Even if you are in public, local laws might prevent you from snapping away; usually people must have the ability to opt out of their picture being taken
Not in the US, and not in many Western nations.
You have a right to prevent the commercial use of your picture and you have a legal right to prohibit publication of pictures of you that mislead or defame.
Your entire posting is full of a vile, arrogant, patronizing attitude towards those "truly less fortunate in poor countries". They don't need handouts, and they don't need Bill Gates to waste money on better toilets for them. What they need is investments, business opportunities, a level playing field, political stability, and a lowering of trade barriers.
As for Bill Gates, he engages in his "charity" for the same reason most rich people do: he knows that giving the money to his children would wreck their lives, he can hobnob with other rich and powerful people, and it gives him something to do, given that he has little else to do with his life or time.
If he really wanted to help people, he'd invest his money in money-making companies in the countries he wants to help, and he'd do the legwork to figure out what those companies are. And he'd spend his money on making political change happen here in the US, aiming towards more free trade, free markets, and more liberal immigration policies.
The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it. Gates made it through monopolistic practices and dirty tricks, mostly in the first world, and mostly profiting from other people's innovations and ideas. In that case, "making a profit" is not useful. But if you actually make a good product that people want to buy, making a profit is a good thing: it indicates that your product satisfies people's needs better than someone else's.
As for Gates, he is trying to salvage his reputation as much as he can.
They assumption that people need to 'play fair' is built in.
Repeating this obvious nonsense again and again doesn't make it true. Bitcoin assumes adversaries and widespread attacks. That's the whole point of a cryptographic currency: to guard against such attacks.
"US government has obstructed its adoption;" It has done no such thing.
You should take your signature line on Dunning Kruger to heart... and stop embarrassing yourself.
sorry, man, it's not genetics, or at least not exclusively, as much as our capitalist overlords would like to have us believe that
Quite to the contrary: captialists (I am one) believe that it is necessity and the desire to improve one's material wealth that motivates people. You know, like those Chinese kids do you describe. And we actually believe that almost everybody has the capacity to succeed if they are only motivated, again like those Chinese kids.
It's people like you who divide the world into "dumbfucks" and brainiacs, then want to treat low performance as a disability, and reward people for it.
According to our presently available research and body of technique is there really anything on the table that 'results in outstanding academic ability'?
Yes: a culture and parents that value education and encourage their kids to succeed in it. Nothing else really makes much of a difference.
That bullshit. The "promoters of Bitcoin" made a reasonable assumption about adversaries and stated it clearly up front; there was no "backup" and they didn't assume that people would "play fair".
You could decide whether you wanted to take that risk or not, no "confidence" required. Furthermore, the only reason it is in this situation is because the US government has obstructed its adoption; if it were in widespread use, this imbalance wouldn't exist.
Maybe flaky Sun hardware needed the file system to perform such checks; high quality disk drives test for data integrity in the controller. For ZFS to check is redundant and probably does more harm than good.
Somehow you read my post complaining about subsidies (agricultural and Medicaid) and taxation as an endorsement of Obamacare,
No, I just responded to your idea that the uninsured or unpaid hospital bills are responsible for our high medical costs. I mean, man, do the math. $41b amounts to about $150 per American. Obviously, that's not where our high health care costs come from. Furthermore, most of the people who owe that money wouldn't have been paying insurance anyway under the new system.
I don't understand how forcing people to buy private insurance is destroying the market
Because "the market" only operates when people have a choice not to buy something.
but it's pretty far from single-payer socialism
You have to be pretty stupid to think that single payer systems amount to socialism.
Health insurance != Health care costs. Health insurance is largely an American problem.
Health insurance isn't a "problem" at all, either in the US or elsewhere, because what is billed as "health insurance" isn't insurance, it's more like a cable subscription. And in this case, it's a mandatory cable subscription for thousands of channels, most of which most people neither want nor need. It's a gigantic ripoff.
The idea that the problems with government are due to corruption or ill intent is a fantasy promoted by progressives that can be fixed by just selecting better people (by which they mean themselves).
In reality, most people in government have good intentions are are not blatantly corrupt, whether they are low-level civil servants or higher-up bureaucrats with political ambitions. The problem is intrinsic to governmental structures, and you can't fix it other than by keeping government generally small.
I work and have health insurance (I'm in the US, it's a big deal here).
It's a big deal everywhere; health care costs are spiraling out of control in other systems as well. Stop living under the illusion that this is a uniquely American problem.
Why? There are unpaid hospital bills in the amount of $41 billion [forbes.com]. Except those bills really aren't unpaid now, are they?... High insurance premiums and, of course, our friend taxes (which fund state-level Medicaid entitlements) are how the costs get covered.
