While it is tempting to agree with the conclusion that FB is "morally bankrupt liars", the rationale offered is extremely faulty.
Of all people, privacy commissioner should understand that a system that could proactively prevent "live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders" would be extremely hostile to concepts of both privacy and all forms of freedom of expression.
Of all people, you should understand that a system that fails to proactively prevent "live streaming of suicides, rapes and murders" is extremely hostile to concepts of both society and all forms of freedom of expression.
You seem to be confusing support for Zionism with whether or not one is anti-Semitic.
One can be opposed to Zionism without being anti-semitic, and I imagine, if albeit unlikely, that even the converse is true.
You of course are not alone in this but most Jewish Americans are not die hard supporters of Zionism unlike right-wing Christians, Trump included.
sarcasm on
Yeah, I mean really, what were people thinking- those glatzkoepfig jack-booted thugs wearing Nazi tattoes in Charlottesville were like most definitely all liberal DNC supporters.
Nah, it's not a weird understanding of post-modernism, it is pure unadulterated ignorance, or to put it in another way, "this is what it sounds like when your ass is doing the talking". I appreciate your attempts to counter such statements, but I venture such is in vain. I studied philosophy for some 20 years, much of it working with thinkers others labeled "post-modernists"(Foucault, Deleuze, Derridas, Lyotard, and many more). Since having left academia, returning to the states, much to my chagrin, I have discovered a couple of things: America, as a society, has become rabidly anti-intellectual, and American Universities have so debased the concept of academia that any cultural appreciation of those who dedicated their lives to academic pursuits has long since evaporated, moreover Philosophy as perhaps the most academic of studies is perceived by most Americans as a bad or dangerous thing, if it is even acknowledged at all. My favorite example of this was when a neighbor asked my mother what I was studying, my mother told her I was studying philosophy, the woman then replied "does that mean he doesn't believe in God?". Bless her soul.
Descending from the heights of broad generalizations about America, brings us here to slashdot. I have been a registered user here for 20 years now and I can count the informed comments regarding anything philosophical on two hands. I come here because despite my deep and abiding fascination for genuine thinking, I also have a lifelong fascination with technology, having worked with computers since my early childhood back in the '70's. Despite the attitudes omnipresent at slashdot(anti-intellectualism, slashjocks, etc.) occasionally articles appear which solicit comments where people actually engage their noggins and actually *think*, gasp (sic), usually within the context of trying to understand/solve problems. I usually don't comment much because If I were to draw peoples attention to the fact that they actually were thinking, they might get embarrassed and promptly quit. So when thought rears it's beautiful face, a sardonic smile simply settles along my lips.
Your equivocation here, as usual, obscures far more than it reveals. Lumping " unscientific ideas such as astrology, homeopathy, spiritism, power of crystals, ancient hidden civilizations" in with flat-earthers misses the point of being a flat-earther. Ideas, in and of themselves, are neither scientific nor unscientific, as such you are labeling that which does not exist. Believing the earth is flat is a an act of defiance against that which is commonly held and in such is comparable to the belief that the moon landing was fake. It is in essence a symbolic middle finger against the certitude and arrogance common amongst many who mistake their knowledge of science, technology and the progression thereof, for belief therein. Such a belief traces it's roots, intellectually, back to Diogenes, and is properly labelled kynical, the more humorous, less serious, misbegotten half-brother of cynism. Such a belief is harmless, other than the consternation it causes amongst those whose certitude is sacrosanct. Such a belief has virtually no significant consequences for those who hold it, it does not justify any particular action or inaction, nor does it provide anything to which to attribute things to, as in blame or accusation. The world is big, more than big enough to accommodate such folk for they are a threat to no one.
To compare such with Astrology, again, profoundly obscure what you are talking about. Astrology is, in it's myriad of forms, a field of human inquiry with dates back thousands of years and practiced in one form or another in most cultures in the world. The human mind apprehends the world vis-a-vis patterns and patterns in movement over time, and how they influence one another, are understood as constellations. The stars, planets, and other heavenly objects have provided us with a spectical to study and try to grasp since the dawn of time. The leap to try to understand human traits, characteristics, behaviors, and ultimately fate, as represented in the collage of constellations of heavenly objects is actually not so far fetched, in fact such has been obvious to many, many people throughout all of recorded human history. Astrology, as with any field of human inquiry, if applied with sufficient intellectual rigor and discipline can be understood as a science, for it represents a body of knowledge, notwithstanding however contentious that knowledge may be. Nowadays, many, who call themselves astrologers, are indeed far removed from anything scientific, and many are in fact charlatans, but that is not true of of all who practice astrology. In contrast to flat-eathers, astrology is a system of belief, which offers attribution, as in blame and/or accusation, it is seen in terms of causality, albeit necessary but not sufficient, it does not absolve one of personal responsibility and choice, but rather compliments such with additional explanatory models. Although it is not my cup of tea, I respect those who have dedicated their lives to the study thereof and although I do not engage in such myself I can appreciate the the worlds within worlds, and the fascination therein, that is proper to any field of human inquiry.
Perhaps it is a misnomer to refer to belief in flat-earth, due to the fact that such does not represent a system of belief, and is not attribitual and plays no role in our understanding of causality. Perhaps one grasps it better by understanding it simply as an attitude, a silent middle finger with a smile. As regards Homeopathy, I would suspect that what holds for astrology also holds for homeopathy, that many who currently associate with the label are charlatans, but that others have dedicated their lives with intellectual rigor and discipline and as such have built a body of contentious knowledge. And with regards to crystal power, I was so stoked when, back in the day, my neo-hippie friends came back from New Orleans swearing to me that they had run of gas and simply put crystals in the carburetor and drove back on crystal power, yeah man, give me another hit off that joint;)
Nothing of any significance will reach this houses(session) floor, period. This current configuration of the congress, senate and presidency will yield not one significant piece of positive legislation under any circumstance. Mitch McConnell, only over his dead body, would allow for any progressive legislation to be voted on in the Senate. And Nancy Pelosi will fight any progressive legislation until she can't win, at which point she will promptly turn and follow, once the cattle start moving she will herd them in the direction they are already going. One of the unwritten rules in the senate and house is: only those who will not lead are ever allowed in to leadership positions, those who can and wont to do so are never allowed in leadership. It's related to the principle at work in bureaucracies where if you are really good at your job you never get promoted, upward promotion ironically being failing upwards, which is why the top of management invariably consists of those least competent.
Look, I can totally understand your scepticism, and will freely admit that at first glance her proposition seems rather pie-in-the-sky. Now people can and do have totally different understandings of what politics is about or about the best way to go about achieving something.
I honestly do not care about the supposed time-frame that is being talked about. Rather the questions for me are a) is this the right direction b) is it a direction people could rally behind c) is it significant enough for politicians to use as a policy platform around which to elect candidates. Our current representatives will not do anything of significance, but that does not mean that we could not elect politicians that someday will.
Right now the biggest problem is we the people. We, as a society, are incapable of articulating anything that we commonly want. So first up there needs to be a building of the "we": what speaks to the values that most Americans would like to hold, not what we already do hold, but that we could aspire to. The only majority that counts in a democracy is a majority that is built around consensus, but for their to be a majority one must first build such a consensus, one does this proposing ideas around which people can rally.
Trump is attempting to do this with the wall right now, luckily he cannot possibly achieve this because the vast majority of Americans do not aspire to being chickenshits who are terrified of immigrants. But a lot of people could aspire to to a vision of Americas future where instead of being impotent and doomed we could see ourselves as agents of positive change, effecting a future which we want to have- a future where we adequately address climate change fears, where we make profound investments in our own infrastructure and technologically lead the world in addressing a whole host of issues, while pursuing a goal that we agree is a good goal.
If a "we" can be constituted around positive goals and politicians are then elected who represent that "we", damn near anything is possible, not necessarily in 10 years but over the course of a generation profound changes can and do happen. Right now "we" want to argue, fight, bicker and complain, right now "we" can't agree as to whether or not the sky is blue, when it is. This has been true for a friggin generation, at least since Bill Clinton became president.
One of the primary reasons our political system is so completely broken is that our politicians have fundamentally failed to do their most basic job which is to build consensi around issues about which people care and to do so in such a fashion that people feel empowered to participate/be part of. Most people feel impotent to do much of anything about much of anything, most people feel that politics is nothing more than a spectator sport or really bad entertainment. In the absence of things, which we can aspire to achieve, around which we can build consensi, we devolve into fearmongering, othering and cowardice-we become our own worst enemies.
I understand scepticism, I get it, it's healthy in certain doses, but the question really is not whether this New Green Deal is something that can be passed as a bill, which it is not, currently by this house and this senate with this president, but rather is it a direction we could and more importantly should be headed in? Do you actually oppose what is contained in the New Green Deal?, do you feel that these lofty goals are going in the wrong direction? Or simply that such is not simply possible right now?
Everyone has a right to be completely jaded right now in regards to our politics, completely justified, in fact optimism at this point in time would appear to be completely delusional, but can you really say no to a prospect where we might be able to actually say yes to the goals of our politicians and feel part of some positive grand ambition which we can aspire to achieve? And just remember this the scale of problems we are confronting require nothing less than a g
You still didn't state what you think her economic misunderstanding is. Moreover more people take her seriously than either you or me, of for that matter, both of us combined. You can state that nobody takes her seriously, but I would argue that relative to her, both you and I, are the relative nobodies. I guess that's why nobody else is posting your or my political policy proposals and discussing them in public on slashdot, but that would be stating the obvious.
If, however, you are, unbeknownst to me, an elected public representative representing some hundreds of thousands of voters, I will stand corrected. I do not take Trump seriously, but you won't hear me arguing that no one else does(nobody), because that would simply be on it's face untrue. It actually bothers me that others do take him seriously.
