My bank has had internet banking that worked in mozilla since the M18 days, but only because their design was no-frills, simple html. It works in every browser I've thrown at it, and doesn't even require ssl because the site is served up through a local encrypting proxy (available for linux and mac as well).
It's great when a banking website is written by people who know what they're doing.
This is a timing related problem (conditions had to be just right for it). It should be mostly fixed in firefox 1.0PR. Ofcourse, some of the blame is on slashdot's shoulders too for not outputting standardized HTML.
Personally, I'd like to see combo cards that can talk to all the wireless networks, in a trickle-down fashion. I'm thinking of some kind of ubiquitous degrading wireless service like in neal stephenson's snow crash. It would start out trying to use bluetooth and/or wifi to find a local network. If it didn't find that, it would try UMTS, GPRS, and basic cell phone service, with a gradual degradation of data speed. It would have two settings: "fast" and "cheap", where it would either always choose the fastest link, or always choose the cheapest link.
The simple truth of the matter is, no matter what sort of government construction you try, it's going to suck. Flopping to socialist democracy from liberatarian is merely exchanging one set of problems for another.
No, the simple truth of the matter is that the US electoral system is designed to shut out third parties by making it next to impossible for small parties to form coalitions and thus get any power. As a result you get two behemoths who take positions on issues, and people choose the least of two evils. That's not a very democratic way of running things. And you see this reflected by government policy often being contrary to what the american public actually wants.
You can't just wave the magic government wand and make things that aren't profitable suddenly be worth people's time. Russia and China both tried that and history shows that it doesn't work.
Russia and China were communist nations (china is gradually transitioning away from communism). There is a world of difference between communism (the abolishment of private property with the aim of maximizing quality of life by providing goods and services on an as-need basis) and social democracy (government funding and regulating of enterprises that are unprofitable and/or natural monopolies with the aim of providing a minimum quality of life by guaranteeing a minimum level of service). If you take something that is not naturally profitable for some segments of the population (like healthcare), and you leave it entirely to private enterprise, private enterprise will cut out service to the least profitable segments of society until it makes maximum profit. That's why so many americans don't have affordable healthcare. You need government involvement in some classes of enterprise to be able to provide that minimum quality of service and life.
As an aside, the reason communism failed was not government involvement, it was lack of personal incentive. When working hard gets you no more than working the absolute minimum, you lose all motivation to work hard. Productivity in Russia was abysmal. Social democracy does not have this lack of personal incentive, and as a result productivity per hour of labor in Europe is roughly equal to the US. The reason Europeans have lower net wages, is because they work fewer hours, have more free time, spend more time with the kids. It's a lifestyle choice, not some inherently bad design of government.
This lack of personal incentive can occur under capitalism too. Everyone knows at least one person who slaves away at a job that won't pay them more regardless of how well a job they do, and as a result spends most of their job hours procrastinating and generally being useless.
Right, which is sort of my point. This information is hard to come by because it's not routinely divulged by the newsprint media.
It isn't the job of the media to divulge the sampleset, it's the job of whoever did the study. That they don't makes it impossible to verify if what they claim is accurate, and so it becomes just pointless rethoric that doesn't talk about facts.
In my experience there are just as many (if not more) liberal stories that don't get told by the american mainstream media. Personally, I think the bias is money, not politics. The primary goal of the media is profitability, and so they will do minimal work for maximal shock factor and audience draw. That's why you see stories like the CBS documents getting out with a lot of brouhaha and very little research to verify the story. It makes people tune in, and it costs little, so it is very profitable.
I see this in my own country too, where the smaller news budgets of the commercial stations often means they go for the easy story instead of the true story.
Isn't it a little peculiar that the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to keep somebody off the ballot, but yet this gets little to no coverage in the mainstream media? However, can you imagine the shock and revolt the Democrats would spew out if the Republicans were trying to keep a candidate off the ballot?
If you want to really see underreported stories, read project censored.
This story doesn't qualify, because clearly there is a different angle to it, which is that instead of democrats trying to get nader OFF the ballot contrary to the law, it is republicans trying to get nader ON the ballot contrary to the law. So if they weren't reporting this story you'd hear accusations of pro-republican bias.
