sounds more like the real worry is that if the US pisses NK off enough, NK may actually have the balls (and a sufficient lack of concern for self-preservation) to unleash cans of nuclear whoop ass across the pacific.
the reason why this could become a real possibility is that the NK leadership would all be hiding in their nuclear-proof bunkers and would likely not give a rats about its citizens on the surface, so the traditional concept of MAD wouldn't apply to NK
But what happens when they have to eventually come out of the bunkers? Doesn't seem like much of a plan to me.
"they?" A Conspiracy!! Yep, that's it, numerous oil companies, some nationalized and some privatized, shipping companies, refiners, governments, etc. all got together and decided that you needed to have higher prices, and kept the manipulation secret...those sneaky bastards. You know, the Sun keeps rising and falling in the sky....a Conspiracy!!
Right, because price fixing never happens and every bad act is eventually found out. No one ever gets away with anything, and the Authorities are always on the up and up. How could it be otherwise? After all, wealthy powerful people usually come to and maintain their power through honesty and transparency.
Really, there is no conspiracy necessary for those with like interests to work together to forward those interests. It's quite natural. However, contrary to your insinuation, conspiracies do happen and some are actually kept secret. It's really not that hard. The people involved just have to all benefit from the secret. If you were making billions of dollars through some conspiracy, why on earth would you ever tell anyone?
So in exchange for shutting up about it, they'll probably get it officiously, thanks to nations who also want full control but didn't formally ask for it (ie, all of them?).
Or am I being paranoid?
Maybe, because I'm fairly paranoid myself. But I thought more or less the same thing.
It's "off putting" to me, so I won't buy one. But look at how people fall all over themselves to use email services that data-mine keywords from their emails for advertising purposes. Look at how people let Facebook snoop their visits not only to facebook, but to a million other sites around the web.
As far as i can tell, people LOVE having parts of their private conversations captured, data-mined for ad keywords, and used to display advertising to them. I see no reason to believe they won't love this too, although I am bewildered at why anyone would. But just watch.... I am always - always, surprised by how little people care about privacy. It seems just the opposite, they actually prefer not having any.
They don't see the downside in their daily lives, so they don't notice it. It takes thinking a few moves ahead to see what constant data capture and mining can be used for. It takes critical thinking and some imagination. But if you sign up for GMail, how is your life different the next day? Other than your new email address, it isn't. We all live in our own little worlds and most of us never question it. Most think the world is just as it seems day-to-day, and don't consider what is happening outside of their immediate field of vision.
I saw this insightful comment and will post it here.
How about this! If we took the power away from a bunch of secret bank mobsters to PRINT MONEY and instead backed it with gold or some other finite, precious commodity, the dollar would retain its value.
I'm sick and tired of this implicit tax that I have just because I *HOLD* a dollar. Read Greenspan's "Gold and Economic Freedom" essay. Once it's started, that money which is printed out can only be repaid by printing more money. This is the shabby key to the (corporate/social) welfare state that exists today.
I'm actually ok with fiat currency. It allows for adjusting the money supply for various reasons. The problem I have is with debt-backed fiat currency like teh Federal Reserve gives us. The USA basically borrows all of its money from the Fed. Why should a nation borrow all of its money, when it could print it itself? The US treasury could print money and spend it into existence, rather than us borrowing it into existence.
It's not a perfect system. But neither is the gold standard. I think reasonable people can disagree, but I haven't found anyone who agrees that we should borrow all our money. Of course, most people don't realize we borrow all of our money. Hence why I chose the sig I did.
I don't believe in "national security journalism". Hopefully as the baby boomers die off, we can get over the Sixties-worship that makes people think "national security journalism" is even a thing.
It's a thing whether you believe it or not. Sometimes the government, military or intelligence agencies do illegal, immoral or generally bad things. In a democracy, or a republic, the citizens should be able to find out about those things so they can hold their leaders to account. If no one asks, no one will find out.
