Instead of wasting money, time, and medical work on chipping the rich, how about fixing the poverty crisis in Mexico? You know, the main source of crime?
While your reply sounds noble, the reality is that poverty isn't the main source of crime. Corruption is.
and would be a clearer and less unpleasant identifier than a body part.
Kidnappers don't want it to be less unpleasant. They send a finger not to identify the person but to freak the family out so they pay up ASAP. Sending an electronic device isn't nearly as motivating to the people that have to find a way to come up with the requested money.
It's a result of gross class inequality--which is the REAL pity.
No, actually it's the result of corruption. You can make the argument that the class inequality leads to the corruption, but that would be a very weak argument.
Brazilian economy is ten times bigger than Mexico's.
Ten times bigger? Brazil = $1.314 trillion. Mexico = $893.4 billion. Brazil's economy isn't even twice as large as Mexico's. And while your economy is slightly larger, Mexico's per capita GDP is $12,800 while Brazil's is $9,700.
Sorry, Mexico is doing better than Brazil by any meaningful measure. But yes, Brazil has more people earning less money than Mexico. What Brazil lacks in personal income it makes up for in population quantity.
Once you get beyond the faux friendliness of the population that they put on when they see you as a possible consumer, the Gringo-hatred runs hard and deep. Are whatever the other advantages are really worth it?
Where the heck did you visit or live in Mexico? I'm an American and lived there for 10 years and noticed none of what you're talking about. Sure, no-one likes Mexico City. Not even most Mexicans. But I lived in Mexico (not Mexico City) for 10 years and I was never treated anything but superbly. Faux friendliness? Nonsense! They're an exceptionally friendly people. Unless you're an *sshole, but then people aren't friendly to *ssholes in the U.S., either.
Why live in Mexico? Why not? There's a world outside the U.S. and it's worth exploring. I'm back in the U.S. now and I do appreciate the U.S. more now than ever, but about the only reason not to live in Mexico right now is security.
Okay, well 40% increase doesn't neccesarily mean its a large number or ever was to begin with.
It is and it was.
I'm an American citizen that lived in Mexico 10 years but moved back to the US in 2006. I did so just in time. Things have really gotten nasty down there and are even getting dangerous in places that were previously pretty much as safe as most places in the US.
Katrina is fading in folks' memories and "Brownie", who took the fall for that cluster fuck, is long gone but the agency is still apparently still incredibly dysfunctional and run by incompetents.
That's true of most of the government. All the more reason to reduce the government's role in our lives rather than expand it.
Excellence and failure both start at the top. When the head guy is incompetent, he will hire incompetents.
The truth is that the government will always be inept and inefficient regardless of who's at the top. But having someone at the top that you don't like makes you more prone to be more critical of the entire government apparatus even though the majority of the government apparatus does not change from administration to administration.
Doesn't bother me much because even with the media helping them, Democrats as a rule have a hard time winning the White House--or, when they win it, actually keeping it into a second term.
It's more the liberal denial of the fact that the media is liberally biased that annoys me. But I generally let them get away with it since while they control the media, we Republicans control the country.:)
Indeed. I was going to say that software cannot change real signal strength. Sure, perhaps the firmware can instruct the chips to go into some other mode that better uses the existing signal. But if you had 2 bars (whatever that means) of signal strength yesterday and you have 3 bars today, either the signal characteristic has changed (due to different things going on in the RF environment that has nothing to do with the software) or your phone has changed its definition of 3 bars.
Indeed. I still use a Treo 650 from 2006. Still works just fine. Maybe there's not much "coolness factor" to it--but all the coolness I need is email, occasional web browsing, and SSH client to my server. And the Treo 650 has given me all of that for years now. Reliably. No frills but no fuss, either.
Someday my Treo 650 will give up the ghost. Heck, someday I assume my battery will not hold a good charge and I might just look at what's available rather than replacing the battery. But why millions of people are so quick to leave their perfectly functional phones behind in order to buy the latest beta version of the iPhone beats the heck out of me.
Let's not mention that I do other things on my iPhone more often than I make calls.
Great. But when my phone doesn't reliably let me make calls, I get pretty pissed... even if I can click other pretty icons or listen to music while I'm waiting for my phone to decide to work again.
Umm there's a problem with the iPho... OMG! CNN needs to cover this!
That's what happens when a company--either by market forces or by design--turns the release of a product into a media event. If you get coverage on the good days, expect coverage on the bad days. Unless you're a Republican in which case you can forget getting coverage in the first case.
Frankly I find the whole thing to be something of a joke, and an incredible waste of money.
I agree. It's a lot of fanfare for not a whole lot. It's great that athletes have a forum in which to compete, but the whole thing has become monolithic.
