Calling Gawker a 'media entity' is probably being generous. I'm glad you didn't even try for 'journalist' or something serious.
Gawker is barely a step up from the office scuttlebutt in terms of pandering to the lowest common denominator. They make the National Enquirer or the Daily Mail look like the flippin' NYT in terms of fact checking and intellectual rigor.
In another time, the vulgar 'hitpiece' style of commentary would have marked them as fodder only for the lowest of the low, not to be taken seriously. They could say whatever they wanted about whomever because they were a $100 million conglomerate, immune to any consequence. Well, there's always a bigger fish and finally, they pissed off someone with the cash to beat them.
In 2016, 8 years after he was no longer president, the "It's Bush's fault" is getting a little worn-thin, particularly when she was part of the government that sent us to war.
He thinks her criminality will actually matter. That's so charming.
The narrative's already written, folks. (And the script has been WELL paid for.)
I heard an interview on NPR the other day about the triviality of the 'secret' emails found to have gone through her server. It seems to have been entirely forgotten that this is WHAT HER PEOPLE RELEASED - ie long after they'd scrubbed it clean of meaningful communications.
That some were left of 'somewhat' secret nature is due to incompetence or more likely a deliberate effort to leave "something to be found".
Nixon would have been impeached over 18.5 minutes of missing tape. Hilary with roll to the presidency despite deliberately criminal behavior.
....if you started with something like Biosphere 2.
We can't manage a self-sustaining environment that doesn't require CONSTANT maintenance on Earth. To suggest that we'll somehow 'muddle through' doing it 100 million miles away is folly.
"Some people will die" sure, that hasn't caused humans to flinch from trying hard things. And yes, doing hard things costs lives in many cases.
But it's truly a shitty, sociopathic narcissist that is willing to throw away lives to no good end.
And if you can imagine implementing the whole "internet of things" you could wake up every morning to find out something like this about all sorts of critical systems on your house!
The "internet of things" is a COMPLETELY stupid concept; I'm not sure why people seem to keep promoting it.
First, let's not hysterically confuse momentary tragedy with durable long term trends. Violence and violent crimes in the US have gone DOWN significantly, more or less consistently, for DECADES, and continue to fall: http://www.statista.com/graphi... One might note that this decline has happened since the 90s, which was right about when the US saw widespread revision to make conceal-carry easier. This of course could be simple coincidence.
Second, while it's convenient to say "it's the gun lobby" the fact is that tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans believe that it is an intrinsic right of an individual to provide for their own self-defense and that the government has no right whatsoever to impinge on that as long as the person is of sound mind and no criminal record. That is precisely why I own a firearm. I never concealed-carry (although I have the permit), and don't hunt.
I'd recommend this interesting article from the Guardian from 2013 about the crazy-quilt of US gun laws: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... - for example, Alaska and Idaho PROHIBIT *any* registration of firearms. If gun ownership were intrinsically dangerous, you'd think those places would be free-fire zones with many gun deaths; in fact, they're 26th and 42nd respectively for most gun-murders per 100k people.
And, forgive me for saying so, but considering the US Constitution has formed the structure of (debatably) the longest-existing functioning and most successful modern democracy on the planet, I'm going to go with their ideas in every single case over the outrage-fueled maunderings of some internet poster. If the US population wanted to remove the 2nd Amendment, they could; the process is really rather simple.
I understand that the US system is a difficult one for non-Americans to comprehend. Frankly, due to our crappy educational system, I daresay a majority of Americans don't really understand how it works. The fact is that the Founding Fathers were essential humanists: they believed that while a government was necessary in a Hobbesian sense, it should never be allowed to be more important than the rights of the individual.
I would argue that the culprit here is endemic, chronic, systemic narcissism ENABLED by the easy access to firearms. "Taking away the guns" wouldn't really fix the problem.
If you tell college freshmen you're going to apply a "lay theory intervention" to them, you might find them a little disappointed with the result when you just talk.
