Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
Well, fuck you too for the ad-hominem.
That's not ad-hominem, merely a statement of observation.
Seriously, I can't believe you're so satisfied with the status quo.
This is a strawman.
At no point did I say I was happy with the status quo. I simply questioned your assumptions of this Fair Tax as being a silver bullet. Your argument towards the status quo is basically that taxes distort markets, and can be worked around, but at no point does the Fair Tax solve either issue. Therefore, I do not feel it is a solution to the problem you present.
I simply feel the real problem is something different entirely.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
The chief benefit of the FairTax, is that it removes taxation as a consideration for investments.
That same benefit could be derived by treating all income the same, regardless of source. One problem we have today is all the tax loopholes congress crooks have put in for their lobbyist buddies.
The FairTax is a retail-level sales tax only.
Yes, which means it impacts heavily consideration for purchases. Small clue here... purchases are what drive the economy, not investments. This is why I compared it to Europe, which has an incredibly high savings rate, but low spending as a result the economy remains much more stagnant than it needs to be.
No tax on capital gains, no reason to invent paper losses to offset taxable income, no benefit to keeping your money in Bermuda, etc.
Right, except now we've got this huge black market created sourced out of Bermuda for purchases.
Eliminating income and investment taxes alone will most likely result in the re-patriation of some ten trillion dollars currently held in offshore accounts.
Coupled with an ex-patriation of some 20 trillion dollars resulting from people buying merchandise in Mexico while on vacation there.
Seriously, I can't believe you are this naive. Think about what you are saying for a moment, and ponder why you want to amputate a leg to deal with a blister.
I'm sorry, but I thought you were interested in a serious discussion, but clearly that is not the case since you're whining about Waco... a clear example of the extremism resulting from Republican law-enforcement policies.
Ruby Ridge happened before Clinton took office. Don't even bring it up.
Waco happened weeks after. This wasn't Clinton or Reno who made that decision, it was an ongoing investigation that they just happened to let continue. However following that disaster there was a real attempt to clean house.
The truth is that both parties do the same things. The Democrats are better in a few degrees, not principles, and that really does depend on the area you're talking about because they are far worse than the Republicans in their fair share of areas as well.
The truth is, you've been brainwashed by G Gordon Liddy and the other fruitcakes.
Spend some time looking for the facts and analyzing them in context. If you're getting your news fed to you by fruitcake sources, chances are you aren't thinking for yourself.
We have US soldiers who are putting their lives on the line for Duty, Honor and Country.
Meanwhile we've got a bunch of mercs running about the country, stirring trouble up, because they can make a few bucks. No duty, ho honor, no regard for their country, and no regard for the sacrifice that our soldiers make.
I say screw 'em as well. Mercs are the bane of a regular army. The cockroaches of war.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
I don't find the idea of a consumption tax to be any less awful than an income tax. In fact, I think it would be disasterous to our economy. If you want to see this model in action, look at Europe.
I'd go back to reading a bit of Adam Smith, if I were you. The reason why the income tax was his preference was because it was less obtrusive, and as such had the least impact on economic growth. Now the reason why Libertarians have been pushing for a consumption tax is that they want to show everybody just how costly taxes are. That is, make you think about it every day.
But it's a fantasy... we still have the fundamental problem that people don't want to pay taxes, y et they want all kinds of government services. These two demands are at polar opposites to one another. The Libertarian tax proposal isn't going to stop this.
The problem we have right now is the REpublicans broke the system of checks and balances. Rather than complaining about spending and taxes all the time, they decided they could have it both ways... lower taxes and increase spending. The voters would keep voting them into office, because they didn't notice the problem this causes in any immediate fashion.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm a libertarian in the small-l sense. While in 2004 the Libertarian party did make an attempt to be serious, I generally find that it's mostly filled with college kids who think the world is simple and don't really spend much time thinking.
Consider this line off the website: "The Libertarian Party would increase employment opportunities by slashing taxes and government red tape. We would also end the welfare system with its culture of dependence and hopelessness."
