Do you really KNOW that fits those values, or are you just hoping that the teenager in the back room didn't accidently drop the meat on the floor, pick it up and wipe it off, and feed it through the grinder?
It isn't possible to guarantee the contents of a given package of hamburger. Thus, visual and olfactory inspection is necessary (not too much oxidation, it doesn't smell like something other than fresh hamburger, etc.), and cooking the hell out of it is essential.
I'd say that it isn't the "warm and fuzzy legislation" as you put it, but automation, general lazyness, and attitude of people.
Well, the staring grandmother existed before the USDA, the FDA, the DEA, etc. existed for her "protection". Government certifications are taking the place of reputation, which is all that really matters (just ask for a tour of any given restaurant between health department inspections--truly a joke, i.e., soap what soap?). This is one reason why most restaurants still survive on word-of-mouth advertising.
The government doesn't protect consumers very well.
Er, I agree.
If you've ever been screwed by a business, you'd know that.
I take it as a lesson earned and learned. Also, I've been amazingly rarely screwed by businesses, becuase it doesn't take much hard thought to see where the money is flowing. Once my financial conflict of interest alarm goes off, the tables are turned in my favor.
However, the empirical data in this story shows that corporations are still using deceptive practices in an attempt to screw consumers, despite current legislation and government entities.
Thus creating opportunity for non-government entities, such as Consumer Reports, Underwriter's Laboratories, credit counselors, etc. It doesn't take legislation to protect consumers, keep corporations somewhat honest, and set things right. All legislation does is codify a status quo that will never go away and stifle progress.
But let me ask you, you are sure she won't go haywire or start using drugs or beating kids but how do you know she isn't sleeping with the mailman or a co-worker or whatever?
Yes, because if there is a problem developing we can at least talk about it and figure out the cause. Finding the cause creates the opportunity for figuring out the cure. The people who are on-line looking for extra-marital affairs are not only lying to their spouse but also to themselves (unless, of course, they are "swingers" or something with full consent of their spouse). They are keeping secrets whose nature is quite dark and very destructive to the fabric of their relationships.
One spouse spends too much, doesn't understand how money works....etc.
One underlying problem with this is that public schools fail to teach children finance and how business works, and it seems families are failing, also. There are cultural faults that reinforce, somehow, that ignorance is bliss, which is very unfortunate. In my opinion, finance should displace the full semester of state history, at least, in junior high school (memorizing counties and rivers is pretty damn useless) to make two half-semester classes--one finance, and one the remaining useful state history.
The vast majority of European countries have voted in socialist governments.
Unfortunately, it seems the USA might be headed in this direction. Democrats have been trying for socialized health care for sixty years, now, and they might just get it in 2004.
Americans live in a society with only a facade of change.
Only because they somehow have bought into that Republicans and Democrats represent the only viewpoints. People in the US are taking their freedom for granted, and the resulting complacency will lead us right back to 1776. Culturally, Americans just aren't bred for socialism, if our waistlines are any indicator of this (consume, consume, then consume some more). What would be the checks and balances in a socialist system to keep the tax base from collapsing in the face of extraordinary government spending and public consumption?
Whether you get Bush or Gore, the real power lies with the people who pay them, corporations.
Thus the need to get the money out of government. Phasing out the federal income tax and eventually repealing the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution would do a lot to reset the balance of power between the people and their government.
You'd sell one license. It would only one customer to mirror it on line. BSD and GPL licenses aren't appropriate for generating profit from the software itself; the profit has to come from other sources, such as service, support, or some other value adding feature.
From my experience as a commercial developer, my motivation isn't "embrace and extend" to take over the world, rather I'd like to integrate open source into portions of my code (typically in-house type stuff). BSD is pretty close to the public domain, and it allows a net global savings of work by allowing code reuse explicitly. For example, why spend a day or two trying to figure out base-64 encoding, code it up, and test it, when there is a free implementation just sitting there begging to be used (legally under BSD, illegally under GPL).
The GPL release would allow those people who depend on an untainted version to have it. It's sort of like Troll Tech's dual licensing of Qt, just the other way around.
Also, in practice, I don't know of a case where the BSD license has come back to bite the developers and squash their project out of existence. The biggest excersize of the BSD license's rights are by Microsoft (famous TCP/IP example, Services For Unix examples, etc.), and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are still around and kicking. The irony is that even after using BSD code, Microsoft still managed to make Windows suck.
