Do you feel a need to have a gun in the house for defense? That seems to be an indicator of this 'fear' or distrust that some studies suggest drives some conservative ideas.
One side of my family is conservative, the other liberal (such useless terms, but they'll serve here for a general descriptor). The conservative side all own guns. Many of them have them in their cars. What I find interesting is that the majority of the liberals, myself included, don't have a problem with guns. We were all raised around them. However none of us own any for defense. We don't feel the need.
Guns aside, most of them have chosen to live in smaller towns. They are generally uncomfortable in dense urban areas. Not racism, but a discomfort with the unknown. Lots of 'different' looking diverse people, etc.. They tend to imagine the worse case scenarios. They prefer to do things themselves, or in a small group. They tend to not volunteer at charities, nor get involved in any sort of cooperative endeavors organized in the community.
I really think that is hard coded somewhere in the brain. A general "I don't trust society, I'll take care of myself" attitude. And that eventually develops into ideologies that seek out supportive evidence to back them up.
get rid of long sentences for minor drug possession Get rid of elected district attorneys so they can pursue justice instead of elections Get rid of over broad laws with long sentences for minor crimes. Get rid of 'three strikes' laws Get rid of overly long minimum sentences
I'd like to see all sentences for drug possession go away. Look at the prison population when we started the 'war on drugs' http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4f79b67569beddcc69000004-590/since-the-war-on-drugs-started-in-1970-americas-prison-population-has-surged-700-percent-to-24-million.jpg
I especially disagree about elected district attorneys. A district attorney can only bring so many cases to trial, so they have to pick and choose. I want someone that has a strategy that I agree with. Just because some voters in certain areas are electing bad DAs isn't a call for un-elected DAs. It is a call for more voter information campaigns. In my area, due to a generally informed populous, we elected a DA who promised, and then followed through on, a focus on the environment, and pushing for more treatment and less jail time for drug abuse.
I think the overall higher prison populations as well as the high ratio of minorities in prison has more to do with the dramatic rise of income inequality since the 1950's. The creation of ghettos, inner city poverty cycles, and the dwindling middle class. A hard worker used to be able to get a factory job, often without even a high school education, support a family of 4, own a home, have a car, etc...
When people feel hopeless, they often turn to crime.
All musicians used to make nearly 100% of their income from performances. (The time before record labels existed).
If you are small and unknown, 5 dollar cover charge at a bar. 300 people over the course of the night, that's 1500 dollars for one nights work.
Here in Portland most shows sell out fast, even if it is 20-40 dollar tickets. Look, if a musician is not savvy enough to work the bar scenes, or promoting themselves enough to draw decent crowds, they should probably consider music a hobby. Play at night and work an office job during the day.
Renewable Energy can NEVER satisfy 100% of the total energy requirement to run the current human civilization.
Never is a pretty strong word. Care to cite any source proving that renewable energy can never meet our needs? Because I've read probably dozens that say even with current tech, we could replace all liquid fuel and all electricity with renewable sources.
It's a matter of cost right now. No one is willing to invest the trillions to build new infrastructure, molten salt solar plants, algae farms for biodiesel, solar on every rooftop, pumped hydro storage, Wind generators surround all our coasts that have their own pumped storage, tidal generators along all our coasts, geothermal, etc... until cheap non-renewable sources dry up.
We are a large community college and have always had a mix of servers. Probably equal parts windows, linux, some netware. We choose the best application to meet the needs of our clients (other employees, faculty, and students), and consider the OS largely irrelevant.
I'm not sure what percent of schools operate that way though. The few other schools in our state that I've talked to though are very similar to us. If I had to guess, I would say that the larger the school, the more likely it is that they confidently handle a mixed environment.
It has been my experience that Windows and Linux are identical in terms of admin support costs. A good windows admin should cost you as much as a good Linux admin. However, I find that Linux ends up costing less over time from a system administration perspective. You can usually find free and open source products (of enterprise quality) to do things like cloning, anti-virus, etc.. for linux, but usually you have to pay for similar features on windows servers.
I think he was referring to the time before linux was stable. Back in 1998 in healthcare, there was IBM AS/400, VAX/VMS, other UNIX, and Windows. Some of us were experimenting installing linux on the desktop every 6 months or so, but usually gave up because it was in a sorry state back then.
Apache tomcat wasn't even released until 1999. However, java 1.0 was released in 1996, meaning java stuff did often end up on Windows servers. It took some time before open source began to dominate the server market.
