When you say that English "has been the common language pretty much since inception" you'd be... wrong.
A couple of examples: Until the USA entered WWI, there were more German language newspapers in Pennsylvania than English. Dwight David Eisenhower spoke German growing up. You may have heard of him.
It's only recently that Americans (mostly right-wingers, mostly xenophobic) have insisted that everybody speak American. It's only recently that said assholes accost people in public and scream at them for not speaking American in their presence.
I think it would be good for most folks to learn a little bit about their own country before spouting off. Why do you want to make Americans look stupid?
I love how my conservative friends complain about liberals. Oh, liberals are a bunch of namby pampy snowflakes. They're everything that's wrong with America today. One even told me how he "fucking hates liberals". I laughed, being perhaps the most liberal person he knows.
I remind my conservative friends that America's founding fathers were the most liberal men in the world. I remind them that their favorite Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was the most liberal public figure of his time. I remind them that Teddy Roosevelt was a liberal.
I ask them, if we had a time machine, how far back into the past would we have to send them before they'd be a liberal. They get all agitated because it's only a few decades. They get all agitated when I tell them that over 6000 years of human history, it's been liberal positions they support. The usual response is something along the lines of "well, it can't be true that liberals were always right." Sure, you can think about it a long time. Do some serious research. I'm sure you can come up with an exception here and there. I guess that's why they think they're exceptional thinkers. "Liberals have been right 99% of the time for 6000 years, but liberals suck!"
With no special care or handling, books will easily last a century or three. My oldest book was published in 1848 and it's in pretty good shape. I own three other books that are more than 100 years old. Roughly a third of my ~800 books are older than your few dozen years (i.e. published prior to 1982). They're all perfectly readable and the vast majority are in fine or very fine condition.
If you're really a librarian, you'd know how ridiculous your claims are. Most books are withdrawn from circulation because they're not being checked out, not because they're unreadable. I don't find century old books in the collections of my county library, but I can easily find them in the main branch of the Denver Library or Norlin Library on campus at C.U.
As a counterpoint to your preference for digital, I have a copy of the first software I developed back in the early 1980's. It's construction accounting software. I printed out the source code and documentation and also have copies on 5.25" floppy disk. I can still read the hard copy, but the digital copy is unreadable for me. You may have some old hardware available to you, but I'm not a collector. I'd have had to convert the format of that stuff several times over the years to keep a readable digital copy. I don't think I've had a machine with a 5.25" floppy drive in more than 20 years.
Are you going to format shift your eBooks or just let them fade away? Sure, somebody will keep doing it, but what makes you think they'll make it available to you? Think of how much music and how many movies are already unavailable because they're not commercially viable.
Not only that, but do you realize how few books are actually available as eBooks? Sure, most titles being published today are, but I seldom read new books. Had this conversation on a plane, once. Guy sitting next to me said I should get a Kindle. I had him search for the book I had in my hands. Not available. I gave him the titles of the last half dozen I'd read, only one was available. But, you're a librarian. You already know everything I've said.
I have one that's worse than this. The manual for my car has chapters like "EMP", "JJ", "EM", and so on. They're not in alphabetical order. Within each chapter, pages are just numbered starting at 1. Chapter code at the top of the page, number at the bottom. What sort of mental defective thinks this is a good idea?
True, he never bought nor sold slaves. He did often mortgage them.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia in Jefferson's time, it was perfectly legal to manumit your slaves. Problem was, those former slaves would have to immediately leave the Commonwealth of Virginia. He did manumit a small number of them, but not many.
She won the primaries by nearly 4 million votes and the only candidate to ever receive more votes in the general election was Obama. The primaries weren't rigged (Sanders got most of his delegates in caucus states, where the turnout was exceedingly low).
As to corruption, Republicans spent about a billion dollars investigating her and couldn't find anything worthy of an indictment. Sounds like she's perhaps the least corrupt politician ever.
Somehow, this idiot actually thinks that power can be transferred from capital to labor (or vice versa) by imposing tariffs on imported goods???
Where do you get that idea? It's nothing to do with capital vs labor, it's to do with Chinese capital vs USA capital. Labor can get stuffed. We here in the USA are capitalists, not socialists. It's all about capital. If we wanted labor over capital we'd just tax labor at a lower rate than capital. That hasn't happened in living memory. We don't want labor to have a voice - we're pretty much all against labor unions. We don't want labor to earn anything - we're for automation and against minimum wages. We don't care if labor gets sick and dies - we are generally against universal health care.
