Politics are not Pro- or Anti-Science. It is weather the science is political useful for them or not. Otherwise they will be happy putting their head in the sand.
This. If you know anything about lawyers and law, the first tenet is NEVER ADMIT FAULT. No good can come of it. People might then expect you to pay for damages or whatever.
Environmentalists make the mistake thinking that conservatives are stupid. That is not the case. The only thing they care about is that they will not have to pay for or be part of the solution. Any time you spend trying to convince them otherwise is wasted.
The other bit is that politics is never proactive, always reactionary. No environmental protection or anti-pollution law was ever passed until something was already FUBAR, be it due to the London yellow fog, or smog over LA, holes in the ozone layer, or Chinese urban centers shutting down due to respiratory issues. The politicians will maybe finally get around to doing something substantial about AGW after there's a refugee crises from low-lying areas, like the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Louisiana, Florida, etc. Chances are, they still won't blame AGW, since it'll be sea swell from a hurricane/typhoon that does those population centers in, but at some point they'll get tired of throwing money at those places to rebuild. Fortunately there are already a lot of migrant refugee boats in the Mediterranean and Andaman Sea for other reasons, so we're already slowly building a framework for dealing with these kinds of things.
The thing you propose sounds fine. But do they really want to upgrade all of the pumps at once? Sounds like a great way to brick an entire facility.
The only "improvement" I could think of would be to set up some kind of cheap router that can do MAC address filtering, that way you can set up the router to allow only one of each pump to show up as that one silly IP address at a time on a switched network. But then you'll still be able to only do one at a time.
The "right" way to do this is just throw money at the problem and attach a real computer to each pump, with a separate interface to talk to the static IP. Maybe something as small as http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod... or just some generic mini-ITX board in a telecom chassis or whatever.
An IPO is where you get stock in exchange for investing in actual production....
I was able to buy it because someone broke the rules.
Thanks for that story! Yeah, it sounds like that was pretty lucrative, and that's why they have those kinds of rules to keep the plebs out. Good that you were able to get in.
I did manage to pick up a bit of Boeing stock while I worked there in the early phase of my career. Yes, I broke a lot of risk guidelines by investing substantially in one stock that also happened to be my employer. It's certainly time to "make good" and sell it off now, since it easily overshadows all of my other conventional managed/index funds, even though I had originally allocated a smaller fraction to it than anything else. But I'd also just as soon hold on to it for many rationalizations: * BCA used to go in fairly predictable 7-year cycles, but since they merged with their defense wing, that smoothed things out a bit. Also helps that the defense side tends to have revenue during wartime and the commercial side tends to have revenue during peacetime. * I still have plenty of smart friends on the inside so I'll have some warning when they jump ship. For now it sounds like they've been happy with the trimming down of the top-heavy management hierarchy from the time I was there. * They're quite good at spinning the media to keep their stock prices elevated. * As the largest US exporter, they're probably too big to fail(tm), so I'm not too worried about them going under suddenly without some kind of US taxpayer intervention:-P
At the same time, I wouldn't buy any more stock at current prices:P And since it was from an early phase of my career, it's not even really all that much money to spend time worrying about.
Education? I have a degree in one field, and work in another. I don't need education.
I'd love to invest in education (well, I sorta did by marrying a teacher). But there are lots of indications that we're in an educational loan bubble right now which has both driven degree prices way up so high that the students you invest in will likely never be able to pay you back.
So your argument is left to pedantry, the kind where you want exclusive ownership of the now genericized "engineer" tag. well, fire up the coal engine on a choo choo train or shut the hell up.
Eh, this is one of the few pedantic things that I feel ought to worry us. "Financial Engineering" is a disparaging term that drags down all engineers in ABET-accredited fields. A lot of us work in the public trust, and are held accountable for our fuck-ups, even choo-choo or building HVAC engineers. Financial managers who know how to use "the calculus" to do risk management and manipulate the market to jump off the roulette wheel while it's high and leave the mess to everyone else are just plain sociopaths.
<shrug> isn't that exactly what the rich people with all of the money do?:-D
"real" rich people, I mean... I realize that a lot of people who "live richly" are actually in massive debt. As they say... owe the bank a million dollars, and they own you. Owe the bank a billion dollars, and you own the bank.
