I know its a waste of time, but thought I'd let others know who might believe you. Iraq was developing/using WMDs on its own population. They probably got those weapons from the US, but were making their own as well.
In order to make them stop, the UN Security Council in one of its unanimous votes passed UN resolution 1441 aimed at stopping Iraq from developing WMDs (gas weapons that they had used on their own people already). Saddam refused to comply, period. Anything Hans Blix said is irrelevant because Saddam refused to comply with the resolution. Before the invasion there was a UN vote to use force for non-compliance, and 2 different US Congressional votes on the same thing. The only one in the world who said they shouldn't invade for non-compliance was Saddam.
They all voted this because they assumed Saddam would comply or force would not be used. Bush said what he was going to do, held the votes before he did it, and followed through.
All other claims that Bush did it by himself with no support or reasonable chances for Saddam to stop it are lying, pure and simple. The only people who believe like you do refuse to admit the truth of what happened and ignore 182,000 murders by gas attacks of his own people by Saddam.
Hi Judy, welcome to Slashdot. How's the book tour going?
Quite a bit happened before the seals choppered into a complex then shot him and dumped his body in the ocean. Is anyone even sure that happened, if it did I doubt it did the way they say it did..
Nearly everybody in the complex killed and who remained has never even been brought forward to account for events. The most hated man was shot on sight instead of being drug into a kangaroo court to be humiliated for a year before being put to death just like every other villain the US put its hands on. His body was respectfully buried in a conveniently unrecoverable and unspecific location. The trumpets weren't even continuously sounded for political and military benefit with no end when even that silly "mission accomplished" presentation was stretched far too long.
Yeah, I'd imagine you are right. One big obvious question is: why isn't anyone talking about it?
No one is talking about it because most people still think the evening news (or its equivalent these days) presents an accurate picture of what's happening in the world.
I once was talking to a guy who said, "You wouldn't believe how much of the news is bullshit." And I responded, "No, you wouldn't believe how much of the news is bullshit." I then asked him if he thought Bin Laden had been killed that May (It had recently happened). He said he did and seemed incredulous that I didn't, or at least questioned it. I pointed out that all we had were the administration's account of what happened, which had changed a few times over the course of a couple of weeks. No body, no hard evidence except reports of a crashed helicopter. Sure they say they have DNA, but it's a familial match, not a personal one; if they actually have the DNA as claimed. he still didn't really buy my skepticism, this guy who had just told me how much of the news is bullshit.
It's really hard to pull yourself out of the mindset and start doubting what you are told by people you used to trust. And it's disconcerting. You feel adrift, not knowing what to believe. It's quite uncomfortable and most people won't do it. They prefer to believe lies and half-truths rather than face the vertigo of uncertainty.
Indeed. I never understood that circular logic. Perhaps somebody of that persuasion can explain how it (allegedly) works for us.
Businesses want control, and if you don't properly regulate them, they'll use every method they have to gain their desired control. I see the government functioning like referees. Without referees a game would become a dirty slugfest instead of a skillfest. Basketball and wrestling would be the same sport. Sure, refs are sometimes stupid, but anybody in any institution can likewise be stupid.
The idea is that companies seek that control through government. So if you limit government you limit the control that corporations can exert through it. For whatever reason, libertarians don't consider that wealth brings power regardless of the size of government and that government can be a check on that power. I often find it to be a simplistic ideology, even though I find some of it appealing. It's basically lemonade stand economics, which doesn't scale.
Now, before going into the ECU and replacing the program in it, did you go through all the testing that's required by the auto makers of their ECU programmers to make sure that your code won't suddenly run into an edge case that makes the controller throw the car into a lethal state and shit a brick on the highway?
Don't try and pretend the answer is "yes." Automative control code and the required reliability have always been Serious Business. It just only now that the reality of "your car is a rolling computer network whose topological complexity rivals a small office building" is starting to filter out of the automakers themselves, with potential to get the attention of the dreaded Legislatosaurus.
The answer is yes. The program on my car's ECU has been running on cars for the past 13 years without any catastrophic failure. All that is modified are the engine tuning tables; throttle mapping, ignition timing, valve timing, wastegate duty, etc.. The worst thing that could happen would be for the throttle to stick at 100%. In that case I would just shut down the engine. It's not that big a deal.
