Umm, may I ask how the hell this got modded as Insightful? If I had mod points I would drop this as Flamebait more than anything.
I get that the US in general has some obsessive hatred of Cuba, but were you to actually go there and meet the people you would come back with the impression only of a society trying to survive under grinding poverty because they cannot trade with a lot of foreign nations due to the embargo, NOT one of wanton cruelty as the Parent is trying to suggest.
A lot of the problem isn't with the poor. It is in the gap between poor enough to be granted state-funded medi-care, and rich enough to afford health-care on your own. They are the working poor.
The people who get lost are those working low-wage jobs and are just making ends meet. The state doesn't recognize them as being poor enough to need assistance, and to these people it is more important to put food on the table than purchase independent health-insurance. If they get sick, often what little health-insurance they may have through work will not cover their needs. This leaves them with enormous medical bills, and no way to pay them.
Actually I think the poor are well looked after in the states, if you are unable to work or qualify for state-assistance you can be better off than people who work two jobs and make just enough money to scrape by. It's the people in the middle that fall between the cracks. I only have heard anecdotal evidence that that gap is getting larger... but I don't have any real evidence at hand to justify that statement so it could be false.
Of course I can conceptualize what a billion is, but the way to do it isn't to think of a billion distinct objects and try to count them in your mind. You have to group them and relate them to things that you can conceptualize easily.
For example: $60 billion can build 400,000 4 person homes where I live (where the average price is about $150,000). That means $60 billion could provide shelter for close to 1.6 million people.
And in the case of my city of 670,000 people, that means with that much money you could rebuild homes for the entire population 2.39 times over.
I have a firm concept of how large my city is, what kind of area it covers and can thus grasp the scale of how much money $60 billion actually is.
It's a hard path, and I know someone who has walked it. I have a cousin who was in the same situation and was fired for refusing to perform those illegal acts. If you are in your grace period, they can terminate you without giving a reason, but if you've been employed for some time they cannot legally fire you for refusing to perform an illegal act.
In the end, my cousin didn't get anything out of it. He had to find another job (and did) but he did have the satisfaction of seeing the company get busted for unrelated illegal actions, which were then compounded when the illegal software was discovered.
To this day, even though it was tough being forced to find a new job, he is glad that he took a stand against it... and I'll be the first to admit that I admire him for it.
I believe what he is saying is that if your an application developer who is pushing the limits of what a single core is capable of in terms of performance, then you are going to see decreasing rate of improvement and then stagnation because the focus of hardware development is shifting away from more power in a single core to more power because there are more cores. At some point you will hit a wall, and for single-threaded applications you're going to reach a point where there isn't any more power to be had.
Therefore if you want to tap that extra power that a multi-core processor has, you will by definition *need* to start multi-threaded programming. This isn't about you people who are happy with the speed and power that you already have, research is pointless if you already have everything you could possibly need. This is for the people who push the edge, at some point if you need more you will need to learn to multi-thread correctly.
No myth, my father got that far and showed it to me:). I had the patience to bring my city up to the arcology stage once my city was self-sustaining, but I never had enough to demolish everything and replace them entirely with arcologies myself.
I mostly agree with you. I have a degree in mathematics, and calculators can be useful now and then on the odd occasion that you're actually dealing with numbers. However, in those cases a simple casio scientific works just as well as my TI did.
All in all I rarely used my TI, and then most of the time it was used for simple calculations. After Calc 1, it simply wasn't powerful enough to do the work that we had. It can't handle multivariate calculus or complex matrix transformations.
So yeah I pretty much agree with you, very quickly does a graphing calculator become useless and then if you don't have a good grasp of the basics it will be much harder. In all I think the students are better served by not using a calculator for the easy stuff, so that when they get to the hard stuff it will all be old-hat.
And on a side note, none of my mathematics or comp sci courses allowed calculators, my physics courses allowed non-graphing calculators only, and my english courses allowed anything.
The same with us Canadians, I mean in order to pass a bill into law it goes through the process:
The steps in the federal legislative process are: first reading, second reading, committee stage, report stage, third reading, referral of the bill to the senate house, passage through the senate house, then royal assent from the Governor General. The last stage signals the bill's passage into law.
If there is not agreement on a bill's contents, amendments are made, discussed and voted upon until there is agreement. Source:CBC News Indepth: Canadian Government - picked this source because it was the shortest and most concise, you can find details on the Canadian Parlimentary system in many locations.
