we were cleaning out our fraternity fridge and, while it had never lost power, it still had mystery packages. there were about a half-dozen foil wrapped packages, roughly the size and shape of a jumbo hot dog with bun. One of the pledges (what, do you think brothers would do this work? we were there to supervise)found one of the old timers, who looked at them and seemed stumped. Then his eyes lit up and he said "Holy Shit! It's Jebens' squirrels!"
Apparently there was a brother who would shoot squirrels out his window, and skin them and cook 'em up. The ones he wasn't ready to eat right away he would freeze. We were *this* close to serving them to the pledges for dinner that evening.
Worked in a small sewage treatment plant at a nuclear power plant for a spell. 2 things I remember:
1) I didn't puke at the smell, but I almost did when I saw the plant operator use his bare hand and a Mason jar to take a sample of the raw sewage.
2) Every year, the plant would need to import raw sewage from outside because all the good bacteria would die off. This would generally happen right after the start of an outage, where the plant would bring in LOTS of temporary workers, most female. The best we could figure, the huge influx of dumping their sanitary products into the toilets (picture a small sea of tampon applicators that need to be skimmed off) killed the aerobic bacteria.
"Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of. That can be done for a short time, but eventually every secret that has more than about 3 people in on it comes out."
Thank you. I've always been amazed by theories that posit that a cabal of people are so sophisticated that they are completely fooling everybody in the world - EXCEPT those with such clarity of vision and acute mental powers so as to see and understand the conspiracy completely.
"Everyone is stupid but the conspirators and me. And I'm smarter than both."
I quibble - the virus is NOT mild. It is at least 10 times more lethal than seasonal flu (and that's including treatment with Tamiflu), and 10 times more likely to land you in the hospital. People are only calling it mild because it doesn't have the lethality of H5N1.
"Excuse me sir, as you can see we're getting a bit crowded. Would you mind sharing your table? No? I'me very sorry to hear that, sir, but as you can see we really need the space. May I ask you to come back later and connect at a time when it's a bit less crowded? We apologize for the inconvenience; here's a card for 2 free hours when you return."
90% of the people a manager approaches will voluntarily bail when asked - or share the table. Of the ones who won't, another 9% will take the second offer. For that last 1 percent, pull out the "customer causing a disruption" section of the franchise manual and go from there.
Now, to find a McDonald's employee that speaks english...
"These days the kid would never be allowed to read classic Greek Mythology at age 11 lest it damage their precious innocent psyche, or prompt them to go postal at school."
Hear, hear! The tragedy in this story is not that this precocious girl lived and then died at a ripe old age, but that a girl like her may never exist again.
Or like Larry Niven said: "I always believed I'd be alive to see the first man land on the moon. I never imagined I's be alive to see the last."
I find it telling that much the same description and accolades are given for Harlan Ellison, who is also quite...adamant about defending his copyright. Oddly enough, I dislike both authors; I find their works not so much deep as opaque.
You are displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "monopoly". A company is a monopoly if they have a dominant market share - period. And it is not illegal, nor even necessarily bad. What is illegal is using that monopoly position in illegal ways, such as forcing competitors out of business, etc.
It is that confusion that causes these periodic swings in enforcement policy, because the mere fact that a company is that large is an advantage in the market, and hurts competitors. The progressive/liberal viewpoint is that this is enough to trigger regulatory action. So, Google should deserve regulatory sanctions because, since they are so large, it's hard for competitors to make money competing with them. Of course, the problem with this viewpoint is that it will quickly lead to the anti-trust version of affirmative action - companies that are larger than others will be restrained simply because they are larger, with no regard to how they got that way. Better business practices, brilliant ideas, terrible missteps by competitors: it won't matter. "We're sorry, but you have too much market share. Give it to someone else".
Free marketers/conservatives take the opposite tack - if a company is large, so what - they shouldn't be subject to special laws or scrutiny. And we've seen where that leads - the robber barons, Standard Oil, etc.