ABET does not consider "Financial Engineering" to be an engineering field... it's just a bunch of quants setting up a house of cards so they can stretch the value of whatever assets they have available to be worth 15 - 30x more on paper once all of the banks finished loaning everything to each other. Packaging all of the portfolios of sub-prime loans to dilute the risks, and then setting up the rules and insurance so their initial investors get the guaranteed payout and the rest of the public investors that they've convinced to buy into their portfolio gets stuck holding onto the defaulted mortgages. And whatever it is that HFET people do to take a bit off the top of "normal" trades everyone else is trying to conduct, or by feeding wacky headlines to various news feeds to make some of these HFET algorithms flash crash parts of the market so they can buy in low. It stinks, and I resent having not many other viable options for what to do with my 401k savings, but what else can we do with them?
An iPhone is objectively more valuable and useful than the equivalent pile of raw materials. And if one iPhone is 100x as valuable as the raw materials, then 10 iPhones are 1000x as valuable as their raw materials.
From what I've heard of the stock market, it's not really that simple... Sure an iPhone is worth more than the sum of its parts, but Apple is special and has managed to market their brand so people will pay more than what their products are worth. That makes it sound overvalued to me. And Apple is also good at squeezing their suppliers while cornering the market with 1-2 year exclusivity agreements, so if they sell 10x more iPhones, that doesn't necessarily mean a 10x increase in the revenue of all of their suppliers. Not to mention that if the market analysts project that they could grow their sales by 10x, but they run into some supply chain snags and "only" grow their sales by 9x, they've failed the market and all of their stock prices tumble.
Buy stock in a company that makes stuff. It's not a good investment because "stuff" isn't all that valuable anymore to people in the era of 3D printers and rapid manufacturing, but hey, if it makes you happy...
Heh, yeah, investing in companies that make 3D printers and do rapid manufacturing would make me happy:-D . On one hand, it seems to be a good idea to turn stock market investments into useful "stuff" just before it crashes. On the other hand, even useful stuff that no one can afford to buy from you because their savings and investments were wiped out by a stock market crash isn't going to help you make ends meet:-/
Maybe "insults" was poor word choice. It's just kinda strange to see people with strong math skills get sucked into doing stuff for Wall Street when the system is clearly rigged not in your favor. Rather than something, you know, useful to everyone. And then the rest of us are just stuck with 401k savings plans (if we're even that lucky) that we can't really do anything else with, other than play the market and hope someone doesn't screw it all up for us (even though that's exactly what everyone else on the market is there to do).
Yeah, I did have a good "accounting for engineers" class for my MS degree, it was easily more interesting than the other systems classes. Was taught by a brilliant Arthur Anderson guy who was laid off after the Enron scandal, ironically enough. Didn't cover much of the stock market, of course.
Anyways, just hold onto your butts for the next crash, I guess.
Thanks.. I'm sorta at a point in my life where all of those are actually options that are available to me, and I sorta have lower time commitments to my employer & family and a workshop area to start tinkering with some of that on the side.
I'm not at the point where I can actually start using any of my 401k savings towards any of that, though. Supposedly I have an OK but still somewhat aggressive portfolio, but I try to ignore it and let the fund managers do their thing until I see stories like this that remind us that, yes, we're due for another bubble bursting soon, and it could well be some combination of tech/realty/edu loans/energy or even something we don't expect to all come tumbling down.
All those things used to be "the conventional wisdom", but nowadays all of those things have been proven to be quite volatile.
I never believed in "making money from money"... I guess that's called "financial engineering" nowadays? That kinda insults me as an engineer, since we generally abide by physical laws. With financial laws, you're pretty much playing games using other people's rules. Other people who profess to love money above all else, and play the game to generate more money out of "nothing", and if you would just give them some of your money to play with, they'll help you "grow" your money too for a cut of the "take". But they don't add any value to the economy... they "multiply" it. And then they can just take "a little bit off the top", because no one will notice.
I'd love to invest in actual production... you know, things that add value and subtract costs instead of just "multiply" monopoly money. What options are there for that kind of thing?
