Fair enough, but Obama is also guilty of murder and the people who are sent to Gitmo are also guilty until proven innocent and no such proof is even allowed. We also use torture in the US. Does Malaysia?
Isn't Malaysia the country where you can be arrested for insulting the king? Who cares about whether this law "goes too far"?
When you say "the country" you seem to be implying that there is only one country were "lese-majesty" is a crime. That is not the case. Also, I cannot find any evidence that even a single person has been arrested for "lese-majesty" in Malaysia. At least in modern times. Do you have a reference?
The only US city I've lived in that had pollution you could smell and see was Los Angeles and that's at least partly because of the inversion layer. The last Asian country I lived in had a very different kind of problem. Because trash pickup was infrequent and unreliable and possibly expensive for some people most residents would burn their trash in their yard in plastic bags. The smoke and the scent of burnt plastic would permeate the air for hours nearly every evening. It was so bad that that was the reason I left. I just couldn't take it anymore. I was sick of the nearly constant smell of burning plastic. There were many nights when I tried to fall asleep while wearing a respirator. Yes, it was that bad.
You might want to check a map. Asia is big. It's like talking about the Americas as in both North and South America together. I've visited every country in East Asia except for Mongolia and Myanmar, and I've actually lived in a couple and I don't ever remember seeing anyone cooking with firewood. Where are these 2 billion people supposed to be living? Are you talking specifically about India? I've never been there. It seems strange that wood would be more cost effective than propane or electric stoves. It doesn't seem like it would be.
Right. Because if it's not CO2 it's not pollution. You do realize that it's possible to actually output toxic chemicals into the air and water. Stuff that causes problems immediately instead of maybe in 10,000 years.
I'm not sure it's possible to force China to stop polluting. Nor am I sure that it's possible to just stop buying Chinese products. They make almost everything now. They are the manufacturer for the world. It's just not realistic to boycott them. It also may not always be fair. I doubt if every Chinese manufacturer actually creates pollution. To be fair you'd really have to investigate each company and only boycott the ones who are actually polluting. Punishing every Chinese company solely because they are located in China is obviously wrong. What might be more useful is some kind of organization that investigates Chinese companies accused of poor environmental practices and publicizing it so that people can choose not to buy their products.
I've personally found that being funny doesn't get you chicks. That's a total myth. Not as damaging as the "being nice" thing which actually makes things worse, but false. Funny and good looking, yes. Funny and ugly? Not a chance. I used to be considered funny up until I was maybe 15 or 16. I was the clowniest of class clowns from a very young age. Didn't help me with girls at all. My unfunny but good looking friends would score the hottest chicks, but I never got anywhere with them. Not so much as even a kiss. They would laugh at what I said and then go kiss the best looking guy they could find. I've never personally met an ugly but funny guy who gets hot chicks. Not saying it never happens. Almost everything that's at least possible happens on occasion, but it's very rare.
Anyway, telling someone to "be funny" is useless. You either are or you're not. Making people laugh is not something you can learn how to do. I remember watching a Seinfeld interview where he talked about being funny and he pegged it. You just know what to say. Something funny either comes into your head or it doesn't. Strangely enough I've never actually met a girl who was funny. I've seen some on TV, but they must be quite rare. Makes me wonder if being funny is some kind of unconscious but lame attempt at scoring with women. It's great if you're already good looking though.
Being "in shape" is necessary but definitely not sufficient. I used to work out at the gym obsessively in my mid-twenties. I popped amino acid pills throughout the day and lifted 3-4 days a week doing a split routine. I even hit on girls at the gym. Got me absolutely nowhere. Actually one of the girls I hit on at the gym ended up briefly going out with a good looking friend I had at the time after I introduced them. Perfect symbolism.
Occasionally an ugly guy just gets lucky. I did too once, but after we broke up that was it. It's not realistic to expect to get that lucky more than once per lifetime. I have a friend who is about as ugly as I am and he's never even had that sort of thing once. So I was pretty lucky in a way, although there's something to be said about not knowing what you are missing.
As far as strategies I think I've tried everything that can reasonably be attempted. Every possible strategy. The bottom line is the vast majority of girls don't want to be with an ugly guy any more than guys want to be with an ugly girl. Maybe they don't value looks quite as much guys do, but they do want to be with a guy they find physically attractive. Regardless of what they say. Only an infinitesimally small percentage of the women who say they don't care about looks really don't. I've occasionally met such women. Their actions speak much louder than bullshit words.
As far as "being social" and all the rest I've already tried stuff like that. Well, not rock climbing, dancing, or playing an instrument. The last two take some degree of natural talent. I remember trying to dance at a night club and the girl actually laughed at me. And, no, I didn't go home with her that night or get her phone number because I made her laugh. I've been given informal dance lessons in both Cuba and Colombia and if they can't teach me then no one can. It was funny how much of a problem it was for Cuban girls. To them not being able to dance is like not being able to walk.
In terms of practical advice I'm much too old for anything like that stuff now. Not that that sort of advice ever did anything for me in my teens and twenties. If it didn't work for me then it sure as hell isn't going to now that I am middle aged. I never liked being social anyway. The only reason I ever tried was to get the mythical girlfriend. So much wasted effort. Effort that I could have instead put toward learning lots of languages. For an ugly guy who seriously wants a pretty girl you've gotta learn some languages other than English. You should at least be fluent in Spanish and ideally Czech/Slovakian, Romanian/Bulgarian, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai/Lao as well. It's too bad I didn't think of the expat angle when I was much younger. That's the only thing that really works. I wish some older person had simply told me that when I was like 13.
