The band isn't there to perform something they conceived in a dark room, they're there to play the crowd, to react and interact with the people as they get excited, antsy, tired, etc.
Go listen to Frank Zappa and the Mother's 1966 "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", one of the most groundbreaking tracks of the twentieth century. It's "what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o'clock in the morning on $500 worth of rented percussion equipment" -- pretty much something they conceived in a dark room.
I'm pretty sure that Beethoven, Mozart, et. al. conceived some of their music in dark rooms.
Yes, live improvised music, or composed music varied in response to the crowd, is great too. But the fact that live stuff can be great doesn't preclude stuff conceived in a dark room by artists working alone also being great.
Never get into an argument with an officer. Let me repeat... Never get into an argument with an officer.
That's all well and fine when dealing with a minor traffic violation where you can work it out in court.
It's a different case when you're dealing with cops trampling your civil rights or threatening brutality. Argue? Hell yes -- scream your head off and draw as many witnesses as you can. Fight? You have to make the call, but the right of self-defense applies even if the thug attacking you has a badge. (Whether the state will recognize that right is another question.)
Police are there to enforce the law. Not interpret it.
Sorry, but "I was only following orders" didn't fly at Nuremberg, and still doesn't fly when the orders come a democratically elected legislature. Separation of powers has a purpose.
Sorry, but that is nothing more than "locker room talk".
What, "locker room talk" isn't valid evidence? If I'm in the locker room and confess to a crime, my confession doesn't count?
If a cop lies in the locker room, why would I believe he's telling the truth in court?
No more joking on the internet because someone could take it seriously!
If you're a cop? Yes, no joking about following proper procedure and respecting people's rights, on the net or in meatspace. If you can't take the topic seriously, you're in the wrong line of work. (Yes, this may apply to most cops. I'll stand by the conclusion that most people wearing a badge today, ought not to be.)
Given the relative positions of "guns" and "butter" on ye olde national shopping list, you really don't want things to be bad enough that we can't afford guns.
Or, you know, we could reprioritize the list. We might just decide that spending ten times more than any other nation on "guns" is too much, cut it down to, say, five times, spend some of the saving on "butter" and some on repaying the loans we started taking out back in the Reagan days to buy all those "guns", and tell the military-industrial complex to go on a fscking diet already.
Whether or not we refurbish these Trident missiles, whether or not we have a missile as fast as the Russkies' Moskit, we still have an order of magnitude more rockets, bombs, ships, planes, tanks, and other forms of military-industrial complex hardware than is needed to keep other countries from invading the U.S.
Screw the Trident missiles. Put those resources into building some solar cells or ground-source heat pumps or mass transit projects. Or training some doctors. Or fixing some sewer lines before they collapse.
I can cancel with verizon right now before this takes effect and sign up with a company who doesn't do this (which I'm currently doing).
Who are you signing up with instead? You know of an American telecom company that's not a bunch of morally crippled rat bastards who ought to be first against the wall when the revolution comes?
Why on earth are we trying to build electric cars that make no sense instead of using cheap, proven turbo-diesel technologies?
Because diesel fuel is only "cheap" because we externalize many of the costs. If you had to pay at the pump and at the meter for the climate change, air pollution, Middle-east wars and skulduggery, oil spills and other damage caused by storage and transport, and the irreplaceable nature of fossil fuels involved in producing and supplying electricity, gasoline, and diesel fuel, electricity wins hands down.
It seems to make sense that there is no way that one could know why an employer did something.
It might seem to make sense. But it's wrong.
For a number of classes of people ( genders, ethnic groups, etc ) the mere act of not having the right number of people of a certain class can be construed as proof that there was discrimination.
The accurate way to determine if racial, gender, etc., discrimination is occurring is to send in dummy candidates with comparable qualifications, who differ only on the attribute in question. If an investigator sends in a dozen pairs of resumes with qualifications, one under a man's name and one under a woman's, and each time the man gets called for an interview and the woman doesn't, that's proof of discrimination.
You don't need to be a mind-reader, or rely on quotas.
It might be a little trickier to do resumes with names that turn up crazy stuff on a Google search, but it could be done.
Or, one could rely on an old fashioned technique to bringing malfeasance to light: whistle-blowers from inside. Again, when someone testifies "The boss told me, 'We don't want to hire no stinking [whatevers]!'", you don't need to be a mind-reader, or rely on quotas.
We're living in the real world, and people don't take jobs just because they want to enjoy themselves at the job. They take jobs because you need a job to live.
If you take a job working for total idiots, you're working in a place where not only won't you be able to advance you career, but where you're liable to see you job evaporate as the market collects its toll for stupid companies.
First guy: You should be more careful what you write. You never know when a future employer might read it.
Second guy: When did we forget our dreams?
First guy: What?
