Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
Interesting question. The Big Mac is testament to the power of mass production. This is a concept closely tied to American industry, since it was primarily Americans such as Henry Ford who used this concept in the late 1800s/early 1900s to revolutionize the world.
The ingredients used are nothing special. They are cheap, and are produced in the cheapest way possible before being shipped en-masse to restaurants across the planet, where Big Macs are slapped together by the millions daily by a huge minimum wage workforce. The individual ingredients aren't made exclusively at a single location, as that would be inefficient; instead they are manufactured in facilities across the world to specific standards, packaged in standard packaging, and shipped to restaurants on specific schedules, where they are then stored, cooked, and assembled into burgers using standardized equipment and procedures.
Despite the flaws and variations inherent in the process, when you order a Big Mac you know exactly what you're getting, no matter if you are in New York, Bumfuck Oklahoma, or Syria. The burger is not gourmet food by any means, but it's cheap, fast, and good enough--which are core values of American culture, if anything is, and have been for a long time.
Consider World War II, and Panzer tanks vs Sherman tanks. The Panzers were advanced, complicated, well designed, expensive and hard to produce tanks. The Sherman was a flawed piece of shit, but Americans could slap ten Shermans together in the same time it took to build one Panzer. If one Panzer gets blown up it's a setback, but if a Sherman blows up or breaks down, oh well, just roll in another to replace it. Guess who won that war?
I could go on, as there are many more examples, but my point has been made. Thanks for the interesting post. I find the study of human cultures fascinating.
What part of "74,000 milse on the odometer, which was broken" did you overlook?
What part of "'The frame was sound and all the body panels were sound,' he said. It had a 3.9-liter 6-cylinder engine and was in driving condition." did you overlook?
Suit yourself. I'm self employed and loving it, mainly because I don't have to wake up to a fucking alarm clock. It's amazing how much better I feel these days.
If someone can see it, they can take it down. I'd use a hot air balloon with a basket full of explosives and some kind of rudimentary maneuvering system, maybe some small rockets or something. Mohammed guides the balloon to its target using a good pair of binoculars and a radio remote, perhaps with the aid of a second spotter. Use the wind to get the balloon within a certain distance, use the maneuvering system to get it beside the blimp, then trigger the explosives. Perhaps harder to do than it is to describe, but it could be done, and on a reasonable budget too.
The hard part, of course, will be finding the blimp to begin with. That problem can be solved by using your network of informants and spotters to follow it from take-off until it reaches its destination, or at least until it reaches a point where it can be intercepted en-route.
Fuck you, Mozilla. All I want is a simple fucking browser that does its damn job and does it well. That's what Firefox used to be. Now it's a bloated piece of shit that randomly freezes for seconds (or even minutes) at a time, randomly crashes due to shit design (Flash should NOT be allowed to crash the fucking browser!), ignores commands I give it (such as "STOP LOADING THE FUCKING PAGE"), loads pages slower than every other browser on the planet, goes to hell in a handbasket and refuses to save my tabs whenever I make the mistake of upgrading the browser while it's still running, and swallows every byte of free memory it can wrap its claws around. It's fucking garbage. And now, instead of concentrating all effort on fixing these horrendous flaws, the clueless fools at Mozilla want to turn their attention to wrecking the UI instead? These people should be lined up against the wall and shot.
That's it. I'm done with Firefox. I'll never recommend it to anyone ever again. Take this pile of shit you call a "browser" and shove it up your ass, Mozilla. I'm switching to something else, ANYTHING else.
The Hoover Dam is a big ass wall, and it DOES generate money year after year. Should the people who built the wall receive its yearly revenues instead of the people who paid for the wall's construction and thus own it?
An apartment building, which is a collection of walls, generates money year after year. Should the people who built the building receives its yearly revenues instead of the people who paid for the building's construction and thus own it?
If You can spend 2 hours and have a domain deployment with all the features You need done by a average paid admin, why spend two weeks by a linux guru?
