If everyone disgusted with the system stayed home, the system would *never* change. That's sufficient proof that your method is broken.
That is simply not true. Voting / participating in the democratic process is not the only way to change the system. It is simply one of the many tools those in power have used through the ages to keep those without power from using violence to TAKE power.
Many people today are content to let those with the power do as they please because it doesn't affect their daily lives in easy to identify ways. For the time being few will stand up and be counted because they will effectively stand alone. When enough people see the choices ahead of them, and death at the hands of the state is not the worst option, then things will change. Until then its all just window dressing anyways.
I believe you have that backwards. junk mail is subsidizing the first class mail. bulk mail get's cheaper rates, but it is also cheaper to deliver, and often is presorted for them by the sender, which is one of the reasons why it is cheaper to deliver because some of the work has already been done for them. also junk mail is a constant revenue stream whereas the first class mail is more sporadic.
No, I really dont have that backwards. Bulk mail accounts for the vast majority of the post office normal( meaning daily) volume. Often times there isn't even any first class mail going to a given address. The sum total of first class mail just doesn't make a very big difference to the post office bottom line. All else being equal, if the post office charged first class rate for all bulk mail, they would be in the black. OTOH if the post office charged $2.00 instead of $0.40 for first class stamps (or whatever it is these days), they still wouldn't be cash flow positive. This means that the post office is undercharging for bulk rate mail. The pricing is still working from the assumption that the post office would have to go to every mailbox every day due to first class mail needing to be delivered. With the dramatic reduction in first class mail over the last decade, the post office no longer needs to go to every mailbox every day. This means that first class mail is now subsidizing bulk rate. A complete reversal of the way it was "supposed to be". Long story short, if congress let them change the pricing for first class mail, it would make very little difference for the post office. What the post office needs to do is re-evaluate their pricing for bulk rate, and make necessary changes to account for the reduction in bulk rate mail they will see when they increase those prices to an amount that is greater than cost for the post office.
Think of it as a deposit. Because democrats don't have fuck-all worth of credit. They just like to spend. Republicans are having to teach these children a lesson in balancing a budget. Don't have enough money? Oh well, guess that means you'll have to not expand government. That's the goal BTW. Starve that fucking beast!
Its not a matter of republicans vs democrats: Not a one of your elected reps in Washington can balance a checkbook, much less the national budget. We need to radically restructure the way money is apportioned in this country. Congress should no longer be allowed to write their own checks. They need to be forced to come begging to an authority that is under no real compulsion to give congress anything. We need separation of powers for the budget. Give one organization the power to raise money, (by raising or reducing taxes), and give another organization the power to spend (but only what is in the budget. no deficit spending). That would put an end to much of this damn deadlock in Washington. Future deadlock would mean no change in status quo, but that would also include no growth in national debt by definition.
If it weren't for republicans passing that fucked up bill requiring USPS to pre-fund retirement 75 years out, the USPS would be making a profit.
No, they wouldn't. To be sure the losses would be smaller, but the USPS would still be loosing money. According to the 2012 annual report to congress, The USPS lost 13.8 billion. Of that total, the pre-fund on their pensions cost 11.1 billion (2 years worth). That means that without paying a single penny for pensions costs, the USPS lost $2.7 Billion on 67 Billion in revenue. That's pretty crappy, especially considering they just came out of a re-org, and overall mail volume has been increasing slowly. More than likely, the problem is that their expenses are fixed largely due to having to deliver everywhere everyday almost regardless of volume, and their income is fixed due to congress setting their prices for them. high density urban mail is subsidizing rural mail. First class mail (e.g. mail that counts) is also subsidizing bulk rate mail. This is pretty stupid if you ask me. We are all paying to subsidize the junk mail.
You can follow the scientific method perfectly and arrive at the wrong result.
No, you really can't. That is why the scientific method works. Only the ignorant believe that science can lead to bad results. Science does not lead to failure, incorrect application of science, or outright failure to follow the scientific method is what leads to incorrect results.
Yeah, everyone wants office on their tablets. I do, my daughters and wife do, and just think of how stupid all those iPad users are going to feel when they see cool, cool windows tablets running a cut-down version of the latest version of Office. Excel on a train? No problem. Outlook in a nightclub? Sorted. Word in a park? Job done! I just hope Access works on mobile too - that would be sweet! I'd never leave the house! That'd show those Android using chumps!
