The US has been spending *billions* to continue to mint sub-worthless pennies because we can't stand to part with them. We continue to print $1 paper bills LONG after it's been successfully proved by other Western commercial societies that 1-unit, 2-unit, and even 5-unit coins make far more sense.
Do you seriously think we're going to "get rid of cash" generally (for sensible or malignant reasons, take your pick) when we're the currency-equivalent of irrational hoarders?
Oh I fully agree with you about both the Saudis, and the Chinese (and a host of others, frankly).
My point was just that he happens to be GOING to Cuba, and I fully expect that Guantanamo will be discussed in the media - while there's some irony that 400 miles away is the Canaleta prison.
...it'd be curious if Mr Obama bothered to talk with Castro about the conditions in Cuban prisons for political prisoners, which has been arguably worse than the worst of Guantanamo for FIFTY years.
Of course, there's few "Shame on USA" points to be garnered for such a discussion, so I doubt it will happen.
"Old Kindles Will Be Disconnected Unless You Update By Tuesday" No. This is NOT TRUE.
From TFA: "If you do miss the deadline, you'll need to manually download and install the required update."
So if you don't do the update, it will continue to be just fine (particularly if you're using calibre - and if you're not, WHY NOT?).
OTOH, you can update, and make sure that Amazon has the freshest ability to dump shit ads onto your kindle and pester you to buy crap. Hey, maybe it'll even enable them to apply some sort of new DRM to those books you all purchased legally, I'm sure?
Yeah, no. NOT doing the update will do nothing except force you to manually update next time. As someone elsewhere observed, not updating may even break their ability to stream you new ad content, so there's that.
"most brutal and least reported abuse under the US governments authority that any human has seen in the 21st century" And this is why nothing happens with Guantanamo. Serious discussions are impossible when the starting point is such ridiculous hyperbole.
FIRST: It's almost inevitable that you'd go straight to Godwin the thread, of course. But I'd remark there's a pretty substantial gulf in agency and innocence between Nazi death camps (where people all the way down to children were rounded up and ultimately exterminated solely because they were Jewish, gay, or any number of other 'negative elements' in the Nazi schema) and a US detention facility which was largely used for COMBATANTS seized in what is effectively a war zone, but whose status was questionable as they chose not to wear uniforms.
BIG fucking difference, in fact.
I agree Guantanamo should have been closed a long, long time ago. I felt from the start that the US was wrong to take and hold prisoners in such a conflict; by the rules of the Geneva Convention, combatants seized in such circumstances should have been wrung for information and then summarily executed as they were nothing more than bandits, having failed to comply with the characteristics b, c, and d that would have required them to be treated as captured POWs: (a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; --- (c) That of carrying arms openly; --- (d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. --- Had they done those things, they would have been entitled to treatment as POWs. For the Bush administration to allow them to persist in this gray area left the US vulnerable to these ongoing histrionics.
SECOND: "...most brutal and least reported abuse...that any human has seen in the 21st century" Not even close to true. You must have missed ISIS, then? Or did I miss the mass executions at Guantanamo? The videotaped beheadings?
THIRD: You might want to review that list of inhumanities; the forced intubation and rectal feeding had to do with prisoners hunger-striking. Should they have been allowed to kill themselves instead? Extreme temperatures: people working minimum-wage jobs in the US regularly suffer worse conditions. NONE of the what, 9 deaths at Guantanamo have been caused by the US government. 7 were suicides, 1 was heart attack, and 1 was cancer (and those last to I almost guarantee got BETTER health care and end-of-life care than they'd have gotten in whatever pestilential 3rd world country they came from). Ultimately, it's pretty clear that as prisons go, the Cuban ones outside Guantanamo's walls have been FAR worse for 50 years. Curious that you haven't complained about that?
FOURTH: You skip quickly past the point that many (2 score) are in fact free today. They can leave BUT THEIR HOMES DON'T WANT THEM, NEITHER DOES ANY OTHER COUNTRY - even countries inimical to the US like Venezuela or North Korea. Why do you suppose that is? These are troublemaking, BAD people.
Again, I agree with you in the basic point: Guantanamo should never have been used as a detention camp. That was ridiculously dumb. What you fail to recognize is that camp is in fact probably the only reason those men remain alive today. It wasn't "whistling a merry happy tune at the playground" vs "internment at Guantanamo"; it was "be shot dead" or "internment". I'd have strongly recommended the former on the basis of costs and long term policy impact on the US.
