After all, just because the USSR no longer exists doesn't mean they still don't present a deadly threat to the existence of the Free World. Our troops in the Free Republic of Germany need to be properly armed and prepared to bravely defend us from the Red Armies of International Communism. Without constant vigilance, the Khmer Rouge could even gain the upper hand and threaten the Republic of Vietnam and the rest of SEATO.
Needless to say, anyone who opposes these plans is an agent working under the direction of Che Guevera.
Including falsely inflated skills listings designed to keep anyone from successfully applying for the jobs later salted to H-1Bs with far less than the originally advertised qualifications.
Actually, they don't have to go through that rigamarole any longer: they quietly dropped the requirement that jobs be offered to citizens before hiring an H-1B the last time the various tech kingpins called up their patsies in Congress to ask for a change.
The US needs enemies - without them, they can't justify the country's wartime government budget that has lasted since approximately 1940. If the US doesn't have any enemies, it goes out of its way to create some.
Of course, "terrorist sleeper cells" are the best enemy anyone's ever thought of because (a) they could be anywhere, (b) it's impossible to say you've destroyed all of them, (c) everything you're going to do to stop them is required to be secret, (d) they could attack anywhere in the US at any time creating a wonderful fear factor, and (e) the government is supposed to catch them before they've actually done anything criminal.
Different officials - some were executed for the crimes you mentioned, others were executed for waterboarding.
I'm not arguing that the Japanese were somehow saints. I am arguing that we should be holding US government officials to the same standards we hold other country's officials.
Does this mean that the United States and Allies deliberately chose to use "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Kuwait, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea and Vietnam, since they indiscriminately harmed civilians as well?
Shouldn't all the Presidents, Secretary of States, Joint Chiefs of Staffs and soldiers be investigated for war crimes during those conflicts?
Yes, absolutely, those who ordered or committed war crimes should be investigated, tried, and punished for it.
For example, Dick Cheney by his own admission ordered the waterboarding of prisoners, an act for which we tried, convicted, and executed Japanese officials for committing in WWII. Richard Nixon ordered carpet-bombing areas of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, and the use of chemical weapons in those countries, and should have been tried for that. Barack Obama should be tried as well, for engaging in "double-tap" drone strikes (where you blow something up, and 15 minutes later blow it up again) that are basically guaranteed to hit medical personnel and civilian rescuers. And the soldiers that relayed or followed those orders also should be tried.
The point is supposed to be that the risk of being tried and convicted of war crimes is greater than the risk entailed by not committing those crimes in the first place.
Justice is when he is tried for his crimes, found guilty in a court of law, and penalized according to a sentence by a judge. Just killing him is simply mob action. As a moral point, going the whole trial business is what makes us better than him. As a practical point, while he's alive we can learn things from him, whereas dead men tell no tales.
This is a continual pattern by the US federal agencies though: When some company is caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they're routinely settling the case for a relatively small fine that just looks like a really big number but is peanuts compared to the profits from the crime. They should, of course, be nailing the company and its officers to the wall.
And this phenomenon isn't a Democratic thing or a Republican thing - the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all have been routinely doing this.
But I wouldn't be surprised if straight women and gay men are more likely to talk to well-dressed attractive men than well-dressed attractive women, which is the real question here. Well that and whether somebody should be making purchasing decisions based on whether the booth person is hot.
Brooks made a big point in "No Silver Bullet" about the difference between what he called accidental complexity (introduced by the developers) and essential complexity (introduced by the reality of the problem). And the key thing is that the accidental complexity needs to be avoided or fixed with tools, but the essential complexity can't be avoided.
I also think that if 2 people simply live together they should get the same rights, "love" should never be the deciding factor when it comes to giving tax breaks to people or even worse tax money to people.
Of course, there are plenty of people who are married that aren't in love. I mean, how many May-December romances are actually about love, rather than the May half of the couple getting a ton of cash by the time they're 40 while the December half gets some sex and nursing in their old age? And there are also plenty of couples that are married and remain together solely to prevent the kids from living through a divorce. And in some subcultures in the US there are still arranged marriages. And there are some college friends of mine who weren't in love at all but were legally married because they could get better financial aid that way.
I agree with your basic premise though. What the government should be doing is providing a way to designate any other person as legally a part of your family, for medical decision-making, inheritance, etc, without any assumptions about what the nature of that relationship actually is. For example, my grandmother lived with a long-time friend of hers for about 20 years, and to the best of my knowledge weren't lovers, but that friendship was at least as important to them as their marriages had been.