I think you'll find that a touch interface is simple not really up to the task of content creation. There is no decent workflow at all that involves a touch screen for editing anything. Typing e-mail and texts on a touchscreen is somewhat marginal, and anything more complex than raw text is going to be an exercise in frustration. While I agree that having my phone or tablet capable of doing real work while I'm on the go would be cool, I simply don't see any good way to deal with the lack of rich inputs on a mobile device. Even laptops are kind of marginal, and I can really only use one with a mouse, although I know many people who make do with a track-pad. The real killer application will be whoever can come up with a rich input device that fully and completely replaces the keyboard/mouse combination with something as good or better that can fit into a mobile form factor. Until then, mobile productivity software is a non-starter.
Metro UI is designed to combine both PC and tablet UI's. So because Microsoft saw that PC sales were declining, they wanted to compete in the tablet space. That was against everything that Slashdot users said back in the day when Metro UI was introduced, and they called it a huge mistake from Microsoft.
Just because M$ had an actual plan doesn't mean that the plan was any good. It was a mistake for M$ to try to force their way into the tablet market. It was doomed to failure. Worse yet, it has continued a long string of M$ screwing its loyal customer base in an ill-advised attempt to convert customers from one market into another. M$ has to learn that it cannot mess with its loyal windows customer base. It cant leverage its existing monopolies for new markets because it is no longer the 800Lb gorilla of all things tech. The more they pull crap like this, the more rabid haters they create. How many people will put up with a fair amount of inconvenience just to run open-office. How many people were willing to switch to Firefox when it offered only marginally better value over IE (both were free after all). A large number of people (myself included) switched to these other platforms and solutions for no other reason than because we hate M$. I do still run some M$ products because the alternative is not really practical, but every time a good enough alternative comes along, I switch away from yet another M$ product. How many others are out there like me?
No, the Zune was bit of a failure. It didn't sell at all. But there still are some users (even on Slashdot) that say it was a really good product. So it's more like 50/50. However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
The zune sold more than a million units in its first year, compared with 35 million IPODs sold in that same span, and yet it is universally considered to have been a failure.
The Surface RT and Surface Pro together sold less than a million units int their first year, while the IPAD sold more than 22 million units in that same period. It sounds to me like the surface and zune fall into the same category of failure...
Now Blackberry will have abysmal sales numbers in India instead of non-existent. I cant help but wonder how this will affect their sales in the rest of the world. I suppose it cant do a lot of damage though, Its not like they are the hottest selling phones...
In the future people will forget about Stephen King
Like Card, King has some excellent works, and some not so good works. Read the Bachman books. He was near his prime then, and he wrote them under a pseudonym because he wanted to know if people were buying his books because they were good, or because of the name. Turned out they were some really good books. The Long Walk was as close as I ever want to get to understanding death, and for a good mind-fuck, read Rage. It leaves you almost believing you can understand what is going on in a kid like Adam Lanzas head.
Never tolerate, for one second, someone who wants to hurt others because of those beliefs.
Yes. Tolerate everyone regardless of their beliefs. Whether you think they are crazy or not. As an atheist (or maybe agnostic, I'm not really sure), I understand fully the "message of Jesus Christ". His message was simple, even if the various catholic denominations have all but abandoned it. The only way to begin to heal an intolerant person is to teach them about tolerance by example. Being intolerant towards them only deepens the schism, and hardens their beliefs. A violently intolerant person should be treated with pity. Do what is necessary to protect others from that person, but pity them.
I tolerate people who reject the theory of evolution, but I do not accept their position is valid. They're still nutjobs.
You just proved conclusively that you do *not* tolerate such people. You resorted to name calling and belittlement in order to bolster your own prejudice against them. Whether they are right or wrong, you failed to see your own intolerance, and blithely claim you are not intolerant.
No, by "bigot" we mean the very dictionary definition of the word:
a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices;
That describes pretty much everyone I have ever met. The only differences are the actual opinions... As evidence I submit: Washington DC. The entire population meets this definition, the only thing that changes are the D or the R.
