When your country is spending as much on its military as is the rest of the world *combined*, "National Defense" is an obvious euphemism. It's a very expensive jobs program. It's a very expensive scientific research program. It's a hidden subsidy for the aerospace industry. It's a program for enforcing the interests of our corporations abroad.
Now, which of the listed things passes the muster of your strict constructionist views?
When we pare our forces and expenditures back to the point where we can only repel simultaneous invasions by the other four biggest armies in the world, then I'll believe you're sincere about all this talk about "legitimate constitutional responsibilities." If protecting American access to natural resources abroad qualifies as legitimate, then your position isn't coherent.
You say they're "planning" on it, when in reality they simply understand that they won't be able to prevent it.
You are a disturbingly hateful person. Anyone who could look at a situation this tragic and find a way to blame the victims has lost all my respect. In these situations, family is their primary resource for survival, and asking them to choose to curtail their reproduction (without giving them so much as a "have you tried oral sex?" in support) is tantamount to asking them to commit suicide. In short, it's inhumane.
Even among affluent, white, educated Americans, you find people who theoretically understand the problems of overpopulation, but decide to have five or six kids anyways because A) they want them, and B) they figure their contribution to the overall problem is minimal either way. But you want to villify starving, uneducated people for making basically the same decision on far less information.
You say you've been hearing about the project for a long time, but that's not the same as knowing a lot about it. A few reasons these laptops won't be stolen:
1) There isn't much first world demand for them, since first worlders will be able to get a lot more computer for a couple hundred dollars more.
2) The computers are somewhat underpowered for many uses, so people in the third world who have money won't want them much either.
3) Have you seen them? Built for tiny hands, with a very distinctive profile. You see one of these suckers at the flea market, everyone around you will know that somewhere along the line it was stolen from a child.
4) The project itself is working on security features that will disable the computer if it goes too long without being in range of the school.
It sounds like you think "they haven't put a lot of thought into it" because you haven't been reading the thinking they *have* been putting into it.
To repeat it for the n+1th time: These laptops aren't being sent to starving children. They are being sent to places where the basic needs (food, water, shelter) are taken care of.
You're also assuming that the primary purpose of giving people computers is to teach computer skills, and that , which is fallacious. The goal is to use them as a tool to teach things like basic literacy, math, etc., as well as practical skills, and to help the users communicate with the outside world. The project won't be a failure if the kids don't grow up to get a job that requires using the computer all day. The project will be a failure if the kids aren't better educated than they would have been without the computers.
Finally, why make it a choice between giving starving children money to eat and giving laptops to the children who can already get food? Why, in the name of any god with a shred of compassion, aren't we already feeding the starving? Oh, but that's too pie-in-the-sky. I must be one of those brainless liberals, right? Wrong. Perfectly reasonable estimates have suggested that the first world could eliminate extreme poverty (defined as living on $1/day or less) by sacrificing less than 1% of our GDP to the cause. If the U.S. economy grows by 2% a year on average, we could be doing our share by choosing the same standard of living we had... six months ago?
Too much of a sacrifice, that. I'm just a sentimental, bleeding hearted moron.
The "fine article" (every article on the site is one swipe at OLPC or another) basically assumes a bunch of wrongheaded things:
1) The laptops are worthless without Internet access. (they're not)
2) Internet access will cost $135/year (the OLPC project is already investigating ways to drive this waaaaaay down, and they have a deal in place to provide many of the target children with $1/year access (which the "fine article" assumes will fall apart).
3) Without training, the laptops are worthless (NOT). Training will be hugely expensive (I find his reasoning suspect). Training costs will recur every year. (WTF?)
4) Five laptops will need full replacements every year. While that may be true, the justification ignores all the effort the OLPC people have put into making these things user-servicable, and hardening them against heat and dust.
#2 is the biggie, since it provides the bulk of the TCO figure. It's also incredibly suspicious, since it both assumes that the current Internet arrangements will fall apart, and that everyone will have to fall back on the worst-case scenario of $135/year. It fails to recognize that costs will be far lower in some areas.
Quick counterpoint: The reason these countries have so many children is precisely because they suck so badly. If you want to ensure that two children are alive to take care of you in your old age, you have to have five or seven. Couple that with a lack of access to effective family planning measures, and you've got a population explosion on your hands. When people feel more secure about their future, they tend to have two or three children, not seven or ten.