And the best quote from the Ars comment section was "Darth Vader" is pretty much a Germanic version of "Dark Father"... so for all of Lucas's failings, that " I am your father" moment that the paper is largely based on was likely not one of the serendipitous ones that the paper hopes it to be.
"Han shot first", OTOH, we see cropping up in law ALL THE TIME.
you know, a country made up of multinationals... people who immigrated from various other places. Some of them even still have dual citizenship or more.
Not to be confused with multinational corporations, but those are also a thing that happens, btw.
And I will say the same "Fuck You!" to those who say that "Affirmative Action" is still needed
Well haven't you heard? The American University is a place where Russian professors teach Chinese students.
(As an ironic aside, most martial arts studios in my area are where American masters teach Chinese martial arts to Russians)
Last I checked, Russia still has plenty of quotas on how many Jews are allowed in each of their universities. Otherwise the Jews would totally take over. Fortunately, Jews are welcome to emigrate to Israel or the US and enter decent universities there. Try doing that as a black or hispanic.
When will America grow up?
In Japan, in Korea, in China they do not have AA --- and their economies are growing leaps and bounds and everybody can attest to their technological achievements
America is somewhat... different from the rest of the world, even compared to Western Europe. Diversity is not a bad thing. Lack of diversity has certainly provided its share of problems throughout history, though.
Harvard (and other Ivy League colleges) has a reputation for generating a fair amount of lawyers, politicians, doctors, etc. What do you think would happen if all of the people with positions in charge of a multinational country were all, say for the sake of argument, "white men"?
yep. When referring to government Dept. of Redundancy Dept. functions, it's totally appropriate to use "irregardless", regardless of how wasteful and inefficient adding the excess 'ir' is.
That sounds like the "country mouse" / "city mouse" view. I agree that to a country mouse, the vast majority of what the government does with your tax dollars looks like a pointless waste. Cities have quite different problems on a different scale than what independent rural societies deal with. I'm quite comfortable to admit that there are people much smarter than me working on those problems with my tax dollars, even if once in a while there are reports of corruption which was appropriately handled by some oversight committee.
I did grow up in the DC metro area and worked for the defense industrial complex across the street from the Pentagon, wining and dining with DoD officers and the occasional congressman. I also have a lot of friends from HS doing social work in the surrounding area. Let me tell you sometime about which group has become dependent on the government and is enjoying the lavish lifestyle at the expense of everyone else, it might not be very obvious to you.
Mad props to the conservatives for realizing that yes, people lie, cheat, and steal, and shouldn't be trusted with their money. But most liberals I know believe in The System and want government to work and do the best they can in whatever position they have to make it work. And I kinda know which world I'd rather live in, even if there is some amount of corruption overhead.
Well, I guess we'll gradually find out more about what the jury was thinking.
But I'm not surprised that politically the US government would prefer to create more terrorists, after following most of the stories at http://scgnews.com/
We need lots of boogeymen to justify our military and intelligence spending.
The link is that the conservatives blame everything bad that happens on liberal ideology when there's a Democrat in the White House, and the liberals blame everything on the conservative ideology when a Republican is in the White House, irregardless of what the rest of the government is actually doing.
Conservatives are stereotypically the party that wants to take the direct approach to solving problems, and prefer to spend tax money on helping winners: military, business, churches, prisons, etc.
Liberals are stereotypically the party that wants progressive solutions to problems, and prefer to spend tax money on helping losers: through education, labor unions, health care, environmentalism, community centers, etc.
So they both want essentially the same things... peace, prosperity, they just go about it different ways. Liberals would like to eliminate poverty by helping poor people become less poor; conservatives would prefer to eliminate poverty by eliminating poor people.
Because of things like this, conservatives view liberals as weak, and liberals view conservatives as afraid. And they like to point that out whenever they can.
There are loopholes around that. Several towns (even in the US) have a barter economy based on hours of labor, so you could go volunteer time doing something for someone (like mowing lawns) in exchange for other services (like bicycle repair). Bonus for avoiding regulations and taxes.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of what Argentina is doing is similar to that. And probably also similar to what Russians would do during the lean years.