The point is, that even though a bill may address a number of things, it has to pass 3 readings in both of the houses plus reviews and amendments. It doesn't mean that controversial legislation can't be pushed through by the ruling party, but it does mean that the details are in the open and offending sections can be removed. If there is a minority government (like we currently have) that means that the house can easily force the bill to be amended into something sensible before being passed, or just shot down entirely.
The parent never once mentioned Bush or even the United States of America, he simply mentioned that our elected officials need to set an example for our corporations to follow.
The fact that you instantly jumped to the conclusion that he was referring to Bush and the whole NSA wiretapping thing, speaks volumes about the president and his actions, far more than the parent poster.
it tells that most Americans are more likely to believe what they find desirable to believe, rather than the truth.
The only thing that changes are the idiosyncrasies, the individual blind spots, usually about the things that we personally or culturally choose to care about. That my fellow countrymen happen to believe a particularly embarrassing one is unfortunate, but in the grand scheme of things is hardly the ultimate sin against 'Truth'.
No, that *is* the ultimate sin against truth. Believing what you find desirable or want to believe instead of the truth against all evidence is the ultimate sin because it is the root that leads to all other sins against truth.
Someone who pretends one point of view but knows and believes the truth can cause trouble, but are for the most part not very dangerous because they can be reasoned with. They know the front they put forward is wrong and as such are open to be convinced.
Someone who believes in falsities against all evidence, they embrace denial of truth and they are the ones who are truely dangerous. They are dangerous because they are zealots, and a true zealot will defend their belief regardless of how wrong they are, and attempting to reason with them or convince them otherwise can easily lead you to be dismissed as irrelevant or a threat.
I care about what I choose to care about, that is a given. I don't however, hold any belief sacred because the only way we can deal with this world is in knowing what is, not what we wish it to be.
"I am not going to worry too much about the lack of music in the system either. Most of my grade school musical education was a complete waste. I barely remember the musical scale (though that might be better then most my peers), and I certainly wouldn't have felt cheated if I got to hear less Bach, Beethoven, et. al."
You may not be interested in any sort of technical aspect of music or appreciate classical compositions, but that is no excuse for brushing off exposing our future young to such things. We *want* to expose children to as wide a variety of culture as possible, so that they can choose and find something that they are happy with. Taking that away because it isn't something that interests you is the worst thing we could do.
I'm not a teacher, nor do I have any vested interest in public education at the moment (no kids, yet). However I am a great lover of classical compositions, and music in general and I abhor the thought of raising children without giving them at least the opportunity to decide whether this is something they would like or not. I play three instruments (piano, flute, and bass guitar), not many yet but I have started learning the clarinet, oboe, and saxophone, and it all started with grade school music class, playing the recorder and asking to take piano lessons.
And in case someone gets the wrong idea, I am not a professional musician by any means. I'm a programmer, graduate of Computer Science, music is just my hobby.
My biggest problems traditionally have been trying to work with positioning/layout, and scrollable block tags.
If you've tried to create a scrollable table with a static table head, you know how difficult it is to make that work in IE. It forces you to jump through hoops by not allowing blocks to be scrollable, which means the workaround is that a div surrounding the table must be scrollable, your header section must then be floating (instead of simply not scrollable) and it requires some fancy javascript to detect form controls that have moved too high up because IE refuses to hide them behind the headers.
I've never had a problem dialog boxes, but then I have never needed to use them to any great extent. All I've needed was the occasional (yes/no) save confirmation popup, and they've never given me any trouble.
Anyone who answers "YES" to this headline without a "but..." isn't doing this for a living where making it work and look correctly is more important than standards compliance.
I follow the standards to the best of my ability and test in all major browsers until something breaks (thanks IE, thanks a lot) which is when I break out the hacks until the page works correctly for everyone.
So do I follow standards? Well, when you get right down to it, no, I don't. I follow them up until the point that they prevent me from doing my job, then they get tossed out the window.
"There is no way other than the use of industrial espionage to explain the short amount of time China took in developing its space program and supercomputer capabilities."
You do realize China has been sending things to space since 1970, and modules that could be manned since 1999. So, potentially manned modules for 7 years, does that number sound familiar? The US made it to the moon in 7 years when it *had never been done before*, and you seem to think that it is beyond thinking that China could put people into space within 7 years of first having the capability to do so?
