All right, all right... Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what has the government ever done for us?
Sanitation: usually run by private companies (Allied Waste, etc.) at no tax cost an less cost per month than Netflix.
Medicine: FDA/etc. only serve to make sure nothing breaks too badly. They have helped prevent abuses at times but are also guilty of preventing life-saving treatments for questionable reasons.
Wine: Really?
Public order: Sorta, but most of the really useful stuff is local, not federal. Just look at the DEA/BATF and the Mexican cartel gun sting (and others) for myriad reasons why they suck at it.
Irrigation: you mean like the flooding all along the artificially screwed up Mississippi this year? Yeah, bad example, brah.
Roads: another love/hate situation. In Texas, road crews are usually pretty efficient (block off a quarter mile of road for a few weeks, then move on to the next quarter mile) where Louisiana road crews are the epitome of sloth (ever drive I-10 in the 80s/90s? Dozens of miles of interstate reduced to single-lane traffic and you MIGHT find one truck every few miles).
Fresh water: fair enough but again this is largely a local government issue, not federal. Then again, the science behind flourination and other treatments isn't settled yet, so not sure if this isn't something in a decade we'll all be decrying as another government boondoggle.
Public health: Yes/no. Smallpox and such, great. DDT and others, not so much.
We could argue for ages about government vs private sector and not agree. It's a good thing we have the ability to disagree without the government hauling us off to jail, eh?;)
This criticism isn't applied uniformly. Somehow getting funding from these guys taints everything they do regardless of whether they publish verifiable data. Yet we don't apply the same standard to say, "news" outlets that contribute 85% to one political party. Where else might these standards be conveniently brushed under the rug?
I suspect if you dig deep enough, you'll find some evidence of this in one form or another and to varying degrees for every single scientist in existence. Good science can be verified.
NY City code enforcement officer fines man for mining gold without a permit. The city's spokesman commented, "If we're going to hold grade-school girls with lemonade stands to our stringent codes, we can't rightly overlook this guy, can we?" The mayor could not be reached for comment.
The UI has everything hidden behind searches or submenus or whatever to free up screen real estate on smaller screens. On my dual-26" monitor setup, I don't want buried and simple. I want the 10-15 main apps/scripts I use on the front page and the start menu to show me all the admin/config options in a standard menu the way I've had it everywhere else.
Maybe I'm getting old and fuddy-duddy but I found this interface a clunky and unusable attempt to look like a mix of Windows 7, iOS, Android and Mac OSX. The search box in Windows 7's start menu still shows me all the control panel/admin task items just like the start menu. The Unity search box could not find my network config, my updater app or a bunch of other apps I'd been happily using before switching.
I'll be honest and say I read no documentation or tutorials on how to use Unity but I can't remember the last time I had to read a book on how to use a flippin' menu system.
...that all of these complaints about the Patriot Act having no meaningful review in committee or otherwise before it was passed and ditto with the current extension didn't happen when Obamacare was passed with an admittedly unreviewed 2000+ pages of legislation.
"I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill!' What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?" -- John Conyers (D-MI)
Anti-intellectuals on the right? Honey, I grew up in Louisiana where anti-intellectualism is a secondary religion, and I've yet to meet one of those that voted republican/independent or called themselves right/conservative.
Drudge succeeds at the newsfeed game for the same reason Google did as a search engine: Just The Facts, Ma'am(tm). Go to CNN, Fox, Huffpo, whatever and you are bombarded by flashy-blinky-OMGTHEYMAKETHATCOLOR? bits of stuff that may or may not be related to news. And drudge is text, making it easy to view on mobile devices.
I really don't care if my news site has New and Improved(tm) columns and colors every 6 months. I'm only here for the data, bro.
Agreed regarding drugs like extasy[sic]/pot and the other low-risk drugs. Re: the legalization of cocaine/heroine/meth, I might agree with you to a point but we have (here in the USofA) an administration that is:
* trying to ban "junk food" in schools and restaurants either through direct bans or by mandating expensive analysis and labeling
* saying that end-of-life decisions should be at least partially based on the costs to the health system as a whole
* have spent billions per year decrying the evils of Big Tobacco(tm) and its effects on the health care system
* spend billions per year investigating trace elements and how they affect public health in order to (among other things) reduce health care costs.
