That was the start of AJAX and sophisticated asynchronous web applications. Without it we'd still be stuck with get and post.
Actually if you want to speak of what Microsoft has done for the web...
During the DOJ investigation, it was found out (by subpoenaing internal Microsoft memos) that the whole reason Microsoft created Internet Explorer was because they perceived the web as being a threat to Windows. That is, when they saw the rise of Netscape, they noticed how developers could write web applications and plugins for the browser, which ran on any platform, so developers were now free to target Netscape instead of their cash cow.
Microsoft was having none of that, so they explicitly designed IE to break the more advanced web standards, as well as introducing activex, so that if IE reached critical mass (say, over 70% of users) then they could render the web to become something that permanently belongs to Windows. After Windows 98 achieved that (by including it built in, which saved download time for dialup users, which were the vast majority at the time) then the world was stuck with IE5 and IE6 for about 7 years, which fully neglected to implement new web standards, and barely even supported HTML4.
So in other words, Microsoft deliberately held back web development for 7 years.
Meanwhile, guess what happened when AJAX did finally come around? Microsoft saw their freemail dominance in purchased hotmail fall flat on its face, as gmail's web interface was even faster than the copy of Outlook that most people ran natively on their desktop (the gig of email space was just to get people in, but the webUI was the real innovation there, which unlike hotmail, didn't require a full page reload every time you clicked anything.) Microsoft also saw Google maps completely wipe out their sales of MapPoint and Streets & Trips.
From our present position in the galaxy, yes, the chances of that are a mathematical impossibility. However, a few billion years ago our star system was part of a cluster of stars which were in very close proximity to one another, possibly having a protoplanetary disk that overlapped with these other systems.
I personally think panspermia is not only possible, but even likely, as it would explain why we haven't been able to find the right conditions for abiogenesis on this planet.
Here's a little rule: All systems which assume humans won't be greedy selfish bastards who will cheat and manipulate the system for their own gain, are systems which are doomed to fail because they stupidly ignore human nature.
Well capitalism works because the anticipation is that people will be working towards their own ends.
I.e. if you grow apples and sell said apples, you have your own interests at heart (i.e. greed) and not necessarily the good of the world, and meanwhile somebody else gets fed.
That is opposed to, for example, communism which assumes that everybody will continue working towards "the greater good" just because it feels good to do so. Or socialism where it's assumed that the government hands out resources equally, and the political elite don't grant themselves favors.
Anybody who isn't self deluded by the whole concept can see that it's a big joke in the making. So would people take advantage? Yeah, of course they would, just like how John Edward takes advantage of derps who genuinely believe that it is actually possible to talk to the dead.
Look at Al Gore for example; the guy has gotten so rich off of this ever since his term as VP ended. FFS he even sells carbon offsets to himself. And the worst part? He's one of the biggest energy consumers in the US (for example, flies around in his own private jet instead of buying a ticket on an airline, which ends up using FAR LESS carbon on a per passenger basis.)
There was actually one person who was cured of HIV who received a marrow transplant from an HIV resistant donor.
Later two more people who had HIV with a non HIV resistant donor who showed no signs of the disease for about a year, and then it returned, and often when you hear about the first story, people confuse it with the second one where the two individuals recurred with the disease, and thus believe that the first guy still has HIV, but he doesn't.
It seems that the process of irradiating the body of its own marrow also destroys HIV, but it will return if the t-cells aren't resistant to the virus because there are certain areas of the body where the virus can survive the radiation treatment.
It's not necessarily that so much as the head honchos usually have grandiose visions that are short sighted.
For that reason, and others, IMO it is best to follow the typical procedures one does in typical successful IT project management, which may sound bureaucratic, but it avoids disasters, thus these are pretty common procedures for a very good reason:
i.e: 1) Problem statement: Why is what we're currently doing insufficient? 2) Do a productivity gap analysis: Where are we now, where do we want to be? 3) Does the proposed solution provide for long term growth (so that we don't have to ask these questions again in only a few years)? 4, 5, 6, etc, etc,
But along the way, never leave out this important step: Consult with all of the stakeholders and make sure this solution works for them early in the design phase to figure out if this solution is even worth pursuing.
