But seriously, is there all that much difference between any of them? Just because we can trace these two churches back to their wacko founders, doesn't mean the other older churches weren't founded by wackos too.
I believe that there are severe differences from them... Take these two:
Scientology is a scam, clearly designed by a science fiction author to part fools and their money
Islam was established as a way to control and motivate followers and gain power by a local chief... it just spread a bit much afterward
In contrast, some of the other religions (Judaism, Christendom, Hinduim, Buddhism) seem to have started out as attempts to understand the world and fill out holes of their knowledge... and then it grew from there. Sure, many sects and leaders have used these to the same ends as the two religions listed above, but at least they don't seem to be started by someone with a clear motive to gain from it.
Other than maybe Buddhism, Scientology and Islam are the only ones where we have good documentation of the origins.
Personally I tend to place Scientology a little further out on the crazy spectrum, but as an atheist I'm not sure how well I can justify that. Are the highest beliefs of Scientology really that much crazier than Christianity? Are the abuses of the church of Scientology that much worse than the Catholic church? To what degree is Scientology getting a worse rap just because it's the wrong flavour of crazy?
I think that near 2007~2008 they seized ExxonMobil assets and kicked them out, making their refineries state-controlled, which is really awful.
Why is that so bad? Far better to take the profit for the country than simply give it to a foreign company.
Except that the next big multinational that comes along might decide that it's not worth building those assets if the government may simply come along name their own price and take it.
Just because you're picking on a bad guy doesn't make it fair.
Without links I'm guessing you're referring to Democratic legislators? If so it was probably just politicizing and not real opposition (the debt ceiling is a bad time to complain anyhow since you've already agreed to the spending)
There's a big difference regardless, during the Bush years the economy was healthy, running a massive debt while the economy is strong is moronic and they absolutely should have been paying it down, running a debt during a recession is simply necessary.
Wait, so you admit you don't understand what happened in Greece (which was quite simple), but you're sure it's not the same thing as in the USA?
Ok, if the Greeks stayed with the drachma lenders would have realized the Greeks may get in over their heads and start inflating their currency so they could pay back their debts. As a result lenders would have charged higher interest rates and the Greeks would have restrained their borrowing, they probably still would have had a pretty bad crisis but not to the same degree.
What happened with the Euro is the lenders knew two things one countries don't default on debts, and two, the Greeks couldn't simply inflate away their debt because they didn't control the Euro. Thus they continued to give Greece an interest rate on par with the stronger European economies, assuming that it would get paid back no matter what.
Of course the reason countries don't default is they generally control their own currency and thus can inflate debts away. What I didn't understand (and you don't really explain either) is why the Greek lenders didn't realize this. They may have been working off a US model with multiple governments (states) who are all on the same currency with separate budgets so just discounted a default, maybe they were taken in by the fraudulent statistics, maybe it's simply that Greece was a small nation so you didn't need that many bad lenders to give it money.
But at the end of the day the Euro is the defining feature of the Greek crisis because it's the cause of the scale of their crisis and the reason why they have so much trouble recovering, if you want Greece without the Euro look at Iceland, their currency underwent a huge devaluation, but since then the economy has been growing.
I agree there's a bit of a comparison to Greece since the USD is a reserve currency, so rates might be a bit lower on that account, but the US itself is still a huge economy with the ability to print USD so I don't think the Greek example is useful.
Then give me a reputable non-government source that gives a different figure, or at least explains why the 1.8 figure is BS. You don't get to win an argument simply by typing 'BULLSHIT', implying conspiracy, then backing it up with unverifiable anecdotes.
Except the big problem in the recession has been too little inflation
Try telling that to anyone who actually gets out of the basement to buy food and fuel. They will laugh at that idea, but inside they will be extremely upset.
The price at the pump is determined by the world price for oil (which is world supply and demand, and the strength of the US dollar). And gas prices have yet to hit pre-meltdown levels, hell, just yesterday I was driving by gas stations surprised at how cheap it was, and I can also remember the prices in '07 and '08 that are higher than anything I've seen since.
As for food it's risen about 1.8% in the past year. Sure you can cherry pick a few items that have gone up more, but there's others that have stayed the same or even gone down. (my grocery bill has definitely gone down, but I've also grown smarter with my shopping habits)
Everyone saw the internet bubble bursting, and a lot of people foresaw the housing crisis (though they couldn't guess the year to the same degree). But that's not really relevant since bubbles are due to a completely different mechanism. In modern bubbles mutual funds attract investors through growth, so even if the fund manager knows it's a bubble they can't avoid it since the other funds joining the bubble will cash in on the growth and attract more investors.