Stating that nobody takes her seriously, is actually positing yourself as the expert, not on whatever the particular topic one is or one is not supposedly an expert on, but even more generally as the arbiter of who or who not should be taken seriously in general.
Hilariously, that is even more arrogant than my little anti-economist rant was, which, granted, was rather arrogant.;)
In contrast to most other fields of study, economics stands out, for producing legions of educated idiots, who, on average, have less understanding of economics than those with no formal training. The number of actual economists who truly grasp how economies in reality, vs. theory, actually work, is so small that they should be on the endangered species list.
For most of the 20th century a degree in economics signified literally nothing more than ideological indoctrination in dogma, that had no social scientific basis whatsoever, which proved wonderfully immune to any actual empirical research, which understood itself completely a-historically and which proffered self-justifying theories with a level of theoretical sophistication appropriate to third graders. As a field of study, economics, as taught in most universities in the west throughout most of the 20th century was simply put the absolute least critical field of study in existence, critical thought being somewhat incompatible with mere regurgitation of ideological dogma and the mental mastubatory mantras of free markets.
Your average economist has zero understanding of how money is created. Zero understanding of how banks work. Zero understanding of the relationship of credit and debt. No comprehension whatsoever of the most basic elements of anything which could be considered an economy. As the most intellectually bankrupt field of study in existence, economics, truly does stand out.
Most economists believe everything is a market. They believe Markets are nature(al). They believe Markets naturally tend towards perfect competition, in which information and knowledge is equally present for all actors, at all times, and thus natural markets are by their nature, perfect. They believe any failure of markets is due to intervention, usually attributed to government regulation. They believe Markets always seek equilibrium and that equilibrium is qua definition just distribution. You might be inclined to call economics a bad religion, but Bad Religion, at least produced some really good music, in contrast to economists, who missed every significant ongoing in the actual economy, until after the fact, and then misdiagnosed what had happened.
If you think that Alexandria Occassio-Cortez doesn't understand economics and that she's a dingbat, chances are your understanding of economics is based on mere regurgitation of ideological dogma, void of any critical thought. But hey, don't take this as a personal attack, the real goal of most economists has been to indoctrinate the entire population with their braindead propaganda. As with any generalization, there are exceptions, and perhaps your critique of her understanding of economics is founded in something, if that's the case please excuse my little rant here, but go ahead and explicate exactly what her economics misunderstanding supposedly is.
As a non-economist I would eat most economists for breakfast if it wasn't for the bad digestion which follows.
I am so sick of the fawning over our so-called 'intelligence' agencies, that I have had enough. Let's call them what they really are, the short bus commando.
When in your life time has the CIA or the NSA *ever* been right with their so-called intelligence? When did they ever give us a heads up on important developments? When did they ever prevent something bad from happening? When did their 'intelligence' ever lead to anything good? The answer, never. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Libya. In fact the only thing they are good for is being wrong. On the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of the law, the wrong side of the *people*, simply wrong.
Oh and I am supposed to be shushed because I am not aware of what they supposedly know, whatever top secret information they might have, to which I am not privileged. LOL. The CIA is the propaganda bureau plain and simple.
They only intelligence they possess is the art of manipulation, which granted does require cunning, malice, and skullduggery. But knowledge, understanding, grasping of significance etc. is something they have systematically proven to be incapable of.
The CIA has been the bastion of foreign election intervention since it's inception, they have been responsible for dozens of coup d'etats, assassinations, civil wars and other mayhem, destabilizing societies around the world and generally fucking the common man for the benefit of rich paymasters who they serve.
As an institution they are morally bankrupt, ethically corrupt, and deserving of nothing else than contempt and derision. And now our glorious free(TM) media pays them to spread their propaganda on our news programs and in our newspaper articles. I don't really hate the kids on the short bus, I actually kind of feel for them, but intelligence is not a property appropriately applied to describe them.
I won't waste too many words on the Federal Bureau of Entrapment, Americas premeier law enforcement agency. That bungling gaggle of incompetent nincompoops are only to be taken seriously because of the lives they have taken. Entrapment is their specialty because they are almost universally incapable of capturing actual criminals, but of course it's not their fault that are Justice Department never, ever really prosecutes the real criminals(hey 2008 financial crisis, heres looking at you!). As far as investigation goes the FBI is really good at finding out who MLK was sleeping with, what drugs the peace protestors in the 60's were taking, and infiltrating the Black Panthers and other resistance organizations, yet when it comes to investigating things that most Americans are rightfully concerned about, the FBI has nada.
And just a final note: We cannot and will not ever know what really happened with the DNC server because a private security firm wiped any traces of what happened before the DNC had cooked up their Russian conspiracy theory. There is a conspiracy, no theory needed, which does not involve any Russians. It was the conspiracy to make sure that none of the damaging info from the DNC leaks ever made it into the mainstream media and instead we got to hear one bogus story after the next about Russian boogeymen by ignorant young reporters who aren't even old enough to remember the friggin cold war.
Oh and just so it's clear where I stand on Trump and the Mueller investigation: We don't need an investigation regarding Trump. Anyone who wasn't on the short bus knew that Trump was a lying sack of shit, who'd sell his mother for a tower in Moscow, hell even Timbuktu, long before he became president. He commits crimes every single day, he can't help it, it's in his nature, just like lying, cheating, stealing and screwing people over. But this was fucking clear almost 40 years ago. The Russians had nothing to do with his election, it was the good ole American Pie short bus baking brigade that elected him.
Ok. I got some sleep and have had some coffee, things are calmer now;)
Yeah my rant was a bit over the top, i'll admit, and of course I realize my argumentation there was completely and utterly reactionary(slap!bad !iwbcman !bad!slap!), given that *anything* can and will be used as an excuse to squeeze the maximum amount of rent out of the public, while doing the least possible, pocketing the most possible.
Hell the ISP's deliberately fail to cancel your service(which they force on you by constantly changing terms/prices and only running bogus teaser rates specifically designed to reward those who constantly change service on the the never ending quest for reasonable rates), when you cancel it, on the off chance that you won't contest being charged an additional one or two months of fees, given enough customers and the percentages of those who have time and potentially money to contest such, this scheme might even account for 5-10% of their revenue.
Part of my reaction is based on the long deep running suspicion that 4k video is just a ploy by the content industry to circumvent pirating due to the impracticality of working with video of such size(whether in terms of hd space, data caps, or streaming speed). I formed this opinion when I saw millenials pirating anime in 4k, which given a codec which wouldn't introduce such horrible distortions, as currently is the case, could be rendered perfectly in a 1/32nd that resolution, due to the utter lack of detail present in most anime I have seen.
I also know that the only limit to the amount and speed of data transfer on the internet is the infrastructure available, such is not a naturally limited resource, I still believe it behoves us to treat it as such, as if it was a limited resource, due to the radical disparities in the ways it is apportioned.
The mindset change, which accompanied the development of streaming internet services, has led to regression, backwards movement-technologically speaking. Partial downloads of packages-due to timeout,error etc., by package managers, fedora's dnf -here is looking at you, force complete re-downloading of the data, even though the data is delivered in chunks that are crc'd and would be obvious candidates for an algorithm which only re-downloads corrupted chunks and resumes downloads upon reconnect-hell we wrote those algorithms 30 years ago, back in the analog modem days....And don't get me going on youtube which performs worse now that it did 15 years ago, not due to an increase in the number of users or size of data, both which have soared astronomically, but due to the fact it refuses to buffer data and constantly triggers a re-download every time one resizes the video.....arrrgggghhh, the only thing worse than///buffering/// is absolutely no buffering, at least then you could hit pause and come back a couple of minutes later, now youtube routinely fails to deliver low res video without interruption- and that on 100mbits internet connections....
Gawd, I am becoming a curmudgeon, damn- knew it when I saw those first white nose hairs and got fuzzy ears.
////rant////
F* you, and your 4k F*ing video streams.
I hope you have to pay through the nose for those 4k video streams. Until the baseline definition for broadband has been bumped up to 1Gigabit/sec, meaning a new definition of the minimum internet connection speed for sale in the US, allowing a few special snowflakes to be used as a rational for the outrageously expensive costs of internet connections that are common here in the US and at the same time leaving tens of millions of people with no access to 1Gigabit/sec connections, whatsoever, due to the criminal diversion of exorbitantly high monthly rates from the long-promised and never-delivered upgrades to our infrastructure, straight into the pockets of their F*in shareholders, is injustice in the extreme.
4k video on your F* phone!, give me a F*ing break, the human being has yet to be born, whose eyes can discern that kind of resolution difference on a 5" screen at 2 ft. Maybe it's worth it on a 60" screen from 12-15 ft away, but on a F*ing phone??????????
The USA has a huge military budget because:
[1] it values its freedom and independence
[2] it values its allies and trade routes
[3] it costs the USA a lot more to get any measure of military might since it does not have a conscripted military and its materiel is not made by government suppliers.
The USA has a huge military budget because:
[1] it has whipped it's population, and that of a significant portion of the worlds population, into a frenzy of fear and paranoia, by maintaining a permanent war status since the end of WWII. Whether hot or cold, the USA has waged war against non-enemies, aggressively supporting brutal dictatorships around, killing millions in defence of "freedom and democracy" around the world. The USA as "protector" of the "free world" has been holding the human species hostage to the possibility of imminent extinction via nuclear weapons for nearly 70 years now.
This in the name of valuing its freedom and independence.
[2]it has decided that the best social control mechanism for social pacification is to provide the lowest possible cost for goods and promoted consumerism as ersatz status symbols for a largely disenfranchised permanent underclass. In order to secure such cheap access to goods, the USA must dominate all world trade and be able to dictate prices for resources, resource extraction, production and distribution. This in the name of valuing its allies and trade routes.
[3] it spends a lot less money for the size of our military than any other country would for a similarly sized and scaled military because 18 year-old's with no prospects always form a cheap labor pool( "sold" as in soldier, comes from Roman Latin, daily wage-worker), particularly if one can convince them that they are serving their country men in the name of noble goals and values like "freedom and democracy". And because military production in the USA has always been "dual-purpose", a civilian feel-good, while producing weapons of mass destruction.