What makes anyone think that, considering the above, they would all of a sudden legalize substances that are known to cause catastrophic health/psychological problems in a significant portion of their users?
I mean, I'm all in favor of removing the warning labels on life and letting Darwinian evolution take its course (would sure as hell make manufacturing a lot cheaper) but I don't think the current hypocrites in charge of world governments would be willing to condemn their own ethics history. There are things we could do as a public that would largely mitigate any crime that could spring up from legalization of the harder drugs but the current panty-waists in charge of things would see it as too much power in the hands of individual citizens and, thus, surely pooh-pooh it as more dangerous than the problem it would solve.
That folks outside of America believe the statist propaganda or that it's American Christians that are the root of all perceived evils laid at its feet. Most Americans I've ever known are either living in a dream world where nothing bad ever happens and if we could only just Get Along(tm), everything would work out in the end, or they are pissed at all the liberties that the idiot voters in metro regions keep giving away to the ideologues and corrupt leadership factions in government, mostly at the federal level.
What I think a lot of you furriners(hic) miss is the false dichotomy we see here in the U.S.: if we go help people in other countries, we're imperialist pigs fighting illegal wars for oil/resources -- if we don't go help people in other countries, we're arrogant in our wealth and don't care about any "brown" people. Why are these the only damn stories that ever get traction? For all the "stop meddling in our politics" complaints, people sure don't hesitate to meddle in ours.
I think the simplest answer is that the vast majority of people the world over just want to be left the hell alone to earn a decent living without being fiscally raped by governments to fund every little pet project and failed social experiment that informs their guilty conscience. The road to Hell* is paved with good intentions.
...the "no shit, Sherlock?" thread. If it seems blatantly obvious to the variegated crowd here on slashdot, you'd think maybe the **AA would consider firing their market research personnel. If you drop the price of your goods by 80% but sales go up by 400%, you're now making the same money but with a lot higher market penetration, right? Is my math wrong? (Likely wrong -- I attended Louisiana public schools.:P)
Think about it. The results would obviously be rather useless if it was in your shirt pocket, but if it's in the console or on the seat, you don't need to do any fancy up-then-down-then-blah characterization. Just have the software monitor the vibrations from normal road noise and isolate spikes in the pattern. You don't have to know the pattern ahead of time. Let the software decide what the noise floor is based on the aggregate data it's seeing over X seconds, then watch for the abnormals. Even if you get the occasional person bumping it or picking it up or running over the bumps in the middle of the road, when the "home office" processing software does the mass data analysis, it will weed out the flyers and only identify the spikes that show up consistently. They don't have to know what kind of bump it is, just that there is a bump in the road that is bad enough to show up at a consistent rate and that would trigger an inspection to find out if it's expected (train tracks) or unexpected (pothole/buckling/etc.).
It doesn't have to be perfect: just good enough to identify the bad areas. Even if it was horrendously inaccurate, an automated system that was nearly free and got 30% right would be better than waiting on people to call in reports with erroneous or hard-to-understand data.
Foxconn is one of the better Chinese employers. There are a lot of employers that are a whole lot worse.
This is a meaningless statement. Primarily because saying there are a lot of companies that are worse is telling us something we already know about ANY country. Further, stating Foxconn is one of the better Chinese employers removes any context. I was at their Long Hua facility for two months a few years back. Foxconn is the running joke of the Shenzhen tech area: they pay much worse than almost all of their competitors, so employees work there for 6-12 months just to get enough experience so that the other guys will hire them...for 140-180% or more pay.
One wonders what your agenda was in making the claim in the first place.
This. Among other issues. I have a friend who just went to a Windows MObile 7 phone and he tells me even that was a major upgrade from his iPhone 4 due to primarily usability and performance among other issues. Naturally, he didn't specify and my father's brother's sister's cousin's former roomate probably wouldn't bother elaborating if you asked me for a "qualified, trusted source or GTFO," but hey, we voted with our wallets, which is what the fanboys usually tell us to do anyway.;)
Your strawman called. He's been abused enough and wants to go home now.
