This is the claim I have a problem with. Oil companies supply oil. They do that because there is a demand. That's the extent of their involvement. What are they supposed to do? Cut down on production? Other companies will attempt to fill in the gap.
This is like fighting a War on Drugs by arresting the people selling them on the street corner.
But hey, you know what I saw in my local paper? People claiming that Trump was a great Christian person. Donald Trump.
Evangelists were split on this, but the majority decided Trump was a good Christian (and some were appalled by that). I really hope this hypocrisy hurts the evangelical political movement badly.
They could have decided that Trump was worth supporting despite his morals, which is a supportable decision, but if they're going to call him a good Christian they've lost sight of reason and Christianity.
I was able to read some good reporting on the coal miners, better than I found on any other group, so I went with them. I saw nothing to indicate that they were atypical Trump supporters, and Trump pandered to them. Is there some reason I shouldn't have paid attention to them?
For some things, a natural vs. artificial distinction makes sense. I'm not at all convinced it's different for extinction-level events, so I'm largely agreeing with you.
The question is not "Is healthcare necessary?", which I hope we'd all answer "yes". The question is "Is it necessary to pay as much for it as the US does?", and the answer to that is clearly "no".
I've been using the Net to meet and converse with strangers I'll never meet for over 25 years now. I find the ability to build a virtual community fascinating.
How about health care? US health care is ridiculously expensive. If we could stop paying for all the insurance overhead and divert that to NASA, NASA would be in great shape.
Most people currently receiving SS, or who are soon to receive it, have been paying into it for decades, and older folks vote in considerable numbers. SS is a very dangerous program to attack.
If what you say were true, places that have been inhabited by humans would be depopulated wastelands. They aren't. Humans move into an area and stay in some form of dynamic equilibrium.
Of course there's species coming and going all the time. The problem we've got now is a lot of species going very rapidly. Lots of things are fine at normal levels but not when vastly accelerated.
A long time, an efficient form of life appeared that suffused the atmosphere with a deadly gas, now making up about 20% of it, causing mass extinction. That's about as natural as what we're doing.
Human population growth is stopping worldwide. Give women education, access to birth control, and cut infant mortality and population levels off or declines slightly.
If the Democrats take the House in 2018, the Speaker would be a Democrat, and if Trump and Pence left office somehow without enough intervening time to nominate a new VP and get that person approved by the Senate, the new President would be a Democrat. Impeachment and conviction aren't the most common ways Presidents and VPs leave office; I believe the leading cause is death, followed by resignation.
Another scenario would be a sufficiently big disaster to wipe out the Cabinet and everyone earlier in the succession chain. At that point, I believe the succession goes to some surviving Senator, I don't know how that one is selected, and so it could be a Democrat. Typically, at least one person early in the line of succession will be kept physically away from the others, to guard against such disasters. This isn't very likely, but could possibly happen. Another way would be for Trump or Pence to leave office, and for the remaining one to nominate a Democrat for VP, but that isn't likely either.
Actually, I've been making an effort to understand Trump supporters, and that's why I agree with GP. For example, consider the coal miners. They want life back like it was in the 1960s, when a strong work ethic and no particular skills meant you could sacrifice your health to mine coal and support a house and a family. That is, very simply, not going to happen, and Trump has shown no signs of trying to make it happen, or, for that matter trying to come up with a solution.
The real problem these people have is that they don't have what it takes to succeed in a modern economy, and I haven't seen signs that most of them consider this. Instead, they blame their problems on all sorts of things that don't involve requiring personal change. As a group, they don't seem interested in retraining to get skills for success. They appear to think that the decline in coal-mining jobs is due to some sort of politics or internationalism that can be reversed.
They have real problems, but appear unwilling to consider real solutions. They don't show any particular sign of caring about the harm coal does worldwide, or that there are reasons why coal is less in demand (renewables and natural gas, for example).
Instead, they voted for someone who said the right things to them in the most successful con game in the history of the world. They went for meaningless external validation rather than actual assistance, perhaps because actual assistance would mean that they'd have to change their identity.
I may have gotten some of this wrong, and would welcome reasoned corrections.
Now, to me these people look like whiny entitled brats who want the world to work the way they want it to work, and thinks the world owes them a living doing what they want to do. Setting that aside, my plan to help them would be to help them not be coal miners, but to acquire skills and experience for a more challenging and fluid economy. They apparently don't want this.
