I believe that CBC gets it's free press tradition from the BBC as does the ABC and SBS stations here in Oz. I can't think of a US media organization that has that built in zeal for political independence, although I think the NYT and WP (pre-murdoch) do come close..
And you're sure AJ is doing that, right?
I wasn't because I occasionally read AJ, so I checked out a few articles just now, some about ME countries, some about the US. NONE of them allow comments, they ALL have the same "feedback" button. That's what gets me about this kind of bullshit, why does it stick so firmly in people's heads when most of it is trivially easy to disprove.
False equivalence is the favorite propaganda tool of Fox news and similar organisations.' Sure all sources are biased, but not all sources are equally credible or equally biased. The difference between Fox and AJ is that Fox is first and foremost a political organisation and AJ is a news organisation. AJ aspires to be a credible representative of the free press specializing in it's own region, and they do a pretty good job of it. Fox wants to persuade you to vote against your own self interest and will knowingly lie to it's audience to achieve that, they also do a pretty good job but they're not doing the same job as AJ, BBC and other members of the "forth estate".
The fact that you and others think that food deserves the same protection shows that you're either food industry shills or just really shallow thinkers.
Please don't assume to know what I think, I'm obviously the one who has all the "facts" on that subject.
It's not the same question and it IS flamebait. Food doesn't have feelings,
Your a perfect example of why I bitched about the moderation, your comprehension sucks! The GP's and my post were not about what or who is being labeled, they are about the power a label has over the human psyche. A label is specifically a mental simplification that replaces thinking with a standard response, it's is THE way human minds communicate with each other and it is basically the definition of "shallow thinking" and it is necessary because the brain does not have time to think deeply about everything it encounters. If you don't have the introspective abilities to see this behavior in yourself then you are much more susceptible to propaganda, you will tend towards "shallow thinking" and jump to erroneous conclusions as you have done here.
You can't identify a Jew by looking at them. Yes the basic problem is the xenophobic nature of humans in large groups, but by putting a label on something with a negative stigma you make the stigma official in many people's eyes, the result is the mob swells with more people who believe the stigma is warranted.
You're assuming that whoever puts the label on has good intentions. In both the cases (the yellow star and GMO's) the stigma was based on false information, one had evil intentions the other was misguided good intentions, but the end results are the same in terms of reenforcing the stigma. Also I'm not advocating a ban on GMO labels, but I do suspect a large portion of the people who are demanding GMO labels have swallowed the propaganda and would like the labels to say "Franken Food" and be prominently displayed on the front of the item.
It may not have been clear in my original post but I think the way the Irish handled their enforced labeling with green is a lesson in how such propaganda can be defeated. If a food company really believes GMO are better, then tell people why your company is proud to use them. However you will never convince everyone, fluoride, chlorinated water, iodine in table salt, mass vaccinations, these things are indisputably good for public health, yet there are still lots of groups of misguided people dedicated to fighting them. As you say the best defense is education but as someone once said about religion, "you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into".
If you want a current example of what inexpensive propaganda for hire can do then look no further than the AGW deniers and the army of "useful idiots" (with good intentions) that they have created in the last decade. The army is certainly not lacking access to observations, reputable scientific opinion, or detailed technical explanations, but for some reason they still won't question the "scam" label attached to it by "for hire" circus clowns like Lord Monckton.
Venus has a similar overall quantity of nitrogen in its atmosphere as earth does, just diluted by considerable excess of carbon dioxide.
Are you sure about that? I know Venus's atmosphere is much denser but it's 98% CO2, is it really that dense that 3/4 of the Earth's atmosphere would fit into the remaining 2%? Your right, the hardest problem is lack of Hydrogen caused by a runaway greenhouse effect that evaporated the Venusian oceans, the same fate awaits Earth in about half a billion years from now ( much sooner if we burn all the coal as per current plans). We can already terraform planets, we have been doing so on a significant scale right here on Earth for the last 100yrs but importing significant quantities of raw materials for that purpose has yet to be tried.
Kepler figured out he had it all wrong after a career spent trying to prove bad theories (Platonic model of the universe? Really?)... and arguably launched the age of the scientific enlightenment.
I'm anxious read Mr. Lynas' coming works.
