In Western democracies turnout can vary a lot, so if a candidate gets say 51% with 50% turnout he got 25.5% of potential voters.
Hitler, even with a street army intimidating voters, never got more than 33% of the vote (much less the population). He used some "national emergency" political maneuvers to take power and take power and cancel future elections. I think there was a subsequent election, run by the nazis with little opposition and direct intimidation of voters (invisible ink to find out who voted how, fictional counts, etc.) but he certainly did not have a consensus for war and genocide.
Most Germans, certainly most Berliners, were against going to war. They were driven to fight by intimidation and propaganda.
Not to mention initially grabbing parts of Czechoslovakia instead of supporting them against invasion.
Polish leadership was abysmal in the '30s. Actually political leadership sort of hit an international low at that time. Horrible leaders popping up everywhere.
Offshoring to companies that provide guys with huge lists of (bought? fictional) certifications on their CVs and signatures and no actual knowledge whatsoever. It may be cheap but the servers and network are being run by some guy off the street who can't spell "Windows," "TCP/IP," or "UNIX."
The frustration with trying to get these "admins" to do simple tasks is mind boggling.
I think there is value for the clueless. A lot of the people in our class loved it and were amazed by the questions. I could not believe that people were getting married (and, in several cases (though it WAS catholic) re-married) without thinking about basic living together stuff (and 28 out of 30 couples were living together, including us). I know people who had more enjoyable courses but I don't know anyone who said they really got much out of the class.
The history of the period that I last read was written by a Reaganite republican, so lots of aspects (especially the ones relating to the '80s) were biased and some were completely wrong, but I had the impression that he tended to get what he wanted and kill the people who opposed him. He did not kill off as many people as Stalin, but I don't think the decisions were collegian, or at least not peacefully collegian. People thought very hard before opposing Lenin (or at least they did after he killed the ones who did not take him seriously).
With Stalin it did not matter, he ended up killing everyone he interacted with.
Neither paid a lot of attention to what life was really like in Russia or to what was going on outside of their power grabs.
Dictators can do capitalism (e.g. Singapore), no one has tried communism (dictatorships say they are communist, none of them are, Russia, China, Burma, Cuba, etc. are incompetentist dictatorships) outside of a few American hippies, and levels of socialism tend to make more difference to the people than to the economy. Regulatory structure makes a huge economic impact (Germany and Japan had good ones imposed on them and they used them to outcompete America while being fairly socialist), socialism makes a minor one.
I did. It was painful and unproductive. "What would you do if you found out you could not have kids?" What would you do if you had not thought about this before deciding to get married? Almost everyone in the class I took was already living together, most were married, almost none were clued in. It was a complete, complete waste of time.
I suppose that if you get through the course it is a sign your relationship is strong and that you are on the same wavelength.
I guess the only positive impact was that it was a significant step on my SO's way out of the catholic church. I used to feel bad (20 years ago, or so) about not going to church with her, especially as she would often end up not going, and there are seriously positive aspects (meeting people when you move to new areas, shared context with said people) to church attendance (that do not balance the negative for me of actually having to sit through it, or at least did not when I was much younger). Now she has no interest in going either.
The priest who married us said the relationship would not last due to my lack of faith. The marriage is still fine after 15 years.
YMMV. I have heard of better and worse churches and priests. Ours were pretty bad.
Yes, but non-dictators would not have done such a terrible job of implementing socialism. Lenin was completely out of touch. He supported getting Russia out of WWI and that was enough to bring him to power. He had no idea how people lived, what economics was, nothing. He purged most of the people who could have let him know. Then he acted as though he was god. Stalin pretty much followed. They could have chosen any economic model and botched it.
I think it was the dictatorship, not the socialism, that caused problems in Russia. As in Cuba, China, etc. the "communist" government was a pack of opportunist thugs seizing power and making most of the population miserable. Socialism was a detail.
Well they claimed number of devs not number of commits, and they also said that they were submitting to RedHat for their distro more than to the linux kernel, but, yeah, you can't put a lot of faith in sales reps which is why I prefaced my comment with the source.