As an ugly guy, porn is the closest I'm ever going to get to a female that I don't have to pay and I'm supposed to think it's wrong? The only chance I have of seeing a pretty girl naked? That it's somehow bad for me? Bullshit. Fuck the Beautiful People and their stupid, twisted moral code. Not everyone has the option of having sex with another real life human being. Yes, I know beautiful people find it impossible to even imagine and don't want to believe it, but it's 100% true.
Men are more visual. So we tend to like porn more than women do. You may as well rant about romance novel "addiction". Morality is relative. The important thing is not to violate your own moral code. I see absolutely nothing wrong with watching 2 mammals of my own species mating and there sure as hell is nothing wrong with playing games. All intelligent animals like to play. We are simply more advanced than other species on our planet and we have more sophisticated ways to play. We don't have to chase each other around and fake fight each other for fun. We've advanced beyond that. Hopefully as time goes on we will have even more sophisticated ways of entertaining ourselves.
Is having sex with a real girl better than porn? Duh! You don't need some study to figure that one out. Back in the olden days when I had a girlfriend I didn't watch porn nearly as often. I had my own free porn actress right in front of me. It was great, but not everyone is lucky enough to be born beautiful and have that kind of thing for most of their life. Also you can claim anything human beings value is harmful by calling it an "addiction". Yes, "addictions" are often not healthy. Doing anything too much is probably not a great idea. Is that supposed to be some surprising scientific discovery?
If you really feel that way you should start looking for chicks outside the US. North American and British women are a bit less traditionally feminine than in most other countries. You also may find that someone from another culture is just more interesting. Dating an American girl may start to seem a bit like dating your sister or something. To be fair, I think you are generally also describing the Hot Girl. The girl who is constantly getting hit on and is spoiled for choice. I really think that tends to warp their personality. Probably permanently. Yes, there are some ugly girls who act like hot girls too, but they aren't as common.
What has truly amazed me is that in some other countries there are breathtakingly beautiful women who will actually talk to you even if you're not at her level of looks. You may not be able to date them, but at least they will treat you fully as someone of equal value as a human being. They don't look down on you the way a pretty American girl would, like an aristocrat looking down at a lowly peasant. They actually see you as a member of the same species instead of some insect so unimportant that they wouldn't even step on you. They are also not so afraid of being friendly. A pretty girl without a "bitch shield"? Yup. You can find that in other countries.
If you are ugly like me, poor countries may be your only chance. It's still not easy to get a pretty girl, but if you have some money and don't mind spending some on her you may be able to have a girlfriend or wife for whom you are mainly an ATM with legs. You may never be able to find a girl who likes you in the way that you like her, but some action is better than no action IMO.
There are no guarantees of course. I tried that strategy, but I guess I was just too ugly. I had one girlfriend as a teenager and that was it. Although I don't have any at the moment, pets can be a decent substitute for a girlfriend/wife. They can be affectionate. They will never leave you unless they die. Anyone who's ever loved their pet knows that there can be a real bond between the two of you. You'll never be as happy as a good looking guy would be, but there's nothing you can do about that except kill yourself.
If people don't need 2TB of storage then why are they buying the large capacity drives? Even 3TB drives are popular. The same need based argument you make for magnetic platter drives also works for speed. The reason I don't own an SSD is because I don't feel I really need the extra speed. Some people (like you apparently) value speed over capacity. Other people (like me) value capacity over speed. The slow hard drive speeds I've always lived with seem good enough for me. Actually, I've been planning to buy a fast SSD for an OS and installed game drive as soon as the prices drop significantly below the current $1/GB sale prices. I've been waiting a long time for prices to drop. At this point I'm starting to wonder if I should just wait for memristor SSDs to hit the market. I won't be holding my breath though.
Keep in mind that Paine was a Lockean Libertarian more or less, like most of the other revolutionaries (terrorists). So it's not entirely clear to me what he would have thought of our modern limited liability corporations-as-people. Looking back at the history of our failed republic it's difficult to avoid seeing that large, powerful Corporations, particularly when they team up with the government, are just plain evil. It's the old truism about the corruption of power. Modern corporations represent an unnecessary and unnatural concentration of power.
If Paine had had a time machine and turned the dial to 2012 he might have published another treatise called "Common Cents" in which he argues that the limited liability corporation-as-citizen model needs to have a stake driven through its heart, then covered with petrol and set ablaze. If people want to organize themselves into a group of some kind with a common name and purpose that is their right as human beings, but we as a society don't have to make it so easy for them to become overly powerful. It's difficult to argue that any sort of concentration of power is in the interest of a free society. Laissez-faire capitalism may indeed have an invisible hand which unintentionally helps others financially, but that hand doesn't have any kind of moral compass. There is such a thing as right or wrong independent of the trade of goods. That's the whole point of a constitution. To try to stop the government from sliding into its usual evil tendencies. That didn't work so well, but overly powerful corporations aren't helping matters either.
A possible increase of less than 1 degree Celsius in 130 years? Of those 130 years the trend was clearly downward for about 50 or about 38% of the total period. What was the accuracy for digital thermometers in 1880? Of course they had all kinds of fancy digital circuitry in the 19th century. For analog thermometers how much accuracy was lost due to the parallax effect when trying to estimate the meniscus level? Was the fact that thermometers tend to have a nonlinear tolerance range taken into account? What was the margin for error? We can be pretty sure it wasn't +/- 0.000 degrees.
Even in the distant future here in the 21st century our inexpensive traditional thermometer designs often have tolerances of +/- 1 or 2 degrees celsius. When did the more expensive hyper-accurate environmental thermometers that we now have begin to be used by defualt? What about rounding errors? if the thermometer at a station read 23.23 degrees did 19th century observers round it down? Did we have the same number of weather stations in 1880 as in 2012? If the rising CO2 really is the cause of the temperature increase then why is the temperature going down for almost 40% of the time? I would expect at least a more or less steadily increasing temperature to go along with the steadily increasing level of CO2.