If you really want a victory for alternative policical voices then push hard and jump and down for a democratic preferential voting system.
I don't think that would particularly help, because the underlying problems of a president representing only a single party would still be there. Even if the largest party under instant-runoff has only 30 percent of the vote (or the equivalent thereof), they get 100 percent of the executive power.
Most countries have systems which allow coalition governments, which represent a true majority of voters, in addition to allowing small 3rd parties to become part of government without having to win in absolute numbers from the big entrenched parties.
Now, what might happen is that with preferential voting, 3rd party candidates would start getting seats in congress, and then they would be able to cut coalition deals in congress with whichever of the big two wanted to become a true majority. But that would be unlikely, and would still not solve a lot of the structural problems with the way the executive branch in the US is formed.
X windows crashes far, far more often than MS-Windows.
It actually heavily depends on what graphics card you have. The nvidia drivers are notably unstable. I run two debian installs side by side. One machine has an nvidia card with the binary drivers, and making X run more than 48 hours straight on that is an achievement. The other has a matrox millenium II pci card (very old, but fast enough for 2D) and has recorded several 100+ day X sessions, with active daily use (browsing, email, openoffice, development,...). In fact, in my experience, windowmaker crashes more often than X on that machine. And windowmaker isn't exactly known for a lack of stability.
Science on the other hand builds a view of the universe by observing it and constructing logical theories to explain it. If a theory is shown to be false, it is changed, scientists seek a better theory rather than sticking to the old one even when it has been proven false.
What are you talking about? Every big scientific breakthrough I'm aware of has had to battle for years, often decades and sometimes centuries to become commonly accepted. Science is a LOT about what you believe. The scientific process only allows you to determine that which is false, not that which is accurate. And it is exacerbated by the problem that a theory might be on the right track, but just in need of "tuning", so when a theory is disproven through the scientific process, but still mostly accurate, its adherents will usually go on saying that all it needs is a slight modification.
but I've yet to have an interesting one with a "born-again" who feels in the absolute truth and validity of the Bible and everything...EVERYTHING in it.
It's called cognitive dissonance. If you come to believe something that is too far from reality to be reconcilable with it, your mind will choose to reject reality instead of rejecting existing knowledge. That is the essence of brainwashing: you fill a person's mind with so much disinformation they are unable to act outside the guidelines of what they already know.
When you talk to those people both of you are unable to reconcile what the other person is saying with what you already know, and you never reach a common ground to start a debate from. By wholly rejecting the other person based on what they are saying, it becomes impossible to hold a real conversation, which is why neither of you finds anything but affirmation of their existing beliefs in what little conversation that does ensue.
First of all, it is regularly pointed out [admittedly by Republicans] that Nature is politically far left.
Anything is politically far left compared to the republicans. They are the most extremely right-wing party I am aware of in any post-industrial nation.
But I'm sure to you it makes perfect sense for people who paid less in to the government to get more back.
It does make sense to me. The reason it makes sense is the US's record income inequality, which when graphed details how over the last few decades the rich have gotten richer at the expense of the poor. Being rich is not a character flaw, but when 40 million people don't have affordable healthcare you have to ask yourself where the real priorities of a country lie: to the rich, or to human rights. Progressive taxation exists for a reason, to make sure the lowest rungs of society get access to their human rights, like healthcare, like education, like justice, and so on. If you do away with progressive taxation, you might as well do away with government entirely, because there is no purpose to government without income redistribution (everything else can be privatized, justice included).
Remember that big tax cut that Bush and the Republican Congress gave you?
The people that got most of that taxcut have better things to do than read slashdot, like having that orgy with those supermodels on their private yacht.
So massive tax increases to subsidize the rich. Interesting plans.
Well, you can use taxes on environmentally unfriendly products to fund tax incentives on environmentally friendly products. For example, in Belgium we have an eco tax on polluting packaging. Just adding a few cents of eco tax on packaging formats that pollute more than others can add up to a lot of money useful for subsidizing wind farms and the like, with the nice side benefit of moving packaging industries towards more enviro-friendly materials (and boosting materials research).
This system can be used in a lot of situations. You could for example tax air conditioners in new buildings (it is well known how to build buildings so they don't need air conditioners in moderate climates), and then use the resulting revenue to fund fusion research, to get more energy sooner for the airco's in existing buildings to run on.