But that wouldn't apply to the low fed rates since there's no low interest rate bubble for them to cash in on.
Anyway the investors trusted Greece too to pay back its loan. I do not buy it that with a 150% debt to assets ratio is possible to payback without major austerity?
I don't understand all the mechanisms at work in the Greek crisis (maybe they just didn't anticipate the effects of the 2008 meltdown) but again, very different circumstances than the US.
True he is just one guy, but I trust those with a track record first and I believe debt should be a liability instead of an asset in the accounting books. Consider I make 40k a year and maxed out my credit cards for -$10k and then claim I have $50k in assets! That is luducrious and a sign of trouble.
For history the UK never recovered from its debt and financial collapse in the depression of 1873 (The 1930s was not the first). America superseeded it as it took 50 years to pay it back and recover when it was too late.
Treasury bonds will be toxic very soon and you can mark my words. Japan made its intentions of printing more money and a crises like that will spill into the US where investors will then ask for their money and both republicans and democrats will refuse to compromise showing them they will not keep their words in seeing their money back. Simple investing 101. It is never a good time to payback to the debtor, but the US technically has been out of the recession for 2 years. That means the bill is due.
The problem with trusting one guy with a track record is there's a plethora of pundits, so it's easy to find one who's nailed a couple predictions and shares your beliefs. As for history I'm not sure an economic crisis from 1873 is relevant (if for no other reason than the gold standard). Also note that one of the reasons why Japan's economy has struggled for so long is they never got their interest rates back up.
btw, debt IS a liability, the $10k in your example would only be an asset if you used it to buy $10k of assets, then you'd have $50k of assets and $10k of debt, nothing crazy there. Though the credit card company will consider your $10k in debt an asset, which was one of the causes of the crisis if you default and that asset vanishes. Either was the US is technically out of recession, but growth is still sluggish and Europe is vulnerable to a second crisis, there's a reason why so many economists think going over the cliff is a bad idea.
Except the big problem in the recession has been too little inflation, which is why the fed started setting inflation targets.
Besides, the US is in an unusually good position wrt to hyperinflation because you're the world's reserve currency (and will be for the foreseeable future). So you can safely maintain much higher dept levels than other countries since there's so many USD out there, and so many parties with a vested interest in its stability.
But this? Yes, the Tea Party said enough is enough and put their foot down saying "If you are not going to be serious grownups and live within your means with no plans to pay it back, then I wont sign the check". That is what the debt ceiling is.
Except the middle of an economic crisis is a really bad time to suddenly get concerned about the dept (why weren't they around in the Bush years?), particularly if your attempt at austerity causes the economy to go into recession, the tax receipts to plummet, and the social safety net to balloon.
It is not a new budget. It is to pay your existing bill. Every American owes $150,000 each and by not going off the fiscal cliff you are telling your creditors that you wont pay them back! In essence raising the debt ceiling is simply paying your credit card bill by charging to the same company over and over again.
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Any bond investor would be nuts to invest in the dollar right now.
Apparently the market disagrees with your assessment since treasury bonds are at record lows. All those people are apparently convinced they're going to get paid back, as someone with faith in the market I tend to take their word over yours.
Republicans are trying to do the right thing and that is do what they were hired for. To put in an ultra conservative mandate in 2010 to stop government and bailouts. Not everyone agrees with this, but I happen to feel Obama is not being serious enough with cuts and republicans know how to talk to the talk but refuse to raise taxes.
We need 5 fiscal cliffs in a row for the next 20 years to dig out of this hole. Seriously, Americans are clueless and watch what will happen next?
The Tea Party had a bit of a mandate in 2010, but now they've definitely lost it. And it's quite doable to start paying off the dept without a cliff, simply wait for the economy to get going again, then raise taxes, slash military spending, slash healthcare spending, maybe a few other bits, then soon you'll be in the black and paying off the dept.
Going by the article, it seems to only stop addictions 10% better than traditional methods, and is still well under half.
Would be interesting to see which people are helped, do we even really know what causes some people to become addicts while others have no problem with recreational use? There could be different mechanisms at work for different people.
Losing a friend because he made bad decisions is tragic, and cause for grief. Having a friend lobotomized because the government has decided youre making bad decisions is horrifying, and cause for outrage.
There is a big difference between making bad decisions freely, and having the government decide that you are no longer fit to make your own decisions.