Hmm, I played with some old Sansa and got Rockbox running on it a few years ago... just when I was got it all set up and was about to start using it regularly, it somehow bricked itself. Never really bothered trying to replace it, since I think it was a gift and music worked fine from my Palm T|X or whatever I had at the time anyway
Yeah, I kinda felt like Drew's response to #4 was a wonderful specimen of political doublespeak. He is ready!
Yes, we understand that "the appearance of motive or conflict" is more important than whether there's stated or actual intent. But most people that politicians make their statements to totally don't work that way. It's all about the sound bite.
I think Fark is... coping with the changes. People always find a way to speak their minds, even if they have to bend to fit the limitations set forth by their communications medium.
FWIW, here's an long but excellent piece on political overcorrectedness vs. comedians: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/1... Come to watch two white male SJWs slug it out, stay for the inevitable Mien Kampf references!
Yeah, those high end consultants are people that companies hire to "help" them get through their annual security / PCI audit. They know what to say to the auditors to prevent further digging, and know what not to say to help hide the actual deficiencies. I bet they do little to actually improve security practices, though. OTOH, you will have your anti-virus definitions reporting in as updated, though!
Places that need (to pass) real security audits will have the requirements baked in to the design phase early on enough. Everyone will need to change their passwords every 90 days, and the thing will actually enforce length and entropy policies. All laptops will have whole-disk encryption. They might actually bother to set up email encryption using two-factor authentication with your ID badge... maybe. IT will come after you if you postpone rebooting for OS updates for more than 30 days. It's pretty simple stuff. But it's also pretty easy stuff to slack off on if no one is auditing.
Slashdot Mirror
Politics are not Pro- or Anti-Science. It is weather the science is political useful for them or not. Otherwise they will be happy putting their head in the sand.
This. If you know anything about lawyers and law, the first tenet is NEVER ADMIT FAULT. No good can come of it. People might then expect you to pay for damages or whatever.
Environmentalists make the mistake thinking that conservatives are stupid. That is not the case. The only thing they care about is that they will not have to pay for or be part of the solution. Any time you spend trying to convince them otherwise is wasted.
The other bit is that politics is never proactive, always reactionary. No environmental protection or anti-pollution law was ever passed until something was already FUBAR, be it due to the London yellow fog, or smog over LA, holes in the ozone layer, or Chinese urban centers shutting down due to respiratory issues. The politicians will maybe finally get around to doing something substantial about AGW after there's a refugee crises from low-lying areas, like the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Louisiana, Florida, etc. Chances are, they still won't blame AGW, since it'll be sea swell from a hurricane/typhoon that does those population centers in, but at some point they'll get tired of throwing money at those places to rebuild. Fortunately there are already a lot of migrant refugee boats in the Mediterranean and Andaman Sea for other reasons, so we're already slowly building a framework for dealing with these kinds of things.
There are some kickass "glacier calving" videos on youtube, though...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's the bit at the end that shows glaciers have been receding more in the last 10 years than they have in the last 100 years, so there's that...
Was parent modded down due to lack of citation? Maybe they were referring to this?
http://www.prb.org/Publication...
... is no.
The thing you propose sounds fine. But do they really want to upgrade all of the pumps at once? Sounds like a great way to brick an entire facility.
The only "improvement" I could think of would be to set up some kind of cheap router that can do MAC address filtering, that way you can set up the router to allow only one of each pump to show up as that one silly IP address at a time on a switched network. But then you'll still be able to only do one at a time.
The "right" way to do this is just throw money at the problem and attach a real computer to each pump, with a separate interface to talk to the static IP. Maybe something as small as http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod... or just some generic mini-ITX board in a telecom chassis or whatever.
An IPO is where you get stock in exchange for investing in actual production. ...
I was able to buy it because someone broke the rules.
Thanks for that story! Yeah, it sounds like that was pretty lucrative, and that's why they have those kinds of rules to keep the plebs out. Good that you were able to get in.