Oracle sales reps claim that they have more linux devs than RedHat and that they feed lots of code back. They also say that they used to work more closely with Redhat but ended up getting frustrated and now they just buy one subscription and go their own way though they still provide fixes.
Oracle's plan of owning everything remotely connected to the database makes some sense as 90% of Oracle support calls consist of proving the problem is not the O/S, the app server, the hardware, Veritas, etc.
Sun hardware and support was reliable when techies were running the company. Since the money men (read "idiots") took over and purged anyone who knew anything and outsourced it has gone downhill.
Sun has had some problems with their planning for a long time (they specialized in SMP hardware, and then brought out JAVA in a manner that made it scale really badly over multiple CPUs, for example).
I expect Oracle will work out the planning and hardware selection.
And a lot of the HR and management people prefer mediocre non-perfectionists who let them maintain their illusions. When they hire good people it is a lot of work because they start finding all the stuff that is done wrong and criticizing the people around them for not doing a better job. In a large company, especially one that does not really produce much like pharma (purchases and fake studies > innovation), IT software (just buy bad software and stamp a big name on it), and some consulting companies (prolong the problem for $$$), it is a lot easier to hire mediocre people.
When the HR staff is made up of people who scraped through college they tend to be unable to judge people who excelled. Companies with good HR departments are very rare. Companies with incompetent HR departments are extremely common.
I suspect that when you miss some details things appear better. People tend to look better at a distance before you get detail. Lowered senses probably contribute to "beer goggles" as well, though there are other factors.
Stripping detail does not make art but it may make pop.
The car companies want hydrogen, not electrical, because it preserves their profits.
-still requires gas stations -high maintenance combustion engine, $$$ -sounds good because you can get hydrogen from water (but not just water unfortunately)
Of course hydrogen engines don't really make sense because they don't solve any problems. Hydrogen works as a large, inconvenient battery. But the American car companies all say hydrogen is better than electric and it is what they are aiming for because they would rather remain unchanged and lose out to imports than make any change to their businesses.
The American car companies, like the banks, have no one to blame but themselves. They don't want to change with the times. 30 years ago they could afford to pay someone a lifetime pension for 30 years work, now they should admit they can't (and can't afford to pay huge wages for repetitive work). 30 years ago there was no competition and they could make whatever they want, now they should follow the market (small cars=small profits, so no small cars for US automakers -> fail). 30 years ago they made cars that lasted too long and they lost money, but now they choose to make cars that die soon and need lots of maintenance. Greed leads to failure.
I agree. I think the main points of interest are that the vigilantes realize that what they are doing is weird, and that there are no villains in tights. The justification for pretty much every other superhero franchise is "look, mean guy in tights and mask doing naughty things, I'll put on some funny clothes and kick his ass." In Watchmen once the mean guys stop wearing tights pretty much everyone else does, too, because they feel silly.
Of course Dr Manhattan doesn't have much choice (though he chooses to wear less and less clothing, and couldn't he just decide not to be blue?) and Roschach just likes hurting people.
Watchmen sort of goes one level beyond most other comics (Spiderman tries to figure out how to be happy when he HAS to be Spiderman, Superman sort of likewise, X-men same except more violent with rejection overtones...) in looking at motivation and having sort of reasonable self-images (Dirk Gently's rules apply, the impossible happens often, the ridiculously improbably is fishy; why do they do it?). Of course Ozymandias is way out there.
I'm in no rush to see the movie, though I did read the book because the movie came out.
I thought the second non-canon book was OK, or at least bits of the end were. The co-authors probably had more original stuff to work with for that one. The first I found to be pretty bad, not in tune with the mood of the earlier books, and the last one was better but still significantly worse than any book in the series actually written by Frank Herbert. Way better than anything else I've picked up by Brian Herbert, though. I finish almost anything I start to read, but I've discarded some of his stuff.
I did not find that the two books really added much to the series, but I don't regret reading them, either. I am not going to read their other pseudo-dune stuff, though. The excerpts are pretty weak.