...could look at something that was conceived, paid for, and built by the US defense department and sigh "Don't you wish we could have this without all that pesky GOVERNMENT involvement?"
Except by that measure, we too are fantastically unlikely. Humans are made up of hundreds of millions of specialized cells which, in the scant 3-ish billion years since prokaryotes showed up, had to learn to cooperate synergistically. And "learn" in a non-deterministic sense: basically they had to mutate (randomly) into combinations (randomly) and then be stressed (randomly) such that their offspring would demonstrate a competitive advantage...to the order of a hundred million cooperating.
If you think about that, alone, it's staggering that it happened in that SHORT a time.
"Researchers make wild ass fucking guess" because that's pretty much all it is when you have a sample size of one.
In this case I'd assert that the person sitting next to you on the bus has nearly the same chance of being right, so clothing their opinion in the false-authority of calling them researchers is rather misleading.
"You have to address the root cause." I entirely agree with pretty much everything you posted.
My question is: how will handing that family a handful of money improve their options?
Do you really, sincerely believe that if you handed them $200 they'd buy a bed for their kid? Or a single mom handed $500 would use it to buy nutritious, healthful food and maybe work a few hours less so she can prepare it at regular times?
Look at *any* poor person who's won the lottery. They are - AFAIK without fail - poorer afterward than before.
My point is that just handing them money is probably the WORST possible way to teach them to make better choices, and will in fact have a corrosive/destructive effect on their futures. I'm not saying take away their benefits; I'm saying that this method of delivery, for whatever attractiveness it holds in efficiency* will be absolutely the OPPOSITE.
*and I'll say it again, I believe the people in favor of it are simply trolling for another way to create MORE handouts; not in any way replace the current handouts at all. The 'efficiency' thing is a canard to try to disguise it for people with economic sense.
In the blunter words from The Economist, 1848: "Suffering and evil are natureâ(TM)s admonitionsâ"they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good."
1) it's not the free market crippling the USPS, it's the government itself, and
2) pretty shitty if you have a business and the government decides to take over your commercial niche: no taxes to pay, not to mention a host of organizational advantages, immunity to lawsuits, and the opportunity to have laws written on their behalf without even paying a lobbyist to smoke a congressman's pole to get it done.
"...But the APâ(TM)s findings are similar to those of a February report by the Government Accountability Office, which found hurricane aid was used for to pay for guns, strippers and tattoos. The GAO concluded that between $600 million and $1.4 billion was improperly spent on Katrina relief alone...."
"...that result in people incapable of making good life choices..."
So you're ultimately agreeing with me that it's people making shitty choices (but you're blaming their inability to make good choices on their early environment and upbringing, which they clearly had no choice in).
Fair enough, I'm open to considering that. Except I'd make 2 comments in reply: 1) personally, I'm more than a little uncomfortable completely taking away people's human agency in their choices. If you say that they are INCAPABLE of making good choices, that makes them morally little more than (mostly useless) farm animals. 2) let's assume your explanation is a valid one: how does handing these people a big fat check every month POSSIBLY a) improve their condition, or b) put them in a place where they can learn to make better decisions, or at least not make decisions that will make their condition even worse?
"The patchwork of programs dies, the government shrinks, the disincentives to work go away,..."
I'm sorry, but your premise fails immediately there.
1) the huge majority of people that are poor today are poor because they made/make shitty life choices. Handing them a big fat check instead of money specifically allocated for food, housing, education, etc is a recipe for disaster. Even with such rules, the system is still rife with stories of them still spending their little income on stupid crap.
2) I'd like to see one example of a single government program sunsetting before we assume that a single change in benefit deliveries will somehow dismantle the largest segment of firmament spending?
...because taking your credit card out just takes TOO DAMNED LONG! What if there's something else you need to buy in another place and you're WASTING 3.5 seconds fiddling with your credit card here?
