Chill. Relax. Folks aren't going to throw money into an investment with no value beyond fleeting popular perception. Nothing like that will ever happen. Just calm down. Enjoy life. Stop and smell the tulips.
Have you ever self-censored a comment on Slashdot due to fear of government surveillance:
1) Yes. I wanted to share my improved tin foil hat design but fear that it might be compromised if it goes public.
2) No. I have nothing to hide and I'm quite certain that the shadowy government agencies spying on me are sufficiently restrained by secret and democratically unaccountable courts. They all have my best interests in mind.
Looks like it has a more advanced competitor now. But Waiting in Line 3D shouldn't give Healthcare.gov too much problem. We know it'll take years before the sequel, Waiting in Line Forever comes out.
Just for saying that, Google will punish you with Tide ads before every Youtube video you watch. Just remember, you brought this fresh scented, stain removing power on yourself.
(The following should be read with a [Don't Be] Evil villain accent in mind) And thus ad buyers have no reason to ask Facebook for data. After all, if Google's analytics include social media interactions with enough detail to predict responses, why bother with Facebook? To sell ads on Facebook? Hardly. Ever since Google started giving everyone's generic responses they all stopped getting on Facebook. At last, we shall have our revenge... er, market share!
RTFA. Cowboy Neal can make up to 88 Micro$ofts an hour working from your house. Click here for one weird tip on how Texas school board can lose idiocracy. OMG U R homo Ponies!!! Ron Paul 2012!
not to have to stand in the cold for hours, fight a mob, get cussed at by numerous irrational drones, guarantee that you'll come home miserable and exhausted, force a retail employee to skip Thanksgiving, and then stand in interminable check out line before going to do it again at another store? If this amount is greater than the $75 you'll save on that TV, then you should just stay home and do something you'll actually enjoy. How much is it worth to you to have a day off, to be able to read an extra book to your kids or, if you don't have any, to yourself?
Why, that's lunacy! That's nothing but a bunch of [right wing conspiracy theory/left wing agitation, depending upon which audience we're dealing with]! Such a thing would never happen.
According to President Harry S. Truman, Hoover transformed the FBI into his private secret police force; Truman stated that "we want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him".
Why would congress or the president want to stop this? It's a serious question because I don't understand how any adult in the US today honestly thinks that any of the powers that be have any interest in stopping any of this.
Because the people in power are self-interested and as much as they despise complaints from the plebs they don't want to be treated like them. They (the Congress more than the president) have a very good reason to want this stopped and that's so it won't be used against them.
That is not to say they'll act to stop it, but you only asked why they might want to stop it. Whatever they might individually want, they won't do anything to stop it. They've the wolf by the ears.
It's difficult to imagine how the NSA can possibly survive all of this.
Well Mr. Congressman, we understand your concerns. But before you vote to restructure the agency, we've some material you might like to see. Now, don't ask how we got our hands on your browsing records, records which will offend the religious sensibilities of your conservative voters and the racial sensitivities of your liberal voters, but we just wanted you to know that our agency is doing everything in its power to make sure such things don't become public record.
How would the NSA prove that the "private" browsing activity that they are exposing is really their activity and not something they made up?
We can't tell you. National security.
Oh, by the way, your family might find your browsing history from last week interesting. You wouldn't want to change your publicly stated opinions on our programs would you?
In reality, you'll just be convincing the people who already don't like that person that he is a filthy disgusting bad person. And the people who approved of his ideas will claim it is a conspiracy by the NSA/FBI/CIA/whatever to discredit him and that those pictures were planted.
And that's one of the (many) problems with this whole system. Here it wouldn't be a question of agents having to sneak into a guy's house and plant the material. They'll just claim that he browsed such sites and the rest of us will be expected to take their word for it. "Where's the evidence to support this claim?" "We can't tell you. National security."
Sure. But notice the timing. Enclosure became increasingly common during the same period that groundwork was laid for the bourgeois economic revolution. This was not so much a feature of the system as it was a sign of its demise. No system lasts forever. But traditional rights had greater staying power than, say, unions.
There's a basic problem with any system of "obligations and rights" against a class that relies on a political system in the hands of that same class for its enforcement.