Now we tried this once, a long time ago and it resulted in a series of boom and bust cycles made most famous with the Great Depression. That's not to say I necessarily support the Great Society programs in entirety, but I do support the safety net. In fact I would argue that the safety net allows the economy to grow faster, as people are willing to take risks because they know if it doesn't pan out they aren't entirely fucked. Now obviously there is balance, but eliminating it is as bad as over doing it.
Anyway, this is the kind of policy ideas you come up with when you analyze something, see one small symptom and then decide that is the disease. It's like a doctor amputating a leg because you've got a blister on your foot and then saying "See, the problem with the blister is solved!"
I don't agree with the Right and Left dichotomies, but the Libertarian party isn't the answer either.
When kos complaints about political consultants, he's primarily complaining about thieves and obsessives.
Re:Interesting point...
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Perhaps.
Most of kos's pushes for candidates are fringe. Promoting a primary challenger to Lieberman democrats and such. They haven't been successful perhaps, but the point again is to change the dynamics of the discussion. He wants to see competitive primaries and general elections. By making things competitive, you force the opposition to defend on multiple fronts.
I'm not sure where the freakin hippy comment comes from. If you've ever seen a picture of kos, or myself or numerous others now involved in the debate. We ain't hippies. We also didn't wear pink polo's in school either.
Honestly, I think your opinion here is not quite accurate. That is, you are building a stereotype without merit based on a perception issue.
There's a lot more here that I could debate. But consider the alternative of Republican economic policies. Do you think they are free-market and pro-individual? At this point, the people I know who are progressives simply know that the Republican policies don't work and they are looking for an answer to combat them with.
The Locke arguments do work with this group, when framed right.
Although I really don't get your Windows NT point, since NT is a distributed control environment.
But I think it kind of misses the point of what kos is about.
It's not so much about winning elections, but rather changing the dynamics of the debate. Changing the dynamics of the debate is a longer term strategy than just winning an election.
While I haven't read this book, my impression is that is what it is about. Not on how to win elections, but rather on how to influence direction.
Are you saying the Weekly World News is wrong, and President Bush didn't approve a national chain of brothels to help finance the National Debt?
Say it ain't so!
In all seriousness... CHB is more reliable than Weekly World News, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page, but it is probably less reliable than the National Enquirer.
Reason: It's a new development. I've lived here now for about 15 months, construction started about 30 months ago.
maps.google.com - Thinks I am trying to look something up in France.
www.mapquest.com - Places a really nice pushpin right where my house is, but there are no roads there for the development. So that's interesting, graphics out of sync with database.
maps.live.com - It's trying to find something over in a town 10 miles away. A restaurant with a name sounding similar to my road.
maps.yahoo.com - BINGO! Found my house, displays the roads which have been here for a year, even if it doesn't have the most recently built roads in there. Yahoo! has earned eternal loyalty from this customer for knowing where I live.
Another friend of mine lives in a similar situation. New development. He tried calling Pizza Hut to order delivery pizza. Response was he wasn't in there service area. 3 months later, same answer. 6 months later same answer. His neighbor's kid actually works delivery for the pizza hut and knows where the house is, but the computer system which hasn't been updated in years won't allow the order because it can't locate the address.
But on the bright side, the computers are probably updated more frequently than paper maps stuck in my glovebox.
Interesting that he didn't mention that the difference between 6.1 and 7.1 is the extra rear channel is simply a mirror of the first. That is there are only 6.1 discrete channels. With 7.1 you're just adding a second speaker in back reproducing the same sound.
7.1 is only useful if you have a really large room.
I have 5.1 right now, but my Denon receiver does support 6.1, and I have contemplated adding another speaker in back, but my room is small so what's the point. I'd be better off with a subwoofer first me thinks.
Agreed. My Sony HDTV I bought back in 2002 only has component video, and I have no intention of buying anything new until this set dies. In say 5-10 years.
