Roughly stated, speed traps and red light cameras cause people to slam on their brakes, which more than one study has shown causes the very accidents they're hoping to avoid.
The other big point of discussion used to be that when you need to find a cop, they shouldn't be hidden from view. Speed traps raise tons of revenue, but they make society as a whole less safe by leeching police presence and resources away from attending to actual crime and accidents.
Before radar guns, the police generally had to match your speed over 1/4 mile to issue a speeding ticket.
Needless to say, a lot fewer speeding tickets were written. The radar gun's debut in the 70s led to the exact same discussion we're having now with red light cams. They actually made the roads less safe, but they were a revenue godsend, so they became the norm.
You make such a wonderfully reasonable defense of Apple that I'm gonna to try to ratchet my rhetoric back a bit.:-)
Unfortunately, with pictures of Tiananmen etched forever in my head, I'm going to fail. Once you slaughter 3,000 kids on TV, I find it hard to give China's rulers the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, Apples runs audits and publishes reports. They might even make a few token changes. My disagreement with you is that I believe such efforts are window-dressing and PR spin. My support for that belief are the nine people who killed themselves on the job -- not nine random people who committed suicide out of a randomly chosen sample, but nine people who make the specific point that things are so bad here I would rather kill myself than continue, and then signed it with their own blood.
Apple found and stopped rights abuses at their factory.
Have you ever been "the foreigner?" I have. Nothing is easier than making "changes," waiting for the visiting boss to finish his tour, and then go right back to business as usual. If Apple were sincere, they wouldn't "make changes." They'd find new people to partner with.
People are literally killing themselves to send us the message through the PR spin.
This seems to be a case where Western mores are being applied to the Chinese. Media here in the US and the West continually attempt to reinforce their guilty feelings...
Human rights are universal. My wife's Asian. She was endowed by her Creator with the same rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that I was. My children, bearing epicanthic folds around their eyes, do not somehow possess fewer natural rights than I do.
Many of those who are working in those factories got lucky: they would be working just as hard or harder farming their own land for next to nothing.
Nope, sorry, try again. My grandparents were hillbilly subsistence farmers. Give a man a plot of land and the right to keep what he grows and he'll prosper. It's sharecroppers, constantly robbed of their harvest, who suffer. Read the histories of industrialization, particularly that of Britain and India. When factories and their need for labor enter the picture, government policies are soon implemented to drive farmers off their land.
I have loved ones in Asia. I'm offended at the suggestion that they should be grateful for simply being allowed to survive.
Depends on what value you give yourself, and how good you can make others believe in that value.
Sure. To a point. Every arena will have a champion. But even the champion doesn't live long. Successful, winning Thai kickboxing careers run about two or three years. Even Mohammed Ali -- and I practically worship the man -- ended up with brain damage.
Wouldn't it be better just to get along reasonably than to make everyone fight to the death?
Yup, actually I'd rather die than this kind of job. I have no problem with death.
That attitude and choice, and I shared it and have the scars to prove it, lasts right up to the moment she says, "Honey, I'm late." The second a child enters the picture, your freedom to go out in a blaze of glory disappears.
People act so surprised by this, as they buy their high-complexity electronics from wal-mart at dirt cheap prices.
Wow, I totally overlooked that "Don't Beat Your Workers" price tag at WalMart, as well my local "No Oppression Electronics" store.
OK, look, forgive my snark and the angry frustration that follows, but the general public is not to blame for the horrific way these factories are managed. Prices are set as high as the market will bear. Companies have entire departments whose whole job is to figure out "At what price are our profits maximized?" and costs do not enter into it. No company has ever said, "Wow, we could make a profit at $10, so even though we'd make the same number of sales at $100 for our widget, we just wouldn't feel right taking the extra money..."
The blood money these companies make does not go into my pocket. I paid plenty for my goods. At the price I paid, these workers would have full, meaningful lives if only management paid them their fair share.
Ever since Tiananmen, I have tried my best to boycott China. I routinely pay extra to buy "Made in the USA" only to find that label is a lie.
