Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again?
Umm, for the same reason Americans regularly make fun of the Canadians, Brits, French, and just about everyone else? Poking fun at foreigners is something almost everyone does.
How should they promote it to listeners who aren't already streaming music in their vehicles?
That's easy: Perform live. That's where the vast majority of musicians make their real money anyways.
Most bands perform live for a couple of years at least before releasing an album. And the #1 way to sell albums when starting out as an independent musician is to bring them with you to your live gigs and sell them to people who are already enjoying hearing you perform (and often a little drunk and impulsive, which makes it easier). Now, you don't sell as many albums that way, but the math works out that you make the same amount as you would have with a label if you sell only 1/10 the albums you would have sold with the label. 100 albums at a gig as an independent = 1000 albums in a store as a signed band.
This is also getting easier with the introduction of relatively cheap recording equipment and editing software, meaning your initial cost of recording the album in the first place is much lower now than it was 20 years ago.
To be among that many marketdroids... Did it resemble a robotics class?
No, it resembled a remedial course in comparative literature: Anyone with half a brain could tell that most of what was being said was nonsense, but most of the attendees were eating it up.
The goal here is to make payment so easy that you don't have the time to reconsider the purchase decision while, for instance, you're pulling out your wallet to get out your credit card. These are people that firmly believe that the way to make the world a better place is to make it easier for them to buy stuff whether or not it is of any use to them whatsoever. I know, because I've attended one of the major conferences in the industry and met some of these folks and listened to their talks about this sort of technology.
And of course, what makes it easy for a legitimate business to take your money also makes it easy for a not-so-legitimate business or a thief to take your money.
So, if people sort themselves into two groups say one called "Republicans" and the other say "Democrats" and would identify themselves as such, we could save everyone a lot of grief.
That's not really accurate though. The people who agree with those statements are properly termed "morons" or "idiots" regardless of party affiliation.
You're right there's a correlation with voting Republican at the moment, but I'd attribute that to a related-but-not-identical third factor, namely getting all ones news and information from right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News. But at the same time, how many people think that:
- George W Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks
- Obama has never ordered the summary execution of a US citizen
- the reason we don't have a public healthcare option was that the Republicans demanded it in negotiations
- Obama has never locked up a US citizen for over a year in solitary confinement without putting him on trial
- If you taxed the richest 1% of Americans 90% for a year, you'd be able to eliminate the federal debt
I'm sure that list could be made longer easily enough.
Absolutely, I just like it when an experimental result matches educated guesses.
Reminds me of my joke about good research: A farmer noticed that his brown horses collectively were eating twice as much as his white horses collectively. After properly researching the subject, he decided to focus on the fact that he had 20 brown horses and only 10 white horses.
The testes are towards the outside of the body and vulnerable to all sorts of things, while the ovaries are better protected. Furthermore, sperm is produced over the course of a lifetime, whereas eggs aren't. The end result is that eggs are likely to have the original genetic material of Mom, while the sperm is more likely to have been modified (by radiation, damage from trauma, copying errors, etc) from the original genetic material of Dad.
This seems like a good evolutionary strategy, however it arose: Mom provides a version that has allowed her to survive and reproduce, suggesting a minimum viability, which she passes on to the child. Dad provides a version of an evolutionarily successful human that is modified, allowing the species to improve itself (And if he's lived to old age, he was probably an effective survivor evolutionarily speaking).
They aren't talking about suing the individual programmers, they're talking about suing the software companies. Specifically, they want to disallow this kind of language very common in EULAs (this is taken from an actual EULA, name omitted to protect the guilty):
_______ and/or its respective suppliers hereby disclaim all warranties and conditions with regard to this product, including all implied warranties and conditions of merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. In no event shall _______ and/or its respective suppliers be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use of this software.
The translation of this clause out of legalese is "No matter what happens, you can't sue us, we're not responsible. We don't promise that this software is even remotely like what we advertised it to be."
It depends who you are and what you can do. Many countries (such as Canada and Germany) like seeing potential immigrants with strong educational and work experience backgrounds. They also typically expect you to be proficient in their language, like it when you arrange your first job in their country beforehand, will expect you to abide by their laws as well as (in most cases) have no criminal record in the US, and if you choose to become a citizen will expect you to swear loyalty to your newly adopted country.
Basically, they're happy to have you if you're going to be a net benefit to their economy, and not so happy to have you if it looks like you'd be a drain on their economy. My understanding is that there's less of a "Dey took our jerbs!" attitude in many other countries than in the US, in part because much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US is fuelled by racism, and in part because people in the rest of the world don't pride themselves on ignorance of other countries.
