These corporations start out with good intentions.
Then they realize the stockholders don't care. Their employees don't care. What everyone wants is the bottom line, which can be expressed as a certain amount of progress to financial independence.
We value financial independence because that means we can escape this neurotic society and its neurotic people and go do something fun for a change. Most people won't admit it but they hate their jobs and the people around them because they're inconsistent, nervous, full of doubt, greedy and aggressive.
This is why retirement is prized. You are no longer forced to deal with other people's dysfunction.
And retirement is why we prize the bottom line. We don't care about the ethics. Just get us out of here. And so "Don't be evil" becomes "Don't be unprofitable."
If she's been stalked for ten years, and our enlightened law enforcement can't do anything about it, we need to get less "enlightened."
Stalkers will steal your life away. It's abuse of the first amendment to insist that people have a right to express themselves in destructive ways. Stalking is one of those ways, child porn is another.
Let's start yanking citizenship for these mentally defective stalkers and pedophiles and instead send them to another continent. Maybe another society is short on insane predatory parasites and needs more.
As someone on the right, I am forced to admit that often Fox/WND/TheBlaze carry important stories that the rest of our media seem to ignore or bury on the digital equivalent of the last pages of a newspaper.
However, I can't stand their dramatic, self-victimizing, emotional style.
Yet over the past few years I've realized this isn't unique to these news sources. MSNBC, USA Today, CNN and even NPR use these same tactics; they're just better at covering it up.
A hybrid is a significantly more complex vehicle that uses more toxic parts than a regular car.
In addition, a few million retired Baby Boomers (this is the only type of person I see driving a Prius) driving hybrids will not impact the environment at all.
Our environmental problem consists of two real problems and many false ones. The real problems: (a) overpopulation and (b) reckless industrial growth. The fake problems: inefficient lightbulbs, unrecycled condoms, non-hybrid cars, non-"green" cleaners, etc.
If we want to stop our slow but ongoing ecocide, we need to change the way we live. You can start by buying a car with a reasonably sized engine, making as few trips as possible, and keeping that car for 20-30 years as once was done.
Rest in peace, Jack Tramiel, famed for "The Jack Attack."
The Commodore 64 truly was The People's Computer, like the Volkswagen "bug" was The People's Car.
At a time when an Apple//e cost $2500 for monitor, CPU, extra RAM (necessary), and two disk drives, you could walk out of the store with a full Commodore system for $350 and hook it up to an old TV.
This is why C64 culture was so vital: people took risks with their computers instead of treating them like business machines or expensive curiosities. Back in the BBS days, the Commodore boards were where it was at. Total anarchy zones. If the feds or feebs swooped in to confiscate them, one paycheck later they were up and operating again.
I hope Jack gets the recognition he deserves in the great beyond. With any luck, he's just finished sliding a whoopee cushion onto Steve Jobs' easy chair and is watching from behind a corner with a devilish grin.
In any form -- ethnic, religious, racial, class, caste, even wide disparities in intelligence -- it promotes alienation, distrust, lack of unity and self-hatred among a population. It destroys that nation.
Wherever it has been tried, it has failed and left behind unstable third-world countries. Even in "white" nations like the Balkans, Northern Ireland and Russia, diversity has been nothing more than a destructive bother.
The reason we have diversity is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was designed to switch the USA from a majority-European-descended population to a majority third world population, because minorities vote against the perceived majority and thus will always vote for Democrats. Many even credit that change with getting Barack Obama elected.
I don't see the point in revisiting the black crime figures. They're there in the FBI's uniform crime reports, produced by a government that for 60 years has tried as hard as possible to be as non-racist as possible. I think the figures are accurate. They reveal that although blacks commit much more crime per capita, and Mexicans are halfway between whites and blacks on the crime per capita scale, most victims of a criminal of a certain race are also of that race (the defining statistic is white male rape of black women, which is virtually nonexistent). The race and IQ statistics are probably also good science, given that they are consistent with international estimates. There is no reason to suppose any of this is wrong, but I find it unnecessary.