Some guy wrote a book about it about 250 years ago. Sure, he's pretty obscure now, but there's a tiny chance you may have heard of him: Adam Smith. He spent about 250 pages debunking the entire mercantilist system. He demonstrates over and over again how both impediments and inducements to trade are suboptimal.
Some guy wrote a book, nearly 250 years ago now, said there's really no such thing as a trade deficit. You may have heard of him, Scottish guy, went by the name Adam Smith. He explained the concept pretty well, pretty much debunked the whole mercantilist system. You might want to read it some time.
What's actually happening is that China works for us. What's so bad about having people work for us? You do this all the time in your own life, don't you? You have a "trade deficit" with the grocery store, the hardware store, the gas station. You have a "trade surplus" with your employer. And you think this is bad? Oh... I get it! You haven't thought about it at all! You're just parroting what somebody else told you!
Well, we have laws about political campaign finance. They vary widely from state to state. I can't speak to Washington, but when I ran for office a couple years ago I had to take a half day class from the Secretary of State's office here in Colorado.
For example, it's illegal for a foreigner to contribute to the political campaign of somebody running for office in Colorado. That contribution doesn't need to be in cash. It could be "in kind", which would include pretty much anything other than money. Like advertising. There are also limits on individual donations. Here in CO, a person can't contribute more than $400, and corporations aren't allowed to contribute.
You invoking the First Amendment doesn't apply. What we want to find out is who is paying and how much they're paying. It's not about the content of the speech. So, we require reporting. Which means we want to know who spent the money and how much they spent.
Of course, you might be somebody who doesn't care how our elections are funded. In which case you can drink some Chlorox. Have a nice day!
Yeah, was about to post the same thing. Well, not the same thing. I don't fish, but I have visited something like 90 of Rocky Mountain National Park's ~150 named lakes.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's two parties because 99.9% of the population can't be bothered to participate in democracy. I have yet to meet a single person who claims to want a third party who is willing to get off his ass and actually participate IN ANY PARTY AT ALL. Don't like who the Democratic Party nominates? Get involved. Don't like Republican candidates? Get involved. You know that old saw, "Think globally, act locally"? "Act" is the key part.
About a third of eligible voters actually bother to vote in presidential elections. More like a tenth in other elections, and fewer in primaries. The number of people who volunteer or make contributions is microscopic. The number of people who show up at party functions is close to zero. If you're not willing to participate in either of the two existing parties, you won't participate in a third one. So why would things get any better?
Perhaps if you GOT OFF YOUR LAZY ASSES and participated, instead of watching Dancing With the Stars you'd get a better outcome.
YOU are the agent of change. If you don't like the way the democratic system works, spend perhaps an hour a month participating.
I would agree with you, if everyone was up front about who they're refusing service to.
But that bakery that is run by bigoted homophobes doesn't give me any way to know they're bigoted assholes beforehand. So, if I was a customer of theirs, it would only be possible because they're not being transparent. You may be okay in supporting people with hidden hateful agendas, but I'm generally not.
In contrast, GoDaddy has me agree to their terms of service when I sign up.
And, of course, it's easy (as many people here do) to confuse these issues. Lots of people here are supporting hate. So they support the hateful bigoted bakers and they're against GoDaddy for not supporting hateful bigoted Nazis, neo-Nazis, and traitorous Confederate lovers. And lots of people here seem to be using "libertarian" views in a way to support hate. Whatever melts your butter.
I'd love it if my FB friends just posted what they do rather than what they think or believe. When you tell me what you do, you come across as interesting, funny, generous, creative, kind. When you tell me what you think, you come across as illiterate, innumerate, and unreasonable.
>I've yet to see any car manufacturer other than Tesla irresponsibly brand them as "autopilot"
What does your lack of vision have to do with the issue?
The first car I ever owned was a 1967 Chrysler Imperial Crown, top of the line Imperial of its day. It had this really cool feature called "Autopilot". Autopilot was a dial with numbers on it, and a button to activate. Simply dial in the speed you wanted to go, press the button, and voila! The car magically maintained that speed. It even turned itself off if you tapped the brake pedal. Really cool stuff!
Yes, these days everybody calls this feature "cruise control". But on my 1967 Chrysler it was "Autopilot". I certainly didn't expect the car to drive itself.
Just because you've never heard of Chrysler using the term "autopilot" 50 years ago doesn't mean it didn't happen.
"Reagan was one of the best presidents of the last 50 years"
You can't be serious. I'd put him in the bottom three of that period.
