calling the Republicans out on their anti-science platform. A good friend of mine insists on being Republican and I ask why he says "I'm gonna change it from the inside". At a certain point it starts to look like Stockholm syndrome or an abused spouse. Net Neutrality, their stance on health care, the fact that their tax cut hasn't even passed on their Speaker of the House is already talking about cutting Social Security (that I paid into for 25 years) to pay for it and now this... There's just a time when you have to call someone on their bullshit.
It's something I don't get. People really, really hate 'partisanship'. But is it partisan when the other side is objectively wrong?
By leftists you really mean radical feminists. Aside from occasionally making you take a dumb gen Ed class they have little or no day in public policy. Evangelicals OTOH have massive power. They own the South and thanks to our Senate have veto power over just about any law (save for the ones really calling the shots want a e.g. the billionaire aristocracy). What I'm saying is, you're wasting time and energy worrying about a total non threat. You might just as well rail against the scourge of the Amish...
when they point to them as a failing of socialism. Venezuela is a country that lived through nearly two hundreds years of abject poverty. Then for a very brief time had the resources to function as a first word country. It's a testament to their government's decency that they didn't just pocket all the money for themselves like most do. What I'm saying is that it's unreasonable to expect them to solve decades and decades of systemic poverty with 20-30 years of usually high oil profits.
And you're completely missing my original point: What we call communism isn't. It's authoritarianism that borrows communist rhetoric. Kinda like those preachers who buy private jets with the money they fleece out of people. They're not really men of God. People _can_ lie. They can misrepresent themselves. Dr Nick Riviera is not, in fact, a Doctor. In the same vein Stalin and Mao weren't communists. They were basically kings who seized the thrown with violence.
every time somebody lies. Stalin and Mao where not Communists. Not even a little. At no point did they relinquish power to the proletariat. At no point was actual ownership given to the proles. They just traded one aristocracy for another.
Also, while we're on the subject of logical fallacies nice appeal to authority.
isn't leftist, it's authoritarian/fascist. Look to the Scandinavian countries, France and when they're not taking after the USA Britain for leftist ideals.
They tried. Or at least the businesses that profit from ads on fake news sites did. What they found was that anything they tried got debunked in a matter of hours. It just didn't work. There's lots of theories why, you can Google the discussion. It's too controversial and this post is already likely to start a troll storm. But the fact remains fake news just doesn't work for the left.
No joke. After WWII Eisenhower couldn't figure out how to keep our economy from falling back into the inevitable recession that resulted from the massive wealth inequality of the 20s and 30s. His solution was the Military Industrial Complex. The theory being that the rich would pay for it (and therefore some money would make it out of their hands and into the general populace) to protect themselves. He talked about feeling guilty about it in his memoirs.
Jokes on him. The Uber rich are global now. They're not tied down by companies anymore. So they no longer fear another nation coming and taking all their stuff. So more and more of that government military money is going to the war profiteers and less to the troops. This is why we had soldiers die from electrocution in badly made buildings in Iraq.
Gawker thought they were taking part in what is a pretty standard farce in the entertainment industry: Release info that portrays a star in bad light, get sued, use the lawsuit for publicity and then pay the star several million dollars in settlement. It's usually an 'everybody wins' scenario. The star gets a bunch of publicity (no such thing as bad) the tabloid gets a lot of sales/traffic and the fans get some juicy dirt to keep them interested. It's a major part of the entertainment industry that is largely ignored by the/. crowd because, well, we're nerds. It's something mostly of interest to women to be honest. And not nerdy women, but regular run of the mill kind.
What Gawker didn't know was the entire thing was a set up by Thiel to shut them down. So at the stage when the entire thing was supposed to become a settlement, well, it didn't. By then it was too late, and Gawker was doomed.
On the plus side this will probably not happen again. On the down side we lost of of our muck rakers, and other muck rakers have to tread much, much more carefully. As bizarre as it sounds this is a blow for freedom. We've lost a pretty major part of what makes journalism work, and whether we know it or not we're going to regret it. That's just the kind of world we live in.
around here, but believe it or not Gawker did a lot of real journalism. What got them in trouble wasn't the sex tape or outing Thiel, it was Exposés on Thiel's various shady business deals. They were a muck raker, so yeah, lots and lots of mean spirited tabloid journalism. But that paid the bills on the other side of muck raking: exposing the wrong doings of wealthy and powerful people.
