It's astounding and disappointing that this kind of post gets modded down to troll while the parent and the other whiny responses get modded to +4 insightful. The bad news is that this kind of pervasive attitude of failure is bad for society. The good news is that I'll have plenty of "hard workers" to make my tacos and burgers.
There are several places where I group up in South Louisiana that were the same way. It's like some kind of Little Man Syndrome. I especially love when you have a major road going through the town but they slow everything down to 35mph. Go 36mph and that's a ticket.
Then they're the ones who scream bloody murder when interstates and other bypasses are proposed. Jackasses.
There's the problem, though. You don't get what you want. You get lied to and fooled again.
Even if Paul was the POTUS, he's not getting us to change to the gold standard. That wouldn't be nearly within his power. He could trim some spending, though. He could get us out of endless meddling in other nations' affairs. He could ensure that we're balancing the budget rather than continuing to destroy our national credit.
In short, he could get the pendulum swinging in a better direction.
The "whackjob" personas are figments of the same frat boy mentality that dominates politics, the media, and most of the rest of society.
When you go for the party packaged candidates, you're like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football that Lucy is holding. You will be suckered every time.
We could use more principled whackjobs in politics. At least if we (as a society) learned how to filter for the principled candidates we could then fine tune our arguments about specific policy decisions. As it is, politics is just a bunch of noise with very little signal for making any rational choices whatsoever.
I don't know what the proper solution is; but I can see that what we have isn't it.
If your problem is: How do we put the right leaders in place to control our lives?
Then you're right, there is no solution. That control will always be abused, maybe not by every politician in ever circumstance, but that's the tendency.
That's why I always vote for politicians who advocate increasing freedom by decreasing the power of government. Government will always abuse its power, so the only thing we can do is work diligently to limit the power we give to it. Whenever you vote for a guy to get money for your pet project, it doesn't end there. The next politician wants like funds for his projects. Taxes go up. Power in the government increases. It gets abused.
Democrats and Republicans generally want more power. If I do vote for those parties, I tend to vote for the ones who are most interested in attacking government spending and waste like Ron Paul.
Usually I throw my votes away to Libertarians. Not that I'd want to live in a Libertarian utopia. It's just that they're the only ones who most consistently promote freedom and government restraint.
Ugh, are you one of those who thinks that communism just hasn't been done the "right way" yet?
Maybe you aren't, but people who tout communism in the ideal never seem to understand human nature and motivation applied across the structure of a nontrivially-sized society.
They never seem to realize that an absence of an agreed upon benefit to individual actions (money in a capitalistic society) leads to an extreme disparity in production from individual to individual. If no one is paying me to make shoes that people want and my subsistence is guaranteed, I'm going to make whatever is easiest for me or whatever I feel like making... probably shoes that no one want. Hell, maybe everyone in my community might feel like making crappy shoes. Then we all have lots of unwanted shoes, but nothing else. Apply the same logic to those producing the food and it gets really ugly.
To combat those random individualistic tendencies, decision making must become more centralized and people must be coerced into obeying the centralized authority. Oops, there went freedom. Communism really starts to suck after that.
I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America..
The clues were all there before the election. You, "like so many others", just didn't want to listen. You wanted your rock star and you didn't care that he had no experience, ties to some pretty unsavory characters, and no real plusses besides that he was well spoken. The pass that the mainstream media gave him meant that you needed to seek out contrary opinions and journalists if you didn't want to make a poor decision.
Instead of looking for the next JFK next time, try for someone more straightforward and ethical. I don't care if he's from the left or right of the political spectrum, just elect someone who is smart and has a track record for fairness and following through on his/her campaign promises.
It just kills me that the voting public is so abjectly stupid when electing the POTUS. They can never see through the campaign rhetoric, the "my team" mentality, and the cults of personality. They fall for them every single time.
Rather than voting for principled politicians like Kucinich or Ron Paul (or hell, even Nader), the public goes for the flashy salesmen who just tell the voters what they want to hear to get elected. Then they just screw us all over as much as the last guy did.
That's where I think a lot of people on Slashdot get tripped up. They myopically think that the only people's rights worth protecting are copyright or patent infringers and not the content creators' or inventors'.
What are the interests of the public? I think that elements of the patent system have greatly benefitted the public. So advocates for some degree of patents have been on the side of the public.
That said, I like the FSF and the EFF. It doesn't mean that I believe that they don't have their own motivations that may be counter to what's good for society as a whole. Stallman is cool some days. Other days I think that his utopia would lead to the death of innovation in the software field.
That's a pretty simplistic (and backwards) view that it takes more taxes to make you domestically safer.
