Boss-lady steals your entire life from you ("Why would you ever want to do anything but be at work here? Don't you love job?" she says as she reaches for a pink slip). Then proves how nice she is by offering to give a little piece of it back.
Marissa Mayer is a sociopath. Remind me to steer a wide path of employment at Yahoo.
The Book of the New Sun should be considered one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century. It has been aptly described as a work of vast imagination.
Absolutely! one of the my three favorites of all time. Neil Gaiman credits him, for a span of time in the late 60s and early 70s, of being the greatest short story writer in the world.
Runners-up: Gene Wolfe, and Jorge Luis Borges (the greatest writer of the 20th Century).
Can you provide a link to Romney's college transcripts?
No, you cannot. He has not released them. Why should Obama be obligated to do something that Romney has not done? Obama on the other hand has released his tax returns.
First, the political damage is not that huge. Second, it's very likely that Romney has paid little income tax, though quite large amounts of other taxes...
Interesting. Normally right-wingers do not acknowledge the existence of taxes other than income taxes (virtually the only progressive tax it in the combined American local, state, and federal government revenue systems) since they are constantly decrying that 46% of Americans "do not pay taxes", ignoring the highly regressive FICA, sales taxes, etc. that cause the total tax rate of the bulk of the middle class (not just the marginal rate) to be nearly as high as that of the top 1%: http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2012.pdf . In fact once you get into to the top 1% your overall tax rate is lower than the brakcets just below you, and the higher you go (0.1%, 0.01%, etc.) the lower it drops.
... There's actually less evaporation in total than if the reservoir weren't built....
In the world I live in increasing the area of water surfaces increases evaporation since there is a larger surface to lose water from. Water losses from reservoirs is an important problem in areas with scarce water resources: http://www.unep.org/dewa/vitalwater/article46.html.
The most extreme extension of this is "the gun in the room," an argument that literally boils down to insisting that there is no subject that's not state coercion, and that nothing else can be discussed or spoken of until libertarian ideals are implemented in their entirety. (Courtesy note: As soon as someone does this, if at all possible leave and never speak to them again. There is no meaningful discussion to be had with anyone who uses this)
Ironically, when pressed to explain what legitimate function government does have the answer boils down to just "guns" - a military to protect the borders, and police to protect the sanctity of private property.
The most extreme extension of this is "the gun in the room," an argument that literally boils down to insisting that there is no subject that's not state coercion, and that nothing else can be discussed or spoken of until libertarian ideals are implemented in their entirety. (Courtesy note: As soon as someone does this, if at all possible leave and never speak to them again. There is no meaningful discussion to be had with anyone who uses this)
Ironically, when pressed to state what legitimate function government has - the Objectivist response is basically "guns" - a military to protect the borders, and internal police to use (ultimately) deadly force to protect private property.
Objectivism is the Marxism of the right. They both describe a self-referencing theory of a society that was dreamed up by an academic mind (describing the type of mind, not the profession of the writer), offered as an incontrovertible truth, but without any actual analytical or evidentiary support, apparently developed to satisfy the author's emotional needs and preferences (ironic in the case of Marx since he was a ground-breaking analyst of capitalism; Rand has no such work to her credit).
In the case of Rand in fact her work is a direct reaction to Communism - her family being dispossessed by the Communist revolution in Russia. As such it is a psychologically revealing work about an angry woman, seeking to create a mirror-image to the thing that hurt her personally. As a work of serious political, economic or sociological thought, it is utterly vacuous.
Of course one of the two was a turgid dense writer, the other very eloquent. Das Kapital is much easier going than Atlas Shrugged.
Any exactly none of the people you mention "caused progress by act of their sheer will and ingenuity, pretty much regardless of the environment, and in fact often directly against it", they were all deeply embedded in their times, and brought about their advances either by building on the works of others, or engaging other people, and most definitely not being absolute independent individualists (the mix differs form person to person, the accomplishments of Einstein being quite different from Churchill).
There are no real world equivalents of Rand's fantasy figures.
