And it's not all "Nazi" in origin - many Trump supporters, including several IN CONGRESS, have LITERALLY DEFENDED the idea of bringing back US Internment camps.
Half of the goddamn country is Trump supporters. If you can't nail the guy on what he's actually said (and for fuck's sake, he has given you PLENTY of ammo) why don't you keep these sorts of observations to yourself? The best propaganda for Trump right now are these pitiful dumbassed attacks that draw attention away from his real negatives. Half of the former George W. Bush bashers I know are at least tentatively backing Trump, from what I can tell mostly because the attacks against him are so ill-conceived.
If you don't see some of the parallels in the wording of antisemitic propaganda of the 30's and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda of the last year, you are not paying attention or refusing to listen.
One main difference being that there weren't any Jewish organizations of note dedicated to the destruction of Germany or western culture. And the leftists in Germany weren't campaigning to bring tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from a war-torn area overrun by anti-German Jewish extremists. And there was already rampant legalized anti-Semitism at the time.
The world is surrounded by extremists saying stupid shit. It's always been that way. The facts on the ground in America: after a major tragedy like the Orlando nightclub shooting, the police rush out to the mosques across the country and stand in front of them for days to protect Muslims before there's even a hint of a threat, while those same police simultaneously warn right wing anti-Islam speakers like Milo (a blowhard, of course, but one who is not entirely incorrect on this issue) that he shouldn't speak out against Islam in public because they cannot send even a single police offer to protect him, even though he's received actual death threats.
So far, many more people who have supposedly blasphemed Islam have died for blaspheming it than people have died for supporting Islam. That doesn't mean I support internment camps. I would oppose any WWII style internment of American citizens, physically and in person. But it does mean that in this war of hysteria, your side has less credibility than the side fearmongering about Islam. The Muslim Hitler exists. Thousands of them do, in fact. Your American Hitler is a distant mirage, almost certainly just a goon in a baseball cap.
Which bit? Black holes, the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on other planets or the evolutionary stability of universal altruism towards conscious creatures? None of these things involves, invokes or borders on religion.
Yes yes, I understand that GR is modeled as a distortion of spacetime and those distortions are measurable and have been repeatedly measured. I meant warping to an extent that fast travel is possible, be it FTL or otherwise.
Go ahead and move the goalpost if you want, but they're more likely to be malevolent than benevolent or indifferent if they do exist. I don't think a tremendous amount of resources should be devoted to hiding ourselves from them (should they exist) but I don't think Hawking said that, either.
Hawking said something perfectly reasonable based on fair assumptions (although it's hard to judge the amount of time or resources that should be spent on it.) You made a bunch of unsupported assertions and changed the topic when challenged.
If you're referring to his lost "bets", my understanding was that he was purposefully making tongue-in-cheek bets against what his gut told him. He's probably not the most important scientist of his generation, but he's not lower-rung. Singularity theory is quite important because that's one of the main areas where our current science breaks down, and he's made some important contributions there.
Yes, he has some extra celebrity because of his medical condition. So what? I wouldn't begrudge him that.
Did you "not somehow get" that we have two different INCOMPATIBLE theories of physics (GRand QM) that haven't been reconciled? And did you also miss the bit about GR solutions that imply it may be possible to warp space?
Or do you just think you're smarter than the guy the wheelchair because you 'know' the solution to the Drake equation? What values did you select for the variables and how did you discern their values?
In physics, nothing can be stated for absolute certain until we have a quantum theory of gravity. Space warping techniques have not been definitively ruled out even with our current understanding.
By the same logic, there's no reason we should find bacteria interesting or useful. But we do.
It's useful to see what mother nature has done on a molecular level. We can't just simulate it all away. The construction of proteins or certain other chemical are non-trivial problems that are daunting even with huge advances in computing technology.
Also, plenty of human are interested in studying bacteria (or squirrels), just for the sake of studying them. And we aren't particularly scrupulous about their feelings in the matter.
Black holes and big bang stuff. You know, obscure shit no one cares about.
"Dumbass" is a good description of anyone who believes aliens are particularly likely to be benevolent. The evolution of altruism is by no means universal, particularly altruism towards different species.