I wish Douglas Adams could have written a Salmon of Doubt, and, of course, lots of other stuff. Judging from his later works (both biographical and fictional) the last few years of his life were not really happy. Too bad he did not stay in Britain. RIP.
Much like psychology or history. Economics is much more focused on convincing people than on developing scientific hypotheses. Ideology trumps results. Economists are not often judged on their work or their qualifications, they are judged based on how closely what they suggest fits with what their bosses want to do.
Remember the guy the fund companies brought out to say (base on his geology degree) that Amazon should be at $400? The fund companies made a killing after publicizing his lack of knowledge.
Church hospitals routinely make massive profits and refuse to do the community work they are supposed to do to maintain their tax free "non-profit" status. The problem with the US system is that it is designed to make huge money available to the dishonest, and few resist the temptation. Of course the system is supposed to look like it provides medical care.
Most other countries do not have a mechanism for paying people not to provide medical services (though some do have bonuses based on people not needing medical services, i.e. doctors get paid extra if their patients are healthy).
You have to wait quite a long time if you are not very sick, but I was offered same-day knee surgery, and ended up having it in about 10 days after I tried to avoid it. Life-threatening cases get immediate treatment as well, no waits.
Admittedly here in Quebec the equipment is not as good as in, say, Ontario, where just about everything in major hospitals, from the machinery to the restroom stall doors, has a "donated by" plaque, but hospital care is still pretty good.
Of course things are privatizing here too. If you really need an MRI you had better have private insurance because without it you will wait 6-8 weeks instead of 0-2. I'm all for private companies providing care, but I disagree with getting away from single payer. For profit companies just can't leave the "but they'll pay anything" bit alone and care goes down while prices go up.
Other countries pay less per person for health care, and they cover everybody. Higher taxes are for other reasons (I will not even guess what). The US could lower taxes by going single payer.
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In Western democracies turnout can vary a lot, so if a candidate gets say 51% with 50% turnout he got 25.5% of potential voters.
Hitler, even with a street army intimidating voters, never got more than 33% of the vote (much less the population). He used some "national emergency" political maneuvers to take power and take power and cancel future elections. I think there was a subsequent election, run by the nazis with little opposition and direct intimidation of voters (invisible ink to find out who voted how, fictional counts, etc.) but he certainly did not have a consensus for war and genocide.
Most Germans, certainly most Berliners, were against going to war. They were driven to fight by intimidation and propaganda.
And I'm off topic... Damn Godwin!
Did not think hard enough... Divine right to rule anyone? Does any god see believers equally?
Equal before god? Depends on the god.
Not to mention initially grabbing parts of Czechoslovakia instead of supporting them against invasion.
Polish leadership was abysmal in the '30s. Actually political leadership sort of hit an international low at that time. Horrible leaders popping up everywhere.
Offshoring to companies that provide guys with huge lists of (bought? fictional) certifications on their CVs and signatures and no actual knowledge whatsoever. It may be cheap but the servers and network are being run by some guy off the street who can't spell "Windows," "TCP/IP," or "UNIX."
The frustration with trying to get these "admins" to do simple tasks is mind boggling.
I think there is value for the clueless. A lot of the people in our class loved it and were amazed by the questions. I could not believe that people were getting married (and, in several cases (though it WAS catholic) re-married) without thinking about basic living together stuff (and 28 out of 30 couples were living together, including us). I know people who had more enjoyable courses but I don't know anyone who said they really got much out of the class.
The history of the period that I last read was written by a Reaganite republican, so lots of aspects (especially the ones relating to the '80s) were biased and some were completely wrong, but I had the impression that he tended to get what he wanted and kill the people who opposed him. He did not kill off as many people as Stalin, but I don't think the decisions were collegian, or at least not peacefully collegian. People thought very hard before opposing Lenin (or at least they did after he killed the ones who did not take him seriously).
With Stalin it did not matter, he ended up killing everyone he interacted with.
Neither paid a lot of attention to what life was really like in Russia or to what was going on outside of their power grabs.