If you are one of those authoritarians who thinks the government, military or intelligence agencies should be able to break the law and do terrible things without public interference to further our national interest, well then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Oh well, the fancy tires are probably too loud for me to hear the difference between HD and plain old FM anyway.
If your fancy tires are loud, you have a problem. Good tires tend not to be very loud on the road at all, because the noise they produce indicates energy lost, which means higher rolling resistance.
Good != low rolling resistance. Performance tires are usually high rolling resistance because they grip the road like a cat on carpet.
And that's because the article says -13C and not +13C which is quite a bit of difference. It'd be cool if the editors actually did their editing work;-)
I don't know. 13C is already a little cool in some parts of the country.
What level of marijuana impairs a driver?!? Weed gets you high. There is only one level of high, and that is high. You can smoke 100 joints an hour and still be at the level of high.
That's not even close to true. You need to get better shit, dude.
soccer moms scare me WAY more than drunks or any other intoxicated driver does. the thing is, drunks know they are drunk (usually) and so they at least try to be careful. moms, otoh, think things are perfectly fine even though little johnny is screaming his head off in the back seat and slapping his sister suzie. each time the mom turns around to scold the kids, she takes her eye off the road.
I seriously fear the soccer moms more than any chemically enhanced driver.
No joke, I saw a m0m in a minivan turning around to READ A BOOK to her kid in the back seat, while driving on the freeway. You're completely right, it's the everyday unsafe drivers that worry me just as much as or more than the ones that are under the influence of something.
Don't forget too that they are talking on the phone while doing all of the above...
Driving erratically is going to be a HELLUVA lot harder to prove than DUI, it will be easier to defend against, and the penalties will no doubt be lessened.
AFAIK the statements of a police officer are considered facts by the court, unless they can be specifically disproved. So if an officer says you were driving erratically, you were driving erratically unless you can prove you weren't. Good luck with that.
Remember that they legalized for medicinal uses, not recreational as far as I know.
In that case, you put a label on it like you would any judgement imparing drug: Do not operate automobiles or heavy equipment while taking this medication.
Colorado and Washington state legalized it for recreational use.
It seems like the world took a wrong turn somewhere:
Showing violent acts, blood, gore, murder and suffering is totally acceptable (movies, tabloids etc.), but
if half a butt, boob or nipple is visible, it's deemed unmoral, wrong, destructive, offensive and so on...
I'd rather have my children gaze upon some exposed skin, or two (or more) people in a loving embrace/sexual situation, rather than a orgy of dismembered bodies, blood and gore.
The point of free speech is to protect informative discussion and analysis of policy.
Emotional gestures don't actually do that.
Burning flags, burning poppies, etc. express discontent but not much else. In fact, it seems to me that these events get in the way of actually having a discussion on the issue and getting closer to resolution.
It's more like karma-whoring than political speech.
So getting in the way of a productive discussion should now be a jail-able offense? I always understood the purpose of free speech to be preventing the government from censoring dissent or criticism. Seems to me that's what's going on here. It's not illegal to be a jerk, and it shouldn't be.
That could create more problems than it solves. Unfortunately, your average citizen just doesn't have the skills to evaluate the pros and cons of every single issue. That is the sad failing of democracy. Joe Citizen seems to use a limited set of retarded tools to make voting decisions, such as what the media or institutions (eg churches) tell him. You only have to look at quagmired, emotive but sensible issues like banning the death penalty, drug decriminalization, gun control, and criminal justice/penal system reform. The right way to go on those issues has been validated by countless studies - even proven in implementation in other countries - but rational thought is simply ignored in the popularity contest and the old "against" arguments marketed as truth.
The thing is that this is partially by design. The elite have never wanted a truly educated and enlightened citizenry. A few is okay, but the "masses"? No way. As the late great George Carlin pointed out shortly before he died:
"...I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it."
Democracy would work better if people had better education and were earnestly informed of their rights and responsibilities in the context of the bigger picture. I know that's a tall order, and I'm not sure just how to do it either. But instead, people are ruthlessly propagandized to suit the agenda of candidate or party X. When people are taught what to think rather than how to think, it's no wonder they make bad decisions.