You're kidding yourself if you think a good Windows network can be set up in two hours whereas a Linux network is going to take two weeks. That's a gross exaggeration. And even if it DID take two weeks to get the Linux network up and rolling, guess what? It's worth it because you save a shitload of time not having to fuck around with Active Directory/Microsoft Exchange/etc when it gives you problems.
IT on a basic level is not something that adds immense value so why spend a lot on it?
Wait, whoa, what? IT doesn't add value? Just TRY doing business in a large company in 2009 without IT, then come back to me and try to tell me IT--when done right--doesn't add immense value to your business.
Yeah, and that's why one must consider the credibility of the source when weighing anecdotal evidence. Let's take myself, for instance. I am extremely good at sorting out bullshit from credible information when doing research. The end result is I am able to learn new things very quickly, and with much less trial and error than others.
Then there's a guy I know who, in this respect, is the complete opposite. If two people are trying to give him advice, a dumb ass who doesn't know what he's talking about and another guy who is an expert on the subject, odds are he'll end up listening to the dumb ass and ignore what the expert is saying. It's like he forms preconceived notions about the subject (which are totally wrong) and then believes the dumb ass because that guy's ideas more closely match his own. Or if the dumb ass in question is a family member or someone he looks up to, he'll just accept that guys ideas by default.
The end result is he is absolutely worthless at problem solving. Trying to diagnose the simplest problem with an electronic circuit is beyond him. Not because he doesn't have an expert on hand who has tried to teach him, but because his Uncle said try such-and-such instead. Completely worthless advice, but it's his Uncle who's a pretty good hunter and a funny guy, so he's the one to listen to, and damn what the electronics expert has to say about it.
Oh, and it certainly wasn't a surprise when I found out this guy also believes in the occult; i.e. psychic phenomenon, alchemy, dowsing, etc.
So while anecdotal evidence may not be useful in strict scientific settings, it can be extremely useful for human beings attempting to recognize patterns and learn new information quickly. It can also lead you to a life mediocrity (or even death) if you lack critical thinking skills, so it's a double edged sword for sure.
Apparently you've never been involved in crime before. It's nothing like the movies. Yes, when talking about larger criminal organizations such as the mafia, there IS "honor amongst thieves." If they were all just a bunch of hooligans who ran around killing and cheating each other indiscriminately, they never would have grown as large as they have. When you don't have the law on your side, a certain amount of trust is required to hold together such an operation. You lose a lot of trust when you start double crossing your allies for no good reason.
Most people would refuse to do this deed, even for very large sums of money, without a moment's hesitation because they wouldn't be able to live with their guilty conscience.
Really? So if someone walked up to you and said "Here is a briefcase with $10 million dollars in small, unmarked bills. All you have to do is pilot this old ship out to the middle of the ocean, abandon ship on a lifeboat and row over to your buddy's yacht, then press this red button on the remote control from a safe distance. The cash is yours to keep and nobody will ever know about it. Deal?" you'd say NO to that? You might claim you would, but I seriously doubt that you would turn this down "without any hesitation" if this actually happened to you right now. Perhaps YOU might say no in public, and perhaps a lot of people would say no if asked in public. But I'd bet big money that 90% of average Joes on the street--if approached in private--would have no problem agreeing to do it. Their conscience wouldn't even enter into play at all, only the fear of getting caught.
I know I'd do it in a heartbeat and I'm not ashamed to admit that. Toxic waste is bad, sure, but if you sunk one shipload into a 50,000 foot trench in the middle of the Atlantic, how much harm could it possibly do? And I damn sure could use $10 million bucks. Shit, I'd probably do it for $100k if I was certain I wouldn't get caught.
Hey troll, I'm from Alabama. Even the dumbest redneck out there doesn't harbor any resentment of intellectualism. On the contrary, most everyone here has plenty of respect for people who are smart, as long as they're not smart asses, like a lot of holier-than-thou "Oh you're from Alabama...did you marry your sister? *snicker*" douchebags I've met from San Francisco--and particularly New York. And yes, we have plenty of smart people in this state, most of whom were raised with much better attitude, class, and manners than you portray. So how about you take your intellectual elitism and shove it up your ass, you ignorant and bigoted mother fucker?