I'm not really a zealot favoring either GPL or BSD exclusively, as I would choose a license based on my needs and intents. If I had a business selling software but not services, I would probably take Troll Tech's stance and offer the GPL for non-profit use and a proprietary license for business use. If I had developed a library that had no influence on my personal bottom line, I'd most likely offer it as BSD or even as public domain. And, if the software I sold eventually became unprofitable, I wouldn't hesitate to consider putting it under BSD, just to give people freedom to use it as it best fits their needs.
I think the main difference between GPL and BSD comes down to courage and faith, in a way. It is harder to release something under BSD, because it is sort of like sending a kid off to college. Some of the control is gone, but the potential outcome is greater for it.
Despite the most well intentioned efforts it is quite simply impossible to predict the future. There is no way for example, Mrs. Patric Naughton could have predicted that her future husband would turn out to be a pedophile.
This is true, but people should do more to mitigate these risks. I knew my wife for years before getting married and had no qualms about getting joint accounts and joint ownerships of things. She is trustworthy and I know it. She has a good family. The odds are very very low that she will go haywire and start abusing drugs or beating neighborhood children or embezzling money.
I think too many people play relationships and marriage as if they are some sort of game. Popular culture certainly reinforces this with trash TV shows that encourage using other people for sex and status. I have heard men say that they would never trust a woman, because that's just how women are, and they would never get married without a prenup. I think this is all really pretty sick.
We need people willing to fight selflessly and tirelessly for people that can't fight for themselves.
Many people may find this ironic, but fighting for the little guy is what libertarians so. Liberals [sic] fight only for big government using the little guy's story as an excuse.
We have refused to take a stand and say we are simply not going to allow this to continue.
Consumers have gotten softer and softer as the warm-n-fuzzy legislation piles up. Now people don't have to be as schrewd, because for every problem there is a three or four-letter government agency to handle everything for them. People are letting their guard down, leaving that gaping asshole ready and waiting for a-plungin. Foreiners who think Americans are soft are probably right.
This is a good example of how the public is being brainwashed be the media and large-scale scandals and lawsuits. If every company were out screwing the customers over everywhere everyday, then no commerce would happen, period. The people who do get screwed are the people who actually believed the salesman's smile was sincere as they handed over their check (i.e., they were morons to begin with).
We need a Teddy Roosevelt...somebody who can fix the legal standing of the corporation for good, somebody who can tax the shit out of the rich.
Good plan. You cry out for someone in the government to fix the problems on your behalf, and, as the capital dries up, so does the USA.
A better plan is to get rid of the taxes themselves (for everyone's benefit).
BTW, many of the transgressions in the early 20th century had to do with the fact that the economy in the USA was pretty small. Not until enough wealth was generated did a solid middle class emerge with a decent standard of living.
And speaking of greed, aren't unions among the greediest organizations around? Mandatory membership fees, a "holier than thou" subculture, protectionism, etc. Unions aren't all sugar and spice, you know.
What does marital status have to do with the level of care one gives their child?
In many cases, it shows how committed a person is to their family. The divorced families I've seen are just fucked up in one way or another. Angry kids, hateful spouses... With a little foresight, perhaps they could have avoided the marriage in the first place by using birth control or being objective regarding their ill-founded idealism.
Divorce is the product of a mistake. Putting the kids in the middle of that is just wrong, and if divorce is the outcome, it shows that it would have probably been better to have never had the kids in the first place.
So your logical argument of "it's advantageous, therefor it's obviously true" is false.
You are injecting words into my post. I never said it is "obviously true". I said that we shouldn't be suprised, because it is so common that so many modern animals do, in fact, float.
Does the culture for yogurt and cheese consume the pus? I have yet to taste the pus in yogurt, but, perhaps, that's just the blueberries covering it up.
Seriously, though, it's interesting that human milk contains more fatty acids than cow's milk. If that isn't an argument in favor of breast-feeding, I don't know what is (our kids gotta have brains, you know).
how to build a meal that has all the nutrients you need
If they taught this, it would be based on a government-sanctioned special-interest-group-purchased food pyramid of some form rather than a system based on sound nutritional science and generally agreed-upon principles among nutritionists (if they exist...just in the last couple years I learned of all sorts of different fats all of which are both good and bad for me...I guess they're still climing the learning curve and will be for quite some time).
Seriously though, I don't think it's a good idea to give kids juice all the time.
I agree and wasn't trying to advocate otherwise. Fruit juice is a food and not necessarily a beverage. Also, while the fructose takes longer to break down and has less "kick" than corn syrup and refined sugar, it is sugar nonetheless.
...making the kids drink water when they're thirsty.
