Strange that so many of the professional economists credit the improving economy to the tax cuts. How does this fit into your rant?
You know how on fighter jets the pilot can turn on the afterburners to get a temporary boost in speed? Those are the tax cuts. Thing is, you burn up fuel faster, and only buy yourself a temporary reprieve. You still have to worry about gravity, or forces which counter your thrust; in this case, that's the huge ($500 billion) trade deficit, the huge budget deficit, increased interest payments, and the shifting of real wealth overseas via jobs. The Fed can only do so much; interest rates are already at historic lows, and going lower will probably not help the economy much. Average wages (taking out the top 1% of wage earners) have gone down, adding to the loss of real wealth in the US.
Sure, we could have bought outselves some time. And the vagarities of international finance are difficult to interpret and impossible to predict. But the financial situation of the US, and many developed western nations, is increasingly shaky. Bush's wreckless -- indeed, destructive -- policies have done nothing to better the financial health of the nation.
Where it's me me me, taxation is theft, war is peace, helping the poor hurts the poor, Jesus is coming Real Soon Now(tm), and right wing propaganda reigns the landscape.
Sure those tax cuts will create jobs! IN INDIA! MOOOOOHAHAHAHAAHAHA!
Bush can do no wrong! Long live the democratically elected leader of We The People!
If it wasn't for all the government regulation, this never would have happened. Government is the source of problems like this, the cause, and it cannot solve them or keep them from happening. Regulating the infrastructure has only led to a decrease in reliability of the power grid, and the only thing that can fix it are market forces. This is true both from an ethical level (embracing true freedom), and from a pratical level: the pure free market is the best solver of problems there is.
This would not have happened in a market unencumbered by overzealous regulations and socialist mindsets.
As far as uning people as batteries, that's the toughest to explain.
I think that the series fails when looked at from a "hard sci-fi" viewpoint, but I also do not think that is the point of the movies. These are ultimately movies that explore philosophical and religious motifs; trying to look at them as if they were Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy does not correctly take into account the creator's underlying intentions. This was not hard sci-fi, and in fact used quite a bit of "magic" throughout, although most of that magic was at least partially explained. Instead, this was fundamentally an exploration of meaning and choice, and other non-physical questions.
Looked at through these lenses, the "humans as power source" thing was just a metaphor used to allow people to break free, to see the light, and be englightened. If you look at it from a more physical point of view, then the wrong questions are being asked.
Other than this I think your write-up was excellent, although I don't think there will be another sequel.:)
Nobody would bat an eye if the donors were any other party. I'm actually kind of glad that this electronic voting crap happened on a conservative rather than liberal watch. If this had happened, say, with Clinton in office or after the next Democrat President, we'd never hear about the problems inherent in the system in the mainstream press.
And how many stories have you heard about this in the mainstream press? By my count, CNN has run one story on it, and the New York Times has run another single story on it. The AP also ran a story, which was picked up by some outlets. But doing a search of news.google.com does not turn up all that much, certainly not as much as you'd think this would warrant.
Thank you! Did anybody ever see a report on exactly who Enron donated to? The Rebpulican connection was heavily touted as "proof" that Bush was in bed with Enron, but the truth of the matter was that Enron donated heavily to both of the big political parties. Yes, they did give a bit more to the Republicans, but the disproportions can be traced to state and local political parties. Enron was in Texas, a heavily conservative state.
Look at this. Summarized here for your pleasure: Total donations, 1990-2004 for Enron: 29% to Democrats, 71% to Republicans. Enron heavily favored Republicans in their political contributions, both on the state and national level. Enron obviously favored the Republican party.
I posted this as a reply to another comment here, but I saw other comments which claim that Diebold probably gives to Democrats equally, depending on who is in power. This is simply not true.
Diebold employees give exclusively to Republican candidates and organizations. During the 1996 and 1998 election cycles (when, I probably don't need to remind you, Clinton was president) Diebold gave over $36,000 to Republicans, and $0.00 to Democrats. Source. Further, for the 2000 and 2002 cycles, they gave $31,000 to Republican causes, and zero dollars to Democratic ones. Source.
