But you want people in front of you to slow down, and slow down everyone else in the next lane over, so that you can go faster.
Take this exaggerated hypothetical. Four lane highway. Empty where you are. You're cruising in the rightmost lane. Then you come upon a place where that lane is full of bumper-to-bumper slow traffic, so you merge left to pass them. Then you come to a place where that lane is likewise congested, so you move left to pass them. Then you come to a place where that lane is likewise congested, so you move left (into the leftmost lane) to pass them. It's congested for a long time, so you're traveling in the left lane for a long time. Then someone flies up on your tail and starts tailgating you. Do you have to merge over into the congested traffic and slow down with them (and add to their congestion, slowing them all down) so that that guy behind you can go faster? No, of course not.
In reality, a lot of cars in that second-to-left lane will have merged over to pass the slower people ahead of them, so you will eventually reach a point where that lane is congested too. And like you didn't have to merge over to let the guy behind you pass in the example able, they don't have to merge over for you. They're passing. They have a right to be there. Even if they're slower than you. The rule is not "move right to let others pass", it's "stay right unless you're passing". And they're passing, because the lane to their right is full of slower traffic. So they're following the rules.
Here's the thing people misunderstand: "keep left except to pass" doesn't mean "move right if someone wants to go faster than you". If you're in the left lane, and there's traffic in the lane to your right going slower than you, and traffic behind you that wants to go faster, you don't have to move.
If you did, that would be requiring you to slow down (joining the slower traffic to your right), just so someone else can go faster.
If there's no traffic to your right, merge right. Until you're in the rightmost lane, then stay there. Until traffic in front of you is slower than you, then merge left. If you're in the leftmost lane and traffic in front of you is still slower than you, tough shit, deal with it.
That is also a good idea, but the improvement on usenet killfiles I thought you were going to suggest it: modern systems like Facebook are better able to track what is a reply to whom than usenet was, so if you block a user, you can also (optionally) block all replies to that user as well, so you don't see one side of an argument against the trolls, you just don't see the argument at all.
Facebook (et al) can themselves offer prebuilt block lists of known-bad actors (like they already build), and allow people to choose between them, or choose none of them, and of course to make their own modifications to (their copies of) the prebuilt lists once they're picked. It's just like what they're doing now, except you can opt out of it if you want, and also opt into alternatives, and custom configure your own alternatives if you want. The default block list would just be the same list of people currently banned, and so give new users the exact same experience; but other users can choose different experiences if they want to.
You could be "silenced" on UseNet, with a killfile. But the thing was, killfiles were user-specific. Each user could decide who they wanted to "ban" from the discussion, and to that user, whoever they wanted gone, was gone. Any nobody else had any idea.
I don't see why modern discussion systems can't implement something like that. Allow people to share "kill-lists" too, so you can get a list of all the known [the-other-side] trolls you don't want to deal with from other people who've had to deal with them. Everyone gets their own personal shadowban button, but it only shadowbans people from that user's perspective. Eliminate anyone you want from your view of the discussion and build your own personal filter bubble if you want. Nobody else will be any the wiser. Nobody gets censored, and anyone who wants to see the shitstorm of unfiltered content can, at their own expense and nobody else's.
I was disappointed to discover, prompted by this article, that a major reason metric was rejected in the early US was religion. Not exactly that it was a tool of the devil per se, but that it was a tool of atheists, and unacceptable to God.
The customary system was championed by the U.S.-based International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting Weights and Measures in the late 19th century. Advocates of the customary system saw the French Revolutionary, or metric, system as atheistic.[6] An auxiliary of the Institute in Ohio published a poem with wording such as "down with every 'metric' scheme" and "A perfect inch, a perfect pint".[6] One adherent of the customary system called it "a just weight and a just measure, which alone are acceptable to the Lord."[6]
Technically the US uses its own customary units, which like the British Imperial units are derived from the older English units but not exactly the same.
Point is that considering someone a sinner doesn't stop you from being nice to them, so on a modern social policy level, putting God first isn't really an excuse for opposing policies aimed at alleviating suffering, which is the un-Christian behavior GGP was accusing Christians of. Jesus wouldn't have said "yeah but those suffering people are sinners so we can't help them or we'll just be enabling their sinful lifestyle."
[T]here is a large population that lives here until they have kids, then move "back home."
