We need to engage in the unsexy business of building a lot more rail. If something has to move from a port to 800 miles inland, barring it being military equipment that the military deems too sensitive to send by rail (ie things like nuclear weapons), it should be sent by rail most of the way. That is way more cost-effective than fleets of trucks for the same purpose and much more environmentally sound.
I'm actually surprised Musk hasn't hedged his bets on this and offered to have the Boring Company help build small networks of tunnels to make direct routes by rail cheaper and less reliant on eminent domain. (It wouldn't be big business, but it would be a great way to test the tech)
Guy I worked with who was one of those types: *rants about how vapid and low brow Transformers was, lots of posturing to make it sound snobby*
Me: It's a live action version of a 1980s cartoon whose whole reason for being was to sell a line of toys. The fact that it has a plot that doesn't make adults barf and awesome special effects is pretty damn impressive.
The reason everything you claim to hate is on the rise is because of people like you who support the dehumanization of your opponents. How do I know you support it? Because you went into an emotional hissy fit the moment I broke with the Narrative by showing that no one trusts the people you like because they say "expressing abstract racism is BEYOND THE PALE" but curiously can't find a rule violation in threatening to burn someone alive.
Funny thing is, I don't even like Sarah Palin. I really don't, but I recognize a fundamental principle: advocating grabbing random women you disagree with and forcing them to submit to having a massive dump fed down their throat like a duck undergoing foie gras is the epitome of "speech that is unacceptable no matter what."
Group Threatening to Burn 'Activist Mommy' Alive Doesn't Violate Standards, Facebook Says
Amazing how the examples in the linked article don't constitute a violation of standards on harassment and threatening violence. Must be like the Sarah Palin principle. You can say "someone should shit down Sarah Palin's throat" on national television and not be roundly condemned, but say anything about women on the other side, no matter how tepid the statement, and it's going to be a 2 minute hate session.
The rest of the world just takes it as a given that they're being exposed to American propaganda.
There is a huge whiff of "us be bad guys, us get taste of own medicine? Unpossible!"
Maybe if the Democrats had run Sanders and not Felonia Von Pantsuit, they wouldn't have given the Russians such a target-rich environment.
Look, it's not hard. If Clinton were the Foreign Minister of any of our NATO allies, her government would have put her in prison for a very long time for even a third of what she's accused of doing.
Admitting that he should have publicly fired the person who took the non-memo that was actually an internal G+ discussion item and waved it like a bloody flag to clickbait shitposters would be an admission that Damore has a case.
But that is precisely what he should have done. He should have called a town hall meeting, asked the person to come to the stage and publicly fired them without any severance with a stern warning that anyone who decides to go activist and take dirty laundry to the media instead of working through official channels will be punished even harder because now they know that Google won't tolerate it.
Hire the person on a probation period and make it clear to them that they're being evaluated for attitude and talent for the job. If they don't hold up, fire them. No one is going to fault Google if they have a high turn over rate because they gave someone a year to go from just-in-the-door to fully functional junior employee and their attitude or total lack of ability made them a bad fit.
Funny thing too. This would probably get you a hell of a lot more of those "underrepresented minorities" that Google has a perpetual hard-on for hiring.
It's a pity that the bleeding hearts got "hard labor" declared "cruel and unusual" because being sentenced to years or even life of grueling, back-breaking work for white collar crime would be a terrifying incentive to many of these guys to never defraud anyone.
Because it puts the Roman Catholic Church and its institutions at risk. The RCC is the largest religion in the US and controls 1/3 of our hospitals. Nothing good can come from antagonizing your largest native religious group and putting at risk an immense number of charitable organizations, hospitals and colleges connected to it and its international seat of authority.
2. Careful, I could easily construct a way to get rid of political rivals that way.
It could, but if you establish a hard requirement of a mens rea in the law any rivals who intentionally accept foreign money should be hammered.
3. No complaints here, as long as we find ways to ensure that this isn't abused to get rid of "inconvenient" people.
Espionage and sedition are pretty cut and dry compared to "being inconvenient."
