You forgot 5: immortality. Since it appears that real immortality won't be discovered any time in the near future, Bill has to console himself in the way that the rich have been doing for centuries, by building statues/buildings/foundations with their names attached to it. So while he's almost certainly wormfood, his name will live on.
It makes me wonder if this practice will continue once actual immortality becomes a reality. I sincerely hope I'll be around to observe the results, but like Bill I'm not holding my breath.
I thought the current political meme was "government regulation is always bad."
Don't tell that to the Republicans. Despite having a Republican congress we have more laws and more regulation on the books than ever before. Republicans seem to be just as enamored of legislation as Democrats and, in fact, I don't see any real policy difference between the two when it comes to who they favor (i.e., whoever happens to be paying them off, which is always special interest groups or big businesses).
I'm not citing Gatto's book itself as the source, but as the place to get the sources you need to confirm the information. As I said, I don't have the direct links in front of me, but those links are in Gatto's book and can be used for independent confirmation of the material in question.
The rest of Gatto's book, including Gatto's conclusions concerning the school system, are immaterial to the discussion. So I'd suggest that it's you who needs to "grow up", perhaps starting with the mastery of 'reading comprehension'.
Yes, indeed. I don't have the direct links right in front of me, but there's an entire chunk of John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of American Education" devoted to this very subject, complete with relevant source materials. You can find Gatto's book online here, and from there you can find the sources that you need to confirm what I said.
This was big news in the late 1800's and early 1900's when even common people had a pretty good idea that something fishy was going on, but since then we've been convinced that "government regulation is always good, mmmkay" and swallow this horseshit without a second thought.
In the age of the industrial revolution, it was free market all the way. It turned out to be a reall hell for the employees. Near-slavery situations.
Not true in America. Corporations operating within the free market only made up a tiny fraction of the American economy right up to 1900, no matter what you learned in your school textbooks. More than 90% of the entire economic output of the U.S. was in the hands of small businesses, most of these family-operated.
In those businesses working conditions were better than anywhere else in the Western world. But since this doesn't make for great pro-government copy, the only thing history books focus on is the abuse workers took at the hands of corporations.
And, of course, no one talks about how all that great, wonderful, "for the people" legislation killed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, leaving corporations free to pick up the pieces, expand their markets, and levy their influence on a government eager to sell out. Nope, you won't find that in a high school or college text. It's anti-government and anti-corporation, and therefore anti-American!
Oh, and by the way the companies would hire thugs to kill picketers and union organizers.
And now they have government thugs to do it for them. That is, if the government doesn't decide to make it illegal for the workers to strike at all "in the national interest".
You also failed to mention that the regulations in question forced THOUSANDS of small family-owned and operated coal mining businesses to fold. Not a single major corporation suffered in any conceivable way, nearly all of the small businesses went under in less than a decade.
Yeah, that was a real win for "the people". With your natural ability to selectively present the facts that you happen to agree with, you should consider running for office.
All you're arguing for is a borg-like compliance among distributions simply to make your own life easier - or perhaps just because the idea of fifty different distributions with fifty different solutions to problems assaults your insistence that everything be neatly confined to clear definable boxes. And that all the boxes be compatible.
If you want this sort of compatibility, use Windows. Incompatibilities, competing systems, even flamewars - they all encourage competition and innovation. This is a good thing. It may not be something that Joe User wants to deal with it, but *we're under no obligation to provide for Joe User*. Joe User can go get a copy of WinXP if he isn't up to doing a little thinking.
I'm not one of those freakoid zealots whose sole goal in life is to commander Linux to destroy the Evil Empire. *I don't care* if Linux has 5% of the market share or 50% of the market share; either way 95% of the people who work on Linux will continue to plug away, and the product I choose will get better and better. And it will do so BECAUSE of competition and incompatibilities and flamewars, and not because of a lack of these things.
For doubleplusgood groupthink there's Microsoft. For those who like variety in all of its forms, there's Linux.
While I have no doubt that the number of Mozilla/Firefox/whatever users are growing, the statistics can and will be skewed by a variety of factors. One in particular I don't see being discussed is that many Opera users mask themselves as IE users when browsing (such as moi) in order to avoid those annoying "sorry, you have to have IE to access this site" messages.