The USA has co-opted a tremendously large section of it's so-called private market for dual-purpose: production of disposable goods, while supplying the worlds largest military with an endless production line of "goods", of which no good can ever
come. Most major manufacturing firms in the USA would not be economically viable if it were not for this arrangement. Boeing could never make it solely producing commercial air-liners, the market for such is not large enough, but if the Pentagon needs x number of fighter jets, missiles and rockets every year, which must be constantly restocked, due to usage in wars or due to degradation from not ever being used, they can show a profit for their civilian production lines. The same is, and has always been, true for GM, Ford, GE, etc.
The USA has not, historically, HAD a "health service" because we traditionally left health to the people themselves, the private sectore, and communities and states (The US Constitution says nothing about healthcare, and it explicitly says that anything it does not assign to the federal government belongs to the people and to the states).
The USA has not, historically, HAD a health service, because immiseration is a constitutive part of maintaining an exploitable permanent underclass. During the first 250 years of American history, surplus value, ie. profit, was made primarily by either a) stealing the indigenous peoples lands or b) exploiting "free labor", ie. slavery. Following the civil war profit has largely been made by exploiting those born into inter-generational poverty, both here and around the world. The majority of Europeans who immigrated to the USA during the first 150 years of colonization were debt-prisoners, ie. the then european permanent underclass. The USA has proudly cultivated cultural identities for the permanent underclass, going back almost 350 years, nowadays we call them "redne
I have read these kinds of articles for years. Finally instead of just laughing at how incredibly stupid they are I thought I might just respond.
If you want to measure the revenue of a public transportation system simply halt it's operations for one year. Measure the the relative increase or decrease of economic activity in the effected area, eg. the city limits. If you find, after one year, that commercial economic activity has increased, you can then argue that public transportation is a "cost" to the community. If on the other hand, you see a marked down turn in commercial activity, due to customers not being able to reach said businesses, and employees not being able to commute to their places of employment, you can count said economic losses as the profit, the value-add, of the public transportation system.
Death spiral. Give me a break. Poor New York, poor MTA. Look at the millions fleeing NYC, the city is failing, the sky is falling and death is nigh!. The very idea that a public transportation system should be turning a profit according to quarterly accounting practices is so brain dead that a collective ouch of agony of trillions of still functioning brain cells scream out in vain. An accounting practice that does not take into account the timeline of that which it means to measure, is beyond meaningless.
Public transportation systems effectively have a lifetime of in-perpetuum, particularly if they are not so spectacularly mismanaged as to threaten the viability of the community. The revenue of a public transportation systems *is* the tax the base of the community.
In the absence of the said systems the community, as such, would not exist, and yes -roads, sidewalks, bike paths, and highways are all part of public transportation systems. Failure to use the tax base of a community to maintain and improve the existing public transportation systems, and investing said moneys in expanding available transportation options is simply malfeasance-mismanagement. It reflects in no way on the utility of said public transportation systems, but rather how incredibly short-sighted and dumb their elected leadership is.
Slavery by conviction, as a form of punishment, was made legal, in the exact *same* sentence which abolished slavery.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America states:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Roughly 3,000,000 American citizens as exceptions, nowadays.
The only missing element that I can see is that private for-profit prisons aren't buying and selling inmates, be patient, give 'em time.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
As one can see the the exact same sentence which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, which are held to be interchangeable terms, legalizes slavery and involuntary servitude for those parties duly convicted- ie. prisoners of the state.
The primary economic justification for slavery in modern times boils down to this: where labor is free, ie. unpaid for due to being forced involuntary servitude, the only capital cost involved in production cost is what is spent on raw resources, equipment and property, which translates directly to increased profit, and given free labor, slaves, a form of property, enable the purest form of producing profits, for none of the profits need be given back to pay for labor.
With this economic rational, which is as valid today as it was when it was widely practiced, the economic exploitation of prisoners, by and for for-profit corporations is fundamentally pre-programmed.
In essence this has said to capitalist, if you want free labor, find reasons to lock 'em up and wage campaigns to convince the public of this necessity and pass laws imprisoning those who violate the new laws. And remember the next best thing the free labor is dirt cheap labor and even if you don't end up capitalizing on the while their in prison, you'll get cheap labor out of them for the rest of their lives cause they will no longer be eligible for high paid employment, plus they won't be able to vote against the laws which made involuntary servants out of them.
With the passage of the 13th Amendment the penitentiary system of the United States, which we had pioneered, which focused on redemption and rehabilitation, suffered a fatal blow, from which it has never recovered. Our once proud, enlightenment inspired, alternative to the brutal dungeons and prisons of yore, was systematically converted into slave factories, hence the real origin of the prison industrial complex, which now pervades American society.
The apparent intentions behind the passage of the 13th Amendment, the ostensible ones, was the abolition of slavery. But there is something genuinely warped, codified in the text, about how they, that generation, went about abolishing slavery. It's almost as if they needed to concede to those slave holders, that slave holders were not morally bankrupt for desiring and having slaves, but rather that if they wished to continue having slaves they would have to come up with new ways of justifying/legitimizing it. So paradoxically it ends up giving the slave holders right in their aspiration to hold other human beings as slaves, just changing who the subjects of slavery would be.
Sure human beings were no longer being bought and sold as property in broad day light on Market Str. in Louisiville, Ky, the largest open-air slave market in America in the lead-up to the civil war. And certainly the color of your skin was no longer the exclusive characteristic which defined whether you could be owned or not by another human being. But did we not take at least one solid step backwards in the two steps forward of the progress of human emancipation?
Trains in America are not even the in the same league as trains in Europe. If you have never been on one you simply don't know the difference. European, and Japanese, and even Chinese trains travel at much higher speeds than anything in the US. The higher speed is accompanied with a totally different riding experience: much less noise, vibration and being tossed around.
You are correct in comparing buses. But you are missing the point of my previous post. Buses are fine when used in conjunction with other mass transit systems(subway, trams, light rail, hihgh speed trains), but buses do not cause the synergistic effects that permanent mass transit connections do, thus they have negligible effects on property value and utility, partly due to the fact that bus stops are moved around frequently and they don't generate the amount of foot traffic, except where bus hubs connect with other mass transit systems. When you couple this with the American system of having separate bus systems for children of school age, which have zero connection with other bus systems or other mass transit connections, because they are 100% decoupled, you end up with public bus systems that remain under utilized and inefficient.
Additionally you have a different social environment on public transit when each adult on the bus is responsible for safeguarding the well being of young children. In Europe 6-7 years hop on the trams by themselves to go to school, frequently in the company of other school-aged children, they are not accompanied by adults, but each adult on the tram understands their responsibility towards safeguarding the children. Let's put it this way, it's just really different than what we experience here in the US.
There are important exceptions, alternate implementations of bus systems that actually do have the kind of synergistic effects. One city in China, whose name I forget, actually has a setup with a major artery traversing the city alone one axis have something like 12 lanes, with the interior 4 lanes physically isolated from the surrounding 8 lanes, where there are bus stop every 100 meters and the buses run continuous loops up and down this artery, the buses hit each bus stop with something like 30 seconds between buses, creating a hyper efficient form of mass transit which actually surpasses subways in terms of utility and mobility.
But again most cities in America *only* have bus systems and they do not connect with any other forms of mass transit. Which means that bus systems utterly fail, on their own, to create the synergistic economies which are to be found everywhere where buses compliment actual mass transit systems.
I lived in a city named Marburg in Germany from 1994 till 1998, part of the 190 Deutsch Mark(60 dollar) tuition fee for University studies included free use of all public transit within 100km of the city. I had an opportunity to study Latin in Frankfurt which was roughly 90km distance from Marburg. Marburg has approximately 60,000 inhabitants, Frankfurt some around 1.5 million inhabitants. 5 days a week I would leave my apart, walk 100 yards to the bus stop, caught the bus to the central train station, caught a train to Frankfurt, went to the subway station beneath the Frankfurt central train station, rode the subway for 3 1/2 mites, exited the subway climbed up the stairs to the street, hopped on a tram for the remaining two miles, and then walked 100 yards to the Latin class, where I studied for 4 hours and then did the exact same trip in reverse.
The total trip time from my apartment to the Latin class was about 75 minutes, the same in reverse, and in 4 months I never ran into a delay, and I probably only had to walked about 250 yards total each way. And this was included in the cost of the University Tuition.
There is nothing like this in the United States, there are only a handful of American cities that have rudimentary mass transit systems, nothing approaching what roughly 300 million people take for granted across most of Europe.
Your lack of experience of what modern mass transit is actually like, ie. what we, as Americans, for the most part do not actually have, can be forgiven as a basis for your negative attitude.
Modern mass transit offers multiple advantages over our current Hobsian all-against-all free for all of individually driven cars, given your ignorance, let me list some:
1) modern mass transit has amazing air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, I have never sweated or froze in modern mass transit. You don't have to sit in place warm up your transit for 10 minutes prior to departure in the morning, you don't have to sweat and gasp for air while waiting for your transit to cool down from 120 degrees Fahrenheit, upon entering your transit after a long days work. It's virtually never too hot or too cold in modern mass transit.
2) modern mass transit is clean, well maintained and quite pleasant, and you might just be sitting next to corporate executives and/or high ranked politicians, for in places with modern mass transit, even the well off prefer using mass transit. Only in *expletive* societies like the US is mass transit considered only good enough for the poorest of the poor.
3) modern mass transit allows you to make great use of the 3-4 hours a day that countless Americans waste driving their cars. Modern mass transit has internet, electricity, tables to work on and places where 4-6 people can, if they so choose, sit together. You can text safely while riding in modern mass transit, whereas in a car you threaten the life of yourself and everyone around you. You can read, write reports, hell you can even code, surf the web, watch videos or listen to music. And god forbid if you are so inclined you can even *speak* to another also present human being.