From what I gather, there might have been around 500 cases of fires from Pintos being rear ended.
How many millions of Pintos were sold again?
It might interest you to know that the later model Ford Crown Vic have the problems with fuel leakage on rear impact as the Pinto, yet nobody calls the Crown Vic a flaming death trap.
The Pinto is an example of what bad publicity can do to one's image, and nothing more. It is certainly not the most dangerous car ever built, not by a long shot.
Not only that, but the use of Javascript for EVERYTHING, even where there is absolutely no reason to use it. Try disabling Javascript in your browser some day then browse the web. You will be shocked at what this breaks. Oh, and NONE of those web sites will failover gracefully to a non-Javascript version. Maybe 5% will print a warning banner saying this site needs Javascript to function properly, but that's about it.
This is why, after we get some kind of health care reform, car insurance reform needs to be next. Car insurance is a racket, plain and simple. Insurance should not even be required--and if we had a "no fault" insurance system nationwide, it wouldn't be. Each person would insure his own vehicle, not the other guy's. This way broke college students who drive $500 cars wouldn't have to fork over hundreds of dollars a month in insurance. Insured drivers wouldn't have to worry about being hit by uninsured drivers who can't afford to pay for repairs.
I'm all for requiring extensive training and testing to get a driver's license. But why should people who need to drive be bent over the table by exorbitant insurance costs? Driving is way more expensive than it should be.
And before some city slicker hippie jumps in here saying "that's a good thing", let me ask you this: have you ever lived in rural Alabama? Iowa? Kansas? Texas? Anywhere in the U.S. besides some densely packed city? Driving in 90% of America is mandatory, at least for those who want to eat. Extremely high insurance rates don't discourage driving, they just work as another money sink that makes the poor poorer. Isn't that one of the things that you people consistently rail against?
Interesting note, piracy forces prices higher which forces a reaction to integrate ever changing DRM.
Wait, what? A game company would have to be idiots to raise prices because of piracy. If anything, piracy should lower prices, right? If you aren't selling enough copies of your game at the current price (for whatever reason) then the solution is to lower prices to a more reasonable selling point. If you still can't make enough profit, that's not because of piracy--it's because your game is a piece of shit or run of the mill game that nobody wants. It's very convenient to blame the users for every poor business decision your company makes, but the end result of such stupidity is bankruptcy. You just couldn't cut it. Don't worry though, other companies will adapt to the changing times instead of sitting around whining about their sense of entitlement, and those companies will prosper.
I learned to type "by myself" and I can type 120 words per minute at the max, 90 wpm comfortably--using 3 or 4 fingers at the most. And I have never had the slightest symptoms of repetitve stress or any discomfort when typing.
It's just like anything else--the more you do it, the faster and better you'll become. The people who hunt and peck and only type 40 words per minute are the ones who don't really do a whole lot of typing.
But before you go after the environmentalists with guns, you should probably consider that in the grand scheme of things, the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
I bet it's a pretty big problem for the people who just lost a multi-million dollar tower.
Huh, may be a regional thing. Port 25 is not blocked on my service. Maybe my local Comcast office is just plain exceptional, or maybe yours just plain sucks. Hard to tell without seeing others' experiences.
Perhaps if you were actually capable of reading and processing what the GP was saying, instead of just making wild assumptions and ridiculing him, you would see that he did in fact win the argument--by forfeiture, since nobody else even bothered to show.
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Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
Interesting question. The Big Mac is testament to the power of mass production. This is a concept closely tied to American industry, since it was primarily Americans such as Henry Ford who used this concept in the late 1800s/early 1900s to revolutionize the world.