So, how would I engage with them? How could I convince them that the world has moved on, and that their problems are not due to malice? That the world will never again be what they want? Facts are apparently useless in the argument. I can understand what they want, but there's no way they're going to get it, and they seem emotionally invested in the impossible. I can't use facts or empathy as arguments. Where do I go from here?
If Hillary Clinton had been elected and was accused of even 1/10th of what Trump is under investigation for there is zero doubt in my mind that there would be armed revolt in the streets with rifles and everything else.
Nah. However, Congress would be doing almost nothing but investigating and desperately trying to come up with something that didn't seem too laughable as an impeachment offense.
I'm not saying he will or won't be impeached, because that's a political process, and it would take a lot of Republican support to impeach and convict. The Democrats could take control of the House in 2018, but if they won every Senate seat up for election then they would not have near enough votes to convict.
The definition of impeachable offense is very slippery. If Trump or his business empire has accepted money from any government source since his inauguration, he's violated the Constitution. The investigation into potentially illegal Russian involvement in the election continues, and it would be premature to dismiss it. Trump has always been rather careless of the law, and I haven't seen him acting more responsibly, so there's any number of impeachable offenses he might commit.
A lot of the Republican advances have been due to flagrant gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court is cracking down on.
You're wrong about "If you release code under the GPL, people are NOT free to use it for whatever software they want to write.", of course. Anybody can use GPLed code to write whatever they want. Your " If someone wants to use GPL code directly in closed-source software, they cannot." is correct, but I never said anything otherwise. Software itself is not Free or proprietary on its own, that's an attribute people assign to it with licensing. "There's a legal maze to navigate with any version of the GPL." is also false, since all versions of the GPL are reasonably clearly written and understandable. It's not a legal maze, unless you're looking for loopholes to abuse the license, which you shouldn't be doing anyway. " It's a showstopper for many, despite your personal feelings on the matter." is partly true. Some people want to do things incompatible with the GPL, and that's their business, but any whining about how someone else didn't let them use the code for their own specific purposes is unbecoming. Some people just have inept and lazy lawyers, who'd rather advise their clients to do nothing rather than do a little work to understand the legal situation.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't listen to them, how do you know whether they're trying to make things better or worse?
Jurassic Park.
This is the claim I have a problem with. Oil companies supply oil. They do that because there is a demand. That's the extent of their involvement. What are they supposed to do? Cut down on production? Other companies will attempt to fill in the gap.
This is like fighting a War on Drugs by arresting the people selling them on the street corner.
Evangelists were split on this, but the majority decided Trump was a good Christian (and some were appalled by that). I really hope this hypocrisy hurts the evangelical political movement badly.
They could have decided that Trump was worth supporting despite his morals, which is a supportable decision, but if they're going to call him a good Christian they've lost sight of reason and Christianity.
I was able to read some good reporting on the coal miners, better than I found on any other group, so I went with them. I saw nothing to indicate that they were atypical Trump supporters, and Trump pandered to them. Is there some reason I shouldn't have paid attention to them?
For some things, a natural vs. artificial distinction makes sense. I'm not at all convinced it's different for extinction-level events, so I'm largely agreeing with you.
The question is not "Is healthcare necessary?", which I hope we'd all answer "yes". The question is "Is it necessary to pay as much for it as the US does?", and the answer to that is clearly "no".
In my experience, it is as simple as that. As long as you have some half-assed excuse for not hiring, you're probably in the clear.
The problem is that jobs are not always available. I've had to work places I would rather not have before, between jobs I like.
I've been using the Net to meet and converse with strangers I'll never meet for over 25 years now. I find the ability to build a virtual community fascinating.
How about health care? US health care is ridiculously expensive. If we could stop paying for all the insurance overhead and divert that to NASA, NASA would be in great shape.
Do we have a problem with the engineering? It sounds to me like you're complaining about the management.
Most people currently receiving SS, or who are soon to receive it, have been paying into it for decades, and older folks vote in considerable numbers. SS is a very dangerous program to attack.
If what you say were true, places that have been inhabited by humans would be depopulated wastelands. They aren't. Humans move into an area and stay in some form of dynamic equilibrium.
Of course there's species coming and going all the time. The problem we've got now is a lot of species going very rapidly. Lots of things are fine at normal levels but not when vastly accelerated.
A long time, an efficient form of life appeared that suffused the atmosphere with a deadly gas, now making up about 20% of it, causing mass extinction. That's about as natural as what we're doing.
You're making that up. We really are losing species at a very rapid rate.