Thank you for this post. I can only imagine how much more successful the OLPC project will be if the computers *do* come with manuals and on-screen instructions. And if they can successfully connect to the wider Internet, a lot of these concerns should just solve themselves.
You could argue that, but most Japanese people would disagree with you. In their view, Japan was already seeking an end to hostilities. Certainly, in the months leading up to the bombing, nobody in the Japanese government believed that they could win the war; those who insisted that they continue fighting were mostly hoping that in doing so they could convince the United States to give them more generous terms of surrender. Eisenhower shared this view.
On the other hand, the embargo alone was killing people at a rapid clip, and the conventional bombing that would have been needed to sustain pressure wasn't exactly casualty-free either. Meanwhile, the Soviets were obliterating Japanese forces on the Asian mainland (which itself was both increasing pressure to surrender and inflicting casualties).
In my mind, the sad thing is that the biggest term of surrender the Japanese government was holding out for was that they would keep their emperor. But the U.S. insisted on "unconditional surrender." Strangely enough, guess which country still has an emperor? His role is greatly reduced, but who knows if their government wouldn't have accepted that as a term of surrender.
In my mind, the use of nuclear weapons is inherently immoral, and we should never have dropped them. But the calculus needed to determine whether the decision eventually saved lives is far too complicated for anyone to claim the answer with any certainty. Nonetheless, it is a sign of our own hubris that we so often seem to take the attitude that the Japanese should be grateful that we nuked them.
Ah, the old "aid to Africa doesn't work, because they just don't have the same decency and respect for the rule of law and I'll bet they don't even play baseball or love their children" chestnut.
Yes, many governments in Africa are corrupt. That's why aid needs to come with oversight. Not oversight of the "We'll say how you spend it" variety, because that just leads to 'solutions' that don't have much effect on the ground. Instead, we ask them to come up with a plan that will do something like fighting poverty or AIDS or illiteracy, and then verify that the money is being spent the way they said. That would take a big investment on our part, but it would be far more effective than the crap the IMF has been pulling (see Stiglitz for more info).
If you look at the rankings from Transparency International, the governments in Africa aren't significantly more corrupt than the governments in the Middle East that we're happy to work with (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait).
All those things you talk about, like the rule of law and an independent judiciary? They are impossible without a financially stable government. If your government is so strapped for cash that there isn't enough money to pay people (for example, because your government is saddled with huge foreign aid debts), then it makes sense to turn a blind eye while your judges and police officers take bribes, because it's the only way to keep them on the job. To pretend that aid can wait until these countries have successfully developed beyond a culture of corruption is naive.
Increasing the amount and effectiveness of our aid to Africa is in our own best interests. Poverty is a great radicalizer, so it's a form of counterterrorism. Further, China is already sucking up to Africa to ensure its continued access to resources. If we don't join that effort, an entire continent will remember the fact.
We knew Saddam was years away from getting nukes. We knew that most of the evidence that he was actively pursuing nukes was crap (yellowcake from Niger) or wishful thinking (aluminum tubes can only be used for uranium purification! No, really!)
I agree that Iran shouldn't be allowed to have nuclear weapons, but Bush's misadventures in Iraq has actually made it more difficult to stop that from happening. Our military is too busy with Iraq, our populace will have zero enthusiasm for military action against Iran, and according to the new study group report, we need to be making diplomatic gestures towards Iran and Syria to get things under control. I wonder what Iran will ask for in those negotiations...
Iran did not cause September 11th. Iraq did not cause September 11th. Most of the hijackers (and most of the money for the operation) came from Saudi Arabia. If there was one thing that could have prevented September 11th, it wasn't "more military spending" but "a president who actually took briefings seriously". "You've covered your ass," my ass.
Also, the Iraq war seriously degraded our ability to respond to Hurricane Katrina. All the troops and helicopters that could have been keeping the peace and rescuing people stranded on rooftops and providing shelter? Busy with the Iraq thing. I don't know why you even brought up the Wikipedia death toll article. You're probably one of those people who suggests that it dishonors the sacrifices of the American soldiers killed in Iraq if we pull out before "the mission is complete." Yet you're more than happy to dishonor those very sacrifices by claiming that until we get a Vietnam-esque body count, it's really no big deal.
So, what you're saying is, you're in favor of government-subsidized scientific research. Cool.