Second guy: The infinite possibilities that each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a few paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, every day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.
And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But i do know one thing: The solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of someday easing my fit into a mold. It doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.
This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
I've been outspoken on the internet since the early 90s, back before USENET was choked with spam. I've managed to stay employed.
Or else you'd think people still are social animals when they hit 30, feeling good about belonging to a group
Yes, humans are social animals. But anyone over the age of sixteen who defines their group membership by the brands of the products they own is a hopeless idiot, someone who needs to be institutionalized for their own protection and the protection of others.
Defining yourself as an "Apple" or a "Nike" or a "Chevy" person is even dumber than defining yourself in terms of what sports teams you're a fan of. And that's pretty damn stupid.
I'm not saying people don't have a preference in brands, or shouldn't root for the home team. I'm saying that defining who you are in those terms, makes you a stunted human being.
So when a whole country (well, not really) rejects a lifestyle choice that an iPhone user made
And that's the other reason why Apple nauseates me. (The first one being that they're a bunch of patent-abusing bastards dating back to the old "look-and-feel" lawsuits.) Somehow, according to their marketing, the choice of which brand of gizmos I buy is supposed to be a "lifestyle choice."
Thank you, but no, I don't need a multinational corporation to set my "lifestyle choices".
Apple absolutely dominates the MP3 category with the iPod here, and the Macbooks sell like gangbusters.
Where's "here" for you? I saw so many tiny cheap music players in Osaka's Den-den town that I'd have to question any iPod dominance. But yes, Macs did seem to be common, and the Apple store doing good business.
How can you have a "class" of capitalists when everyone is able to own property ? (and note: I'm not talking about land and capital goods, specifically. Even my daughters owns capital - clothes, toys, cash etc.).
I'm sorry that you don't know what capital is. Clothes and toys are finished goods, not capital; cash is capital only when invested.
The capitalist class is the class that controls capital: controls the money, and owns the land, the factories, even (thanks to copyrights and patents) the very ideas, that workers need access to to produce goods and services. Should the workers attempt to access this capital directly, the capitalist class's government backers start shooting people; so workers are forced to tithe to the capitalist class in order to be productive.
(Obviously, I am tremendously oversimplifying, ignoring the small business owner, the petit-bourgeois, whose capital needs are small.)
(You'll have to elaborate because "democratic control of capital" reads as being another way to say "state control of capital".
No, it doesn't. Capitalism is, in the end, state control of capital - who issues land deeds? Who charters corporations? Libertarian socialism can get along without the state, capitalism can't.
You said "state-backed minority class of 'owners'". Thus you know damned well that what you are describing is not laissez-faire capitalism.
Because there's not such thing as "laissez-faire capitalism". Capitalism requires a strong government to create and defend the property rights that make it possible.
Take away all those government issued land and resource deeds, corporate charters, copyrights, patents, and the like, and tell me what sort of "laissez-faire capitalism" you have left.
That doesn't mean that people don't have to work to survive, but that will be the case in any system. Every single human being prefers leisure to labour. So in a make-believe system where no one has to work production and technological progress will grind to a halt.
We say "money doesn't grow on trees" -- but did you know that food does? Food actually does literally grow on trees! As does fuel, and a great material for making shelter.
It's only when you have to pay some king or landlord for the privilege of occupying part of the Earth's surface, or when we overbreed the sustainable carrying capacity of the land and force each other into marginal areas, that leisure becomes a rarity.
In capitalism every single individual is both a producer and consumer.
No, in capitalism, the capitalist class skims off the labor of producers by charging them for access to the resources that capitalists "own" and producers need to get stuff done.
This is all as opposed to socialism in which the government controls all of the means of exchange and production.
No, socialism is a system based on the exchange of labor and the democratic control of capital. State socialism, as practiced by Marxists, is not the only variety. Anarchists are socialists.
Even if you just hold a "9 - 5" you sell your labour in exchange for a mutually-agreed-upon paycheck. It's a voluntary exchange.
No arrangement made in the face of an overwhelming imbalance of power is "voluntary". So long as a state-backed minority class of "owners" controls the vast majority of economic resources, referring to the wage slavery that all but the most skilled workers have to sell themselves into as "voluntary" is a sick joke.
If it were shut down, it wouldn't return to forest. It would return to semi-desert scrubland....Most places where trees are farmed for paper are like this: take a chunk of cheap land with good irrigation, plant a bunch of fast-growing trees, and harvest them every 15 years or so.
Then reducing the consumption of trees for paper would reduce the consumption of fresh water, and of the energy used to pump it for irrigation. Even better.
I live adjacent to 250 acres of tree farm. It *is* a forest. No doubt about that.