None of my right-wing friends have ever held a "cops can do no wrong" agenda-driven viewpoint. As far as I can tell, the gulf exists primarily between the "if a cop does anything that looks rough it MUST BE ABUSE" viewpoint and the "well, you don't really know all the details leading up to the problem that put said 'victim' in a position to draw the 'abuse' they maybe rightly suffered" viewpoint. Case in point is all the dark horse instigators the left places at right-wing events with the sole intention of causing an "incident" that might reflect badly on the organizers. None of these shenanigans would work if the media actually did their jobs and provided honest investigative journalism instead of just the presentation of foregone conclusions. A 30-second video tells the entire story, AMIRITE?
Before you lash out, consider that we're no longer talking about Rodney King types of abuse; we're talking about a random bump or harsh language or some other silly shit that you wouldn't even get in trouble for in high school. It's all about the any-violence-is-evil crowd making it so you can't have an honest fisticuffs now and then when people bite off more than they can chew.
The ESA, government and ??AA caught being sneaky and underhanded in order to fuck over another citizen? I'm surprised it's even news except when the tallies of nefarious activities they've been caught at passes each 100/1000/n+^10 milestone. And yet they still get to do business.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." The quote applies to this because if the good guys arbitrarily limit themselves to only using "fair fight" morality, the bad guys start with a clear advantage. I'm sorry it impinges on some of you folks' rose-colored worldview but sometimes, bad people need to be dealt with using their own tactics. It sucks. And we'd all love it if we could just sit down at the table and talk things over. Unfortunately, the world is a dangerous place because self-interest works differently for people depending on their culture.
A question: if the best defense is a good offense, and there is never a good excuse for violence, what then?
Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something.
Slashdot Mirror
Sanitation: usually run by private companies (Allied Waste, etc.) at no tax cost an less cost per month than Netflix.
Medicine: FDA/etc. only serve to make sure nothing breaks too badly. They have helped prevent abuses at times but are also guilty of preventing life-saving treatments for questionable reasons.
Wine: Really?
Public order: Sorta, but most of the really useful stuff is local, not federal. Just look at the DEA/BATF and the Mexican cartel gun sting (and others) for myriad reasons why they suck at it.
Irrigation: you mean like the flooding all along the artificially screwed up Mississippi this year? Yeah, bad example, brah.
Roads: another love/hate situation. In Texas, road crews are usually pretty efficient (block off a quarter mile of road for a few weeks, then move on to the next quarter mile) where Louisiana road crews are the epitome of sloth (ever drive I-10 in the 80s/90s? Dozens of miles of interstate reduced to single-lane traffic and you MIGHT find one truck every few miles).
Fresh water: fair enough but again this is largely a local government issue, not federal. Then again, the science behind flourination and other treatments isn't settled yet, so not sure if this isn't something in a decade we'll all be decrying as another government boondoggle.
Public health: Yes/no. Smallpox and such, great. DDT and others, not so much.
We could argue for ages about government vs private sector and not agree. It's a good thing we have the ability to disagree without the government hauling us off to jail, eh? ;)
Now if only we'd apply that to congressmen and business entities deemed "too big to fail."
Classy, as always.
Sounds a whole lot like "sniff mode" commonly used on (non-sucky implementations of) Bluetooth.
This criticism isn't applied uniformly. Somehow getting funding from these guys taints everything they do regardless of whether they publish verifiable data. Yet we don't apply the same standard to say, "news" outlets that contribute 85% to one political party. Where else might these standards be conveniently brushed under the rug?
I suspect if you dig deep enough, you'll find some evidence of this in one form or another and to varying degrees for every single scientist in existence. Good science can be verified.
Fact: missing the punchline(s) does not mean there wasn't a joke.
NY City code enforcement officer fines man for mining gold without a permit. The city's spokesman commented, "If we're going to hold grade-school girls with lemonade stands to our stringent codes, we can't rightly overlook this guy, can we?" The mayor could not be reached for comment.