Ugh, I think you need to actually work on cars before saying anything like that.
Only the Nissan GTR has an engine mated and tuned directly to the transmission. Other high end (150+k) cars would have this even remotely possible. Cars are mass produced. The transmission your car can be replaced with any of the like car transmissions without being disabled.
A buddy of mine drives a 2010 Audi S4. He was driving like an ass and slammed his rear tire into a curb. It needed a whole new rear-end. The car has the sport diff installed and it had to be mated to the rest of the car electronically before it would work. The rear diff is electronically controlled and had to be authorized by the dealer for it to work.
New cars with GDI engines have truly impressive fuel-economy numbers these days, being able to push 3200-pound cars around with 200+ HP while still getting 37mpg.
You don't get 37 MPG while using all 200 of those ponies. Physics is still physics. But you're right, more companies are moving to DI and turbocharging to up their numbers. And it does work. My car is putting out about 370 HP at peak. It's a turbo 4 so when I'm just cruising I get better mileage than a comparably powered naturally aspirated car. But when I use those 370 horses you can practically watch the fuel gauge go down.
Well, first off, the average middle-class person may spend $300/month on food; it's possible, with discipline, to get down as low as $35/month, and in fact $100/mo is a good target,
Are you serious? I spend one hundred dollars a week on groceries which typically includes ten dollars on average for household and hygiene cleaning products. I only buy food that I prepare meals from scratch which includes meat and vegetables and fruit and grains and dairy products.
It sounds like you are either feeding a family or are a bodybuilder.
"One of the goals of any company is to manage it's workforce"
No, that may perhaps be a smaller goal of the human resources department or whatever, but the goal of the company as a whole is to make money: sell lots of good stuff at a reasonable profit. (If the "goal" were eliminating its own workforce, every company could trivially make that happen by disbanding! Profit!... er, GOOAAAALLLLL!.)
Payroll is often the largest expense by far. So minimizing the workforce leads to more profit. Corporate profits are currently through the roof and a lot of it has to do with reducing staff. If a company can reduce their costs by replacing people with machines it will be done, generally speaking.
The rich can just exchange between themselves... They don't need billions of people on earth to have everything... Why the hell would they need to pay the upkeep for people they no longer need?
Unfortunately, I believe this is how a number of them think. However, John Galt was a fictional character and Galt's Gulch wouldn't work in real life.
He may well believe that past results are no indication of future results, there's one overwhelmingly important fact that comes to mind: noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.
And if noone can buy the stuff, the owners aren't going to get rich selling the stuff. Which means THEY won't be able to buy stuff either....
We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the capitalistic model. It breaks down if people can't sell their labor. It would be nice if we could use this transition to develop an economic model that would be more widely equitable than Capitalism has turned out to be. And maybe get rid of debt-backed money as well, as it also serves to concentrate wealth. I know who has control and makes the rules, so I'm not overly optimistic, but it would be nice.
These are murderers, rapists, and other scumbags. We do we care if their deaths are painless? Their victims' deaths certainly weren't...
Ah, the old letting someone else's lack of morality justify your own, eh? I would think we care because we are not murderers, rapists or scumbags. But I guess it's easier to act like the people you condemn when you use their behavior as a benchmark for your own.
About 10% of people killed on death row are later proven innocent, after they're dead of course. One of the biggest issues is that eye witnesses are horrible, one of the worse forms of evidence. If you're for killing innocent people, I'm not sure how to react other than GTFO.
IMO, anyone who is in favor of the death penalty is okay with killing a few innocent people. In a real-world application, you can't separate the two.
I approve of the death penalty for those who commit premeditated murder. I don't care if it is a deterrent or not. It is just. People who deliberately murder others don't deserve to continue living.
For my part, I choose to wring my hands contemplating the single mom who has to make hard decisions about which bills she will be paying this month and which will have to wait. I won't spend much emotional energy worrying about the lower middle class teenager who feels that life is just not worth living if she is not decked out in Louis Vuitton. Apparently, your mileage varies. Whatever. Enjoy your poverty. I'm sure it will be filled with all sorts of useless crap that doesn't enhance your life and is beyond your income. Just remember, you (or the marketers you in thrall to) asked for it.