Racism is what happens when diversity happens. We all want to live with people like ourselves. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that diversity destroys trust and makes paranoid communities. This does not affect liberals, who are concerned primarily with fairness by institutions to individuals. But conservatives, who value social order (per the research of Jonathan Haidt) find it disturbing.
In fact, many of the healthiest countries are almost entirely mono-racial -- Finland and Japan come to mind.
For background information, read the Race FAQ. Then check out the biological basis of race. This gives you a background in understanding race that isn't tainted by either racism or diversity, both of which are dead ends if you ask me.
"Science" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a product and a political statement.
If you don't already have an audience in mind for your research, who will pay for it? No one wants the truth -- we all want "truths" we can use.
If your sponsor is a Democrat, your science will be blue state science. If your sponsor is a pharmaceutical company, you may find yourself praising SSRIs. If you work for the government, torture = good. And so forth.
It's time we stopped pretending that science was anything but the work of humans, and funded by humans with different agendas. And as today's most interesting article shows us the effects are a polarization of the population from science.
There was a great thread about this on our forum which added another wrinkle. Science studies material. It's possible that not all of the universe is materiality. We may need to open our minds to keep our science from becoming controlled by only one voice in the debate.
When you meddle, you become the sugar daddy and the other countries will either hate you for being rich and not being able to solve all their problems, or will hate you for controlling their countries even if your intentions are good.
I just want to know if it matters what I eat, and whether they're going to hurry up. Tonight is Tex-Mex. I guarantee I'm going to be a power station by morning!
Banning speech for being offensive is a dangerous precedent. This is what Orwell was warning about, because "offensive" covers speech of many different types, including political speech.
I can see banning some kinds of speech or expression. Pedophilia. Nuclear bomb instructions. The home address and security system code of a cheerleader. Your tax return. Your passwords. Your credit card numbers.
Despite all the blather about how "free" we are in democracy, we're seeing people being put in jail for expressing an opinion.
That is a sure sign that we as a culture are falling just like Rome did.
More sensitive and emotional means more unstable. Women are also more prone toward detail oriented, which means tasks get partially completed but every detail of that partial completion is done.
In addition, I think it's time we stopped the knee jerk praise of democratic thinking around here. It's downright Soviet how we have to grovel and kowtow to the buzzword. Democracy has brought us an unending series of wars, a totally vapid culture, a disintegrating economy and whores for politicians. Let's try something new instead.
The old way: look at a candidate, see what they can do, see what they have done, and give them a try.
The new way: do they have the cert? Oh okay, they do, hire them and ignore anyone else who does not have that cert.
The problem is that certs, as relatively narrow tests, involve a certain amount of studying and not any kind of broad knowledge, or any testing of attributes like problem-solving that are essential to this field.
Terrorist is a generic term for anyone who opposes us. That means both our government, and the false reality of popular notions that we insist is real through the democratic process.
Thus the word "terrorist" joins many other catch-alls used through history, mixing legitimate fear with a need to smash all dissenters:
Since the French Revolution in 1789, no Western society has had a center -- a role formerly provided by culture.
As a result, we're always looking for a bad guy. Any of these will do:
1. Hitler/KKK 2. Communists 3. Anarchists 4. Hackers 5. Drug users 6. Satanists 7. Global warming deniers
You don't want to be on that list, do you, Comrade Citizen?
Good.
(On a side note, a thesis that says CO2 is natural and thus we should not worry about its rise is like saying that milk is natural and then drinking 80 gallons of it and dying.)
1. Allow terrorist crimes to happen, then prosecute; 2. Look for suspicious behaviors and arrest beforehand, although this will include internet searches, purchases of ingredients (think of the pipe bomb making scene from "Teminator") and possibly illicit thoughts; 3. Racially and culturally profile, as a precursor to achieving a monoracial and monoethnic society with a single strong religious foundation.
Different religions, ideologies, cultures, etc. don't play well with each other. So we need some way to arrest people in advance, or we just watch the buildings explode.