What really sucks is for those of us for whom this is home. It's a lifelong struggle for me not to be forced out of the place I was born and raised and educated where my job and family and friends and loved ones all are, just because a bunch of rich people from far away want to live here which makes living here unaffordable for people like me who were born here. There is no "home" to go back to. I haven't had a home my entire adult life, and it's increasingly unlikely that I ever will. I could move to what may as well be another country, some place that I will hate and be miserable, and buy a "home" there, but it still wouldn't be home.
If this was true, why the hell would anybody ever rent? I am stuck renting a shitty tiny trailer because even saving at the rate I'm saving now it looks like I will barely put away enough money to have paid cash for the cheapest homes at today's prices by the time I retire, and if I were to buy one of those cheapest-available homes now, not only what I'm paying for rent now but nearly 100% of what I'm saving (towards future housing, natch) would be eaten up by mortgage INTEREST alone, never mind taxes, insurance, etc, with negative money left over to pay down the principle.
If buying were cheaper than renting there would be no point in renting.
I don't think anyone is saying that people drawing on social security don't deserve to do so. Just that it's not quite the same as paying into an investment fund and then withdrawing from it later. It's more like insurance. (In fact, I think maybe technically it is insurance).
If I pay for fire insurance on a house for my entire life and there's never a fire so I never have to draw on it, there's not some pool of unclaimed fire insurance fund money that belongs to my estate left over when I die. Likewise, if I pay into social security for my entire working life and then get hit by a bus right before I'd have started collecting, there's not a pool of unclaimed social security fund money with my name on it.
The money I pay for fire insurance goes to paying for people who are suffering house fires right now; and if I should ever suffer one, the money from people paying for fire insurance and not suffering house fires will go to pay for my needs. It doesn't matter how much I did or didn't pay in or how much I need paid out right now; I could have just now bought fire insurance, only paid a few hundred dollars so far, and suddenly need hundreds of thousands of dollars of payout, and I'd get it, even though I've never paid anywhere near that in. And I wouldn't owe that money later. I could stop paying for fire insurance a year later, or switch to a different insurer, and there fire insurance company can't come after me because there was never some account balancing how much I've paid in vs how much I've collected.
Likewise, the money I pay for social security goes to taking care of people who are old right now, and then if I live to be old, the money from young people paying for it then will pay for what I'll collect. If I miraculously live another two centuries somehow, I'm never going to run out of money in my social security fund, because it's not being paid out of some account that I've been paying into. I've been paying to cover other people while I'm young, and other young people will pay for me for however long I manage to stay alive when I'm old. (Assuming the program still exists by then, which I'm not taking for granted).
The potential throttling would be downstream to each ISP's customers, not upstream from the sites. So if Comcast throttles Netflix and you're not a Comcast customer, you won't be affected. Comcast is just shaking down Netflix to pay up if Netflix wants Comcast to deliver Netflix content to Comcast customer. Netflix is already paying their own ISP to deliver their content to the backbone carriers, and so long as your non-American ISP isn't throttling the content from there, you'll get it at normal speeds.
Thank you, I've been saying this for a while now. The technology required to enable permanent human settlement on any other known celestial body would also enable us to preserve Earth's habitability in the face of pretty much any disaster we're afraid might befall it. Climate change, nuclear winter, meteor impact? None of those will result in a world anywhere near as uninhabitable as Mars or Venus. If we could turn Mars or Venus into a habitable place, then we could much more easily restore Earth to habitability in the face of any such disaster. The entire world could be turned into the Sahara, or Antarctica, or entirely submerged under the ocean, and it would still be more habitable than any other planet we know of. So by the time we can settle other worlds, we won't need to. And until we're habitually settling the Sahara, Antarctica, or the seafloor, we clearly aren't ready to settle any of the even-less-hospitable places out there.
Even a business that doesn't make any profit for itself, is still a good endeavor if people can feed themselves and be happy.
That's what profiting is. Money is an abstract representation of value, where value is something that makes you feel happy and enables you to do things like feed yourself. When we say there's no profit in something, it means it's unrewarding work: you put effort into it, and don't get anything you value out of the process, so you're just wasting time and energy for nothing.
As it happens, right now there's not a lot to be gained by sending people to space, compared to what it takes to do so. It's like taking a bunch of time off work to train and compete in a marathon, that you win, but you end up missing your next rent check because of it. You get a warm feeling of accomplishment, but it costs you a warm place to sleep. Is it really worth that?
