How the hell did we get from "Man (woman) marries man (woman) he is committed to and loves" to "anybody marrying anything" ?!?!?!?
It's a common tactic of gay marriage opponents - they're just trying to tar the issue with anything they can find, and 'Man marrying livestock' seems universally repugnant. I believe the technical term is 'straw-man'
I just said that gay and lesbian marriage propnents ignore a particular attribute of marriage, and that the idea of "anybody marrying anything" need not necessarily be as wonderful as it may seem.
Firstly, I would imagine that they don't publicize their itnentions to adopt for fear of being further demonized - lots of people really do think that all gays are pedophiles. Secondly, marriage includes a whole host of other privileges that gays have every right to exercise (hospital visitation, inheritance, etc.). Since we don't make childrearing a requirement for marriage, then it isn't a valid legal reason to exclude gays. Marriage is primarily about commitment and is a legal union - there's no reason to say that two men can't do that as well as a man and a woman.
The reason you can move your deductions onto your partners return and vice-versa, to get the tax breaks, is because even if there was no law allowing it **you could do it anyway**, because they would never be able to prove whose actual deduction it was in the first place, since you likely have joint accounts etc etc.
Don't you mean 'even if there was no law forbidding it'? We don't need laws to tell us what we can do.
On the other hand, if everybody has bread and circuses, it's a pretty good indicator that our system is mostly working. Even 90% of civil liberties issues come about as a result of people being denied equal opportunity to access one or the other.
Which begs the question of what our system is trying to do in the first place - is it intended to placate us enough that we don't notice the small number of people at the top (wherever they are) doing whatever the hell we want and running roughshod over is to get it?
The original claim was that "the market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering". Standard Oil is NOT a case of this.
I thought the claim was that this was the common case; certainly, it happens, so the only debate is how often it occurrs. Regardless, we have seen the damaging effect of allowing consolidation in certain sectors (specifically communication), and so we do need regulation there. This does move away from a pure free market, but that's as much an abstraction as a perfect anarchy.
Here is one example. Rockefeller pressured a railroad into preventing a rival oil pipeline from crossing its property. But wait! It was only because of prior government interference that the railroad had such long narrow swaths of inviolate property and right of ways! The government had granted railroads the property and right to build legal fences baring the transport of goods they didn't want transported. Common law would have allowed the passage of that pipeline.
That's rather tortured. In order for your condition of no government interference to hold, we'd need no government at all. Go look at Russia for that, back after the USSR fell. There you'll see what happens with zero government.
The mythology of anti-freedom is that monopolies can lower their prices such that their competitors will be run out of business, after which they can jack up their prices to extreme levels. But this doesn't match Standard Oil's history. They consistantly kept their prices low. Never did they raise them to exorbitant levels.
Possibly, Rockefeller used other tactics to force his competitors out of business. Sabotage, collusion (with the railroad company), and so forth. The tricks played by Ma bell pale in comparison.
Notice how I'm talking about competitors? That's because THEY EXISTED. That 90% was a *peak* market share! Their share was only 64% at the time of their anti-trust trial. How can there be a *continuous* history of competitor buyouts if there were no competitors?
Notice that bit I wrote about finding oil in LA? The anti trust trial didn't hurt Standard Oil, all the new competitors did. Before that, they dispensed with competitors fairly handily.
I'm sorry, but Standard Oil does not meet the criteria. Its existance did not exclude competition in the marketplace. While it did exploit the power of government on occasion, overall it is an example of efficiency, not of coercive malignancy.
Nothing in the world will prevent competition from existing. A large, aggressive company like Standard Oil will, however, ensure that competition is short lived.
Please name one. You said there are "plenty", but I'll make it easy as ask for just one. But you must use YOUR criteria:
Standard Oil, which grew to its peak in spite of government efforts to split it up. It finally succumbed (sort of) when Oil was discovered in Louisianna and companies formed faster than they could be bought out/sabotaged.