I loved loved loved "Ender's Game" as a youth, but 10 years ago, when I discovered Orson Scott Card's blog and his perpetual stream of scientifically illiterate bigoted ravings, it really tainted everything with his name on it for me. Suddenly, "Ender's Game," "Speaker for the Dead," and "Xenocide" were no longer deep books about ethical conundrums, but shallow stories where ethical conflicts just happen with depth given to them by the reader--because there's no way Card's shallow, binary mind could possibly comprehend the many ethical dimensions of the events he describes in his stories.
That is as may be, but keep in mind that comprehension of the power of their works is not necessary to the works themselves being powerful. Mozart couldn't hear a damn thing, but his works were still extraordinary. Van Gogh was bat-shit crazy and still made some awesome paintings. Just because he couldn't understand the power of his art doesn't mean it doesn't have power. Granted, Card only really had the one good story, and most of the rest are mediocre, but as they say where I work "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while".
Yes, they both espouse extreme left-wing positions associated with the National Socialist Party (Nazi).
Nazi's were totalitarians and, thus, left-wing.
As were Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
The particulars may vary at points but the man thrust is the same.
Right-wing positions are conservatives, some libertarians, anarchists.
ACs are getting dumber by the minute. Sigh. Fascism [e.g., the Nazis] is fundamentally right-wing.
And anarchists don't belong on that spectrum anywhere. They cant be anywhere on the political spectrum because the spectrum presupposes a belief in the necessity of government, and differs only in its construction of how the government should behave.
None of those things are like handing a bigot money.
I don't have to buy Jefferson a slave to read his works, I don't have to pay an artist to see his work in a museum. I do have to give Card money to see his film, he will use that money against people who I like.
MPAA and RIAA accounting being what it is, there is nothing saying that you would be giving any money to Card even if you see the movie 5 times in the theaters, and buy a wheelbarrow full of Enders Game Blu rays...
When politicians and lawyers get together, you get All kinds of stupid in one place . We cant trust those people to balance a budget without outside help, so letting them legislate that two people can or cant get married is patently absurd and should never have been tolerated in the first place. If our elected officials are so out of touch that they cant understand that a large part of the purpose of government is to protect the few from the many, then we need to stand up and replace them before we become the few...
Posting web pages and not doing anything... is not fucking doing anything. It is unbelievable to me that Anonymous can organize large protests against the CoS, a group that harms a tiny fraction of the world's population,
Protesting on a limited scale does pretty much nothing as well. It works only to bring awareness to a problem that the majority will actively deal with if they become aware. The protests in the Arab world were only successful because they lead to violence, and as such lead to a change in regime. In our country, the majority already are aware of the problem. No one is willing to escalate it to the level of violence because the resulting civil war would be devastating if successful, and painfully bad for the losers (likely the protesters) otherwise. Most people still hold out the hope that normal democratic process' can be used to fix the problem, and will only resort to violent protests when it becomes unavoidably apparent that nothing else will work.
It is not the spying, nor the increasingly antisocial behavior of our government that concerns me. As long as the military maintains its strictly apolitical stance, I am not worried that our leaders will gain too much power, but sometime in the near future, I see a tipping point when our elected government will do something that will force the military leaders to make a nasty decision. The result of that decision will determine the course of events. If the military decides on the side of we the people, there will probably be an ugly coup and forced military ouster Ala Mohammed Morsi. If the military comes down the other way, there will be a bloody civil war, the outcome of which is anybody's guess.
The starting salaries for college grads at large SV companies are I think around $100k now and probably rising. It goes up from there mind you and goes up rather quickly if you switch to a competitor at the right time. As the fun facebook and google salary war has shown money isn't the problem.
100k might or might not be a lot of money depending on where you have to live to make that kind of money. If a studio apartment an hour from work each way is the cheapest you can get and runs you $2,000 per month, that 100k just isn't going got go all that far. OTOH if you make half that, but can get an entire 2000 sf house 15 minutes from work (maybe within biking distance) for $800 / month including MITs, you will have a better standard of living. I knew a guy who got a co-op job as a masters student. He was making 70k per year annualized, but had to drive almost three hours a day commute because it was the only housing available, and it still cost him 60% of his paycheck in rent. I'll grant you that was an exceptional case, but raw income numbers don't mean much without context.