That would be "humans lived in tribes for most of human existence" I think. History starts with written records, well after the transition to settled communities and the creation of political power structure.
Wow. You had to bring in the entire crop to build that straw man.
In other words unless the censorship can be effectively enforced through every possible means of distribution - and is more effective than even the control of information in the former Soviet Union (or modern China) ever was it doesn't exist. In other words no censorship has ever existed anywhere since this type of absolute control over society has never been successfully enforced.
Investopedia gives a very fair definition of the term "free market":
"A market economy based on supply and demand with little or no government control. A completely free market is an idealized form of a market economy where buyers and sellers are allowed to transact freely (i.e. buy/sell/trade) based on a mutual agreement on price without state intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies or regulation."
This makes it clear that it is not a real thing that can be created, but an ideal thing that does not exist anywhere.
Investopedia further provides this very cogent observation:
"Each exchange is a voluntary agreement between two parties who trade in the form of goods and services. In reality, this is the extent to which a free market exists since there will always be government intervention in the form of taxes, price controls and restrictions that prevent new competitors from entering a market. Just like supply-side economics, free market is a term used to describe a political or ideological viewpoint on policy and is not a field within economics."(My emphasis.)
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freemarket.asp#axzz1zx4SZtCM
I am a programmer from way back, I once counted up how many different languages and major language variants I had actually written code in and came up 40 or so (several assemblers, etc.). Today I write code almost exclusively in Java (followed by Python and Mathematica) because it is the most productive tool for what I want to do - solving problems and building systems (though I am looking at Scala now).
But I agree that there are a lot of mediocre Java programmers running around today. In fact I run across a lot of "application assemblers" - people who build systems using frameworks and the Java foundation classes who can't really program at all. It is a testament to the power of the OO paradigm and the maturity of Java and the frameworks that this is even possible. But I never hire these people. They understand nothing about efficiency or proper multi-threaded design, and those systems are terribly inefficient and often dangerously flawed.
I am tempted to say that the safety and high level abstraction of the language has enabled/encouraged barely competent programmers to enter the field. But then I remember all of the frighteningly horrible FORTRAN programs I ran across back in the day...
...homosexuality is literally biologically stupid...
And yet it is common throughout the animal kingdom. The fact of its persistence within a species, and prevalence across the kingdom suggests that it has real value to many species. I suppose you think that it is biologically stupid for humans to live past their normal reproductive period? The stupidity here lies in your bias.
Just so you can see it's every bit as bad as the summary says.
Worse even. I couldn't eff-in believe it. I honestly think a direct attempt at parody would likely be less grotesque than this dreck, since the creator would feel the need to make it looking some thing like science to sell the material. The only way you can top this is to go Rule 34 on it.
Reading the linked articles (in defiance of./ tradition, I know), it looks like artifacts that were significantly more identifiable as being linked her, and human remains that might have actually been her, were recovered from the island 1 to 3 years after her disappearance (1938-1940). With proper investigation and preservation of the findings it might have settled the matter then. It is not like there was no material evidence to already think this is the crash site.
And it has those high paying jobs with health care benefits that California just can't seem to keep around.>
Flatly untrue. The high unemployment is at the low wage end of the scale, causing the income inequality in California to skyrocket precisely because it is not the high paying jobs most affected. Those at the low end of the economic scale also comprise most of those leaving the state:
http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_1211SBR.pdf
The thinking is that these people supported stupid policies that transformed California from the nation's envy to Greece with a Valley Girl accent... I've got friends there that are worried about Californians coming to Texas for the jobs, and then trying to turn Texas into California.
You and your friends need to turn off Fox News and learn a little bit about the real world. The Greece crack is obviously about the state's budget deficit.
Second the primary problem for California's budget is due to the actions of the right-wing which have ham-strung the states ability to raise revenues. This began with Prop 13 in the 1970s, which though pitched as relief for home owners has had the effect of nearly zero-ing out tax revenue from commercial property which never changes hands, and is thus taxed at low rate, and at inflation-unadjusted 1970s property values. this makes the state budget very sensitive to recessions, since this stable source of revenue has disappeared. And then we have the conservative 2/3 majority requirement to raise any taxes at all, and a republican minority that holds barely enough votes (and vote lockstep) against any tax increase for any reason.