Of course they do. That's mainly what they're designed for.
But as I read an interview with an Israeli (airline) security expert: most people I would be perfectly fine carrying a stick of dynamite openly onto an airplane. Nobody is in danger (aside from the intrinsic risk of dynamite aboard aircraft, for the pedants) from that person, NO MATTER WHAT WEAPON THEY HAVE.
OTOH, there are people (he continued) that I wouldn't want aboard an airplane with a jackknife. I wouldn't want to even give them real silverware.
Separating out these people, and recognizing they exist is the MAIN issue. Identifying them and addressing them is the main issue. Not the tools that they may/may not have in their pocket.
...Eric, ALL problems that affect more than a single small group are ultimately political.
To think anything else is staggeringly naive.
Look at climate change; many people misunderstand that it's a question of science. Not really. Ultimately, it's a question of focus, resources, and priorities which are POLITICAL questions. To deny that people are politically collectively vested in the results is fundamentally misunderstanding the very nature of the question.
It doesn't help that (in the US at least) that politics as a field has come to be populated by some of the most despicable characters in our society. We keep electing them mainly because it matters so little: firstly, we have no ability to draft 'our best citizens' for the roles of leadership, and they're staying the hell away from the grubby business. Second, the US is (at least perceived to be) eternal; there's no existential crisis and thus little perceived need to really give a shit about who's running things - vote for one party, and one bunch of people & their friends get rich. Vote for the other, and a different group and their friends get rich instead.
...that we have a serious culture-of-crazy-people-willing-to-kill-over-nothing problem; unfortunately, it's too politically useful to interpret it as a "gun problem".
The fact that you're both actually talking about it (ok, yes, this is the interweb and some post AC and never return) is the POINT though.
One says "you can't really negotiate people out of irrational fears", the other says "my fears have an entirely rational basis".
God forbid any national political leaders take even this nuanced, thoughtful an approach.
Hell, you can barely get water-cooler conversation that's not just people spouting shit (whatever monologue that they happened to just read online) at each other.
Notice Juncker reacted VEHEMENTLY, publicly, immediately against the ~threat~ of a conservative Austrian politician.
Has there been any comparable reaction against the ACTUAL arrival of *millions* of people who are publicly homophobic, misogynistic, murderously xenophobic religious zealots?
Sure, there are going to be some people who'd be better of with *nix and who could cope with it, but they're not the ones asking. It's my grandma, uncle, cousin, sister, neighbor - all who care NOTHING about the "politics" of OSes, just want something that works.
So my advice is this: YES, I wholeheartedly advise upgrading to Win10. It is a robust, stable, modern OS. I've been running it on probably a dozen systems since January, and not one BSOD. That's pretty good. It's miles better than XP or 8, and reasonably better than 7. If you're running anything else (shudder, Vista, ME, 2000, etc) it's not even a question.
HOWEVER, *actually* read and attend the install process. TURN OFF shit that you don't need.
As a last resort, I'd rather come over and spend 10 mins cleaning out the Win10 settings cruft and then knowing you're running a decent OS than keep having to try to remember how the hell to do X in XP or Vista when your system goes down, again.
Let's all remember that this doesn't really REMOVE hate speech. It hides it, allowing us all to feel wonderful about ourselves and that we've "done something" about hate speech.
We haven't *actually* DONE anything.
Like Juncker's fantastically anti-democratic reaction to the threat of the Ã-FP victory in Austria (I won't allow any far-right reactionaries any power in the EU!), Europe seems to fundamentally "not get" how democracy works. When confronted with something unpleasant, they try to ban it.
The only cure for unpleasant speech is more speech. Anything else ultimately makes it worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling Gawker a 'media entity' is probably being generous. I'm glad you didn't even try for 'journalist' or something serious.
Gawker is barely a step up from the office scuttlebutt in terms of pandering to the lowest common denominator. They make the National Enquirer or the Daily Mail look like the flippin' NYT in terms of fact checking and intellectual rigor.
