The relevant regulations are here: http://about.usps.com/publications/pub542/welcome.htm
Private couriers like FedEx and UPS can deliver letters, but only if they're express ("Extremely Urgent Letters" is how the regulation puts it). They're not allowed to deliver regular "I don't care exactly when it gets there as long as it doesn't take too long" letters, which are the "costs a few pennies" referred to in the comment I was responding to. During the 90s, the USPS got worried that people were using FedEx and UPS too much, and was conducting investigations with an eye on cracking down on the practice. My memory is fuzzy, but I think the key allegation they were making was that people were sending letters express that didn't really have a time-sensitive aspect to them. That is, they wanted to step in and say "your letter doesn't need to be there that fast. You can't send it via FedEx, you have to give it to us."
The TSA was created in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks, with the reasoning that failures in airport security were at partly to blame for those attacks succeeding. But the reason the hijackers succeeded (or partly succeeded in the case of United 93) was because they exploited existing assumptions about what airline hijackers do.
Prior to 9/11, the primary purposes of a hijacking were to gain publicity and to use the passengers and crew as hostages. The terrorists would issue demands (usually for release of prisoners allied with them), maybe force the pilot to fly the plane around from airport to airport. Maybe (but not often) they might pick out a passenger belonging to a group they hated (members of the US military, or Jews) and kill him. But overall, if everyone cooperated, they'd come out of it alive, albeit after some miserable days or weeks -- TWA Flight 847 in 1985 being the archetypal example. This is the way the public perceived it, and it was the basis for official government policy: cooperate and negotiate, because the hostage are valuable to the terrorists. If the hostages are dead, the terrorists have nothing to bargain with, and the government has no reason not to go in with guns blazing.
Based on this, all the 9/11 attackers had to do was present the passengers and crew with a situation where the perceived risks of resisting were greater than the perceived risks of cooperating. Without the knowledge that their situation did not match the pattern and that cooperation would result in everybody being killed, a credible threat to the life of just one person would have been enough. The hijackers could have accomplished this with their bare hands by ganging up on a single vulnerable person (elderly or very young), holding him/her, and threatening to strangle them. No pilot was going to say "Go ahead, break the old lady's neck, the cops can arrest you when we land in LA." Having box cutters made things easier, but not having them (because airport security would have confiscated them) would not have stopped them.
The way people perceive the situation is different now, and indeed the perception changed during the hijackings, once the passengers aboard United 93 found out what what the hijackers actually intended. Now, a hijacking couldn't succeed unless the hijackers were heavily armed, because the assumption among everyone else would be that cooperation means dying.
My point here (sorry for the rambling) is that the assumption behind creating the TSA is "if we'd only had it on 9/11, the attacks would have been prevented", and that's not true. Likewise, if the 9/11 attacks were attempted using the same tactics today, they'd fail, TSA or no TSA.
I honestly can't tell if you're a very naive anti-privatization person, or a pro-privatization person doing an absolutely brilliant parody of the anti-privatization position.
This is why sending mail via government costs pennies, while sending mail via UPS or FedEx costs $10 or more. Privatization only makes things wasteful and inefficient because companies can't compete when they have to make a profit.
The only kind of mail that costs pennies via USPS is first class (letters), which private companies are forbidden by law from carrying. Also, the USPS is indirectly subsidized by taxpayers via exemption from federal taxes and special borrowing privileges, among other things. If the USPS provides such a better value, why do almost all online retailers use UPS or FedEx?
Actually, the best comparison I’ve seen is the one between Windows 1.0 and Windows 8.
Agreed. Basically, they've gone from just lines ("flat"), to beveled, to Luna (the "Fisher Price" default XP theme) to Aero Glass, and back to lines again. I wonder how much Aero cost to develop, now that they're basically tossing it.
The definition of "email" is a little vague, but for the analogy to snail mail to work, you just need two things:
1. Asynchronicity/persistence: the receiver doesn't have to interpret the message while the sender is sending it. A letter recipient doesn't have to be looking over the writer's shoulder while the letter is being written, compared to (non-recorded) verbal conversation where one person has to be listening at the same time that the other person is speaking.
2. Delivery: the message is moved from one location to another. A non-electronic example of a lack of delivery would be a post-it note.
Adding qualifiers like "full-scale" or "inter-organizational" and so forth is like saying the Wright Flyer wasn't an airplane because it didn't have an enclosed cockpit.
Sorry for the delay in replying, been busy. Now then...
