Well, I agree with you in the sense that if Microsoft really wanted to kill Quicken, they could have (they could have just bundled Money with the operating system, after all). Still, I think it's also a mistake to characterize it as Microsoft not caring about that market. At one time, Microsoft fancied getting into financial services, and they cared about defeating Quicken very much -- to the point of just admitting defeat and buying the damn company (which of course was blocked by the FTC).
Besides which, Quicken established themselves very early on, before Microsoft became quite the behemoth that they are today.
Well, so did Netscape. The difference is that Netscape got suckier and suckier, while Quicken actually tried to improve their products over time.
Re:LoudCloud can't compete either
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Andreesen "Grows Up"
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· Score: 3, Insightful
One word: Quicken.
Yes, it is possible to defeat Microsoft. It's hard, but not impossible.
If you wear a suit you are trying to conform. (or conforming to the "monoculture")
Sheesh, spoken like a true geek. Did it ever occur to you that some people like wearing suits? Some people like the fit and feel of a quality garment?
Not to mention that you someone "being yourself" can be different things at different times. Just because I normally like a T-shirt and jeans when I'm programming doesn't mean I also don't enjoy wearing the full-blown suit to a formal party, and not looking like I just rolled out of the rack wearing yesterday's clothes.
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
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Andreesen "Grows Up"
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The Internet's greatest impact has been on the the voice it gives the public. Business is just using it as a tool, people use it to invoke change in the systems that regulate their lives.
That's pretty arguable. I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet. Sure, we're communicating faster, but has it actually provided a clear social change? Not to say it never will, but so far there just hasn't been much.
On the other hand, there has been huge changes in business. Not so much in retail, but in business-to-business data communications. That's where you see the major upheaval, and it's almost invisible to the average person. Setting up a data link between companies used to be a major operation of running leased lines, now it's completely trivial.
OK, you've covered the minor superficial elements. Now explain context sensitive menus, Alt-TAB (which is a stack, rather than IDIOTIC mac method of making it the same list everytime, preventing alt-tabbing between two apps when you have more than one open), Task bars, per-window and per-app menu bars (rather than the inferior Mac single-system-bar), text descriptions rather than icon-only (icons-only SUCK as a user interface element, because they are simply not descriptive enough), universal keyboard traversal (tab/arrows), mouse wheels, anti-aliased fonts (finally in OS X, Windows had it for SEVEN FREAKING YEARS), virtual memory that works right (ditto), memory protection (ditto), on and on and on.
But you know what I hate most about the Mac user interface? Gray outs. For some INSANE reason, the Mac style guide says that controls should be grayed out when they are "not available" by context. That is the most frustrating thing about the Mac, because it gives you no feedback on WHY it's grayed out. Typically in Windows applications, selecting a bad option gives you a popup of why it doesn't work.
Absolute proof positive that no matter how different product X is from a Mac, Mac people will claim that product X was "ripped off" from the Mac. The proof used to be that Mac people constantly claimed that Windows was a "rip off" of the Mac even though the user interfaces are different in almost every possible way (with the exception of mouse and pixels).
Re:200 dpi looks almost like paper
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Tiqit Handheld PC
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· Score: 2
doing a moderate etimation of greyscale anti-aliasing I'd say that a 200 dpi screen can be compared to at least 4 times the printed matter resolution.
Although I've never done the experiment, I highly doubt that anti-aliasing is going to make up for 4 times of resolution. Put it this way. Which do you think would look better: 25 dpi with 256 shades of gray antialiasing, or 100 dpi of B/W resolution? Or 50/200?
200 DPI is going to look fairly good, but no one is going to mistake that for a printed page. If you can see the dots, then it's not a quality printed page.
Re:200 dpi looks almost like paper
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
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· Score: 2
Throw in ClearType, and you pretty much have print equivalent resolution.
Uh, no. Good quality print resolution is generally considered about 1000 dpi, although 600 dpi laser printers look pretty good. You can easily see jaggies with a 300 dpi laser printer.
I know you meant this as a joke in the sense of assembly language being so much more difficult than obfuscated C, but it's only funny to people who are ignorant of programming in assembly.
