The biggest problem with SF is that it is male-centric. I think that exploration of the male psyche is neat and all, but when the author is totally unaware of the other dimensions of human existence, I get bored really quick. I loved golden-era SF when I was 12, but now most of it reads like a parody of a Victorian-era psychoanalytical session ( Here's a good example, Common Time by James Blish).
But the real issue I have is that SF in general is either an elaborate dance around the actual present-day or "normal-life" issues that it is addressing, or it is stories about ideas, and Nabokov said that the worst stories are about ideas. Anyone who likes SF and hasn't read female writers is missing out big-time on the things that really matter: explorations of the interactions between (non-cardboard cutout) characters and technology and technologically advanced cultures.
I would prefer if some version of LISP was "the beginner language", because even just bemoaning its shortcomings in comments on/. 20 years later will be a variety of torture.
I suppose that I should wait until I have the time to write an entire article before I say anything here. I don't want to be an authority on this matter; I just know enough about these incidents to know that what the officer did was blatantly wrong, or else I would not have brought them up. Officer Ryan Donald was not in any danger of actually being hit with a skateboard. Andre or Bryson 'brandished' it at him as they were fleeing. He proceeded to chase them for about 1/4 mile before opening fire on them while they continued to flee.
The incident with the homeless man: as far as I understand it, this man was a nuisance, who would get the cops called on him routinely for yelling and walking in circles and talking to himself. He was having an especial instance of these behaviors and needed to be restrained. We have a fair number of people like this downtown. So SOP in restraining the nuisance perp would be to pin him to the ground. The official report says that he died of a drug overdose, but several people said that his head hit the pavement hard enough to make a loud sound and bounce off of it.
In the case of Andre and Bryson, they were charged with assault while Ryan Donald was not. In the case of the homeless man at the transit center, I don't know of any official inquiries, but this is not for lack of trying.
You can use Google. I don't have the photo of the shot-out window handy but I can get it if you want.
If you aren't a criminal, I'm not sure what you are worried about.
So many people have been criticized for this "if you're a good citizen you have nothing to hide" bullshit on./ that I can't believe I'm still reading it. Again, Google is your friend here.
While it is true that there are a few officers that deserve jail time (and the do get it most of the time) 99.99% of the LEOs our there are the good guys.
If you think 1/10000 cops is a bad apple, you haven't been around much. That would be roughly 90 "bad cops" in the US. Well, an officer in my town shot and permanently disabled a young black man for stealing beer and brandishing a skateboard. He was shooting so wild that I saw a photo of a bullet hole in the upstairs window of a house across the street. Later the same year I saw other officers giving him high fives after he knocked a homeless man's head into the ground and that man had a seizure and died shortly thereafter. I live in a small town; I would have to be a moron to think he's that exceptional.
They go out every day with a target painted on their back to protect the rest of us for crap pay.
Wrong and wrong; average income for a LEO is ~$48000, and national average is around $42000, so not "low", but above average. And being a cop is safer than being a security guard.
I am fine if they want to make sure their neighbors/acquaintances/dates don't have drug or assault convictions.
I don't even know what to say to this. Are you trying to be a troll?
If Apple has a better idea than a headphone jack, I'd be all about it. Do they? I doubt it. Demonstrate some actual function improvement or GTFO. Simply swapping the analog for the digital is incredibly annoying, not only because the interfaces might not be compatible, but also because now I have to worry about the quality of the DAC as well as the speakers if I want good sound. It is a problem multiplier.
I was trying to understand your response, and I just realized my post was ambiguous. I meant that it sucks for me to not use Facebook, not that I quit using Facebook because "It sucks."
I quit using Facebook about 6 months ago. It sucks. Several times I have missed events or scheduled events that overlapped others, because I am out of the loop. I think if I moved to a city, there would be more diversity in notifications.
But I think the USA is still operating on the strategy that we must keep that part of the world unstable. I think the US intelligence agencies would oust anyone more capable than Putin. They like evil crackpots, not powerful leaders.
I will eat GMO foods all day. I'm not worried about eating them. But I think it's crazy to assume that artificially introduced genes in plants and animals will not spread throughout whole species over time. That kind of regulation just can't be enforced enough. And there are so many mechanisms at play in DNA that we only partly understand. A researcher could write over some 'junk' to add genes to rice, and then it turns out the 'junk' contained a RNA suppressor of a crop-destroying rice virus. We don't know enough.