In another time, the vulgar 'hitpiece' style of commentary would have marked them as fodder only for the lowest of the low, not to be taken seriously. They could say whatever they wanted about whomever because they were a $100 million conglomerate, immune to any consequence. Well, there's always a bigger fish and finally, they pissed off someone with the cash to beat them.
Good riddance.
In 2016, 8 years after he was no longer president, the "It's Bush's fault" is getting a little worn-thin, particularly when she was part of the government that sent us to war.
Oh, and Clinton's speech supporting her vote in favor:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
He thinks her criminality will actually matter. That's so charming.
The narrative's already written, folks. (And the script has been WELL paid for.)
I heard an interview on NPR the other day about the triviality of the 'secret' emails found to have gone through her server. It seems to have been entirely forgotten that this is WHAT HER PEOPLE RELEASED - ie long after they'd scrubbed it clean of meaningful communications.
That some were left of 'somewhat' secret nature is due to incompetence or more likely a deliberate effort to leave "something to be found".
Nixon would have been impeached over 18.5 minutes of missing tape. Hilary with roll to the presidency despite deliberately criminal behavior.
....if you started with something like Biosphere 2.
We can't manage a self-sustaining environment that doesn't require CONSTANT maintenance on Earth. To suggest that we'll somehow 'muddle through' doing it 100 million miles away is folly.
"Some people will die" sure, that hasn't caused humans to flinch from trying hard things. And yes, doing hard things costs lives in many cases.
But it's truly a shitty, sociopathic narcissist that is willing to throw away lives to no good end.
And if you can imagine implementing the whole "internet of things" you could wake up every morning to find out something like this about all sorts of critical systems on your house!
The "internet of things" is a COMPLETELY stupid concept; I'm not sure why people seem to keep promoting it.
First, let's not hysterically confuse momentary tragedy with durable long term trends.
Violence and violent crimes in the US have gone DOWN significantly, more or less consistently, for DECADES, and continue to fall:
http://www.statista.com/graphi...
One might note that this decline has happened since the 90s, which was right about when the US saw widespread revision to make conceal-carry easier.
This of course could be simple coincidence.
Second, while it's convenient to say "it's the gun lobby" the fact is that tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans believe that it is an intrinsic right of an individual to provide for their own self-defense and that the government has no right whatsoever to impinge on that as long as the person is of sound mind and no criminal record. That is precisely why I own a firearm. I never concealed-carry (although I have the permit), and don't hunt.
I'd recommend this interesting article from the Guardian from 2013 about the crazy-quilt of US gun laws: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... - for example, Alaska and Idaho PROHIBIT *any* registration of firearms. If gun ownership were intrinsically dangerous, you'd think those places would be free-fire zones with many gun deaths; in fact, they're 26th and 42nd respectively for most gun-murders per 100k people.
And, forgive me for saying so, but considering the US Constitution has formed the structure of (debatably) the longest-existing functioning and most successful modern democracy on the planet, I'm going to go with their ideas in every single case over the outrage-fueled maunderings of some internet poster. If the US population wanted to remove the 2nd Amendment, they could; the process is really rather simple.
I understand that the US system is a difficult one for non-Americans to comprehend. Frankly, due to our crappy educational system, I daresay a majority of Americans don't really understand how it works. The fact is that the Founding Fathers were essential humanists: they believed that while a government was necessary in a Hobbesian sense, it should never be allowed to be more important than the rights of the individual.
I would argue that the culprit here is endemic, chronic, systemic narcissism ENABLED by the easy access to firearms. "Taking away the guns" wouldn't really fix the problem.
Might want to quick google what CERN is?
If you tell college freshmen you're going to apply a "lay theory intervention" to them, you might find them a little disappointed with the result when you just talk.