Back when I used to do a fair amount of assembly programming along with C, I would often run the debugger in assembly mode to see exactly what was happening. Very often I could uncover subtle bugs that way.
I don't really do it as much anymore, primarily because I'm not familiar with the assembly of my modern machines anymore (alas).
Thats keeps them playable when they get scratched. Now how will that be with the crippled discs?
Probably won't affect it much at all. You don't have to introduce very many errors to make it unusable for a computer, say, 1 error per second. That's only 1 error about every 44K samples.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the redbook standard specified that CDs must be able to be read by computer. In fact, a major part of the redbook standard is interpolation of errors, so allowing errors is part of the standard.
In fact, it's your computer that's violating the standard, because it's not interpolating the data. It's simply rejecting the CD.
If it breaks the redbook standard, it's not a music CD.
The problem is that I'm not sure if it does break the standard. My understanding is that these things work by introducing intentional errors into the data stream, which are corrected by the CD player's interpolation algorithms.
This means that computer rippers will choke on them because of the errors, but will still play just fine on regular audio CD players. Note that the errors can be inaudible if you design your error such that the interpolation gives the correct data anyway.
So, do you have a better way of population control?
Yes, Capitalism and Democracy. As a population becomes more economically stable, the birth rate naturally decreases. In fact, I've seen some studies that show population will stop increasing around 2050 or 2100.
How about this: "Once I found a woman who was 9 months pregnant, but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an induced abortion. In the operating room, I saw the child's lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving. The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown into the trash can. Afterwards the husband was holding his wife and crying loudly and saying, what kind of man am I? What kind of husband am I? I can't even protect my wife and child. Do you have any sort of humanity?"
To be honest, I'd like to know what the 'editors' do all day - there are 5-10 story posts a day (plus maybe another 5 in sections with volunteer editors), and I really can't work out how that's a full-time job.
Are you kidding? Clearly the editors MUST be unbelievably busy. How do I know? They haven't put in the FIVE MINUTE F'ING FIX for the page widening posts into the lame filter.
To be honest, that pisses me off enough for me to not want to give them money. If they want me to give them money, step 1 is to make damn sure the site runs smoothly.
Being white is in and of itself a privilege. I realize is this generally a hard thing for white folks to grasp, but it happens to be very real.
For whatever reason, you are determined to ignore what I actually say, and just argue against some phantom that you keep making up. I said, "Do you have a harder road if you're a black person? Of course. You also have a harder road if have limited social skills, are ugly or are short. What's your point?"
Of course black people have a harder road. What's the difference between a successful black person and non-successful one? The successful one doesn't make excuses.
If you want but one real-life example, take a look at how many CEOs are white and how many are black, how many are male and how many are female.
Of public companies, not many. However, there are a lot of them in private businesses. One again, you use a very narrow standard. How many blacks have aspired to be CEOs of a public company over the last 30 years? Not a whole hell of a lot, because of past injustices. The pipeline was not very full, because it takes a long-ass time.
But how many blacks are successful basketball stars? A lot. And guess what -- they make a hell of a lot more money than CEOs. You know why? Because they perceived a road toward success through sports. They work hard.
I guess so long as you aren't one of those millions everything is okay, eh? Here you tacitly accept that some people will never make it no matter how hard they try or how smart they are, but since they represent only "1-2%" of the population it doesn't matter.
No, you said that in a single year, millions of people will fail. And I said, so what? That doesn't mean those millions of people will fail next year. In other words, it doesn't have to be the same "millions" every year.
But of course, it will be. There will be a subset of the population that will never make it. But you think it's because of "the system", and it's not. They choose to fail every year. They choose it because they don't become educated. They choose it because they listen to people like you who tell them they have no chance, and might as well just sit on welfare.
Honestly, I can't imagine what it must be like to be someone like you who just sits around with a black cloud.
The people who insist otherwise are the ones who've already "got theirs" and think that they deserve it in some sort of vague karmic fashion because they, obviously, are smart and hard-working. Everyone who hasn't made it, by definition, isn't smart and hard-working.