When did we make the jump to the government forcing this surgery on people? Everything I saw in the article suggested people were volunteering (and paying for) the procedure.
How much moralizing did your friend have to put up with that only drove him to be more addicted rather than accepting he's addicted and choosing treatment. How much stigma was associated with "being committed" in his mind? For that matter, how many shitty, controlling people were in his life that he needed to escape into a drug. For that matter, WHAT drug. Alcohol? Cocaine? Cough syrup? Meth? Heroin? Weed? Ah, I see, it was just... drugs. Because every one I just listed is exactly the same.
At least in the mind of a puritan. I know people who moralize about using tylenol. I'm not kidding. I don't know if that's you, but come on.
If you haven't already, go read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
So someone comes on./, tells how their friend died yesterday, and your response is to make a bunch of baseless assumptions about what happened and essentially blame them for their friend's death?!?
Would he have wanted to live if he never found any joy in living ever again?
Speaking for myself (who doesn't have a drug addition), hell yes.
Sure it's a reduced quality of life from ideal, but it's still life. Besides, there's a reason it's referred to as the "pleasure centre" and not the pleasure centre, the brain isn't that neatly divided, I'm sure they can still feel some kind of pleasure, and have other forms of satisfaction in life, but that particular reward mechanism won't function (at least not in the same way).
I agree that Linus went overboard, but I think a strong reaction was still appropriate. The (paid) developer broke code in userspace, but more importantly, seemed claim it wasn't a bug since the user code shouldn't have been doing that anyway. That kernel developer was missing a major lesson of kernel development. If Linus merely said "Don't break userspace" the lesson might not stick, but by going overboard, and doing it publicly, Linus ensured that developer, nor any others reading the email, would realize this was a very big deal.
Now I don't have the technical background about those drivers to know if the dev was trying to dump responsibility, but even at the end he still didn't seem to have fully accepted responsibility and not knowing the code I still don't fully trust that he wouldn't do a similar thing in the future (the other dev I saw on the thread agreed with Linus's assessment).
Note there's a clear difference between the kernel and other projects since the kernel is really friggin important, if you break userspace that affects the entire Linux userbase. Other project leaders would hopefully understand this difference in context.
The bee's die if the stinger gets stuck and torn out when they leave (leaving behind some of their insides), that's generally just a problem when it's stinging bigger animals like us with thicker skin, when stinging other insects (or maybe even small animals, though I'm not sure) they're generally fairly safe. Also it's really only the honey bee that has this problem (though I'm sure that's what most bee keepers keep) but I'm sure they designed this system to leave the bees intact.
I should have been more precise, but I think it's a fair assumption that if he's in favour of GW he's also in favour of AGW (at least in the context he used it).
> I think it's important to understand that for decades AGW has convinced...
No. When I had my graduate-level class on the physics of weather, almost half of the time was spent talking about global cooling. One of the speakers had been quoted on the cover of (IIRC) Time about the problem of global cooling. The decision by a few politicians to push the AGW agenda is more recent than what you claim.
When was this? Global cooling has NEVER been scientific consensus, and was only taken seriously for a short period in the 70's. As for the politicians trying to push the AGW agenda, to the very limited extent that has happened its been very muted, do you really think politicians are chomping at the bit to be perceived as adding taxes and killing jobs?
Unless it turns into touch football, or they discover a way to cure concussions, I can't see how it survives. If you have the head of professional athlete repeatedly coming to a sudden stop you're going to have concussions, you can't make a helmet that prevents that. Plus I think football has a serious risk of a sudden collapse, boxing only needs a couple boxers and a ref, a football game needs two full teams, once the idea of head injuries starts pervading the public high school teams could collapse in a handful of years, possibly faster than the sport can adapt. It will be a very tricky transition when people start playing touch people but still want to watch tackle, if the big leagues don't transition properly the whole system might collapse and some other sport like soccer might take up the slack.
Then again, if you could somehow buy stocks in touch football it might be a hell of an investment.
Hockey has a similar (though less severe problem), but I think the difference is that hitting is a lot less integral to hockey than football and a smooth transition from full contact to none is possible.
Devout AGW believers will not be swayed by any argument. To them AGW is self-evident and the burden of proof should be on the other side to prove that it is not happening.
I think it's important to understand that for decades AGW has convinced an overwhelming majority of scientists and become the scientific consensus. If you want to explain the same data with a different theory you can't just pretend the current theory doesn't exist, you have to show why it's wrong and your theory is better.