I think we'll see algae fuel contributing more to our liquid energy needs once the tech has been refined some. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
0.42% of the US land mass required to replace all gas and diesel. And I've seen algae farms floating in the ocean (long clear plastic tubes), so we wouldn't even need to use up land.
That renewable energy sources can't meet base load appears to be a myth that has been repeated so often, people think that it's true. It won't be cheap building the infrastructure to do it, but it can be done. Geothermal, molten salt reactors, wave energy: all examples of 24/7 renewable power. Pumped water storage for wind and solar, decentralized power by having each house have solar, etc... There are a lot of ways to reach 100% renewable. We just need to get started.
I agree with you that people in public should be free to record whatever is occurring in public. Even a jerk recording someone's mental breakdown. What the police should have done, is actually protect and serve, and held up a blanket so people couldn't see the ill person while they were being treated.
Basically, partisan committees attempt to draw a district line around as many democratic bodies as possible, and call that district 1. Then they cut some conservative farmland into districts 1 and 2. Result, 1 democrat 2 republicans.
Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that districts must be 'close to equal in population', but that is what partisan committees push to the limit: the equal number of bodies. Now of course both sides do this, but it just happens that right now, the districts are heavily favoring republicans.
I can't find the link right now, but one article I read went district by district in a few states and showed how the lines changed after the 2000 census.
Some people may see it that way, but I doubt lawmakers see it that way. They want less people to get sick and cost their health care programs money. So if you choose to develop health problems intentionally, you are going to get taxed along the way for it.
Another way to think of it: if the government wanted to punish people for essentially killing themselves, wouldn't it follow that the gov. would tax or penalize a spouse if their s.o. committed suicide? The government doesn't care if you kill yourself. They do care if you cost Medicare or Medicaid money.
Is culture the new (conservative) way of basically saying ghetto or poor area?
Why do I never hear any conservative say that the huge wealth inequality we have in the US is a problem we must solve?
I am pro-gun to a certain extent. The place at which we draw the line marking how much lethal power one individual can possess obviously has no correct position. (Nukes obviously not, grenades only with special permits, clips that hold 50 rounds?... what is too much power?, etc.. ). It is a judgement call, balancing our rights vs the possible harm to society. I personally think that our line needs to be lower, but that can come in a variety of forms. Require that guns are registered to individuals, lower capacity clips, 'assault' rifles should require special permits, etc..
But it seems like both sides of the debate only concentrate on one thing: guns. Why aren't we talking about lowering our huge wealth inequality? Providing better opportunities for social mobility (job programs, education programs for poor areas, etc..)? Increasing our funding to mental health programs across the country?
I can pretty much tell you why: for some reason any talk like that is now considered 'socialism' which is apparently a horrible word now. If conservatives (no idea if you are, just generalizing) want to keep their assault rifles with huge clips, maybe they should broaden the range of social cures that are allowed in their political ideology, because 'free market' and 'capitalism' alone isn't going to cut it.
I think its about time that both 'teams' having this debate in the US admit that there are many factors involved in the number of deaths by gun. Culture, wealth inequality, availability of guns, power of guns available, social mobility, etc.. etc..
There is one thing that I think we should all be able to agree with: something is wrong in the US. The number of deaths by gun in the US is very high compared with other industrialized nations.
It would be nice for cooking. If all cook books and web sites, and the kitchen tools I were able to buy in stores were metric, it would make scaling recipes up and down easier. Also, often when I find a recipe on the internet, it will be in metric, which is a pain to convert to all the tools I have.
You might think that it should be much easier to dig a big hole in the ground than to go to Mars, but you go far enough down, the Earth is just as hostile a place as space could ever be, in its own way.
I don't think you'd have to dig too deep. Just enough to provide insulation from the nuclear winter. Of course, any given particular bore hole wouldn't survive a direct impact. But I'd imagine we'd be boring holes all over the world if we knew in advance that an impact was coming (and had years to build underground).
For me it seems like power would be the biggest obstacle to living underground for years. Unless we had 10+ years notice then I imagine we could probably build nuclear reactors in time.
It is also a cultural and mental shift that you are probably having trouble adjusting to. (Or the mass trans there could suck, I've never been there).