The sad fact for the movie people is... I don't pirate movies or music. But they don't seem to care and they've decided to treat me like a criminal anyhow.
So I guess that means, I don't buy their new stuff.
Sounds like a pretty stupid business decision. Screw over the early adopters who were the people most likely to want to buy your new product.
Agreed, it's definately hard to branch out sometimes within a company. I guess it depends on the company and what opportunities are available around you. I think if a company doesn't provide a path for this, it's not a good company to work for.
Even then, sometimes opportunities made available are not good ones and you have to pick and choose. I had an option a while back to work with a particular product, but thinking about it I decided that would stick me into a small niche I'd probably never get back out of and I didn't find it that interesting.
You're absolutely correct. Which is why I feel in the tech field, you ought not allow yourself to get pigeonholed. When the world starts moving a different direction, you need to move with it and keep your skills up to date.
It's difficult, because it takes you out of your comfort zone, but you have to do it. Even though there is still work out there for some old system, eventually that's going to dry up, and you'll be left holding a bag of useless knowledge.
The experience is still useful though, and applicable towards new technologies. The lessons I learned watching system performance on DECstations back in the early 1990s is still applicable today when we're trying to watch performance on Windows servers using SQL Analysis Services 2005 today. The computers are faster, bigger and the technology is vastly improved... but an I/O bottleneck is still a bottleneck and the tell tale signs of what limit your hitting is still very similar.
I think you've brought up a very good point though, something people in the tech world need to be aware of if they want to remain employed.
I would have to agree that once you get a job, the college degree on your resume isn't all that important compared to your real job experience.
But I also want to counter the "education doesn't matter" bullshit argument.
I work with several people who do not have degrees in Computer Science or Computer Engineering who do fairly well with their tech jobs. Until you get into something that deals with knowledge of how the computer works internally rather than experimental knowledge gained by trying things. For instance, once I got into an argument with someone once about the behavior of a system under load and he didn't understand the concept of context switching or semaphores. No clue, never heard of it, didn't even understand how multitasking was handled at the CPU level. Yet, he kept trying to argue that the behavior we were seeing was perfectly reasonable rather than a bug.
It depends. As long as you know the limits of your knowledge, then fine. But sometimes the less you know, the less likely you are to realize you know less.:-(
One of the recent buzzwords in the industry is Service Oriented Architecture.
That is, if your business logic is wrapped up in various services and events, things you can publish and subscribe to... something. It doesn't matter whether it's written in Java, C#, or COBOL.
I'd say anybody who thinks code reuse involves cut-n-paste, has no coherent vision.
Standardization lasts for a while. Then the paradigm changes. I remember back in 1998 hearing some old greybeard rant about how all development at the company was done in COBOL on the mainframe. That was the standard. Anything else was verboten!
NLite saved me last week. I was trying to install XP on my machine after having replaced the motherboard. I had configured my two SATA drives in a RAID configuration using the built in Intel RAID controller. This required me to use the RAID driver during the install of XP(The F6-Additional Drivers prompt), but this being a modern computer I had decided to not install a floppy drive.
So I went to my laptop, took NLite and extracted my XP w/SP2 CD, added the additional drivers, and then created an ISO image with the new super CD.
Worked like a charm. I liked NLite in that it handled all the editing of config files, whatever for me. Saved a lot of time and effort.
Why conservative politicians don't post commentary on conservative blogs, because the commentators on those sites are frequently disappointed out government isn't more like the Nazis rather than less.(don't believe me, check out lgf, freeperville)
Glenn Reynolds explained yesterday during a panel on blogger ethics that he doesn't allow comments on instapundit because he doesn't want to be associated with their extremism. Which is interesting, as he frequently links to such examples on other blogs to prove his own perverted points. So he's afraid others might do to him what he does to them, I guess. Sort of a reverse Golden Rule.
Frankly I don't care what commentators say, and in many cases the extremist comments on these blogs are actually coming from the opposition in an attempt to make people look ridiculous. It's just fucking gotcha politics. Let's deal with the real party platforms and issues, and ignore the lunatics on the fringes who don't get listened to anyway.