This is that strangely common "just don't buy it" argument that has been circling the web for years now.
It appears to be an irrational random mutation of some kind of pro-capitalism argument (people are free to buy or not buy what they want, blah blah blah) that some people appear to have taken it a step further to mean that no one should ever criticize any product for any reason.
It's not tinfoil. There's ample evidence that Microsoft has long considered Linux to be a threat, and this is hardly the first piece of Windows-only hardware the world has seen.
Linux has plenty of outstanding desktop productivity applications for everyday home computer usages, many arguably better than their most common Windows equivalents. Its business desktop performance is more of a mixed bag, but the competition is close if you are looking at apples-to-apples and not dragging legacy dependencies into the mix.
The simple, highly functional UI is present as well but it isn't uniform, and unfortunately the one project pushing for uniformity is both user-hostile and aims to purposefully use new paradigms so that a transition isn't straightforward (GNOME) and another high profile project (Unity) is equally troublesome (albeit not nearly as user-hostile.)
The problem thus isn't with capability but with branding and corporate backing. Red Hat and Canonical, two of the biggest names in LInux, both attempted to do their own separate Apple-like "Different is Better" thing whist simultaneously trying to do a Microsoft-like thing of making a desktop GUI that could double as a cell phone or tablet GUI (and nevermind the fact that trying to take on Android head-on is mostly a waste of time.) If the OSS world had rallied around XFCE or KDE, they would have faired better, but the bottom line is modern XFCE and KDE solutions do favorably compare to Windows in almost every area except when Window-only proprietary or legacy support is needed.
That isn't necessarily a trivial "except", but your summary of the situation on Linux was quite misleading. It's obscene to imply Windows 8-10 have a better UI than XFCE or KDE distros.
To clarify, there may have been cause to plant cameras to see what the parents were up to when they thought no one was around. And there may or may not have been reason to have court-ordered medical testing and psychiatric evaluations. But given what we know about the rarity of 'medical child abuse', there was no reason to made a definitive conclusion or remove custody for such a long period of time even if one or both of the parents were being obviously irrational or hyperbolic.
Furthermore, if there were concerns about unnecessary medical treatment (as opposed to the parents inflicting the harm themselves), the court proceedings should've targeted the physicians, not the parents, even if the parents supported the physicians.
Once again, child abuse (either in hospitals or in court) is almost always stuff like broken arms, cigarette burns or signs of sexual abuse, not parents poisoning their children to get attention. People are weird, but the vast majority aren't that weird. I don't particularly feel like deep digging but I do recall one study in the 90s (back before the internet was widespread and thus before psychotically lonely people had other outlets) where something like 140 suspected cases were seen in the United Kingdom over the course of two or three years. Unless you've evidence that this is a lot more common, it is thus should have been an "extraordinary claims ==> extraordinary evidence" situation, even from the perspective of someone who sees a lot of child abuse cases.
I'm not sure why so many people around here find the "massive institutional fuckup" theory to be so implausible. Haven't you ever worked in an organization of significant size and seen the kind of insanities high ranking "experts" get up to when they get a bee in their bonnet?
Straw man against whom? You implied that it was to some degree or from some perspective reasonable (or not completely unreasonable) to suspect child abuse instead of a physiological condition. I pointed out that from a purely statistical point of view the zebras argument doesn't make sense. Those people are unlikely to have seen many other examples of this sort of thing in their lives.
Maybe you could take issue with "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy" (perhaps insisting that some other nebulous definition of "medical child abuse" is used), but I think that's splitting hairs.
A fine theory, except that Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy isn't regular child abuse.
Numbers are hard to come by, but unlike 'regular' child abuse it looks like it's on the order of perhaps a couple hundred per year. It seems like a "zebra" no matter who is looking at it (judge or doctor.)
I mean just think about this for a second. Most people do not like hanging around in hospitals and doctors' offices, and within that strange group we're looking at a further subset of people who are willing to poison their own child just for the pleasure of doing exactly that (plus the occasional sympathy hug and Hallmark card, presumably.)