I agree. But that's also what we have now, just without the meager constraints of tradition. The governmental system we have, the one we expect to defend the rights of the worker, is largely subservient to the same worker's employer. A given politician may claim to care about an "associate" at Walmart, but he depends upon the wealthiest shareholders for campaign contributions and lobbyists to write legislation.
In any case, my purpose is not to say, 'Wouldn't it be great if we were all serfs?' The disappearance of serfdom was no great loss, so long as it was replaced by something better such as a free peasantry, skilled laborers owning their own capital, and a wide distribution of real property. My purpose was to say that the direction we're going points to something worse than serfdom. It points to an ever growing class of people who own nothing, whose lives depend upon a paycheck which can disappear in a moment, and who will not therefore be in a position to object to ever greater abuses. If this seems a little extreme, I would point out that in the U.S. the government forcing people to buy insurance from private corporations is decried by the opposition as socialism. In a system where the left demands you give money to the corporations and the right regards this as an abuse of business interests, where will one find the political will to oppose anything a corporate lobbyist demands?
The democracy has been captured by plutocrats and, what is worse still, the populace is suffering Stockholm syndrome.
Lass throwing a sword? I think the phrase you're looking for refers to a "watery tart" or "moistened bint" who "lobbed a scimitar." Don't they teach history in schools these days?
Not serfdom. Serfs were bound by traditional duties, but the same traditions bound their liege lords with obligations and to recognize certain rights. So, for example, you cannot turn a serf off the land his father worked. You cannot threaten him and his family with hunger in order to compel new concessions. He has a great many days guaranteed off since they're holy days. Most days of the week, he's actually working for himself and only a fraction was her required to work on his liege's land and projects.
Compare this with the circumstances your cite. Some rights are granted by our legal system but the obligations owed to a worker (esp. pay) have been in decline since the 1970's. But the employee has no security. High unemployment makes them easily replaceable; Walmart doesn't allow them to organize; they could be left at any moment with more bills than money. Thus, concessions are easy to secure for the employer who knows his employees only work for him because they've few other options. Sure, they don't lower their worker's salaries but they do reduce labor costs by having ever fewer workers perform ever more tasks. And who can complain? As for days off, Walmart workers certainly don't get our civic holidays off. Days like Sunday were once a great and beautiful thing. They were guarantees that an employer was not the master of an employees life. They granted all people the very human dignity of being able to spend time with family. They even allowed time for people to recognize a god other than Mammon. Walmart employees even have to work on Thanksgiving now and the holiday season has the most taxing schedule for them. A retail worker often does not know when he'll be working two weeks hence, and can therefore make few sure plans to spend with family and friends. Oh well, it's easier just to stay home and watch TV ($199 at Walmart!) and eat popcorn than to have to risk cancelling on friends again. As for the fraction of pay, I would be willing to bet that the ratio of profit, Walmart:"associate", is far better for Walmart than ever was the ratio of produce, liege:serf.
So, I do not think it best to say Walmart wishes to make its employees serfs. Serfs are a meddlesome bunch and tend to riot when their traditional rights are usurped. I think rather that Walmart wishes to leave its employees in a servile condition, as a great master over so many slaves. And while I'm at it, I'll throw this little bomb: the current form of consumerist capitalism undermines friendship, family, the human dignity of workers, and even religion.
If you must know,* I threw in that line in order to avoid a pedantic argument. I feared my interlocutor might seize upon the line, "After the musket came the breech-loading rifle", reading it as though there were nothing in between, so I thought I'd go ahead and concede something to avoid the discussion entirely and focus on the actual issue at hand.
If you think this an odd thing to do, note what had come before. My interlocutor seemed to believe that citing when the flintlock was invented somehow undermined Orwell's argument. Of course it didn't, since Orwell's argument depends on the cheapness and availability of the weapon, a factor which developed over time, rather than the exact date of its invention. I suspected one who would read things in this way would assume Orwell was treating musket as any muzzle-loading firearm and rifle as a breech loading firearm. I know people who seize upon those terms anytime they hear them and insist upon greater precision. Such conversations are wearisome. Therefore, assuming such a one would prefer more precise and descriptive terms like, "muzzle-loading flintlock rifle", "smooth-bore flintlock musket", etc, I decided to try and defuse that objection by indicating that Orwell was not speaking with all the precision he might want.
