The most important aspect you have to remember when applying the teachings of Sun Tzu is the realizing who your enemy is. Thus, a major part of winning the victory before the battle is realizing what victory is. In the context of this discussion, the one who I am trying to achieve victory over is untruth, not Random Guy On The Internet. I'm a reasonable person, so now I know the truth - that my original interpetation of the facts was mistaken. If I wanted to seek battle, I would have ignored that realization and fought you until I "won", regardless of the truth.
You're still making assumptions about me, then attacking those assumptions. Attacking paper tigers is never good policy.
Sun Tzu is a fictional character created by Chinese philosophers, as such, Sun Tzu cannot die.
Here's the thing. If I have a few grams of a strong alkali metal, and ask the stewardess for a glass of water, that plane isn't staying in the air long. Since something deep inside my soul tells me most dogs aren't trained to sniff alkali metals, I have a feeling that could be a very bad thing.
What's my point? Since it's impossible to protect against even a significant number of ways that a person who wants to die can destroy an aircraft, isn't it better to just scale back to rational, sensible security measures, and give people back their freedom to travel as they please, forced to deal with the fact that with freedom comes the possiblity of death?
I don't fly anymore. The thought of being treated like a prison inmate just isn't appealing. I'd rather die from a rubidium bomb than life treated like a terrorist suspect for the grand offense of wanting to fly from one unspectacular city to another.
The Liberal Party in Canada lasted 12 years on a platform which included paying back the federal debt. The Progressive Conservatives in Ontario lasted almost as long on a platform which included cutting back welfare and other social programs to the effect of cutting taxes while maintaining a balanced budget.
All it takes is for the populace to understand where the money the government spends comes from for the populace to start demanding a bit of responsibility.
If I had mod points, I'd mod up the grandparent, and mod down your whining post. Don't whine about how you've been modded. It's gayer than finding a man wedged between your cheeks.
Sun Tzu says that the victorious strategist seeks victory first and battle second. If you hadn't been so quick to fight me, perhaps you could have successfully expressed your point in the first place. Instead, you decided that it would be better to battle first. It is your error, not mine.
On the other hand, Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics, so perhaps you were just hoping for a good waste of time debate.
And you're missing the overall point, that the problem being pointed out so long ago was that Greenpeace wasn't making a distinction between chemicals with known, proven risks, and chemicals which MAY pose some unproven risk.
An important point that's flying over your head is the fact that the obscufication isn't mine. Greenpeace are the ones throwing a bunch of scary chemical names out there, saying that "though for many of these we don't actually have any proof, they might possibly be dangerous", and tut tutting Apple et. al. for using them.
"Good comeback... denial without explanation. The internet equivalent of closing your eyes, putting your hands over your ears, and chanting the theme sont to Gilligans Island."
It wasn't a trick, I know full well that everyone on Slashdot knows full well what DHMO is. It's a massive internet meme, for christs' sake. My POINT, which you missed entirely, is that you can't just say "There might be risks associated with this but we don't actually have any proof that there is" and use that as a part of a legitimate study regarding environmental risks associated with certain chemicals.
To do so is to resort to pure scare tactics. "BEWARE! APPLE COMPUTER USES DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE IN THEIR PRODUCTS! WE CAN'T PROVE THAT IT'S HAZARDOUS, BUT WE'LL PRETEND IT'S MERCURY ANYWAY!!!"
And your putting words in my mouth and making grand assumptions about my point of view then attacking me based on assumption alone is typical of Americans.
In the arguement between "That's not a word!" and "Is too!", the only way to definitively win is to refer to an authority on the subject, like a dictionary.
It's not news, but if you never want to be a liar or the slightest bit decietful, just build guns. Your buyers know full well that you're supplying both sides. They don't care, they just want guns.
Many people believe Dihydrogen Monoxide is dangerous, but very few scientific studies have been done to assess it's negative effects on life. I guess greenpeace can toss DHMO into the list, and if they find any, suddenly the computer is filled with amounts of liquid Dihydrogen Monoxide.