As ridiculous and conspiratorial as it sounds, there is some evidence that the Republican party, or at the least some of those who have associations with it, is engaging in a conscious effort to undermine the democracy. Add to this the fact that all opposition to paper trails is coming from the Republican leadership and things begin to smell just a tad.
If Al Gore were president, then they would be Gore (Al, not VIDal) donors. They just want to make money through policy, it doesn't matter the administration. Vidal needs to stop making it a party or conservative vs. liberal issue.
Not true. Ex: The president and CEO of Diebold, Walden O'Dell, is a long time Republican contributor, as well as organizer for Republican fund-raising events. Look at this for example. All contributions from Diebold employees for the 1996 and 1998 election cycles went to Republican candidates or Republican organizations.
As ridiculous and conspiratorial as it sounds, there is some evidence that the Republican party, or at the least some of those who have associations with it, is engaging in a conscious effort to undermine the democracy. Add to this the fact that all opposition to paper trails is coming from the Republican leadership and things begin to smell just a tad.
On my way to donate I noticed that they were a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. I thought that political groups were not allowed to be claimed as non-profit? Where exactly is the line drawn?
Endorsing candidates, or a political party, is a good rubric. The EFF does neither. Although the EFF might currently (and historically, AFAIK) be facing the most opposition from the Republican party and the positions taken by its members, that does not mean that the EFF therefore endorses the Democratic party, or any candidate of it.
The video newspaper displays even echoes something that started in sci-fi. Wasn't that featured in that Tom Cruise film "Minority Report?"
Yup, and that's exactly what I was thinking when I saw this article. Except in Minority Report it was a box of cereal that started singing at him after he poured a bowl; it wouldn't stop, so he threw the damn thing across the room.
Yeah. More avenues for evil marketdroids to ply their wares with.
Plus imho Tomcat is a pain in the ass to configure, and you gotta keep javac'ing, and so on. Just give me a language where I can throw in a little bit of code in the middle of a webpage, in the regular web directory, and be done with it.
Boy, what da HELL you talkin 'bout? Looky heah:
<body> <p> <% for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { %> <b>Youz dummer dan a gator on whiskey!</b> <% } %> </p>
Now, what so hard 'bout dat? Looks like code t'me! Looks like it's in the middle of a page! Hit it, load it, be done with it. Need t'change a value? Change it, save it, reload it. You all needs t'pull yo cranium outta yo backside, mmmhmm.
"Gotta keep javac'ing." I declare, that's the DUMBEST thing I done heard all day.
It was fun to watch Bill Maher ridicule the Republican parakeets like Tom Stoppard and Ann Coulter who repeated this tripe on his show.
Tom Stoppard? The British playwright? You sure about that? He doesn't seem to be living in the same solar system as Coulter, let alone another propagandist of the right wing.
Unless the Democrats decide they don't like those appointments, which is why they've been delaying every single one of Bush's nominations to the federal courts.
I don't know what wingnut propaganda outlet you get your news from, but it's obviously rotted your mind. To date, Bush has had 117 federal judicial nominees approved by the Senate. This is completely in line with historical norms. Reagan had 293 appointments over his two terms, Bush Sr. had 150 appointments, and Clinton had 306 over his two terms.
So I fail to see where you see evidence that the Democrats are delaying appointments. If there were any delaying going on whatsoever these numbers would be much lower.
If you do the crime; you should be willing to do the time.
Wow, I think that's about the only time in recent memory that I've agreed with a Republican about damn near anything. Most of this seems to be, as you said, whining from those who are upset that they might one day not be able to get free shit anymore. There is no civil right at question here, just simple piracy.
I'm not all that sympathetic. Most of the arguments seem to revolve around legalistic hair-splitting, all the while avoiding the issue of whether file trading under current copyright law is actually immoral or not.
I, for one, believe that obeying the law is a virtue, even when you wish it were different.
