you seem to be left on an island in history. i remember that island, it was somewhere around 2003 i think:
the thinking was that javascript was unnecessary bloat and a properly written website didn't need any javascript, and a good netizen concerned about safety and privacy turned his/her javascript off. people were (and are) doing harebrained unnecessary things with javascript (whoa dude! look at the animated cursor!) and incompatibility between browsers in an era when firefox was still a cult and ie5 was king meant nobody thought to program for anything but ie. and ie's javascript quirks meant anyone using any other browser was getting nothing but error messages anyways. so just turn javascript off
sorry dude, but the functionality AJAX delivers and how it fundamentally changes the browsing experience in powerful and positive ways utterly washed away any validity to that kind of thinking
but, enjoy your craiglist. i think that's the only site of any heft that came out of that era of web philosophy that survives today with the "pure HTML 3.2 ought to be good enough for anybody" attitude still intact
i think that anti-<TABLE/> jihad from that era is still going strong though. all hail the holy <DIV/>!
Piracy and copyright are not comparable to monks and the printing press. The primary question you should ask when figuring out whether a comparison to piracy is accurate or not is this: "Does society end up with the same or comparible product in both cases?" That is *the question*. The printing press put monks out of work, but society still got the books -- and they got the books at a lower price. If the printing press put authors out of work, then maybe you'd have a gripe about the printing press. Piracy, on the other hand, puts the authors and creators out of work. The final stage of piracy is that no one can earn a living from their work that is benefiting society.
Piracy, on the other hand, puts the authors and creators out of work.
no, you've drunk the koolaid, the distributors' propaganda. piracy puts ONLY the distributor out of work
The final stage of piracy is that no one can earn a living from their work that is benefiting society.
you've somehow made the fanciful leap that the distributor is an integral part of the economics of the music creating process. the final stage of piracy is that distributors go out of business, and only the distributors. first, you are assuming that the pre-internet distribution model gave artists a living. plenty toiled in poverty, and plenty will always toil in poverty, regardless of piracy or not. that's simply the nature of being an artist: for every success, there are thousands of anonymous failures, always was and always will be. nothing about the pre-internet distribution model protects the artist from this truth, and nothing can ever protect the artist from this truth (and nothing ever should: if you suck, oh well)
plenty of one hit wonders became broke as well, as the distributors wrote their agreements so the artists got pennies while the distributors reaped all the real benefit. only the stellar hits: the beatles, jay z, were able to muscle their way into the sphere of distributor-level profits
meanwhile, on the internet, artists have free advertising to everyone in the world, rather than a gateway controlled by distributors. artists can connect directly to fans for free, and distribute their works for free. then they make a living via concerts, promotions, endorsements, advertising, and other ancillary revenues. this is superior to the distributor model as the artist is completely in control, not beholden to some asshole who signs contracts for willynilly reasons and willynilly projections. via a direct link between artist and consumer, an artist rises and falls simply on quality as perceived by the consumer, without an artificial filter in between of a distributor. this is a more efficient model of who deserves cash flows. rather than a distributor giving millions of dollars in advance to an artist who makes absolute crap, while utterly ignoring a musical genius, for random pointless reasons of the distributors sole discretion
study up on the history of artist-distributor contracts, and what millions of artists, successful or not have said about the randomness and arbitrarienss and frustration of their contracts, having nothing whatsoever to do with quality or the fans
Printing press = fewer jobs for scribes, more books for society, lower costs for books, and supports authors. Piracy = creators and authors go bankrupt, society has fewer new creations and becomes culturally poor, feeding on the remnants of old creations, when creating them was still financially possible.
Piracy = distributors go bankrupt, society has diurect access to millions of artist rather than working through a bullshit filter and becomes culturally rich
why do you believe large financial outlays are required for the creation of art? why do you believe we need distributors to tell us what to listen to and that this artificial filter is somehow a definition of cultural richness? why do believe their decisions are more valid or more economically efficient than you yourself and millions of consumers deciding directly who deserves to reap economic benefits from all of the ancillary revenue streams available to an artist?
by giving him free advertising for his ancillary revenue streams (concerts, the cinema house, movie script sales, public speaking, endorsement, toy product line tie-ins, personalized content, etc)
the day of author's great grandchildren given a revenue stream because great grand daddy wrote a song are over, regardless of any law anyone rights. the technology routes around the legal environment, rendering the law moot and pointless. it is our moral duty to kill the obscene arrangement of cureent copyright law. do you think current copyright laws are not obscene and do not deserve to be ignored and actively fought on moral grounds?