I don't care if they see I'm talking to a divorce lawyer or AIDS doctor. Really, the whole world can see this. The websites I visit ? Public knowledge and in no way shameful or compromising. My friends ? All of them ordinary, upstanding guys with no political interests or inclination for subversive activities. It's not like I'm one of those Muslims who are all at 5 degrees of separation to a known terrorist. My day to day location and CCTV images ? Public. My full financial data ? No problem there, I'm 100% free of any tax related problem - I have the tax code memorized (all it's 14K pages). I have nothing to hide !
I have some bad news for you, you are almost certainly within 5 degrees of separation from some "person of interest". Pretty much everyone is. Otherwise why would they have to gather data on everyone.
The problem isn't that this particular set of collected data is or isn't a danger to all of our freedoms. The problem isn't whether or not there is proper oversight for the people conducting the spying. The problem is that this amount of power will inherently lead to corruptions and abuses, and as such, no government can be trusted with it. The very fact that the government felt the need to conduct this spying in secret is ample evidence that their intentions are not on the up and up. If you tell everyone that you are monitoring who they communicate with, then the paranoid people will act to prevent the eavesdropping, but their behavior alone will single them out, giving the would-be-eavesdroppers just as much useful intelligence as having all of that metadata. The idea that the spying has to be secret to be effective is absurd in practice. Since the given reason for the secrecy is false, the only remaining explanations are far more sinister. We now hear that the french are partaking of this level of spying? Is foreign terrorism that big of a threat in France? I suspect that the biggest terrorist threat in France is the same as the US: good old fashioned homegrown whackjobs. No amount of communication surveillance is going to help find and catch the lone bomber, or the dedicated pair of crazies. There are only two uses for that level of survailance: Post-incident investigation (they already admitted that no one looks at the data in real time). And oppression. Just because it makes the investigators jobs easier for the first option doesn't mean its worth risking the second option.
But they are! Unions have done nothing but raise costs and cause distress for all those poor whittle employers. Just think how much more work could be done without all the lazy people demanding "living wages" (they should be working 2 or 3 jobs instead of expecting decent pay!), 2 days off, working only 40 hours/week (and then if they work more many of these same fuckers expect time and a half!). And don't get me started on all the increased expenses just to make sure employees are safe at work. What country are we living in? The Soviet fucking Union!!! Even that name has that evil "union" word in it!
But more seriously, it is quite amusing since you know the same people who bash unions would throw a shit fit if they lost their weekends, 40 hour weeks, and other benefits that the average worker now takes for granted that took unions decades to get us.
The problem that unions face is one of bad PR. When unions are going toe to toe with corporate giants, everyone cheers for the union, but many union rules pit the union and its membership directly against the supervisors and lower management. There then becomes the perception that the union protects the lazy workers against the poor hard-working supervisor (or other union members) who have to pick up the slack. That automatically creates an entire legion of people who are right at the beginning of their careers. Many of those young supervisors and mangers will eventually find their way into positions of policy making, and they wont forget how hard they had to work because the union protected people it had no business protecting. The end result is a large swath of the population willing to testify that unions are bad.
Unions need to get much more picky about their rules. Seniority shouldn't count for nearly as much as it does. It should get you preference on vacations, and more time off than those with lower seniority, but the pay discrepancy is far too large. The unions should also figure out how to reward their hard working members at the expense of their lazier members. This will induce their members to *want* to work hard, and everyone wins. The union gets a better reputation with the world at large, the hard working members get unions protection and the best wages they can get. The lazy members get compensated less if they choose to remain lazy, and the company gets a more reliable work ethic. Most importantly, you reduce the animosity between lower management and the workers, which is critical to keeping an anti-union sentiment from growing in the population at large. Such a union would have tremendous bargaining power at the negotiating table, as they would bring an elite workforce to bear, and present a much less complicated job of managing and supervising.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. In the West, they vote with dollars. The voter with the most dollars elects their own government.
In soviet America, the money elects you!
Your claims that their are only two choices falls on very deaf ears when speaking to someone from Connecticut. Stop voting to increase evil. Now.
Show me the candidate!
I'll give you a hint: You're wrong, (s)he isn't the magic bullet you seem to think.
If everyone disgusted with the system stayed home, the system would *never* change. That's sufficient proof that your method is broken.