The US...is not responsible when a former Baathist sets off a bomb in a marketplace. He -- and whatever organization he answers to, if any -- is responsible. He is not a toddler or monkey or a robot responding unthinkingly to stimuli or programming. He is a moral actor.
The US is not responsible for creating a lawless failed state where settling old scores along tribal and religious lines is acceptable? Arguing about enabling the moral acts of a single person in this environment is getting waaaaay off track. It's like you're arguing about the actions of a single drunk driver in a country where drunk driving is legal and all of the bars are 30 miles away from neighborhoods.
On the contrary, arguing about the actions of a single person is the only way to get to the underlying morals of the matter. Any act of any kind, good or bad, boils down to individuals. Their actions are not dictated by their "environment", like birds flying south for the winter.
And what's this garbage about Baathists? In Iraq, Baathism was the party of Saddam Hussein. It had no real leaders when he fell, and was hardly relevant at all in the civil war. The civil war was between Sunnis, Shiites and (to a lesser extent) Kurds and Turks. The civil war started when the US invaded Iraq and fired the Iraqi army, leaving a bunch of angry, broke men with weapons and military training with no source of income. The results are obvious.
The same moral calculus applies to the Sunnis, Shiites, and other groups. Once more, you're talking about those men as if they're children, animals, or inanimate objects. If we were talking about me starting a boulder rolling down a cliff, or starting a stampede of buffalo, the fault for any resulting death or damage would be mine -- the boulder and the buffalo are acting on physics and instinct, in response to what I did. They are not capable of moral judgement. The acts you are trying to place at the US's doorstop were carried out by people capable of moral judgement and responsible for their own acts.
The idea that the US is responsible for his actions...is of the same spirit as what a Victorian colonial might say with a shrug: "Well, what do you expect, chap? They're just wogs, after all."
How ironic! The Imperial British were masters of fomenting ethnic/religious strife in order to maintain their grip on power. Although I think the US's version was unintentional, it had the same result, albeit with a client state vs. direct colonial control.
My point, which you seem to have missed, is that you're displaying the same "they don't know any better" attitude, though you probably don't explicitly hold it. If an Iraqi blows up a marketplace, the only way the US can be responsible for his act is if he isn't responsible, and the only way he can not be responsible is for him to be somehow less capable of moral judgement than we are.
If getting rid of Saddam was (in your estimation) not worth the post-overthrow cost, then by your logic it would have been immoral for the Iraqis themselves to do it, assuming they had the power to.
We're not talking about internal revolution here (much as you want to dig up bogus connections to the Civil War). We're talking about the most powerful country in the world overthrowing a neutered dictator who only had nominal control over part of his country under the pretext that he was a clear and immediate threat to them. Or have you forgotten?
My reference to the Civil War has nothing to do with whether or not the source of Saddam's overthrow was internal or external, since that makes no difference as far as I'm concerned. If overthrowing him was in and of itself right (which you agreed it was), then it doesn't matter who did it. The Lincoln/KKK pattern applies just fine: if Party A does something good
You want to pay me to stand there in a skimpy outfit and feign interest in people? Where do I sign up?
I agree with the point of your comment, but in the case of most folks on Slashdot (self included), the more-effective strategy would be to dress in said skimpy outfit, stand next to the booth, and wait for the inevitable offer of money to move away...
Because on slashdot, nobody EVER makes a post about how they hate their job but feel trapped in it.
All of the Slashdot complaints (at least that I've seen) have been "this job sucks but I feel trapped" not "tech work sucks but I feel trapped." I'm not going to get overly worked up about an airline pilot who fears flying, a career soldier who hates wearing uniforms, or a forest ranger who can't stand the outdoors. If a tech company were trying to get its IT staff to dress to draw looks, that would be way out of line, but for a model that's just part of the job.
All nonsense used to justify an elective adventure that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and liquidated the educated class of an entire country.
An "adventure" or a "situation" did not do anything. Certain people killed certain other people. The US is morally responsible for those innocents shot or bombed by its forces. It is not responsible when a former Baathist sets off a bomb in a marketplace. He -- and whatever organization he answers to, if any -- is responsible. He is not a toddler or monkey or a robot responding unthinkingly to stimuli or programming. He is a moral actor. The idea that the US is responsible for his actions, the way someone would be if they stampeded a herd of cattle, is of the same spirit as what a Victorian colonial might say with a shrug: "Well, what do you expect, chap? They're just wogs, after all."