And this definately goes to the lack of critical thinking which can come into play with partisanship.
Now I'm a supporter of owning guns, and certainly think they can work for self defense in some cases. that being said, John Lott's study conveniently ignored other variables such as economic conditions, additional cops on the street, etc.
I live in Minnesota. We have had a concealed carry law now in this state for about three years now. For the most part I don't think it's really caused any problems, other than some confusion and at least one dead bouncer at a bar.
But in the past year, crime has increased. Murders are up a bit, but so also are burglaries. Heck just the other night there were two armed robberies of hotels, which is something kind of unusual.
So does this disprove John Lott's theory? That armed citizens increase crime, rather than decrease? I don't think so, rather I think it's more directly related to the increased population and the decreased number of cops by comparison.
Netscape 4.x started down the path of trying to implement CSS before the spec was finalized. They implemented it the way Netscape had advocated the spec be written.
When the spec was finalized, it was a totally different spec than what Netscape wanted. Instead of being ahead of the game, they got caught with their pants down.
Which is why we had the days of "Best when viewed with Netscape", etc.
We used to have a guy working at our company who was a complete jackass and a slacker. He was also Japanese. He used to brag, "They can't fire me. I'm the only asian in the department."
He was let go about two years ago.
There may be a handful of people who think that's the way the system works.
It does not.
I've found an awful lot of people who think they are being discriminated against, white, black, asian, whatever simply didn't have the skills necessary for the job. Slashdot had a story a few years ago about a study that showed the more incompetent you are, the less likely you are to realize it.
I see it mentioned in a working group, but I see no confirmation this is part of any final adopted spec.
That's my only concern... that Mozilla is once again off on a path of implementing stuff before the spec is adopted, and we're going to have "Best if using Mozilla" icons showing up on websites.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, fuck you too for the ad-hominem.
That's not ad-hominem, merely a statement of observation.
Seriously, I can't believe you're so satisfied with the status quo.
This is a strawman.
At no point did I say I was happy with the status quo. I simply questioned your assumptions of this Fair Tax as being a silver bullet. Your argument towards the status quo is basically that taxes distort markets, and can be worked around, but at no point does the Fair Tax solve either issue. Therefore, I do not feel it is a solution to the problem you present.
I simply feel the real problem is something different entirely.
The chief benefit of the FairTax, is that it removes taxation as a consideration for investments.
That same benefit could be derived by treating all income the same, regardless of source. One problem we have today is all the tax loopholes congress crooks have put in for their lobbyist buddies.
The FairTax is a retail-level sales tax only.
Yes, which means it impacts heavily consideration for purchases. Small clue here... purchases are what drive the economy, not investments. This is why I compared it to Europe, which has an incredibly high savings rate, but low spending as a result the economy remains much more stagnant than it needs to be.
No tax on capital gains, no reason to invent paper losses to offset taxable income, no benefit to keeping your money in Bermuda, etc.
Right, except now we've got this huge black market created sourced out of Bermuda for purchases.
Eliminating income and investment taxes alone will most likely result in the re-patriation of some ten trillion dollars currently held in offshore accounts.
Coupled with an ex-patriation of some 20 trillion dollars resulting from people buying merchandise in Mexico while on vacation there.
Seriously, I can't believe you are this naive. Think about what you are saying for a moment, and ponder why you want to amputate a leg to deal with a blister.
I'm sorry, but I thought you were interested in a serious discussion, but clearly that is not the case since you're whining about Waco... a clear example of the extremism resulting from Republican law-enforcement policies.
Ruby Ridge happened before Clinton took office. Don't even bring it up.
Waco happened weeks after. This wasn't Clinton or Reno who made that decision, it was an ongoing investigation that they just happened to let continue. However following that disaster there was a real attempt to clean house.
The truth is that both parties do the same things. The Democrats are better in a few degrees, not principles, and that really does depend on the area you're talking about because they are far worse than the Republicans in their fair share of areas as well.