That said, people _hate_ Gawker. I can't see this working out. Funny though that a site that popular and profitable was that well hated. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's not on purpose. Given that they were taken down by a very real conspiracy that's not too far fetched. What's that old Gore Vidal quote, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.".
it was about fear. Sure, competition got the working class fired up, but you needed to get the aristocracy to buy into spending that much of their money (keeping in mind that they think of every dollar as 'theirs'). The threat of space based weaponry did that. Even the pyramids had a purpose. They were built to show other nations that Egypt was not to be trifled with.
Anyway, that threat is gone, and with it any interest by the aristocracy to pay for space exploration. Unless you can put some money on the table for them it's not going anywhere.
chance of profit. So far there isn't one for space. Stuff like space needs to be paid for by our civilization's wealthiest. It's simply too expensive otherwise. You can't get that kind of money from the working class. They don't have it. You'd have to take their food from them, and they'll revolt. Now, we got away with that during the cold war because the aristocracy in America was afraid of the Russians coming and taking their stuff. Most of the good from the 50s through the 90s came from that. That threat is gone. The aristocracy has stepped out onto the global stage. They've made deals with their fellows in other parts of the world. They're no longer tethered to a country like you and me. They don't _care_. If you want them to give up the goods you're gonna have to put money on the table. And right now that's not happening.
and they announced bandwidth caps just after Trump got elected and it was clear regulatory pressure would be off. That wasn't a coincidence.
As for the rest of the changes, yeah, they're not happening overnight overnight. But it's going to mean the end to innovations. The big players will survive. Middle level players will get swallowed up and finally startups will just be over and done with unless they're evil enough to attract venture capital (Uber, I'm lookin' at you). Take stock of your options for video, purchasing games, working at home on your company's VPN, or any other high bandwidth activity.
Did you encourage your family and friends to do the same? If so, thanks. But there's more to do. We need to take care of the folks in the Rust Belt. Give them jobs and college and health care and a future. Or they're gonna keep voting guys like Trumph in, and it's only going to get worse. I know folks don't like partisanship, but somebody needs to say it, and I've got Karma to burn.
how about we pay people to invent those things without also paying them to shoot missiles into space to watch stars. You know that's an option, right? The two aren't mutually exclusive. The big reason we did NASA was it was the only way to get funding for that stuff. The cold war drove the space race and let us tax people (especially the rich) enough to pay for those advancements. Cold Wars over, and it's not starting up again. So if we want money to make the world a better place we're gonna have to find another way.
nothing of utility is being produced. Yeah, a lot of tech got made, but it just as easily could have gotten made without spending billions launching stuff into space. You're confusing the goal (launch stuff) with the result (the stuff we invented to launch stuff). But when you think about it, it's kind of silly. Instead of spending billions on sending a probe how about some money spent on developing a safe and effective form of Male Birth control? How about money spent solving the rapidly approaching water shortage problems.
And yes, this is a zero sum game. It's remarkably hard to pry money out of the hands of the wealthy for these sort of things and the working class just doesn't have that much for you to pry. Now, during the cold war we could pry a ton of money out of the rich to fight the Ruskies, but that's over. It's not going to happen again. The rich figured out the Russians weren't a threat to them (maybe to you and me, but not them). The ultra wealthy are globalists now anyway. So we're not gonna get another bonanza like that. What little we get to devote the the general betterment of mankind needs to be spent carefully.
This won't change one single vote. Not one. People will go to the polls and they'll vote jobs. They'll vote on guns. They'll vote on abortion. Not a single person will ever vote on Net Neutrality. Not enough to _change_ a vote. Sure, some folks who were already going to vote against Trump and the Republican party (and make no mistake, this is a Republican policy. It's not partisan bickering when the other side overwhelmingly opposes it) will vote for a D or maybe even an L or a G, but they were never going to fall in line with the Rs to begin with.