Part of what's been going on since the death of L Ron Hubbard, as I understand it, is that there are significant numbers of people who are leaving the CoS but retaining the belief system, as sort of a "protestant" version of Scientology. And the CoS is reacting to that about as well as the Catholics did to Martin Luther, because its current leadership has really retained the paranoid and conspiratorial streak that the CoS has had throughout its history.
The thetans, the auditing, etc I see as no more harmful than any other religion. It's the efforts to hide their activities and sometimes terrorize people that I'm not so cool with.
When was that, exactly? Because the US (who I'm assuming you're referring to when you say "we") has been oppressing various portions of its population regularly and frequently since before it was a country. Sometimes this oppression was over race, sometimes religion, sometimes political beliefs, sometimes economic choices and association, sometimes gender, sometimes (and to a degree still) age, but it's always been there.
The humanities course were full of people that were extremely confident that their morals were correct and universal
And if they got through that course without having their viewpoint challenged at least once, then they didn't get good value for their tuition.
For instance, in a course where theism is relevant, a worthwhile exercise is to ask students to make arguments for both the theist and atheist positions, so they can understand how someone could legitimately arrive at a position that disagrees with their deeply held beliefs. For example, a good teacher might make an atheist understand Rene DesCartes' argument in favor of the existence of some sort of god, while making a theist understand Bertrand Russell's argument against it.
Well, let me make the case for them: 1. There's more to "the humanities" than literature and the arts. They also include language and linguistics, philosophy, and sometimes history.
2. There are skills that fall under "the humanities" that are damn useful - anyone can benefit from being able to write or speak well, anyone can benefit from learning what is and isn't a valid argument, and anyone can benefit from learning how to extract an idea of reality from documents that are frequently suspect or outright lying.
3. There are overlaps between humanities and STEM fields. For example, writing a decent compiler or interpreter requires concepts from linguistics.
4. The point of education isn't just to produce workers. An educated person should have a basic understanding in a wide variety of fields, not enough to necessarily be an expert but enough to understand an argument about a subject and how to verify claims made about it.
More precisely, it's the owners of large corporations that give large quantities of money to political campaigns.
Because as much as Mitt Romney wants to deny it, corporations are not people - they are owned by people, they are run by people, they employ people, but they are very different from people in very important ways. For example, there is absolutely no way to send a corporation to jail. Also, a lot of the people connected to the corporation have absolutely no say in what the corporation actually does.
In each case the thinkers were directed by patrons.
Who told Erastothenes to measure the size of the earth? Who told Jabir ibn Hayyan to perform a ridiculous number of chemistry experiments? Who told Isaac Newton to write about physics and mathematics? Who told Charles Darwin to come up with evolution? Who told Ken Thompson to write an operating system?
I'm not saying you can't give smart people some kind of direction, like they did in the Manhatten Project, but you certainly get a lot when you do what something along the lines of "Welcome! Here's your lab and office. Here are your colleagues. Here's where you can find supplies, and here's how to request supplies if we don't have what you need on hand. Now, do something."
Oh, come on! These two curves are perfectly related: They're both attempting to vaguely connect 2 variables that intuitively seem like they ought to have something to do with each other without actually being a remotely accurate description of reality.
For reference, Arthur Laffer said the theoretical relationship between tax rates and government revenue per capita looks like this: Laffer Curve A suspicious Martin Gardner then plotted the actual relationship between tax rates and government revenue per capita, and got something that looks like this: Neo-Laffer Curve
My basic view on the subject: 1. There's absolutely no way to measure real innovation. Some of the problems: - Discoveries that seem unimportant can turn out to be incredibly important 15 years later, and vice versa. - Organizations sometimes protect their discoveries by keeping them secret. - Academics often give away the knowledge they have without patenting it to build their career. However, they can also build their career by giving away nonsense and getting away with it. - A lot of "innovations" are just tiny variations on things that we already have and don't make much real difference (e.g. the rounded rectangle). 2. There are lots of motivations for innovation, some of which can't be bottled, organized, or turned into policies. For example, the more idealistic scientists are motivated more by the joy of discovery than by the cash they'll get. 3. That means that trying to take a theoretical approach to creating more innovation is just plain unworkable. The one thing that seems to have worked, historically speaking, is (1) put really smart people in contact with each other, (2) make sure they have plenty of cash and whatever they need to do their work, and (3) tell them they can focus on pretty much whatever they feel like working on, just make something awesome happen. That worked in Alexandria 2300 years ago, it worked in Baghdad around 1000 years ago, it worked in London around 200 years ago, it worked in Bell Labs in the last century.