I will wring my hands for both groups. But the point you seem to be missing is that advertisers have worked to influence the subconscious. It's not a matter of you making conscious, rational decisions about what you buy. You are influenced without your knowledge. Even if you are on-guard against it (and most people aren't) you can still be manipulated. I am hyper-aware of this dynamic and even I have been sucked in.
You seem to chalk this up to weak-willed people, sure in your knowledge that you would never be influenced by advertizing. Though I don't know you, I doubt it. These people have spent almost a century refining the art of influence at a distance. It's not just ads on billboards, television, magazines and websites. They have studied the psychology of acceptance, rejection, love, want, fear, hope, envy, superiority, belonging, self-esteem, class and status. They work your feelings about who you are and your place in life. Do you know why you have to add an egg to an instant cake mix? It has nothing to do with making the cake.
This means that salary increases often lead to drops in employment
Can you cite any evidence for this? I'm not talking about theory, but about real-world cause and effect. Because I don't think it's anywhere near that simple.
This is exactly what's wrong with America. The majority is convinced convinced that our economy is broken because people aren't working hard enough. I'm convinced of the exact opposite. The reason the economy isn't working right is because people are working too hard in exchange for too little. Furthermore, we could be more productive, and more prosperous, by working more cooperatively and less competitively.
You sir, are spot on. And I also think this is why America will continue its decline into neo-feudalism. We have a number of dearly held, cherished beliefs that are really counter productive.
I realize you're trolling, but there's nothing about capitalism that prohibits benevolence. This seems to be a very confusing point for many people.
Perhaps, but there is plenty about Capitalism that discourages benevolence. If that were not the case, this story wouldn't have the appeal that it does and supply-side economics would work. Capitalism facilitates aggregating wealth in the hands of the owners. Many of those owners strove to become owners in order to become wealthy. You don't become wealthy by sharing.
No this is the great "tax" thing to do. He'll just take his paycheck in dividends, stock options, and capital gains on said stock options, along with buying all his cars, homes and toys on the company dime (those will then all be tax right offs too) and pay about 1/4 the tax. At the same time he'll get a giant PR boost for being such a kind hearted socialist.
The other end of that stick is he is going to hit all the salary workers with a lot of overtime since they all got big raises.
I'm sure people are going to love making ends meet with their new windfall, but not love working 60+ hours a week to do so.
Who pissed in your corn flakes? I have to marvel at the level of discourse when a person considers this CEO to be a "kind hearted socialist". You really think paying people more than you absolutely have to is Socialism? The propaganda is working well.
What he just did was remove all money worries from his staff.
Not necessarily. When people earn more money, they tend to spend more less efficiently or
for things they want more than need. If they have poor discipline, now they are eligible for more
credit and can rack up bigger debts faster.
Often people spend more money than they should,
Or they have a "spending disorder", such as Shopping Addiction OR Binge + Buyer's Remorse, and it ultimately results in money worries.
In other words: money worries are not exclusively caused by low salaries.
Money worries can be caused by insufficient education/poor resource management, and psychological problems as well.
Our modern economy is based on this dynamic. We would not be able to sustain economic growth if people just bought what they need and maybe a little extra. Because of the way our monetary and economic systems are set up, they require constant growth or the music stops.
I would also add that people are constantly inundated with advertizing. That advertizing often seeks to make the subject feel inadequate in some way and offers the solution by way of the product being advertized. People have studied how to make people react in a certain way and what triggers their responses. Basically it is those people's job to figure out what makes you tick and use that knowledge to manipulate you. So I can't be too hard on people who make seemingly foolish decisions with their money. We are so immersed in advertizing and PR it's hard to even see it happening. The psychological pressure is immense and is designed to be hard to resist.
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I know its a waste of time, but thought I'd let others know who might believe you. Iraq was developing/using WMDs on its own population. They probably got those weapons from the US, but were making their own as well.