Dictators can do capitalism (e.g. Singapore), no one has tried communism (dictatorships say they are communist, none of them are, Russia, China, Burma, Cuba, etc. are incompetentist dictatorships) outside of a few American hippies, and levels of socialism tend to make more difference to the people than to the economy. Regulatory structure makes a huge economic impact (Germany and Japan had good ones imposed on them and they used them to outcompete America while being fairly socialist), socialism makes a minor one.
I did. It was painful and unproductive. "What would you do if you found out you could not have kids?" What would you do if you had not thought about this before deciding to get married? Almost everyone in the class I took was already living together, most were married, almost none were clued in. It was a complete, complete waste of time.
I suppose that if you get through the course it is a sign your relationship is strong and that you are on the same wavelength.
I guess the only positive impact was that it was a significant step on my SO's way out of the catholic church. I used to feel bad (20 years ago, or so) about not going to church with her, especially as she would often end up not going, and there are seriously positive aspects (meeting people when you move to new areas, shared context with said people) to church attendance (that do not balance the negative for me of actually having to sit through it, or at least did not when I was much younger). Now she has no interest in going either.
The priest who married us said the relationship would not last due to my lack of faith. The marriage is still fine after 15 years.
YMMV. I have heard of better and worse churches and priests. Ours were pretty bad.
Yes, but non-dictators would not have done such a terrible job of implementing socialism. Lenin was completely out of touch. He supported getting Russia out of WWI and that was enough to bring him to power. He had no idea how people lived, what economics was, nothing. He purged most of the people who could have let him know. Then he acted as though he was god. Stalin pretty much followed. They could have chosen any economic model and botched it.
I find the good headhunters tend not to stay in the business long. Strangely the clueless make-a-pile-of-CVs-and-shovel-it-over guys stay forever.
I think it was the dictatorship, not the socialism, that caused problems in Russia. As in Cuba, China, etc. the "communist" government was a pack of opportunist thugs seizing power and making most of the population miserable. Socialism was a detail.
Unlike the US system it is not the worst in the developed world.
I guess the location explains the utter uselessness of Comupuware software.
Well they claimed number of devs not number of commits, and they also said that they were submitting to RedHat for their distro more than to the linux kernel, but, yeah, you can't put a lot of faith in sales reps which is why I prefaced my comment with the source.
Oracle sales reps claim that they have more linux devs than RedHat and that they feed lots of code back. They also say that they used to work more closely with Redhat but ended up getting frustrated and now they just buy one subscription and go their own way though they still provide fixes.
Oracle's plan of owning everything remotely connected to the database makes some sense as 90% of Oracle support calls consist of proving the problem is not the O/S, the app server, the hardware, Veritas, etc.
Sun hardware and support was reliable when techies were running the company. Since the money men (read "idiots") took over and purged anyone who knew anything and outsourced it has gone downhill.
Sun has had some problems with their planning for a long time (they specialized in SMP hardware, and then brought out JAVA in a manner that made it scale really badly over multiple CPUs, for example).
I expect Oracle will work out the planning and hardware selection.
And a lot of the HR and management people prefer mediocre non-perfectionists who let them maintain their illusions. When they hire good people it is a lot of work because they start finding all the stuff that is done wrong and criticizing the people around them for not doing a better job. In a large company, especially one that does not really produce much like pharma (purchases and fake studies > innovation), IT software (just buy bad software and stamp a big name on it), and some consulting companies (prolong the problem for $$$), it is a lot easier to hire mediocre people.
When the HR staff is made up of people who scraped through college they tend to be unable to judge people who excelled. Companies with good HR departments are very rare. Companies with incompetent HR departments are extremely common.
I suspect that when you miss some details things appear better. People tend to look better at a distance before you get detail. Lowered senses probably contribute to "beer goggles" as well, though there are other factors.
Stripping detail does not make art but it may make pop.
The car companies want hydrogen, not electrical, because it preserves their profits.