The UI has everything hidden behind searches or submenus or whatever to free up screen real estate on smaller screens. On my dual-26" monitor setup, I don't want buried and simple. I want the 10-15 main apps/scripts I use on the front page and the start menu to show me all the admin/config options in a standard menu the way I've had it everywhere else.
Maybe I'm getting old and fuddy-duddy but I found this interface a clunky and unusable attempt to look like a mix of Windows 7, iOS, Android and Mac OSX. The search box in Windows 7's start menu still shows me all the control panel/admin task items just like the start menu. The Unity search box could not find my network config, my updater app or a bunch of other apps I'd been happily using before switching.
I'll be honest and say I read no documentation or tutorials on how to use Unity but I can't remember the last time I had to read a book on how to use a flippin' menu system.
...that all of these complaints about the Patriot Act having no meaningful review in committee or otherwise before it was passed and ditto with the current extension didn't happen when Obamacare was passed with an admittedly unreviewed 2000+ pages of legislation.
Anti-intellectuals on the right? Honey, I grew up in Louisiana where anti-intellectualism is a secondary religion, and I've yet to meet one of those that voted republican/independent or called themselves right/conservative.
Wait, so being Jewish is now considered "non-conformist?"
http://www.compression.ca/act/act-win.html
Drudge succeeds at the newsfeed game for the same reason Google did as a search engine: Just The Facts, Ma'am(tm). Go to CNN, Fox, Huffpo, whatever and you are bombarded by flashy-blinky-OMGTHEYMAKETHATCOLOR? bits of stuff that may or may not be related to news. And drudge is text, making it easy to view on mobile devices.
I really don't care if my news site has New and Improved(tm) columns and colors every 6 months. I'm only here for the data, bro.
I mean, it's good that the asshole is dead but we need a(nother) flamewar on slashdot about it?
But I really wish these "patent trolls" and their ilk would get the fuck out of Texas -- they're making us normal Texans look bad.
Agreed regarding drugs like extasy[sic]/pot and the other low-risk drugs. Re: the legalization of cocaine/heroine/meth, I might agree with you to a point but we have (here in the USofA) an administration that is:
* trying to ban "junk food" in schools and restaurants either through direct bans or by mandating expensive analysis and labeling
* saying that end-of-life decisions should be at least partially based on the costs to the health system as a whole
* have spent billions per year decrying the evils of Big Tobacco(tm) and its effects on the health care system
* spend billions per year investigating trace elements and how they affect public health in order to (among other things) reduce health care costs.
What makes anyone think that, considering the above, they would all of a sudden legalize substances that are known to cause catastrophic health/psychological problems in a significant portion of their users?
I mean, I'm all in favor of removing the warning labels on life and letting Darwinian evolution take its course (would sure as hell make manufacturing a lot cheaper) but I don't think the current hypocrites in charge of world governments would be willing to condemn their own ethics history. There are things we could do as a public that would largely mitigate any crime that could spring up from legalization of the harder drugs but the current panty-waists in charge of things would see it as too much power in the hands of individual citizens and, thus, surely pooh-pooh it as more dangerous than the problem it would solve.
That folks outside of America believe the statist propaganda or that it's American Christians that are the root of all perceived evils laid at its feet. Most Americans I've ever known are either living in a dream world where nothing bad ever happens and if we could only just Get Along(tm), everything would work out in the end, or they are pissed at all the liberties that the idiot voters in metro regions keep giving away to the ideologues and corrupt leadership factions in government, mostly at the federal level.
What I think a lot of you furriners(hic) miss is the false dichotomy we see here in the U.S.: if we go help people in other countries, we're imperialist pigs fighting illegal wars for oil/resources -- if we don't go help people in other countries, we're arrogant in our wealth and don't care about any "brown" people. Why are these the only damn stories that ever get traction? For all the "stop meddling in our politics" complaints, people sure don't hesitate to meddle in ours.
I think the simplest answer is that the vast majority of people the world over just want to be left the hell alone to earn a decent living without being fiscally raped by governments to fund every little pet project and failed social experiment that informs their guilty conscience. The road to Hell* is paved with good intentions.
I'm sure it'll all be Bush's fault in the end.