Seriously though - what do you think will happen if Comcast decides to fuck with customers Hulu/Netflix/Amazon traffic? or Comcast gets busted fucking with access to websites? Nothing? No market ramifications?
There can't be market ramifications where there is no market. Comcast has a monopoly or at best a duopoly in the markets it serves, so it's not like upset customers could "vote with their dollars", because there's only one name on the proverbial ballot.
Net neutrality existed de facto since there was a net, and for most of that time competition between ISPs pretty much guaranteed it, so there were no need for rules requiring it. Then in the first half of this decade the handful of surviving consolidated major ISPs began trying to do away with it. So in 2015 rules were passed saying they can't. Now those rules are repealed, and they're going to move on to do what the rules were created to stop. Which will not be the net that we've known for a few decades.
Are you suggesting that they keep stray humans in cages and try to get other humans to agree to care for them, until they run out of space in the cages and then euthanize them?
People should be allowed to own whatever they like. They should not be entitled to money for letting others use things they own. Which makes it pointless to own more than you are using yourself, inducing people who already do to sell off their excess as that is then the most profitable thing to do with it, but because nobody is going to be buying for profit anymore, they will have to sell on terms that people who need it to use themselves can afford, leading to more people owning the places they live in.
I'm more than happy to pay for housing, provided I actually end up owning housing for my money. Rent does not fit that description, and its existence makes options that do fit that description even more inaccessible than they otherwise would be.
Property taxes legally are basically rent (almost nobody really outright owns their property, they are tenants on the state's land on terms called 'fee simple', and property tax is a part of those terms), and for that reason I'm against them too. The services they fund should be funded by other means instead.
I believe in individuals owning their own homes, not living in someone else's.
Collective ownership would still have each individual living in someone else's home, so it's not what I'm after, but at least it would be more equitable than some individuals owning other people's homes but not vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
But you want people in front of you to slow down, and slow down everyone else in the next lane over, so that you can go faster.
Take this exaggerated hypothetical. Four lane highway. Empty where you are. You're cruising in the rightmost lane. Then you come upon a place where that lane is full of bumper-to-bumper slow traffic, so you merge left to pass them. Then you come to a place where that lane is likewise congested, so you move left to pass them. Then you come to a place where that lane is likewise congested, so you move left (into the leftmost lane) to pass them. It's congested for a long time, so you're traveling in the left lane for a long time. Then someone flies up on your tail and starts tailgating you. Do you have to merge over into the congested traffic and slow down with them (and add to their congestion, slowing them all down) so that that guy behind you can go faster? No, of course not.
In reality, a lot of cars in that second-to-left lane will have merged over to pass the slower people ahead of them, so you will eventually reach a point where that lane is congested too. And like you didn't have to merge over to let the guy behind you pass in the example able, they don't have to merge over for you. They're passing. They have a right to be there. Even if they're slower than you. The rule is not "move right to let others pass", it's "stay right unless you're passing". And they're passing, because the lane to their right is full of slower traffic. So they're following the rules.
Then you just can't pass. Tough shit.
fuck, caught a brain fart a second too late. should have said:
"keep right except to pass" doesn't mean "move right if someone wants to go faster than you"
Here's the thing people misunderstand: "keep left except to pass" doesn't mean "move right if someone wants to go faster than you". If you're in the left lane, and there's traffic in the lane to your right going slower than you, and traffic behind you that wants to go faster, you don't have to move.
If you did, that would be requiring you to slow down (joining the slower traffic to your right), just so someone else can go faster.
If there's no traffic to your right, merge right.
Until you're in the rightmost lane, then stay there.
Until traffic in front of you is slower than you, then merge left.
If you're in the leftmost lane and traffic in front of you is still slower than you, tough shit, deal with it.
That is also a good idea, but the improvement on usenet killfiles I thought you were going to suggest it: modern systems like Facebook are better able to track what is a reply to whom than usenet was, so if you block a user, you can also (optionally) block all replies to that user as well, so you don't see one side of an argument against the trolls, you just don't see the argument at all.
