Obama's comment was indeed stupid. However, Palin is the one who thought Africa was a country, according to McCain's own staffers (not the press).
As for Biden, Obama is not very likely to die of a heart attack any time soon. McCain would have been the oldest President in history, and his health wasn't great. It was entirely reasonable to assume the stress of Presidency would have killed him. Obama (as much as he sucks otherwise) is IIRC one of the youngest Presidents ever, so we at least don't have to worry about him dying in office.
>Unlike Obama, the Clinton Administration was thoroughly competent.
Hillary is not her husband.
Yes, all your criticisms of Obama are perfectly valid and probably correct. However, the idea that President Palin would have done any better is sheer lunacy. She's a moron and a nitwit. You're probably right, however, that we would have been better off with Hillary as President. However, I've long said that the Democrat voters totally fucked up in 2008, and out of all the candidates running in the Primaries that year, they managed to pick the very worst one. Any of the other Dem candidates would have been better than Obama. Of course, the Republican voters didn't do much better, picking Caribou Barbie. Any of the other Republican candidates probably would have been better.
Going to keyfobs in cars will not deprive you of key-weapons. How many houses or apartments have you seen which do not use old-fashioned metal keys? Unless you live in your car, you're still going to need to carry around Kwikset or Schlage-type metal keys to get into your dwelling.
The Windows 8 interface being a case in point where there's overwhelming dislike of that poorly thought out mess but there are still plenty of people here in favour of it because new is always better.
No, it's because Slashdot is known to have a lot of Microsoft shills on it.
Also in the case of git, when the central public repository is down, that does not mean you can't work. Compare that to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, the entire company grinds to a halt when these systems go down and I have seen my fair share of downtime.
Don't compare GIT to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, as those are not version-control systems. Compare GIT instead to IBM Rational ClearCase, which IS a competing version control system.
When your ClearCase central repository goes down, you can't work any more, or at least not much. You can't make any checkins, you can't do diffs with any other versions to see what you've changed, in short you can't do anything that involves version control in any way. And if you're using dynamic views you can't work at all, because you have to be in constant communication with the server for that feature to work.
With GIT, you only need access to the central repository (or rather, "remote repository", as GIT is decentralized) when you want to sync with it. GIT maintains a full copy of the repo on your local machine so you can do everything locally, and only syncing with the remote server when necessary.
On top of all that, ClearCase costs an insane amount of money, and requires a full-time administrator to keep it running, who's dedicated to administering that machine and doing nothing else.
Obama sucks, to be sure. But you can't seriously think Caribou Barbie would have done any better. Good lord, the woman thought Africa was a single country. She was an absolute bimbo, and would have been one McCain heart attack away from the Presidency.
Hillary has been in on all this crap that the Obama administration has been involved in, so I have serious doubts she would have been much better too, but at least she isn't inexperienced, for what little that's worth.
Did you even read TFS? Apparently, for a lot of people, Update 1 simply won't install for some reason. How are these people supposed to apply OS updates when the OS won't allow it?
Sounds reasonable to me. However, that's probably assuming current accident rates. If, for instance, we mostly abandoned private cars and mass-transit buses, and moved instead to SkyTran automated personal rapid transit, very few people would die in road accidents. That'd probably leave natural disasters and murders as the main killers of humans: storms, asteroids, tornadoes, etc. Also, childhood accidents (kids falling out of trees, etc.).
Last I heard, fleeing the country to avoid repaying debt is an extraditable offense. So unless you're planning to flee to someplace like Russia, this probably won't work for you.
Anyway, you're right, the job itself isn't making you a slave, but you are a slave, to the situation.
What's really horrible is if you're older (late 30s, 40s), and don't have kids. Then you don't fit in anywhere. The 20-somethings who drink and party all the time won't socialize much with you, and you can't stand being around people your own age because all they do is talk about their kids, which you can't relate to in any way. You might end up hanging around the 60-something set, since they're old enough that their kids are all becoming parents themselves, so they don't really talk about their kids too much, though they might occasionally mention their grandkids.
The Crown Vic probably wasn't all that much cheaper; remember, it was a rear-wheel drive car, and those cost more in assembly than FWD cars because of the prop shaft and rear differential. FWD cars are much easier to assemble in a factory; you just put everything together on a subframe, and then bolt that into the car.