4. Does that include the Westboro Baptist Church?
No because the WBC is a scam that isn't guilty of anything resembling sedition or espionage. Most hardline Islamic preachers make public statements that could easily be considered sedition.
Note that this is no accident; the WBC is filled with lawyers and they operate accordingly. They precisely push the right buttons with their trolling hoping to make money by skewering people in court.
5. See 3. Also, where do you want to put such a person, most likely there is no original state to shove him into.
There usually is, and when there isn't, someone can be convinced to take them. We could always drop them off in Mexico because it's not like Mexico is shy about exporting its problems here.
I used to work with a few Syrian expatriates who were nominally Muslim. They were shocked at the level of Saudi influence in the mosques in our region and had to really bounce around to find one that was not on the take. That's their word, not mine. They could not believe that we'd spend so much time and money on "surveillance," but allow what would be the equivalent of open KGB recruitment (as in uniformed Soviet officers at career fairs) on college campuses during the Cold War.
I have a much simpler and less constitutionally dangerous solution:
1. Pass a law forbidding the funding of any domestic organization by a foreign government except the Vatican. 2. Authorize the use the corporate death penalty and full asset forfeiture for any organization convicted of intentionally accepting that funding. 3. Pass a law that amends immigration law to provide for the banishment of any foreigner who is convicted of espionage or sedition. 4. Prosecute all extremist preachers (like Wahabis and Salafists) under the Sedition Act. 5. Pass a law providing the courts with the discretionary power to remove the citizenship of any foreign-born person who is convicted of sedition or espionage
One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes.
I wonder if there is any correlation between this attitude toward property and the rampant sexual abuse you see in the same regions. Nah, couldn't be. They're all totally woke on those issues. Couldn't possibly be that you cannot silo off such a mentality into just one area rather than letting it spill into other areas.
This is a general problem in many democracies. Younger people don't vote as much as older ones, so get screwed.
I used a pediatric cancer patient as an example. In my example, she was 6 years old. There is no "democracy" out there where a 6 year old can vote. It is the moral imperative of her elders to represent her interests. In modern democracies, there is absolutely epic fail there as the elders are now increasingly in a vampiric mindset of "I'll extract the most resources I can to ensure I get the lifestyle I want."
I'm not going to argue for a duty to die, but the 65 year old voters should have the mentality associated with the Titanic: the children take priority over everyone in getting them to safety. One of the reasons Boomers sometimes get flabbergasted that I don't respect my elders is precisely that so many of them see their interests as of equal importance with that of the youngest generation (Gen Z, not Millennial; I am Millennial). As a Millennial father of two "Gen Z" kids, I take strong exception to my elders wanting respect and consideration when so many of them cannot even consider the traditional sacrifices the elderly have made to protect their grandkids and grandkids' generation as a whole.
A gene therapy for a disease that has a pool of potential patients in the thousands costs nearly seven figures? Absolutely shocking! If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can defeat the law of supply and demand!
But ironically, if it works, it makes far more sense than a lot of the emotion-driven spending we do via public healthcare programs and private insurance such as spend hundreds of thousands on treating quite possibly terminal disease in people past their gender's life expectancy.
How about another example? We treat funding cancers that mainly impact retirement age women as the highest cancer priorities, but people doing childhood cancer treatment practically have to sell drugs and do bake sales to get any real funding. Fuck you 6 year old sally, we can't have your parent's 65 year old neighbor die of breast cancer because she's a voter and you're not.
Like when a town of 3k people has 4.5k votes cast in it. That's about the number in one county that Roy Moore lost in Alabama. That's third world level brazenness in terms of voter fraud in a country that prides itself on the "rule of law." Someone please provide a logical reason why state and federal law enforcement have never gone into places like this and announced that the entire election officiating organization is under criminal investigation. You can't because the reason is really simple: politics.
If you want to "safeguard democracy," I have a really simple suggestion: make any sort of organized voter fraud like this covered under the charge of "attempted overthrow of the United States Government." That's what it is: an attempted bloodless coup against the elected government through voter fraud.
