IOW, "we are scum whose very purpose in life is to force unwanted messages into your eyes and ears, but trust us that this incident of unwanted messages was accidental."
A police officer or firefighter can retire at 50 with 90% of their base pay...
And that was part of the compensation package the city agreed to pay them when they took their job. Retroactive compensation cuts are bullshit, fraud to the nth degree.
Due to inflexable union rules regarding retirement benefits many towns in California have become insolvent.
Bullshit. Some towns became insolvent because they entered into agreements to pay employees some money now and some at a later time, and then so badly mismanaged their finances -- largely through giving more and more tax breaks to the wealthy -- that they couldn't follow up on their obligation to pay people the agreed-upon compensation. Blaming unions for right-wing policies that benefit the 1% while screwing workers is ludicrous.
the difference is that you can choose not to consume a company's products/services. You can't choose not to be a part of a duly elected government.
A true distinction, yes, but one unrelated to the meaning of "censorship". (And putting aside the various ways in which governments often compel, as a practical matter, the use of various company's products/services.)
This article isn't about censorship in any sense of the word.
Except for the correct, dictionary definition sense of censorship...which, you know, I did quote and link above.
Look, friend, you're just wrong. "Censorship" does not mean what you want it to mean. You've made an error, it happens to to best of us. But please don't compound your error, that's the action of a fool.
I know it's fashionable for apologists for corporatism to claim that only the state can censor; but it happens to be wrong. When a private company decides "this is objectionable", that's censorship. (Note that deciding "this won't sell therefore we don't want to waste space carrying it" is different.)
I'm guessing cable subscriptions are falling, but I really doubt TV ownership is.
Define a "TV". I have a set which is, thanks to the digital switch-over a few years ago, unable to receive broadcasts. I never did pick up a converter box. So it's essentially just a large low-resolution CRT monitor, hooked up to my Blueray player (which is also a Netflix box), or sometimes to a laptop to watch downloaded videos. I would guess there are a fair number of "TVs" which are never used to watch either OTA, cable, or satellite broadcasts, only as monitors.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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It doesn't matter if it's a state university or not. They both are happy to take borrowed money for tuition.
Except that in the case of the state university, there are no parasitic investors in the loops skimming off unearned wealth, no profit motive to distort the process. If you fail out of the University of Maryland, you've just wasted people's time; if you fail out of Forprofit U., you've fattened someone's pockets.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Failing that, they should be expelled and expect no government benefits at all. Why should society pay for assholes to be assholes?
I'm sure that, having been judged "assholes" by some government employee, those folks will then quietly and peaceful starve to death without making trouble for any of us. A minimal package of welfare benefits is generally cheaper than jail.
If you want to play the property game -- if you want the state to mark off some piece of land, or objects made from raw materials extracted from the land, and enforce your "ownership" of it -- the ante for the game of excluding others from the free use of the material world is seeing that their basic needs are met. Even if they are assholes.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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The answer to the above is that there's no incentive to train your own workforce
Employers have an interest (maybe) in workforce training. They have no interest -- often, a negative interest -- in an educated citizenry.
Educated citizens tend to be the bane of for-profit companies. They understand science, so want regulation (or lawsuits) against polluters dumping crap in the air, water, and soil. They understand history, they read up on labor movements and find out how to organize for better working conditions and pay.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Loans that are backed with public money, and managed by people with no stake in the outcome, most of all.
Citation needed.
Seriously. That's a very specific statement about economic behavior, and if it's true that loans make with public funds and managed by disinterested bureaucrats have a high default rate, there should be evidence.
It does seem that student loan default rates have increased recently, driven partly by the poor economy but also by the rise in for-profit education, where schools -- perhaps I should say "schools" -- deceive students into taking out large loans (publicly or privately backed) with promises of high-income careers. Rather than trying to squeeze the victims of this scam, seems to me that disinterested bureaucrats ought to crush the scammers.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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As unfortunate as it is, some people don't want to be educated
And when you're an adult, capable of having meaningful wants, you don't have to be. The "wants" of children, on the other hand, are substantially less meaningful. And if parents don't want their children to be educated, that's child abuse.
If you want to improve education in the US, start by fixing the dismal quality being offered in the K-12 arena.
