Raspail?? I thought Camp of the Saints was not only out-of-print but really deliberately, just short of burning the remaining copies out-of-print. My old copy suffered severely from a long-ago poolside reading but I still have it. A shocking book, probably moreso today than when written.
Must be at a certain level of appreciation, certainly below the sophisticated understanding of modern MFAs, but I liked that.
Anyway, the most under-appreciated sci-fi author, bar none, is Jack Vance. If any deem this underappreciation deserved because he didn't seem to undertake the addressing of Big Themes, said "any" merely show they just. don't. get it.
Also, he was the best at creating names, like, evar!! He could outname Tolkein on Tolkein's best day even if he let Tolkein use the CERN High-Velocity Namer and spotted him half the alphabet.
Are you truly convinced that, vast conspiracies aside, government actions designed purportedly for one noble purpose or another, never result in exactly that ("...shake good ol' hardworking folk out of their hard-earned money and give it to others")?
I do like your point that our concern for the environment should be informed, first and first, 1A and 1B, by the goal of maintiining its suitability for HUMAN habitation. Not to restore it to some perfect natural state.
All this Gaia crap and talk of "Nature's dynamic harmony" give me the creeps. Nature's "harmony" and "stability" are achieved through cataclysm, catastrophe, extinction and savage competition. The "harmony" is only observed because the result of this upheaval...is a result. It all ends up somewhere, with one species or another occupying one ecological niche or another or none. And it looks like harmonic dynamism or beneficial stability only because the geological, meteorological, and biological time frames are so much greater than our human-life-span-scaled perspective.
Research grants dude, research grants. Big money, you're in charge, you can advance people's careers, make sweet connections, hand out sub-contracts, it's the Holy Grail for shit sake.
Oh, I forgot. That can't be. To suggest it is trolling. AGW 'insisters' are all monastic apolitical world-savers. They have nothing to gain. Just the advancement of science.
Ah, I can't even maintain sarcasm, much less malice. Look, just because a bias works in a subtle manner in a complex human system doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It isn't trolling to point out that the government can get what it wants, when it comes to government-funded studies and research. When has that ever NOT happened?? Such "research" will always point to measures the government must take that a) will result in greater government regulatory power/taxation/control and b) require distributing money to some people TBDL but probably friends of whoever is in charge of the expenditure.
It's discouraging. People who seem otherwise intelligent, informed, and logical (or at the very least capable of making smug, irritating liberal arguments with excellent grammar) remain convinced that having the government in charge of a response to AGW is a good thing. Unbalanced skepticism is dangerous, and their faith is based on zero examples. In my lifetime, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty and the Just Plain War to Kill Foreigners (I think it's some "Mission to Spread Democracy and Freedom" or something in the official parlance) have without exception caused more problems to the actual citizenry than they have solved and have without exception enriched some pretty vile, undeserving people. Who are not all in the polluting professions.
So no. The suggestion that there is likely to be corruption and waste in the meteing out of the "Save the World Fund" or "War on Warming Package" or whatever they'll call it is NOT trolling.
Compare the relative "popularity" among other researchers, grant-seekers, and government agency employees of a study that shows little anthropogenic effect (or worse, the uncomely "inconclusive results") and a study that shows a little validation for it and which just might, if released at the right time of the week on a slow news cycle, result in scary headlines. Keep in mind that the group judging these papers are quite likely to be peer-reviewers AND people whose careers will be positively effected by more concern for AGW.
Not as blatant as the "paid off by Big Oil!" ad hominem, but just as consistent with the way the world works.
And I'd hope no one would want to be a Selection Pressure on Research denialist??
Heh. Possibly even better for you than avoiding the religious indoctrination was seeing an adult contest what is largely set up to be seen by children as "the absolute authority" of the school.
Note that this was a principled (and in this case, correct) disagreement with the school system, and not just an excuse to get out of school on a spring day and shout slogans, as many of today's yutes seem to see "dissent", "rebellion" and "protest".
This latter is especially painful to see when they are being used as pawns by the teachers' unions. "lockstep dissent" is as ugly as it is oxymoronic.