As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies."
The biggest conspiracy on the left is the conspiracy of silence, like Ellen Degeneres saying "Obama gave us eight years of no scandals."
See kids, if you can truly convince yourself that everything your side is accused of either is purely partisan bickering or has a totally innocent explanation, you're fine.
I remember reading a story about a man who was Facebook mobbed by a woman who accused him of being a pedophile because her kids were in part of a selfie he took. She later apologized and admitted that she was an idiot. The best way to deal with a troll mob is really simple:
1. Lock the account of EVERYONE who shared it. 2. Force them to read a notice that they participated in a troll mob based on defamatory/abusive content. 3. Threaten them that if it happens again within 90 days, they'll be locked out for 30 days. 4. If it happens three times in a year they get a lifetime ban from all Facebook social networks and using Facebook Connect to login to third party services.
If and when self-driving cars really become a thing, vandalism of street signs will probably have to be elevated to a felony with a mandatory minimums, even if no one gets hurt. It'll also have to be something where minors can be charged as adults because they're the ones who probably do the majority of it, and you know there will be teens who'll think it's funny to cause a 10 car pile up.
Was from a famous university with an over $50k/year price tag for tuition. Not Ivy League, but not far from it in prestige.
- Couldn't use Google to answer truly dumbass questions like "derp derp how do I run duh script." (Answer it was inter-name script) - Couldn't pick up a new language to save his life.
Dude quit his job like 2-3 weeks after starting.
We could have gone down to a Northern Virginia Community College (very good CC, on par with most of Virginia's 4 year schools as much as a 2 year school can be), swung a dead cat into a filled CS room and every candidate it hit would have done better than this guy.
It's the Federal Rules of Procurement. They're designed for buying either large bulk purchases of commodity items or securing expensive contracts like a new fighter or tanks. Computer-related work outside of embedded systems is almost always too agile, even under a more waterfall release schedule, for the extremely brittle and rigid law.
To steal an infamous line from Chateau Heartiste/Roissy: "diversity + proximity = war."
Identity politics is just the first stage as every non-white minority trends toward cohesive identity groups if they aren't already.
The old order was based on a simple formula:
1. At least 80% white majority. 2. 20% or so minorities and tolerance for diversity because it was really just "cultural flavor." 3. Minorities can be separate ethnoi when they want to be, but whites cannot.
Now that the white majority is demographically plummeting (the Baby Boomers and Gen X aborted and contracepted away a ton of Millennial and Gen Z replacements) you no longer have "tolerable hypocrisy," you have a rapidly shrinking group that is increasingly being told it cannot play by the same rules that increasingly radical "minorities" are.
The surveillance step is the bandage over a sucking chest wound. The next phase is the collapse of the social order as the different ethnoi demand their own pieces.
I've felt for a while that there has been a steady drumbeat in the culture to be "engaged" and "informed" and now "woke." There's no respect for someone who says "I work 50 hours a week plus commute, I don't give a shit about $HEADLINE_X. I am going to grab some beer and enjoy $ALCOHOL_COMPATIBLE_ACTIVITY instead of worrying about shit that I can't fix."
But that person is actually speaking a pretty hardcore truth 99% of the time, and the effects of denigrating it are toxic. Here's a good example...
How well do you know the local police force's reputation? There are plenty of people who shriek "da police, da police, fuck da police" like there aren't something like over 3k departments with very different cultures. Yet how many people, not knowing much of anything about the reputation of their local police looks at some shit that went down several states away and resents their local police? A lot. You know what that is? It's not woke, it's fucking braindead.
“Only a white man would believe you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.”
Daylight saving time does strike you as something that only a progressive era, white intellectual could think of rather than something simpler like changing school schedules.
Every pack included common cards and semi-rare to very rare cards. The theoretical resale value of your pack was about what you paid for it according to the game guides. (Yes, I said theoretical)
It made everyone happy because it ensured that if you bought a full box of packs, you would get some decent stuff. There were no odds of dropping $50-$100 on a box of card packs and box being just crappy common cards.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to engage in the unsexy business of building a lot more rail. If something has to move from a port to 800 miles inland, barring it being military equipment that the military deems too sensitive to send by rail (ie things like nuclear weapons), it should be sent by rail most of the way. That is way more cost-effective than fleets of trucks for the same purpose and much more environmentally sound.
