It's called rate-busting. You're working in a factory, and your quota is 100 doohickeys per hour. Then some new guy hires in, and wanting to impress management he busts his butt, sweating out 150 an hour. He doesn't understand why his mates are giving him a hard time; he's just trying to be the best that he can be, even if it isn't sustainable. But sure enough, on Monday morning everyone finds out that 150 is the new minimum!
We currently have a 40 hour work-week. If we cut 10 hours from it, get paid the same salary, we'd have more time for recreation and family.
You'd have more time for recreation and family even if you didn't get paid the same salary. But we Americans are willing to trade those things for bigger houses, SUVs, toys, and 24/7 entertainment, because that's how we define "quality of life". If we were offered a 30-hour week for the same money, we'd just be thinking about all of the extra stuff we could have if we worked 40 (or 50) hours anyway.
Back in the 60s someone said that if Lyndon Johnson had asked for our cars instead of our sons, we'd never have gone to war in Vietnam. It's still the same today.
Unless you have had some major disasters in life, the answer will probably rotate around having too much to do and too little time to accomplish all the tasks.
No, it probably rotates around not having any control over what you do or the conditions under which you do it.
why would he carry on an extended debate about "communism", over inflammatory words whose meaning he doesn't really understand?
He knows exactly what he's doing. It's the same thing that conservatives have successfully done with words like "liberal" and "terrorism". You may not really understand what they are, but you know they're bad, and you know that anything they're stuck to must be bad, as well.
You are missing his point. Communist is a trigger word. Like terrorist.
Unfortunately, most political discourse is on this level. We all have little clusters of neurons in our brains that encode concepts like "communism", "terrorism", "family", "God", "liberal", etc., and much of politics is the process of getting people to connect them to other little clusters like "Good" and "Evil". There is no requirement that this process be rational. Once those trigger words are properly linked, one can then use them to attack other ideas that may or may not even be related.
Back when the Soviet Union collapsed, and as China was becoming a major trading partner and thereby transitioning from "evil" to "OK", I wondered what bogeyman we would come up with to replace "communism". Up through Reagan, it was always an election issue who was going to be "tough on communism". It's not hard to see what the new replacement is!
I'm at a loss as to the disparity between these two sources, but suffice to say that, in practice, communism results in the inability of individuals to excercise ownership over anything.
The OED definition tells us what communism is, as envisioned by the people who originally invented it as an "ism". Yours is the anticommunist's definition of communism. It points to oppressive regimes in the Soviet Union and China, assumes that those are faithful implementations of "communist" ideas, and notes their tyranny and their failure.
But you're largely correct about the ownership issue. Property as a legal construct - and that's all it really is, now or ever - becomes largely irrelevant in a communist society. The practical problem with Marxist ideology is that it demands a new kind of human being (altruistic, placing the community before the self, etc.) and doesn't tolerate greed, avarice, or "free riders" terribly well, and I doubt that anyone could rid the world of those (although the Chinese certainly tried, during their Cultural Revolution).
If you want a truer example of communism in practice, I'd look to native American societies (e.g., the Iroquois nation) before we Europeans showed up.
You're describing the way power was consolidated in the Soviet Union and China, under the legitimizing banner of Marxism. Marx himself would have doubted that anything resembling "communism" could have arisen in either of those agrarian societies; he was thinking of industrial countries like England and Germany where there was a substantial working class, and (critically) that this working class would be politically aware and vigilant enough to react to and prevent such a corruption of power. But alas, political awareness is a lot to ask even of highly educated people, and you can never guarantee that any grant of absolute power will be revokable. Therein lies the rub.
Re:Alright! Another thread where we can bash Bush
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Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 1
This thread provides and excellent opportunity to bash Bush, America, Corporations and Fox News!
...who are obviously all above criticism by any true American, regardless of what they say or do!
Re:My personal favorite
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Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 1
I just read in today's NY Times that Americans spend $42 billion annually on diet books. Do the math!
Re:Statistical Lies...
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Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 2, Funny
First published in 1954: How to Lie With Statistics
It's still a lot easier to lie without statistics...
Absolutely. The whole "threat" as presented to the public doesn't make any sense for a number of practical reasons. Why hype it then? Someone else here suggested that perhaps the real issue is the possibility of cheap laser-guided missiles...
Someone please mod this WAY up. I just finished a post suggesting that the "threat" was being hyped for some reason, but I couldn't think of what that reason might be, except maybe to maintain terror hysteria for political reasons. I think you may have hit the bullseye there.
This entire issue seems a little fishy to me. Laser pointers are not very powerful (as someone else here pointed out), and the accuracy and stability with which someone on the ground would have to hold it in order to keep the (weak and highly diverged) spot on a pilot's retina (in a moving aircraft, no less) for any length of time is very hard to imagine.
