I'm sorry but as long as you make the changes slowly enough, people just get used to them... for the love of gawd, they were using human beings as kindling in Germany, and the majority of the German Jews never left, because they couldn't imagine it going that wrong.
All of them... have you not paid attention to the national economic situation since 2008 which is DIRECTLY a result of an unregulated Wallstreet Banking industry resulting in virtually EVERY STATE in the union on the verge of bankruptcy.
I would classify this as a pretty massive failure in the free market myself. Would you be interested in debating that issue?
Blood my friend is a bio-hazard. If those pigs had accidentally been infected with something (and if the handling of these animals is reflected by the way their wastes are being handled the sky really is the limit here), then that pathogenic waste just hit a couple million people. The reason that the laws are not being enforced is that corporations have lobbied our representatives to GUT agencies involved with regulation and a means to cut government spending, so now we have supermarkets selling rotten food because theirs only one government inspector for an entire national region. You may be right about people being clever about polluting, to that I would simply say, take the economic incentive to pollute out of the equation. Make the cost of poisoning air, water or employees so gawd aweful that no sane executive would even consider doing it.
It won't help, browsers are so smart they conform to your search habits so this twit will only see the kind of mind-numbing tripe that has already stunted his perception of reality. Have him go to the LIBRARY, and use an unpolluted search environment. Then look up the purely insane laws that Dick
Chaney got shoved through for his fracking buddies at Halliburton. Better yet, go get the HBO emmy award winning documentary on fracking "Gasland". There are people out there who have no problem crashing your economy to get wealthy, what makes you think there aren't people who will poison your water for the same reason?
I have a profound confusion for folks who think that government is evil, but corporation and business are magically devoid of human frailty. Human beings are amazing, on the one hand they are loving, compassionate, generous and noble. On the other hand they are some of the lowest scum sucking primates with a pulse. This would suggest that all human enterprise requires some level of monitoring, management and regulation, to prevent what is worst in people from crapping all over the scenery and one another. That goes for governments, and you better believe that goes for corporations. We need to build a strong cage of regulation with the room and freedom to grow and thrive, but HARSH penalties for committing wanton acts of abuse on people or the environment. Why is this not obvious?
Alright, you watch "48 Hours" or "Criminal minds" on TV and something you see about terrorism or murder piques your interest so gawd forbid you Google it. Whether it the "Anarchists Cookbook" or "How to hide murder by using succinylcholine", you have just made yourself a potential target of a law enforcement agency, and if gawd forbid again, anything bad happens in your household or neighborhood in the next 24 months, your browsing habits have just planted a smoking gun in your hand.
You don't even have to be the one who does the search. You leave you home PC logged in as you, and your eldest male-child does a search on how to "Terminate a butthead little brother" and you could be buggered.
Its not paranoia if Government Agencies have virtually unlimited resources to smoke your hinny like a Cohiba, at the first blush of illegal activity. Its also not particularly heart warming to discover that Prosecuting Attorneys have almost no interest in getting the right guy (that's the job of the police), just winning the case. The number of poor innocent bastards in prison in this country does not exactly inspire confidence in our legal system. Hell, Texas just executed what the entire planet now knows was almost certainly an innocent man just for political value.
You better believe that I find myself faced with two options in these modern times. They are; Willfully avoid any appearance or opportunity to be caught doing anything that might get me buggered, or Run silent and run deep. Anything else is Russian Roulette.
My friend, I hate to be the one to tell you this but your pants are already down around your ankles and you are about to take a most unpleasant excursion into what happens to people with unprotected orifices. There are huge forces at work here. Some of those forces have faces, but many of them don't. Greed is a mindless drive. It doesn't look at repercussions. A company makes a financially wise decision for this quarter, sowing the seeds for the destruction of of own middle class market. That's profoundly stupid, but the bean counters can't see the connection between short term choices and long term impacts. You crap into the water and air, and in a hundred year you can't drink or breath... or worse, the climate rolls over and dies and nobody can say for certain it was all that crap, so they just keep on crapping.
That run away locomotive, technology, it has you square in its sights my friend. I may get run over first, but you aren't far behind. What happens when the machines you design today leads to machines who can do your job, or any job cheaper that any human being can do it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Tell me where your pants are going to be on that fine day. We are in a race to the bottom, with a tiny few who are now at the top. However, even that will collapse. The world is getting very unpredictable, and I would be ever so careful not to cultivate hubris in the face of accelerating change. Now is time for sanity, in world where sanity is quick becoming a rare commodity.