The ingredients used are nothing special. They are cheap, and are produced in the cheapest way possible before being shipped en-masse to restaurants across the planet, where Big Macs are slapped together by the millions daily by a huge minimum wage workforce. The individual ingredients aren't made exclusively at a single location, as that would be inefficient; instead they are manufactured in facilities across the world to specific standards, packaged in standard packaging, and shipped to restaurants on specific schedules, where they are then stored, cooked, and assembled into burgers using standardized equipment and procedures.
Despite the flaws and variations inherent in the process, when you order a Big Mac you know exactly what you're getting, no matter if you are in New York, Bumfuck Oklahoma, or Syria. The burger is not gourmet food by any means, but it's cheap, fast, and good enough--which are core values of American culture, if anything is, and have been for a long time.
Consider World War II, and Panzer tanks vs Sherman tanks. The Panzers were advanced, complicated, well designed, expensive and hard to produce tanks. The Sherman was a flawed piece of shit, but Americans could slap ten Shermans together in the same time it took to build one Panzer. If one Panzer gets blown up it's a setback, but if a Sherman blows up or breaks down, oh well, just roll in another to replace it. Guess who won that war?
I could go on, as there are many more examples, but my point has been made. Thanks for the interesting post. I find the study of human cultures fascinating.
What part of "74,000 milse on the odometer, which was broken" did you overlook?
What part of "'The frame was sound and all the body panels were sound,' he said. It had a 3.9-liter 6-cylinder engine and was in driving condition." did you overlook?
Sad to see you modded flamebait. I think you're right.
Suit yourself. I'm self employed and loving it, mainly because I don't have to wake up to a fucking alarm clock. It's amazing how much better I feel these days.
If someone can see it, they can take it down. I'd use a hot air balloon with a basket full of explosives and some kind of rudimentary maneuvering system, maybe some small rockets or something. Mohammed guides the balloon to its target using a good pair of binoculars and a radio remote, perhaps with the aid of a second spotter. Use the wind to get the balloon within a certain distance, use the maneuvering system to get it beside the blimp, then trigger the explosives. Perhaps harder to do than it is to describe, but it could be done, and on a reasonable budget too.
The hard part, of course, will be finding the blimp to begin with. That problem can be solved by using your network of informants and spotters to follow it from take-off until it reaches its destination, or at least until it reaches a point where it can be intercepted en-route.
Fuck you, Mozilla. All I want is a simple fucking browser that does its damn job and does it well. That's what Firefox used to be. Now it's a bloated piece of shit that randomly freezes for seconds (or even minutes) at a time, randomly crashes due to shit design (Flash should NOT be allowed to crash the fucking browser!), ignores commands I give it (such as "STOP LOADING THE FUCKING PAGE"), loads pages slower than every other browser on the planet, goes to hell in a handbasket and refuses to save my tabs whenever I make the mistake of upgrading the browser while it's still running, and swallows every byte of free memory it can wrap its claws around. It's fucking garbage. And now, instead of concentrating all effort on fixing these horrendous flaws, the clueless fools at Mozilla want to turn their attention to wrecking the UI instead? These people should be lined up against the wall and shot.
That's it. I'm done with Firefox. I'll never recommend it to anyone ever again. Take this pile of shit you call a "browser" and shove it up your ass, Mozilla. I'm switching to something else, ANYTHING else.
The Hoover Dam is a big ass wall, and it DOES generate money year after year. Should the people who built the wall receive its yearly revenues instead of the people who paid for the wall's construction and thus own it?
An apartment building, which is a collection of walls, generates money year after year. Should the people who built the building receives its yearly revenues instead of the people who paid for the building's construction and thus own it?
If You can spend 2 hours and have a domain deployment with all the features You need done by a average paid admin, why spend two weeks by a linux guru?
You're kidding yourself if you think a good Windows network can be set up in two hours whereas a Linux network is going to take two weeks. That's a gross exaggeration. And even if it DID take two weeks to get the Linux network up and rolling, guess what? It's worth it because you save a shitload of time not having to fuck around with Active Directory/Microsoft Exchange/etc when it gives you problems.