Repeat after me: Copyright infringment != Stealing
The real question is: Is it a violation of the law, and if so, it it a justifiable violation of the law? I just don't see it being justifiable beyond simple selfishness. File sharing is something we like to do, and it's fun to get free shit, but that doesn't make it moral.
Not to say I haven't partaken, but I'm not going to give the EFF money over this. There are other causes that are far more worthy.
Like, I dunno, feeding starving children or something.
Re:Java, my abusive friend
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
Anyone know any good/quick IDEs for Java?
Eclipse. It's from IBM, and has its own GUI library which is a replcement for Swing, and is damn fast. Especially compared to that bloated POS that is Forte/NetBeans.
Code Generation is for people who don't understand or are too lazy for abstraction, and it will ALWAYS have the problem of, what if you want to go through all your projects and change one single thing about the generated part of your code?
While I completely agree with your statement, I don't think it wholly applies to cases where you are using code generators to do things like generate an XML config file, or other such cases where you are using different technologies that don't talk to each other well. XDoclet is an example of this: among other things you can use it to generate your servlet container configuration files based totally upon comments in your source code, or your custom tag configuration files, including TLDs.
Having said that, I completely agree that using a tool to generate actual source code seems to be lazy design. Some form of abstraction/factory/builder/whatever should be able to take care of just about all of these cases.
Several years ago I worked at the JC Penney corporate offices in Texas. At the time the building was new, and one of the cool gadgets they had were mail robots. They would load up the robots with mail, the robot would roll to the elevator, call the elevator, and then follow a special strip in the carpet of each floor, stopping every so often to deliver mail.
Well, about a week into this people started complaining about the elevators being extremely slow, like a 5 minute or more wait. Turned out that the mail robots were fighting over the elevators: if there was a robot on 3, and one in the basement, and both called the elevator at the same time, the elevator would get stuck.
Actually, this is not at all similar, now that I think about it.
The Polygraph and Lie Detection Juicy quote: "Polygraph testing now rests on weak scientific underpinnings despite nearly a century of study, the committee said. And much of the available evidence for judging its validity lacks scientific rigor."
There's never been a study that conclusively shows that lie detectors work. Never.
That's the great thing about government contracts: it's not whether it works, it's who you know with their face in the pork trough...
Roger that. Lie detectors don't work, have been scientifically shown not to work since sometime around 1616CE, and yet the USG continues to use it as a condition of employment in many areas. Moronic.
I'm just happy that in this case a law enforcement agency actually stopped doing something because it didn't work. That doesn't always happen.
If by "insane" you mean "whores who will justify any behavior, however repugnant, if it makes them money" then yes, absolutely. And the more money it makes, the easier it is to justify.
What is wrong with collateral damage when you're out there killing people and destroying large portions of their country?
Because, see, most people thing it's wrong to kill people. But since we all know about war, those same people understand that if you're gonna do some killing, at least try to minimize it if you can. If you can, and don't, that's a bad thing.
I tend to agree and vehemently support this position. War may occasionally be necessary [wasn't in Iraq - ed.] but that doesn't mean you have the right to go in and start killing civilians. Then you lose whatever moral credibility you had going into the war.
Killing is bad. Try to avoid it unless absoultely necessry. You know, love thy neighbor and all that other hippie shit.
Dead on accurate. What kills me is that in both cases it is Republican administrations who are vigorously pursuing this, and yet the Democrats get are the ones with the bad rep. I just don't get it.
Sorry to turn this into political fodder, but it really drives me crazy. The only "freedom" lobby that the Republicans seem interested in is the NRA; beyond that anything goes so long as you're fighting drugs/terrorism/abortion.
It seems like the right to vote should be one of those "fundamental" rights that cannot be denied to anyone.
There are no fundamental rights. Haven't you heard? We have to fight terrorists, now. And the Republicans know what's best. So don't you go talking about "fundamental" rights. There are only rights for fundamentalists.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange that so many of the professional economists credit the improving economy to the tax cuts. How does this fit into your rant?