Our species, up to and including our most advanced thinkers*, is too wedded to unexamined assumptions and too fond of creating self-referential aphorisms and/or ironic maxims to realistically model first contact with non-human species.
That was the third thing I thought of. (first, the "running over hot women" thing, then the "That comment will be -1, redundant in about 5 minutes".)
What the fuck is the market for this?? I mean, I have as much empathy for paraplegics as anyone but I wouldn't think the potential sales would justify the development cost.
I had a '59, '58 Ford 3/4 ton once long ago (yes, it was already old), no power nothin'. Manual steering, brakes and a long stick floor shifter. That thing was a job to drive, like actual work (still easier than walking, especially with a dozen bags of sand). So I can understand the move to Hydraguide (look it up) and automatic transmissions and power brakes...it was to make driving more practical for bluehairs, girls, stick-armed wimps and lazy people. Now THAT'S a market share.
But apparently the momentum of "making things easier" has swept automotive engineers past the point of rational analysis of what they are actually trying to accomplish.
I'm not so sure the moderation of "troll" is really accurate.
The account of the banning of freon (related to the "ozone hole", which has certainly receded as a catastrophic concern...how many of you observed "Ozone Day" this year??) exemplifies an admirable cynicism. While there were definitely environmental concerns, who would be so naive as to think the expiration of DuPont pantents played no part in the ban??
However convinced many are of the nobility and innate goodness of the Gaia-lovers and Earth-savers who promote ecological actions for improving the environment, those good people* do operate in a world where the levers of power are pulled by political animals and corporate entities for their own purposes. Cynicism about their motives and actions is warranted in every case.
*-I actually find many of them to be vile misanthropes, but hey...
It isn't "-1, flamebait" to dissect opinions someone has put forth in a post. Gates' action does indeed represent a logical argument ("Agree with me because...") and does indeed demonstrate a rare double fallacy, as it consists entirely of an argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity) combined with argumentum ad baculum (threatening the audience).
I've seen other posts in this thread, sound of argument and duly informative (but apparently of inadequate Ecological Correctness) modded down, ignored or modded flamebait when the content merely presented an alternative opinion. *tsk-tsk*
Guess we'll see.
Yes, First World ecological concerns about "wetlands" and raptor eggs are inappropriately transferred, by eco-NGOs and lobbying groups, to malaria-relief efforts in Africa. It is not "flamebait" to point out the millions of preventable deaths as a result thereof.
As for the claims that DDT was banned in part because it "causes cancer", we should do a little risk analysis comparing the number of deaths (not to lab animals) due to DDT-caused cancer (0) against deaths among the "poor people" Gates is so empathetic towards from malaria (many millions).
That DDT-resistant strains of mosquitoes may arise as a result of using DDT is not an argument against its use, and devalues the millions of lives that would be spared in the interim. Also, "This might not work in the future!" is decidedly not an argument we present when considering the futility of using vaccines against microorganisms, using laws against anti-social behavior or using charity against poverty. The proper response to this argument is "So what?".
Calling the current UN policy towards malaria treatment in Africa 'genocidal', 'murderous' or 'arrogant' may be flamebait...ish. Pointing out that said policies are misguided, self-indulgent and the result of shallow analysis warped by the necessity to be ecologically correct is not.
Regardless of one's opinion of the FPS genre (The novelty long ago wore off for me, and eventually the interest in playing them waned...sometime after Castle Wolfenstein (the first). So I share his experience there.), the designation "troll" was generous, assuming the OP would know that posting of such an obtuse comment constituted the dangling of the irresistible "low-hanging fruit" in front of/.ers. This is "trolling".
Actually responding as if he were serious, ex: "They develop them because people still buy them derrr.", or pointing out that the comment is as remarkably clueless as an old man wondering why people still have sex when he's been disinterested in it for a long time, would require a tag.
Hence, the ridicule. THIS. IS. INTERNETS!!!
ps) I read your (recursively ironic) post whining about the "bully" mods in Comic Book Guy's voice and it was equally lame, but very funny. See, the mods are tasked with judging whether this guy was trolling or just a little thoughtless, whereas you jump in with butthurt nitpickery to do the same to them just to make yourself look...ummm, I'm not sure what you were going for. But it's certainly a subjective judgement, eh?