Correlation of symptom severity and the mother's visits is extremely weak for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is confirmation bias.) Unless there's some other dramatic piece of evidence that hasn't come out yet, this appears to be a rather large fuckup, not an easy-to-make mistake fueled by a little too much self-righteousness.
I'm genuinely curious about the background of people who are as... let's say "non-cynical" as you seem to be. I genuinely wish I had the life you've had, such that a story like this seems ridiculously implausible.
If you haven't lived to see one or two spectacular fuckups--I mean of the really tragic sort, not just "the server just went up in flames"--then it's very hard to describe. Let me try anyway:
Upper-middle class people working in a bureaucratic setting is a recipe for a very special sort of refined, extra-powerful fuckups. Yes, the threat of being sued can sometimes cause people to wake up and act sensibly but it just as frequently causes them to double down. If you admit a mistake, you WILL get sued. If you keep ploughing on and the months pass and details get blurry and there's a lot of people involved, people are less likely to focus on you. Plus, the more time these people give themselves the more chances they have of finding evidence that their theories were correct.
This isn't something that happens fully consciously. Most humans lie to themselves all the time (in one way or another) but these are mild to moderately rich, reasonably intelligent, overworked humans who are in public contact positions (and much of those people are very emotional) and red tape all day long.
They are not paragons of introspection, and most of them probably learned a long time ago that the key to success doesn't have anything to do with repeatedly second-guessing their own diagnoses.
I have an undiagnosed stomach condition. After getting an endoscopy (paid for out of pocket, because I didn't have insurance out of the time), the specialist noticed "very mild" inflammation but nothing else. In his report, he gave a diagnosis of anxiety. He said that I was "probably" habitually swallowing air some kind of nervous tic (continuous unexplained belching is one of the key symptoms I was and to an extent still am having, along with occasional bouts of burning pain) and I should go see a psych for antianxiety medicines.
I was flummoxed. I did not walk into his office with an anxiety diagnosis. We didn't discuss mental health at all. And I was pretty fucking sure I wasn't swallowing air out of some kind of goddamn random nervous tic; however, he wouldn't talk to me any more or say anything else after that. And why should he? He knew I was uninsured and thus couldn't afford to pay for a bunch of random tests, and he knew the inflammation was mild enough to hand-wave away as irrelevant, but he can't very well say "nothing is wrong with you".
Doctors are overqualified, overstressed and overworked. Of course, none of us here on slashdot know what actually happened and we should keep an open mind and all of that...
But speaking only as a humble student of human behavior, someone has seen his fair share of Dilbert-esque catastrophes, I'd have to say that institutional incompetence is almost certainly more common than Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
Programmed into me by whom? I've never met a single person who views contract law like I do.
There might be a very superficial similarity with some of the things progressivist-"liberal" morons (of the type who advocate boycotting Walmart for not paying their workers enough) tend to say, but their claims and goals and overall views are entirely different.
That wasn't a rhetorical question. I'd love to know who it is you think I'm mindlessly parroting. It would be great to see some proof that there are a few other sane people in the country (more specifically, sane small-government conservatives.)
You, on the other hand, are far from being the first libertarian-type to equate an completely uninhibited view of contract law with the tiniest government and maximum amount of freedom. It doesn't mean you're a bad person; it's just that you probably haven't spent enough time outside of the echo chamber, getting drunk and staring into the abyss and thinking for yourself.
I'd start with the deep breathing first, though. Just a suggestion.
As a very quick adendum, I suppose you were trying to imply that the government was 'smaller' in the days when property rights didn't exist re: land? That is... well ridiculous for a cornucopia of reasons, but I think the main one is that the primary reason they didn't have a concept of land rights is that those tribes were migratory. There are too many human beings, our methods of food production have changed too much, and we've become much too specialized for us to return to a non-sedentary society. If you want to argue about some radical but realistic method of demolishing land property rights in modern society, I'm all ears.