Right now the liberals are in charge, so that's the way it will trend. But let us at least be precise in our descriptions of the problems
No, it's not. It arbitrarily and abruptly transforms what was to be a two-way communication into a one-way communication with a strict time limit. It's an artificial artefact borne of weak technology and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
ABSOLUTELY! Thank God someone sees SMS for what it really is!
I never said that the parents bear no responsibility; but that doesn't excuse the woman's actions. And moral responsibility doesn't need to be parsed up - the parents can be "fully" responsible and the harasser can be "fully" responsible. It isn't a zero sum game.
There's also intent to take into account. The woman INTENDED to cause harm, although perhaps not as much as a happened. The most you can argue about the parents is that they may have been negligent. BIG difference.
The problem is that the line had turned 90 degrees from where it was. Previously, people were responsible for their own safety and the safety of their families/clans, etc. The courts dispensed justice after a crime was committed, but the job of preventing it or defending against it was the individuals.
This group, called the Bow Street Runners, was the first group paid through public funds that emphasized crime prevention in addition to crime investigation and apprehension of criminals. While citizens responsible for social control used to simply react to crimes, the Bow Street Runners added the responsibility of preventing crime through preventive patrol, changing the system of policing considerably.
Despite the Bow Street Runners' efforts, most English citizens were opposed to the development of a police force. Their opposition was based on two related factors: (1) the importance placed on individual liberties, and (2) the English tradition of local government (Langworthy and Travis). To reconcile these issues with the development of a police force, a Scottish magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, developed the science of policing in the late 1700s (Langworthy and Travis). Colquhoun suggested that police functions must include detection of crime, apprehension of offenders, and prevention of crime through their presence in public. The function of crime prevention was supported by other influential scholars at the time. In his 1763 essay On Crimes and Punishment, Italian theorist Cesare Beccaria proposed that "it is better to prevent crimes than to punish them" (p. 93).
For 250 years, the government has been telling it's citizenry that it would protect them. Are we surprised that, when someone is hurt, people demand the protection they were "promised"? And those that wish to protect themselves are viewed as a threat.
"In civil matters, destroying evidence means that whatever was there was far worse and far more damaging than anything currently residing on the drive. Lawyers can get away with that because they can say whatever they like and you have no way of proving them wrong."
But...
What if I have my machine set to do a HD scrub periodically, say 1x/week? If you can prove that this was your "standard business practice/policy", would not your defense be that there's no proof that I INTENTIONALLY destroyed the files. This would be similar to email retention policies - if a company follows them, they can't be compelled to produce a document that's already gone.
This is just a clarification of "harassment" as it already exists. It's not an attempt to shut down blogs. If someone is obviously and intentionally harassing someone else, I have no problem with them having legal recourse.
But according to you, they already HAVE legal recourse - harassment is already against the law. The real heartache is that what happened to Megan Meyers while certainly evil, was not apparently illegal. therefore, since we don't want the Bad Thing happening again, we must pass a LAW!
Of course, it could be that the prosecution was simply incompetent, or that the case was more complex than a senator can form into a 20 second sound bite. But then Ms Sanchez wouldn't be getting the free campaign advertising she now has.
Oh, yeah - in keeping with the theme from another poster:
Ms. Sanchez, I believe you are a cunt. Pass your law, and you can arrest me for saying it, but that doesn't remedy your cuntiness one iota.
"The reality is that the budget cannot be balanced right now without destroying the federal government. It can't happen. We have to run deficits for a while."
So to combat my criticism that Keynseian economic theory is an article of faith, you come back with "That's just the way it is?"
I never said that the budget should be balanced; there are plenty of reasons to go into long term debt. My argument is that Keynseian macroeconomic theory is not one of them. There is no solid proof that economic stimulus via deficit spending works as intended. The largest experiment, the new deal, was hopelessly corrupted by WWII in terms of evaluating outcomes.
I mean I know you conservatives get so pissed off that someone might get a free meal, but over here in reality we realize that it is cheaper to give someone a sandwich than put them in prison and give them a sandwich, which is what happens when you remove the social safety net.
