Point taken, but I was thinking of sunlight from high windows in workrooms, since -- bizarre but true -- I was aware that we didn't have electric lighting in the era when early globes were made.
Once people decided that the spin axis itself would be vertical, then N or S being up was a coin flip. In that sense, it was arbitrary, but one or the other had to be chosen; hence, not arbitrary, but inevitable.
But let's say further that you were a globe-maker from the 1800s. Since we have gravity, hence mounts, and simple mounts at that, then your globes had to have a set orientation when placed in a room. Which way up would you have chosen? Yes, that's right, North... so that all the important geography (as far as your European heritage would be concerned) would be clearly seen from the room light falling from above.
One thing which mystifies me is why the spin axis was chosen to be vertical. If the axis were horizontal, the light used in illuminating rooms would fall on the globe as the sun's rays do... essentially perpendicular to the equator. There must be some sort of uppedness bias when reading a round object; perhaps linked to the orientation of ancient scrolls.
What you have said is cogent and essentially undeniable. Anyone -- having been educated in real government forms over history -- who reads a newspaper over the course of a month in America can only come to your conclusions by being particularly honest with themselves.
However, what I was getting as was more in line with your singular statement [o]nce theft becomes legal, anarchy reigns. The point of Hypercapitalism is that it is a pervasive form of "crony capitalism", acculturated, in which all levels of society that have capital, seek to lie, cheat and steal in order to continue amassing wealth without limit. Hypercapitalism is a complete denial of social forces, other than selfishness and greed.
This is similar to the problem of overspending and excess credit. The government and the people observe each other running deficits, hence they dance in time to increasing debt loads. We may criticize when the Federal government runs a $400 billion deficit this year, but we must acknowledge that the average credit-card holder holds an enormous balance on his card himself. It's a matter beyond the government-business cronies. It's a matter that essentially everyone who can, is doing it too.
As a bank employee, 1 week of my vacation had to be taken each year, and it had to be taken as 1 block of time... effectively forcing me to take 1 week off. And the reason for that is as you stated; your co-workers will have to do your work to cover your absence, and any little schemes you had running will appear.
Re:The funny thing is you have it backwards
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
Reviews, and pandering to them, are possibly the most pointless waste of time ever invented by humanity.
Reviews are like most laws. The elite keep them around in case they have to hang somebody. The review hence serves no practical function if it is positive, even glowing. It's the bad review that has a real use.
In a different fashion, your efforts still won't bring you notoriety since "jack of all trades", "making do", and "increasing reliability" are simply not admirable qualities to today's MBA-governed businesses. They only admire making more profit this quarter over the last. If they could make more money this quarter by setting the building on fire, they would.
What you did was take care of infrastructure. Infrastructure is the most invisible thing in the world to Americans, and to excessively-capitalistic people in general. Infrastructure is only overhead to them -- an investment, made by some bankrupt folks, that they get a return on for nothing -- and I certainly don't need to tell you that salespeople are less involved than technicians in the details of infrastructure. Infrastructure is tech, hence despised and marginalized.
I admire what you did, and your pluck. I fear you will hardly ever receive recognition and appreciation for it.
It's funny how many times I hear that, while also noting how little companies care about the experience content of resumes. If education and (or?) experience have much less effect, then We The Workers are truly doomed. Hopefully I'll have saved enough money before some real doom hits, and I can move to a nation with more sensible Socialism, like Switzerland.
Generation X is quite guilty of holding manual and factory laborers in contempt. Now that superqualification, offshoring and outsourcing are threatening to make their own jobs as scarce as they smugly applauded for the blue collar set, they are unhappy and are crying "foul!". You should never attempt to impoverish your own parents; but this fact is unable to enter the general GenX brain.
I should know; I'm GenX myself. I used to express at least some disdain for unions. Now I fully understand that unions in part gave me the America I was able to gorw up in with running water, electricity, schools, roads, entertainment, and all that vast countryside with no bombs falling on it. The question is, did I awaken too late?
Your sentiment is sensible and considered, but I must still take a difference with your no one will ever know statement.