In addition, since the consumer market for (Ford-made) RWD cars has completely dried up, it was probably highly unprofitable for Ford to keep making a car model that only police would ever buy, instead of pushing them to use some a police-version of some other existing car. In fact, considering the police departments seem to have switched to Chrysler cars (like the Charger) these days, and Ford is doing quite well financially, maybe the profit they were making on police cars just wasn't worth the trouble, and it made more sense to just push them away altogether.
The problem with comparing the murder rate of the US to other "wealthy countries" is that most of the murders in the US are committed by non-wealthy people, against other non-wealthy people. To be blunt, most murders are done by criminals in the ghetto, against other criminals, usually involved in the drug trade. A very significant portion of the US population lives this way, and it's very comparable to third-world conditions in places like El Salvador, where 1 in 9 men will be murdered in his lifetime. Those other wealthy countries don't have large underclasses of violent people living in third-world conditions, and instead they're far smaller (population-wise) and more homogenous.
Does it have an easily-removable battery and SD card though? According to my quick search, the answer is no. That makes it completely unusable for me. If my wife can't change it while away from home (like when sitting on a bus, or in the car), then it's useless to me as a replacement for our HTCs.
I think we're splitting hairs here, but if all you own is a clothing brand and some employees who design these clothes, that seems like a huge amount of risk and very little of any value, should things go south. All it takes is for your brand to become unpopular (as is not uncommon with something in fashion like that) and the value of your brand, and your company, goes promptly down the toilet, and then your employees quit and go to work elsewhere and suddenly you're bankrupt, as you have nothing to sell and no assets at all (remember, the brand is now worthless). The company that you outsourced your production to has a factory, machines, etc. which they can sell if things go badly, but as you note, people are always going to buy clothes unless someone figures out how to make 3D printers that can print clothes (good luck with that; clothes are made of woven fibers, not molten plastics, it'll be a long time before we have replicators that can make those), so your factory with sewing machines and garment workers can be put to work making anyone's clothing designs, so not only do you have near-zero risk, you also have accumulated value: if you decide to exit the business, you can easily sell your factory to someone else, even if all your workers decide to quit one day. Also, workers (and any knowledge they have) is not really an asset: you can't own employees (at least in countries which don't allow slavery). You can own buildings and machinery, plus IP.
I don't see it. For your clothing example: yes, people will be buying clothes from someone, but if you fall out of fashion, it won't be you, so whatever soft assets you have won't be of much value. You won't have anything you can fall back on, or sell to get some value back out of the company. The fickleness of consumers will wipe you out quickly. The company you outsource actual production to: they'll be just fine. They'll just switch to making clothes for your competitor that everyone thinks is new and hip.
Any recommendations for a new(er) phone? My current one is a HTC Sensation 4G. I'd like to have something I can put an alternative ROM (maybe CyanogenMod) on, and I'd prefer a removable SD card, and require a replaceable battery. I actually replace the battery in mine (and my wife's; she has the same model) quite frequently when away from home too long. I have a set of replacement batteries and a standalone charger, and this has been extremely useful.
The healthcare disaster is Republican: it's a product of a right-wing thinktank, and used to be called "RomneyCare". The Democrats adopted it for some dumb reason (probably corruption) and then the Republicans shifted even farther to the right so they could be against it, rather than pushing for universal healthcare which would actually bring down healthcare costs for everyone, because they don't want to be seen as "socialists".
Also, the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans, if you haven't noticed. So are lots of state governments. The Senate is about 50/50. As for "the bureaucracy", the IRS, etc., you're referring to Federal agencies, which are all part of the Executive Branch, which is run by the President. Of course those things are going to be Democrat-controlled to a great extent, since the President is a Democrat. Did you fail Civics class? You seem to be rather clueless about the very structure of the government you're complaining about, and just regurgitating right-wing talking points from Fox News or other even more right-wing "news" sources. (Don't worry, the Democrat side, which I hesitate to call "left wing" since it's really center-right, not not far-right like the Republicans, also has its own idiotic talking points.)
The problem with unprincipled people is that you have no clue how they are going to act.
Yeah, you get someone like Obama, who makes great-sounding promises about government transparency and not appointing lobbyists to policy-making positions, and who promptly does exactly the opposite when he's in office.