Ahh, yes - if we don't take care of the poor we'll wind up taking care of them anyway, because obviously the poor are incapable of taking care of themselves without government intervention or turning to crime. What a load of elitist crap. You don't care that someone's poor - you care that that person doesn't impinge upon your existence. Yes, it is easier to maintain an underclass with bread and circuses. But that's all it is - containment. It's not noble or progressive; it's a plantation mentality with a sympathetic accent. We in the US are continuing to deal with the consequences of those attitudes - when are you going to deal with it?
Ever look up rates of charitable giving? They are substantially higher among those who identify themselves as conservatives. Because, you know they just hate seeing someone get a free meal.
"When times are good, we slowly ramp off spending, and raise taxes to pay the deficit."
Except that has never, EVER, happened. The "virtually all economists" you cite *believe* it's a good idea, because some guy named Keynes said it -should- work. The fact that step 2 hasn't happened yet isn't enough to deter them in their faith, because THIS time their will be people in charge who do things the right way.
Keynesian economic theory has such a stranglehold on economic and political thought people don't even ask if "it's a good idea during a recession for the government to spend more, and tax less, thus running up a deficit." They debate the degree to which they should occur.
If medicine was still in the same state of economics, we'd be debating whether to draw 1 pint of blood or 2 to cure a cold. I mean, there's no real proof it's worked in the past, but the alternative would be to admit we don't know what to do, and then how would economists get interviewed on NPR?
"If you can't make a profit playing by the rules then stop trying to make a profit and die. That's how the system is supposed to work, isn't it? (Whether or not that's a dumb idea is an entirely different debate...)"
You have inadvertently put your finger on the root problem. The thing is, tax avoidance is NOT illegal, but tax evasion is. These companies have gigantic legal teams whose sole purpose is to make sure that the companies are obeying the letter of the law. And I'd be willing to bet that what they are all doing is "legal" in that sense.
So, how is Obama going to make them pay? Because the tax code is so byzantine, there's no way to be absolutely sure that what you are doing is allowed or not. The only difference is the amount of attention the IRS pays to you. So these companies will trot out their lawyers and show where, by chapter and verse in the tax code, what they are doing is not illegal. And then the IRS will say "Well, OUR interpretation is different, therefore what you are doing is illegal, and has always BEEN illegal, even though we just changed our interpretation last week - interest and penalties, please?"
Are corporations being "greedy"? If we are anthropomorphizing them, yes. Are the people who run corporations greedy? Of course they are, as are the people who moan about their 401k plummeting in value - you know, the OWNERS of those corporations. But none of it is any excuse for a tax system so Kafka-esque that what I did yesterday is perfectly fine, until today when what I did was illegal, and no one can tell me what changed.
It's like the IRS is run by southern sheriffs who decide whether whatever you are doing in your car is illegal, depending on the state of the county treasury and the color of your skin.
Who do you think those numbers are for? They aren't intended for the layman. They are for other health agencies and governments. It's like the richter scale or the meteor destruction scale - yes, the bigger numbers are scarier, and the news media loves reporting them, but most people have no fucking clue what they mean.
It's not like the Security alert colors - there are actual criteria used in determining the pandemic level. and they were designed to let health officials make plans and then translate that into action on a regional basis, not "Level 4 means tape up the windows."
Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what those numbers mean. They are not a measure of lethality, but a combined measure of a number of factors. "6" isn't "fatal", it's "pandemic" - there's a difference
"I remember staring at those Magic Eye posters for hours, frustrated that all the other kids could see dolphins and ships and stuff, while all I saw was a bunch of weird looking colors. "
That's odd. I can't see a damned thing in those posters, but my depth perception is uncommonly strong. I've had new optometrists do the tests on me twice because they couldn't believe the first result.
You are missing the point - for some people no nation can EVER be as bad as the US. Most of those people also were born and live in the US and have benefited from it's history and economy.
Were they to think that way about themselves such self loathing would be treated as a pathology.
