Re:What happened to Robert Jordan?
on
A Game of Thrones
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· Score: 1
Agreed - no flamewar intended, but I couldn't finish the first WOT. If they were above someone's threshold for reading pleasure, more power to them. I found WOT just too derivative. Not very compelling. Not well characterized.
The opposite is true of the Ice and Fire books.
So I conclude "this R.R. Martin guy is really good." I haven't enjoyed books this much since Tolkien, the first Dune, and Hyperion.
I'm much happier now that I learned to put a book down if it sucks. There have been some comments about Jordan to the effect of "I didn't like books 1-4 that much and really hated 5-20!" Now if only I could learn to put a good book down before losing consciousness.
Not sequels - genuine heptology - and great
on
A Game of Thrones
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree - these are amazing books, and they are part of a single story, not just a reworking of a product that was already successful. In otherwords, not a bunch of sequels with ever-decreasing juice (like, for me, Dune). They get stronger as they go because we know the characters better and care about the outcomes more.
They are such rich books! Massive, but not an ounce of padding. The conflict is almost fractal - there's an overall arc that gets advanced in bits and peices, hints and prologues, while the lower level stuff sorts itself out. Below the conflict between Fire and Ice, there's civil war in the realm - as many as 7-8 contenders for the throne. Within each faction is conflict. Within each family anchoring a faction, there is conflict. Within each family member there is conflict!
Which leads to...his incredbily strong characterization. He has nuanced bad guys. Even his good guys (Ned Stark) are so well rendered that I believed them, and knew them, even though they epitomized Good and Honor. His characters have delusions, and act on them, traits that are pro-survival and not so much. And he is ruthless with them.
As well as he knows the characters, he knows his world. It's a 360 degree view at whatever narrative location he puts us in. I get the sense that he could turn the narrative in a different direction, illuminate different stuff, and it would be as complete as what he did write about. It's not like Disneyland where you just have to peak behind a crowd control rope to see where the paint on the cement stops and the illusion ends. Wherever he puts our eye is enough detail for us to implicitly know that the world continues beyond our view.
I have to rave about his storytelling fu: he turns things over, so that we (and usually the characters) are surprised at how things turn out. But even when that's not the case, it is still strong stuff! I just finished rereading the 3, and even when I knew what was going to happen, I was compelled. I dreaded getting to certain parts.
The first time I read them, I went out of order (on the recommendation of some slashdot dweeb). I figured after reading the 3rd, that the 1st would cover the tremendously interesting backstory (a successful rebellion 10 years previous). Nope. It just went back about a year. He has such invention that he can "squander" a magnificent tale as mere backstory!
The series has elements of fantasy, but the rest of it is so strong that it would still work without it. It has the great politics of the first Dune, but the series is not in any way derivitave.
There's a whole class of tolkien wannabes I just can't read. "THis is different! They must destroy the *bracelet* of power!" "They aren't orcs...they're urcs!" Mr. Martin is not of their ilk. No questing, no rehash. Very original.
Kicking myself for wasting his time
on
A Game of Thrones
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· Score: 1
I sent him an email - a shameless adultation fanboy email - and wrote "please write back" rather than "please don't waste time writing back"
I just wanted to encourage him, if he needed it and random comments from a stranger would help.
I don't write fanmail - this was a thank you card. It's that good.
Sorry - that's dumb. They send 1 million emails per sale. They would send 1 billion if it were an order of magnitude cheaper. There must only be 1 idiot to make it worth annoying 1 million people. The problem is not resolvable with market solutions.
IIS, IE, outlook and outlook excess get hacked because they are shitty. Borked beyond belief.
The windows architecture is fundamentally broken. Even Mundie says it can't be fixed. And they won't fix what they can. Why do my win2k/Xpee servers have outhouse excess? Why do I have to hack them to get rid of that program? Why was it such a design priority to allow web sites to do arbitrary things to my system?
You're 'turfing, dude.
Re:Hmmmmmm I wonder...
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Naw - Wallyworld will just make everyone a rotating supervisor for the day so they will be exempt from OT for all of their shifts. Wally does not like to pay OT. Wally is not particularly thrilled about paying plain old T.