current copyright law benefits authors obscenely, but it benefits distributors even more. they wish to put a tollgate on our culture
so we shall destroy distributors. its amazing how the internet has made media empires smaller and weaker than some teenager's hard drive and a broadband connection. now multiply by millions teenagers. go ahead, add a couple thousand corporate lawyers. i don't see a difference
i found out that the printing press made thousands of monk scribes impoverished, no longer able to support their abbeys with book copying by hand
furthermore, without the monks around to copy books, books themselves disappeared from the historical record, and likewise the written word
new technology, the printing press, destroyed all of human written culture. without the archaic scribbling monk, i mean er, god-ordained media distribution technology that was around for centuries and was never intended to change or go away, books as you know them ceased to to exist
i'm not saying your complaints about the cinema are invalid, i'm saying your personal experience isn't the only valid experience, expecially since box office receipts suggest your experience is not typical
the cinema is still a good value. that's not an opinion, box office receipts point to that statement as an objective fact for the majority of people. i mean, i hate cars, i don't own one. i live in midtown manhattan and i think the suburban/ strip mall/ clogged highway lifestyle is an atrocity. however, i recognize that plenty of people still think the car is a good value because of the freedom it represents to them in the suburbs: people continue to buy cars. in other words, i recognize that my opinion on automobiles, however passionate, is not typical. perhaps you should consider that your opinion on the cinema house is not typical
you admit car ownership can be a hassle, and that's it probably more of a hassle every day with raising gas prices, worse road conditions, more traffic, etc... right? well going to the cinema is a hassle to, and is probably more of a hassle everyday. and yet going to the cinema, much like car ownership, is still a value, as spoken by the masses and the wallets. i hate the car ownership experience. you hate the cinema experience. now admit, like me, that we are not the majority on our respective issues
i mean, i live in midtown manhattan, for many reasons, but not least of which i refuse to submit myself to the hellish experience of commuting by car. i could write a 10 page treatise on how hellish car ownership is in my opinion
however, i do not dispute the fact that people continue to buy cars. i guess because an automobile delivers a lot of freedom in a suburban layout. and that therefore i accept that i am in the minority on the issue
so like me, you should admit that the cinema, much like the automobile, is still a great value, despite all the hassles
lesson: people fear losing control. as if control had anything to do with making money off media in the first place
in your desperate attempt to retain control, dear media execs, you might want to notice you are wasting a lot of energy over issues that have nothing to do with your bottom line. only your fear tells you this is the case
in your business strategies, you need more zen, less mafia goons
that i really am not inclined to hold your hand and spoonfeed you the intellectual charity you're asking for. you are not worth the effort. because if you can't see the proof you are asking for on your own, this reflects poorly on your abilities of perception, not my abilities at persuasion
so how about this: i admit complete defeat
you have utterly spanked me in this argument. lo do i regret the day i defied your ideas. your conviction that the world is full of empathic loving human beings, and is only ruined by an exotic 1% of senator palaptines, stands unsundered by my bizarre and unfounded assertions that empathy is easily turned off and often is. and of course, that i am desperately trying to make this absurd argument to you is because i myself am a senator palpatine
consider your delusions unpunctured by any rude intrusions of my so-called reality. carry on with your convictions unchallenged and unprovoked
i've simply pointed out common and straightforward human conditions that a kindergartener would understand and perceive as lacking in empathy. go ahead and reject that. you're not rejecting me, you're rejecting reality. so whatever
and you've tried to hurt my feelings, which is quite psychopathic of you LOL;-)
a clear situation in which myself, or you, or anyone else would act psychopathically: starvation
you bring further proof for my position by citing the milgram experiments, where two thirds of people act psychopathologically... under the influence of authority. right, because acting under the influenced by authority is such a rare and exotic occurrence in modern life. pfffft
you accuse me of projecting. rather, i think it strange you have so much resistance to the idea of a straightforward universal simple ugly truth about the human condition. i think you have a lot invested in the concept that human empathy is stronger than it really is. this naivete on your part or willful blindness
one need only look at the state of the world and see that empathy is in short supply, that lack of empathy is not some strange rare condition that requires special mental illness labelling, but very common and just under the surface in all of us
but don't mind me. no need to change your theory that businessmen are strange exotic agents under the influence of a special mental condition which renders their behavior completely alien and completely criminal. zzz
that is, many here have pointed out that fear mongering results in breaking laws and protections important to our society. this is correct
but i'd like to point out that fear mongering of another sort you see in comments here: that if someone in the government breaks our laws and protections out of fear, OMG WE LIVE IN A FASCIST AUTOCRACY, ITS ORWELL, THERES NO GOING BACK, etc., etc. zzz
obviously, wiretaps without warrants is a bad thing, and needs to be fought and corrected and reversed. but you have to recognize that all societies lie on a continuum of 100% free to 100% oppressed (never achieving 100% either way, that's impossible), and we simply have moved 0.5% towards the oppressed direction, and still come out by and large on the free side of things. in a way, a little backsliding after the trauma of 9/11 is to be expected. the backsliding is BAD and should be FOUGHT, but its almost a given from basic human pscyhology after a traumatic experience to function on fear and panic for a bit rather than being 100% rock solid level headed. the need to calm down and get a hold of your scruples is the mode we are in now
