Nothing has changed since Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men--serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."
What your media earpiece is calling "specluators" this week are more accurately called "futures traders."
Futures traders are speculators. So are stock and bond traders. They all buy things on the speculation that they will be able to sell them later on at a higher price.
The fact that many people have been duped into gambling their retirement funds on speculation does not indicate that speculation is an sound basis for an economy
But let me recommend the collection The Mind's I, edited by him and by Daniel Dennet. It'll introduce you to Hofstadter and Dennet, and also to folks like Borges, Smullyan, Dawkins, Turing, and Lem.
Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" was, I think, a bestseller and was very good too.
IIRC, that was the book of which it was said, "bought by millions of people, read by thousands, understood by hundreds".
safety comparison
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 3, Insightful
when [the U.S.] is actually behind Europe when it comes to safety metrics (Europe has.032 hull losses per 1 million departures vs..049 in North America).
You've gone from an argument about the U.S. to cite statistics from North America - which, as you may have noticed, contains other nations. And you've not taken into account differences of flight distances or number of passengers per flight; I would think a much more useful number would be deaths per passenger-mile.
If you're directly quoting an argument from the book, this puts s large hole in its credibility.
Now, have any idea who those are? If not, then you're taking a stranger's word for another stranger's ID.
Unless you're building your browser from sources you've vetted or had vetted by trusted parties (using a compiler you've, etc.), you're already placing total trust in your browser vendor. Doesn't do you any good to get a list of trusted CAs from another source and feed them to a browser you don't trust.
Once the government is in charge of health care, they have a responsibility to manage every part of your life which effects your health.
Hmm. So my health insurance company currently has responsibility to manage every part of my life which effects my health? If not, why does that necessarily change if the state or federal government becomes my health insurance company? Does the government currently have responsibility to manage every health-relevant part of the lives of people on Medicare and Medicaid?
Or, are you just full of it?
These will all be necessary to combat the increased cost that government control of health care will create.
Sorry, but single payer makes heath care cheaper than a for-profit system, as there are no parasitic investors taking money out of the system.
Because [sex] is such a private and special act...
Um, no. Sex is not particularly special, the majority of adults have had it. It's considered private in our culture, but in other cultures a couple living in a one room hut with a couple of kids will think nothing of getting it on while the kids are there.
(Sex with someone you love is, hopefully, a special thing. But then, going out to dinner with someone you love is, hopefully, a special thing - it's the "with someone you love" that makes it special, not the act itself.)
Sexual intercourse is meant to be an act performed in private for the two parties that love and care for each other deeply enough to create a stronger bond.
Sexual intercourse is "meant" to be an act performed to make more members of the screwing couple's species. Anything additional is a social or psychological construct. Which doesn't mean that adding to it is good or bad - but seeking "meaning" in biology is not a useful endeavor.
Certainly, in the Judeo-Christian value system that Europe and the US was brought up in, we were taught that once Adam & Eve ate the fruit and became smart, they put clothes on - to be in public without clothes on is an affront to modesty and morality.
Ancient Hebrew mythology about talking snakes, magical trees, and why all the problems in the world are the fault of a woman, is not a good reason for pointing guns at people and locking them in cages if they step outside with no clothes on.
Any purported system of morality that claims public nudity to be immoral has left any vestige of rationality behind. Hundreds of people have seen me naked (at events like this and this and this) and no one has been harmed.
The particles are going to be colliding at very nearly the speed of light. In that context "more or less at rest with respect to the Earth" will still be many, many times escape velocity.
How you figure? If proton A is moving to the right at c - delta and proton B is moving to the left at c - delta, the net momentum is zero. If protons were little bits of silly putty, when they hit the resultant lump of putty would be at rest.
It's the difference between shooting the cue ball into another ball that is at rest, and shooting two cue balls at each other from the opposite end of the table. If you had some weird balls that broke into BBs on impact, you could still pocket the whole mess in the first instance, but in the second, you're going to end up with a mess of BBs on the table.
There are many political issues and any one candidate may fall at many different places on those issues.