4) modern mass transit is amazingly quiet and smooth. In some cities the trams are so quiet that bicyclists wearing headphones cant even tell their coming, ie. that's how little vibration and noise they make nowadays. Rapid high speed trains, a critical part of modern mass transit, are so frigging smooth you can fill a glass of wine on your table and leave it untouched over a 500 miles trip at speeds in excess of 250 mph on average. We have nothing like this in America, so I forgive you for being ignorant.
5) modern mass transit systems consist of multiple separate yet inter-linked systems. Your experience as a passenger is as if there is a single moving sidewalk, because you can effortlessly and quickly switch from one to the next to the next of these separate inter-linked systems. Modern mass tranist systems usually consist of inter-linked high speed trains, subways, trams and bus systems. These inter-linked system connect cities and towns over larger geographic areas, metropolitan areas can extend hundreds of miles in all directions, meaning you can easily work or study hundred+ miles from where you live, and still spend less time in-transit than you currently do with your car.
6) modern mass transit systems are incredibly reliable in terms of timing, if for no other reason than that are entirely isolated from automobile traffic and do not compete with cars. Modern mass transit systems run almost 24 hours offering service from whee early in the morning (5:00AM), until quite late at night(12:00 - 2:00 AM), and they operate on the weekends. If you want to be guaranteed to be on time to work or classes, use modern mass transit.
7) modern mass transit systems ensure that where you want and need to shop is almost always within some smallish number of yards from mass transit stops. This means far less walking than what is entailed when shopping in places surrounded by epically large parking places. It also means you can easily do a little bit of shopping on your way back home from work or school 2-3 times a week rather than trying to buy everything needed for half a month and being exhausted from carrying 100 plus bags of goods for your family every time
his proposal is absolutely worth considering seriously
No it isn't. If America starts seriously talking about regulating AI research, companies will move their research and funding out of America. Attempts to regulate will create even less democratic accountability.
It is a stupid idea, and we need to make clear that in America "freedom to program" is an inalienable right.
Dear Gawd, what pray tell, constitutes "democratic accountability" for you? Do you honestly believe that the "Free Market" is "democratic" ? Let me have some of what you're smoking, because that is some good shit, unfortunately the same shit that the Democrats have been pushing since Bill Saxophone Clinton. Government regulation is ipso facto the definition of "democratic accountability", whether it suits you or not-if you dislike how it works, you probably have a problem with how are democracy works(legitimate)/ and/or doesn't work.
AI is a smokescreen, meant to distract from the actual problem, which is big data, how it is collected, who has access and how it is used, each of which is determined by humans without any AI at all. Name me a problem with (TM)actually existing AI, and I will point to the human intelligence(or lack thereof) problem that it presents. I occasionally watch interviews with Elon Musk primarily because I find him interesting-at once he has many novel and brilliant ideas, and has been amazingly successful in seeing some of these ideas to fruition, while at the same time he spends his intellectual energy chasing phantoms (AI, Mars habitation etc.) and embracing notions that were brain dead before they became popular( ie. carbon taxes). Fascinatingly contradictory, wonderfully human.
I know you libertarian types get such a hard on fantasizing about how Atlas Shrugged, but your idol, Ayn Rand was one sick bitch, and if she had just slept with Alan Greenspan back in the day maybe our economy would have been spared from her twisted/demented influence.
Facebook is a private corporation, not the commons, or a public domain-everything about Facebook including all of the content, each web page-which includes where advertising is embedded, is private property.
Think of it this way: Facebook is like some rich mofo's BIGASS backyard. The rich mofo invited a bunch of kids to hang out on his lawn. At some point some of the kids started tearing up the yard, mostly by shitting all over it. Finally the mofo decided enough is enough, you can't shit on my lawn. Consequently he decided to tell them to Get The Fuck Off My Lawn. And that rich mofo don't need to call the police. Because you earning money on his fuckin lawn is not a right, but a privilege which he grants you at his sole discretion.
Sorry folks, but Slashdot just revealed it's true colors. The chorus of OMG! WTF! down with Mozilla, witnessed in this thread is, sadly, proof that the Slashdot audience has become those who the hackers of yore were hacking against. Is there not an ounce of rebellious spirit left on this site? Whether you like the show, Mr. Robot, or not, I just can't fathom the reaction here.
For those those who say this is the last straw for Mozilla-good riddance, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Look there are lots of things I could complain about regarding Firefox, but a chance wanderer coming to Slashdot would think this site is full of nothing but chrome shills and misanthropes who actually *hate* Free software. What made this site so interesting in days long ago was the tension between the rebellious spirit of Free Software and those who made their living working for the man or trying to make a living selling proprietary software. Nowadays corporate shills and libtards reign supreme on this site and the very notion that technology can actually be a source of societal change is completely and utterly lost.
Well duh maybe that's why most here don't even get what Mozilla is, what it represents and how much it actually changed the world around us.
But oh my God they rendered my extension useless, oh my God one of my 80 tabs is leaking memory, or Oh my God it takes a full 1.7 seconds to launch on a modern computer.
Oh well I guess I am just a fanboy, forgot to check the mail and get my check for promoting not only Firefox but Mozilla as a an organization, foundation and corporation. Am I the only idiot here who jumped for joy back in January of 1998 when the mozilla source code was made free and downloaded it just so I could see the code?
My guess is that anywhere from %30-50 of all currently existing jobs in software development wouldn't even exist without Free Software, and Mozilla did more to promote and garner mainstream acceptance of Free Software than the GNU movement ever dreamt of. In all likelihood there would be no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc. without the courage and commitment that founded Mozilla. Alas without Richard Stallman and the GNU movement there probably would never have been a Mozilla.
Honestly I am not so sure about Bannon being a bigot. Trump, however, eliminated any room for doubt on that issue in his most infamous press conference on Tuesday.
Here is what I am certain about regarding Bannon: Bannon is straight out of the oldest school of political manipulators which has ever existed, the sophists. Plato founded his academy in Athens in reaction to and in opposition to the rampant sophistry, which was destroying Athenian Democracy. The sophists were the then current intellectual hired-guns of Athenian politicians. These hired-guns mastered the rhetorical art of equivocation, showing, in part at least, the originary fundamental relationship between Democracy and Demagoguery. Athenian politicians hired these men to craft their speeches, speeches designed to inflame the passions of their supporters, for short term political gain, regardless of whatever consequences followed, which ultimately led to the downfall of Democracy in Athens. Philosophy, from it's inception in the academy, correctly understood, sought to discredit sophistry in general and equivocation in particular. Remember that, for close to 2,000 years, rhetoric was held to be the highest form of intellectual art, and one wasn't considered to be educated if one wasn't trained in the rhetorical Arts.
Why do I doubt whether Bannon himself is a racist or biggot, given his work in unleashing Breitbart on the world? Simple really. Bannon never concerned himself with who his fellow travellers were. He simply designed and delivered the rhetorical argumentation which Trump, and many others, used to whip their followers into a frenzy. If modern Americans had even the remotest clue as to the origin and history of the art of rhetorics there would be no need to argue with people about "slippery-slopes", because the "slippery-slope" argument in every single on of it's incarnations is nothing other than plain-ole equivocation, sophistry for those with a somewhat larger vocabulary. So who was speaking when Trump spoke about "many, many sides" or "what's next after the statues of Robert E. Lee, are you gonna take down the statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, they were both slave owners....", or the "fine people" amongst the torch bearing, swastika waiving, sieg-heiling brown shirts marching through Chralottesville who had exactly one and only one objective planned with their march- to terrorize the good people of Charlottesville and Americans in general of every color and persuasion?.
Most of 20th century American politics, and that which still dominates us today, would have been completely impossible had the majority of our citizens been trained to recognized and see through simple rhethoric, and how easily we are manipulated by those who have mastered these arts. How many people had to die in east/southeast asia by virtue of one of the, literally, oldest tricks in the book, 'slippery-slope' rhetoric? Lather, rinse, repeat, Iraq, Libya, Syria, TEH Terruhrism. Even the expression 'Alt-right' is straight up sophism, except that the semantic confusion spread by it has rendered even those who consider themselves to be Alt-Right unable to distinguish themselves from their fellow travellers the fuckin NeoNazis and the KKK. Wake up folks we are being played, and Bannon was damned good at what he did. Fuckin snake.
Gosh I am just shakin in my boots, our Anonymous Coward just issued a threat. Are you even old enough to use the word communist? Little boy go home and play with yourself. Nice troll though, have to give you credit. Man up and drop the AC, or shut the fuck up. I for one am sick and tired of of providing cover for your ilk under the guise of freedom of speech. Your freedom of speech ends when you equivocate those who would terrorize us(the KKK, Nazi's and the so-called 'Alt-right') with those of us who fight against terrorism. You can howl into the night and scream to your hearts discontent but when I hear equivocators like you all I really here is:
"Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on"
We won't kill you for what you say, but when you die we will bury you. We were here before you and and after you are gone we will raise your children to be better.
Apparently yours is. Wall Street is owned and run by big bankers, not by egomaniacal real estate magnates. Bankers and real estate investors often clash. If you want to accurately associate Donald Trump with any Manhattan roadway, he would be Fifth Avenue.
You know I hate this expression in English, but you leave me no choice:
same fucking difference./
That's a difference without distinction, at least from the vantage point of the 99%
Frankly I couldn't care less about distinctions only relevant to the 1%.
I will gladly concede that HRC with the Clinton Foundation is *also* Wall Street, but to pretend that The Donald does not represent Wall Street is kind of like the ostrich sticking it's head in the sand and thinking that no one can see it.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is tempting to agree with the conclusion that FB is "morally bankrupt liars", the rationale offered is extremely faulty. Of all people, privacy commissioner should understand that a system that could proactively prevent "live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders" would be extremely hostile to concepts of both privacy and all forms of freedom of expression.