in other words, being a free society is not a binary either/ or state, its a continuum of interconnecting complex concepts, and this loss of freedom with warrantless wiretaps is a small part of a much larger picture. we can and SHOULD reverse it, and be angry about it, but there's no need to get our panties in a bunch about the fallacy that we are on a slippery slope, an unstoppable slide into oppression. does anyone seriously believe that? we've moved a couple inches in the direction of oppression, not a full mile, and we can move a few inches back. and we can, and we should, and we will, move back with calm, rational level headed effort
there's no need to fear monger and panic from the side worried about our freedoms disappearing. is that the best tactic? that kind of reaction reflects poorly on you if you care about your freedoms, because you need to be level headed and stable about your commitment to your freedoms, not worked up into a tizzy. if you are so easily upset, that betrays a lack of faith, and a lack of strong belief in the strength of your freedoms and their staying power. i believe in our freedoms strongly, and that gives me a faith that will carry me through the hiccups without turning into a hysteric about how my freedoms are going to slide out of my grasp completely on a moments notice. no: our culture and our commitment to our values and freedoms is strong and deep, and will not be trifled with
so stop freaking out some of you. it reflects poorly on the strength of your convictions
that is, we all have the ability to turn off our empathy for other human beings
ever walk by a bum with sores on his face begging on the street? ever been to a third world country?
civilized behavior is a very thin veneer on a bunch of large bipedal monkeys. if the food supply dwindled, you watch how you and your fellow men behave. i think the majority of that behavior you would describe as psychopathic: you HAVE to block out your ability to empathize with the plight of other people suffering if your own survival is threatened. we all can do that. of course some people do it all the time, or rather, most of the time. and such people's behavior quickly marks them out for exclusion. so they wind up being homeless drifters, not sharks in suits. the sharks in suits act psychopathic IN THE REALM OF BUSINESS, and then go home to their family and are as "normal" as you are. they compartmentalize their psychopathology
the potential for psychopathic behavior is in all of us, and given the right incentives, right now, you, or i, or anyone reading these words, would act psychopathically
manic depression, schizophrenia, psychopathology, etc., are all aspect of every human being alive. its just that in most people, its below a certain threshold. above that theshold, and you begin to show qualities which put you in a category of illness
but everyone, to some degree, exhibits an ability to dampen their human empathy. if you showed parents the body of their dead child, and one retched on the spot, and the other calmly and grimly left, which is the "normal" person? is the parent who exhibited no physical revulsion a psychopath? we all process these things differently, and you have no objective, only subjective measurement for temporary or permanent empathy deficits
just look at stanley milgram's experiments where he took normal everyday people and got them to shock people to death (in simulation)
just with the excuse of peer pressure and following orders. so what does that mean? psychopathology is widespread?
no, it means "psychopath" is in every single one of us, and can come out under all sorts of conditions. yes, for some, it is easier conditions, but the term psychopathic behavior, in potential, and in our behavior in the past, is an accurate description of something you have done or could do under the right conditions, or me, or anyone reading these words
civilized behavior is a very thin veneer on a bunch of large bipedal monkeys. if the food supply dwindled, you watch how you and your fellow men behave. i think the majority of that behavior you would describe as psychopathic: you have to block out your ability to empathize with the plight of other people suffering if your own survival is threatened. we all can do that. the potential for psychopathic behavior is in all of us
#1. we're all psychopathic to some degree or another
#2. it excuses criminals. rather than start with idea of a human who has erred, you start with the idea there's something special about someone that has made them a criminal. no: good people go bad, and bad people go good, and whatever someone's flaws, you talk about their criminal acts, not this supposed otherworldly quality about them that means they are forever more this cartoonish stereotype of behavior. it also ignore st eh fact that YOU can commit these crimes, which you can, under the right conditions. you put your guard down
#3. it perpetuates this stupid idea of a magical "other", some sort of special class of people who can have superhuman powers of turning off their empathy and lording over us. its an "us" versus "them" situation, and its the same old retarded thinking from throughout history. it also makes you think you can't succeed, because only a psychopath can truly run a business
this is the truth: you can do any of the crimes you see snakes in suits do. snakes in suits are as flawed as you and me. there's nothing special about them, except the crimes they've committed, which they should be prosecuted on that basis and that basis alone. not this quasi-cartoonish idea of a "psychopath"
the word has become a massively overused mental shorthand for "bogeyman" and does not retain its narrow psychological definition. therefore, it as useless as any other overused synonym people use for bogeyman, like "socialist" or "terrorist"
much like communist propaganda made a herd of idiots support autocrats at the expense of their impoverishment, libertarian propaganda makes a herd of idiots support monopolists at the expense of their impoverishment
libertarian propaganda, of course, being the mirror image of the evil that is marx's das kapital: the holy text of ayn rand
Rand's particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism -- to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand's teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.
Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject -- she writes that she is "a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations" -- while allowing the reader to understand the power of Rand's conviction and her odd charisma. Rand labored for more than two years on Galt's radio address near the end of "Atlas Shrugged" -- a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" sound like the Sermon on the Mount. "At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row," Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a "drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture." Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt's speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls "a comment that became publishing legend": "Would you cut the Bible?"
market fundamentalists and agrarian fundamentalists loudly rage about their incredibly retarded ideologies, and us normal folk have to tolerate these ignorant assholes who do nothing but create suffering for us. i liked how this biography of rand linked her creation to her upbringing in revolutionary russia. in other words, the prophet of the libertarians was born as an angry revenge, a living vendetta, against the suffering of her upbringing in the birthing pains of communist russia. fitting and poetic: the idiocy of communism begat the idiocy of libertarianism, directly
Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as "collectivism," from Soviet Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren't immune: after Wendell Willkie's defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization called Associated Ex-Willkie Workers Against Willkie, berating the candidate as "the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt."
death to libertarians and communists, mirror image morons and assholes who create suffering for us all with their loud ignorance they call an ideology
the question being: how many addicts does easy access by casual users create?
CASUAL users, who would not pursue the drug if it were less available
depending upon that number of addicts you harvest from casual users who are created by easy access, you have a greater amount of evil happening from the drug itself VERSUS from the society's prohibition effects
with some substances, prohibition is clearly worse. with other substances, the actual DRUG is the worst effect
now lets get to my point as unambiguously as possible: increased casual use leads to more addicts
so if you have a society where access to drugs is easy, versus one where it is difficult, sure, there will be a core committed population who will get drugs no matter what you do, in either society. again, i agree with that point of yours
but this group does not describe every type of user
there's another population, the casually interested group, which is a much larger population. they are not highly motivated to get access to drugs, but if access is available they will try it
now you can't talk about alcohol and marijuana in the same breath as cocaine, meth, or heroin in this situation. simply because basic pharmacology tells us that the addiction potential is much higher for meth/ heroin/ coke than anything else, and so this casual group will result in a number of addicts. do you dispute that?
such that, with this casual population, with the easy access to these hardest of drugs that you accept, you harvest a population of addicts THAT WOULD BE MUCH SMALLER IF ACCESS WAS DIFFICULT
do you see my point?
the war on drugs that makes access difficult for the casual user has MANY negative side effects you demonstrate. and yet the positive of the war on drugs: a much smaller population of addicts, is something you will not recognize or admit to, when basic logic about the addictive potential of something like meth/ heroin/ coke should tell you something about the fate of many casual users with easy access. the best way to fight addiction to hardest of drugs is to fight this initial contact between CASUAL user (you can't do anything about the committed losers) and hardcore drugs
casual interest + easy access + high addictive potential = much larger pool of addicts. do you dispute that logic?