The stakeholders often include: Upper management, middle management, lower management, the techies, the rank and file employees, the customers, and sometimes the shareholders.
When you consult with them, what you're looking for are things like this: Does this new system work better than the old one? Does the new system make your job more difficult in any way? Does the system make your job easier in any way? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What else do you think you may need? (On that last question, make sure to have well defined scope limits early on to avoid feature creep.)
I remember at one place I worked, somebody higher up decided that they wanted to move all of the sales department to Microsoft Dynamics CRM some time before I first worked there. One day while I was asked to troubleshoot a problem with it, (and believe me, MS CRM has TONS of bugs) and I was totally stumped because this person's account didn't work even though his permissions were the same as everybody else's. After I did some investigation, I found out (and the management wasn't even aware) that every salesperson had this problem, only very few of them even tried to use MS CRM at all, so nobody actually reported it until this one guy happened to try it a few years after we had already supposedly been using it.
That's a classic example of when somebody implemented a new "IT system" but completely failed to consult with the rank and file employees to see if it's something they'd even want to use at all. It's also one of many classic examples of failed IT project management.
TL;DR: Basically, everybody who it applies to should have a say in it.
I would think one of the shiny new instruction features added to skylake could go horribly horribly wrong in basically the worst way you could possibly imagine:
Basically, imagine code running on your computer that you aren't allowed to see even at the binary level, which means anti-malware software cannot scan it, and you can't debug it if you suspect it is doing something malicious, and even worse, I suspect that groups like the NSA could NSL the keys so that they could write their own state sponsored backdoors. IMO this is a feature that really doesn't belong on consumer grade hardware.
I just look at it the way I look at TV shows/movies where shit happens that just doesn't look realistic at all.
Basically, I just dismiss it as creative license. I only get annoyed when they do it so fucking badly that it's super distracting from the story.
For example, that show Under the Dome, I was watching how that Barbie guy used a goofy little Windows Phone (a blatant in-show product placement ad, by the way) to make an improvised bomb by using its timer with a blasting cap wired to the headphone jack, and the screen zooms to the timer and you hear it "beep" before the bomb actually goes off...rolleyes...and then again when he pulls up a surface tablet with an IE page (again, product placement) that just says "this page can't be displayed", to where he accuses somebody else of firewalling the wifi from outside the dome, whereas previously they mentioned that they had no wifi signal at all, and Barbie somehow instantly recognizes the "this page can't be displayed" message as a firewall issue, when about a hundred things could cause that, nevermind a firewall issue.
Does make you wonder why such a relatively higher budget show can't hire a few technical consultants to at least get that shit straight, but then again they may have deliberately did some of those things for the product placement. They did something similar in a later season where those teenagers were driving a current (2015) model plug in prius (massive gaping continuity problem there,) in pristine condition no less (again, big continuity problem,) and spent about 20 seconds on a scene that showed them plugging it in to make the battery last longer, and it in no way advanced the plot.
I think that in most cases, most people don't even care. I think I heard something like the South Park creators didn't even have any idea what the town's layout looked like until they actually had to draw it out for the Stick of Truth game.
There is a specific basis for monogamy in the bible.
Ah yeah, about that...
Exodus 20:14 You shall not commit adultery
Guess what adultery means in this context? It means a male having sex with another woman who is married to somebody else. However there is no stipulation against married men having sex with unmarried women.
Kind of like how the commandment for "thou shall not kill" doesn't actually mean not to kill, just not to do so unjustly.
It's not a matter of respect so much as it is that mammalian males are naturally driven to desire more than one mate. There have been experiments done that show that all males become less and less sexually attracted to the same mate the more they have sex with them. Fun fact: Having sex with a second mate often increases sexual desire for the first one, almost like having the same food over and over again, and then eating something else for a while, makes you like the first thing again.
Sure, you can talk all day about how you'll never cheat and how you're as pure as your "god" made you, but it's just not true at all. But as an atheist, I don't believe in that. In fact, none of the world's religions actually espouse monogamy.