You have it in reverse, environmentalism arose in the late 60's from solid scientific roots, it soon branched out into all kinds of psuedo-scientific sub-groups such as the anti-GMO crowd, Mr Lynas no loner pisses me off when he calls himself an "environmentalist", out of respect for his genuine enlightenment* I will no longer refer to him as a "luddite".
Disclaimer: Self identified "greenie" since the 70's. I was lucky, I received my "enlightenment" from a book by the (now) well known skeptic Randi debunking Uri Geller, (as a 20yo HS drop out, I actually believed he had physic powers ). Waiting patiently for greenpeace to follow Mr Lynas' example and apologies for misinformed campaigns such as their efforts to ban chlorinated water treatment in the 90's (a technology that saved more lives in the 20th century than any other single public heath measure). People who start those misguided campaigns are not environmentalists, they are the enemy of ignorance from within, they tarnish our reputation, trivialize the real issues by association, and distract from the basic causes.
* - Enlightenment; The knowledge that you could be wrong about everything, and the courage to admit it when you are.
How is the parent post flamebait? What has happened to people's ability to comprehend a rephrasing the same question into a "cautionary tale"?
Pointing out the fact that even people have been unjustly demonized by a label is both informative and insightful. It does not equate anyone's view with that of the Nazi's, but (for anyone who knows their history) it is a vivid description of the power a label can have over human behavior. The Irish did it differently, when the English forced them to wear green, they turned it into a symbol of pride.
Maybe they're not smarter, maybe they're just interested in different things? Animals with a gut all evolved from worms, in a sense the rest of the animal is there to keep the "worm" inside them alive. A human gut has it's own nervous system that can continue to function normally even if all connections to the brain are severed. If a fish gut works the same way then maybe they are "just" moving computing resources around between gut and brain? Kinda like getting an Obama by selectively breeding Texan Governors.
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I'm not so keen to have my ISP define the word "crap" for me, but since it's an opt in thing all it will do is cut out 5% of the advertisers audience who would do it via their own ad-blockers anyway, sending ads to that 5% is counter-productive. It's like delivering junk snail mail to a "no junk mail" box, you know the recipient will just get angry at you. Advertisers (as opposed to ad distributors) may actually benefit from those people excluding themselves from that particular medium, it will be the middle men like Google who have to work a bit harder.
A similar thing exists in many countries in the form of government mandated "child friendly filters", schools, libraries,etc are compelled to use the filter, ISP's are compelled by law to offer it to subscribers who want it. The filter here in Oz sees about 5% of internet subscriptions opting in (about the same percentage who wanted it to be mandatory), that figure is pretty stable from one country to another in the western world. I suspect this scheme will see a similar uptake from their subscribers, so I doubt it will ever have a major effect on the advertising industry, even if it becomes the norm for ISP's to offer that kind of service.
OTOH, if it was opt-out, they really would be inviting a corporate bitch fight rather than simply offering a service.
Finding worthwhile information on the web was much, much easier before the rise of advertising.
I'm old enough that my son ran his own BBS in the late 80's, had access (via a university) to the internet before it was the internet, was studying for a CS degree when HTML was invented (didn't "get it" immediately, few people did). It's far from an exaggeration to say information has never been easier to find in the entire history of mankind, nor has there ever been so much information of both types, useful and useless. For people like me who used to loan from the non-fiction section of the library, the internet is like having the world's technical and scientific libraries at your fingertips. Sure it's not the jet pack I was promised, but it's a pretty good consolation prize.
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising.
I don't really know... are you arguing for or against ads? Your "threat" might be seen as a promise.
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but only a Luddite could possibly see the expansion of news groups into what we have today as a BadThing(TM). Seriously, "there is no such thing as a free lunch", news groups in the early days were funded mainly by the taxpayer, advertising pays for the banquet of free content we now enjoy. If you have a better funding model for providing free content on the same scale as radio/TV/internet combined, we'd all like to hear it.
Whether you're liberal or conservative, does anyone really believe that the government spending tax dollars on expensive speculative investments makes sense?
Considering the long term scientific, economic and social payoff we Aussies get from an organization such as CSIRO, I'd say it makes a huge amount of sense. Such organisations exist in the US, NOAA and NASA come to mind, and then there are the international organizations funded by taxpayers such as the LHC. As for it being speculative, scientists have a saying; "If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be called research".