More money in government leads to more power. More power leads to more corruption.
We should be defanging government by only electing representatives who will counter government power by reducing taxes, increasing ethics enforcement, decreasing the influence of big business on government, decreasing citizen dependence upon social programs, etc. The only expansion of government that we could use these days is in the trust busting area to dismantle the industry giants that are abusing their monopolies and unduly interfering with governance.
Yeah, and the police kicking in your teeth during a routine traffic stop because you weren't polite enough is part of the devil's bargain you made when you took advantage of the opportunities provided by our society to engage in 'your' freedom of expression.
Abridging a citizens' personal, expressive, or economic freedoms is wrong whether it's perpetrated by a jack-booted thug or by congress. Limiting freedoms for critically important reasons like limiting freedom of speech by not allowing the yelling of "fire" in a theatre or perhaps collecting taxes in the name of providing for a reasonable level of national defense should be performed with extreme care.
This is a ideological issue. A position not held for rational but because of an emotion belief.
So, if a guy sees you driving up in a new car and mugs you for your watch and cash, you would not be rational if you made a big deal of it. I mean, obviously you have plenty of money if you're buying a new car.
Just because Ballmer has principles that may differ from yours doesn't make them irrational.
The man said "steal". Obviously he meant a boxed copy from Fry's, like shoplifting.
Taxation is a "necessary evil" form of theft. It's hardly bartering when you don't have a choice whether or not you turn over something that you own. The government can come in and use physical force and incarceration to take away your money on the whim of some politicians.
Sure, taxes are necessary to run a government to protect us from outside invaders and to run our domestic legal system. Very few people will argue that strawman you're throwing up there. But are they necessary to build bridges to nowhere? Are they necessary to do multi-million dollar surveys on the breeding habits of the black beaked owl? Are they necessary to pay for endless wars in other nations? We should really never forget the immoral component of taxation. It's not pure theft, but it borders on it and should be used extraordinarily judiciously.
those who are making the most money are deriving the most benefit, and thus they should pay the most.
They already do pay the most. I'd argue that the people deriving the most benefit work for the government, receive welfare, receive food stamps, live off various government contracts, etc.
Benefit is a two way street. Individuals benefit from a healthy business environment maintained by the structures of society, but the society benefits from individuals who generate the most commerce. They generate a lot of taxes, employ people, create products and services that people want, etc. Two willfully punish the successful as owing everything to the society is just so wrongheaded. The society itself is successful because of them. They are successful IN SPITE OF the government. We should let them have as much of their reward as possible and be thankful that we're not an entire society of shiftless malcontents who would much worse off without the achievers.
I always love it when people denigrate the sacrifices I've made in my life to make more money by telling me to "stop whining" when the State comes in to steal whatever it wants because it's too irresponsible to manage its own money.
My sig has a link to a site that is a daily reminder of how utterly clueless and irresponsible our leaders are. Yet they should be able to break into my house and dig into my cookie jar whenever they feel like it.
Rendell said that he will not fire or discipline anyone in the Office of Homeland Security, headed by director James F. Powers Jr., for the lapse.
Yeah, giving a speech about how dastardly it was to pass on protester information (for gay and lesbian groups, a key Democratic constituency) while not firing one of your political appointees really makes the case that Democrats don't protect their own.
Hey, I can show you the problem with American politics.
Go look in the mirror and wipe the "Go Democratic Team!" grease paint off your forehead. Burn your "Liberals are #1" oversized foamy finger.
Both parties tend to protect their own. If you haven't observed how the Democrats vehemently protect their own then you haven't been paying any attention whatsoever.
The "majority of the media marching in lockstep"? Seriously? The Conservatives have talk radio and Fox News. The Liberals have the rest. Reminds me of this graphic.
No, Governor Rendell denouncing an embarrassing political scandal that's already gone public is no proof of anything unless you're a Democrat fanboi.
Seriously, go look up the fallacy of special pleading. It applies to all your comments/arguments. The major parties' battle is a total farce used to ignite team spirit and keep themselves in power. If you really care about politics and where this country is headed, you'll hold all politicians to the same standard and vote just about all of these bums out of office.
I'm sure they would too, but it's one of those issues where it really points out the hypocrisy of the party. It's like when a Republican violates family values and has a homosexual affair. It invokes a Nelson "ha ha" response.
Slashdot Mirror
It's astounding and disappointing that this kind of post gets modded down to troll while the parent and the other whiny responses get modded to +4 insightful. The bad news is that this kind of pervasive attitude of failure is bad for society. The good news is that I'll have plenty of "hard workers" to make my tacos and burgers.