I've said this before, I'll say it again. Unless we techies start promoting policies that help the working class, especially blue collar types, then things are going to get worse and worse for us and our issues. What we need right now is solidarity. What we've got is a bunch of wedge issues that keep us apart and doing exactly what the aristocracy wants us to do.
to the job killing regulation that is the medical license. If it's good enough for Dr Nick Riviera it's good enough for me. And let's not let anyone sue Dr Nick, heavens no. Sure, he used an artichoke heart instead of a human on, but he passed the savings on to you!
Oh, fyi, payouts for medical malpractice, according to this very pro tort reform (I hate calling it that) website are only $3.6 billion. This is/., so this story didn't belong here in the first place (news for nerds) but as a nerd I trust you can figure out that this is.3% of the annual cost of healthcare in America.
it would mean a big shift in purchasing and consequently a ton of money he could give away to himself or his buddies. As always with politics, follow the money.
from the US. Mostly the hazardous stuff. I'm actually a bit worried. Right at a time when we need some extra oversight on how waste is going to be disposed we've got a head of the EPA on record saying he'd end it if he could.
seriously. Goldman Sachs runs the Whitehouse and has for 20 years. They shut down Occupy WallStreet using elements of the Patriot Act to organize local police and the FBI. There's a mountain of evidence that voter suppression and outright hacks and not a peep from anybody. And then there's the whole Russian interference. I cop just shot a man who was begging for his life with an AR-15 and got off scott free. And lord, anybody remember Dick Cheney and his blatant war crimes? Christ, if I want to look at the local level what about all the bribes paid to make red light cameras happen? I could go on and on and on and on...
There is zero attempt hide their corruption. This has nothing to do with that. This is about keeping numbnuts from taking a drone to a football game and crashing it into the stands not as an act of terror but an act of sheer, drunken 'hold my beer and watch this' stupidity.
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calling the Republicans out on their anti-science platform. A good friend of mine insists on being Republican and I ask why he says "I'm gonna change it from the inside". At a certain point it starts to look like Stockholm syndrome or an abused spouse. Net Neutrality, their stance on health care, the fact that their tax cut hasn't even passed on their Speaker of the House is already talking about cutting Social Security (that I paid into for 25 years) to pay for it and now this... There's just a time when you have to call someone on their bullshit.
It's something I don't get. People really, really hate 'partisanship'. But is it partisan when the other side is objectively wrong?
and I encourage everyone to like, share or comment on this post if they also agree!
and PEBKAC both come to mind. As does the classic "The software isn't finished until the last user's dead".
By leftists you really mean radical feminists. Aside from occasionally making you take a dumb gen Ed class they have little or no day in public policy. Evangelicals OTOH have massive power. They own the South and thanks to our Senate have veto power over just about any law (save for the ones really calling the shots want a e.g. the billionaire aristocracy). What I'm saying is, you're wasting time and energy worrying about a total non threat. You might just as well rail against the scourge of the Amish...
when they point to them as a failing of socialism. Venezuela is a country that lived through nearly two hundreds years of abject poverty. Then for a very brief time had the resources to function as a first word country. It's a testament to their government's decency that they didn't just pocket all the money for themselves like most do. What I'm saying is that it's unreasonable to expect them to solve decades and decades of systemic poverty with 20-30 years of usually high oil profits.
And you're completely missing my original point: What we call communism isn't. It's authoritarianism that borrows communist rhetoric. Kinda like those preachers who buy private jets with the money they fleece out of people. They're not really men of God. People _can_ lie. They can misrepresent themselves. Dr Nick Riviera is not, in fact, a Doctor. In the same vein Stalin and Mao weren't communists. They were basically kings who seized the thrown with violence.
every time somebody lies. Stalin and Mao where not Communists. Not even a little. At no point did they relinquish power to the proletariat. At no point was actual ownership given to the proles. They just traded one aristocracy for another.
Also, while we're on the subject of logical fallacies nice appeal to authority.
isn't leftist, it's authoritarian/fascist. Look to the Scandinavian countries, France and when they're not taking after the USA Britain for leftist ideals.