I'm assuming OP is in the US, because in most other countries this is a non-issue.
This was the kind of situation that Obamacare is intended to address, by making the individual market a viable option for people who aren't getting insurance through their employment, eliminating exclusions for preexisting conditions and requiring no more than 20% overhead (for reference, Medicare runs at about 3% overhead and the VA closer to 1%).
Other approaches, while you're waiting for that law to fully kick in: - If you're married, and your spouse is a full-time employee somewhere, use their group plan. - If you've saved up a lot, which it sounds like you have, consider focusing on catastrophic coverage. - If you're older than 50, consider the AARP. They provide all sorts of discounts, including on health insurance. - If your life situation allows, you might be able to relocate to a civilized country. This is obviously a big change, so you wouldn't want to make this lightly. - Put up with the higher rates and less insurance. It's not pleasant, of course, but it sounds like you can afford it.
That being said, there is no reason not be be responsible with the environment and fight pollution for the sake of fighting pollution.
Sure there is: If I'm owning a corporation doing the polluting, I stand to make a very large sum of money by ignoring the problem. Of course, everybody else might be a bit upset about this, but I can use some of that cash to buy off politicians to ensure that those annoyed masses don't actually have the power to stop me, and some more of the cash to fund "Institutes" and "think tanks" and media organizations to legitimately convince people that that what I'm doing isn't a problem.
So without class action, what exactly is the reason a company won't try this: 1. Overcharge all customers by $30. 2. Refuse to refund the money. 3. If anybody goes to the time and expense of suing them in small claims court, concede and refund the money and the 1 hours' worth of the attorney's time ($300 or so).
This strategy is profitable so long as less than 10% of the customers affected don't go after them. And because it's not in fact worth my time to haggle over a $30 overcharge, chances are I won't. With a class action, somebody else can take the initiative, file the suit on my behalf, and I can get my $30 and the lawyers can get an extra $10 per person on top of that as punative damages. The only real loser in that scenario is the scammer.
1. Solution: put doctors on salary. You seem to forget that doctors are Free people and are not serfs owned by the Crown.
Actually, a lot of doctors would prefer salary. The Mayo Clinic has done this for a really long time, and still gets lots of applicants.
2. Solution: end-of-life counseling and legalizing euthanasia
The goal here is to prevent us from spending lots of money taking care of, say, Alzheimers patients who have deteriorated so much they can't remember that they have a son, much less what his name is or what he looks like. A sane health care policy would work with the patient, their family, any advisors they want involved (e.g. a pastor or trusted friend), decide when the patient's life is not worth living, get everyone together for one last goodbye, and then administer a lethal level of painkillers to minimize the suffering.
3. Solution: Single payer and single provider, so there's nobody else to haggle with. And you don't shop around for a better price on your commodity items and just go to the local monopoly store to buy your food?
If you're lying in a bed in an ER with a broken leg, you don't want to shop around for the cheapest and best deal, you want to get your leg set and get the heck out of there. If you're sitting in a doctors' office and the doc tells you you have a serious disease and will die unless you take this particular pill, you'll likely take the pill no matter how much it costs you. It's not like broccoli at all, where I can relatively easily tell what's good and what's not, and can decide to buy carrots or cauliflower instead, and can easily shop around if I want to do so.
4. Solution: Cover everybody. They tend to seek care in ER's since they know that they cannot be turned away due to the laws. Change the laws back and make them goto a clinic for the sniffles.
They can't afford the clinic, otherwise they would go there. What do you want them to do to get health care? Or would you rather they just lived with their illness?
They created change for the sake of change and that is a very bad reason for change when people are depending on keeping things as they are.
Ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
What should have happened, after Gnome 2 was released and was really darn good, is that Gnome should have downshifted into maintenance mode. The features were quite sufficient for their purpose, and the focus should have switched to just making things faster and slightly more awesome.
Here's the ideal software development lifecycle: 1. Ideation and design: Somebody has a good idea for a piece of software. It solves a problem, it's an entertaining game, it's a potentially valuable utility. 2. Initial development: Developers work on it, and get a prototype out there that achieves the initial goal in a very simplified way. 3. Feature growth: Users like it, so the project grows. Developers continue to add features and improve the user experience to improve the value of the tool to users. 4. Maintenance: Users are now quite happy with the results feature-wise. Developers focus now on making things more robust, stable, flexible, fast, etc pushing out bugs and handling strange edge cases. 5. Completed: Users are now quite happy with the results, and the tool works without any significant maintenance.