I have no way of knowing how the products I buy on a day-to-day basis were manufactured. I don't buy Nike. Guess what? Asics, Adidas and New Balance are manufactured in the same horrible places. Oh, "Quit buying yuppie crap," you say? All the generic goods say "Made in Godawful Horror" as well.
Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs. I understand "Our CEO Below" has quite the sweatshop prepared for him. Given the shaky state of his liver, you'd think Steve would be a bit more worried about his soul.
Yeah, that was a cheap shot. Cheap shots are all I have left. My political vote seems to count for squat. I can't even say "Vote with my wallet" with a straight face. I'd be more than happy to join the protest, but protesting from the "free speech zone" in a chainlink box in the next town doesn't get it done. I'm not willing to hurt anybody.
So if reminding the man who is responsible for this blood of his own mortality is the only shot I have left, I'll take it.
...then that only makes the article even more damning, because Apple does not come off well in this report. The article also provides a terrifying glimpse of your future if you work for a living.
See the Chinese news reports cited below where the undercover reporter both connects the dots for you and, if you work for a living, gives you a terrifying glimpse of your future.
You don't think they actually work for you, do you?:-)
As far as I can tell, and as much as I hate to say it, the purpose of men with uniforms and guns these days is to facilitate the transfer of money from your pocket to the pocket of someone richer and more deserving.
I initially read about this in a news story where the SEC employee was bemoaning the fact that they had cases they wanted to pursue, but couldn't due to interference from above. He was screaming that they had caught all the major players pulling exactly this scam, but the best he could get his bosses to sign off on were minor fines that didn't even qualify as "a cost of doing business."
I don't think anyone of note on Wall Street has been afraid of the SEC for quite some time...
What the original poster means is that the brokers are, against fiduciary duty, siphoning money from their customers. Consider the following, very rough, case:
I'm Mr. Megabroker. A new multibillion dollar marketing campaign hits, and suddenly I have a ton of BUY orders for SLUSHO stock. I hold those orders for a split second and buy up SLUSHO, knowing that the ton of orders I hold will drive up the price. Once I secure my stocks, I submit my ton of buy orders after my own.
Suddenly, I'm sitting on a bunch of SLUSHO stock that's had a guaranteed jump in price. If I had executed my customer's orders immediately, that increase in price would have been theirs, not mine.
Baby Cloverfield hits Manhattan, and suddenly SLUSHO is radioactive waste. I get a ton of SELL orders. I dump my SLUSHO holdings before the ton of SELL orders hit, having perfect knowledge this is about to occur because I'm the one who's about to do it. I sell my SLUSHO when prices are still high. My customers bleed out.
I've made money coming and going for no other reason than I hold the orders in my pocket and therefore have perfect knowledge of the future. The money I make is not reflective of any real productivity, but is instead theft I can get away with by ignoring my fiduciary duties for a brief while.
Look, I know you read her book and all, but the documents you're trying to reference by way of Ann Coulter don't mean what she says they mean.
We know this because the only person saying they do is Ann. The Emory professor who actually brought those docs to light has recoiled in horror and publicly disavowed her interpretation of them.
So, for the record, the Venona papers do not exonerate McCarthy, Ann is still a shrill harpy, and shouldn't you be glued to the television watching Rush right about now?
For anyone who, like me, is wondering how in the world anyone could be defending McCarthy, here's how. Ann Coulter has been pushing this nonsense that we found "sekret papers" from the KGB that prove McCarthy had it right all along, sort of like the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," only for Commies instead of Jews.
OK, got that? We have a secret list proving that McCarthy's secret list was the right secret list all along.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled sanity currently in progress.
Yes, it is, and I'm not sincere about it. Think of the suggestion more as a happy daydream than an actual proposal.:-)
But, on the other hand, Bubba thinks he's gonna strike oil in his back yard one day and get rich, so he votes for every tax cut for the wealthy thinking he's going to join them one day.
