I think it's pretty telling that you dismiss claims based on the body of his writing, focus down only on the piece that fits your narrative, and then accuse people who disagree with you of trying to fit things to a pre-held position.
As far as "a product of our culture", that's just nonsensical. This kid was clearly seriously mentally ill. He absolutely IS a one-off. Severe and pervasive narcissistic behavior is not something that can be instilled by society at large in an otherwise healthy person. Mental illness is not simply a matter of degrees, it's a fundamental failure to react to external stimuli in a rational way. You're trying to ascribe cultural guilt to a single disturbed person, but reality just doesn't work that way.
His narcissism is sexually driven, to my eye, and a result of his deeply held belief that women owe him sex because he's better.
I don't think I regard your opinion very highly, given that you're confusing the manifesto you _claim_ to have read with the youtube video that you're actually quoting from. I can see the problem just fine, but I don't appreciate people excluding large portions of what's happening in order to emphasize their pre-held position.
In fact, I've seen several women say as much -- that this tragedy proves that misogyny hurts men, too.
Then presumably you've also seen the people objecting to those statements and claiming that any attempt to talk about anything other than women is "men feeling left out"? Because even the statements you've made here would generate some hate on Twitter. In fact, try posting some of what you put in this post under "#YesAllWomen" and see what kind of response you get. I'm guessing something like this:
#YesAllWomen because the #YesAllPeople tag is essentially about men feeling left out. How does it feel? Not good? Wow would never guess
Ok, let's have this conversation. I'm assuming you've actually read a decent portion of his writing, since you seem to support the claim that it reeks of misogyny, and that you're not just parroting back claims from a bunch of people trying to fit it to a narrative (who haven't read it themselves either) right? It's available here if you haven't: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2259...
So let's talk. The boy clearly shows signs of blatant narcissism. In the first couple pages he brags about having visited 4 countries by the time he was 3, as if any child that age could gain anything meaningful from that experience. He goes on to describe a facile and warped world view, including how much joy he took in excluding his arch rival (a boy) from his 6th birthday party, classifying being denied entry to a roller coaster ride at 7 because of his height as "an injustice", and overall demonstrates a clear love of power, money, and status in settings that have no bearing on gender whatsoever. Where's the misogyny there?
He talks at length about how he refused to get a "low class retail job" because he's "an intellectual who's destined for greatness." He decides he'll be a screenwriter for about 2 weeks until he realizes they don't make much money, and then bails on it. He takes a college class, but quits halfway through because he's physically disgusted by the site of a happy couple sitting together every day. He took a janitorial job out of desperation, then quite after 5 hours because it was so beneath him. Where's the misogyny there?
There's a lot of misogynistic expression as well, of course. At one point he tells his mother that she should "sacrifice her happiness to secure his future" by marrying a rich guy she only wants to date. And yes, there's a lot of ranting about how women ignore him. But if you actually read even a little bit of it, it becomes very clear that this is a fundamentally delusional person no matter what gender he's talking about.
If you actually look at what he says, it's clear that he feels entitled to EVERYTHING. Not just women, but money, power, respect, friendship, and luxury. He's clearly not able to connect well with other people, and he basically viewed women as a prop in the perfect life of adoration that he felt he was owed. Is that misogynistic? Certainly. But taken as a whole his delusion was no more misogynistic than it was hateful of the entire human race indiscriminate of gender. Hell, he even killed twice as many men as women.
So then why is it that the outcry over this tragedy has immediately become slanted towards "violence against women!! men are terrible!!" The kid had horrific attitudes toward literally everybody around him, and was clearly an entitled little shit in every aspect of his life. In his world view all women were sluts and all men were intellectual nitwits and brutes, and NONE of them deserved to live if they got in his way. He outright said as much. Yet the social reaction to this not only emphasizes the effect it has on women, it actively EXCLUDES people from talking about the effect it has on men, and implicitly tries to lump all men in as perpetrators of the distorted mindset that Elliot Rodger had toward the world. It's divisive and bigoted, and frankly it's fucking disgusting.
In what sense? The law is they give you that money, and damned if they don't try really hard to do that, even for an amount you might as well just ignore...