That is simply not true. Voting / participating in the democratic process is not the only way to change the system. It is simply one of the many tools those in power have used through the ages to keep those without power from using violence to TAKE power.
Many people today are content to let those with the power do as they please because it doesn't affect their daily lives in easy to identify ways. For the time being few will stand up and be counted because they will effectively stand alone. When enough people see the choices ahead of them, and death at the hands of the state is not the worst option, then things will change. Until then its all just window dressing anyways.
I believe you have that backwards. junk mail is subsidizing the first class mail. bulk mail get's cheaper rates, but it is also cheaper to deliver, and often is presorted for them by the sender, which is one of the reasons why it is cheaper to deliver because some of the work has already been done for them. also junk mail is a constant revenue stream whereas the first class mail is more sporadic.
No, I really dont have that backwards. Bulk mail accounts for the vast majority of the post office normal( meaning daily) volume. Often times there isn't even any first class mail going to a given address. The sum total of first class mail just doesn't make a very big difference to the post office bottom line. All else being equal, if the post office charged first class rate for all bulk mail, they would be in the black. OTOH if the post office charged $2.00 instead of $0.40 for first class stamps (or whatever it is these days), they still wouldn't be cash flow positive. This means that the post office is undercharging for bulk rate mail. The pricing is still working from the assumption that the post office would have to go to every mailbox every day due to first class mail needing to be delivered. With the dramatic reduction in first class mail over the last decade, the post office no longer needs to go to every mailbox every day. This means that first class mail is now subsidizing bulk rate. A complete reversal of the way it was "supposed to be". Long story short, if congress let them change the pricing for first class mail, it would make very little difference for the post office. What the post office needs to do is re-evaluate their pricing for bulk rate, and make necessary changes to account for the reduction in bulk rate mail they will see when they increase those prices to an amount that is greater than cost for the post office.
Think of it as a deposit. Because democrats don't have fuck-all worth of credit. They just like to spend. Republicans are having to teach these children a lesson in balancing a budget. Don't have enough money? Oh well, guess that means you'll have to not expand government. That's the goal BTW. Starve that fucking beast!
Its not a matter of republicans vs democrats: Not a one of your elected reps in Washington can balance a checkbook, much less the national budget. We need to radically restructure the way money is apportioned in this country. Congress should no longer be allowed to write their own checks. They need to be forced to come begging to an authority that is under no real compulsion to give congress anything. We need separation of powers for the budget. Give one organization the power to raise money, (by raising or reducing taxes), and give another organization the power to spend (but only what is in the budget. no deficit spending). That would put an end to much of this damn deadlock in Washington. Future deadlock would mean no change in status quo, but that would also include no growth in national debt by definition.
If it weren't for republicans passing that fucked up bill requiring USPS to pre-fund retirement 75 years out, the USPS would be making a profit.
No, they wouldn't. To be sure the losses would be smaller, but the USPS would still be loosing money. According to the 2012 annual report to congress, The USPS lost 13.8 billion. Of that total, the pre-fund on their pensions cost 11.1 billion (2 years worth). That means that without paying a single penny for pensions costs, the USPS lost $2.7 Billion on 67 Billion in revenue. That's pretty crappy, especially considering they just came out of a re-org, and overall mail volume has been increasing slowly. More than likely, the problem is that their expenses are fixed largely due to having to deliver everywhere everyday almost regardless of volume, and their income is fixed due to congress setting their prices for them. high density urban mail is subsidizing rural mail. First class mail (e.g. mail that counts) is also subsidizing bulk rate mail. This is pretty stupid if you ask me. We are all paying to subsidize the junk mail.
You can follow the scientific method perfectly and arrive at the wrong result.
No, you really can't. That is why the scientific method works. Only the ignorant believe that science can lead to bad results. Science does not lead to failure, incorrect application of science, or outright failure to follow the scientific method is what leads to incorrect results.
Yeah, everyone wants office on their tablets. I do, my daughters and wife do, and just think of how stupid all those iPad users are going to feel when they see cool, cool windows tablets running a cut-down version of the latest version of Office. Excel on a train? No problem. Outlook in a nightclub? Sorted. Word in a park? Job done! I just hope Access works on mobile too - that would be sweet! I'd never leave the house! That'd show those Android using chumps!