In order to make them stop, the UN Security Council in one of its unanimous votes passed UN resolution 1441 aimed at stopping Iraq from developing WMDs (gas weapons that they had used on their own people already). Saddam refused to comply, period. Anything Hans Blix said is irrelevant because Saddam refused to comply with the resolution. Before the invasion there was a UN vote to use force for non-compliance, and 2 different US Congressional votes on the same thing. The only one in the world who said they shouldn't invade for non-compliance was Saddam.
They all voted this because they assumed Saddam would comply or force would not be used. Bush said what he was going to do, held the votes before he did it, and followed through.
All other claims that Bush did it by himself with no support or reasonable chances for Saddam to stop it are lying, pure and simple. The only people who believe like you do refuse to admit the truth of what happened and ignore 182,000 murders by gas attacks of his own people by Saddam.
Hi Judy, welcome to Slashdot. How's the book tour going?
Quite a bit happened before the seals choppered into a complex then shot him and dumped his body in the ocean. Is anyone even sure that happened, if it did I doubt it did the way they say it did..
Nearly everybody in the complex killed and who remained has never even been brought forward to account for events. The most hated man was shot on sight instead of being drug into a kangaroo court to be humiliated for a year before being put to death just like every other villain the US put its hands on. His body was respectfully buried in a conveniently unrecoverable and unspecific location. The trumpets weren't even continuously sounded for political and military benefit with no end when even that silly "mission accomplished" presentation was stretched far too long.
Yeah, I'd imagine you are right. One big obvious question is: why isn't anyone talking about it?
No one is talking about it because most people still think the evening news (or its equivalent these days) presents an accurate picture of what's happening in the world.
I once was talking to a guy who said, "You wouldn't believe how much of the news is bullshit." And I responded, "No, you wouldn't believe how much of the news is bullshit." I then asked him if he thought Bin Laden had been killed that May (It had recently happened). He said he did and seemed incredulous that I didn't, or at least questioned it. I pointed out that all we had were the administration's account of what happened, which had changed a few times over the course of a couple of weeks. No body, no hard evidence except reports of a crashed helicopter. Sure they say they have DNA, but it's a familial match, not a personal one; if they actually have the DNA as claimed. he still didn't really buy my skepticism, this guy who had just told me how much of the news is bullshit.
It's really hard to pull yourself out of the mindset and start doubting what you are told by people you used to trust. And it's disconcerting. You feel adrift, not knowing what to believe. It's quite uncomfortable and most people won't do it. They prefer to believe lies and half-truths rather than face the vertigo of uncertainty.
Indeed. I never understood that circular logic. Perhaps somebody of that persuasion can explain how it (allegedly) works for us.
Businesses want control, and if you don't properly regulate them, they'll use every method they have to gain their desired control. I see the government functioning like referees. Without referees a game would become a dirty slugfest instead of a skillfest. Basketball and wrestling would be the same sport. Sure, refs are sometimes stupid, but anybody in any institution can likewise be stupid.
The idea is that companies seek that control through government. So if you limit government you limit the control that corporations can exert through it. For whatever reason, libertarians don't consider that wealth brings power regardless of the size of government and that government can be a check on that power. I often find it to be a simplistic ideology, even though I find some of it appealing. It's basically lemonade stand economics, which doesn't scale.
Now, before going into the ECU and replacing the program in it, did you go through all the testing that's required by the auto makers of their ECU programmers to make sure that your code won't suddenly run into an edge case that makes the controller throw the car into a lethal state and shit a brick on the highway?
Don't try and pretend the answer is "yes." Automative control code and the required reliability have always been Serious Business. It just only now that the reality of "your car is a rolling computer network whose topological complexity rivals a small office building" is starting to filter out of the automakers themselves, with potential to get the attention of the dreaded Legislatosaurus.
The answer is yes. The program on my car's ECU has been running on cars for the past 13 years without any catastrophic failure. All that is modified are the engine tuning tables; throttle mapping, ignition timing, valve timing, wastegate duty, etc.. The worst thing that could happen would be for the throttle to stick at 100%. In that case I would just shut down the engine. It's not that big a deal.
Not even close, you jackass.
Ugh, I think you need to actually work on cars before saying anything like that.