I beg your pardon, feces form the base of fertilizing thousands of fields around the world!!! Shit serves a useful purpose. I challenge you to find a single useful purpose for Mr. Murdoch! Now if you were to plow his sorry ass into a rice paddy, then I would wholeheartedly agree on calling him shit.
I'm sorry, are we not aware of the consolidation of global mass media to a pretty much a monolithic group of fewer than two dozen mega-corporations? Add to the fact that print, video, recording and film media have their unified consortia and you're surprised that they march in lock step? Its all the same people. You hear what they want, when they want, and nobody talks about whatever they want to remain out of the public eye or ear. The internet is the last rodeo in town and you best believe they're going after it like their lives depend on it. Checkmate in 4 moves... WAKE UP!!!
You're right. We shouldn't blame tigers for eating people either. They're just doing what tigers do. We do however, cage them or shoot them. When corporations exercise their need for profit to the detriment of the world and its inhabitants, its time to cage them or shoot them (metaphorically speaking.) Government needs to be COMPLETELY ISOLATED from corporations for the benefit of all, including the corporations themselves who will gleefully gut themselves tomorrow for profit today. Government's job is to provide working infrastructure and common social resource to make most human enterprises feasible and operable (both for profit and not.)
Our failure has been to allow corporations to hijack the machine managing infrastructure for... PROFIT. This in turn has been a slow motion disaster to the people of the United States and the world at large. It is now time to lock down on corporations HARD! We build a beautiful cage after the great depression, it took the last 30 years for Corporate America to destroy its cage and now we have the world of the present going to hell in a hand basket. Its time to repair the cage, bolster it where it was previously weak, and institute a Constitutional Amendment that separates corporation and state the same way church and state are currently separate.
It is much easier to manage these institutions when we keep them away from one another.
Clearly you've bought into the misdirection. At first blush, it looks like they want to prevent the illegal download of copyrighted material (their water.) On closer examination they could care less about the "water" they want your "pipes." With control of your pipes, it doesn't matter where your water comes from or what you use the water for, they control the flow and can turn off your water without so much as a second thought... and with that, kiss anything resembling global free speech and democracy goodbye (that kind of water will never see "their" piped ever again.)
Our society has ALWAYS put up with minor inconvenience (idiots talking loudly in public, and yellow journalism) because we thought the price was small compared to the benefit that freedom brings. This however won't fly in the face of "Profit". There is no margin for "putting up with" if your intent is to squeeze every last femto-liter of profit out of the world at large. At best you and I are imminent trespassers on the property of some future super-Murdoch. As for your metaphor, look at what is happening to water on the planet today.
Perhaps its time for people to try something different. During times of strife, "The People" boycotted despotic providers. In the south, the black civil rights leaders convinced a city to walk instead of riding the bus in the back. In India, million started wearing only home woven fabric. We can break the financial backs of those who would buy and sell us. We would simply have to put our conscience ahead of our comfort.
The problem with the U.S. government is that it's virtually impossible for it to get vocal when it's collective mouths are full of Corporate Kielbasa. Over the last 30 years we've had a dramatic shift of power away from the people and towards corporation. Politics has always demanded a certain level of whoring, if for nothing else, to keep both ones adversaries and ones own party at bay. However, today we have an elected body that has for all intents and purposes perfected the art of felating our corporate leaders, truth in advertising would suggest that all pictures of the legislature include knee pads. The supreme court, stuffed with neo-fascist ass hats by 30 years of neo-fascist presidents, has all but paved the way for the corporate take-over of the Federal Government. Our "Bill of Rights" hangs in tatters, while corporate leaders proudly proclaim on national television "We don't particularly like democracy, it just gets in the way." Sadly we now have the best government money can buy.
Welcome to the land of the boondoggle...
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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E85 was a bad joke from the start. If you consider the amount of oil it takes to water the corn, fertilize the corn, then harvest the corn, then process it to get your ethanol, its a huge losing proposition from a purely environmental position. It also profoundly screws with the food markets, and puts the poor around the world on precarious footing towards starvation.
The people it benefits are the big moneied corporate agribusinesses. It makes grain less available, jacks up the price of corn commodities, and in short makes a bunch of greedy buggers even wealthier.
You want to use a sane fuel? Oil from Algae, is sane. Ethanol from bullgrass is sane. Ethanol and methanol from sewage and organic waste is sane. By all means, turn refuse and societies byproducts into fuel and fuel additives. Just get food out of the equation.