It's not really proven that chronic exposure is toxic, but it COULD BE, like non-ionizing radiation from cell phones.
When I don't give my money to the music industry, I don't spend it again. It just sits in my bank account in perpetuity. Food? Rent? Computers? Toys? No. The money I would have spent goes directly into my bank account, and I don't spend it again. I just wait until inflation has rendered it valueless, then I flush it down the toilet.
(And I STILL bet that they lose more hard currency from people like me who don't feel like sponsoring lawsuits against dead people and little kids than they do from piracy. I'm much happier listening to unknowns who have no record of suing grandmothers, kids, and dead people.)
Why do people get away with not stopping at stop signs? Why don't the police arrest every single person leaving a bar at 2am for drunk driving? The answer is simple: the law says one thing, but nobody actually follows it. Just because nobody follows the law doesn't mean it's not illegal.
Hell, when I worked for the truck stop, the only way to find out what was in a bottle was to spray some on a surface and find out what it smelled like! It could be big blue industrial cleaner, it could be ammonia, it could be bleach, and there wasn't any way to find out. No manufacturer labels, no MSDS, nothing. I'm a follower of the teaching of Sun Tzu, who said to seek victory first and battle second, however, so instead of whine to the workplace health and safety committee, I just gritted my teeth and dealt with it, because I didn't trust them as far as I could throw them and I needed money for school more than I needed righteous poverty. Today I work in an engineering office at an industrial plant. THESE guys label EVERYTHING.
But that doesn't make that other place any less illegal, and that was the center of my arguement.
Employees are not property. Again, it is workplace health and safety legislation in question, not anti-smoking legislation per se.
And "It's not MUCH of a carcinogen" is NOT an acceptable reason to defy workplace health and safety legislation. The law recognises the effects of cigarettes and the chemicals in them.
I'm done with this discussion. If you ever have your lungs burned by bleach because the employer didn't bother to label the container with the proper WHIMIS label, or if you get cancer because you're working with radium paint without proper safeguards and the employer didn't supply an msds to show the effects of chronic exposure, or if you crush your hands or lose an eye becuase a job you had to do involved working with equipment that wasn't properly tagged and locked out, then you can try to tell me that the legislation is terrible and horrible and you don't agree with it one bit.
Conversely, when you lose everything you own in a lawsuit against an employee because you decided that your property rights were more important than his or her rights under workplace health and safety legislation, don't cry to anyone, because the legislation is there to protect owners from frivilous lawsuits just as much as it is there to protect the workers.
As I said in the other message, I hope for your sake you don't own a business. You're arguing against one of the single most important pieces of legislation in the lawbooks because you don't feel like having to light up outside.
One last note, based on your rhetorical quasi-threat not to hire anyone who coughs because they might know the law? That's how you end up with incompotent buffoons. When you hire incompotent buffoons, you end up coming in to work because your last guy didn't show up. I'm the sort of person you hire and keep on for years. The sort of person who becomes an asset no matter what job position they're in(Lasted 2 years as a gas station attendant, a job nobody else lasted a month at, to pay for college). Why do I know workplace health and safety? Because my employer makes it their priority, and thus it has become mine. If you want to hire a vapid nitwit so you can smoke, go right ahead, but remember that you own a business to make money so you can actually make a living, not so you can be the big man in charge firing intelligent people and hiring buffoons so you can make the laws.
Again, you don't appear to know the law. The freedom to quit is NOT what the law means by "The freedom to refuse unsafe work".
If a worker refuses to work because of a workplace health and safety issue, the freedom to refuse to work isn't a freedom to quit (Or a freedom to be fired). After they refuse to work over such an issue, the issue is handed to the local workplace health and safety officer, who, along with the workplace health and safety committee for that workplace (The right to participate includes the right to act on this committee), have to determine whether the complaint is definitely a hazard (and it is, just look at what's written on every cigarette carton and advertisement), and a resolution.