...could look at something that was conceived, paid for, and built by the US defense department and sigh "Don't you wish we could have this without all that pesky GOVERNMENT involvement?"
Except by that measure, we too are fantastically unlikely.
Humans are made up of hundreds of millions of specialized cells which, in the scant 3-ish billion years since prokaryotes showed up, had to learn to cooperate synergistically. And "learn" in a non-deterministic sense: basically they had to mutate (randomly) into combinations (randomly) and then be stressed (randomly) such that their offspring would demonstrate a competitive advantage...to the order of a hundred million cooperating.
If you think about that, alone, it's staggering that it happened in that SHORT a time.
"Researchers make wild ass fucking guess" because that's pretty much all it is when you have a sample size of one.
In this case I'd assert that the person sitting next to you on the bus has nearly the same chance of being right, so clothing their opinion in the false-authority of calling them researchers is rather misleading.
"You have to address the root cause." I entirely agree with pretty much everything you posted.
My question is: how will handing that family a handful of money improve their options?
Do you really, sincerely believe that if you handed them $200 they'd buy a bed for their kid? Or a single mom handed $500 would use it to buy nutritious, healthful food and maybe work a few hours less so she can prepare it at regular times?
Look at *any* poor person who's won the lottery. They are - AFAIK without fail - poorer afterward than before.
My point is that just handing them money is probably the WORST possible way to teach them to make better choices, and will in fact have a corrosive/destructive effect on their futures. I'm not saying take away their benefits; I'm saying that this method of delivery, for whatever attractiveness it holds in efficiency* will be absolutely the OPPOSITE.
*and I'll say it again, I believe the people in favor of it are simply trolling for another way to create MORE handouts; not in any way replace the current handouts at all. The 'efficiency' thing is a canard to try to disguise it for people with economic sense.
In the blunter words from The Economist, 1848: "Suffering and evil are natureâ(TM)s admonitionsâ"they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good."
1) it's not the free market crippling the USPS, it's the government itself, and
2) pretty shitty if you have a business and the government decides to take over your commercial niche: no taxes to pay, not to mention a host of organizational advantages, immunity to lawsuits, and the opportunity to have laws written on their behalf without even paying a lobbyist to smoke a congressman's pole to get it done.
Why do the wrong parents make it impossible to make sound economic choices?
And whatever your reply, do you really think simply HANDING these people a check is the best wat to help them?
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/1700...
"...But the APâ(TM)s findings are similar to those of a February report by the Government Accountability Office, which found hurricane aid was used for to pay for guns, strippers and tattoos. The GAO concluded that between $600 million and $1.4 billion was improperly spent on Katrina relief alone...."
"...that result in people incapable of making good life choices..."
So you're ultimately agreeing with me that it's people making shitty choices (but you're blaming their inability to make good choices on their early environment and upbringing, which they clearly had no choice in).
Fair enough, I'm open to considering that. Except I'd make 2 comments in reply:
1) personally, I'm more than a little uncomfortable completely taking away people's human agency in their choices. If you say that they are INCAPABLE of making good choices, that makes them morally little more than (mostly useless) farm animals.
2) let's assume your explanation is a valid one: how does handing these people a big fat check every month POSSIBLY a) improve their condition, or b) put them in a place where they can learn to make better decisions, or at least not make decisions that will make their condition even worse?
I'd genuinely like to understand.
"The patchwork of programs dies, the government shrinks, the disincentives to work go away,..."
I'm sorry, but your premise fails immediately there.
1) the huge majority of people that are poor today are poor because they made/make shitty life choices. Handing them a big fat check instead of money specifically allocated for food, housing, education, etc is a recipe for disaster. Even with such rules, the system is still rife with stories of them still spending their little income on stupid crap.
2) I'd like to see one example of a single government program sunsetting before we assume that a single change in benefit deliveries will somehow dismantle the largest segment of firmament spending?
Correction: any rational person has severe concern about security and the ridiculous "IoT".