the lessons of prohibition of things like alcohol and marijuana do not teach us anything about the highly addictive+inebriating drugs because the harm the highly addictive+inbriating drugs do to individuals directly far outweighs all of the negative prohibition effects you speak of. the negative prohibition effects you speak of DOES argue for soft drugs like marijuana and alcohol to be legal, but NOT meth/ coke/ heroin
Slashdot Mirror
http://answers.yahoo.com/
and the end all most awesome/ most depressing question ever asked there:
"how is babby formed, how girl get pragnent"
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
american civil character, 2009:
"We will sniff you if you have fear, so have no fear"
american civil character, 2085:
"The only thing we have to fear is rogue self-aware fear-sniffing robots"
modern civilization
relies on
modem serialization
you seem to be left on an island in history. i remember that island, it was somewhere around 2003 i think:
the thinking was that javascript was unnecessary bloat and a properly written website didn't need any javascript, and a good netizen concerned about safety and privacy turned his/her javascript off. people were (and are) doing harebrained unnecessary things with javascript (whoa dude! look at the animated cursor!) and incompatibility between browsers in an era when firefox was still a cult and ie5 was king meant nobody thought to program for anything but ie. and ie's javascript quirks meant anyone using any other browser was getting nothing but error messages anyways. so just turn javascript off
sorry dude, but the functionality AJAX delivers and how it fundamentally changes the browsing experience in powerful and positive ways utterly washed away any validity to that kind of thinking
but, enjoy your craiglist. i think that's the only site of any heft that came out of that era of web philosophy that survives today with the "pure HTML 3.2 ought to be good enough for anybody" attitude still intact
i think that anti-<TABLE/> jihad from that era is still going strong though. all hail the holy <DIV/>!
it's the difference between catching a lofted cricket ball or baseball, and catching a fly."
to complete your allegory in terms of childhood classic movies, the solution to the problem is less bad news bears and more karate kid
who can't balance their checkbooks
that nicely summarizes the contradictions between being "high iq" and "smart"
i forgot to put quotes on the guy's words. you are actually responding to the guy i am responding to. so we agree 100% ;-)
Piracy and copyright are not comparable to monks and the printing press. The primary question you should ask when figuring out whether a comparison to piracy is accurate or not is this: "Does society end up with the same or comparible product in both cases?" That is *the question*. The printing press put monks out of work, but society still got the books -- and they got the books at a lower price. If the printing press put authors out of work, then maybe you'd have a gripe about the printing press. Piracy, on the other hand, puts the authors and creators out of work. The final stage of piracy is that no one can earn a living from their work that is benefiting society.
Piracy, on the other hand, puts the authors and creators out of work.
no, you've drunk the koolaid, the distributors' propaganda. piracy puts ONLY the distributor out of work
The final stage of piracy is that no one can earn a living from their work that is benefiting society.
you've somehow made the fanciful leap that the distributor is an integral part of the economics of the music creating process. the final stage of piracy is that distributors go out of business, and only the distributors. first, you are assuming that the pre-internet distribution model gave artists a living. plenty toiled in poverty, and plenty will always toil in poverty, regardless of piracy or not. that's simply the nature of being an artist: for every success, there are thousands of anonymous failures, always was and always will be. nothing about the pre-internet distribution model protects the artist from this truth, and nothing can ever protect the artist from this truth (and nothing ever should: if you suck, oh well)
plenty of one hit wonders became broke as well, as the distributors wrote their agreements so the artists got pennies while the distributors reaped all the real benefit. only the stellar hits: the beatles, jay z, were able to muscle their way into the sphere of distributor-level profits
meanwhile, on the internet, artists have free advertising to everyone in the world, rather than a gateway controlled by distributors. artists can connect directly to fans for free, and distribute their works for free. then they make a living via concerts, promotions, endorsements, advertising, and other ancillary revenues. this is superior to the distributor model as the artist is completely in control, not beholden to some asshole who signs contracts for willynilly reasons and willynilly projections. via a direct link between artist and consumer, an artist rises and falls simply on quality as perceived by the consumer, without an artificial filter in between of a distributor. this is a more efficient model of who deserves cash flows. rather than a distributor giving millions of dollars in advance to an artist who makes absolute crap, while utterly ignoring a musical genius, for random pointless reasons of the distributors sole discretion
study up on the history of artist-distributor contracts, and what millions of artists, successful or not have said about the randomness and arbitrarienss and frustration of their contracts, having nothing whatsoever to do with quality or the fans
Printing press = fewer jobs for scribes, more books for society, lower costs for books, and supports authors.
Piracy = creators and authors go bankrupt, society has fewer new creations and becomes culturally poor, feeding on the remnants of old creations, when creating them was still financially possible.