And it is right-wing policies that have essentially starved California's higher education system, which is now essentially a state-run privately funded university, with little support from state revenues. Free education for the top 10% of California students vanished more than a generation ago.
And no, California is not a high tax state. It is a moderate tax state, Its overall tax burden is in the middle third of states.
If they did, they would be idiots (as grammar Nazis typically are). Transliterations from foreign languages are inexact, and unless it gets adopted into English as an English word, and you are clearly using it in that sense, variation in spelling is normal. Taliban, Taleban (preferred by many experts), and Talaban are all acceptable approximations.
After decades of always trying to fix broken appliances, if it seemed at all possible, I have virtually given up. Looking back I can point to few successes, in most cases the money spent on repair efforts was wasted. There are a number of reasons I can identify - with short product cycles the unavailability of parts, and extortionate cost of parts when available, the fact that many "planned obsolescence" products are in fact NOT easy to fix without access to expensive tools and skills if at all, electronics that cannot be serviced, etc.
The last time I successfully rescued a product from the scrap heap was a recently purchased clothes washer, cost $1000, that had a circuit board goon the fritz not long after the warranty ran out - repair cost $500 for the board that cost maybe $5 to make. It beat buying a new washer, but I can't say I felt "good" about the repair experience.
Come on, what's innovative about Dropbox?
Yes, the interface is all cute, it runs smoothly and doesn't spam the hell out of me....
You answered your own question in the next sentence. First-time-anyone-did-something almost aways sucks royally. The trick is: to do it right. That is innovation too.
Slashdot Mirror
Google, and other search engines, apparently unavailable to you here is something to help you out: http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
Amen to that.
Boss-lady steals your entire life from you ("Why would you ever want to do anything but be at work here? Don't you love job?" she says as she reaches for a pink slip). Then proves how nice she is by offering to give a little piece of it back.
Marissa Mayer is a sociopath. Remind me to steer a wide path of employment at Yahoo.
The Book of the New Sun should be considered one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century. It has been aptly described as a work of vast imagination.
Absolutely! one of the my three favorites of all time. Neil Gaiman credits him, for a span of time in the late 60s and early 70s, of being the greatest short story writer in the world.
Runners-up: Gene Wolfe, and Jorge Luis Borges (the greatest writer of the 20th Century).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teancum
In LDS theology he was a Nephilite leader.
Can you provide a link to Romney's college transcripts?
No, you cannot. He has not released them. Why should Obama be obligated to do something that Romney has not done? Obama on the other hand has released his tax returns.
First, the political damage is not that huge. Second, it's very likely that Romney has paid little income tax, though quite large amounts of other taxes...
Interesting. Normally right-wingers do not acknowledge the existence of taxes other than income taxes (virtually the only progressive tax it in the combined American local, state, and federal government revenue systems) since they are constantly decrying that 46% of Americans "do not pay taxes", ignoring the highly regressive FICA, sales taxes, etc. that cause the total tax rate of the bulk of the middle class (not just the marginal rate) to be nearly as high as that of the top 1%: http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2012.pdf . In fact once you get into to the top 1% your overall tax rate is lower than the brakcets just below you, and the higher you go (0.1%, 0.01%, etc.) the lower it drops.
... There's actually less evaporation in total than if the reservoir weren't built....
In the world I live in increasing the area of water surfaces increases evaporation since there is a larger surface to lose water from. Water losses from reservoirs is an important problem in areas with scarce water resources: http://www.unep.org/dewa/vitalwater/article46.html .
Creating reservoirs has a very considerable effect on the surrounding environment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reservoirs . This dude wants to be free from considering the costs he places on others.
The most extreme extension of this is "the gun in the room," an argument that literally boils down to insisting that there is no subject that's not state coercion, and that nothing else can be discussed or spoken of until libertarian ideals are implemented in their entirety. (Courtesy note: As soon as someone does this, if at all possible leave and never speak to them again. There is no meaningful discussion to be had with anyone who uses this)
Ironically, when pressed to explain what legitimate function government does have the answer boils down to just "guns" - a military to protect the borders, and police to protect the sanctity of private property.
