the old P4 Prescott chip, we used to ccall it the Pres-hott. Intel dumped amost of them in Asia when it became clear that they were not living up to expectations in terms of life expectancy. I put one into the first box I built in Thailand, maybe 2003 or 4, it was just fine but need 5 internal fans to keep it cool. My wife complained about it for years because the noise from the fans would fill the house at night when we were trying to go to sleep.
There is no office environment that has any need for a quad core cpu, for example. I am running a 5+ year old core 2 duo box that I built just before leaving Thailand. I have added 6G of RAM (trivial, 5 minute procedure, including shutdown, unplugging, open on a desktop, remove Ram, replace Ram, close box, reset in place and plug in the 4 or 5 cables, turn on,) and have played with adding 2- 2TB drives, a 1TB drive and now a sweet setup with a 60 GB SSD and 2 TB of file storage with 2TB of backup in a separate drive. Every single change was trivial, took less time than updating Fedora every 6 months.
My office machine is similar and has a virtual-enabled cpu so I run fedora at work with Win7 in a virt wrapper, my box still runs faster at work with six or seven different programs running ( including both IE and Firefox) than anyone else in the offfice.
So, STFU, Munich is going into a good future in a thoughtful way, don't you wish we had a state or city with the balls to face down MS?
Actualy, i have played it in Dutch where there is a remarkable difference in number of available letters. For example there are more "g" and "h" letters, as well as "j" for the Dutch version.
Disagree, old school man says what university should teach (and stilll does sometimes) is how to think like people who are skilled in a discipline can think: that is to say like a historian, like a psychologist, like a scientist, like a mathmatician, etc.
I drank that kool aid, took a degree in linguistics, turned down offers from CIA and MS and went off to travel the world, live on peanuts and succeed at whatever i felt like doing. Still do all the above and love my life. The only thing i have never succeeded in was thinking like an MBA, don't know why that is;)>
I was in a completely unrelated industry for most of my life and I can tell you unequivocally that most people can't tell the difference between excellent anything and barely OK anything. Cars, furniture, music,movies, food, mixed drinks, wine, water, etc. etc. CHoose a category and most people can't tell any difference that whatever-philes will gladly die over. This does not say that the -philes are wrong or stupid, just that we have achieved a worldwhere the general populace has taste that is controled by advertising.
That's right, you choose things based on what has been advertised to you in a way you can accept. I was in the grocery store the other day and paused to consider laundry detergents. I have been away from the US for long enough to not recognize the packages anymore so it took a moment. A woman stopped and told me that a detergent at the end of the line was the best and that I would get a discount today if I bought it. So I did.
On the ride home I heard a soft news story about this being the new ad medium. Homeless or unemployed people given the job of making these personal connection advertisements. I fell for it, so don't think I am laughing at anybody about it, or feeling superior. The detergent was, of course, no better than any other on the shelves. But it was well advertised.
The thing I don't think you are getting is that the employer is also factoring in the training period for a new employee, when they are least productive. When you set that scale as your norm, then a burnout empoyee at 60 hours a week is still working as expected. The fact that they could be producing more at 40 hours a week than they do at 60 doesn't matter, they are meeting the expected ROI.
When I was a worker (and I mean that literally, as a carpenter, job superintendent and contractor) I and my crews were quite frustrating for my various employers. We could finish our days allotment of work in 3-5 hours. Then, because we didn't have the material to continue to work, we goofed off for the rest of the day. One company finally tried to get us material on our schedule and we were out of work in under 2 months (for what was scheduled as a 4 month job).
Rule 1: No overtime. We worked 40 hours a week, period. Rule 2: No layoffs. Everybody comes to work every day and works 8 hours, even if it is just cleaning the jobsite. Rule 3: Safety begins and ends in your head and your heart: Watch out for your buddy and trust them to watch out for you (25 years without a jobsite injury AND without hardhats and steel-toed boots) Rule 4: quality is your job
That was all that was needed, we never ran out of work and I had men who followed me from company to company just to stay with me. They still email me and I've been out of that industry since 1996.
Personally, I believe that the destruction of the American work ethic came about because of the rise of the MBA. The change that this signalled, from labor as an asset to labor as an expense, destroyed the American work environment. Or, as Utah Phillips once said, "When they tell you that you are America's greatest asset, run for the hills! Have you seen what we do to our 'greatest assets?' Have you seen a strip mined mountain, a clearcut forest or a burning river? Those were America's greatest assets!"