You know how on fighter jets the pilot can turn on the afterburners to get a temporary boost in speed? Those are the tax cuts. Thing is, you burn up fuel faster, and only buy yourself a temporary reprieve. You still have to worry about gravity, or forces which counter your thrust; in this case, that's the huge ($500 billion) trade deficit, the huge budget deficit, increased interest payments, and the shifting of real wealth overseas via jobs. The Fed can only do so much; interest rates are already at historic lows, and going lower will probably not help the economy much. Average wages (taking out the top 1% of wage earners) have gone down, adding to the loss of real wealth in the US.
Sure, we could have bought outselves some time. And the vagarities of international finance are difficult to interpret and impossible to predict. But the financial situation of the US, and many developed western nations, is increasingly shaky. Bush's wreckless -- indeed, destructive -- policies have done nothing to better the financial health of the nation.
Where it's me me me, taxation is theft, war is peace, helping the poor hurts the poor, Jesus is coming Real Soon Now(tm), and right wing propaganda reigns the landscape.
Sure those tax cuts will create jobs! IN INDIA! MOOOOOHAHAHAHAAHAHA!
Bush can do no wrong! Long live the democratically elected leader of We The People!
If it wasn't for all the government regulation, this never would have happened. Government is the source of problems like this, the cause, and it cannot solve them or keep them from happening. Regulating the infrastructure has only led to a decrease in reliability of the power grid, and the only thing that can fix it are market forces. This is true both from an ethical level (embracing true freedom), and from a pratical level: the pure free market is the best solver of problems there is.
This would not have happened in a market unencumbered by overzealous regulations and socialist mindsets.
As far as uning people as batteries, that's the toughest to explain.
I think that the series fails when looked at from a "hard sci-fi" viewpoint, but I also do not think that is the point of the movies. These are ultimately movies that explore philosophical and religious motifs; trying to look at them as if they were Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy does not correctly take into account the creator's underlying intentions. This was not hard sci-fi, and in fact used quite a bit of "magic" throughout, although most of that magic was at least partially explained. Instead, this was fundamentally an exploration of meaning and choice, and other non-physical questions.
Looked at through these lenses, the "humans as power source" thing was just a metaphor used to allow people to break free, to see the light, and be englightened. If you look at it from a more physical point of view, then the wrong questions are being asked.
Other than this I think your write-up was excellent, although I don't think there will be another sequel. :)
Nobody would bat an eye if the donors were any other party. I'm actually kind of glad that this electronic voting crap happened on a conservative rather than liberal watch. If this had happened, say, with Clinton in office or after the next Democrat President, we'd never hear about the problems inherent in the system in the mainstream press.
And how many stories have you heard about this in the mainstream press? By my count, CNN has run one story on it, and the New York Times has run another single story on it. The AP also ran a story, which was picked up by some outlets. But doing a search of news.google.com does not turn up all that much, certainly not as much as you'd think this would warrant.
Thank you! Did anybody ever see a report on exactly who Enron donated to? The Rebpulican connection was heavily touted as "proof" that Bush was in bed with Enron, but the truth of the matter was that Enron donated heavily to both of the big political parties. Yes, they did give a bit more to the Republicans, but the disproportions can be traced to state and local political parties. Enron was in Texas, a heavily conservative state.
Look at this. Summarized here for your pleasure: Total donations, 1990-2004 for Enron: 29% to Democrats, 71% to Republicans. Enron heavily favored Republicans in their political contributions, both on the state and national level. Enron obviously favored the Republican party.
I posted this as a reply to another comment here, but I saw other comments which claim that Diebold probably gives to Democrats equally, depending on who is in power. This is simply not true.
Diebold employees give exclusively to Republican candidates and organizations. During the 1996 and 1998 election cycles (when, I probably don't need to remind you, Clinton was president) Diebold gave over $36,000 to Republicans, and $0.00 to Democrats. Source. Further, for the 2000 and 2002 cycles, they gave $31,000 to Republican causes, and zero dollars to Democratic ones. Source.