IE users don't mask themselves as anyone else; they don't have to. Since I don't use IE I'm not even sure they can. I also don't know if Mozilla users can mask themselves, but it's apparent from the slashdot posts here that many of the Mozilla folks are pretty fanatic about their support of the product and wouldn't be nearly as pragmatic in their approach to web browsing as Opera users would (Opera is all about pragmatism, not open source fanaticism or brand loyalty or defeating the Evil Empire).
My completely unsubstantiated guess based on a variety of statistics is that IE use is declining and that the use of ALL alternate browsers - open source or not - is rising. I very much doubt that Mozilla has many times the usage rate of Opera, as is often bandied about here on slashdot. Reliable statistics can be obtained to show that IE dominance is declining, but so long as we have various other factors at work (e.g., the Opera masking I talked about above) we can't show in any sort of empirical fashion that alternative browser X is the big leader.
Unless you happen to be one of those brand loyalty loons, this isn't a matter for concern. The more browsers in the market, the more competition among browser makers, the better it is for the rest of us. The last thing we want is for IE to be replaced by another dominant web browser, like Mozilla. This situation would only lend itself to abuse, as the Mozilla group would become the de facto web standards group in the process. We don't want ANY browser maker to be dominant in the market, open source or not; there's nothing 'holy' about open source that keeps the makers of a dominant product from using that product to enforce their own ideas and conventions as standards. A massively dominant market share lends itself to unethical exploitation, not to mention rampant egotism among those who see themselves as part of the 'winning' team.
If anything, we shouldn't be encouraging the use of Mozilla alone as an alternative to IE, but the use of ANY browser that does the job. And that means Konqueror, Galeon, Opera, and so forth. We want all of these products to pick up significant market share so that no one of them can take a dominant position ever again.
For a better explanation than I can present here on slashdot, you might try reading "The Wealth of Nations".
And your contention that the desire to lead a happy life is antithetical to free market capitalism is just plain hogwash. They don't have anything to do with one another.
According to some sources, the Depression was artificially extended by both the government and certain 'captains of industry' in order to thoroughly wreck competing small businesses and consolidate power in the hands of the few. The "New Deal" was the method by which the government got the unemployed to swallow this crap and at the same time defuse the growing rumblings of revolution.
World War 2 came along just in time to quash all the talk of rebellion when it was seen that the "New Deal" wasn't going over so well with the general populace. Great timing, that.
but what we call the poor now are far better off than they were in the past.
Guess you haven't been paying attention. The wage of the average American worker, after adjusting for inflation, is lower than what the average American worker was making in the fifies.
Not that this is any surprise. Gen-X was told this was going to happen back in the early 80's; that we'd be the first generation of Americans worse off than their parents. What's amusing is that a) very few people believed it, and now seem shocked that it's actually come true, and b) that some of those people still live in a fantasy land where we're all 'better off' than ever before.
You need to read a bit of history. The Japanese economy enjoys some of the strictest governmental protectionism seen in the First World. They use that protectionism to excellent effect, keeping their industries vibrant while effectively co-opting big chunks of business in other nations.
That's pretty much how lawyers and doctors started out. After awhile they decided that they had enough members and needed to restrict new entries. With state sanctions they drew up requirements which tightened over the years, and also were awarded the ability to boot their members (with no alternate organizations as recourse) whenever those members didn't toe the party line. If those booted members dared to practice their profession, the professional organizations would cry 'foul!' and the government would come along to thump the miscreant.
So tell me: how long will it take your organization to go the same way? Or do you honestly think that unlike the doctors, the lawyers, the plumbers, the electricians, the psychiatrists, and all the others that have gone before you, you'll somehow be exempt from the same sort of greed and corruption?
I think I'll become an auto mechanic. a plumber, or an electrican.
And don't forget that two of these three professions are guild-controlled, and that you can only practice these crafts if they allow you to do so. Which typicaly consists of spending money on bribes, er, 'licensing', not to mention mandated training and whatever other requirements your state government has dreamed up in order to let those guilds maintain their monopolies.
Damn straight. The last thing I want to see is any more socialism, of either the Democratic or Republican flavor. If a company folds, then company fucking folds! Instead of giving a bunch of idiots who can't properly manage their business my tax money, send it on back my way; I'll 'help' the economy by spending it on stuff I'd like to have, thank you.