Not if you're broke. Not if you don't have assurance that things will be any different where you go. It's the choice between slow and rapid starvation.
There ain't no such thing as a true capitalist society. Inevitably you get market-deforming agglomerations of power. In a company town, there's no voluntary association with the only source of goods and services. Oligopoly/monopoly is a very different animal and obliterates the "free market" basis for libertarian thought.
That's why I'm disgusted with Republicans - they aren't acting like conservatives. They are anti-market and pro-business, and business has plenty of power vs. consumers as is.
Wow. Reasoned disagreement. We better move this discussion to another forum.
I guess I view all vices as sins, and some are worse than others. If it's not wrong, I wouldn't regard it as a vice.
I think pot smoking is no more harmful or sinful than consumption of the primary legal drugs. Bennett has urged savage penalties for using pot. Prison terms destroy families. On this he is either dangerously deluded about the relative dangers or a hypocrite. As a drug czar, I have to believe he had access to information and declined to incorporate it. I conclude pot use is one of those "other people's vices" and therefore ripe for condemnation, in his pov.
I don't think a multi-million dollar gambling loss quite compares with church bingo, but I could certainly concede that cultural differences might apply. I don't know that Buddhists consider gambling different than other passtimes. I'm still sold, partly because of the schaedenfruede factor, but also because his response when the story broke suggest to me he had a guilty conscience. 2 minutes of web research suggests that the biblical case against gambling is about as weak as that against masturbation. So we caught him wanking.
Plus, I guess if his behavior doesn't meet my moral code, I'm entitled to denounce him as intemperately as my vocabulary will allow.
If he were a force for good in the world, I'd not be so delighted by this whole thing. But he's made a career of sorts (he makes a lot of money, but he's not really had a job) of pandering to the American urge to to condemn and punish somebody.
J. Edgar was blackmailed by the Mob by photos of indiscretions with other men. But he had a mania for enforcing straight-laced sex lives for his employees.
The article yesterday about how to get the police involved in a massive hack was instructive. Many posts indicated that even when the threshold $5K provable monetary loss was reached, and the sysadmins had located the suspects - the fbi would do nothing.
It's amazing. And every description of the FBI resources in the context of fighting terrorism uses the word "thin".
Being a judgemental, bigoted ass is worse, and he's guilty of that.
Hypocrisy can be fairly admirable: holding ideals you can't quite live up to is not such a bad thing. Combine it with honesty and self-knowledge and you have a grown up. Leave it out and you have Bill Bennett.
You have an unsupportably narrow definition of hypocrisy. We agree the pompous ass is unlikable. My reason for it is he has made a living denouncing what are generally agreed to be vices. He did not ever claim that he was denouncing only a few, specific behaviors. He has claimed a mantle of moral authority. Before this particular scandal broke, there were probably fewer than three people who condemned the set of things he condemned while excluding gambling from that set. Once the scandal broke, his allies in the conservative dominated media (and it is dominated by conservatives - compare the air time given conservative spokespeople to that given to moderates and leftists) then drew that distinction. But they wouldn't have before.
If he had only one particular thing he railed against, only one axe to grind, then it wouldn't be hypocrisy. But he has set himself up as the arbiter of moral behavior, and has railed against all the sins he himself doesn't pursue. And he knows the ones he does pursue are sins. I am sure that he believes gambling is not a moral behavior. Besides, it is very common for a hypocrite to forgive and regard his/her own behavior - that's its essence! So Bennett is a hypocrite for denouncing vices while having them. In his position he cannot hector others' harmless vices while having any himself and be clear of hypocrisy. It's not that he has denounced a select few behaviors; he has championed a moral code in broad and general ways and failed to live up to it himself. His definition of vice comes down to "what other people do" and that is essential to the moral blindness of hypocrisy.
"All the things you do are bad. What I do (which is indisputably comparable) is acceptable." I don't follow your statement drawing a distinction between a vice and immorality. A vice is a vice because it's immoral. He's a hypocrite for giving his behavior a pass while judging everyone elses on a vast range of topics. That's bullshit, and it's hypocrisy. I don't know if he has specifically denounced theft, but given his pose as the moral guardian of our (my!) behavior, he would be a hypocrite for embezzling from one of his organizations. There are other sins/moral failings he might have omitted from his specific list, but being guilty of any of them, while presenting himself as a moral authority, fairly brands him a hypocrite.