I'm actually surprised Musk hasn't hedged his bets on this and offered to have the Boring Company help build small networks of tunnels to make direct routes by rail cheaper and less reliant on eminent domain. (It wouldn't be big business, but it would be a great way to test the tech)
Guy I worked with who was one of those types: *rants about how vapid and low brow Transformers was, lots of posturing to make it sound snobby*
Me: It's a live action version of a 1980s cartoon whose whole reason for being was to sell a line of toys. The fact that it has a plot that doesn't make adults barf and awesome special effects is pretty damn impressive.
The reason everything you claim to hate is on the rise is because of people like you who support the dehumanization of your opponents. How do I know you support it? Because you went into an emotional hissy fit the moment I broke with the Narrative by showing that no one trusts the people you like because they say "expressing abstract racism is BEYOND THE PALE" but curiously can't find a rule violation in threatening to burn someone alive.
Funny thing is, I don't even like Sarah Palin. I really don't, but I recognize a fundamental principle: advocating grabbing random women you disagree with and forcing them to submit to having a massive dump fed down their throat like a duck undergoing foie gras is the epitome of "speech that is unacceptable no matter what."
This doesn't violate Facebook standards. Or for those who won't read TFL:
Amazing how the examples in the linked article don't constitute a violation of standards on harassment and threatening violence. Must be like the Sarah Palin principle. You can say "someone should shit down Sarah Palin's throat" on national television and not be roundly condemned, but say anything about women on the other side, no matter how tepid the statement, and it's going to be a 2 minute hate session.
The rest of the world just takes it as a given that they're being exposed to American propaganda.
There is a huge whiff of "us be bad guys, us get taste of own medicine? Unpossible!"
Maybe if the Democrats had run Sanders and not Felonia Von Pantsuit, they wouldn't have given the Russians such a target-rich environment.
Look, it's not hard. If Clinton were the Foreign Minister of any of our NATO allies, her government would have put her in prison for a very long time for even a third of what she's accused of doing.
Admitting that he should have publicly fired the person who took the non-memo that was actually an internal G+ discussion item and waved it like a bloody flag to clickbait shitposters would be an admission that Damore has a case.
But that is precisely what he should have done. He should have called a town hall meeting, asked the person to come to the stage and publicly fired them without any severance with a stern warning that anyone who decides to go activist and take dirty laundry to the media instead of working through official channels will be punished even harder because now they know that Google won't tolerate it.
If your control systems weren't connected to the Interwebz so you could save a little money on payroll, you wouldn't have to apply the patch.
Hire the person on a probation period and make it clear to them that they're being evaluated for attitude and talent for the job. If they don't hold up, fire them. No one is going to fault Google if they have a high turn over rate because they gave someone a year to go from just-in-the-door to fully functional junior employee and their attitude or total lack of ability made them a bad fit.
Funny thing too. This would probably get you a hell of a lot more of those "underrepresented minorities" that Google has a perpetual hard-on for hiring.
It's a pity that the bleeding hearts got "hard labor" declared "cruel and unusual" because being sentenced to years or even life of grueling, back-breaking work for white collar crime would be a terrifying incentive to many of these guys to never defraud anyone.
1. Why exempt the Vatican?
Because it puts the Roman Catholic Church and its institutions at risk. The RCC is the largest religion in the US and controls 1/3 of our hospitals. Nothing good can come from antagonizing your largest native religious group and putting at risk an immense number of charitable organizations, hospitals and colleges connected to it and its international seat of authority.
2. Careful, I could easily construct a way to get rid of political rivals that way.
It could, but if you establish a hard requirement of a mens rea in the law any rivals who intentionally accept foreign money should be hammered.
3. No complaints here, as long as we find ways to ensure that this isn't abused to get rid of "inconvenient" people.
Espionage and sedition are pretty cut and dry compared to "being inconvenient."