No one gets things through "vague karmic fashion". It's a very simple formula: Go to school. Become educated in something useful to society. Work as hard as you can and be paid for it. Why is this so difficult for you to understand?
Oh, I see. If everyone can't be a CEO, then everyone is a failure. I've got news for you: Someone can be successful by having a good job, supporting their family, and having a happy life.
Are you honestly going to back this as a position? Because I can rip you a new asshole in record time if you decide to support this kind of stupidity with example after example of people who got the short end when they clearly didn't deserve it.
Very few people "deserve" to get screwed. I didn't deserve it the many times I got screwed. What made the difference was how I responded to it. I could have taken your attitutude and just said, "Well, that's business. There's no way I can succeed, because everyone is just out to screw me". Instead, I looked back and figured out the warning signs that I had missed. I learned from my mistakes. And guess what? I kept working hard, and success came.
The "American Dream" is a myth, a lie. Not everyone can make it - any economist can tell you that. The system inherently requires that a certain percentage of folks always be losers, that the exploitable exist to support capitalism. That's a basic precept of economic theory.
That is so totally wrong, I actually can't believe that someone believes it. The only way you can hold that thought in your mind is if you believe that a "loser" is anyone who is not a CEO and makes millions of dollars a year.
Now, what IS inherent in the system is that some are going to make more money than others. And that is completely fair and the way it should be. But that doesn't preclude everyone from being able to make an honest living. And working for someone (AKA exchanging labor for money) is NOT exploitation.
...quite another to spout a recycled version of personal Manifest Destiny, an idea laughed out of serious scientific circles more than a century ago.
Well, laughed out of YOUR circles, apparently. Not laughed out of actual reality. People prove you wrong every day. But I guess they just accidently stumbled into that education, right?
Although I am a "white-boy", I was hardly privileged growing up. It's your own bigotry that causes you to believe that the only successful people are people from a privileged background.
Hate to break it to ya, pal, but there are millions of Americans who will work their asses off this year, harder than you will, smarter than you will, certainly more deserving than you - and because of luck they simply *will not* succeed.
So what? "Millions" is only 1-2%. But in any case, how do you define "success"? Can someone live a middle class life but be a failure in your elitist book?
If you honestly think that luck has nothing to do with it then you're a first-class fool.
Of course random chance has something to do with your level of success, but it ONLY determines the time line.
If you think luck is the sole determiner or even the major determiner of success, then you are the fool, trapped in your own beliefs. I would say straight, blind luck is only about 5% of success or failure.
To be honest, I feel sorry for people like you who think you have so little control over your own life.
I've had a fair amount of success in my life, and I've had my share of failure. But in no case do I blame anyone but myself, even in the cases where I was clearly screwed by another party. Because I chose to let myself be screwed, by not paying more attention, by not choosing my partners more carefully, or not being more observant when I should have.
Clearly you're a white boy. Only a white boy would say something that stupid.
Do you have a harder road if you're a black person? Of course. You also have a harder road if have limited social skills, are ugly or are short. What's your point?
The United State is full of successful black people. Are they successful because the "star chamber" of white people picked them out of a hat, and magically granted them success just to fool and repress the other black people? No, they simply didn't give into the victimization mindset that people like you help to keep alive. They worked hard, became educated, and took advantage of the unparalleled opportunity available to them.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Give me an example of some black person who is being exploited who is unable to choose to end that exploitation.
I mean, heck, the worst exploitation in the U.S. is the Democratic party and the black leadership who exploit poor blacks. But I'm not even going to excuse those people, because they choose to be believe the lies and promises. That's a self-inflicted prison.
The notion that the GOVERNMENT should run all business is not communist. It's socialist, and *that* I agree is highly evil, but it has nothing to do with what Marx described as communism.
I agree the evil is not Communism per se, it's the forcible implementation of Communism on a society. It's entirely possible for a small number of people to decide to create a "commune" and function peacefully.
I personally don't believe it's possible to implement socialism or communism on a large society without major oppression. The defining question is whether someone has a choice to participate in the socialism or communism.
People are exploited because they have no other choice - unless they want to starve.