IT on a basic level is not something that adds immense value so why spend a lot on it?
Wait, whoa, what? IT doesn't add value? Just TRY doing business in a large company in 2009 without IT, then come back to me and try to tell me IT--when done right--doesn't add immense value to your business.
...I'm guessing this is a joke?
Yeah, and that's why one must consider the credibility of the source when weighing anecdotal evidence. Let's take myself, for instance. I am extremely good at sorting out bullshit from credible information when doing research. The end result is I am able to learn new things very quickly, and with much less trial and error than others.
Then there's a guy I know who, in this respect, is the complete opposite. If two people are trying to give him advice, a dumb ass who doesn't know what he's talking about and another guy who is an expert on the subject, odds are he'll end up listening to the dumb ass and ignore what the expert is saying. It's like he forms preconceived notions about the subject (which are totally wrong) and then believes the dumb ass because that guy's ideas more closely match his own. Or if the dumb ass in question is a family member or someone he looks up to, he'll just accept that guys ideas by default.
The end result is he is absolutely worthless at problem solving. Trying to diagnose the simplest problem with an electronic circuit is beyond him. Not because he doesn't have an expert on hand who has tried to teach him, but because his Uncle said try such-and-such instead. Completely worthless advice, but it's his Uncle who's a pretty good hunter and a funny guy, so he's the one to listen to, and damn what the electronics expert has to say about it.
Oh, and it certainly wasn't a surprise when I found out this guy also believes in the occult; i.e. psychic phenomenon, alchemy, dowsing, etc.
So while anecdotal evidence may not be useful in strict scientific settings, it can be extremely useful for human beings attempting to recognize patterns and learn new information quickly. It can also lead you to a life mediocrity (or even death) if you lack critical thinking skills, so it's a double edged sword for sure.
Apparently you've never been involved in crime before. It's nothing like the movies. Yes, when talking about larger criminal organizations such as the mafia, there IS "honor amongst thieves." If they were all just a bunch of hooligans who ran around killing and cheating each other indiscriminately, they never would have grown as large as they have. When you don't have the law on your side, a certain amount of trust is required to hold together such an operation. You lose a lot of trust when you start double crossing your allies for no good reason.
Most people would refuse to do this deed, even for very large sums of money, without a moment's hesitation because they wouldn't be able to live with their guilty conscience.
Really? So if someone walked up to you and said "Here is a briefcase with $10 million dollars in small, unmarked bills. All you have to do is pilot this old ship out to the middle of the ocean, abandon ship on a lifeboat and row over to your buddy's yacht, then press this red button on the remote control from a safe distance. The cash is yours to keep and nobody will ever know about it. Deal?" you'd say NO to that? You might claim you would, but I seriously doubt that you would turn this down "without any hesitation" if this actually happened to you right now. Perhaps YOU might say no in public, and perhaps a lot of people would say no if asked in public. But I'd bet big money that 90% of average Joes on the street--if approached in private--would have no problem agreeing to do it. Their conscience wouldn't even enter into play at all, only the fear of getting caught.
I know I'd do it in a heartbeat and I'm not ashamed to admit that. Toxic waste is bad, sure, but if you sunk one shipload into a 50,000 foot trench in the middle of the Atlantic, how much harm could it possibly do? And I damn sure could use $10 million bucks. Shit, I'd probably do it for $100k if I was certain I wouldn't get caught.
Hey troll, I'm from Alabama. Even the dumbest redneck out there doesn't harbor any resentment of intellectualism. On the contrary, most everyone here has plenty of respect for people who are smart, as long as they're not smart asses, like a lot of holier-than-thou "Oh you're from Alabama...did you marry your sister? *snicker*" douchebags I've met from San Francisco--and particularly New York. And yes, we have plenty of smart people in this state, most of whom were raised with much better attitude, class, and manners than you portray. So how about you take your intellectual elitism and shove it up your ass, you ignorant and bigoted mother fucker?
From what I gather, there might have been around 500 cases of fires from Pintos being rear ended.
