Across the Western world, it has been the Right's strategy to privatise popular public services by first deliberately ruining them. Then public perception changes toward, "Oh wow you're right state ownership doesn't work!"
Occasionally, this comes at a cost to human life, such as Thatcher's deliberate underinvestment in the railways, followed by Major's spinning off of Railtrack without any clear identification as to who is responsible for maintenance. But usually it's just a huge fucking waste of money, and the privatised industry ends up enjoying multiple subsidies and regulatory capture.
I had thought that the most powerful outcome of the Nuremberg trials was its impact on the public view of necessary ingredients for freedom. IOW, you can never have freedom unless each person acts as a rational individual, questioning everything.
Even if the law hadn't changed, the Western value system had been refined - the civil rights movement of the '60s, for example, was the product of post-war enlightenment. Even the hippy movement was an albeit sometimes directionless expression of, "Question everything!"
But either I have misread the message, or its impact has been lost as veterans and their immediate families+friends have died. I'm sure it's a lot of the latter. 2013 is the first year without a surviving WW1 veteran to stop us forgetting. That scares me a little.
tl;dr return to the '80s and '90s where businesses had servers in their server room.
Never left it. Feels good, bro. My only "conspiracy theory" (in that I extrapolated from the available evidence quite a bit) has turned out to be mostly accurate.
This fascistic "only following orders" mindset really needs to be nipped in the bud. America understood that it was unjustifiable in the 1940s, but it's their first refuge now.
If for profit(*) you maintain a product knowingly used for evil, you are just as responsible as the person directing you.
(*) A person who has little choice will have diminished or zero responsibility. So, a destitute person who gets a job as a cleaner for Google when there is nothing else on offer, or someone given forced labour in a prison, cannot really be judged.
Yes, but Iran isn't OPEC, so it still makes sense to say that it might put pressure on OPEC.
How exactly does spying on internal OPEC discussions stop them from deciding to limit supply to Britain, please? Is it so Britain can figure out ASAP how it should threaten Iran as a whole because a group has dared to exercise its right not to sell a product to private companies?
Of course it's a concern that Britain's energy policy has been directed toward maximising profit for energy companies rather than to securing domestically owned and located energy sources. Band-aid after band-aid won't solve the fact that Britain remains at the mercy of being "frozen to death" by OPEC (misdirected hyperbole yours - in fact, people are already freezing to death, and the numbers are expected to increase significantly this winter).
Now, recent moves toward fracking and building of new nuclear power stations have all involved foreign companies, which is only better in that we can in principle regulate in our interest and force nationalisation if absolutely necessary. In practice, the government ends up being subordinate to the needs of the energy companies - hence the spying!.
Genuine military threats from Iran are of course within the remit of spy agencies. That's not the same as sabre-rattling, but I simply don't know enough to say for sure whether Iran is a genuine military threat to Britain. FWIW, I have no evidence that it is.
The concern is not whether spying activity is at home or abroad - any such distinction can be defeated with recriprocal agreements. The issue is that the targetting was of administrators at Internet exchanges.
And you're worried about Iran putting pressure on OPEC? Deal with your lack of domestic energy security. You had 40 years to wake up, but instead you sold everything off to mostly foreign concerns. Spying on OPEC is just doing dirty work for these businesses to ensure they profitably receive their fuels.
My (long ago retired) father ended up as a relatively senior civil servant for his home country, working abroad and dealing with, to put it generally, import&export. Now he was once asked by his government if he would exploit the contacts he'd formed and cooperate in passing certain useful information to them as and when required. He refused.
I'm sure he'd have enjoyed greater job security in his latter years if he'd cooperated, but he did what was right - ultimately for him too, because being open and honest means a more relaxed life, where you are free to build what you want and speak about what you want.
Even if - and let's say your a stellar maths grad - you're given the most comfortable desk, access to the best machines and the company of a small subset of brilliant minds, your work won't go to improving human scholarship if you work for a secret service. It'll be kept under lock and key, deployed for the whim of the politicians of the day and their masters. And yes, you'll be indoctrinated with the mantra of every civil servant - "I'm not allowed an opinion because I'm only following orders". But that's only acceptable if your orders can ultimately be scrutinised by the general public on behalf of whom you are working.
