Well, the first time I voted for him it seemed like the choice was between nieve new guy vs. untrustworthy guy.
The second time I voted for him it was hamstrung guy vs. out of touch rich guy.
While unsatisfied with the results I don't see that voting the other way would have been an improvement and I'm not even a Democrat. Sadly, it's looking like the choices this time are going to be even worse.
Of course they could probably also do better if they had more resources, but who wants to pay for more cops?
If they'd use them to fight crimes I actually care about like real property theft (as opposed to trivial copyright infringement) and stop wasting time on crimes I don't care about like gambling, prostitution and drugs, then yeah I'd pay for that.
Whether we're experiencing AGW (likely but not completely certain) or not (unlikely but theoretically possible) the main problem in California is actually an economic one. They're failing to allow water to be correctly priced. Allow prices for agricultural water use to be set by the market instead of the artificially suppressed rate and the whole shortage issue will take care of itself.
Actually, systemd is an actual huge upgrade for system administrators who manage servers, in the actual world, not in an hypothetical one.
In what way? I see how it's great for mobile, tablet and even desktop users but frankly I fail to see how it improves server administration. Sure, we trade init scripts for service definitions but that's more of a sidegrade than an improvement.
Sure, you can say it's a Unix principle, of course Linux is a Unix based OS so in general that's the principle. Yes, this mostly applies to things other than the kernel, though I'm sure we're all eager to see how HURD works out if it's ever actually finished. If the systemd developers had wanted to solve multiple problems the more Unix-ish way they would have done something more like this:
Init sucks, so we built newinitd (it's awesome because it's threaded and shiny, did we mention shiny?)
Oh by the way since SysVInit scripts are lame we also wrote newscriptd (has a great new service definition language, try it out, or don't since it will execute your old SysVInit scripts just fine if you're too lazy to learn something new)
While we were at it we decided that syslog is boring so in a Mountain Dew fueled coding spree we also created newloggerd (has funky binary logs but we think you'll love the features we created and besides who likes using vi to read log files anyways? Oh, if you're not as cool as us both newinitd and newscriptd have syslog support)
Hey, you know how services die and don't get restarted easily, yeah we hated that too so we wrote newprocessd (does all kinds of spiffy process management things and integrates well with our other new tools, but since you might be old and not hip with them it can be run using syslog and init, you really should try our cool new stuff though)
We kind of got excited and carried away so after laughing at one of the old timers stories about how great vt220s were we wrote a replacement for terminals we're calling newconsold (who uses terminals anymore anyways?)
By this point we were so charged up we wrote a bunch of other stuff which you can download as bigbundleofshiny.deb, there are like twelve more bits of awesome in there that you should totally check out. (if you don't it will hurt our feelings but none of them are required for our other stuff to run)
As long as the feature you want is one of the pre-defined set then service definitions are probably easier than init scripts even though you have to learn a new syntax. For customization the advantage seems less obvious. One advantage with init scripts over service definitions is that you can read them to figure out how something works, service definitions hide the complexity, which is both good and bad depending on the situation.
"possible downgrade for systems administrators who manage servers." - no, its one of its aims to help admins by standardizing and speeding start up across all linux flavors that use systemd, just a learning curve for the admins
Startup speed isn't a server issue, frankly it's irrelevant from that perspective. The startup is already standardized so I fail to see how changing the standard is a net benefit. The main benefit of systemd is for mobile and tablet users with a slight bump for desktops.
The init system handles the initial startup of a linux os. It's been acknowledged for some time that it has some limitations, especially in terms of threading and dependency management but for the server world that's usually not that big a deal since the primary users are technical specialists who are comfortable mucking around with that sort of thing. For desktops and mobile devices though those are more serious concerns because they impact user experience and many users don't have the skills to modify things themselves. Systemd is a replacement for init.
PROS: It has faster boot time and more sophisticated dependency management
CONS: It's new (which means lots of people who understand the current system will have to relearn how things work), it's harder to directly customize (requires a higher level of skill to modify), it's a more monolithic design (which violates the linux design principle of do one thing and do it well), it uses binary log files (which violates the linux principle of everything is a text file) and it's taken on a larger number of roles than many feel is appropriate for a single subsystem.
In short, it's probably an improvement for desktop & mobile users who mostly don't care and it's a pretty big inconvenience and possible downgrade for systems administrators who manage servers.
You do bring up an interesting point about labor, however many libertarians feel it is a red herring. It is true there could be some situations where it would be possible that there is literally no opportunity to make a living. These situations would by their very nature almost invariable spawn from the source that libertarians dislike the most, the government.