I find your post highly insensitive and downright insulting, and demand you issue an apology and retraction. Monkeys are wonderful, affectionate, curious, and intelligent creatures, though sometimes a bit mischievous. Comparing them to politicians is the worst kind of insult and degradation. Even comparing them to the current population of Americans is insulting.
Stocks are the only thing with intrinsic value: ownership of the means of production.
Not really true. Stocks give you a share of ownership of a company, not a means of production. Some companies do produce things, and some companies have a means of production, but these aren't quite the same thing.
Let's look at a typical American company that makes some kind of electronic device, for instance. What does it produce? Designs, maybe software, and that's about it. I worked at a place like this a few years ago; they used to build their own electronic devices, and the software which ran on them, however they sold off their factory and office which they owned and moved to a fancy rented corporate-park office closer to the new CEO's home. Their hardware engineers all left eventually, and they couldn't get many software engineers in either. For their latest product, the hardware design was outsourced to a Taiwanese ODM (which also manufactured the hardware, hence the term ODM). Most of the software design was also outsourced, to a different (American) vendor. Basically, all this company did was some design for the outer plastics, and the high-level architecture of the software, as well as some of the more critical software using what was left of its software engineering capability.
What "production" does this company own? None really. All their capability is tied up in their employees, and when they leave, it's gone. What they really own is a brand name, and a place in the market, with established customers, a supply chain, etc. It's not hard for end customers to switch to competitors (in fact, a bunch have since I left there; I'm surprised the company still exists but it's much smaller than it used to be). So all it takes is a few bad quarters and a company like that can disappear, with very few real assets.
If you were talking about a company like Toyota or Intel, it'd be different: these companies own their own factories, so not only do they have employees and IP they can use to make things, they have the physical means of making them too.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama's comment was indeed stupid. However, Palin is the one who thought Africa was a country, according to McCain's own staffers (not the press).
As for Biden, Obama is not very likely to die of a heart attack any time soon. McCain would have been the oldest President in history, and his health wasn't great. It was entirely reasonable to assume the stress of Presidency would have killed him. Obama (as much as he sucks otherwise) is IIRC one of the youngest Presidents ever, so we at least don't have to worry about him dying in office.
>Unlike Obama, the Clinton Administration was thoroughly competent.
Hillary is not her husband.
Yes, all your criticisms of Obama are perfectly valid and probably correct. However, the idea that President Palin would have done any better is sheer lunacy. She's a moron and a nitwit. You're probably right, however, that we would have been better off with Hillary as President. However, I've long said that the Democrat voters totally fucked up in 2008, and out of all the candidates running in the Primaries that year, they managed to pick the very worst one. Any of the other Dem candidates would have been better than Obama. Of course, the Republican voters didn't do much better, picking Caribou Barbie. Any of the other Republican candidates probably would have been better.
Going to keyfobs in cars will not deprive you of key-weapons. How many houses or apartments have you seen which do not use old-fashioned metal keys? Unless you live in your car, you're still going to need to carry around Kwikset or Schlage-type metal keys to get into your dwelling.
The Windows 8 interface being a case in point where there's overwhelming dislike of that poorly thought out mess but there are still plenty of people here in favour of it because new is always better.
No, it's because Slashdot is known to have a lot of Microsoft shills on it.
Jet aircraft do not have mag switches.
Also in the case of git, when the central public repository is down, that does not mean you can't work. Compare that to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, the entire company grinds to a halt when these systems go down and I have seen my fair share of downtime.
Don't compare GIT to Exchange or Team Foundation Server, as those are not version-control systems. Compare GIT instead to IBM Rational ClearCase, which IS a competing version control system.
When your ClearCase central repository goes down, you can't work any more, or at least not much. You can't make any checkins, you can't do diffs with any other versions to see what you've changed, in short you can't do anything that involves version control in any way. And if you're using dynamic views you can't work at all, because you have to be in constant communication with the server for that feature to work.
With GIT, you only need access to the central repository (or rather, "remote repository", as GIT is decentralized) when you want to sync with it. GIT maintains a full copy of the repo on your local machine so you can do everything locally, and only syncing with the remote server when necessary.