I also disagree with the degree of alignment with a condemned behavior ones own behavior must have to qualify as hypocritical. Newt is certainly a scumbag and I hope the next time he says "family values" he chokes. But I don't think it has to be the exact same act (sex with an intern, as Newt did) to qualify as hypocrisy. Anything substantially similar would do. Getting a lap dance would suffice for one who condemned sexual immorality. A serious porn habit...hmmm. Dunno- there's probably enough distance from that.
Our dispute is whether gambling itself makes him a hypocrite, and if I haven't convinced you, we can still agree the shithead is a hypocrite for specific behaviors he himself has denounced.
I'm pretty sure he railed against dishonesty during the Clinton era. So his lies about this episode make him a hypocrite. He lied about his gambling habit, its extent and its costs.
While drug czar, he used drugs. His were legal, but they were still mood altering, health damaging substances. Anyone who uses the phrase "drugs AND alcohol", rather than "Drugs, including alcohol" is a liar.
Besides, don't you find it smacks of Clintonian hair-splitting to say, "I never said you shouldn't gamble." It sounds a lot like excluding blowjobs from the definition of sex.
Oh, he absolutely is a hypocrite. He has denounced a vast array of vices who directly affect only the individual offender. He has set himself up as a paragon and arbiter of virtue and is nothing of the kind. Your argument follows the conservative media spin, but come on! Think about it. If he'd been caught in bed with a male pig, you'd be saying, "He never specifically denounced sex with *male* livestock!"
Besides's basically been the political equivalent of a game show celebrity - famous for being famous, but actually never accomplished anything. Oh, apart from winning the war on drugs.
He's not even a conservative, merely a republican.
Remember that "Dickhead" Cheney convened an energy panel consisting entirely of foxes to recommend improvements in henhouse security? Remember all that talk about letting the market work when actually it was not a market at all - it was as rigged as a carnival wheel. There was an entire artillary regiment of smoking cannon on this point.
Enron gave to Democrats at 1/3 the rate they gave to Republicans, and a sizable fraction of the Democrat take was as the scandal broke to either gain some bipartisan stooges or to smear both parties equally - as you have done.
It is simply incorrect to say that Enron is/was anything but a Republican outfit. They underwrote the Dauphin's career from way back.
They don't have standards of decency. They are bluenoses and prudes, but not decent. There is something mentally ill about pushing violence porn from Ah-nold while banning sexual stuff.
One example of their product selection: pulling t-shirts that were offensive because they asserted that one day a woman will be president.
I bet you can get chadors cheap at Walmart. And wife-beaters.
I can see the point, but Congress was pretty messed up even in the first half of his first term.
The "Don't Ask, Still Persecute" policy abortion came up from an attempt to integrate gay service men and women into the military. They've been there all along, serving honorably. In the first Gulf war, the military delayed discharges until after the conflict, which totally obliterates any arguments the military had. Unit cohesion is only affected, or if affected is only important, in peacetime????But some democrats led the fight to make the policy even harsher.
He did change his economic policy, but only when advisors convinced him that the Fed would offset any stimulous spending with rate hikes. He deserves credit for a budget many standard deviations closer to sanity than any we're going to see for the next few years. He also had no hard on for raping the environment, like Shrub.
I also like that Clinton frankly opposed the Vietnam war and see no inconsistency in his avoiding service. I see a massive inconsistency with the current reign of chickenhawks, to a man draft dodgers. In the commander in chief's person, an actual deserter from the Millionaire Boy's Club that was his unit of the Texas Guard.
Seriously - apart from a sick and maximally politicized permanent inquisition, what did Clinton do wrong? Intervened to prevent genocide a couple of times, one of which he chickened out of. Balanced the budget, kept the lunatics in the House from doing the damage to the country that W is doing. Pretty successful presidency, particularly given the unprecedented character of the opposition.