Please, back up your claim that the Army has made huge advances in the field of education, and that these advances have been widely adopted in places like India and China. As someone who has been through a couple of Army schools, I never saw any particularly advanced educational technology (unless you count the Scantron sheet as an Armed Forces invention). The schools did a good job teaching us, but their methods always seemed pretty straightforward, and I attribute their success to the highly focused, disciplined atmosphere.
I'm less skeptical of your claim that the Armed Services is pioneering new energy sources, but I'd be interested in seeing some backup for that.
Finally, I don't think that the military has been a major force driving computer technology since their widespread adoption by private industry in the 70's and 80's. If they were really the driving force, do you think they'd have let all our semiconducter manufacturing capacity go to Malaysia?
The problem with your claims (besides the fact that they're entirely unsourced, and most of the advances would have been made independent of the military) is that we're dropping $400B into the military every single year! If you throw that much money at a particular set of problems, you can't help but get some interesting advances out of it. The military is a crappy research and development program. The military is a crappy jobs program. The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things, and I don't think it needs to apologize for that. But we spend as much on military expenditures as the rest of the world combined, and there is no need for that.
The military-industrial complex is out of control, and needs to be drastically scaled back. Unchecked government spending is doing grave harm to our national interests, and I believe that drastically reducing military spending is the best way to do that.
The student was of Iranian descent. Not that you would care. Since you obviously don't believe that racial profiling exists (or at least that victims should just suck it up), the fact that we've been singling out people like him as special security concerns for the last half decade is probably not relevant to you.
Despite the fact that you weren't there, you're asserting that he was simply being asked to follow the same rules as everyone else. Was he? Did the library staff ask for his ID also ask the people around him to prove that they belonged there as well? Does the library do comprehensive sweeps, or do they spot check people who light up their "evil detector?"
You don't know, and it's naive of you to assume. But let's pretend that the library staff was being perfectly evenhanded in their enforcement of a basically stupid rule (and it is indeed a stupid rule, because ownership of a student ID doesn't even remotely demonstrate that the bearer is not a psycho/murderer/rapist). The student responded harshly when they tried to enforce it on him. Once again, you make a stupid assumption: that he reacted that way because he felt his race entitled him to special treatment. But if he felt he was being singled out for special enforcement, then he was merely asking to be treated like everyone else. Further, if he was protesting the authoritarian stupidity of the law, then he acted because he felt that *nobody* should have the rule enforced on them. Far from acting from a position of superiority and entitlement, I'm sure the student would have been happy if other students asked not to have to follow the rule either.
You act as though any resistance to legal authority is wrong, but civil disobedience has a long and inspiring history. This wasn't exactly a Rosa Parks moment, but the student (whom you unconvincingly tried to paint as a thief of electronic gadgetry) was standing up for his convictions. I commend him for that. The officer, meanwhile, was standing up for his conviction that anyone who disrespects him deserves a good smackdown. You commend him for that.
You are wrong about pretty much every specific of the case you bring up.
1) The student didn't forget his ID. He refused to show it, because it's a stupid rule and because he felt he was being singled out for his ethnicity.
2) The police didn't ask to see his ID. A librarian did. By the time the police got there, the student was heading out the door, but the cop couldn't resist putting a hand on him. That's no way to treat someone who is already complying with your requests, because it escalates the situation. The cops escalated the situation repeatedly.
3) The students surrounding the cops seemed far less concerned about their term papers than about the flagrant abuse the cops were inflicting on an unresisting student who posed no threat to them.
4) You say that after the first tazering, he still didn't "grow up." In fact, the problem was that he didn't *get* up, which is hard to do after being hit with a stun gun, and even harder after three or four blasts. Of course, at this point he was already handcuffed, and couldn't pose any threat to anything except for the... sniff... fragile egos of those brave men in blue.
5) The cop in question was actually the reason the UCLA cops were carrying tasers in the first place. He'd previously been suspended for three months after fatally shooting a homeless man. I'm sure the guy gave the cop lip, though. So he obviously deserved it.
I'm amazed that you're more concerned with a student being "a whiny bitch" than a cop denigrating his own profession and abusing a citizen. But given how you recount the events with such utter relish, my amazement is tempered by the realization that you're basically an idiot, and your opinion doesn't count for much.
I've been following this thread. I've decided you're clearly a lunatic. I'm sure your mother disagrees, however, and thinks you're a wonderful young man.