Let's back up 1) paper money IS just paper. What makes it special is that we, as a society, have decided to embue it with special value. We agree to believe that it has special value. We accept that the governement that we allow to make these decisions has made the right economic decisions to support the use of this paper as "legal tender" for all debts public and private.
2) A perfect digital copy of that legal tender is not the same exact paper that was blessed by the government as legal tender. For this reason alone it has no value. Even if it is a perfect molecular copy, atomic copy or quantum particle copy it has not received the "holy" blessing that makes money legal tender.
3) A digitalcopy of a movie is the same thing. It also has not been blessed by the producer (in the same role of the government, the producer runs the "mint" that creates and blesses the original movie or music or stamped copy on CD or DVD or bluish raygun thingy) and therefore it is NOT THE SAME.
4) If people try to create copies of money that is intended to fool people into believing that the apparent paper is the legal tender type of paper then they are guilty of counterfeiting. They are, therefore, criminals.
5) If you, however, make a copy of a piece of legal tender without that intention and send it to the MAFIAA without the intention of tricking them into believing it is legal tender then there is no crime. This is accepted legal understanding. This is also why people can make and change copies of money for artistic or advertising purposes.
6) the disconnect comes when we apply this simple formula to media files. I maintain that as long as there is no attempt to pass the copy off in return for money, in other words to sell it as an original, "blessed" copy on a CD or DVD, etc. then there is no crime being perpetrated. You have a copy of something that you are giving to someone else. If you charge them money for it them you are "counterfeiting" and should be considered a criminal. If you give it away with no intention of deceit: in other words it is clear that it is not a "blessed" version but a copy that you have created yourself, then you have done nothing illegal.
7) using terms like "pirates" or "counterfeiter" to describe someone who simply shares a copy of something they own is the same as accusing people who send a fax of a dollar bill of being pirates or counterfeiters. It is disingenuous, confusing and lacks any logical connection to the real world. This description means that people who describe file sharers as counterfeiters or pirates are sociopaths or psychopaths. They are disconnected from logical reality and need help, desperately.
I believe, personally, that it was the 30 years of cocaine abuse in the media industry that led to this disconnect from logical reality. Just as any crackhead can make up a compelling case for why their addiction/ need/ want/ criminal activity/ whatever is not their fault but rather the fault of those "other people" who are stealing their shit from them and not giving them the money that they need to support their addiction (etc). So, we are trying to argue with coked up socio/psychopaths. They need to be hospitalized first before we can have a logical discussion with them.
As opposed to places where the concealed guns are concealed because they are owned illegally and not registered because they are often used for crimes. Apples and oranges, not useful stats. When I lived in DC in the 90s we had plexiglas windows on the front of fthe house becsuse it was easier to use some tape to cover the bullet holes than to replace glass. Those bullets were not from licensed weapons duh,
As a big American who h as lived in Holland, let me just say that 1) Dutch people are taller that we are: Schipol airport in AMsterdam is the only airport in the world where I cannot see over the heads of everyone else in the crowd to find the person/ storefront/ exit / whatever that I am looking for. How do you short people do this every day? In fact, Dutch people are the tallest in the world I have read somewhere.
2) Do not watch Dutch porn. Even men with normal sized penises are bigger than yours, mine, ours. Humbling, humbling.
3) do not go to a Dutch sauna.It is coed and nude. It is also wonderful and relaxing and has steam and dry heat. tanning booths, reading rooms, tea and coffee and cold baths/ tubs and hot tubs and all the rest for a very modest fee for the whole day if you like (I do, along with my wife and daughters and son), but it will make you....humble, very humble... and very glad that size doesn't really matter, at least so she says.
The Chinese claim that they have found Shangri La. It is in the northwest corner of Yunnan province, on the Tibetan Plateau. I went there a few years ago and it was definitely high up, I had trouble breathing and came down after a day,much to my wife's disappointment. It is quite.... Chinese.... in a Tibetan way. Most of the people there are Tibetan, but the business owners are mostly Han Chinese. It is a relatively popular tourist destination, but more for backpackers, at that time anyway (@ 10 years ago).
So, you can go, it is a good trip if you like lite adventure travel.