Of course, the victims (employees) could always have chosen to work elsewhere, or even to not-work.
If they didn't, then the owners made the right economic choice.
Employment isn't about what's "best for everyone", it's a tug-of-war between two selfish parties: the owners and the employees. One wants to pay as LITTLE as possible for what they get, the other wants to get paid as MUCH as possible for what they do. (Or do as little as they can, for what they get paid.)
What the SJWs fail to understand - and even Karl Marx failed to understand - is that businesses don't just 'happen to exist'. There's a process BEFORE the business gets to the point of employing people, and that's an evolutionary process. It's hard work, and it's fraught with failure.
What the left sees as 'disproportional' rewards and power wielded by "the owners" vis a vis their workers disregards that these benefits are the return not just from those owners choices, but from all the other business-founders that litter the roadside between nothing and "successful business".
If you don't like it, or think running a business is easy, found one yourself. Choosing to work for someone else is the EASY choice, made by far, far more people. Contrary to the simplistic assumptions in the workers' movement, MOST businesses are not founded by trust-fund inheritance: they're average folks who took a risk and worked their asses off.
Except that it DOES modify the original statement for clarity. Raising the minimum wage IS an inherently "progressive" idea, politically, and implies (I think reasonably) that the decision isn't purely one of economics (as might have been stated) but of politics.
- scholarly writings - professors that remember him as a teacher - students that remember him as a teacher - people that remember going to school with him - teachers ever remembering him as a student
The fact that we can have a president who's been sitting in office for two terms and nobody's bothered to crack his 'sealed' college records (and why they would be sealable in the first place?) should tell you more about the government / media collusion than anything.
As much as I despise DT himself, do they not understand the impact of their self-righteous vigilantism?
If they'd just *quietly* attacked him, slowly DDOS'ing his sites and businesses, it could have been months before the news got out, all the while doing damage to the campaign.
But the "look how awesome we are fighting evil" grandstanding is going to resonate in PRECISELY the opposite way with the bulk of US voters who will - I guarantee you - sympathize with him against a 'shadowy internet mafia'.
The only way they're going to HURT him now is if you're able to hack the voting machines; thankfully Diebold almost certainly installed backdoors for (the Republicans/the Democrats/the Russians/the Illuminati/whatever cabal you prefer to fear) so maybe that's still possible.
PET is common in the waste stream because it's common in use.
This means that the moment we figure out a way to use this to consume pet efficiently, everything in the works that depends on pet to function is now threatened if the organism gets into the wild, compelling scientists to research a coating or addative that repels it...and then we are back to square one.
Yes, but if my post encourages someone ELSE to do it: - someone else does it, and jams phones (my benefit) - they get caught because it's in THEIR pocket (still my benefit)
....for taking it out to flip a stupid switch. Smart would have been to be on a call himself, and meanwhile in his pocket flip the switch, then act all annoyed and pissed like everyone else.
Not (apparently) having learned anything from the switch to digital tv broadcasting (where the higher bandwidth was not used for better quality, but was co opted to shovel more channels of low quality shit) this "34% faster" algorithm will simply result in web coders programming at least 34% more crap ads and scripts into web pages.
Perhaps teaching algebra, geometry, and such isn't so much about the UTILITY of the specific skills, but more about teaching kids a methodical, procedural, deductive method of thinking and problem solving?
Not every answer in their lives will be found by 'googling' or 'asking their friends'. Sometimes, there are going to be hard problems - and not just math-related ones, although likely there will be plenty of those - where having some experience in methodically stepping-through the issue's component parts and rigorously analyzing the thing will be the only way to come to a good conclusion.
EITHER a) if this is GENUINELY a mattter of national security, the FBI could actually hand the phone to the NSA and get the information in about 30 seconds but for some reason isn't doing so, or b) the NSA's upteen-gajillion-dollar "black" budget has pretty much enabled them to record/analyze/store only the utterly banal unencrypted conversations that you could hear just sitting and listening to the guy next to you at the coffeeshop, ie almost entirely wasted on stupid crap.
I don't see really any other alternative.
I'd expect, for example, that Russian and Chinese government communications are ROUTINELY of a higher level of encryption than the bloody iPhone you can buy at the mall, and yet the NSA's *job* is to listen in on that stuff and they claim that they're pretty damned good at it?