What scares me most is having this undead piece of rancid pig feces laying around, is that some time over the next year a special committee will convene and railroad this thing through in the dark of night while nobody is looking or can respond to it. Our legislature has in recent years done a number of dirty deeds in the middle of the night to avoid notice, prevent obstruction and make evil corporate masters happy.
I want a stake through this things heart, its head removed and a bucket of holy water dowsed on it.
This is exactly the point, the society is cannibalizing itself. Sure you have folks who would pull the gold from other people teeth while they chew for drug money, but there are a lot of folks who've gotten just plain desperate for money to keep the kids in milk and Captain Crunch. As we continue to saw off support for the poor, and their numbers swell, people will resort to ever greater acts of desperation, and the price will be a chronic failure of fundamental infrastructure. Its not like we haven't seen this kind of thing happen many times before in history. Just not here (at least not since the Great Depression.)
You know, the nerd amongst us are really the worst communicating bunch of people on the planet (except for everyone else:-) We don't deal with getting our hearts broke or our asses kicked very well because of childhood trauma for being different. So we put up with virtually infinite discomfort that ultimately demands we either go dead inside or commit some for of professional seppuku. So here are some dots placed CLOSE TOGETHER for you to follow.
1. Tell your management what you want. Explain to them where your biggest contribution to them are. Let them know that you appreciate the fact they have a plan. let them know that you want to empower their success and that requires using you most efficiently. Frame the conversation to their benefit, while explaining why you need what you need.
2. If you manage other people, Let them know that you are their champion, you're here to make their lives work. You are not their Father, you aren't there either to throw a couple in the backyard (though having fun it totally part of the gameplan), and you're not there to whip their hinnie if they behave poorly (though shitty performance beget a shitty review.) They are here to be party to building something, and your are here to point the way, conduct, and celebrate the accomplishments of your team members. Have them actually use you to grow themselves in a way that's important to them. Then treat them with infinite respect and dignity even when you feel like kicking them in the groin
3. Start your own company, absolutely do something different, EXPERIENCE DISCOMFORT, here's a fantastic rule: Profound satisfaction is inversely proportional to comfort. We get complacent. We slowly succumb to TV and potato chips. We go for the rut. You what a rut is? It's a coffin with the ends knocked out and you walk back and forth until you lie down in it. Challenge yourself. Grow a pair. Take a chance. Life is out there. Life demands creating new and powerful relationships. Stop trying to do it all by yourself. Get coaching. Take a class. Make connections. Find out where successful entrepreneurs meet and go there (you'd be amazed at how many are interested in helping you get started.) NETWORK YOUR ASS OFF!!! Use social networks.
4. As a group, we have this profound need to know everything before we attempt, quantify all the variables, plan for all the contingencies. This is a nonsubtle form of mental masturbation, and will displace your potential future with a million good reasons why you shouldn't leave the nest... consider you were born to fly and not flying is a waste of your purpose. If nothing else. There is a great course available all over the world, I'm not proselytizing the provider, they're great people don't get me wrong, but pushing their business is... well, their business:-) It's called the "Team Management and Leadership Program". It's a two year program to train you in powerful distinctions in being able to create enterprises both personal and professional, connect them with huge global networks and make them brilliantly productive all the while having more fun than the law should allow. Its not particularly cheap, but its not financial rape either. Part of the cost is the fact that there are 3 prerequisite classes that come before it (but they are weekend seminars, and with any luck you can get them out of the way over in anything from 2 to 6 months (the courses are surprisingly affordable considering the cost or most coursework these days.) The most expensive part of it for people in the US, is that you have to travel to a national convention/classroom once a quarter and they alternate between left and right coasts. They promise when you complete year one, you'll be fit to run a fair sized corporation and when you complete year two you'll be fit to run a fair sized nation. We are not born entrepreneurs. That's why we love machines, they do what you tell them, they're predictable and you get what you asked for eve
You missed the subtle suggestion of overtaking a kingdom. Yes, taking the "reigns", then installing your own puppet ministry. Its all going according to program! Bwuhahahahaahh!!!!