And if you just enjoy playing god, well, go into the City, or start up your own business. If you're that good, then you can perform in plain sight, can't you?
I'm as far from "poor student" as you can get, so no vested interest here!
If there is anything you should learn with age, it's JUST HOW MUCH you owe to other people, without whom you'd be scraping around in the dirt, no matter your personal opinion of your own genius. If you think that people are sponging off you, you're learning nothing at all, and just taking advantage of others.
Yes exactly. Every scheme has "salt of the earth" people who just want to do an honest day's work, exploitative dickheads at the top, and a mixture half way between the two. That Bible-bashing gun-worshipper is probably just as decent, honest and hardworking as the girl who makes peace signs and sticks flowers in her hair, but they are taught to hate each other.
You've just listed typical communistic values. Indeed, "from each according to his ability" involves the greatest possible self-reliance and working hard so as not to be a burden.
The main difference between all the mainstream philosophies is in terms of how much work each thinks needs to be done. The capitalist thinks they only need to work for themselves for long enough to hoard and invest; the socialist thinks they need to work for as long as possible for themselves; and the communist they should work as long as possible for everyone.
Now the capitalist likes to misrepresent the communist as lazy ("he'll just expect someone ELSE to do the work!"), and the communist does the same back to the capitalist ("he'll just expect someone ELSE to do the work!"), but every sort has to do some work. The capitalist is nevertheless, ideologically speaking, the laziest. This isn't really a criticism, but an observation.
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Across the Western world, it has been the Right's strategy to privatise popular public services by first deliberately ruining them. Then public perception changes toward, "Oh wow you're right state ownership doesn't work!"
Occasionally, this comes at a cost to human life, such as Thatcher's deliberate underinvestment in the railways, followed by Major's spinning off of Railtrack without any clear identification as to who is responsible for maintenance. But usually it's just a huge fucking waste of money, and the privatised industry ends up enjoying multiple subsidies and regulatory capture.
What can Brown do for you?
Because, of course, a private service is always cheaper and more reliable.
And is never too big to fail.
Let's privatise the air you breathe. NOBODY IS MAKING MONEY FROM YOUR BREATHING and it is an ideological tragedy.
Doubt it, but I'm not exactly destitute.
Serious question: how close is your nearest slum?
I had thought that the most powerful outcome of the Nuremberg trials was its impact on the public view of necessary ingredients for freedom. IOW, you can never have freedom unless each person acts as a rational individual, questioning everything.
Even if the law hadn't changed, the Western value system had been refined - the civil rights movement of the '60s, for example, was the product of post-war enlightenment. Even the hippy movement was an albeit sometimes directionless expression of, "Question everything!"
But either I have misread the message, or its impact has been lost as veterans and their immediate families+friends have died. I'm sure it's a lot of the latter. 2013 is the first year without a surviving WW1 veteran to stop us forgetting. That scares me a little.
tl;dr return to the '80s and '90s where businesses had servers in their server room.
Never left it. Feels good, bro. My only "conspiracy theory" (in that I extrapolated from the available evidence quite a bit) has turned out to be mostly accurate.
This fascistic "only following orders" mindset really needs to be nipped in the bud. America understood that it was unjustifiable in the 1940s, but it's their first refuge now.
If for profit(*) you maintain a product knowingly used for evil, you are just as responsible as the person directing you.
(*) A person who has little choice will have diminished or zero responsibility. So, a destitute person who gets a job as a cleaner for Google when there is nothing else on offer, or someone given forced labour in a prison, cannot really be judged.
Please be more explicit. Some were evacuated; others were murdered; most of them I know nothing about.
Straw man. We're talking about having $3 million spare cash, not savings in general.
I can't move - I'm under siege!
Yes, but Iran isn't OPEC, so it still makes sense to say that it might put pressure on OPEC.
How exactly does spying on internal OPEC discussions stop them from deciding to limit supply to Britain, please? Is it so Britain can figure out ASAP how it should threaten Iran as a whole because a group has dared to exercise its right not to sell a product to private companies?