Yes, but left/right refers to one specific axis: the axis of the aristocrats versus the commoners, or in modern terms, capital versus labor. Properly, one is not "left" or "right" on social issues, or foreign policy, or even on the amount of regulation and intervention the government should perform in the marketplace; one is leftist if one wants an economic system favorable to workers, and rightist if one wants one favorable to the owning class.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats favor policies that continue the accumulation of wealth into the hands of a small minority, the Democrats just favor a few small governors on that engine.
If you think the Democrat's are moving right, then look for either the Republican's or a third party to move into the political niche that is being vacated.
Which is why I usually vote Green, and probably will again this year. (Even if it's a write-in, and even if I might send money to or do some work for the Obama campaign. I live in a securely blue state with terrible ballot access laws, YMMV.)
Third, using game theory if we assume:...all the issues collapse down to a one dimensional continuum...
Which they don't. You need at least four dimensions to make sense of of politics: personal liberty on social issues, labor versus capital, planned economy versus free market, and aggressive versus diplomatic foreign policy.
Believing in a one-dimensional continuum is how we've come to the mess we're in, where people vote to make sure that the wrong lizard doesn't get in.
the voters vote for the person who is closest to their position
Interestingly, they often don't - when you ask people their positions on issues, they're often at odds with which party or candidate they vote for.
It's just another way in which people are a problem: given a population of politicians skilled in manipulating people, and a population of powerful people with a great deal of influence with said politicians, notions of "democracy" and "limited government" are a very brittle things.
Let me be quite clear that I don't think the LHC is likely to destroy the Earth.
However, the argument that what the LHC does is equivalent to collisions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere is bogus. The LHC's collisions between two particle streams with equal and opposite momentum could create things that are more or less at rest with respect to the Earth; a cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere carries momentum that will cause any resultant particles to move away from us very quickly.
"X is guilty of Y. There's no evidence? That just shows how despicably crafty X is." With an argument like that, you can make Obama the "20th hijacker", McCain the man responsible for the "9/11 coverup", and the Dali Lama responsible for the JFK assassination.
Don't get me wrong - I've no doubt that Bill and Hillary are both twisted, troubled individuals who, in any sane society, would be institutionalized for their own protection and the protection of others. (I would say the same about any president since JFK, except maybe Carter.) That doesn't mean that every allegation about them dragged up by their political opponents (a group of twisted, troubled individuals who, in any sane society, etcetera) is true.
Whitewater and the Clinton-esque cover-up was *nothing* compared to this stuff.
Whitewater was nothing. The GOP attack machine tried and tried but found nothing there, finally having to turn to Clinton's sex life to secure the impeachment they wanted.
(Of course, Clinton had committed all sort of impeachable offenses against the Constitution. But since they were the same sort that GOP presidents had committed - not surprising, given Clinton's conservative heart - there was fat chance of those being used against him.)
One vote for the democratic party of america is one less vote for the republican party of america, but is it really a vote to the left?
True - we've got two major parties in the U.S., one representing the center of the right wing, one representing the right wing of the center.
It's no wonder that, until this charismatic upstart Obama came along, the "sure winner" of the Democratic primaries was a woman who had been the president of her campus's chapter of the College Republicans, and whose husband was called "the best Republican president we've had in a while" by Alan Greenspan.
It's not a straw man, it's a counterexample, showing that a nation with low taxes and low government spending can still suck when it comes to freedom.
We advocate a society heavy on social and financial liberties, not a communistic/socialist society.
A society heavy on liberty is one where the people who do the work control the means of production, not one where parasitic capitalists backed by the government control wealth. It won't look much like what the so-called "Libertarian" party advocates; it would be more of a libertarian socialist system.
I have to disagree. It's like if they kept track of every phone call you made, and who you made it to, just to make sure you're paying the proper amount of phone taxes.
Except that that's not even close to what's happening here. Under this proposal, your merchant bank sends you and the IRS a total amount, not every transaction.
They feds don't need to know who you called in order to collect their taxes, so they shouldn't get the info. Nor do they need to know whether you're selling copies of Playboy or of National Review from your online bookstore, and they won't get that info. They just get a notice from your merchant account bank that "Arccot did $17,654 in business charged through us last year."