The truth is, you've been brainwashed by G Gordon Liddy and the other fruitcakes.
Spend some time looking for the facts and analyzing them in context. If you're getting your news fed to you by fruitcake sources, chances are you aren't thinking for yourself.
We have US soldiers who are putting their lives on the line for Duty, Honor and Country.
Meanwhile we've got a bunch of mercs running about the country, stirring trouble up, because they can make a few bucks. No duty, ho honor, no regard for their country, and no regard for the sacrifice that our soldiers make.
I say screw 'em as well. Mercs are the bane of a regular army. The cockroaches of war.
I don't find the idea of a consumption tax to be any less awful than an income tax. In fact, I think it would be disasterous to our economy. If you want to see this model in action, look at Europe.
I'd go back to reading a bit of Adam Smith, if I were you. The reason why the income tax was his preference was because it was less obtrusive, and as such had the least impact on economic growth. Now the reason why Libertarians have been pushing for a consumption tax is that they want to show everybody just how costly taxes are. That is, make you think about it every day.
But it's a fantasy... we still have the fundamental problem that people don't want to pay taxes, y et they want all kinds of government services. These two demands are at polar opposites to one another. The Libertarian tax proposal isn't going to stop this.
The problem we have right now is the REpublicans broke the system of checks and balances. Rather than complaining about spending and taxes all the time, they decided they could have it both ways... lower taxes and increase spending. The voters would keep voting them into office, because they didn't notice the problem this causes in any immediate fashion.
I'm a libertarian in the small-l sense. While in 2004 the Libertarian party did make an attempt to be serious, I generally find that it's mostly filled with college kids who think the world is simple and don't really spend much time thinking.
Consider this line off the website:
"The Libertarian Party would increase employment opportunities by slashing taxes and government red tape. We would also end the welfare system with its culture of dependence and hopelessness."
Now we tried this once, a long time ago and it resulted in a series of boom and bust cycles made most famous with the Great Depression. That's not to say I necessarily support the Great Society programs in entirety, but I do support the safety net. In fact I would argue that the safety net allows the economy to grow faster, as people are willing to take risks because they know if it doesn't pan out they aren't entirely fucked. Now obviously there is balance, but eliminating it is as bad as over doing it.
Anyway, this is the kind of policy ideas you come up with when you analyze something, see one small symptom and then decide that is the disease. It's like a doctor amputating a leg because you've got a blister on your foot and then saying "See, the problem with the blister is solved!"
I don't agree with the Right and Left dichotomies, but the Libertarian party isn't the answer either.
I'm not sure I understand.
When kos complaints about political consultants, he's primarily complaining about thieves and obsessives.
Perhaps.
Most of kos's pushes for candidates are fringe. Promoting a primary challenger to Lieberman democrats and such. They haven't been successful perhaps, but the point again is to change the dynamics of the discussion. He wants to see competitive primaries and general elections. By making things competitive, you force the opposition to defend on multiple fronts.
I'm not sure where the freakin hippy comment comes from. If you've ever seen a picture of kos, or myself or numerous others now involved in the debate. We ain't hippies. We also didn't wear pink polo's in school either.
Honestly, I think your opinion here is not quite accurate. That is, you are building a stereotype without merit based on a perception issue.
There's a lot more here that I could debate. But consider the alternative of Republican economic policies. Do you think they are free-market and pro-individual? At this point, the people I know who are progressives simply know that the Republican policies don't work and they are looking for an answer to combat them with.
The Locke arguments do work with this group, when framed right.
Although I really don't get your Windows NT point, since NT is a distributed control environment.
But I think it kind of misses the point of what kos is about.
It's not so much about winning elections, but rather changing the dynamics of the debate. Changing the dynamics of the debate is a longer term strategy than just winning an election.
While I haven't read this book, my impression is that is what it is about. Not on how to win elections, but rather on how to influence direction.
WAIT A MINUTE!