Nothing is "simple". When Jane Goodall first did her research with chimpanzees in the field it was because women were so so despised in the then male dominated field of biology, that no lab would have her and her only access to real research was in the field (a place where very few leading researchers spent any time.) What was particularly interesting is, that at the time the definition of human being included the use of tools. She discovered that chimps were fishing for termites with specially prepared sticks that the apes would carefully fashion for the task. When word got back to the main body of researchers, they had to change the definition of what it meant to be human and spoke of the primitive use of tools. Jane laughed and said "Primitive? You try fishing for termites with a stick." In fact the skill requires such finesse and care, that it takes a human being almost as long as a chimpanzee to perfect the skill. That is, it takes weeks, even months of training.
Plumbing, isn't just sweating pipes. Its following code. Its knowing about the relationship between flow, pressure, and hydraulic shock. Its being clear how to plumb a system so your fresh water source never gets mixed with your grey or black water even if for some reason flow reverses. There are thousands of important issues to be aware of to perform plumbing well, even more to do it brilliantly.
At one time I worked with plumbing for semiconductor furnaces. These were very critical lines carrying N2, SiH4, ArH4, PH3, gases that are toxic in part per billion. We had to use helium leak check equipment to ensure the security of our plumbing. Advanced fittings, exotic metals, high vac and pneumatic systems, all of it is just plumbing.
Basic or simply scripting are coding. Dynamic HTML sits on the borderline between coding and simple content. I don't know what they plan on teaching in a year, but it depends on the person playing. Give a bright kid a little rope and he might just get all boy scout on you. More often then not though, expect some poor sod to hang himself.
Its not that these people are stupid or lazy. Its a serious problem related to being human. During the Nazi takeover of Germany, about a 100,000 Jews saw the writing on the wall and got out of Dodge before things got really ugly. Another 450,000 stayed put, because they couldn't believe that things would get that bad that quickly. They were educated, well to do, and socially active. They had no idea that the world was about to throw them under the bus.
Like other mammals, we can deal with instant risk like a car coming at us, well. Slow motion risks, like building homes on the San Andreas fault, not so much. So its taken 30 years to hijack our government, really screw it over and sell it off one piece at a time to the highest bidder..Now there is only 1 party and it has two faces, whose only difference is who get's the welfare, poor folk or corporations. By the way, I assume you know whose really winning.
We are now being scrutinized more closely than any generation in the history of being human. Virtually everything you do is being recorded somewhere. The pieces haven't all fallen together yet, but they're close. God they're close. If we allow this slow motion coupe to continue, even the pretense of civil rights and human freedom could very well vanish.
We need to have a nice sit down talk with all the folks involved. Sort of explain the basic rules for playing the game. The guys on the left. What you do is not science. It has no basis in science. Its belief... faith... it needs no foundation in science, because its about your mythos and the stories you tell about the creator. You absolutely have a right to that, and in this country the freedom to celebrated and express that faith any way you see fit, save acts that harm or risk harm to others. Stop trying to crib you faith into some psuedo-scientific theoretical framework. When you try to force facts to fit theory, you end up with something contrary to the very nature of science and anyway, its klugie, smells like feet and you've gone and dressed it funny.
You, yes, all y'all on the right. Stop poking at the folks on the left. They aren't stupid. They are practicing a perfectly natural human behavior and if it doesn't pass the muster of your process for validating truth and reality, tough, it isn't meant to, they have the right engage in magical thinking, and in some very interesting conversations, may well have things to say a human beings and metaphysics that will take the scientists among us a very long time to determine one way or the other. I mean its nonsense to mess with intangibles that way, would you try to quantify the elements of your healthy emotional life? There are parts of the human experience and behavior that are illogical, and presuppose completely unprovable assertions. Trying to logic your way through them will only irritate the natives and undermine your ability to communicate or demonstrate the amazing power of your rigorous intellectual process for determining reality when the general populace will some day most need that bright thinking.
Please, play nice and stop trying to break each others toys. Its irritating. I know some of you get your hackles up when you see Cavemen riding on the backs of Apatosaurs at the Christian Museum in Kansas City (a la Flintstones.) It wasn't so long ago you believed in St. Nick. Stop trying to screw up the others kids Christmas morning, its not your place. Maybe some day soon, somebody will squish something big at the LHC and what quirts out displays a message that says "Jesus is here too!", until then, cut each other a little slack and try to enjoy the toys you have.
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I'm sorry but as long as you make the changes slowly enough, people just get used to them... for the love of gawd, they were using human beings as kindling in Germany, and the majority of the German Jews never left, because they couldn't imagine it going that wrong.
And for the Luv-O-Jebus don't say "Ay?".