Of all people, you should understand that a system that fails to proactively prevent "live streaming of suicides, rapes and murders" is extremely hostile to concepts of both society and all forms of freedom of expression.
You seem to be confusing support for Zionism with whether or not one is anti-Semitic.
One can be opposed to Zionism without being anti-semitic, and I imagine, if albeit unlikely, that even the converse is true.
You of course are not alone in this but most Jewish Americans are not die hard supporters of Zionism unlike right-wing Christians, Trump included.
sarcasm on
Yeah, I mean really, what were people thinking- those glatzkoepfig jack-booted thugs wearing Nazi tattoes in Charlottesville were like most definitely all liberal DNC supporters.
sarcasm off
Nah, it's not a weird understanding of post-modernism, it is pure unadulterated ignorance, or to put it in another way, "this is what it sounds like when your ass is doing the talking". I appreciate your attempts to counter such statements, but I venture such is in vain. I studied philosophy for some 20 years, much of it working with thinkers others labeled "post-modernists"(Foucault, Deleuze, Derridas, Lyotard, and many more). Since having left academia, returning to the states, much to my chagrin, I have discovered a couple of things: America, as a society, has become rabidly anti-intellectual, and American Universities have so debased the concept of academia that any cultural appreciation of those who dedicated their lives to academic pursuits has long since evaporated, moreover Philosophy as perhaps the most academic of studies is perceived by most Americans as a bad or dangerous thing, if it is even acknowledged at all. My favorite example of this was when a neighbor asked my mother what I was studying, my mother told her I was studying philosophy, the woman then replied "does that mean he doesn't believe in God?". Bless her soul.
Descending from the heights of broad generalizations about America, brings us here to slashdot. I have been a registered user here for 20 years now and I can count the informed comments regarding anything philosophical on two hands. I come here because despite my deep and abiding fascination for genuine thinking, I also have a lifelong fascination with technology, having worked with computers since my early childhood back in the '70's. Despite the attitudes omnipresent at slashdot(anti-intellectualism, slashjocks, etc.) occasionally articles appear which solicit comments where people actually engage their noggins and actually *think*, gasp (sic), usually within the context of trying to understand/solve problems. I usually don't comment much because If I were to draw peoples attention to the fact that they actually were thinking, they might get embarrassed and promptly quit. So when thought rears it's beautiful face, a sardonic smile simply settles along my lips.
Your equivocation here, as usual, obscures far more than it reveals. Lumping " unscientific ideas such as astrology, homeopathy, spiritism, power of crystals, ancient hidden civilizations" in with flat-earthers misses the point of being a flat-earther. Ideas, in and of themselves, are neither scientific nor unscientific, as such you are labeling that which does not exist. Believing the earth is flat is a an act of defiance against that which is commonly held and in such is comparable to the belief that the moon landing was fake. It is in essence a symbolic middle finger against the certitude and arrogance common amongst many who mistake their knowledge of science, technology and the progression thereof, for belief therein. Such a belief traces it's roots, intellectually, back to Diogenes, and is properly labelled kynical, the more humorous, less serious, misbegotten half-brother of cynism. Such a belief is harmless, other than the consternation it causes amongst those whose certitude is sacrosanct. Such a belief has virtually no significant consequences for those who hold it, it does not justify any particular action or inaction, nor does it provide anything to which to attribute things to, as in blame or accusation. The world is big, more than big enough to accommodate such folk for they are a threat to no one.
To compare such with Astrology, again, profoundly obscure what you are talking about. Astrology is, in it's myriad of forms, a field of human inquiry with dates back thousands of years and practiced in one form or another in most cultures in the world. The human mind apprehends the world vis-a-vis patterns and patterns in movement over time, and how they influence one another, are understood as constellations. The stars, planets, and other heavenly objects have provided us with a spectical to study and try to grasp since the dawn of time. The leap to try to understand human traits, characteristics, behaviors, and ultimately fate, as represented in the collage of constellations of heavenly objects is actually not so far fetched, in fact such has been obvious to many, many people throughout all of recorded human history. Astrology, as with any field of human inquiry, if applied with sufficient intellectual rigor and discipline can be understood as a science, for it represents a body of knowledge, notwithstanding however contentious that knowledge may be. Nowadays, many, who call themselves astrologers, are indeed far removed from anything scientific, and many are in fact charlatans, but that is not true of of all who practice astrology. In contrast to flat-eathers, astrology is a system of belief, which offers attribution, as in blame and/or accusation, it is seen in terms of causality, albeit necessary but not sufficient, it does not absolve one of personal responsibility and choice, but rather compliments such with additional explanatory models. Although it is not my cup of tea, I respect those who have dedicated their lives to the study thereof and although I do not engage in such myself I can appreciate the the worlds within worlds, and the fascination therein, that is proper to any field of human inquiry.
Perhaps it is a misnomer to refer to belief in flat-earth, due to the fact that such does not represent a system of belief, and is not attribitual and plays no role in our understanding of causality. Perhaps one grasps it better by understanding it simply as an attitude, a silent middle finger with a smile. As regards Homeopathy, I would suspect that what holds for astrology also holds for homeopathy, that many who currently associate with the label are charlatans, but that others have dedicated their lives with intellectual rigor and discipline and as such have built a body of contentious knowledge. And with regards to crystal power, I was so stoked when, back in the day, my neo-hippie friends came back from New Orleans swearing to me that they had run of gas and simply put crystals in the carburetor and drove back on crystal power, yeah man, give me another hit off that joint
Oh come on, he lives in Nordanswedfin, like you didn't know that ....; )
Nothing of any significance will reach this houses(session) floor, period. This current configuration of the congress, senate and presidency will yield not one significant piece of positive legislation under any circumstance. Mitch McConnell, only over his dead body, would allow for any progressive legislation to be voted on in the Senate. And Nancy Pelosi will fight any progressive legislation until she can't win, at which point she will promptly turn and follow, once the cattle start moving she will herd them in the direction they are already going. One of the unwritten rules in the senate and house is: only those who will not lead are ever allowed in to leadership positions, those who can and wont to do so are never allowed in leadership. It's related to the principle at work in bureaucracies where if you are really good at your job you never get promoted, upward promotion ironically being failing upwards, which is why the top of management invariably consists of those least competent.
Look, I can totally understand your scepticism, and will freely admit that at first glance her proposition seems rather pie-in-the-sky. Now people can and do have totally different understandings of what politics is about or about the best way to go about achieving something.
I honestly do not care about the supposed time-frame that is being talked about. Rather the questions for me are a) is this the right direction b) is it a direction people could rally behind c) is it significant enough for politicians to use as a policy platform around which to elect candidates. Our current representatives will not do anything of significance, but that does not mean that we could not elect politicians that someday will.
Right now the biggest problem is we the people. We, as a society, are incapable of articulating anything that we commonly want. So first up there needs to be a building of the "we": what speaks to the values that most Americans would like to hold, not what we already do hold, but that we could aspire to. The only majority that counts in a democracy is a majority that is built around consensus, but for their to be a majority one must first build such a consensus, one does this proposing ideas around which people can rally.
Trump is attempting to do this with the wall right now, luckily he cannot possibly achieve this because the vast majority of Americans do not aspire to being chickenshits who are terrified of immigrants. But a lot of people could aspire to to a vision of Americas future where instead of being impotent and doomed we could see ourselves as agents of positive change, effecting a future which we want to have- a future where we adequately address climate change fears, where we make profound investments in our own infrastructure and technologically lead the world in addressing a whole host of issues, while pursuing a goal that we agree is a good goal.
If a "we" can be constituted around positive goals and politicians are then elected who represent that "we", damn near anything is possible, not necessarily in 10 years but over the course of a generation profound changes can and do happen. Right now "we" want to argue, fight, bicker and complain, right now "we" can't agree as to whether or not the sky is blue, when it is. This has been true for a friggin generation, at least since Bill Clinton became president.
One of the primary reasons our political system is so completely broken is that our politicians have fundamentally failed to do their most basic job which is to build consensi around issues about which people care and to do so in such a fashion that people feel empowered to participate/be part of. Most people feel impotent to do much of anything about much of anything, most people feel that politics is nothing more than a spectator sport or really bad entertainment. In the absence of things, which we can aspire to achieve, around which we can build consensi, we devolve into fearmongering, othering and cowardice-we become our own worst enemies.
I understand scepticism, I get it, it's healthy in certain doses, but the question really is not whether this New Green Deal is something that can be passed as a bill, which it is not, currently by this house and this senate with this president, but rather is it a direction we could and more importantly should be headed in? Do you actually oppose what is contained in the New Green Deal?, do you feel that these lofty goals are going in the wrong direction? Or simply that such is not simply possible right now?
Everyone has a right to be completely jaded right now in regards to our politics, completely justified, in fact optimism at this point in time would appear to be completely delusional, but can you really say no to a prospect where we might be able to actually say yes to the goals of our politicians and feel part of some positive grand ambition which we can aspire to achieve? And just remember this the scale of problems we are confronting require nothing less than a g
You still didn't state what you think her economic misunderstanding is. Moreover more people take her seriously than either you or me, of for that matter, both of us combined. You can state that nobody takes her seriously, but I would argue that relative to her, both you and I, are the relative nobodies. I guess that's why nobody else is posting your or my political policy proposals and discussing them in public on slashdot, but that would be stating the obvious.
If, however, you are, unbeknownst to me, an elected public representative representing some hundreds of thousands of voters, I will stand corrected. I do not take Trump seriously, but you won't hear me arguing that no one else does(nobody), because that would simply be on it's face untrue. It actually bothers me that others do take him seriously.
Stating that nobody takes her seriously, is actually positing yourself as the expert, not on whatever the particular topic one is or one is not supposedly an expert on, but even more generally as the arbiter of who or who not should be taken seriously in general.