By the same token, Bubba thinks Junior's gonna go to the Ivy League after he finishes his night school. Telling Bubba and Madge the President of the Homeowners Association that Bubba Junior maybe ain't going to Princeton cuz the skool ain't teaching him right might get their attention.:-)
the Soviet Union did in fact spend large amounts of money and influence to induce as much unrest and disruption as possible.
Yeah, the KGB was real. Yeah, the Soviet Union had a massive spy program. The stars on the wall at the CIA aren't there for decoration. Reagan didn't call them "the Evil Empire" for nothing.
I'll go you one better. I'll bet the Chinese, right now, have more than maybe one or two active assets in the US. In fact, I'll bet there's at least one Chinese spy on American soil who reads Slashdot. They probably enjoy the unfettered internet access.
But how many actual spies did McCarthy and HUAC turn up? Oh, yeah, that's right, exactly none of them. How many lives did they ruin across the Arts and Academia? A lot. I'll personally never forgive them for the Dalton Trumbo stories they cost us.
But, by all means, there is no God but Reagan and Nixon is his profit. Go forth and spread the Word that McCarthy was a patriot crucified for America. While you're at it, you should set the record straight and let everyone know Roy Cohn died of liver cancer too.
My grandfather and my wife's grandfather were on opposite sides of WWII. We have radically different interpretations of the events of that conflict. You should hear some of the conflicting explanations my wife and I offer our kids when we travel to some places around the Pacific Rim.
But, to borrow from Lewis Black, we "agree on what the fuck reality is." We agree that you can't talk about Truman without Hirohito, you have to include both Tojo and MacArthur, the A6M and the Corsair.
Only telling part of the truth is a famous method of deception. In fact, the Devil is famous for telling the worst lies by speaking only part of the truth.
The Texas Board of Education isn't even trying to look like they're working in good faith.
Yeah, that's a sentence fragment. I can do that. That's how I roll.
You, on the other hand, need to quit molesting colons. Commas are not salt. You don't get to just sprinkle some on whenever the mood strikes. I've had drugs in surgery that caused fewer hallucinations and less confusion than one of your run-on sentences. I've never seen someone in such dire need of both spellcheck and a dictionary.
I want you to stop what you're doing, right now, and run to an office supply store like your life depends on it. I want you to buy boxes and boxes of red pens and pencils. I want you to fly to the nearest campus and scream, "Is there a Freshman Comp TA in the house?!" until some bespectacled grad student takes pity on you. I want you to hand them your boxes of red and beg them to beat you with them until you reach the First Enlightenment of Grammar.
Joseph McCarthy was a power-mad lunatic who ran through the arts and academia with a chainsaw. We lost Dalton Trumbo because of that jackass. We damn near lost Dash Hammett. Thank God for Edward Murrow.
To hear little right-wing syncophants try to rehabilitate that monster's image today is just nauseating.
How about we do this? When it comes time to put down your state on the application, just put "Enlightened." We'll understand that to mean you come from Texas, Iran, North Korea or some other godawful backwater, but that you'd appreciate it if we didn't hold you responsible for being unable to choose where you were born.
You'll have to take a short quiz consisting of two questions:
1. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
2. If a Believer and a Pagan/Heathen/Infidel are fighting five feet away from a nuke when it explodes, who gets vaporized?
If you answer, 1. "Jefferson" and 2. "Both of them," then we're good. You're in.:-)
Nobody is that stupid. Sure they'll be happy to fuck up your shit, but they'll make sure theirs is nice and pretty,
We begin today's lesson with a discussion of the horrific history of the Rapa Nui and Easter Island. We'll draw a line from that ancient environmental disaster to the current situation in Los Angeles where the ditance between "your fucked-up shit" and "my pretty shit" is currently the width of one street in most places.
We all breathe the same air, we drink the same water. Ultimately, it all "our shit." Today's homework is Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" for a discussion about how well separating the Rich from the Poor works.
Am I wrong for thinking of a time when the textbooks were written by the honestly incompetent and merely neglected in favor of bribery and corruption as "the good olds days?"
Slashdot Mirror
Roughly stated, speed traps and red light cameras cause people to slam on their brakes, which more than one study has shown causes the very accidents they're hoping to avoid.