On top of all that, ClearCase costs an insane amount of money, and requires a full-time administrator to keep it running, who's dedicated to administering that machine and doing nothing else.
Obama sucks, to be sure. But you can't seriously think Caribou Barbie would have done any better. Good lord, the woman thought Africa was a single country. She was an absolute bimbo, and would have been one McCain heart attack away from the Presidency.
Hillary has been in on all this crap that the Obama administration has been involved in, so I have serious doubts she would have been much better too, but at least she isn't inexperienced, for what little that's worth.
Did you even read TFS? Apparently, for a lot of people, Update 1 simply won't install for some reason. How are these people supposed to apply OS updates when the OS won't allow it?
Sounds reasonable to me. However, that's probably assuming current accident rates. If, for instance, we mostly abandoned private cars and mass-transit buses, and moved instead to SkyTran automated personal rapid transit, very few people would die in road accidents. That'd probably leave natural disasters and murders as the main killers of humans: storms, asteroids, tornadoes, etc. Also, childhood accidents (kids falling out of trees, etc.).
This sucks because eventually in the future there will be a generation born that won't die.
They'll die, eventually. Anti-aging cures won't keep you from being killed by a speeding bus.
fleeing the country.
Last I heard, fleeing the country to avoid repaying debt is an extraditable offense. So unless you're planning to flee to someplace like Russia, this probably won't work for you.
Anyway, you're right, the job itself isn't making you a slave, but you are a slave, to the situation.
What's really horrible is if you're older (late 30s, 40s), and don't have kids. Then you don't fit in anywhere. The 20-somethings who drink and party all the time won't socialize much with you, and you can't stand being around people your own age because all they do is talk about their kids, which you can't relate to in any way. You might end up hanging around the 60-something set, since they're old enough that their kids are all becoming parents themselves, so they don't really talk about their kids too much, though they might occasionally mention their grandkids.
The Crown Vic probably wasn't all that much cheaper; remember, it was a rear-wheel drive car, and those cost more in assembly than FWD cars because of the prop shaft and rear differential. FWD cars are much easier to assemble in a factory; you just put everything together on a subframe, and then bolt that into the car.
In addition, since the consumer market for (Ford-made) RWD cars has completely dried up, it was probably highly unprofitable for Ford to keep making a car model that only police would ever buy, instead of pushing them to use some a police-version of some other existing car. In fact, considering the police departments seem to have switched to Chrysler cars (like the Charger) these days, and Ford is doing quite well financially, maybe the profit they were making on police cars just wasn't worth the trouble, and it made more sense to just push them away altogether.
The problem with comparing the murder rate of the US to other "wealthy countries" is that most of the murders in the US are committed by non-wealthy people, against other non-wealthy people. To be blunt, most murders are done by criminals in the ghetto, against other criminals, usually involved in the drug trade. A very significant portion of the US population lives this way, and it's very comparable to third-world conditions in places like El Salvador, where 1 in 9 men will be murdered in his lifetime. Those other wealthy countries don't have large underclasses of violent people living in third-world conditions, and instead they're far smaller (population-wise) and more homogenous.
Not always. Back in WWII, the other guys really were a lot worse.
But yes, over much of its history, the US has been extremely imperialistic.
We should rename the country "Ferengi States of America".
The whole east coast is a lot like that. The rest of the country would be better off if they seceded from the northeast states (including MD and DC).
Does it have an easily-removable battery and SD card though? According to my quick search, the answer is no. That makes it completely unusable for me. If my wife can't change it while away from home (like when sitting on a bus, or in the car), then it's useless to me as a replacement for our HTCs.
I think we're splitting hairs here, but if all you own is a clothing brand and some employees who design these clothes, that seems like a huge amount of risk and very little of any value, should things go south. All it takes is for your brand to become unpopular (as is not uncommon with something in fashion like that) and the value of your brand, and your company, goes promptly down the toilet, and then your employees quit and go to work elsewhere and suddenly you're bankrupt, as you have nothing to sell and no assets at all (remember, the brand is now worthless). The company that you outsourced your production to has a factory, machines, etc. which they can sell if things go badly, but as you note, people are always going to buy clothes unless someone figures out how to make 3D printers that can print clothes (good luck with that; clothes are made of woven fibers, not molten plastics, it'll be a long time before we have replicators that can make those), so your factory with sewing machines and garment workers can be put to work making anyone's clothing designs, so not only do you have near-zero risk, you also have accumulated value: if you decide to exit the business, you can easily sell your factory to someone else, even if all your workers decide to quit one day. Also, workers (and any knowledge they have) is not really an asset: you can't own employees (at least in countries which don't allow slavery). You can own buildings and machinery, plus IP.