The trouble is, this is also in order from most glamorous to least glamorous. Whoever who does step 1 will often end up in the role of BDFL, or at the very least will be treated as a visionary. The people who do step 2 can become well-known among developers (e.g. Alan Cox), and get to work on the cutting edge, and all the excitement of the new project. By the time you get to step 3, you can only have the satisfaction of adding a new feature that the world enjoys. And step 4 is typically painful, difficult, relatively unnoticed, and unrewarded. Which means that the few things that have ever made it to step 5 are typically small but very handy utility programs like dc.
Hence the story with Gnome 3: They decided to go back to step 1 rather than continue on with step 4 and 5.
The person in the passenger seat can actually be more of a distraction than someone on the phone, so what will we do, limit vehicles to not have any passenger seats?
If you're voting for either Democrats or Republicans this November, both are guaranteed to win: AT&T's bribes. Microsoft's bribes. Now, Microsoft is about 2/3 supporting Democrats and hedging 1/3 for Republicans, and AT&T is the other way around, but neither of them can really lose.
If you don't want to vote for them, you'll have to vote for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein (Green) or Gary Johnson (Libertarian).
Before birth: Yes, mom is free to choose whether to have an abortion, on the principle that dad shouldn't be able to force her to go through pregnancy or have a medical procedure.
After birth: Whoever has custody of the child is the one who makes that call. Typically, she does, so she gets to make that choice, but if he wants to raise the child and she doesn't, it is legal for the father to ask for custody.
Interestingly enough, there was recently a case that sorta dealt with the first situation: A 20-year-old woman slept with a 16-year-old Justin Bieber, committing statutory rape. A pregnancy ensued. She claimed paternity against Justin Bieber, but changed her mind and dropped the claim once she realized that to claim paternity would be to admit to her crime of rape.
As far as I know, this kind of situation hasn't actually been tested in court - the tough part is that it's probably in the best interests of the child to have dad's financial support, but at the same time it seems unfair to punish dad for being raped.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again?
Umm, for the same reason Americans regularly make fun of the Canadians, Brits, French, and just about everyone else? Poking fun at foreigners is something almost everyone does.
Which, for some reason, he can't answer when he's in the embassy talking on the phone or in a room with Swedish investigators, as he's offered to do.
How should they promote it to listeners who aren't already streaming music in their vehicles?
That's easy: Perform live. That's where the vast majority of musicians make their real money anyways.
Most bands perform live for a couple of years at least before releasing an album. And the #1 way to sell albums when starting out as an independent musician is to bring them with you to your live gigs and sell them to people who are already enjoying hearing you perform (and often a little drunk and impulsive, which makes it easier). Now, you don't sell as many albums that way, but the math works out that you make the same amount as you would have with a label if you sell only 1/10 the albums you would have sold with the label. 100 albums at a gig as an independent = 1000 albums in a store as a signed band.
This is also getting easier with the introduction of relatively cheap recording equipment and editing software, meaning your initial cost of recording the album in the first place is much lower now than it was 20 years ago.
*ducks*
You know what? Given the current economy, I might be willing to accept ducks as currency.
To be among that many marketdroids... Did it resemble a robotics class?
No, it resembled a remedial course in comparative literature: Anyone with half a brain could tell that most of what was being said was nonsense, but most of the attendees were eating it up.
The goal here is to make payment so easy that you don't have the time to reconsider the purchase decision while, for instance, you're pulling out your wallet to get out your credit card. These are people that firmly believe that the way to make the world a better place is to make it easier for them to buy stuff whether or not it is of any use to them whatsoever. I know, because I've attended one of the major conferences in the industry and met some of these folks and listened to their talks about this sort of technology.
And of course, what makes it easy for a legitimate business to take your money also makes it easy for a not-so-legitimate business or a thief to take your money.
"Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that!" - George Carlin
So, if people sort themselves into two groups say one called "Republicans" and the other say "Democrats" and would identify themselves as such, we could save everyone a lot of grief.
That's not really accurate though. The people who agree with those statements are properly termed "morons" or "idiots" regardless of party affiliation.
You're right there's a correlation with voting Republican at the moment, but I'd attribute that to a related-but-not-identical third factor, namely getting all ones news and information from right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News. But at the same time, how many people think that:
- George W Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks
- Obama has never ordered the summary execution of a US citizen
- the reason we don't have a public healthcare option was that the Republicans demanded it in negotiations
- Obama has never locked up a US citizen for over a year in solitary confinement without putting him on trial
- If you taxed the richest 1% of Americans 90% for a year, you'd be able to eliminate the federal debt
I'm sure that list could be made longer easily enough.
Absolutely, I just like it when an experimental result matches educated guesses.
