I think its because they are titled, old newspaper snobs who think its not only their duty, but their right to decide what the people get and do not get to hear.
Of course they think that, it's right up in the masthead: "All the news that's fit to print"
... but for domestic content it seems to have lost that neutrality it once had.
Err, what? Since when was it neutral? And I say that as someone who's definitely different from you politically.
The biggest bias in the Times, though, is actually the same one as you'd find on Fox News: Basically, it's that the truth of any significant issue ranges from what politically connected liberals say to what politically connected conservatives say.
Some more examples: - At Bradley Manning's trial, a case with significant national interest with major implications for whistleblowers and the freedom of the press, and for the Times itself (which had been one of the papers that had gotten the story from Wikileaks), the New York Times couldn't be bothered to send a reporter until there was a lot of public shaming of the paper about it.
- The New York Times has admitted on many occasions to suppressing stories for the sole reason that the White House asked them to. That was true under both the Obama and Bush administrations.
Basically, I read the New York Times the same way I'm guessing a lot of Russians read Pravda back in the day: The point isn't to discover the truth, it's to discover what the government wants you to think is the truth.
Side A: "The sky is blue." Side B: "No, the sky is green." Side A: "No, really, the sky is blue, look." Side B: "I think the sky is really green, so it must be green." Side A: "No it isn't. Use this camera, point it at the sky, and see what color the camera says the sky is." Side B: "I still think it's green." Side A: "See, as described by John Tyndall in 1859, the small particles in the air scatter the blue light more than the red light. This was later quantified by Lord Rayleigh when he determined exactly how large the effect is." Side B: "Well, that's all well and good, but I still think it's green."
Now, is Side A being stupid because they stop taking Side B's arguments seriously at that point?
I'm happy to agree with you that bailouts did little to nothing to prevent economic catastrophe, and are a demonstrably stupid policy.
Hoover was at the very least telling Congress that he was trying to balance the budget, as Brad DeLong at UC Berkeley points out. In doing so, he was following the economic wisdom of the day: Keep the budget balanced, and you'll build market confidence, which will allow the stock markets to bounce back, which will allow businesses to invest again, and then people will be hired, and all will be well. Hoover's counterparts in other countries, including Germany's Heinrich Bruning and Britain's Ramsey MacDonald, were pursuing similar policies.
When the policies weren't working, John Maynard Keynes started trying to come up with a new theory, figuring that maybe the prevailing economic thinkers were understanding the problem incorrectly. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, started pursuing Keynes' policies in 1933, and GDP was back to pre-crisis levels (in nominal dollars at least) by 1940. That's why Keynesian economics was the dominant way of thinking right up until 1970's stagflation hit.
That's not really true, and it shows the dangers of lumping people together. An example of the difference:
- Marissa Mayer has a B.S. and M.S., with honors, from Stanford specializing in artificial intelligence. That's where she met Larry and Sergei, and became Google employee #20 as an engineer. It's safe to say that if you put her down in front of a bash prompt with some broken code she'd show you that she is in fact quite capable technically. So I'd consider her a woman in tech, and a highly successful one at that.
- Meg Whitman has no technical skills whatsoever, and is the exemplar of the myth that it's possible to run an organization well when you have no clue what your people are doing. Her career start was as a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble, then management consulting, and as far as I can tell she's never held a job where her primary responsibility was to actually make a product or sell a product. To give you an idea, at the beginning of her time at eBay, the website crashed, so Whitman's first goal was to create a new executive team.
Imagine a federal government that was given 8% of annual GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion) to perform its duties and constrained by a balanced budget law.
We don't have to imagine that government: that's exactly what we had in the Hoover administration. Herbert Hoover, contrary to popular belief, responded to the stock market crash of 1929... by vigorously pursuing completely successful efforts to keep the federal budget balanced. The economy after a few years of that was why the country elected Franklin Roosevelt.
Parking and traffic enforcement on public property and public roads should always be performed by public employees and the fines should go to a random, approved charity.
There's an argument to be made that fine revenue should be used to defray the costs of parking and traffic enforcement. The problem, of course, is that if the actual crime goes down, the meter maids and policemen are motivated to keep their jobs by making up crimes or issuing dubious but legally justifiable tickets.