While I don't disagree that those are pretty bad (assuming they're all true) BYU is an EXPLICITLY, clearly, ardently Mormon school. Always has been, as far as I know.
What you're talking about would be like going to Islam University and then claiming you're atheist. The only place that's allowed is explicitly Christian schools, they're expected to tolerate it.
First, you need to have a military: They couldn't even bomb some Libyan bandits without running out of bombs and needing US air control and mid-air refueling. 5 of the 28 members of NATO even bother to meet their treaty-obligated minimum defense budgets, much less anything more. Most EU country militaries are barely more than ill-concealed jobs programs, and are populated a few patriots but mostly by the hopeless dregs that for some reason can't simply do nothing. Yes, they (UK...assuming it's still EU this time next year, and France) have nukes; then again, so does North Korea. That doesn't make DPRK a superpower, either.
Second: you have to have the will to actually USE the military. Yes, some few EU states sent token forces to Afghanistan, usually with engagement orders that would be appropriate to kindergarten, not a war zone. Most EU countries are terrified of conflict, afraid to send soldiers into harm's way. For most EU states, they're more likely to wet their pants than use the military forcefully to exert policy
Finally, we'll simply assume for this discussion that the EU actually continues to exist, and doesn't shatter into near-insignificance in the next several years.
I don't disagree with you about Russia though, they're barely more than a 3rd-world state but Putin's aggressiveness and opportunism moves them up a little. But no, you're right, it's really US or China.
My entire point was to illustrate that for all its problems, compared to a Pax Sinaticus, the Pax Americana is pretty benign.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has been spending *billions* to continue to mint sub-worthless pennies because we can't stand to part with them. We continue to print $1 paper bills LONG after it's been successfully proved by other Western commercial societies that 1-unit, 2-unit, and even 5-unit coins make far more sense.
Do you seriously think we're going to "get rid of cash" generally (for sensible or malignant reasons, take your pick) when we're the currency-equivalent of irrational hoarders?
...and of course, where did we find the ancient forefathers of Ireland?
Outside a bar.
Just sayin'.
Oh I fully agree with you about both the Saudis, and the Chinese (and a host of others, frankly).
My point was just that he happens to be GOING to Cuba, and I fully expect that Guantanamo will be discussed in the media - while there's some irony that 400 miles away is the Canaleta prison.
"... fundamental challenge to constraining future climate projections"
I'd think they'd be celebrating?
I mean, they essentially are saying there's no reason to temper the FUD. All projections of panic, fear, misery, and terror are hereby justified.
...it'd be curious if Mr Obama bothered to talk with Castro about the conditions in Cuban prisons for political prisoners, which has been arguably worse than the worst of Guantanamo for FIFTY years.
Of course, there's few "Shame on USA" points to be garnered for such a discussion, so I doubt it will happen.
"Old Kindles Will Be Disconnected Unless You Update By Tuesday"
No. This is NOT TRUE.
From TFA:
"If you do miss the deadline, you'll need to manually download and install the required update."
So if you don't do the update, it will continue to be just fine (particularly if you're using calibre - and if you're not, WHY NOT?).
OTOH, you can update, and make sure that Amazon has the freshest ability to dump shit ads onto your kindle and pester you to buy crap. Hey, maybe it'll even enable them to apply some sort of new DRM to those books you all purchased legally, I'm sure?
Yeah, no. NOT doing the update will do nothing except force you to manually update next time.
As someone elsewhere observed, not updating may even break their ability to stream you new ad content, so there's that.
"most brutal and least reported abuse under the US governments authority that any human has seen in the 21st century"
And this is why nothing happens with Guantanamo. Serious discussions are impossible when the starting point is such ridiculous hyperbole.
FIRST:
It's almost inevitable that you'd go straight to Godwin the thread, of course. But I'd remark there's a pretty substantial gulf in agency and innocence between Nazi death camps (where people all the way down to children were rounded up and ultimately exterminated solely because they were Jewish, gay, or any number of other 'negative elements' in the Nazi schema) and a US detention facility which was largely used for COMBATANTS seized in what is effectively a war zone, but whose status was questionable as they chose not to wear uniforms.
BIG fucking difference, in fact.