Uh... bullshit? Unless there's a glossary on the constitution that I don't know about, the distinction between "wage" and "income" is pedantic. Also, the constitution says what the courts interpret it to say, and I'm damn sure they don't agree with this.
False. I made a mistake on my taxes 5 years ago and forgot to include a $17 capital loss. They sent me a letter saying they disagreed with my filed taxes, and that they owed me $17. Then a check. I was too lazy to cash it, and they've been relentless in trying to return my $17 ever since.
tl;dr: they care about following the law, not taking your money.
I restored something like 350GB in smaller files, and that all went smoothly. It seems that it generally DOES support resuming. But for some reason, the 50GB file just keeps restarting in the middle. My guess is actually something weird about the FS interaction or the output buffers they're using, but who knows for sure. It's taken about 2 weeks of back and forth on a support ticket to get them to even _mention_ that they might eventually need to hand this off to Tier 2 support. Everything else about the service has been pretty good, but this is a pretty big downer.
Watch out for Crashplan in certain cases. I'm currently trying to restore a 50GB file, and it keeps restarting the download halfway through. Their support is useless, basically leaving it at "sorry dude, nothing we can do". For other files it's been good, but their testing and support of edge cases doesn't seem especially solid.
That seems uncommon. At a lot of the major tech companies (Amazon and Microsoft for sure) managers make at least 20% more than the equivalent engineer, and often even more than that. Sort of shows you what they value.
Programs are getting too complex for humans to understand
That's just silly. I have yet to see a programming problem that couldn't be made to wind up looking dirt simple by factoring out abstractions and reusable pieces. The real problem is effort and attention span. A lot of people see a complex problem and give up, instead of looking for the first black box sub-system they can factor out.
There's a very specific set of concepts that's easier to express on the command line than in traditional programming languages, and it's pretty much entirely limited to processing streams of text. Which is nice, and it's great that this is easy to do. For what it's worth, a lot of programming languages have string buffers that can operate much like pipes to let you code in the same style internally.
However, text streams as a foundation for coding break down really quickly. Command line pipe "programs" basically require that all the data you care about be represented as a series of lines of text at every point along the way, and while that representation is very powerful for things that fit the model, it becomes a giant pain in the ass to use it to write logic that doesn't fit well.
Some newer languages are adding things like lambdas and comprehensions to move closer to this style in certain cases. And while they're nice, they're really just syntactic sugar. The fact remains that programming needs to be able to operate on variables and objects in ways that stream processing just can't do. The Unix command line paradigm is a specialized tool, while procedural/functional/OO/aspected programming is a much more general purpose one.
Desire works the other way too. More employees are available in the city because people want to live there, so the company has to go where the people are. And there are likely many companies competing for employees in the same field, so they have to pay competitive wages, which people generally view as accounting for cost of living.
Anyway, theory aside, the trend right now in a lot of fields is for there to be a marked cost of living differential reflected in salaries. A job that would pay 60k in Des Moines, IA pays 100k+ in any city on the west coast, and more like 120k-130k in NYC.
On average you'll find that the same work pays as good or better in a more expensive area (maybe better because for a lot of careers the "big" companies that can afford more competitive salaries are often in the city). So in most cases, your major costs (housing, food) should be the same percentage of your salary because your pay is adjusted for the area. However, national things like books, clothes, music, furniture, cars, airfare, etc. all cost the same wherever you live, so they'll be "cheaper" for you if you live in a more expensive town.
Put another way, 70k in Alabama is probably more like 110k in Chicago. You could pretty easily pull a 350k house on that salary, which gets you a nice 3-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood (according to a quick search). And now a new car is now 27% of your yearly salary, rather than 43% so you can upgrade almost twice as often (or buy more books, go on more vacations, or just save more).
That's not to mention all the cultural opportunities you give up living in Alabama instead of Chicago. I'm sure Alabama has some nice countryside, and I know it's not all Deliverance-style back-country. But it can't compete with Chicago in terms of world-class theater, museums, symphony, cinema, or restaurants either.
Not all cities are Detroit. Many of them are actually quite nice.