There's no single definition of what a workplace should be. Smoke jumpers should not wear ties. Neither should coders or anyone remotely techy. Techy shops and suits do not coexist. Suits have a purpose - they bring in money for what the techs do. Dressing suits and techs alike is dumb. Expecting them all to speak as if their sphincters were welded is also dumb. Addressing one's superiors with the diffidence of Jeeves the Butler is servile and, to the extent that it impedes communication, dumb. Addressing customers in a servile manner is often profitable.
Now, as a nice guy I try not to hurt anyone's feelings, and for those who are offended, they find my word choice altered. But it's not a matter of professionalism. That's just a blanket term for class-conscious, irrelevant inefficiency.
This touches off a rant: I saw that CA just instituted a dress code. That and your concern over language and a "professional" atmosphere spell doom for tech. If I had CA stock, I'd sell it. Dunno where you work, but I'm glad I'm not there.
Neckties reduce circulation to the brain. IBM pulled out of an epic stall when they dropped the dress code for employees who don't have customer face time. That wasn't what saved them, exactly, but it is indicative of the mindset that did save them. Don't put nonsensical restraints on creative intellects.
Yeah- your salespeople have to put on the costume to get sales. Just like a peacock has to have a larger than optimal tail in order to attract a mate.
I think it's wrong to suggest that clear communication (with apt word choice, imo) is "unprofessional" unless by that term you mean "insufficiently stuffy."
The first signs of MS' doom were when they codenamed some office construction projects with the names of golf courses. Golf courses! I can't imagine anything less techy, less geeky, less inspired. This is what the IBM PHBs circa 1975 would have picked. This is what Safeco insurance would have picked. Yeah, they've made some money since, but I don't see them winning through superior tech. Sure enough, they haven't introduced any since 1998. I don't see them ever creating anything cool, which dooms their content ambitions. And if you are convinced that MS is going to continue to be successful, consider the language and clothing patterns: their weasels use weasel words, their geeks speak straight. Their sales droids dress business casual+, their coders...dress.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - no flamewar intended, but I couldn't finish the first WOT. If they were above someone's threshold for reading pleasure, more power to them. I found WOT just too derivative. Not very compelling. Not well characterized.
The opposite is true of the Ice and Fire books.
So I conclude "this R.R. Martin guy is really good." I haven't enjoyed books this much since Tolkien, the first Dune, and Hyperion.
I'm much happier now that I learned to put a book down if it sucks. There have been some comments about Jordan to the effect of "I didn't like books 1-4 that much and really hated 5-20!" Now if only I could learn to put a good book down before losing consciousness.
I agree - these are amazing books, and they are part of a single story, not just a reworking of a product that was already successful. In otherwords, not a bunch of sequels with ever-decreasing juice (like, for me, Dune). They get stronger as they go because we know the characters better and care about the outcomes more.
...they're urcs!" Mr. Martin is not of their ilk. No questing, no rehash. Very original.
They are such rich books! Massive, but not an ounce of padding. The conflict is almost fractal - there's an overall arc that gets advanced in bits and peices, hints and prologues, while the lower level stuff sorts itself out. Below the conflict between Fire and Ice, there's civil war in the realm - as many as 7-8 contenders for the throne. Within each faction is conflict. Within each family anchoring a faction, there is conflict. Within each family member there is conflict!
Which leads to...his incredbily strong characterization. He has nuanced bad guys. Even his good guys (Ned Stark) are so well rendered that I believed them, and knew them, even though they epitomized Good and Honor. His characters have delusions, and act on them, traits that are pro-survival and not so much. And he is ruthless with them.
As well as he knows the characters, he knows his world. It's a 360 degree view at whatever narrative location he puts us in. I get the sense that he could turn the narrative in a different direction, illuminate different stuff, and it would be as complete as what he did write about. It's not like Disneyland where you just have to peak behind a crowd control rope to see where the paint on the cement stops and the illusion ends. Wherever he puts our eye is enough detail for us to implicitly know that the world continues beyond our view.
I have to rave about his storytelling fu: he turns things over, so that we (and usually the characters) are surprised at how things turn out. But even when that's not the case, it is still strong stuff! I just finished rereading the 3, and even when I knew what was going to happen, I was compelled. I dreaded getting to certain parts.