Hilariously, that is even more arrogant than my little anti-economist rant was, which, granted, was rather arrogant.
In contrast to most other fields of study, economics stands out, for producing legions of educated idiots, who, on average, have less understanding of economics than those with no formal training. The number of actual economists who truly grasp how economies in reality, vs. theory, actually work, is so small that they should be on the endangered species list.
For most of the 20th century a degree in economics signified literally nothing more than ideological indoctrination in dogma, that had no social scientific basis whatsoever, which proved wonderfully immune to any actual empirical research, which understood itself completely a-historically and which proffered self-justifying theories with a level of theoretical sophistication appropriate to third graders. As a field of study, economics, as taught in most universities in the west throughout most of the 20th century was simply put the absolute least critical field of study in existence, critical thought being somewhat incompatible with mere regurgitation of ideological dogma and the mental mastubatory mantras of free markets.
Your average economist has zero understanding of how money is created. Zero understanding of how banks work. Zero understanding of the relationship of credit and debt. No comprehension whatsoever of the most basic elements of anything which could be considered an economy. As the most intellectually bankrupt field of study in existence, economics, truly does stand out.
Most economists believe everything is a market. They believe Markets are nature(al). They believe Markets naturally tend towards perfect competition, in which information and knowledge is equally present for all actors, at all times, and thus natural markets are by their nature, perfect. They believe any failure of markets is due to intervention, usually attributed to government regulation. They believe Markets always seek equilibrium and that equilibrium is qua definition just distribution. You might be inclined to call economics a bad religion, but Bad Religion, at least produced some really good music, in contrast to economists, who missed every significant ongoing in the actual economy, until after the fact, and then misdiagnosed what had happened.
If you think that Alexandria Occassio-Cortez doesn't understand economics and that she's a dingbat, chances are your understanding of economics is based on mere regurgitation of ideological dogma, void of any critical thought. But hey, don't take this as a personal attack, the real goal of most economists has been to indoctrinate the entire population with their braindead propaganda. As with any generalization, there are exceptions, and perhaps your critique of her understanding of economics is founded in something, if that's the case please excuse my little rant here, but go ahead and explicate exactly what her economics misunderstanding supposedly is.
As a non-economist I would eat most economists for breakfast if it wasn't for the bad digestion which follows.
Give me a break
I am so sick of the fawning over our so-called 'intelligence' agencies, that I have had enough. Let's call them what they really are, the short bus commando.
When in your life time has the CIA or the NSA *ever* been right with their so-called intelligence? When did they ever give us a heads up on important developments? When did they ever prevent something bad from happening? When did their 'intelligence' ever lead to anything good? The answer, never. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Libya. In fact the only thing they are good for is being wrong. On the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of the law, the wrong side of the *people*, simply wrong.
Oh and I am supposed to be shushed because I am not aware of what they supposedly know, whatever top secret information they might have, to which I am not privileged. LOL. The CIA is the propaganda bureau plain and simple.
They only intelligence they possess is the art of manipulation, which granted does require cunning, malice, and skullduggery. But knowledge, understanding, grasping of significance etc. is something they have systematically proven to be incapable of.
The CIA has been the bastion of foreign election intervention since it's inception, they have been responsible for dozens of coup d'etats, assassinations, civil wars and other mayhem, destabilizing societies around the world and generally fucking the common man for the benefit of rich paymasters who they serve.
As an institution they are morally bankrupt, ethically corrupt, and deserving of nothing else than contempt and derision. And now our glorious free(TM) media pays them to spread their propaganda on our news programs and in our newspaper articles. I don't really hate the kids on the short bus, I actually kind of feel for them, but intelligence is not a property appropriately applied to describe them.
I won't waste too many words on the Federal Bureau of Entrapment, Americas premeier law enforcement agency. That bungling gaggle of incompetent nincompoops are only to be taken seriously because of the lives they have taken. Entrapment is their specialty because they are almost universally incapable of capturing actual criminals, but of course it's not their fault that are Justice Department never, ever really prosecutes the real criminals(hey 2008 financial crisis, heres looking at you!). As far as investigation goes the FBI is really good at finding out who MLK was sleeping with, what drugs the peace protestors in the 60's were taking, and infiltrating the Black Panthers and other resistance organizations, yet when it comes to investigating things that most Americans are rightfully concerned about, the FBI has nada.
And just a final note: We cannot and will not ever know what really happened with the DNC server because a private security firm wiped any traces of what happened before the DNC had cooked up their Russian conspiracy theory. There is a conspiracy, no theory needed, which does not involve any Russians. It was the conspiracy to make sure that none of the damaging info from the DNC leaks ever made it into the mainstream media and instead we got to hear one bogus story after the next about Russian boogeymen by ignorant young reporters who aren't even old enough to remember the friggin cold war.
Oh and just so it's clear where I stand on Trump and the Mueller investigation: We don't need an investigation regarding Trump. Anyone who wasn't on the short bus knew that Trump was a lying sack of shit, who'd sell his mother for a tower in Moscow, hell even Timbuktu, long before he became president. He commits crimes every single day, he can't help it, it's in his nature, just like lying, cheating, stealing and screwing people over. But this was fucking clear almost 40 years ago. The Russians had nothing to do with his election, it was the good ole American Pie short bus baking brigade that elected him.
Ok. I got some sleep and have had some coffee, things are calmer now ;)
///buffering/// is absolutely no buffering, at least then you could hit pause and come back a couple of minutes later, now youtube routinely fails to deliver low res video without interruption- and that on 100mbits internet connections....
Yeah my rant was a bit over the top, i'll admit, and of course I realize my argumentation there was completely and utterly reactionary(slap!bad !iwbcman !bad!slap!), given that *anything* can and will be used as an excuse to squeeze the maximum amount of rent out of the public, while doing the least possible, pocketing the most possible.
Hell the ISP's deliberately fail to cancel your service(which they force on you by constantly changing terms/prices and only running bogus teaser rates specifically designed to reward those who constantly change service on the the never ending quest for reasonable rates), when you cancel it, on the off chance that you won't contest being charged an additional one or two months of fees, given enough customers and the percentages of those who have time and potentially money to contest such, this scheme might even account for 5-10% of their revenue.
Part of my reaction is based on the long deep running suspicion that 4k video is just a ploy by the content industry to circumvent pirating due to the impracticality of working with video of such size(whether in terms of hd space, data caps, or streaming speed). I formed this opinion when I saw millenials pirating anime in 4k, which given a codec which wouldn't introduce such horrible distortions, as currently is the case, could be rendered perfectly in a 1/32nd that resolution, due to the utter lack of detail present in most anime I have seen.
I also know that the only limit to the amount and speed of data transfer on the internet is the infrastructure available, such is not a naturally limited resource, I still believe it behoves us to treat it as such, as if it was a limited resource, due to the radical disparities in the ways it is apportioned.
The mindset change, which accompanied the development of streaming internet services, has led to regression, backwards movement-technologically speaking. Partial downloads of packages-due to timeout,error etc., by package managers, fedora's dnf -here is looking at you, force complete re-downloading of the data, even though the data is delivered in chunks that are crc'd and would be obvious candidates for an algorithm which only re-downloads corrupted chunks and resumes downloads upon reconnect-hell we wrote those algorithms 30 years ago, back in the analog modem days....And don't get me going on youtube which performs worse now that it did 15 years ago, not due to an increase in the number of users or size of data, both which have soared astronomically, but due to the fact it refuses to buffer data and constantly triggers a re-download every time one resizes the video.....arrrgggghhh, the only thing worse than
Gawd, I am becoming a curmudgeon, damn- knew it when I saw those first white nose hairs and got fuzzy ears.
ok. so here goes my karma...
////rant////
////rant off ////
F* you, and your 4k F*ing video streams.
I hope you have to pay through the nose for those 4k video streams. Until the baseline definition for broadband has been bumped up to 1Gigabit/sec, meaning a new definition of the minimum internet connection speed for sale in the US, allowing a few special snowflakes to be used as a rational for the outrageously expensive costs of internet connections that are common here in the US and at the same time leaving tens of millions of people with no access to 1Gigabit/sec connections, whatsoever, due to the criminal diversion of exorbitantly high monthly rates from the long-promised and never-delivered upgrades to our infrastructure, straight into the pockets of their F*in shareholders, is injustice in the extreme.
4k video on your F* phone!, give me a F*ing break, the human being has yet to be born, whose eyes can discern that kind of resolution difference on a 5" screen at 2 ft. Maybe it's worth it on a 60" screen from 12-15 ft away, but on a F*ing phone??????????
Says some ignorant european
Lol, Sorry Mr. Cowherd, American born and bred
The USA has a huge military budget because:
[1] it values its freedom and independence
[2] it values its allies and trade routes
[3] it costs the USA a lot more to get any measure of military might since it does not have a conscripted military and its materiel is not made by government suppliers.
The USA has a huge military budget because:
[1] it has whipped it's population, and that of a significant portion of the worlds population, into a frenzy of fear and paranoia, by maintaining a permanent war status since the end of WWII. Whether hot or cold, the USA has waged war against non-enemies, aggressively supporting brutal dictatorships around, killing millions in defence of "freedom and democracy" around the world. The USA as "protector" of the "free world" has been holding the human species hostage to the possibility of imminent extinction via nuclear weapons for nearly 70 years now. This in the name of valuing its freedom and independence.
[2]it has decided that the best social control mechanism for social pacification is to provide the lowest possible cost for goods and promoted consumerism as ersatz status symbols for a largely disenfranchised permanent underclass. In order to secure such cheap access to goods, the USA must dominate all world trade and be able to dictate prices for resources, resource extraction, production and distribution. This in the name of valuing its allies and trade routes.
