OK you caught me, you nailed it exactly --- I'm a member of Indian royalty who emigrated to USA California! Lol - you people are hilarious. Of course I'm African; there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans already with Internet access back in '95, even Internet cafes were common then --- but don't let facts get in the way of you revelling in pure ignorance.
Where did I say I know better than statistics? Stop making things up. I've travelled widely and studied things personally as well as studied a LOT of actual information and statistics on Africa. And it remains a shithole. And come live in SA for a while (and no not just in the rich areas) before you spout totally ignorant nonsense about it 'hardly counting'.
But they exemplify a social self-organization that does have positive consequences from a sustainability perspective.
Except... they don't. They *precisely* don't. Slums are a major example of a social structure that is *unsustainable*. That is precisely part of their problem. Come experience some real slums for yourself and see if you still agree with yourself.
I get what the author is trying to say, I'm not an idiot -- basically that high-density settlements have a low *per-capita* 'ecological footprint'. YAY. What big news. But now what? I must "learn" from that? That's pointless, stupid and misguided. Slums are also filthy, disease-ridden, crime-ridden hotbeds of human suffering, they still cause *major* damage to the environment (ever see a river running through a slum? ever see the air pollution from 5 million poor people crammed into a few hectares burning whatever rubbish they can to keep warm or cook their food? ever see first-hand how every living green thing is decimated, how rubbish piles up everywhere because of lack of services, how people live in fear constantly? I am "learning" that this is "good"?)
I'm quite capable of learning how to lower my ecological 'footprint' without looking at a slum. I know what sustainable living is. I know what the problems are. I agree we should lower pollution. None of this requires me to admire a slum.
It was a beacon of liberty, just not for the blacks;) I know that might seem selective or disingenuous, but that's not how it's intended: The presence of blemishes on the record does not invalidate the argument for everything else that occurred. In short, if somebody does something good and also then does something bad at the same time, it doesn't mean that they *never did* the good thing at all.
That's hilariously ironic --- you do realise, don't you, that the Spanish conquered and colonised Latin America in much the same way as other Western Europeans did North America? You think Spanish Mexicans were always 'just there'? They did their share of killing the indigenous populations too - why do you single out the US? You seem to have an agenda.
Africans (kidnapping and slavery)
And yet America fought a civil war partly over slavery, emancipating the African Americans, fought to end the Jim Crow era, and ultimately African Americans now enjoy more liberty than the majority of their 'counterparts' living under despotic murderous dictators in various African countries.
Women and their rights, and the list goes on?
What!? The Western world has been BY FAR the world's leaders in the women's rights movements --- most other cultures are only now slowly starting to "catch up". You think the Middle East leads in women's rights? You think China leads in women's rights? You think Africa leads in women's rights? They are all FAR behind the US, my friend!
And stop worrying about overpopulation. There are enough other things to worry about.
I didn't say I was "worried about it", moron, I was just stating the facts plainly --- no, I'm not worried about it, because it's not going to affect me badly, I know how to plan for my future. because the bias in the Western world is to see Western fertility rates dropping and think "the world"'s fertility rate is magically dropping and that this is the trend everyone will magically follow as "they" "modernize".
Most of Africa is getting better, the distorted image you get from news reported from the war torn regions of Congo and Somalia doesn't change that. Please, allow your mind to be changed by this dataset.
Ha ha --- I don't derive my views from foreign news reports as I am African live in Africa - born here and have lived here my whole life, and have travelled to many African countries and into many African slums and spent a fair bit of time seeing the problems first-hand. My work involves, at times, working with local African communities. I think you might be the one who is confused by distorted media perceptions if you're buying into the notion that Africa is getting better. Statistics? We can look at actual statistics too, I do all the time, I've been studying Africa for years --- they also don't bear out your views. Africa is and remains, overall, a shithole, and no, it's not getting better.
Hmm, I recall I was voluntarily working from as young as 13, and in fact I've worked basically every year since then. I just wanted to, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, as I've always loved making money. Gee, it never even occurred to me that I'd stumbled into being a 'victim' of child labor. I'm glad nobody "saved" me; the money I earned helped contribute to my cost of living while studying at university.