4. Does that include the Westboro Baptist Church?
No because the WBC is a scam that isn't guilty of anything resembling sedition or espionage. Most hardline Islamic preachers make public statements that could easily be considered sedition.
Note that this is no accident; the WBC is filled with lawyers and they operate accordingly. They precisely push the right buttons with their trolling hoping to make money by skewering people in court.
5. See 3. Also, where do you want to put such a person, most likely there is no original state to shove him into.
There usually is, and when there isn't, someone can be convinced to take them. We could always drop them off in Mexico because it's not like Mexico is shy about exporting its problems here.
I used to work with a few Syrian expatriates who were nominally Muslim. They were shocked at the level of Saudi influence in the mosques in our region and had to really bounce around to find one that was not on the take. That's their word, not mine. They could not believe that we'd spend so much time and money on "surveillance," but allow what would be the equivalent of open KGB recruitment (as in uniformed Soviet officers at career fairs) on college campuses during the Cold War.
I have a much simpler and less constitutionally dangerous solution:
1. Pass a law forbidding the funding of any domestic organization by a foreign government except the Vatican.
2. Authorize the use the corporate death penalty and full asset forfeiture for any organization convicted of intentionally accepting that funding.
3. Pass a law that amends immigration law to provide for the banishment of any foreigner who is convicted of espionage or sedition.
4. Prosecute all extremist preachers (like Wahabis and Salafists) under the Sedition Act.
5. Pass a law providing the courts with the discretionary power to remove the citizenship of any foreign-born person who is convicted of sedition or espionage
I wonder if there is any correlation between this attitude toward property and the rampant sexual abuse you see in the same regions. Nah, couldn't be. They're all totally woke on those issues. Couldn't possibly be that you cannot silo off such a mentality into just one area rather than letting it spill into other areas.
I used a pediatric cancer patient as an example. In my example, she was 6 years old. There is no "democracy" out there where a 6 year old can vote. It is the moral imperative of her elders to represent her interests. In modern democracies, there is absolutely epic fail there as the elders are now increasingly in a vampiric mindset of "I'll extract the most resources I can to ensure I get the lifestyle I want."
I'm not going to argue for a duty to die, but the 65 year old voters should have the mentality associated with the Titanic: the children take priority over everyone in getting them to safety. One of the reasons Boomers sometimes get flabbergasted that I don't respect my elders is precisely that so many of them see their interests as of equal importance with that of the youngest generation (Gen Z, not Millennial; I am Millennial). As a Millennial father of two "Gen Z" kids, I take strong exception to my elders wanting respect and consideration when so many of them cannot even consider the traditional sacrifices the elderly have made to protect their grandkids and grandkids' generation as a whole.
A gene therapy for a disease that has a pool of potential patients in the thousands costs nearly seven figures? Absolutely shocking! If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can defeat the law of supply and demand!
But ironically, if it works, it makes far more sense than a lot of the emotion-driven spending we do via public healthcare programs and private insurance such as spend hundreds of thousands on treating quite possibly terminal disease in people past their gender's life expectancy.
How about another example? We treat funding cancers that mainly impact retirement age women as the highest cancer priorities, but people doing childhood cancer treatment practically have to sell drugs and do bake sales to get any real funding. Fuck you 6 year old sally, we can't have your parent's 65 year old neighbor die of breast cancer because she's a voter and you're not.
Like when a town of 3k people has 4.5k votes cast in it. That's about the number in one county that Roy Moore lost in Alabama. That's third world level brazenness in terms of voter fraud in a country that prides itself on the "rule of law." Someone please provide a logical reason why state and federal law enforcement have never gone into places like this and announced that the entire election officiating organization is under criminal investigation. You can't because the reason is really simple: politics.
If you want to "safeguard democracy," I have a really simple suggestion: make any sort of organized voter fraud like this covered under the charge of "attempted overthrow of the United States Government." That's what it is: an attempted bloodless coup against the elected government through voter fraud.