I agree Guantanamo should have been closed a long, long time ago. I felt from the start that the US was wrong to take and hold prisoners in such a conflict; by the rules of the Geneva Convention, combatants seized in such circumstances should have been wrung for information and then summarily executed as they were nothing more than bandits, having failed to comply with the characteristics b, c, and d that would have required them to be treated as captured POWs:
(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; ---
(c) That of carrying arms openly; ---
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. ---
Had they done those things, they would have been entitled to treatment as POWs. For the Bush administration to allow them to persist in this gray area left the US vulnerable to these ongoing histrionics.
SECOND: "...most brutal and least reported abuse ...that any human has seen in the 21st century"
Not even close to true.
You must have missed ISIS, then? Or did I miss the mass executions at Guantanamo? The videotaped beheadings?
THIRD:
You might want to review that list of inhumanities; the forced intubation and rectal feeding had to do with prisoners hunger-striking. Should they have been allowed to kill themselves instead? Extreme temperatures: people working minimum-wage jobs in the US regularly suffer worse conditions.
NONE of the what, 9 deaths at Guantanamo have been caused by the US government. 7 were suicides, 1 was heart attack, and 1 was cancer (and those last to I almost guarantee got BETTER health care and end-of-life care than they'd have gotten in whatever pestilential 3rd world country they came from).
Ultimately, it's pretty clear that as prisons go, the Cuban ones outside Guantanamo's walls have been FAR worse for 50 years. Curious that you haven't complained about that?
FOURTH:
You skip quickly past the point that many (2 score) are in fact free today. They can leave BUT THEIR HOMES DON'T WANT THEM, NEITHER DOES ANY OTHER COUNTRY - even countries inimical to the US like Venezuela or North Korea. Why do you suppose that is? These are troublemaking, BAD people.
Again, I agree with you in the basic point: Guantanamo should never have been used as a detention camp. That was ridiculously dumb. What you fail to recognize is that camp is in fact probably the only reason those men remain alive today. It wasn't "whistling a merry happy tune at the playground" vs "internment at Guantanamo"; it was "be shot dead" or "internment". I'd have strongly recommended the former on the basis of costs and long term policy impact on the US.
Of course, the victims (employees) could always have chosen to work elsewhere, or even to not-work.
If they didn't, then the owners made the right economic choice.
Employment isn't about what's "best for everyone", it's a tug-of-war between two selfish parties: the owners and the employees. One wants to pay as LITTLE as possible for what they get, the other wants to get paid as MUCH as possible for what they do. (Or do as little as they can, for what they get paid.)
What the SJWs fail to understand - and even Karl Marx failed to understand - is that businesses don't just 'happen to exist'. There's a process BEFORE the business gets to the point of employing people, and that's an evolutionary process. It's hard work, and it's fraught with failure.
What the left sees as 'disproportional' rewards and power wielded by "the owners" vis a vis their workers disregards that these benefits are the return not just from those owners choices, but from all the other business-founders that litter the roadside between nothing and "successful business".
If you don't like it, or think running a business is easy, found one yourself. Choosing to work for someone else is the EASY choice, made by far, far more people. Contrary to the simplistic assumptions in the workers' movement, MOST businesses are not founded by trust-fund inheritance: they're average folks who took a risk and worked their asses off.
Except that it DOES modify the original statement for clarity.
Raising the minimum wage IS an inherently "progressive" idea, politically, and implies (I think reasonably) that the decision isn't purely one of economics (as might have been stated) but of politics.
- scholarly writings
- professors that remember him as a teacher
- students that remember him as a teacher
- people that remember going to school with him
- teachers ever remembering him as a student
The fact that we can have a president who's been sitting in office for two terms and nobody's bothered to crack his 'sealed' college records (and why they would be sealable in the first place?) should tell you more about the government / media collusion than anything.
...so you're telling me that Twitter isn't actually worth $15 billion dollars?
Phht.
Next, you're going to tell me Uber's not worth $62 billion.
"...should be available to the citizens who pay that tax...."
So the bottom half of US citizens (who pay no federal income tax) shouldn't get to see them? :)
As much as I despise DT himself, do they not understand the impact of their self-righteous vigilantism?
If they'd just *quietly* attacked him, slowly DDOS'ing his sites and businesses, it could have been months before the news got out, all the while doing damage to the campaign.
But the "look how awesome we are fighting evil" grandstanding is going to resonate in PRECISELY the opposite way with the bulk of US voters who will - I guarantee you - sympathize with him against a 'shadowy internet mafia'.