Hmm, OK, I see Wikipedia includes anarchists as a *subset* of libertarianism. Well, that is certainly not what I've learned from my sources, and I suspect that that's just part of a general popular campaign to discredit libertarianism, by lumping in something completely different that most people dislike. It's not "just a spectrum"; that tiny "little" difference of, you know, "having a government with a monopoly on force that protects individual and property rights" are absolutely massive and profound compared to anarchy.
What's sadder than the steady demise of America as a world 'beacon of freedom' is that there are people who even believe that that 'beacon of freedom' never existed --- it most certainly did (even though it was far from perfect, sure), just crack open a few history books. Come live in a communist or failed state for a while (like myself, where amongst the general collapse of the country and takeover by communists and socialists our people are being slaughtered and the government is complicit in allowing it to happen), and you might get some perspective --- the US most certainly even today still looks nowhere near as bad as half the wretched countries on this planet.
I know it's fashionable to be anti-American (even in America) and to claim that America is just as 'evil' as all the rest, but such views are simply not based on any reality at all, they're just fashionable memes.
Even the very idea of libertarianism originated from Europe (from Scottish politics of the 1600s and Australian economists of the late 1800s/early 1900s). That's not to say Americans have not contributed, but I'd only give them half credit while reserving the other half to Europeans.
I didn't say the US "invented" libertarianism; lol --- regardless of where the idea originated, it remains that the US of the 19th and early 20th centuries was the closest the world has seen to an actual working model of a large pseudo-libertarian-style system, and it was highly successful.
It's true that Europe played a large part in the most recent technological revolution, because it was really "The West", which spans primarily Western Europe and Northern America. But I think you're definitely playing down the amount of innovation that occurred in the US. Then when your perspective is global, and you see where the rest of the world was at, well you realise what happened in early America was truly amazing.
Hmm, well the problem with that is that it is wrong. You can't be a libertarian and an anarachist, since the two are non-overlapping sets. "No government, no government-enforced property rights" and "Government with monopoly on power that enforces property rights" are non-overlapping sets; you can't "be" both. You can say you wouldn't mind either coming into effect, but that just makes you apathetic; "not caring one way or another" is not the same as *being* both.
There is some confusion about as the *older* definition of libertarianism was closer to anarchism.
I like your point about Libertarians. Many Ls are actually anarchists, saying that human society would actually be better-off with no government (other than self-rule). If Libertarian ideals took-over would we eventually end-up living in compact, filthy cities like our 1700s/1800s ancestors did?
You just changed the definition of "libertarian" and then postulated what might happen if (your definition of) "libertarians" "took over". WTF? A "libertarian" is not an anarchist, they are two *very* different things. Maybe you meant "some people who call themselves libertarians are actually anarchists", but did you make that omission on purpose? And then did you actually mean "If anarchists took over", or, "If libertarians took over"? Are you purposely trying to conflate the two, or did you just word your post extremely badly?
To clarify for other readers who might now have been misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government (leaving people to be entirely self-organising, and thus allowing private armies and thus, in all probability, the ultimate rule of whoever has the biggest private army), while a libertarian believes in small government, with individual rights and property ownership, and an enforcement system, but government retains a monopoly on force in order to enforce individual liberties.
Finally, you imply that libertarian societies would lead to "compact, filthy cities like our 1700s/1800s ancestors", conveniently leaving out that the results of that was the biggest economic boom in the history of humanity leading to a powerful society with one of the highest standards of living in human history, a technological superpower society that basically invented almost every useful bit of technology the rest of the world uses today to slowly catch up in dragging itself out of poverty.
The apartheid government in South Africa thought that creating large concentrated pools of unskilled labor nearby major economic centers was a good thing for the economy. In the short term that might seem true, but as it turns out, in the longer run, "it doesn't work".