Well, yes and no. I was a member of an expats asociation in China, around Shanghai and the forums, comments sections, actually pretty much anywhere that allowed public expression by the expats was a pitiful embarrassment. Not only were the comments and posts not cogent, they were seldom on topic, usuallly just flamebait and... well... stupid. These were people who were living well, disgustingly well and they couldn't get their language, much less their minds, out of the sewer that the gutter empties into. The embarrassing part is that the forums were often read by Chinese people who were trying to find information, and instead were abused and shamed by rascist pigs.
At the same time I belong to many useful forums and sometimes try to post thoughtful comments in various places.I don't usually get flamed, but then I am careful about putting my head out.
tiny, man oh man, i got the biggest Hummer on the road, like a Hummer 0 man, and a goddamn chauffeur to boot. That's what a bus is man, the best ride on the road. Penis? what you talkin'? It's like that old scene that played out at work with me and my buddy peeing: He says: "damn, that water is cold today!" "yeah, I said, and deep too!" sheeit
Years ago I worked for a company that was near a major nuclear bomb maker. (yes, everybody knew what they did there, but it was good work) Anyway, My boss got the opportunity to bid on building some boxes to haul some nuclear shells (maybe bombs, maybe not) and we built them to incredibly tight spec. Brass screws on 2 inch centers, clear lodgepole pine, all dimensions = or - 1/16" etc. In the end they took our prototype, used a crane to raise it 60 feet in the air and drop it so that it landed on a corner of the box. Then they studied the results and added a few screws on tighter centers on the corners and a different adhesive for the rubber beds that the.... well whatever they were... would rest during transport.
The boss said that we got the job (ten boxes or something, a few thousand dollars a piece) because we had the strongest boxes and the tightest results. I just kept thinking about the truck driving that shit around, like where does it go with warheads?
Last summer we were in Frankfort waiting for a flight back to the US. My wife is a Dutch national without a green card. So, she is required to have a return ticket. Of course nobody tells you this (which for us was a new law) until the boarding begins. he had to run back acroos the airport to a travel agent who sold her the requisite ticket. This was not a government official, rather it was a ticket agent for the airline
The history of what happened is more complex. Jimmy Carter tried to relieve some of the problems with the institutions by providing government support for some less needy cases to return home or to live on their own with social workers supporting them and their families. The idea was that it was cheaper to do this than to keep them in an institution, which was true but the other part was that the institutions were not helping the mentally ill to live the best life they could. They were just warehoused because the funds for the institutions were inadequate. So, by helping them live on their own more funds were available for those who remained in the institutions, as well as relieving the crowding.
The program was somewhat successful, but never had time to get the kinks ironed out because Reagan came into office and proposed a budget, which was passed by his pocket congress, that declared that the program was a failure. The people who had been released didn't really need to be institutionalized as was obvious from the fact that they were living outside the institution, and so they could be cut off from the safety net that Carter had set up and taxpayers could reap in the billions in savings from this change.
Obviously there were little savings. Obviously this idea just left mentally ill people with no safety net and they crashed onto the street as homeless people. Obviously this was stupid. I volunteered in homeless shelters that were flooded with these people in the late eighties, it was just heartbreaking because their families had entrusted their care to the state who had dumped them on the street. The families had no clue what to do and the homeless folks, unable to collect benefits, medicine or help just spiralled into deeper insanity.
And the nazi solution (state organized murder) was more vicious?
Have you been to Walmart, in China? They sell cheap Chinese made crap to Chinese people who are more than happy to buy it at Chinese prices. Where exactly is the problem? Is it that Walmart ships higher quality cheap junk to the US for us to buy?
The fabs in China also make the same products for Chinese people, they are complaining about the fabs working conditions and the deaths at the APPLE facilities. So there is a difference, it has to do with the actual worker complaints and the public's complaints in China. Paying the workers more will help, but it will also raise the prices for the end consumers who are both Chinese and Western. This will lower the value of Chinese fabs in company eyes and start a move to other countries where the people care less than the Chinese.
(Warning: this is my usual rant following, if you have heard it before you can skip to the following comment) All of this is only to feed the consumers with cheap products that will not last very long because they are designed to fail and be replaced with more cheap crap. Labor costs are important to this equation because if the products are more expensive we will not replace them so quickly. We might even (as the Chinese do) repair them and/or buy used in preference to new. This would destroy the current consumption driven economic model. So,this model must be maintained for "economic stability."