In an environment with no frontier or free land available for development it's actually fairly inevitable that individuals will have no choice but to sell their labor in order to avoid starvation. The ability to choose your master makes you no less a slave. I'm registered libertarian but I'd say one the faults with the philosophy is that it fails to consider power imbalances outside of government vs. individual. There is an implicit assumption that freely negotiating parties both have the ability to accept or reject contracts and influence the terms thereof. In the real world it often doesn't work that way. Try negotiating the terms of your Verizon contract and let me know how that goes.
As I mentioned in another post, fascism does indeed promote primacy of the state over the individual, however the composition of "the state" is different from what we're normally used to in that it extends to include business and labor. It's much closer to a combination of corporatism and syndicalism than what is normal currently in western democracies.
As for the old "the voters will vote themselves benefits" complaint against democracy -- it's an often heard complaint. Can you point to an example?
So you're arguing that voters don't vote themselves benefits but then saying that the voters in the story would do so because they're a minority?
I don't think it was mentioned in the book what percentage of the populace were veterans but it seemed like it was a sizable chunk, not just a 5% slice for example. If I had to guess based on the clues available I would probably have pegged it as around 40% or so.
Regardless, the US had a minority voting system in the beginning since it was restricted to land owning white males and that seems to have gone just fine for the most part. Universal suffrage isn't a necessary pre-condition for a workable society.
It's a difficult philosophy for modern westerners to grasp since it doesn't fit well on the left-right spectrum. In socialism labor and government combine to dominate business. In corporatism government and business combine to dominate labor. In fascism, the three supposedly combine in an equal sort of way.
Whether or not that's a good thing is up to your individual politics of course. The German implementation was particularly hideous due to it's willingness to murder its own citizens on an industrial scale, communism has had much the same effect in most places it's been tried.
As a libertarian I don't think any system which stresses the primacy of the state is really going to be a good place to live in the long term. That seems to be borne out by historical precedent and is likely just a consequence of human nature.
Your amount of service to the State determines whether or not you get privileges as a citizen, in the ST universe. That is not the least bit fascist, of course.
Militarist perhaps but fascist no. Fascism describes a particular form of government that involves apportionment of power and tight integration between government, business and labor. Sort of government by large groups rather than individuals.
The political system it described was impossible -- there was nothing stopping the "veterans" stealing everything.
In any republic the voters can vote themselves benefits, it's one of the downsides of a representational system. Given that in their system you had to volunteer and endure hardship before getting suffrage I think the voters would actually be more reasonable than the ones in our system.
I had to go look this up. Apparently the distinction is that they must accept payment in dollars and may not require that you pay in rubles, pesos or pieces of eight but they're free to mandate what form those dollars take, electronic vs. paper for example.
So you think it should be legal to take secret information about perfectly legal but secret acts of the US government and publicize them, to the detriment of US foreign relations? Or that it should be legal if he's also whistle-blowing? That release of documents that we really, really needed to know about absolves him of all other crimes in the act?
He definitely broke the law, I don't think that's in question. I do think the main reason he broke the law is that the current whistleblowing system doesn't work. Reporting this through proper channels would have either A) Produced no results or B) Resulted in him being disappeared or ruined. My personal opinion is that his releases, while embarrassing for the current government, weren't actually particularly damaging to the US Strategic position as a whole. Because he worked with a reputable journalist and filtered the releases (unlike Bradley Manning's straight dump, which was intolerable) I think the good he did outweighed the problems he caused, which is why I think he deserves a pardon.
Personally I think basic income is compatible with libertarianism though I'm sure many will disagree. After all, if you're compelled to sell your labor due to having no other choice but starvation are you really free at all? Imposing libertarianism without a frontier or a BI is essentially just license for capital to exploit labor with all the power on the capital end of things.
I'm not sure the government of that universe can be properly described as fascist just because they limited suffrage to veterans. My understanding was that it was still a mixed economy republic without the organized business and labor groups that would be required for a fascist system.
Regardless, a movie about Starship Troopers that doesn't include power armor isn't a proper re-telling of the story.
My definition would be anyone on whom we've declared war (of course), since we don't do that as much any more I'd accept a congressional authorization of military force. In my opinion everyone else doesn't count even if we don't trust them or like them very much. I believe the only groups covered by this currently would be North Korea (armistice, not peace) and Al-Qaeda. (Apologies if I missed one) I'm sure the government would disagree and want to have the ability to add groups from an arbitrarily created list that has no oversight such as the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. I wouldn't be comfortable with that without congressional oversight and a formal approval vote for each entry.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama wasn't a good choice either.
Well, the first time I voted for him it seemed like the choice was between nieve new guy vs. untrustworthy guy. The second time I voted for him it was hamstrung guy vs. out of touch rich guy. While unsatisfied with the results I don't see that voting the other way would have been an improvement and I'm not even a Democrat. Sadly, it's looking like the choices this time are going to be even worse.