So I don't think the results are quite so certain and even if the results were 100% certain statistically it still doesn't change the fact that the CO2 increase is being measured in parts per million and not percent and, considering how complex all the climate variables are in the real world, an increase of 1 degree celsius over more than a century just isn't all that convincing. It's a small change no matter how you want to look at it. Maybe it is due to the additional CO2 from human combustion. It's certainly possible, but if you just consider the temperature record evidence it is by no means conclusive. And even if it were conclusive, fossil fuels could easily run out or become too expensive before the planet is rendered uninhabitable to human life. Or a superior energy source might be discovered/invented before Armageddon rendering combustion as obsolete as whale oil energy. I could just imagine how panicked everyone must have been when they did the math and realized that eventually they would simply kill all the whales and run out of oil.
Well my sound card doesn't work in Windows 7. Search doesn't work without indexing. The task bar concept was spoiled by trying to make it both a launcher and a task switcher. And aside from the glass effects which I like the UI was made even uglier. The only way I found to fix it was to use the Windows Classic theme which removes pretty much all of the nice gradient glass effects. And why is it that we still can't customize the look of the UI with themes the way you can with Linux GUIs?
It never fails. No matter how idiotic Microsoft makes their GUI there are always going to be Microsoft fanboys who love everything and anything they do. It's probably one of the reasons that Microsoft doesn't particularly care about their stupid decisions. They know the masses will love whatever changes they make "once they get used to it".
IMO opinion Linux has the best GUI choices. LXDE, Enlightenment, KDE, and and even Gnome are superior to Windows 2000 and XP. XP/2000 is superior to Vista/7. Windows 7 is superior to OS X. Unless you happen to own a Windows tablet as your only computer and you don't like iOS or Android, Windows 8 has the worst GUI I've ever seen. If there is one thing that Microsoft truly excels at it is making things worse. It could almost be seen as a gift.
You only work with trivial software if you have formulated that opinion from your software experience.
You mean like an OS GUI? That's the whole point. The OS GUI should just get out of the way so that you can run your programs. It should be intuitive and maybe aesthetically pleasing. Changing a GUI, creating a pointless learning curve, and very likely making things less intuitive just because it sells more copies of the new version is the wrong way to do things.
Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.
Of course they do have to come up with some kind of weapon. And the fingerprint thing is kind of difficult. They might produce a pair of latex gloves and claim that I wore them. Presumably they would have to claim that I was wearing latex gloves for some reason when I was detained.
In my case they eventually just dropped the "deadly weapon" charge. I was quite curious about what weapon they were going to produce. I hoped that it was something like a kitchen knife or some small folding knife that the cop carried with him and not a gun. Getting caught with an illegal firearm in my state carries a 2 year minimum sentence I think.
Who knows what the cop was planning to do about the weapon part. My attorney told me that they usually claim you took off your shoe and hit them with it. Shoes can be considered deadly weapons apparently. Although I find it quite hard to imagine someone taking off their shoe and attempting to beat a cop with it.
They didn't have a motive for my attacking the cop either, but that didn't stop the prosecutor going after me. Well I think my motive was supposed to have been something to the effect that I hate cops so much because of the fact that they rescued people and were great heroes on 9/11 that I couldn't resist attacking the first one I saw. I kid you not. The police report actually claimed that I went on some long rant about how happy I was that cops died on 9/11 and how much I loved Al-Qaeda. Presumably this was an attempt to prejudice a jury against me.
Is this tariff the equivalent of a regressive tax that only hurts lower income Americans? Is this a transfer of wealth from lower income people to higher income people? Yes and Yes. It is taxing the poor to increase the income of a handful of rich people. And maybe add a few more low income jobs in the few areas where solar panels are made. But who cares about poor people? Clearly not the Democrats and Republicans in favor of this tariff who are like an anti Robin Hood stealing from a large number of relatively poor people and giving to a handful of rich people. Since we are increasing the profits of corporations at the expense of lower income people this tariff is also consistent with our current slide into fascism. A nice little agreement between a government and a corporation, both of which hope to gain. I have to wonder whether the Democrats in favor of this realize that the alleged benefit to lower income people depends entirely on the theory of trickle down economics..
Will this tariff increase the income of US solar panel manufacturers? Maybe, but for that to even be a possibility the tariff must be sufficiently high that it makes US solar panels cheaper than foreign ones. Whether eliminating foreign competition while drastically increasing the price of a solar panels will raise the income of US solar panel manufacturers is questionable at best. The laws of supply and demand still hold. Higher prices will result in fewer installed solar panels in the US. Much higher prices will result in a drastic reduction in new solar panel installations. This is just basic economics. Nevertheless cutting out Chinese competition completely may result in higher profits for the rich solar panel company owners.
With a high enough tariff you might make your product cheaper than the the foreign product and basically end all foreign sales, but you can't force people to actually buy American solar panels. Poor people already cannot afford even Chinese solar panels. This will reduce the number of middle class Americans who can afford them. Perhaps significantly. If solar power was beyond the means of the bottom 25% it will now be beyond the means of some higher percentage of Americans. I don't know what the new percentage will be, but it will be higher than it is now. Keep in mind also that there are far more lower middle class people in the US than higher income people. So the reduction in solar panel installations may not be linear. By raising the US price by, say, 250% you might have a reduction in new solar panel installations of 400%. Without having to worry about foreign competition the US panel manufacturers may well actually be able to raise their current prices significantly. Before they were stuck with tight margins to at least attempt to make the price gap between themselves and the Chinese suppliers as small as possible. Now that they have a captive audience they may raise their prices almost to the point where they are only slightly less expensive than the new Chinese + tariff price. There's a ceiling on how much they can do this because if the difference between the Chinese and US panels is small enough the Chinese would almost certainly drop their price to match or beat it, but they might have a bit of wiggle room. 250% is a lot.