Me? I've put all my bomb-making instructions on an encrypted darknet. You'll never get my decryption code either, since I've written it down and hidden it in my rectum.
USA: starry-eyed techs go into IT in order to make our lives better through technology, end up having to update thoughtless websites, and hate it.
Middle East: starry-eyed techs go into IT with hopes of bringing democracy to their countries, end up working for Islamic Brotherhood and designing suicide vests, and hate it.
I_RAPE_SHEEP has been my SSID for a number of years. I kept hoping it would make the news.
If I knew it was as easy as renaming my SSID "F--- All Jews and N----" I'd have been famous already.
Oh well. This country is going to the dogs because pluralism ensures we'll all be offended, which means the only safe stance is fiddling while Rome burns.
Slashdot Mirror
These corporations start out with good intentions.
Then they realize the stockholders don't care. Their employees don't care. What everyone wants is the bottom line, which can be expressed as a certain amount of progress to financial independence.
We value financial independence because that means we can escape this neurotic society and its neurotic people and go do something fun for a change. Most people won't admit it but they hate their jobs and the people around them because they're inconsistent, nervous, full of doubt, greedy and aggressive.
This is why retirement is prized. You are no longer forced to deal with other people's dysfunction.
And retirement is why we prize the bottom line. We don't care about the ethics. Just get us out of here. And so "Don't be evil" becomes "Don't be unprofitable."
And like all true evils, it's nobody's fault.
Stalking is not a right.
If she's been stalked for ten years, and our enlightened law enforcement can't do anything about it, we need to get less "enlightened."
Stalkers will steal your life away. It's abuse of the first amendment to insist that people have a right to express themselves in destructive ways. Stalking is one of those ways, child porn is another.
Let's start yanking citizenship for these mentally defective stalkers and pedophiles and instead send them to another continent. Maybe another society is short on insane predatory parasites and needs more.
As someone on the right, I am forced to admit that often Fox/WND/TheBlaze carry important stories that the rest of our media seem to ignore or bury on the digital equivalent of the last pages of a newspaper.
However, I can't stand their dramatic, self-victimizing, emotional style.
Yet over the past few years I've realized this isn't unique to these news sources. MSNBC, USA Today, CNN and even NPR use these same tactics; they're just better at covering it up.
And when NBC got caught editing the Trayvon Martin 911 call to make Zimmerman seem like a Klansman, instead of some guy answering a direct question from the 911 operator, I think I finally got it: Fox isn't the exception. It's the rule. There are no exceptions.
Obvious solution. You will have invented the reverse slashdot effect .
Sadly, it's true: if you're the superpower, you become the police power, and all wrongdoers in the world hate you.
Russia and China have been fighting us via proxy wars for six decades and it's not going to stop until one party wins.
A hybrid is a significantly more complex vehicle that uses more toxic parts than a regular car.
In addition, a few million retired Baby Boomers (this is the only type of person I see driving a Prius) driving hybrids will not impact the environment at all.
Our environmental problem consists of two real problems and many false ones. The real problems: (a) overpopulation and (b) reckless industrial growth. The fake problems: inefficient lightbulbs, unrecycled condoms, non-hybrid cars, non-"green" cleaners, etc.
If we want to stop our slow but ongoing ecocide, we need to change the way we live. You can start by buying a car with a reasonably sized engine, making as few trips as possible, and keeping that car for 20-30 years as once was done.
Rest in peace, Jack Tramiel, famed for "The Jack Attack."
The Commodore 64 truly was The People's Computer, like the Volkswagen "bug" was The People's Car.
At a time when an Apple //e cost $2500 for monitor, CPU, extra RAM (necessary), and two disk drives, you could walk out of the store with a full Commodore system for $350 and hook it up to an old TV.
This is why C64 culture was so vital: people took risks with their computers instead of treating them like business machines or expensive curiosities. Back in the BBS days, the Commodore boards were where it was at. Total anarchy zones. If the feds or feebs swooped in to confiscate them, one paycheck later they were up and operating again.