I did manage to pick up a bit of Boeing stock while I worked there in the early phase of my career. Yes, I broke a lot of risk guidelines by investing substantially in one stock that also happened to be my employer. It's certainly time to "make good" and sell it off now, since it easily overshadows all of my other conventional managed/index funds, even though I had originally allocated a smaller fraction to it than anything else. But I'd also just as soon hold on to it for many rationalizations: :-P
* BCA used to go in fairly predictable 7-year cycles, but since they merged with their defense wing, that smoothed things out a bit. Also helps that the defense side tends to have revenue during wartime and the commercial side tends to have revenue during peacetime.
* I still have plenty of smart friends on the inside so I'll have some warning when they jump ship. For now it sounds like they've been happy with the trimming down of the top-heavy management hierarchy from the time I was there.
* They're quite good at spinning the media to keep their stock prices elevated.
* As the largest US exporter, they're probably too big to fail(tm), so I'm not too worried about them going under suddenly without some kind of US taxpayer intervention
At the same time, I wouldn't buy any more stock at current prices :P And since it was from an early phase of my career, it's not even really all that much money to spend time worrying about.
Education? I have a degree in one field, and work in another. I don't need education.
I'd love to invest in education (well, I sorta did by marrying a teacher). But there are lots of indications that we're in an educational loan bubble right now which has both driven degree prices way up so high that the students you invest in will likely never be able to pay you back.
So your argument is left to pedantry, the kind where you want exclusive ownership of the now genericized "engineer" tag. well, fire up the coal engine on a choo choo train or shut the hell up.
Eh, this is one of the few pedantic things that I feel ought to worry us. "Financial Engineering" is a disparaging term that drags down all engineers in ABET-accredited fields. A lot of us work in the public trust, and are held accountable for our fuck-ups, even choo-choo or building HVAC engineers. Financial managers who know how to use "the calculus" to do risk management and manipulate the market to jump off the roulette wheel while it's high and leave the mess to everyone else are just plain sociopaths.
<shrug> isn't that exactly what the rich people with all of the money do? :-D
"real" rich people, I mean... I realize that a lot of people who "live richly" are actually in massive debt. As they say... owe the bank a million dollars, and they own you. Owe the bank a billion dollars, and you own the bank.
ABET does not consider "Financial Engineering" to be an engineering field... it's just a bunch of quants setting up a house of cards so they can stretch the value of whatever assets they have available to be worth 15 - 30x more on paper once all of the banks finished loaning everything to each other. Packaging all of the portfolios of sub-prime loans to dilute the risks, and then setting up the rules and insurance so their initial investors get the guaranteed payout and the rest of the public investors that they've convinced to buy into their portfolio gets stuck holding onto the defaulted mortgages. And whatever it is that HFET people do to take a bit off the top of "normal" trades everyone else is trying to conduct, or by feeding wacky headlines to various news feeds to make some of these HFET algorithms flash crash parts of the market so they can buy in low. It stinks, and I resent having not many other viable options for what to do with my 401k savings, but what else can we do with them?
An iPhone is objectively more valuable and useful than the equivalent pile of raw materials. And if one iPhone is 100x as valuable as the raw materials, then 10 iPhones are 1000x as valuable as their raw materials.
From what I've heard of the stock market, it's not really that simple... Sure an iPhone is worth more than the sum of its parts, but Apple is special and has managed to market their brand so people will pay more than what their products are worth. That makes it sound overvalued to me. And Apple is also good at squeezing their suppliers while cornering the market with 1-2 year exclusivity agreements, so if they sell 10x more iPhones, that doesn't necessarily mean a 10x increase in the revenue of all of their suppliers. Not to mention that if the market analysts project that they could grow their sales by 10x, but they run into some supply chain snags and "only" grow their sales by 9x, they've failed the market and all of their stock prices tumble.
Buy stock in a company that makes stuff. It's not a good investment because "stuff" isn't all that valuable anymore to people in the era of 3D printers and rapid manufacturing, but hey, if it makes you happy...
Heh, yeah, investing in companies that make 3D printers and do rapid manufacturing would make me happy :-D . On one hand, it seems to be a good idea to turn stock market investments into useful "stuff" just before it crashes. On the other hand, even useful stuff that no one can afford to buy from you because their savings and investments were wiped out by a stock market crash isn't going to help you make ends meet :-/
Sounds cool!