The whole concept of monogamy is political in nature to create a power structure derived from united families, and the concept of it being under good is to give the would be breakers of that power structure a message that somebody is always watching them. And for what it's worth, for you Christians, monogamy has no biblical basis. If you look at practically every single male biblical figure, all of them had concubines and/or otherwise had sexual relations with more people than just their official spouse, except for Jesus. (And by the way, Jesus's message wasn't ever intended for gentiles, it was only aimed at Jews, and the "salvation" was for them to be saved from the Romans. 666 is a reference to Neron Caesar, not Satan, in fact there's no mention of hell at all other than some city called Gahenna where they burned their trash. Hell that Christians know of today is purely a concept borrowed from paganism by Catholics.)
FWIW I personally have never married and thus have been single my entire life (never dated either) so as a male on the outside looking in, I'm calling this as I see it.
Actually yeah, that's totally expected if you consume that few calories. The thing is, you're a mammal, and if you have few calories, your liver goes into a hibernation state where it metabolizes few calories when you're doing nothing.
Not only does it make it hard for you to think, have no energy, and be really slow, but it lowers your basal metabolic rate, meaning that you burn fewer calories. End result? You don't shed pounds.
To avoid sending your metabolic system into hibernation mode, adult females should consume at least 1200 calories per day, and adult males 1800 per day.
If 98% of people can't "follow the proper regimen", then it's not a proper regimen, and it's quite obviously not at all what thin people are doing. That's the fucking point.
My BMI was 40 last year, now it's 28.5. While still overweight, that's not obese.
Proper regimen only means this: Properly accounting for calories. I don't care what kind of poop you have, the reality is that it's physically impossible to gain or even retain weight if your net calorie intake is zero.
No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
And by the way, this is the same reason why dietary science gets it wrong all the time: It's largely based on studies and surveys where people don't actually eat what they say they eat, and they exercise less than they claim they do, making these studies that draw "a link between x and y" completely fucking meaningless.
This, by the way, is exactly why the FDA held the nonsensical position that eating dietary cholesterol causes your blood cholesterol to go up, so they did silly things like telling people to eat less eggs and more cereal grains in order to lower their cholesterol (in reality, following that recommendation raises cholesterol rather than lowers it.)
Who said anything about banning private lending or insurance, just the banning of the force of law in private lending or insurance.
Which basically puts lenders who follow the law out of business, making loan sharks the only option.
And in case you haven't noticed, loan sharks are often known to make it impossible to pay off a loan at all, keeping you into perpetual debt. Remember, they're already operating outside of the law, so they don't have to actually honor their end of the agreement. And since they usually have a mafia sized stick, they have plenty of resources with which to pursue their interests.
Want to play loanshark, go ahead but expect no support from law when it comes to recovery money but expect force of law against you in your attempts to recover money.
In case you haven't noticed, that is already the reality for loan sharks, and they still operate anyways. They really don't give a shit if the law won't help them collect debts (because it doesn't) and they don't give a shit if the law is against them (because it is.) If you simply disappear, they'll often resort to tactics like threatening your family and demanding the money from them instead. And yes, it still happens to this day in areas where there are actual usury laws on the books, like New York for example.
As for the old total bullshit lie that private can be trusted more than government, give up on the bullshit from 30 years of main stream media owned by private corporations propaganda
On the contrary, it sounds like you've been listening to communist propaganda.
Imagine the chaos of private armies not government armies
Why would I need to imagine that? It's already been done. The wealthiest private entity to ever exist was the Dutch East India Company, who at the time owned their own Army, Navy, and Merchant Marine regiments, and had the power to declare their own wars, and arrest, jail, and even execute people who didn't pay their debts. At their peak, they were worth about $7.4 trillion of today's dollars, making them richer than all of today's world economies except for the US and China. Likewise, they weren't the only corporation to have ever been in such a situation, as there have been several.
It is called psychopathic capitalism for a reason
Speak of propaganda, it seems that you do a lot of reading of propaganda blogs, based on the links you're giving. Meanwhile, everything I've told you is based on actual crime reports based on lending laws in different jurisdictions.
I'm inclined to agree. A lot of people out there like to talk up a storm about how evil the banks are, and believe in a concept called predatory lending. The fact is, nobody forces you to borrow money, and we need private lenders who can serve any particular borrowing need while still operating within the law.