If the Feds were tracking every charge, hell yes, I'd say it's time to break out the torches and pitchforks. This, though, is pretty uninteresting.
As far as their right to do it, the government doesn't have a right to search me because I MAY be doing something illegal. That applies to my finances, too.
But they're not searching you. They're putting restrictions on entities engaged in interstate commerce, in support of their system of taxation.
This is about as invasive as a W2 or a 1099 form. It doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, and if I was going to wave my magic wand and create a tax system I'd do away with taxes on earned income; but there's not much here worth getting stressed about.
If the government were to be run in such a way that it did not extend past its Constitutional limits (gasp!), the budget would only be a tiny fraction of what it is today.
Would you like to live in a nation where government spending is only a small fraction (per capita) of what it is in the U.S., and where most taxes were abolished in the 1970s? Come to sunny North Korea! Yes, North Korea, proving that you can run a dictatorship on the cheap.
Lets see it is a political story, on the negative side and does not mention the party the person is a member of.
Do you think that if a story that mentions Bush, Clinton, McCain, Obama, Kucinich, Huckabee, or Paul, doesn't mention their party, it's some sort of conspiracy?
Just a few months ago, Dodd was a Democratic candidate for President. If you need it explicitly mentioned that he's a Democrat, you're not paying any attention to American politics, and are not the target demographic for this article.
Hobbes used to say that the advantage of governments isn't that violence itself ceases to exist, just that it switches level.
Hobbes was an idiot who believed that mankind is so inherently bad and violent that only a totalitarian government can keep it from a state of "war of all against all".
But the oppression of a totalitarian government is not, as you put it, a "peaceful coexistence." There's no significant difference between living in fear of the police and living in fear of gangsters. The "monopoly on violence" solves nothing.
Your ass had better be posting from a Darfur refugee camp, if you're going to make that kind of claim.
Non sequitur. I didn't say "good guys" seek out high levels of risk, I said "good guys" will act even if there is risk. We all have opportunities to help others come our way, and many of them they carry risks - physical risks, legal risks, financial risks, social risks.
I don't ask that everyone take risks to their physical safety - I don't expect the little old lady down the street to jump in to break up a fight (as I have done several times), or run into a burning building to save someone. But if she wants to be one of the "good guys", I do expect that she takes the risk of, for example, being kicked out of her bridge club and being rejected by her friends for speaking out if they deny entry to someone based on race.
Merely refraining from hurting others doesn't make someone a "good guy", it's not enough. You've got to get up off your ass and actively help, at least a little bit.
Slashdot Mirror
All of them? No. Too many? Yes.
Nothing has changed since Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men--serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."
Meh. Found that one somewhat disappointing, actually.
Futures traders are speculators. So are stock and bond traders. They all buy things on the speculation that they will be able to sell them later on at a higher price.
The fact that many people have been duped into gambling their retirement funds on speculation does not indicate that speculation is an sound basis for an economy
According to the Wik, while his Ph.D. is in physics, he's been a professor of cognitive science, computer science, psychology, history and philosophy of science, philosophy, and comparative literature - but never of physics. (Of course, Hofstadter has said that that entry is "filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me."
But let me recommend the collection The Mind's I , edited by him and by Daniel Dennet. It'll introduce you to Hofstadter and Dennet, and also to folks like Borges, Smullyan, Dawkins, Turing, and Lem.
IIRC, that was the book of which it was said, "bought by millions of people, read by thousands, understood by hundreds".
You've gone from an argument about the U.S. to cite statistics from North America - which, as you may have noticed, contains other nations. And you've not taken into account differences of flight distances or number of passengers per flight; I would think a much more useful number would be deaths per passenger-mile.
If you're directly quoting an argument from the book, this puts s large hole in its credibility.
Unless you're building your browser from sources you've vetted or had vetted by trusted parties (using a compiler you've, etc.), you're already placing total trust in your browser vendor. Doesn't do you any good to get a list of trusted CAs from another source and feed them to a browser you don't trust.
If you don't recognize the source of the nym, chum, your geek card is hereby suspended until you read Verne Vinge's classic novel True Names .