A large part of high US health care costs is that medical providers and insurance companies have successfully created an oligopoly where they used to be able to charge high prices; they have created that not though some nefarious market mechanisms, but by lobbying Congress, who has time and again given them what they wanted. Now it's gotten even worse in that they have eliminated the last remaining vestiges of a market mechanism under Obamacare.
There is a "we" in US. Your federal taxes fund the subsidies to the corn syrup producers so politicians in the Midwest can remain relevant.
Agricultural subsidies are very wrong and should be eliminated. But you need to realize that agricultural subsidies and progressive health care legislation (Obamacare, single payer) are cut from the same cloth: special interests enriching themselves at everybody's expense and loss, and justifying it with the kind of b.s. "we"-stories you are using.
People who are bad in bed, financially irresponsible, or bad at math don't manage to fix those conditions long term either. That doesn't make them diseases or disabilities.
This is why all this fat-shaming is just plain idiotic. Some fat people are literally unable to lose fat
If you have a diagnosed disease that causes your obesity, then you can claim disability because of that.
Likewise, if you are sick, you may be staying home and not working; but that doesn't mean that everybody who stays home and is not working is sick.
If you look like a Greek god, good for you; but you aren't one, so settle for admiring your abs in the mirror, rather than give other people grief over their lack of them.
Obesity isn't about aesthetics, it's about health, productivity, and health care costs. Since society now has to pay for your health care costs, society is going to tell you to shape up or be penalized.
You may be forced to get into weight loss programs, just like people are forced to get into drug treatment programs, even if think your obesity isn't causing you any problems.
the idea that people need to justify their body shape would still be wrong
The old deal was: you choose your body shape, you suffer the consequences, and your employer chooses whether to hire you.
The emerging alternative deal is: if your body shape doesn't conform to parameters determined to be acceptable and healthy by government experts, you will have to undergo treatment, but you will be legally protected while you do so.
What you want, namely choosing a costly body shape and having society subsidize your choice is not going to happen in the long run because we can't pay for it.
You clearly have read the IPCC reports if you are wading in on this discussion from the position you are. You are either lazy or being purposefully misleading in your position.
No, I simply read carefully. The IPCC summarizes research that shows a modest degree of warming and shows that humans probably contributed to that. Most of the rest, both predictions about temperature changes and their consequences, are based on numerous assumptions that intrinsically cannot be "shown". You may think those assumptions are plausible, but that's not the same as scientific evidence.
Why haven’t we encountered aliens yet? The answer could be climate change
Or maybe drug abuse. Or space Nazis. Or pedophiles. Or terrorism. Or digital piracy. Or inequality. Or male chauvinism. Or sex slavery. Or whatever other insignificant problem people fabricate a crisis out of these days.
in the count of number of people the balance is very strongly in favor of accepting AGW to degrees ( e.g. this recent set of studies arriving at between 91-97% consensus).
That's not what those studies actually say. Furthermore, even if that were true, pre-20th century, there was nearly universal agreement on the validity of classical physics, but then QM and GR came along, so consensus doesn't tell you about truth.
The denialists get disproportionate attention, which is actually a known type of political manipulation (e.g. argument to moderation) and this type of attention has been shown to disproportionately affect people who aren't specialized in the subject matter to moderate their position when no such moderation is required
Funny, it seems to me that people like global warming activists have been getting "disproportionate attention", given the weakness of their actual evidence.
And thirdly the AGW debate is much bigger than the USA. I understand that you have bipartisan issues across the board (not just AGW, and to be clear: I think both parties are in the wrong) but that doesn't extend to the rest of the world and this is a global issue.
And the general attitude of the rest of the world is something like "oh, it's a big problem, and someone else should give us money to fix it". Then countries try to pick metrics to shift the blame on someone else. Europeans point to current per-capita emissions, the Chinese want to emit for a while in order to develop, and everybody gangs up on the US because we have money. Rationally, if you believe AGW requires action, it's clear that Europe should bear the brunt of any costs and payments for carbon emissions, China should curb its emissions, and the US is somewhere in the middle.
AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree. The challenge is to find solutions, and that's also with science.
The second sentence doesn't logically follow from the first. Yes, AGW does exist, but whether that is a problem and whether we need to find "solutions" is an open question.
Finally, I find the actual article very intriguing and somewhat challenging to my own views on AGW, as evidenced by my first thoughts on this: could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity?
No, that doesn't work for many reasons. But it's a nice illustration about how people love to fit new data in with their existing preconceptions instead of looking at it rationally.
When that 'chance' and 'unfair advantage' comes about because they can afford to pay more into the political system to ensure that their 'chance' comes about, you should be bothered too.