Also, in the long term, if the US managed to achieve energy independence, this would mean it would no longer need to be involved militarily in the middle east. Not only would this massively decrease terrorist activity (since the stated goal of a lot of anti-US terrorist organisations is simply to get the US out of the middle east), but it would decrease the amount of money flowing out of the US economy, and so would be a boost to domestic US investment. This would result in higher tax revenues, and lower military costs, so the US could decrease defense spending to normal levels (instead of perennially maintaining a wartime defense budget).
I'm just throwing ideas out there, I'm sure the real thinkers have come up with much better plans. Cost is often a fake reason for lack of environmentalism, since the real costs associated with pollution often exceed whatever cost is associated with cleaning up.
You can get perfect geometry on an LCD (Trinitrons are a simple example, but there are others) and you can get the same sharpness of LCDs as well (but only with much, much more expensive models).
Trinitrons, though they have square/rectangular pixels, don't have perfect geometry because they lack subpixel-addressability. That's why cleartype only works on LCD screens. Additionally, the high end of LCD (ibm's 200 dpi screens) is much, much sharper than the high end of CRT. What distorts people's opinion about the relative sharpness of LCD and CRT is that CRT's often can be driven at higher resolutions than their dot pitch supports, which just makes things fuzzier (think: showing a 640*480 image on a regular TV, it's usable, but it's fuzzy). With LCD's you're pretty much stuck at their native resolution.
There may be no free lunch, but seeing as how you need to stretch badly to find costs that aren't calculated into the wind power cost, I think it's fair to argue wind power cost is calculated a lot more fairly than fossil fuel cost is.
Europe is smaller. Yes, it matters. The shorter the distance between power generation and utilization the less loss. The greater the distance, the more loss and thus the more the net cost is.
That might be true, but wind power is more expensive here too than other sources of power, so the government subsidizes you in a lot of EU nations if you put up a windfarm (or even a single turbine).
Do you have any answers? Or just questions? Remember, no is sometimes the right answer, but it never solves a problem.
Answer: subsidized wind farms Answer: subsidized rooftop solar panels Answer: subsidized biodiesel Answer: higher investment in fusion research Answer: tax disincentives for using energy-inefficient products
There are a lot of things that could be done by the government to wean people off fossil fuel, but inertia is a strong factor, and oil industry lobbying doesn't help.
How much are Japan, China, India etc paying for fighting wars for Oil?
Nothing.
Everyone piggybacks on the US military involvement in the middle east. The US pacifies the middle east through regular wars and constant large military presence in the region, and in return the entire world gets cheap oil.
Money has a tendency to pool. The lowest rungs of society spend instead of invest, and so their resources depreciate rather than appreciate. Unless you have a progressive taxation system in place, this over time leads to exactly what we've seen in the US, income inequality at record levels. Look up the gini index, it doesn't lie.
All flat rate taxation systems do is make the poor poorer and the rich richer. Not that there's anything wrong with the rich getting richer, it's the whole part with it being at the expense of the poor that's the problem.
The pact of the New Deal is that if you do your part, the government will cover your butt if something really bad happens, and that's good. The problem is with the "you do part" part of it. Just like with Communism, the "give what you have and take what you need" won't work when people fail to acknowledge the proper definitions of "have" and "need".
From the universal declaration of human rights: Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
A social safety net is a human right. You can exclude people if they refuse to work, but you can not exclude people if they are unable to work. I would personally argue that society can bear the burden even of those who don't want to work, if you limit the social safety net to just the basic human rights, and don't include luxuries. If people couldn't watch their TV, they'd get their asses off the couch and get a job pretty darn fast.
It would be interesting to see some real hard statistics on how many people "abuse" the social safety net. I have a feeling this is another political wedge issue that has no real meat to it once you look beyond the slogans.
Slashdot Mirror
I just wish there was a good way of overlaying teletext subtitles with tvtime. It's handy being able to watch tv without needing the sound on.
It's amusing that tvtime with my nearly decade-old hauppauge tv card still gives a better picture quality than any TV I've seen.