I hope Jack gets the recognition he deserves in the great beyond. With any luck, he's just finished sliding a whoopee cushion onto Steve Jobs' easy chair and is watching from behind a corner with a devilish grin.
Diversity doesn't work.
In any form -- ethnic, religious, racial, class, caste, even wide disparities in intelligence -- it promotes alienation, distrust, lack of unity and self-hatred among a population. It destroys that nation.
Wherever it has been tried, it has failed and left behind unstable third-world countries. Even in "white" nations like the Balkans, Northern Ireland and Russia, diversity has been nothing more than a destructive bother.
The reason we have diversity is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was designed to switch the USA from a majority-European-descended population to a majority third world population, because minorities vote against the perceived majority and thus will always vote for Democrats. Many even credit that change with getting Barack Obama elected.
I don't see the point in revisiting the black crime figures. They're there in the FBI's uniform crime reports, produced by a government that for 60 years has tried as hard as possible to be as non-racist as possible. I think the figures are accurate. They reveal that although blacks commit much more crime per capita, and Mexicans are halfway between whites and blacks on the crime per capita scale, most victims of a criminal of a certain race are also of that race (the defining statistic is white male rape of black women, which is virtually nonexistent). The race and IQ statistics are probably also good science, given that they are consistent with international estimates. There is no reason to suppose any of this is wrong, but I find it unnecessary.
Racism is what happens when diversity happens. We all want to live with people like ourselves. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that diversity destroys trust and makes paranoid communities. This does not affect liberals, who are concerned primarily with fairness by institutions to individuals. But conservatives, who value social order (per the research of Jonathan Haidt) find it disturbing.
In fact, many of the healthiest countries are almost entirely mono-racial -- Finland and Japan come to mind.
For background information, read the Race FAQ. Then check out the biological basis of race. This gives you a background in understanding race that isn't tainted by either racism or diversity, both of which are dead ends if you ask me.
"Science" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a product and a political statement.
If you don't already have an audience in mind for your research, who will pay for it? No one wants the truth -- we all want "truths" we can use.
If your sponsor is a Democrat, your science will be blue state science. If your sponsor is a pharmaceutical company, you may find yourself praising SSRIs. If you work for the government, torture = good. And so forth.
It's time we stopped pretending that science was anything but the work of humans, and funded by humans with different agendas. And as today's most interesting article shows us the effects are a polarization of the population from science.
There was a great thread about this on our forum which added another wrinkle. Science studies material. It's possible that not all of the universe is materiality. We may need to open our minds to keep our science from becoming controlled by only one voice in the debate.
When you meddle, you become the sugar daddy and the other countries will either hate you for being rich and not being able to solve all their problems, or will hate you for controlling their countries even if your intentions are good.
Another writer expressed this better than I can.
I don't want to work for anyone who doesn't want to work with me. That is a bad relationship which will end in nothing but misery.
I don't care why they don't want to work with me. Pounding square pegs into round holes is a stupid idea.
I don't want solar power, I want colon power.
I just want to know if it matters what I eat, and whether they're going to hurry up. Tonight is Tex-Mex. I guarantee I'm going to be a power station by morning!
It's gone mainstream. Now that it has viruses, it's like the Miley Cyrus of computing.
Time to find something more obscure. OpenVMS on an Atom system with a retro GEOS interface. That's the ticket.
I used to like Apple before it was mainstream, but now I've moved on. Just like with White Ring and fixies.
Banning speech for being offensive is a dangerous precedent. This is what Orwell was warning about, because "offensive" covers speech of many different types, including political speech.
I can see banning some kinds of speech or expression. Pedophilia. Nuclear bomb instructions. The home address and security system code of a cheerleader. Your tax return. Your passwords. Your credit card numbers.
Despite all the blather about how "free" we are in democracy, we're seeing people being put in jail for expressing an opinion.
That is a sure sign that we as a culture are falling just like Rome did.
For this to pay off, they'd have to execute a lot more people per day than they're going to be able to investigate.