Given his response to my post, I think my efforts were misguided anyway. Seeing me speak of illegal acts of war, he decided to protest the views of "Strict Constitutional Constructionists", as though only strict constructionists see some of these actions illegal and as though only Constitution determined what constituted an illegal act of war. I concluded on this basis that the fellow had an ax to grind and although I'm interested in conversation, I'm not interested in dispute for its own sake. So, I let it be.
* And you're not just looking for a spat. I would hope you're not, but with that attempt at a closing insult, one cannot be certain. You know nothing about me, much less what I'm familiar with, so save it.
Context in the article is everything here. Yes, I agree that a wind farm getting blown a way would normally be a better example of irony than a geothermal plant suffering such an end. I'd say likewise for a geothermal power plant getting destroyed by a volcano erupting. But in this case the article did not speak of the geothermal power plant as geothermal power plant, but as a response to global warming in a country that had contributed little to the same. It was in this context that they say, 'Look, here's a paradox: a potential solution for global warming gets destroyed by a typhoon which was particularly vicious because of global warming.' But there is nothing paradoxical about this. Yet a potential solution to global warming being destroyed by global warming is ironic and also, as you say, unfortunate.
How many years did flintlocks exist before there was a revolution? They were invented in 1610, after all.
Per the article cited, I actually had in mind the flintlock rifle, although Orwell is somewhat sloppy in his application of the term rifle. In any case, there is no lack of revolution in the 17th century, glorious and otherwise.
As for drones potential to expand government power, how?
Cheaper surveillance means many of the practical constraints our would-be lords and masters might face fall away. The same thing goes not just for surveillance, however. The cheapness and efficiency of small arms in our age makes the guerrilla's task much easier, as the U.S. occupation of the middle east shows. Yet the occupation is made easier by the use of drones.
The government always had the power to kill people it didn't like. War, the death penalty, skirmishes technically not wars, etc. give it the legal power to kill people. Planes give the US Government the power to do this to anyone anywhere back in the days of the Doolittle Raid.
This seems somewhat confused. Government does not always have the legal authority to kill anyone it likes. Sometimes, however, it pretends it does and new technology often allows a sort of sleight of hand. Thus we end up with our illegal involvement in wars in Libya and Yemen, with the government claiming that it isn't war since no human being is inside the drones and cruise missiles piloting them.
Restrictions on drones would be remarkably ineffective. [...] You could restrict the government's ability to USE drones by creating some sort of international legal mechanism to decide who is a valid drone-target.
The first statement claims that legal restrictions would be ineffective due to practical considerations. The second statement claims that legal restrictions would be effective because it forgets an important consideration of actual practice: i.e. there are a great many international laws that the U.S. habitually violate.
I do not think rules and restrictions on drones are likely to completely control there use, anymore than I think the 4th amendment protects U.S. citizens from illegal search and seizure in practice. But without such rules give at least some protection, if only the ability to skewer in the courts those who abuse and flout the rules after the fact.
But for that to actually happen the US would have to agree to give it the right to execute Americans, and I doubt you'd be cool with that.
No, I wouldn't. But, then, I'm not cool with my own government having such a power (a government in which I ostensibly have some say). I'm hardly about to ask for an unelected international body to have such power.
For many in the Philippines, the damage here exemplifies a broader paradox: A storm consistent with some scientists’ warnings about climate change has done tremendous damage to an island that is one of the world’s biggest success stories of renewable energy, and to a country that has contributed almost nothing to the global accumulation of greenhouse gases.
Come on NYT! That not paradoxical; it's ironic.
Regardless, this is an odd way to frame the story. Such a storm would (and did) destroy other kinds of power plants. Geothermal power is not a casualty of the typhoon.
Nuclear weapons had a stabilizing and centralizing tendency for governments, due to the great expense involved and the infrastructure needed to create them. As drone are developed and become more effective, governments like that in the U.S. may find their monopoly on force undermined.
I would have careful restrictions placed on drone use, equal or exceeding those already on other technologies (aircraft, etc.). A great risk remains that they'll be used to expand government power. But occasionally I wonder whether the drone might not represent revolutionary potential like the flintlock musket once did.