What makes no sense to me is short changing science in a technological world and expecting a government to have the motivations and goals of a large corporation.
Ever been in the situation where a co-worker asks you what a bit of code does, you skim it for a few minutes and brush him off with "not sure", then he replies; "but you wrote it"? If you write enough code (especially maintenance code), it will happen to you eventually.
So IMHO not really your "fault" that you can't pick up the kernel design in an afternoon by skimming the code, it's the coder's job to clearly explain the implementation, not the design.To paraphrase an old friend of mine, "Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own". Even if the code was written by Shakespeare, browsing code is still the hard way to pick up the design of a non-trivial application, but if your not surrounded by co-workers who wrote it then it's often the only way available.
Trivia: I used to teach C to second year engineering and CS students in the early 90's. The engineers were the worst for writing the entire thing in main() because they already had leaned bad habits from elsewhere. Each year most of them would fail the first assignment and then complain about the harshness of the assessment, one they knew I was serious about my style sheet most of them would do much better on the second and subsequent assignments. I wonder how many of them now understand why their code's comments and style were worth a full 50% of their mark.
Nope, that's just you failing to comprehend my simplification and jumping to the irrational conclusion that I think nationalization is justified. I don't think in black and white, there are scenarios where nationalization is and is not appropriate, as stated in my OP I don't agree with Hugo but I also do not agree with the knee-jerk Nationalization == BadThing(TM) reaction either. Complicated I know, but it's what I like to call a "grey area" that depends largely on something called "circumstance".
Slashdot Mirror
Switching from driving on the left to the right could be a tad harder though
Oh come on, I've driven on Irish roads, most of them are only wide enough for one car anyway.
Simple, no?
Japan also has the tastiest and most expensive cattle on the planet.
I believe that CBC gets it's free press tradition from the BBC as does the ABC and SBS stations here in Oz. I can't think of a US media organization that has that built in zeal for political independence, although I think the NYT and WP (pre-murdoch) do come close..
I'm not surprised it's been repudiated either, Africa is big business to US evangelicals and that sort of a scandal could harm profits.
And you're sure AJ is doing that, right?
I wasn't because I occasionally read AJ, so I checked out a few articles just now, some about ME countries, some about the US. NONE of them allow comments, they ALL have the same "feedback" button. That's what gets me about this kind of bullshit, why does it stick so firmly in people's heads when most of it is trivially easy to disprove.
False equivalence is the favorite propaganda tool of Fox news and similar organisations.' Sure all sources are biased, but not all sources are equally credible or equally biased. The difference between Fox and AJ is that Fox is first and foremost a political organisation and AJ is a news organisation. AJ aspires to be a credible representative of the free press specializing in it's own region, and they do a pretty good job of it. Fox wants to persuade you to vote against your own self interest and will knowingly lie to it's audience to achieve that, they also do a pretty good job but they're not doing the same job as AJ, BBC and other members of the "forth estate".
Murdoch became a US citizen to enable him to buy into US media companies.
The fact that you and others think that food deserves the same protection shows that you're either food industry shills or just really shallow thinkers.
Please don't assume to know what I think, I'm obviously the one who has all the "facts" on that subject.
It's not the same question and it IS flamebait. Food doesn't have feelings,
Your a perfect example of why I bitched about the moderation, your comprehension sucks! The GP's and my post were not about what or who is being labeled, they are about the power a label has over the human psyche. A label is specifically a mental simplification that replaces thinking with a standard response, it's is THE way human minds communicate with each other and it is basically the definition of "shallow thinking" and it is necessary because the brain does not have time to think deeply about everything it encounters. If you don't have the introspective abilities to see this behavior in yourself then you are much more susceptible to propaganda, you will tend towards "shallow thinking" and jump to erroneous conclusions as you have done here.
You can't identify a Jew by looking at them. Yes the basic problem is the xenophobic nature of humans in large groups, but by putting a label on something with a negative stigma you make the stigma official in many people's eyes, the result is the mob swells with more people who believe the stigma is warranted.