His was the most corrupt administration in my lifetime. Have you forgotten Ollie North's conviction for destruction of evidence? Have you forgotten all the pardons George H. W. Bush granted for Reagan's people, including the Secretary of State?
When he wasn't corrupt, he was just horrible. His AIDS policy ("let the queers and drug addicts die") resulted in the poisoning of the blood supply, killing thousands.
Then he went and laid a wreath at the burial plots of the Waffen SS. He couldn't be bothered to even visit any concentration camp sites.
You could drive in racetracks or other closed courses where people are willing to be put in that kind of risk.
Frankly, it's safer to drive on a track than on the roads.
I drive my car on a race track 5 or 6 times a year. At the track, I know everybody is paying attention to what they're doing, everybody is going the same direction, people wave flags at me if anything unexpected has happened, if I make a mistake and go off the track there's nothing to run into, I know there is no debris I'll have to dodge, and every car has been inspected for safety.
Don't be an idiot. Can you name a single element of "atheist philosophy" (whatever that is) that supports anybody's murder?
I'm guessing you include Hitler and Stalin as murderers of record numbers of people. And murderers they are. However, they were not atheists.
Hitler said this: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. Raised as Catholic he went to a monastery school. He also had all his soldiers wear belt buckles that said "Gott mit uns". That means "God is with US".
To claim that Stalin was an atheist is overly simplistic. As the de facto ruler of the USSR, he initiated many purges. Many clergy were killed and this is often cited as Stalin's anti-christian mark. However, he did not simply remove clergy, he replaced them. He established a new national church of Russia, which of course answered to him. He considered the church very important to extending control from Moscow to the satellite nations. Stalin's church was called the Russian Orthodox Church or The Moscow Patriarchate; and the suppressed church was called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. They have a bitter history. Also, look to the resurgence of the church in the USSR during WWII.
You would be more correct by saying "Men with mustaches pretty much hold the record for murdering the most people."
Slashdot Mirror
When you say that English "has been the common language pretty much since inception" you'd be ... wrong.
A couple of examples: Until the USA entered WWI, there were more German language newspapers in Pennsylvania than English. Dwight David Eisenhower spoke German growing up. You may have heard of him.
It's only recently that Americans (mostly right-wingers, mostly xenophobic) have insisted that everybody speak American. It's only recently that said assholes accost people in public and scream at them for not speaking American in their presence.
I think it would be good for most folks to learn a little bit about their own country before spouting off. Why do you want to make Americans look stupid?
I love how my conservative friends complain about liberals. Oh, liberals are a bunch of namby pampy snowflakes. They're everything that's wrong with America today. One even told me how he "fucking hates liberals". I laughed, being perhaps the most liberal person he knows.
I remind my conservative friends that America's founding fathers were the most liberal men in the world. I remind them that their favorite Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was the most liberal public figure of his time. I remind them that Teddy Roosevelt was a liberal.
I ask them, if we had a time machine, how far back into the past would we have to send them before they'd be a liberal. They get all agitated because it's only a few decades. They get all agitated when I tell them that over 6000 years of human history, it's been liberal positions they support. The usual response is something along the lines of "well, it can't be true that liberals were always right." Sure, you can think about it a long time. Do some serious research. I'm sure you can come up with an exception here and there. I guess that's why they think they're exceptional thinkers. "Liberals have been right 99% of the time for 6000 years, but liberals suck!"
With no special care or handling, books will easily last a century or three. My oldest book was published in 1848 and it's in pretty good shape. I own three other books that are more than 100 years old. Roughly a third of my ~800 books are older than your few dozen years (i.e. published prior to 1982). They're all perfectly readable and the vast majority are in fine or very fine condition.
If you're really a librarian, you'd know how ridiculous your claims are. Most books are withdrawn from circulation because they're not being checked out, not because they're unreadable. I don't find century old books in the collections of my county library, but I can easily find them in the main branch of the Denver Library or Norlin Library on campus at C.U.
As a counterpoint to your preference for digital, I have a copy of the first software I developed back in the early 1980's. It's construction accounting software. I printed out the source code and documentation and also have copies on 5.25" floppy disk. I can still read the hard copy, but the digital copy is unreadable for me. You may have some old hardware available to you, but I'm not a collector. I'd have had to convert the format of that stuff several times over the years to keep a readable digital copy. I don't think I've had a machine with a 5.25" floppy drive in more than 20 years.