Of course they could probably also do better if they had more resources, but who wants to pay for more cops?
If they'd use them to fight crimes I actually care about like real property theft (as opposed to trivial copyright infringement) and stop wasting time on crimes I don't care about like gambling, prostitution and drugs, then yeah I'd pay for that.
Whether we're experiencing AGW (likely but not completely certain) or not (unlikely but theoretically possible) the main problem in California is actually an economic one. They're failing to allow water to be correctly priced. Allow prices for agricultural water use to be set by the market instead of the artificially suppressed rate and the whole shortage issue will take care of itself.
Actually, systemd is an actual huge upgrade for system administrators who manage servers, in the actual world, not in an hypothetical one.
In what way? I see how it's great for mobile, tablet and even desktop users but frankly I fail to see how it improves server administration. Sure, we trade init scripts for service definitions but that's more of a sidegrade than an improvement.
If you have 100 servers down due to a bad software upgrade you didn't do a very good job of testing before rolling it out to production did you?
Sure, you can say it's a Unix principle, of course Linux is a Unix based OS so in general that's the principle. Yes, this mostly applies to things other than the kernel, though I'm sure we're all eager to see how HURD works out if it's ever actually finished. If the systemd developers had wanted to solve multiple problems the more Unix-ish way they would have done something more like this:
Init sucks, so we built newinitd (it's awesome because it's threaded and shiny, did we mention shiny?)
Oh by the way since SysVInit scripts are lame we also wrote newscriptd (has a great new service definition language, try it out, or don't since it will execute your old SysVInit scripts just fine if you're too lazy to learn something new)
While we were at it we decided that syslog is boring so in a Mountain Dew fueled coding spree we also created newloggerd (has funky binary logs but we think you'll love the features we created and besides who likes using vi to read log files anyways? Oh, if you're not as cool as us both newinitd and newscriptd have syslog support)
Hey, you know how services die and don't get restarted easily, yeah we hated that too so we wrote newprocessd (does all kinds of spiffy process management things and integrates well with our other new tools, but since you might be old and not hip with them it can be run using syslog and init, you really should try our cool new stuff though)
We kind of got excited and carried away so after laughing at one of the old timers stories about how great vt220s were we wrote a replacement for terminals we're calling newconsold (who uses terminals anymore anyways?)
By this point we were so charged up we wrote a bunch of other stuff which you can download as bigbundleofshiny.deb, there are like twelve more bits of awesome in there that you should totally check out. (if you don't it will hurt our feelings but none of them are required for our other stuff to run)
As long as the feature you want is one of the pre-defined set then service definitions are probably easier than init scripts even though you have to learn a new syntax. For customization the advantage seems less obvious. One advantage with init scripts over service definitions is that you can read them to figure out how something works, service definitions hide the complexity, which is both good and bad depending on the situation.
"possible downgrade for systems administrators who manage servers." - no, its one of its aims to help admins by standardizing and speeding start up across all linux flavors that use systemd, just a learning curve for the admins
Startup speed isn't a server issue, frankly it's irrelevant from that perspective. The startup is already standardized so I fail to see how changing the standard is a net benefit. The main benefit of systemd is for mobile and tablet users with a slight bump for desktops.
The init system handles the initial startup of a linux os. It's been acknowledged for some time that it has some limitations, especially in terms of threading and dependency management but for the server world that's usually not that big a deal since the primary users are technical specialists who are comfortable mucking around with that sort of thing. For desktops and mobile devices though those are more serious concerns because they impact user experience and many users don't have the skills to modify things themselves. Systemd is a replacement for init.
PROS: It has faster boot time and more sophisticated dependency management
CONS: It's new (which means lots of people who understand the current system will have to relearn how things work), it's harder to directly customize (requires a higher level of skill to modify), it's a more monolithic design (which violates the linux design principle of do one thing and do it well), it uses binary log files (which violates the linux principle of everything is a text file) and it's taken on a larger number of roles than many feel is appropriate for a single subsystem.
In short, it's probably an improvement for desktop & mobile users who mostly don't care and it's a pretty big inconvenience and possible downgrade for systems administrators who manage servers.
It's a combinations about as much as you can call an army a combination of officers and enlisted men. It's obvious where the power lies.
Based on my experience I'd say mostly with the senior enlisted, though the officers run things on paper.
You do bring up an interesting point about labor, however many libertarians feel it is a red herring. It is true there could be some situations where it would be possible that there is literally no opportunity to make a living. These situations would by their very nature almost invariable spawn from the source that libertarians dislike the most, the government.