A community adjacent to mine, notorious for funding almost their entire city government on traffic tickets, had to cool it, but for the worst possible reason: They pulled over a state legislator who threatened to take away their power to pull over anyone on the highway, which was their cash cow.
nothing you can't handle with a high power rifle and some explosives, dear.
It also might be something you'll be able to handle with some explosive deer. That would give you both self-defense, and some fresh venison when you're done!
The fundamental problem is this: There are 4 naturally occurring measurements of time, all of which are in common use, and none of them are consistently expressible in terms of the other.
The 4 are: - Years (Based on Earth's revolutions of the sun) - Lunar months (Based on the moon's revolutions of the Earth) - Days (Based on Earth's rotation) - Periods of the radiation of ground state cesium 133 (which form the official SI definition of a second) And of course you have lots of artificial units of time measurement defined or mangled from those naturally occurring 4, for convenience, with concepts dating back to the Sumerians. These were mostly created because humans have a tough time interpreting large numbers.
That's why you have at least 6 parts of an ISO-8601 date: The problem is inherently complicated, there is no easy way out.
Actually, no, John Jay politicized the Court when he was appointed the first Chief Justice in 1789 after being a noted and influential Federalist politician. FDR changed the composition of the Court in the same way that all his predecessors had, by making appointments, and because his politics had more in common with Teddy Roosevelt than they did with Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, or Herbert Hoover, the decisions made by the court in 1938 were different than the decision in similar circumstances in 1916 and 1922.
Generally speaking, the Supreme Court represents the political views held by presidents and senators over the past 25 years or so. The only time it didn't was when the nation was less than 25 years old.
By the time child labor was outlawed, the industrial base had been built up to the point that child laborers weren't needed, and were vanishingly rare.
This is incorrect, and in an important way.
First off, the timeline: The first attempts to restrict child labor in the US were as early as 1837. By 1900, about half of the states in the US had banned child labor entirely. In 1916 and again in 1922, Congress passed child labor bans, but they were struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1938, most child labor was banned once and for all, and this time it passed constitutional muster due to FDR's appointments to the Supreme Court.
The really interesting period, then, is between 1900 and 1930, when child labor was legal in some places and illegal elsewhere. So it might surprise you to find out that in 1900, with child labor illegal in half the states in the US, approximately 1 out of 4 boys and 1 out of 15 girls was working. Same time, same technology, same markets, and where child labor was legal it was pretty common.
Another thought: Most clothing sold in the US today is in part manufactured with child labor. There's no technological reason for this whatsoever, but the corporations that manufacture clothing are just too cheap to pay adult wages to do the work.
The markets often decide, but they can and do make the wrong decision sometimes. Unless you think child labor is OK.
In 2007, it was the Democrats screaming for full disclosure about Bush's violations of civil liberties, while Republicans in Congress were doing everything they could to protect their dear leader. In 2013, the roles are reversed, but the play is basically the same.
Why is it that so few politicians are willing to say "All violations of civil liberties are wrong, regardless of who's party is currently in control of the presidency?"
Actually, the really big problem that he's ducking here is the question the complaining community developers may not have explicitly asked but were probably thinking, which is: "Is Mark Shuttleworth basically just treating us like free labor for Canonical? And if so, why are we bothering to help him?"
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
How that works in a lot of projects is the BDFL: Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, etc. And that seems to work well enough, without being tied into a specific for-profit company's bottom line.
I suspect the reasons for this are: 1. Mars is the most Earth-like planet (other than Earth) we've encountered. 2. We don't really know how to land on Europa, Titan, etc. Mars, on the other hand, is a place we've been able to land on since the 1970's, and we now know how to land really sophisticated mobile probes to get really detailed looks at everything that seems interesting. 3. Mars is a likely target for eventual human colonization. It would help to understand the place as much as possible before we make the trip. 4. Mars is much much closer: If we launch at the right time, we can get there in as little as 8-9 months. Europa, on the other hand, is at least 6 times that distance.
But hey, I'm just a layman. I'm sure some professionals in the field could present even more compelling arguments.
If I was caught sacrificing animals to a god, I would be arrested.
Nonsense. Santeria practitioners, Satanists, and some other religions do that regularly, and it's perfectly legal. If you wanted to do animal sacrifices as described in Leviticus, that's legal. Disgusting, in my view, but legal.
If I was a teacher, I couldn't take a group of school children to a Catholic church, but I bet I could take them to a Mosque.