All of them... have you not paid attention to the national economic situation since 2008 which is DIRECTLY a result of an unregulated Wallstreet Banking industry resulting in virtually EVERY STATE in the union on the verge of bankruptcy.
I would classify this as a pretty massive failure in the free market myself. Would you be interested in debating that issue?
I'm a US citizen, and lately I'm half tempted to cut diplomatic ties!!!
Blood my friend is a bio-hazard. If those pigs had accidentally been infected with something (and if the handling of these animals is reflected by the way their wastes are being handled the sky really is the limit here), then that pathogenic waste just hit a couple million people. The reason that the laws are not being enforced is that corporations have lobbied our representatives to GUT agencies involved with regulation and a means to cut government spending, so now we have supermarkets selling rotten food because theirs only one government inspector for an entire national region. You may be right about people being clever about polluting, to that I would simply say, take the economic incentive to pollute out of the equation. Make the cost of poisoning air, water or employees so gawd aweful that no sane executive would even consider doing it.
It won't help, browsers are so smart they conform to your search habits so this twit will only see the kind of mind-numbing tripe that has already stunted his perception of reality. Have him go to the LIBRARY, and use an unpolluted search environment. Then look up the purely insane laws that Dick Chaney got shoved through for his fracking buddies at Halliburton. Better yet, go get the HBO emmy award winning documentary on fracking "Gasland". There are people out there who have no problem crashing your economy to get wealthy, what makes you think there aren't people who will poison your water for the same reason?
I have a profound confusion for folks who think that government is evil, but corporation and business are magically devoid of human frailty. Human beings are amazing, on the one hand they are loving, compassionate, generous and noble. On the other hand they are some of the lowest scum sucking primates with a pulse. This would suggest that all human enterprise requires some level of monitoring, management and regulation, to prevent what is worst in people from crapping all over the scenery and one another. That goes for governments, and you better believe that goes for corporations. We need to build a strong cage of regulation with the room and freedom to grow and thrive, but HARSH penalties for committing wanton acts of abuse on people or the environment. Why is this not obvious?
Alright, you watch "48 Hours" or "Criminal minds" on TV and something you see about terrorism or murder piques your interest so gawd forbid you Google it. Whether it the "Anarchists Cookbook" or "How to hide murder by using succinylcholine", you have just made yourself a potential target of a law enforcement agency, and if gawd forbid again, anything bad happens in your household or neighborhood in the next 24 months, your browsing habits have just planted a smoking gun in your hand.
You don't even have to be the one who does the search. You leave you home PC logged in as you, and your eldest male-child does a search on how to "Terminate a butthead little brother" and you could be buggered.
Its not paranoia if Government Agencies have virtually unlimited resources to smoke your hinny like a Cohiba, at the first blush of illegal activity. Its also not particularly heart warming to discover that Prosecuting Attorneys have almost no interest in getting the right guy (that's the job of the police), just winning the case. The number of poor innocent bastards in prison in this country does not exactly inspire confidence in our legal system. Hell, Texas just executed what the entire planet now knows was almost certainly an innocent man just for political value.
You better believe that I find myself faced with two options in these modern times. They are; Willfully avoid any appearance or opportunity to be caught doing anything that might get me buggered, or Run silent and run deep. Anything else is Russian Roulette.
My friend, I hate to be the one to tell you this but your pants are already down around your ankles and you are about to take a most unpleasant excursion into what happens to people with unprotected orifices. There are huge forces at work here. Some of those forces have faces, but many of them don't. Greed is a mindless drive. It doesn't look at repercussions. A company makes a financially wise decision for this quarter, sowing the seeds for the destruction of of own middle class market. That's profoundly stupid, but the bean counters can't see the connection between short term choices and long term impacts. You crap into the water and air, and in a hundred year you can't drink or breath... or worse, the climate rolls over and dies and nobody can say for certain it was all that crap, so they just keep on crapping.
That run away locomotive, technology, it has you square in its sights my friend. I may get run over first, but you aren't far behind. What happens when the machines you design today leads to machines who can do your job, or any job cheaper that any human being can do it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Tell me where your pants are going to be on that fine day. We are in a race to the bottom, with a tiny few who are now at the top. However, even that will collapse. The world is getting very unpredictable, and I would be ever so careful not to cultivate hubris in the face of accelerating change. Now is time for sanity, in world where sanity is quick becoming a rare commodity.
Yes, we call them privatized prisons...