The problem is that it requires some socialism - going into people's houses and upgrading their insulation, fitting energy saving lighting and appliances and so forth, instead of just pumping all the money into a new profit-generating power plant.
An interesting case of the silliness that's going on here: A few years back, then Secretary of Energy and long-time physicist Stephen Chu suggested reducing cooling needs and global warming by making roofs white instead of black so they reflect rather than absorb more of the sunlight that hits it. He was proposing something cheap and effective, and was met not with cheers but with ridicule. As far as the lighting thing goes, remember the outcry at the demise of incandescent light bulbs?
We have the same problem with NIMBYs as nuclear does, but at least no-one can object to you putting up solar panels in most cases.
Some bright person also pointed out this strange incongruity: Libertarians should love solar power, because it would get them away from using the heavily regulated big-government power grid. In fact, many libertarians hate solar power, mostly because of its hippie connotations.
For the same reason anyone else goes to work: To continue collecting their paycheck for a while longer. And it's not like there's a shortage of would-be managers in the world who could not be brought on board if needed, even for a short-term contract.
You need to stop thinking the union cares about the workers. Union management cares about the same thing company management does
Union management is voted in by the union membership, which means that a union management that fails to do what their workers want them to do will get replaced. For major union actions, such as strikes and accepting contracts, union members vote directly. So the only possible way your view of things is remotely accurate is if workers either don't know what's good for them, or vote against their own interests.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, just because the USSR no longer exists doesn't mean they still don't present a deadly threat to the existence of the Free World. Our troops in the Free Republic of Germany need to be properly armed and prepared to bravely defend us from the Red Armies of International Communism. Without constant vigilance, the Khmer Rouge could even gain the upper hand and threaten the Republic of Vietnam and the rest of SEATO.
Needless to say, anyone who opposes these plans is an agent working under the direction of Che Guevera.
Including falsely inflated skills listings designed to keep anyone from successfully applying for the jobs later salted to H-1Bs with far less than the originally advertised qualifications.
Actually, they don't have to go through that rigamarole any longer: they quietly dropped the requirement that jobs be offered to citizens before hiring an H-1B the last time the various tech kingpins called up their patsies in Congress to ask for a change.
The US needs enemies - without them, they can't justify the country's wartime government budget that has lasted since approximately 1940. If the US doesn't have any enemies, it goes out of its way to create some.
Of course, "terrorist sleeper cells" are the best enemy anyone's ever thought of because (a) they could be anywhere, (b) it's impossible to say you've destroyed all of them, (c) everything you're going to do to stop them is required to be secret, (d) they could attack anywhere in the US at any time creating a wonderful fear factor, and (e) the government is supposed to catch them before they've actually done anything criminal.
Different officials - some were executed for the crimes you mentioned, others were executed for waterboarding.
I'm not arguing that the Japanese were somehow saints. I am arguing that we should be holding US government officials to the same standards we hold other country's officials.
Well, that means the US and the UK were correct - Iraq *did* have weapons of mass destruction,
Just to be clear, Iraq did at one point have chemical weapons: The US knew this because the US had sold them to Iraq back in the 1980's.
But you cannot even begin to put America in the category of war crimes when you compare American actions to the crimes of the Germans and Japanese.
You might well be able to once you include the very intentional genocides of American Indian nations.
Does this mean that the United States and Allies deliberately chose to use "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Kuwait, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea and Vietnam, since they indiscriminately harmed civilians as well?
Shouldn't all the Presidents, Secretary of States, Joint Chiefs of Staffs and soldiers be investigated for war crimes during those conflicts?
Yes, absolutely, those who ordered or committed war crimes should be investigated, tried, and punished for it.
For example, Dick Cheney by his own admission ordered the waterboarding of prisoners, an act for which we tried, convicted, and executed Japanese officials for committing in WWII. Richard Nixon ordered carpet-bombing areas of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, and the use of chemical weapons in those countries, and should have been tried for that. Barack Obama should be tried as well, for engaging in "double-tap" drone strikes (where you blow something up, and 15 minutes later blow it up again) that are basically guaranteed to hit medical personnel and civilian rescuers. And the soldiers that relayed or followed those orders also should be tried.