If you consider yourself part of the Green movement this reduction in the number of solar panel isntallations is obviously a bad thing. It means more combustion and more CO2 than you would otherwise have. So while the owners of US solar panel manufacturers might be able to buy that new Ferrari they've been pining over or maybe another ocean front home to add to their collection, and maybe hire a few more minimum wage workers, it's at the expense of, if you are an AGW believer, helping to eventually destroy all mammalian life on the planet, including humans. So new exotic cars for a few already rich Americans in exchange for pushing forward the extinction of our species by some number of years. Sounds lik
Despite all that, despite the fact you'd be hurting your career and that your superiors don't want to hear it and all the rest, if you aren't willing to stand up for what is right, why be a police officer at all? What about the value of being able to look yourself in the mirror without shame?
I'm a victim of police brutality here in the US and I thought back to all the portrayals of police officers that I saw in films and television. Whatever faults the characters might have, most of them had a strong sense of right and wrong. It's too bad that so few police officers seem to have that in real life.
In my own experience the US has some of the worst police officers. They seem to hate pretty much anyone who is not a cop. They are often angry and have short tempers and get some kind of enjoyment out of hurting people. In other countries I've lived in the police seemed more just like regular guys. They didn't have that 'edge' to them that makes American cops seem so much like grown up bullies.
I'm not sure how plea bargaining works in the UK, but I was advised by my attorney to lie to the judge under oath because the deal he made with the prosecutor required that I admit to all the charges against me. I had only minutes to decide and so I decided to make a false confession, but it was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I will always think at least somewhat less of myself for doing it. I felt terribly guilty about it because doing so violated my own sense of right and wrong. In order to stay out of prison for things I did not do I was persuaded to commit the real crime of perjury and admit to a violent crime that I did not commit.
It's amazing to me the kinds of things that American cops do to hurt people on a regular basis and yet they don't seem to feel any guilt about it. I think they must dehumanize us. Anyone who is not a cop they see as lesser beings. And maybe some cops just can't live with all of the horrible things they have done to people and that's why the police suicide rate is so high in the US. Not because of the things they've seen, but because of the things they've done. I think a lot of cops are true sociopaths who just do not feel guilt, but if you do feel guilt I would imagine that doing what you feel is right is far more important than getting a promotion by doing things you know are wrong. Despite what some people think, for anyone who is not a sociopath immune to feelings of guilt, integrity and honesty and always doing what you think is right have their own rewards.
It's actually amazing that in this day and age police officers in all first world countries are not simply provided with a small camera on their vest and lots of recording media so that every encounter with a suspect and every arrest is captured. It's obviously in the officers interest to make such a recording if the arrest is lawful. More evidence for a trial. It's equally obvious that any camera would be shut off before getting violent with a suspect and that any recording media would be lost or erased. But if the lack of video makes it difficult to prosecute someone then it would definitely discourage some of the violence. The UK does at least have all those cameras in London. God how I wished there had been a camera like that when I was attacked. Such privacy violations don't seem so bad when you need the video to prove your innocence.
The truly pathetic part is the state could easily prevent a lot of police beatings and misconduct by simply forcing them to get video recordings for any of the typical cover and contempt of cop charges. Resisting arrest? Disorderly conduct? Disturbing the peace? Failure to obey a lawful order? Assault and battery against a police officer? With a deadly weapon? In my case they even included little things like "failure to identify oneself". All of the attorneys know that a lot of the time these charges are bogus and in fact likely mean that the alleged aggressor is in fact the victim. So why treat the situation the same as any other charge? When it comes to these sorts of charges the police should need real evidence and only unbiased civilian witness testimony should be admissible.
You obviously can't trust other police officers to come forward and rat out their fellow officer for beating up or in some cases even killing someone for some minor insult or sign of disrespect. In fact you can pretty much count on every last one of them to lie about it even under oath. I mean, you are talking about accusing a fellow officer of excessive use of force, false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, violating the victim's civil rights and tort assault and battery. It's just not going to happen. To pretend that it is is completely ridiculous. There is simply no police misconduct case where the police officers themselves can be counted on to testify truthfully. In such situations it is quite reasonable to assume that they are going to lie to protect themselves and lie to protect each other under the assumption that if they ever ended up losing control and injuring or killing someone out of anger that their fellow officers would back up their story as well.
I was attacked by a pissed off psycho cop at a DUI roadblock They had to drop the DUI charges against me when they finally allowed me to take a breathalyzer test at the police station and after 3 separate tries the machine refused to output anything other than 0.0% alcohol. They really wanted to get me on that, but I don't even drink. Luckily I don't use alcohol based mouthwash either or I might have been fighting a DUI charge as well and probably wouldn't have gotten such a favorable plea bargain. DUI roadblocks shouldn't even exist in this country and some states don't allow them, but if we have to have them all the encounters should be filmed. Police simply cannot be trusted to not abuse their power in such situations. If they can't videotape the stops and sobriety tests they should at least have an unbiased witness not associated with law enforcement there to observe and make sure things don't get out of hand or serve as a witness if they do. Former victims of police brutality would make good witnesses although most of us would probably be too scared. Once you realize that cops can and will severely injure or kill you for even the most minor sign of disrespect, it's difficult to have voluntary contact with any of them for any reason ever again. I can only admire the courage of those NH guys intentionally filming the police. No doubt if one of them is killed or very badly injured people will consider that courage to be stupidity. People will say, "What did he expect, provoking a cop like that? I have no sympathy for him."
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That's what extradition treaties are for.
Fair enough, but Obama is also guilty of murder and the people who are sent to Gitmo are also guilty until proven innocent and no such proof is even allowed. We also use torture in the US. Does Malaysia?