It doesn't require industrial espionage to let someone else experiement until they figure out what works and what doesn't, and then develop your own system based on the knowledge of what does work. Sure, there may be industrial espionage going on, but it is positively insulting to think that it couldn't be done with *legal* models to work from because it is China. The US holds no monopoly on being able to invent well and invent fast.
Haha, thats hilarious! You do remember Sputnik, don't you?
Or the fact that the cold war spurred massive advances in technology for both the US and the USSR?
Ingenuity and invention are not limited by the type of government, *because* of the type of government. It can be limited by hostile attitudes and rampant fundamentalism in the ruling classes however. If anything, the Soviet revolution spurred Russian invention, rapidly transforming its society into a heavily industrial one.
Between the Soviets forward looking attitude (especially during the earlier years of the USSR) and the conflicts with the Germans, and then with the Western world, the government actively pursued technological advancement and by all means achieved one of the quickest rates of invention in history, surpassed only by the United States during the same period of time, and the time since the end of the cold war which is in part a result of the cold war's legacy.
But when a country goes to war on the strength of what 51% of the voting population says... then I don't give a damn what the minority thinks. If you don't like the administration, then get out. I will say what I want about "Americans" as a whole because by the very founding notions of your country, your government is representative of the people, by the people, and for the people.
If you don't like it, then it's your responsibility to change it, not mine. And as long as your government continues on the path it's been then I'll keep saying what I feel needs to be said.
Run your "analysis" again, but replace intelligence with wealth. I think your correlation to negative birth rate will be much higher.
It just so happens that in the already wealthy western world (which on the whole has a much lower birth rate than poorer nations) income is partially related to intelligence, in the fact that university graduates on average make more money than non-grads.
quote: "tax on blank CD-R and CD-RW discs will remain at 21 cents per unit" "29 cent tax on blank tapes and 77 cent tax on blank CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio and MiniDiscs"
It's already true in sports like skiing, snowboarding, and hockey.
Really, 'amateur' sport isn't any more noble or better than professional sport, it was originally conceived as an elitist ideal at the dawn of the modern Olympic games because only the rich could compete since they were the only ones that could fund their lifestyle and afford the time and money to be any good at 'amateur' sport.
It's a restriction that should have been discarded a long time ago... because someone is 'professional' just means that they are good enough that people are willing to pay them to compete, and should be just as valid as competitors. It doesn't make you any less for making money at what you do.
Of course it's entirely possible that science can't prove everything. At some point it may be that human ingenuity may run across problems that simply cannot be further understood, like the Hisenberg Uncertainty Principle is part of... it's the science of indeterminacy.
But damn it, there is nothing that is going to stop humanity from following science as far as it is able to take us. There is no 'faith' in that, we know there is something we don't know, and we know that we aren't near the end of all that can be discovered, nor are we likely to ever be... so we keep going. Belief that science can discover everything is as wrong as belief that it cannot.
And in the end, science is not about answers, and faith is not about questions. Faith is about giving easy and unprovable answers to vast questions about the nature of existence. Science is about knowledge and understanding of the universe (or multiverse if that is what it actually is), the majority of science isn't going to give you hard concrete answers, but simply answers that best fit the evidence that we have today, and understandable models that approximate phenomena.
Your beliefs are endangering our people by inciting radical extremist factions to overthrow our government. Our purpose is to have our citizens live in a society dedicated towards Peace, Prosperity, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Somehow, despite evidence of humanity striving for Peace, Prosperity, and Happiness since the beginning of recorded history, there is a strain of thought that still survives. It hides in the shadows and mewls "Well, maybe they don't believe like we do, we shouldn't judge them, it's not our place...".
OF COURSE we should judge! It is not only the right, but the RESPONSIBILITY of every Peaceful and Prosperous happy person to hold any and all governments accountable for thier actions, thier laws, and the way they govern!
To do anything less is nothing short of cowardice and collaboration with those who would steal our security and happiness for thier own power and enrichment.
I don't personally believe all of what I wrote above, but I wrote it to prove a point. Tirades like yours do not accomplish much, because too easily they can be turned on their heads and used to argue an opposing point of view with equal validity. Persuasion, education, compassion, and understanding are necessary to induce voluntary change. Stiff arm 'accept it or else' does not work on the global scale.
Vested Interest: #1 & #2 are irrelevant #3 A special interest in protecting or promoting that which is to one's own personal advantage. #4 vested interests Those groups that seek to maintain or control an existing system or activity from which they derive private benefit.