The point is supposed to be that the risk of being tried and convicted of war crimes is greater than the risk entailed by not committing those crimes in the first place.
Justice is when he is tried for his crimes, found guilty in a court of law, and penalized according to a sentence by a judge. Just killing him is simply mob action. As a moral point, going the whole trial business is what makes us better than him. As a practical point, while he's alive we can learn things from him, whereas dead men tell no tales.
This is a continual pattern by the US federal agencies though: When some company is caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they're routinely settling the case for a relatively small fine that just looks like a really big number but is peanuts compared to the profits from the crime. They should, of course, be nailing the company and its officers to the wall.
And this phenomenon isn't a Democratic thing or a Republican thing - the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all have been routinely doing this.
But I wouldn't be surprised if straight women and gay men are more likely to talk to well-dressed attractive men than well-dressed attractive women, which is the real question here. Well that and whether somebody should be making purchasing decisions based on whether the booth person is hot.
Actually, that was Yogi Berra.
Brooks made a big point in "No Silver Bullet" about the difference between what he called accidental complexity (introduced by the developers) and essential complexity (introduced by the reality of the problem). And the key thing is that the accidental complexity needs to be avoided or fixed with tools, but the essential complexity can't be avoided.
I also think that if 2 people simply live together they should get the same rights, "love" should never be the deciding factor when it comes to giving tax breaks to people or even worse tax money to people.
Of course, there are plenty of people who are married that aren't in love. I mean, how many May-December romances are actually about love, rather than the May half of the couple getting a ton of cash by the time they're 40 while the December half gets some sex and nursing in their old age? And there are also plenty of couples that are married and remain together solely to prevent the kids from living through a divorce. And in some subcultures in the US there are still arranged marriages. And there are some college friends of mine who weren't in love at all but were legally married because they could get better financial aid that way.
I agree with your basic premise though. What the government should be doing is providing a way to designate any other person as legally a part of your family, for medical decision-making, inheritance, etc, without any assumptions about what the nature of that relationship actually is. For example, my grandmother lived with a long-time friend of hers for about 20 years, and to the best of my knowledge weren't lovers, but that friendship was at least as important to them as their marriages had been.
Part of what's been going on since the death of L Ron Hubbard, as I understand it, is that there are significant numbers of people who are leaving the CoS but retaining the belief system, as sort of a "protestant" version of Scientology. And the CoS is reacting to that about as well as the Catholics did to Martin Luther, because its current leadership has really retained the paranoid and conspiratorial streak that the CoS has had throughout its history.
The thetans, the auditing, etc I see as no more harmful than any other religion. It's the efforts to hide their activities and sometimes terrorize people that I'm not so cool with.
Good ol' times. Back when we were the free world.
When was that, exactly? Because the US (who I'm assuming you're referring to when you say "we") has been oppressing various portions of its population regularly and frequently since before it was a country. Sometimes this oppression was over race, sometimes religion, sometimes political beliefs, sometimes economic choices and association, sometimes gender, sometimes (and to a degree still) age, but it's always been there.
The humanities course were full of people that were extremely confident that their morals were correct and universal
And if they got through that course without having their viewpoint challenged at least once, then they didn't get good value for their tuition.
For instance, in a course where theism is relevant, a worthwhile exercise is to ask students to make arguments for both the theist and atheist positions, so they can understand how someone could legitimately arrive at a position that disagrees with their deeply held beliefs. For example, a good teacher might make an atheist understand Rene DesCartes' argument in favor of the existence of some sort of god, while making a theist understand Bertrand Russell's argument against it.
Well, let me make the case for them:
1. There's more to "the humanities" than literature and the arts. They also include language and linguistics, philosophy, and sometimes history.
2. There are skills that fall under "the humanities" that are damn useful - anyone can benefit from being able to write or speak well, anyone can benefit from learning what is and isn't a valid argument, and anyone can benefit from learning how to extract an idea of reality from documents that are frequently suspect or outright lying.
3. There are overlaps between humanities and STEM fields. For example, writing a decent compiler or interpreter requires concepts from linguistics.
