if you're Syrian, I'm so sorry, but this trend of westerners 'othering' their governments when they're part of it fucking baffles me.
I, most certainly, did not vote for Obama, who got just barely more than 50% of the vote and quickly fell below that in approval ratings. Congress' ratings are even worse.
At any point in time about half the country disagrees with the sitting President and the Legislature. We accept them as a necessary evil — "evil" being the keyword — hence the "othering".
We hire the government to do the things, that nobody else can do or be allowed to do: protect us from violence within and without and enforce the contracts. They should not be allowed to do anything else: not issue loans, not treat the sick, not feed the hungry nor shelter the homeless, none of that — and certainly not sell electricity. All of that was a mission creep, which ought to stop.
Well, the temperature that maximizes biodiversity across the planet.
Could you expand on why "biodiversity" ought to be the goal? If I had to pick something, I'd have picked "comfort of humans" or, perhaps, the humans' longevity or something like that.
I agree that most rich CEOs weren't in the military
You claimed there being a double standard — that someone would object to "the same in a US company" being "held against it on the international stage". I asked you for citations — who had made such a claim and where.
upper class like Donald Trump were draft dodgers
Attempts to switch topic detected and accepted as a means of surrendering the position held on the earlier topic. Have a nice day.
Only a small minority of textbook authors ever see meaningful cash from them. Most textbooks get written because a book is a CV line towards tenure.
That's completely irrelevant. Your proposal — that of forcing all text-books to be published under Creative Commons license — limits freedom. Case closed.
An individual college may make it a policy, but any attempts to legislate that — either openly through Congress or covertly through some executive rule or regulation — ought to be resisted.
I have the ultimate solution, taken from the likes of OSS, lets make all of our textbooks setup with Creative Commons License
That will prevent authors from making perfectly legitimate profits from their writings. We don't need ultimate (nor "final") solutions — we already have one and have been using it for centuries: free market.
Though colleges still compete with each other for students, other aspects of a proper market are missing. When the actual consumers of a service or product aren't the same people as the payers for it, prices spiral through the roof: education, in the modern Western world, is similar in this regard to health-care.
Would you not choose a 64Gb version of a smart phone over a 16Gb one, if someone else were paying for it anyway? Would you not agree, that the nice janitor-lady should get a raise — as long as it does not come out of your pocket? Of course, you would.
Now, the deceptive pricing — a course may cost $1000, but the $180 book required for it is extra — is a disgusting trick, which would subject a car-dealer, for example, to Attorney General's scrutiny (and prosecution). But it is a relatively small manifestation of the much bigger problem. Big Ed ought to be grilled the way Big Tobacco once was.
Yeah, it seems insanely low. Given the monopoly power of the schools — they control, which books can be used — they could ask for your first-born child as well.
The Big Ed's shenanigans are far worse than those of the regularly-condemned Big Oil and Big Pharma, for example, and they are long overdue for some Congressional scrutiny.
Even if they don't volunteer to report dangerous deviations, they may be compelled to do so by the future Department of Justice.
And, given an already existing opinion — not all of it humorous — that certain political convictions are either coincidental to or outright symptomatic of a mental disorder, the future of political dissent is bleak indeed.
The way Google in particular treats their own workforce may be indicative of what may, one day, be in store for ordinary Internet-users — including "lay-offs", as submitting to the monitoring may become a condition for eligibility for the wonderful Google Fiber service.
The "above" I was replying to compared number of accidents per person — without calibration for the distance travelled. Which "above" are you referring to?
I was talking about Eastern Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk. They are in Europe and, according to your own words, you'd rather pick a job there, than anywhere in the United States.
Luckily for the rebels, many of them have military experience in the Ukrainian army
False. Ukrainian army prior to 2014 was, for most intents and purposes, non-existent. Nobody trained in the use of Buk.
Well, there's the Iranian one for a start.
The claim was, there is "a good number of the commercial airplanes which were shot down could be attributed to the US" (emphasis mine). All you can name is one. Why don't you offer a longer list?
Interesting that you don't acknowledge that MH17 is almost certainly an honest mistake too.
I do, actually, when I state, that the question of whether the targeting was deliberate or a mistake. But the topic is who, not why.
You're falling apart in our other debate too.
I will not debate a comic without audience. And that other "debate" only had the two of us remaining last week — I'm done with it and any posts made there during and after this past weekend shall be returned unopened.