But I suspect you weren't proposing any such thing. I suspect you were trying to draw an absurd comparison between property rights and the courts (and by extension, police officers) recognizing unlimited 'voluntary' contractual restrictions. It's extremely easy to imagine a modern society where no one gets arrested for putting up ham radio antennae on their own property. It's extremely hard to imagine a society where no one can ever have someone arrested for trespassing.
You're inserting your personal viewpoint and opinion and assuming it is fact.
In the history of human discourse, has there ever been a retort weaker than "yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man." ? You haven't offered any argument at all that would show how your vision results in a smaller government.
The fact the matter is the courts (and by extension, the police who must step in after noncompliance) have less to do when the government recognizes fewer contractual restrictions. YOU are the one advocating for the government step in more frequently. I am saying that people who own houses should, generally speaking, get to live in them and do what they want and the police are never dispatched to forcibly remove people from their houses because they installed ham radio antennae that were too big.
You think the police should be engaged in these activities, because the homeowner in question "voluntarily" signed his rights away (nevermind that it was impossible to get a house near his job or good schools without living in an HOA area), but that doesn't have anything to do with smaller government. It is a nigh-unassailable fact that what I am advocating would mean that the police and the courts have more free time, which would (over the long term) mean fewer tax dollars would be needed for judges, police officers and support staff, which would result in a smaller government by any reasonable measure.
Go back a few hundred years and many Native Americans didn't think people could even own land, it belonged to everyone.
I've no idea what you're even trying to imply here. Take a deep breath man, and maybe go a month or two without looking at whatever bullshit blogs/podcasts/youtube channels you frequent.
Your brand of populist fascio-libertarianism is so contaminated with paleoconservatism that you cannot recognize big government when it is staring you in the face.
I recently commented offhand, but without reservation, that in the medium-far future some descendant of iOS is likely to be one of the most common desktops in the world. The same goes for Android. I freely admit that the allure of the walled garden is too strong (and the general public is far too lazy) for it to not ultimately prevail.
My "bias" here is against small piddling closed-sourced projects. They do not tend to last very long and there tends to be all kinds of rough edges and for those reasons alone they are not noob-friendly. And there are a plethora of OTHER reasons to assume that this project will not be noob-friendly which I've already explored: Android apps typically being less powerful, mouse UI issues, etc.
But please, keep pretending you've already won the war when the first, pathetically weak shot against non-Android distros has barely been fired. If the rest of the masochistically delusional Android fanboys are like you, that at least gives us more time to delay the inevitable.
It's a good thing everyone in the country lives where your parents live... oh wait, we don't.
HOAs are taking over a lot of middle class areas around here. When I looked a few years back, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of newer houses in the $180,000-$200,000 range were HOA controlled. Hooray, everyone gets to pay something like $80/month for life even after their houses are paid off! Furthermore, for some mysterious reason there are several developers refusing to work in non-HOA areas. If some immediate neighbors want to get together *after* their home purchase and sign some sort of basic agreement to keep their lawns clean that might be fine, but what's happening here probably has a lot more to do with oligarchical enrichment schemes than making sure the neighborhood stays clean.
That percentage changes drastically from place to place, and many choice areas are completely controlled by HOAs.
Land isn't fungible; therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to expect the government to not permit (or more accurately, to not send out its police officers to enforce) contractual provisions that undercut basic property rights.
If you disagree, so be it. But you are advocating for a larger and more intrusive government, whether you admit it or not.
I'm surprised more people haven't figured out that Emacs is actually a specialized (though highly configurable) desktop environment. I think all of the jokes disguise the reality of the fact that Emacs went beyond the paltry goal of text editing a very long time ago.
At least one person has taken this to heart and actually written an Emacs-style tiling window manager, although like Emacs itself I suspect it will remain in the shadows, useful only to people willing to put in hundreds of hours necessary to learn it and write their own utilities to match their workflow. What the world really needs are more projects that bridge the wide gulf between intuition and power, but I suspect we're more likely to end up with (in twenty years' time) some variant of iOS as the most popular desktop in the world with a small cabal of hackers in a darkened corner diligently cranking out Emacs 67.
Slashdot Mirror
You're boycotting people for boycotting people?