The first time I read them, I went out of order (on the recommendation of some slashdot dweeb). I figured after reading the 3rd, that the 1st would cover the tremendously interesting backstory (a successful rebellion 10 years previous). Nope. It just went back about a year. He has such invention that he can "squander" a magnificent tale as mere backstory!
The series has elements of fantasy, but the rest of it is so strong that it would still work without it. It has the great politics of the first Dune, but the series is not in any way derivitave.
There's a whole class of tolkien wannabes I just can't read. "THis is different! They must destroy the *bracelet* of power!" "They aren't orcs
I sent him an email - a shameless adultation fanboy email - and wrote "please write back" rather than "please don't waste time writing back"
I just wanted to encourage him, if he needed it and random comments from a stranger would help.
I don't write fanmail - this was a thank you card. It's that good.
Sorry - that's dumb. They send 1 million emails per sale. They would send 1 billion if it were an order of magnitude cheaper. There must only be 1 idiot to make it worth annoying 1 million people. The problem is not resolvable with market solutions.
vigilantism, yeah.
IIS, IE, outlook and outlook excess get hacked because they are shitty. Borked beyond belief.
The windows architecture is fundamentally broken. Even Mundie says it can't be fixed. And they won't fix what they can. Why do my win2k/Xpee servers have outhouse excess? Why do I have to hack them to get rid of that program? Why was it such a design priority to allow web sites to do arbitrary things to my system?
You're 'turfing, dude.
Naw - Wallyworld will just make everyone a rotating supervisor for the day so they will be exempt from OT for all of their shifts. Wally does not like to pay OT. Wally is not particularly thrilled about paying plain old T.
Not if you're broke. Not if you don't have assurance that things will be any different where you go. It's the choice between slow and rapid starvation.
There ain't no such thing as a true capitalist society. Inevitably you get market-deforming agglomerations of power. In a company town, there's no voluntary association with the only source of goods and services. Oligopoly/monopoly is a very different animal and obliterates the "free market" basis for libertarian thought.
That's why I'm disgusted with Republicans - they aren't acting like conservatives. They are anti-market and pro-business, and business has plenty of power vs. consumers as is.
The navy has an "all MS policy" with exceptions for "legacy" systems. Doubtless the knowledgible folks are #defining world+dog as "legacy"
Wow. Reasoned disagreement. We better move this discussion to another forum.
I guess I view all vices as sins, and some are worse than others. If it's not wrong, I wouldn't regard it as a vice.
I think pot smoking is no more harmful or sinful than consumption of the primary legal drugs. Bennett has urged savage penalties for using pot. Prison terms destroy families. On this he is either dangerously deluded about the relative dangers or a hypocrite. As a drug czar, I have to believe he had access to information and declined to incorporate it. I conclude pot use is one of those "other people's vices" and therefore ripe for condemnation, in his pov.
I don't think a multi-million dollar gambling loss quite compares with church bingo, but I could certainly concede that cultural differences might apply. I don't know that Buddhists consider gambling different than other passtimes. I'm still sold, partly because of the schaedenfruede factor, but also because his response when the story broke suggest to me he had a guilty conscience. 2 minutes of web research suggests that the biblical case against gambling is about as weak as that against masturbation. So we caught him wanking.
Plus, I guess if his behavior doesn't meet my moral code, I'm entitled to denounce him as intemperately as my vocabulary will allow.
If he were a force for good in the world, I'd not be so delighted by this whole thing. But he's made a career of sorts (he makes a lot of money, but he's not really had a job) of pandering to the American urge to to condemn and punish somebody.
J. Edgar was blackmailed by the Mob by photos of indiscretions with other men. But he had a mania for enforcing straight-laced sex lives for his employees.
What a piece of work.
The article yesterday about how to get the police involved in a massive hack was instructive. Many posts indicated that even when the threshold $5K provable monetary loss was reached, and the sysadmins had located the suspects - the fbi would do nothing.
It's amazing. And every description of the FBI resources in the context of fighting terrorism uses the word "thin".
Being a judgemental, bigoted ass is worse, and he's guilty of that.
Hypocrisy can be fairly admirable: holding ideals you can't quite live up to is not such a bad thing. Combine it with honesty and self-knowledge and you have a grown up. Leave it out and you have Bill Bennett.