Isn't Malaysia the country where you can be arrested for insulting the king? Who cares about whether this law "goes too far"?
When you say "the country" you seem to be implying that there is only one country were "lese-majesty" is a crime. That is not the case. Also, I cannot find any evidence that even a single person has been arrested for "lese-majesty" in Malaysia. At least in modern times. Do you have a reference?
The only US city I've lived in that had pollution you could smell and see was Los Angeles and that's at least partly because of the inversion layer. The last Asian country I lived in had a very different kind of problem. Because trash pickup was infrequent and unreliable and possibly expensive for some people most residents would burn their trash in their yard in plastic bags. The smoke and the scent of burnt plastic would permeate the air for hours nearly every evening. It was so bad that that was the reason I left. I just couldn't take it anymore. I was sick of the nearly constant smell of burning plastic. There were many nights when I tried to fall asleep while wearing a respirator. Yes, it was that bad.
You might want to check a map. Asia is big. It's like talking about the Americas as in both North and South America together. I've visited every country in East Asia except for Mongolia and Myanmar, and I've actually lived in a couple and I don't ever remember seeing anyone cooking with firewood. Where are these 2 billion people supposed to be living? Are you talking specifically about India? I've never been there. It seems strange that wood would be more cost effective than propane or electric stoves. It doesn't seem like it would be.
Have you actually ever purchased goods? Have you ever gone to a store of some kind and bought a product? It sounds like you haven't.
Do you live in Southern Italy? I'm not sure why you guys even bother with stop signs or traffic lights. Totally pointless.
Right. Because if it's not CO2 it's not pollution. You do realize that it's possible to actually output toxic chemicals into the air and water. Stuff that causes problems immediately instead of maybe in 10,000 years.
I'm not sure it's possible to force China to stop polluting. Nor am I sure that it's possible to just stop buying Chinese products. They make almost everything now. They are the manufacturer for the world. It's just not realistic to boycott them. It also may not always be fair. I doubt if every Chinese manufacturer actually creates pollution. To be fair you'd really have to investigate each company and only boycott the ones who are actually polluting. Punishing every Chinese company solely because they are located in China is obviously wrong. What might be more useful is some kind of organization that investigates Chinese companies accused of poor environmental practices and publicizing it so that people can choose not to buy their products.
I've personally found that being funny doesn't get you chicks. That's a total myth. Not as damaging as the "being nice" thing which actually makes things worse, but false. Funny and good looking, yes. Funny and ugly? Not a chance. I used to be considered funny up until I was maybe 15 or 16. I was the clowniest of class clowns from a very young age. Didn't help me with girls at all. My unfunny but good looking friends would score the hottest chicks, but I never got anywhere with them. Not so much as even a kiss. They would laugh at what I said and then go kiss the best looking guy they could find. I've never personally met an ugly but funny guy who gets hot chicks. Not saying it never happens. Almost everything that's at least possible happens on occasion, but it's very rare.
Anyway, telling someone to "be funny" is useless. You either are or you're not. Making people laugh is not something you can learn how to do. I remember watching a Seinfeld interview where he talked about being funny and he pegged it. You just know what to say. Something funny either comes into your head or it doesn't. Strangely enough I've never actually met a girl who was funny. I've seen some on TV, but they must be quite rare. Makes me wonder if being funny is some kind of unconscious but lame attempt at scoring with women. It's great if you're already good looking though.
Being "in shape" is necessary but definitely not sufficient. I used to work out at the gym obsessively in my mid-twenties. I popped amino acid pills throughout the day and lifted 3-4 days a week doing a split routine. I even hit on girls at the gym. Got me absolutely nowhere. Actually one of the girls I hit on at the gym ended up briefly going out with a good looking friend I had at the time after I introduced them. Perfect symbolism.
Occasionally an ugly guy just gets lucky. I did too once, but after we broke up that was it. It's not realistic to expect to get that lucky more than once per lifetime. I have a friend who is about as ugly as I am and he's never even had that sort of thing once. So I was pretty lucky in a way, although there's something to be said about not knowing what you are missing.
As far as strategies I think I've tried everything that can reasonably be attempted. Every possible strategy. The bottom line is the vast majority of girls don't want to be with an ugly guy any more than guys want to be with an ugly girl. Maybe they don't value looks quite as much guys do, but they do want to be with a guy they find physically attractive. Regardless of what they say. Only an infinitesimally small percentage of the women who say they don't care about looks really don't. I've occasionally met such women. Their actions speak much louder than bullshit words.
As far as "being social" and all the rest I've already tried stuff like that. Well, not rock climbing, dancing, or playing an instrument. The last two take some degree of natural talent. I remember trying to dance at a night club and the girl actually laughed at me. And, no, I didn't go home with her that night or get her phone number because I made her laugh. I've been given informal dance lessons in both Cuba and Colombia and if they can't teach me then no one can. It was funny how much of a problem it was for Cuban girls. To them not being able to dance is like not being able to walk.
In terms of practical advice I'm much too old for anything like that stuff now. Not that that sort of advice ever did anything for me in my teens and twenties. If it didn't work for me then it sure as hell isn't going to now that I am middle aged. I never liked being social anyway. The only reason I ever tried was to get the mythical girlfriend. So much wasted effort. Effort that I could have instead put toward learning lots of languages. For an ugly guy who seriously wants a pretty girl you've gotta learn some languages other than English. You should at least be fluent in Spanish and ideally Czech/Slovakian, Romanian/Bulgarian, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai/Lao as well. It's too bad I didn't think of the expat angle when I was much younger. That's the only thing that really works. I wish some older person had simply told me that when I was like 13.
No no. I'm saying instead of wasting years of your life attempting the impossible it's better to just look for a non-human companion. Human beings are not the only interesting animals on the planet.