Sure, getting rid of Hussein was a good thing, but guess what? In the real world, you can't eliminate Hussein in a vacuum. You have to consider the possibility that one tin-pot dictator is not worth razing a country, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents including nearly all of the educated class
Aside from your continuing to lump together who did what, I pointed out that the Baathists would have been trying to get back into power regardless of who took that power away. If getting rid of Saddam was (in your estimation) not worth the post-overthrow cost, then by your logic it would have been immoral for the Iraqis themselves to do it, assuming they had the power to. And as I also pointed out, the number of people killed in the overthrow itself was far lower than it would have been otherwise (for a rough comparison, scaling what happened in Lebanon to account for population differences, gives 1.1 million at the low end). So, again by your standards, an indigenous overthrow would be even more wrong.
plus thousands of your own soldiers, and spending billions of dollars that could have helped immensely with the current financial crisis.
As I noted, that's a valid objection, but a different one than the issue I was responding to.
The war in Iraq killed over a hundred thousand civilians - I have no doubt that in several decades, the USA will officially give REAL recognition to these victims (instead of blanket statements such as "we remember the victims of this war" which doesn't clearly spell out "CIVILIANS"). However, this won't make up for the fact that the war should have ended years earlier than it did (and in fact should have never been started).
Except that the vast majority of those civilians were killed by people who had lost their power trying to get it back. Blaming the US for that is equivalent to blaming Abraham Lincoln for the KKK -- after all, if the slaves had never been freed, there wouldn't have been any reason for the southern whites to put them back in their place by terrorizing and killing them, right? And in both cases, those who had been overthrown (the Baathists or the slave owners) would have been killing their former subjects to try to reassert the old order, whether the overthrow had been at the hands of the formerly-oppressed, or from an outside force -- in fact, the body count would probably have been much higher in the Iraq case, because there is no way any home-grown anti-Baathist force could have overthrown Saddam as quickly as the US-led coalition did. If (as you assert) the fact that those who were overthrown killed a lot of people trying to get back into power dictates that they never should have been overthrown in the first place, then by your reasoning it would have been immoral for anyone to overthrow him.
Now, you can assert that the US handled things badly afterward, and on many points I'll agree with you. You can say that the whole thing wasn't worth it to the US given the price paid -- that's more or less the paleoconservative position. But if you do something good (if you think overthrowing Saddam wasn't in and of itself good, I don't have the time of day for you), the only blood on your hands is from those killed while doing it, not the blood spilled by those trying to roll it back. And if you doubt that US forces went out of their way to spill as little blood as possible, compare 2003 Baghdad with 1995 Grozny.
(Note: not attempting to condemn the Russians by that last item. I don't know enough about the Chechen wars to comment on what level of force was justified. It just makes a good recent example for comparison).
Ah yes, that stuffy, hidebound world of academia, where smart people have to think really hard for a long time to understand complicated subjects, instead of getting their information in easily digestible "infographics" and becoming instant experts.
Your point is taken, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to ease the process by using newer techniques at conveying information. That dismissiveness towards "infographics" can apply just as readily to Cartesian graphs, chemical formula notation, Arabic numerals, or even writing itself. Decreasing the effort necessary for one person to comprehend another is a basic goal of language. Well, unless you're a lawyer or politician, of course.
You left out the bit about how lefties are all godless blasphemers who want to destroy the natural order of the world by allowing women to go around with their heads uncovered or even drive cars.
Well, the lefties do seem to get awfully upset whenever anyone criticizes the biggest-by-far group of people who believe those things. The word "Islamophobia" comes to mind for some reason.
This is yet another example of the prosecution of the drug war infringing on the rights, not only of the people who want to buy and sell the drugs, but everyone else. The time is well past to end the damn thing. Pursuing it costs way too much money, disrupts too many innocent lives, violates free market principles, diverts law enforcement/judicial/penal resources from actual crimes, provides riches and power to murderous gangs who otherwise wouldn't exist, encourages similar (if less violent) government interference with other items (tobacco, fat, salt, etc) and warps US foreign policy. Hell, it even hinders our efforts to fight terrorists -- things would be a lot easier in Afghanistan if we weren't pissing off the locals by trying to interfere with their opium production.
How much will it cost to purchase the electricity to recharge that battery pack? It is naive to assume that electricity to recharge cars will be cheaper than gasoline to power cars once the electricity is the primary fuel source.