And it's not all "Nazi" in origin - many Trump supporters, including several IN CONGRESS, have LITERALLY DEFENDED the idea of bringing back US Internment camps.
Half of the goddamn country is Trump supporters. If you can't nail the guy on what he's actually said (and for fuck's sake, he has given you PLENTY of ammo) why don't you keep these sorts of observations to yourself? The best propaganda for Trump right now are these pitiful dumbassed attacks that draw attention away from his real negatives. Half of the former George W. Bush bashers I know are at least tentatively backing Trump, from what I can tell mostly because the attacks against him are so ill-conceived.
If you don't see some of the parallels in the wording of antisemitic propaganda of the 30's and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda of the last year, you are not paying attention or refusing to listen.
One main difference being that there weren't any Jewish organizations of note dedicated to the destruction of Germany or western culture. And the leftists in Germany weren't campaigning to bring tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from a war-torn area overrun by anti-German Jewish extremists. And there was already rampant legalized anti-Semitism at the time.
The world is surrounded by extremists saying stupid shit. It's always been that way. The facts on the ground in America: after a major tragedy like the Orlando nightclub shooting, the police rush out to the mosques across the country and stand in front of them for days to protect Muslims before there's even a hint of a threat, while those same police simultaneously warn right wing anti-Islam speakers like Milo (a blowhard, of course, but one who is not entirely incorrect on this issue) that he shouldn't speak out against Islam in public because they cannot send even a single police offer to protect him, even though he's received actual death threats.
So far, many more people who have supposedly blasphemed Islam have died for blaspheming it than people have died for supporting Islam. That doesn't mean I support internment camps. I would oppose any WWII style internment of American citizens, physically and in person. But it does mean that in this war of hysteria, your side has less credibility than the side fearmongering about Islam. The Muslim Hitler exists. Thousands of them do, in fact. Your American Hitler is a distant mirage, almost certainly just a goon in a baseball cap.
Which bit? Black holes, the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on other planets or the evolutionary stability of universal altruism towards conscious creatures? None of these things involves, invokes or borders on religion.
Yes yes, I understand that GR is modeled as a distortion of spacetime and those distortions are measurable and have been repeatedly measured. I meant warping to an extent that fast travel is possible, be it FTL or otherwise.
Go ahead and move the goalpost if you want, but they're more likely to be malevolent than benevolent or indifferent if they do exist. I don't think a tremendous amount of resources should be devoted to hiding ourselves from them (should they exist) but I don't think Hawking said that, either.
Hawking said something perfectly reasonable based on fair assumptions (although it's hard to judge the amount of time or resources that should be spent on it.) You made a bunch of unsupported assertions and changed the topic when challenged.
If you're referring to his lost "bets", my understanding was that he was purposefully making tongue-in-cheek bets against what his gut told him. He's probably not the most important scientist of his generation, but he's not lower-rung. Singularity theory is quite important because that's one of the main areas where our current science breaks down, and he's made some important contributions there.
Yes, he has some extra celebrity because of his medical condition. So what? I wouldn't begrudge him that.
Did you "not somehow get" that we have two different INCOMPATIBLE theories of physics (GRand QM) that haven't been reconciled? And did you also miss the bit about GR solutions that imply it may be possible to warp space?
Or do you just think you're smarter than the guy the wheelchair because you 'know' the solution to the Drake equation? What values did you select for the variables and how did you discern their values?
In physics, nothing can be stated for absolute certain until we have a quantum theory of gravity. Space warping techniques have not been definitively ruled out even with our current understanding.
By the same logic, there's no reason we should find bacteria interesting or useful. But we do.
It's useful to see what mother nature has done on a molecular level. We can't just simulate it all away. The construction of proteins or certain other chemical are non-trivial problems that are daunting even with huge advances in computing technology.
Also, plenty of human are interested in studying bacteria (or squirrels), just for the sake of studying them. And we aren't particularly scrupulous about their feelings in the matter.
Black holes and big bang stuff. You know, obscure shit no one cares about.
"Dumbass" is a good description of anyone who believes aliens are particularly likely to be benevolent. The evolution of altruism is by no means universal, particularly altruism towards different species.