Regarding the overall claim that "smart people don't live in the city", that's flat-out ridiculous. Cities provide a much greater wealth of quality and diversity in food, entertainment, and culture than the suburbs or rural areas. You could get that by living out in the burbs and driving to the city, but some people are smart enough to value their time for more than sitting in traffic. I guess you could go the other way and do nothing but stay home and watch TV, but I think that kind of disqualifies you from the "intelligent" part we mentioned earlier.
Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours.
Got squatters in your basement? Just buy a new house and move on!
Why should I vacate my email address just because somebody occasionally mistakes it as their own? It doesn't do them any good, because they don't have the password to it (it's my account, after all). And presumably any other address I choose is also going to have the same problem, so I haven't made anything better by switching.
1. All of this highly secretive, decades-to-rebuild information was exposed by ONE guy with a conscience. From everything we've heard, Snowden wasn't some hacker genius, this stuff was just extremely poorly protected once you got to a certain access level. It's possible, in fact I would say probable, that the exact same set of secrets and more have been removed without authorization in similar ways in the past, but by people with less conscience. From there they could sell them to Russia, China, Al Qaeda, or GIVE them to any number of causes to which they happen to be sympathetic. They may do this either out of greed, loyalty to something other than the US intelligence apparatus, or because they were planted by an external power in the first place.
Why do I think it's highly probably this information has leaked before? Simple: the information was clearly too easy for Snowden to reach, which indicates a fundamental flaw in the NSA security structure... inside any organization, you have to assume that some people aren't what they say. No matter how good your psych screening process, no human system can keep out people with ulterior motives with 100% accuracy -- you have to limit access to only those who truly "need to know" and that doesn't mean broad cross-cutting security clearance levels. It's obvious that foreign governments would be highly interested in information like this, yet Snowden was able to access a huge array of information that he had no legitimate need to access (from the NSA's point of view). Clearly they trust people "inside the circle" far more than they should, which combined with the high probability of at least a couple of successful infiltrations by foreign agents makes it all but a certainty that Snowden's isn't the first leak, only the first PUBLIC leak.
2. All of the public surprise and outrage is coming from people who never bothered to stop and think about the subject before the leak. If they had, it would be fairly obvious that a pretty wide set of things described in the Snowden leak were probably happening. Of course you could never tell for sure, but if you were a little paranoid there were a large number of safe bets you could make, most of which have now turned out to be true. Now, the general public had no specific reason to be paranoid, so they're surprised and upset by these revelations... but they don't matter. This official is claiming that the leak puts them in a worse position compared to the people they want to use these tools against, and (unless the NSA is actually in the business of spying on innocent civilians) anyone they need to legitimately use these tools against is by definition doing something fairly obviously illegal, and would have every reason to be paranoid.
In short, nobody evil enough for the NSA to legitimately want to target AND smart enough to warrant tools this sophisticated is surprised by any but a very small handful of these revelations. And even the ones that are surprising are likely made moot by precautions those people would take against the more obvious NSA tricks.
In short, either the NSA rep is lying, or they really think the people they're hunting are so dumb that they never questioned whether plaintext email over SSL to the GMail servers was enough security to hide them from the NSA, or whether phones registered in their name could be tracked. And frankly, neither answer is good. If they're lying, it's more of the same; and if they really believe the people they were hunting hadn't guessed the majority of this already, then they're criminally underestimating the very people they're supposed to be watching (or door 3, they wanted to watch people who hadn't done anything wrong, and so had no reason to think about this stuff... but they sure do now!)
As an aside, I like how he casually tosses it out like, "yeah, it'll take decades to get back to this level again" as if it were
I am strongly against these private corporations illegal use of public space for their own benefit.
Frankly, it's highly unlikely that they're getting the better end of the deal here. These companies operate private buses at their own expense, which both improves their employee's commute and reduces vehicle volume on public roadways. I'd be willing to bet that they also provide employees with passes for the local transit system, as that's pretty standard in the industry.
So the net effect is this:
Fewer cars on the road
Transit company gets paid for a pass, but doesn't have to carry an additional rider
Bus stop is temporarily used to load passengers who would otherwise be on the road or a public bus
I don't see any realistic scenario where the public is WORSE off for this arrangement. Sure, it might be nice if Google bought space for their own stops... but then you'd have 70 feet of street space taken up JUST for them, with no benefit to parking, street use, or public transit. Surely that would be a worse arrangement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's pretty telling that you dismiss claims based on the body of his writing, focus down only on the piece that fits your narrative, and then accuse people who disagree with you of trying to fit things to a pre-held position.