I beg your pardon, feces form the base of fertilizing thousands of fields around the world!!! Shit serves a useful purpose. I challenge you to find a single useful purpose for Mr. Murdoch! Now if you were to plow his sorry ass into a rice paddy, then I would wholeheartedly agree on calling him shit.
I'm sorry, are we not aware of the consolidation of global mass media to a pretty much a monolithic group of fewer than two dozen mega-corporations? Add to the fact that print, video, recording and film media have their unified consortia and you're surprised that they march in lock step? Its all the same people. You hear what they want, when they want, and nobody talks about whatever they want to remain out of the public eye or ear. The internet is the last rodeo in town and you best believe they're going after it like their lives depend on it. Checkmate in 4 moves... WAKE UP!!!
You should stop right there! That would be a "Blow" job over which you would never get!
You're right. We shouldn't blame tigers for eating people either. They're just doing what tigers do. We do however, cage them or shoot them. When corporations exercise their need for profit to the detriment of the world and its inhabitants, its time to cage them or shoot them (metaphorically speaking.) Government needs to be COMPLETELY ISOLATED from corporations for the benefit of all, including the corporations themselves who will gleefully gut themselves tomorrow for profit today. Government's job is to provide working infrastructure and common social resource to make most human enterprises feasible and operable (both for profit and not.)
Our failure has been to allow corporations to hijack the machine managing infrastructure for... PROFIT. This in turn has been a slow motion disaster to the people of the United States and the world at large. It is now time to lock down on corporations HARD! We build a beautiful cage after the great depression, it took the last 30 years for Corporate America to destroy its cage and now we have the world of the present going to hell in a hand basket. Its time to repair the cage, bolster it where it was previously weak, and institute a Constitutional Amendment that separates corporation and state the same way church and state are currently separate.
It is much easier to manage these institutions when we keep them away from one another.
Clearly you've bought into the misdirection. At first blush, it looks like they want to prevent the illegal download of copyrighted material (their water.) On closer examination they could care less about the "water" they want your "pipes." With control of your pipes, it doesn't matter where your water comes from or what you use the water for, they control the flow and can turn off your water without so much as a second thought... and with that, kiss anything resembling global free speech and democracy goodbye (that kind of water will never see "their" piped ever again.)
Our society has ALWAYS put up with minor inconvenience (idiots talking loudly in public, and yellow journalism) because we thought the price was small compared to the benefit that freedom brings. This however won't fly in the face of "Profit". There is no margin for "putting up with" if your intent is to squeeze every last femto-liter of profit out of the world at large. At best you and I are imminent trespassers on the property of some future super-Murdoch. As for your metaphor, look at what is happening to water on the planet today.
Perhaps its time for people to try something different. During times of strife, "The People" boycotted despotic providers. In the south, the black civil rights leaders convinced a city to walk instead of riding the bus in the back. In India, million started wearing only home woven fabric. We can break the financial backs of those who would buy and sell us. We would simply have to put our conscience ahead of our comfort.
The landing turned Tom inside out and made a crater.... negative height!
The problem with the U.S. government is that it's virtually impossible for it to get vocal when it's collective mouths are full of Corporate Kielbasa. Over the last 30 years we've had a dramatic shift of power away from the people and towards corporation. Politics has always demanded a certain level of whoring, if for nothing else, to keep both ones adversaries and ones own party at bay. However, today we have an elected body that has for all intents and purposes perfected the art of felating our corporate leaders, truth in advertising would suggest that all pictures of the legislature include knee pads. The supreme court, stuffed with neo-fascist ass hats by 30 years of neo-fascist presidents, has all but paved the way for the corporate take-over of the Federal Government. Our "Bill of Rights" hangs in tatters, while corporate leaders proudly proclaim on national television "We don't particularly like democracy, it just gets in the way." Sadly we now have the best government money can buy.
E85 was a bad joke from the start. If you consider the amount of oil it takes to water the corn, fertilize the corn, then harvest the corn, then process it to get your ethanol, its a huge losing proposition from a purely environmental position. It also profoundly screws with the food markets, and puts the poor around the world on precarious footing towards starvation.
The people it benefits are the big moneied corporate agribusinesses. It makes grain less available, jacks up the price of corn commodities, and in short makes a bunch of greedy buggers even wealthier.
You want to use a sane fuel? Oil from Algae, is sane. Ethanol from bullgrass is sane. Ethanol and methanol from sewage and organic waste is sane. By all means, turn refuse and societies byproducts into fuel and fuel additives. Just get food out of the equation.