The other big point of discussion used to be that when you need to find a cop, they shouldn't be hidden from view. Speed traps raise tons of revenue, but they make society as a whole less safe by leeching police presence and resources away from attending to actual crime and accidents.
Before radar guns, the police generally had to match your speed over 1/4 mile to issue a speeding ticket.
Needless to say, a lot fewer speeding tickets were written. The radar gun's debut in the 70s led to the exact same discussion we're having now with red light cams. They actually made the roads less safe, but they were a revenue godsend, so they became the norm.
They're called "gated communities."
Shiny. :-)
I'd mod you to 11 if only I had the points.
Hi Bottles,
You make such a wonderfully reasonable defense of Apple that I'm gonna to try to ratchet my rhetoric back a bit. :-)
Unfortunately, with pictures of Tiananmen etched forever in my head, I'm going to fail. Once you slaughter 3,000 kids on TV, I find it hard to give China's rulers the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, Apples runs audits and publishes reports. They might even make a few token changes. My disagreement with you is that I believe such efforts are window-dressing and PR spin. My support for that belief are the nine people who killed themselves on the job -- not nine random people who committed suicide out of a randomly chosen sample, but nine people who make the specific point that things are so bad here I would rather kill myself than continue, and then signed it with their own blood.
Apple found and stopped rights abuses at their factory.
Have you ever been "the foreigner?" I have. Nothing is easier than making "changes," waiting for the visiting boss to finish his tour, and then go right back to business as usual. If Apple were sincere, they wouldn't "make changes." They'd find new people to partner with.
People are literally killing themselves to send us the message through the PR spin.
This seems to be a case where Western mores are being applied to the Chinese. Media here in the US and the West continually attempt to reinforce their guilty feelings...
Human rights are universal. My wife's Asian. She was endowed by her Creator with the same rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that I was. My children, bearing epicanthic folds around their eyes, do not somehow possess fewer natural rights than I do.
Many of those who are working in those factories got lucky: they would be working just as hard or harder farming their own land for next to nothing.
Nope, sorry, try again. My grandparents were hillbilly subsistence farmers. Give a man a plot of land and the right to keep what he grows and he'll prosper. It's sharecroppers, constantly robbed of their harvest, who suffer. Read the histories of industrialization, particularly that of Britain and India. When factories and their need for labor enter the picture, government policies are soon implemented to drive farmers off their land.
I have loved ones in Asia. I'm offended at the suggestion that they should be grateful for simply being allowed to survive.
Depends on what value you give yourself, and how good you can make others believe in that value.
Sure. To a point. Every arena will have a champion. But even the champion doesn't live long. Successful, winning Thai kickboxing careers run about two or three years. Even Mohammed Ali -- and I practically worship the man -- ended up with brain damage.
Wouldn't it be better just to get along reasonably than to make everyone fight to the death?
Yup, actually I'd rather die than this kind of job. I have no problem with death.
That attitude and choice, and I shared it and have the scars to prove it, lasts right up to the moment she says, "Honey, I'm late." The second a child enters the picture, your freedom to go out in a blaze of glory disappears.
People act so surprised by this, as they buy their high-complexity electronics from wal-mart at dirt cheap prices.
Wow, I totally overlooked that "Don't Beat Your Workers" price tag at WalMart, as well my local "No Oppression Electronics" store.
OK, look, forgive my snark and the angry frustration that follows, but the general public is not to blame for the horrific way these factories are managed. Prices are set as high as the market will bear. Companies have entire departments whose whole job is to figure out "At what price are our profits maximized?" and costs do not enter into it. No company has ever said, "Wow, we could make a profit at $10, so even though we'd make the same number of sales at $100 for our widget, we just wouldn't feel right taking the extra money..."
The blood money these companies make does not go into my pocket. I paid plenty for my goods. At the price I paid, these workers would have full, meaningful lives if only management paid them their fair share.
Ever since Tiananmen, I have tried my best to boycott China. I routinely pay extra to buy "Made in the USA" only to find that label is a lie.