You're assuming that whoever puts the label on has good intentions. In both the cases (the yellow star and GMO's) the stigma was based on false information, one had evil intentions the other was misguided good intentions, but the end results are the same in terms of reenforcing the stigma. Also I'm not advocating a ban on GMO labels, but I do suspect a large portion of the people who are demanding GMO labels have swallowed the propaganda and would like the labels to say "Franken Food" and be prominently displayed on the front of the item.
It may not have been clear in my original post but I think the way the Irish handled their enforced labeling with green is a lesson in how such propaganda can be defeated. If a food company really believes GMO are better, then tell people why your company is proud to use them. However you will never convince everyone, fluoride, chlorinated water, iodine in table salt, mass vaccinations, these things are indisputably good for public health, yet there are still lots of groups of misguided people dedicated to fighting them. As you say the best defense is education but as someone once said about religion, "you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into".
If you want a current example of what inexpensive propaganda for hire can do then look no further than the AGW deniers and the army of "useful idiots" (with good intentions) that they have created in the last decade. The army is certainly not lacking access to observations, reputable scientific opinion, or detailed technical explanations, but for some reason they still won't question the "scam" label attached to it by "for hire" circus clowns like Lord Monckton.
I can't be racist, I get drunk with my Irish friends.
Venus has a similar overall quantity of nitrogen in its atmosphere as earth does, just diluted by considerable excess of carbon dioxide.
Are you sure about that? I know Venus's atmosphere is much denser but it's 98% CO2, is it really that dense that 3/4 of the Earth's atmosphere would fit into the remaining 2%? Your right, the hardest problem is lack of Hydrogen caused by a runaway greenhouse effect that evaporated the Venusian oceans, the same fate awaits Earth in about half a billion years from now ( much sooner if we burn all the coal as per current plans). We can already terraform planets, we have been doing so on a significant scale right here on Earth for the last 100yrs but importing significant quantities of raw materials for that purpose has yet to be tried.
Lockheed cocks up and you blame "moron scientists"? - Pretty sure we all know who the real moron is.
Kepler figured out he had it all wrong after a career spent trying to prove bad theories (Platonic model of the universe? Really?) ... and arguably launched the age of the scientific enlightenment.
I'm anxious read Mr. Lynas' coming works.
You have it in reverse, environmentalism arose in the late 60's from solid scientific roots, it soon branched out into all kinds of psuedo-scientific sub-groups such as the anti-GMO crowd, Mr Lynas no loner pisses me off when he calls himself an "environmentalist", out of respect for his genuine enlightenment* I will no longer refer to him as a "luddite".
Disclaimer: Self identified "greenie" since the 70's. I was lucky, I received my "enlightenment" from a book by the (now) well known skeptic Randi debunking Uri Geller, (as a 20yo HS drop out, I actually believed he had physic powers ). Waiting patiently for greenpeace to follow Mr Lynas' example and apologies for misinformed campaigns such as their efforts to ban chlorinated water treatment in the 90's (a technology that saved more lives in the 20th century than any other single public heath measure). People who start those misguided campaigns are not environmentalists, they are the enemy of ignorance from within, they tarnish our reputation, trivialize the real issues by association, and distract from the basic causes.
* - Enlightenment; The knowledge that you could be wrong about everything, and the courage to admit it when you are.
How is the parent post flamebait? What has happened to people's ability to comprehend a rephrasing the same question into a "cautionary tale"?
Pointing out the fact that even people have been unjustly demonized by a label is both informative and insightful. It does not equate anyone's view with that of the Nazi's, but (for anyone who knows their history) it is a vivid description of the power a label can have over human behavior. The Irish did it differently, when the English forced them to wear green, they turned it into a symbol of pride.
Maybe they're not smarter, maybe they're just interested in different things? Animals with a gut all evolved from worms, in a sense the rest of the animal is there to keep the "worm" inside them alive. A human gut has it's own nervous system that can continue to function normally even if all connections to the brain are severed. If a fish gut works the same way then maybe they are "just" moving computing resources around between gut and brain? Kinda like getting an Obama by selectively breeding Texan Governors.
I'm pretty sure it was an everyday "dildo scare", misreported as a "bomb scare".