Especially if construction of new power plants is artificially constrained. Besides the environmental argument, there's always a fair amount of NIMBYism -- "I want my electric car, but I don't want the power plant that runs it to be anywhere near where I live." While there's nothing inherently wrong with that sentiment (I wouldn't blame someone who likes beef yet doesn't like the smell of a cattle ranch), it is another upward force on price.
Gasoline is not priced by supply and demand, it is priced by what the market will bear. Why would you expect electric recharging to be any different?
"Supply and demand" and "what the market will bear" are precisely the same thing. Or do you mean that energy demand is partly inelastic? In that case, I agree with you.
I think the only value that all of them have in common is lower taxes and smaller government. After that, all bets off. The ultra-religious Christian Taliban loony toonies get all the press -
And that says far more about the press, than about the Tea Party movement.
the ones that kind of hijacked the Tea Party and turned it from a strictly fiscal conservative movement into one that also has the social conservatives;
A key point of the movement is for different groups normally associated with conservative politics to put aside their differences and focus on something they agree on. For instance, at the rally I attended, there were folks who agreed and who disagreed with current US foreign policy when I spoke to them.
which I get the impression that the social conservatives now pretty much run the show
They'd certainly like to, but there was very little in the way of social-related anything at the rally I went to. No mention of abortion at all. The pro gay marriage GOProud folks were handing out flyers and such, without a single unkind word towards any of them, but other than that, nothing related to sex during the speeches or on the signs. Perhaps I missed something. What should I have been keeping a look out for?
There's a bit of a difference between calling something by a silly name, and threatening legal action against someone. I don't recall anyone from the US State Department (equivalent to the Foreign Ministry, I assume) ever mentioning the matter, much less threatening anyone who avoided the matter by just calling them "fries."
Though I do wonder: legal action? What are they going to sue Google for? The closet thing I can think of is lack of trademark attribution, which is still light years away from being applicable.
Umm... no. I'm pointing out that when the US gets accused of something bad, the comments are about the US, and when some other country is accused of something bad, the comments are... about the US. There were several privacy or "Your Rights Online" posts dealing specifically with the US within the last week. Did the comments immediately stray into discussion of Iran? No, nor should they have. Same thing goes here. There's a person -- a tech guy, one of our own -- getting stomped on. How about some sympathy for him? Likewise with the discussion of Saeed Malekpour a few months ago: a programmer is at risk of being executed because of source code sharing (something rather dear to the hearts of a lot of people on Slashdot), and a major chunk of the comments are "but in the US etc. etc."
Once -- just once -- can there be a post about censorship in Country X where the comments are primarily about the censorship in question, and not US policy towards Country X, nor a list of "tu quoque" complaints about the US?
By "new" you mean "starting with the very first post on a controversial topic even remotely involving a person or group with more than two nickels to rub together"?
I knew some Saudi guys who were perfectly pious in their own country, but vacationed in Florida to booze it up and hit the titty bars.
On a less-extreme note, I recall the way people in Iran (at least the ones I knew) treated Ramadan when I was there. Theoretically, you're supposed to fast during the day, plus pray and reflect a lot in general. In reality, most folks fasted during the day, then at sundown everybody got together to stuff themselves, party, and crank up the (shudder) disco. Forgive them. It was the seventies, they knew not what they were doing.
Note: not saying anything specific about Moslems, of course. Most Christians in the US are no more pious than that at Christmas or Easter.
That brings up another question...muslims have food restrictions right? Can they have oral sex legally in their religion?
I presume you're being facetious, but the topic actually came up in an article I was reading recently (in Slate, I think) about the life of women in a Bangladesh brothel and their conflict with the local clergy. The older women advise the younger women (sort of a master/padawan thing) that if they don't wish to engage in oral sex, to tell their customers that they refuse to do that because their mouths are used to recite the verses of the Koran.
Rule #1: Nuclear weapons for democracies only.
Rule #2: Fast learn rule #1.
Unfortunately there's not much that can be done about non-democracies that already have nukes, but that should be the general rule. I have zero concern about the arsenals of India, or France, or the UK. It would have been fine with me if post-apartheid South Africa had kept theirs. I wouldn't bat an eye if, say, Sweden or Taiwan or Chile decided to develop some. North Korea and Iran are in a completely-different category.
Yes, I realize this is a missile we're talking about, but the reason we're talking about them is that they can carry warheads.