Facebook (et al) can themselves offer prebuilt block lists of known-bad actors (like they already build), and allow people to choose between them, or choose none of them, and of course to make their own modifications to (their copies of) the prebuilt lists once they're picked. It's just like what they're doing now, except you can opt out of it if you want, and also opt into alternatives, and custom configure your own alternatives if you want. The default block list would just be the same list of people currently banned, and so give new users the exact same experience; but other users can choose different experiences if they want to.
You could be "silenced" on UseNet, with a killfile. But the thing was, killfiles were user-specific. Each user could decide who they wanted to "ban" from the discussion, and to that user, whoever they wanted gone, was gone. Any nobody else had any idea.
I don't see why modern discussion systems can't implement something like that. Allow people to share "kill-lists" too, so you can get a list of all the known [the-other-side] trolls you don't want to deal with from other people who've had to deal with them. Everyone gets their own personal shadowban button, but it only shadowbans people from that user's perspective. Eliminate anyone you want from your view of the discussion and build your own personal filter bubble if you want. Nobody else will be any the wiser. Nobody gets censored, and anyone who wants to see the shitstorm of unfiltered content can, at their own expense and nobody else's.
I was disappointed to discover, prompted by this article, that a major reason metric was rejected in the early US was religion. Not exactly that it was a tool of the devil per se, but that it was a tool of atheists, and unacceptable to God.
To quote Wikipedia's United States customary units: History:
The customary system was championed by the U.S.-based International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting Weights and Measures in the late 19th century. Advocates of the customary system saw the French Revolutionary, or metric, system as atheistic.[6] An auxiliary of the Institute in Ohio published a poem with wording such as "down with every 'metric' scheme" and "A perfect inch, a perfect pint".[6] One adherent of the customary system called it "a just weight and a just measure, which alone are acceptable to the Lord."[6]
Technically the US uses its own customary units, which like the British Imperial units are derived from the older English units but not exactly the same.
Point is that considering someone a sinner doesn't stop you from being nice to them, so on a modern social policy level, putting God first isn't really an excuse for opposing policies aimed at alleviating suffering, which is the un-Christian behavior GGP was accusing Christians of. Jesus wouldn't have said "yeah but those suffering people are sinners so we can't help them or we'll just be enabling their sinful lifestyle."
Okay Worf.
Yeah, like how Jesus went around stoning adulterers and reprimanding everyone for being too soft on them before.
[T]here is a large population that lives here until they have kids, then move "back home."
What really sucks is for those of us for whom this is home. It's a lifelong struggle for me not to be forced out of the place I was born and raised and educated where my job and family and friends and loved ones all are, just because a bunch of rich people from far away want to live here which makes living here unaffordable for people like me who were born here. There is no "home" to go back to. I haven't had a home my entire adult life, and it's increasingly unlikely that I ever will. I could move to what may as well be another country, some place that I will hate and be miserable, and buy a "home" there, but it still wouldn't be home.
If this was true, why the hell would anybody ever rent? I am stuck renting a shitty tiny trailer because even saving at the rate I'm saving now it looks like I will barely put away enough money to have paid cash for the cheapest homes at today's prices by the time I retire, and if I were to buy one of those cheapest-available homes now, not only what I'm paying for rent now but nearly 100% of what I'm saving (towards future housing, natch) would be eaten up by mortgage INTEREST alone, never mind taxes, insurance, etc, with negative money left over to pay down the principle.
If buying were cheaper than renting there would be no point in renting.
I don't think anyone is saying that people drawing on social security don't deserve to do so. Just that it's not quite the same as paying into an investment fund and then withdrawing from it later. It's more like insurance. (In fact, I think maybe technically it is insurance).
If I pay for fire insurance on a house for my entire life and there's never a fire so I never have to draw on it, there's not some pool of unclaimed fire insurance fund money that belongs to my estate left over when I die. Likewise, if I pay into social security for my entire working life and then get hit by a bus right before I'd have started collecting, there's not a pool of unclaimed social security fund money with my name on it.
The money I pay for fire insurance goes to paying for people who are suffering house fires right now; and if I should ever suffer one, the money from people paying for fire insurance and not suffering house fires will go to pay for my needs. It doesn't matter how much I did or didn't pay in or how much I need paid out right now; I could have just now bought fire insurance, only paid a few hundred dollars so far, and suddenly need hundreds of thousands of dollars of payout, and I'd get it, even though I've never paid anywhere near that in. And I wouldn't owe that money later. I could stop paying for fire insurance a year later, or switch to a different insurer, and there fire insurance company can't come after me because there was never some account balancing how much I've paid in vs how much I've collected.