Under the right to privacy, we are able to perform immoral things. We can break the laws all we wish. This is because liberty is not safe. If it was safe, it wouldn't be liberty. Hence, if privacy were monitored for legal compliance, it wouldn't be privacy.
Under the idea that it's better to let 10 guilty men walk free than to imprison 1 innocent man, I still propose that it is wise to restrain law enforcement and legislatures. It's also not a matter of you liking your privacy... your privacy is your right, as is mine. If you want to voluntarily submit to things like real-time police monitoring of your movements, then that's your choice. But don't presume that you can choose such a thing for anyone else.
In Canada, although we are qutie capitalist in our business practices, a wealth of programs and services exist for the less fortunate (business and individual) so that the balance of wealth can be equalized.
This is because you have yet to hit America's favorite disease: Hypercapitalism (a.k.a. "predatory capitalism" or "looting capitalism"). Under Hypercapitalism, all money or property obtained (i.e. earned, defrauded or outrightly stolen) by a businessman is entirely his. Any attempt to tax or fee it, is denounced under various negative -isms like Communism, Socialism, and of course the current favorite: Terrorism.
You have to be careful with tossing labels around. The "free market" oft admired, is actually unregulated capitalism for the poor and working middle class, while also solid socialism for the upper class and entrepreneurial middle class. And as far as "capitalism" goes, if I were to apply Elbert Hubbard's definition of it to today's American society -- and I do -- then I can only conclude capitalism is quite rare. (Hubbard paraphrasingly said capitalism is the consequence of men with savings and homes. With America's zero-to-negative savings rate, and with homes at such price levels that few will be able to pay them off over the life of the loan, then you can see where I'm coming from.)
If you think all that's fun enough, I'm seeing a "tax revolt" of sorts around Toledo OH, in which people and publicly-funded institutions are so strapped that elections are attempting to convert property-tax funding pipelines into income- and sales-tax pipelines. It's not going to work, but it does reveal that all those so-called "homeowners" (in financial reality, they are long-term renters) are trying to push off tax liability upon others. It's a kind of rising feudalism, in which incomes will be levied to keep the propertied in their wealth. The corporations are already well off the tax rolls as far as property goes. Now it seems to be applying to the individual.
You break the law constantly. There are far too many laws on the books to avoid criminality. Traffic law is notorious for this. I have a friend who's a cop. Occasionally when we are driving along he'll point out how many people he can pull over and ticket. On the highway in modest traffic, that translates into about 1 person every 30 seconds... and that's just within the radius of 1 travelling car. All it takes is a split second or an inch of play in the movement of your vehicle, over a line or by a line on the road, and then your just another dirty, lawbreaking motherfucker who deserves to be punished. Right?
When you have more law, you have less justice. If we pass enough laws, everyone becomes a criminal. The wise man knows that criminals are primarily made by the legislature, and exercises restraint when empowering the legal system.
As for terrorism... we have plenty of law enforcement to get terrorists. But as FBI whistleblowers demonstrate, law enforcement is constantly under poitical pressure to avoid investigation of certain families, even racial/national groups. For example, Saudi Arabians are still being handled with kid gloves. You DO know that 14 of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers were Saudis, don't you? Shit, it seems that half of polled America thinks 9-11 was an Iraqi operation.
That quip about the massive fusion plant is no joke. For all the money we've blown on fusion development efforts, we could have had a thriving solar industry by now, with electricity predicted to be "too cheap to meter"... and even though it would've turned out to be just as expensive as the standard fuels coal, oil), those standards have been thrown into suspicion due to pollution and war. In short, solar energy would have been on-line in time to short circuit the intense social problems that the standard fuels have brought us.
We are even further ahead on wind turbine technology, considering generation capacity, than we are on solar. That's why I cheered once the Superexpensive Superconducting Supercollider was killed off. Those programs are boondoggles from the word go, hence pathetic. Culturally, we've no willpower to see a technology through to the end result: installed plant servicing consumers. Culturally, we have too many academic parasites who want to study things endlessly.