Yes, but then what? I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes into play here. At base people need food, shelter and relative safety. But once those things are secured, people start looking to things like self-esteem and self-actualization. That's where the freedom comes into play.
No one likes the feeling of being watched or judged. But constant surveillance and evaluation of actions is the dystopian conclusion of a world without privacy. But as Mr. Adams points out, we have already lost our privacy. So what we really want and need is restraint and accountability. Mr. Adams talks about all the great things we could have and do if we gave up our privacy. But he predicates all that on having an incorruptible guardian of our information; nuns in his case. But that's the problem; we don't have incorruptible nuns. The reason we are so protective of our privacy is that we don't trust the government to not abuse the power and information it is given. It comes down to trust. That's why we actually need restraint and accountability, not the privacy we have already lost.
Unfortunately, with the rise of the national security state, especially after 9/11/01, the citizenry is treated more as potential criminals than responsible citizens. The safeguards of accountability and restraint are being stripped away in the forms of warrant-less surveillance, TSA checkpoints far from the border, and Presidential kill lists. So people trust the government less and less as the government trusts the people less and less. People naturally become wary and afraid of the government, as they would any entity that was much more powerful than them and not trustworthy. I think that's what people are really expressing when they talk about privacy and Big Brother.
To begin with if you normally don't pay with cash you don't get much cash.
Also it litters the pocket or whatever.
I bother because I don't like the idea of someone I've never met building a psychological profile of me based on my buying habits, and using that information to predict and manipulate my behavior for their own ends. I want to minimize the data points.
Slashdot Mirror
sounds more like the real worry is that if the US pisses NK off enough, NK may actually have the balls (and a sufficient lack of concern for self-preservation) to unleash cans of nuclear whoop ass across the pacific. the reason why this could become a real possibility is that the NK leadership would all be hiding in their nuclear-proof bunkers and would likely not give a rats about its citizens on the surface, so the traditional concept of MAD wouldn't apply to NK
But what happens when they have to eventually come out of the bunkers? Doesn't seem like much of a plan to me.
And oral sex increases your risk.
So it's up to you to decide how to start the day.
Between oral sex and coffee? I'll take my chances with the BJ 8 days a week!
"they?" A Conspiracy!! Yep, that's it, numerous oil companies, some nationalized and some privatized, shipping companies, refiners, governments, etc. all got together and decided that you needed to have higher prices, and kept the manipulation secret...those sneaky bastards. You know, the Sun keeps rising and falling in the sky....a Conspiracy!!
Right, because price fixing never happens and every bad act is eventually found out. No one ever gets away with anything, and the Authorities are always on the up and up. How could it be otherwise? After all, wealthy powerful people usually come to and maintain their power through honesty and transparency.
Really, there is no conspiracy necessary for those with like interests to work together to forward those interests. It's quite natural. However, contrary to your insinuation, conspiracies do happen and some are actually kept secret. It's really not that hard. The people involved just have to all benefit from the secret. If you were making billions of dollars through some conspiracy, why on earth would you ever tell anyone?
So in exchange for shutting up about it, they'll probably get it officiously, thanks to nations who also want full control but didn't formally ask for it (ie, all of them?). Or am I being paranoid?
Maybe, because I'm fairly paranoid myself. But I thought more or less the same thing.
Unfortunately, it's not that new of an export.
It's "off putting" to me, so I won't buy one. But look at how people fall all over themselves to use email services that data-mine keywords from their emails for advertising purposes. Look at how people let Facebook snoop their visits not only to facebook, but to a million other sites around the web.
As far as i can tell, people LOVE having parts of their private conversations captured, data-mined for ad keywords, and used to display advertising to them. I see no reason to believe they won't love this too, although I am bewildered at why anyone would. But just watch.... I am always - always, surprised by how little people care about privacy. It seems just the opposite, they actually prefer not having any.