While there are dumb people out there who will agree to extremely unfair loans, you can't blame the lender for that. However even if you take away the lenders (i.e. make their job illegal) then you still end up with people who want to borrow under onerous terms anyways. So what do those people do? They seek out illegal lenders, aka loan sharks, which is much worse.
Unlike lenders who operate within the law, loan sharks may very well break your legs or cut off your thumbs if you don't pay them back.
In Arizona, we don't have any usury laws. Likewise, people can take out loans with 300% interest rate if it suits them. However what we don't have are loan sharks. Why? Because nobody would ever have any reason to borrow from a loan shark.
And if you did what GP suggests, everybody who isn't the government that loans money would be a loan shark. And believe me, lots of people would still borrow from illegal lenders anyways, despite the risks.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives. They don't want to just sit around on their arse all day. They want to own things, they want to be able to do things - that's human nature.
I don't think it's safe to say the vast majority. A majority? Maybe, it's hard to say, but I kind of doubt it, and I'll explain why. When I was taking business courses in college, I remember reading two conflicting theories about what motivates workers.
One of them went something like: Most employees are inherently lazy, and only by constant supervision, and proper discipline can you get them to continue to work most efficiently. This was the prevailing theory until about the 1940s
The other one went something like this: Most employees want to work, and if you give them more autonomy, more power to make their own work decisions, and more flexibility in work hours, then they are happier and more productive workers. (This theory largely prevailed after Henry Ford set a global trend of 40 hours a week, taking Saturday off, and giving higher pay to encourage his more productive employees to stay with his company rather than go elsewhere.)
Anyways what I'm getting at is this: Both theories are still employed to this day, and each different theory is applied to different types of work. For work on a massive scale that is highly time sensitive, the first theory prevails. For example, UPS is notorious for micromanaging their truck drivers (I recommend further Googling of that rather than explain it here) whereas companies like Google that are looking for creative and engineering talent needed to create the "Next Big Thing(TM)", and those people must have autonomy.
I personally think that the first theory represents the majority however, namely because it applies to some of the most numerous jobs in the world, such as fast food workers, janitors, etc, whose employers rely on them to do menial tasks, and do them quickly, but the quality of employees that they find at the wages they can afford are NOT the self motivated types.
In addition to what I said above, there's another growing demographic that's sort of the elephant in the room here: The basement dweller who spends his days playing World of Warcraft while his parents work. I've seen a lot of these, and IMO they're the biggest cause of the obesity epidemic. If you give these people free money, believe me, they don't move on unless they are literally evicted. I'm sure you guys have heard the horror stories about video game addiction where such and such person loses their job, their wife, and their house, while they were playing video games.
Personally, I don't believe in such a thing as video game addiction, because I've seen people do these things without video games (sometimes it's TV, sometimes it's drug abuse, sometimes it's the religious belief that "god will save me from myself", etc.)
And finally one more point that ties back to the theories about why people work: Both of the theories that I mentioned above stipulate that money itself does not motivate people to work harder; so for example, giving somebody a raise doesn't mean they'll be more productive (if you believe otherwise, I'm sorry, but all of the evidence so far says you're just wrong) but it does mean they're more likely to continue working for you instead of somebody else.
But why am I mentioning this? Simple: If you pay somebody money to do nothing, then they're also more likely to continue doing nothing.
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
Because when you're being politically correct, anything that has black skin is identified as African-American, even if they're an Australian Aboriginal.
What really irked Snowden, apparently, was that the NSA (and thus, himself) knew that the New York Times had an awareness of what was going on, but chose to withhold it until after the 2012 election for fear of causing Obama to not get re-elected, and even then once they released it, they released a sugar coated version, again because they didn't want to harm Obama's reputation.
If I were Snowden, I would be pissed too. The New York Times had the chance to make it a major issue during voting season, which could have brought about major change quickly, and instead we got nothing. So I'm not surprised at all that he released it, nor am I surprised who he released it to (the Guardian, a British newspaper not subject to US partisan politics.)
I don't know about anybody else, but my insurance rates haven't gone up one bit since Uber and Lyft have been around. If anything, they've gotten lower.
Slashdot Mirror
+1000
That was the start of AJAX and sophisticated asynchronous web applications. Without it we'd still be stuck with get and post.
Actually if you want to speak of what Microsoft has done for the web...