But really the devs etc don't matter that much - what matters most is top management. Go see the difference of Apple with and without Steve Jobs.
Now try and imagine Apple without Woz - not happening. A tech company with no devs can exist for awhile, but if you want to start something new, you gotta have the devs. They can also be management - look at google.
Development is pretty far down, as you can see. You must understand - you don't bring cash into the organization (sales), nor do your efforts directly affect the price of company stock (marketing), both of which are of top importance to the CxOs.
You must be in a different company from me. If development stops, yeah, things keep going, but nothing new will get developed. We won't make anything new, no new deals will be signed (if they're smart), you get the idea. Sales signs deals, but we make the money and drive new growth.
I wish I had better news for you, but you can always get salespeople; developers are your lifeblood. Yeah, you need someone to sell the stuff, but technical people concieve the product and give it form.
This included everything. Including the screensaver that seamlessly blended from slide to slide of the company's publicity shots. Bingo! 100% CPU when the screensaver kicks in and the analysis runs can no longer work unattended.
Wonderful - in order to do your work, you had to compromise security. Just one thing: did they also install the screen saver on the DB servers?
may require much more than you realize. Case in point. A developer needed a single column added to a table, and we had done test and acceptance testing. He wanted the column added during the day, so we put it in with an alter - no big deal right? After 50 seconds or so, the alter timed out, and took down users all over the country with it!!!!
What sort of idiot does a ddl change in the middle of the day? Also, shouldn't you already know the usage patterns of your own application? This isn't a problem of unknown consequences, it's a problem of developers messing with things they don't understand. I have a similar story, but I at least knew to expect problems:
I was retiring a use case for a legacy application that had been around for a few years and was used by anybody who could get at the data. I checked all the obvious places, notified teams that may be using it - nothing. I moved the data to a new service, everything looked fine. Two hours later, I get paged - one of the teams failed to notice that they were using the data in some egregious hack and this impacted production. Had to roll the whole thing back.
Notice how this worked: Notify, write a backout plan, test, deploy, watch. No 'little changes'.
for instance who owns the system? If it's IT, they may not have budget to add more ram whenever someone asks for it. If it's you or your group, can you get a PO approved?
Since when does IT own anything outside of IT? Your system should be owned by your group. IT just supports it.
Those kinds of moves are exactly the kind that destroy IT's willingness to accomodate user requests.
This isn't a user request. It's a group giving requirements to IT. IT is within its rights to demand control over the boxes or else disclaim all responsibility, but the migration of rickety dev services to production is certainly part of their duties, if only in a consulting capacity.
The other example I remember him pointing is the German word Schadenfreude (the malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortune of others). There is no Engligh word for that
Sure there is: Schadenfreude. We'll take words from anywhere; we're not proud.
The Eskimo kid would learn early-on that snow has different forms, and that life depended on knowing how to behave in their vicinity. The fact that those types of snow probably were adressed by a multitude of recursive suffixes to a root noun can only have some effect on a learning brain.
Why should a brain under these conditions develop the same patterns as the brain of a kid that lives with guys that call everything "the white stuff"?
Obviously, a kid who grows up around snow knows more about it than somebody in LA, but what about the kid in vermont? He has just as many ways to describe snow (crunchy, soft, coarse, fine, wet, etc.), it's just structured in a different (equivalent way). A common vocabulary allows easier communication, but that's all.
I remember having read about a study that found that community of people from a certain area in Africa, who had a long-standing history of cattle breeding and trading, had a whole lot of (92?) "words" for brown. [...] Anyway, these people were reported to also be able to dinstinguish far many more differences of brown shades than Europeans in non-verbal tests (IIRC - might also be that the control group was non-cattle farming people in the same area.)
Betcha they'd compare about equally to ranchers in the midwest - it's not about language so much as experience. Experience begets language; this is why most computer jargon is english - we (US and UK) got there first, so we made the jargon. I expect to see more Japanese-rooted jargon in fields like AI and robotics due to the work of the Japanese, but I expect that it will have nothing to do with magical properties inherent in Japanese. We just make up jargon as needed.