Well it apparently was too complicated since they shot down the wrong kind of plane
The system is manned by an officer and two enlisted men — conscripts with no more than 2 years in the military total, including basic training. There are no "years of experience".
a couple weeks back in Russia being taught which buttons to push in order to shoot down planes
Russia merely having provided such weapons is bad enough. Russia also providing training, however poor, is worse.
So much worse, the question of whether or not it was bona-fide Russian military or "merely" Russia-trained locals becomes moot — distinction without difference.
But that's because the country is organised around driving more
Which is because we can better afford it here. Personal car is almost always the most convenient choice, but it is more expensive overall than public transport...
Given a job offer in the US and another somewhere in Europe, I could choose the one in Europe
You'd be a fool — and a good riddance for us here — if you picked a locale based not on the local statistics and quality of life in general, but on just one parameter averaged over an an entire continent.
less chance of dying in a road accident
I see Eastern Ukraine in your future — your above-stated illogic will make your prefer that European region over, say, Houston-area, or Atlanta, or Seattle.
That number is meaningless. You want the number of accidents per person per unit of distance travelled. And here, because Americans ride in their cars much more than Europeans, we do not look so bad.
(Too lazy to struggle with WolframAlpha to give you a link here myself.)
In this case, the arrested (and beaten-up) kid offered no resistance. I was talking about violence used by police against people resisting. Care to try again?
it was rebels from Ukraine which were armed by Russia
False. Operating the Buk system is too complicated for "peaceful coal-miners" to have done it — certainly not the mere 3 months into the insurrection. It was Russian military — even if disguised as locals. Whether they targeted a passenger liner by mistake or deliberately is still a question, but it obviously was not the rebellious locals.
I'm pretty sure a good number of the commercial airplanes which were shot down could be attributed to the US.
For an accusation of such gravity, you better have more solid citations than your own "pretty sure". Do you?
Finally, Ukraine also shot a Russian commercial aircraft in 2001.
First of all, that was an honest mistake. Second, Ukraine hasn't denied it. And third — and most intriguing — the missile was fired from Crimea and the servicemen responsible are now all Russians. Temporarily.
And by the way, the US certainly played an important role in the current Ukrainian situation
Whether that's true or not, how is this relevant to the conversation?..
The ones who are in power right now in Ukraine had support from the US and Europe
So?.. Your desperation in trying to switch the topic is really showing. Mr. Kiselev would've done a better job — were he not busy blaming some non-existent Ukrainian jets for the crime.
Imagine if Russia was supporting a successful coup in Mexico.
Why imagine it in Mexico, when saw it actually happen in Cuba and, more recently, Venezuela? No passenger airliners were shot down in either place...
What if a policeman tells you to go into a bank and start shooting?
The law usually limits the cop's orders to "lawful" ones — but it is the cop, who is the immediate judge of whether or not his own order is lawful... If you disobey such an order, you will avoid prosecution later because the order will be deemed by others to have been illegal, but meanwhile he can arrest you. And if you resist the arrest, he can use violence to subdue you, yes. The very arrest may later be deemed illegal, and he will be prosecuted for it, but not for any violence used during it (though such violence may be part of aggravating circumstances during the prosecution).
Frankly, it's people who blindly support the police, irrespective of the violence that they perpetrate on people, that are the root cause of the situation that we are in now.
How so? How many murders and other violent crimes — including unjustified police shootings — have we had before and how many do we have now that police are afraid to do their jobs, according to TFA?
If I am, they can arrest me. That still doesn't give them the right to assault me.
They can use whatever violence they — at their own discretion — deem necessary to subdue you. Yes, they can. They may be punished later for exceeding the amount of violence necessary, but that is still a judgment call for the cops to make. For example, consider the following legalese:
When an officer meets resistance from a suspect, that officer is legally authorized to escalate the level of force employed, depending on the resistance received from the suspect. The continuum of force ranges from an officer’s presence to verbalization, command voice, firm grips, pain compliance, impact techniques and, finally, deadly force.
Meanwhile the police killing someone through excessive use of force is a crime
No, it is not. The victim may have a civil case, but it is rarely (if ever) a crime, my loud- and dirty-mouthed friend. Time for you to learn a thing or two about the actual laws.
The police should fucking behave
The police are the armor, that society wears to protect itself from criminals. You should not and can not expect the armor to be as comfortable and attractive as jeans or tuxedo. Yes, it is better, when that armor is shiny and smooth. But whether it is or is not, it is that armor, that stands between your pink flesh and the real assholes — the ones immediately responsible for the spike of crime, that's the very subject of TFA.