Knowledgable ends and vested interest begins when the person has something to gain, or something to lose by having a subject being portrayed in a specific way.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, may I ask how the hell this got modded as Insightful? If I had mod points I would drop this as Flamebait more than anything.
I get that the US in general has some obsessive hatred of Cuba, but were you to actually go there and meet the people you would come back with the impression only of a society trying to survive under grinding poverty because they cannot trade with a lot of foreign nations due to the embargo, NOT one of wanton cruelty as the Parent is trying to suggest.
Take it from someone who has seen it firsthand.
A lot of the problem isn't with the poor. It is in the gap between poor enough to be granted state-funded medi-care, and rich enough to afford health-care on your own. They are the working poor.
The people who get lost are those working low-wage jobs and are just making ends meet. The state doesn't recognize them as being poor enough to need assistance, and to these people it is more important to put food on the table than purchase independent health-insurance. If they get sick, often what little health-insurance they may have through work will not cover their needs. This leaves them with enormous medical bills, and no way to pay them.
Actually I think the poor are well looked after in the states, if you are unable to work or qualify for state-assistance you can be better off than people who work two jobs and make just enough money to scrape by. It's the people in the middle that fall between the cracks. I only have heard anecdotal evidence that that gap is getting larger... but I don't have any real evidence at hand to justify that statement so it could be false.
Of course I can conceptualize what a billion is, but the way to do it isn't to think of a billion distinct objects and try to count them in your mind. You have to group them and relate them to things that you can conceptualize easily.
For example: $60 billion can build 400,000 4 person homes where I live (where the average price is about $150,000). That means $60 billion could provide shelter for close to 1.6 million people.
And in the case of my city of 670,000 people, that means with that much money you could rebuild homes for the entire population 2.39 times over.
I have a firm concept of how large my city is, what kind of area it covers and can thus grasp the scale of how much money $60 billion actually is.
That is a hell of a lot of money.
It's a hard path, and I know someone who has walked it. I have a cousin who was in the same situation and was fired for refusing to perform those illegal acts.
If you are in your grace period, they can terminate you without giving a reason, but if you've been employed for some time they cannot legally fire you for refusing to perform an illegal act.
In the end, my cousin didn't get anything out of it. He had to find another job (and did) but he did have the satisfaction of seeing the company get busted for unrelated illegal actions, which were then compounded when the illegal software was discovered.
To this day, even though it was tough being forced to find a new job, he is glad that he took a stand against it... and I'll be the first to admit that I admire him for it.
I think you've missed the mark a little.
I believe what he is saying is that if your an application developer who is pushing the limits of what a single core is capable of in terms of performance, then you are going to see decreasing rate of improvement and then stagnation because the focus of hardware development is shifting away from more power in a single core to more power because there are more cores.
At some point you will hit a wall, and for single-threaded applications you're going to reach a point where there isn't any more power to be had.
Therefore if you want to tap that extra power that a multi-core processor has, you will by definition *need* to start multi-threaded programming. This isn't about you people who are happy with the speed and power that you already have, research is pointless if you already have everything you could possibly need. This is for the people who push the edge, at some point if you need more you will need to learn to multi-thread correctly.
And a simpler way to do it, is gold in my books.
*From a former University classmate of Stephanos*
No myth, my father got that far and showed it to me :). I had the patience to bring my city up to the arcology stage once my city was self-sustaining, but I never had enough to demolish everything and replace them entirely with arcologies myself.
You probably already have a correct reply,
but I'll go with "Put in disk 3 and press enter."
Or in case of Monkey Island 2: disks 1 through 11.
I mostly agree with you. I have a degree in mathematics, and calculators can be useful now and then on the odd occasion that you're actually dealing with numbers. However, in those cases a simple casio scientific works just as well as my TI did.
All in all I rarely used my TI, and then most of the time it was used for simple calculations. After Calc 1, it simply wasn't powerful enough to do the work that we had. It can't handle multivariate calculus or complex matrix transformations.
So yeah I pretty much agree with you, very quickly does a graphing calculator become useless and then if you don't have a good grasp of the basics it will be much harder. In all I think the students are better served by not using a calculator for the easy stuff, so that when they get to the hard stuff it will all be old-hat.
And on a side note, none of my mathematics or comp sci courses allowed calculators, my physics courses allowed non-graphing calculators only, and my english courses allowed anything.