AC has this right. The basis for papal claims to religious authority are not founded on the Donation of Constantine, though the document was used many centuries ago to bolster claims to temporal authority. References to the document don't even appear in the sources until the eighth century, long after the bishop of Rome had begun to build more universal claims upon his succession from Peter. Indeed, apostolic succession--not any grant of authority from an emperor--has been the foundation of episcopal authority at least since the second (cf. Irenaeus of Lyons) and arguably since the first (cf. Clement of Rome) century.
No Catholic, therefore, will need to reference that spurious document to support his faith in the authority of the Roman bishop. The fact that the Donation was accepted at all was an effect rather than a cause of the broad acceptance of papal authority in the West.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not translated. It's just using elvish and dwarfish scripts.
Chill. Relax. Folks aren't going to throw money into an investment with no value beyond fleeting popular perception. Nothing like that will ever happen. Just calm down. Enjoy life. Stop and smell the tulips.
I propose the following be applied to posts predicting racist posts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulence_humor#Assigning_of_blame
Incidentally, this was a new one for me: "Whoever thunk it stunk it."
Looks like it has a more advanced competitor now. But Waiting in Line 3D shouldn't give Healthcare.gov too much problem. We know it'll take years before the sequel, Waiting in Line Forever comes out.
Just for saying that, Google will punish you with Tide ads before every Youtube video you watch. Just remember, you brought this fresh scented, stain removing power on yourself.
(The following should be read with a [Don't Be] Evil villain accent in mind) And thus ad buyers have no reason to ask Facebook for data. After all, if Google's analytics include social media interactions with enough detail to predict responses, why bother with Facebook? To sell ads on Facebook? Hardly. Ever since Google started giving everyone's generic responses they all stopped getting on Facebook. At last, we shall have our revenge... er, market share!
RTFA. Cowboy Neal can make up to 88 Micro$ofts an hour working from your house. Click here for one weird tip on how Texas school board can lose idiocracy. OMG U R homo Ponies!!! Ron Paul 2012!
Want to give tech stuff to a loved one for Christmas? Russian Orthodox Christians have got this thing figured out.
not to have to stand in the cold for hours, fight a mob, get cussed at by numerous irrational drones, guarantee that you'll come home miserable and exhausted, force a retail employee to skip Thanksgiving, and then stand in interminable check out line before going to do it again at another store? If this amount is greater than the $75 you'll save on that TV, then you should just stay home and do something you'll actually enjoy. How much is it worth to you to have a day off, to be able to read an extra book to your kids or, if you don't have any, to yourself?
Why, that's lunacy! That's nothing but a bunch of [right wing conspiracy theory/left wing agitation, depending upon which audience we're dealing with]! Such a thing would never happen.
Oh. Wait.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_edgar_hoover:
Because the people in power are self-interested and as much as they despise complaints from the plebs they don't want to be treated like them. They (the Congress more than the president) have a very good reason to want this stopped and that's so it won't be used against them.
That is not to say they'll act to stop it, but you only asked why they might want to stop it. Whatever they might individually want, they won't do anything to stop it. They've the wolf by the ears.
Well Mr. Congressman, we understand your concerns. But before you vote to restructure the agency, we've some material you might like to see. Now, don't ask how we got our hands on your browsing records, records which will offend the religious sensibilities of your conservative voters and the racial sensitivities of your liberal voters, but we just wanted you to know that our agency is doing everything in its power to make sure such things don't become public record.
Arrest Donald Trump in the name of national security? You're not an NSA shill trying to convince us of the value of this program are you?
We can't tell you. National security.
Oh, by the way, your family might find your browsing history from last week interesting. You wouldn't want to change your publicly stated opinions on our programs would you?
And that's one of the (many) problems with this whole system. Here it wouldn't be a question of agents having to sneak into a guy's house and plant the material. They'll just claim that he browsed such sites and the rest of us will be expected to take their word for it. "Where's the evidence to support this claim?" "We can't tell you. National security."
Sure. But notice the timing. Enclosure became increasingly common during the same period that groundwork was laid for the bourgeois economic revolution. This was not so much a feature of the system as it was a sign of its demise. No system lasts forever. But traditional rights had greater staying power than, say, unions.