There were plenty of officers there to carry him out. There was no need to use "pain compliance," because there was no real need for the student's immediate compliance, so long as he wasn't physically violent. Anyone who can't handle getting yelled at without breaking out the painstick is a... how should I put this? A wuss. As is anyone who gets a raging hard-on from the idea of vigilante cops dishing out retribution rather than doing their jobs.
P.S.: The blank is filled in with, "You're under arrest for tresspassing. You have the right to remain silent. [and so on]" If he continues to give the officer lip, the officer can politely ask if he also wants to be booked on resisting arrest.
Notice that BZZZZTTT-AAAAAAUGGGGHHHHHH!!!! never enters into the equation.
I think you're pretty close. As the article indicates, burnout happens when your results don't match your expectations:
Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback).
If you don't care about your work, it's a strong indicator that you have little control over the type of work you're doing. If you're working 100 hours a week and loving it, it can't be just about the money. Sure, the money is a motivator, but it also means you're doing something that strongly appeals to you in its own right.
So, let me understand: you're peeved by the concept that a good employer actually takes the employee's emotional needs into consideration?
If you find the idea threatening, maybe it's because you're one of those not-so-good employers, who treats his employees as nothing but a means to an end. If I were someone like that, I'd certainly get annoyed with people constantly treating my indifference to their feelings as some sort of deficiency.
You know, I honestly care whether an employer genuinely cares for my happiness, or whether they're only trying to keep me happy because they calculate that I'll make them more money that way. I can generally tell the difference. So if an employer is only faking their interest in me because it makes financial sense to do so, then I'm happy to fake interest in their success for as long as it serves my interest. In the long term, it's far better for employers to try and breed genuine loyalty, and that requires giving genuine loyalty in return. To do that, you must treat your employees as full-fledged human beings with complex emotional needs. Treating your workers as mere contractants in a labor-for-wages agreement is about as likely a route to success as treating your wife as a contractant in a sex-for-security agreement.
In general, I would agree. But sometimes, if your thoughts on religion and business and politics are far beyond the realm of sanity that everyone around you dies a little inside every time you start talking about the subjects, then maybe you're better off.
I'm not saying this is one of those times, but check the guy's posting history and decide for yourself.
You lost me. Where did he say he would be giving money to the open source projects? All he's talking about is trying to contribute patches, which shouldn't cost him anything.
Even better than that, it's possible that the patches will not only make it into the trunk, but actually get improved there. Say you upload a Perl module for handling some obscure file format. Somebody else might have the same problem, but also have a group of files that exercise other corner cases of that format. When you go to upgrade your software, suddenly it handles all these corner cases, without your company having to lift a finger.
I'll admit, I hadn't looked at the second link. But I did look at the first, and given the rather overhyped nature of the cases I was familiar with, it seemed very likely that many of the other cases would be similarly suspect. Now I'm looking at your second list of Incredible Victories of the Forces of Good against the Evil Terrorists, and I'm seeing a helluva lot of two and five year sentences.
The second link also lists the shoe bomber guy, Johnny Lindh, and Zacarias Moussaoui, none of whom demonstrated much competence in their chosen profession of evil masterminds. I'm not saying that people who try to blow up airplanes don't belong in prison. But the Bush Administration has been pretending that these people are so dangerous, so evil, so utterly brillant and diabolical, that it would be suicide to give them the rights accorded to your average, run-of-the-mill serial killer. But now they're telling us that we're supposed to give up civil rights with thousand year track records (habeas corpus) in order to nab the shoe bomber guy?
If you're going to trample the Constitution in order to conduct a "war on terror," the least you can do is show better results than this.
Wikipedia is reporting that the population of Stephen Colbert's stage crew has tripled in the last six months. I knew he was successful, but that's amazing!
You may be overestimating the value of formal training. You can get a lot of mileage just by installing it on your own, getting it talking to the rest of the network, and then eventually finding some non-critical services to run on it.
One approach would be using virtual machine to run Linux, or installing Linux and running Windows in a VM. Bochs and xen are both candidates on the Linux side. Or if you're willing to plunk down some money, you can get Microsoft Virtual Machine or VMWare.
Who are you proposing as candidates for switching? The kids? The teachers? The behind-the-scenes infrastructure? I think the first and last cases would be easiest, depending on what the kids actually use the computers for and what sort of network services you're offering. Teachers will be the toughest.
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When your country is spending as much on its military as is the rest of the world *combined*, "National Defense" is an obvious euphemism. It's a very expensive jobs program. It's a very expensive scientific research program. It's a hidden subsidy for the aerospace industry. It's a program for enforcing the interests of our corporations abroad.