But here in Portland OR, city dwellers do a few things to get around. 1) Pick places near transit lines to shop, eat, drink, etc.. and there are lots of options as more and more places have been built around transit lines over time. 2). Take a bike on the mass trans if further travel is required 3) don't feel walking 20 blocks is a big deal, 4) rent a car2go for any out of the way city trips. https://www.car2go.com/en/portland/
I visited New York and the mass trans there was also very good. I was able to explore every spot on Manhattan on foot using the subways, and this was from staying at a friends house across the water from the island.
The people that do it all the time also have all sorts of phone apps and other helpful things that makes getting around using mass trans way more convenient. Like apps telling you in real time where the subway or train is, how long until it arrives, highlighting its route, allowing you to search for where you want to go and the app laying out exactly what bus to take, which line to transfer on, etc..
The car2go concept is fairly new (at least here in Portland), but it's great. People leave the cars all over town. So you pull out your phone, look at the map for the nearest vacant car, walk over, swipe your car2go card, drive to wherever, leave the car either telling it you are done, or you want it reserved, account is automatically charged. The city allows for free parking because they like the concept, etc..
ZFS pools can expand by swapping in larger disks or adding disks. http://forums.nas4free.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=1528
I do agree with your description of it not being simple though. You have to learn a bit about ZFS vs simply buying something like a ReadyNAS which is hot swappable out of the box.
I'm not sure why people have such a hard time with areas of law like this (well, I kinda know why: most programmers/engineers, etc.. want black and white answers). Laws that define fuzzy things like 'hate speech' use phrases like "a reasonable person would feel that this is considered hateful and designed to intimidate an entire community".
The reasonable person is a judge and the reasonable people are the jurors. So yes, what is considered 'obscene' or 'hate speech' today, might not be tomorrow. That is how the law works.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you feel a need to have a gun in the house for defense? That seems to be an indicator of this 'fear' or distrust that some studies suggest drives some conservative ideas.
One side of my family is conservative, the other liberal (such useless terms, but they'll serve here for a general descriptor). The conservative side all own guns. Many of them have them in their cars. What I find interesting is that the majority of the liberals, myself included, don't have a problem with guns. We were all raised around them. However none of us own any for defense. We don't feel the need.
Guns aside, most of them have chosen to live in smaller towns. They are generally uncomfortable in dense urban areas. Not racism, but a discomfort with the unknown. Lots of 'different' looking diverse people, etc.. They tend to imagine the worse case scenarios. They prefer to do things themselves, or in a small group. They tend to not volunteer at charities, nor get involved in any sort of cooperative endeavors organized in the community.
I really think that is hard coded somewhere in the brain. A general "I don't trust society, I'll take care of myself" attitude. And that eventually develops into ideologies that seek out supportive evidence to back them up.
Portland has a nice downtown. Concentrated clubs, restaurants, shops, etc.. Ditto New York and Seattle. What city are you in?
The healthcare premium deduction is just for the self-employed right?
He stopped the Iraq war as promised and we will be out of Afghanistan I think by December 2014. What is he doing wrong in that regard?
get rid of long sentences for minor drug possession
Get rid of elected district attorneys so they can pursue justice instead of elections
Get rid of over broad laws with long sentences for minor crimes.
Get rid of 'three strikes' laws
Get rid of overly long minimum sentences
I'd like to see all sentences for drug possession go away. Look at the prison population when we started the 'war on drugs'
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4f79b67569beddcc69000004-590/since-the-war-on-drugs-started-in-1970-americas-prison-population-has-surged-700-percent-to-24-million.jpg
I especially disagree about elected district attorneys. A district attorney can only bring so many cases to trial, so they have to pick and choose. I want someone that has a strategy that I agree with. Just because some voters in certain areas are electing bad DAs isn't a call for un-elected DAs. It is a call for more voter information campaigns. In my area, due to a generally informed populous, we elected a DA who promised, and then followed through on, a focus on the environment, and pushing for more treatment and less jail time for drug abuse.
I just noticed another thing about the graph http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/incarceration.jpg
Isn't that right around the time that the 'war' on drugs started?
I think the overall higher prison populations as well as the high ratio of minorities in prison has more to do with the dramatic rise of income inequality since the 1950's. The creation of ghettos, inner city poverty cycles, and the dwindling middle class. A hard worker used to be able to get a factory job, often without even a high school education, support a family of 4, own a home, have a car, etc...
When people feel hopeless, they often turn to crime.
All musicians used to make nearly 100% of their income from performances. (The time before record labels existed).