I think that Schwartzeneggar (sp?) has more than enough experience in living his life, interacting with other people, and managing his finances... which makes him entirely qualified to lead the government of the world's 5th largest economy. The "qualified" politicians aren't gods; in contrast, they're people who tend to be far removed from the facts of common financial life, which brings their overall qualification into serious question. Of course, there's the issue of there being such a time of crisis that the usual elitism is precisely the problem besetting the people, hence men of more common nature are the fix.
Damned English; concision makes for great quotes but risks misunderstanding. I was pointing out that a society has inherent stability when it doesn't react to threat events by changing law enforcement. We already have sufficient gun regulation, but with each shooting the politicians continue to react by proposing and implementing more restrictive laws. (If anything, weapon laws should be changed from a ban mentality to a qualification one.)
I hope it's a real "investment" mentality. I was recently outsourced to what I term a "scumbag IT solutions" company, and the outsourcing VP had the unmitigated gall to say we techs were "an expense" and a "necessary evil". I'm sure he didn't think of his $100K salary as an expense.
A solid IT force is of course a real investment in keeping your infotech running... so you can continue the business of enterprise. The bloat of the late 1990s should be removed, but what remains should not be insulted or depreciated.
This essentially sums up my shoplifting experience as a young teen. I was warned that I was seen taking an item, and that I should go back and "find" it and return it. I went to the back of the store, pulled the gum out of my pocket, and returned it to the shelf. No police, no threats... but a firm reminder that I was as "caught" as they wanted me to be. The scare factor worked, and I never shoplifted again. Kids are kids, and the entire thing seemed wisely handled.
And when I see discussions like this, I feel completely and utterly belittled.
Why?
No, really, why do you let such things degrade your self esteem?
For Instance {tm}: People are saying shit all the time now about how my Nader vote is less than useless, and how it exhibits an intellectual failure to understand civics, democracy itself, and all the other attack phrasings of the political establishment. Do I feel belittled? Hell, no.
So why do you let sexism of any kind get you down? You have self-worth, right? Screw whatever is said contrary to that.
One of the finer points of warfare is to deny the enemy the will to continue. In that sense, you are helping your implied critics along. I heartily advise you to stop fighting yourself. Hold your head up, square those shoulders, and face the truth that life is often frought with contentious battles. The avoidance of risk is itself the riskiest behavior. You don't need testosterone to realize that.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the similar reaction women have to men talking about tech, math, history or politics?
That aside, you're still right. Two wrongs don't make a right. Men and women could stand to conversationally interact more qualitatively... and in fact, much of America needs to in general. The art of conversation seems to take a hit with each succeeding generation. If it were not for the example of Internet blogging, I'd throw up my hands in utter despair.
Realistically, obtaining control of an airliner with a set of box cutters should have been difficult to impossible. Unfortunately, with the mass of out-of-shape sheep who pass for the average American population, it proved possible to likely.
My reaction to all of this is to condemn the bad health and placating attitude of threatened Americans, not to go after their pocket knives, letter openers, and nail clippers.
I really don't understand why Microsoft is trying to release this crap. No more than 3 apps at a time? Why that hard limit? It's not like they re-built XP for simpler multitasking.
Microsoft is an enormous corporation with many people trying to get things done. If my experience at DEC and HP in the 1990s is any metric, XP Lite could be some pet project for a VP to gain some brownie or "atta boy" points. If it works out, then good for him. If it doesn't... well, there's always the Microsoft Bob Memorial Archive.
As far as intrinsically important issues go -- foreign relations and domestic economy -- then yes, it didn't make any difference then (2000) as is doesn't now (2004) about who wins the Presidency.
And, no, I'm not ill-informed or insane, thanks. I make my statement from the standpoint of deep historical information.
If you want to qualify the parties by minor items like gay marriage and logging rights, then have at it. Your homosexuals will be free to marry... under the bridge where they have setup their shanty-town due to the excessively elitist economic policies of every politician in their welfare-warfare nation-state. Just don't pretend that a gay marriage compares to lost pensions, homes and lives. Put food on the table before attending to niceties like the kitchen wallpaper.