Depends on where you live. If you live in the United States (and you are able-bodied and able-minded, etc, etc), you are NEVER exploited except by choice. Never.
Right, and there were no negative consequences beyond being called in front of the Committee on Anti-American Activities.
As I said, "which was wrong, but limited". The point is that it was very limited in scope.
However, it is intrinsic not to Socialism/Communism, but to the *forcing* of *any* organization of the means of production on a society that is not ready for it.
Well, OK, but that doesn't say anything. All you've said is "system X is not oppressive if the members of that society decide to embrace system X". But my point is that it's *impossible* to implement any kind of socialism/communism without force and restriction of rights.
An example of the same concept can be seen in the result of forcing Democracy on societies that do not have the prerequisite social and educational structures required for a functioning Democracy.
Democracy is different from Capitalism. Democracy (or Republicanism, really) provides a relatively stable political structure to guarantee individuals rights and freedoms. But Capitalism and free trade can function under any political structure. The only question is whether those free trade rights are stable or not.
Free trade and Capitalism are never "forced" on anyone, it's intrinsic to human nature. I guess there are certain people who think that if they are not guaranteed a lifestyle by everyone else, then they are "forced" to participate in Capitalism, but that's simply foolish. That's like saying you're "forced" to have freedom by living outside of jail.
Is corruption therefore "intrinsic" to Democracy?
As a matter of fact, it is. That's why we have so many fair voting laws (no electioneering, secret ballots, etc, etc).
There is a huge difference between the government having hearings about potential communist sympathizers (which was wrong, but limited), and wholesale mass oppression of an entire country.
Communism is intrinsically oppressive because the government has to restrict freedom in order to implement it (such as property rights, freedom of trade, etc). Capitalism is intrisically free because it looks to individuals to make decisions about their own lives. The disadvantage to capitalism is that you have certain elements unable or unwilling to take advantage of the freedom that they have, and potentially allow themselves to be exploited.
On balance, however, I would rather have the power be in my own hands and other citizens, rather than in the hands of certain "elite" others.
Slashdot Mirror
I've honestly never seen pure managers work harder than the engineers. They're usually in at 9, out at 6.
Of course, one could make the argument that this is proof that the managers are smarter than the engineers. :->
Well, I agree with you in the sense that if Microsoft really wanted to kill Quicken, they could have (they could have just bundled Money with the operating system, after all). Still, I think it's also a mistake to characterize it as Microsoft not caring about that market. At one time, Microsoft fancied getting into financial services, and they cared about defeating Quicken very much -- to the point of just admitting defeat and buying the damn company (which of course was blocked by the FTC).
Besides which, Quicken established themselves very early on, before Microsoft became quite the behemoth that they are today.
Well, so did Netscape. The difference is that Netscape got suckier and suckier, while Quicken actually tried to improve their products over time.
One word: Quicken.
Yes, it is possible to defeat Microsoft. It's hard, but not impossible.
If you wear a suit you are trying to conform. (or conforming to the "monoculture")
Sheesh, spoken like a true geek. Did it ever occur to you that some people like wearing suits? Some people like the fit and feel of a quality garment?
Not to mention that you someone "being yourself" can be different things at different times. Just because I normally like a T-shirt and jeans when I'm programming doesn't mean I also don't enjoy wearing the full-blown suit to a formal party, and not looking like I just rolled out of the rack wearing yesterday's clothes.
The Internet's greatest impact has been on the the voice it gives the public. Business is just using it as a tool, people use it to invoke change in the systems that regulate their lives.
That's pretty arguable. I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet. Sure, we're communicating faster, but has it actually provided a clear social change? Not to say it never will, but so far there just hasn't been much.
On the other hand, there has been huge changes in business. Not so much in retail, but in business-to-business data communications. That's where you see the major upheaval, and it's almost invisible to the average person. Setting up a data link between companies used to be a major operation of running leased lines, now it's completely trivial.
Any body else find this passage depressing? Its not that he has grown up as much as he has been assimilated made to conform.
Or maybe some of us don't need to hit people over the head with flashy displays to "prove" how non-conforming we are.