During the DOJ investigation, it was found out (by subpoenaing internal Microsoft memos) that the whole reason Microsoft created Internet Explorer was because they perceived the web as being a threat to Windows. That is, when they saw the rise of Netscape, they noticed how developers could write web applications and plugins for the browser, which ran on any platform, so developers were now free to target Netscape instead of their cash cow.
Microsoft was having none of that, so they explicitly designed IE to break the more advanced web standards, as well as introducing activex, so that if IE reached critical mass (say, over 70% of users) then they could render the web to become something that permanently belongs to Windows. After Windows 98 achieved that (by including it built in, which saved download time for dialup users, which were the vast majority at the time) then the world was stuck with IE5 and IE6 for about 7 years, which fully neglected to implement new web standards, and barely even supported HTML4.
So in other words, Microsoft deliberately held back web development for 7 years.
Meanwhile, guess what happened when AJAX did finally come around? Microsoft saw their freemail dominance in purchased hotmail fall flat on its face, as gmail's web interface was even faster than the copy of Outlook that most people ran natively on their desktop (the gig of email space was just to get people in, but the webUI was the real innovation there, which unlike hotmail, didn't require a full page reload every time you clicked anything.) Microsoft also saw Google maps completely wipe out their sales of MapPoint and Streets & Trips.
From our present position in the galaxy, yes, the chances of that are a mathematical impossibility. However, a few billion years ago our star system was part of a cluster of stars which were in very close proximity to one another, possibly having a protoplanetary disk that overlapped with these other systems.
I personally think panspermia is not only possible, but even likely, as it would explain why we haven't been able to find the right conditions for abiogenesis on this planet.
Here's a little rule: All systems which assume humans won't be greedy selfish bastards who will cheat and manipulate the system for their own gain, are systems which are doomed to fail because they stupidly ignore human nature.
Well capitalism works because the anticipation is that people will be working towards their own ends.
I.e. if you grow apples and sell said apples, you have your own interests at heart (i.e. greed) and not necessarily the good of the world, and meanwhile somebody else gets fed.
That is opposed to, for example, communism which assumes that everybody will continue working towards "the greater good" just because it feels good to do so. Or socialism where it's assumed that the government hands out resources equally, and the political elite don't grant themselves favors.
Anybody who isn't self deluded by the whole concept can see that it's a big joke in the making. So would people take advantage? Yeah, of course they would, just like how John Edward takes advantage of derps who genuinely believe that it is actually possible to talk to the dead.
Look at Al Gore for example; the guy has gotten so rich off of this ever since his term as VP ended. FFS he even sells carbon offsets to himself. And the worst part? He's one of the biggest energy consumers in the US (for example, flies around in his own private jet instead of buying a ticket on an airline, which ends up using FAR LESS carbon on a per passenger basis.)
There was actually one person who was cured of HIV who received a marrow transplant from an HIV resistant donor.
Later two more people who had HIV with a non HIV resistant donor who showed no signs of the disease for about a year, and then it returned, and often when you hear about the first story, people confuse it with the second one where the two individuals recurred with the disease, and thus believe that the first guy still has HIV, but he doesn't.
It seems that the process of irradiating the body of its own marrow also destroys HIV, but it will return if the t-cells aren't resistant to the virus because there are certain areas of the body where the virus can survive the radiation treatment.
http://www.livescience.com/480...
I'm sure you'll find one somewhere, but that doesn't mean it was the correct diagnosis.
It's not necessarily that so much as the head honchos usually have grandiose visions that are short sighted.
For that reason, and others, IMO it is best to follow the typical procedures one does in typical successful IT project management, which may sound bureaucratic, but it avoids disasters, thus these are pretty common procedures for a very good reason:
i.e:
1) Problem statement: Why is what we're currently doing insufficient?
2) Do a productivity gap analysis: Where are we now, where do we want to be?
3) Does the proposed solution provide for long term growth (so that we don't have to ask these questions again in only a few years)?
4, 5, 6, etc, etc,
But along the way, never leave out this important step: Consult with all of the stakeholders and make sure this solution works for them early in the design phase to figure out if this solution is even worth pursuing.
The stakeholders often include: Upper management, middle management, lower management, the techies, the rank and file employees, the customers, and sometimes the shareholders.