Slashdot Mirror
The relevant regulations are here: http://about.usps.com/publications/pub542/welcome.htm Private couriers like FedEx and UPS can deliver letters, but only if they're express ("Extremely Urgent Letters" is how the regulation puts it). They're not allowed to deliver regular "I don't care exactly when it gets there as long as it doesn't take too long" letters, which are the "costs a few pennies" referred to in the comment I was responding to. During the 90s, the USPS got worried that people were using FedEx and UPS too much, and was conducting investigations with an eye on cracking down on the practice. My memory is fuzzy, but I think the key allegation they were making was that people were sending letters express that didn't really have a time-sensitive aspect to them. That is, they wanted to step in and say "your letter doesn't need to be there that fast. You can't send it via FedEx, you have to give it to us."
The TSA was created in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks, with the reasoning that failures in airport security were at partly to blame for those attacks succeeding. But the reason the hijackers succeeded (or partly succeeded in the case of United 93) was because they exploited existing assumptions about what airline hijackers do.
Prior to 9/11, the primary purposes of a hijacking were to gain publicity and to use the passengers and crew as hostages. The terrorists would issue demands (usually for release of prisoners allied with them), maybe force the pilot to fly the plane around from airport to airport. Maybe (but not often) they might pick out a passenger belonging to a group they hated (members of the US military, or Jews) and kill him. But overall, if everyone cooperated, they'd come out of it alive, albeit after some miserable days or weeks -- TWA Flight 847 in 1985 being the archetypal example. This is the way the public perceived it, and it was the basis for official government policy: cooperate and negotiate, because the hostage are valuable to the terrorists. If the hostages are dead, the terrorists have nothing to bargain with, and the government has no reason not to go in with guns blazing.
Based on this, all the 9/11 attackers had to do was present the passengers and crew with a situation where the perceived risks of resisting were greater than the perceived risks of cooperating. Without the knowledge that their situation did not match the pattern and that cooperation would result in everybody being killed, a credible threat to the life of just one person would have been enough. The hijackers could have accomplished this with their bare hands by ganging up on a single vulnerable person (elderly or very young), holding him/her, and threatening to strangle them. No pilot was going to say "Go ahead, break the old lady's neck, the cops can arrest you when we land in LA." Having box cutters made things easier, but not having them (because airport security would have confiscated them) would not have stopped them.
The way people perceive the situation is different now, and indeed the perception changed during the hijackings, once the passengers aboard United 93 found out what what the hijackers actually intended. Now, a hijacking couldn't succeed unless the hijackers were heavily armed, because the assumption among everyone else would be that cooperation means dying.
My point here (sorry for the rambling) is that the assumption behind creating the TSA is "if we'd only had it on 9/11, the attacks would have been prevented", and that's not true. Likewise, if the 9/11 attacks were attempted using the same tactics today, they'd fail, TSA or no TSA.
I honestly can't tell if you're a very naive anti-privatization person, or a pro-privatization person doing an absolutely brilliant parody of the anti-privatization position.
This is why sending mail via government costs pennies, while sending mail via UPS or FedEx costs $10 or more. Privatization only makes things wasteful and inefficient because companies can't compete when they have to make a profit.
The only kind of mail that costs pennies via USPS is first class (letters), which private companies are forbidden by law from carrying. Also, the USPS is indirectly subsidized by taxpayers via exemption from federal taxes and special borrowing privileges, among other things. If the USPS provides such a better value, why do almost all online retailers use UPS or FedEx?
Actually, the best comparison I’ve seen is the one between Windows 1.0 and Windows 8.
Agreed. Basically, they've gone from just lines ("flat"), to beveled, to Luna (the "Fisher Price" default XP theme) to Aero Glass, and back to lines again. I wonder how much Aero cost to develop, now that they're basically tossing it.
The definition of "email" is a little vague, but for the analogy to snail mail to work, you just need two things:
1. Asynchronicity/persistence: the receiver doesn't have to interpret the message while the sender is sending it. A letter recipient doesn't have to be looking over the writer's shoulder while the letter is being written, compared to (non-recorded) verbal conversation where one person has to be listening at the same time that the other person is speaking.
2. Delivery: the message is moved from one location to another. A non-electronic example of a lack of delivery would be a post-it note.
Adding qualifiers like "full-scale" or "inter-organizational" and so forth is like saying the Wright Flyer wasn't an airplane because it didn't have an enclosed cockpit.
Sorry for the delay in replying, been busy. Now then...
The US ...is not responsible when a former Baathist sets off a bomb in a marketplace. He -- and whatever organization he answers to, if any -- is responsible. He is not a toddler or monkey or a robot responding unthinkingly to stimuli or programming. He is a moral actor.