Reminds me of my joke about good research: A farmer noticed that his brown horses collectively were eating twice as much as his white horses collectively. After properly researching the subject, he decided to focus on the fact that he had 20 brown horses and only 10 white horses.
The testes are towards the outside of the body and vulnerable to all sorts of things, while the ovaries are better protected. Furthermore, sperm is produced over the course of a lifetime, whereas eggs aren't. The end result is that eggs are likely to have the original genetic material of Mom, while the sperm is more likely to have been modified (by radiation, damage from trauma, copying errors, etc) from the original genetic material of Dad.
This seems like a good evolutionary strategy, however it arose: Mom provides a version that has allowed her to survive and reproduce, suggesting a minimum viability, which she passes on to the child. Dad provides a version of an evolutionarily successful human that is modified, allowing the species to improve itself (And if he's lived to old age, he was probably an effective survivor evolutionarily speaking).
They aren't talking about suing the individual programmers, they're talking about suing the software companies. Specifically, they want to disallow this kind of language very common in EULAs (this is taken from an actual EULA, name omitted to protect the guilty):
_______ and/or its respective suppliers hereby disclaim all warranties and conditions with regard to this product, including all implied warranties and conditions of merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. In no event shall _______ and/or its respective suppliers be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use of this software.
The translation of this clause out of legalese is "No matter what happens, you can't sue us, we're not responsible. We don't promise that this software is even remotely like what we advertised it to be."
Wow! What kind of socialist put that idea through? I'm sure the Republican presidential nominee wouldn't approve of that sort of giveaway!
Hope you didn't think you'd get much out of your car insurance company. Well, they might look for your missing leg for a few minutes.
Actually, chances are it will be the cement truck's insurance that pays up for that situation.
It depends who you are and what you can do. Many countries (such as Canada and Germany) like seeing potential immigrants with strong educational and work experience backgrounds. They also typically expect you to be proficient in their language, like it when you arrange your first job in their country beforehand, will expect you to abide by their laws as well as (in most cases) have no criminal record in the US, and if you choose to become a citizen will expect you to swear loyalty to your newly adopted country.
Basically, they're happy to have you if you're going to be a net benefit to their economy, and not so happy to have you if it looks like you'd be a drain on their economy. My understanding is that there's less of a "Dey took our jerbs!" attitude in many other countries than in the US, in part because much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US is fuelled by racism, and in part because people in the rest of the world don't pride themselves on ignorance of other countries.
Ah, yes, this is the plan laid out by Alan Grayson as what it appears the GOP is aiming for.
I'm assuming OP is in the US, because in most other countries this is a non-issue.
This was the kind of situation that Obamacare is intended to address, by making the individual market a viable option for people who aren't getting insurance through their employment, eliminating exclusions for preexisting conditions and requiring no more than 20% overhead (for reference, Medicare runs at about 3% overhead and the VA closer to 1%).
Other approaches, while you're waiting for that law to fully kick in:
- If you're married, and your spouse is a full-time employee somewhere, use their group plan.
- If you've saved up a lot, which it sounds like you have, consider focusing on catastrophic coverage.
- If you're older than 50, consider the AARP. They provide all sorts of discounts, including on health insurance.
- If your life situation allows, you might be able to relocate to a civilized country. This is obviously a big change, so you wouldn't want to make this lightly.
- Put up with the higher rates and less insurance. It's not pleasant, of course, but it sounds like you can afford it.
That being said, there is no reason not be be responsible with the environment and fight pollution for the sake of fighting pollution.
Sure there is: If I'm owning a corporation doing the polluting, I stand to make a very large sum of money by ignoring the problem. Of course, everybody else might be a bit upset about this, but I can use some of that cash to buy off politicians to ensure that those annoyed masses don't actually have the power to stop me, and some more of the cash to fund "Institutes" and "think tanks" and media organizations to legitimately convince people that that what I'm doing isn't a problem.
Purely hypothetical, of course.
So without class action, what exactly is the reason a company won't try this:
1. Overcharge all customers by $30.
2. Refuse to refund the money.
3. If anybody goes to the time and expense of suing them in small claims court, concede and refund the money and the 1 hours' worth of the attorney's time ($300 or so).
This strategy is profitable so long as less than 10% of the customers affected don't go after them. And because it's not in fact worth my time to haggle over a $30 overcharge, chances are I won't. With a class action, somebody else can take the initiative, file the suit on my behalf, and I can get my $30 and the lawyers can get an extra $10 per person on top of that as punative damages. The only real loser in that scenario is the scammer.
1. Solution: put doctors on salary. You seem to forget that doctors are Free people and are not serfs owned by the Crown.