Only the Nissan GTR has an engine mated and tuned directly to the transmission. Other high end (150+k) cars would have this even remotely possible. Cars are mass produced. The transmission your car can be replaced with any of the like car transmissions without being disabled.
A buddy of mine drives a 2010 Audi S4. He was driving like an ass and slammed his rear tire into a curb. It needed a whole new rear-end. The car has the sport diff installed and it had to be mated to the rest of the car electronically before it would work. The rear diff is electronically controlled and had to be authorized by the dealer for it to work.
New cars with GDI engines have truly impressive fuel-economy numbers these days, being able to push 3200-pound cars around with 200+ HP while still getting 37mpg.
You don't get 37 MPG while using all 200 of those ponies. Physics is still physics. But you're right, more companies are moving to DI and turbocharging to up their numbers. And it does work. My car is putting out about 370 HP at peak. It's a turbo 4 so when I'm just cruising I get better mileage than a comparably powered naturally aspirated car. But when I use those 370 horses you can practically watch the fuel gauge go down.
Well, first off, the average middle-class person may spend $300/month on food; it's possible, with discipline, to get down as low as $35/month, and in fact $100/mo is a good target,
Are you serious? I spend one hundred dollars a week on groceries which typically includes ten dollars on average for household and hygiene cleaning products. I only buy food that I prepare meals from scratch which includes meat and vegetables and fruit and grains and dairy products.
It sounds like you are either feeding a family or are a bodybuilder.
The old "No true Scotsman" explanation, eh?
"One of the goals of any company is to manage it's workforce"
No, that may perhaps be a smaller goal of the human resources department or whatever, but the goal of the company as a whole is to make money: sell lots of good stuff at a reasonable profit. (If the "goal" were eliminating its own workforce, every company could trivially make that happen by disbanding! Profit! ... er, GOOAAAALLLLL!.)
Payroll is often the largest expense by far. So minimizing the workforce leads to more profit. Corporate profits are currently through the roof and a lot of it has to do with reducing staff. If a company can reduce their costs by replacing people with machines it will be done, generally speaking.
The rich can just exchange between themselves... They don't need billions of people on earth to have everything... Why the hell would they need to pay the upkeep for people they no longer need?
Unfortunately, I believe this is how a number of them think. However, John Galt was a fictional character and Galt's Gulch wouldn't work in real life.
He may well believe that past results are no indication of future results, there's one overwhelmingly important fact that comes to mind: noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.
And if noone can buy the stuff, the owners aren't going to get rich selling the stuff. Which means THEY won't be able to buy stuff either....
We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the capitalistic model. It breaks down if people can't sell their labor. It would be nice if we could use this transition to develop an economic model that would be more widely equitable than Capitalism has turned out to be. And maybe get rid of debt-backed money as well, as it also serves to concentrate wealth. I know who has control and makes the rules, so I'm not overly optimistic, but it would be nice.
These are murderers, rapists, and other scumbags. We do we care if their deaths are painless? Their victims' deaths certainly weren't...
Ah, the old letting someone else's lack of morality justify your own, eh? I would think we care because we are not murderers, rapists or scumbags. But I guess it's easier to act like the people you condemn when you use their behavior as a benchmark for your own.
About 10% of people killed on death row are later proven innocent, after they're dead of course. One of the biggest issues is that eye witnesses are horrible, one of the worse forms of evidence. If you're for killing innocent people, I'm not sure how to react other than GTFO.
IMO, anyone who is in favor of the death penalty is okay with killing a few innocent people. In a real-world application, you can't separate the two.
I think it's because only the Christian god is allowed to kill people.
And the state, apparently. Plenty of Christians are a-okay with the death penalty.
Like abortion and gay marriage, the death penalty in the US is a non-issue from a real-world point of view.
I would say that greatly depends on one's circumstance.
My immune system kills harmful agents. Why shouldn't societies?
I'm going to go with, because humans are not bacteria.
I approve of the death penalty for those who commit premeditated murder. I don't care if it is a deterrent or not. It is just. People who deliberately murder others don't deserve to continue living.
Good, good. Let the hate flow through you.