Not really. An MRI sitting at a small town clinic is a huge piece of capital investment with very low utilization. You could invest that money in more doctors and nurses, pay less, and get a better bang for the buck.
One of the problems with the health system currently is the oversupply of capital equipment. Have you ever gone to schedule an MRI, and hear "we only do those on Tuesdays and Thursdays"? The equipment, and its associated costs, don't disappear the other 5 days of the week. So the carrying costs of the idle time are spread over the fees that the patient pays.
Question: If you could get an MRI for 1/3 the price, but it would be at 2:00 AM, would you do it?
Slashdot Mirror
we were cleaning out our fraternity fridge and, while it had never lost power, it still had mystery packages. there were about a half-dozen foil wrapped packages, roughly the size and shape of a jumbo hot dog with bun. One of the pledges (what, do you think brothers would do this work? we were there to supervise)found one of the old timers, who looked at them and seemed stumped. Then his eyes lit up and he said "Holy Shit! It's Jebens' squirrels!"
Apparently there was a brother who would shoot squirrels out his window, and skin them and cook 'em up. The ones he wasn't ready to eat right away he would freeze. We were *this* close to serving them to the pledges for dinner that evening.
Good times.
Worked in a small sewage treatment plant at a nuclear power plant for a spell. 2 things I remember:
1) I didn't puke at the smell, but I almost did when I saw the plant operator use his bare hand and a Mason jar to take a sample of the raw sewage.
2) Every year, the plant would need to import raw sewage from outside because all the good bacteria would die off. This would generally happen right after the start of an outage, where the plant would bring in LOTS of temporary workers, most female. The best we could figure, the huge influx of dumping their sanitary products into the toilets (picture a small sea of tampon applicators that need to be skimmed off) killed the aerobic bacteria.
"Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of. That can be done for a short time, but eventually every secret that has more than about 3 people in on it comes out."
Thank you. I've always been amazed by theories that posit that a cabal of people are so sophisticated that they are completely fooling everybody in the world - EXCEPT those with such clarity of vision and acute mental powers so as to see and understand the conspiracy completely.
"Everyone is stupid but the conspirators and me. And I'm smarter than both."
I quibble - the virus is NOT mild. It is at least 10 times more lethal than seasonal flu (and that's including treatment with Tamiflu), and 10 times more likely to land you in the hospital. People are only calling it mild because it doesn't have the lethality of H5N1.
Yet.
Her's an even simpler one:
"Excuse me sir, as you can see we're getting a bit crowded. Would you mind sharing your table? No? I'me very sorry to hear that, sir, but as you can see we really need the space. May I ask you to come back later and connect at a time when it's a bit less crowded? We apologize for the inconvenience; here's a card for 2 free hours when you return."
90% of the people a manager approaches will voluntarily bail when asked - or share the table. Of the ones who won't, another 9% will take the second offer. For that last 1 percent, pull out the "customer causing a disruption" section of the franchise manual and go from there.
Now, to find a McDonald's employee that speaks english...
"These days the kid would never be allowed to read classic Greek Mythology at age 11 lest it damage their precious innocent psyche, or prompt them to go postal at school."
Hear, hear! The tragedy in this story is not that this precocious girl lived and then died at a ripe old age, but that a girl like her may never exist again.
Or like Larry Niven said: "I always believed I'd be alive to see the first man land on the moon. I never imagined I's be alive to see the last."
I find it telling that much the same description and accolades are given for Harlan Ellison, who is also quite...adamant about defending his copyright. Oddly enough, I dislike both authors; I find their works not so much deep as opaque.
You are displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "monopoly". A company is a monopoly if they have a dominant market share - period. And it is not illegal, nor even necessarily bad. What is illegal is using that monopoly position in illegal ways, such as forcing competitors out of business, etc.