To use your words: "horseshit"; that's not what's happening in the US.
So you're officially saying you've accepted a broken system, but you're so apathetic you don't care any more?
I care a great deal: I want people not to sacrifice our liberties and democracy in order to fix imaginary problems that power-hungry politicians use to win elections, and then enrich themselves and their cronies.
You want to break the system more and more, and you need to stop being someone's mindless political puppet.
I think one of the biggest problems with America, besides most of it's people not giving a shit, is that it thinks it's the only country in the world. There are plenty of countries who are what you would consider "socialist", although they all laugh at the term, and they're doing just fine.
Having spent lots of time (one can't call it "living") in real socialist countries and also some of those "wealthy" European nations and other European ex-colonies, I can tell from first hand experience: the residents of those countries are wealthy, uneducated nincompoops, who know nothing about the world, socialism, or the US. That probably includes you.
Look outside the US. Yours is not the only system in the world.
You should take that to heart: the European welfare state is not the only system in the world, and it's broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in the US, and not in many Western nations.
You have a right to prevent the commercial use of your picture and you have a legal right to prohibit publication of pictures of you that mislead or defame.
Your entire posting is full of a vile, arrogant, patronizing attitude towards those "truly less fortunate in poor countries". They don't need handouts, and they don't need Bill Gates to waste money on better toilets for them. What they need is investments, business opportunities, a level playing field, political stability, and a lowering of trade barriers.
As for Bill Gates, he engages in his "charity" for the same reason most rich people do: he knows that giving the money to his children would wreck their lives, he can hobnob with other rich and powerful people, and it gives him something to do, given that he has little else to do with his life or time.
If he really wanted to help people, he'd invest his money in money-making companies in the countries he wants to help, and he'd do the legwork to figure out what those companies are. And he'd spend his money on making political change happen here in the US, aiming towards more free trade, free markets, and more liberal immigration policies.
The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it. Gates made it through monopolistic practices and dirty tricks, mostly in the first world, and mostly profiting from other people's innovations and ideas. In that case, "making a profit" is not useful. But if you actually make a good product that people want to buy, making a profit is a good thing: it indicates that your product satisfies people's needs better than someone else's.
As for Gates, he is trying to salvage his reputation as much as he can.
Repeating this obvious nonsense again and again doesn't make it true. Bitcoin assumes adversaries and widespread attacks. That's the whole point of a cryptographic currency: to guard against such attacks.
You should take your signature line on Dunning Kruger to heart... and stop embarrassing yourself.
Quite to the contrary: captialists (I am one) believe that it is necessity and the desire to improve one's material wealth that motivates people. You know, like those Chinese kids do you describe. And we actually believe that almost everybody has the capacity to succeed if they are only motivated, again like those Chinese kids.
It's people like you who divide the world into "dumbfucks" and brainiacs, then want to treat low performance as a disability, and reward people for it.
Yes: a culture and parents that value education and encourage their kids to succeed in it. Nothing else really makes much of a difference.
That bullshit. The "promoters of Bitcoin" made a reasonable assumption about adversaries and stated it clearly up front; there was no "backup" and they didn't assume that people would "play fair".
You could decide whether you wanted to take that risk or not, no "confidence" required. Furthermore, the only reason it is in this situation is because the US government has obstructed its adoption; if it were in widespread use, this imbalance wouldn't exist.
If a fatty diet with little vegetables is no worse than a regular diet, that is interesting enough on its own.
Maybe flaky Sun hardware needed the file system to perform such checks; high quality disk drives test for data integrity in the controller. For ZFS to check is redundant and probably does more harm than good.
This sounds like actual disk errors. File systems can't do much about them, you really need something like a RAID.
No, I just responded to your idea that the uninsured or unpaid hospital bills are responsible for our high medical costs. I mean, man, do the math. $41b amounts to about $150 per American. Obviously, that's not where our high health care costs come from. Furthermore, most of the people who owe that money wouldn't have been paying insurance anyway under the new system.
Because "the market" only operates when people have a choice not to buy something.
You have to be pretty stupid to think that single payer systems amount to socialism.
Health insurance isn't a "problem" at all, either in the US or elsewhere, because what is billed as "health insurance" isn't insurance, it's more like a cable subscription. And in this case, it's a mandatory cable subscription for thousands of channels, most of which most people neither want nor need. It's a gigantic ripoff.
The idea that the problems with government are due to corruption or ill intent is a fantasy promoted by progressives that can be fixed by just selecting better people (by which they mean themselves).