As far as "a product of our culture", that's just nonsensical. This kid was clearly seriously mentally ill. He absolutely IS a one-off. Severe and pervasive narcissistic behavior is not something that can be instilled by society at large in an otherwise healthy person. Mental illness is not simply a matter of degrees, it's a fundamental failure to react to external stimuli in a rational way. You're trying to ascribe cultural guilt to a single disturbed person, but reality just doesn't work that way.
I don't think I regard your opinion very highly, given that you're confusing the manifesto you _claim_ to have read with the youtube video that you're actually quoting from. I can see the problem just fine, but I don't appreciate people excluding large portions of what's happening in order to emphasize their pre-held position.
Then presumably you've also seen the people objecting to those statements and claiming that any attempt to talk about anything other than women is "men feeling left out"? Because even the statements you've made here would generate some hate on Twitter. In fact, try posting some of what you put in this post under "#YesAllWomen" and see what kind of response you get. I'm guessing something like this:
Ok, let's have this conversation. I'm assuming you've actually read a decent portion of his writing, since you seem to support the claim that it reeks of misogyny, and that you're not just parroting back claims from a bunch of people trying to fit it to a narrative (who haven't read it themselves either) right? It's available here if you haven't: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2259...
So let's talk. The boy clearly shows signs of blatant narcissism. In the first couple pages he brags about having visited 4 countries by the time he was 3, as if any child that age could gain anything meaningful from that experience. He goes on to describe a facile and warped world view, including how much joy he took in excluding his arch rival (a boy) from his 6th birthday party, classifying being denied entry to a roller coaster ride at 7 because of his height as "an injustice", and overall demonstrates a clear love of power, money, and status in settings that have no bearing on gender whatsoever. Where's the misogyny there?
He talks at length about how he refused to get a "low class retail job" because he's "an intellectual who's destined for greatness." He decides he'll be a screenwriter for about 2 weeks until he realizes they don't make much money, and then bails on it. He takes a college class, but quits halfway through because he's physically disgusted by the site of a happy couple sitting together every day. He took a janitorial job out of desperation, then quite after 5 hours because it was so beneath him. Where's the misogyny there?
There's a lot of misogynistic expression as well, of course. At one point he tells his mother that she should "sacrifice her happiness to secure his future" by marrying a rich guy she only wants to date. And yes, there's a lot of ranting about how women ignore him. But if you actually read even a little bit of it, it becomes very clear that this is a fundamentally delusional person no matter what gender he's talking about.
If you actually look at what he says, it's clear that he feels entitled to EVERYTHING. Not just women, but money, power, respect, friendship, and luxury. He's clearly not able to connect well with other people, and he basically viewed women as a prop in the perfect life of adoration that he felt he was owed. Is that misogynistic? Certainly. But taken as a whole his delusion was no more misogynistic than it was hateful of the entire human race indiscriminate of gender. Hell, he even killed twice as many men as women.
So then why is it that the outcry over this tragedy has immediately become slanted towards "violence against women!! men are terrible!!" The kid had horrific attitudes toward literally everybody around him, and was clearly an entitled little shit in every aspect of his life. In his world view all women were sluts and all men were intellectual nitwits and brutes, and NONE of them deserved to live if they got in his way. He outright said as much. Yet the social reaction to this not only emphasizes the effect it has on women, it actively EXCLUDES people from talking about the effect it has on men, and implicitly tries to lump all men in as perpetrators of the distorted mindset that Elliot Rodger had toward the world. It's divisive and bigoted, and frankly it's fucking disgusting.
In what sense? The law is they give you that money, and damned if they don't try really hard to do that, even for an amount you might as well just ignore...
Uh... bullshit? Unless there's a glossary on the constitution that I don't know about, the distinction between "wage" and "income" is pedantic. Also, the constitution says what the courts interpret it to say, and I'm damn sure they don't agree with this.