The US is not responsible for creating a lawless failed state where settling old scores along tribal and religious lines is acceptable? Arguing about enabling the moral acts of a single person in this environment is getting waaaaay off track. It's like you're arguing about the actions of a single drunk driver in a country where drunk driving is legal and all of the bars are 30 miles away from neighborhoods.
On the contrary, arguing about the actions of a single person is the only way to get to the underlying morals of the matter. Any act of any kind, good or bad, boils down to individuals. Their actions are not dictated by their "environment", like birds flying south for the winter.
And what's this garbage about Baathists? In Iraq, Baathism was the party of Saddam Hussein. It had no real leaders when he fell, and was hardly relevant at all in the civil war. The civil war was between Sunnis, Shiites and (to a lesser extent) Kurds and Turks. The civil war started when the US invaded Iraq and fired the Iraqi army, leaving a bunch of angry, broke men with weapons and military training with no source of income. The results are obvious.
The same moral calculus applies to the Sunnis, Shiites, and other groups. Once more, you're talking about those men as if they're children, animals, or inanimate objects. If we were talking about me starting a boulder rolling down a cliff, or starting a stampede of buffalo, the fault for any resulting death or damage would be mine -- the boulder and the buffalo are acting on physics and instinct, in response to what I did. They are not capable of moral judgement. The acts you are trying to place at the US's doorstop were carried out by people capable of moral judgement and responsible for their own acts.
The idea that the US is responsible for his actions...is of the same spirit as what a Victorian colonial might say with a shrug: "Well, what do you expect, chap? They're just wogs, after all."
How ironic! The Imperial British were masters of fomenting ethnic/religious strife in order to maintain their grip on power. Although I think the US's version was unintentional, it had the same result, albeit with a client state vs. direct colonial control.
My point, which you seem to have missed, is that you're displaying the same "they don't know any better" attitude, though you probably don't explicitly hold it. If an Iraqi blows up a marketplace, the only way the US can be responsible for his act is if he isn't responsible, and the only way he can not be responsible is for him to be somehow less capable of moral judgement than we are.
If getting rid of Saddam was (in your estimation) not worth the post-overthrow cost, then by your logic it would have been immoral for the Iraqis themselves to do it, assuming they had the power to.
We're not talking about internal revolution here (much as you want to dig up bogus connections to the Civil War). We're talking about the most powerful country in the world overthrowing a neutered dictator who only had nominal control over part of his country under the pretext that he was a clear and immediate threat to them. Or have you forgotten?
My reference to the Civil War has nothing to do with whether or not the source of Saddam's overthrow was internal or external, since that makes no difference as far as I'm concerned. If overthrowing him was in and of itself right (which you agreed it was), then it doesn't matter who did it. The Lincoln/KKK pattern applies just fine: if Party A does something good
Really, if you're a programmer, are you going to use a development tool because of something a salesperson told you?
You want to pay me to stand there in a skimpy outfit and feign interest in people? Where do I sign up?
I agree with the point of your comment, but in the case of most folks on Slashdot (self included), the more-effective strategy would be to dress in said skimpy outfit, stand next to the booth, and wait for the inevitable offer of money to move away...
Because on slashdot, nobody EVER makes a post about how they hate their job but feel trapped in it.
All of the Slashdot complaints (at least that I've seen) have been "this job sucks but I feel trapped" not "tech work sucks but I feel trapped." I'm not going to get overly worked up about an airline pilot who fears flying, a career soldier who hates wearing uniforms, or a forest ranger who can't stand the outdoors. If a tech company were trying to get its IT staff to dress to draw looks, that would be way out of line, but for a model that's just part of the job.
All nonsense used to justify an elective adventure that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and liquidated the educated class of an entire country.
An "adventure" or a "situation" did not do anything. Certain people killed certain other people. The US is morally responsible for those innocents shot or bombed by its forces. It is not responsible when a former Baathist sets off a bomb in a marketplace. He -- and whatever organization he answers to, if any -- is responsible. He is not a toddler or monkey or a robot responding unthinkingly to stimuli or programming. He is a moral actor. The idea that the US is responsible for his actions, the way someone would be if they stampeded a herd of cattle, is of the same spirit as what a Victorian colonial might say with a shrug: "Well, what do you expect, chap? They're just wogs, after all."