Agreed. I think the lawyer's job is not to argue to get "bad guys" off the hook (and perhaps it isn't; I don't see lawyers outside of TV or movies), but to ensure a fair trial.
A lawyer's job is to win. Like it or not, that's how it is.
Glad I'm not the only guy to think the blocking could back-fire. Theoretically (and I'm sure someone will correct me), now members of Congress have standing to sue Wikipedia for an equal rights violation (you give everyone rights to edit information, to even possibly slander the politicians, but do not give those people who are theoretically best able to judge the accuracy that right.)
Nah, you don't have a guarantee of equal access to other people's publications.
If they don't watch out, they could find themselves in a free-speech shoot-out with Congress passing laws that wiki owners are responsible for all content posted online, or that hey have a responsibility to get rid of "slanderous" information within a certain period of time.
Sounds like a slight modification of the DMCA - problem is, slander is harder to prove than copyright status.
When there is a female president, that is when women are truly free. When Hilary Clinton wins the election, this is when women are people.
Screw Hillary and her plantation rhetoric. The president of Pakistan is a woman, and the PM of England was named Margaret back in the day. What were you saying again?
By that logic, Blizzard can just remove all stats and graphics and just become IRC-III. Just because some people are ignoring the game doesn't mean the people trying to foster the game should throw up their hands and give up.
What's that got to do with roleplaying? I was speaking more of the actual RP dialog, as opposed to the rampant Chuck Norris refs.
Slashdot Mirror
How the hell did we get from "Man (woman) marries man (woman) he is committed to and loves" to "anybody marrying anything" ?!?!?!?
It's a common tactic of gay marriage opponents - they're just trying to tar the issue with anything they can find, and 'Man marrying livestock' seems universally repugnant. I believe the technical term is 'straw-man'
I just said that gay and lesbian marriage propnents ignore a particular attribute of marriage, and that the idea of "anybody marrying anything" need not necessarily be as wonderful as it may seem.
Firstly, I would imagine that they don't publicize their itnentions to adopt for fear of being further demonized - lots of people really do think that all gays are pedophiles. Secondly, marriage includes a whole host of other privileges that gays have every right to exercise (hospital visitation, inheritance, etc.). Since we don't make childrearing a requirement for marriage, then it isn't a valid legal reason to exclude gays. Marriage is primarily about commitment and is a legal union - there's no reason to say that two men can't do that as well as a man and a woman.
The reason you can move your deductions onto your partners return and vice-versa, to get the tax breaks, is because even if there was no law allowing it **you could do it anyway**, because they would never be able to prove whose actual deduction it was in the first place, since you likely have joint accounts etc etc.
Don't you mean 'even if there was no law forbidding it'? We don't need laws to tell us what we can do.
On the other hand, if everybody has bread and circuses, it's a pretty good indicator that our system is mostly working. Even 90% of civil liberties issues come about as a result of people being denied equal opportunity to access one or the other.
Which begs the question of what our system is trying to do in the first place - is it intended to placate us enough that we don't notice the small number of people at the top (wherever they are) doing whatever the hell we want and running roughshod over is to get it?
The original claim was that "the market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering". Standard Oil is NOT a case of this.
I thought the claim was that this was the common case; certainly, it happens, so the only debate is how often it occurrs. Regardless, we have seen the damaging effect of allowing consolidation in certain sectors (specifically communication), and so we do need regulation there. This does move away from a pure free market, but that's as much an abstraction as a perfect anarchy.
Here is one example. Rockefeller pressured a railroad into preventing a rival oil pipeline from crossing its property. But wait! It was only because of prior government interference that the railroad had such long narrow swaths of inviolate property and right of ways! The government had granted railroads the property and right to build legal fences baring the transport of goods they didn't want transported. Common law would have allowed the passage of that pipeline.