And as far as lost lives go, Clinton did his own share of bombing in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, as you'd recall. Furthermore, after the bombings of Iraq in the 1988-1992 Republican adminstration, Clinton continued the Imperial policy of keeping Iraq bottled up with interdiction, no-fly zones and overall boycotts, so that the next Republican adminstration could continue the saturation bombing.
Do I really need to identify the non-stop culture of outsourcing and offshoring that has flourished in every administration since Reagan? How about tax shelters and dodges? Investment bubbles? Tax-and-spend vs. borrow-and-spend? Need I go on?
As far as foreign relations and domestic economy go, there's no significant difference betwen the two parties. As long as they are so religious about supporting corporations and securing wealth against taxation, then this will continue.
Like many people of conscience, I started out pretty damned liberal, then time added layers of conservative thought... forming the fine and detailed sediment that I am today. Conservatism as an idea is just as well-constructed and respectful as Liberalism. They key in criticizing them in today's political environment is to identify their unquestioned extremities.
I often use the term prefix "Neo-" to qualify what's happened to the promoted or mainstreamed Conservatives and Liberals. The Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs are wrecking America's ability to peacefully live with the rest of the world (i.e. "foreign policy") and ensure domestic tranquility (i.e. "domestic economy").
The only real "runoff" happening here is whether or not the Democrats will sink into real electoral mediocrity before they start abiding by democratic principles and their own platform.
Slight sarcasm aside, please consider voting for the best man all the time, and adhere to conscience always. Remember, it's not the ~2 million Nader voters in 2000 that put Bush in the White House, it was the ~50 million Bush voters.
You neglected to mention to your parent poster that it wasn't the ~2 million Nader voters in 2000 that brought Bush the Presidency... it was instead the ~50 million voters who voted for Bush such that he achieved 270 electoral votes. 2 million compared to 50 million. It sure is funny how people ignore that 50. We must bring the battle back to the people who are truly responsible for the Bush election: half of voting America.
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Point taken, but I was thinking of sunlight from high windows in workrooms, since -- bizarre but true -- I was aware that we didn't have electric lighting in the era when early globes were made.
Once people decided that the spin axis itself would be vertical, then N or S being up was a coin flip. In that sense, it was arbitrary, but one or the other had to be chosen; hence, not arbitrary, but inevitable.
... so that all the important geography (as far as your European heritage would be concerned) would be clearly seen from the room light falling from above.
... essentially perpendicular to the equator. There must be some sort of uppedness bias when reading a round object; perhaps linked to the orientation of ancient scrolls.
But let's say further that you were a globe-maker from the 1800s. Since we have gravity, hence mounts, and simple mounts at that, then your globes had to have a set orientation when placed in a room. Which way up would you have chosen? Yes, that's right, North
One thing which mystifies me is why the spin axis was chosen to be vertical. If the axis were horizontal, the light used in illuminating rooms would fall on the globe as the sun's rays do
What you have said is cogent and essentially undeniable. Anyone -- having been educated in real government forms over history -- who reads a newspaper over the course of a month in America can only come to your conclusions by being particularly honest with themselves.
However, what I was getting as was more in line with your singular statement [o]nce theft becomes legal, anarchy reigns. The point of Hypercapitalism is that it is a pervasive form of "crony capitalism", acculturated, in which all levels of society that have capital, seek to lie, cheat and steal in order to continue amassing wealth without limit. Hypercapitalism is a complete denial of social forces, other than selfishness and greed.
This is similar to the problem of overspending and excess credit. The government and the people observe each other running deficits, hence they dance in time to increasing debt loads. We may criticize when the Federal government runs a $400 billion deficit this year, but we must acknowledge that the average credit-card holder holds an enormous balance on his card himself. It's a matter beyond the government-business cronies. It's a matter that essentially everyone who can, is doing it too.
As a bank employee, 1 week of my vacation had to be taken each year, and it had to be taken as 1 block of time ... effectively forcing me to take 1 week off. And the reason for that is as you stated; your co-workers will have to do your work to cover your absence, and any little schemes you had running will appear.