Sure, getting rid of Hussein was a good thing, but guess what? In the real world, you can't eliminate Hussein in a vacuum. You have to consider the possibility that one tin-pot dictator is not worth razing a country, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents including nearly all of the educated class
Aside from your continuing to lump together who did what, I pointed out that the Baathists would have been trying to get back into power regardless of who took that power away. If getting rid of Saddam was (in your estimation) not worth the post-overthrow cost, then by your logic it would have been immoral for the Iraqis themselves to do it, assuming they had the power to. And as I also pointed out, the number of people killed in the overthrow itself was far lower than it would have been otherwise (for a rough comparison, scaling what happened in Lebanon to account for population differences, gives 1.1 million at the low end). So, again by your standards, an indigenous overthrow would be even more wrong.
plus thousands of your own soldiers, and spending billions of dollars that could have helped immensely with the current financial crisis.
As I noted, that's a valid objection, but a different one than the issue I was responding to.
The war in Iraq killed over a hundred thousand civilians - I have no doubt that in several decades, the USA will officially give REAL recognition to these victims (instead of blanket statements such as "we remember the victims of this war" which doesn't clearly spell out "CIVILIANS"). However, this won't make up for the fact that the war should have ended years earlier than it did (and in fact should have never been started).
Except that the vast majority of those civilians were killed by people who had lost their power trying to get it back. Blaming the US for that is equivalent to blaming Abraham Lincoln for the KKK -- after all, if the slaves had never been freed, there wouldn't have been any reason for the southern whites to put them back in their place by terrorizing and killing them, right? And in both cases, those who had been overthrown (the Baathists or the slave owners) would have been killing their former subjects to try to reassert the old order, whether the overthrow had been at the hands of the formerly-oppressed, or from an outside force -- in fact, the body count would probably have been much higher in the Iraq case, because there is no way any home-grown anti-Baathist force could have overthrown Saddam as quickly as the US-led coalition did. If (as you assert) the fact that those who were overthrown killed a lot of people trying to get back into power dictates that they never should have been overthrown in the first place, then by your reasoning it would have been immoral for anyone to overthrow him.
Now, you can assert that the US handled things badly afterward, and on many points I'll agree with you. You can say that the whole thing wasn't worth it to the US given the price paid -- that's more or less the paleoconservative position. But if you do something good (if you think overthrowing Saddam wasn't in and of itself good, I don't have the time of day for you), the only blood on your hands is from those killed while doing it, not the blood spilled by those trying to roll it back. And if you doubt that US forces went out of their way to spill as little blood as possible, compare 2003 Baghdad with 1995 Grozny.
(Note: not attempting to condemn the Russians by that last item. I don't know enough about the Chechen wars to comment on what level of force was justified. It just makes a good recent example for comparison).
Perhaps someone stuck in traditional Academia.
Ah yes, that stuffy, hidebound world of academia, where smart people have to think really hard for a long time to understand complicated subjects, instead of getting their information in easily digestible "infographics" and becoming instant experts.
Your point is taken, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to ease the process by using newer techniques at conveying information. That dismissiveness towards "infographics" can apply just as readily to Cartesian graphs, chemical formula notation, Arabic numerals, or even writing itself. Decreasing the effort necessary for one person to comprehend another is a basic goal of language. Well, unless you're a lawyer or politician, of course.
You left out the bit about how lefties are all godless blasphemers who want to destroy the natural order of the world by allowing women to go around with their heads uncovered or even drive cars.
Well, the lefties do seem to get awfully upset whenever anyone criticizes the biggest-by-far group of people who believe those things. The word "Islamophobia" comes to mind for some reason.
This is yet another example of the prosecution of the drug war infringing on the rights, not only of the people who want to buy and sell the drugs, but everyone else. The time is well past to end the damn thing. Pursuing it costs way too much money, disrupts too many innocent lives, violates free market principles, diverts law enforcement/judicial/penal resources from actual crimes, provides riches and power to murderous gangs who otherwise wouldn't exist, encourages similar (if less violent) government interference with other items (tobacco, fat, salt, etc) and warps US foreign policy. Hell, it even hinders our efforts to fight terrorists -- things would be a lot easier in Afghanistan if we weren't pissing off the locals by trying to interfere with their opium production.
How much will it cost to purchase the electricity to recharge that battery pack? It is naive to assume that electricity to recharge cars will be cheaper than gasoline to power cars once the electricity is the primary fuel source.