Are you going to format shift your eBooks or just let them fade away? Sure, somebody will keep doing it, but what makes you think they'll make it available to you? Think of how much music and how many movies are already unavailable because they're not commercially viable.
Not only that, but do you realize how few books are actually available as eBooks? Sure, most titles being published today are, but I seldom read new books. Had this conversation on a plane, once. Guy sitting next to me said I should get a Kindle. I had him search for the book I had in my hands. Not available. I gave him the titles of the last half dozen I'd read, only one was available. But, you're a librarian. You already know everything I've said.
I have one that's worse than this. The manual for my car has chapters like "EMP", "JJ", "EM", and so on. They're not in alphabetical order. Within each chapter, pages are just numbered starting at 1. Chapter code at the top of the page, number at the bottom. What sort of mental defective thinks this is a good idea?
True, he never bought nor sold slaves. He did often mortgage them.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia in Jefferson's time, it was perfectly legal to manumit your slaves. Problem was, those former slaves would have to immediately leave the Commonwealth of Virginia. He did manumit a small number of them, but not many.
Your narrative doesn't match actual history.
She won the primaries by nearly 4 million votes and the only candidate to ever receive more votes in the general election was Obama. The primaries weren't rigged (Sanders got most of his delegates in caucus states, where the turnout was exceedingly low).
As to corruption, Republicans spent about a billion dollars investigating her and couldn't find anything worthy of an indictment. Sounds like she's perhaps the least corrupt politician ever.
The 2nd Amendment being about the well-regulated militia and all...
Somehow, this idiot actually thinks that power can be transferred from capital to labor (or vice versa) by imposing tariffs on imported goods???
Where do you get that idea? It's nothing to do with capital vs labor, it's to do with Chinese capital vs USA capital. Labor can get stuffed. We here in the USA are capitalists, not socialists. It's all about capital. If we wanted labor over capital we'd just tax labor at a lower rate than capital. That hasn't happened in living memory. We don't want labor to have a voice - we're pretty much all against labor unions. We don't want labor to earn anything - we're for automation and against minimum wages. We don't care if labor gets sick and dies - we are generally against universal health care.
Some guy wrote a book about it about 250 years ago. Sure, he's pretty obscure now, but there's a tiny chance you may have heard of him: Adam Smith. He spent about 250 pages debunking the entire mercantilist system. He demonstrates over and over again how both impediments and inducements to trade are suboptimal.
Some guy wrote a book, nearly 250 years ago now, said there's really no such thing as a trade deficit. You may have heard of him, Scottish guy, went by the name Adam Smith. He explained the concept pretty well, pretty much debunked the whole mercantilist system. You might want to read it some time.
What's actually happening is that China works for us. What's so bad about having people work for us? You do this all the time in your own life, don't you? You have a "trade deficit" with the grocery store, the hardware store, the gas station. You have a "trade surplus" with your employer. And you think this is bad? Oh... I get it! You haven't thought about it at all! You're just parroting what somebody else told you!
It's been a while since I read the book. Can you give me the page number where his race is specified? Or quote the passage?
Well, we have laws about political campaign finance. They vary widely from state to state. I can't speak to Washington, but when I ran for office a couple years ago I had to take a half day class from the Secretary of State's office here in Colorado.
For example, it's illegal for a foreigner to contribute to the political campaign of somebody running for office in Colorado. That contribution doesn't need to be in cash. It could be "in kind", which would include pretty much anything other than money. Like advertising. There are also limits on individual donations. Here in CO, a person can't contribute more than $400, and corporations aren't allowed to contribute.
You invoking the First Amendment doesn't apply. What we want to find out is who is paying and how much they're paying. It's not about the content of the speech. So, we require reporting. Which means we want to know who spent the money and how much they spent.
Of course, you might be somebody who doesn't care how our elections are funded. In which case you can drink some Chlorox. Have a nice day!
Yeah, you probably need to bone up on campaign finance law.
Yeah, was about to post the same thing. Well, not the same thing. I don't fish, but I have visited something like 90 of Rocky Mountain National Park's ~150 named lakes.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's two parties because 99.9% of the population can't be bothered to participate in democracy. I have yet to meet a single person who claims to want a third party who is willing to get off his ass and actually participate IN ANY PARTY AT ALL. Don't like who the Democratic Party nominates? Get involved. Don't like Republican candidates? Get involved. You know that old saw, "Think globally, act locally"? "Act" is the key part.
About a third of eligible voters actually bother to vote in presidential elections. More like a tenth in other elections, and fewer in primaries. The number of people who volunteer or make contributions is microscopic. The number of people who show up at party functions is close to zero. If you're not willing to participate in either of the two existing parties, you won't participate in a third one. So why would things get any better?