That's rather tortured. In order for your condition of no government interference to hold, we'd need no government at all. Go look at Russia for that, back after the USSR fell. There you'll see what happens with zero government.
The mythology of anti-freedom is that monopolies can lower their prices such that their competitors will be run out of business, after which they can jack up their prices to extreme levels. But this doesn't match Standard Oil's history. They consistantly kept their prices low. Never did they raise them to exorbitant levels.
Possibly, Rockefeller used other tactics to force his competitors out of business. Sabotage, collusion (with the railroad company), and so forth. The tricks played by Ma bell pale in comparison.
Notice how I'm talking about competitors? That's because THEY EXISTED. That 90% was a *peak* market share! Their share was only 64% at the time of their anti-trust trial. How can there be a *continuous* history of competitor buyouts if there were no competitors?
Notice that bit I wrote about finding oil in LA? The anti trust trial didn't hurt Standard Oil, all the new competitors did. Before that, they dispensed with competitors fairly handily.
I'm sorry, but Standard Oil does not meet the criteria. Its existance did not exclude competition in the marketplace. While it did exploit the power of government on occasion, overall it is an example of efficiency, not of coercive malignancy.
Nothing in the world will prevent competition from existing. A large, aggressive company like Standard Oil will, however, ensure that competition is short lived.
Please name one. You said there are "plenty", but I'll make it easy as ask for just one. But you must use YOUR criteria:
Standard Oil, which grew to its peak in spite of government efforts to split it up. It finally succumbed (sort of) when Oil was discovered in Louisianna and companies formed faster than they could be bought out/sabotaged.
BUT if the Bosses keep deciding _they_ get most of the resources, guess what happens.
We run off to start another company and wish the bosses luck replacing us?
But really the devs etc don't matter that much - what matters most is top management. Go see the difference of Apple with and without Steve Jobs.
Now try and imagine Apple without Woz - not happening. A tech company with no devs can exist for awhile, but if you want to start something new, you gotta have the devs. They can also be management - look at google.
Development is pretty far down, as you can see. You must understand - you don't bring cash into the organization (sales), nor do your efforts directly affect the price of company stock (marketing), both of which are of top importance to the CxOs.
You must be in a different company from me. If development stops, yeah, things keep going, but nothing new will get developed. We won't make anything new, no new deals will be signed (if they're smart), you get the idea. Sales signs deals, but we make the money and drive new growth.
I wish I had better news for you, but you can always get salespeople; developers are your lifeblood. Yeah, you need someone to sell the stuff, but technical people concieve the product and give it form.
This included everything. Including the screensaver that seamlessly blended from slide to slide of the company's publicity shots. Bingo! 100% CPU when the screensaver kicks in and the analysis runs can no longer work unattended.
Wonderful - in order to do your work, you had to compromise security. Just one thing: did they also install the screen saver on the DB servers?
may require much more than you realize. Case in point. A developer needed a single column added to a table, and we had done test and acceptance testing. He wanted the column added during the day, so we put it in with an alter - no big deal right? After 50 seconds or so, the alter timed out, and took down users all over the country with it!!!!
What sort of idiot does a ddl change in the middle of the day? Also, shouldn't you already know the usage patterns of your own application? This isn't a problem of unknown consequences, it's a problem of developers messing with things they don't understand. I have a similar story, but I at least knew to expect problems:
I was retiring a use case for a legacy application that had been around for a few years and was used by anybody who could get at the data. I checked all the obvious places, notified teams that may be using it - nothing. I moved the data to a new service, everything looked fine. Two hours later, I get paged - one of the teams failed to notice that they were using the data in some egregious hack and this impacted production. Had to roll the whole thing back.
Notice how this worked: Notify, write a backout plan, test, deploy, watch. No 'little changes'.
for instance who owns the system? If it's IT, they may not have budget to add more ram whenever someone asks for it. If it's you or your group, can you get a PO approved?
Since when does IT own anything outside of IT? Your system should be owned by your group. IT just supports it.