I have no way of knowing how the products I buy on a day-to-day basis were manufactured. I don't buy Nike. Guess what? Asics, Adidas and New Balance are manufactured in the same horrible places. Oh, "Quit buying yuppie crap," you say? All the generic goods say "Made in Godawful Horror" as well.
Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs. I understand "Our CEO Below" has quite the sweatshop prepared for him. Given the shaky state of his liver, you'd think Steve would be a bit more worried about his soul.
Yeah, that was a cheap shot. Cheap shots are all I have left. My political vote seems to count for squat. I can't even say "Vote with my wallet" with a straight face. I'd be more than happy to join the protest, but protesting from the "free speech zone" in a chainlink box in the next town doesn't get it done. I'm not willing to hurt anybody.
So if reminding the man who is responsible for this blood of his own mortality is the only shot I have left, I'll take it.
...then that only makes the article even more damning, because Apple does not come off well in this report. The article also provides a terrifying glimpse of your future if you work for a living.
See the Chinese news reports cited below where the undercover reporter both connects the dots for you and, if you work for a living, gives you a terrifying glimpse of your future.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/the-fate-of-a-generation-of-workers-foxconn-undercover-fully-tr/
You don't think they actually work for you, do you? :-)
As far as I can tell, and as much as I hate to say it, the purpose of men with uniforms and guns these days is to facilitate the transfer of money from your pocket to the pocket of someone richer and more deserving.
I initially read about this in a news story where the SEC employee was bemoaning the fact that they had cases they wanted to pursue, but couldn't due to interference from above. He was screaming that they had caught all the major players pulling exactly this scam, but the best he could get his bosses to sign off on were minor fines that didn't even qualify as "a cost of doing business."
I don't think anyone of note on Wall Street has been afraid of the SEC for quite some time...
What the original poster means is that the brokers are, against fiduciary duty, siphoning money from their customers. Consider the following, very rough, case:
I'm Mr. Megabroker. A new multibillion dollar marketing campaign hits, and suddenly I have a ton of BUY orders for SLUSHO stock. I hold those orders for a split second and buy up SLUSHO, knowing that the ton of orders I hold will drive up the price. Once I secure my stocks, I submit my ton of buy orders after my own.
Suddenly, I'm sitting on a bunch of SLUSHO stock that's had a guaranteed jump in price. If I had executed my customer's orders immediately, that increase in price would have been theirs, not mine.
Baby Cloverfield hits Manhattan, and suddenly SLUSHO is radioactive waste. I get a ton of SELL orders. I dump my SLUSHO holdings before the ton of SELL orders hit, having perfect knowledge this is about to occur because I'm the one who's about to do it. I sell my SLUSHO when prices are still high. My customers bleed out.
I've made money coming and going for no other reason than I hold the orders in my pocket and therefore have perfect knowledge of the future. The money I make is not reflective of any real productivity, but is instead theft I can get away with by ignoring my fiduciary duties for a brief while.
Look, I know you read her book and all, but the documents you're trying to reference by way of Ann Coulter don't mean what she says they mean.
We know this because the only person saying they do is Ann. The Emory professor who actually brought those docs to light has recoiled in horror and publicly disavowed her interpretation of them.
So, for the record, the Venona papers do not exonerate McCarthy, Ann is still a shrill harpy, and shouldn't you be glued to the television watching Rush right about now?
For anyone who, like me, is wondering how in the world anyone could be defending McCarthy, here's how. Ann Coulter has been pushing this nonsense that we found "sekret papers" from the KGB that prove McCarthy had it right all along, sort of like the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," only for Commies instead of Jews.
OK, got that? We have a secret list proving that McCarthy's secret list was the right secret list all along.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled sanity currently in progress.
Where do I send the campaign contributions?
Yes, it is, and I'm not sincere about it. Think of the suggestion more as a happy daydream than an actual proposal. :-)
But, on the other hand, Bubba thinks he's gonna strike oil in his back yard one day and get rich, so he votes for every tax cut for the wealthy thinking he's going to join them one day.