Reviews, and pandering to them, are possibly the most pointless waste of time ever invented by humanity.
Reviews are like most laws. The elite keep them around in case they have to hang somebody. The review hence serves no practical function if it is positive, even glowing. It's the bad review that has a real use.
In a different fashion, your efforts still won't bring you notoriety since "jack of all trades", "making do", and "increasing reliability" are simply not admirable qualities to today's MBA-governed businesses. They only admire making more profit this quarter over the last. If they could make more money this quarter by setting the building on fire, they would.
What you did was take care of infrastructure. Infrastructure is the most invisible thing in the world to Americans, and to excessively-capitalistic people in general. Infrastructure is only overhead to them -- an investment, made by some bankrupt folks, that they get a return on for nothing -- and I certainly don't need to tell you that salespeople are less involved than technicians in the details of infrastructure. Infrastructure is tech, hence despised and marginalized.
I admire what you did, and your pluck. I fear you will hardly ever receive recognition and appreciation for it.
It's funny how many times I hear that, while also noting how little companies care about the experience content of resumes. If education and (or?) experience have much less effect, then We The Workers are truly doomed. Hopefully I'll have saved enough money before some real doom hits, and I can move to a nation with more sensible Socialism, like Switzerland.
Generation X is quite guilty of holding manual and factory laborers in contempt. Now that superqualification, offshoring and outsourcing are threatening to make their own jobs as scarce as they smugly applauded for the blue collar set, they are unhappy and are crying "foul!". You should never attempt to impoverish your own parents; but this fact is unable to enter the general GenX brain.
I should know; I'm GenX myself. I used to express at least some disdain for unions. Now I fully understand that unions in part gave me the America I was able to gorw up in with running water, electricity, schools, roads, entertainment, and all that vast countryside with no bombs falling on it. The question is, did I awaken too late?
Your sentiment is sensible and considered, but I must still take a difference with your no one will ever know statement.
... your privacy is your right, as is mine. If you want to voluntarily submit to things like real-time police monitoring of your movements, then that's your choice. But don't presume that you can choose such a thing for anyone else.
Under the right to privacy, we are able to perform immoral things. We can break the laws all we wish. This is because liberty is not safe. If it was safe, it wouldn't be liberty. Hence, if privacy were monitored for legal compliance, it wouldn't be privacy.
Under the idea that it's better to let 10 guilty men walk free than to imprison 1 innocent man, I still propose that it is wise to restrain law enforcement and legislatures. It's also not a matter of you liking your privacy
In Canada, although we are qutie capitalist in our business practices, a wealth of programs and services exist for the less fortunate (business and individual) so that the balance of wealth can be equalized.
This is because you have yet to hit America's favorite disease: Hypercapitalism (a.k.a. "predatory capitalism" or "looting capitalism"). Under Hypercapitalism, all money or property obtained (i.e. earned, defrauded or outrightly stolen) by a businessman is entirely his. Any attempt to tax or fee it, is denounced under various negative -isms like Communism, Socialism, and of course the current favorite: Terrorism.
You have to be careful with tossing labels around. The "free market" oft admired, is actually unregulated capitalism for the poor and working middle class, while also solid socialism for the upper class and entrepreneurial middle class. And as far as "capitalism" goes, if I were to apply Elbert Hubbard's definition of it to today's American society -- and I do -- then I can only conclude capitalism is quite rare. (Hubbard paraphrasingly said capitalism is the consequence of men with savings and homes. With America's zero-to-negative savings rate, and with homes at such price levels that few will be able to pay them off over the life of the loan, then you can see where I'm coming from.)
If you think all that's fun enough, I'm seeing a "tax revolt" of sorts around Toledo OH, in which people and publicly-funded institutions are so strapped that elections are attempting to convert property-tax funding pipelines into income- and sales-tax pipelines. It's not going to work, but it does reveal that all those so-called "homeowners" (in financial reality, they are long-term renters) are trying to push off tax liability upon others. It's a kind of rising feudalism, in which incomes will be levied to keep the propertied in their wealth. The corporations are already well off the tax rolls as far as property goes. Now it seems to be applying to the individual.