Piracy = distributors go bankrupt, society has diurect access to millions of artist rather than working through a bullshit filter and becomes culturally rich
why do you believe large financial outlays are required for the creation of art? why do you believe we need distributors to tell us what to listen to and that this artificial filter is somehow a definition of cultural richness? why do believe their decisions are more valid or more economically efficient than you yourself and millions of consumers deciding directly who deserves to reap economic benefits from all of the ancillary revenue streams available to an artist?
by giving him free advertising for his ancillary revenue streams (concerts, the cinema house, movie script sales, public speaking, endorsement, toy product line tie-ins, personalized content, etc)
the day of author's great grandchildren given a revenue stream because great grand daddy wrote a song are over, regardless of any law anyone rights. the technology routes around the legal environment, rendering the law moot and pointless. it is our moral duty to kill the obscene arrangement of cureent copyright law. do you think current copyright laws are not obscene and do not deserve to be ignored and actively fought on moral grounds?
current copyright law benefits authors obscenely, but it benefits distributors even more. they wish to put a tollgate on our culture
so we shall destroy distributors. its amazing how the internet has made media empires smaller and weaker than some teenager's hard drive and a broadband connection. now multiply by millions teenagers. go ahead, add a couple thousand corporate lawyers. i don't see a difference
game over
i found out that the printing press made thousands of monk scribes impoverished, no longer able to support their abbeys with book copying by hand
furthermore, without the monks around to copy books, books themselves disappeared from the historical record, and likewise the written word
new technology, the printing press, destroyed all of human written culture. without the archaic scribbling monk, i mean er, god-ordained media distribution technology that was around for centuries and was never intended to change or go away, books as you know them ceased to to exist
i'm not saying your complaints about the cinema are invalid, i'm saying your personal experience isn't the only valid experience, expecially since box office receipts suggest your experience is not typical
the cinema is still a good value. that's not an opinion, box office receipts point to that statement as an objective fact for the majority of people. i mean, i hate cars, i don't own one. i live in midtown manhattan and i think the suburban/ strip mall/ clogged highway lifestyle is an atrocity. however, i recognize that plenty of people still think the car is a good value because of the freedom it represents to them in the suburbs: people continue to buy cars. in other words, i recognize that my opinion on automobiles, however passionate, is not typical. perhaps you should consider that your opinion on the cinema house is not typical
you admit car ownership can be a hassle, and that's it probably more of a hassle every day with raising gas prices, worse road conditions, more traffic, etc... right? well going to the cinema is a hassle to, and is probably more of a hassle everyday. and yet going to the cinema, much like car ownership, is still a value, as spoken by the masses and the wallets. i hate the car ownership experience. you hate the cinema experience. now admit, like me, that we are not the majority on our respective issues
i mean, i live in midtown manhattan, for many reasons, but not least of which i refuse to submit myself to the hellish experience of commuting by car. i could write a 10 page treatise on how hellish car ownership is in my opinion
however, i do not dispute the fact that people continue to buy cars. i guess because an automobile delivers a lot of freedom in a suburban layout. and that therefore i accept that i am in the minority on the issue
so like me, you should admit that the cinema, much like the automobile, is still a great value, despite all the hassles
you are describing your own experience and thinking it has anything to do with everybody's experience
follow the boxofficemojo link in my previous post: income keeps going up
that's the only thing that matters
if income goes down steeply at some point, then maybe some of what you brought up will be addressed, or maybe not ever
then the vcr was supposed to kill the cinema house
now the internet is supposed to kill the cinema house
meanwhile:
http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/
lesson: people fear losing control. as if control had anything to do with making money off media in the first place
in your desperate attempt to retain control, dear media execs, you might want to notice you are wasting a lot of energy over issues that have nothing to do with your bottom line. only your fear tells you this is the case
in your business strategies, you need more zen, less mafia goons
"Let's just say the technology is not quite there yet"
aka
"Pertaining to the acceptability, us, speaking of the mechanical acumen almost has arrived, still"
that i really am not inclined to hold your hand and spoonfeed you the intellectual charity you're asking for. you are not worth the effort. because if you can't see the proof you are asking for on your own, this reflects poorly on your abilities of perception, not my abilities at persuasion
so how about this: i admit complete defeat
you have utterly spanked me in this argument. lo do i regret the day i defied your ideas. your conviction that the world is full of empathic loving human beings, and is only ruined by an exotic 1% of senator palaptines, stands unsundered by my bizarre and unfounded assertions that empathy is easily turned off and often is. and of course, that i am desperately trying to make this absurd argument to you is because i myself am a senator palpatine
consider your delusions unpunctured by any rude intrusions of my so-called reality. carry on with your convictions unchallenged and unprovoked
(snicker)