What scares me most is having this undead piece of rancid pig feces laying around, is that some time over the next year a special committee will convene and railroad this thing through in the dark of night while nobody is looking or can respond to it. Our legislature has in recent years done a number of dirty deeds in the middle of the night to avoid notice, prevent obstruction and make evil corporate masters happy.
I want a stake through this things heart, its head removed and a bucket of holy water dowsed on it.
This is exactly the point, the society is cannibalizing itself. Sure you have folks who would pull the gold from other people teeth while they chew for drug money, but there are a lot of folks who've gotten just plain desperate for money to keep the kids in milk and Captain Crunch. As we continue to saw off support for the poor, and their numbers swell, people will resort to ever greater acts of desperation, and the price will be a chronic failure of fundamental infrastructure. Its not like we haven't seen this kind of thing happen many times before in history. Just not here (at least not since the Great Depression.)
You know, the nerd amongst us are really the worst communicating bunch of people on the planet (except for everyone else :-) We don't deal with getting our hearts broke or our asses kicked very well because of childhood trauma for being different. So we put up with virtually infinite discomfort that ultimately demands we either go dead inside or commit some for of professional seppuku. So here are some dots placed CLOSE TOGETHER for you to follow.
1. Tell your management what you want. Explain to them where your biggest contribution to them are. Let them know that you appreciate the fact they have a plan. let them know that you want to empower their success and that requires using you most efficiently. Frame the conversation to their benefit, while explaining why you need what you need.
2. If you manage other people, Let them know that you are their champion, you're here to make their lives work. You are not their Father, you aren't there either to throw a couple in the backyard (though having fun it totally part of the gameplan), and you're not there to whip their hinnie if they behave poorly (though shitty performance beget a shitty review.) They are here to be party to building something, and your are here to point the way, conduct, and celebrate the accomplishments of your team members. Have them actually use you to grow themselves in a way that's important to them. Then treat them with infinite respect and dignity even when you feel like kicking them in the groin
3. Start your own company, absolutely do something different, EXPERIENCE DISCOMFORT, here's a fantastic rule: Profound satisfaction is inversely proportional to comfort. We get complacent. We slowly succumb to TV and potato chips. We go for the rut. You what a rut is? It's a coffin with the ends knocked out and you walk back and forth until you lie down in it. Challenge yourself. Grow a pair. Take a chance. Life is out there. Life demands creating new and powerful relationships. Stop trying to do it all by yourself. Get coaching. Take a class. Make connections. Find out where successful entrepreneurs meet and go there (you'd be amazed at how many are interested in helping you get started.) NETWORK YOUR ASS OFF!!! Use social networks.
4. As a group, we have this profound need to know everything before we attempt, quantify all the variables, plan for all the contingencies. This is a nonsubtle form of mental masturbation, and will displace your potential future with a million good reasons why you shouldn't leave the nest... consider you were born to fly and not flying is a waste of your purpose. If nothing else. There is a great course available all over the world, I'm not proselytizing the provider, they're great people don't get me wrong, but pushing their business is... well, their business :-) It's called the "Team Management and Leadership Program". It's a two year program to train you in powerful distinctions in being able to create enterprises both personal and professional, connect them with huge global networks and make them brilliantly productive all the while having more fun than the law should allow. Its not particularly cheap, but its not financial rape either. Part of the cost is the fact that there are 3 prerequisite classes that come before it (but they are weekend seminars, and with any luck you can get them out of the way over in anything from 2 to 6 months (the courses are surprisingly affordable considering the cost or most coursework these days.) The most expensive part of it for people in the US, is that you have to travel to a national convention/classroom once a quarter and they alternate between left and right coasts. They promise when you complete year one, you'll be fit to run a fair sized corporation and when you complete year two you'll be fit to run a fair sized nation. We are not born entrepreneurs. That's why we love machines, they do what you tell them, they're predictable and you get what you asked for eve
You missed the subtle suggestion of overtaking a kingdom. Yes, taking the "reigns", then installing your own puppet ministry. Its all going according to program! Bwuhahahahaahh!!!!