As an ugly guy, porn is the closest I'm ever going to get to a female that I don't have to pay and I'm supposed to think it's wrong? The only chance I have of seeing a pretty girl naked? That it's somehow bad for me? Bullshit. Fuck the Beautiful People and their stupid, twisted moral code. Not everyone has the option of having sex with another real life human being. Yes, I know beautiful people find it impossible to even imagine and don't want to believe it, but it's 100% true.
Men are more visual. So we tend to like porn more than women do. You may as well rant about romance novel "addiction". Morality is relative. The important thing is not to violate your own moral code. I see absolutely nothing wrong with watching 2 mammals of my own species mating and there sure as hell is nothing wrong with playing games. All intelligent animals like to play. We are simply more advanced than other species on our planet and we have more sophisticated ways to play. We don't have to chase each other around and fake fight each other for fun. We've advanced beyond that. Hopefully as time goes on we will have even more sophisticated ways of entertaining ourselves.
Is having sex with a real girl better than porn? Duh! You don't need some study to figure that one out. Back in the olden days when I had a girlfriend I didn't watch porn nearly as often. I had my own free porn actress right in front of me. It was great, but not everyone is lucky enough to be born beautiful and have that kind of thing for most of their life. Also you can claim anything human beings value is harmful by calling it an "addiction". Yes, "addictions" are often not healthy. Doing anything too much is probably not a great idea. Is that supposed to be some surprising scientific discovery?
If you really feel that way you should start looking for chicks outside the US. North American and British women are a bit less traditionally feminine than in most other countries. You also may find that someone from another culture is just more interesting. Dating an American girl may start to seem a bit like dating your sister or something. To be fair, I think you are generally also describing the Hot Girl. The girl who is constantly getting hit on and is spoiled for choice. I really think that tends to warp their personality. Probably permanently. Yes, there are some ugly girls who act like hot girls too, but they aren't as common.
What has truly amazed me is that in some other countries there are breathtakingly beautiful women who will actually talk to you even if you're not at her level of looks. You may not be able to date them, but at least they will treat you fully as someone of equal value as a human being. They don't look down on you the way a pretty American girl would, like an aristocrat looking down at a lowly peasant. They actually see you as a member of the same species instead of some insect so unimportant that they wouldn't even step on you. They are also not so afraid of being friendly. A pretty girl without a "bitch shield"? Yup. You can find that in other countries.
If you are ugly like me, poor countries may be your only chance. It's still not easy to get a pretty girl, but if you have some money and don't mind spending some on her you may be able to have a girlfriend or wife for whom you are mainly an ATM with legs. You may never be able to find a girl who likes you in the way that you like her, but some action is better than no action IMO.
There are no guarantees of course. I tried that strategy, but I guess I was just too ugly. I had one girlfriend as a teenager and that was it. Although I don't have any at the moment, pets can be a decent substitute for a girlfriend/wife. They can be affectionate. They will never leave you unless they die. Anyone who's ever loved their pet knows that there can be a real bond between the two of you. You'll never be as happy as a good looking guy would be, but there's nothing you can do about that except kill yourself.
If people don't need 2TB of storage then why are they buying the large capacity drives? Even 3TB drives are popular. The same need based argument you make for magnetic platter drives also works for speed. The reason I don't own an SSD is because I don't feel I really need the extra speed. Some people (like you apparently) value speed over capacity. Other people (like me) value capacity over speed. The slow hard drive speeds I've always lived with seem good enough for me. Actually, I've been planning to buy a fast SSD for an OS and installed game drive as soon as the prices drop significantly below the current $1/GB sale prices. I've been waiting a long time for prices to drop. At this point I'm starting to wonder if I should just wait for memristor SSDs to hit the market. I won't be holding my breath though.
And we were supposed to have 14 Ghz CPUs by now too. The industry can predict anything they want. Doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Keep in mind that Paine was a Lockean Libertarian more or less, like most of the other revolutionaries (terrorists). So it's not entirely clear to me what he would have thought of our modern limited liability corporations-as-people. Looking back at the history of our failed republic it's difficult to avoid seeing that large, powerful Corporations, particularly when they team up with the government, are just plain evil. It's the old truism about the corruption of power. Modern corporations represent an unnecessary and unnatural concentration of power.
If Paine had had a time machine and turned the dial to 2012 he might have published another treatise called "Common Cents" in which he argues that the limited liability corporation-as-citizen model needs to have a stake driven through its heart, then covered with petrol and set ablaze. If people want to organize themselves into a group of some kind with a common name and purpose that is their right as human beings, but we as a society don't have to make it so easy for them to become overly powerful. It's difficult to argue that any sort of concentration of power is in the interest of a free society. Laissez-faire capitalism may indeed have an invisible hand which unintentionally helps others financially, but that hand doesn't have any kind of moral compass. There is such a thing as right or wrong independent of the trade of goods. That's the whole point of a constitution. To try to stop the government from sliding into its usual evil tendencies. That didn't work so well, but overly powerful corporations aren't helping matters either.
A possible increase of less than 1 degree Celsius in 130 years? Of those 130 years the trend was clearly downward for about 50 or about 38% of the total period. What was the accuracy for digital thermometers in 1880? Of course they had all kinds of fancy digital circuitry in the 19th century. For analog thermometers how much accuracy was lost due to the parallax effect when trying to estimate the meniscus level? Was the fact that thermometers tend to have a nonlinear tolerance range taken into account? What was the margin for error? We can be pretty sure it wasn't +/- 0.000 degrees.
Even in the distant future here in the 21st century our inexpensive traditional thermometer designs often have tolerances of +/- 1 or 2 degrees celsius. When did the more expensive hyper-accurate environmental thermometers that we now have begin to be used by defualt? What about rounding errors? if the thermometer at a station read 23.23 degrees did 19th century observers round it down? Did we have the same number of weather stations in 1880 as in 2012? If the rising CO2 really is the cause of the temperature increase then why is the temperature going down for almost 40% of the time? I would expect at least a more or less steadily increasing temperature to go along with the steadily increasing level of CO2.