i've simply pointed out common and straightforward human conditions that a kindergartener would understand and perceive as lacking in empathy. go ahead and reject that. you're not rejecting me, you're rejecting reality. so whatever
and you've tried to hurt my feelings, which is quite psychopathic of you LOL ;-)
a clear situation in which myself, or you, or anyone else would act psychopathically: starvation
you bring further proof for my position by citing the milgram experiments, where two thirds of people act psychopathologically... under the influence of authority. right, because acting under the influenced by authority is such a rare and exotic occurrence in modern life. pfffft
you accuse me of projecting. rather, i think it strange you have so much resistance to the idea of a straightforward universal simple ugly truth about the human condition. i think you have a lot invested in the concept that human empathy is stronger than it really is. this naivete on your part or willful blindness
one need only look at the state of the world and see that empathy is in short supply, that lack of empathy is not some strange rare condition that requires special mental illness labelling, but very common and just under the surface in all of us
but don't mind me. no need to change your theory that businessmen are strange exotic agents under the influence of a special mental condition which renders their behavior completely alien and completely criminal. zzz
that is, many here have pointed out that fear mongering results in breaking laws and protections important to our society. this is correct
but i'd like to point out that fear mongering of another sort you see in comments here: that if someone in the government breaks our laws and protections out of fear, OMG WE LIVE IN A FASCIST AUTOCRACY, ITS ORWELL, THERES NO GOING BACK, etc., etc. zzz
obviously, wiretaps without warrants is a bad thing, and needs to be fought and corrected and reversed. but you have to recognize that all societies lie on a continuum of 100% free to 100% oppressed (never achieving 100% either way, that's impossible), and we simply have moved 0.5% towards the oppressed direction, and still come out by and large on the free side of things. in a way, a little backsliding after the trauma of 9/11 is to be expected. the backsliding is BAD and should be FOUGHT, but its almost a given from basic human pscyhology after a traumatic experience to function on fear and panic for a bit rather than being 100% rock solid level headed. the need to calm down and get a hold of your scruples is the mode we are in now
in other words, being a free society is not a binary either/ or state, its a continuum of interconnecting complex concepts, and this loss of freedom with warrantless wiretaps is a small part of a much larger picture. we can and SHOULD reverse it, and be angry about it, but there's no need to get our panties in a bunch about the fallacy that we are on a slippery slope, an unstoppable slide into oppression. does anyone seriously believe that? we've moved a couple inches in the direction of oppression, not a full mile, and we can move a few inches back. and we can, and we should, and we will, move back with calm, rational level headed effort
there's no need to fear monger and panic from the side worried about our freedoms disappearing. is that the best tactic? that kind of reaction reflects poorly on you if you care about your freedoms, because you need to be level headed and stable about your commitment to your freedoms, not worked up into a tizzy. if you are so easily upset, that betrays a lack of faith, and a lack of strong belief in the strength of your freedoms and their staying power. i believe in our freedoms strongly, and that gives me a faith that will carry me through the hiccups without turning into a hysteric about how my freedoms are going to slide out of my grasp completely on a moments notice. no: our culture and our commitment to our values and freedoms is strong and deep, and will not be trifled with
so stop freaking out some of you. it reflects poorly on the strength of your convictions
that is, we all have the ability to turn off our empathy for other human beings
ever walk by a bum with sores on his face begging on the street? ever been to a third world country?
civilized behavior is a very thin veneer on a bunch of large bipedal monkeys. if the food supply dwindled, you watch how you and your fellow men behave. i think the majority of that behavior you would describe as psychopathic: you HAVE to block out your ability to empathize with the plight of other people suffering if your own survival is threatened. we all can do that. of course some people do it all the time, or rather, most of the time. and such people's behavior quickly marks them out for exclusion. so they wind up being homeless drifters, not sharks in suits. the sharks in suits act psychopathic IN THE REALM OF BUSINESS, and then go home to their family and are as "normal" as you are. they compartmentalize their psychopathology
the potential for psychopathic behavior is in all of us, and given the right incentives, right now, you, or i, or anyone reading these words, would act psychopathically
manic depression, schizophrenia, psychopathology, etc., are all aspect of every human being alive. its just that in most people, its below a certain threshold. above that theshold, and you begin to show qualities which put you in a category of illness
but everyone, to some degree, exhibits an ability to dampen their human empathy. if you showed parents the body of their dead child, and one retched on the spot, and the other calmly and grimly left, which is the "normal" person? is the parent who exhibited no physical revulsion a psychopath? we all process these things differently, and you have no objective, only subjective measurement for temporary or permanent empathy deficits
just look at stanley milgram's experiments where he took normal everyday people and got them to shock people to death (in simulation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
just with the excuse of peer pressure and following orders. so what does that mean? psychopathology is widespread?