If you are small and unknown, 5 dollar cover charge at a bar. 300 people over the course of the night, that's 1500 dollars for one nights work.
Here in Portland most shows sell out fast, even if it is 20-40 dollar tickets. Look, if a musician is not savvy enough to work the bar scenes, or promoting themselves enough to draw decent crowds, they should probably consider music a hobby. Play at night and work an office job during the day.
Renewable Energy can NEVER satisfy 100% of the total energy requirement to run the current human civilization.
Never is a pretty strong word. Care to cite any source proving that renewable energy can never meet our needs? Because I've read probably dozens that say even with current tech, we could replace all liquid fuel and all electricity with renewable sources.
It's a matter of cost right now. No one is willing to invest the trillions to build new infrastructure, molten salt solar plants, algae farms for biodiesel, solar on every rooftop, pumped hydro storage, Wind generators surround all our coasts that have their own pumped storage, tidal generators along all our coasts, geothermal, etc... until cheap non-renewable sources dry up.
We are a large community college and have always had a mix of servers. Probably equal parts windows, linux, some netware. We choose the best application to meet the needs of our clients (other employees, faculty, and students), and consider the OS largely irrelevant.
I'm not sure what percent of schools operate that way though. The few other schools in our state that I've talked to though are very similar to us. If I had to guess, I would say that the larger the school, the more likely it is that they confidently handle a mixed environment.
It has been my experience that Windows and Linux are identical in terms of admin support costs. A good windows admin should cost you as much as a good Linux admin. However, I find that Linux ends up costing less over time from a system administration perspective. You can usually find free and open source products (of enterprise quality) to do things like cloning, anti-virus, etc.. for linux, but usually you have to pay for similar features on windows servers.
I think he was referring to the time before linux was stable. Back in 1998 in healthcare, there was IBM AS/400, VAX/VMS, other UNIX, and Windows. Some of us were experimenting installing linux on the desktop every 6 months or so, but usually gave up because it was in a sorry state back then.
Apache tomcat wasn't even released until 1999. However, java 1.0 was released in 1996, meaning java stuff did often end up on Windows servers. It took some time before open source began to dominate the server market.
Algae is pretty efficient. Maybe they could ferment algae mass grown in the ocean (in containers) instead of slower growing plants on land.
I think we'll see algae fuel contributing more to our liquid energy needs once the tech has been refined some. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
0.42% of the US land mass required to replace all gas and diesel. And I've seen algae farms floating in the ocean (long clear plastic tubes), so we wouldn't even need to use up land.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374
That renewable energy sources can't meet base load appears to be a myth that has been repeated so often, people think that it's true. It won't be cheap building the infrastructure to do it, but it can be done. Geothermal, molten salt reactors, wave energy: all examples of 24/7 renewable power. Pumped water storage for wind and solar, decentralized power by having each house have solar, etc... There are a lot of ways to reach 100% renewable. We just need to get started.
I agree with you that people in public should be free to record whatever is occurring in public. Even a jerk recording someone's mental breakdown. What the police should have done, is actually protect and serve, and held up a blanket so people couldn't see the ill person while they were being treated.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/19/lawmakers-pledge-to-reform-but-gerrymandering-keeps-getting-worse.html
Basically, partisan committees attempt to draw a district line around as many democratic bodies as possible, and call that district 1. Then they cut some conservative farmland into districts 1 and 2. Result, 1 democrat 2 republicans.
Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that districts must be 'close to equal in population', but that is what partisan committees push to the limit: the equal number of bodies. Now of course both sides do this, but it just happens that right now, the districts are heavily favoring republicans.
I can't find the link right now, but one article I read went district by district in a few states and showed how the lines changed after the 2000 census.
Cigarette tax - punishment for smoking
Some people may see it that way, but I doubt lawmakers see it that way. They want less people to get sick and cost their health care programs money. So if you choose to develop health problems intentionally, you are going to get taxed along the way for it.
Another way to think of it: if the government wanted to punish people for essentially killing themselves, wouldn't it follow that the gov. would tax or penalize a spouse if their s.o. committed suicide? The government doesn't care if you kill yourself. They do care if you cost Medicare or Medicaid money.
The problem is we continue to take from the top 50% and give it away to the bottom 50%
You do know that taxes are at historic lows since 1950 right?
And income and wealth inequality is at historic highs since the Great Depression right?
Is culture the new (conservative) way of basically saying ghetto or poor area?