I think you'll find that a touch interface is simple not really up to the task of content creation. There is no decent workflow at all that involves a touch screen for editing anything. Typing e-mail and texts on a touchscreen is somewhat marginal, and anything more complex than raw text is going to be an exercise in frustration. While I agree that having my phone or tablet capable of doing real work while I'm on the go would be cool, I simply don't see any good way to deal with the lack of rich inputs on a mobile device. Even laptops are kind of marginal, and I can really only use one with a mouse, although I know many people who make do with a track-pad. The real killer application will be whoever can come up with a rich input device that fully and completely replaces the keyboard/mouse combination with something as good or better that can fit into a mobile form factor. Until then, mobile productivity software is a non-starter.
Metro UI is designed to combine both PC and tablet UI's. So because Microsoft saw that PC sales were declining, they wanted to compete in the tablet space. That was against everything that Slashdot users said back in the day when Metro UI was introduced, and they called it a huge mistake from Microsoft.
Just because M$ had an actual plan doesn't mean that the plan was any good. It was a mistake for M$ to try to force their way into the tablet market. It was doomed to failure. Worse yet, it has continued a long string of M$ screwing its loyal customer base in an ill-advised attempt to convert customers from one market into another. M$ has to learn that it cannot mess with its loyal windows customer base. It cant leverage its existing monopolies for new markets because it is no longer the 800Lb gorilla of all things tech. The more they pull crap like this, the more rabid haters they create. How many people will put up with a fair amount of inconvenience just to run open-office. How many people were willing to switch to Firefox when it offered only marginally better value over IE (both were free after all). A large number of people (myself included) switched to these other platforms and solutions for no other reason than because we hate M$. I do still run some M$ products because the alternative is not really practical, but every time a good enough alternative comes along, I switch away from yet another M$ product. How many others are out there like me?
No, the Zune was bit of a failure. It didn't sell at all. But there still are some users (even on Slashdot) that say it was a really good product. So it's more like 50/50. However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
The zune sold more than a million units in its first year, compared with 35 million IPODs sold in that same span, and yet it is universally considered to have been a failure.
The Surface RT and Surface Pro together sold less than a million units int their first year, while the IPAD sold more than 22 million units in that same period. It sounds to me like the surface and zune fall into the same category of failure...
The NSA has proven that they don't need drones to spy on you. Maybe the federal government should only be able to use horses and parchment.
You speak in jest, and yet I think there is merit to the idea. We might all be better of with a less adequately equipped government.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
In this case, I'm pretty sure they do...
Now Blackberry will have abysmal sales numbers in India instead of non-existent. I cant help but wonder how this will affect their sales in the rest of the world. I suppose it cant do a lot of damage though, Its not like they are the hottest selling phones...
In the future people will forget about Stephen King
Like Card, King has some excellent works, and some not so good works. Read the Bachman books. He was near his prime then, and he wrote them under a pseudonym because he wanted to know if people were buying his books because they were good, or because of the name. Turned out they were some really good books. The Long Walk was as close as I ever want to get to understanding death, and for a good mind-fuck, read Rage. It leaves you almost believing you can understand what is going on in a kid like Adam Lanzas head.
Tolerate those who have crazy beliefs.
Never tolerate, for one second, someone who wants to hurt others because of those beliefs.
Yes. Tolerate everyone regardless of their beliefs. Whether you think they are crazy or not. As an atheist (or maybe agnostic, I'm not really sure), I understand fully the "message of Jesus Christ". His message was simple, even if the various catholic denominations have all but abandoned it. The only way to begin to heal an intolerant person is to teach them about tolerance by example. Being intolerant towards them only deepens the schism, and hardens their beliefs. A violently intolerant person should be treated with pity. Do what is necessary to protect others from that person, but pity them.
I tolerate people who reject the theory of evolution, but I do not accept their position is valid. They're still nutjobs.
You just proved conclusively that you do *not* tolerate such people. You resorted to name calling and belittlement in order to bolster your own prejudice against them. Whether they are right or wrong, you failed to see your own intolerance, and blithely claim you are not intolerant.