What blew me away was when they were hoisting the Olympic flag in the Opening Ceremonies... and the Chinese soldiers were saluting it? WTF? Did we do that, too, when we hoisted the Olympic flag in games that were held in the U.S.? If so, that's just WRONG.
People mock the U.S. for being some kind of corporate entity but saluting the Olympic flag is saluting a corporation. WTF???
The problem isn't the lack of term limits, it's the seniority system in committees.
True. Which is why a state would be crazy to implement term limits on their own representatives unless every other state in the country did the same. In other words: If there are to be term limits, it must be a constitutional amendment that applies to everyone.
Of course, how much power a given representative wields on behalf of his state only matters when it comes to pork spending. If we could get the federal government out of the business of creating dependency in individuals and in states, we'd save a lot of money and then, all the sudden, seniority in Congress wouldn't matter so much.
It all comes back to getting the federal government to do the job it was originally meant to do--and precious little more. Unfortunately, neither party does a very good job at reducing the scope of government in our lives. To the contrary, both parties just make it worse.
Four years from now Linux will be doing whatever non-Linux applications are doing two years from now. But you'll still have to compile it with all the right switches.
>A girl I know changed her "It was shit and boring" opinion of Borat's American adventures when I told her that all those people he met? They weren't actors.
I found that that made the movie all the more distasteful.
Indeed. And maybe Democrats get a boost and Republicans don't because more Democrats watch the show than Republicans. I have no idea if that's true or not but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.
I'm also curious how they compared "similar candidates" that did or didn't do the show. If it's not the same candidate, the same night, and the same election their results will differ.
But whatever. I'm sure someone feels pretty insightful for producing such a useful study.
Wouldn't you consider pulling that product from your shelf?
Removing it from your shelf is akin to removing it from an Apple application online store. Deleting/disabling it on customers' phones is akin to breaking into their house and destroying what they've already bought.
I've long planned on letting an iteration or two of the iPhone get eaten up by the early adopters before even considering trading in my Treo for one. I'm glad I've waited. The longer I wait, the more reasons I see for just sticking with what works.
My bad. I just went back and watched that part in the DVR recording.
Yes, they did say something about it being "a cinematic device" and how they'd talked about the Olympics being "real-time cinema" and that this was "really cinema", "almost animation." But, in my opinion, one could be forgiven for thinking that "a cinematic device" meant some special camera mounted under a helicopter and all the other comments were just waxing poetic on the quality of the scene.
They could've just come out and said, "This is a computer-generated simulation that took a year to develop." They didn't.
Add to that that a lot of us try to tune out the dorks talking and it'd be easy to not realize that it was faked.
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You're joking, right?
While your reply sounds noble, the reality is that poverty isn't the main source of crime. Corruption is.
Kidnappers don't want it to be less unpleasant. They send a finger not to identify the person but to freak the family out so they pay up ASAP. Sending an electronic device isn't nearly as motivating to the people that have to find a way to come up with the requested money.
No, actually it's the result of corruption. You can make the argument that the class inequality leads to the corruption, but that would be a very weak argument.
Ten times bigger? Brazil = $1.314 trillion. Mexico = $893.4 billion. Brazil's economy isn't even twice as large as Mexico's. And while your economy is slightly larger, Mexico's per capita GDP is $12,800 while Brazil's is $9,700.
Sorry, Mexico is doing better than Brazil by any meaningful measure. But yes, Brazil has more people earning less money than Mexico. What Brazil lacks in personal income it makes up for in population quantity.
Where the heck did you visit or live in Mexico? I'm an American and lived there for 10 years and noticed none of what you're talking about. Sure, no-one likes Mexico City. Not even most Mexicans. But I lived in Mexico (not Mexico City) for 10 years and I was never treated anything but superbly. Faux friendliness? Nonsense! They're an exceptionally friendly people. Unless you're an *sshole, but then people aren't friendly to *ssholes in the U.S., either.
Why live in Mexico? Why not? There's a world outside the U.S. and it's worth exploring. I'm back in the U.S. now and I do appreciate the U.S. more now than ever, but about the only reason not to live in Mexico right now is security.
It is and it was.
I'm an American citizen that lived in Mexico 10 years but moved back to the US in 2006. I did so just in time. Things have really gotten nasty down there and are even getting dangerous in places that were previously pretty much as safe as most places in the US.
That's true of most of the government. All the more reason to reduce the government's role in our lives rather than expand it.
The truth is that the government will always be inept and inefficient regardless of who's at the top. But having someone at the top that you don't like makes you more prone to be more critical of the entire government apparatus even though the majority of the government apparatus does not change from administration to administration.