If you want a pleasant background noise, the aural equivalent of a Glade Plugin, and you never actually pay attention to it, then the streaming services should do the trick. But if you like music, then in my experience, you have to do something else. I think that the services push garbage. If I make a station on one of them, any of them, it starts out playing the music I want to hear (if they have it, which is often not the case). But it rapidly drifts into canned garbage. No matter the genre or style or whatever, they suck. So I download music illegally, or buy it sometimes, or get tapes from my friend who makes tapes. I don't have a record player at the moment, but they work good too. Honestly the illegal services are the fastest and best way to find most stuff.
???? Stories about dystopian developments make the feed all of the time. Poorly-implemented tech services are being proffered at an enormous profit margin to a locked-in customer base. Do I have to add a car analogy and a get-off my lawn joke, and a alien overlords joke?
For me, it's related to the principle of "I vote on businesses by spending my money there." I don't like the companies that track internet users, and I would prefer it if we could collectively starve them out of business by using tools like Ghostery.
Also, I don't know what the future will hold. Right now, all of this tracking seems relatively innocuous, but these are massive datasets, and unforeseen developments could lead to consequences that I don't like.
It's obviously the mobile phone. Smart phones are just addenda because almost anyt problem you can solve with a smart phone, you could call someone and figure out. But my favorite invention is the bicycle.
What about mutualism, fascism, participatory (confederalism), the whole spectrum of socialism, gift economy, green economy, etc. You picked one. I think that capitalism survives not because it is fair (it obviously isn't) and not because it is especially efficient (it destroys the environment and oppresses whole countries; the efficiency is a facade based on cost externalization), but because it exterminates alternatives. And I don't view the USSR as an attempt at a real alternative to capitalism, but as a series of dictatorships over a giant corporation which was interested in competing in the capital system, rather than the stated goal of improving quality of life for the masses.
So the various government agencies will continue to expand and spend even more money on housing, food, medical care, etc. The UBI won't even make a dent in entitlement budgets. Instead, it will become "free money" to be squandered on a thousand other things besides basic human needs.
All we have to do is draw a hard line. "That's what we offer, it's plenty, deal with it." People will adjust, share, do the same things they are doing now....
I don't think "That's not fair!" is interesting or even very pertinent to this argument. There are two factors that favor a UBI: efficiency has increased to the point that most jobs are not relevant, and the tasks that capitalism does not incentivize are piling up . I see two possible solutions to these problems. One would be to force people to work the jobs that we make migrants and foreigners do, but that's impossible because people won't be told what to do except by an abstract force (money). The other is to give everyone enough money that they are free to do things that they want to do.
I think that quality of life and prosperity will increase if we relax the daily struggle. It's just time.
Straw man. No alternative was specified so you picked a supposedly plausible one, which you could handily excoriate. I doubt the user wanted to extol the virtues of mercantilism, but you didn't give them the chance.
You're deliberately pretending that history didn't happen so you can insist that having other people provide for you
Ad hominem. My least favorite thing about arguing in general is being assigned to a common and storied stance. My positions might have nuances y'know?
We've never seen pure capitalism. United Steel was enriched by high tariffs. The US was largely built on slavery. It's arguable that syndicalism was thriving in Catalonia for the short period before it got squashed. I think that pure capitalism would be a plague.
If I had mod points today I would put one here.
I want to add, that there are several different physiological conditions where a person appears to be one gender, until they hit puberty, whereupon they 'turn' into the other. And then there's the people who decide they are the other sex than they appear to be, and even when it upsets or endangers their lives they consider it to be important enough to change that they do.
For the same reason that people find it a bad idea to self-identify as "liberal" or "socialist". Reactionary types have poisoned the word in the popular vernacular.
When I think of those terms, I tend to think of people who are willing to work with or be complicit with the current capitalist regime. To me, that is poisonous. They are both actually worse than 'pure' capitalism in the way that the proponents of 'progressive liberalism' or 'democratic socialism' both apologize for the current shit capitalists. I think that if 'democratic socialism' was the majority, then we would be in an even worse mire than we are now.
moo! Copyright Cow 2016 No part of this may be reproduced, copied or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in any database or retrieval system, without the express prior written permission of the owners. No part of this shall be reproduced, modified, transmitted, distributed, disseminated, sold, published, sub-licenced, or have derivative work created or based upon it, without the express prior written permission of the owners. If you wish to reproduce any part of this, please contact the owners, providing full details.