A forest has a variety of tree species of various sizes. It has large trees that have been growing for decades, it has seedlings, it has dead trees, and a whole bunch of undergrowth. It had a variety of animal life. Thick layers of humus enrich the soil.
Trees farms have closely-spaced trees, all of about the same age. Moncultures are used. Vehicle traffic compacts the soil.
Slashdot Mirror
Go listen to Frank Zappa and the Mother's 1966 "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", one of the most groundbreaking tracks of the twentieth century. It's "what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o'clock in the morning on $500 worth of rented percussion equipment" -- pretty much something they conceived in a dark room.
I'm pretty sure that Beethoven, Mozart, et. al. conceived some of their music in dark rooms.
Yes, live improvised music, or composed music varied in response to the crowd, is great too. But the fact that live stuff can be great doesn't preclude stuff conceived in a dark room by artists working alone also being great.
That's all well and fine when dealing with a minor traffic violation where you can work it out in court.
It's a different case when you're dealing with cops trampling your civil rights or threatening brutality. Argue? Hell yes -- scream your head off and draw as many witnesses as you can. Fight? You have to make the call, but the right of self-defense applies even if the thug attacking you has a badge. (Whether the state will recognize that right is another question.)
Sorry, but "I was only following orders" didn't fly at Nuremberg, and still doesn't fly when the orders come a democratically elected legislature. Separation of powers has a purpose.
Right. The cop should take responsibility for his bad attitude and not blame Facebook.
(That is what you meant, right?)
What, "locker room talk" isn't valid evidence? If I'm in the locker room and confess to a crime, my confession doesn't count?
If a cop lies in the locker room, why would I believe he's telling the truth in court?
If you're a cop? Yes, no joking about following proper procedure and respecting people's rights, on the net or in meatspace. If you can't take the topic seriously, you're in the wrong line of work. (Yes, this may apply to most cops. I'll stand by the conclusion that most people wearing a badge today, ought not to be.)
Ex-fscking-actly. The whole point of a file system is to abstract this stuff away.
Or, you know, we could reprioritize the list. We might just decide that spending ten times more than any other nation on "guns" is too much, cut it down to, say, five times, spend some of the saving on "butter" and some on repaying the loans we started taking out back in the Reagan days to buy all those "guns", and tell the military-industrial complex to go on a fscking diet already.
And why the hell not?
Whether or not we refurbish these Trident missiles, whether or not we have a missile as fast as the Russkies' Moskit, we still have an order of magnitude more rockets, bombs, ships, planes, tanks, and other forms of military-industrial complex hardware than is needed to keep other countries from invading the U.S.
We could halve our military budget, and still be outspending the entire European Union. Our military spending is more than ten times that of the number two nation, China.
(BTW, you do realize that the site you link to re: the Moskit is 100% pure nutjob, right? In actual fact, the Moskit is dangerous but no superweapon.)
Screw the Trident missiles. Put those resources into building some solar cells or ground-source heat pumps or mass transit projects. Or training some doctors. Or fixing some sewer lines before they collapse.
Who are you signing up with instead? You know of an American telecom company that's not a bunch of morally crippled rat bastards who ought to be first against the wall when the revolution comes?
Like, perhaps, the way that ZAP has partnered with China Youngman Automotive Group?
Because diesel fuel is only "cheap" because we externalize many of the costs. If you had to pay at the pump and at the meter for the climate change, air pollution, Middle-east wars and skulduggery, oil spills and other damage caused by storage and transport, and the irreplaceable nature of fossil fuels involved in producing and supplying electricity, gasoline, and diesel fuel, electricity wins hands down.
Indeed. Politicians who say "mistakes were made" have been cited as evidence.
Your washing machine has a general purpose computer embedded in it?
Anything involving Powerpoint slideshows should count as getting things undone. It's like generating negative information.
Of course.
You must not have looked too hard, because a few minutes with Google turns up several cases of workplace discrimination against men being prosecuted. In 2002 the EEOC filed suit against L.A. Weight Loss Centers, Inc. for discrimination against male job applicants. In 2004 they had a case against Jillian's. And last year they had a case against Razzoo's.
Furthermore, while not related to directly employment, court cases involving discrimination against men in favor of women include Craig v. Boren and Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan.
It might seem to make sense. But it's wrong.
The accurate way to determine if racial, gender, etc., discrimination is occurring is to send in dummy candidates with comparable qualifications, who differ only on the attribute in question. If an investigator sends in a dozen pairs of resumes with qualifications, one under a man's name and one under a woman's, and each time the man gets called for an interview and the woman doesn't, that's proof of discrimination.
You don't need to be a mind-reader, or rely on quotas.
It might be a little trickier to do resumes with names that turn up crazy stuff on a Google search, but it could be done.
Or, one could rely on an old fashioned technique to bringing malfeasance to light: whistle-blowers from inside. Again, when someone testifies "The boss told me, 'We don't want to hire no stinking [whatevers]!'", you don't need to be a mind-reader, or rely on quotas.