By the same token, Bubba thinks Junior's gonna go to the Ivy League after he finishes his night school. Telling Bubba and Madge the President of the Homeowners Association that Bubba Junior maybe ain't going to Princeton cuz the skool ain't teaching him right might get their attention. :-)
the Soviet Union did in fact spend large amounts of money and influence to induce as much unrest and disruption as possible.
Yeah, the KGB was real. Yeah, the Soviet Union had a massive spy program. The stars on the wall at the CIA aren't there for decoration. Reagan didn't call them "the Evil Empire" for nothing.
I'll go you one better. I'll bet the Chinese, right now, have more than maybe one or two active assets in the US. In fact, I'll bet there's at least one Chinese spy on American soil who reads Slashdot. They probably enjoy the unfettered internet access.
But how many actual spies did McCarthy and HUAC turn up? Oh, yeah, that's right, exactly none of them. How many lives did they ruin across the Arts and Academia? A lot. I'll personally never forgive them for the Dalton Trumbo stories they cost us.
But, by all means, there is no God but Reagan and Nixon is his profit. Go forth and spread the Word that McCarthy was a patriot crucified for America. While you're at it, you should set the record straight and let everyone know Roy Cohn died of liver cancer too.
My grandfather and my wife's grandfather were on opposite sides of WWII. We have radically different interpretations of the events of that conflict. You should hear some of the conflicting explanations my wife and I offer our kids when we travel to some places around the Pacific Rim.
But, to borrow from Lewis Black, we "agree on what the fuck reality is." We agree that you can't talk about Truman without Hirohito, you have to include both Tojo and MacArthur, the A6M and the Corsair.
Only telling part of the truth is a famous method of deception. In fact, the Devil is famous for telling the worst lies by speaking only part of the truth.
The Texas Board of Education isn't even trying to look like they're working in good faith.
And how it shows.
Yeah, that's a sentence fragment. I can do that. That's how I roll.
You, on the other hand, need to quit molesting colons. Commas are not salt. You don't get to just sprinkle some on whenever the mood strikes. I've had drugs in surgery that caused fewer hallucinations and less confusion than one of your run-on sentences. I've never seen someone in such dire need of both spellcheck and a dictionary.
I want you to stop what you're doing, right now, and run to an office supply store like your life depends on it. I want you to buy boxes and boxes of red pens and pencils. I want you to fly to the nearest campus and scream, "Is there a Freshman Comp TA in the house?!" until some bespectacled grad student takes pity on you. I want you to hand them your boxes of red and beg them to beat you with them until you reach the First Enlightenment of Grammar.
Joseph McCarthy was a power-mad lunatic who ran through the arts and academia with a chainsaw. We lost Dalton Trumbo because of that jackass. We damn near lost Dash Hammett. Thank God for Edward Murrow.
To hear little right-wing syncophants try to rehabilitate that monster's image today is just nauseating.
How about we do this? When it comes time to put down your state on the application, just put "Enlightened." We'll understand that to mean you come from Texas, Iran, North Korea or some other godawful backwater, but that you'd appreciate it if we didn't hold you responsible for being unable to choose where you were born.
You'll have to take a short quiz consisting of two questions:
1. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
2. If a Believer and a Pagan/Heathen/Infidel are fighting five feet away from a nuke when it explodes, who gets vaporized?
If you answer, 1. "Jefferson" and 2. "Both of them," then we're good. You're in. :-)
Nobody is that stupid. Sure they'll be happy to fuck up your shit, but they'll make sure theirs is nice and pretty,
We begin today's lesson with a discussion of the horrific history of the Rapa Nui and Easter Island. We'll draw a line from that ancient environmental disaster to the current situation in Los Angeles where the ditance between "your fucked-up shit" and "my pretty shit" is currently the width of one street in most places.
We all breathe the same air, we drink the same water. Ultimately, it all "our shit." Today's homework is Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" for a discussion about how well separating the Rich from the Poor works.
Am I wrong for thinking of a time when the textbooks were written by the honestly incompetent and merely neglected in favor of bribery and corruption as "the good olds days?"