My bank has had internet banking that worked in mozilla since the M18 days, but only because their design was no-frills, simple html. It works in every browser I've thrown at it, and doesn't even require ssl because the site is served up through a local encrypting proxy (available for linux and mac as well).
It's great when a banking website is written by people who know what they're doing.
This is a timing related problem (conditions had to be just right for it). It should be mostly fixed in firefox 1.0PR. Ofcourse, some of the blame is on slashdot's shoulders too for not outputting standardized HTML.
Personally, I'd like to see combo cards that can talk to all the wireless networks, in a trickle-down fashion. I'm thinking of some kind of ubiquitous degrading wireless service like in neal stephenson's snow crash. It would start out trying to use bluetooth and/or wifi to find a local network. If it didn't find that, it would try UMTS, GPRS, and basic cell phone service, with a gradual degradation of data speed. It would have two settings: "fast" and "cheap", where it would either always choose the fastest link, or always choose the cheapest link.
The simple truth of the matter is, no matter what sort of government construction you try, it's going to suck. Flopping to socialist democracy from liberatarian is merely exchanging one set of problems for another.
No, the simple truth of the matter is that the US electoral system is designed to shut out third parties by making it next to impossible for small parties to form coalitions and thus get any power. As a result you get two behemoths who take positions on issues, and people choose the least of two evils. That's not a very democratic way of running things. And you see this reflected by government policy often being contrary to what the american public actually wants.
You can't just wave the magic government wand and make things that aren't profitable suddenly be worth people's time. Russia and China both tried that and history shows that it doesn't work.
Russia and China were communist nations (china is gradually transitioning away from communism). There is a world of difference between communism (the abolishment of private property with the aim of maximizing quality of life by providing goods and services on an as-need basis) and social democracy (government funding and regulating of enterprises that are unprofitable and/or natural monopolies with the aim of providing a minimum quality of life by guaranteeing a minimum level of service). If you take something that is not naturally profitable for some segments of the population (like healthcare), and you leave it entirely to private enterprise, private enterprise will cut out service to the least profitable segments of society until it makes maximum profit. That's why so many americans don't have affordable healthcare. You need government involvement in some classes of enterprise to be able to provide that minimum quality of service and life.
As an aside, the reason communism failed was not government involvement, it was lack of personal incentive. When working hard gets you no more than working the absolute minimum, you lose all motivation to work hard. Productivity in Russia was abysmal. Social democracy does not have this lack of personal incentive, and as a result productivity per hour of labor in Europe is roughly equal to the US. The reason Europeans have lower net wages, is because they work fewer hours, have more free time, spend more time with the kids. It's a lifestyle choice, not some inherently bad design of government.
This lack of personal incentive can occur under capitalism too. Everyone knows at least one person who slaves away at a job that won't pay them more regardless of how well a job they do, and as a result spends most of their job hours procrastinating and generally being useless.
Right, which is sort of my point. This information is hard to come by because it's not routinely divulged by the newsprint media.
It isn't the job of the media to divulge the sampleset, it's the job of whoever did the study. That they don't makes it impossible to verify if what they claim is accurate, and so it becomes just pointless rethoric that doesn't talk about facts.
In my experience there are just as many (if not more) liberal stories that don't get told by the american mainstream media. Personally, I think the bias is money, not politics. The primary goal of the media is profitability, and so they will do minimal work for maximal shock factor and audience draw. That's why you see stories like the CBS documents getting out with a lot of brouhaha and very little research to verify the story. It makes people tune in, and it costs little, so it is very profitable.
I see this in my own country too, where the smaller news budgets of the commercial stations often means they go for the easy story instead of the true story.
They lack documentation on how the samples in the various studies were chosen. That makes it impossible to verify how representative the studies are.
It's not a question of agenda versus no agenda, when 90% of newpaper journalists vote Democrat.
Where do you get this number? I tried to google its source, but couldn't find it. Though I did find a lot of claims that it was "well known".
Isn't it a little peculiar that the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to keep somebody off the ballot, but yet this gets little to no coverage in the mainstream media? However, can you imagine the shock and revolt the Democrats would spew out if the Republicans were trying to keep a candidate off the ballot?
If you want to really see underreported stories, read project censored.