GW heretics like myself OTOH, will not be convinced of AGW without the sort of overwhelming evidence that we aren't likely to ever have. Certainly not within the lifetime of anyone now alive.
How do you know we don't have the overwhelming evidence? Something is convincing all the scientists, for me AGW skepticism always seems to fall down when it's tasked with explaining how all the scientists are wrong. It's always skeptics playing like they're researchers and interpreting the data themselves, but if they ever put in enough work to become actual researchers they're no longer skeptics.
The fact that the vast majority believes AGW is undeniably real and even some kind of immediate threat to our species makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term loosely) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of AGW. Not so much on proving that it exists.
I think this is the one part of your post where I don't disagree with your reasoning as much as I think you're simply factually incorrect. AGW isn't some binary condition, scientists are constantly gathering new information trying to get a better understanding of AGW. I can't find the link but just this week there was a big disagreement between two top researchers about the scale of warming that would occur by the end of the century. As for the scientists focus, well if you're listening to the media or even the blogosphere of course you're only going to hear from the people spending their time on making the argument. But the overwhelming majority of climate researchers are doing what they're paid to do, research the climate, and only a small minority will have ever done any serious public communication.
btw
I am pro-GW (I am in favor of it).
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GW heretics like myself OTOH, will not be convinced of AGW
So you think AGW is good, but you don't think it's happening? It sounds to me like you're just trying to be super contrarian.
A couple points. First the traditional role of the UN is to avoid war (particularly big ones, like the first and second world wars), this resolution (which I think is generally a good one), is a very new role for the UN (and for the US within the UN). Second, it's misleading to say "members of the security council are bound to assist and/or defend civilian populations" since this was a role actively sought by the US though this resolution, for moral, but also strategic purposes (a potential justification for deploying forces).
Today, the House votes unanimously to say largely the same thing as the EU. The reaction on slashdot? Outrage at the horrible undercutting of freedom, the ITU and the UN in particular.
Actually most of the comments here seem to agree that the UN shouldn't take control of the Internet.
There's some skepticism about the motives of the US lawmakers (not surprising considering their history), but not the specific decision.
There's also some backlash against a few comments bashing the UN, but support for the UN taking control of the Internet is pretty limited.
The UN has gotten a really bad reputation lately due to the pandering to groups that outright hate the United States.
Say the UN didn't let Chavez to stand up and and insult the US for a few minutes, would that make him a nice guy? Probably not, more likely he'll just become more isolated, and a bunch of Americans will forget that there's countries like his that really don't like the US. Think of the UN General Assembly as the worlds cafeteria, there's a lot of nonsense going on (like the human rights council), but it gives you a decent overview of how everyone gets along and what they're thinking.
However, the US is called upon to be the world's police force, ambulance, piggy bank, and shoulder to cry on; but the US is denied the ability to have an appropriate role in the UN in exchange for these services.
Well no one actually asked the US to be the world's police force, you just sort of... volunteered. BTW, what would you consider an appropriate role? You already have a seat on the security council and an absurd amount of influence.
Never mind that without the US, the UN would have no teeth to accomplish anything. This is not to belittle the good things the UN HAS accomplished - but the United States does get tired of being treated like the scapegoat for all the world's problems.
So here's the deal with the US military. It's really, really, big (about half the world's total budget). It's not really required for UN peacekeeping, other western nations have strong militaries, but the US has such a big military they might as well use it.
Now you'll make the argument that we should all be thankful that the US spends so much to keep the rest of the civilized world safe and let us spend less on our own militaries, and that might have been true at the height of the cold war, but not so much anymore.
You don't spend so much on your military to protect us, you do it so you can exercise your power unilaterally. So you can invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11 and everyone jumps on board. So you can invade Iraq and even though everyone else knows it's a bad idea and we don't want it to happen, we can't really stop it (how many other nations could pull that off?).
We'd actually prefer you cut your military budget a bunch, let us pick up the slack if there was any, and you cab think a little longer before going to war.
So I agree that a change in web infrastructure could eliminate the big bandwidth costs that are a major factor for big websites and necessitate a lot of ads, and I actually like the idea of a de-centralized p2p system for distributing websites (you could use key signatures to ensure pages are being served accurately). Though there will still be a good number of sites that do rely on ads and paid developers that won't exist in that ecosystem, or would need to switch to micropayments, I think it's an idea worth exploring.
My main issue is people who come from the perspective where the seem to think that everyone should ad block and the only consequence would be the current Internet but without ads, or that anyone who sees an ad is a sucker who is supporting the web for the people smart enough to use blockers.