As well as a story, fact checked a hundred years ago by a Chinese governement official, about a man who lived to be @250 years old. True or not, the records still exist and his great great great grandkids knew him.
Yeah, I work in offfices (full of teachers) where they can input numbers to a calculator, but are terrified of spreadsheets. Og course now they have some specialty software that they can use (even though it restricts how you can think about grades and grading) to input raw numbers from papers and automgically get a final grade. Not my fault if the grade is wrong, it was the computer!
But wait, I am an old fart, card carrying in fact and I have also worked with gnome for a dog's age. And I like gnome 3, a lot. But.... I am also old enough to not think that you are (insert pejorative here) OR that the devs are even more (insert other pejorative here) than the KDE devs because they have destroyed the old gnome 2 which was perfect. No, it wasn't perfect. Well, at least it might have been perfect for a particular time and place and environment, but all that has evolved and gnome had to as well. That is OK. OK?
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YMMV, agreed. At my work I was in one building with an IT admin who only knew windows, so I "had to" run fedora in a VM. Now I am in a building with a linux geek as admin so i can run fedora with win7 in a vm. Truthfully, the same computer in both buildings (spec-wise anyway) and the fedora with win7 vm is much faster for everything
Actually, when I switched to linux it was because,with four computers in the house I was spending up to 8 hours a week checking, upgrading, re-installing etc, etc both our windows and mac computers. Those that say, or said, that macs didn't get infected have been wrong all along, and i could prove it. Nowadays, I have six computers ( actually more, but they are not active enough to worry about) all running linux, all with avast home edition, all with rkhunter and chkrootkit, all with strong passwords for root and user passwords for the ....users. Since they don't download software outside the repo channels there are few worries there. Updating is automagic, I can ssh to my daughter's machines weeklyto make sure they are fine, it takes maybe ten minutes each (one in virginia, one in amsterdam) and then I am done.
My wife and daughters are not uber geeks, but my daughter said today that she actually knows more about computersthan her supervisors, they now (after one week) come toher when they need help.
oh well, the other fanbois will hate on me, i suppose, but in this family, even the users are able to care for their machines better than most. I think that a lot of the discussion is missing the real point: People are not educated about their tools. Think of it this way, many people own a hammer. But how many are really skilled enough to masterfully use it? can you hammer a nail perfectly, without the head sliding off the nail and bruising the wood? can you hammer with the head, the sides or even the claw? Most carpenters no lionger have these skills,just as almost none of you can program in machine code or assembler.
My point is that by mastering "high level" skills, involving use of our machines as tools, we are cutting ourselves off from the gritty reality of the levels that are the foundations of those skills. I argue that if those skills are dead, when you need those skills, and the thought processes that created those skills, they won't be there for you. Do you see the problem now?
To close the circle, our apple (it is completely blackbox automagic) and windows (Call tech support, it crashed again) friends are quite far from control and understanding of their machines. They actuually don't own them now, since they merely have a license to use them that can be revoked whenever the license holder chooses. So their future seems to be rather bleak as the virus writers (who have done the requisite work to fully understand at least some of the sub-systems of the machine will always be ahead of your protectors.
And Thailand and Mainland China.
yeah, he is talking about the old P4 Prescott chip, we used to ccall it the Pres-hott. Intel dumped amost of them in Asia when it became clear that they were not living up to expectations in terms of life expectancy. I put one into the first box I built in Thailand, maybe 2003 or 4, it was just fine but need 5 internal fans to keep it cool. My wife complained about it for years because the noise from the fans would fill the house at night when we were trying to go to sleep.
There is no office environment that has any need for a quad core cpu, for example. I am running a 5+ year old core 2 duo box that I built just before leaving Thailand. I have added 6G of RAM (trivial, 5 minute procedure, including shutdown, unplugging, open on a desktop, remove Ram, replace Ram, close box, reset in place and plug in the 4 or 5 cables, turn on,) and have played with adding 2- 2TB drives, a 1TB drive and now a sweet setup with a 60 GB SSD and 2 TB of file storage with 2TB of backup in a separate drive. Every single change was trivial, took less time than updating Fedora every 6 months.
My office machine is similar and has a virtual-enabled cpu so I run fedora at work with Win7 in a virt wrapper, my box still runs faster at work with six or seven different programs running ( including both IE and Firefox) than anyone else in the offfice.