Human population growth is stopping worldwide. Give women education, access to birth control, and cut infant mortality and population levels off or declines slightly.
Last I checked, the Sun was going to get Earth well over boiling temperature in less than a billion years. No time to waste!
It's not really secure if it can be powered on.
If the Democrats take the House in 2018, the Speaker would be a Democrat, and if Trump and Pence left office somehow without enough intervening time to nominate a new VP and get that person approved by the Senate, the new President would be a Democrat. Impeachment and conviction aren't the most common ways Presidents and VPs leave office; I believe the leading cause is death, followed by resignation.
Another scenario would be a sufficiently big disaster to wipe out the Cabinet and everyone earlier in the succession chain. At that point, I believe the succession goes to some surviving Senator, I don't know how that one is selected, and so it could be a Democrat. Typically, at least one person early in the line of succession will be kept physically away from the others, to guard against such disasters. This isn't very likely, but could possibly happen. Another way would be for Trump or Pence to leave office, and for the remaining one to nominate a Democrat for VP, but that isn't likely either.
Actually, I've been making an effort to understand Trump supporters, and that's why I agree with GP. For example, consider the coal miners. They want life back like it was in the 1960s, when a strong work ethic and no particular skills meant you could sacrifice your health to mine coal and support a house and a family. That is, very simply, not going to happen, and Trump has shown no signs of trying to make it happen, or, for that matter trying to come up with a solution.
The real problem these people have is that they don't have what it takes to succeed in a modern economy, and I haven't seen signs that most of them consider this. Instead, they blame their problems on all sorts of things that don't involve requiring personal change. As a group, they don't seem interested in retraining to get skills for success. They appear to think that the decline in coal-mining jobs is due to some sort of politics or internationalism that can be reversed.
They have real problems, but appear unwilling to consider real solutions. They don't show any particular sign of caring about the harm coal does worldwide, or that there are reasons why coal is less in demand (renewables and natural gas, for example).
Instead, they voted for someone who said the right things to them in the most successful con game in the history of the world. They went for meaningless external validation rather than actual assistance, perhaps because actual assistance would mean that they'd have to change their identity.
I may have gotten some of this wrong, and would welcome reasoned corrections.
Now, to me these people look like whiny entitled brats who want the world to work the way they want it to work, and thinks the world owes them a living doing what they want to do. Setting that aside, my plan to help them would be to help them not be coal miners, but to acquire skills and experience for a more challenging and fluid economy. They apparently don't want this.
So, how would I engage with them? How could I convince them that the world has moved on, and that their problems are not due to malice? That the world will never again be what they want? Facts are apparently useless in the argument. I can understand what they want, but there's no way they're going to get it, and they seem emotionally invested in the impossible. I can't use facts or empathy as arguments. Where do I go from here?
Nah. However, Congress would be doing almost nothing but investigating and desperately trying to come up with something that didn't seem too laughable as an impeachment offense.
I'm not saying he will or won't be impeached, because that's a political process, and it would take a lot of Republican support to impeach and convict. The Democrats could take control of the House in 2018, but if they won every Senate seat up for election then they would not have near enough votes to convict.
The definition of impeachable offense is very slippery. If Trump or his business empire has accepted money from any government source since his inauguration, he's violated the Constitution. The investigation into potentially illegal Russian involvement in the election continues, and it would be premature to dismiss it. Trump has always been rather careless of the law, and I haven't seen him acting more responsibly, so there's any number of impeachable offenses he might commit.
A lot of the Republican advances have been due to flagrant gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court is cracking down on.
Ah, so we're back in the insult level of debate.
You're wrong about "If you release code under the GPL, people are NOT free to use it for whatever software they want to write.", of course. Anybody can use GPLed code to write whatever they want. Your " If someone wants to use GPL code directly in closed-source software, they cannot." is correct, but I never said anything otherwise. Software itself is not Free or proprietary on its own, that's an attribute people assign to it with licensing. "There's a legal maze to navigate with any version of the GPL." is also false, since all versions of the GPL are reasonably clearly written and understandable. It's not a legal maze, unless you're looking for loopholes to abuse the license, which you shouldn't be doing anyway. " It's a showstopper for many, despite your personal feelings on the matter." is partly true. Some people want to do things incompatible with the GPL, and that's their business, but any whining about how someone else didn't let them use the code for their own specific purposes is unbecoming. Some people just have inept and lazy lawyers, who'd rather advise their clients to do nothing rather than do a little work to understand the legal situation.