This is that strangely common "just don't buy it" argument that has been circling the web for years now.
It appears to be an irrational random mutation of some kind of pro-capitalism argument (people are free to buy or not buy what they want, blah blah blah) that some people appear to have taken it a step further to mean that no one should ever criticize any product for any reason.
It's weird, but extremely common.
It's not tinfoil. There's ample evidence that Microsoft has long considered Linux to be a threat, and this is hardly the first piece of Windows-only hardware the world has seen.
Linux has plenty of outstanding desktop productivity applications for everyday home computer usages, many arguably better than their most common Windows equivalents. Its business desktop performance is more of a mixed bag, but the competition is close if you are looking at apples-to-apples and not dragging legacy dependencies into the mix.
The simple, highly functional UI is present as well but it isn't uniform, and unfortunately the one project pushing for uniformity is both user-hostile and aims to purposefully use new paradigms so that a transition isn't straightforward (GNOME) and another high profile project (Unity) is equally troublesome (albeit not nearly as user-hostile.)
The problem thus isn't with capability but with branding and corporate backing. Red Hat and Canonical, two of the biggest names in LInux, both attempted to do their own separate Apple-like "Different is Better" thing whist simultaneously trying to do a Microsoft-like thing of making a desktop GUI that could double as a cell phone or tablet GUI (and nevermind the fact that trying to take on Android head-on is mostly a waste of time.) If the OSS world had rallied around XFCE or KDE, they would have faired better, but the bottom line is modern XFCE and KDE solutions do favorably compare to Windows in almost every area except when Window-only proprietary or legacy support is needed.
That isn't necessarily a trivial "except", but your summary of the situation on Linux was quite misleading. It's obscene to imply Windows 8-10 have a better UI than XFCE or KDE distros.
To clarify, there may have been cause to plant cameras to see what the parents were up to when they thought no one was around. And there may or may not have been reason to have court-ordered medical testing and psychiatric evaluations. But given what we know about the rarity of 'medical child abuse', there was no reason to made a definitive conclusion or remove custody for such a long period of time even if one or both of the parents were being obviously irrational or hyperbolic.
Furthermore, if there were concerns about unnecessary medical treatment (as opposed to the parents inflicting the harm themselves), the court proceedings should've targeted the physicians, not the parents, even if the parents supported the physicians.
Once again, child abuse (either in hospitals or in court) is almost always stuff like broken arms, cigarette burns or signs of sexual abuse, not parents poisoning their children to get attention. People are weird, but the vast majority aren't that weird. I don't particularly feel like deep digging but I do recall one study in the 90s (back before the internet was widespread and thus before psychotically lonely people had other outlets) where something like 140 suspected cases were seen in the United Kingdom over the course of two or three years. Unless you've evidence that this is a lot more common, it is thus should have been an "extraordinary claims ==> extraordinary evidence" situation, even from the perspective of someone who sees a lot of child abuse cases.
I'm not sure why so many people around here find the "massive institutional fuckup" theory to be so implausible. Haven't you ever worked in an organization of significant size and seen the kind of insanities high ranking "experts" get up to when they get a bee in their bonnet?
Straw man against whom? You implied that it was to some degree or from some perspective reasonable (or not completely unreasonable) to suspect child abuse instead of a physiological condition. I pointed out that from a purely statistical point of view the zebras argument doesn't make sense. Those people are unlikely to have seen many other examples of this sort of thing in their lives.
Maybe you could take issue with "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy" (perhaps insisting that some other nebulous definition of "medical child abuse" is used), but I think that's splitting hairs.
A fine theory, except that Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy isn't regular child abuse.
Numbers are hard to come by, but unlike 'regular' child abuse it looks like it's on the order of perhaps a couple hundred per year. It seems like a "zebra" no matter who is looking at it (judge or doctor.)
I mean just think about this for a second. Most people do not like hanging around in hospitals and doctors' offices, and within that strange group we're looking at a further subset of people who are willing to poison their own child just for the pleasure of doing exactly that (plus the occasional sympathy hug and Hallmark card, presumably.)