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The biggest problem with SF is that it is male-centric. I think that exploration of the male psyche is neat and all, but when the author is totally unaware of the other dimensions of human existence, I get bored really quick. I loved golden-era SF when I was 12, but now most of it reads like a parody of a Victorian-era psychoanalytical session ( Here's a good example, Common Time by James Blish).
But the real issue I have is that SF in general is either an elaborate dance around the actual present-day or "normal-life" issues that it is addressing, or it is stories about ideas, and Nabokov said that the worst stories are about ideas. Anyone who likes SF and hasn't read female writers is missing out big-time on the things that really matter: explorations of the interactions between (non-cardboard cutout) characters and technology and technologically advanced cultures.
I would prefer if some version of LISP was "the beginner language", because even just bemoaning its shortcomings in comments on /. 20 years later will be a variety of torture.
The incident with the homeless man: as far as I understand it, this man was a nuisance, who would get the cops called on him routinely for yelling and walking in circles and talking to himself. He was having an especial instance of these behaviors and needed to be restrained. We have a fair number of people like this downtown. So SOP in restraining the nuisance perp would be to pin him to the ground. The official report says that he died of a drug overdose, but several people said that his head hit the pavement hard enough to make a loud sound and bounce off of it.
In the case of Andre and Bryson, they were charged with assault while Ryan Donald was not. In the case of the homeless man at the transit center, I don't know of any official inquiries, but this is not for lack of trying.
You can use Google. I don't have the photo of the shot-out window handy but I can get it if you want.
If you aren't a criminal, I'm not sure what you are worried about.
So many people have been criticized for this "if you're a good citizen you have nothing to hide" bullshit on ./ that I can't believe I'm still reading it. Again, Google is your friend here.
While it is true that there are a few officers that deserve jail time (and the do get it most of the time) 99.99% of the LEOs our there are the good guys.
If you think 1/10000 cops is a bad apple, you haven't been around much. That would be roughly 90 "bad cops" in the US. Well, an officer in my town shot and permanently disabled a young black man for stealing beer and brandishing a skateboard. He was shooting so wild that I saw a photo of a bullet hole in the upstairs window of a house across the street. Later the same year I saw other officers giving him high fives after he knocked a homeless man's head into the ground and that man had a seizure and died shortly thereafter. I live in a small town; I would have to be a moron to think he's that exceptional.
They go out every day with a target painted on their back to protect the rest of us for crap pay.
Wrong and wrong; average income for a LEO is ~$48000, and national average is around $42000, so not "low", but above average. And being a cop is safer than being a security guard.
I am fine if they want to make sure their neighbors/acquaintances/dates don't have drug or assault convictions.
I don't even know what to say to this. Are you trying to be a troll?
If Apple has a better idea than a headphone jack, I'd be all about it. Do they? I doubt it. Demonstrate some actual function improvement or GTFO. Simply swapping the analog for the digital is incredibly annoying, not only because the interfaces might not be compatible, but also because now I have to worry about the quality of the DAC as well as the speakers if I want good sound. It is a problem multiplier.
I was trying to understand your response, and I just realized my post was ambiguous. I meant that it sucks for me to not use Facebook, not that I quit using Facebook because "It sucks."
Given that many users don't know the difference between 'privacy' and 'security', I have taken to calling it 'amnesic' or 'forgetful' mode instead.
I quit using Facebook about 6 months ago. It sucks. Several times I have missed events or scheduled events that overlapped others, because I am out of the loop. I think if I moved to a city, there would be more diversity in notifications.
But I think the USA is still operating on the strategy that we must keep that part of the world unstable. I think the US intelligence agencies would oust anyone more capable than Putin. They like evil crackpots, not powerful leaders.
I will eat GMO foods all day. I'm not worried about eating them. But I think it's crazy to assume that artificially introduced genes in plants and animals will not spread throughout whole species over time. That kind of regulation just can't be enforced enough. And there are so many mechanisms at play in DNA that we only partly understand. A researcher could write over some 'junk' to add genes to rice, and then it turns out the 'junk' contained a RNA suppressor of a crop-destroying rice virus. We don't know enough.
If you want a pleasant background noise, the aural equivalent of a Glade Plugin, and you never actually pay attention to it, then the streaming services should do the trick. But if you like music, then in my experience, you have to do something else. I think that the services push garbage. If I make a station on one of them, any of them, it starts out playing the music I want to hear (if they have it, which is often not the case). But it rapidly drifts into canned garbage. No matter the genre or style or whatever, they suck. So I download music illegally, or buy it sometimes, or get tapes from my friend who makes tapes. I don't have a record player at the moment, but they work good too. Honestly the illegal services are the fastest and best way to find most stuff.