I agree. But that's also what we have now, just without the meager constraints of tradition. The governmental system we have, the one we expect to defend the rights of the worker, is largely subservient to the same worker's employer. A given politician may claim to care about an "associate" at Walmart, but he depends upon the wealthiest shareholders for campaign contributions and lobbyists to write legislation.
In any case, my purpose is not to say, 'Wouldn't it be great if we were all serfs?' The disappearance of serfdom was no great loss, so long as it was replaced by something better such as a free peasantry, skilled laborers owning their own capital, and a wide distribution of real property. My purpose was to say that the direction we're going points to something worse than serfdom. It points to an ever growing class of people who own nothing, whose lives depend upon a paycheck which can disappear in a moment, and who will not therefore be in a position to object to ever greater abuses. If this seems a little extreme, I would point out that in the U.S. the government forcing people to buy insurance from private corporations is decried by the opposition as socialism. In a system where the left demands you give money to the corporations and the right regards this as an abuse of business interests, where will one find the political will to oppose anything a corporate lobbyist demands?
The democracy has been captured by plutocrats and, what is worse still, the populace is suffering Stockholm syndrome.
Lass throwing a sword? I think the phrase you're looking for refers to a "watery tart" or "moistened bint" who "lobbed a scimitar." Don't they teach history in schools these days?
Not serfdom. Serfs were bound by traditional duties, but the same traditions bound their liege lords with obligations and to recognize certain rights. So, for example, you cannot turn a serf off the land his father worked. You cannot threaten him and his family with hunger in order to compel new concessions. He has a great many days guaranteed off since they're holy days. Most days of the week, he's actually working for himself and only a fraction was her required to work on his liege's land and projects.
Compare this with the circumstances your cite. Some rights are granted by our legal system but the obligations owed to a worker (esp. pay) have been in decline since the 1970's. But the employee has no security. High unemployment makes them easily replaceable; Walmart doesn't allow them to organize; they could be left at any moment with more bills than money. Thus, concessions are easy to secure for the employer who knows his employees only work for him because they've few other options. Sure, they don't lower their worker's salaries but they do reduce labor costs by having ever fewer workers perform ever more tasks. And who can complain? As for days off, Walmart workers certainly don't get our civic holidays off. Days like Sunday were once a great and beautiful thing. They were guarantees that an employer was not the master of an employees life. They granted all people the very human dignity of being able to spend time with family. They even allowed time for people to recognize a god other than Mammon. Walmart employees even have to work on Thanksgiving now and the holiday season has the most taxing schedule for them. A retail worker often does not know when he'll be working two weeks hence, and can therefore make few sure plans to spend with family and friends. Oh well, it's easier just to stay home and watch TV ($199 at Walmart!) and eat popcorn than to have to risk cancelling on friends again. As for the fraction of pay, I would be willing to bet that the ratio of profit, Walmart:"associate", is far better for Walmart than ever was the ratio of produce, liege:serf.
So, I do not think it best to say Walmart wishes to make its employees serfs. Serfs are a meddlesome bunch and tend to riot when their traditional rights are usurped. I think rather that Walmart wishes to leave its employees in a servile condition, as a great master over so many slaves. And while I'm at it, I'll throw this little bomb: the current form of consumerist capitalism undermines friendship, family, the human dignity of workers, and even religion.
If you must know,* I threw in that line in order to avoid a pedantic argument. I feared my interlocutor might seize upon the line, "After the musket came the breech-loading rifle", reading it as though there were nothing in between, so I thought I'd go ahead and concede something to avoid the discussion entirely and focus on the actual issue at hand.
If you think this an odd thing to do, note what had come before. My interlocutor seemed to believe that citing when the flintlock was invented somehow undermined Orwell's argument. Of course it didn't, since Orwell's argument depends on the cheapness and availability of the weapon, a factor which developed over time, rather than the exact date of its invention. I suspected one who would read things in this way would assume Orwell was treating musket as any muzzle-loading firearm and rifle as a breech loading firearm. I know people who seize upon those terms anytime they hear them and insist upon greater precision. Such conversations are wearisome. Therefore, assuming such a one would prefer more precise and descriptive terms like, "muzzle-loading flintlock rifle", "smooth-bore flintlock musket", etc, I decided to try and defuse that objection by indicating that Orwell was not speaking with all the precision he might want.