Those kinds of moves are exactly the kind that destroy IT's willingness to accomodate user requests.
This isn't a user request. It's a group giving requirements to IT. IT is within its rights to demand control over the boxes or else disclaim all responsibility, but the migration of rickety dev services to production is certainly part of their duties, if only in a consulting capacity.
It's just that I believe that language also feeds back into experience. People with a clue tell me I'm wrong, but I'm stubborn.
Language feeds back into experience to the extent that it facilitates further experience and communication.
The other example I remember him pointing is the German word Schadenfreude (the malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortune of others). There is no Engligh word for that
Sure there is: Schadenfreude. We'll take words from anywhere; we're not proud.
The Eskimo kid would learn early-on that snow has different forms, and that life depended on knowing how to behave in their vicinity. The fact that those types of snow probably were adressed by a multitude of recursive suffixes to a root noun can only have some effect on a learning brain. Why should a brain under these conditions develop the same patterns as the brain of a kid that lives with guys that call everything "the white stuff"?
Obviously, a kid who grows up around snow knows more about it than somebody in LA, but what about the kid in vermont? He has just as many ways to describe snow (crunchy, soft, coarse, fine, wet, etc.), it's just structured in a different (equivalent way). A common vocabulary allows easier communication, but that's all.
I remember having read about a study that found that community of people from a certain area in Africa, who had a long-standing history of cattle breeding and trading, had a whole lot of (92?) "words" for brown. [...] Anyway, these people were reported to also be able to dinstinguish far many more differences of brown shades than Europeans in non-verbal tests (IIRC - might also be that the control group was non-cattle farming people in the same area.)
Betcha they'd compare about equally to ranchers in the midwest - it's not about language so much as experience. Experience begets language; this is why most computer jargon is english - we (US and UK) got there first, so we made the jargon. I expect to see more Japanese-rooted jargon in fields like AI and robotics due to the work of the Japanese, but I expect that it will have nothing to do with magical properties inherent in Japanese. We just make up jargon as needed.
Agreed. I think the lawyer's job is not to argue to get "bad guys" off the hook (and perhaps it isn't; I don't see lawyers outside of TV or movies), but to ensure a fair trial.
A lawyer's job is to win. Like it or not, that's how it is.
I think feeling pain is often a mind over matter kind of thing.
It is, but only to a point. I broke my neck about 20 years ago - I don't care who you are, THAT SHIT HURTS!
All beer is mostly water, silly.
So is vodka, but it still dehydrates you.
If getting shot causes pain, wouldn't the same be true for its not-so-distant-cousin, pleasure?
Well, some people get off on hot wax and whips, so yeah.
Glad I'm not the only guy to think the blocking could back-fire. Theoretically (and I'm sure someone will correct me), now members of Congress have standing to sue Wikipedia for an equal rights violation (you give everyone rights to edit information, to even possibly slander the politicians, but do not give those people who are theoretically best able to judge the accuracy that right.)
Nah, you don't have a guarantee of equal access to other people's publications.
If they don't watch out, they could find themselves in a free-speech shoot-out with Congress passing laws that wiki owners are responsible for all content posted online, or that hey have a responsibility to get rid of "slanderous" information within a certain period of time.
Sounds like a slight modification of the DMCA - problem is, slander is harder to prove than copyright status.
When there is a female president, that is when women are truly free. When Hilary Clinton wins the election, this is when women are people.
Screw Hillary and her plantation rhetoric. The president of Pakistan is a woman, and the PM of England was named Margaret back in the day. What were you saying again?
OK, we've covered the gays. Now about Martians playing WoW...
Gay martians, mind, so they're covered as well. By the way, do you know what the queers are doing to the soil?
By that logic, Blizzard can just remove all stats and graphics and just become IRC-III. Just because some people are ignoring the game doesn't mean the people trying to foster the game should throw up their hands and give up.
What's that got to do with roleplaying? I was speaking more of the actual RP dialog, as opposed to the rampant Chuck Norris refs.