I dunno, they might not drink it unless it is in a bottle with an Extreme label featuring a rapper with a gun aimed at his bitch or something. Also, it has to be green and taste like hypermelon (or whatever they call that new flavor, lately).
Actually, it does by creating an illusion of abundance. Where is the motivation? On what basis does that apparent abundance rest? Also, socialism and facism apparently forgot to factor in the human nature of leadership, which always tends towards corruption. Arguments in favor of socialism and communism are fallacies--it's just not always obvious.
Also, while other posts are claiming that socialism doesn't preclude democracy, it does, in fact, preclude freedom through inevitable government intervention and taxation.
Only after technology advances to a point to make sarcity obselete (e.g., Star Trek replicators) would socialism end up working, by default.
...claiming a moral high ground by beating to death a strawman sent from the un-edited nightmares of Anne Coulter is pathetic.
Not all arguments against socialism, fascism, and communism are strawmen, as there is hundreds and thousands of years of history to draw from. Even today, as power consolodates in the US government, there are more signs of corruption beoming evident, elections are suspect, the people are being spied upon, and a chilling effect is subtly coming over free expression. Our future is probably more fragile than most people would like to admit.
What I just can't understand why somebody would want to have some fancy voting machine (be it computer-controlled or not), if such simple technology as a sheet of paper and a pen would do it, too.
In the USA, there is an unfortunate economy of pork-barrel goverment contracting, where lots of money exchanges hands, a lot of work is done, but no working product or result is delivered, yet it is still claimed a success by its advocates. It is a vicious cycle of wasted taxes and unsatisfying employment.
why people give kids stimulant packed drinks is beyond me
Maybe stuffing kids with caffeine, refined sugar, and low-attention-span TV and games and, then, doping them up on ritalin and subjecting them to perverse therapy with child psychologists is entertaining to them, somehow. It's probably more likely the parents are extremely selfish and don't want to expend real effort raising their children, since half of them get divorced, anyway.
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Do you really KNOW that fits those values, or are you just hoping that the teenager in the back room didn't accidently drop the meat on the floor, pick it up and wipe it off, and feed it through the grinder?
It isn't possible to guarantee the contents of a given package of hamburger. Thus, visual and olfactory inspection is necessary (not too much oxidation, it doesn't smell like something other than fresh hamburger, etc.), and cooking the hell out of it is essential.
I'd say that it isn't the "warm and fuzzy legislation" as you put it, but automation, general lazyness, and attitude of people.
Well, the staring grandmother existed before the USDA, the FDA, the DEA, etc. existed for her "protection". Government certifications are taking the place of reputation, which is all that really matters (just ask for a tour of any given restaurant between health department inspections--truly a joke, i.e., soap what soap?). This is one reason why most restaurants still survive on word-of-mouth advertising.
The government doesn't protect consumers very well.
Er, I agree.
If you've ever been screwed by a business, you'd know that.
I take it as a lesson earned and learned. Also, I've been amazingly rarely screwed by businesses, becuase it doesn't take much hard thought to see where the money is flowing. Once my financial conflict of interest alarm goes off, the tables are turned in my favor.
However, the empirical data in this story shows that corporations are still using deceptive practices in an attempt to screw consumers, despite current legislation and government entities.
Thus creating opportunity for non-government entities, such as Consumer Reports, Underwriter's Laboratories, credit counselors, etc. It doesn't take legislation to protect consumers, keep corporations somewhat honest, and set things right. All legislation does is codify a status quo that will never go away and stifle progress.
But let me ask you, you are sure she won't go haywire or start using drugs or beating kids but how do you know she isn't sleeping with the mailman or a co-worker or whatever?
Yes, because if there is a problem developing we can at least talk about it and figure out the cause. Finding the cause creates the opportunity for figuring out the cure. The people who are on-line looking for extra-marital affairs are not only lying to their spouse but also to themselves (unless, of course, they are "swingers" or something with full consent of their spouse). They are keeping secrets whose nature is quite dark and very destructive to the fabric of their relationships.
One spouse spends too much, doesn't understand how money works....etc.
One underlying problem with this is that public schools fail to teach children finance and how business works, and it seems families are failing, also. There are cultural faults that reinforce, somehow, that ignorance is bliss, which is very unfortunate. In my opinion, finance should displace the full semester of state history, at least, in junior high school (memorizing counties and rivers is pretty damn useless) to make two half-semester classes--one finance, and one the remaining useful state history.
The vast majority of European countries have voted in socialist governments.