What? Your post is in stark and blatant contradiction to glaring facts. The "West", which does have a very low birthrate, constitutes only a small percentage of the population, less than 20%. China, another 20 odd %, has a low birthrate but only artificially. Everywhere else, birthrates have exploded since the introduction of large-scale vaccination and the 'food aid' industry that holds back starvation wherever famine crops up. Africa has about a billion people and shows no signs of slowing down, and no, they're not urbanising, they're not becoming educated, and their birthrates aren't dropping significantly. We may never reach 20 billion, sure, but that will more likely be due to the unsustainability of the current 'system' and limited resources.
No shit. Who the hell thinks slums are a positive thing? I've spent a fair bit of time in and around the slums of South Africa, and trust me, it is roughly akin to hell on Earth --- they are not an "example", there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything, and the only lessons we must take away are how to prevent them.
What is perhaps a more useful question to ask is, what are the motives behind those who would attempt to brainwash us into thinking they're a positive thing? I am highly suspicious; for some reason I can't put my finger on, I smell evil here, not ignorance.
If slums were better, people would live in them voluntarily and self-organise their communities like slums naturally when given the choice. Those that live in them are dying to get out.
Not to mention money. So, will the people just roll over as usual and accept this? Once upon a time the US used to be a 'beacon of liberty' to the world. Now the article even talks about "aligning" itself with "global trends" towards fascism, even mentioning Italy's latest display of blatant fascism as something to "align" itself with. When communism was a "global trend" the old-style US had the balls to stand out against it. Now they want to hide behind "global trends" to gain more power and money in clamping down on liberty. You can justify anything these days by just saying it's a "global trend".
Game developers don't generally try to stop crackers entirely, that would be futile; their main goal is to delay the crackers for long enough that the developer makes back most of its money early enough after the game's release (e.g. a few months). Cf. an old 'classic' Gamasutra article: Keeping the Pirates at Bay. The crackers may always eventually "win" in your terms but I'm not sure what they've "won" exactly.
Slashdot Mirror
He meant literally in the figurative sense.
So do something about it.
OK you caught me, you nailed it exactly --- I'm a member of Indian royalty who emigrated to USA California! Lol - you people are hilarious. Of course I'm African; there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans already with Internet access back in '95, even Internet cafes were common then --- but don't let facts get in the way of you revelling in pure ignorance.
Where did I say I know better than statistics? Stop making things up. I've travelled widely and studied things personally as well as studied a LOT of actual information and statistics on Africa. And it remains a shithole. And come live in SA for a while (and no not just in the rich areas) before you spout totally ignorant nonsense about it 'hardly counting'.
India is not in Africa, check a map, lol. And I haven't lied about anything on /., ever.
You're blatantly lying, I claimed no such thing --- citation please. How such a blatant lie got modded up, I don't know.
+1 ... maybe it's just something you have to experience first-hand to really 'get' :/
But they exemplify a social self-organization that does have positive consequences from a sustainability perspective.
Except ... they don't. They *precisely* don't. Slums are a major example of a social structure that is *unsustainable*. That is precisely part of their problem. Come experience some real slums for yourself and see if you still agree with yourself.
I get what the author is trying to say, I'm not an idiot -- basically that high-density settlements have a low *per-capita* 'ecological footprint'. YAY. What big news. But now what? I must "learn" from that? That's pointless, stupid and misguided. Slums are also filthy, disease-ridden, crime-ridden hotbeds of human suffering, they still cause *major* damage to the environment (ever see a river running through a slum? ever see the air pollution from 5 million poor people crammed into a few hectares burning whatever rubbish they can to keep warm or cook their food? ever see first-hand how every living green thing is decimated, how rubbish piles up everywhere because of lack of services, how people live in fear constantly? I am "learning" that this is "good"?)
I'm quite capable of learning how to lower my ecological 'footprint' without looking at a slum. I know what sustainable living is. I know what the problems are. I agree we should lower pollution. None of this requires me to admire a slum.
It was a beacon of liberty, just not for the blacks ;) I know that might seem selective or disingenuous, but that's not how it's intended: The presence of blemishes on the record does not invalidate the argument for everything else that occurred. In short, if somebody does something good and also then does something bad at the same time, it doesn't mean that they *never did* the good thing at all.