If you take a job working for total idiots, you're working in a place where not only won't you be able to advance you career, but where you're liable to see you job evaporate as the market collects its toll for stupid companies.
And if you modulate your life so that total idiots will hire you, you're not living. As always Randall Munroe's xkcd says it well (in fact I just printed that one out a few days ago to hang on the wall:
I've been outspoken on the internet since the early 90s, back before USENET was choked with spam. I've managed to stay employed.
Yes, humans are social animals. But anyone over the age of sixteen who defines their group membership by the brands of the products they own is a hopeless idiot, someone who needs to be institutionalized for their own protection and the protection of others.
Defining yourself as an "Apple" or a "Nike" or a "Chevy" person is even dumber than defining yourself in terms of what sports teams you're a fan of. And that's pretty damn stupid.
I'm not saying people don't have a preference in brands, or shouldn't root for the home team. I'm saying that defining who you are in those terms, makes you a stunted human being.
And that's the other reason why Apple nauseates me. (The first one being that they're a bunch of patent-abusing bastards dating back to the old "look-and-feel" lawsuits.) Somehow, according to their marketing, the choice of which brand of gizmos I buy is supposed to be a "lifestyle choice."
Thank you, but no, I don't need a multinational corporation to set my "lifestyle choices".
In 2006 -- the year that Congress went from GOP to Democratic control -- there were 33 Senate races. Six Republican incumbents and no Democratic incumbents were defeated. There were three open seats. So 24 Senators out of 33 were re-elected.
In the House, twenty-two GOP incumbents got the boot and there 34 open seats (including primary election losers); 379 out of 435 got re-elected.
So in a particularly "revolutionary" and "tumultuous" election, 72% of Senators and 87% of Representatives were re-elected.
I'd have to call that people "re-electing" their congressmen.
Where's "here" for you? I saw so many tiny cheap music players in Osaka's Den-den town that I'd have to question any iPod dominance. But yes, Macs did seem to be common, and the Apple store doing good business.
I'm sorry that you don't know what capital is. Clothes and toys are finished goods, not capital; cash is capital only when invested.
The capitalist class is the class that controls capital: controls the money, and owns the land, the factories, even (thanks to copyrights and patents) the very ideas, that workers need access to to produce goods and services. Should the workers attempt to access this capital directly, the capitalist class's government backers start shooting people; so workers are forced to tithe to the capitalist class in order to be productive.
(Obviously, I am tremendously oversimplifying, ignoring the small business owner, the petit-bourgeois, whose capital needs are small.)
No, it doesn't. Capitalism is, in the end, state control of capital - who issues land deeds? Who charters corporations? Libertarian socialism can get along without the state, capitalism can't.
Because there's not such thing as "laissez-faire capitalism". Capitalism requires a strong government to create and defend the property rights that make it possible.
Take away all those government issued land and resource deeds, corporate charters, copyrights, patents, and the like, and tell me what sort of "laissez-faire capitalism" you have left.
The amount of work that actually needs to be done to support humans is pretty small: hunter-gatherer societies had a lot more leisure time, as did the societies of ancient Greece and Rome -- even medieval Europe.
We say "money doesn't grow on trees" -- but did you know that food does? Food actually does literally grow on trees! As does fuel, and a great material for making shelter.
It's only when you have to pay some king or landlord for the privilege of occupying part of the Earth's surface, or when we overbreed the sustainable carrying capacity of the land and force each other into marginal areas, that leisure becomes a rarity.
No, in capitalism, the capitalist class skims off the labor of producers by charging them for access to the resources that capitalists "own" and producers need to get stuff done.
No, socialism is a system based on the exchange of labor and the democratic control of capital. State socialism, as practiced by Marxists, is not the only variety. Anarchists are socialists.
No arrangement made in the face of an overwhelming imbalance of power is "voluntary". So long as a state-backed minority class of "owners" controls the vast majority of economic resources, referring to the wage slavery that all but the most skilled workers have to sell themselves into as "voluntary" is a sick joke.
That depends on the complexity of the languages.
A Bash script that invokes awk uses two "swallow" languages and is going to be a lot simpler than some crazy conglomeration of, say, C++ and Perl.
Then reducing the consumption of trees for paper would reduce the consumption of fresh water, and of the energy used to pump it for irrigation. Even better.
A forest has a variety of tree species of various sizes. It has large trees that have been growing for decades, it has seedlings, it has dead trees, and a whole bunch of undergrowth. It had a variety of animal life. Thick layers of humus enrich the soil.
Trees farms have closely-spaced trees, all of about the same age. Moncultures are used. Vehicle traffic compacts the soil.
A tree farm is simply not a forest.