So, STFU, Munich is going into a good future in a thoughtful way, don't you wish we had a state or city with the balls to face down MS?
Actualy, i have played it in Dutch where there is a remarkable difference in number of available letters. For example there are more "g" and "h" letters, as well as "j" for the Dutch version.
I learned a long time ago: there is no such thing as useless knowledge.
Disagree, old school man says what university should teach (and stilll does sometimes) is how to think like people who are skilled in a discipline can think: that is to say like a historian, like a psychologist, like a scientist, like a mathmatician, etc.
I drank that kool aid, took a degree in linguistics, turned down offers from CIA and MS and went off to travel the world, live on peanuts and succeed at whatever i felt like doing. Still do all the above and love my life. The only thing i have never succeeded in was thinking like an MBA, don't know why that is;)>
In related news, Kevin Rose was also just hired by Google. What is the chocolate factory up to?????????
it's called "appeal toanecdote" and has no value in scientific investigation. It can get you attention on a date though.
I was in a completely unrelated industry for most of my life and I can tell you unequivocally that most people can't tell the difference between excellent anything and barely OK anything. Cars, furniture, music,movies, food, mixed drinks, wine, water, etc. etc. CHoose a category and most people can't tell any difference that whatever-philes will gladly die over. This does not say that the -philes are wrong or stupid, just that we have achieved a worldwhere the general populace has taste that is controled by advertising.
That's right, you choose things based on what has been advertised to you in a way you can accept. I was in the grocery store the other day and paused to consider laundry detergents. I have been away from the US for long enough to not recognize the packages anymore so it took a moment. A woman stopped and told me that a detergent at the end of the line was the best and that I would get a discount today if I bought it. So I did.
On the ride home I heard a soft news story about this being the new ad medium. Homeless or unemployed people given the job of making these personal connection advertisements. I fell for it, so don't think I am laughing at anybody about it, or feeling superior. The detergent was, of course, no better than any other on the shelves. But it was well advertised.
The thing I don't think you are getting is that the employer is also factoring in the training period for a new employee, when they are least productive. When you set that scale as your norm, then a burnout empoyee at 60 hours a week is still working as expected. The fact that they could be producing more at 40 hours a week than they do at 60 doesn't matter, they are meeting the expected ROI.
When I was a worker (and I mean that literally, as a carpenter, job superintendent and contractor) I and my crews were quite frustrating for my various employers. We could finish our days allotment of work in 3-5 hours. Then, because we didn't have the material to continue to work, we goofed off for the rest of the day. One company finally tried to get us material on our schedule and we were out of work in under 2 months (for what was scheduled as a 4 month job).
Rule 1: No overtime. We worked 40 hours a week, period.
Rule 2: No layoffs. Everybody comes to work every day and works 8 hours, even if it is just cleaning the jobsite.
Rule 3: Safety begins and ends in your head and your heart: Watch out for your buddy and trust them to watch out for you (25 years without a jobsite injury AND without hardhats and steel-toed boots)
Rule 4: quality is your job
That was all that was needed, we never ran out of work and I had men who followed me from company to company just to stay with me. They still email me and I've been out of that industry since 1996.
Personally, I believe that the destruction of the American work ethic came about because of the rise of the MBA. The change that this signalled, from labor as an asset to labor as an expense, destroyed the American work environment. Or, as Utah Phillips once said, "When they tell you that you are America's greatest asset, run for the hills! Have you seen what we do to our 'greatest assets?' Have you seen a strip mined mountain, a clearcut forest or a burning river? Those were America's greatest assets!"
Let's back up
1) paper money IS just paper. What makes it special is that we, as a society, have decided to embue it with special value. We agree to believe that it has special value. We accept that the governement that we allow to make these decisions has made the right economic decisions to support the use of this paper as "legal tender" for all debts public and private.
2) A perfect digital copy of that legal tender is not the same exact paper that was blessed by the government as legal tender. For this reason alone it has no value. Even if it is a perfect molecular copy, atomic copy or quantum particle copy it has not received the "holy" blessing that makes money legal tender.
3) A digitalcopy of a movie is the same thing. It also has not been blessed by the producer (in the same role of the government, the producer runs the "mint" that creates and blesses the original movie or music or stamped copy on CD or DVD or bluish raygun thingy) and therefore it is NOT THE SAME.