I don't see it. For your clothing example: yes, people will be buying clothes from someone, but if you fall out of fashion, it won't be you, so whatever soft assets you have won't be of much value. You won't have anything you can fall back on, or sell to get some value back out of the company. The fickleness of consumers will wipe you out quickly. The company you outsource actual production to: they'll be just fine. They'll just switch to making clothes for your competitor that everyone thinks is new and hip.
Thanks, I'll definitely avoid that. What a POS.
Any recommendations for a new(er) phone? My current one is a HTC Sensation 4G. I'd like to have something I can put an alternative ROM (maybe CyanogenMod) on, and I'd prefer a removable SD card, and require a replaceable battery. I actually replace the battery in mine (and my wife's; she has the same model) quite frequently when away from home too long. I have a set of replacement batteries and a standalone charger, and this has been extremely useful.
The healthcare disaster is Republican: it's a product of a right-wing thinktank, and used to be called "RomneyCare". The Democrats adopted it for some dumb reason (probably corruption) and then the Republicans shifted even farther to the right so they could be against it, rather than pushing for universal healthcare which would actually bring down healthcare costs for everyone, because they don't want to be seen as "socialists".
Also, the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans, if you haven't noticed. So are lots of state governments. The Senate is about 50/50. As for "the bureaucracy", the IRS, etc., you're referring to Federal agencies, which are all part of the Executive Branch, which is run by the President. Of course those things are going to be Democrat-controlled to a great extent, since the President is a Democrat. Did you fail Civics class? You seem to be rather clueless about the very structure of the government you're complaining about, and just regurgitating right-wing talking points from Fox News or other even more right-wing "news" sources. (Don't worry, the Democrat side, which I hesitate to call "left wing" since it's really center-right, not not far-right like the Republicans, also has its own idiotic talking points.)
The problem with unprincipled people is that you have no clue how they are going to act.
Yeah, you get someone like Obama, who makes great-sounding promises about government transparency and not appointing lobbyists to policy-making positions, and who promptly does exactly the opposite when he's in office.
I find your post highly insensitive and downright insulting, and demand you issue an apology and retraction. Monkeys are wonderful, affectionate, curious, and intelligent creatures, though sometimes a bit mischievous. Comparing them to politicians is the worst kind of insult and degradation. Even comparing them to the current population of Americans is insulting.
Stocks are the only thing with intrinsic value: ownership of the means of production.
Not really true. Stocks give you a share of ownership of a company, not a means of production. Some companies do produce things, and some companies have a means of production, but these aren't quite the same thing.
Let's look at a typical American company that makes some kind of electronic device, for instance. What does it produce? Designs, maybe software, and that's about it. I worked at a place like this a few years ago; they used to build their own electronic devices, and the software which ran on them, however they sold off their factory and office which they owned and moved to a fancy rented corporate-park office closer to the new CEO's home. Their hardware engineers all left eventually, and they couldn't get many software engineers in either. For their latest product, the hardware design was outsourced to a Taiwanese ODM (which also manufactured the hardware, hence the term ODM). Most of the software design was also outsourced, to a different (American) vendor. Basically, all this company did was some design for the outer plastics, and the high-level architecture of the software, as well as some of the more critical software using what was left of its software engineering capability.
What "production" does this company own? None really. All their capability is tied up in their employees, and when they leave, it's gone. What they really own is a brand name, and a place in the market, with established customers, a supply chain, etc. It's not hard for end customers to switch to competitors (in fact, a bunch have since I left there; I'm surprised the company still exists but it's much smaller than it used to be). So all it takes is a few bad quarters and a company like that can disappear, with very few real assets.
If you were talking about a company like Toyota or Intel, it'd be different: these companies own their own factories, so not only do they have employees and IP they can use to make things, they have the physical means of making them too.
You just don't understand the bit about "most people", do you?