For a country that shot a passenger airliner to begin with — and not for the first time — for such a country to attempt to affect the investigation of the crime is no surprise at all. What may be surprising, is that none of the Dutch officials involved were killed or blackmailed. But it ain't over yet, is it?..
Slashdot Mirror
I, most certainly, did not vote for Obama, who got just barely more than 50% of the vote and quickly fell below that in approval ratings. Congress' ratings are even worse.
At any point in time about half the country disagrees with the sitting President and the Legislature. We accept them as a necessary evil — "evil" being the keyword — hence the "othering".
We hire the government to do the things, that nobody else can do or be allowed to do: protect us from violence within and without and enforce the contracts. They should not be allowed to do anything else: not issue loans, not treat the sick, not feed the hungry nor shelter the homeless, none of that — and certainly not sell electricity. All of that was a mission creep, which ought to stop.
I am from the government and I am here to help.
Could you expand on why "biodiversity" ought to be the goal? If I had to pick something, I'd have picked "comfort of humans" or, perhaps, the humans' longevity or something like that.
Why do you pick "biodiversity"?
You claimed there being a double standard — that someone would object to "the same in a US company" being "held against it on the international stage". I asked you for citations — who had made such a claim and where.
Attempts to switch topic detected and accepted as a means of surrendering the position held on the earlier topic. Have a nice day.
Absolutely. We don't really have any enemies in this world — only friends, whose grievances we haven't accommodated yet. Our own fault entirely.
Citations?
That's completely irrelevant. Your proposal — that of forcing all text-books to be published under Creative Commons license — limits freedom. Case closed.
An individual college may make it a policy, but any attempts to legislate that — either openly through Congress or covertly through some executive rule or regulation — ought to be resisted.
That will prevent authors from making perfectly legitimate profits from their writings. We don't need ultimate (nor "final") solutions — we already have one and have been using it for centuries: free market.
Though colleges still compete with each other for students, other aspects of a proper market are missing. When the actual consumers of a service or product aren't the same people as the payers for it, prices spiral through the roof: education, in the modern Western world, is similar in this regard to health-care.
Would you not choose a 64Gb version of a smart phone over a 16Gb one, if someone else were paying for it anyway? Would you not agree, that the nice janitor-lady should get a raise — as long as it does not come out of your pocket? Of course, you would.
Now, the deceptive pricing — a course may cost $1000, but the $180 book required for it is extra — is a disgusting trick, which would subject a car-dealer, for example, to Attorney General's scrutiny (and prosecution). But it is a relatively small manifestation of the much bigger problem. Big Ed ought to be grilled the way Big Tobacco once was.
Yeah, it seems insanely low. Given the monopoly power of the schools — they control, which books can be used — they could ask for your first-born child as well.
The Big Ed's shenanigans are far worse than those of the regularly-condemned Big Oil and Big Pharma, for example, and they are long overdue for some Congressional scrutiny.
Even if they don't volunteer to report dangerous deviations, they may be compelled to do so by the future Department of Justice.
And, given an already existing opinion — not all of it humorous — that certain political convictions are either coincidental to or outright symptomatic of a mental disorder, the future of political dissent is bleak indeed.
The way Google in particular treats their own workforce may be indicative of what may, one day, be in store for ordinary Internet-users — including "lay-offs", as submitting to the monitoring may become a condition for eligibility for the wonderful Google Fiber service.
The "above" I was replying to compared number of accidents per person — without calibration for the distance travelled. Which "above" are you referring to?
Of course. Which is what I was talking about. But they are more convenient.
There aren't any.
I was talking about Eastern Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk. They are in Europe and, according to your own words, you'd rather pick a job there, than anywhere in the United States.
Do they have a Halloween special at the strawmen shop? You got a really crappy one, I'm sorry to say...
False. Ukrainian army prior to 2014 was, for most intents and purposes, non-existent. Nobody trained in the use of Buk.
The claim was, there is "a good number of the commercial airplanes which were shot down could be attributed to the US" (emphasis mine). All you can name is one. Why don't you offer a longer list?
I do, actually, when I state, that the question of whether the targeting was deliberate or a mistake. But the topic is who, not why.
I will not debate a comic without audience. And that other "debate" only had the two of us remaining last week — I'm done with it and any posts made there during and after this past weekend shall be returned unopened.