4) If people try to create copies of money that is intended to fool people into believing that the apparent paper is the legal tender type of paper then they are guilty of counterfeiting. They are, therefore, criminals.
5) If you, however, make a copy of a piece of legal tender without that intention and send it to the MAFIAA without the intention of tricking them into believing it is legal tender then there is no crime. This is accepted legal understanding. This is also why people can make and change copies of money for artistic or advertising purposes.
6) the disconnect comes when we apply this simple formula to media files. I maintain that as long as there is no attempt to pass the copy off in return for money, in other words to sell it as an original, "blessed" copy on a CD or DVD, etc. then there is no crime being perpetrated. You have a copy of something that you are giving to someone else. If you charge them money for it them you are "counterfeiting" and should be considered a criminal. If you give it away with no intention of deceit: in other words it is clear that it is not a "blessed" version but a copy that you have created yourself, then you have done nothing illegal.
7) using terms like "pirates" or "counterfeiter" to describe someone who simply shares a copy of something they own is the same as accusing people who send a fax of a dollar bill of being pirates or counterfeiters. It is disingenuous, confusing and lacks any logical connection to the real world. This description means that people who describe file sharers as counterfeiters or pirates are sociopaths or psychopaths. They are disconnected from logical reality and need help, desperately.
I believe, personally, that it was the 30 years of cocaine abuse in the media industry that led to this disconnect from logical reality. Just as any crackhead can make up a compelling case for why their addiction/ need/ want/ criminal activity/ whatever is not their fault but rather the fault of those "other people" who are stealing their shit from them and not giving them the money that they need to support their addiction (etc). So, we are trying to argue with coked up socio/psychopaths. They need to be hospitalized first before we can have a logical discussion with them.
As opposed to places where the concealed guns are concealed because they are owned illegally and not registered because they are often used for crimes. Apples and oranges, not useful stats. When I lived in DC in the 90s we had plexiglas windows on the front of fthe house becsuse it was easier to use some tape to cover the bullet holes than to replace glass. Those bullets were not from licensed weapons duh,
As a big American who h as lived in Holland, let me just say that
1) Dutch people are taller that we are: Schipol airport in AMsterdam is the only airport in the world where I cannot see over the heads of everyone else in the crowd to find the person/ storefront/ exit / whatever that I am looking for. How do you short people do this every day? In fact, Dutch people are the tallest in the world I have read somewhere.
2) Do not watch Dutch porn. Even men with normal sized penises are bigger than yours, mine, ours. Humbling, humbling.
3) do not go to a Dutch sauna.It is coed and nude. It is also wonderful and relaxing and has steam and dry heat. tanning booths, reading rooms, tea and coffee and cold baths/ tubs and hot tubs and all the rest for a very modest fee for the whole day if you like (I do, along with my wife and daughters and son), but it will make you....humble, very humble... and very glad that size doesn't really matter, at least so she says.
The Chinese claim that they have found Shangri La. It is in the northwest corner of Yunnan province, on the Tibetan Plateau. I went there a few years ago and it was definitely high up, I had trouble breathing and came down after a day,much to my wife's disappointment. It is quite .... Chinese.... in a Tibetan way. Most of the people there are Tibetan, but the business owners are mostly Han Chinese. It is a relatively popular tourist destination, but more for backpackers, at that time anyway (@ 10 years ago).
So, you can go, it is a good trip if you like lite adventure travel.
Well, yes and no. I was a member of an expats asociation in China, around Shanghai and the forums, comments sections, actually pretty much anywhere that allowed public expression by the expats was a pitiful embarrassment. Not only were the comments and posts not cogent, they were seldom on topic, usuallly just flamebait and ... well... stupid. These were people who were living well, disgustingly well and they couldn't get their language, much less their minds, out of the sewer that the gutter empties into. The embarrassing part is that the forums were often read by Chinese people who were trying to find information, and instead were abused and shamed by rascist pigs.