So I don't think the results are quite so certain and even if the results were 100% certain statistically it still doesn't change the fact that the CO2 increase is being measured in parts per million and not percent and, considering how complex all the climate variables are in the real world, an increase of 1 degree celsius over more than a century just isn't all that convincing. It's a small change no matter how you want to look at it. Maybe it is due to the additional CO2 from human combustion. It's certainly possible, but if you just consider the temperature record evidence it is by no means conclusive. And even if it were conclusive, fossil fuels could easily run out or become too expensive before the planet is rendered uninhabitable to human life. Or a superior energy source might be discovered/invented before Armageddon rendering combustion as obsolete as whale oil energy. I could just imagine how panicked everyone must have been when they did the math and realized that eventually they would simply kill all the whales and run out of oil.
Well my sound card doesn't work in Windows 7. Search doesn't work without indexing. The task bar concept was spoiled by trying to make it both a launcher and a task switcher. And aside from the glass effects which I like the UI was made even uglier. The only way I found to fix it was to use the Windows Classic theme which removes pretty much all of the nice gradient glass effects. And why is it that we still can't customize the look of the UI with themes the way you can with Linux GUIs?
It never fails. No matter how idiotic Microsoft makes their GUI there are always going to be Microsoft fanboys who love everything and anything they do. It's probably one of the reasons that Microsoft doesn't particularly care about their stupid decisions. They know the masses will love whatever changes they make "once they get used to it".
IMO opinion Linux has the best GUI choices. LXDE, Enlightenment, KDE, and and even Gnome are superior to Windows 2000 and XP. XP/2000 is superior to Vista/7. Windows 7 is superior to OS X. Unless you happen to own a Windows tablet as your only computer and you don't like iOS or Android, Windows 8 has the worst GUI I've ever seen. If there is one thing that Microsoft truly excels at it is making things worse. It could almost be seen as a gift.
You only work with trivial software if you have formulated that opinion from your software experience.
You mean like an OS GUI? That's the whole point. The OS GUI should just get out of the way so that you can run your programs. It should be intuitive and maybe aesthetically pleasing. Changing a GUI, creating a pointless learning curve, and very likely making things less intuitive just because it sells more copies of the new version is the wrong way to do things.
Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.
Of course they do have to come up with some kind of weapon. And the fingerprint thing is kind of difficult. They might produce a pair of latex gloves and claim that I wore them. Presumably they would have to claim that I was wearing latex gloves for some reason when I was detained.
In my case they eventually just dropped the "deadly weapon" charge. I was quite curious about what weapon they were going to produce. I hoped that it was something like a kitchen knife or some small folding knife that the cop carried with him and not a gun. Getting caught with an illegal firearm in my state carries a 2 year minimum sentence I think.
Who knows what the cop was planning to do about the weapon part. My attorney told me that they usually claim you took off your shoe and hit them with it. Shoes can be considered deadly weapons apparently. Although I find it quite hard to imagine someone taking off their shoe and attempting to beat a cop with it.
They didn't have a motive for my attacking the cop either, but that didn't stop the prosecutor going after me. Well I think my motive was supposed to have been something to the effect that I hate cops so much because of the fact that they rescued people and were great heroes on 9/11 that I couldn't resist attacking the first one I saw. I kid you not. The police report actually claimed that I went on some long rant about how happy I was that cops died on 9/11 and how much I loved Al-Qaeda. Presumably this was an attempt to prejudice a jury against me.
Is this tariff the equivalent of a regressive tax that only hurts lower income Americans? Is this a transfer of wealth from lower income people to higher income people? Yes and Yes. It is taxing the poor to increase the income of a handful of rich people. And maybe add a few more low income jobs in the few areas where solar panels are made. But who cares about poor people? Clearly not the Democrats and Republicans in favor of this tariff who are like an anti Robin Hood stealing from a large number of relatively poor people and giving to a handful of rich people. Since we are increasing the profits of corporations at the expense of lower income people this tariff is also consistent with our current slide into fascism. A nice little agreement between a government and a corporation, both of which hope to gain. I have to wonder whether the Democrats in favor of this realize that the alleged benefit to lower income people depends entirely on the theory of trickle down economics..
Will this tariff increase the income of US solar panel manufacturers? Maybe, but for that to even be a possibility the tariff must be sufficiently high that it makes US solar panels cheaper than foreign ones. Whether eliminating foreign competition while drastically increasing the price of a solar panels will raise the income of US solar panel manufacturers is questionable at best. The laws of supply and demand still hold. Higher prices will result in fewer installed solar panels in the US. Much higher prices will result in a drastic reduction in new solar panel installations. This is just basic economics. Nevertheless cutting out Chinese competition completely may result in higher profits for the rich solar panel company owners.
With a high enough tariff you might make your product cheaper than the the foreign product and basically end all foreign sales, but you can't force people to actually buy American solar panels. Poor people already cannot afford even Chinese solar panels. This will reduce the number of middle class Americans who can afford them. Perhaps significantly. If solar power was beyond the means of the bottom 25% it will now be beyond the means of some higher percentage of Americans. I don't know what the new percentage will be, but it will be higher than it is now. Keep in mind also that there are far more lower middle class people in the US than higher income people. So the reduction in solar panel installations may not be linear. By raising the US price by, say, 250% you might have a reduction in new solar panel installations of 400%. Without having to worry about foreign competition the US panel manufacturers may well actually be able to raise their current prices significantly. Before they were stuck with tight margins to at least attempt to make the price gap between themselves and the Chinese suppliers as small as possible. Now that they have a captive audience they may raise their prices almost to the point where they are only slightly less expensive than the new Chinese + tariff price. There's a ceiling on how much they can do this because if the difference between the Chinese and US panels is small enough the Chinese would almost certainly drop their price to match or beat it, but they might have a bit of wiggle room. 250% is a lot.