Maybe "insults" was poor word choice. It's just kinda strange to see people with strong math skills get sucked into doing stuff for Wall Street when the system is clearly rigged not in your favor. Rather than something, you know, useful to everyone. And then the rest of us are just stuck with 401k savings plans (if we're even that lucky) that we can't really do anything else with, other than play the market and hope someone doesn't screw it all up for us (even though that's exactly what everyone else on the market is there to do).
Yeah, I did have a good "accounting for engineers" class for my MS degree, it was easily more interesting than the other systems classes. Was taught by a brilliant Arthur Anderson guy who was laid off after the Enron scandal, ironically enough. Didn't cover much of the stock market, of course.
Anyways, just hold onto your butts for the next crash, I guess.
Thanks.. I'm sorta at a point in my life where all of those are actually options that are available to me, and I sorta have lower time commitments to my employer & family and a workshop area to start tinkering with some of that on the side.
I'm not at the point where I can actually start using any of my 401k savings towards any of that, though. Supposedly I have an OK but still somewhat aggressive portfolio, but I try to ignore it and let the fund managers do their thing until I see stories like this that remind us that, yes, we're due for another bubble bursting soon, and it could well be some combination of tech/realty/edu loans/energy or even something we don't expect to all come tumbling down.
All those things used to be "the conventional wisdom", but nowadays all of those things have been proven to be quite volatile.
I never believed in "making money from money"... I guess that's called "financial engineering" nowadays? That kinda insults me as an engineer, since we generally abide by physical laws. With financial laws, you're pretty much playing games using other people's rules. Other people who profess to love money above all else, and play the game to generate more money out of "nothing", and if you would just give them some of your money to play with, they'll help you "grow" your money too for a cut of the "take". But they don't add any value to the economy... they "multiply" it. And then they can just take "a little bit off the top", because no one will notice.
I'd love to invest in actual production... you know, things that add value and subtract costs instead of just "multiply" monopoly money. What options are there for that kind of thing?
And the best quote from the Ars comment section was "Darth Vader" is pretty much a Germanic version of "Dark Father"... so for all of Lucas's failings, that " I am your father" moment that the paper is largely based on was likely not one of the serendipitous ones that the paper hopes it to be.
"Han shot first", OTOH, we see cropping up in law ALL THE TIME.
you know, a country made up of multinationals... people who immigrated from various other places. Some of them even still have dual citizenship or more.
Not to be confused with multinational corporations, but those are also a thing that happens, btw.
And I will say the same "Fuck You!" to those who say that "Affirmative Action" is still needed
Well haven't you heard? The American University is a place where Russian professors teach Chinese students.
(As an ironic aside, most martial arts studios in my area are where American masters teach Chinese martial arts to Russians)
Last I checked, Russia still has plenty of quotas on how many Jews are allowed in each of their universities. Otherwise the Jews would totally take over. Fortunately, Jews are welcome to emigrate to Israel or the US and enter decent universities there. Try doing that as a black or hispanic.
When will America grow up?
In Japan, in Korea, in China they do not have AA --- and their economies are growing leaps and bounds and everybody can attest to their technological achievements
America is somewhat ... different from the rest of the world, even compared to Western Europe. Diversity is not a bad thing. Lack of diversity has certainly provided its share of problems throughout history, though.
Harvard (and other Ivy League colleges) has a reputation for generating a fair amount of lawyers, politicians, doctors, etc. What do you think would happen if all of the people with positions in charge of a multinational country were all, say for the sake of argument, "white men"?
If only there was some sort of test that people could take to unearth their biases...
Oh, here are some! https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...
yep. When referring to government Dept. of Redundancy Dept. functions, it's totally appropriate to use "irregardless", regardless of how wasteful and inefficient adding the excess 'ir' is.
That sounds like the "country mouse" / "city mouse" view. I agree that to a country mouse, the vast majority of what the government does with your tax dollars looks like a pointless waste. Cities have quite different problems on a different scale than what independent rural societies deal with. I'm quite comfortable to admit that there are people much smarter than me working on those problems with my tax dollars, even if once in a while there are reports of corruption which was appropriately handled by some oversight committee.