Unfortunately, it seems the USA might be headed in this direction. Democrats have been trying for socialized health care for sixty years, now, and they might just get it in 2004.
Americans live in a society with only a facade of change.
Only because they somehow have bought into that Republicans and Democrats represent the only viewpoints. People in the US are taking their freedom for granted, and the resulting complacency will lead us right back to 1776. Culturally, Americans just aren't bred for socialism, if our waistlines are any indicator of this (consume, consume, then consume some more). What would be the checks and balances in a socialist system to keep the tax base from collapsing in the face of extraordinary government spending and public consumption?
Whether you get Bush or Gore, the real power lies with the people who pay them, corporations.
Thus the need to get the money out of government. Phasing out the federal income tax and eventually repealing the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution would do a lot to reset the balance of power between the people and their government.
SELL BSD licenses
You'd sell one license. It would only one customer to mirror it on line. BSD and GPL licenses aren't appropriate for generating profit from the software itself; the profit has to come from other sources, such as service, support, or some other value adding feature.
How is that a compromise?
From my experience as a commercial developer, my motivation isn't "embrace and extend" to take over the world, rather I'd like to integrate open source into portions of my code (typically in-house type stuff). BSD is pretty close to the public domain, and it allows a net global savings of work by allowing code reuse explicitly. For example, why spend a day or two trying to figure out base-64 encoding, code it up, and test it, when there is a free implementation just sitting there begging to be used (legally under BSD, illegally under GPL).
The GPL release would allow those people who depend on an untainted version to have it. It's sort of like Troll Tech's dual licensing of Qt, just the other way around.
Also, in practice, I don't know of a case where the BSD license has come back to bite the developers and squash their project out of existence. The biggest excersize of the BSD license's rights are by Microsoft (famous TCP/IP example, Services For Unix examples, etc.), and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are still around and kicking. The irony is that even after using BSD code, Microsoft still managed to make Windows suck.
I'm not really a zealot favoring either GPL or BSD exclusively, as I would choose a license based on my needs and intents. If I had a business selling software but not services, I would probably take Troll Tech's stance and offer the GPL for non-profit use and a proprietary license for business use. If I had developed a library that had no influence on my personal bottom line, I'd most likely offer it as BSD or even as public domain. And, if the software I sold eventually became unprofitable, I wouldn't hesitate to consider putting it under BSD, just to give people freedom to use it as it best fits their needs.
I think the main difference between GPL and BSD comes down to courage and faith, in a way. It is harder to release something under BSD, because it is sort of like sending a kid off to college. Some of the control is gone, but the potential outcome is greater for it.
Despite the most well intentioned efforts it is quite simply impossible to predict the future. There is no way for example, Mrs. Patric Naughton could have predicted that her future husband would turn out to be a pedophile.
This is true, but people should do more to mitigate these risks. I knew my wife for years before getting married and had no qualms about getting joint accounts and joint ownerships of things. She is trustworthy and I know it. She has a good family. The odds are very very low that she will go haywire and start abusing drugs or beating neighborhood children or embezzling money.
I think too many people play relationships and marriage as if they are some sort of game. Popular culture certainly reinforces this with trash TV shows that encourage using other people for sex and status. I have heard men say that they would never trust a woman, because that's just how women are, and they would never get married without a prenup. I think this is all really pretty sick.
Sorry, s/so/do/
We need people willing to fight selflessly and tirelessly for people that can't fight for themselves.
Many people may find this ironic, but fighting for the little guy is what libertarians so. Liberals [sic] fight only for big government using the little guy's story as an excuse.
We have refused to take a stand and say we are simply not going to allow this to continue.
Consumers have gotten softer and softer as the warm-n-fuzzy legislation piles up. Now people don't have to be as schrewd, because for every problem there is a three or four-letter government agency to handle everything for them. People are letting their guard down, leaving that gaping asshole ready and waiting for a-plungin. Foreiners who think Americans are soft are probably right.
Ethics are nothing more than a form of PR.
This is a good example of how the public is being brainwashed be the media and large-scale scandals and lawsuits. If every company were out screwing the customers over everywhere everyday, then no commerce would happen, period. The people who do get screwed are the people who actually believed the salesman's smile was sincere as they handed over their check (i.e., they were morons to begin with).
We need a Teddy Roosevelt...somebody who can fix the legal standing of the corporation for good, somebody who can tax the shit out of the rich.
Good plan. You cry out for someone in the government to fix the problems on your behalf, and, as the capital dries up, so does the USA.
A better plan is to get rid of the taxes themselves (for everyone's benefit).