You have an unsupportably narrow definition of hypocrisy. We agree the pompous ass is unlikable. My reason for it is he has made a living denouncing what are generally agreed to be vices. He did not ever claim that he was denouncing only a few, specific behaviors. He has claimed a mantle of moral authority. Before this particular scandal broke, there were probably fewer than three people who condemned the set of things he condemned while excluding gambling from that set. Once the scandal broke, his allies in the conservative dominated media (and it is dominated by conservatives - compare the air time given conservative spokespeople to that given to moderates and leftists) then drew that distinction. But they wouldn't have before.
If he had only one particular thing he railed against, only one axe to grind, then it wouldn't be hypocrisy. But he has set himself up as the arbiter of moral behavior, and has railed against all the sins he himself doesn't pursue. And he knows the ones he does pursue are sins. I am sure that he believes gambling is not a moral behavior. Besides, it is very common for a hypocrite to forgive and regard his/her own behavior - that's its essence! So Bennett is a hypocrite for denouncing vices while having them. In his position he cannot hector others' harmless vices while having any himself and be clear of hypocrisy. It's not that he has denounced a select few behaviors; he has championed a moral code in broad and general ways and failed to live up to it himself. His definition of vice comes down to "what other people do" and that is essential to the moral blindness of hypocrisy.
"All the things you do are bad. What I do (which is indisputably comparable) is acceptable." I don't follow your statement drawing a distinction between a vice and immorality. A vice is a vice because it's immoral. He's a hypocrite for giving his behavior a pass while judging everyone elses on a vast range of topics. That's bullshit, and it's hypocrisy. I don't know if he has specifically denounced theft, but given his pose as the moral guardian of our (my!) behavior, he would be a hypocrite for embezzling from one of his organizations. There are other sins/moral failings he might have omitted from his specific list, but being guilty of any of them, while presenting himself as a moral authority, fairly brands him a hypocrite.
I also disagree with the degree of alignment with a condemned behavior ones own behavior must have to qualify as hypocritical. Newt is certainly a scumbag and I hope the next time he says "family values" he chokes. But I don't think it has to be the exact same act (sex with an intern, as Newt did) to qualify as hypocrisy. Anything substantially similar would do. Getting a lap dance would suffice for one who condemned sexual immorality. A serious porn habit...hmmm. Dunno- there's probably enough distance from that.
Our dispute is whether gambling itself makes him a hypocrite, and if I haven't convinced you, we can still agree the shithead is a hypocrite for specific behaviors he himself has denounced.
I'm pretty sure he railed against dishonesty during the Clinton era. So his lies about this episode make him a hypocrite. He lied about his gambling habit, its extent and its costs.
While drug czar, he used drugs. His were legal, but they were still mood altering, health damaging substances. Anyone who uses the phrase "drugs AND alcohol", rather than "Drugs, including alcohol" is a liar.
Besides, don't you find it smacks of Clintonian hair-splitting to say, "I never said you shouldn't gamble." It sounds a lot like excluding blowjobs from the definition of sex.
Oh, he absolutely is a hypocrite. He has denounced a vast array of vices who directly affect only the individual offender. He has set himself up as a paragon and arbiter of virtue and is nothing of the kind. Your argument follows the conservative media spin, but come on! Think about it. If he'd been caught in bed with a male pig, you'd be saying, "He never specifically denounced sex with *male* livestock!"
Besides's basically been the political equivalent of a game show celebrity - famous for being famous, but actually never accomplished anything. Oh, apart from winning the war on drugs.
He's not even a conservative, merely a republican.
Remember that "Dickhead" Cheney convened an energy panel consisting entirely of foxes to recommend improvements in henhouse security? Remember all that talk about letting the market work when actually it was not a market at all - it was as rigged as a carnival wheel. There was an entire artillary regiment of smoking cannon on this point.
Enron gave to Democrats at 1/3 the rate they gave to Republicans, and a sizable fraction of the Democrat take was as the scandal broke to either gain some bipartisan stooges or to smear both parties equally - as you have done.
It is simply incorrect to say that Enron is/was anything but a Republican outfit. They underwrote the Dauphin's career from way back.