False. I made a mistake on my taxes 5 years ago and forgot to include a $17 capital loss. They sent me a letter saying they disagreed with my filed taxes, and that they owed me $17. Then a check. I was too lazy to cash it, and they've been relentless in trying to return my $17 ever since. tl;dr: they care about following the law, not taking your money.
Has to be their client :-(
I restored something like 350GB in smaller files, and that all went smoothly. It seems that it generally DOES support resuming. But for some reason, the 50GB file just keeps restarting in the middle. My guess is actually something weird about the FS interaction or the output buffers they're using, but who knows for sure. It's taken about 2 weeks of back and forth on a support ticket to get them to even _mention_ that they might eventually need to hand this off to Tier 2 support. Everything else about the service has been pretty good, but this is a pretty big downer.
Watch out for Crashplan in certain cases. I'm currently trying to restore a 50GB file, and it keeps restarting the download halfway through. Their support is useless, basically leaving it at "sorry dude, nothing we can do". For other files it's been good, but their testing and support of edge cases doesn't seem especially solid.
That seems uncommon. At a lot of the major tech companies (Amazon and Microsoft for sure) managers make at least 20% more than the equivalent engineer, and often even more than that. Sort of shows you what they value.
That's just silly. I have yet to see a programming problem that couldn't be made to wind up looking dirt simple by factoring out abstractions and reusable pieces. The real problem is effort and attention span. A lot of people see a complex problem and give up, instead of looking for the first black box sub-system they can factor out.
And yet, somehow, the written word has managed to survive.
There's a very specific set of concepts that's easier to express on the command line than in traditional programming languages, and it's pretty much entirely limited to processing streams of text. Which is nice, and it's great that this is easy to do. For what it's worth, a lot of programming languages have string buffers that can operate much like pipes to let you code in the same style internally.
However, text streams as a foundation for coding break down really quickly. Command line pipe "programs" basically require that all the data you care about be represented as a series of lines of text at every point along the way, and while that representation is very powerful for things that fit the model, it becomes a giant pain in the ass to use it to write logic that doesn't fit well.
Some newer languages are adding things like lambdas and comprehensions to move closer to this style in certain cases. And while they're nice, they're really just syntactic sugar. The fact remains that programming needs to be able to operate on variables and objects in ways that stream processing just can't do. The Unix command line paradigm is a specialized tool, while procedural/functional/OO/aspected programming is a much more general purpose one.
Desire works the other way too. More employees are available in the city because people want to live there, so the company has to go where the people are. And there are likely many companies competing for employees in the same field, so they have to pay competitive wages, which people generally view as accounting for cost of living.
Anyway, theory aside, the trend right now in a lot of fields is for there to be a marked cost of living differential reflected in salaries. A job that would pay 60k in Des Moines, IA pays 100k+ in any city on the west coast, and more like 120k-130k in NYC.
On average you'll find that the same work pays as good or better in a more expensive area (maybe better because for a lot of careers the "big" companies that can afford more competitive salaries are often in the city). So in most cases, your major costs (housing, food) should be the same percentage of your salary because your pay is adjusted for the area. However, national things like books, clothes, music, furniture, cars, airfare, etc. all cost the same wherever you live, so they'll be "cheaper" for you if you live in a more expensive town.
Put another way, 70k in Alabama is probably more like 110k in Chicago. You could pretty easily pull a 350k house on that salary, which gets you a nice 3-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood (according to a quick search). And now a new car is now 27% of your yearly salary, rather than 43% so you can upgrade almost twice as often (or buy more books, go on more vacations, or just save more).
That's not to mention all the cultural opportunities you give up living in Alabama instead of Chicago. I'm sure Alabama has some nice countryside, and I know it's not all Deliverance-style back-country. But it can't compete with Chicago in terms of world-class theater, museums, symphony, cinema, or restaurants either.
Either that's false, or you need a better city.
Not all cities are Detroit. Many of them are actually quite nice.
Regarding the overall claim that "smart people don't live in the city", that's flat-out ridiculous. Cities provide a much greater wealth of quality and diversity in food, entertainment, and culture than the suburbs or rural areas. You could get that by living out in the burbs and driving to the city, but some people are smart enough to value their time for more than sitting in traffic. I guess you could go the other way and do nothing but stay home and watch TV, but I think that kind of disqualifies you from the "intelligent" part we mentioned earlier.