I hope for your sake that you don't own a business, because not knowing the law puts you in the position to be in for a world of hurt.
You've gone and missed the point. Exposing employees to carcinogens and toxins with effects from chronic exposure isn't a legal activity. Neither would be my employer forcing me to clean the black liquor tank without a spotter or personal protective equipment or proper lock-out procedures or training.
All the namecalling in the world and all the rhetoric in the world isn't going to change the fact that it's illegal, immoral, and unethical for a business owner to knowingly expose his or her employees to unsafe situations such as chronic chemical exposure. If that employee refuses to work as a result of the hazard presented by that chronic chemical exposure, it's completely within his or her legal rights, as it should be.
"That should be the owner's choice. If I pay my taxes and setup a business, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If I want to allow smoking, so be it. If you don't want to work here, then don't. End of story."
The owner doesn't have the choice to run an unsafe workplace. It's against the law. Workers have the right to participate, the right to know, and the right to refuse unsafe work.
This is why a mine cave-in these days is a tragedy that makes the news, rather than a non-event that happens all the time. This is why workplaces must provide proper ergonomically designed workspaces. This is why policemen are entitled to proper training and equipment.
Also, you obviously don't know anything about power plants or construction.
In nuclear power plants, radiation exposure is strictly controlled, and the worker CANNOT work beyond a certain exposure. In reality, the radiation inside a nuclear power plant is less than the naturally occurring radiation outside in many cases.
In construction, you are entitled to personal protective equipment, and you are legally allowed to refuse to work if its not provided.
I have to assume you're either a desk jockey or something similarly safe if you believe what you're saying. I work in an industrial plant, and they make damn sure I know what the law is, because they can be fined massively if they don't fulfill their responsibility.
If the republicans ran their country like a business, they never would have approved star wars or its missle based son. All the major powers that might attack the country with an ICBM hare now neutralized (Some reigonal powers have gotten the ability, but most are far more likely to kill someone nearby than waste time trying to attack the US), minor powers like terrorists would use another form of delivery, and for the money spent, there are other, actual threats and actual improvements that would, given a "return on investment" which roughly takes the possible damage and multiplies it by the percieved chance of the event actually happening, show a much, much greater return on investment.
Scientific American sort of holds their opinion on their sleeve, to be honest. That said, I enjoyed reading an article a couple months back that more or less showed that every "alternative" form of fuel out there today relies almost directly on fossil fuels for the bulk of their energy, thus eliminating the benefit, and possibly even making things worse because it's just another energy conversion in the chain.
So, how long do you think it'd take for an Atheist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Satanist, Leviathanist, or Wiccan statue to be removed by the local Christian Coalition?
I think you're mistaking becoming part of the same class as everyone else with becoming "second class". Don't worry, landowners in the south didn't quite understand what equality meant at first either. It means that just like you're free to ask city council to take down that giant statue of my dark lord and master Satan from the steps of the legislature, I can ask to have the cross removed. Then, the democratically elected officials in the government who are representing the people, or the judges who are appointed by those officials, and thus are also representing the people, decide whether the complaint is legitimate, and whether the people as a whole would tollerate the request being fulfilled if it is.
To recap:
Equality: You can ask to have the satan statue removed, they can remove to have your cross removed. Representative Democracy: You and your countrymen choose who is to decide whether the complaint is legitimate and whether to effect a solution by choosing a representative for your area.
I'm glad I could clear this up, you dirty heathen. May the dark lord and master Satan watch over you all. (I'm just kidding. Only Christians worship Satan. Nobody else believes he exists.)
Slashdot Mirror
The most important aspect you have to remember when applying the teachings of Sun Tzu is the realizing who your enemy is. Thus, a major part of winning the victory before the battle is realizing what victory is. In the context of this discussion, the one who I am trying to achieve victory over is untruth, not Random Guy On The Internet. I'm a reasonable person, so now I know the truth - that my original interpetation of the facts was mistaken. If I wanted to seek battle, I would have ignored that realization and fought you until I "won", regardless of the truth.