Slashdot Mirror
But seriously, is there all that much difference between any of them? Just because we can trace these two churches back to their wacko founders, doesn't mean the other older churches weren't founded by wackos too.
I believe that there are severe differences from them... Take these two:
In contrast, some of the other religions (Judaism, Christendom, Hinduim, Buddhism) seem to have started out as attempts to understand the world and fill out holes of their knowledge... and then it grew from there. Sure, many sects and leaders have used these to the same ends as the two religions listed above, but at least they don't seem to be started by someone with a clear motive to gain from it.
Other than maybe Buddhism, Scientology and Islam are the only ones where we have good documentation of the origins.
Personally I tend to place Scientology a little further out on the crazy spectrum, but as an atheist I'm not sure how well I can justify that. Are the highest beliefs of Scientology really that much crazier than Christianity? Are the abuses of the church of Scientology that much worse than the Catholic church? To what degree is Scientology getting a worse rap just because it's the wrong flavour of crazy?
I think that near 2007~2008 they seized ExxonMobil assets and kicked them out, making their refineries state-controlled, which is really awful.
Why is that so bad? Far better to take the profit for the country than simply give it to a foreign company.
Except that the next big multinational that comes along might decide that it's not worth building those assets if the government may simply come along name their own price and take it.
Just because you're picking on a bad guy doesn't make it fair.
Without links I'm guessing you're referring to Democratic legislators? If so it was probably just politicizing and not real opposition (the debt ceiling is a bad time to complain anyhow since you've already agreed to the spending)
There's a big difference regardless, during the Bush years the economy was healthy, running a massive debt while the economy is strong is moronic and they absolutely should have been paying it down, running a debt during a recession is simply necessary.
Wait, so you admit you don't understand what happened in Greece (which was quite simple), but you're sure it's not the same thing as in the USA?
Ok, if the Greeks stayed with the drachma lenders would have realized the Greeks may get in over their heads and start inflating their currency so they could pay back their debts. As a result lenders would have charged higher interest rates and the Greeks would have restrained their borrowing, they probably still would have had a pretty bad crisis but not to the same degree.
What happened with the Euro is the lenders knew two things one countries don't default on debts, and two, the Greeks couldn't simply inflate away their debt because they didn't control the Euro. Thus they continued to give Greece an interest rate on par with the stronger European economies, assuming that it would get paid back no matter what.
Of course the reason countries don't default is they generally control their own currency and thus can inflate debts away. What I didn't understand (and you don't really explain either) is why the Greek lenders didn't realize this. They may have been working off a US model with multiple governments (states) who are all on the same currency with separate budgets so just discounted a default, maybe they were taken in by the fraudulent statistics, maybe it's simply that Greece was a small nation so you didn't need that many bad lenders to give it money.
But at the end of the day the Euro is the defining feature of the Greek crisis because it's the cause of the scale of their crisis and the reason why they have so much trouble recovering, if you want Greece without the Euro look at Iceland, their currency underwent a huge devaluation, but since then the economy has been growing.
I agree there's a bit of a comparison to Greece since the USD is a reserve currency, so rates might be a bit lower on that account, but the US itself is still a huge economy with the ability to print USD so I don't think the Greek example is useful.
Then give me a reputable non-government source that gives a different figure, or at least explains why the 1.8 figure is BS. You don't get to win an argument simply by typing 'BULLSHIT', implying conspiracy, then backing it up with unverifiable anecdotes.
Try telling that to anyone who actually gets out of the basement to buy food and fuel. They will laugh at that idea, but inside they will be extremely upset.
The price at the pump is determined by the world price for oil (which is world supply and demand, and the strength of the US dollar). And gas prices have yet to hit pre-meltdown levels, hell, just yesterday I was driving by gas stations surprised at how cheap it was, and I can also remember the prices in '07 and '08 that are higher than anything I've seen since.
As for food it's risen about 1.8% in the past year. Sure you can cherry pick a few items that have gone up more, but there's others that have stayed the same or even gone down. (my grocery bill has definitely gone down, but I've also grown smarter with my shopping habits)
The same investors bought internet stocks in 1999 and also exotic home mortgage instruments too. This one got laughed off Fox news and was mocked in 1999 when his predictions came true. Here is is talking talking about the economic crises of 2009, back in 2006 saying mortgage back securities are not assets but liabilities.