They don't see the downside in their daily lives, so they don't notice it. It takes thinking a few moves ahead to see what constant data capture and mining can be used for. It takes critical thinking and some imagination. But if you sign up for GMail, how is your life different the next day? Other than your new email address, it isn't. We all live in our own little worlds and most of us never question it. Most think the world is just as it seems day-to-day, and don't consider what is happening outside of their immediate field of vision.
Nothing is stopping you from buying gold.
That's really not the same thing.
I saw this insightful comment and will post it here.
How about this! If we took the power away from a bunch of secret bank mobsters to PRINT MONEY and instead backed it with gold or some other finite, precious commodity, the dollar would retain its value.
I'm sick and tired of this implicit tax that I have just because I *HOLD* a dollar. Read Greenspan's "Gold and Economic Freedom" essay. Once it's started, that money which is printed out can only be repaid by printing more money. This is the shabby key to the (corporate/social) welfare state that exists today.
The reference is here: http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html
I'm actually ok with fiat currency. It allows for adjusting the money supply for various reasons. The problem I have is with debt-backed fiat currency like teh Federal Reserve gives us. The USA basically borrows all of its money from the Fed. Why should a nation borrow all of its money, when it could print it itself? The US treasury could print money and spend it into existence, rather than us borrowing it into existence.
It's not a perfect system. But neither is the gold standard. I think reasonable people can disagree, but I haven't found anyone who agrees that we should borrow all our money. Of course, most people don't realize we borrow all of our money. Hence why I chose the sig I did.
I don't believe in "national security journalism". Hopefully as the baby boomers die off, we can get over the Sixties-worship that makes people think "national security journalism" is even a thing.
It's a thing whether you believe it or not. Sometimes the government, military or intelligence agencies do illegal, immoral or generally bad things. In a democracy, or a republic, the citizens should be able to find out about those things so they can hold their leaders to account. If no one asks, no one will find out.
If you are one of those authoritarians who thinks the government, military or intelligence agencies should be able to break the law and do terrible things without public interference to further our national interest, well then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Oh well, the fancy tires are probably too loud for me to hear the difference between HD and plain old FM anyway.
If your fancy tires are loud, you have a problem. Good tires tend not to be very loud on the road at all, because the noise they produce indicates energy lost, which means higher rolling resistance.
Good != low rolling resistance. Performance tires are usually high rolling resistance because they grip the road like a cat on carpet.
And that's because the article says -13C and not +13C which is quite a bit of difference. It'd be cool if the editors actually did their editing work ;-)
I don't know. 13C is already a little cool in some parts of the country.
What level of marijuana impairs a driver?!? Weed gets you high. There is only one level of high, and that is high. You can smoke 100 joints an hour and still be at the level of high.
That's not even close to true. You need to get better shit, dude.
soccer moms scare me WAY more than drunks or any other intoxicated driver does. the thing is, drunks know they are drunk (usually) and so they at least try to be careful. moms, otoh, think things are perfectly fine even though little johnny is screaming his head off in the back seat and slapping his sister suzie. each time the mom turns around to scold the kids, she takes her eye off the road.
I seriously fear the soccer moms more than any chemically enhanced driver.
No joke, I saw a m0m in a minivan turning around to READ A BOOK to her kid in the back seat, while driving on the freeway. You're completely right, it's the everyday unsafe drivers that worry me just as much as or more than the ones that are under the influence of something.
Don't forget too that they are talking on the phone while doing all of the above...
Driving erratically is going to be a HELLUVA lot harder to prove than DUI, it will be easier to defend against, and the penalties will no doubt be lessened.
AFAIK the statements of a police officer are considered facts by the court, unless they can be specifically disproved. So if an officer says you were driving erratically, you were driving erratically unless you can prove you weren't. Good luck with that.
This drug was illegal for a very good reason...
And that reason is what?
Remember that they legalized for medicinal uses, not recreational as far as I know.
In that case, you put a label on it like you would any judgement imparing drug: Do not operate automobiles or heavy equipment while taking this medication.
Colorado and Washington state legalized it for recreational use.
They didn't Decriminalize it; they LEGALIZED it.
There's a difference.
Decriminalize - its no longer a crime Legalize - its no longer a crime
If something is not a crime, then its legal.. Right?