We've lost 2 million jobs, and recovered 1.1 million. That's still 900,000 missing. Furthermore, the average wage of those new jobs is $9,000 less than the ones that were lost.
The disparity between the very rich and the rest of us is greater now than at any time in U.S. history. And despite what the government says, we have more unemployed since 1983; the only difference being that so many of them are off the unemployment rolls they are no longer counted.
I don't think Gore would've done any better than Bush, though. This was started a long, long time ago and no president would've been capable of substantially altering the outcome.
Today I see a leader hell bent on fueling a political machine
I don't see any difference between the politics of today and the politics of the last century. Leaders have been "hell bent on fueling the political machine" for a very long time now.
The people who aren't in good shape are the children and grandchildren in this country...
The baby boomers are deluding themselves if they think their children and grandchildren are going to pay for their retirements through Social Security. They're deluding themselves even further if they think we're going to pay off their debts for them.
Once Gen-X and the others that follow see the price tag up close and personal after the retirement of the Boomers, I think we're going to hear a very loud, national "fuck that!" soon after.
What crap. What farm subsidies do is chain small, independent farmers to government handouts. It's essentially a dole, and a deliberately ineffective one since the number of small farms declines each and every year.
It's important that food production be concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, with all the small farms dependent on government charity until they can be phased out. Control over food production is an absolute requirement of any government that wants to put a lid on the possibility that their populace might become rebellious.
You really want to help small farmers? Exempt them from all property and sales taxes. Make it a Constitutional amendment so that the government can't threaten to revoke it to keep the small farmers in line.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot 5: immortality. Since it appears that real immortality won't be discovered any time in the near future, Bill has to console himself in the way that the rich have been doing for centuries, by building statues/buildings/foundations with their names attached to it. So while he's almost certainly wormfood, his name will live on.
It makes me wonder if this practice will continue once actual immortality becomes a reality. I sincerely hope I'll be around to observe the results, but like Bill I'm not holding my breath.
Max
Wild Turkey. Beer is for pussies, and wine for effeminate pussies. Real men go straight for the good stuff.
Max
Of course, drinking is moderation is good
At least that's what the drunks among us would like us to believe. Not to mention their drug suppliers.
Max
I thought the current political meme was "government regulation is always bad."
Don't tell that to the Republicans. Despite having a Republican congress we have more laws and more regulation on the books than ever before. Republicans seem to be just as enamored of legislation as Democrats and, in fact, I don't see any real policy difference between the two when it comes to who they favor (i.e., whoever happens to be paying them off, which is always special interest groups or big businesses).
Max
I'm not citing Gatto's book itself as the source, but as the place to get the sources you need to confirm the information. As I said, I don't have the direct links in front of me, but those links are in Gatto's book and can be used for independent confirmation of the material in question.
The rest of Gatto's book, including Gatto's conclusions concerning the school system, are immaterial to the discussion. So I'd suggest that it's you who needs to "grow up", perhaps starting with the mastery of 'reading comprehension'.
Max
Yes, indeed. I don't have the direct links right in front of me, but there's an entire chunk of John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of American Education" devoted to this very subject, complete with relevant source materials. You can find Gatto's book online here, and from there you can find the sources that you need to confirm what I said.
This was big news in the late 1800's and early 1900's when even common people had a pretty good idea that something fishy was going on, but since then we've been convinced that "government regulation is always good, mmmkay" and swallow this horseshit without a second thought.
Max
In the age of the industrial revolution, it was free market all the way. It turned out to be a reall hell for the employees. Near-slavery situations.
Not true in America. Corporations operating within the free market only made up a tiny fraction of the American economy right up to 1900, no matter what you learned in your school textbooks. More than 90% of the entire economic output of the U.S. was in the hands of small businesses, most of these family-operated.
In those businesses working conditions were better than anywhere else in the Western world. But since this doesn't make for great pro-government copy, the only thing history books focus on is the abuse workers took at the hands of corporations.