K-12 education is good where there is money and bad where there is not. We don't have a public school system in the U.S., we have thousands, run at the local level; some are excellent, some are crap, and there's a pretty good correlation between poverty and crappy schools.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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I mean that the state is an investor in it's citizen as opposed to a private corporation. With this, they claim rights over the individual much like a corporation would if the state permitted.
The state of Maryland invested a lot in my, my K-12 education plus a free ride at the University of Maryland. The state dosn't make any claim on me that they don't make on everyone else living here, whether they went to school here or not.
I can almost prove my point by reductio ad absurdum. For example, Clair De Lune, Rhapsody in Blue, or [insert your fave pop/rock piece here] is as good as the sound of a mosquito in your ear according to you and other relativists.
I'm sorry but you haven't come close to proving anything. Some people might well find a mosquito whine more pleasing than [insert "great" piece of music here]. I mean, people choose to listen to dubstep and death metal -- mosquito whine jazz isn't really absurd. If someone says, "I like mosquito whine jazz", you cannot demonstrate that they are wrong.
I have no idea WTF that unattractive image is supposed to be, but I've seen paintings in museums that were far closer to featureless or noisy blurs than to that. If someone says "I like this blurry image", you cannot demonstrate that they are wrong.
Not every logical argument begins with assumptions
Yes, it does. Sometimes those assumptions masquerade as "definitions", which may be confusing you here.
This argument is sound and no assumption is made.
(Putting aside for the moment that the "argument" provided makes no sense, and that you probably meant something like "If X then Y, if Y then Z, therefore if X then Z"...)
In order to reach a conclusion -- anything after a "therefore" -- you need to assume a rule of inference in some fashion. In order to make a logical argument, you must define a logical system -- that process of definition is one of assumption. If you like, you are perfectly free to define a logical system whereby you can take the strings "p -> q" and "p" and infer "!q". It's unlikely to be a useful system -- but then, folks used to think that about non-Euclidean geometry, so who knows?
Instead, the users of bitcoin should seek to to destabilize the enemies of freedom and move towards a post-regulatory society.
That would include being "post" the state regulations that, for example, prohibit me to build a cabin on your front lawn?
I'm all for anonymous digital cash (an idea that's been around much longer than Bitcoin), but pretending that any sort of economic regulation is an "enemy of freedom" is a juvenile misunderstanding of freedom.
I keep mail archives going as far back as 1996 on my home box in mh format. Sylpheed (my usual mail client), alpine (used over ssh), and nmh (occasionally used in scripting fashion) can all access it, plus I've got the usual Unixy goodness of grep and find and so on. It's a robust and simple setup.
I pull mail from my server onto my home box via POP. Why anyone wants their e-mail archives on a box that's not under their physical control is beyond my comprehension.
Well, it is generally accepted that we are all matrilinearly decended from the same woman, Mitochondrial Eve, I think this pretty much scientifically disproves there being two women at creation, unless one mothered no daughters.
No. No, it doesn't. "Mitochondrial Eve" is the most regrettable name for a scientific concept behind "the God particle", as it causes superstitious people to think that the topic in question somehow verifies their chosen creation myths.
There were women before and contemporary with "Mitochondrial Eve" who have living descendents today. The title of "Mitochondrial Eve" shifts over time.
I was born in a Baptist family, a family which believes every word in the Bible is literally true and cannot begin to fathom the very possibility that any of it was false.
And of course your family is 100% representative of not just Baptists in general, but the entire spectrum of Protestantism, from Anglicans (basically Catholics minus the Pope and the homophobia) to Calvinists to Quakers to Pentecostalists to...well, pick up a phone book and look under "Churches".
In Japan it is illegal to own scissors with blades more than six inches long without a license. It is the most safety conscious place on Earth.
Nah. Compared to the U.S., where we make laws that say people have to wear bike helmets? (No one does in Japan.) If long scissors are illegal it's under their knife-control laws, which are about the usual ridiculous hoplophobia and not safety.
1.) Install Ghostery. 2) Install AdBlock Plus. 3) Only accept cookies from sites you trust, and for best results clean those out regularly.