No, by "bigot" we mean the very dictionary definition of the word:
a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices;
That describes pretty much everyone I have ever met. The only differences are the actual opinions... As evidence I submit: Washington DC. The entire population meets this definition, the only thing that changes are the D or the R.
I loved loved loved "Ender's Game" as a youth, but 10 years ago, when I discovered Orson Scott Card's blog and his perpetual stream of scientifically illiterate bigoted ravings, it really tainted everything with his name on it for me. Suddenly, "Ender's Game," "Speaker for the Dead," and "Xenocide" were no longer deep books about ethical conundrums, but shallow stories where ethical conflicts just happen with depth given to them by the reader--because there's no way Card's shallow, binary mind could possibly comprehend the many ethical dimensions of the events he describes in his stories.
That is as may be, but keep in mind that comprehension of the power of their works is not necessary to the works themselves being powerful. Mozart couldn't hear a damn thing, but his works were still extraordinary. Van Gogh was bat-shit crazy and still made some awesome paintings. Just because he couldn't understand the power of his art doesn't mean it doesn't have power. Granted, Card only really had the one good story, and most of the rest are mediocre, but as they say where I work "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while".
Yes, they both espouse extreme left-wing positions associated with the National Socialist Party (Nazi). Nazi's were totalitarians and, thus, left-wing. As were Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan. The particulars may vary at points but the man thrust is the same.
Right-wing positions are conservatives, some libertarians, anarchists.
ACs are getting dumber by the minute. Sigh. Fascism [e.g., the Nazis] is fundamentally right-wing.
And anarchists don't belong on that spectrum anywhere. They cant be anywhere on the political spectrum because the spectrum presupposes a belief in the necessity of government, and differs only in its construction of how the government should behave.
None of those things are like handing a bigot money.
I don't have to buy Jefferson a slave to read his works, I don't have to pay an artist to see his work in a museum. I do have to give Card money to see his film, he will use that money against people who I like.
MPAA and RIAA accounting being what it is, there is nothing saying that you would be giving any money to Card even if you see the movie 5 times in the theaters, and buy a wheelbarrow full of Enders Game Blu rays...
I call it bullshit because if a law says two things are equal, they are equal, period.
Indiana almost passed a law making pi = 3.2. How would that have fit into your logic?
When politicians and lawyers get together, you get All kinds of stupid in one place . We cant trust those people to balance a budget without outside help, so letting them legislate that two people can or cant get married is patently absurd and should never have been tolerated in the first place. If our elected officials are so out of touch that they cant understand that a large part of the purpose of government is to protect the few from the many, then we need to stand up and replace them before we become the few...
Posting web pages and not doing anything ... is not fucking doing anything. It is unbelievable to me that Anonymous can organize large protests against the CoS, a group that harms a tiny fraction of the world's population,
Protesting on a limited scale does pretty much nothing as well. It works only to bring awareness to a problem that the majority will actively deal with if they become aware. The protests in the Arab world were only successful because they lead to violence, and as such lead to a change in regime. In our country, the majority already are aware of the problem. No one is willing to escalate it to the level of violence because the resulting civil war would be devastating if successful, and painfully bad for the losers (likely the protesters) otherwise. Most people still hold out the hope that normal democratic process' can be used to fix the problem, and will only resort to violent protests when it becomes unavoidably apparent that nothing else will work.
It is not the spying, nor the increasingly antisocial behavior of our government that concerns me. As long as the military maintains its strictly apolitical stance, I am not worried that our leaders will gain too much power, but sometime in the near future, I see a tipping point when our elected government will do something that will force the military leaders to make a nasty decision. The result of that decision will determine the course of events. If the military decides on the side of we the people, there will probably be an ugly coup and forced military ouster Ala Mohammed Morsi. If the military comes down the other way, there will be a bloody civil war, the outcome of which is anybody's guess.
The starting salaries for college grads at large SV companies are I think around $100k now and probably rising. It goes up from there mind you and goes up rather quickly if you switch to a competitor at the right time. As the fun facebook and google salary war has shown money isn't the problem.