At the same time I belong to many useful forums and sometimes try to post thoughtful comments in various places.I don't usually get flamed, but then I am careful about putting my head out.
tiny, man oh man, i got the biggest Hummer on the road, like a Hummer 0 man, and a goddamn chauffeur to boot. That's what a bus is man, the best ride on the road. Penis? what you talkin'? It's like that old scene that played out at work with me and my buddy peeing: He says: "damn, that water is cold today!" "yeah, I said, and deep too!" sheeit
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Years ago I worked for a company that was near a major nuclear bomb maker. (yes, everybody knew what they did there, but it was good work) Anyway, My boss got the opportunity to bid on building some boxes to haul some nuclear shells (maybe bombs, maybe not) and we built them to incredibly tight spec. Brass screws on 2 inch centers, clear lodgepole pine, all dimensions = or - 1/16" etc. In the end they took our prototype, used a crane to raise it 60 feet in the air and drop it so that it landed on a corner of the box. Then they studied the results and added a few screws on tighter centers on the corners and a different adhesive for the rubber beds that the .... well whatever they were... would rest during transport.
The boss said that we got the job (ten boxes or something, a few thousand dollars a piece) because we had the strongest boxes and the tightest results. I just kept thinking about the truck driving that shit around, like where does it go with warheads?
Last summer we were in Frankfort waiting for a flight back to the US. My wife is a Dutch national without a green card. So, she is required to have a return ticket. Of course nobody tells you this (which for us was a new law) until the boarding begins. he had to run back acroos the airport to a travel agent who sold her the requisite ticket. This was not a government official, rather it was a ticket agent for the airline
The history of what happened is more complex. Jimmy Carter tried to relieve some of the problems with the institutions by providing government support for some less needy cases to return home or to live on their own with social workers supporting them and their families. The idea was that it was cheaper to do this than to keep them in an institution, which was true but the other part was that the institutions were not helping the mentally ill to live the best life they could. They were just warehoused because the funds for the institutions were inadequate. So, by helping them live on their own more funds were available for those who remained in the institutions, as well as relieving the crowding.
The program was somewhat successful, but never had time to get the kinks ironed out because Reagan came into office and proposed a budget, which was passed by his pocket congress, that declared that the program was a failure. The people who had been released didn't really need to be institutionalized as was obvious from the fact that they were living outside the institution, and so they could be cut off from the safety net that Carter had set up and taxpayers could reap in the billions in savings from this change.
Obviously there were little savings. Obviously this idea just left mentally ill people with no safety net and they crashed onto the street as homeless people. Obviously this was stupid. I volunteered in homeless shelters that were flooded with these people in the late eighties, it was just heartbreaking because their families had entrusted their care to the state who had dumped them on the street. The families had no clue what to do and the homeless folks, unable to collect benefits, medicine or help just spiralled into deeper insanity.
And the nazi solution (state organized murder) was more vicious?
Have you been to Walmart, in China?
They sell cheap Chinese made crap to Chinese people who are more than happy to buy it at Chinese prices. Where exactly is the problem? Is it that Walmart ships higher quality cheap junk to the US for us to buy?
The fabs in China also make the same products for Chinese people, they are complaining about the fabs working conditions and the deaths at the APPLE facilities. So there is a difference, it has to do with the actual worker complaints and the public's complaints in China. Paying the workers more will help, but it will also raise the prices for the end consumers who are both Chinese and Western. This will lower the value of Chinese fabs in company eyes and start a move to other countries where the people care less than the Chinese.
(Warning: this is my usual rant following, if you have heard it before you can skip to the following comment) All of this is only to feed the consumers with cheap products that will not last very long because they are designed to fail and be replaced with more cheap crap. Labor costs are important to this equation because if the products are more expensive we will not replace them so quickly. We might even (as the Chinese do) repair them and/or buy used in preference to new. This would destroy the current consumption driven economic model. So,this model must be maintained for "economic stability."
As well as a story, fact checked a hundred years ago by a Chinese governement official, about a man who lived to be @250 years old. True or not, the records still exist and his great great great grandkids knew him.
Yeah, I work in offfices (full of teachers) where they can input numbers to a calculator, but are terrified of spreadsheets.
Og course now they have some specialty software that they can use (even though it restricts how you can think about grades and grading) to input raw numbers from papers and automgically get a final grade. Not my fault if the grade is wrong, it was the computer!
But wait, I am an old fart, card carrying in fact and I have also worked with gnome for a dog's age. And I like gnome 3, a lot. But.... I am also old enough to not think that you are (insert pejorative here) OR that the devs are even more (insert other pejorative here) than the KDE devs because they have destroyed the old gnome 2 which was perfect. No, it wasn't perfect. Well, at least it might have been perfect for a particular time and place and environment, but all that has evolved and gnome had to as well. That is OK. OK?