Why do I never hear any conservative say that the huge wealth inequality we have in the US is a problem we must solve?
I am pro-gun to a certain extent. The place at which we draw the line marking how much lethal power one individual can possess obviously has no correct position. (Nukes obviously not, grenades only with special permits, clips that hold 50 rounds?... what is too much power?, etc.. ). It is a judgement call, balancing our rights vs the possible harm to society. I personally think that our line needs to be lower, but that can come in a variety of forms. Require that guns are registered to individuals, lower capacity clips, 'assault' rifles should require special permits, etc..
But it seems like both sides of the debate only concentrate on one thing: guns. Why aren't we talking about lowering our huge wealth inequality? Providing better opportunities for social mobility (job programs, education programs for poor areas, etc..)? Increasing our funding to mental health programs across the country?
I can pretty much tell you why: for some reason any talk like that is now considered 'socialism' which is apparently a horrible word now. If conservatives (no idea if you are, just generalizing) want to keep their assault rifles with huge clips, maybe they should broaden the range of social cures that are allowed in their political ideology, because 'free market' and 'capitalism' alone isn't going to cut it.
I think its about time that both 'teams' having this debate in the US admit that there are many factors involved in the number of deaths by gun. Culture, wealth inequality, availability of guns, power of guns available, social mobility, etc.. etc..
There is one thing that I think we should all be able to agree with: something is wrong in the US. The number of deaths by gun in the US is very high compared with other industrialized nations.
It would be nice for cooking. If all cook books and web sites, and the kitchen tools I were able to buy in stores were metric, it would make scaling recipes up and down easier. Also, often when I find a recipe on the internet, it will be in metric, which is a pain to convert to all the tools I have.
You might think that it should be much easier to dig a big hole in the ground than to go to Mars, but you go far enough down, the Earth is just as hostile a place as space could ever be, in its own way.
http://www.westseattleherald.com/2012/12/11/news/meet-bertha-world%E2%80%99s-largest-tunnel-boring-machine
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/americas/2012/10/08/356955/Engineers-to.htm
I don't think you'd have to dig too deep. Just enough to provide insulation from the nuclear winter. Of course, any given particular bore hole wouldn't survive a direct impact. But I'd imagine we'd be boring holes all over the world if we knew in advance that an impact was coming (and had years to build underground).
For me it seems like power would be the biggest obstacle to living underground for years. Unless we had 10+ years notice then I imagine we could probably build nuclear reactors in time.
It is also a cultural and mental shift that you are probably having trouble adjusting to. (Or the mass trans there could suck, I've never been there).
But here in Portland OR, city dwellers do a few things to get around. 1) Pick places near transit lines to shop, eat, drink, etc.. and there are lots of options as more and more places have been built around transit lines over time. 2). Take a bike on the mass trans if further travel is required 3) don't feel walking 20 blocks is a big deal, 4) rent a car2go for any out of the way city trips. https://www.car2go.com/en/portland/
I visited New York and the mass trans there was also very good. I was able to explore every spot on Manhattan on foot using the subways, and this was from staying at a friends house across the water from the island.
The people that do it all the time also have all sorts of phone apps and other helpful things that makes getting around using mass trans way more convenient. Like apps telling you in real time where the subway or train is, how long until it arrives, highlighting its route, allowing you to search for where you want to go and the app laying out exactly what bus to take, which line to transfer on, etc..
The car2go concept is fairly new (at least here in Portland), but it's great. People leave the cars all over town. So you pull out your phone, look at the map for the nearest vacant car, walk over, swipe your car2go card, drive to wherever, leave the car either telling it you are done, or you want it reserved, account is automatically charged. The city allows for free parking because they like the concept, etc..
ZFS pools can expand by swapping in larger disks or adding disks. http://forums.nas4free.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=1528
I do agree with your description of it not being simple though. You have to learn a bit about ZFS vs simply buying something like a ReadyNAS which is hot swappable out of the box.
Do you classify "Hate Speech" by popular opinion?
I'm not sure why people have such a hard time with areas of law like this (well, I kinda know why: most programmers/engineers, etc.. want black and white answers). Laws that define fuzzy things like 'hate speech' use phrases like "a reasonable person would feel that this is considered hateful and designed to intimidate an entire community".
The reasonable person is a judge and the reasonable people are the jurors. So yes, what is considered 'obscene' or 'hate speech' today, might not be tomorrow. That is how the law works.