Given his response to my post, I think my efforts were misguided anyway. Seeing me speak of illegal acts of war, he decided to protest the views of "Strict Constitutional Constructionists", as though only strict constructionists see some of these actions illegal and as though only Constitution determined what constituted an illegal act of war. I concluded on this basis that the fellow had an ax to grind and although I'm interested in conversation, I'm not interested in dispute for its own sake. So, I let it be.
* And you're not just looking for a spat. I would hope you're not, but with that attempt at a closing insult, one cannot be certain. You know nothing about me, much less what I'm familiar with, so save it.
Context in the article is everything here. Yes, I agree that a wind farm getting blown a way would normally be a better example of irony than a geothermal plant suffering such an end. I'd say likewise for a geothermal power plant getting destroyed by a volcano erupting. But in this case the article did not speak of the geothermal power plant as geothermal power plant, but as a response to global warming in a country that had contributed little to the same. It was in this context that they say, 'Look, here's a paradox: a potential solution for global warming gets destroyed by a typhoon which was particularly vicious because of global warming.' But there is nothing paradoxical about this. Yet a potential solution to global warming being destroyed by global warming is ironic and also, as you say, unfortunate.
Per the article cited, I actually had in mind the flintlock rifle, although Orwell is somewhat sloppy in his application of the term rifle. In any case, there is no lack of revolution in the 17th century, glorious and otherwise.
Cheaper surveillance means many of the practical constraints our would-be lords and masters might face fall away. The same thing goes not just for surveillance, however. The cheapness and efficiency of small arms in our age makes the guerrilla's task much easier, as the U.S. occupation of the middle east shows. Yet the occupation is made easier by the use of drones.
This seems somewhat confused. Government does not always have the legal authority to kill anyone it likes. Sometimes, however, it pretends it does and new technology often allows a sort of sleight of hand. Thus we end up with our illegal involvement in wars in Libya and Yemen, with the government claiming that it isn't war since no human being is inside the drones and cruise missiles piloting them.
The first statement claims that legal restrictions would be ineffective due to practical considerations. The second statement claims that legal restrictions would be effective because it forgets an important consideration of actual practice: i.e. there are a great many international laws that the U.S. habitually violate.
I do not think rules and restrictions on drones are likely to completely control there use, anymore than I think the 4th amendment protects U.S. citizens from illegal search and seizure in practice. But without such rules give at least some protection, if only the ability to skewer in the courts those who abuse and flout the rules after the fact.
No, I wouldn't. But, then, I'm not cool with my own government having such a power (a government in which I ostensibly have some say). I'm hardly about to ask for an unelected international body to have such power.
Come on NYT! That not paradoxical; it's ironic.
Regardless, this is an odd way to frame the story. Such a storm would (and did) destroy other kinds of power plants. Geothermal power is not a casualty of the typhoon.
Nuclear weapons had a stabilizing and centralizing tendency for governments, due to the great expense involved and the infrastructure needed to create them. As drone are developed and become more effective, governments like that in the U.S. may find their monopoly on force undermined.
I would have careful restrictions placed on drone use, equal or exceeding those already on other technologies (aircraft, etc.). A great risk remains that they'll be used to expand government power. But occasionally I wonder whether the drone might not represent revolutionary potential like the flintlock musket once did.
AC has this right. The basis for papal claims to religious authority are not founded on the Donation of Constantine, though the document was used many centuries ago to bolster claims to temporal authority. References to the document don't even appear in the sources until the eighth century, long after the bishop of Rome had begun to build more universal claims upon his succession from Peter. Indeed, apostolic succession--not any grant of authority from an emperor--has been the foundation of episcopal authority at least since the second (cf. Irenaeus of Lyons) and arguably since the first (cf. Clement of Rome) century.
No Catholic, therefore, will need to reference that spurious document to support his faith in the authority of the Roman bishop. The fact that the Donation was accepted at all was an effect rather than a cause of the broad acceptance of papal authority in the West.