Mexicans who's land was invaded and taken
That's hilariously ironic --- you do realise, don't you, that the Spanish conquered and colonised Latin America in much the same way as other Western Europeans did North America? You think Spanish Mexicans were always 'just there'? They did their share of killing the indigenous populations too - why do you single out the US? You seem to have an agenda.
Africans (kidnapping and slavery)
And yet America fought a civil war partly over slavery, emancipating the African Americans, fought to end the Jim Crow era, and ultimately African Americans now enjoy more liberty than the majority of their 'counterparts' living under despotic murderous dictators in various African countries.
Women and their rights, and the list goes on?
What!? The Western world has been BY FAR the world's leaders in the women's rights movements --- most other cultures are only now slowly starting to "catch up". You think the Middle East leads in women's rights? You think China leads in women's rights? You think Africa leads in women's rights? They are all FAR behind the US, my friend!
And stop worrying about overpopulation. There are enough other things to worry about.
I didn't say I was "worried about it", moron, I was just stating the facts plainly --- no, I'm not worried about it, because it's not going to affect me badly, I know how to plan for my future. because the bias in the Western world is to see Western fertility rates dropping and think "the world"'s fertility rate is magically dropping and that this is the trend everyone will magically follow as "they" "modernize".
You've succumbed to proximity bias; I'm afraid you're the one who doesn't understand this topic.
Most of Africa is getting better, the distorted image you get from news reported from the war torn regions of Congo and Somalia doesn't change that. Please, allow your mind to be changed by this dataset.
Ha ha --- I don't derive my views from foreign news reports as I am African live in Africa - born here and have lived here my whole life, and have travelled to many African countries and into many African slums and spent a fair bit of time seeing the problems first-hand. My work involves, at times, working with local African communities. I think you might be the one who is confused by distorted media perceptions if you're buying into the notion that Africa is getting better. Statistics? We can look at actual statistics too, I do all the time, I've been studying Africa for years --- they also don't bear out your views. Africa is and remains, overall, a shithole, and no, it's not getting better.
Hmm, I recall I was voluntarily working from as young as 13, and in fact I've worked basically every year since then. I just wanted to, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, as I've always loved making money. Gee, it never even occurred to me that I'd stumbled into being a 'victim' of child labor. I'm glad nobody "saved" me; the money I earned helped contribute to my cost of living while studying at university.
Hmm, OK, I see Wikipedia includes anarchists as a *subset* of libertarianism. Well, that is certainly not what I've learned from my sources, and I suspect that that's just part of a general popular campaign to discredit libertarianism, by lumping in something completely different that most people dislike. It's not "just a spectrum"; that tiny "little" difference of, you know, "having a government with a monopoly on force that protects individual and property rights" are absolutely massive and profound compared to anarchy.
What's sadder than the steady demise of America as a world 'beacon of freedom' is that there are people who even believe that that 'beacon of freedom' never existed --- it most certainly did (even though it was far from perfect, sure), just crack open a few history books. Come live in a communist or failed state for a while (like myself, where amongst the general collapse of the country and takeover by communists and socialists our people are being slaughtered and the government is complicit in allowing it to happen), and you might get some perspective --- the US most certainly even today still looks nowhere near as bad as half the wretched countries on this planet.
I know it's fashionable to be anti-American (even in America) and to claim that America is just as 'evil' as all the rest, but such views are simply not based on any reality at all, they're just fashionable memes.
Even the very idea of libertarianism originated from Europe (from Scottish politics of the 1600s and Australian economists of the late 1800s/early 1900s). That's not to say Americans have not contributed, but I'd only give them half credit while reserving the other half to Europeans.
I didn't say the US "invented" libertarianism; lol --- regardless of where the idea originated, it remains that the US of the 19th and early 20th centuries was the closest the world has seen to an actual working model of a large pseudo-libertarian-style system, and it was highly successful.
It's true that Europe played a large part in the most recent technological revolution, because it was really "The West", which spans primarily Western Europe and Northern America. But I think you're definitely playing down the amount of innovation that occurred in the US. Then when your perspective is global, and you see where the rest of the world was at, well you realise what happened in early America was truly amazing.