You can go the extra mile with NoScript, Tor, and so on, but even just doing Ghostery and turning off third-party cookies will knock out much of the problem.
And that correlation, paired with the requirement that server logs be maintained for, what, 18+ months, ensures that you can easily be identified if that were the government's aim.
This means that if you kill a Spaniard while in South America, for example, and aren't "sufficiently" punished for your crime there, Spain may attempt to get you arrested and extradited to Spain where you can stand trial.
Not really any different than the U.S. going after Bin Laden for planning 9/11 -- a crime against US citizens and residents, but not one that he committed within the US. See also the U.S. invasion of Panama and the trail of Manuel Noriega. Spain's claim is much more restrained than the US's, it hasn't invaded another country to capture high-profile suspects.
That's kind of the point I'm trying to make.. For anything beyond a very low power beam, we should require licensing for these plane-dropping laser pointers.
It is a very, very large jump from "Your right to shine a bright light ends at my eyeballs" to "Those who own a laser of power greater than X mw without a permission slip from the government should be locked in a cage" -- which is what "licensing" amounts to. Prior restraint is almost always government overreach.
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foreach (array('PHP', 'Perl', 'Java', 'C', 'C++', 'Javascript') as $language) {
}
"There does not now, nor will there ever exist, a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs." -- Lawrence Flon
IOW, "we are scum whose very purpose in life is to force unwanted messages into your eyes and ears, but trust us that this incident of unwanted messages was accidental."
And that was part of the compensation package the city agreed to pay them when they took their job. Retroactive compensation cuts are bullshit, fraud to the nth degree.
Bullshit. Some towns became insolvent because they entered into agreements to pay employees some money now and some at a later time, and then so badly mismanaged their finances -- largely through giving more and more tax breaks to the wealthy -- that they couldn't follow up on their obligation to pay people the agreed-upon compensation. Blaming unions for right-wing policies that benefit the 1% while screwing workers is ludicrous.
A true distinction, yes, but one unrelated to the meaning of "censorship". (And putting aside the various ways in which governments often compel, as a practical matter, the use of various company's products/services.)
Except for the correct, dictionary definition sense of censorship...which, you know, I did quote and link above.
Look, friend, you're just wrong. "Censorship" does not mean what you want it to mean. You've made an error, it happens to to best of us. But please don't compound your error, that's the action of a fool.
That's not very helpful. Please give an operational definition of a "TV" versus a "monitor".
Since when is that the meaning of "censor"?
"...to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable".
I know it's fashionable for apologists for corporatism to claim that only the state can censor; but it happens to be wrong. When a private company decides "this is objectionable", that's censorship. (Note that deciding "this won't sell therefore we don't want to waste space carrying it" is different.)
Define a "TV". I have a set which is, thanks to the digital switch-over a few years ago, unable to receive broadcasts. I never did pick up a converter box. So it's essentially just a large low-resolution CRT monitor, hooked up to my Blueray player (which is also a Netflix box), or sometimes to a laptop to watch downloaded videos. I would guess there are a fair number of "TVs" which are never used to watch either OTA, cable, or satellite broadcasts, only as monitors.
Except that in the case of the state university, there are no parasitic investors in the loops skimming off unearned wealth, no profit motive to distort the process. If you fail out of the University of Maryland, you've just wasted people's time; if you fail out of Forprofit U., you've fattened someone's pockets.
I'm sure that, having been judged "assholes" by some government employee, those folks will then quietly and peaceful starve to death without making trouble for any of us. A minimal package of welfare benefits is generally cheaper than jail.
If you want to play the property game -- if you want the state to mark off some piece of land, or objects made from raw materials extracted from the land, and enforce your "ownership" of it -- the ante for the game of excluding others from the free use of the material world is seeing that their basic needs are met. Even if they are assholes.
Employers have an interest (maybe) in workforce training. They have no interest -- often, a negative interest -- in an educated citizenry.
Educated citizens tend to be the bane of for-profit companies. They understand science, so want regulation (or lawsuits) against polluters dumping crap in the air, water, and soil. They understand history, they read up on labor movements and find out how to organize for better working conditions and pay.
Part of the problem here is that we keep confusing education of citizens with training of employees. Employers mostly want competent Gammas; educators want as many Alphas as possible.