When you consult with them, what you're looking for are things like this: Does this new system work better than the old one? Does the new system make your job more difficult in any way? Does the system make your job easier in any way? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What else do you think you may need? (On that last question, make sure to have well defined scope limits early on to avoid feature creep.)
I remember at one place I worked, somebody higher up decided that they wanted to move all of the sales department to Microsoft Dynamics CRM some time before I first worked there. One day while I was asked to troubleshoot a problem with it, (and believe me, MS CRM has TONS of bugs) and I was totally stumped because this person's account didn't work even though his permissions were the same as everybody else's. After I did some investigation, I found out (and the management wasn't even aware) that every salesperson had this problem, only very few of them even tried to use MS CRM at all, so nobody actually reported it until this one guy happened to try it a few years after we had already supposedly been using it.
That's a classic example of when somebody implemented a new "IT system" but completely failed to consult with the rank and file employees to see if it's something they'd even want to use at all. It's also one of many classic examples of failed IT project management.
TL;DR: Basically, everybody who it applies to should have a say in it.
I would think one of the shiny new instruction features added to skylake could go horribly horribly wrong in basically the worst way you could possibly imagine:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.p...
Basically, imagine code running on your computer that you aren't allowed to see even at the binary level, which means anti-malware software cannot scan it, and you can't debug it if you suspect it is doing something malicious, and even worse, I suspect that groups like the NSA could NSL the keys so that they could write their own state sponsored backdoors. IMO this is a feature that really doesn't belong on consumer grade hardware.
K-mart. The answer to your question, is k-mart.
I just look at it the way I look at TV shows/movies where shit happens that just doesn't look realistic at all.
Basically, I just dismiss it as creative license. I only get annoyed when they do it so fucking badly that it's super distracting from the story.
For example, that show Under the Dome, I was watching how that Barbie guy used a goofy little Windows Phone (a blatant in-show product placement ad, by the way) to make an improvised bomb by using its timer with a blasting cap wired to the headphone jack, and the screen zooms to the timer and you hear it "beep" before the bomb actually goes off...rolleyes...and then again when he pulls up a surface tablet with an IE page (again, product placement) that just says "this page can't be displayed", to where he accuses somebody else of firewalling the wifi from outside the dome, whereas previously they mentioned that they had no wifi signal at all, and Barbie somehow instantly recognizes the "this page can't be displayed" message as a firewall issue, when about a hundred things could cause that, nevermind a firewall issue.
Does make you wonder why such a relatively higher budget show can't hire a few technical consultants to at least get that shit straight, but then again they may have deliberately did some of those things for the product placement. They did something similar in a later season where those teenagers were driving a current (2015) model plug in prius (massive gaping continuity problem there,) in pristine condition no less (again, big continuity problem,) and spent about 20 seconds on a scene that showed them plugging it in to make the battery last longer, and it in no way advanced the plot.
I think that in most cases, most people don't even care. I think I heard something like the South Park creators didn't even have any idea what the town's layout looked like until they actually had to draw it out for the Stick of Truth game.
There is a specific basis for monogamy in the bible.
Ah yeah, about that...
Exodus 20:14
You shall not commit adultery
Guess what adultery means in this context? It means a male having sex with another woman who is married to somebody else. However there is no stipulation against married men having sex with unmarried women.
Kind of like how the commandment for "thou shall not kill" doesn't actually mean not to kill, just not to do so unjustly.
It's not a matter of respect so much as it is that mammalian males are naturally driven to desire more than one mate. There have been experiments done that show that all males become less and less sexually attracted to the same mate the more they have sex with them. Fun fact: Having sex with a second mate often increases sexual desire for the first one, almost like having the same food over and over again, and then eating something else for a while, makes you like the first thing again.
Sure, you can talk all day about how you'll never cheat and how you're as pure as your "god" made you, but it's just not true at all. But as an atheist, I don't believe in that. In fact, none of the world's religions actually espouse monogamy.