The point is, that even though a bill may address a number of things, it has to pass 3 readings in both of the houses plus reviews and amendments. It doesn't mean that controversial legislation can't be pushed through by the ruling party, but it does mean that the details are in the open and offending sections can be removed. If there is a minority government (like we currently have) that means that the house can easily force the bill to be amended into something sensible before being passed, or just shot down entirely.
The parent never once mentioned Bush or even the United States of America, he simply mentioned that our elected officials need to set an example for our corporations to follow.
The fact that you instantly jumped to the conclusion that he was referring to Bush and the whole NSA wiretapping thing, speaks volumes about the president and his actions, far more than the parent poster.
No, that *is* the ultimate sin against truth. Believing what you find desirable or want to believe instead of the truth against all evidence is the ultimate sin because it is the root that leads to all other sins against truth.
Someone who pretends one point of view but knows and believes the truth can cause trouble, but are for the most part not very dangerous because they can be reasoned with. They know the front they put forward is wrong and as such are open to be convinced.
Someone who believes in falsities against all evidence, they embrace denial of truth and they are the ones who are truely dangerous. They are dangerous because they are zealots, and a true zealot will defend their belief regardless of how wrong they are, and attempting to reason with them or convince them otherwise can easily lead you to be dismissed as irrelevant or a threat.
I care about what I choose to care about, that is a given. I don't however, hold any belief sacred because the only way we can deal with this world is in knowing what is, not what we wish it to be.
"I am not going to worry too much about the lack of music in the system either. Most of my grade school musical education was a complete waste. I barely remember the musical scale (though that might be better then most my peers), and I certainly wouldn't have felt cheated if I got to hear less Bach, Beethoven, et. al."
You may not be interested in any sort of technical aspect of music or appreciate classical compositions, but that is no excuse for brushing off exposing our future young to such things. We *want* to expose children to as wide a variety of culture as possible, so that they can choose and find something that they are happy with. Taking that away because it isn't something that interests you is the worst thing we could do.
I'm not a teacher, nor do I have any vested interest in public education at the moment (no kids, yet). However I am a great lover of classical compositions, and music in general and I abhor the thought of raising children without giving them at least the opportunity to decide whether this is something they would like or not. I play three instruments (piano, flute, and bass guitar), not many yet but I have started learning the clarinet, oboe, and saxophone, and it all started with grade school music class, playing the recorder and asking to take piano lessons.
And in case someone gets the wrong idea, I am not a professional musician by any means. I'm a programmer, graduate of Computer Science, music is just my hobby.
My biggest problems traditionally have been trying to work with positioning/layout, and scrollable block tags.
If you've tried to create a scrollable table with a static table head, you know how difficult it is to make that work in IE. It forces you to jump through hoops by not allowing blocks to be scrollable, which means the workaround is that a div surrounding the table must be scrollable, your header section must then be floating (instead of simply not scrollable) and it requires some fancy javascript to detect form controls that have moved too high up because IE refuses to hide them behind the headers.
I've never had a problem dialog boxes, but then I have never needed to use them to any great extent. All I've needed was the occasional (yes/no) save confirmation popup, and they've never given me any trouble.
Anyone who answers "YES" to this headline without a "but..." isn't doing this for a living where making it work and look correctly is more important than standards compliance.
I follow the standards to the best of my ability and test in all major browsers until something breaks (thanks IE, thanks a lot) which is when I break out the hacks until the page works correctly for everyone.
So do I follow standards? Well, when you get right down to it, no, I don't. I follow them up until the point that they prevent me from doing my job, then they get tossed out the window.
"There is no way other than the use of industrial espionage to explain the short amount of time China took in developing its space program and supercomputer capabilities."
You do realize China has been sending things to space since 1970, and modules that could be manned since 1999. So, potentially manned modules for 7 years, does that number sound familiar? The US made it to the moon in 7 years when it *had never been done before*, and you seem to think that it is beyond thinking that China could put people into space within 7 years of first having the capability to do so?
It doesn't require industrial espionage to let someone else experiement until they figure out what works and what doesn't, and then develop your own system based on the knowledge of what does work. Sure, there may be industrial espionage going on, but it is positively insulting to think that it couldn't be done with *legal* models to work from because it is China. The US holds no monopoly on being able to invent well and invent fast.
Haha, thats hilarious! You do remember Sputnik, don't you?