Neither of those is true. It depends entirely on why you're taking them to that building: If, for instance, you were going to the Catholic church to hear a concert of Gregorian chant for your music class, that would probably be OK. If you were going to the mosque to learn about the instrument used to call for prayers, also OK. If you were going to either of those to hear religious preaching, then it's a problem.
for example, intersectional feminism purports that black women in the US face face more challenges than black men and white women combined, and even if they don't, that's a heckuva lot of challenges.
Yeah, I understand why they might have thought that at one time, but it turns out that now it's demonstrably untrue: Black women are far more likely than black men to: - Graduate high school - Stay out of jail - Be employed - Benefit from public assistance programs - Live in the same location for more than 5 years - Die of old age rather than violence
A lot of the disadvantages that black men have compared to black women have a lot to do with the first two things I mentioned, namely graduating high school and arrest records, and those have a lot to do with teachers and police regularly discriminating against black men.
Food, water, medicine, clothing, shelter, I understand stealing all of those.
"Content", though, is not a life-or-death kind of thing. Sure, you might want to watch The Avengers, but if you can't afford to is your life really going to be ruined if you instead borrow A Day at the Races from your local library or stream Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning?
I'm no fan of the RIAA or MPAA, but you're making a lousy argument here.
If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so.
Many do just that, and a fair number who do make enough to support themselves well enough or even do quite well for themselves performing live and selling CDs on their own. You've probably never heard of them unless they're local to you, though, because they get no radio airplay and basically no distribution. The media conglomerates enforce that with contracts (or in some cases overlapping ownership), so that any retailer that will carry, say, the latest Taylor Swift album will not be allowed to carry independent musician's albums.
Typically, the way the RIAA recording contracts work, the musician gets an advance that seems like a lot to a starving artist. The advance typically amounts to something like $30-50K per musician in the band, and thanks to Hollywood accounting, that's all that musician will typically see. After that point, the signed musician is basically a debt slave to their label.
If you want to support music and musicians financially, by far the best way to do that is to go to live shows in local venues and buy CDs or recordings directly from the bands.
Employers would likely have no issues granting you study time, even at work, if they felt secure that you were not going to take your new skills elsewhere before the ink dries on your new certificate.
And employees would probably be less likely to leave if they felt secure that they wouldn't just walk into work one day and be told "Clean out your desk, and then security will escort you from the building. You can write a letter of resignation if you like." Loyalty is a two-way street, but a lot of companies don't want that.
One of my basic insights of life: When someone is running around screaming "emergency", a lot of the time they simply want people to shut down the smart part of their brain and do something they otherwise wouldn't.
Some examples of what people often mean when they say "This is an emergency!": - Your boss: "Please work lots of overtime for no compensation." - A salesperson at your company: "Please work lots of overtime so I can get a big fat commission." - A salesperson selling to you: "Please don't think too hard about either the product or the price." - A politician: "Please stop complaining about this bill I'm going to shove through that hurts you and helps my friends." - A non-profit: "Please donate more time and money to our group, preferably without asking too many questions." - Some (thankfully not all) spousal partners: "Please give me more control over our shared resources so I can buy the things I want." Or "Please make me feel appreciated." - A friend or family member: "Please give me more of your time, money, and attention."
So that's why you have to define what an emergency is and what it isn't. My personal definition: A problem where human lives or a very large amount of property is at stake, and swift action will demonstrably reduce the damage. That means that a heart attack is an emergency, a server down is a problem but not an emergency. In the case of the Patriot Act, all the useful emergency actions had been done several weeks earlier, and the emergency part of what happened was over when Congress passed the bill.
"National Security Letters" were quite plainly search warrants and subpoenas without Fourth Amendment protections back when they were first proposed. And that's all they'll ever be: If the FBI had real evidence that somebody was a bad guy, they could have easily gone to a judge and said "We'd like to investigate this person, and here's why."
Instead, we're heading into Kafka land: People investigated and/or locked up without charges, without evidence they can confront, without a chance of freedom, and punishment of death when it's all over.
It's still an advert, this time saying "Please download my project" rather than "Please buy my product". The payoff is the validation from his users that his efforts were actually worth something, rather than cold hard cash.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of Europa, it's obvious, unless the phrase "Attempt no landings there" isn't clear enough for you!