This story doesn't qualify, because clearly there is a different angle to it, which is that instead of democrats trying to get nader OFF the ballot contrary to the law, it is republicans trying to get nader ON the ballot contrary to the law. So if they weren't reporting this story you'd hear accusations of pro-republican bias.
If you really want a victory for alternative policical voices then push hard and jump and down for a democratic preferential voting system.
I don't think that would particularly help, because the underlying problems of a president representing only a single party would still be there. Even if the largest party under instant-runoff has only 30 percent of the vote (or the equivalent thereof), they get 100 percent of the executive power.
Most countries have systems which allow coalition governments, which represent a true majority of voters, in addition to allowing small 3rd parties to become part of government without having to win in absolute numbers from the big entrenched parties.
Now, what might happen is that with preferential voting, 3rd party candidates would start getting seats in congress, and then they would be able to cut coalition deals in congress with whichever of the big two wanted to become a true majority. But that would be unlikely, and would still not solve a lot of the structural problems with the way the executive branch in the US is formed.
Isn't cmdrtaco just an employee nowadays? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he pays the bandwidth bill anymore.
X windows crashes far, far more often than MS-Windows.
...). In fact, in my experience, windowmaker crashes more often than X on that machine. And windowmaker isn't exactly known for a lack of stability.
It actually heavily depends on what graphics card you have. The nvidia drivers are notably unstable. I run two debian installs side by side. One machine has an nvidia card with the binary drivers, and making X run more than 48 hours straight on that is an achievement. The other has a matrox millenium II pci card (very old, but fast enough for 2D) and has recorded several 100+ day X sessions, with active daily use (browsing, email, openoffice, development,
Science on the other hand builds a view of the universe by observing it and constructing logical theories to explain it. If a theory is shown to be false, it is changed, scientists seek a better theory rather than sticking to the old one even when it has been proven false.
What are you talking about? Every big scientific breakthrough I'm aware of has had to battle for years, often decades and sometimes centuries to become commonly accepted. Science is a LOT about what you believe. The scientific process only allows you to determine that which is false, not that which is accurate. And it is exacerbated by the problem that a theory might be on the right track, but just in need of "tuning", so when a theory is disproven through the scientific process, but still mostly accurate, its adherents will usually go on saying that all it needs is a slight modification.
but I've yet to have an interesting one with a "born-again" who feels in the absolute truth and validity of the Bible and everything...EVERYTHING in it.
It's called cognitive dissonance. If you come to believe something that is too far from reality to be reconcilable with it, your mind will choose to reject reality instead of rejecting existing knowledge. That is the essence of brainwashing: you fill a person's mind with so much disinformation they are unable to act outside the guidelines of what they already know.
When you talk to those people both of you are unable to reconcile what the other person is saying with what you already know, and you never reach a common ground to start a debate from. By wholly rejecting the other person based on what they are saying, it becomes impossible to hold a real conversation, which is why neither of you finds anything but affirmation of their existing beliefs in what little conversation that does ensue.
First of all, it is regularly pointed out [admittedly by Republicans] that Nature is politically far left.
Anything is politically far left compared to the republicans. They are the most extremely right-wing party I am aware of in any post-industrial nation.
But I'm sure to you it makes perfect sense for people who paid less in to the government to get more back.
It does make sense to me. The reason it makes sense is the US's record income inequality, which when graphed details how over the last few decades the rich have gotten richer at the expense of the poor. Being rich is not a character flaw, but when 40 million people don't have affordable healthcare you have to ask yourself where the real priorities of a country lie: to the rich, or to human rights. Progressive taxation exists for a reason, to make sure the lowest rungs of society get access to their human rights, like healthcare, like education, like justice, and so on. If you do away with progressive taxation, you might as well do away with government entirely, because there is no purpose to government without income redistribution (everything else can be privatized, justice included).
Remember that big tax cut that Bush and the Republican Congress gave you?
The people that got most of that taxcut have better things to do than read slashdot, like having that orgy with those supermodels on their private yacht.
So massive tax increases to subsidize the rich. Interesting plans.
Well, you can use taxes on environmentally unfriendly products to fund tax incentives on environmentally friendly products. For example, in Belgium we have an eco tax on polluting packaging. Just adding a few cents of eco tax on packaging formats that pollute more than others can add up to a lot of money useful for subsidizing wind farms and the like, with the nice side benefit of moving packaging industries towards more enviro-friendly materials (and boosting materials research).