I'm not going to do anything illegal.
... and that's just within the radius of 1 travelling car. All it takes is a split second or an inch of play in the movement of your vehicle, over a line or by a line on the road, and then your just another dirty, lawbreaking motherfucker who deserves to be punished. Right?
... we have plenty of law enforcement to get terrorists. But as FBI whistleblowers demonstrate, law enforcement is constantly under poitical pressure to avoid investigation of certain families, even racial/national groups. For example, Saudi Arabians are still being handled with kid gloves. You DO know that 14 of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers were Saudis, don't you? Shit, it seems that half of polled America thinks 9-11 was an Iraqi operation.
You break the law constantly. There are far too many laws on the books to avoid criminality. Traffic law is notorious for this. I have a friend who's a cop. Occasionally when we are driving along he'll point out how many people he can pull over and ticket. On the highway in modest traffic, that translates into about 1 person every 30 seconds
When you have more law, you have less justice. If we pass enough laws, everyone becomes a criminal. The wise man knows that criminals are primarily made by the legislature, and exercises restraint when empowering the legal system.
As for terrorism
That quip about the massive fusion plant is no joke. For all the money we've blown on fusion development efforts, we could have had a thriving solar industry by now, with electricity predicted to be "too cheap to meter" ... and even though it would've turned out to be just as expensive as the standard fuels coal, oil), those standards have been thrown into suspicion due to pollution and war. In short, solar energy would have been on-line in time to short circuit the intense social problems that the standard fuels have brought us.
We are even further ahead on wind turbine technology, considering generation capacity, than we are on solar. That's why I cheered once the Superexpensive Superconducting Supercollider was killed off. Those programs are boondoggles from the word go, hence pathetic. Culturally, we've no willpower to see a technology through to the end result: installed plant servicing consumers. Culturally, we have too many academic parasites who want to study things endlessly.
I think that Schwartzeneggar (sp?) has more than enough experience in living his life, interacting with other people, and managing his finances ... which makes him entirely qualified to lead the government of the world's 5th largest economy. The "qualified" politicians aren't gods; in contrast, they're people who tend to be far removed from the facts of common financial life, which brings their overall qualification into serious question. Of course, there's the issue of there being such a time of crisis that the usual elitism is precisely the problem besetting the people, hence men of more common nature are the fix.
Damned English; concision makes for great quotes but risks misunderstanding. I was pointing out that a society has inherent stability when it doesn't react to threat events by changing law enforcement. We already have sufficient gun regulation, but with each shooting the politicians continue to react by proposing and implementing more restrictive laws. (If anything, weapon laws should be changed from a ban mentality to a qualification one.)
I hope it's a real "investment" mentality. I was recently outsourced to what I term a "scumbag IT solutions" company, and the outsourcing VP had the unmitigated gall to say we techs were "an expense" and a "necessary evil". I'm sure he didn't think of his $100K salary as an expense.
... so you can continue the business of enterprise. The bloat of the late 1990s should be removed, but what remains should not be insulted or depreciated.
A solid IT force is of course a real investment in keeping your infotech running
This essentially sums up my shoplifting experience as a young teen. I was warned that I was seen taking an item, and that I should go back and "find" it and return it. I went to the back of the store, pulled the gum out of my pocket, and returned it to the shelf. No police, no threats ... but a firm reminder that I was as "caught" as they wanted me to be. The scare factor worked, and I never shoplifted again. Kids are kids, and the entire thing seemed wisely handled.
And when I see discussions like this, I feel completely and utterly belittled.
Why?
No, really, why do you let such things degrade your self esteem?
For Instance {tm}: People are saying shit all the time now about how my Nader vote is less than useless, and how it exhibits an intellectual failure to understand civics, democracy itself, and all the other attack phrasings of the political establishment. Do I feel belittled? Hell, no.
So why do you let sexism of any kind get you down? You have self-worth, right? Screw whatever is said contrary to that.