4. The point of education isn't just to produce workers. An educated person should have a basic understanding in a wide variety of fields, not enough to necessarily be an expert but enough to understand an argument about a subject and how to verify claims made about it.
the inherent variability with Red Dwarf stars
I was going to say: Lister, Rimmer, and Cat were the same stars throughout the series. Only Kochanski and Kryten really changed.
More precisely, it's the owners of large corporations that give large quantities of money to political campaigns.
Because as much as Mitt Romney wants to deny it, corporations are not people - they are owned by people, they are run by people, they employ people, but they are very different from people in very important ways. For example, there is absolutely no way to send a corporation to jail. Also, a lot of the people connected to the corporation have absolutely no say in what the corporation actually does.
No, it was dreamed up on the back of a napkin by Arthur Laffer during lunch hour, which is why it's called the "Laffer Curve".
In each case the thinkers were directed by patrons.
Who told Erastothenes to measure the size of the earth? Who told Jabir ibn Hayyan to perform a ridiculous number of chemistry experiments? Who told Isaac Newton to write about physics and mathematics? Who told Charles Darwin to come up with evolution? Who told Ken Thompson to write an operating system?
I'm not saying you can't give smart people some kind of direction, like they did in the Manhatten Project, but you certainly get a lot when you do what something along the lines of "Welcome! Here's your lab and office. Here are your colleagues. Here's where you can find supplies, and here's how to request supplies if we don't have what you need on hand. Now, do something."
Oh, come on! These two curves are perfectly related: They're both attempting to vaguely connect 2 variables that intuitively seem like they ought to have something to do with each other without actually being a remotely accurate description of reality.
For reference, Arthur Laffer said the theoretical relationship between tax rates and government revenue per capita looks like this:
Laffer Curve
A suspicious Martin Gardner then plotted the actual relationship between tax rates and government revenue per capita, and got something that looks like this:
Neo-Laffer Curve
My basic view on the subject:
1. There's absolutely no way to measure real innovation. Some of the problems:
- Discoveries that seem unimportant can turn out to be incredibly important 15 years later, and vice versa.
- Organizations sometimes protect their discoveries by keeping them secret.
- Academics often give away the knowledge they have without patenting it to build their career. However, they can also build their career by giving away nonsense and getting away with it.
- A lot of "innovations" are just tiny variations on things that we already have and don't make much real difference (e.g. the rounded rectangle).
2. There are lots of motivations for innovation, some of which can't be bottled, organized, or turned into policies. For example, the more idealistic scientists are motivated more by the joy of discovery than by the cash they'll get.
3. That means that trying to take a theoretical approach to creating more innovation is just plain unworkable. The one thing that seems to have worked, historically speaking, is (1) put really smart people in contact with each other, (2) make sure they have plenty of cash and whatever they need to do their work, and (3) tell them they can focus on pretty much whatever they feel like working on, just make something awesome happen. That worked in Alexandria 2300 years ago, it worked in Baghdad around 1000 years ago, it worked in London around 200 years ago, it worked in Bell Labs in the last century.
The problem is that it requires some socialism - going into people's houses and upgrading their insulation, fitting energy saving lighting and appliances and so forth, instead of just pumping all the money into a new profit-generating power plant.
An interesting case of the silliness that's going on here: A few years back, then Secretary of Energy and long-time physicist Stephen Chu suggested reducing cooling needs and global warming by making roofs white instead of black so they reflect rather than absorb more of the sunlight that hits it. He was proposing something cheap and effective, and was met not with cheers but with ridicule. As far as the lighting thing goes, remember the outcry at the demise of incandescent light bulbs?
We have the same problem with NIMBYs as nuclear does, but at least no-one can object to you putting up solar panels in most cases.
Some bright person also pointed out this strange incongruity: Libertarians should love solar power, because it would get them away from using the heavily regulated big-government power grid. In fact, many libertarians hate solar power, mostly because of its hippie connotations.
Why should management stay on a sinking ship?
For the same reason anyone else goes to work: To continue collecting their paycheck for a while longer. And it's not like there's a shortage of would-be managers in the world who could not be brought on board if needed, even for a short-term contract.
You need to stop thinking the union cares about the workers. Union management cares about the same thing company management does
Union management is voted in by the union membership, which means that a union management that fails to do what their workers want them to do will get replaced. For major union actions, such as strikes and accepting contracts, union members vote directly. So the only possible way your view of things is remotely accurate is if workers either don't know what's good for them, or vote against their own interests.