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I'm not so keen to have my ISP define the word "crap" for me, but since it's an opt in thing all it will do is cut out 5% of the advertisers audience who would do it via their own ad-blockers anyway, sending ads to that 5% is counter-productive. It's like delivering junk snail mail to a "no junk mail" box, you know the recipient will just get angry at you. Advertisers (as opposed to ad distributors) may actually benefit from those people excluding themselves from that particular medium, it will be the middle men like Google who have to work a bit harder.
A similar thing exists in many countries in the form of government mandated "child friendly filters", schools, libraries,etc are compelled to use the filter, ISP's are compelled by law to offer it to subscribers who want it. The filter here in Oz sees about 5% of internet subscriptions opting in (about the same percentage who wanted it to be mandatory), that figure is pretty stable from one country to another in the western world. I suspect this scheme will see a similar uptake from their subscribers, so I doubt it will ever have a major effect on the advertising industry, even if it becomes the norm for ISP's to offer that kind of service.
OTOH, if it was opt-out, they really would be inviting a corporate bitch fight rather than simply offering a service.
Finding worthwhile information on the web was much, much easier before the rise of advertising.
I'm old enough that my son ran his own BBS in the late 80's, had access (via a university) to the internet before it was the internet, was studying for a CS degree when HTML was invented (didn't "get it" immediately, few people did). It's far from an exaggeration to say information has never been easier to find in the entire history of mankind, nor has there ever been so much information of both types, useful and useless. For people like me who used to loan from the non-fiction section of the library, the internet is like having the world's technical and scientific libraries at your fingertips. Sure it's not the jet pack I was promised, but it's a pretty good consolation prize.
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising.
I don't really know... are you arguing for or against ads? Your "threat" might be seen as a promise.
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but only a Luddite could possibly see the expansion of news groups into what we have today as a BadThing(TM). Seriously, "there is no such thing as a free lunch", news groups in the early days were funded mainly by the taxpayer, advertising pays for the banquet of free content we now enjoy. If you have a better funding model for providing free content on the same scale as radio/TV/internet combined, we'd all like to hear it.
Whether you're liberal or conservative, does anyone really believe that the government spending tax dollars on expensive speculative investments makes sense?
Considering the long term scientific, economic and social payoff we Aussies get from an organization such as CSIRO, I'd say it makes a huge amount of sense. Such organisations exist in the US, NOAA and NASA come to mind, and then there are the international organizations funded by taxpayers such as the LHC. As for it being speculative, scientists have a saying; "If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be called research".
What makes no sense to me is short changing science in a technological world and expecting a government to have the motivations and goals of a large corporation.
Haven't RTFA, can someone explain to me why these kids are behind bars, who do I blame for that?
Ever been in the situation where a co-worker asks you what a bit of code does, you skim it for a few minutes and brush him off with "not sure", then he replies; "but you wrote it"? If you write enough code (especially maintenance code), it will happen to you eventually.
So IMHO not really your "fault" that you can't pick up the kernel design in an afternoon by skimming the code, it's the coder's job to clearly explain the implementation, not the design.To paraphrase an old friend of mine, "Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own". Even if the code was written by Shakespeare, browsing code is still the hard way to pick up the design of a non-trivial application, but if your not surrounded by co-workers who wrote it then it's often the only way available.
Trivia: I used to teach C to second year engineering and CS students in the early 90's. The engineers were the worst for writing the entire thing in main() because they already had leaned bad habits from elsewhere. Each year most of them would fail the first assignment and then complain about the harshness of the assessment, one they knew I was serious about my style sheet most of them would do much better on the second and subsequent assignments. I wonder how many of them now understand why their code's comments and style were worth a full 50% of their mark.
You oversimplify things..
Yes, this is slashdot, right?
somehow using that to justify nationalization
Nope, that's just you failing to comprehend my simplification and jumping to the irrational conclusion that I think nationalization is justified. I don't think in black and white, there are scenarios where nationalization is and is not appropriate, as stated in my OP I don't agree with Hugo but I also do not agree with the knee-jerk Nationalization == BadThing(TM) reaction either. Complicated I know, but it's what I like to call a "grey area" that depends largely on something called "circumstance".
Who decides what is fair shouldn't be a popularity contest.
I appear to have found some words in my mouth that don't belong to me, are they yours?