[3] it spends a lot less money for the size of our military than any other country would for a similarly sized and scaled military because 18 year-old's with no prospects always form a cheap labor pool( "sold" as in soldier, comes from Roman Latin, daily wage-worker), particularly if one can convince them that they are serving their country men in the name of noble goals and values like "freedom and democracy". And because military production in the USA has always been "dual-purpose", a civilian feel-good, while producing weapons of mass destruction.
The USA has co-opted a tremendously large section of it's so-called private market for dual-purpose: production of disposable goods, while supplying the worlds largest military with an endless production line of "goods", of which no good can ever come. Most major manufacturing firms in the USA would not be economically viable if it were not for this arrangement. Boeing could never make it solely producing commercial air-liners, the market for such is not large enough, but if the Pentagon needs x number of fighter jets, missiles and rockets every year, which must be constantly restocked, due to usage in wars or due to degradation from not ever being used, they can show a profit for their civilian production lines. The same is, and has always been, true for GM, Ford, GE, etc.
The USA has not, historically, HAD a "health service" because we traditionally left health to the people themselves, the private sectore, and communities and states (The US Constitution says nothing about healthcare, and it explicitly says that anything it does not assign to the federal government belongs to the people and to the states).
The USA has not, historically, HAD a health service, because immiseration is a constitutive part of maintaining an exploitable permanent underclass. During the first 250 years of American history, surplus value, ie. profit, was made primarily by either a) stealing the indigenous peoples lands or b) exploiting "free labor", ie. slavery. Following the civil war profit has largely been made by exploiting those born into inter-generational poverty, both here and around the world. The majority of Europeans who immigrated to the USA during the first 150 years of colonization were debt-prisoners, ie. the then european permanent underclass. The USA has proudly cultivated cultural identities for the permanent underclass, going back almost 350 years, nowadays we call them "redne
I have read these kinds of articles for years. Finally instead of just laughing at how incredibly stupid they are I thought I might just respond.
If you want to measure the revenue of a public transportation system simply halt it's operations for one year. Measure the the relative increase or decrease of economic activity in the effected area, eg. the city limits. If you find, after one year, that commercial economic activity has increased, you can then argue that public transportation is a "cost" to the community. If on the other hand, you see a marked down turn in commercial activity, due to customers not being able to reach said businesses, and employees not being able to commute to their places of employment, you can count said economic losses as the profit, the value-add, of the public transportation system.
Death spiral. Give me a break. Poor New York, poor MTA. Look at the millions fleeing NYC, the city is failing, the sky is falling and death is nigh!. The very idea that a public transportation system should be turning a profit according to quarterly accounting practices is so brain dead that a collective ouch of agony of trillions of still functioning brain cells scream out in vain. An accounting practice that does not take into account the timeline of that which it means to measure, is beyond meaningless.
Public transportation systems effectively have a lifetime of in-perpetuum, particularly if they are not so spectacularly mismanaged as to threaten the viability of the community. The revenue of a public transportation systems *is* the tax the base of the community.
In the absence of the said systems the community, as such, would not exist, and yes -roads, sidewalks, bike paths, and highways are all part of public transportation systems. Failure to use the tax base of a community to maintain and improve the existing public transportation systems, and investing said moneys in expanding available transportation options is simply malfeasance-mismanagement. It reflects in no way on the utility of said public transportation systems, but rather how incredibly short-sighted and dumb their elected leadership is.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America states:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Roughly 3,000,000 American citizens as exceptions, nowadays.
The only missing element that I can see is that private for-profit prisons aren't buying and selling inmates, be patient, give 'em time.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
As one can see the the exact same sentence which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, which are held to be interchangeable terms, legalizes slavery and involuntary servitude for those parties duly convicted- ie. prisoners of the state.
The primary economic justification for slavery in modern times boils down to this: where labor is free, ie. unpaid for due to being forced involuntary servitude, the only capital cost involved in production cost is what is spent on raw resources, equipment and property, which translates directly to increased profit, and given free labor, slaves, a form of property, enable the purest form of producing profits, for none of the profits need be given back to pay for labor.
With this economic rational, which is as valid today as it was when it was widely practiced, the economic exploitation of prisoners, by and for for-profit corporations is fundamentally pre-programmed.
In essence this has said to capitalist, if you want free labor, find reasons to lock 'em up and wage campaigns to convince the public of this necessity and pass laws imprisoning those who violate the new laws. And remember the next best thing the free labor is dirt cheap labor and even if you don't end up capitalizing on the while their in prison, you'll get cheap labor out of them for the rest of their lives cause they will no longer be eligible for high paid employment, plus they won't be able to vote against the laws which made involuntary servants out of them.
With the passage of the 13th Amendment the penitentiary system of the United States, which we had pioneered, which focused on redemption and rehabilitation, suffered a fatal blow, from which it has never recovered. Our once proud, enlightenment inspired, alternative to the brutal dungeons and prisons of yore, was systematically converted into slave factories, hence the real origin of the prison industrial complex, which now pervades American society.
The apparent intentions behind the passage of the 13th Amendment, the ostensible ones, was the abolition of slavery. But there is something genuinely warped, codified in the text, about how they, that generation, went about abolishing slavery. It's almost as if they needed to concede to those slave holders, that slave holders were not morally bankrupt for desiring and having slaves, but rather that if they wished to continue having slaves they would have to come up with new ways of justifying/legitimizing it. So paradoxically it ends up giving the slave holders right in their aspiration to hold other human beings as slaves, just changing who the subjects of slavery would be.
Sure human beings were no longer being bought and sold as property in broad day light on Market Str. in Louisiville, Ky, the largest open-air slave market in America in the lead-up to the civil war. And certainly the color of your skin was no longer the exclusive characteristic which defined whether you could be owned or not by another human being. But did we not take at least one solid step backwards in the two steps forward of the progress of human emancipation?
Trains in America are not even the in the same league as trains in Europe. If you have never been on one you simply don't know the difference. European, and Japanese, and even Chinese trains travel at much higher speeds than anything in the US. The higher speed is accompanied with a totally different riding experience: much less noise, vibration and being tossed around.
You are correct in comparing buses. But you are missing the point of my previous post. Buses are fine when used in conjunction with other mass transit systems(subway, trams, light rail, hihgh speed trains), but buses do not cause the synergistic effects that permanent mass transit connections do, thus they have negligible effects on property value and utility, partly due to the fact that bus stops are moved around frequently and they don't generate the amount of foot traffic, except where bus hubs connect with other mass transit systems. When you couple this with the American system of having separate bus systems for children of school age, which have zero connection with other bus systems or other mass transit connections, because they are 100% decoupled, you end up with public bus systems that remain under utilized and inefficient.
Additionally you have a different social environment on public transit when each adult on the bus is responsible for safeguarding the well being of young children. In Europe 6-7 years hop on the trams by themselves to go to school, frequently in the company of other school-aged children, they are not accompanied by adults, but each adult on the tram understands their responsibility towards safeguarding the children. Let's put it this way, it's just really different than what we experience here in the US.
There are important exceptions, alternate implementations of bus systems that actually do have the kind of synergistic effects. One city in China, whose name I forget, actually has a setup with a major artery traversing the city alone one axis have something like 12 lanes, with the interior 4 lanes physically isolated from the surrounding 8 lanes, where there are bus stop every 100 meters and the buses run continuous loops up and down this artery, the buses hit each bus stop with something like 30 seconds between buses, creating a hyper efficient form of mass transit which actually surpasses subways in terms of utility and mobility.
But again most cities in America *only* have bus systems and they do not connect with any other forms of mass transit. Which means that bus systems utterly fail, on their own, to create the synergistic economies which are to be found everywhere where buses compliment actual mass transit systems.
I lived in a city named Marburg in Germany from 1994 till 1998, part of the 190 Deutsch Mark(60 dollar) tuition fee for University studies included free use of all public transit within 100km of the city. I had an opportunity to study Latin in Frankfurt which was roughly 90km distance from Marburg. Marburg has approximately 60,000 inhabitants, Frankfurt some around 1.5 million inhabitants. 5 days a week I would leave my apart, walk 100 yards to the bus stop, caught the bus to the central train station, caught a train to Frankfurt, went to the subway station beneath the Frankfurt central train station, rode the subway for 3 1/2 mites, exited the subway climbed up the stairs to the street, hopped on a tram for the remaining two miles, and then walked 100 yards to the Latin class, where I studied for 4 hours and then did the exact same trip in reverse.
The total trip time from my apartment to the Latin class was about 75 minutes, the same in reverse, and in 4 months I never ran into a delay, and I probably only had to walked about 250 yards total each way. And this was included in the cost of the University Tuition.
There is nothing like this in the United States, there are only a handful of American cities that have rudimentary mass transit systems, nothing approaching what roughly 300 million people take for granted across most of Europe.
Spoken like a true American.
Your lack of experience of what modern mass transit is actually like, ie. what we, as Americans, for the most part do not actually have, can be forgiven as a basis for your negative attitude.
Modern mass transit offers multiple advantages over our current Hobsian all-against-all free for all of individually driven cars, given your ignorance, let me list some:
1) modern mass transit has amazing air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, I have never sweated or froze in modern mass transit. You don't have to sit in place warm up your transit for 10 minutes prior to departure in the morning, you don't have to sweat and gasp for air while waiting for your transit to cool down from 120 degrees Fahrenheit, upon entering your transit after a long days work. It's virtually never too hot or too cold in modern mass transit.
2) modern mass transit is clean, well maintained and quite pleasant, and you might just be sitting next to corporate executives and/or high ranked politicians, for in places with modern mass transit, even the well off prefer using mass transit. Only in *expletive* societies like the US is mass transit considered only good enough for the poorest of the poor.
3) modern mass transit allows you to make great use of the 3-4 hours a day that countless Americans waste driving their cars. Modern mass transit has internet, electricity, tables to work on and places where 4-6 people can, if they so choose, sit together. You can text safely while riding in modern mass transit, whereas in a car you threaten the life of yourself and everyone around you. You can read, write reports, hell you can even code, surf the web, watch videos or listen to music. And god forbid if you are so inclined you can even *speak* to another also present human being.