This system can be used in a lot of situations. You could for example tax air conditioners in new buildings (it is well known how to build buildings so they don't need air conditioners in moderate climates), and then use the resulting revenue to fund fusion research, to get more energy sooner for the airco's in existing buildings to run on.
Also, in the long term, if the US managed to achieve energy independence, this would mean it would no longer need to be involved militarily in the middle east. Not only would this massively decrease terrorist activity (since the stated goal of a lot of anti-US terrorist organisations is simply to get the US out of the middle east), but it would decrease the amount of money flowing out of the US economy, and so would be a boost to domestic US investment. This would result in higher tax revenues, and lower military costs, so the US could decrease defense spending to normal levels (instead of perennially maintaining a wartime defense budget).
I'm just throwing ideas out there, I'm sure the real thinkers have come up with much better plans. Cost is often a fake reason for lack of environmentalism, since the real costs associated with pollution often exceed whatever cost is associated with cleaning up.
You can get perfect geometry on an LCD (Trinitrons are a simple example, but there are others) and you can get the same sharpness of LCDs as well (but only with much, much more expensive models).
Trinitrons, though they have square/rectangular pixels, don't have perfect geometry because they lack subpixel-addressability. That's why cleartype only works on LCD screens. Additionally, the high end of LCD (ibm's 200 dpi screens) is much, much sharper than the high end of CRT. What distorts people's opinion about the relative sharpness of LCD and CRT is that CRT's often can be driven at higher resolutions than their dot pitch supports, which just makes things fuzzier (think: showing a 640*480 image on a regular TV, it's usable, but it's fuzzy). With LCD's you're pretty much stuck at their native resolution.
There may be no free lunch, but seeing as how you need to stretch badly to find costs that aren't calculated into the wind power cost, I think it's fair to argue wind power cost is calculated a lot more fairly than fossil fuel cost is.
Europe is smaller. Yes, it matters. The shorter the distance between power generation and utilization the less loss. The greater the distance, the more loss and thus the more the net cost is.
That might be true, but wind power is more expensive here too than other sources of power, so the government subsidizes you in a lot of EU nations if you put up a windfarm (or even a single turbine).
Do you have any answers? Or just questions? Remember, no is sometimes the right answer, but it never solves a problem.
Answer: subsidized wind farms
Answer: subsidized rooftop solar panels
Answer: subsidized biodiesel
Answer: higher investment in fusion research
Answer: tax disincentives for using energy-inefficient products
There are a lot of things that could be done by the government to wean people off fossil fuel, but inertia is a strong factor, and oil industry lobbying doesn't help.
How much are Japan, China, India etc paying for fighting wars for Oil?
Nothing.
Everyone piggybacks on the US military involvement in the middle east. The US pacifies the middle east through regular wars and constant large military presence in the region, and in return the entire world gets cheap oil.
Money has a tendency to pool. The lowest rungs of society spend instead of invest, and so their resources depreciate rather than appreciate. Unless you have a progressive taxation system in place, this over time leads to exactly what we've seen in the US, income inequality at record levels. Look up the gini index, it doesn't lie.
All flat rate taxation systems do is make the poor poorer and the rich richer. Not that there's anything wrong with the rich getting richer, it's the whole part with it being at the expense of the poor that's the problem.
The pact of the New Deal is that if you do your part, the government will cover your butt if something really bad happens, and that's good. The problem is with the "you do part" part of it. Just like with Communism, the "give what you have and take what you need" won't work when people fail to acknowledge the proper definitions of "have" and "need".
From the universal declaration of human rights:
Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
A social safety net is a human right. You can exclude people if they refuse to work, but you can not exclude people if they are unable to work. I would personally argue that society can bear the burden even of those who don't want to work, if you limit the social safety net to just the basic human rights, and don't include luxuries. If people couldn't watch their TV, they'd get their asses off the couch and get a job pretty darn fast.
It would be interesting to see some real hard statistics on how many people "abuse" the social safety net. I have a feeling this is another political wedge issue that has no real meat to it once you look beyond the slogans.