Everyone saw the internet bubble bursting, and a lot of people foresaw the housing crisis (though they couldn't guess the year to the same degree). But that's not really relevant since bubbles are due to a completely different mechanism. In modern bubbles mutual funds attract investors through growth, so even if the fund manager knows it's a bubble they can't avoid it since the other funds joining the bubble will cash in on the growth and attract more investors.
But that wouldn't apply to the low fed rates since there's no low interest rate bubble for them to cash in on.
Anyway the investors trusted Greece too to pay back its loan. I do not buy it that with a 150% debt to assets ratio is possible to payback without major austerity?
I don't understand all the mechanisms at work in the Greek crisis (maybe they just didn't anticipate the effects of the 2008 meltdown) but again, very different circumstances than the US.
True he is just one guy, but I trust those with a track record first and I believe debt should be a liability instead of an asset in the accounting books. Consider I make 40k a year and maxed out my credit cards for -$10k and then claim I have $50k in assets! That is luducrious and a sign of trouble.
For history the UK never recovered from its debt and financial collapse in the depression of 1873 (The 1930s was not the first). America superseeded it as it took 50 years to pay it back and recover when it was too late.
Treasury bonds will be toxic very soon and you can mark my words. Japan made its intentions of printing more money and a crises like that will spill into the US where investors will then ask for their money and both republicans and democrats will refuse to compromise showing them they will not keep their words in seeing their money back. Simple investing 101. It is never a good time to payback to the debtor, but the US technically has been out of the recession for 2 years. That means the bill is due.
The problem with trusting one guy with a track record is there's a plethora of pundits, so it's easy to find one who's nailed a couple predictions and shares your beliefs. As for history I'm not sure an economic crisis from 1873 is relevant (if for no other reason than the gold standard). Also note that one of the reasons why Japan's economy has struggled for so long is they never got their interest rates back up.
btw, debt IS a liability, the $10k in your example would only be an asset if you used it to buy $10k of assets, then you'd have $50k of assets and $10k of debt, nothing crazy there. Though the credit card company will consider your $10k in debt an asset, which was one of the causes of the crisis if you default and that asset vanishes. Either was the US is technically out of recession, but growth is still sluggish and Europe is vulnerable to a second crisis, there's a reason why so many economists think going over the cliff is a bad idea.
Except the big problem in the recession has been too little inflation, which is why the fed started setting inflation targets.
Besides, the US is in an unusually good position wrt to hyperinflation because you're the world's reserve currency (and will be for the foreseeable future). So you can safely maintain much higher dept levels than other countries since there's so many USD out there, and so many parties with a vested interest in its stability.
But this? Yes, the Tea Party said enough is enough and put their foot down saying "If you are not going to be serious grownups and live within your means with no plans to pay it back, then I wont sign the check". That is what the debt ceiling is.
Except the middle of an economic crisis is a really bad time to suddenly get concerned about the dept (why weren't they around in the Bush years?), particularly if your attempt at austerity causes the economy to go into recession, the tax receipts to plummet, and the social safety net to balloon.
It is not a new budget. It is to pay your existing bill. Every American owes $150,000 each and by not going off the fiscal cliff you are telling your creditors that you wont pay them back! In essence raising the debt ceiling is simply paying your credit card bill by charging to the same company over and over again.
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Any bond investor would be nuts to invest in the dollar right now.
Apparently the market disagrees with your assessment since treasury bonds are at record lows. All those people are apparently convinced they're going to get paid back, as someone with faith in the market I tend to take their word over yours.
Republicans are trying to do the right thing and that is do what they were hired for. To put in an ultra conservative mandate in 2010 to stop government and bailouts. Not everyone agrees with this, but I happen to feel Obama is not being serious enough with cuts and republicans know how to talk to the talk but refuse to raise taxes.
We need 5 fiscal cliffs in a row for the next 20 years to dig out of this hole. Seriously, Americans are clueless and watch what will happen next?
The Tea Party had a bit of a mandate in 2010, but now they've definitely lost it. And it's quite doable to start paying off the dept without a cliff, simply wait for the economy to get going again, then raise taxes, slash military spending, slash healthcare spending, maybe a few other bits, then soon you'll be in the black and paying off the dept.
Going by the article, it seems to only stop addictions 10% better than traditional methods, and is still well under half.
Would be interesting to see which people are helped, do we even really know what causes some people to become addicts while others have no problem with recreational use? There could be different mechanisms at work for different people.
Losing a friend because he made bad decisions is tragic, and cause for grief. Having a friend lobotomized because the government has decided youre making bad decisions is horrifying, and cause for outrage.