Asteroids have been splattering Earth samples across the Solar System for billions of years. Ummm...just how are these chunky samples of Earth ejected into space?? Oh, wait...when you said "asteroids" maybe you meant "meteoroids", which have been splattering cometary, asteroidal and other space flotsam across the solar system for billions of years.
But even if chunks of Earth had been spewed into space over millions of years, that would be more of a test of which terrestrial life-forms could survive cold well below any earth environment, airlessness, the absence of gravity and impacts matching nuclear explosion than of which target was most amenable to earth life.
Plus, he totally mis-quoted. It should always be "ha-HA!", reflecting the meter of the original.
And Burns should always be quoted as saying "ECK-cellent."
Ever hear of Tri-Star? Motherboard manufacturer for eMachines. I did support for them years ago, and WE couldn't find any information on them. "What video chip is integrated on your board? No idea, sir. Sorry." Scary shit*.
eMachines bought no-name (LITERALLY no-name) modems in lots of 10k for under $2/unit. The used a 120w power supply that was below-standard size to fit in their mini-boxes and it was only produced by one factory...when it (the factory, not the power supply) was damaged in that Taiwanese earthquake/fire/Godzirra attack back about 2001 (circa), they spent HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on many, many thousands of support calls from customers whose computers were unusable because they could NOT replace these (frequently-failing) PSs. They were unavailable for months. A disaster.
eMachines had LOTS of stuff like that in their systems. Supposedly, right before the Gateway purchase, they started using 'real' MBs and other components, but continued to save production costs on the cheapest RAM in existence and cheap power supplies. These hardware design decisions, of course, generated huge support costs, but that's one part of the company earning bonuses while another part has to explain why they can't hit their metrics. Pretty funny. Unless you owned one of them. Or worked in their support (I got out wit a quickness.). But when Gateway purchased them, they were making money and Gateway was not. Go figger.
Oh, and I once got a cheap Packard-Bell from an employee who let me look at their support database. I was checking the 'issues' on the various motherboards, and came across one (the 800, IIRC) that had a list a mile long. He explained it was a "brilliant" design that was meant to compatible with AMD, Intel and CYRIX processors. The support and replacement costs for this one horrible design decision may have caused NEC to shut down PB North America altogether, cause they sold millions of 'em.
a) Old, and officially entering curmudgeonhood. The old telling how things were golden in the old days and crap nowdays is itself as old as human civilization. And with three thousand years of such steady descent, we should have reached more of a 'bottom' position today than can actually be observed, doncha think? Or maybe the geezeers (including Sir Reginald here) are guilty of nostalgic romanticization.
3) "Subtly" trying to point out that what everyone ELSE listens to is crap, and only they and their fellows are initiates into the The True School of Cool Music.
vi) Observing change and mistaking it for "death". Frankly, if the music company-dictated winner-take-all star system declines, I for one welcome our new musician overlords. If nobody ever again sells 10 million copies of something, it hardly means music is dead.
Killing music is like destroying water. You can break an ice cube, but there's still water. You can steam it out of pan, but there's still water, and even if it's in a form you can't see, you'd be mistaken to say it's gone.
I tend to listen to 'folk music', which is, I guess, music made by folks. Unamplified instruments sometimes. NOT dependent on record companies, or radio, or the internets. Sure, none of these porch pickers is Bryan Sutton, or Bela Fleck, and none of the fiddlers are Mark O'Connor...but maybe I missed the part of the definition of music that's about 'winning'.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen.
Zelazny was...audacious. And audaciousness, as a writerly virtue, covers a multitude of writerly sins.
"Imagine a feather falling down an unlit well.
Now take away the feather.
Now take away the well.
Now take away the falling."
Never forgot that chapter opening...
Raspail?? I thought Camp of the Saints was not only out-of-print but really deliberately, just short of burning the remaining copies out-of-print. My old copy suffered severely from a long-ago poolside reading but I still have it. A shocking book, probably moreso today than when written.
Huh. I actually liked that.
Must be at a certain level of appreciation, certainly below the sophisticated understanding of modern MFAs, but I liked that.