"But my friends need to contact me on faecesbook" - Get some better friends.
I can't get better friends, I don't have any mod points!
???? Stories about dystopian developments make the feed all of the time. Poorly-implemented tech services are being proffered at an enormous profit margin to a locked-in customer base. Do I have to add a car analogy and a get-off my lawn joke, and a alien overlords joke?
For me, it's related to the principle of "I vote on businesses by spending my money there." I don't like the companies that track internet users, and I would prefer it if we could collectively starve them out of business by using tools like Ghostery.
Also, I don't know what the future will hold. Right now, all of this tracking seems relatively innocuous, but these are massive datasets, and unforeseen developments could lead to consequences that I don't like.
It's obviously the mobile phone. Smart phones are just addenda because almost anyt problem you can solve with a smart phone, you could call someone and figure out. But my favorite invention is the bicycle.
What about mutualism, fascism, participatory (confederalism), the whole spectrum of socialism, gift economy, green economy, etc. You picked one. I think that capitalism survives not because it is fair (it obviously isn't) and not because it is especially efficient (it destroys the environment and oppresses whole countries; the efficiency is a facade based on cost externalization), but because it exterminates alternatives. And I don't view the USSR as an attempt at a real alternative to capitalism, but as a series of dictatorships over a giant corporation which was interested in competing in the capital system, rather than the stated goal of improving quality of life for the masses.
So the various government agencies will continue to expand and spend even more money on housing, food, medical care, etc. The UBI won't even make a dent in entitlement budgets. Instead, it will become "free money" to be squandered on a thousand other things besides basic human needs.
All we have to do is draw a hard line. "That's what we offer, it's plenty, deal with it." People will adjust, share, do the same things they are doing now....
I don't think "That's not fair!" is interesting or even very pertinent to this argument. There are two factors that favor a UBI: efficiency has increased to the point that most jobs are not relevant, and the tasks that capitalism does not incentivize are piling up . I see two possible solutions to these problems. One would be to force people to work the jobs that we make migrants and foreigners do, but that's impossible because people won't be told what to do except by an abstract force (money). The other is to give everyone enough money that they are free to do things that they want to do.
I think that quality of life and prosperity will increase if we relax the daily struggle. It's just time.
Ask the people in East Germany
Straw man. No alternative was specified so you picked a supposedly plausible one, which you could handily excoriate. I doubt the user wanted to extol the virtues of mercantilism, but you didn't give them the chance.
You're deliberately pretending that history didn't happen so you can insist that having other people provide for you
Ad hominem. My least favorite thing about arguing in general is being assigned to a common and storied stance. My positions might have nuances y'know?
We've never seen pure capitalism. United Steel was enriched by high tariffs. The US was largely built on slavery. It's arguable that syndicalism was thriving in Catalonia for the short period before it got squashed. I think that pure capitalism would be a plague.
They're about signing in and talking to your parents and stuff. Messing with user content is contrary to the stated goal. Of course they do it constantly, but this discussion is about what they say.
Which do you think is a greater service to existing humanity, producing a baby from your body, or doing a good job of raising a healthy human being?
If I had mod points today I would put one here.
I want to add, that there are several different physiological conditions where a person appears to be one gender, until they hit puberty, whereupon they 'turn' into the other. And then there's the people who decide they are the other sex than they appear to be, and even when it upsets or endangers their lives they consider it to be important enough to change that they do.
For the same reason that people find it a bad idea to self-identify as "liberal" or "socialist". Reactionary types have poisoned the word in the popular vernacular.
When I think of those terms, I tend to think of people who are willing to work with or be complicit with the current capitalist regime. To me, that is poisonous. They are both actually worse than 'pure' capitalism in the way that the proponents of 'progressive liberalism' or 'democratic socialism' both apologize for the current shit capitalists. I think that if 'democratic socialism' was the majority, then we would be in an even worse mire than we are now.
Watch out
moo!
Copyright Cow 2016
No part of this may be reproduced, copied or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in any database or retrieval system, without the express prior written permission of the owners. No part of this shall be reproduced, modified, transmitted, distributed, disseminated, sold, published, sub-licenced, or have derivative work created or based upon it, without the express prior written permission of the owners. If you wish to reproduce any part of this, please contact the owners, providing full details.