How many millions of Pintos were sold again?
It might interest you to know that the later model Ford Crown Vic have the problems with fuel leakage on rear impact as the Pinto, yet nobody calls the Crown Vic a flaming death trap.
The Pinto is an example of what bad publicity can do to one's image, and nothing more. It is certainly not the most dangerous car ever built, not by a long shot.
...and all of them on gigabit ethernet connections, I'm sure.
Try using Ebay on a low speed connection some time, such as shared bandwidth over a satellite, for example.
Not only that, but the use of Javascript for EVERYTHING, even where there is absolutely no reason to use it. Try disabling Javascript in your browser some day then browse the web. You will be shocked at what this breaks. Oh, and NONE of those web sites will failover gracefully to a non-Javascript version. Maybe 5% will print a warning banner saying this site needs Javascript to function properly, but that's about it.
This is why, after we get some kind of health care reform, car insurance reform needs to be next. Car insurance is a racket, plain and simple. Insurance should not even be required--and if we had a "no fault" insurance system nationwide, it wouldn't be. Each person would insure his own vehicle, not the other guy's. This way broke college students who drive $500 cars wouldn't have to fork over hundreds of dollars a month in insurance. Insured drivers wouldn't have to worry about being hit by uninsured drivers who can't afford to pay for repairs.
I'm all for requiring extensive training and testing to get a driver's license. But why should people who need to drive be bent over the table by exorbitant insurance costs? Driving is way more expensive than it should be.
And before some city slicker hippie jumps in here saying "that's a good thing", let me ask you this: have you ever lived in rural Alabama? Iowa? Kansas? Texas? Anywhere in the U.S. besides some densely packed city? Driving in 90% of America is mandatory, at least for those who want to eat. Extremely high insurance rates don't discourage driving, they just work as another money sink that makes the poor poorer. Isn't that one of the things that you people consistently rail against?
Interesting note, piracy forces prices higher which forces a reaction to integrate ever changing DRM.
Wait, what? A game company would have to be idiots to raise prices because of piracy. If anything, piracy should lower prices, right? If you aren't selling enough copies of your game at the current price (for whatever reason) then the solution is to lower prices to a more reasonable selling point. If you still can't make enough profit, that's not because of piracy--it's because your game is a piece of shit or run of the mill game that nobody wants. It's very convenient to blame the users for every poor business decision your company makes, but the end result of such stupidity is bankruptcy. You just couldn't cut it. Don't worry though, other companies will adapt to the changing times instead of sitting around whining about their sense of entitlement, and those companies will prosper.
Starving students spend more than that on snowboards
Yeah, and you could download a bad ass snowboard for free off the internet, how many of these starving students would find other uses for that money?
I learned to type "by myself" and I can type 120 words per minute at the max, 90 wpm comfortably--using 3 or 4 fingers at the most. And I have never had the slightest symptoms of repetitve stress or any discomfort when typing.
It's just like anything else--the more you do it, the faster and better you'll become. The people who hunt and peck and only type 40 words per minute are the ones who don't really do a whole lot of typing.
The fact that practically no-one uses a pen these days seems to have escaped the 19th century educators.
By "practically no-one", you mean everyone, right?
But before you go after the environmentalists with guns, you should probably consider that in the grand scheme of things, the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
I bet it's a pretty big problem for the people who just lost a multi-million dollar tower.
Huh, may be a regional thing. Port 25 is not blocked on my service. Maybe my local Comcast office is just plain exceptional, or maybe yours just plain sucks. Hard to tell without seeing others' experiences.
Perhaps if you were actually capable of reading and processing what the GP was saying, instead of just making wild assumptions and ridiculing him, you would see that he did in fact win the argument--by forfeiture, since nobody else even bothered to show.
IT is truly arrogant to believe you are such a great communicator that nothing you write might be misunderstood.
Idiotic vitriol aside, what he wrote WAS pretty damn unambigious. There isn't really any way he could have worded it more clearly.