It is that confusion that causes these periodic swings in enforcement policy, because the mere fact that a company is that large is an advantage in the market, and hurts competitors. The progressive/liberal viewpoint is that this is enough to trigger regulatory action. So, Google should deserve regulatory sanctions because, since they are so large, it's hard for competitors to make money competing with them. Of course, the problem with this viewpoint is that it will quickly lead to the anti-trust version of affirmative action - companies that are larger than others will be restrained simply because they are larger, with no regard to how they got that way. Better business practices, brilliant ideas, terrible missteps by competitors: it won't matter. "We're sorry, but you have too much market share. Give it to someone else".
Free marketers/conservatives take the opposite tack - if a company is large, so what - they shouldn't be subject to special laws or scrutiny. And we've seen where that leads - the robber barons, Standard Oil, etc.
Right now the liberals are in charge, so that's the way it will trend. But let us at least be precise in our descriptions of the problems
ABSOLUTELY! Thank God someone sees SMS for what it really is!
I never said that the parents bear no responsibility; but that doesn't excuse the woman's actions. And moral responsibility doesn't need to be parsed up - the parents can be "fully" responsible and the harasser can be "fully" responsible. It isn't a zero sum game.
There's also intent to take into account. The woman INTENDED to cause harm, although perhaps not as much as a
happened. The most you can argue about the parents is that they may have been negligent. BIG difference.
The problem is that the line had turned 90 degrees from where it was. Previously, people were responsible for their own safety and the safety of their families/clans, etc. The courts dispensed justice after a crime was committed, but the job of preventing it or defending against it was the individuals.
Around the middle of the 18th century the concept of police emerged. These were not agents of the court, but agents of the government and had an additional charge - prevention of crime. From http://law.jrank.org/pages/1639/Police-History-beginning-modern-policing-in-England.html :
For 250 years, the government has been telling it's citizenry that it would protect them. Are we surprised that, when someone is hurt, people demand the protection they were "promised"? And those that wish to protect themselves are viewed as a threat.
But...
What if I have my machine set to do a HD scrub periodically, say 1x/week? If you can prove that this was your "standard business practice/policy", would not your defense be that there's no proof that I INTENTIONALLY destroyed the files. This would be similar to email retention policies - if a company follows them, they can't be compelled to produce a document that's already gone.
Is that something like military intelligence? Business ethics?
Maybe compassionate conservative?
How about free-thinking liberal?
But according to you, they already HAVE legal recourse - harassment is already against the law. The real heartache is that what happened to Megan Meyers while certainly evil, was not apparently illegal. therefore, since we don't want the Bad Thing happening again, we must pass a LAW!
Of course, it could be that the prosecution was simply incompetent, or that the case was more complex than a senator can form into a 20 second sound bite. But then Ms Sanchez wouldn't be getting the free campaign advertising she now has.
Oh, yeah - in keeping with the theme from another poster:
Ms. Sanchez, I believe you are a cunt. Pass your law, and you can arrest me for saying it, but that doesn't remedy your cuntiness one iota.
So to combat my criticism that Keynseian economic theory is an article of faith, you come back with "That's just the way it is?"
I never said that the budget should be balanced; there are plenty of reasons to go into long term debt. My argument is that Keynseian macroeconomic theory is not one of them. There is no solid proof that economic stimulus via deficit spending works as intended. The largest experiment, the new deal, was hopelessly corrupted by WWII in terms of evaluating outcomes.
Ahh, yes - if we don't take care of the poor we'll wind up taking care of them anyway, because obviously the poor are incapable of taking care of themselves without government intervention or turning to crime. What a load of elitist crap. You don't care that someone's poor - you care that that person doesn't impinge upon your existence. Yes, it is easier to maintain an underclass with bread and circuses. But that's all it is - containment. It's not noble or progressive; it's a plantation mentality with a sympathetic accent. We in the US are continuing to deal with the consequences of those attitudes - when are you going to deal with it?
Ever look up rates of charitable giving? They are substantially higher among those who identify themselves as conservatives. Because, you know they just hate seeing someone get a free meal.
"When times are good, we slowly ramp off spending, and raise taxes to pay the deficit."