The only way they're going to HURT him now is if you're able to hack the voting machines; thankfully Diebold almost certainly installed backdoors for (the Republicans/the Democrats/the Russians/the Illuminati/whatever cabal you prefer to fear) so maybe that's still possible.
PET is common in the waste stream because it's common in use.
This means that the moment we figure out a way to use this to consume pet efficiently, everything in the works that depends on pet to function is now threatened if the organism gets into the wild, compelling scientists to research a coating or addative that repels it...and then we are back to square one.
Yes, but if my post encourages someone ELSE to do it:
- someone else does it, and jams phones (my benefit)
- they get caught because it's in THEIR pocket (still my benefit)
I don't see the problem.
....for taking it out to flip a stupid switch.
Smart would have been to be on a call himself, and meanwhile in his pocket flip the switch, then act all annoyed and pissed like everyone else.
BTW where could I buy one?
Not (apparently) having learned anything from the switch to digital tv broadcasting (where the higher bandwidth was not used for better quality, but was co opted to shovel more channels of low quality shit) this "34% faster" algorithm will simply result in web coders programming at least 34% more crap ads and scripts into web pages.
A link to the story/article, etc would be rather useful.
Perhaps teaching algebra, geometry, and such isn't so much about the UTILITY of the specific skills, but more about teaching kids a methodical, procedural, deductive method of thinking and problem solving?
Not every answer in their lives will be found by 'googling' or 'asking their friends'.
Sometimes, there are going to be hard problems - and not just math-related ones, although likely there will be plenty of those - where having some experience in methodically stepping-through the issue's component parts and rigorously analyzing the thing will be the only way to come to a good conclusion.
What I fundamentally don't understand is this:
EITHER
a) if this is GENUINELY a mattter of national security, the FBI could actually hand the phone to the NSA and get the information in about 30 seconds but for some reason isn't doing so, or
b) the NSA's upteen-gajillion-dollar "black" budget has pretty much enabled them to record/analyze/store only the utterly banal unencrypted conversations that you could hear just sitting and listening to the guy next to you at the coffeeshop, ie almost entirely wasted on stupid crap.
I don't see really any other alternative.
I'd expect, for example, that Russian and Chinese government communications are ROUTINELY of a higher level of encryption than the bloody iPhone you can buy at the mall, and yet the NSA's *job* is to listen in on that stuff and they claim that they're pretty damned good at it?
Fixed that:
"If you're using crowdsourcing to figure out the safe way to go, someone's got to be the first one to survive to report a hazard."
Yeah, no porn / adult-entertainment possibility there, I'm sure.
While I don't disagree that those are pretty bad (assuming they're all true) BYU is an EXPLICITLY, clearly, ardently Mormon school. Always has been, as far as I know.
What you're talking about would be like going to Islam University and then claiming you're atheist.
The only place that's allowed is explicitly Christian schools, they're expected to tolerate it.
The EU a "super power" militarily? Bwahaha.
First, you need to have a military: They couldn't even bomb some Libyan bandits without running out of bombs and needing US air control and mid-air refueling. 5 of the 28 members of NATO even bother to meet their treaty-obligated minimum defense budgets, much less anything more. Most EU country militaries are barely more than ill-concealed jobs programs, and are populated a few patriots but mostly by the hopeless dregs that for some reason can't simply do nothing.
Yes, they (UK...assuming it's still EU this time next year, and France) have nukes; then again, so does North Korea. That doesn't make DPRK a superpower, either.
Second: you have to have the will to actually USE the military. Yes, some few EU states sent token forces to Afghanistan, usually with engagement orders that would be appropriate to kindergarten, not a war zone. Most EU countries are terrified of conflict, afraid to send soldiers into harm's way. For most EU states, they're more likely to wet their pants than use the military forcefully to exert policy
Finally, we'll simply assume for this discussion that the EU actually continues to exist, and doesn't shatter into near-insignificance in the next several years.
I don't disagree with you about Russia though, they're barely more than a 3rd-world state but Putin's aggressiveness and opportunism moves them up a little. But no, you're right, it's really US or China.
My entire point was to illustrate that for all its problems, compared to a Pax Sinaticus, the Pax Americana is pretty benign.
Not trying to be a smart ass, really but: how exactly is this "surprising"?