Doesn't bother me much because even with the media helping them, Democrats as a rule have a hard time winning the White House--or, when they win it, actually keeping it into a second term.
It's more the liberal denial of the fact that the media is liberally biased that annoys me. But I generally let them get away with it since while they control the media, we Republicans control the country. :)
Indeed. I was going to say that software cannot change real signal strength. Sure, perhaps the firmware can instruct the chips to go into some other mode that better uses the existing signal. But if you had 2 bars (whatever that means) of signal strength yesterday and you have 3 bars today, either the signal characteristic has changed (due to different things going on in the RF environment that has nothing to do with the software) or your phone has changed its definition of 3 bars.
Indeed. I still use a Treo 650 from 2006. Still works just fine. Maybe there's not much "coolness factor" to it--but all the coolness I need is email, occasional web browsing, and SSH client to my server. And the Treo 650 has given me all of that for years now. Reliably. No frills but no fuss, either.
Someday my Treo 650 will give up the ghost. Heck, someday I assume my battery will not hold a good charge and I might just look at what's available rather than replacing the battery. But why millions of people are so quick to leave their perfectly functional phones behind in order to buy the latest beta version of the iPhone beats the heck out of me.
Great. But when my phone doesn't reliably let me make calls, I get pretty pissed... even if I can click other pretty icons or listen to music while I'm waiting for my phone to decide to work again.
That's what happens when a company--either by market forces or by design--turns the release of a product into a media event. If you get coverage on the good days, expect coverage on the bad days. Unless you're a Republican in which case you can forget getting coverage in the first case.
But look on the bright side. She can vote in the Chinese elections when she's really only 16. Oh, wait, never mind...
The truth is, there never was.
I agree. It's a lot of fanfare for not a whole lot. It's great that athletes have a forum in which to compete, but the whole thing has become monolithic.
What blew me away was when they were hoisting the Olympic flag in the Opening Ceremonies... and the Chinese soldiers were saluting it? WTF? Did we do that, too, when we hoisted the Olympic flag in games that were held in the U.S.? If so, that's just WRONG.
People mock the U.S. for being some kind of corporate entity but saluting the Olympic flag is saluting a corporation. WTF???
True. Which is why a state would be crazy to implement term limits on their own representatives unless every other state in the country did the same. In other words: If there are to be term limits, it must be a constitutional amendment that applies to everyone.
Of course, how much power a given representative wields on behalf of his state only matters when it comes to pork spending. If we could get the federal government out of the business of creating dependency in individuals and in states, we'd save a lot of money and then, all the sudden, seniority in Congress wouldn't matter so much.
It all comes back to getting the federal government to do the job it was originally meant to do--and precious little more. Unfortunately, neither party does a very good job at reducing the scope of government in our lives. To the contrary, both parties just make it worse.
Funny, but those that try to equate the U.S. action in Iraq to the Russian action in Georgia aren't paying attention.
Four years from now Linux will be doing whatever non-Linux applications are doing two years from now. But you'll still have to compile it with all the right switches.
I found that that made the movie all the more distasteful.
I don't doubt it. That would be the liberal media in the back getting a kick out of a liberal host taking free shots at a Republican president.
Indeed. And maybe Democrats get a boost and Republicans don't because more Democrats watch the show than Republicans. I have no idea if that's true or not but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.
I'm also curious how they compared "similar candidates" that did or didn't do the show. If it's not the same candidate, the same night, and the same election their results will differ.
But whatever. I'm sure someone feels pretty insightful for producing such a useful study.
TV broadcasts. With DVDs captioning is usually available as an option on the DVD menu. That obviously worked.
Or I could just not use HDMI and not have to replace all my hardware. :)
Removing it from your shelf is akin to removing it from an Apple application online store. Deleting /disabling it on customers' phones is akin to breaking into their house and destroying what they've already bought.
I've long planned on letting an iteration or two of the iPhone get eaten up by the early adopters before even considering trading in my Treo for one. I'm glad I've waited. The longer I wait, the more reasons I see for just sticking with what works.
My bad. I just went back and watched that part in the DVR recording.
Yes, they did say something about it being "a cinematic device" and how they'd talked about the Olympics being "real-time cinema" and that this was "really cinema", "almost animation." But, in my opinion, one could be forgiven for thinking that "a cinematic device" meant some special camera mounted under a helicopter and all the other comments were just waxing poetic on the quality of the scene.
They could've just come out and said, "This is a computer-generated simulation that took a year to develop." They didn't.
Add to that that a lot of us try to tune out the dorks talking and it'd be easy to not realize that it was faked.