The most extreme extension of this is "the gun in the room," an argument that literally boils down to insisting that there is no subject that's not state coercion, and that nothing else can be discussed or spoken of until libertarian ideals are implemented in their entirety. (Courtesy note: As soon as someone does this, if at all possible leave and never speak to them again. There is no meaningful discussion to be had with anyone who uses this)
Ironically, when pressed to state what legitimate function government has - the Objectivist response is basically "guns" - a military to protect the borders, and internal police to use (ultimately) deadly force to protect private property.
Objectivism is the Marxism of the right. They both describe a self-referencing theory of a society that was dreamed up by an academic mind (describing the type of mind, not the profession of the writer), offered as an incontrovertible truth, but without any actual analytical or evidentiary support, apparently developed to satisfy the author's emotional needs and preferences (ironic in the case of Marx since he was a ground-breaking analyst of capitalism; Rand has no such work to her credit).
In the case of Rand in fact her work is a direct reaction to Communism - her family being dispossessed by the Communist revolution in Russia. As such it is a psychologically revealing work about an angry woman, seeking to create a mirror-image to the thing that hurt her personally. As a work of serious political, economic or sociological thought, it is utterly vacuous.
Of course one of the two was a turgid dense writer, the other very eloquent. Das Kapital is much easier going than Atlas Shrugged.
Any exactly none of the people you mention "caused progress by act of their sheer will and ingenuity, pretty much regardless of the environment, and in fact often directly against it", they were all deeply embedded in their times, and brought about their advances either by building on the works of others, or engaging other people, and most definitely not being absolute independent individualists (the mix differs form person to person, the accomplishments of Einstein being quite different from Churchill).
There are no real world equivalents of Rand's fantasy figures.
That would be "humans lived in tribes for most of human existence" I think. History starts with written records, well after the transition to settled communities and the creation of political power structure.
Wow. You had to bring in the entire crop to build that straw man.
In other words unless the censorship can be effectively enforced through every possible means of distribution - and is more effective than even the control of information in the former Soviet Union (or modern China) ever was it doesn't exist. In other words no censorship has ever existed anywhere since this type of absolute control over society has never been successfully enforced.
Total BS.
Investopedia gives a very fair definition of the term "free market":
"A market economy based on supply and demand with little or no government control. A completely free market is an idealized form of a market economy where buyers and sellers are allowed to transact freely (i.e. buy/sell/trade) based on a mutual agreement on price without state intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies or regulation."
This makes it clear that it is not a real thing that can be created, but an ideal thing that does not exist anywhere.
Investopedia further provides this very cogent observation:
"Each exchange is a voluntary agreement between two parties who trade in the form of goods and services. In reality, this is the extent to which a free market exists since there will always be government intervention in the form of taxes, price controls and restrictions that prevent new competitors from entering a market. Just like supply-side economics, free market is a term used to describe a political or ideological viewpoint on policy and is not a field within economics."(My emphasis.) http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freemarket.asp#axzz1zx4SZtCM
I am a programmer from way back, I once counted up how many different languages and major language variants I had actually written code in and came up 40 or so (several assemblers, etc.). Today I write code almost exclusively in Java (followed by Python and Mathematica) because it is the most productive tool for what I want to do - solving problems and building systems (though I am looking at Scala now).
But I agree that there are a lot of mediocre Java programmers running around today. In fact I run across a lot of "application assemblers" - people who build systems using frameworks and the Java foundation classes who can't really program at all. It is a testament to the power of the OO paradigm and the maturity of Java and the frameworks that this is even possible. But I never hire these people. They understand nothing about efficiency or proper multi-threaded design, and those systems are terribly inefficient and often dangerously flawed.
I am tempted to say that the safety and high level abstraction of the language has enabled/encouraged barely competent programmers to enter the field. But then I remember all of the frighteningly horrible FORTRAN programs I ran across back in the day...