The system is manned by an officer and two enlisted men — conscripts with no more than 2 years in the military total, including basic training. There are no "years of experience".
Russia merely having provided such weapons is bad enough. Russia also providing training, however poor, is worse.
So much worse, the question of whether or not it was bona-fide Russian military or "merely" Russia-trained locals becomes moot — distinction without difference.
Pizzerias have made billions selling pizzas, why shouldn't the government go into baking?
For the same reasons, you don't put Seti@Home into kernel.
Very simple solution — get the government out of the loans-business altogether. Why it got there in the first place is, sort of, a mystery...
Which is because we can better afford it here. Personal car is almost always the most convenient choice, but it is more expensive overall than public transport...
You'd be a fool — and a good riddance for us here — if you picked a locale based not on the local statistics and quality of life in general, but on just one parameter averaged over an an entire continent.
I see Eastern Ukraine in your future — your above-stated illogic will make your prefer that European region over, say, Houston-area, or Atlanta, or Seattle.
That number is meaningless. You want the number of accidents per person per unit of distance travelled. And here, because Americans ride in their cars much more than Europeans, we do not look so bad.
(Too lazy to struggle with WolframAlpha to give you a link here myself.)
Try using Google. https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/news/m...
In this case, the arrested (and beaten-up) kid offered no resistance. I was talking about violence used by police against people resisting. Care to try again?
Incidentally, http://www.nolo.com/legal-ency...
Yeah, it might happen, but is very rare — as the very page you cited acknowledges.
Sorry to hear about it... Didn't mean to push your buttons, man.
Citations?
False. Operating the Buk system is too complicated for "peaceful coal-miners" to have done it — certainly not the mere 3 months into the insurrection. It was Russian military — even if disguised as locals. Whether they targeted a passenger liner by mistake or deliberately is still a question, but it obviously was not the rebellious locals.
For an accusation of such gravity, you better have more solid citations than your own "pretty sure". Do you?
First of all, that was an honest mistake. Second, Ukraine hasn't denied it. And third — and most intriguing — the missile was fired from Crimea and the servicemen responsible are now all Russians. Temporarily.
Whether that's true or not, how is this relevant to the conversation?..
So?.. Your desperation in trying to switch the topic is really showing. Mr. Kiselev would've done a better job — were he not busy blaming some non-existent Ukrainian jets for the crime.
Why imagine it in Mexico, when saw it actually happen in Cuba and, more recently, Venezuela? No passenger airliners were shot down in either place...
Go back to watching Kremlin-TV...
The law usually limits the cop's orders to "lawful" ones — but it is the cop, who is the immediate judge of whether or not his own order is lawful... If you disobey such an order, you will avoid prosecution later because the order will be deemed by others to have been illegal, but meanwhile he can arrest you. And if you resist the arrest, he can use violence to subdue you, yes. The very arrest may later be deemed illegal, and he will be prosecuted for it, but not for any violence used during it (though such violence may be part of aggravating circumstances during the prosecution).
How so? How many murders and other violent crimes — including unjustified police shootings — have we had before and how many do we have now that police are afraid to do their jobs, according to TFA?
Murder rate is up in cities across America — hundreds more will have died by the end of 2015, than in 2014. How many lives has the police-bashing saved to counter-balance that spike?
Failure to obey a police order is usually a misdemeanor. You can be arrested for a misdemeanor. If you resist such an arrest in any way, the officer can use whatever violence he deems necessary to subdue you. Even if you are wearing a bikini.
They can use whatever violence they — at their own discretion — deem necessary to subdue you. Yes, they can. They may be punished later for exceeding the amount of violence necessary, but that is still a judgment call for the cops to make. For example, consider the following legalese:
No, it is not. The victim may have a civil case, but it is rarely (if ever) a crime, my loud- and dirty-mouthed friend. Time for you to learn a thing or two about the actual laws.
The police are the armor, that society wears to protect itself from criminals. You should not and can not expect the armor to be as comfortable and attractive as jeans or tuxedo. Yes, it is better, when that armor is shiny and smooth. But whether it is or is not, it is that armor, that stands between your pink flesh and the real assholes — the ones immediately responsible for the spike of crime, that's the very subject of TFA.
For a country that shot a passenger airliner to begin with — and not for the first time — for such a country to attempt to affect the investigation of the crime is no surprise at all. What may be surprising, is that none of the Dutch officials involved were killed or blackmailed. But it ain't over yet, is it?..