For the record: the hippy was dead and buried in 1968, 38 ain't old, for an American I'm pretty slim, and my ass ain't wrinkled yet.
But take the "fat wrinkled naked old" person you're picturing, and add a Speedo or a G-string and pasties. Is that really more aesthetically pleasing?
Hmm. So my health insurance company currently has responsibility to manage every part of my life which effects my health? If not, why does that necessarily change if the state or federal government becomes my health insurance company? Does the government currently have responsibility to manage every health-relevant part of the lives of people on Medicare and Medicaid?
Or, are you just full of it?
Sorry, but single payer makes heath care cheaper than a for-profit system, as there are no parasitic investors taking money out of the system.
Um, no. Sex is not particularly special, the majority of adults have had it. It's considered private in our culture, but in other cultures a couple living in a one room hut with a couple of kids will think nothing of getting it on while the kids are there.
(Sex with someone you love is, hopefully, a special thing. But then, going out to dinner with someone you love is, hopefully, a special thing - it's the "with someone you love" that makes it special, not the act itself.)
Sexual intercourse is "meant" to be an act performed to make more members of the screwing couple's species. Anything additional is a social or psychological construct. Which doesn't mean that adding to it is good or bad - but seeking "meaning" in biology is not a useful endeavor.
Ancient Hebrew mythology about talking snakes, magical trees, and why all the problems in the world are the fault of a woman, is not a good reason for pointing guns at people and locking them in cages if they step outside with no clothes on.
Any purported system of morality that claims public nudity to be immoral has left any vestige of rationality behind. Hundreds of people have seen me naked (at events like this and this and this) and no one has been harmed.
How you figure? If proton A is moving to the right at c - delta and proton B is moving to the left at c - delta, the net momentum is zero. If protons were little bits of silly putty, when they hit the resultant lump of putty would be at rest.
It's the difference between shooting the cue ball into another ball that is at rest, and shooting two cue balls at each other from the opposite end of the table. If you had some weird balls that broke into BBs on impact, you could still pocket the whole mess in the first instance, but in the second, you're going to end up with a mess of BBs on the table.
Yes, but left/right refers to one specific axis: the axis of the aristocrats versus the commoners, or in modern terms, capital versus labor. Properly, one is not "left" or "right" on social issues, or foreign policy, or even on the amount of regulation and intervention the government should perform in the marketplace; one is leftist if one wants an economic system favorable to workers, and rightist if one wants one favorable to the owning class.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats favor policies that continue the accumulation of wealth into the hands of a small minority, the Democrats just favor a few small governors on that engine.
Which is why I usually vote Green, and probably will again this year. (Even if it's a write-in, and even if I might send money to or do some work for the Obama campaign. I live in a securely blue state with terrible ballot access laws, YMMV.)
Which they don't. You need at least four dimensions to make sense of of politics: personal liberty on social issues, labor versus capital, planned economy versus free market, and aggressive versus diplomatic foreign policy.
Believing in a one-dimensional continuum is how we've come to the mess we're in, where people vote to make sure that the wrong lizard doesn't get in.
Interestingly, they often don't - when you ask people their positions on issues, they're often at odds with which party or candidate they vote for.
It's just another way in which people are a problem: given a population of politicians skilled in manipulating people, and a population of powerful people with a great deal of influence with said politicians, notions of "democracy" and "limited government" are a very brittle things.
Let me be quite clear that I don't think the LHC is likely to destroy the Earth.
However, the argument that what the LHC does is equivalent to collisions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere is bogus. The LHC's collisions between two particle streams with equal and opposite momentum could create things that are more or less at rest with respect to the Earth; a cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere carries momentum that will cause any resultant particles to move away from us very quickly.
Hmm. Nice non-falsifiable hypothesis you've got there.
"X is guilty of Y. There's no evidence? That just shows how despicably crafty X is." With an argument like that, you can make Obama the "20th hijacker", McCain the man responsible for the "9/11 coverup", and the Dali Lama responsible for the JFK assassination.