But then, I can't think of a reason why the Powers That Be would want to hype the threat, unless a ban on laser pointers was coming for some unrelated and unpublicized reason. Or, perhaps, just to maintain the general level of terror hysteria here in the U.S..
You had to know that this discussion was going to go the way of the Microsoft response to Linux.
The rational position is to take a hard look at the actual value of this "support" relative to what you're paying for it, keeping in mind that its high cost stems largely from the closed and proprietary nature of the products being supported. It would be surprising if a competitive independent service & support industry for open source telephony didn't spring up, and once it does it is likely to considerably more economical than the premium brands.
I suppose the moral of this story is to be careful when you play around with the dd command and your MBR.
I messed up my MBR once, back when I was dual-booting Linux and WinNT. Had to type the hex in manually (I found it in a book) before converting it to binary and dd'ing it back onto the disk. I was surprised myself when that worked. Since then I've always kept a copy of it on hand, Just In Case...
You may wonder how that is anti-social, but the reason they have a cell phone is to hide behind it.
I've long suspected that this is true. Just walking through a campus or down a street is anxiogenic for many, many people. Every person they encounter is another social dilemma: Do I make eye contact, do I avert my glance in a possibly obvious and unfriendly way, etc. Not only does a cell phone give you something else to focus on, but it also projects the impression that you have friends, or at least that there's one person in the world who's willing to talk to you. It works whether there's anyone at the other end, or not.
Yet most adults don't appear to realize that their $20k new car cost them a lot more than $20k after interest.
And don't think that car dealers don't take advantage of that. I visited a Mitsubishi dealership near DC once, and all of their models were marked up 15-20% over list price! The sales guy explained that "price doesn't matter", and that what does matter is that they can get me (well, my girlfriend, actually) into a new car for a competitive monthly payment. An extra year of them, in fact!
I left wondering how many people fall for that. It must work at least sometimes, or they wouldn't be doing it...
Well, look at the bright side. This will drive more and more people to open source software, as the terms and legal liabilities of using the proprietary stuff become more and more onerous. E.g., vendors will be demanding access to your machine to verify that their licensing terms aren't being violated, you'll be required to upgrade at their whim, etc. etc.
Why deal with crap like that any more than you absolutely have to (which is not at all)?
Well, first of all I would suggest that if you're in your 20s you probably can't yet be aware of the ways in which "overload" and excessive "context switching" will ultimately affect you. You could equally well say that heavy smoking doesn't affect your health, because at 22 you feel fine.
But consider this: We're all talking about whether we feel stressed as consumers of information and sensory stimulation. Perhaps the effects will showing up more in our ability to create things - software, literature, art, etc. - that require intense and extended concentration and focus.
Anybody know how long the feature program is between commercial breaks? 12 minutes perhaps?
Not to mention that the average scene length on children's programs is far shorter than it used to be, like around 1 or 2 seconds. Studies have shown that kids' attention starts to drift if scenes change any more slowly than that.
I think at least part of the rationale is that a paid subscription service is considered more like a private communication between consenting parties, whereas an over-the-air broadcast is accessible to anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called rate-busting. You're working in a factory, and your quota is 100 doohickeys per hour. Then some new guy hires in, and wanting to impress management he busts his butt, sweating out 150 an hour. He doesn't understand why his mates are giving him a hard time; he's just trying to be the best that he can be, even if it isn't sustainable. But sure enough, on Monday morning everyone finds out that 150 is the new minimum!
You'd have more time for recreation and family even if you didn't get paid the same salary. But we Americans are willing to trade those things for bigger houses, SUVs, toys, and 24/7 entertainment, because that's how we define "quality of life". If we were offered a 30-hour week for the same money, we'd just be thinking about all of the extra stuff we could have if we worked 40 (or 50) hours anyway.
Back in the 60s someone said that if Lyndon Johnson had asked for our cars instead of our sons, we'd never have gone to war in Vietnam. It's still the same today.
No, it probably rotates around not having any control over what you do or the conditions under which you do it.
He knows exactly what he's doing. It's the same thing that conservatives have successfully done with words like "liberal" and "terrorism". You may not really understand what they are, but you know they're bad, and you know that anything they're stuck to must be bad, as well.
Unfortunately, most political discourse is on this level. We all have little clusters of neurons in our brains that encode concepts like "communism", "terrorism", "family", "God", "liberal", etc., and much of politics is the process of getting people to connect them to other little clusters like "Good" and "Evil". There is no requirement that this process be rational. Once those trigger words are properly linked, one can then use them to attack other ideas that may or may not even be related.
Back when the Soviet Union collapsed, and as China was becoming a major trading partner and thereby transitioning from "evil" to "OK", I wondered what bogeyman we would come up with to replace "communism". Up through Reagan, it was always an election issue who was going to be "tough on communism". It's not hard to see what the new replacement is!
I noticed that, too. Makes quite a difference, doesn't it?