Now, which of the listed things passes the muster of your strict constructionist views?
When we pare our forces and expenditures back to the point where we can only repel simultaneous invasions by the other four biggest armies in the world, then I'll believe you're sincere about all this talk about "legitimate constitutional responsibilities." If protecting American access to natural resources abroad qualifies as legitimate, then your position isn't coherent.
That whooshing sound you heard was a joke flying overhead.
Read it again, paying more attention to the "quotes".
You say they're "planning" on it, when in reality they simply understand that they won't be able to prevent it.
You are a disturbingly hateful person. Anyone who could look at a situation this tragic and find a way to blame the victims has lost all my respect. In these situations, family is their primary resource for survival, and asking them to choose to curtail their reproduction (without giving them so much as a "have you tried oral sex?" in support) is tantamount to asking them to commit suicide. In short, it's inhumane.
Even among affluent, white, educated Americans, you find people who theoretically understand the problems of overpopulation, but decide to have five or six kids anyways because A) they want them, and B) they figure their contribution to the overall problem is minimal either way. But you want to villify starving, uneducated people for making basically the same decision on far less information.
You say you've been hearing about the project for a long time, but that's not the same as knowing a lot about it. A few reasons these laptops won't be stolen:
1) There isn't much first world demand for them, since first worlders will be able to get a lot more computer for a couple hundred dollars more.
2) The computers are somewhat underpowered for many uses, so people in the third world who have money won't want them much either.
3) Have you seen them? Built for tiny hands, with a very distinctive profile. You see one of these suckers at the flea market, everyone around you will know that somewhere along the line it was stolen from a child.
4) The project itself is working on security features that will disable the computer if it goes too long without being in range of the school.
It sounds like you think "they haven't put a lot of thought into it" because you haven't been reading the thinking they *have* been putting into it.
To repeat it for the n+1th time: These laptops aren't being sent to starving children. They are being sent to places where the basic needs (food, water, shelter) are taken care of.
You're also assuming that the primary purpose of giving people computers is to teach computer skills, and that , which is fallacious. The goal is to use them as a tool to teach things like basic literacy, math, etc., as well as practical skills, and to help the users communicate with the outside world. The project won't be a failure if the kids don't grow up to get a job that requires using the computer all day. The project will be a failure if the kids aren't better educated than they would have been without the computers.
Finally, why make it a choice between giving starving children money to eat and giving laptops to the children who can already get food? Why, in the name of any god with a shred of compassion, aren't we already feeding the starving? Oh, but that's too pie-in-the-sky. I must be one of those brainless liberals, right? Wrong. Perfectly reasonable estimates have suggested that the first world could eliminate extreme poverty (defined as living on $1/day or less) by sacrificing less than 1% of our GDP to the cause. If the U.S. economy grows by 2% a year on average, we could be doing our share by choosing the same standard of living we had... six months ago?
Too much of a sacrifice, that. I'm just a sentimental, bleeding hearted moron.
The "fine article" (every article on the site is one swipe at OLPC or another) basically assumes a bunch of wrongheaded things:
1) The laptops are worthless without Internet access. (they're not)
2) Internet access will cost $135/year (the OLPC project is already investigating ways to drive this waaaaaay down, and they have a deal in place to provide many of the target children with $1/year access (which the "fine article" assumes will fall apart).
3) Without training, the laptops are worthless (NOT). Training will be hugely expensive (I find his reasoning suspect). Training costs will recur every year. (WTF?)
4) Five laptops will need full replacements every year. While that may be true, the justification ignores all the effort the OLPC people have put into making these things user-servicable, and hardening them against heat and dust.
#2 is the biggie, since it provides the bulk of the TCO figure. It's also incredibly suspicious, since it both assumes that the current Internet arrangements will fall apart, and that everyone will have to fall back on the worst-case scenario of $135/year. It fails to recognize that costs will be far lower in some areas.
Quick counterpoint: The reason these countries have so many children is precisely because they suck so badly. If you want to ensure that two children are alive to take care of you in your old age, you have to have five or seven. Couple that with a lack of access to effective family planning measures, and you've got a population explosion on your hands. When people feel more secure about their future, they tend to have two or three children, not seven or ten.