And, of course, no one talks about how all that great, wonderful, "for the people" legislation killed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, leaving corporations free to pick up the pieces, expand their markets, and levy their influence on a government eager to sell out. Nope, you won't find that in a high school or college text. It's anti-government and anti-corporation, and therefore anti-American!
Max
Oh, and by the way the companies would hire thugs to kill picketers and union organizers.
And now they have government thugs to do it for them. That is, if the government doesn't decide to make it illegal for the workers to strike at all "in the national interest".
You also failed to mention that the regulations in question forced THOUSANDS of small family-owned and operated coal mining businesses to fold. Not a single major corporation suffered in any conceivable way, nearly all of the small businesses went under in less than a decade.
Yeah, that was a real win for "the people". With your natural ability to selectively present the facts that you happen to agree with, you should consider running for office.
Max
All you're arguing for is a borg-like compliance among distributions simply to make your own life easier - or perhaps just because the idea of fifty different distributions with fifty different solutions to problems assaults your insistence that everything be neatly confined to clear definable boxes. And that all the boxes be compatible.
If you want this sort of compatibility, use Windows. Incompatibilities, competing systems, even flamewars - they all encourage competition and innovation. This is a good thing. It may not be something that Joe User wants to deal with it, but *we're under no obligation to provide for Joe User*. Joe User can go get a copy of WinXP if he isn't up to doing a little thinking.
I'm not one of those freakoid zealots whose sole goal in life is to commander Linux to destroy the Evil Empire. *I don't care* if Linux has 5% of the market share or 50% of the market share; either way 95% of the people who work on Linux will continue to plug away, and the product I choose will get better and better. And it will do so BECAUSE of competition and incompatibilities and flamewars, and not because of a lack of these things.
For doubleplusgood groupthink there's Microsoft. For those who like variety in all of its forms, there's Linux.
Max
While I have no doubt that the number of Mozilla/Firefox/whatever users are growing, the statistics can and will be skewed by a variety of factors. One in particular I don't see being discussed is that many Opera users mask themselves as IE users when browsing (such as moi) in order to avoid those annoying "sorry, you have to have IE to access this site" messages.
IE users don't mask themselves as anyone else; they don't have to. Since I don't use IE I'm not even sure they can. I also don't know if Mozilla users can mask themselves, but it's apparent from the slashdot posts here that many of the Mozilla folks are pretty fanatic about their support of the product and wouldn't be nearly as pragmatic in their approach to web browsing as Opera users would (Opera is all about pragmatism, not open source fanaticism or brand loyalty or defeating the Evil Empire).
My completely unsubstantiated guess based on a variety of statistics is that IE use is declining and that the use of ALL alternate browsers - open source or not - is rising. I very much doubt that Mozilla has many times the usage rate of Opera, as is often bandied about here on slashdot. Reliable statistics can be obtained to show that IE dominance is declining, but so long as we have various other factors at work (e.g., the Opera masking I talked about above) we can't show in any sort of empirical fashion that alternative browser X is the big leader.
Unless you happen to be one of those brand loyalty loons, this isn't a matter for concern. The more browsers in the market, the more competition among browser makers, the better it is for the rest of us. The last thing we want is for IE to be replaced by another dominant web browser, like Mozilla. This situation would only lend itself to abuse, as the Mozilla group would become the de facto web standards group in the process. We don't want ANY browser maker to be dominant in the market, open source or not; there's nothing 'holy' about open source that keeps the makers of a dominant product from using that product to enforce their own ideas and conventions as standards. A massively dominant market share lends itself to unethical exploitation, not to mention rampant egotism among those who see themselves as part of the 'winning' team.
If anything, we shouldn't be encouraging the use of Mozilla alone as an alternative to IE, but the use of ANY browser that does the job. And that means Konqueror, Galeon, Opera, and so forth. We want all of these products to pick up significant market share so that no one of them can take a dominant position ever again.
Max
Why should that be?
For a better explanation than I can present here on slashdot, you might try reading "The Wealth of Nations".
And your contention that the desire to lead a happy life is antithetical to free market capitalism is just plain hogwash. They don't have anything to do with one another.
Max
However, there were a lot of people working in the industry who shouldn't have been.
There still are. Most of them have C.S. degrees.