Citation needed.
Seriously. That's a very specific statement about economic behavior, and if it's true that loans make with public funds and managed by disinterested bureaucrats have a high default rate, there should be evidence.
It does seem that student loan default rates have increased recently, driven partly by the poor economy but also by the rise in for-profit education, where schools -- perhaps I should say "schools" -- deceive students into taking out large loans (publicly or privately backed) with promises of high-income careers. Rather than trying to squeeze the victims of this scam, seems to me that disinterested bureaucrats ought to crush the scammers.
And when you're an adult, capable of having meaningful wants, you don't have to be. The "wants" of children, on the other hand, are substantially less meaningful. And if parents don't want their children to be educated, that's child abuse.
K-12 education is good where there is money and bad where there is not. We don't have a public school system in the U.S., we have thousands, run at the local level; some are excellent, some are crap, and there's a pretty good correlation between poverty and crappy schools.
I know it's fashionable to bash public schools, but the bashing is largely unjustified: the fact is that public schools have equal or better performance to private schools with similar per-student spending.
I'm sorry but you haven't come close to proving anything. Some people might well find a mosquito whine more pleasing than [insert "great" piece of music here]. I mean, people choose to listen to dubstep and death metal -- mosquito whine jazz isn't really absurd. If someone says, "I like mosquito whine jazz", you cannot demonstrate that they are wrong.
I have no idea WTF that unattractive image is supposed to be, but I've seen paintings in museums that were far closer to featureless or noisy blurs than to that. If someone says "I like this blurry image", you cannot demonstrate that they are wrong.
Yes, it does. Sometimes those assumptions masquerade as "definitions", which may be confusing you here.
(Putting aside for the moment that the "argument" provided makes no sense, and that you probably meant something like "If X then Y, if Y then Z, therefore if X then Z"...)
In order to reach a conclusion -- anything after a "therefore" -- you need to assume a rule of inference in some fashion. In order to make a logical argument, you must define a logical system -- that process of definition is one of assumption. If you like, you are perfectly free to define a logical system whereby you can take the strings "p -> q" and "p" and infer "!q". It's unlikely to be a useful system -- but then, folks used to think that about non-Euclidean geometry, so who knows?
That would include being "post" the state regulations that, for example, prohibit me to build a cabin on your front lawn?
I'm all for anonymous digital cash (an idea that's been around much longer than Bitcoin), but pretending that any sort of economic regulation is an "enemy of freedom" is a juvenile misunderstanding of freedom.
I keep mail archives going as far back as 1996 on my home box in mh format. Sylpheed (my usual mail client), alpine (used over ssh), and nmh (occasionally used in scripting fashion) can all access it, plus I've got the usual Unixy goodness of grep and find and so on. It's a robust and simple setup.
I pull mail from my server onto my home box via POP. Why anyone wants their e-mail archives on a box that's not under their physical control is beyond my comprehension.
And of course your family is 100% representative of not just Baptists in general, but the entire spectrum of Protestantism, from Anglicans (basically Catholics minus the Pope and the homophobia) to Calvinists to Quakers to Pentecostalists to...well, pick up a phone book and look under "Churches".
Nah. Compared to the U.S., where we make laws that say people have to wear bike helmets? (No one does in Japan.) If long scissors are illegal it's under their knife-control laws, which are about the usual ridiculous hoplophobia and not safety.
1.) Install Ghostery. 2) Install AdBlock Plus. 3) Only accept cookies from sites you trust, and for best results clean those out regularly.
You can go the extra mile with NoScript, Tor, and so on, but even just doing Ghostery and turning off third-party cookies will knock out much of the problem.
There is no such requirement in the U.S.
Not really any different than the U.S. going after Bin Laden for planning 9/11 -- a crime against US citizens and residents, but not one that he committed within the US. See also the U.S. invasion of Panama and the trail of Manuel Noriega. Spain's claim is much more restrained than the US's, it hasn't invaded another country to capture high-profile suspects.
It is a very, very large jump from "Your right to shine a bright light ends at my eyeballs" to "Those who own a laser of power greater than X mw without a permission slip from the government should be locked in a cage" -- which is what "licensing" amounts to. Prior restraint is almost always government overreach.