Thank you for this post. I can only imagine how much more successful the OLPC project will be if the computers *do* come with manuals and on-screen instructions. And if they can successfully connect to the wider Internet, a lot of these concerns should just solve themselves.
You could argue that, but most Japanese people would disagree with you. In their view, Japan was already seeking an end to hostilities. Certainly, in the months leading up to the bombing, nobody in the Japanese government believed that they could win the war; those who insisted that they continue fighting were mostly hoping that in doing so they could convince the United States to give them more generous terms of surrender. Eisenhower shared this view.
On the other hand, the embargo alone was killing people at a rapid clip, and the conventional bombing that would have been needed to sustain pressure wasn't exactly casualty-free either. Meanwhile, the Soviets were obliterating Japanese forces on the Asian mainland (which itself was both increasing pressure to surrender and inflicting casualties).
In my mind, the sad thing is that the biggest term of surrender the Japanese government was holding out for was that they would keep their emperor. But the U.S. insisted on "unconditional surrender." Strangely enough, guess which country still has an emperor? His role is greatly reduced, but who knows if their government wouldn't have accepted that as a term of surrender.
In my mind, the use of nuclear weapons is inherently immoral, and we should never have dropped them. But the calculus needed to determine whether the decision eventually saved lives is far too complicated for anyone to claim the answer with any certainty. Nonetheless, it is a sign of our own hubris that we so often seem to take the attitude that the Japanese should be grateful that we nuked them.
Ah, the old "aid to Africa doesn't work, because they just don't have the same decency and respect for the rule of law and I'll bet they don't even play baseball or love their children" chestnut.
Yes, many governments in Africa are corrupt. That's why aid needs to come with oversight. Not oversight of the "We'll say how you spend it" variety, because that just leads to 'solutions' that don't have much effect on the ground. Instead, we ask them to come up with a plan that will do something like fighting poverty or AIDS or illiteracy, and then verify that the money is being spent the way they said. That would take a big investment on our part, but it would be far more effective than the crap the IMF has been pulling (see Stiglitz for more info).
If you look at the rankings from Transparency International, the governments in Africa aren't significantly more corrupt than the governments in the Middle East that we're happy to work with (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait).
All those things you talk about, like the rule of law and an independent judiciary? They are impossible without a financially stable government. If your government is so strapped for cash that there isn't enough money to pay people (for example, because your government is saddled with huge foreign aid debts), then it makes sense to turn a blind eye while your judges and police officers take bribes, because it's the only way to keep them on the job. To pretend that aid can wait until these countries have successfully developed beyond a culture of corruption is naive.
Increasing the amount and effectiveness of our aid to Africa is in our own best interests. Poverty is a great radicalizer, so it's a form of counterterrorism. Further, China is already sucking up to Africa to ensure its continued access to resources. If we don't join that effort, an entire continent will remember the fact.
We knew Saddam was years away from getting nukes. We knew that most of the evidence that he was actively pursuing nukes was crap (yellowcake from Niger) or wishful thinking (aluminum tubes can only be used for uranium purification! No, really!)
I agree that Iran shouldn't be allowed to have nuclear weapons, but Bush's misadventures in Iraq has actually made it more difficult to stop that from happening. Our military is too busy with Iraq, our populace will have zero enthusiasm for military action against Iran, and according to the new study group report, we need to be making diplomatic gestures towards Iran and Syria to get things under control. I wonder what Iran will ask for in those negotiations...
Iran did not cause September 11th. Iraq did not cause September 11th. Most of the hijackers (and most of the money for the operation) came from Saudi Arabia. If there was one thing that could have prevented September 11th, it wasn't "more military spending" but "a president who actually took briefings seriously". "You've covered your ass," my ass.
Also, the Iraq war seriously degraded our ability to respond to Hurricane Katrina. All the troops and helicopters that could have been keeping the peace and rescuing people stranded on rooftops and providing shelter? Busy with the Iraq thing. I don't know why you even brought up the Wikipedia death toll article. You're probably one of those people who suggests that it dishonors the sacrifices of the American soldiers killed in Iraq if we pull out before "the mission is complete." Yet you're more than happy to dishonor those very sacrifices by claiming that until we get a Vietnam-esque body count, it's really no big deal.
So, what you're saying is, you're in favor of government-subsidized scientific research. Cool.