Don't get me wrong - I've no doubt that Bill and Hillary are both twisted, troubled individuals who, in any sane society, would be institutionalized for their own protection and the protection of others. (I would say the same about any president since JFK, except maybe Carter.) That doesn't mean that every allegation about them dragged up by their political opponents (a group of twisted, troubled individuals who, in any sane society, etcetera) is true.
Whitewater was nothing. The GOP attack machine tried and tried but found nothing there, finally having to turn to Clinton's sex life to secure the impeachment they wanted.
(Of course, Clinton had committed all sort of impeachable offenses against the Constitution. But since they were the same sort that GOP presidents had committed - not surprising, given Clinton's conservative heart - there was fat chance of those being used against him.)
Hmm. If googlebombing is "poisoning the available information", so is any act of speech taken with effectiveness of communication in mind.
This is no different than cranking out handbills noting that McCain wants to overturn Roe v. Wade or John McCain thinks it would be okay if U.S. troops stayed in Iraq for another hundred years. No one is engaging in slander, libel, rumormongering, or censorship here; they're spreading true and relevant information.
True - we've got two major parties in the U.S., one representing the center of the right wing, one representing the right wing of the center.
It's no wonder that, until this charismatic upstart Obama came along, the "sure winner" of the Democratic primaries was a woman who had been the president of her campus's chapter of the College Republicans, and whose husband was called "the best Republican president we've had in a while" by Alan Greenspan.
It's not a straw man, it's a counterexample, showing that a nation with low taxes and low government spending can still suck when it comes to freedom.
A society heavy on liberty is one where the people who do the work control the means of production, not one where parasitic capitalists backed by the government control wealth. It won't look much like what the so-called "Libertarian" party advocates; it would be more of a libertarian socialist system.
Except that that's not even close to what's happening here. Under this proposal, your merchant bank sends you and the IRS a total amount, not every transaction.
They feds don't need to know who you called in order to collect their taxes, so they shouldn't get the info. Nor do they need to know whether you're selling copies of Playboy or of National Review from your online bookstore, and they won't get that info. They just get a notice from your merchant account bank that "Arccot did $17,654 in business charged through us last year."
If the Feds were tracking every charge, hell yes, I'd say it's time to break out the torches and pitchforks. This, though, is pretty uninteresting.
But they're not searching you. They're putting restrictions on entities engaged in interstate commerce, in support of their system of taxation.
This is about as invasive as a W2 or a 1099 form. It doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, and if I was going to wave my magic wand and create a tax system I'd do away with taxes on earned income; but there's not much here worth getting stressed about.
Would you like to live in a nation where government spending is only a small fraction (per capita) of what it is in the U.S., and where most taxes were abolished in the 1970s? Come to sunny North Korea! Yes, North Korea, proving that you can run a dictatorship on the cheap.
Do you think that if a story that mentions Bush, Clinton, McCain, Obama, Kucinich, Huckabee, or Paul, doesn't mention their party, it's some sort of conspiracy?
Just a few months ago, Dodd was a Democratic candidate for President. If you need it explicitly mentioned that he's a Democrat, you're not paying any attention to American politics, and are not the target demographic for this article.
Hobbes was an idiot who believed that mankind is so inherently bad and violent that only a totalitarian government can keep it from a state of "war of all against all".
But the oppression of a totalitarian government is not, as you put it, a "peaceful coexistence." There's no significant difference between living in fear of the police and living in fear of gangsters. The "monopoly on violence" solves nothing.
Non sequitur. I didn't say "good guys" seek out high levels of risk, I said "good guys" will act even if there is risk. We all have opportunities to help others come our way, and many of them they carry risks - physical risks, legal risks, financial risks, social risks.
I don't ask that everyone take risks to their physical safety - I don't expect the little old lady down the street to jump in to break up a fight (as I have done several times), or run into a burning building to save someone. But if she wants to be one of the "good guys", I do expect that she takes the risk of, for example, being kicked out of her bridge club and being rejected by her friends for speaking out if they deny entry to someone based on race.
Merely refraining from hurting others doesn't make someone a "good guy", it's not enough. You've got to get up off your ass and actively help, at least a little bit.