Anyway, the most under-appreciated sci-fi author, bar none, is Jack Vance. If any deem this underappreciation deserved because he didn't seem to undertake the addressing of Big Themes, said "any" merely show they just. don't. get it.
Also, he was the best at creating names, like, evar!! He could outname Tolkein on Tolkein's best day even if he let Tolkein use the CERN High-Velocity Namer and spotted him half the alphabet.
Umm...where are my mod points plz? I think some AC deserves a "+1, strained sarcastococcix" rating.
What are the results when looking at people who drink decaffeinated coffee?
Well, when I look at them; queasiness, contempt and the unshakable conviction that I'll be staying up longer than they will.
"...political bias is like a fucking terminal disease on this site."
Sadly, no it isn't, or there would be a lot less of it. Nor is it like fucking, or there would be a lot more of it.
Are you truly convinced that, vast conspiracies aside, government actions designed purportedly for one noble purpose or another, never result in exactly that ("...shake good ol' hardworking folk out of their hard-earned money and give it to others")?
I do like your point that our concern for the environment should be informed, first and first, 1A and 1B, by the goal of maintiining its suitability for HUMAN habitation. Not to restore it to some perfect natural state.
All this Gaia crap and talk of "Nature's dynamic harmony" give me the creeps. Nature's "harmony" and "stability" are achieved through cataclysm, catastrophe, extinction and savage competition. The "harmony" is only observed because the result of this upheaval...is a result. It all ends up somewhere, with one species or another occupying one ecological niche or another or none. And it looks like harmonic dynamism or beneficial stability only because the geological, meteorological, and biological time frames are so much greater than our human-life-span-scaled perspective.
ps) you didn't change your .sig this time.
Research grants dude, research grants. Big money, you're in charge, you can advance people's careers, make sweet connections, hand out sub-contracts, it's the Holy Grail for shit sake.
Oh, I forgot. That can't be. To suggest it is trolling. AGW 'insisters' are all monastic apolitical world-savers. They have nothing to gain. Just the advancement of science.
Ah, I can't even maintain sarcasm, much less malice. Look, just because a bias works in a subtle manner in a complex human system doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It isn't trolling to point out that the government can get what it wants, when it comes to government-funded studies and research. When has that ever NOT happened?? Such "research" will always point to measures the government must take that a) will result in greater government regulatory power/taxation/control and b) require distributing money to some people TBDL but probably friends of whoever is in charge of the expenditure.
It's discouraging. People who seem otherwise intelligent, informed, and logical (or at the very least capable of making smug, irritating liberal arguments with excellent grammar) remain convinced that having the government in charge of a response to AGW is a good thing. Unbalanced skepticism is dangerous, and their faith is based on zero examples. In my lifetime, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty and the Just Plain War to Kill Foreigners (I think it's some "Mission to Spread Democracy and Freedom" or something in the official parlance) have without exception caused more problems to the actual citizenry than they have solved and have without exception enriched some pretty vile, undeserving people. Who are not all in the polluting professions.
So no. The suggestion that there is likely to be corruption and waste in the meteing out of the "Save the World Fund" or "War on Warming Package" or whatever they'll call it is NOT trolling.
There is also selection pressure on research.
Compare the relative "popularity" among other researchers, grant-seekers, and government agency employees of a study that shows little anthropogenic effect (or worse, the uncomely "inconclusive results") and a study that shows a little validation for it and which just might, if released at the right time of the week on a slow news cycle, result in scary headlines. Keep in mind that the group judging these papers are quite likely to be peer-reviewers AND people whose careers will be positively effected by more concern for AGW.
Not as blatant as the "paid off by Big Oil!" ad hominem, but just as consistent with the way the world works.
And I'd hope no one would want to be a Selection Pressure on Research denialist??
But...but..how would we do that thing you said..."colonize another planet", was it??
Wouldn't we need some kind of large governmental agency dedicated to...oh, I get it.
Ah. "Conservatism is what liberals say conservatism is."
Got ya.
I have an avatar that says we should virtually try him for treason.
Heh. Possibly even better for you than avoiding the religious indoctrination was seeing an adult contest what is largely set up to be seen by children as
"the absolute authority" of the school.