OK, you've covered the minor superficial elements. Now explain context sensitive menus, Alt-TAB (which is a stack, rather than IDIOTIC mac method of making it the same list everytime, preventing alt-tabbing between two apps when you have more than one open), Task bars, per-window and per-app menu bars (rather than the inferior Mac single-system-bar), text descriptions rather than icon-only (icons-only SUCK as a user interface element, because they are simply not descriptive enough), universal keyboard traversal (tab/arrows), mouse wheels, anti-aliased fonts (finally in OS X, Windows had it for SEVEN FREAKING YEARS), virtual memory that works right (ditto), memory protection (ditto), on and on and on.
But you know what I hate most about the Mac user interface? Gray outs. For some INSANE reason, the Mac style guide says that controls should be grayed out when they are "not available" by context. That is the most frustrating thing about the Mac, because it gives you no feedback on WHY it's grayed out. Typically in Windows applications, selecting a bad option gives you a popup of why it doesn't work.
Absolute proof positive that no matter how different product X is from a Mac, Mac people will claim that product X was "ripped off" from the Mac. The proof used to be that Mac people constantly claimed that Windows was a "rip off" of the Mac even though the user interfaces are different in almost every possible way (with the exception of mouse and pixels).
doing a moderate etimation of greyscale anti-aliasing I'd say that a 200 dpi screen can be compared to at least 4 times the printed matter resolution.
Although I've never done the experiment, I highly doubt that anti-aliasing is going to make up for 4 times of resolution. Put it this way. Which do you think would look better: 25 dpi with 256 shades of gray antialiasing, or 100 dpi of B/W resolution? Or 50/200?
200 DPI is going to look fairly good, but no one is going to mistake that for a printed page. If you can see the dots, then it's not a quality printed page.
Throw in ClearType, and you pretty much have print equivalent resolution.
Uh, no. Good quality print resolution is generally considered about 1000 dpi, although 600 dpi laser printers look pretty good. You can easily see jaggies with a 300 dpi laser printer.
I know you meant this as a joke in the sense of assembly language being so much more difficult than obfuscated C, but it's only funny to people who are ignorant of programming in assembly.
Back when I used to do a fair amount of assembly programming along with C, I would often run the debugger in assembly mode to see exactly what was happening. Very often I could uncover subtle bugs that way.
I don't really do it as much anymore, primarily because I'm not familiar with the assembly of my modern machines anymore (alas).
Thats keeps them playable when they get scratched. Now how will that be with the crippled discs?
Probably won't affect it much at all. You don't have to introduce very many errors to make it unusable for a computer, say, 1 error per second. That's only 1 error about every 44K samples.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the redbook standard specified that CDs must be able to be read by computer. In fact, a major part of the redbook standard is interpolation of errors, so allowing errors is part of the standard.
In fact, it's your computer that's violating the standard, because it's not interpolating the data. It's simply rejecting the CD.
If it breaks the redbook standard, it's not a music CD.
The problem is that I'm not sure if it does break the standard. My understanding is that these things work by introducing intentional errors into the data stream, which are corrected by the CD player's interpolation algorithms.
This means that computer rippers will choke on them because of the errors, but will still play just fine on regular audio CD players. Note that the errors can be inaudible if you design your error such that the interpolation gives the correct data anyway.
So, do you have a better way of population control?
Yes, Capitalism and Democracy. As a population becomes more economically stable, the birth rate naturally decreases. In fact, I've seen some studies that show population will stop increasing around 2050 or 2100.
How about this: "Once I found a woman who was 9 months pregnant, but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an induced abortion. In the operating room, I saw the child's lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving. The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown into the trash can. Afterwards the husband was holding his wife and crying loudly and saying, what kind of man am I? What kind of husband am I? I can't even protect my wife and child. Do you have any sort of humanity?"
China also injects the skulls of unlicensed newborns as they come out of the womb to kill them, in order to control population.
I don't look to China for my ethics.
To be honest, I'd like to know what the 'editors' do all day - there are 5-10 story posts a day (plus maybe another 5 in sections with volunteer editors), and I really can't work out how that's a full-time job.