There is a big difference between making bad decisions freely, and having the government decide that you are no longer fit to make your own decisions.
When did we make the jump to the government forcing this surgery on people? Everything I saw in the article suggested people were volunteering (and paying for) the procedure.
How much moralizing did your friend have to put up with that only drove him to be more addicted rather than accepting he's addicted and choosing treatment. How much stigma was associated with "being committed" in his mind? For that matter, how many shitty, controlling people were in his life that he needed to escape into a drug. For that matter, WHAT drug. Alcohol? Cocaine? Cough syrup? Meth? Heroin? Weed? Ah, I see, it was just... drugs. Because every one I just listed is exactly the same.
At least in the mind of a puritan. I know people who moralize about using tylenol. I'm not kidding. I don't know if that's you, but come on.
If you haven't already, go read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
So someone comes on ./, tells how their friend died yesterday, and your response is to make a bunch of baseless assumptions about what happened and essentially blame them for their friend's death?!?
Dude, could you get any more classless?
Would he have wanted to live if he never found any joy in living ever again?
Speaking for myself (who doesn't have a drug addition), hell yes.
Sure it's a reduced quality of life from ideal, but it's still life. Besides, there's a reason it's referred to as the "pleasure centre" and not the pleasure centre, the brain isn't that neatly divided, I'm sure they can still feel some kind of pleasure, and have other forms of satisfaction in life, but that particular reward mechanism won't function (at least not in the same way).
I agree that Linus went overboard, but I think a strong reaction was still appropriate. The (paid) developer broke code in userspace, but more importantly, seemed claim it wasn't a bug since the user code shouldn't have been doing that anyway. That kernel developer was missing a major lesson of kernel development. If Linus merely said "Don't break userspace" the lesson might not stick, but by going overboard, and doing it publicly, Linus ensured that developer, nor any others reading the email, would realize this was a very big deal.
Now I don't have the technical background about those drivers to know if the dev was trying to dump responsibility, but even at the end he still didn't seem to have fully accepted responsibility and not knowing the code I still don't fully trust that he wouldn't do a similar thing in the future (the other dev I saw on the thread agreed with Linus's assessment).
Note there's a clear difference between the kernel and other projects since the kernel is really friggin important, if you break userspace that affects the entire Linux userbase. Other project leaders would hopefully understand this difference in context.
The bee's die if the stinger gets stuck and torn out when they leave (leaving behind some of their insides), that's generally just a problem when it's stinging bigger animals like us with thicker skin, when stinging other insects (or maybe even small animals, though I'm not sure) they're generally fairly safe. Also it's really only the honey bee that has this problem (though I'm sure that's what most bee keepers keep) but I'm sure they designed this system to leave the bees intact.
I could remember that Galadriel crossed into Middle Earth with Feanor after Morgoth stole the Silmarils and killed King Finwe.
Sure, isn't that common knowledge?
I should have been more precise, but I think it's a fair assumption that if he's in favour of GW he's also in favour of AGW (at least in the context he used it).
> I think it's important to understand that for decades AGW has convinced...
No. When I had my graduate-level class on the physics of weather, almost half of the time was spent talking about global cooling. One of the speakers had been quoted on the cover of (IIRC) Time about the problem of global cooling. The decision by a few politicians to push the AGW agenda is more recent than what you claim.
When was this? Global cooling has NEVER been scientific consensus, and was only taken seriously for a short period in the 70's. As for the politicians trying to push the AGW agenda, to the very limited extent that has happened its been very muted, do you really think politicians are chomping at the bit to be perceived as adding taxes and killing jobs?
Unless it turns into touch football, or they discover a way to cure concussions, I can't see how it survives. If you have the head of professional athlete repeatedly coming to a sudden stop you're going to have concussions, you can't make a helmet that prevents that. Plus I think football has a serious risk of a sudden collapse, boxing only needs a couple boxers and a ref, a football game needs two full teams, once the idea of head injuries starts pervading the public high school teams could collapse in a handful of years, possibly faster than the sport can adapt. It will be a very tricky transition when people start playing touch people but still want to watch tackle, if the big leagues don't transition properly the whole system might collapse and some other sport like soccer might take up the slack.
Then again, if you could somehow buy stocks in touch football it might be a hell of an investment.
Hockey has a similar (though less severe problem), but I think the difference is that hitting is a lot less integral to hockey than football and a smooth transition from full contact to none is possible.
Devout AGW believers will not be swayed by any argument. To them AGW is self-evident and the burden of proof should be on the other side to prove that it is not happening.