BTW, many of the transgressions in the early 20th century had to do with the fact that the economy in the USA was pretty small. Not until enough wealth was generated did a solid middle class emerge with a decent standard of living.
And speaking of greed, aren't unions among the greediest organizations around? Mandatory membership fees, a "holier than thou" subculture, protectionism, etc. Unions aren't all sugar and spice, you know.
What does marital status have to do with the level of care one gives their child?
In many cases, it shows how committed a person is to their family. The divorced families I've seen are just fucked up in one way or another. Angry kids, hateful spouses... With a little foresight, perhaps they could have avoided the marriage in the first place by using birth control or being objective regarding their ill-founded idealism.
Divorce is the product of a mistake. Putting the kids in the middle of that is just wrong, and if divorce is the outcome, it shows that it would have probably been better to have never had the kids in the first place.
Think of all the poor people in Africa who you are depriving of their annual allowance!
Well, if they aren't wearing any clothing to begin with, they already have all the soft-core they could hope for.
So your logical argument of "it's advantageous, therefor it's obviously true" is false.
You are injecting words into my post. I never said it is "obviously true". I said that we shouldn't be suprised, because it is so common that so many modern animals do, in fact, float.
Does the culture for yogurt and cheese consume the pus? I have yet to taste the pus in yogurt, but, perhaps, that's just the blueberries covering it up.
Seriously, though, it's interesting that human milk contains more fatty acids than cow's milk. If that isn't an argument in favor of breast-feeding, I don't know what is (our kids gotta have brains, you know).
WHAT YOU PUT IN YOUR BODY, IS EQUIVALENT TO WHAT YOU GET OUT!
Don't forget the irreversable chemical process that occurs, because what you get out ain't nearly as tasty.
how to build a meal that has all the nutrients you need
If they taught this, it would be based on a government-sanctioned special-interest-group-purchased food pyramid of some form rather than a system based on sound nutritional science and generally agreed-upon principles among nutritionists (if they exist...just in the last couple years I learned of all sorts of different fats all of which are both good and bad for me...I guess they're still climing the learning curve and will be for quite some time).
Seriously though, I don't think it's a good idea to give kids juice all the time.
...making the kids drink water when they're thirsty.
I agree and wasn't trying to advocate otherwise. Fruit juice is a food and not necessarily a beverage. Also, while the fructose takes longer to break down and has less "kick" than corn syrup and refined sugar, it is sugar nonetheless.
I dunno, they might not drink it unless it is in a bottle with an Extreme label featuring a rapper with a gun aimed at his bitch or something. Also, it has to be green and taste like hypermelon (or whatever they call that new flavor, lately).
Neither precludes the use of democracy within a society.
What would they vote for?
Socialism doesn't tell people to stop thinking...
...claiming a moral high ground by beating to death a strawman sent from the un-edited nightmares of Anne Coulter is pathetic.
Actually, it does by creating an illusion of abundance. Where is the motivation? On what basis does that apparent abundance rest? Also, socialism and facism apparently forgot to factor in the human nature of leadership, which always tends towards corruption. Arguments in favor of socialism and communism are fallacies--it's just not always obvious.
Also, while other posts are claiming that socialism doesn't preclude democracy, it does, in fact, preclude freedom through inevitable government intervention and taxation.
Only after technology advances to a point to make sarcity obselete (e.g., Star Trek replicators) would socialism end up working, by default.
Not all arguments against socialism, fascism, and communism are strawmen, as there is hundreds and thousands of years of history to draw from. Even today, as power consolodates in the US government, there are more signs of corruption beoming evident, elections are suspect, the people are being spied upon, and a chilling effect is subtly coming over free expression.
Our future is probably more fragile than most people would like to admit.
What I just can't understand why somebody would want to have some fancy voting machine (be it computer-controlled or not), if such simple technology as a sheet of paper and a pen would do it, too.
In the USA, there is an unfortunate economy of pork-barrel goverment contracting, where lots of money exchanges hands, a lot of work is done, but no working product or result is delivered, yet it is still claimed a success by its advocates. It is a vicious cycle of wasted taxes and unsatisfying employment.
why people give kids stimulant packed drinks is beyond me
Maybe stuffing kids with caffeine, refined sugar, and low-attention-span TV and games and, then, doping them up on ritalin and subjecting them to perverse therapy with child psychologists is entertaining to them, somehow. It's probably more likely the parents are extremely selfish and don't want to expend real effort raising their children, since half of them get divorced, anyway.
Where are they going to get the nano-grad students to work in it?