For my part, I choose to wring my hands contemplating the single mom who has to make hard decisions about which bills she will be paying this month and which will have to wait. I won't spend much emotional energy worrying about the lower middle class teenager who feels that life is just not worth living if she is not decked out in Louis Vuitton. Apparently, your mileage varies. Whatever. Enjoy your poverty. I'm sure it will be filled with all sorts of useless crap that doesn't enhance your life and is beyond your income. Just remember, you (or the marketers you in thrall to) asked for it.
I will wring my hands for both groups. But the point you seem to be missing is that advertisers have worked to influence the subconscious. It's not a matter of you making conscious, rational decisions about what you buy. You are influenced without your knowledge. Even if you are on-guard against it (and most people aren't) you can still be manipulated. I am hyper-aware of this dynamic and even I have been sucked in.
You seem to chalk this up to weak-willed people, sure in your knowledge that you would never be influenced by advertizing. Though I don't know you, I doubt it. These people have spent almost a century refining the art of influence at a distance. It's not just ads on billboards, television, magazines and websites. They have studied the psychology of acceptance, rejection, love, want, fear, hope, envy, superiority, belonging, self-esteem, class and status. They work your feelings about who you are and your place in life. Do you know why you have to add an egg to an instant cake mix? It has nothing to do with making the cake.
This means that salary increases often lead to drops in employment
Can you cite any evidence for this? I'm not talking about theory, but about real-world cause and effect. Because I don't think it's anywhere near that simple.
This is exactly what's wrong with America. The majority is convinced convinced that our economy is broken because people aren't working hard enough. I'm convinced of the exact opposite. The reason the economy isn't working right is because people are working too hard in exchange for too little. Furthermore, we could be more productive, and more prosperous, by working more cooperatively and less competitively.
You sir, are spot on. And I also think this is why America will continue its decline into neo-feudalism. We have a number of dearly held, cherished beliefs that are really counter productive.
I realize you're trolling, but there's nothing about capitalism that prohibits benevolence. This seems to be a very confusing point for many people.
Perhaps, but there is plenty about Capitalism that discourages benevolence. If that were not the case, this story wouldn't have the appeal that it does and supply-side economics would work. Capitalism facilitates aggregating wealth in the hands of the owners. Many of those owners strove to become owners in order to become wealthy. You don't become wealthy by sharing.
Who defines what your fair share is? Beyond who defines it, what are the criteria for determining fair share.
Considering the state of income and wealth inequality, it seems no one is defining it.
No this is the great "tax" thing to do. He'll just take his paycheck in dividends, stock options, and capital gains on said stock options, along with buying all his cars, homes and toys on the company dime (those will then all be tax right offs too) and pay about 1/4 the tax. At the same time he'll get a giant PR boost for being such a kind hearted socialist.
The other end of that stick is he is going to hit all the salary workers with a lot of overtime since they all got big raises.
I'm sure people are going to love making ends meet with their new windfall, but not love working 60+ hours a week to do so.
Who pissed in your corn flakes? I have to marvel at the level of discourse when a person considers this CEO to be a "kind hearted socialist". You really think paying people more than you absolutely have to is Socialism? The propaganda is working well.
What he just did was remove all money worries from his staff.
Not necessarily. When people earn more money, they tend to spend more less efficiently or for things they want more than need. If they have poor discipline, now they are eligible for more credit and can rack up bigger debts faster.
Often people spend more money than they should, Or they have a "spending disorder", such as Shopping Addiction OR Binge + Buyer's Remorse, and it ultimately results in money worries.
In other words: money worries are not exclusively caused by low salaries. Money worries can be caused by insufficient education/poor resource management, and psychological problems as well.
Our modern economy is based on this dynamic. We would not be able to sustain economic growth if people just bought what they need and maybe a little extra. Because of the way our monetary and economic systems are set up, they require constant growth or the music stops.
I would also add that people are constantly inundated with advertizing. That advertizing often seeks to make the subject feel inadequate in some way and offers the solution by way of the product being advertized. People have studied how to make people react in a certain way and what triggers their responses. Basically it is those people's job to figure out what makes you tick and use that knowledge to manipulate you. So I can't be too hard on people who make seemingly foolish decisions with their money. We are so immersed in advertizing and PR it's hard to even see it happening. The psychological pressure is immense and is designed to be hard to resist.