Are you kidding? Clearly the editors MUST be unbelievably busy. How do I know? They haven't put in the FIVE MINUTE F'ING FIX for the page widening posts into the lame filter.
To be honest, that pisses me off enough for me to not want to give them money. If they want me to give them money, step 1 is to make damn sure the site runs smoothly.
Being white is in and of itself a privilege. I realize is this generally a hard thing for white folks to grasp, but it happens to be very real.
For whatever reason, you are determined to ignore what I actually say, and just argue against some phantom that you keep making up. I said, "Do you have a harder road if you're a black person? Of course. You also have a harder road if have limited social skills, are ugly or are short. What's your point?"
Of course black people have a harder road. What's the difference between a successful black person and non-successful one? The successful one doesn't make excuses.
If you want but one real-life example, take a look at how many CEOs are white and how many are black, how many are male and how many are female.
Of public companies, not many. However, there are a lot of them in private businesses. One again, you use a very narrow standard. How many blacks have aspired to be CEOs of a public company over the last 30 years? Not a whole hell of a lot, because of past injustices. The pipeline was not very full, because it takes a long-ass time.
But how many blacks are successful basketball stars? A lot. And guess what -- they make a hell of a lot more money than CEOs. You know why? Because they perceived a road toward success through sports. They work hard.
I guess so long as you aren't one of those millions everything is okay, eh? Here you tacitly accept that some people will never make it no matter how hard they try or how smart they are, but since they represent only "1-2%" of the population it doesn't matter.
No, you said that in a single year, millions of people will fail. And I said, so what? That doesn't mean those millions of people will fail next year. In other words, it doesn't have to be the same "millions" every year.
But of course, it will be. There will be a subset of the population that will never make it. But you think it's because of "the system", and it's not. They choose to fail every year. They choose it because they don't become educated. They choose it because they listen to people like you who tell them they have no chance, and might as well just sit on welfare.
Honestly, I can't imagine what it must be like to be someone like you who just sits around with a black cloud.
The people who insist otherwise are the ones who've already "got theirs" and think that they deserve it in some sort of vague karmic fashion because they, obviously, are smart and hard-working. Everyone who hasn't made it, by definition, isn't smart and hard-working.
No one gets things through "vague karmic fashion". It's a very simple formula: Go to school. Become educated in something useful to society. Work as hard as you can and be paid for it. Why is this so difficult for you to understand?
Oh, I see. If everyone can't be a CEO, then everyone is a failure. I've got news for you: Someone can be successful by having a good job, supporting their family, and having a happy life.
Are you honestly going to back this as a position? Because I can rip you a new asshole in record time if you decide to support this kind of stupidity with example after example of people who got the short end when they clearly didn't deserve it.
Very few people "deserve" to get screwed. I didn't deserve it the many times I got screwed. What made the difference was how I responded to it. I could have taken your attitutude and just said, "Well, that's business. There's no way I can succeed, because everyone is just out to screw me". Instead, I looked back and figured out the warning signs that I had missed. I learned from my mistakes. And guess what? I kept working hard, and success came.
The "American Dream" is a myth, a lie. Not everyone can make it - any economist can tell you that. The system inherently requires that a certain percentage of folks always be losers, that the exploitable exist to support capitalism. That's a basic precept of economic theory.
That is so totally wrong, I actually can't believe that someone believes it. The only way you can hold that thought in your mind is if you believe that a "loser" is anyone who is not a CEO and makes millions of dollars a year.
Now, what IS inherent in the system is that some are going to make more money than others. And that is completely fair and the way it should be. But that doesn't preclude everyone from being able to make an honest living. And working for someone (AKA exchanging labor for money) is NOT exploitation.
Well, laughed out of YOUR circles, apparently. Not laughed out of actual reality. People prove you wrong every day. But I guess they just accidently stumbled into that education, right?
Uh huh. Typical privileged white-boy tripe.
Although I am a "white-boy", I was hardly privileged growing up. It's your own bigotry that causes you to believe that the only successful people are people from a privileged background.
Hate to break it to ya, pal, but there are millions of Americans who will work their asses off this year, harder than you will, smarter than you will, certainly more deserving than you - and because of luck they simply *will not* succeed.