As ridiculous and conspiratorial as it sounds, there is some evidence that the Republican party, or at the least some of those who have associations with it, is engaging in a conscious effort to undermine the democracy. Add to this the fact that all opposition to paper trails is coming from the Republican leadership and things begin to smell just a tad.
If Al Gore were president, then they would be Gore (Al, not VIDal) donors. They just want to make money through policy, it doesn't matter the administration. Vidal needs to stop making it a party or conservative vs. liberal issue.
Not true. Ex: The president and CEO of Diebold, Walden O'Dell, is a long time Republican contributor, as well as organizer for Republican fund-raising events. Look at this for example. All contributions from Diebold employees for the 1996 and 1998 election cycles went to Republican candidates or Republican organizations.
As ridiculous and conspiratorial as it sounds, there is some evidence that the Republican party, or at the least some of those who have associations with it, is engaging in a conscious effort to undermine the democracy. Add to this the fact that all opposition to paper trails is coming from the Republican leadership and things begin to smell just a tad.
On my way to donate I noticed that they were a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. I thought that political groups were not allowed to be claimed as non-profit? Where exactly is the line drawn?
Endorsing candidates, or a political party, is a good rubric. The EFF does neither. Although the EFF might currently (and historically, AFAIK) be facing the most opposition from the Republican party and the positions taken by its members, that does not mean that the EFF therefore endorses the Democratic party, or any candidate of it.
The video newspaper displays even echoes something that started in sci-fi. Wasn't that featured in that Tom Cruise film "Minority Report?"
Yup, and that's exactly what I was thinking when I saw this article. Except in Minority Report it was a box of cereal that started singing at him after he poured a bowl; it wouldn't stop, so he threw the damn thing across the room.
Yeah. More avenues for evil marketdroids to ply their wares with.
NUKE IT ALL, I SAY.
Plus imho Tomcat is a pain in the ass to configure, and you gotta keep javac'ing, and so on. Just give me a language where I can throw in a little bit of code in the middle of a webpage, in the regular web directory, and be done with it.
Boy, what da HELL you talkin 'bout? Looky heah:
Now, what so hard 'bout dat? Looks like code t'me! Looks like it's in the middle of a page! Hit it, load it, be done with it. Need t'change a value? Change it, save it, reload it. You all needs t'pull yo cranium outta yo backside, mmmhmm.
"Gotta keep javac'ing." I declare, that's the DUMBEST thing I done heard all day.
It was fun to watch Bill Maher ridicule the Republican parakeets like Tom Stoppard and Ann Coulter who repeated this tripe on his show.
Tom Stoppard? The British playwright? You sure about that? He doesn't seem to be living in the same solar system as Coulter, let alone another propagandist of the right wing.
Don't even waste your mod points. This is only a test.
Please ignore this post. Don't even waste a mod point on it. It's just filler.
Unless the Democrats decide they don't like those appointments, which is why they've been delaying every single one of Bush's nominations to the federal courts.
I don't know what wingnut propaganda outlet you get your news from, but it's obviously rotted your mind. To date, Bush has had 117 federal judicial nominees approved by the Senate. This is completely in line with historical norms. Reagan had 293 appointments over his two terms, Bush Sr. had 150 appointments, and Clinton had 306 over his two terms.
So I fail to see where you see evidence that the Democrats are delaying appointments. If there were any delaying going on whatsoever these numbers would be much lower.
Source
If you do the crime; you should be willing to do the time.
Wow, I think that's about the only time in recent memory that I've agreed with a Republican about damn near anything. Most of this seems to be, as you said, whining from those who are upset that they might one day not be able to get free shit anymore. There is no civil right at question here, just simple piracy.
I'm not all that sympathetic. Most of the arguments seem to revolve around legalistic hair-splitting, all the while avoiding the issue of whether file trading under current copyright law is actually immoral or not.
I, for one, believe that obeying the law is a virtue, even when you wish it were different.