I think its because they are titled, old newspaper snobs who think its not only their duty, but their right to decide what the people get and do not get to hear.
Of course they think that, it's right up in the masthead: "All the news that's fit to print"
Err, what? Since when was it neutral? And I say that as someone who's definitely different from you politically.
The biggest bias in the Times, though, is actually the same one as you'd find on Fox News: Basically, it's that the truth of any significant issue ranges from what politically connected liberals say to what politically connected conservatives say.
Some more examples:
- At Bradley Manning's trial, a case with significant national interest with major implications for whistleblowers and the freedom of the press, and for the Times itself (which had been one of the papers that had gotten the story from Wikileaks), the New York Times couldn't be bothered to send a reporter until there was a lot of public shaming of the paper about it.
- The New York Times has admitted on many occasions to suppressing stories for the sole reason that the White House asked them to. That was true under both the Obama and Bush administrations.
Basically, I read the New York Times the same way I'm guessing a lot of Russians read Pravda back in the day: The point isn't to discover the truth, it's to discover what the government wants you to think is the truth.
Not necessarily:
Side A: "The sky is blue."
Side B: "No, the sky is green."
Side A: "No, really, the sky is blue, look."
Side B: "I think the sky is really green, so it must be green."
Side A: "No it isn't. Use this camera, point it at the sky, and see what color the camera says the sky is."
Side B: "I still think it's green."
Side A: "See, as described by John Tyndall in 1859, the small particles in the air scatter the blue light more than the red light. This was later quantified by Lord Rayleigh when he determined exactly how large the effect is."
Side B: "Well, that's all well and good, but I still think it's green."
Now, is Side A being stupid because they stop taking Side B's arguments seriously at that point?
I'm happy to agree with you that bailouts did little to nothing to prevent economic catastrophe, and are a demonstrably stupid policy.
Hoover was at the very least telling Congress that he was trying to balance the budget, as Brad DeLong at UC Berkeley points out. In doing so, he was following the economic wisdom of the day: Keep the budget balanced, and you'll build market confidence, which will allow the stock markets to bounce back, which will allow businesses to invest again, and then people will be hired, and all will be well. Hoover's counterparts in other countries, including Germany's Heinrich Bruning and Britain's Ramsey MacDonald, were pursuing similar policies.
When the policies weren't working, John Maynard Keynes started trying to come up with a new theory, figuring that maybe the prevailing economic thinkers were understanding the problem incorrectly. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, started pursuing Keynes' policies in 1933, and GDP was back to pre-crisis levels (in nominal dollars at least) by 1940. That's why Keynesian economics was the dominant way of thinking right up until 1970's stagflation hit.
That's not really true, and it shows the dangers of lumping people together. An example of the difference:
- Marissa Mayer has a B.S. and M.S., with honors, from Stanford specializing in artificial intelligence. That's where she met Larry and Sergei, and became Google employee #20 as an engineer. It's safe to say that if you put her down in front of a bash prompt with some broken code she'd show you that she is in fact quite capable technically. So I'd consider her a woman in tech, and a highly successful one at that.
- Meg Whitman has no technical skills whatsoever, and is the exemplar of the myth that it's possible to run an organization well when you have no clue what your people are doing. Her career start was as a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble, then management consulting, and as far as I can tell she's never held a job where her primary responsibility was to actually make a product or sell a product. To give you an idea, at the beginning of her time at eBay, the website crashed, so Whitman's first goal was to create a new executive team.
Imagine a federal government that was given 8% of annual GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion) to perform its duties and constrained by a balanced budget law.
We don't have to imagine that government: that's exactly what we had in the Hoover administration. Herbert Hoover, contrary to popular belief, responded to the stock market crash of 1929 ... by vigorously pursuing completely successful efforts to keep the federal budget balanced. The economy after a few years of that was why the country elected Franklin Roosevelt.
Parking and traffic enforcement on public property and public roads should always be performed by public employees and the fines should go to a random, approved charity.
There's an argument to be made that fine revenue should be used to defray the costs of parking and traffic enforcement. The problem, of course, is that if the actual crime goes down, the meter maids and policemen are motivated to keep their jobs by making up crimes or issuing dubious but legally justifiable tickets.
A community adjacent to mine, notorious for funding almost their entire city government on traffic tickets, had to cool it, but for the worst possible reason: They pulled over a state legislator who threatened to take away their power to pull over anyone on the highway, which was their cash cow.
nothing you can't handle with a high power rifle and some explosives, dear.