Likewise, the money I pay for social security goes to taking care of people who are old right now, and then if I live to be old, the money from young people paying for it then will pay for what I'll collect. If I miraculously live another two centuries somehow, I'm never going to run out of money in my social security fund, because it's not being paid out of some account that I've been paying into. I've been paying to cover other people while I'm young, and other young people will pay for me for however long I manage to stay alive when I'm old. (Assuming the program still exists by then, which I'm not taking for granted).
The potential throttling would be downstream to each ISP's customers, not upstream from the sites. So if Comcast throttles Netflix and you're not a Comcast customer, you won't be affected. Comcast is just shaking down Netflix to pay up if Netflix wants Comcast to deliver Netflix content to Comcast customer. Netflix is already paying their own ISP to deliver their content to the backbone carriers, and so long as your non-American ISP isn't throttling the content from there, you'll get it at normal speeds.
Thank you, I've been saying this for a while now. The technology required to enable permanent human settlement on any other known celestial body would also enable us to preserve Earth's habitability in the face of pretty much any disaster we're afraid might befall it. Climate change, nuclear winter, meteor impact? None of those will result in a world anywhere near as uninhabitable as Mars or Venus. If we could turn Mars or Venus into a habitable place, then we could much more easily restore Earth to habitability in the face of any such disaster. The entire world could be turned into the Sahara, or Antarctica, or entirely submerged under the ocean, and it would still be more habitable than any other planet we know of. So by the time we can settle other worlds, we won't need to. And until we're habitually settling the Sahara, Antarctica, or the seafloor, we clearly aren't ready to settle any of the even-less-hospitable places out there.
Even a business that doesn't make any profit for itself, is still a good endeavor if people can feed themselves and be happy.
That's what profiting is. Money is an abstract representation of value, where value is something that makes you feel happy and enables you to do things like feed yourself. When we say there's no profit in something, it means it's unrewarding work: you put effort into it, and don't get anything you value out of the process, so you're just wasting time and energy for nothing.
As it happens, right now there's not a lot to be gained by sending people to space, compared to what it takes to do so. It's like taking a bunch of time off work to train and compete in a marathon, that you win, but you end up missing your next rent check because of it. You get a warm feeling of accomplishment, but it costs you a warm place to sleep. Is it really worth that?
Seriously though - what do you think will happen if Comcast decides to fuck with customers Hulu/Netflix/Amazon traffic? or Comcast gets busted fucking with access to websites? Nothing? No market ramifications?
There can't be market ramifications where there is no market. Comcast has a monopoly or at best a duopoly in the markets it serves, so it's not like upset customers could "vote with their dollars", because there's only one name on the proverbial ballot.
Net neutrality existed de facto since there was a net, and for most of that time competition between ISPs pretty much guaranteed it, so there were no need for rules requiring it. Then in the first half of this decade the handful of surviving consolidated major ISPs began trying to do away with it. So in 2015 rules were passed saying they can't. Now those rules are repealed, and they're going to move on to do what the rules were created to stop. Which will not be the net that we've known for a few decades.
Are you suggesting that they keep stray humans in cages and try to get other humans to agree to care for them, until they run out of space in the cages and then euthanize them?
People should be allowed to own whatever they like. They should not be entitled to money for letting others use things they own. Which makes it pointless to own more than you are using yourself, inducing people who already do to sell off their excess as that is then the most profitable thing to do with it, but because nobody is going to be buying for profit anymore, they will have to sell on terms that people who need it to use themselves can afford, leading to more people owning the places they live in.
I'm more than happy to pay for housing, provided I actually end up owning housing for my money. Rent does not fit that description, and its existence makes options that do fit that description even more inaccessible than they otherwise would be.
Property taxes legally are basically rent (almost nobody really outright owns their property, they are tenants on the state's land on terms called 'fee simple', and property tax is a part of those terms), and for that reason I'm against them too. The services they fund should be funded by other means instead.
Wow that got mangled, damn virtual keyboard.
I believe in individuals owning their own homes, not living in someone else's.
Collective ownership would still have each individual living in someone else's home, so it's not what I'm after, but at least it would be more equitable than some individuals owning other people's homes but not vice versa.
I Believe in individuals oning thr own homes, not living in someone else's.