Perhaps if you GOT OFF YOUR LAZY ASSES and participated, instead of watching Dancing With the Stars you'd get a better outcome.
YOU are the agent of change. If you don't like the way the democratic system works, spend perhaps an hour a month participating.
I would agree with you, if everyone was up front about who they're refusing service to.
But that bakery that is run by bigoted homophobes doesn't give me any way to know they're bigoted assholes beforehand. So, if I was a customer of theirs, it would only be possible because they're not being transparent. You may be okay in supporting people with hidden hateful agendas, but I'm generally not.
In contrast, GoDaddy has me agree to their terms of service when I sign up.
And, of course, it's easy (as many people here do) to confuse these issues. Lots of people here are supporting hate. So they support the hateful bigoted bakers and they're against GoDaddy for not supporting hateful bigoted Nazis, neo-Nazis, and traitorous Confederate lovers. And lots of people here seem to be using "libertarian" views in a way to support hate. Whatever melts your butter.
The big problem with the zipper was it would gouge into the album next to it on your shelf.
Not just you.
A costs $100.
If B costs 1 times less than A, it would be free.
If B costs 2 times less than A, shouldn't I get $100 back?
It's not just you.
I'd love it if my FB friends just posted what they do rather than what they think or believe. When you tell me what you do, you come across as interesting, funny, generous, creative, kind. When you tell me what you think, you come across as illiterate, innumerate, and unreasonable.
>I've yet to see any car manufacturer other than Tesla irresponsibly brand them as "autopilot"
What does your lack of vision have to do with the issue?
The first car I ever owned was a 1967 Chrysler Imperial Crown, top of the line Imperial of its day. It had this really cool feature called "Autopilot". Autopilot was a dial with numbers on it, and a button to activate. Simply dial in the speed you wanted to go, press the button, and voila! The car magically maintained that speed. It even turned itself off if you tapped the brake pedal. Really cool stuff!
Yes, these days everybody calls this feature "cruise control". But on my 1967 Chrysler it was "Autopilot". I certainly didn't expect the car to drive itself.
Just because you've never heard of Chrysler using the term "autopilot" 50 years ago doesn't mean it didn't happen.
"Reagan was one of the best presidents of the last 50 years"
You can't be serious. I'd put him in the bottom three of that period.
His was the most corrupt administration in my lifetime. Have you forgotten Ollie North's conviction for destruction of evidence? Have you forgotten all the pardons George H. W. Bush granted for Reagan's people, including the Secretary of State?
When he wasn't corrupt, he was just horrible. His AIDS policy ("let the queers and drug addicts die") resulted in the poisoning of the blood supply, killing thousands.
Then he went and laid a wreath at the burial plots of the Waffen SS. He couldn't be bothered to even visit any concentration camp sites.
I'm hoping you're just ignorant.
You could drive in racetracks or other closed courses where people are willing to be put in that kind of risk.
Frankly, it's safer to drive on a track than on the roads.
I drive my car on a race track 5 or 6 times a year. At the track, I know everybody is paying attention to what they're doing, everybody is going the same direction, people wave flags at me if anything unexpected has happened, if I make a mistake and go off the track there's nothing to run into, I know there is no debris I'll have to dodge, and every car has been inspected for safety.
Don't be an idiot. Can you name a single element of "atheist philosophy" (whatever that is) that supports anybody's murder?
I'm guessing you include Hitler and Stalin as murderers of record numbers of people. And murderers they are. However, they were not atheists.
Hitler said this: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. Raised as Catholic he went to a monastery school. He also had all his soldiers wear belt buckles that said "Gott mit uns". That means "God is with US".
To claim that Stalin was an atheist is overly simplistic. As the de facto ruler of the USSR, he initiated many purges. Many clergy were killed and this is often cited as Stalin's anti-christian mark. However, he did not simply remove clergy, he replaced them. He established a new national church of Russia, which of course answered to him. He considered the church very important to extending control from Moscow to the satellite nations. Stalin's church was called the Russian Orthodox Church or The Moscow Patriarchate; and the suppressed church was called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. They have a bitter history. Also, look to the resurgence of the church in the USSR during WWII.
You would be more correct by saying "Men with mustaches pretty much hold the record for murdering the most people."
You forgot guns.
"... lack of quality ..."
Quality is like temperature. Everything has it. It can be either high or low, but everything has it.