Or the fact that the cold war spurred massive advances in technology for both the US and the USSR?
Ingenuity and invention are not limited by the type of government, *because* of the type of government. It can be limited by hostile attitudes and rampant fundamentalism in the ruling classes however. If anything, the Soviet revolution spurred Russian invention, rapidly transforming its society into a heavily industrial one.
Between the Soviets forward looking attitude (especially during the earlier years of the USSR) and the conflicts with the Germans, and then with the Western world, the government actively pursued technological advancement and by all means achieved one of the quickest rates of invention in history, surpassed only by the United States during the same period of time, and the time since the end of the cold war which is in part a result of the cold war's legacy.
Yes, because that *so* worked with doctors who perform abortions.
But when a country goes to war on the strength of what 51% of the voting population says... then I don't give a damn what the minority thinks. If you don't like the administration, then get out. I will say what I want about "Americans" as a whole because by the very founding notions of your country, your government is representative of the people, by the people, and for the people.
If you don't like it, then it's your responsibility to change it, not mine. And as long as your government continues on the path it's been then I'll keep saying what I feel needs to be said.
In Canada, we dispense with the padlock.
Run your "analysis" again, but replace intelligence with wealth. I think your correlation to negative birth rate will be much higher.
It just so happens that in the already wealthy western world (which on the whole has a much lower birth rate than poorer nations) income is partially related to intelligence, in the fact that university graduates on average make more money than non-grads.
From Digital Home Canada
quote:
"tax on blank CD-R and CD-RW discs will remain at 21 cents per unit"
"29 cent tax on blank tapes and 77 cent tax on blank CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio and MiniDiscs"
Copyright Board of Canada Fact Sheet for more info.
It's already true in sports like skiing, snowboarding, and hockey.
Really, 'amateur' sport isn't any more noble or better than professional sport, it was originally conceived as an elitist ideal at the dawn of the modern Olympic games because only the rich could compete since they were the only ones that could fund their lifestyle and afford the time and money to be any good at 'amateur' sport.
It's a restriction that should have been discarded a long time ago... because someone is 'professional' just means that they are good enough that people are willing to pay them to compete, and should be just as valid as competitors. It doesn't make you any less for making money at what you do.
Of course it's entirely possible that science can't prove everything. At some point it may be that human ingenuity may run across problems that simply cannot be further understood, like the Hisenberg Uncertainty Principle is part of... it's the science of indeterminacy.
But damn it, there is nothing that is going to stop humanity from following science as far as it is able to take us. There is no 'faith' in that, we know there is something we don't know, and we know that we aren't near the end of all that can be discovered, nor are we likely to ever be... so we keep going. Belief that science can discover everything is as wrong as belief that it cannot.
And in the end, science is not about answers, and faith is not about questions. Faith is about giving easy and unprovable answers to vast questions about the nature of existence.
Science is about knowledge and understanding of the universe (or multiverse if that is what it actually is), the majority of science isn't going to give you hard concrete answers, but simply answers that best fit the evidence that we have today, and understandable models that approximate phenomena.
Your beliefs are endangering our people by inciting radical extremist factions to overthrow our government. Our purpose is to have our citizens live in a society dedicated towards Peace, Prosperity, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Somehow, despite evidence of humanity striving for Peace, Prosperity, and Happiness since the beginning of recorded history, there is a strain of thought that still survives. It hides in the shadows and mewls "Well, maybe they don't believe like we do, we shouldn't judge them, it's not our place...".
OF COURSE we should judge! It is not only the right, but the RESPONSIBILITY of every Peaceful and Prosperous happy person to hold any and all governments accountable for thier actions, thier laws, and the way they govern!
To do anything less is nothing short of cowardice and collaboration with those who would steal our security and happiness for thier own power and enrichment.
I don't personally believe all of what I wrote above, but I wrote it to prove a point. Tirades like yours do not accomplish much, because too easily they can be turned on their heads and used to argue an opposing point of view with equal validity. Persuasion, education, compassion, and understanding are necessary to induce voluntary change. Stiff arm 'accept it or else' does not work on the global scale.
Vested Interest:
#1 & #2 are irrelevant
#3 A special interest in protecting or promoting that which is to one's own personal advantage.
#4 vested interests Those groups that seek to maintain or control an existing system or activity from which they derive private benefit.
Knowledgable ends and vested interest begins when the person has something to gain, or something to lose by having a subject being portrayed in a specific way.