So what? "Millions" is only 1-2%. But in any case, how do you define "success"? Can someone live a middle class life but be a failure in your elitist book?
If you honestly think that luck has nothing to do with it then you're a first-class fool.
Of course random chance has something to do with your level of success, but it ONLY determines the time line.
If you think luck is the sole determiner or even the major determiner of success, then you are the fool, trapped in your own beliefs. I would say straight, blind luck is only about 5% of success or failure.
To be honest, I feel sorry for people like you who think you have so little control over your own life.
I've had a fair amount of success in my life, and I've had my share of failure. But in no case do I blame anyone but myself, even in the cases where I was clearly screwed by another party. Because I chose to let myself be screwed, by not paying more attention, by not choosing my partners more carefully, or not being more observant when I should have.
Clearly you're a white boy. Only a white boy would say something that stupid.
Do you have a harder road if you're a black person? Of course. You also have a harder road if have limited social skills, are ugly or are short. What's your point?
The United State is full of successful black people. Are they successful because the "star chamber" of white people picked them out of a hat, and magically granted them success just to fool and repress the other black people? No, they simply didn't give into the victimization mindset that people like you help to keep alive. They worked hard, became educated, and took advantage of the unparalleled opportunity available to them.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Give me an example of some black person who is being exploited who is unable to choose to end that exploitation.
I mean, heck, the worst exploitation in the U.S. is the Democratic party and the black leadership who exploit poor blacks. But I'm not even going to excuse those people, because they choose to be believe the lies and promises. That's a self-inflicted prison.
The notion that the GOVERNMENT should run all business is not communist. It's socialist, and *that* I agree is highly evil, but it has nothing to do with what Marx described as communism.
I agree the evil is not Communism per se, it's the forcible implementation of Communism on a society. It's entirely possible for a small number of people to decide to create a "commune" and function peacefully.
I personally don't believe it's possible to implement socialism or communism on a large society without major oppression. The defining question is whether someone has a choice to participate in the socialism or communism.
People are exploited because they have no other choice - unless they want to starve.
Depends on where you live. If you live in the United States (and you are able-bodied and able-minded, etc, etc), you are NEVER exploited except by choice. Never.
Right, and there were no negative consequences beyond being called in front of the Committee on Anti-American Activities.
As I said, "which was wrong, but limited". The point is that it was very limited in scope.
However, it is intrinsic not to Socialism/Communism, but to the *forcing* of *any* organization of the means of production on a society that is not ready for it.
Well, OK, but that doesn't say anything. All you've said is "system X is not oppressive if the members of that society decide to embrace system X". But my point is that it's *impossible* to implement any kind of socialism/communism without force and restriction of rights.
An example of the same concept can be seen in the result of forcing Democracy on societies that do not have the prerequisite social and educational structures required for a functioning Democracy.
Democracy is different from Capitalism. Democracy (or Republicanism, really) provides a relatively stable political structure to guarantee individuals rights and freedoms. But Capitalism and free trade can function under any political structure. The only question is whether those free trade rights are stable or not.
Free trade and Capitalism are never "forced" on anyone, it's intrinsic to human nature. I guess there are certain people who think that if they are not guaranteed a lifestyle by everyone else, then they are "forced" to participate in Capitalism, but that's simply foolish. That's like saying you're "forced" to have freedom by living outside of jail.
Is corruption therefore "intrinsic" to Democracy?
As a matter of fact, it is. That's why we have so many fair voting laws (no electioneering, secret ballots, etc, etc).
There is a huge difference between the government having hearings about potential communist sympathizers (which was wrong, but limited), and wholesale mass oppression of an entire country.
Communism is intrinsically oppressive because the government has to restrict freedom in order to implement it (such as property rights, freedom of trade, etc). Capitalism is intrisically free because it looks to individuals to make decisions about their own lives. The disadvantage to capitalism is that you have certain elements unable or unwilling to take advantage of the freedom that they have, and potentially allow themselves to be exploited.
On balance, however, I would rather have the power be in my own hands and other citizens, rather than in the hands of certain "elite" others.