They tried. Or at least the businesses that profit from ads on fake news sites did. What they found was that anything they tried got debunked in a matter of hours. It just didn't work. There's lots of theories why, you can Google the discussion. It's too controversial and this post is already likely to start a troll storm. But the fact remains fake news just doesn't work for the left.
No joke. After WWII Eisenhower couldn't figure out how to keep our economy from falling back into the inevitable recession that resulted from the massive wealth inequality of the 20s and 30s. His solution was the Military Industrial Complex. The theory being that the rich would pay for it (and therefore some money would make it out of their hands and into the general populace) to protect themselves. He talked about feeling guilty about it in his memoirs.
Jokes on him. The Uber rich are global now. They're not tied down by companies anymore. So they no longer fear another nation coming and taking all their stuff. So more and more of that government military money is going to the war profiteers and less to the troops. This is why we had soldiers die from electrocution in badly made buildings in Iraq.
Gawker thought they were taking part in what is a pretty standard farce in the entertainment industry: Release info that portrays a star in bad light, get sued, use the lawsuit for publicity and then pay the star several million dollars in settlement. It's usually an 'everybody wins' scenario. The star gets a bunch of publicity (no such thing as bad) the tabloid gets a lot of sales/traffic and the fans get some juicy dirt to keep them interested. It's a major part of the entertainment industry that is largely ignored by the /. crowd because, well, we're nerds. It's something mostly of interest to women to be honest. And not nerdy women, but regular run of the mill kind.
What Gawker didn't know was the entire thing was a set up by Thiel to shut them down. So at the stage when the entire thing was supposed to become a settlement, well, it didn't. By then it was too late, and Gawker was doomed.
On the plus side this will probably not happen again. On the down side we lost of of our muck rakers, and other muck rakers have to tread much, much more carefully. As bizarre as it sounds this is a blow for freedom. We've lost a pretty major part of what makes journalism work, and whether we know it or not we're going to regret it. That's just the kind of world we live in.
around here, but believe it or not Gawker did a lot of real journalism. What got them in trouble wasn't the sex tape or outing Thiel, it was Exposés on Thiel's various shady business deals. They were a muck raker, so yeah, lots and lots of mean spirited tabloid journalism. But that paid the bills on the other side of muck raking: exposing the wrong doings of wealthy and powerful people.
That said, people _hate_ Gawker. I can't see this working out. Funny though that a site that popular and profitable was that well hated. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's not on purpose. Given that they were taken down by a very real conspiracy that's not too far fetched. What's that old Gore Vidal quote, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.".
it was about fear. Sure, competition got the working class fired up, but you needed to get the aristocracy to buy into spending that much of their money (keeping in mind that they think of every dollar as 'theirs'). The threat of space based weaponry did that. Even the pyramids had a purpose. They were built to show other nations that Egypt was not to be trifled with.
Anyway, that threat is gone, and with it any interest by the aristocracy to pay for space exploration. Unless you can put some money on the table for them it's not going anywhere.
chance of profit. So far there isn't one for space. Stuff like space needs to be paid for by our civilization's wealthiest. It's simply too expensive otherwise. You can't get that kind of money from the working class. They don't have it. You'd have to take their food from them, and they'll revolt. Now, we got away with that during the cold war because the aristocracy in America was afraid of the Russians coming and taking their stuff. Most of the good from the 50s through the 90s came from that. That threat is gone. The aristocracy has stepped out onto the global stage. They've made deals with their fellows in other parts of the world. They're no longer tethered to a country like you and me. They don't _care_. If you want them to give up the goods you're gonna have to put money on the table. And right now that's not happening.
and they announced bandwidth caps just after Trump got elected and it was clear regulatory pressure would be off. That wasn't a coincidence. As for the rest of the changes, yeah, they're not happening overnight overnight. But it's going to mean the end to innovations. The big players will survive. Middle level players will get swallowed up and finally startups will just be over and done with unless they're evil enough to attract venture capital (Uber, I'm lookin' at you). Take stock of your options for video, purchasing games, working at home on your company's VPN, or any other high bandwidth activity.