Correlation of symptom severity and the mother's visits is extremely weak for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is confirmation bias.) Unless there's some other dramatic piece of evidence that hasn't come out yet, this appears to be a rather large fuckup, not an easy-to-make mistake fueled by a little too much self-righteousness.
I hope this doesn't come across as an insult but:
...a THREE digit ID?
1. What do you do for a living?
2. How old are you?
I'm genuinely curious about the background of people who are as... let's say "non-cynical" as you seem to be. I genuinely wish I had the life you've had, such that a story like this seems ridiculously implausible.
If you haven't lived to see one or two spectacular fuckups--I mean of the really tragic sort, not just "the server just went up in flames"--then it's very hard to describe. Let me try anyway:
Upper-middle class people working in a bureaucratic setting is a recipe for a very special sort of refined, extra-powerful fuckups. Yes, the threat of being sued can sometimes cause people to wake up and act sensibly but it just as frequently causes them to double down. If you admit a mistake, you WILL get sued. If you keep ploughing on and the months pass and details get blurry and there's a lot of people involved, people are less likely to focus on you. Plus, the more time these people give themselves the more chances they have of finding evidence that their theories were correct.
This isn't something that happens fully consciously. Most humans lie to themselves all the time (in one way or another) but these are mild to moderately rich, reasonably intelligent, overworked humans who are in public contact positions (and much of those people are very emotional) and red tape all day long.
They are not paragons of introspection, and most of them probably learned a long time ago that the key to success doesn't have anything to do with repeatedly second-guessing their own diagnoses.
I have an undiagnosed stomach condition. After getting an endoscopy (paid for out of pocket, because I didn't have insurance out of the time), the specialist noticed "very mild" inflammation but nothing else. In his report, he gave a diagnosis of anxiety. He said that I was "probably" habitually swallowing air some kind of nervous tic (continuous unexplained belching is one of the key symptoms I was and to an extent still am having, along with occasional bouts of burning pain) and I should go see a psych for antianxiety medicines.
I was flummoxed. I did not walk into his office with an anxiety diagnosis. We didn't discuss mental health at all. And I was pretty fucking sure I wasn't swallowing air out of some kind of goddamn random nervous tic; however, he wouldn't talk to me any more or say anything else after that. And why should he? He knew I was uninsured and thus couldn't afford to pay for a bunch of random tests, and he knew the inflammation was mild enough to hand-wave away as irrelevant, but he can't very well say "nothing is wrong with you".
Doctors are overqualified, overstressed and overworked. Of course, none of us here on slashdot know what actually happened and we should keep an open mind and all of that...
But speaking only as a humble student of human behavior, someone has seen his fair share of Dilbert-esque catastrophes, I'd have to say that institutional incompetence is almost certainly more common than Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
Programmed into me by whom? I've never met a single person who views contract law like I do.
There might be a very superficial similarity with some of the things progressivist-"liberal" morons (of the type who advocate boycotting Walmart for not paying their workers enough) tend to say, but their claims and goals and overall views are entirely different.
That wasn't a rhetorical question. I'd love to know who it is you think I'm mindlessly parroting. It would be great to see some proof that there are a few other sane people in the country (more specifically, sane small-government conservatives.)
You, on the other hand, are far from being the first libertarian-type to equate an completely uninhibited view of contract law with the tiniest government and maximum amount of freedom. It doesn't mean you're a bad person; it's just that you probably haven't spent enough time outside of the echo chamber, getting drunk and staring into the abyss and thinking for yourself.
I'd start with the deep breathing first, though. Just a suggestion.
As a very quick adendum, I suppose you were trying to imply that the government was 'smaller' in the days when property rights didn't exist re: land? That is... well ridiculous for a cornucopia of reasons, but I think the main one is that the primary reason they didn't have a concept of land rights is that those tribes were migratory. There are too many human beings, our methods of food production have changed too much, and we've become much too specialized for us to return to a non-sedentary society. If you want to argue about some radical but realistic method of demolishing land property rights in modern society, I'm all ears.