Especially if construction of new power plants is artificially constrained. Besides the environmental argument, there's always a fair amount of NIMBYism -- "I want my electric car, but I don't want the power plant that runs it to be anywhere near where I live." While there's nothing inherently wrong with that sentiment (I wouldn't blame someone who likes beef yet doesn't like the smell of a cattle ranch), it is another upward force on price.
Gasoline is not priced by supply and demand, it is priced by what the market will bear. Why would you expect electric recharging to be any different?
"Supply and demand" and "what the market will bear" are precisely the same thing. Or do you mean that energy demand is partly inelastic? In that case, I agree with you.
Ever see those Tea Party rallies?
Yep, attended one a while ago, actually.
I think the only value that all of them have in common is lower taxes and smaller government. After that, all bets off. The ultra-religious Christian Taliban loony toonies get all the press -
And that says far more about the press, than about the Tea Party movement.
the ones that kind of hijacked the Tea Party and turned it from a strictly fiscal conservative movement into one that also has the social conservatives;
A key point of the movement is for different groups normally associated with conservative politics to put aside their differences and focus on something they agree on. For instance, at the rally I attended, there were folks who agreed and who disagreed with current US foreign policy when I spoke to them.
which I get the impression that the social conservatives now pretty much run the show
They'd certainly like to, but there was very little in the way of social-related anything at the rally I went to. No mention of abortion at all. The pro gay marriage GOProud folks were handing out flyers and such, without a single unkind word towards any of them, but other than that, nothing related to sex during the speeches or on the signs. Perhaps I missed something. What should I have been keeping a look out for?
There's a bit of a difference between calling something by a silly name, and threatening legal action against someone. I don't recall anyone from the US State Department (equivalent to the Foreign Ministry, I assume) ever mentioning the matter, much less threatening anyone who avoided the matter by just calling them "fries."
Though I do wonder: legal action? What are they going to sue Google for? The closet thing I can think of is lack of trademark attribution, which is still light years away from being applicable.
Umm... no. I'm pointing out that when the US gets accused of something bad, the comments are about the US, and when some other country is accused of something bad, the comments are... about the US. There were several privacy or "Your Rights Online" posts dealing specifically with the US within the last week. Did the comments immediately stray into discussion of Iran? No, nor should they have. Same thing goes here. There's a person -- a tech guy, one of our own -- getting stomped on. How about some sympathy for him? Likewise with the discussion of Saeed Malekpour a few months ago: a programmer is at risk of being executed because of source code sharing (something rather dear to the hearts of a lot of people on Slashdot), and a major chunk of the comments are "but in the US etc. etc."
... nevermind, I'm too late.
Once -- just once -- can there be a post about censorship in Country X where the comments are primarily about the censorship in question, and not US policy towards Country X, nor a list of "tu quoque" complaints about the US?
By "new" you mean "starting with the very first post on a controversial topic even remotely involving a person or group with more than two nickels to rub together"?
I knew some Saudi guys who were perfectly pious in their own country, but vacationed in Florida to booze it up and hit the titty bars.
On a less-extreme note, I recall the way people in Iran (at least the ones I knew) treated Ramadan when I was there. Theoretically, you're supposed to fast during the day, plus pray and reflect a lot in general. In reality, most folks fasted during the day, then at sundown everybody got together to stuff themselves, party, and crank up the (shudder) disco. Forgive them. It was the seventies, they knew not what they were doing.
Note: not saying anything specific about Moslems, of course. Most Christians in the US are no more pious than that at Christmas or Easter.
That brings up another question...muslims have food restrictions right? Can they have oral sex legally in their religion?
I presume you're being facetious, but the topic actually came up in an article I was reading recently (in Slate, I think) about the life of women in a Bangladesh brothel and their conflict with the local clergy. The older women advise the younger women (sort of a master/padawan thing) that if they don't wish to engage in oral sex, to tell their customers that they refuse to do that because their mouths are used to recite the verses of the Koran.
Because we're trading partners...
"If goods don't cross borders, armies will."
Rule #1: Nuclear weapons for democracies only.
Rule #2: Fast learn rule #1.
Unfortunately there's not much that can be done about non-democracies that already have nukes, but that should be the general rule. I have zero concern about the arsenals of India, or France, or the UK. It would have been fine with me if post-apartheid South Africa had kept theirs. I wouldn't bat an eye if, say, Sweden or Taiwan or Chile decided to develop some. North Korea and Iran are in a completely-different category.
Yes, I realize this is a missile we're talking about, but the reason we're talking about them is that they can carry warheads.