Did you encourage your family and friends to do the same? If so, thanks. But there's more to do. We need to take care of the folks in the Rust Belt. Give them jobs and college and health care and a future. Or they're gonna keep voting guys like Trumph in, and it's only going to get worse. I know folks don't like partisanship, but somebody needs to say it, and I've got Karma to burn.
how about we pay people to invent those things without also paying them to shoot missiles into space to watch stars. You know that's an option, right? The two aren't mutually exclusive. The big reason we did NASA was it was the only way to get funding for that stuff. The cold war drove the space race and let us tax people (especially the rich) enough to pay for those advancements. Cold Wars over, and it's not starting up again. So if we want money to make the world a better place we're gonna have to find another way.
nothing of utility is being produced. Yeah, a lot of tech got made, but it just as easily could have gotten made without spending billions launching stuff into space. You're confusing the goal (launch stuff) with the result (the stuff we invented to launch stuff). But when you think about it, it's kind of silly. Instead of spending billions on sending a probe how about some money spent on developing a safe and effective form of Male Birth control? How about money spent solving the rapidly approaching water shortage problems.
And yes, this is a zero sum game. It's remarkably hard to pry money out of the hands of the wealthy for these sort of things and the working class just doesn't have that much for you to pry. Now, during the cold war we could pry a ton of money out of the rich to fight the Ruskies, but that's over. It's not going to happen again. The rich figured out the Russians weren't a threat to them (maybe to you and me, but not them). The ultra wealthy are globalists now anyway. So we're not gonna get another bonanza like that. What little we get to devote the the general betterment of mankind needs to be spent carefully.
This won't change one single vote. Not one. People will go to the polls and they'll vote jobs. They'll vote on guns. They'll vote on abortion. Not a single person will ever vote on Net Neutrality. Not enough to _change_ a vote. Sure, some folks who were already going to vote against Trump and the Republican party (and make no mistake, this is a Republican policy. It's not partisan bickering when the other side overwhelmingly opposes it) will vote for a D or maybe even an L or a G, but they were never going to fall in line with the Rs to begin with.
I've said this before, I'll say it again. Unless we techies start promoting policies that help the working class, especially blue collar types, then things are going to get worse and worse for us and our issues. What we need right now is solidarity. What we've got is a bunch of wedge issues that keep us apart and doing exactly what the aristocracy wants us to do.
to the job killing regulation that is the medical license. If it's good enough for Dr Nick Riviera it's good enough for me. And let's not let anyone sue Dr Nick, heavens no. Sure, he used an artichoke heart instead of a human on, but he passed the savings on to you!
/., so this story didn't belong here in the first place (news for nerds) but as a nerd I trust you can figure out that this is .3% of the annual cost of healthcare in America.
Oh, fyi, payouts for medical malpractice, according to this very pro tort reform (I hate calling it that) website are only $3.6 billion. This is
it would mean a big shift in purchasing and consequently a ton of money he could give away to himself or his buddies. As always with politics, follow the money.
Mom moved us here when we were kids and I've been stuck ever since.
it would be if they used these.
from the US. Mostly the hazardous stuff. I'm actually a bit worried. Right at a time when we need some extra oversight on how waste is going to be disposed we've got a head of the EPA on record saying he'd end it if he could.
a steam powered fridge. Some of us have to make do with the old fashion electric ones.
seriously. Goldman Sachs runs the Whitehouse and has for 20 years. They shut down Occupy WallStreet using elements of the Patriot Act to organize local police and the FBI. There's a mountain of evidence that voter suppression and outright hacks and not a peep from anybody. And then there's the whole Russian interference. I cop just shot a man who was begging for his life with an AR-15 and got off scott free. And lord, anybody remember Dick Cheney and his blatant war crimes? Christ, if I want to look at the local level what about all the bribes paid to make red light cameras happen? I could go on and on and on and on...
There is zero attempt hide their corruption. This has nothing to do with that. This is about keeping numbnuts from taking a drone to a football game and crashing it into the stands not as an act of terror but an act of sheer, drunken 'hold my beer and watch this' stupidity.