I did grow up in the DC metro area and worked for the defense industrial complex across the street from the Pentagon, wining and dining with DoD officers and the occasional congressman. I also have a lot of friends from HS doing social work in the surrounding area. Let me tell you sometime about which group has become dependent on the government and is enjoying the lavish lifestyle at the expense of everyone else, it might not be very obvious to you.
Mad props to the conservatives for realizing that yes, people lie, cheat, and steal, and shouldn't be trusted with their money. But most liberals I know believe in The System and want government to work and do the best they can in whatever position they have to make it work. And I kinda know which world I'd rather live in, even if there is some amount of corruption overhead.
Well, I guess we'll gradually find out more about what the jury was thinking.
But I'm not surprised that politically the US government would prefer to create more terrorists, after following most of the stories at http://scgnews.com/
We need lots of boogeymen to justify our military and intelligence spending.
The link is that the conservatives blame everything bad that happens on liberal ideology when there's a Democrat in the White House, and the liberals blame everything on the conservative ideology when a Republican is in the White House, irregardless of what the rest of the government is actually doing.
Conservatives are stereotypically the party that wants to take the direct approach to solving problems, and prefer to spend tax money on helping winners: military, business, churches, prisons, etc.
Liberals are stereotypically the party that wants progressive solutions to problems, and prefer to spend tax money on helping losers: through education, labor unions, health care, environmentalism, community centers, etc.
So they both want essentially the same things... peace, prosperity, they just go about it different ways. Liberals would like to eliminate poverty by helping poor people become less poor; conservatives would prefer to eliminate poverty by eliminating poor people.
Because of things like this, conservatives view liberals as weak, and liberals view conservatives as afraid. And they like to point that out whenever they can.
Yes, under certain conditions you can deduct what you pay other people for their hours helping you with your tax preparation.
No, it is not a capital expense, it's more of an operations expense.
There are loopholes around that. Several towns (even in the US) have a barter economy based on hours of labor, so you could go volunteer time doing something for someone (like mowing lawns) in exchange for other services (like bicycle repair). Bonus for avoiding regulations and taxes.
e.g. http://ithacahours.info/
I wouldn't be surprised if some of what Argentina is doing is similar to that. And probably also similar to what Russians would do during the lean years.
Hmm, I played with some old Sansa and got Rockbox running on it a few years ago... just when I was got it all set up and was about to start using it regularly, it somehow bricked itself. Never really bothered trying to replace it, since I think it was a gift and music worked fine from my Palm T|X or whatever I had at the time anyway
Wondering if that might explain the "Hack and Slash" lyric in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yeah, I kinda felt like Drew's response to #4 was a wonderful specimen of political doublespeak. He is ready!
Yes, we understand that "the appearance of motive or conflict" is more important than whether there's stated or actual intent. But most people that politicians make their statements to totally don't work that way. It's all about the sound bite.
I think Fark is ... coping with the changes. People always find a way to speak their minds, even if they have to bend to fit the limitations set forth by their communications medium.
FWIW, here's an long but excellent piece on political overcorrectedness vs. comedians:
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/1...
Come to watch two white male SJWs slug it out, stay for the inevitable Mien Kampf references!
Grr, thanks for reminding me that I'm still trying to save up for a used PS3 so I can http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-...
Yeah, those high end consultants are people that companies hire to "help" them get through their annual security / PCI audit. They know what to say to the auditors to prevent further digging, and know what not to say to help hide the actual deficiencies. I bet they do little to actually improve security practices, though. OTOH, you will have your anti-virus definitions reporting in as updated, though!
Places that need (to pass) real security audits will have the requirements baked in to the design phase early on enough. Everyone will need to change their passwords every 90 days, and the thing will actually enforce length and entropy policies. All laptops will have whole-disk encryption. They might actually bother to set up email encryption using two-factor authentication with your ID badge... maybe. IT will come after you if you postpone rebooting for OS updates for more than 30 days. It's pretty simple stuff. But it's also pretty easy stuff to slack off on if no one is auditing.