Please, back up your claim that the Army has made huge advances in the field of education, and that these advances have been widely adopted in places like India and China. As someone who has been through a couple of Army schools, I never saw any particularly advanced educational technology (unless you count the Scantron sheet as an Armed Forces invention). The schools did a good job teaching us, but their methods always seemed pretty straightforward, and I attribute their success to the highly focused, disciplined atmosphere.
I'm less skeptical of your claim that the Armed Services is pioneering new energy sources, but I'd be interested in seeing some backup for that.
Finally, I don't think that the military has been a major force driving computer technology since their widespread adoption by private industry in the 70's and 80's. If they were really the driving force, do you think they'd have let all our semiconducter manufacturing capacity go to Malaysia?
The problem with your claims (besides the fact that they're entirely unsourced, and most of the advances would have been made independent of the military) is that we're dropping $400B into the military every single year! If you throw that much money at a particular set of problems, you can't help but get some interesting advances out of it. The military is a crappy research and development program. The military is a crappy jobs program. The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things, and I don't think it needs to apologize for that. But we spend as much on military expenditures as the rest of the world combined, and there is no need for that.
The military-industrial complex is out of control, and needs to be drastically scaled back. Unchecked government spending is doing grave harm to our national interests, and I believe that drastically reducing military spending is the best way to do that.
The student was of Iranian descent. Not that you would care. Since you obviously don't believe that racial profiling exists (or at least that victims should just suck it up), the fact that we've been singling out people like him as special security concerns for the last half decade is probably not relevant to you.
Despite the fact that you weren't there, you're asserting that he was simply being asked to follow the same rules as everyone else. Was he? Did the library staff ask for his ID also ask the people around him to prove that they belonged there as well? Does the library do comprehensive sweeps, or do they spot check people who light up their "evil detector?"
You don't know, and it's naive of you to assume. But let's pretend that the library staff was being perfectly evenhanded in their enforcement of a basically stupid rule (and it is indeed a stupid rule, because ownership of a student ID doesn't even remotely demonstrate that the bearer is not a psycho/murderer/rapist). The student responded harshly when they tried to enforce it on him. Once again, you make a stupid assumption: that he reacted that way because he felt his race entitled him to special treatment. But if he felt he was being singled out for special enforcement, then he was merely asking to be treated like everyone else. Further, if he was protesting the authoritarian stupidity of the law, then he acted because he felt that *nobody* should have the rule enforced on them. Far from acting from a position of superiority and entitlement, I'm sure the student would have been happy if other students asked not to have to follow the rule either.
You act as though any resistance to legal authority is wrong, but civil disobedience has a long and inspiring history. This wasn't exactly a Rosa Parks moment, but the student (whom you unconvincingly tried to paint as a thief of electronic gadgetry) was standing up for his convictions. I commend him for that. The officer, meanwhile, was standing up for his conviction that anyone who disrespects him deserves a good smackdown. You commend him for that.
You are wrong about pretty much every specific of the case you bring up.
... sniff... fragile egos of those brave men in blue.
1) The student didn't forget his ID. He refused to show it, because it's a stupid rule and because he felt he was being singled out for his ethnicity.
2) The police didn't ask to see his ID. A librarian did. By the time the police got there, the student was heading out the door, but the cop couldn't resist putting a hand on him. That's no way to treat someone who is already complying with your requests, because it escalates the situation. The cops escalated the situation repeatedly.
3) The students surrounding the cops seemed far less concerned about their term papers than about the flagrant abuse the cops were inflicting on an unresisting student who posed no threat to them.
4) You say that after the first tazering, he still didn't "grow up." In fact, the problem was that he didn't *get* up, which is hard to do after being hit with a stun gun, and even harder after three or four blasts. Of course, at this point he was already handcuffed, and couldn't pose any threat to anything except for the
5) The cop in question was actually the reason the UCLA cops were carrying tasers in the first place. He'd previously been suspended for three months after fatally shooting a homeless man. I'm sure the guy gave the cop lip, though. So he obviously deserved it.
I'm amazed that you're more concerned with a student being "a whiny bitch" than a cop denigrating his own profession and abusing a citizen. But given how you recount the events with such utter relish, my amazement is tempered by the realization that you're basically an idiot, and your opinion doesn't count for much.
I've been following this thread. I've decided you're clearly a lunatic. I'm sure your mother disagrees, however, and thinks you're a wonderful young man.