Many libertarians are actually anarchists,
Hmm, well the problem with that is that it is wrong. You can't be a libertarian and an anarachist, since the two are non-overlapping sets. "No government, no government-enforced property rights" and "Government with monopoly on power that enforces property rights" are non-overlapping sets; you can't "be" both. You can say you wouldn't mind either coming into effect, but that just makes you apathetic; "not caring one way or another" is not the same as *being* both.
There is some confusion about as the *older* definition of libertarianism was closer to anarchism.
I like your point about Libertarians. Many Ls are actually anarchists, saying that human society would actually be better-off with no government (other than self-rule). If Libertarian ideals took-over would we eventually end-up living in compact, filthy cities like our 1700s/1800s ancestors did?
You just changed the definition of "libertarian" and then postulated what might happen if (your definition of) "libertarians" "took over". WTF? A "libertarian" is not an anarchist, they are two *very* different things. Maybe you meant "some people who call themselves libertarians are actually anarchists", but did you make that omission on purpose? And then did you actually mean "If anarchists took over", or, "If libertarians took over"? Are you purposely trying to conflate the two, or did you just word your post extremely badly?
To clarify for other readers who might now have been misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government (leaving people to be entirely self-organising, and thus allowing private armies and thus, in all probability, the ultimate rule of whoever has the biggest private army), while a libertarian believes in small government, with individual rights and property ownership, and an enforcement system, but government retains a monopoly on force in order to enforce individual liberties.
Finally, you imply that libertarian societies would lead to "compact, filthy cities like our 1700s/1800s ancestors", conveniently leaving out that the results of that was the biggest economic boom in the history of humanity leading to a powerful society with one of the highest standards of living in human history, a technological superpower society that basically invented almost every useful bit of technology the rest of the world uses today to slowly catch up in dragging itself out of poverty.
The apartheid government in South Africa thought that creating large concentrated pools of unskilled labor nearby major economic centers was a good thing for the economy. In the short term that might seem true, but as it turns out, in the longer run, "it doesn't work".
What? Your post is in stark and blatant contradiction to glaring facts. The "West", which does have a very low birthrate, constitutes only a small percentage of the population, less than 20%. China, another 20 odd %, has a low birthrate but only artificially. Everywhere else, birthrates have exploded since the introduction of large-scale vaccination and the 'food aid' industry that holds back starvation wherever famine crops up. Africa has about a billion people and shows no signs of slowing down, and no, they're not urbanising, they're not becoming educated, and their birthrates aren't dropping significantly. We may never reach 20 billion, sure, but that will more likely be due to the unsustainability of the current 'system' and limited resources.
No shit. Who the hell thinks slums are a positive thing? I've spent a fair bit of time in and around the slums of South Africa, and trust me, it is roughly akin to hell on Earth --- they are not an "example", there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything, and the only lessons we must take away are how to prevent them.
What is perhaps a more useful question to ask is, what are the motives behind those who would attempt to brainwash us into thinking they're a positive thing? I am highly suspicious; for some reason I can't put my finger on, I smell evil here, not ignorance.
If slums were better, people would live in them voluntarily and self-organise their communities like slums naturally when given the choice. Those that live in them are dying to get out.
Not to mention money. So, will the people just roll over as usual and accept this? Once upon a time the US used to be a 'beacon of liberty' to the world. Now the article even talks about "aligning" itself with "global trends" towards fascism, even mentioning Italy's latest display of blatant fascism as something to "align" itself with. When communism was a "global trend" the old-style US had the balls to stand out against it. Now they want to hide behind "global trends" to gain more power and money in clamping down on liberty. You can justify anything these days by just saying it's a "global trend".
Game developers don't generally try to stop crackers entirely, that would be futile; their main goal is to delay the crackers for long enough that the developer makes back most of its money early enough after the game's release (e.g. a few months). Cf. an old 'classic' Gamasutra article: Keeping the Pirates at Bay. The crackers may always eventually "win" in your terms but I'm not sure what they've "won" exactly.
As opposed to splashing all over the underside of the lid, that you sit with your whole back against when you take a dump?