Repeat after me: Copyright infringment != Stealing
The real question is: Is it a violation of the law, and if so, it it a justifiable violation of the law? I just don't see it being justifiable beyond simple selfishness. File sharing is something we like to do, and it's fun to get free shit, but that doesn't make it moral.
Not to say I haven't partaken, but I'm not going to give the EFF money over this. There are other causes that are far more worthy.
Like, I dunno, feeding starving children or something.
Anyone know any good/quick IDEs for Java?
Eclipse. It's from IBM, and has its own GUI library which is a replcement for Swing, and is damn fast. Especially compared to that bloated POS that is Forte/NetBeans.
Code Generation is for people who don't understand or are too lazy for abstraction, and it will ALWAYS have the problem of, what if you want to go through all your projects and change one single thing about the generated part of your code?
While I completely agree with your statement, I don't think it wholly applies to cases where you are using code generators to do things like generate an XML config file, or other such cases where you are using different technologies that don't talk to each other well. XDoclet is an example of this: among other things you can use it to generate your servlet container configuration files based totally upon comments in your source code, or your custom tag configuration files, including TLDs.
Having said that, I completely agree that using a tool to generate actual source code seems to be lazy design. Some form of abstraction/factory/builder/whatever should be able to take care of just about all of these cases.
Plus, it just strikes me as being so inelegant.
Several years ago I worked at the JC Penney corporate offices in Texas. At the time the building was new, and one of the cool gadgets they had were mail robots. They would load up the robots with mail, the robot would roll to the elevator, call the elevator, and then follow a special strip in the carpet of each floor, stopping every so often to deliver mail.
Well, about a week into this people started complaining about the elevators being extremely slow, like a 5 minute or more wait. Turned out that the mail robots were fighting over the elevators: if there was a robot on 3, and one in the basement, and both called the elevator at the same time, the elevator would get stuck.
Actually, this is not at all similar, now that I think about it.
Umm, no.
The Polygraph and Lie Detection Juicy quote: "Polygraph testing now rests on weak scientific underpinnings despite nearly a century of study, the committee said. And much of the available evidence for judging its validity lacks scientific rigor."
There's never been a study that conclusively shows that lie detectors work. Never.
That's the great thing about government contracts: it's not whether it works, it's who you know with their face in the pork trough...
Roger that. Lie detectors don't work, have been scientifically shown not to work since sometime around 1616CE, and yet the USG continues to use it as a condition of employment in many areas. Moronic.
I'm just happy that in this case a law enforcement agency actually stopped doing something because it didn't work. That doesn't always happen.
Is this world full of insane people ?
If by "insane" you mean "whores who will justify any behavior, however repugnant, if it makes them money" then yes, absolutely. And the more money it makes, the easier it is to justify.
What is wrong with collateral damage when you're out there killing people and destroying large portions of their country?
Because, see, most people thing it's wrong to kill people. But since we all know about war, those same people understand that if you're gonna do some killing, at least try to minimize it if you can. If you can, and don't, that's a bad thing.
I tend to agree and vehemently support this position. War may occasionally be necessary [wasn't in Iraq - ed.] but that doesn't mean you have the right to go in and start killing civilians. Then you lose whatever moral credibility you had going into the war.
Killing is bad. Try to avoid it unless absoultely necessry. You know, love thy neighbor and all that other hippie shit.
Dead on accurate. What kills me is that in both cases it is Republican administrations who are vigorously pursuing this, and yet the Democrats get are the ones with the bad rep. I just don't get it. Sorry to turn this into political fodder, but it really drives me crazy. The only "freedom" lobby that the Republicans seem interested in is the NRA; beyond that anything goes so long as you're fighting drugs/terrorism/abortion.
It seems like the right to vote should be one of those "fundamental" rights that cannot be denied to anyone.
There are no fundamental rights. Haven't you heard? We have to fight terrorists, now. And the Republicans know what's best. So don't you go talking about "fundamental" rights. There are only rights for fundamentalists.