There were plenty of officers there to carry him out. There was no need to use "pain compliance," because there was no real need for the student's immediate compliance, so long as he wasn't physically violent. Anyone who can't handle getting yelled at without breaking out the painstick is a... how should I put this? A wuss. As is anyone who gets a raging hard-on from the idea of vigilante cops dishing out retribution rather than doing their jobs.
P.S.: The blank is filled in with, "You're under arrest for tresspassing. You have the right to remain silent. [and so on]" If he continues to give the officer lip, the officer can politely ask if he also wants to be booked on resisting arrest.
Notice that BZZZZTTT-AAAAAAUGGGGHHHHHH!!!! never enters into the equation.
If you don't care about your work, it's a strong indicator that you have little control over the type of work you're doing. If you're working 100 hours a week and loving it, it can't be just about the money. Sure, the money is a motivator, but it also means you're doing something that strongly appeals to you in its own right.
So, let me understand: you're peeved by the concept that a good employer actually takes the employee's emotional needs into consideration?
If you find the idea threatening, maybe it's because you're one of those not-so-good employers, who treats his employees as nothing but a means to an end. If I were someone like that, I'd certainly get annoyed with people constantly treating my indifference to their feelings as some sort of deficiency.
You know, I honestly care whether an employer genuinely cares for my happiness, or whether they're only trying to keep me happy because they calculate that I'll make them more money that way. I can generally tell the difference. So if an employer is only faking their interest in me because it makes financial sense to do so, then I'm happy to fake interest in their success for as long as it serves my interest. In the long term, it's far better for employers to try and breed genuine loyalty, and that requires giving genuine loyalty in return. To do that, you must treat your employees as full-fledged human beings with complex emotional needs. Treating your workers as mere contractants in a labor-for-wages agreement is about as likely a route to success as treating your wife as a contractant in a sex-for-security agreement.
In general, I would agree. But sometimes, if your thoughts on religion and business and politics are far beyond the realm of sanity that everyone around you dies a little inside every time you start talking about the subjects, then maybe you're better off.
I'm not saying this is one of those times, but check the guy's posting history and decide for yourself.
dada21 wrote a post, and I find myself completely agreeing with it.
Have we entered some sort of bizarro-world? If the next news item I see is "Bush Considered Shoo-in for Mt. Rushmore," that oughta cinch it.
You lost me. Where did he say he would be giving money to the open source projects? All he's talking about is trying to contribute patches, which shouldn't cost him anything.
Even better than that, it's possible that the patches will not only make it into the trunk, but actually get improved there. Say you upload a Perl module for handling some obscure file format. Somebody else might have the same problem, but also have a group of files that exercise other corner cases of that format. When you go to upgrade your software, suddenly it handles all these corner cases, without your company having to lift a finger.
I'll admit, I hadn't looked at the second link. But I did look at the first, and given the rather overhyped nature of the cases I was familiar with, it seemed very likely that many of the other cases would be similarly suspect. Now I'm looking at your second list of Incredible Victories of the Forces of Good against the Evil Terrorists, and I'm seeing a helluva lot of two and five year sentences.
The second link also lists the shoe bomber guy, Johnny Lindh, and Zacarias Moussaoui, none of whom demonstrated much competence in their chosen profession of evil masterminds. I'm not saying that people who try to blow up airplanes don't belong in prison. But the Bush Administration has been pretending that these people are so dangerous, so evil, so utterly brillant and diabolical, that it would be suicide to give them the rights accorded to your average, run-of-the-mill serial killer. But now they're telling us that we're supposed to give up civil rights with thousand year track records (habeas corpus) in order to nab the shoe bomber guy?
If you're going to trample the Constitution in order to conduct a "war on terror," the least you can do is show better results than this.
Wikipedia is reporting that the population of Stephen Colbert's stage crew has tripled in the last six months. I knew he was successful, but that's amazing!
/me blinks.
I'm suddenly feeling very confused.
You may be overestimating the value of formal training. You can get a lot of mileage just by installing it on your own, getting it talking to the rest of the network, and then eventually finding some non-critical services to run on it.
One approach would be using virtual machine to run Linux, or installing Linux and running Windows in a VM. Bochs and xen are both candidates on the Linux side. Or if you're willing to plunk down some money, you can get Microsoft Virtual Machine or VMWare.
Who are you proposing as candidates for switching? The kids? The teachers? The behind-the-scenes infrastructure? I think the first and last cases would be easiest, depending on what the kids actually use the computers for and what sort of network services you're offering. Teachers will be the toughest.