You're still making assumptions about me, then attacking those assumptions. Attacking paper tigers is never good policy.
Sun Tzu is a fictional character created by Chinese philosophers, as such, Sun Tzu cannot die.
Here's the thing. If I have a few grams of a strong alkali metal, and ask the stewardess for a glass of water, that plane isn't staying in the air long. Since something deep inside my soul tells me most dogs aren't trained to sniff alkali metals, I have a feeling that could be a very bad thing.
What's my point? Since it's impossible to protect against even a significant number of ways that a person who wants to die can destroy an aircraft, isn't it better to just scale back to rational, sensible security measures, and give people back their freedom to travel as they please, forced to deal with the fact that with freedom comes the possiblity of death?
I don't fly anymore. The thought of being treated like a prison inmate just isn't appealing. I'd rather die from a rubidium bomb than life treated like a terrorist suspect for the grand offense of wanting to fly from one unspectacular city to another.
Oh yeah? Well I'd mod you down for saying you'd mod me down for saying I'd mod you down! So there!
The Liberal Party in Canada lasted 12 years on a platform which included paying back the federal debt. The Progressive Conservatives in Ontario lasted almost as long on a platform which included cutting back welfare and other social programs to the effect of cutting taxes while maintaining a balanced budget.
All it takes is for the populace to understand where the money the government spends comes from for the populace to start demanding a bit of responsibility.
If I had mod points, I'd mod up the grandparent, and mod down your whining post. Don't whine about how you've been modded. It's gayer than finding a man wedged between your cheeks.
Sun Tzu says that the victorious strategist seeks victory first and battle second. If you hadn't been so quick to fight me, perhaps you could have successfully expressed your point in the first place. Instead, you decided that it would be better to battle first. It is your error, not mine.
On the other hand, Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics, so perhaps you were just hoping for a good waste of time debate.
And you're missing the overall point, that the problem being pointed out so long ago was that Greenpeace wasn't making a distinction between chemicals with known, proven risks, and chemicals which MAY pose some unproven risk.
An important point that's flying over your head is the fact that the obscufication isn't mine. Greenpeace are the ones throwing a bunch of scary chemical names out there, saying that "though for many of these we don't actually have any proof, they might possibly be dangerous", and tut tutting Apple et. al. for using them.
"Good comeback... denial without explanation. The internet equivalent of closing your eyes, putting your hands over your ears, and chanting the theme sont to Gilligans Island."
No it isn't.
It wasn't a trick, I know full well that everyone on Slashdot knows full well what DHMO is. It's a massive internet meme, for christs' sake. My POINT, which you missed entirely, is that you can't just say "There might be risks associated with this but we don't actually have any proof that there is" and use that as a part of a legitimate study regarding environmental risks associated with certain chemicals.
To do so is to resort to pure scare tactics. "BEWARE! APPLE COMPUTER USES DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE IN THEIR PRODUCTS! WE CAN'T PROVE THAT IT'S HAZARDOUS, BUT WE'LL PRETEND IT'S MERCURY ANYWAY!!!"
I never said he was an American, only that it was typical of americans.
Functional Illiteracy, thy name is stupidfoo.
So now I'm on your foes list? Let me guess -- The sort of person this group is forming to battle?
I'm terribly sorry I brought facts into your little "oh smokers have it so hard" diatribe.
And your putting words in my mouth and making grand assumptions about my point of view then attacking me based on assumption alone is typical of Americans.
Why shoot the messenger? Why not instead just not do fucking stupid things in front of a video camera?
That's what I'd do.
In the arguement between "That's not a word!" and "Is too!", the only way to definitively win is to refer to an authority on the subject, like a dictionary.