Are you saying the Weekly World News is wrong, and President Bush didn't approve a national chain of brothels to help finance the National Debt?
Say it ain't so!
In all seriousness... CHB is more reliable than Weekly World News, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page, but it is probably less reliable than the National Enquirer.
Which mapping service can find my house.
Reason: It's a new development. I've lived here now for about 15 months, construction started about 30 months ago.
maps.google.com - Thinks I am trying to look something up in France.
www.mapquest.com - Places a really nice pushpin right where my house is, but there are no roads there for the development. So that's interesting, graphics out of sync with database.
maps.live.com - It's trying to find something over in a town 10 miles away. A restaurant with a name sounding similar to my road.
maps.yahoo.com - BINGO! Found my house, displays the roads which have been here for a year, even if it doesn't have the most recently built roads in there. Yahoo! has earned eternal loyalty from this customer for knowing where I live.
Another friend of mine lives in a similar situation. New development. He tried calling Pizza Hut to order delivery pizza. Response was he wasn't in there service area. 3 months later, same answer. 6 months later same answer. His neighbor's kid actually works delivery for the pizza hut and knows where the house is, but the computer system which hasn't been updated in years won't allow the order because it can't locate the address.
But on the bright side, the computers are probably updated more frequently than paper maps stuck in my glovebox.
Interesting that he didn't mention that the difference between 6.1 and 7.1 is the extra rear channel is simply a mirror of the first. That is there are only 6.1 discrete channels. With 7.1 you're just adding a second speaker in back reproducing the same sound.
7.1 is only useful if you have a really large room.
I have 5.1 right now, but my Denon receiver does support 6.1, and I have contemplated adding another speaker in back, but my room is small so what's the point. I'd be better off with a subwoofer first me thinks.
Agreed. My Sony HDTV I bought back in 2002 only has component video, and I have no intention of buying anything new until this set dies. In say 5-10 years.
The sad fact for the movie people is... I don't pirate movies or music. But they don't seem to care and they've decided to treat me like a criminal anyhow.
So I guess that means, I don't buy their new stuff.
Sounds like a pretty stupid business decision. Screw over the early adopters who were the people most likely to want to buy your new product.
Agreed, it's definately hard to branch out sometimes within a company. I guess it depends on the company and what opportunities are available around you. I think if a company doesn't provide a path for this, it's not a good company to work for.
Even then, sometimes opportunities made available are not good ones and you have to pick and choose. I had an option a while back to work with a particular product, but thinking about it I decided that would stick me into a small niche I'd probably never get back out of and I didn't find it that interesting.
Hi Rich! Still with visi I see. :-)
You're absolutely correct. Which is why I feel in the tech field, you ought not allow yourself to get pigeonholed. When the world starts moving a different direction, you need to move with it and keep your skills up to date.
It's difficult, because it takes you out of your comfort zone, but you have to do it. Even though there is still work out there for some old system, eventually that's going to dry up, and you'll be left holding a bag of useless knowledge.
The experience is still useful though, and applicable towards new technologies. The lessons I learned watching system performance on DECstations back in the early 1990s is still applicable today when we're trying to watch performance on Windows servers using SQL Analysis Services 2005 today. The computers are faster, bigger and the technology is vastly improved... but an I/O bottleneck is still a bottleneck and the tell tale signs of what limit your hitting is still very similar.
I think you've brought up a very good point though, something people in the tech world need to be aware of if they want to remain employed.
I would have to agree that once you get a job, the college degree on your resume isn't all that important compared to your real job experience.
:-(
But I also want to counter the "education doesn't matter" bullshit argument.
I work with several people who do not have degrees in Computer Science or Computer Engineering who do fairly well with their tech jobs. Until you get into something that deals with knowledge of how the computer works internally rather than experimental knowledge gained by trying things. For instance, once I got into an argument with someone once about the behavior of a system under load and he didn't understand the concept of context switching or semaphores. No clue, never heard of it, didn't even understand how multitasking was handled at the CPU level. Yet, he kept trying to argue that the behavior we were seeing was perfectly reasonable rather than a bug.