As usual, the fear of bad consequences trumps common sense in the human world. We quiver like mice.
In the meantime, there are a lot of violent criminals out there. They not only contribute nothing, but take lives away.
In death, they can actually give something back, even if it's just a few organs.
If not, they'll become fundamentalists or Muslim terrorists. Or racists.
Normally I'm against Orwellian schemes, but this one is for a good cause.
More sensitive and emotional means more unstable. Women are also more prone toward detail oriented, which means tasks get partially completed but every detail of that partial completion is done.
In addition, I think it's time we stopped the knee jerk praise of democratic thinking around here. It's downright Soviet how we have to grovel and kowtow to the buzzword. Democracy has brought us an unending series of wars, a totally vapid culture, a disintegrating economy and whores for politicians. Let's try something new instead.
I believe the media narrative.
GOP = Nazis, friendless losers, authoritarians, cops, religious fanatics, boring, bad
Dems = Frodo and Sam, revolutionaries, the hippest kids in town, sexy, intelligent, wise, exciting, good
If you deny the media narrative, you'll end up a friendless loser.
The old way: look at a candidate, see what they can do, see what they have done, and give them a try.
The new way: do they have the cert? Oh okay, they do, hire them and ignore anyone else who does not have that cert.
The problem is that certs, as relatively narrow tests, involve a certain amount of studying and not any kind of broad knowledge, or any testing of attributes like problem-solving that are essential to this field.
Terrorist is a generic term for anyone who opposes us. That means both our government, and the false reality of popular notions that we insist is real through the democratic process.
Thus the word "terrorist" joins many other catch-alls used through history, mixing legitimate fear with a need to smash all dissenters:
1. Communist
2. Anarchist
3. Child molestor
4. Satanist
5. Hacker
6. Fascist
7. Mulatto
Don't trust the crowd or its lap-dog, the government, when it makes up some term and uses that term as a blank check to do whatever it wants to you.
What's Twitter supposed to do? They have two options:
(a) Agree to censor by regions on the request of governments.
(b) Have those governments block Twitter so it cannot become a normal part of life in those countries.
We can't blame Twitter for this, much as I detest it and those Idiocracy-style 140 character updates.
Since the French Revolution in 1789, no Western society has had a center -- a role formerly provided by culture.
As a result, we're always looking for a bad guy. Any of these will do:
1. Hitler/KKK
2. Communists
3. Anarchists
4. Hackers
5. Drug users
6. Satanists
7. Global warming deniers
You don't want to be on that list, do you, Comrade Citizen?
Good.
(On a side note, a thesis that says CO2 is natural and thus we should not worry about its rise is like saying that milk is natural and then drinking 80 gallons of it and dying.)
Take your pick:
1. Allow terrorist crimes to happen, then prosecute;
2. Look for suspicious behaviors and arrest beforehand, although this will include internet searches, purchases of ingredients (think of the pipe bomb making scene from "Teminator") and possibly illicit thoughts;
3. Racially and culturally profile, as a precursor to achieving a monoracial and monoethnic society with a single strong religious foundation.
Different religions, ideologies, cultures, etc. don't play well with each other. So we need some way to arrest people in advance, or we just watch the buildings explode.
Me? I've put all my bomb-making instructions on an encrypted darknet. You'll never get my decryption code either, since I've written it down and hidden it in my rectum.
USA: starry-eyed techs go into IT in order to make our lives better through technology, end up having to update thoughtless websites, and hate it.
Middle East: starry-eyed techs go into IT with hopes of bringing democracy to their countries, end up working for Islamic Brotherhood and designing suicide vests, and hate it.
See, we're all the same after all....
I_RAPE_SHEEP has been my SSID for a number of years. I kept hoping it would make the news.
If I knew it was as easy as renaming my SSID "F--- All Jews and N----" I'd have been famous already.
Oh well. This country is going to the dogs because pluralism ensures we'll all be offended, which means the only safe stance is fiddling while Rome burns.