In reality, most people in government have good intentions are are not blatantly corrupt, whether they are low-level civil servants or higher-up bureaucrats with political ambitions. The problem is intrinsic to governmental structures, and you can't fix it other than by keeping government generally small.
It's a big deal everywhere; health care costs are spiraling out of control in other systems as well. Stop living under the illusion that this is a uniquely American problem.
A large part of high US health care costs is that medical providers and insurance companies have successfully created an oligopoly where they used to be able to charge high prices; they have created that not though some nefarious market mechanisms, but by lobbying Congress, who has time and again given them what they wanted. Now it's gotten even worse in that they have eliminated the last remaining vestiges of a market mechanism under Obamacare.
Agricultural subsidies are very wrong and should be eliminated. But you need to realize that agricultural subsidies and progressive health care legislation (Obamacare, single payer) are cut from the same cloth: special interests enriching themselves at everybody's expense and loss, and justifying it with the kind of b.s. "we"-stories you are using.
People who are bad in bed, financially irresponsible, or bad at math don't manage to fix those conditions long term either. That doesn't make them diseases or disabilities.
If you have a diagnosed disease that causes your obesity, then you can claim disability because of that.
Likewise, if you are sick, you may be staying home and not working; but that doesn't mean that everybody who stays home and is not working is sick.
Obesity isn't about aesthetics, it's about health, productivity, and health care costs. Since society now has to pay for your health care costs, society is going to tell you to shape up or be penalized.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
You may be forced to get into weight loss programs, just like people are forced to get into drug treatment programs, even if think your obesity isn't causing you any problems.
The old deal was: you choose your body shape, you suffer the consequences, and your employer chooses whether to hire you.
The emerging alternative deal is: if your body shape doesn't conform to parameters determined to be acceptable and healthy by government experts, you will have to undergo treatment, but you will be legally protected while you do so.
What you want, namely choosing a costly body shape and having society subsidize your choice is not going to happen in the long run because we can't pay for it.
Slippery slope? We've already slipped and are now free falling after having gone off the edge at the bottom of the slope :-)
No, I simply read carefully. The IPCC summarizes research that shows a modest degree of warming and shows that humans probably contributed to that. Most of the rest, both predictions about temperature changes and their consequences, are based on numerous assumptions that intrinsically cannot be "shown". You may think those assumptions are plausible, but that's not the same as scientific evidence.
Or maybe drug abuse. Or space Nazis. Or pedophiles. Or terrorism. Or digital piracy. Or inequality. Or male chauvinism. Or sex slavery. Or whatever other insignificant problem people fabricate a crisis out of these days.
We are talking here about the level of "validity" of work in climate change, which is a low standard indeed.
By the standards required by mainstream physics, climate change science is little different from tea leaf reading.
Please quote and reference specific examples where the IPCC reports "show with a high degree of certainty that AGW will be a problem".
That's not what those studies actually say. Furthermore, even if that were true, pre-20th century, there was nearly universal agreement on the validity of classical physics, but then QM and GR came along, so consensus doesn't tell you about truth.
Funny, it seems to me that people like global warming activists have been getting "disproportionate attention", given the weakness of their actual evidence.
And the general attitude of the rest of the world is something like "oh, it's a big problem, and someone else should give us money to fix it". Then countries try to pick metrics to shift the blame on someone else. Europeans point to current per-capita emissions, the Chinese want to emit for a while in order to develop, and everybody gangs up on the US because we have money. Rationally, if you believe AGW requires action, it's clear that Europe should bear the brunt of any costs and payments for carbon emissions, China should curb its emissions, and the US is somewhere in the middle.
The second sentence doesn't logically follow from the first. Yes, AGW does exist, but whether that is a problem and whether we need to find "solutions" is an open question.
No, that doesn't work for many reasons. But it's a nice illustration about how people love to fit new data in with their existing preconceptions instead of looking at it rationally.
I assume they'd be dependent on electrical solar panels, and those work less efficiently the warmer it gets.
Such suits, in fact, exist and have been tested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
They do allow gas exchange between your body and the space outside (vacuum, Martian atmosphere).
To use your words: "horseshit"; that's not what's happening in the US.
I care a great deal: I want people not to sacrifice our liberties and democracy in order to fix imaginary problems that power-hungry politicians use to win elections, and then enrich themselves and their cronies.
You want to break the system more and more, and you need to stop being someone's mindless political puppet.
Having spent lots of time (one can't call it "living") in real socialist countries and also some of those "wealthy" European nations and other European ex-colonies, I can tell from first hand experience: the residents of those countries are wealthy, uneducated nincompoops, who know nothing about the world, socialism, or the US. That probably includes you.
You should take that to heart: the European welfare state is not the only system in the world, and it's broken.