The whole concept of monogamy is political in nature to create a power structure derived from united families, and the concept of it being under good is to give the would be breakers of that power structure a message that somebody is always watching them. And for what it's worth, for you Christians, monogamy has no biblical basis. If you look at practically every single male biblical figure, all of them had concubines and/or otherwise had sexual relations with more people than just their official spouse, except for Jesus. (And by the way, Jesus's message wasn't ever intended for gentiles, it was only aimed at Jews, and the "salvation" was for them to be saved from the Romans. 666 is a reference to Neron Caesar, not Satan, in fact there's no mention of hell at all other than some city called Gahenna where they burned their trash. Hell that Christians know of today is purely a concept borrowed from paganism by Catholics.)
FWIW I personally have never married and thus have been single my entire life (never dated either) so as a male on the outside looking in, I'm calling this as I see it.
Hmm...let's see...Obama, Feinstein, Napolitano, Holder...a lot of them, actually.
Actually yeah, that's totally expected if you consume that few calories. The thing is, you're a mammal, and if you have few calories, your liver goes into a hibernation state where it metabolizes few calories when you're doing nothing.
Not only does it make it hard for you to think, have no energy, and be really slow, but it lowers your basal metabolic rate, meaning that you burn fewer calories. End result? You don't shed pounds.
To avoid sending your metabolic system into hibernation mode, adult females should consume at least 1200 calories per day, and adult males 1800 per day.
If 98% of people can't "follow the proper regimen", then it's not a proper regimen, and it's quite obviously not at all what thin people are doing. That's the fucking point.
My BMI was 40 last year, now it's 28.5. While still overweight, that's not obese.
Proper regimen only means this: Properly accounting for calories. I don't care what kind of poop you have, the reality is that it's physically impossible to gain or even retain weight if your net calorie intake is zero.
No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
And by the way, this is the same reason why dietary science gets it wrong all the time: It's largely based on studies and surveys where people don't actually eat what they say they eat, and they exercise less than they claim they do, making these studies that draw "a link between x and y" completely fucking meaningless.
This, by the way, is exactly why the FDA held the nonsensical position that eating dietary cholesterol causes your blood cholesterol to go up, so they did silly things like telling people to eat less eggs and more cereal grains in order to lower their cholesterol (in reality, following that recommendation raises cholesterol rather than lowers it.)
Who said anything about banning private lending or insurance, just the banning of the force of law in private lending or insurance.
Which basically puts lenders who follow the law out of business, making loan sharks the only option.
And in case you haven't noticed, loan sharks are often known to make it impossible to pay off a loan at all, keeping you into perpetual debt. Remember, they're already operating outside of the law, so they don't have to actually honor their end of the agreement. And since they usually have a mafia sized stick, they have plenty of resources with which to pursue their interests.
Want to play loanshark, go ahead but expect no support from law when it comes to recovery money but expect force of law against you in your attempts to recover money.
In case you haven't noticed, that is already the reality for loan sharks, and they still operate anyways. They really don't give a shit if the law won't help them collect debts (because it doesn't) and they don't give a shit if the law is against them (because it is.) If you simply disappear, they'll often resort to tactics like threatening your family and demanding the money from them instead. And yes, it still happens to this day in areas where there are actual usury laws on the books, like New York for example.
As for the old total bullshit lie that private can be trusted more than government, give up on the bullshit from 30 years of main stream media owned by private corporations propaganda
On the contrary, it sounds like you've been listening to communist propaganda.
Imagine the chaos of private armies not government armies
Why would I need to imagine that? It's already been done. The wealthiest private entity to ever exist was the Dutch East India Company, who at the time owned their own Army, Navy, and Merchant Marine regiments, and had the power to declare their own wars, and arrest, jail, and even execute people who didn't pay their debts. At their peak, they were worth about $7.4 trillion of today's dollars, making them richer than all of today's world economies except for the US and China. Likewise, they weren't the only corporation to have ever been in such a situation, as there have been several.
It is called psychopathic capitalism for a reason
Speak of propaganda, it seems that you do a lot of reading of propaganda blogs, based on the links you're giving. Meanwhile, everything I've told you is based on actual crime reports based on lending laws in different jurisdictions.
I'm inclined to agree. A lot of people out there like to talk up a storm about how evil the banks are, and believe in a concept called predatory lending. The fact is, nobody forces you to borrow money, and we need private lenders who can serve any particular borrowing need while still operating within the law.