The biggest conspiracy on the left is the conspiracy of silence, like Ellen Degeneres saying "Obama gave us eight years of no scandals."
See kids, if you can truly convince yourself that everything your side is accused of either is purely partisan bickering or has a totally innocent explanation, you're fine.
I remember reading a story about a man who was Facebook mobbed by a woman who accused him of being a pedophile because her kids were in part of a selfie he took. She later apologized and admitted that she was an idiot. The best way to deal with a troll mob is really simple:
1. Lock the account of EVERYONE who shared it.
2. Force them to read a notice that they participated in a troll mob based on defamatory/abusive content.
3. Threaten them that if it happens again within 90 days, they'll be locked out for 30 days.
4. If it happens three times in a year they get a lifetime ban from all Facebook social networks and using Facebook Connect to login to third party services.
If and when self-driving cars really become a thing, vandalism of street signs will probably have to be elevated to a felony with a mandatory minimums, even if no one gets hurt. It'll also have to be something where minors can be charged as adults because they're the ones who probably do the majority of it, and you know there will be teens who'll think it's funny to cause a 10 car pile up.
Was from a famous university with an over $50k/year price tag for tuition. Not Ivy League, but not far from it in prestige.
- Couldn't use Google to answer truly dumbass questions like "derp derp how do I run duh script." (Answer it was inter-name script)
- Couldn't pick up a new language to save his life.
Dude quit his job like 2-3 weeks after starting.
We could have gone down to a Northern Virginia Community College (very good CC, on par with most of Virginia's 4 year schools as much as a 2 year school can be), swung a dead cat into a filled CS room and every candidate it hit would have done better than this guy.
It's the Federal Rules of Procurement. They're designed for buying either large bulk purchases of commodity items or securing expensive contracts like a new fighter or tanks. Computer-related work outside of embedded systems is almost always too agile, even under a more waterfall release schedule, for the extremely brittle and rigid law.
To steal an infamous line from Chateau Heartiste/Roissy: "diversity + proximity = war."
Identity politics is just the first stage as every non-white minority trends toward cohesive identity groups if they aren't already.
The old order was based on a simple formula:
1. At least 80% white majority.
2. 20% or so minorities and tolerance for diversity because it was really just "cultural flavor."
3. Minorities can be separate ethnoi when they want to be, but whites cannot.
Now that the white majority is demographically plummeting (the Baby Boomers and Gen X aborted and contracepted away a ton of Millennial and Gen Z replacements) you no longer have "tolerable hypocrisy," you have a rapidly shrinking group that is increasingly being told it cannot play by the same rules that increasingly radical "minorities" are.
The surveillance step is the bandage over a sucking chest wound. The next phase is the collapse of the social order as the different ethnoi demand their own pieces.
I've felt for a while that there has been a steady drumbeat in the culture to be "engaged" and "informed" and now "woke." There's no respect for someone who says "I work 50 hours a week plus commute, I don't give a shit about $HEADLINE_X. I am going to grab some beer and enjoy $ALCOHOL_COMPATIBLE_ACTIVITY instead of worrying about shit that I can't fix."
But that person is actually speaking a pretty hardcore truth 99% of the time, and the effects of denigrating it are toxic. Here's a good example...
How well do you know the local police force's reputation? There are plenty of people who shriek "da police, da police, fuck da police" like there aren't something like over 3k departments with very different cultures. Yet how many people, not knowing much of anything about the reputation of their local police looks at some shit that went down several states away and resents their local police? A lot. You know what that is? It's not woke, it's fucking braindead.
“Only a white man would believe you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.”
Daylight saving time does strike you as something that only a progressive era, white intellectual could think of rather than something simpler like changing school schedules.
Every pack included common cards and semi-rare to very rare cards. The theoretical resale value of your pack was about what you paid for it according to the game guides. (Yes, I said theoretical)
It made everyone happy because it ensured that if you bought a full box of packs, you would get some decent stuff. There were no odds of dropping $50-$100 on a box of card packs and box being just crappy common cards.
That must be why Apple is soooo butthurt about right to repair legislation.