And if you're the passenger in the car trying to text?
There are several places where I group up in South Louisiana that were the same way. It's like some kind of Little Man Syndrome. I especially love when you have a major road going through the town but they slow everything down to 35mph. Go 36mph and that's a ticket.
Then they're the ones who scream bloody murder when interstates and other bypasses are proposed. Jackasses.
They forgot to add that treatments/products/services using this fantastic discovery should be commercially available within 5 years.
There's the problem, though. You don't get what you want. You get lied to and fooled again.
Even if Paul was the POTUS, he's not getting us to change to the gold standard. That wouldn't be nearly within his power. He could trim some spending, though. He could get us out of endless meddling in other nations' affairs. He could ensure that we're balancing the budget rather than continuing to destroy our national credit.
In short, he could get the pendulum swinging in a better direction.
What, like #8?
an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
Great, so how's that working out?
The "whackjob" personas are figments of the same frat boy mentality that dominates politics, the media, and most of the rest of society.
When you go for the party packaged candidates, you're like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football that Lucy is holding. You will be suckered every time.
We could use more principled whackjobs in politics. At least if we (as a society) learned how to filter for the principled candidates we could then fine tune our arguments about specific policy decisions. As it is, politics is just a bunch of noise with very little signal for making any rational choices whatsoever.
I don't know what the proper solution is; but I can see that what we have isn't it.
If your problem is: How do we put the right leaders in place to control our lives?
Then you're right, there is no solution. That control will always be abused, maybe not by every politician in ever circumstance, but that's the tendency.
That's why I always vote for politicians who advocate increasing freedom by decreasing the power of government. Government will always abuse its power, so the only thing we can do is work diligently to limit the power we give to it. Whenever you vote for a guy to get money for your pet project, it doesn't end there. The next politician wants like funds for his projects. Taxes go up. Power in the government increases. It gets abused.
Democrats and Republicans generally want more power. If I do vote for those parties, I tend to vote for the ones who are most interested in attacking government spending and waste like Ron Paul.
Usually I throw my votes away to Libertarians. Not that I'd want to live in a Libertarian utopia. It's just that they're the only ones who most consistently promote freedom and government restraint.
Ugh, are you one of those who thinks that communism just hasn't been done the "right way" yet?
Maybe you aren't, but people who tout communism in the ideal never seem to understand human nature and motivation applied across the structure of a nontrivially-sized society.
They never seem to realize that an absence of an agreed upon benefit to individual actions (money in a capitalistic society) leads to an extreme disparity in production from individual to individual. If no one is paying me to make shoes that people want and my subsistence is guaranteed, I'm going to make whatever is easiest for me or whatever I feel like making... probably shoes that no one want. Hell, maybe everyone in my community might feel like making crappy shoes. Then we all have lots of unwanted shoes, but nothing else. Apply the same logic to those producing the food and it gets really ugly.
To combat those random individualistic tendencies, decision making must become more centralized and people must be coerced into obeying the centralized authority. Oops, there went freedom. Communism really starts to suck after that.
/. pedant commenting on the factual authenticity of frog boiling characteristics in 3... 2... 1...
I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America..
The clues were all there before the election. You, "like so many others", just didn't want to listen. You wanted your rock star and you didn't care that he had no experience, ties to some pretty unsavory characters, and no real plusses besides that he was well spoken. The pass that the mainstream media gave him meant that you needed to seek out contrary opinions and journalists if you didn't want to make a poor decision.
Instead of looking for the next JFK next time, try for someone more straightforward and ethical. I don't care if he's from the left or right of the political spectrum, just elect someone who is smart and has a track record for fairness and following through on his/her campaign promises.
Really, better than Ron Paul or Dennic Kucinich?
It just kills me that the voting public is so abjectly stupid when electing the POTUS. They can never see through the campaign rhetoric, the "my team" mentality, and the cults of personality. They fall for them every single time.
Rather than voting for principled politicians like Kucinich or Ron Paul (or hell, even Nader), the public goes for the flashy salesmen who just tell the voters what they want to hear to get elected. Then they just screw us all over as much as the last guy did.
So sad...
Yeah, but whose rights?
That's where I think a lot of people on Slashdot get tripped up. They myopically think that the only people's rights worth protecting are copyright or patent infringers and not the content creators' or inventors'.
What are the interests of the public? I think that elements of the patent system have greatly benefitted the public. So advocates for some degree of patents have been on the side of the public.
That said, I like the FSF and the EFF. It doesn't mean that I believe that they don't have their own motivations that may be counter to what's good for society as a whole. Stallman is cool some days. Other days I think that his utopia would lead to the death of innovation in the software field.