They don't have standards of decency. They are bluenoses and prudes, but not decent. There is something mentally ill about pushing violence porn from Ah-nold while banning sexual stuff.
One example of their product selection: pulling t-shirts that were offensive because they asserted that one day a woman will be president.
I bet you can get chadors cheap at Walmart. And wife-beaters.
IHBT
I can see the point, but Congress was pretty messed up even in the first half of his first term.
The "Don't Ask, Still Persecute" policy abortion came up from an attempt to integrate gay service men and women into the military. They've been there all along, serving honorably. In the first Gulf war, the military delayed discharges until after the conflict, which totally obliterates any arguments the military had. Unit cohesion is only affected, or if affected is only important, in peacetime????But some democrats led the fight to make the policy even harsher.
He did change his economic policy, but only when advisors convinced him that the Fed would offset any stimulous spending with rate hikes. He deserves credit for a budget many standard deviations closer to sanity than any we're going to see for the next few years. He also had no hard on for raping the environment, like Shrub.
I also like that Clinton frankly opposed the Vietnam war and see no inconsistency in his avoiding service. I see a massive inconsistency with the current reign of chickenhawks, to a man draft dodgers. In the commander in chief's person, an actual deserter from the Millionaire Boy's Club that was his unit of the Texas Guard.
of peace and prosperity over!" - the Onion
Seriously - apart from a sick and maximally politicized permanent inquisition, what did Clinton do wrong? Intervened to prevent genocide a couple of times, one of which he chickened out of. Balanced the budget, kept the lunatics in the House from doing the damage to the country that W is doing. Pretty successful presidency, particularly given the unprecedented character of the opposition.
ihbt
Saying horseshit like, "I am an educated person" shows that you have a stick up your ass. It shows you are not very self-aware.
Your deductions are inaccurate; you should adjust your self-image accordingly. In particular, don't think of yourself as particularly insightful.
There's no single definition of what a workplace should be. Smoke jumpers should not wear ties. Neither should coders or anyone remotely techy. Techy shops and suits do not coexist. Suits have a purpose - they bring in money for what the techs do. Dressing suits and techs alike is dumb. Expecting them all to speak as if their sphincters were welded is also dumb. Addressing one's superiors with the diffidence of Jeeves the Butler is servile and, to the extent that it impedes communication, dumb. Addressing customers in a servile manner is often profitable.
Now, as a nice guy I try not to hurt anyone's feelings, and for those who are offended, they find my word choice altered. But it's not a matter of professionalism. That's just a blanket term for class-conscious, irrelevant inefficiency.
That's a funny comment from someone with your sig. Hee hee.
I think "bent over" is a good metaphor for measures taken to enjoy the fruits of a coercive license. BS is an excellent term for...BS.
This touches off a rant: I saw that CA just instituted a dress code. That and your concern over language and a "professional" atmosphere spell doom for tech. If I had CA stock, I'd sell it. Dunno where you work, but I'm glad I'm not there.
Neckties reduce circulation to the brain. IBM pulled out of an epic stall when they dropped the dress code for employees who don't have customer face time. That wasn't what saved them, exactly, but it is indicative of the mindset that did save them. Don't put nonsensical restraints on creative intellects.
Yeah- your salespeople have to put on the costume to get sales. Just like a peacock has to have a larger than optimal tail in order to attract a mate.
I think it's wrong to suggest that clear communication (with apt word choice, imo) is "unprofessional" unless by that term you mean "insufficiently stuffy."
The first signs of MS' doom were when they codenamed some office construction projects with the names of golf courses. Golf courses! I can't imagine anything less techy, less geeky, less inspired. This is what the IBM PHBs circa 1975 would have picked. This is what Safeco insurance would have picked. Yeah, they've made some money since, but I don't see them winning through superior tech. Sure enough, they haven't introduced any since 1998. I don't see them ever creating anything cool, which dooms their content ambitions. And if you are convinced that MS is going to continue to be successful, consider the language and clothing patterns: their weasels use weasel words, their geeks speak straight. Their sales droids dress business casual+, their coders...dress.
This is factually correct. He does off some bad guys, but he's one himself.