Of course it's a concern that Britain's energy policy has been directed toward maximising profit for energy companies rather than to securing domestically owned and located energy sources. Band-aid after band-aid won't solve the fact that Britain remains at the mercy of being "frozen to death" by OPEC (misdirected hyperbole yours - in fact, people are already freezing to death, and the numbers are expected to increase significantly this winter).
Now, recent moves toward fracking and building of new nuclear power stations have all involved foreign companies, which is only better in that we can in principle regulate in our interest and force nationalisation if absolutely necessary. In practice, the government ends up being subordinate to the needs of the energy companies - hence the spying!.
Genuine military threats from Iran are of course within the remit of spy agencies. That's not the same as sabre-rattling, but I simply don't know enough to say for sure whether Iran is a genuine military threat to Britain. FWIW, I have no evidence that it is.
The concern is not whether spying activity is at home or abroad - any such distinction can be defeated with recriprocal agreements. The issue is that the targetting was of administrators at Internet exchanges.
And you're worried about Iran putting pressure on OPEC? Deal with your lack of domestic energy security. You had 40 years to wake up, but instead you sold everything off to mostly foreign concerns. Spying on OPEC is just doing dirty work for these businesses to ensure they profitably receive their fuels.
It makes me sad.
My (long ago retired) father ended up as a relatively senior civil servant for his home country, working abroad and dealing with, to put it generally, import&export. Now he was once asked by his government if he would exploit the contacts he'd formed and cooperate in passing certain useful information to them as and when required. He refused.
I'm sure he'd have enjoyed greater job security in his latter years if he'd cooperated, but he did what was right - ultimately for him too, because being open and honest means a more relaxed life, where you are free to build what you want and speak about what you want.
Even if - and let's say your a stellar maths grad - you're given the most comfortable desk, access to the best machines and the company of a small subset of brilliant minds, your work won't go to improving human scholarship if you work for a secret service. It'll be kept under lock and key, deployed for the whim of the politicians of the day and their masters. And yes, you'll be indoctrinated with the mantra of every civil servant - "I'm not allowed an opinion because I'm only following orders". But that's only acceptable if your orders can ultimately be scrutinised by the general public on behalf of whom you are working.
And if you just enjoy playing god, well, go into the City, or start up your own business. If you're that good, then you can perform in plain sight, can't you?
I know you're reading this.
You're smart. Smart enough to be able to work out who I am, probably without much trouble.
Why don't you do something productive?
Oh, I'm not trying to force anyone. Nor do I play the lottery :P.
Everyone thought Segways were stupid.
And they still do.
Where are they now?
Women and the poor. Some "alpha wolf".
...but that one's far away.
If you have $6 million just lying around and have just given $3 million to a good cause, that still leaves $3 million you could give to a good cause.
I think this is a marketing thing, not an investment thing, no?
You're not trying to lie to investors, but to get lots of real people to sign up to something by making your junk seem more popular than it is.
i can't hear you over the sound of how awesome you think i think i am
I'm as far from "poor student" as you can get, so no vested interest here!
If there is anything you should learn with age, it's JUST HOW MUCH you owe to other people, without whom you'd be scraping around in the dirt, no matter your personal opinion of your own genius. If you think that people are sponging off you, you're learning nothing at all, and just taking advantage of others.
Yes exactly. Every scheme has "salt of the earth" people who just want to do an honest day's work, exploitative dickheads at the top, and a mixture half way between the two. That Bible-bashing gun-worshipper is probably just as decent, honest and hardworking as the girl who makes peace signs and sticks flowers in her hair, but they are taught to hate each other.
Arseholes of either or both religions.
You've just listed typical communistic values. Indeed, "from each according to his ability" involves the greatest possible self-reliance and working hard so as not to be a burden.
The main difference between all the mainstream philosophies is in terms of how much work each thinks needs to be done. The capitalist thinks they only need to work for themselves for long enough to hoard and invest; the socialist thinks they need to work for as long as possible for themselves; and the communist they should work as long as possible for everyone.
Now the capitalist likes to misrepresent the communist as lazy ("he'll just expect someone ELSE to do the work!"), and the communist does the same back to the capitalist ("he'll just expect someone ELSE to do the work!"), but every sort has to do some work. The capitalist is nevertheless, ideologically speaking, the laziest. This isn't really a criticism, but an observation.