Nothing is "simple". When Jane Goodall first did her research with chimpanzees in the field it was because women were so so despised in the then male dominated field of biology, that no lab would have her and her only access to real research was in the field (a place where very few leading researchers spent any time.) What was particularly interesting is, that at the time the definition of human being included the use of tools. She discovered that chimps were fishing for termites with specially prepared sticks that the apes would carefully fashion for the task. When word got back to the main body of researchers, they had to change the definition of what it meant to be human and spoke of the primitive use of tools. Jane laughed and said "Primitive? You try fishing for termites with a stick." In fact the skill requires such finesse and care, that it takes a human being almost as long as a chimpanzee to perfect the skill. That is, it takes weeks, even months of training.
Plumbing, isn't just sweating pipes. Its following code. Its knowing about the relationship between flow, pressure, and hydraulic shock. Its being clear how to plumb a system so your fresh water source never gets mixed with your grey or black water even if for some reason flow reverses. There are thousands of important issues to be aware of to perform plumbing well, even more to do it brilliantly.
At one time I worked with plumbing for semiconductor furnaces. These were very critical lines carrying N2, SiH4, ArH4, PH3, gases that are toxic in part per billion. We had to use helium leak check equipment to ensure the security of our plumbing. Advanced fittings, exotic metals, high vac and pneumatic systems, all of it is just plumbing.
Basic or simply scripting are coding. Dynamic HTML sits on the borderline between coding and simple content. I don't know what they plan on teaching in a year, but it depends on the person playing. Give a bright kid a little rope and he might just get all boy scout on you. More often then not though, expect some poor sod to hang himself.
Of an old joke, Java is now like an infected wiener, you don't need to amputate it... "In few days, turn black, and fall off all by self!
Its not that these people are stupid or lazy. Its a serious problem related to being human. During the Nazi takeover of Germany, about a 100,000 Jews saw the writing on the wall and got out of Dodge before things got really ugly. Another 450,000 stayed put, because they couldn't believe that things would get that bad that quickly. They were educated, well to do, and socially active. They had no idea that the world was about to throw them under the bus.
This kind of behavior shows up all over the place and is a form of Risk Normalization. There's a great article about Why Human Beings are so lousy at identifying risk.
Like other mammals, we can deal with instant risk like a car coming at us, well. Slow motion risks, like building homes on the San Andreas fault, not so much. So its taken 30 years to hijack our government, really screw it over and sell it off one piece at a time to the highest bidder..Now there is only 1 party and it has two faces, whose only difference is who get's the welfare, poor folk or corporations. By the way, I assume you know whose really winning.
We are now being scrutinized more closely than any generation in the history of being human. Virtually everything you do is being recorded somewhere. The pieces haven't all fallen together yet, but they're close. God they're close. If we allow this slow motion coupe to continue, even the pretense of civil rights and human freedom could very well vanish.
We need to have a nice sit down talk with all the folks involved. Sort of explain the basic rules for playing the game. The guys on the left. What you do is not science. It has no basis in science. Its belief... faith... it needs no foundation in science, because its about your mythos and the stories you tell about the creator. You absolutely have a right to that, and in this country the freedom to celebrated and express that faith any way you see fit, save acts that harm or risk harm to others. Stop trying to crib you faith into some psuedo-scientific theoretical framework. When you try to force facts to fit theory, you end up with something contrary to the very nature of science and anyway, its klugie, smells like feet and you've gone and dressed it funny.
You, yes, all y'all on the right. Stop poking at the folks on the left. They aren't stupid. They are practicing a perfectly natural human behavior and if it doesn't pass the muster of your process for validating truth and reality, tough, it isn't meant to, they have the right engage in magical thinking, and in some very interesting conversations, may well have things to say a human beings and metaphysics that will take the scientists among us a very long time to determine one way or the other. I mean its nonsense to mess with intangibles that way, would you try to quantify the elements of your healthy emotional life? There are parts of the human experience and behavior that are illogical, and presuppose completely unprovable assertions. Trying to logic your way through them will only irritate the natives and undermine your ability to communicate or demonstrate the amazing power of your rigorous intellectual process for determining reality when the general populace will some day most need that bright thinking.
Please, play nice and stop trying to break each others toys. Its irritating. I know some of you get your hackles up when you see Cavemen riding on the backs of Apatosaurs at the Christian Museum in Kansas City (a la Flintstones.) It wasn't so long ago you believed in St. Nick. Stop trying to screw up the others kids Christmas morning, its not your place. Maybe some day soon, somebody will squish something big at the LHC and what quirts out displays a message that says "Jesus is here too!", until then, cut each other a little slack and try to enjoy the toys you have.