Except that has never, EVER, happened. The "virtually all economists" you cite *believe* it's a good idea, because some guy named Keynes said it -should- work. The fact that step 2 hasn't happened yet isn't enough to deter them in their faith, because THIS time their will be people in charge who do things the right way.
Keynesian economic theory has such a stranglehold on economic and political thought people don't even ask if "it's a good idea during a recession for the government to spend more, and tax less, thus running up a deficit." They debate the degree to which they should occur.
If medicine was still in the same state of economics, we'd be debating whether to draw 1 pint of blood or 2 to cure a cold. I mean, there's no real proof it's worked in the past, but the alternative would be to admit we don't know what to do, and then how would economists get interviewed on NPR?
You have inadvertently put your finger on the root problem. The thing is, tax avoidance is NOT illegal, but tax evasion is. These companies have gigantic legal teams whose sole purpose is to make sure that the companies are obeying the letter of the law. And I'd be willing to bet that what they are all doing is "legal" in that sense.
So, how is Obama going to make them pay? Because the tax code is so byzantine, there's no way to be absolutely sure that what you are doing is allowed or not. The only difference is the amount of attention the IRS pays to you. So these companies will trot out their lawyers and show where, by chapter and verse in the tax code, what they are doing is not illegal. And then the IRS will say "Well, OUR interpretation is different, therefore what you are doing is illegal, and has always BEEN illegal, even though we just changed our interpretation last week - interest and penalties, please?"
Are corporations being "greedy"? If we are anthropomorphizing them, yes. Are the people who run corporations greedy? Of course they are, as are the people who moan about their 401k plummeting in value - you know, the OWNERS of those corporations. But none of it is any excuse for a tax system so Kafka-esque that what I did yesterday is perfectly fine, until today when what I did was illegal, and no one can tell me what changed.
It's like the IRS is run by southern sheriffs who decide whether whatever you are doing in your car is illegal, depending on the state of the county treasury and the color of your skin.
Who do you think those numbers are for? They aren't intended for the layman. They are for other health agencies and governments. It's like the richter scale or the meteor destruction scale - yes, the bigger numbers are scarier, and the news media loves reporting them, but most people have no fucking clue what they mean.
It's not like the Security alert colors - there are actual criteria used in determining the pandemic level. and they were designed to let health officials make plans and then translate that into action on a regional basis, not "Level 4 means tape up the windows."
I'll believe it - I have NEVER gotten it to work.
Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what those numbers mean. They are not a measure of lethality, but a combined measure of a number of factors. "6" isn't "fatal", it's "pandemic" - there's a difference
"I remember staring at those Magic Eye posters for hours, frustrated that all the other kids could see dolphins and ships and stuff, while all I saw was a bunch of weird looking colors. "
That's odd. I can't see a damned thing in those posters, but my depth perception is uncommonly strong. I've had new optometrists do the tests on me twice because they couldn't believe the first result.
You are missing the point - for some people no nation can EVER be as bad as the US. Most of those people also were born and live in the US and have benefited from it's history and economy.
Were they to think that way about themselves such self loathing would be treated as a pathology.
I'm somewhat surprised - do you have examples? The one I gave with Tuesdays and Thursdays was real - it's the one down the road from me.
Not really. An MRI sitting at a small town clinic is a huge piece of capital investment with very low utilization. You could invest that money in more doctors and nurses, pay less, and get a better bang for the buck.
One of the problems with the health system currently is the oversupply of capital equipment. Have you ever gone to schedule an MRI, and hear "we only do those on Tuesdays and Thursdays"? The equipment, and its associated costs, don't disappear the other 5 days of the week. So the carrying costs of the idle time are spread over the fees that the patient pays.
Question: If you could get an MRI for 1/3 the price, but it would be at 2:00 AM, would you do it?
Now, what if you were paying out of pocket?
Cower:(v)to shrink away or crouch especially for shelter from something that menaces, domineers, or dismays
Coward: (n)a person who lacks courage in facing danger, difficulty, opposition, pain, etc.; a timid or easily intimidated person.
2 words, different but similar meanings, sound and look similar. I stand by my defense.