It also might be something you'll be able to handle with some explosive deer. That would give you both self-defense, and some fresh venison when you're done!
The fundamental problem is this: There are 4 naturally occurring measurements of time, all of which are in common use, and none of them are consistently expressible in terms of the other.
The 4 are:
- Years (Based on Earth's revolutions of the sun)
- Lunar months (Based on the moon's revolutions of the Earth)
- Days (Based on Earth's rotation)
- Periods of the radiation of ground state cesium 133 (which form the official SI definition of a second)
And of course you have lots of artificial units of time measurement defined or mangled from those naturally occurring 4, for convenience, with concepts dating back to the Sumerians. These were mostly created because humans have a tough time interpreting large numbers.
That's why you have at least 6 parts of an ISO-8601 date: The problem is inherently complicated, there is no easy way out.
Actually, no, John Jay politicized the Court when he was appointed the first Chief Justice in 1789 after being a noted and influential Federalist politician. FDR changed the composition of the Court in the same way that all his predecessors had, by making appointments, and because his politics had more in common with Teddy Roosevelt than they did with Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, or Herbert Hoover, the decisions made by the court in 1938 were different than the decision in similar circumstances in 1916 and 1922.
Generally speaking, the Supreme Court represents the political views held by presidents and senators over the past 25 years or so. The only time it didn't was when the nation was less than 25 years old.
By the time child labor was outlawed, the industrial base had been built up to the point that child laborers weren't needed, and were vanishingly rare.
This is incorrect, and in an important way.
First off, the timeline: The first attempts to restrict child labor in the US were as early as 1837. By 1900, about half of the states in the US had banned child labor entirely. In 1916 and again in 1922, Congress passed child labor bans, but they were struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1938, most child labor was banned once and for all, and this time it passed constitutional muster due to FDR's appointments to the Supreme Court.
The really interesting period, then, is between 1900 and 1930, when child labor was legal in some places and illegal elsewhere. So it might surprise you to find out that in 1900, with child labor illegal in half the states in the US, approximately 1 out of 4 boys and 1 out of 15 girls was working. Same time, same technology, same markets, and where child labor was legal it was pretty common.
Another thought: Most clothing sold in the US today is in part manufactured with child labor. There's no technological reason for this whatsoever, but the corporations that manufacture clothing are just too cheap to pay adult wages to do the work.
The markets often decide, but they can and do make the wrong decision sometimes. Unless you think child labor is OK.
Unitl 9/11 it was unthinkable that the US military could engage in any activities on American soil.
That's news to all those people at West Point, Fort Hood, etc.
In 2007, it was the Democrats screaming for full disclosure about Bush's violations of civil liberties, while Republicans in Congress were doing everything they could to protect their dear leader. In 2013, the roles are reversed, but the play is basically the same.
Why is it that so few politicians are willing to say "All violations of civil liberties are wrong, regardless of who's party is currently in control of the presidency?"
Actually, the really big problem that he's ducking here is the question the complaining community developers may not have explicitly asked but were probably thinking, which is: "Is Mark Shuttleworth basically just treating us like free labor for Canonical? And if so, why are we bothering to help him?"
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
How that works in a lot of projects is the BDFL: Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, etc. And that seems to work well enough, without being tied into a specific for-profit company's bottom line.
I suspect the reasons for this are:
1. Mars is the most Earth-like planet (other than Earth) we've encountered.
2. We don't really know how to land on Europa, Titan, etc. Mars, on the other hand, is a place we've been able to land on since the 1970's, and we now know how to land really sophisticated mobile probes to get really detailed looks at everything that seems interesting.
3. Mars is a likely target for eventual human colonization. It would help to understand the place as much as possible before we make the trip.
4. Mars is much much closer: If we launch at the right time, we can get there in as little as 8-9 months. Europa, on the other hand, is at least 6 times that distance.
But hey, I'm just a layman. I'm sure some professionals in the field could present even more compelling arguments.
If I was caught sacrificing animals to a god, I would be arrested.
Nonsense. Santeria practitioners, Satanists, and some other religions do that regularly, and it's perfectly legal. If you wanted to do animal sacrifices as described in Leviticus, that's legal. Disgusting, in my view, but legal.