The OED definition tells us what communism is, as envisioned by the people who originally invented it as an "ism". Yours is the anticommunist's definition of communism. It points to oppressive regimes in the Soviet Union and China, assumes that those are faithful implementations of "communist" ideas, and notes their tyranny and their failure.
But you're largely correct about the ownership issue. Property as a legal construct - and that's all it really is, now or ever - becomes largely irrelevant in a communist society. The practical problem with Marxist ideology is that it demands a new kind of human being (altruistic, placing the community before the self, etc.) and doesn't tolerate greed, avarice, or "free riders" terribly well, and I doubt that anyone could rid the world of those (although the Chinese certainly tried, during their Cultural Revolution).
If you want a truer example of communism in practice, I'd look to native American societies (e.g., the Iroquois nation) before we Europeans showed up.
You're describing the way power was consolidated in the Soviet Union and China, under the legitimizing banner of Marxism. Marx himself would have doubted that anything resembling "communism" could have arisen in either of those agrarian societies; he was thinking of industrial countries like England and Germany where there was a substantial working class, and (critically) that this working class would be politically aware and vigilant enough to react to and prevent such a corruption of power. But alas, political awareness is a lot to ask even of highly educated people, and you can never guarantee that any grant of absolute power will be revokable. Therein lies the rub.
...who are obviously all above criticism by any true American, regardless of what they say or do!
I just read in today's NY Times that Americans spend $42 billion annually on diet books. Do the math!
It's still a lot easier to lie without statistics...
Absolutely. The whole "threat" as presented to the public doesn't make any sense for a number of practical reasons. Why hype it then? Someone else here suggested that perhaps the real issue is the possibility of cheap laser-guided missiles...
Someone please mod this WAY up. I just finished a post suggesting that the "threat" was being hyped for some reason, but I couldn't think of what that reason might be, except maybe to maintain terror hysteria for political reasons. I think you may have hit the bullseye there.
It is if some politically well-connected company can make big bucks doing so...
This entire issue seems a little fishy to me. Laser pointers are not very powerful (as someone else here pointed out), and the accuracy and stability with which someone on the ground would have to hold it in order to keep the (weak and highly diverged) spot on a pilot's retina (in a moving aircraft, no less) for any length of time is very hard to imagine.
But then, I can't think of a reason why the Powers That Be would want to hype the threat, unless a ban on laser pointers was coming for some unrelated and unpublicized reason. Or, perhaps, just to maintain the general level of terror hysteria here in the U.S..
The rational position is to take a hard look at the actual value of this "support" relative to what you're paying for it, keeping in mind that its high cost stems largely from the closed and proprietary nature of the products being supported. It would be surprising if a competitive independent service & support industry for open source telephony didn't spring up, and once it does it is likely to considerably more economical than the premium brands.
I messed up my MBR once, back when I was dual-booting Linux and WinNT. Had to type the hex in manually (I found it in a book) before converting it to binary and dd'ing it back onto the disk. I was surprised myself when that worked. Since then I've always kept a copy of it on hand, Just In Case...
I've long suspected that this is true. Just walking through a campus or down a street is anxiogenic for many, many people. Every person they encounter is another social dilemma: Do I make eye contact, do I avert my glance in a possibly obvious and unfriendly way, etc. Not only does a cell phone give you something else to focus on, but it also projects the impression that you have friends, or at least that there's one person in the world who's willing to talk to you. It works whether there's anyone at the other end, or not.
And don't think that car dealers don't take advantage of that. I visited a Mitsubishi dealership near DC once, and all of their models were marked up 15-20% over list price! The sales guy explained that "price doesn't matter", and that what does matter is that they can get me (well, my girlfriend, actually) into a new car for a competitive monthly payment. An extra year of them, in fact!
I left wondering how many people fall for that. It must work at least sometimes, or they wouldn't be doing it...
Well, look at the bright side. This will drive more and more people to open source software, as the terms and legal liabilities of using the proprietary stuff become more and more onerous. E.g., vendors will be demanding access to your machine to verify that their licensing terms aren't being violated, you'll be required to upgrade at their whim, etc. etc.
Why deal with crap like that any more than you absolutely have to (which is not at all)?
Ha! I suspected this as soon as I saw that it was coming out for IE first...
But consider this: We're all talking about whether we feel stressed as consumers of information and sensory stimulation. Perhaps the effects will showing up more in our ability to create things - software, literature, art, etc. - that require intense and extended concentration and focus.
Not to mention that the average scene length on children's programs is far shorter than it used to be, like around 1 or 2 seconds. Studies have shown that kids' attention starts to drift if scenes change any more slowly than that.
Remember, kids:
sucess: not a word
success: achievement of a goal or status
I think at least part of the rationale is that a paid subscription service is considered more like a private communication between consenting parties, whereas an over-the-air broadcast is accessible to anybody.