A copy of the video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA
Just so you can see it's every bit as bad as the summary says.
Agreed. The only way it could be worse is to go Rule 34 on it.
...homosexuality is literally biologically stupid...
And yet it is common throughout the animal kingdom. The fact of its persistence within a species, and prevalence across the kingdom suggests that it has real value to many species. I suppose you think that it is biologically stupid for humans to live past their normal reproductive period? The stupidity here lies in your bias.
A copy of the video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA
Just so you can see it's every bit as bad as the summary says.
Worse even. I couldn't eff-in believe it. I honestly think a direct attempt at parody would likely be less grotesque than this dreck, since the creator would feel the need to make it looking some thing like science to sell the material. The only way you can top this is to go Rule 34 on it.
Reading the linked articles (in defiance of ./ tradition, I know), it looks like artifacts that were significantly more identifiable as being linked her, and human remains that might have actually been her, were recovered from the island 1 to 3 years after her disappearance (1938-1940). With proper investigation and preservation of the findings it might have settled the matter then. It is not like there was no material evidence to already think this is the crash site.
Flatly untrue. The high unemployment is at the low wage end of the scale, causing the income inequality in California to skyrocket precisely because it is not the high paying jobs most affected. Those at the low end of the economic scale also comprise most of those leaving the state: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_1211SBR.pdf
In fact, California is by far the principal beneficiary of venture capital, which is flowing in precisely because the high paying jobs have not disappeared. Indeed California's share of high tech and manufacturing jobs has remained unchanged: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/05/business/la-fi-mo-california-far-away-leader-20120405
Sorry to burst your California hatin' bubble.
You and your friends need to turn off Fox News and learn a little bit about the real world. The Greece crack is obviously about the state's budget deficit.
Two points - Texas budget deficit is even larger as percentage of its economy and budget, and a close second in absolute size (i.e. Texas gets off the hook there only by not being the biggest in population): http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/us-usa-deficits-states-idUSTRE71314420110204
Second the primary problem for California's budget is due to the actions of the right-wing which have ham-strung the states ability to raise revenues. This began with Prop 13 in the 1970s, which though pitched as relief for home owners has had the effect of nearly zero-ing out tax revenue from commercial property which never changes hands, and is thus taxed at low rate, and at inflation-unadjusted 1970s property values. this makes the state budget very sensitive to recessions, since this stable source of revenue has disappeared. And then we have the conservative 2/3 majority requirement to raise any taxes at all, and a republican minority that holds barely enough votes (and vote lockstep) against any tax increase for any reason.
And it is right-wing policies that have essentially starved California's higher education system, which is now essentially a state-run privately funded university, with little support from state revenues. Free education for the top 10% of California students vanished more than a generation ago.
And no, California is not a high tax state. It is a moderate tax state, Its overall tax burden is in the middle third of states.
If they did, they would be idiots (as grammar Nazis typically are). Transliterations from foreign languages are inexact, and unless it gets adopted into English as an English word, and you are clearly using it in that sense, variation in spelling is normal. Taliban, Taleban (preferred by many experts), and Talaban are all acceptable approximations.
After decades of always trying to fix broken appliances, if it seemed at all possible, I have virtually given up. Looking back I can point to few successes, in most cases the money spent on repair efforts was wasted. There are a number of reasons I can identify - with short product cycles the unavailability of parts, and extortionate cost of parts when available, the fact that many "planned obsolescence" products are in fact NOT easy to fix without access to expensive tools and skills if at all, electronics that cannot be serviced, etc.
The last time I successfully rescued a product from the scrap heap was a recently purchased clothes washer, cost $1000, that had a circuit board goon the fritz not long after the warranty ran out - repair cost $500 for the board that cost maybe $5 to make. It beat buying a new washer, but I can't say I felt "good" about the repair experience.
Come on, what's innovative about Dropbox? Yes, the interface is all cute, it runs smoothly and doesn't spam the hell out of me....
You answered your own question in the next sentence. First-time-anyone-did-something almost aways sucks royally. The trick is: to do it right. That is innovation too.