But I suspect you weren't proposing any such thing. I suspect you were trying to draw an absurd comparison between property rights and the courts (and by extension, police officers) recognizing unlimited 'voluntary' contractual restrictions. It's extremely easy to imagine a modern society where no one gets arrested for putting up ham radio antennae on their own property. It's extremely hard to imagine a society where no one can ever have someone arrested for trespassing.
You're inserting your personal viewpoint and opinion and assuming it is fact.
In the history of human discourse, has there ever been a retort weaker than "yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man." ? You haven't offered any argument at all that would show how your vision results in a smaller government.
The fact the matter is the courts (and by extension, the police who must step in after noncompliance) have less to do when the government recognizes fewer contractual restrictions. YOU are the one advocating for the government step in more frequently. I am saying that people who own houses should, generally speaking, get to live in them and do what they want and the police are never dispatched to forcibly remove people from their houses because they installed ham radio antennae that were too big.
You think the police should be engaged in these activities, because the homeowner in question "voluntarily" signed his rights away (nevermind that it was impossible to get a house near his job or good schools without living in an HOA area), but that doesn't have anything to do with smaller government. It is a nigh-unassailable fact that what I am advocating would mean that the police and the courts have more free time, which would (over the long term) mean fewer tax dollars would be needed for judges, police officers and support staff, which would result in a smaller government by any reasonable measure.
Go back a few hundred years and many Native Americans didn't think people could even own land, it belonged to everyone.
I've no idea what you're even trying to imply here. Take a deep breath man, and maybe go a month or two without looking at whatever bullshit blogs/podcasts/youtube channels you frequent.
Your brand of populist fascio-libertarianism is so contaminated with paleoconservatism that you cannot recognize big government when it is staring you in the face.
I recently commented offhand, but without reservation, that in the medium-far future some descendant of iOS is likely to be one of the most common desktops in the world. The same goes for Android. I freely admit that the allure of the walled garden is too strong (and the general public is far too lazy) for it to not ultimately prevail.
My "bias" here is against small piddling closed-sourced projects. They do not tend to last very long and there tends to be all kinds of rough edges and for those reasons alone they are not noob-friendly. And there are a plethora of OTHER reasons to assume that this project will not be noob-friendly which I've already explored: Android apps typically being less powerful, mouse UI issues, etc.
But please, keep pretending you've already won the war when the first, pathetically weak shot against non-Android distros has barely been fired. If the rest of the masochistically delusional Android fanboys are like you, that at least gives us more time to delay the inevitable.
It's a good thing everyone in the country lives where your parents live... oh wait, we don't.
HOAs are taking over a lot of middle class areas around here. When I looked a few years back, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of newer houses in the $180,000-$200,000 range were HOA controlled. Hooray, everyone gets to pay something like $80/month for life even after their houses are paid off! Furthermore, for some mysterious reason there are several developers refusing to work in non-HOA areas. If some immediate neighbors want to get together *after* their home purchase and sign some sort of basic agreement to keep their lawns clean that might be fine, but what's happening here probably has a lot more to do with oligarchical enrichment schemes than making sure the neighborhood stays clean.
That percentage changes drastically from place to place, and many choice areas are completely controlled by HOAs.
Land isn't fungible; therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to expect the government to not permit (or more accurately, to not send out its police officers to enforce) contractual provisions that undercut basic property rights.
If you disagree, so be it. But you are advocating for a larger and more intrusive government, whether you admit it or not.
I'm surprised more people haven't figured out that Emacs is actually a specialized (though highly configurable) desktop environment. I think all of the jokes disguise the reality of the fact that Emacs went beyond the paltry goal of text editing a very long time ago.
At least one person has taken this to heart and actually written an Emacs-style tiling window manager, although like Emacs itself I suspect it will remain in the shadows, useful only to people willing to put in hundreds of hours necessary to learn it and write their own utilities to match their workflow. What the world really needs are more projects that bridge the wide gulf between intuition and power, but I suspect we're more likely to end up with (in twenty years' time) some variant of iOS as the most popular desktop in the world with a small cabal of hackers in a darkened corner diligently cranking out Emacs 67.