If I was a teacher, I couldn't take a group of school children to a Catholic church, but I bet I could take them to a Mosque.
Neither of those is true. It depends entirely on why you're taking them to that building: If, for instance, you were going to the Catholic church to hear a concert of Gregorian chant for your music class, that would probably be OK. If you were going to the mosque to learn about the instrument used to call for prayers, also OK. If you were going to either of those to hear religious preaching, then it's a problem.
for example, intersectional feminism purports that black women in the US face face more challenges than black men and white women combined, and even if they don't, that's a heckuva lot of challenges.
Yeah, I understand why they might have thought that at one time, but it turns out that now it's demonstrably untrue: Black women are far more likely than black men to:
- Graduate high school
- Stay out of jail
- Be employed
- Benefit from public assistance programs
- Live in the same location for more than 5 years
- Die of old age rather than violence
A lot of the disadvantages that black men have compared to black women have a lot to do with the first two things I mentioned, namely graduating high school and arrest records, and those have a lot to do with teachers and police regularly discriminating against black men.
Food, water, medicine, clothing, shelter, I understand stealing all of those.
"Content", though, is not a life-or-death kind of thing. Sure, you might want to watch The Avengers, but if you can't afford to is your life really going to be ruined if you instead borrow A Day at the Races from your local library or stream Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning?
I'm no fan of the RIAA or MPAA, but you're making a lousy argument here.
If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so.
Many do just that, and a fair number who do make enough to support themselves well enough or even do quite well for themselves performing live and selling CDs on their own. You've probably never heard of them unless they're local to you, though, because they get no radio airplay and basically no distribution. The media conglomerates enforce that with contracts (or in some cases overlapping ownership), so that any retailer that will carry, say, the latest Taylor Swift album will not be allowed to carry independent musician's albums.
Typically, the way the RIAA recording contracts work, the musician gets an advance that seems like a lot to a starving artist. The advance typically amounts to something like $30-50K per musician in the band, and thanks to Hollywood accounting, that's all that musician will typically see. After that point, the signed musician is basically a debt slave to their label.
If you want to support music and musicians financially, by far the best way to do that is to go to live shows in local venues and buy CDs or recordings directly from the bands.
Employers would likely have no issues granting you study time, even at work, if they felt secure that you were not going to take your new skills elsewhere before the ink dries on your new certificate.
And employees would probably be less likely to leave if they felt secure that they wouldn't just walk into work one day and be told "Clean out your desk, and then security will escort you from the building. You can write a letter of resignation if you like." Loyalty is a two-way street, but a lot of companies don't want that.
One of my basic insights of life: When someone is running around screaming "emergency", a lot of the time they simply want people to shut down the smart part of their brain and do something they otherwise wouldn't.
Some examples of what people often mean when they say "This is an emergency!":
- Your boss: "Please work lots of overtime for no compensation."
- A salesperson at your company: "Please work lots of overtime so I can get a big fat commission."
- A salesperson selling to you: "Please don't think too hard about either the product or the price."
- A politician: "Please stop complaining about this bill I'm going to shove through that hurts you and helps my friends."
- A non-profit: "Please donate more time and money to our group, preferably without asking too many questions."
- Some (thankfully not all) spousal partners: "Please give me more control over our shared resources so I can buy the things I want." Or "Please make me feel appreciated."
- A friend or family member: "Please give me more of your time, money, and attention."
So that's why you have to define what an emergency is and what it isn't. My personal definition: A problem where human lives or a very large amount of property is at stake, and swift action will demonstrably reduce the damage. That means that a heart attack is an emergency, a server down is a problem but not an emergency. In the case of the Patriot Act, all the useful emergency actions had been done several weeks earlier, and the emergency part of what happened was over when Congress passed the bill.
"National Security Letters" were quite plainly search warrants and subpoenas without Fourth Amendment protections back when they were first proposed. And that's all they'll ever be: If the FBI had real evidence that somebody was a bad guy, they could have easily gone to a judge and said "We'd like to investigate this person, and here's why."
Instead, we're heading into Kafka land: People investigated and/or locked up without charges, without evidence they can confront, without a chance of freedom, and punishment of death when it's all over.
It's still an advert, this time saying "Please download my project" rather than "Please buy my product". The payoff is the validation from his users that his efforts were actually worth something, rather than cold hard cash.