Note that this was a principled (and in this case, correct) disagreement with the school system, and not just an excuse to get out of school on a spring day and shout slogans, as many of today's yutes seem to see "dissent", "rebellion" and "protest".
This latter is especially painful to see when they are being used as pawns by the teachers' unions. "lockstep dissent" is as ugly as it is oxymoronic.
Our species, up to and including our most advanced thinkers*, is too wedded to unexamined assumptions and too fond of creating self-referential aphorisms and/or ironic maxims to realistically model first contact with non-human species.
*-apparently.
My god, I stole this from something I saw not two weeks ago and already forgot where it was...
Subject: Censorship
Fuck you, cowards.
Strong letter to follow.
Amen.
That was the third thing I thought of. (first, the "running over hot women" thing, then the "That comment will be -1, redundant in about 5 minutes".)
What the fuck is the market for this?? I mean, I have as much empathy for paraplegics as anyone but I wouldn't think the potential sales would justify the development cost.
I had a '59, '58 Ford 3/4 ton once long ago (yes, it was already old), no power nothin'. Manual steering, brakes and a long stick floor shifter. That thing was a job to drive, like actual work (still easier than walking, especially with a dozen bags of sand). So I can understand the move to Hydraguide (look it up) and automatic transmissions and power brakes...it was to make driving more practical for bluehairs, girls, stick-armed wimps and lazy people. Now THAT'S a market share.
But apparently the momentum of "making things easier" has swept automotive engineers past the point of rational analysis of what they are actually trying to accomplish.
Unless I'm missing something...
I'm not so sure the moderation of "troll" is really accurate.
The account of the banning of freon (related to the "ozone hole", which has certainly receded as a catastrophic concern...how many of you observed "Ozone Day" this year??) exemplifies an admirable cynicism. While there were definitely environmental concerns, who would be so naive as to think the expiration of DuPont pantents played no part in the ban??
However convinced many are of the nobility and innate goodness of the Gaia-lovers and Earth-savers who promote ecological actions for improving the environment, those good people* do operate in a world where the levers of power are pulled by political animals and corporate entities for their own purposes. Cynicism about their motives and actions is warranted in every case.
*-I actually find many of them to be vile misanthropes, but hey...
FTW? Where's my meta-mod points??
It isn't "-1, flamebait" to dissect opinions someone has put forth in a post. Gates' action does indeed represent a logical argument ("Agree with me because...") and does indeed demonstrate a rare double fallacy, as it consists entirely of an argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity) combined with argumentum ad baculum (threatening the audience).
I've seen other posts in this thread, sound of argument and duly informative (but apparently of inadequate Ecological Correctness) modded down, ignored or modded flamebait when the content merely presented an alternative opinion. *tsk-tsk*
Guess we'll see.
Yes, First World ecological concerns about "wetlands" and raptor eggs are inappropriately transferred, by eco-NGOs and lobbying groups, to malaria-relief efforts in Africa. It is not "flamebait" to point out the millions of preventable deaths as a result thereof.
As for the claims that DDT was banned in part because it "causes cancer", we should do a little risk analysis comparing the number of deaths (not to lab animals) due to DDT-caused cancer (0) against deaths among the "poor people" Gates is so empathetic towards from malaria (many millions).
That DDT-resistant strains of mosquitoes may arise as a result of using DDT is not an argument against its use, and devalues the millions of lives that would be spared in the interim. Also, "This might not work in the future!" is decidedly not an argument we present when considering the futility of using vaccines against microorganisms, using laws against anti-social behavior or using charity against poverty. The proper response to this argument is "So what?".
Calling the current UN policy towards malaria treatment in Africa 'genocidal', 'murderous' or 'arrogant' may be flamebait...ish. Pointing out that said policies are misguided, self-indulgent and the result of shallow analysis warped by the necessity to be ecologically correct is not.
And I meant a "/pointing out painfully obvious" tag. derr.