Actually, a lot of doctors would prefer salary. The Mayo Clinic has done this for a really long time, and still gets lots of applicants.
2. Solution: end-of-life counseling and legalizing euthanasia
The goal here is to prevent us from spending lots of money taking care of, say, Alzheimers patients who have deteriorated so much they can't remember that they have a son, much less what his name is or what he looks like. A sane health care policy would work with the patient, their family, any advisors they want involved (e.g. a pastor or trusted friend), decide when the patient's life is not worth living, get everyone together for one last goodbye, and then administer a lethal level of painkillers to minimize the suffering.
3. Solution: Single payer and single provider, so there's nobody else to haggle with. And you don't shop around for a better price on your commodity items and just go to the local monopoly store to buy your food?
If you're lying in a bed in an ER with a broken leg, you don't want to shop around for the cheapest and best deal, you want to get your leg set and get the heck out of there. If you're sitting in a doctors' office and the doc tells you you have a serious disease and will die unless you take this particular pill, you'll likely take the pill no matter how much it costs you. It's not like broccoli at all, where I can relatively easily tell what's good and what's not, and can decide to buy carrots or cauliflower instead, and can easily shop around if I want to do so.
4. Solution: Cover everybody. They tend to seek care in ER's since they know that they cannot be turned away due to the laws. Change the laws back and make them goto a clinic for the sniffles.
They can't afford the clinic, otherwise they would go there. What do you want them to do to get health care? Or would you rather they just lived with their illness?
They created change for the sake of change and that is a very bad reason for change when people are depending on keeping things as they are.
Ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
What should have happened, after Gnome 2 was released and was really darn good, is that Gnome should have downshifted into maintenance mode. The features were quite sufficient for their purpose, and the focus should have switched to just making things faster and slightly more awesome.
Here's the ideal software development lifecycle:
1. Ideation and design: Somebody has a good idea for a piece of software. It solves a problem, it's an entertaining game, it's a potentially valuable utility.
2. Initial development: Developers work on it, and get a prototype out there that achieves the initial goal in a very simplified way.
3. Feature growth: Users like it, so the project grows. Developers continue to add features and improve the user experience to improve the value of the tool to users.
4. Maintenance: Users are now quite happy with the results feature-wise. Developers focus now on making things more robust, stable, flexible, fast, etc pushing out bugs and handling strange edge cases.
5. Completed: Users are now quite happy with the results, and the tool works without any significant maintenance.
The trouble is, this is also in order from most glamorous to least glamorous. Whoever who does step 1 will often end up in the role of BDFL, or at the very least will be treated as a visionary. The people who do step 2 can become well-known among developers (e.g. Alan Cox), and get to work on the cutting edge, and all the excitement of the new project. By the time you get to step 3, you can only have the satisfaction of adding a new feature that the world enjoys. And step 4 is typically painful, difficult, relatively unnoticed, and unrewarded. Which means that the few things that have ever made it to step 5 are typically small but very handy utility programs like dc.
Hence the story with Gnome 3: They decided to go back to step 1 rather than continue on with step 4 and 5.
The person in the passenger seat can actually be more of a distraction than someone on the phone, so what will we do, limit vehicles to not have any passenger seats?
This claim certainly seems plausible, but somebody actually did the research on this and found the opposite is true:
University of Utah press release on the study
If you're voting for either Democrats or Republicans this November, both are guaranteed to win:
AT&T's bribes.
Microsoft's bribes.
Now, Microsoft is about 2/3 supporting Democrats and hedging 1/3 for Republicans, and AT&T is the other way around, but neither of them can really lose.
If you don't want to vote for them, you'll have to vote for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein (Green) or Gary Johnson (Libertarian).
with no intelligent species within earshot
Including, I should add, on Earth!
Before birth: Yes, mom is free to choose whether to have an abortion, on the principle that dad shouldn't be able to force her to go through pregnancy or have a medical procedure.
After birth: Whoever has custody of the child is the one who makes that call. Typically, she does, so she gets to make that choice, but if he wants to raise the child and she doesn't, it is legal for the father to ask for custody.
Interestingly enough, there was recently a case that sorta dealt with the first situation: A 20-year-old woman slept with a 16-year-old Justin Bieber, committing statutory rape. A pregnancy ensued. She claimed paternity against Justin Bieber, but changed her mind and dropped the claim once she realized that to claim paternity would be to admit to her crime of rape.
As far as I know, this kind of situation hasn't actually been tested in court - the tough part is that it's probably in the best interests of the child to have dad's financial support, but at the same time it seems unfair to punish dad for being raped.