...because taking your credit card out just takes TOO DAMNED LONG! What if there's something else you need to buy in another place and you're WASTING 3.5 seconds fiddling with your credit card here?
Of course they do. That's mainly what they're designed for.
But as I read an interview with an Israeli (airline) security expert: most people I would be perfectly fine carrying a stick of dynamite openly onto an airplane. Nobody is in danger (aside from the intrinsic risk of dynamite aboard aircraft, for the pedants) from that person, NO MATTER WHAT WEAPON THEY HAVE.
OTOH, there are people (he continued) that I wouldn't want aboard an airplane with a jackknife. I wouldn't want to even give them real silverware.
Separating out these people, and recognizing they exist is the MAIN issue. Identifying them and addressing them is the main issue. Not the tools that they may/may not have in their pocket.
...Eric, ALL problems that affect more than a single small group are ultimately political.
To think anything else is staggeringly naive.
Look at climate change; many people misunderstand that it's a question of science. Not really. Ultimately, it's a question of focus, resources, and priorities which are POLITICAL questions. To deny that people are politically collectively vested in the results is fundamentally misunderstanding the very nature of the question.
It doesn't help that (in the US at least) that politics as a field has come to be populated by some of the most despicable characters in our society. We keep electing them mainly because it matters so little: firstly, we have no ability to draft 'our best citizens' for the roles of leadership, and they're staying the hell away from the grubby business. Second, the US is (at least perceived to be) eternal; there's no existential crisis and thus little perceived need to really give a shit about who's running things - vote for one party, and one bunch of people & their friends get rich. Vote for the other, and a different group and their friends get rich instead.
...that we have a serious culture-of-crazy-people-willing-to-kill-over-nothing problem; unfortunately, it's too politically useful to interpret it as a "gun problem".
The fact that you're both actually talking about it (ok, yes, this is the interweb and some post AC and never return) is the POINT though.
One says "you can't really negotiate people out of irrational fears", the other says "my fears have an entirely rational basis".
God forbid any national political leaders take even this nuanced, thoughtful an approach.
Hell, you can barely get water-cooler conversation that's not just people spouting shit (whatever monologue that they happened to just read online) at each other.
Notice Juncker reacted VEHEMENTLY, publicly, immediately against the ~threat~ of a conservative Austrian politician.
Has there been any comparable reaction against the ACTUAL arrival of *millions* of people who are publicly homophobic, misogynistic, murderously xenophobic religious zealots?
It's curious, that different reaction.
...for most people.
Sure, there are going to be some people who'd be better of with *nix and who could cope with it, but they're not the ones asking. It's my grandma, uncle, cousin, sister, neighbor - all who care NOTHING about the "politics" of OSes, just want something that works.
So my advice is this:
YES, I wholeheartedly advise upgrading to Win10. It is a robust, stable, modern OS. I've been running it on probably a dozen systems since January, and not one BSOD. That's pretty good. It's miles better than XP or 8, and reasonably better than 7. If you're running anything else (shudder, Vista, ME, 2000, etc) it's not even a question.
HOWEVER, *actually* read and attend the install process. TURN OFF shit that you don't need.
As a last resort, I'd rather come over and spend 10 mins cleaning out the Win10 settings cruft and then knowing you're running a decent OS than keep having to try to remember how the hell to do X in XP or Vista when your system goes down, again.
Let's all remember that this doesn't really REMOVE hate speech. It hides it, allowing us all to feel wonderful about ourselves and that we've "done something" about hate speech.
We haven't *actually* DONE anything.
Like Juncker's fantastically anti-democratic reaction to the threat of the Ã-FP victory in Austria (I won't allow any far-right reactionaries any power in the EU!), Europe seems to fundamentally "not get" how democracy works. When confronted with something unpleasant, they try to ban it.
The only cure for unpleasant speech is more speech. Anything else ultimately makes it worse.