It depends. As long as you know the limits of your knowledge, then fine. But sometimes the less you know, the less likely you are to realize you know less.
One of the recent buzzwords in the industry is Service Oriented Architecture.
That is, if your business logic is wrapped up in various services and events, things you can publish and subscribe to... something. It doesn't matter whether it's written in Java, C#, or COBOL.
I'd say anybody who thinks code reuse involves cut-n-paste, has no coherent vision.
Standardization lasts for a while. Then the paradigm changes. I remember back in 1998 hearing some old greybeard rant about how all development at the company was done in COBOL on the mainframe. That was the standard. Anything else was verboten!
He no longer works there, thank god.
NLite saved me last week. I was trying to install XP on my machine after having replaced the motherboard. I had configured my two SATA drives in a RAID configuration using the built in Intel RAID controller. This required me to use the RAID driver during the install of XP(The F6-Additional Drivers prompt), but this being a modern computer I had decided to not install a floppy drive.
So I went to my laptop, took NLite and extracted my XP w/SP2 CD, added the additional drivers, and then created an ISO image with the new super CD.
Worked like a charm. I liked NLite in that it handled all the editing of config files, whatever for me. Saved a lot of time and effort.
Please change the title.
Child Porn is classified completely differently from Adult Porn, for good reason.
Why conservative politicians don't post commentary on conservative blogs, because the commentators on those sites are frequently disappointed out government isn't more like the Nazis rather than less.(don't believe me, check out lgf, freeperville)
Glenn Reynolds explained yesterday during a panel on blogger ethics that he doesn't allow comments on instapundit because he doesn't want to be associated with their extremism. Which is interesting, as he frequently links to such examples on other blogs to prove his own perverted points. So he's afraid others might do to him what he does to them, I guess. Sort of a reverse Golden Rule.
Frankly I don't care what commentators say, and in many cases the extremist comments on these blogs are actually coming from the opposition in an attempt to make people look ridiculous. It's just fucking gotcha politics. Let's deal with the real party platforms and issues, and ignore the lunatics on the fringes who don't get listened to anyway.
And this definately goes to the lack of critical thinking which can come into play with partisanship.
Now I'm a supporter of owning guns, and certainly think they can work for self defense in some cases. that being said, John Lott's study conveniently ignored other variables such as economic conditions, additional cops on the street, etc.
I live in Minnesota. We have had a concealed carry law now in this state for about three years now. For the most part I don't think it's really caused any problems, other than some confusion and at least one dead bouncer at a bar.
But in the past year, crime has increased. Murders are up a bit, but so also are burglaries. Heck just the other night there were two armed robberies of hotels, which is something kind of unusual.
So does this disprove John Lott's theory? That armed citizens increase crime, rather than decrease? I don't think so, rather I think it's more directly related to the increased population and the decreased number of cops by comparison.
Not necessarily.
Netscape 4.x started down the path of trying to implement CSS before the spec was finalized. They implemented it the way Netscape had advocated the spec be written.
When the spec was finalized, it was a totally different spec than what Netscape wanted. Instead of being ahead of the game, they got caught with their pants down.
Which is why we had the days of "Best when viewed with Netscape", etc.
We used to have a guy working at our company who was a complete jackass and a slacker. He was also Japanese. He used to brag, "They can't fire me. I'm the only asian in the department."
He was let go about two years ago.
There may be a handful of people who think that's the way the system works.
It does not.
I've found an awful lot of people who think they are being discriminated against, white, black, asian, whatever simply didn't have the skills necessary for the job. Slashdot had a story a few years ago about a study that showed the more incompetent you are, the less likely you are to realize it.
I see it mentioned in a working group, but I see no confirmation this is part of any final adopted spec.
That's my only concern... that Mozilla is once again off on a path of implementing stuff before the spec is adopted, and we're going to have "Best if using Mozilla" icons showing up on websites.