Not right. It can still be a misdemeanor, punishable with a fine.
What have you been smoking?
The federal government has already backed off of the "war on drugs."
Tell that to the city of Oakland.
Kinda shows you how arbitrary it all is, eh?
It seems like the world took a wrong turn somewhere: Showing violent acts, blood, gore, murder and suffering is totally acceptable (movies, tabloids etc.), but if half a butt, boob or nipple is visible, it's deemed unmoral, wrong, destructive, offensive and so on...
I'd rather have my children gaze upon some exposed skin, or two (or more) people in a loving embrace/sexual situation, rather than a orgy of dismembered bodies, blood and gore.
It's an upside-down world we live in, isn't it?
Must.
Not.
Offend.
Anyone.
(unless the target is white males)
You mad!
The point of free speech is to protect informative discussion and analysis of policy.
Emotional gestures don't actually do that.
Burning flags, burning poppies, etc. express discontent but not much else. In fact, it seems to me that these events get in the way of actually having a discussion on the issue and getting closer to resolution.
It's more like karma-whoring than political speech.
So getting in the way of a productive discussion should now be a jail-able offense? I always understood the purpose of free speech to be preventing the government from censoring dissent or criticism. Seems to me that's what's going on here. It's not illegal to be a jerk, and it shouldn't be.
That could create more problems than it solves. Unfortunately, your average citizen just doesn't have the skills to evaluate the pros and cons of every single issue. That is the sad failing of democracy. Joe Citizen seems to use a limited set of retarded tools to make voting decisions, such as what the media or institutions (eg churches) tell him. You only have to look at quagmired, emotive but sensible issues like banning the death penalty, drug decriminalization, gun control, and criminal justice/penal system reform. The right way to go on those issues has been validated by countless studies - even proven in implementation in other countries - but rational thought is simply ignored in the popularity contest and the old "against" arguments marketed as truth.
The thing is that this is partially by design. The elite have never wanted a truly educated and enlightened citizenry. A few is okay, but the "masses"? No way. As the late great George Carlin pointed out shortly before he died:
"...I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it."
Democracy would work better if people had better education and were earnestly informed of their rights and responsibilities in the context of the bigger picture. I know that's a tall order, and I'm not sure just how to do it either. But instead, people are ruthlessly propagandized to suit the agenda of candidate or party X. When people are taught what to think rather than how to think, it's no wonder they make bad decisions.
Nice quote.
They want the shelter, food and safety.
Yes, but then what? I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes into play here. At base people need food, shelter and relative safety. But once those things are secured, people start looking to things like self-esteem and self-actualization. That's where the freedom comes into play.
No one likes the feeling of being watched or judged. But constant surveillance and evaluation of actions is the dystopian conclusion of a world without privacy. But as Mr. Adams points out, we have already lost our privacy. So what we really want and need is restraint and accountability. Mr. Adams talks about all the great things we could have and do if we gave up our privacy. But he predicates all that on having an incorruptible guardian of our information; nuns in his case. But that's the problem; we don't have incorruptible nuns. The reason we are so protective of our privacy is that we don't trust the government to not abuse the power and information it is given. It comes down to trust. That's why we actually need restraint and accountability, not the privacy we have already lost.
Unfortunately, with the rise of the national security state, especially after 9/11/01, the citizenry is treated more as potential criminals than responsible citizens. The safeguards of accountability and restraint are being stripped away in the forms of warrant-less surveillance, TSA checkpoints far from the border, and Presidential kill lists. So people trust the government less and less as the government trusts the people less and less. People naturally become wary and afraid of the government, as they would any entity that was much more powerful than them and not trustworthy. I think that's what people are really expressing when they talk about privacy and Big Brother.
Why bother?
To begin with if you normally don't pay with cash you don't get much cash.
Also it litters the pocket or whatever.
I bother because I don't like the idea of someone I've never met building a psychological profile of me based on my buying habits, and using that information to predict and manipulate my behavior for their own ends. I want to minimize the data points.