While there are dumb people out there who will agree to extremely unfair loans, you can't blame the lender for that. However even if you take away the lenders (i.e. make their job illegal) then you still end up with people who want to borrow under onerous terms anyways. So what do those people do? They seek out illegal lenders, aka loan sharks, which is much worse.
Unlike lenders who operate within the law, loan sharks may very well break your legs or cut off your thumbs if you don't pay them back.
In Arizona, we don't have any usury laws. Likewise, people can take out loans with 300% interest rate if it suits them. However what we don't have are loan sharks. Why? Because nobody would ever have any reason to borrow from a loan shark.
And if you did what GP suggests, everybody who isn't the government that loans money would be a loan shark. And believe me, lots of people would still borrow from illegal lenders anyways, despite the risks.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives. They don't want to just sit around on their arse all day. They want to own things, they want to be able to do things - that's human nature.
I don't think it's safe to say the vast majority. A majority? Maybe, it's hard to say, but I kind of doubt it, and I'll explain why. When I was taking business courses in college, I remember reading two conflicting theories about what motivates workers.
One of them went something like: Most employees are inherently lazy, and only by constant supervision, and proper discipline can you get them to continue to work most efficiently. This was the prevailing theory until about the 1940s
The other one went something like this: Most employees want to work, and if you give them more autonomy, more power to make their own work decisions, and more flexibility in work hours, then they are happier and more productive workers. (This theory largely prevailed after Henry Ford set a global trend of 40 hours a week, taking Saturday off, and giving higher pay to encourage his more productive employees to stay with his company rather than go elsewhere.)
Anyways what I'm getting at is this: Both theories are still employed to this day, and each different theory is applied to different types of work. For work on a massive scale that is highly time sensitive, the first theory prevails. For example, UPS is notorious for micromanaging their truck drivers (I recommend further Googling of that rather than explain it here) whereas companies like Google that are looking for creative and engineering talent needed to create the "Next Big Thing(TM)", and those people must have autonomy.
I personally think that the first theory represents the majority however, namely because it applies to some of the most numerous jobs in the world, such as fast food workers, janitors, etc, whose employers rely on them to do menial tasks, and do them quickly, but the quality of employees that they find at the wages they can afford are NOT the self motivated types.
In addition to what I said above, there's another growing demographic that's sort of the elephant in the room here: The basement dweller who spends his days playing World of Warcraft while his parents work. I've seen a lot of these, and IMO they're the biggest cause of the obesity epidemic. If you give these people free money, believe me, they don't move on unless they are literally evicted. I'm sure you guys have heard the horror stories about video game addiction where such and such person loses their job, their wife, and their house, while they were playing video games.
Personally, I don't believe in such a thing as video game addiction, because I've seen people do these things without video games (sometimes it's TV, sometimes it's drug abuse, sometimes it's the religious belief that "god will save me from myself", etc.)
And finally one more point that ties back to the theories about why people work: Both of the theories that I mentioned above stipulate that money itself does not motivate people to work harder; so for example, giving somebody a raise doesn't mean they'll be more productive (if you believe otherwise, I'm sorry, but all of the evidence so far says you're just wrong) but it does mean they're more likely to continue working for you instead of somebody else.
But why am I mentioning this? Simple: If you pay somebody money to do nothing, then they're also more likely to continue doing nothing.
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
No I mean anything. Like for example, a black sheep is called an "African American sheep" in proper PC terms.
Because when you're being politically correct, anything that has black skin is identified as African-American, even if they're an Australian Aboriginal.
What really irked Snowden, apparently, was that the NSA (and thus, himself) knew that the New York Times had an awareness of what was going on, but chose to withhold it until after the 2012 election for fear of causing Obama to not get re-elected, and even then once they released it, they released a sugar coated version, again because they didn't want to harm Obama's reputation.
If I were Snowden, I would be pissed too. The New York Times had the chance to make it a major issue during voting season, which could have brought about major change quickly, and instead we got nothing. So I'm not surprised at all that he released it, nor am I surprised who he released it to (the Guardian, a British newspaper not subject to US partisan politics.)
So no pizza deliveries on regular insurance?
I don't know about anybody else, but my insurance rates haven't gone up one bit since Uber and Lyft have been around. If anything, they've gotten lower.