If you consider yourself part of the Green movement this reduction in the number of solar panel isntallations is obviously a bad thing. It means more combustion and more CO2 than you would otherwise have. So while the owners of US solar panel manufacturers might be able to buy that new Ferrari they've been pining over or maybe another ocean front home to add to their collection, and maybe hire a few more minimum wage workers, it's at the expense of, if you are an AGW believer, helping to eventually destroy all mammalian life on the planet, including humans. So new exotic cars for a few already rich Americans in exchange for pushing forward the extinction of our species by some number of years. Sounds lik
Despite all that, despite the fact you'd be hurting your career and that your superiors don't want to hear it and all the rest, if you aren't willing to stand up for what is right, why be a police officer at all? What about the value of being able to look yourself in the mirror without shame?
I'm a victim of police brutality here in the US and I thought back to all the portrayals of police officers that I saw in films and television. Whatever faults the characters might have, most of them had a strong sense of right and wrong. It's too bad that so few police officers seem to have that in real life.
In my own experience the US has some of the worst police officers. They seem to hate pretty much anyone who is not a cop. They are often angry and have short tempers and get some kind of enjoyment out of hurting people. In other countries I've lived in the police seemed more just like regular guys. They didn't have that 'edge' to them that makes American cops seem so much like grown up bullies.
I'm not sure how plea bargaining works in the UK, but I was advised by my attorney to lie to the judge under oath because the deal he made with the prosecutor required that I admit to all the charges against me. I had only minutes to decide and so I decided to make a false confession, but it was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I will always think at least somewhat less of myself for doing it. I felt terribly guilty about it because doing so violated my own sense of right and wrong. In order to stay out of prison for things I did not do I was persuaded to commit the real crime of perjury and admit to a violent crime that I did not commit.
It's amazing to me the kinds of things that American cops do to hurt people on a regular basis and yet they don't seem to feel any guilt about it. I think they must dehumanize us. Anyone who is not a cop they see as lesser beings. And maybe some cops just can't live with all of the horrible things they have done to people and that's why the police suicide rate is so high in the US. Not because of the things they've seen, but because of the things they've done. I think a lot of cops are true sociopaths who just do not feel guilt, but if you do feel guilt I would imagine that doing what you feel is right is far more important than getting a promotion by doing things you know are wrong. Despite what some people think, for anyone who is not a sociopath immune to feelings of guilt, integrity and honesty and always doing what you think is right have their own rewards.
It's actually amazing that in this day and age police officers in all first world countries are not simply provided with a small camera on their vest and lots of recording media so that every encounter with a suspect and every arrest is captured. It's obviously in the officers interest to make such a recording if the arrest is lawful. More evidence for a trial. It's equally obvious that any camera would be shut off before getting violent with a suspect and that any recording media would be lost or erased. But if the lack of video makes it difficult to prosecute someone then it would definitely discourage some of the violence. The UK does at least have all those cameras in London. God how I wished there had been a camera like that when I was attacked. Such privacy violations don't seem so bad when you need the video to prove your innocence.
The truly pathetic part is the state could easily prevent a lot of police beatings and misconduct by simply forcing them to get video recordings for any of the typical cover and contempt of cop charges. Resisting arrest? Disorderly conduct? Disturbing the peace? Failure to obey a lawful order? Assault and battery against a police officer? With a deadly weapon? In my case they even included little things like "failure to identify oneself". All of the attorneys know that a lot of the time these charges are bogus and in fact likely mean that the alleged aggressor is in fact the victim. So why treat the situation the same as any other charge? When it comes to these sorts of charges the police should need real evidence and only unbiased civilian witness testimony should be admissible.
You obviously can't trust other police officers to come forward and rat out their fellow officer for beating up or in some cases even killing someone for some minor insult or sign of disrespect. In fact you can pretty much count on every last one of them to lie about it even under oath. I mean, you are talking about accusing a fellow officer of excessive use of force, false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, violating the victim's civil rights and tort assault and battery. It's just not going to happen. To pretend that it is is completely ridiculous. There is simply no police misconduct case where the police officers themselves can be counted on to testify truthfully. In such situations it is quite reasonable to assume that they are going to lie to protect themselves and lie to protect each other under the assumption that if they ever ended up losing control and injuring or killing someone out of anger that their fellow officers would back up their story as well.
I was attacked by a pissed off psycho cop at a DUI roadblock They had to drop the DUI charges against me when they finally allowed me to take a breathalyzer test at the police station and after 3 separate tries the machine refused to output anything other than 0.0% alcohol. They really wanted to get me on that, but I don't even drink. Luckily I don't use alcohol based mouthwash either or I might have been fighting a DUI charge as well and probably wouldn't have gotten such a favorable plea bargain. DUI roadblocks shouldn't even exist in this country and some states don't allow them, but if we have to have them all the encounters should be filmed. Police simply cannot be trusted to not abuse their power in such situations. If they can't videotape the stops and sobriety tests they should at least have an unbiased witness not associated with law enforcement there to observe and make sure things don't get out of hand or serve as a witness if they do. Former victims of police brutality would make good witnesses although most of us would probably be too scared. Once you realize that cops can and will severely injure or kill you for even the most minor sign of disrespect, it's difficult to have voluntary contact with any of them for any reason ever again. I can only admire the courage of those NH guys intentionally filming the police. No doubt if one of them is killed or very badly injured people will consider that courage to be stupidity. People will say, "What did he expect, provoking a cop like that? I have no sympathy for him."