100k might or might not be a lot of money depending on where you have to live to make that kind of money. If a studio apartment an hour from work each way is the cheapest you can get and runs you $2,000 per month, that 100k just isn't going got go all that far. OTOH if you make half that, but can get an entire 2000 sf house 15 minutes from work (maybe within biking distance) for $800 / month including MITs, you will have a better standard of living. I knew a guy who got a co-op job as a masters student. He was making 70k per year annualized, but had to drive almost three hours a day commute because it was the only housing available, and it still cost him 60% of his paycheck in rent. I'll grant you that was an exceptional case, but raw income numbers don't mean much without context.
I don't care if they see I'm talking to a divorce lawyer or AIDS doctor. Really, the whole world can see this. The websites I visit ? Public knowledge and in no way shameful or compromising. My friends ? All of them ordinary, upstanding guys with no political interests or inclination for subversive activities. It's not like I'm one of those Muslims who are all at 5 degrees of separation to a known terrorist. My day to day location and CCTV images ? Public. My full financial data ? No problem there, I'm 100% free of any tax related problem - I have the tax code memorized (all it's 14K pages). I have nothing to hide !
I have some bad news for you, you are almost certainly within 5 degrees of separation from some "person of interest". Pretty much everyone is. Otherwise why would they have to gather data on everyone.
The problem isn't that this particular set of collected data is or isn't a danger to all of our freedoms. The problem isn't whether or not there is proper oversight for the people conducting the spying. The problem is that this amount of power will inherently lead to corruptions and abuses, and as such, no government can be trusted with it. The very fact that the government felt the need to conduct this spying in secret is ample evidence that their intentions are not on the up and up. If you tell everyone that you are monitoring who they communicate with, then the paranoid people will act to prevent the eavesdropping, but their behavior alone will single them out, giving the would-be-eavesdroppers just as much useful intelligence as having all of that metadata. The idea that the spying has to be secret to be effective is absurd in practice. Since the given reason for the secrecy is false, the only remaining explanations are far more sinister. We now hear that the french are partaking of this level of spying? Is foreign terrorism that big of a threat in France? I suspect that the biggest terrorist threat in France is the same as the US: good old fashioned homegrown whackjobs. No amount of communication surveillance is going to help find and catch the lone bomber, or the dedicated pair of crazies. There are only two uses for that level of survailance: Post-incident investigation (they already admitted that no one looks at the data in real time). And oppression. Just because it makes the investigators jobs easier for the first option doesn't mean its worth risking the second option.
-=Geoskd
But they are! Unions have done nothing but raise costs and cause distress for all those poor whittle employers. Just think how much more work could be done without all the lazy people demanding "living wages" (they should be working 2 or 3 jobs instead of expecting decent pay!), 2 days off, working only 40 hours/week (and then if they work more many of these same fuckers expect time and a half!). And don't get me started on all the increased expenses just to make sure employees are safe at work. What country are we living in? The Soviet fucking Union!!! Even that name has that evil "union" word in it!
But more seriously, it is quite amusing since you know the same people who bash unions would throw a shit fit if they lost their weekends, 40 hour weeks, and other benefits that the average worker now takes for granted that took unions decades to get us.
The problem that unions face is one of bad PR. When unions are going toe to toe with corporate giants, everyone cheers for the union, but many union rules pit the union and its membership directly against the supervisors and lower management. There then becomes the perception that the union protects the lazy workers against the poor hard-working supervisor (or other union members) who have to pick up the slack. That automatically creates an entire legion of people who are right at the beginning of their careers. Many of those young supervisors and mangers will eventually find their way into positions of policy making, and they wont forget how hard they had to work because the union protected people it had no business protecting. The end result is a large swath of the population willing to testify that unions are bad.
Unions need to get much more picky about their rules. Seniority shouldn't count for nearly as much as it does. It should get you preference on vacations, and more time off than those with lower seniority, but the pay discrepancy is far too large. The unions should also figure out how to reward their hard working members at the expense of their lazier members. This will induce their members to *want* to work hard, and everyone wins. The union gets a better reputation with the world at large, the hard working members get unions protection and the best wages they can get. The lazy members get compensated less if they choose to remain lazy, and the company gets a more reliable work ethic. Most importantly, you reduce the animosity between lower management and the workers, which is critical to keeping an anti-union sentiment from growing in the population at large. Such a union would have tremendous bargaining power at the negotiating table, as they would bring an elite workforce to bear, and present a much less complicated job of managing and supervising.