...the "no shit, Sherlock?" thread. If it seems blatantly obvious to the variegated crowd here on slashdot, you'd think maybe the **AA would consider firing their market research personnel. If you drop the price of your goods by 80% but sales go up by 400%, you're now making the same money but with a lot higher market penetration, right? Is my math wrong? (Likely wrong -- I attended Louisiana public schools. :P)
Think about it. The results would obviously be rather useless if it was in your shirt pocket, but if it's in the console or on the seat, you don't need to do any fancy up-then-down-then-blah characterization. Just have the software monitor the vibrations from normal road noise and isolate spikes in the pattern. You don't have to know the pattern ahead of time. Let the software decide what the noise floor is based on the aggregate data it's seeing over X seconds, then watch for the abnormals. Even if you get the occasional person bumping it or picking it up or running over the bumps in the middle of the road, when the "home office" processing software does the mass data analysis, it will weed out the flyers and only identify the spikes that show up consistently. They don't have to know what kind of bump it is, just that there is a bump in the road that is bad enough to show up at a consistent rate and that would trigger an inspection to find out if it's expected (train tracks) or unexpected (pothole/buckling/etc.).
It doesn't have to be perfect: just good enough to identify the bad areas. Even if it was horrendously inaccurate, an automated system that was nearly free and got 30% right would be better than waiting on people to call in reports with erroneous or hard-to-understand data.
...that NYT does all this work on StuxNet and so little on the current US administration and its allies?
Foxconn is one of the better Chinese employers. There are a lot of employers that are a whole lot worse.
This is a meaningless statement. Primarily because saying there are a lot of companies that are worse is telling us something we already know about ANY country. Further, stating Foxconn is one of the better Chinese employers removes any context. I was at their Long Hua facility for two months a few years back. Foxconn is the running joke of the Shenzhen tech area: they pay much worse than almost all of their competitors, so employees work there for 6-12 months just to get enough experience so that the other guys will hire them...for 140-180% or more pay.
One wonders what your agenda was in making the claim in the first place.
This. Among other issues. I have a friend who just went to a Windows MObile 7 phone and he tells me even that was a major upgrade from his iPhone 4 due to primarily usability and performance among other issues. Naturally, he didn't specify and my father's brother's sister's cousin's former roomate probably wouldn't bother elaborating if you asked me for a "qualified, trusted source or GTFO," but hey, we voted with our wallets, which is what the fanboys usually tell us to do anyway. ;)
Your strawman called. He's been abused enough and wants to go home now.
None of my right-wing friends have ever held a "cops can do no wrong" agenda-driven viewpoint. As far as I can tell, the gulf exists primarily between the "if a cop does anything that looks rough it MUST BE ABUSE" viewpoint and the "well, you don't really know all the details leading up to the problem that put said 'victim' in a position to draw the 'abuse' they maybe rightly suffered" viewpoint. Case in point is all the dark horse instigators the left places at right-wing events with the sole intention of causing an "incident" that might reflect badly on the organizers. None of these shenanigans would work if the media actually did their jobs and provided honest investigative journalism instead of just the presentation of foregone conclusions. A 30-second video tells the entire story, AMIRITE?
Before you lash out, consider that we're no longer talking about Rodney King types of abuse; we're talking about a random bump or harsh language or some other silly shit that you wouldn't even get in trouble for in high school. It's all about the any-violence-is-evil crowd making it so you can't have an honest fisticuffs now and then when people bite off more than they can chew.
The ESA, government and ??AA caught being sneaky and underhanded in order to fuck over another citizen? I'm surprised it's even news except when the tallies of nefarious activities they've been caught at passes each 100/1000/n+^10 milestone. And yet they still get to do business.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." The quote applies to this because if the good guys arbitrarily limit themselves to only using "fair fight" morality, the bad guys start with a clear advantage. I'm sorry it impinges on some of you folks' rose-colored worldview but sometimes, bad people need to be dealt with using their own tactics. It sucks. And we'd all love it if we could just sit down at the table and talk things over. Unfortunately, the world is a dangerous place because self-interest works differently for people depending on their culture.
A question: if the best defense is a good offense, and there is never a good excuse for violence, what then?
Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something.