Yeah, red lights are flashing in my mind when someone claims to have my interests at heart vs some other party.
I don't like the patenting of software, but I dislike hypocrisy even more.
That's a pretty simplistic (and backwards) view that it takes more taxes to make you domestically safer.
More money in government leads to more power. More power leads to more corruption.
We should be defanging government by only electing representatives who will counter government power by reducing taxes, increasing ethics enforcement, decreasing the influence of big business on government, decreasing citizen dependence upon social programs, etc. The only expansion of government that we could use these days is in the trust busting area to dismantle the industry giants that are abusing their monopolies and unduly interfering with governance.
Yeah, and the police kicking in your teeth during a routine traffic stop because you weren't polite enough is part of the devil's bargain you made when you took advantage of the opportunities provided by our society to engage in 'your' freedom of expression.
Abridging a citizens' personal, expressive, or economic freedoms is wrong whether it's perpetrated by a jack-booted thug or by congress. Limiting freedoms for critically important reasons like limiting freedom of speech by not allowing the yelling of "fire" in a theatre or perhaps collecting taxes in the name of providing for a reasonable level of national defense should be performed with extreme care.
This is a ideological issue. A position not held for rational but because of an emotion belief.
So, if a guy sees you driving up in a new car and mugs you for your watch and cash, you would not be rational if you made a big deal of it. I mean, obviously you have plenty of money if you're buying a new car.
Just because Ballmer has principles that may differ from yours doesn't make them irrational.
The man said "steal". Obviously he meant a boxed copy from Fry's, like shoplifting.
Taxation is a "necessary evil" form of theft. It's hardly bartering when you don't have a choice whether or not you turn over something that you own. The government can come in and use physical force and incarceration to take away your money on the whim of some politicians.
Sure, taxes are necessary to run a government to protect us from outside invaders and to run our domestic legal system. Very few people will argue that strawman you're throwing up there. But are they necessary to build bridges to nowhere? Are they necessary to do multi-million dollar surveys on the breeding habits of the black beaked owl? Are they necessary to pay for endless wars in other nations? We should really never forget the immoral component of taxation. It's not pure theft, but it borders on it and should be used extraordinarily judiciously.
those who are making the most money are deriving the most benefit, and thus they should pay the most.
They already do pay the most. I'd argue that the people deriving the most benefit work for the government, receive welfare, receive food stamps, live off various government contracts, etc.
Benefit is a two way street. Individuals benefit from a healthy business environment maintained by the structures of society, but the society benefits from individuals who generate the most commerce. They generate a lot of taxes, employ people, create products and services that people want, etc. Two willfully punish the successful as owing everything to the society is just so wrongheaded. The society itself is successful because of them. They are successful IN SPITE OF the government. We should let them have as much of their reward as possible and be thankful that we're not an entire society of shiftless malcontents who would much worse off without the achievers.
I always love it when people denigrate the sacrifices I've made in my life to make more money by telling me to "stop whining" when the State comes in to steal whatever it wants because it's too irresponsible to manage its own money.
My sig has a link to a site that is a daily reminder of how utterly clueless and irresponsible our leaders are. Yet they should be able to break into my house and dig into my cookie jar whenever they feel like it.
Nice...
Rendell said that he will not fire or discipline anyone in the Office of Homeland Security, headed by director James F. Powers Jr., for the lapse.
Yeah, giving a speech about how dastardly it was to pass on protester information (for gay and lesbian groups, a key Democratic constituency) while not firing one of your political appointees really makes the case that Democrats don't protect their own.
Hey, I can show you the problem with American politics.
Go look in the mirror and wipe the "Go Democratic Team!" grease paint off your forehead. Burn your "Liberals are #1" oversized foamy finger.
Both parties tend to protect their own. If you haven't observed how the Democrats vehemently protect their own then you haven't been paying any attention whatsoever.
The "majority of the media marching in lockstep"? Seriously? The Conservatives have talk radio and Fox News. The Liberals have the rest. Reminds me of this graphic.
No, Governor Rendell denouncing an embarrassing political scandal that's already gone public is no proof of anything unless you're a Democrat fanboi.
Seriously, go look up the fallacy of special pleading. It applies to all your comments/arguments. The major parties' battle is a total farce used to ignite team spirit and keep themselves in power. If you really care about politics and where this country is headed, you'll hold all politicians to the same standard and vote just about all of these bums out of office.
I'm sure they would too, but it's one of those issues where it really points out the hypocrisy of the party. It's like when a Republican violates family values and has a homosexual affair. It invokes a Nelson "ha ha" response.