Max
According to some sources, the Depression was artificially extended by both the government and certain 'captains of industry' in order to thoroughly wreck competing small businesses and consolidate power in the hands of the few. The "New Deal" was the method by which the government got the unemployed to swallow this crap and at the same time defuse the growing rumblings of revolution.
World War 2 came along just in time to quash all the talk of rebellion when it was seen that the "New Deal" wasn't going over so well with the general populace. Great timing, that.
Max
And if they say it often enough, the serfs will serve them up to Mr. Guillotine and start over.
Max
but what we call the poor now are far better off than they were in the past.
Guess you haven't been paying attention. The wage of the average American worker, after adjusting for inflation, is lower than what the average American worker was making in the fifies.
Not that this is any surprise. Gen-X was told this was going to happen back in the early 80's; that we'd be the first generation of Americans worse off than their parents. What's amusing is that a) very few people believed it, and now seem shocked that it's actually come true, and b) that some of those people still live in a fantasy land where we're all 'better off' than ever before.
Max
Been there, done that, heard this bullshit before. Guess you have to justify all that money you spent on your C.S. degree somehow.
Max
You need to read a bit of history. The Japanese economy enjoys some of the strictest governmental protectionism seen in the First World. They use that protectionism to excellent effect, keeping their industries vibrant while effectively co-opting big chunks of business in other nations.
Max
That's pretty much how lawyers and doctors started out. After awhile they decided that they had enough members and needed to restrict new entries. With state sanctions they drew up requirements which tightened over the years, and also were awarded the ability to boot their members (with no alternate organizations as recourse) whenever those members didn't toe the party line. If those booted members dared to practice their profession, the professional organizations would cry 'foul!' and the government would come along to thump the miscreant.
So tell me: how long will it take your organization to go the same way? Or do you honestly think that unlike the doctors, the lawyers, the plumbers, the electricians, the psychiatrists, and all the others that have gone before you, you'll somehow be exempt from the same sort of greed and corruption?
Max
I think I'll become an auto mechanic. a plumber, or an electrican.
And don't forget that two of these three professions are guild-controlled, and that you can only practice these crafts if they allow you to do so. Which typicaly consists of spending money on bribes, er, 'licensing', not to mention mandated training and whatever other requirements your state government has dreamed up in order to let those guilds maintain their monopolies.
Max
Damn straight. The last thing I want to see is any more socialism, of either the Democratic or Republican flavor. If a company folds, then company fucking folds! Instead of giving a bunch of idiots who can't properly manage their business my tax money, send it on back my way; I'll 'help' the economy by spending it on stuff I'd like to have, thank you.
Max
We've lost 2 million jobs, and recovered 1.1 million. That's still 900,000 missing. Furthermore, the average wage of those new jobs is $9,000 less than the ones that were lost.
The disparity between the very rich and the rest of us is greater now than at any time in U.S. history. And despite what the government says, we have more unemployed since 1983; the only difference being that so many of them are off the unemployment rolls they are no longer counted.
I don't think Gore would've done any better than Bush, though. This was started a long, long time ago and no president would've been capable of substantially altering the outcome.
Max
Today I see a leader hell bent on fueling a political machine
I don't see any difference between the politics of today and the politics of the last century. Leaders have been "hell bent on fueling the political machine" for a very long time now.
Max
You don't. You want the existing demand to be supplied by domestic sources, not foreign ones. That's what tariffs are for.
Max
The people who aren't in good shape are the children and grandchildren in this country...
The baby boomers are deluding themselves if they think their children and grandchildren are going to pay for their retirements through Social Security. They're deluding themselves even further if they think we're going to pay off their debts for them.
Once Gen-X and the others that follow see the price tag up close and personal after the retirement of the Boomers, I think we're going to hear a very loud, national "fuck that!" soon after.
Max
What crap. What farm subsidies do is chain small, independent farmers to government handouts. It's essentially a dole, and a deliberately ineffective one since the number of small farms declines each and every year.
It's important that food production be concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, with all the small farms dependent on government charity until they can be phased out. Control over food production is an absolute requirement of any government that wants to put a lid on the possibility that their populace might become rebellious.
You really want to help small farmers? Exempt them from all property and sales taxes. Make it a Constitutional amendment so that the government can't threaten to revoke it to keep the small farmers in line.
Max