4) modern mass transit is amazingly quiet and smooth. In some cities the trams are so quiet that bicyclists wearing headphones cant even tell their coming, ie. that's how little vibration and noise they make nowadays. Rapid high speed trains, a critical part of modern mass transit, are so frigging smooth you can fill a glass of wine on your table and leave it untouched over a 500 miles trip at speeds in excess of 250 mph on average. We have nothing like this in America, so I forgive you for being ignorant.
5) modern mass transit systems consist of multiple separate yet inter-linked systems. Your experience as a passenger is as if there is a single moving sidewalk, because you can effortlessly and quickly switch from one to the next to the next of these separate inter-linked systems. Modern mass tranist systems usually consist of inter-linked high speed trains, subways, trams and bus systems. These inter-linked system connect cities and towns over larger geographic areas, metropolitan areas can extend hundreds of miles in all directions, meaning you can easily work or study hundred+ miles from where you live, and still spend less time in-transit than you currently do with your car.
6) modern mass transit systems are incredibly reliable in terms of timing, if for no other reason than that are entirely isolated from automobile traffic and do not compete with cars. Modern mass transit systems run almost 24 hours offering service from whee early in the morning (5:00AM), until quite late at night(12:00 - 2:00 AM), and they operate on the weekends. If you want to be guaranteed to be on time to work or classes, use modern mass transit.
7) modern mass transit systems ensure that where you want and need to shop is almost always within some smallish number of yards from mass transit stops. This means far less walking than what is entailed when shopping in places surrounded by epically large parking places. It also means you can easily do a little bit of shopping on your way back home from work or school 2-3 times a week rather than trying to buy everything needed for half a month and being exhausted from carrying 100 plus bags of goods for your family every time
Seriously man, use your brain
his proposal is absolutely worth considering seriously
No it isn't. If America starts seriously talking about regulating AI research, companies will move their research and funding out of America. Attempts to regulate will create even less democratic accountability.
It is a stupid idea, and we need to make clear that in America "freedom to program" is an inalienable right.
Dear Gawd, what pray tell, constitutes "democratic accountability" for you? Do you honestly believe that the "Free Market" is "democratic" ? Let me have some of what you're smoking, because that is some good shit, unfortunately the same shit that the Democrats have been pushing since Bill Saxophone Clinton. Government regulation is ipso facto the definition of "democratic accountability", whether it suits you or not-if you dislike how it works, you probably have a problem with how are democracy works(legitimate)/ and/or doesn't work.
AI is a smokescreen, meant to distract from the actual problem, which is big data, how it is collected, who has access and how it is used, each of which is determined by humans without any AI at all. Name me a problem with (TM)actually existing AI, and I will point to the human intelligence(or lack thereof) problem that it presents. I occasionally watch interviews with Elon Musk primarily because I find him interesting-at once he has many novel and brilliant ideas, and has been amazingly successful in seeing some of these ideas to fruition, while at the same time he spends his intellectual energy chasing phantoms (AI, Mars habitation etc.) and embracing notions that were brain dead before they became popular( ie. carbon taxes). Fascinatingly contradictory, wonderfully human.
I know you libertarian types get such a hard on fantasizing about how Atlas Shrugged, but your idol, Ayn Rand was one sick bitch, and if she had just slept with Alan Greenspan back in the day maybe our economy would have been spared from her twisted/demented influence.
Cry me a damned river man.
What else could you possibly expect?
Facebook is a private corporation, not the commons, or a public domain-everything about Facebook including all of the content, each web page-which includes where advertising is embedded, is private property.
Think of it this way: Facebook is like some rich mofo's BIGASS backyard. The rich mofo invited a bunch of kids to hang out on his lawn. At some point some of the kids started tearing up the yard, mostly by shitting all over it. Finally the mofo decided enough is enough, you can't shit on my lawn. Consequently he decided to tell them to Get The Fuck Off My Lawn. And that rich mofo don't need to call the police. Because you earning money on his fuckin lawn is not a right, but a privilege which he grants you at his sole discretion.
Sorry folks, but Slashdot just revealed it's true colors. The chorus of OMG! WTF! down with Mozilla, witnessed in this thread is, sadly, proof that the Slashdot audience has become those who the hackers of yore were hacking against. Is there not an ounce of rebellious spirit left on this site? Whether you like the show, Mr. Robot, or not, I just can't fathom the reaction here.
For those those who say this is the last straw for Mozilla-good riddance, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Look there are lots of things I could complain about regarding Firefox, but a chance wanderer coming to Slashdot would think this site is full of nothing but chrome shills and misanthropes who actually *hate* Free software. What made this site so interesting in days long ago was the tension between the rebellious spirit of Free Software and those who made their living working for the man or trying to make a living selling proprietary software. Nowadays corporate shills and libtards reign supreme on this site and the very notion that technology can actually be a source of societal change is completely and utterly lost.
Well duh maybe that's why most here don't even get what Mozilla is, what it represents and how much it actually changed the world around us.
But oh my God they rendered my extension useless, oh my God one of my 80 tabs is leaking memory, or Oh my God it takes a full 1.7 seconds to launch on a modern computer.
Oh well I guess I am just a fanboy, forgot to check the mail and get my check for promoting not only Firefox but Mozilla as a an organization, foundation and corporation. Am I the only idiot here who jumped for joy back in January of 1998 when the mozilla source code was made free and downloaded it just so I could see the code?
My guess is that anywhere from %30-50 of all currently existing jobs in software development wouldn't even exist without Free Software, and Mozilla did more to promote and garner mainstream acceptance of Free Software than the GNU movement ever dreamt of. In all likelihood there would be no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc. without the courage and commitment that founded Mozilla. Alas without Richard Stallman and the GNU movement there probably would never have been a Mozilla.
Long live Mozilla
Honestly I am not so sure about Bannon being a bigot. Trump, however, eliminated any room for doubt on that issue in his most infamous press conference on Tuesday.
Here is what I am certain about regarding Bannon: Bannon is straight out of the oldest school of political manipulators which has ever existed, the sophists. Plato founded his academy in Athens in reaction to and in opposition to the rampant sophistry, which was destroying Athenian Democracy. The sophists were the then current intellectual hired-guns of Athenian politicians. These hired-guns mastered the rhetorical art of equivocation, showing, in part at least, the originary fundamental relationship between Democracy and Demagoguery. Athenian politicians hired these men to craft their speeches, speeches designed to inflame the passions of their supporters, for short term political gain, regardless of whatever consequences followed, which ultimately led to the downfall of Democracy in Athens. Philosophy, from it's inception in the academy, correctly understood, sought to discredit sophistry in general and equivocation in particular. Remember that, for close to 2,000 years, rhetoric was held to be the highest form of intellectual art, and one wasn't considered to be educated if one wasn't trained in the rhetorical Arts.
Why do I doubt whether Bannon himself is a racist or biggot, given his work in unleashing Breitbart on the world? Simple really. Bannon never concerned himself with who his fellow travellers were. He simply designed and delivered the rhetorical argumentation which Trump, and many others, used to whip their followers into a frenzy. If modern Americans had even the remotest clue as to the origin and history of the art of rhetorics there would be no need to argue with people about "slippery-slopes", because the "slippery-slope" argument in every single on of it's incarnations is nothing other than plain-ole equivocation, sophistry for those with a somewhat larger vocabulary. So who was speaking when Trump spoke about "many, many sides" or "what's next after the statues of Robert E. Lee, are you gonna take down the statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, they were both slave owners....", or the "fine people" amongst the torch bearing, swastika waiving, sieg-heiling brown shirts marching through Chralottesville who had exactly one and only one objective planned with their march- to terrorize the good people of Charlottesville and Americans in general of every color and persuasion?.
Most of 20th century American politics, and that which still dominates us today, would have been completely impossible had the majority of our citizens been trained to recognized and see through simple rhethoric, and how easily we are manipulated by those who have mastered these arts. How many people had to die in east/southeast asia by virtue of one of the, literally, oldest tricks in the book, 'slippery-slope' rhetoric? Lather, rinse, repeat, Iraq, Libya, Syria, TEH Terruhrism. Even the expression 'Alt-right' is straight up sophism, except that the semantic confusion spread by it has rendered even those who consider themselves to be Alt-Right unable to distinguish themselves from their fellow travellers the fuckin NeoNazis and the KKK. Wake up folks we are being played, and Bannon was damned good at what he did. Fuckin snake.
Gosh I am just shakin in my boots, our Anonymous Coward just issued a threat. Are you even old enough to use the word communist? Little boy go home and play with yourself. Nice troll though, have to give you credit. Man up and drop the AC, or shut the fuck up. I for one am sick and tired of of providing cover for your ilk under the guise of freedom of speech. Your freedom of speech ends when you equivocate those who would terrorize us(the KKK, Nazi's and the so-called 'Alt-right') with those of us who fight against terrorism. You can howl into the night and scream to your hearts discontent but when I hear equivocators like you all I really here is:
"Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on"
We won't kill you for what you say, but when you die we will bury you. We were here before you and and after you are gone we will raise your children to be better.
THIS machine kills fascists.
Apparently yours is. Wall Street is owned and run by big bankers, not by egomaniacal real estate magnates. Bankers and real estate investors often clash. If you want to accurately associate Donald Trump with any Manhattan roadway, he would be Fifth Avenue.
You know I hate this expression in English, but you leave me no choice:
same fucking difference./
That's a difference without distinction, at least from the vantage point of the 99%
Frankly I couldn't care less about distinctions only relevant to the 1%.
I will gladly concede that HRC with the Clinton Foundation is *also* Wall Street, but to pretend that The Donald does not represent Wall Street is kind of like the ostrich sticking it's head in the sand and thinking that no one can see it.