In an environment with no frontier or free land available for development it's actually fairly inevitable that individuals will have no choice but to sell their labor in order to avoid starvation. The ability to choose your master makes you no less a slave. I'm registered libertarian but I'd say one the faults with the philosophy is that it fails to consider power imbalances outside of government vs. individual. There is an implicit assumption that freely negotiating parties both have the ability to accept or reject contracts and influence the terms thereof. In the real world it often doesn't work that way. Try negotiating the terms of your Verizon contract and let me know how that goes.
Fascism is all about the supremacy of the State.
As I mentioned in another post, fascism does indeed promote primacy of the state over the individual, however the composition of "the state" is different from what we're normally used to in that it extends to include business and labor. It's much closer to a combination of corporatism and syndicalism than what is normal currently in western democracies.
As for the old "the voters will vote themselves benefits" complaint against democracy -- it's an often heard complaint. Can you point to an example?
So you're arguing that voters don't vote themselves benefits but then saying that the voters in the story would do so because they're a minority?
I don't think it was mentioned in the book what percentage of the populace were veterans but it seemed like it was a sizable chunk, not just a 5% slice for example. If I had to guess based on the clues available I would probably have pegged it as around 40% or so.
Regardless, the US had a minority voting system in the beginning since it was restricted to land owning white males and that seems to have gone just fine for the most part. Universal suffrage isn't a necessary pre-condition for a workable society.
It's a difficult philosophy for modern westerners to grasp since it doesn't fit well on the left-right spectrum. In socialism labor and government combine to dominate business. In corporatism government and business combine to dominate labor. In fascism, the three supposedly combine in an equal sort of way.
Whether or not that's a good thing is up to your individual politics of course. The German implementation was particularly hideous due to it's willingness to murder its own citizens on an industrial scale, communism has had much the same effect in most places it's been tried.
As a libertarian I don't think any system which stresses the primacy of the state is really going to be a good place to live in the long term. That seems to be borne out by historical precedent and is likely just a consequence of human nature.
Your amount of service to the State determines whether or not you get privileges as a citizen, in the ST universe. That is not the least bit fascist, of course.
Militarist perhaps but fascist no. Fascism describes a particular form of government that involves apportionment of power and tight integration between government, business and labor. Sort of government by large groups rather than individuals.
The political system it described was impossible -- there was nothing stopping the "veterans" stealing everything.
In any republic the voters can vote themselves benefits, it's one of the downsides of a representational system. Given that in their system you had to volunteer and endure hardship before getting suffrage I think the voters would actually be more reasonable than the ones in our system.
You can properly call the US government fascist.
No, corporatist perhaps but a fascist system requires organized labor as one the three legs of the stool.
I understand what you're saying but that's not the way the courts are currently interpreting it.
I had to go look this up. Apparently the distinction is that they must accept payment in dollars and may not require that you pay in rubles, pesos or pieces of eight but they're free to mandate what form those dollars take, electronic vs. paper for example.
Are you suggesting that non-libertarians can't be conservatives? Even as a libertarian I find that silly.
So you think it should be legal to take secret information about perfectly legal but secret acts of the US government and publicize them, to the detriment of US foreign relations? Or that it should be legal if he's also whistle-blowing? That release of documents that we really, really needed to know about absolves him of all other crimes in the act?
He definitely broke the law, I don't think that's in question. I do think the main reason he broke the law is that the current whistleblowing system doesn't work. Reporting this through proper channels would have either A) Produced no results or B) Resulted in him being disappeared or ruined. My personal opinion is that his releases, while embarrassing for the current government, weren't actually particularly damaging to the US Strategic position as a whole. Because he worked with a reputable journalist and filtered the releases (unlike Bradley Manning's straight dump, which was intolerable) I think the good he did outweighed the problems he caused, which is why I think he deserves a pardon.
Personally I think basic income is compatible with libertarianism though I'm sure many will disagree. After all, if you're compelled to sell your labor due to having no other choice but starvation are you really free at all? Imposing libertarianism without a frontier or a BI is essentially just license for capital to exploit labor with all the power on the capital end of things.
I'm not sure the government of that universe can be properly described as fascist just because they limited suffrage to veterans. My understanding was that it was still a mixed economy republic without the organized business and labor groups that would be required for a fascist system.
Regardless, a movie about Starship Troopers that doesn't include power armor isn't a proper re-telling of the story.
That assumes he knew about Romney and Koch, while considering Koch and Romney conservatives(not all do).
It what bizarro world are those two not conservatives?
My definition would be anyone on whom we've declared war (of course), since we don't do that as much any more I'd accept a congressional authorization of military force. In my opinion everyone else doesn't count even if we don't trust them or like them very much. I believe the only groups covered by this currently would be North Korea (armistice, not peace) and Al-Qaeda. (Apologies if I missed one) I'm sure the government would disagree and want to have the ability to add groups from an arbitrarily created list that has no oversight such as the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. I wouldn't be comfortable with that without congressional oversight and a formal approval vote for each entry.