Uh... no. This is grossly inaccurate.
Like Facebook. Hooray!
Got squatters in your basement? Just buy a new house and move on!
Why should I vacate my email address just because somebody occasionally mistakes it as their own? It doesn't do them any good, because they don't have the password to it (it's my account, after all). And presumably any other address I choose is also going to have the same problem, so I haven't made anything better by switching.
Your suggestion is dumb. You are a dumb person.
A lot of sites have stopped doing this. They just blindly assume that whatever you typed must be right. Facebook is a prime example.
It's absolutely not true, and here's why:
1. All of this highly secretive, decades-to-rebuild information was exposed by ONE guy with a conscience. From everything we've heard, Snowden wasn't some hacker genius, this stuff was just extremely poorly protected once you got to a certain access level. It's possible, in fact I would say probable, that the exact same set of secrets and more have been removed without authorization in similar ways in the past, but by people with less conscience. From there they could sell them to Russia, China, Al Qaeda, or GIVE them to any number of causes to which they happen to be sympathetic. They may do this either out of greed, loyalty to something other than the US intelligence apparatus, or because they were planted by an external power in the first place.
Why do I think it's highly probably this information has leaked before? Simple: the information was clearly too easy for Snowden to reach, which indicates a fundamental flaw in the NSA security structure... inside any organization, you have to assume that some people aren't what they say. No matter how good your psych screening process, no human system can keep out people with ulterior motives with 100% accuracy -- you have to limit access to only those who truly "need to know" and that doesn't mean broad cross-cutting security clearance levels. It's obvious that foreign governments would be highly interested in information like this, yet Snowden was able to access a huge array of information that he had no legitimate need to access (from the NSA's point of view). Clearly they trust people "inside the circle" far more than they should, which combined with the high probability of at least a couple of successful infiltrations by foreign agents makes it all but a certainty that Snowden's isn't the first leak, only the first PUBLIC leak.
2. All of the public surprise and outrage is coming from people who never bothered to stop and think about the subject before the leak. If they had, it would be fairly obvious that a pretty wide set of things described in the Snowden leak were probably happening. Of course you could never tell for sure, but if you were a little paranoid there were a large number of safe bets you could make, most of which have now turned out to be true. Now, the general public had no specific reason to be paranoid, so they're surprised and upset by these revelations... but they don't matter. This official is claiming that the leak puts them in a worse position compared to the people they want to use these tools against, and (unless the NSA is actually in the business of spying on innocent civilians) anyone they need to legitimately use these tools against is by definition doing something fairly obviously illegal, and would have every reason to be paranoid.
In short, nobody evil enough for the NSA to legitimately want to target AND smart enough to warrant tools this sophisticated is surprised by any but a very small handful of these revelations. And even the ones that are surprising are likely made moot by precautions those people would take against the more obvious NSA tricks.
In short, either the NSA rep is lying, or they really think the people they're hunting are so dumb that they never questioned whether plaintext email over SSL to the GMail servers was enough security to hide them from the NSA, or whether phones registered in their name could be tracked. And frankly, neither answer is good. If they're lying, it's more of the same; and if they really believe the people they were hunting hadn't guessed the majority of this already, then they're criminally underestimating the very people they're supposed to be watching (or door 3, they wanted to watch people who hadn't done anything wrong, and so had no reason to think about this stuff... but they sure do now!)
As an aside, I like how he casually tosses it out like, "yeah, it'll take decades to get back to this level again" as if it were
Frankly, it's highly unlikely that they're getting the better end of the deal here. These companies operate private buses at their own expense, which both improves their employee's commute and reduces vehicle volume on public roadways. I'd be willing to bet that they also provide employees with passes for the local transit system, as that's pretty standard in the industry.
So the net effect is this:
I don't see any realistic scenario where the public is WORSE off for this arrangement. Sure, it might be nice if Google bought space for their own stops... but then you'd have 70 feet of street space taken up JUST for them, with no benefit to parking, street use, or public transit. Surely that would be a worse arrangement.
Hopefully they'll learn a skill. Jobs aren't disappearing, they're transitioning from low-skill to high(er) skill.