Regardless of one's opinion of the FPS genre (The novelty long ago wore off for me, and eventually the interest in playing them waned...sometime after Castle Wolfenstein (the first). So I share his experience there.), the designation "troll" was generous, assuming the OP would know that posting of such an obtuse comment constituted the dangling of the irresistible "low-hanging fruit" in front of /.ers. This is "trolling".
Actually responding as if he were serious, ex: "They develop them because people still buy them derrr.", or pointing out that the comment is as remarkably clueless as an old man wondering why people still have sex when he's been disinterested in it for a long time, would require a tag.
Hence, the ridicule. THIS. IS. INTERNETS!!!
ps) I read your (recursively ironic) post whining about the "bully" mods in Comic Book Guy's voice and it was equally lame, but very funny. See, the mods are tasked with judging whether this guy was trolling or just a little thoughtless, whereas you jump in with butthurt nitpickery to do the same to them just to make yourself look...ummm, I'm not sure what you were going for. But it's certainly a subjective judgement, eh?
For the improvement of mankind, please sub the following in those instructions:
Bottle Bomb
Ingredients:
* 20 oz soda bottle (empty and dry on the inside)
* black powder (the more fine the better)
* steady burning short wick (no more than 2 seconds delay)
Thank yew.
Plus, he totally mis-quoted. It should always be "ha-HA!", reflecting the meter of the original. And Burns should always be quoted as saying "ECK-cellent."
Ever hear of Tri-Star? Motherboard manufacturer for eMachines. I did support for them years ago, and WE couldn't find any information on them. "What video chip is integrated on your board? No idea, sir. Sorry." Scary shit*.
eMachines bought no-name (LITERALLY no-name) modems in lots of 10k for under $2/unit. The used a 120w power supply that was below-standard size to fit in their mini-boxes and it was only produced by one factory...when it (the factory, not the power supply) was damaged in that Taiwanese earthquake/fire/Godzirra attack back about 2001 (circa), they spent HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on many, many thousands of support calls from customers whose computers were unusable because they could NOT replace these (frequently-failing) PSs. They were unavailable for months. A disaster.
eMachines had LOTS of stuff like that in their systems. Supposedly, right before the Gateway purchase, they started using 'real' MBs and other components, but continued to save production costs on the cheapest RAM in existence and cheap power supplies. These hardware design decisions, of course, generated huge support costs, but that's one part of the company earning bonuses while another part has to explain why they can't hit their metrics. Pretty funny. Unless you owned one of them. Or worked in their support (I got out wit a quickness.). But when Gateway purchased them, they were making money and Gateway was not. Go figger.
Oh, and I once got a cheap Packard-Bell from an employee who let me look at their support database. I was checking the 'issues' on the various motherboards, and came across one (the 800, IIRC) that had a list a mile long. He explained it was a "brilliant" design that was meant to compatible with AMD, Intel and CYRIX processors. The support and replacement costs for this one horrible design decision may have caused NEC to shut down PB North America altogether, cause they sold millions of 'em.
*-oh looky! They've become a real company: http://www.tristar4you.com/
O rly?
People who say "Music is dying" are often:
a) Old, and officially entering curmudgeonhood. The old telling how things were golden in the old days and crap nowdays is itself as old as human civilization. And with three thousand years of such steady descent, we should have reached more of a 'bottom' position today than can actually be observed, doncha think? Or maybe the geezeers (including Sir Reginald here) are guilty of nostalgic romanticization.
3) "Subtly" trying to point out that what everyone ELSE listens to is crap, and only they and their fellows are initiates into the The True School of Cool Music.
vi) Observing change and mistaking it for "death". Frankly, if the music company-dictated winner-take-all star system declines, I for one welcome our new musician overlords. If nobody ever again sells 10 million copies of something, it hardly means music is dead.
Killing music is like destroying water. You can break an ice cube, but there's still water. You can steam it out of pan, but there's still water, and even if it's in a form you can't see, you'd be mistaken to say it's gone.
I tend to listen to 'folk music', which is, I guess, music made by folks. Unamplified instruments sometimes. NOT dependent on record companies, or radio, or the internets. Sure, none of these porch pickers is Bryan Sutton, or Bela Fleck, and none of the fiddlers are Mark O'Connor...but maybe I missed the part of the definition of music that's about 'winning'.