I think it's important to understand that for decades AGW has convinced an overwhelming majority of scientists and become the scientific consensus. If you want to explain the same data with a different theory you can't just pretend the current theory doesn't exist, you have to show why it's wrong and your theory is better.
GW heretics like myself OTOH, will not be convinced of AGW without the sort of overwhelming evidence that we aren't likely to ever have. Certainly not within the lifetime of anyone now alive.
How do you know we don't have the overwhelming evidence? Something is convincing all the scientists, for me AGW skepticism always seems to fall down when it's tasked with explaining how all the scientists are wrong. It's always skeptics playing like they're researchers and interpreting the data themselves, but if they ever put in enough work to become actual researchers they're no longer skeptics.
The fact that the vast majority believes AGW is undeniably real and even some kind of immediate threat to our species makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term loosely) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of AGW. Not so much on proving that it exists.
I think this is the one part of your post where I don't disagree with your reasoning as much as I think you're simply factually incorrect. AGW isn't some binary condition, scientists are constantly gathering new information trying to get a better understanding of AGW. I can't find the link but just this week there was a big disagreement between two top researchers about the scale of warming that would occur by the end of the century. As for the scientists focus, well if you're listening to the media or even the blogosphere of course you're only going to hear from the people spending their time on making the argument. But the overwhelming majority of climate researchers are doing what they're paid to do, research the climate, and only a small minority will have ever done any serious public communication.
btw
I am pro-GW (I am in favor of it).
...
GW heretics like myself OTOH, will not be convinced of AGW
So you think AGW is good, but you don't think it's happening? It sounds to me like you're just trying to be super contrarian.
A couple points. First the traditional role of the UN is to avoid war (particularly big ones, like the first and second world wars), this resolution (which I think is generally a good one), is a very new role for the UN (and for the US within the UN). Second, it's misleading to say "members of the security council are bound to assist and/or defend civilian populations" since this was a role actively sought by the US though this resolution, for moral, but also strategic purposes (a potential justification for deploying forces).
Actually most of the comments here seem to agree that the UN shouldn't take control of the Internet.
There's some skepticism about the motives of the US lawmakers (not surprising considering their history), but not the specific decision.
There's also some backlash against a few comments bashing the UN, but support for the UN taking control of the Internet is pretty limited.
Say the UN didn't let Chavez to stand up and and insult the US for a few minutes, would that make him a nice guy? Probably not, more likely he'll just become more isolated, and a bunch of Americans will forget that there's countries like his that really don't like the US. Think of the UN General Assembly as the worlds cafeteria, there's a lot of nonsense going on (like the human rights council), but it gives you a decent overview of how everyone gets along and what they're thinking.
Well no one actually asked the US to be the world's police force, you just sort of... volunteered. BTW, what would you consider an appropriate role? You already have a seat on the security council and an absurd amount of influence.
So here's the deal with the US military. It's really, really, big (about half the world's total budget). It's not really required for UN peacekeeping, other western nations have strong militaries, but the US has such a big military they might as well use it.
Now you'll make the argument that we should all be thankful that the US spends so much to keep the rest of the civilized world safe and let us spend less on our own militaries, and that might have been true at the height of the cold war, but not so much anymore.
You don't spend so much on your military to protect us, you do it so you can exercise your power unilaterally. So you can invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11 and everyone jumps on board. So you can invade Iraq and even though everyone else knows it's a bad idea and we don't want it to happen, we can't really stop it (how many other nations could pull that off?).
We'd actually prefer you cut your military budget a bunch, let us pick up the slack if there was any, and you cab think a little longer before going to war.
So I agree that a change in web infrastructure could eliminate the big bandwidth costs that are a major factor for big websites and necessitate a lot of ads, and I actually like the idea of a de-centralized p2p system for distributing websites (you could use key signatures to ensure pages are being served accurately). Though there will still be a good number of sites that do rely on ads and paid developers that won't exist in that ecosystem, or would need to switch to micropayments, I think it's an idea worth exploring.
My main issue is people who come from the perspective where the seem to think that everyone should ad block and the only consequence would be the current Internet but without ads, or that anyone who sees an ad is a sucker who is supporting the web for the people smart enough to use blockers.
if someone put up a site they can't pay the bandwidth bill for that's their problem.
Unless you want to read that site (which you almost certainly do, given that you're talking about this on /.), then it's your problem too.
It's as simple as this, no ads means less high quality content, the number of ad block advocates who deny this basic fact is depressing.