One of the finer points of warfare is to deny the enemy the will to continue. In that sense, you are helping your implied critics along. I heartily advise you to stop fighting yourself. Hold your head up, square those shoulders, and face the truth that life is often frought with contentious battles. The avoidance of risk is itself the riskiest behavior. You don't need testosterone to realize that.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the similar reaction women have to men talking about tech, math, history or politics?
... and in fact, much of America needs to in general. The art of conversation seems to take a hit with each succeeding generation. If it were not for the example of Internet blogging, I'd throw up my hands in utter despair.
That aside, you're still right. Two wrongs don't make a right. Men and women could stand to conversationally interact more qualitatively
Realistically, obtaining control of an airliner with a set of box cutters should have been difficult to impossible. Unfortunately, with the mass of out-of-shape sheep who pass for the average American population, it proved possible to likely.
My reaction to all of this is to condemn the bad health and placating attitude of threatened Americans, not to go after their pocket knives, letter openers, and nail clippers.
Actually, it's "XP Lite".
... well, there's always the Microsoft Bob Memorial Archive.
I really don't understand why Microsoft is trying to release this crap. No more than 3 apps at a time? Why that hard limit? It's not like they re-built XP for simpler multitasking.
Microsoft is an enormous corporation with many people trying to get things done. If my experience at DEC and HP in the 1990s is any metric, XP Lite could be some pet project for a VP to gain some brownie or "atta boy" points. If it works out, then good for him. If it doesn't
As far as intrinsically important issues go -- foreign relations and domestic economy -- then yes, it didn't make any difference then (2000) as is doesn't now (2004) about who wins the Presidency.
... under the bridge where they have setup their shanty-town due to the excessively elitist economic policies of every politician in their welfare-warfare nation-state. Just don't pretend that a gay marriage compares to lost pensions, homes and lives. Put food on the table before attending to niceties like the kitchen wallpaper.
And, no, I'm not ill-informed or insane, thanks. I make my statement from the standpoint of deep historical information.
If you want to qualify the parties by minor items like gay marriage and logging rights, then have at it. Your homosexuals will be free to marry
And as far as lost lives go, Clinton did his own share of bombing in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, as you'd recall. Furthermore, after the bombings of Iraq in the 1988-1992 Republican adminstration, Clinton continued the Imperial policy of keeping Iraq bottled up with interdiction, no-fly zones and overall boycotts, so that the next Republican adminstration could continue the saturation bombing.
Do I really need to identify the non-stop culture of outsourcing and offshoring that has flourished in every administration since Reagan? How about tax shelters and dodges? Investment bubbles? Tax-and-spend vs. borrow-and-spend? Need I go on?
As far as foreign relations and domestic economy go, there's no significant difference betwen the two parties. As long as they are so religious about supporting corporations and securing wealth against taxation, then this will continue.
Like many people of conscience, I started out pretty damned liberal, then time added layers of conservative thought ... forming the fine and detailed sediment that I am today. Conservatism as an idea is just as well-constructed and respectful as Liberalism. They key in criticizing them in today's political environment is to identify their unquestioned extremities.
I often use the term prefix "Neo-" to qualify what's happened to the promoted or mainstreamed Conservatives and Liberals. The Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs are wrecking America's ability to peacefully live with the rest of the world (i.e. "foreign policy") and ensure domestic tranquility (i.e. "domestic economy").
The only real "runoff" happening here is whether or not the Democrats will sink into real electoral mediocrity before they start abiding by democratic principles and their own platform.
Slight sarcasm aside, please consider voting for the best man all the time, and adhere to conscience always. Remember, it's not the ~2 million Nader voters in 2000 that put Bush in the White House, it was the ~50 million Bush voters.
You neglected to mention to your parent poster that it wasn't the ~2 million Nader voters in 2000 that brought Bush the Presidency ... it was instead the ~50 million voters who voted for Bush such that he achieved 270 electoral votes. 2 million compared to 50 million. It sure is funny how people ignore that 50. We must bring the battle back to the people who are truly responsible for the Bush election: half of voting America.