no, it means "psychopath" is in every single one of us, and can come out under all sorts of conditions. yes, for some, it is easier conditions, but the term psychopathic behavior, in potential, and in our behavior in the past, is an accurate description of something you have done or could do under the right conditions, or me, or anyone reading these words
civilized behavior is a very thin veneer on a bunch of large bipedal monkeys. if the food supply dwindled, you watch how you and your fellow men behave. i think the majority of that behavior you would describe as psychopathic: you have to block out your ability to empathize with the plight of other people suffering if your own survival is threatened. we all can do that. the potential for psychopathic behavior is in all of us
#1. we're all psychopathic to some degree or another
#2. it excuses criminals. rather than start with idea of a human who has erred, you start with the idea there's something special about someone that has made them a criminal. no: good people go bad, and bad people go good, and whatever someone's flaws, you talk about their criminal acts, not this supposed otherworldly quality about them that means they are forever more this cartoonish stereotype of behavior. it also ignore st eh fact that YOU can commit these crimes, which you can, under the right conditions. you put your guard down
#3. it perpetuates this stupid idea of a magical "other", some sort of special class of people who can have superhuman powers of turning off their empathy and lording over us. its an "us" versus "them" situation, and its the same old retarded thinking from throughout history. it also makes you think you can't succeed, because only a psychopath can truly run a business
this is the truth: you can do any of the crimes you see snakes in suits do. snakes in suits are as flawed as you and me. there's nothing special about them, except the crimes they've committed, which they should be prosecuted on that basis and that basis alone. not this quasi-cartoonish idea of a "psychopath"
the word has become a massively overused mental shorthand for "bogeyman" and does not retain its narrow psychological definition. therefore, it as useless as any other overused synonym people use for bogeyman, like "socialist" or "terrorist"
much like communist propaganda made a herd of idiots support autocrats at the expense of their impoverishment, libertarian propaganda makes a herd of idiots support monopolists at the expense of their impoverishment
libertarian propaganda, of course, being the mirror image of the evil that is marx's das kapital: the holy text of ayn rand
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html
market fundamentalists and agrarian fundamentalists loudly rage about their incredibly retarded ideologies, and us normal folk have to tolerate these ignorant assholes who do nothing but create suffering for us. i liked how this biography of rand linked her creation to her upbringing in revolutionary russia. in other words, the prophet of the libertarians was born as an angry revenge, a living vendetta, against the suffering of her upbringing in the birthing pains of communist russia. fitting and poetic: the idiocy of communism begat the idiocy of libertarianism, directly
death to libertarians and communists, mirror image morons and assholes who create suffering for us all with their loud ignorance they call an ideology
educate yourself. here's a start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg
the question being: how many addicts does easy access by casual users create?
CASUAL users, who would not pursue the drug if it were less available
depending upon that number of addicts you harvest from casual users who are created by easy access, you have a greater amount of evil happening from the drug itself VERSUS from the society's prohibition effects
with some substances, prohibition is clearly worse. with other substances, the actual DRUG is the worst effect
of prohibition you mention
i don't dispute any of it, i agree with it 100%
now lets get to my point as unambiguously as possible: increased casual use leads to more addicts
so if you have a society where access to drugs is easy, versus one where it is difficult, sure, there will be a core committed population who will get drugs no matter what you do, in either society. again, i agree with that point of yours
but this group does not describe every type of user
there's another population, the casually interested group, which is a much larger population. they are not highly motivated to get access to drugs, but if access is available they will try it
now you can't talk about alcohol and marijuana in the same breath as cocaine, meth, or heroin in this situation. simply because basic pharmacology tells us that the addiction potential is much higher for meth/ heroin/ coke than anything else, and so this casual group will result in a number of addicts. do you dispute that?
such that, with this casual population, with the easy access to these hardest of drugs that you accept, you harvest a population of addicts THAT WOULD BE MUCH SMALLER IF ACCESS WAS DIFFICULT
do you see my point?
the war on drugs that makes access difficult for the casual user has MANY negative side effects you demonstrate. and yet the positive of the war on drugs: a much smaller population of addicts, is something you will not recognize or admit to, when basic logic about the addictive potential of something like meth/ heroin/ coke should tell you something about the fate of many casual users with easy access. the best way to fight addiction to hardest of drugs is to fight this initial contact between CASUAL user (you can't do anything about the committed losers) and hardcore drugs
casual interest + easy access + high addictive potential = much larger pool of addicts. do you dispute that logic?
the lessons of prohibition of things like alcohol and marijuana do not teach us anything about the highly addictive+inebriating drugs because the harm the highly addictive+inbriating drugs do to individuals directly far outweighs all of the negative prohibition effects you speak of. the negative prohibition effects you speak of DOES argue for soft drugs like marijuana and alcohol to be legal, but NOT meth/ coke/ heroin