-still requires gas stations
-high maintenance combustion engine, $$$
-sounds good because you can get hydrogen from water (but not just water unfortunately)
Of course hydrogen engines don't really make sense because they don't solve any problems. Hydrogen works as a large, inconvenient battery. But the American car companies all say hydrogen is better than electric and it is what they are aiming for because they would rather remain unchanged and lose out to imports than make any change to their businesses.
The American car companies, like the banks, have no one to blame but themselves. They don't want to change with the times. 30 years ago they could afford to pay someone a lifetime pension for 30 years work, now they should admit they can't (and can't afford to pay huge wages for repetitive work). 30 years ago there was no competition and they could make whatever they want, now they should follow the market (small cars=small profits, so no small cars for US automakers -> fail). 30 years ago they made cars that lasted too long and they lost money, but now they choose to make cars that die soon and need lots of maintenance. Greed leads to failure.
I agree. I think the main points of interest are that the vigilantes realize that what they are doing is weird, and that there are no villains in tights. The justification for pretty much every other superhero franchise is "look, mean guy in tights and mask doing naughty things, I'll put on some funny clothes and kick his ass." In Watchmen once the mean guys stop wearing tights pretty much everyone else does, too, because they feel silly.
Of course Dr Manhattan doesn't have much choice (though he chooses to wear less and less clothing, and couldn't he just decide not to be blue?) and Roschach just likes hurting people.
Watchmen sort of goes one level beyond most other comics (Spiderman tries to figure out how to be happy when he HAS to be Spiderman, Superman sort of likewise, X-men same except more violent with rejection overtones...) in looking at motivation and having sort of reasonable self-images (Dirk Gently's rules apply, the impossible happens often, the ridiculously improbably is fishy; why do they do it?). Of course Ozymandias is way out there.
I'm in no rush to see the movie, though I did read the book because the movie came out.
I thought the second non-canon book was OK, or at least bits of the end were. The co-authors probably had more original stuff to work with for that one. The first I found to be pretty bad, not in tune with the mood of the earlier books, and the last one was better but still significantly worse than any book in the series actually written by Frank Herbert. Way better than anything else I've picked up by Brian Herbert, though. I finish almost anything I start to read, but I've discarded some of his stuff.
I did not find that the two books really added much to the series, but I don't regret reading them, either. I am not going to read their other pseudo-dune stuff, though. The excerpts are pretty weak.
I wish Douglas Adams could have written a Salmon of Doubt, and, of course, lots of other stuff. Judging from his later works (both biographical and fictional) the last few years of his life were not really happy. Too bad he did not stay in Britain. RIP.
Much like psychology or history. Economics is much more focused on convincing people than on developing scientific hypotheses. Ideology trumps results. Economists are not often judged on their work or their qualifications, they are judged based on how closely what they suggest fits with what their bosses want to do.
Remember the guy the fund companies brought out to say (base on his geology degree) that Amazon should be at $400? The fund companies made a killing after publicizing his lack of knowledge.
Church hospitals routinely make massive profits and refuse to do the community work they are supposed to do to maintain their tax free "non-profit" status. The problem with the US system is that it is designed to make huge money available to the dishonest, and few resist the temptation. Of course the system is supposed to look like it provides medical care.
Most other countries do not have a mechanism for paying people not to provide medical services (though some do have bonuses based on people not needing medical services, i.e. doctors get paid extra if their patients are healthy).
You have to wait quite a long time if you are not very sick, but I was offered same-day knee surgery, and ended up having it in about 10 days after I tried to avoid it. Life-threatening cases get immediate treatment as well, no waits.
Admittedly here in Quebec the equipment is not as good as in, say, Ontario, where just about everything in major hospitals, from the machinery to the restroom stall doors, has a "donated by" plaque, but hospital care is still pretty good.
Of course things are privatizing here too. If you really need an MRI you had better have private insurance because without it you will wait 6-8 weeks instead of 0-2. I'm all for private companies providing care, but I disagree with getting away from single payer. For profit companies just can't leave the "but they'll pay anything" bit alone and care goes down while prices go up.
Other countries pay less per person for health care, and they cover everybody. Higher taxes are for other reasons (I will not even guess what). The US could lower taxes by going single payer.