It's not news, but if you never want to be a liar or the slightest bit decietful, just build guns. Your buyers know full well that you're supplying both sides. They don't care, they just want guns.
Many people believe Dihydrogen Monoxide is dangerous, but very few scientific studies have been done to assess it's negative effects on life. I guess greenpeace can toss DHMO into the list, and if they find any, suddenly the computer is filled with amounts of liquid Dihydrogen Monoxide.
It's not really proven that chronic exposure is toxic, but it COULD BE, like non-ionizing radiation from cell phones.
When I don't give my money to the music industry, I don't spend it again. It just sits in my bank account in perpetuity. Food? Rent? Computers? Toys? No. The money I would have spent goes directly into my bank account, and I don't spend it again. I just wait until inflation has rendered it valueless, then I flush it down the toilet.
(And I STILL bet that they lose more hard currency from people like me who don't feel like sponsoring lawsuits against dead people and little kids than they do from piracy. I'm much happier listening to unknowns who have no record of suing grandmothers, kids, and dead people.)
Why do people get away with not stopping at stop signs? Why don't the police arrest every single person leaving a bar at 2am for drunk driving? The answer is simple: the law says one thing, but nobody actually follows it. Just because nobody follows the law doesn't mean it's not illegal.
Hell, when I worked for the truck stop, the only way to find out what was in a bottle was to spray some on a surface and find out what it smelled like! It could be big blue industrial cleaner, it could be ammonia, it could be bleach, and there wasn't any way to find out. No manufacturer labels, no MSDS, nothing. I'm a follower of the teaching of Sun Tzu, who said to seek victory first and battle second, however, so instead of whine to the workplace health and safety committee, I just gritted my teeth and dealt with it, because I didn't trust them as far as I could throw them and I needed money for school more than I needed righteous poverty. Today I work in an engineering office at an industrial plant. THESE guys label EVERYTHING.
But that doesn't make that other place any less illegal, and that was the center of my arguement.
Employees are not property. Again, it is workplace health and safety legislation in question, not anti-smoking legislation per se.
And "It's not MUCH of a carcinogen" is NOT an acceptable reason to defy workplace health and safety legislation. The law recognises the effects of cigarettes and the chemicals in them.
I'm done with this discussion. If you ever have your lungs burned by bleach because the employer didn't bother to label the container with the proper WHIMIS label, or if you get cancer because you're working with radium paint without proper safeguards and the employer didn't supply an msds to show the effects of chronic exposure, or if you crush your hands or lose an eye becuase a job you had to do involved working with equipment that wasn't properly tagged and locked out, then you can try to tell me that the legislation is terrible and horrible and you don't agree with it one bit.
Conversely, when you lose everything you own in a lawsuit against an employee because you decided that your property rights were more important than his or her rights under workplace health and safety legislation, don't cry to anyone, because the legislation is there to protect owners from frivilous lawsuits just as much as it is there to protect the workers.
As I said in the other message, I hope for your sake you don't own a business. You're arguing against one of the single most important pieces of legislation in the lawbooks because you don't feel like having to light up outside.
One last note, based on your rhetorical quasi-threat not to hire anyone who coughs because they might know the law? That's how you end up with incompotent buffoons. When you hire incompotent buffoons, you end up coming in to work because your last guy didn't show up. I'm the sort of person you hire and keep on for years. The sort of person who becomes an asset no matter what job position they're in(Lasted 2 years as a gas station attendant, a job nobody else lasted a month at, to pay for college). Why do I know workplace health and safety? Because my employer makes it their priority, and thus it has become mine. If you want to hire a vapid nitwit so you can smoke, go right ahead, but remember that you own a business to make money so you can actually make a living, not so you can be the big man in charge firing intelligent people and hiring buffoons so you can make the laws.
Again, you don't appear to know the law. The freedom to quit is NOT what the law means by "The freedom to refuse unsafe work".
If a worker refuses to work because of a workplace health and safety issue, the freedom to refuse to work isn't a freedom to quit (Or a freedom to be fired). After they refuse to work over such an issue, the issue is handed to the local workplace health and safety officer, who, along with the workplace health and safety committee for that workplace (The right to participate includes the right to act on this committee), have to determine whether the complaint is definitely a hazard (and it is, just look at what's written on every cigarette carton and advertisement), and a resolution.
I hope for your sake that you don't own a business, because not knowing the law puts you in the position to be in for a world of hurt.
You've gone and missed the point. Exposing employees to carcinogens and toxins with effects from chronic exposure isn't a legal activity. Neither would be my employer forcing me to clean the black liquor tank without a spotter or personal protective equipment or proper lock-out procedures or training.
All the namecalling in the world and all the rhetoric in the world isn't going to change the fact that it's illegal, immoral, and unethical for a business owner to knowingly expose his or her employees to unsafe situations such as chronic chemical exposure. If that employee refuses to work as a result of the hazard presented by that chronic chemical exposure, it's completely within his or her legal rights, as it should be.
"That should be the owner's choice. If I pay my taxes and setup a business, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If I want to allow smoking, so be it. If you don't want to work here, then don't. End of story."
The owner doesn't have the choice to run an unsafe workplace. It's against the law. Workers have the right to participate, the right to know, and the right to refuse unsafe work.
This is why a mine cave-in these days is a tragedy that makes the news, rather than a non-event that happens all the time. This is why workplaces must provide proper ergonomically designed workspaces. This is why policemen are entitled to proper training and equipment.
Also, you obviously don't know anything about power plants or construction.
In nuclear power plants, radiation exposure is strictly controlled, and the worker CANNOT work beyond a certain exposure. In reality, the radiation inside a nuclear power plant is less than the naturally occurring radiation outside in many cases.
In construction, you are entitled to personal protective equipment, and you are legally allowed to refuse to work if its not provided.
I have to assume you're either a desk jockey or something similarly safe if you believe what you're saying. I work in an industrial plant, and they make damn sure I know what the law is, because they can be fined massively if they don't fulfill their responsibility.
If the republicans ran their country like a business, they never would have approved star wars or its missle based son. All the major powers that might attack the country with an ICBM hare now neutralized (Some reigonal powers have gotten the ability, but most are far more likely to kill someone nearby than waste time trying to attack the US), minor powers like terrorists would use another form of delivery, and for the money spent, there are other, actual threats and actual improvements that would, given a "return on investment" which roughly takes the possible damage and multiplies it by the percieved chance of the event actually happening, show a much, much greater return on investment.
Scientific American sort of holds their opinion on their sleeve, to be honest. That said, I enjoyed reading an article a couple months back that more or less showed that every "alternative" form of fuel out there today relies almost directly on fossil fuels for the bulk of their energy, thus eliminating the benefit, and possibly even making things worse because it's just another energy conversion in the chain.
So, how long do you think it'd take for an Atheist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Satanist, Leviathanist, or Wiccan statue to be removed by the local Christian Coalition?
I think you're mistaking becoming part of the same class as everyone else with becoming "second class". Don't worry, landowners in the south didn't quite understand what equality meant at first either. It means that just like you're free to ask city council to take down that giant statue of my dark lord and master Satan from the steps of the legislature, I can ask to have the cross removed. Then, the democratically elected officials in the government who are representing the people, or the judges who are appointed by those officials, and thus are also representing the people, decide whether the complaint is legitimate, and whether the people as a whole would tollerate the request being fulfilled if it is.
To recap:
Equality: You can ask to have the satan statue removed, they can remove to have your cross removed.
Representative Democracy: You and your countrymen choose who is to decide whether the complaint is legitimate and whether to effect a solution by choosing a representative for your area.
I'm glad I could clear this up, you dirty heathen. May the dark lord and master Satan watch over you all. (I'm just kidding. Only Christians worship Satan. Nobody else believes he exists.)