As mentioned below, whether the rescuer will actually have time to apply the paint before entering is another matter.
The other good reason for a clear version is that it doesnt make you look funny/stupid if you have to wear it all day to be ready at a moments notice. Provided it lasts as long as i would expect something intended for battlefield usage, they can apply it at the start of their shift and then their day is otherwise normal.
Intelligent people can still 'vote stupid' due to politics being treated like religion. The 'My dad always voted republican so I do to' line can come from remarkably intelligent individuals who simply havent bothered or dont care about politics.
It would be much better if you just added a requirement to explain your vote, then all the reasons as poorly formulated as 'just cause hes white/black/Asian/Muslim' or 'cause my daddy voted for his daddy' get tossed.
The problem is this is typically considered unfair, prejudiced, etc. I personally have no objection myself to anyone voting... provided they do a proper job of it by understanding & thinking about their choices for more than 5 minutes on voting day.
People like yourself give me hope that one day I will be able to enjoy a visit to a USA that wont keep my prints on file permanently just cause i wasnt born in the country. People should be able to come to the, 'land of the free', 'home of the brave' and marvel at the things accomplished by one of the greatest nations in history. Not feel like they are entering a suspicious surveillance state where as a foreigner they will be measured, details filed permanently away 'just in case', and tracked with advanced dragnet digital surveillance systems looking for key words regardless of who they are, be it 6 year old girl from France, 30 year old man from Japan, or 80 year old woman from Iraq, all because the people are too afraid to accept the reality of life that it includes risks, that bad things happen, bombs go off, people die, and more of their people die of heart disease, cancer and crossing the street than they ever lost in a war anywhere or on any stupid ideological invisible enemy.
Your Intelligent words have made me smile and reminded me why I grew up as a child admiring all the great things done by the USA and wanting to go see those places.
This is the part that intrigues me and I suspect it would be the real definer between 'soul raping' and 'just a job'.
How many places that have employees do this kind of work actually pay for the therapy?
If I had a therapist I could vent at couple of days, say on Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon just to break up the typical work week into neat halves, I think I would be perfectly capable of doing a job like this provided the pay was commensurate, since even with a therapist this is a definite hazard to ones (mental) health and hazardous jobs should pay more.
Doing this without a therapist... yeah that's a recipe for disaster. I'd say its unethical for a company to use/abuse contractors in the way the guy was in TFA. Its like handling radioactive materials without a dosimeter. You shouldn't employ someone to do something likely to drive more than 90% of people nuts, and not provide a therapist that can in the very least tell the person 'I don't think its safe for you to keep doing this'
By gradually chipping away at the old code in every component until you can prove to the lawyers that you own the copyrights to the entire thing. Then when you compile the next version. Your free to change the license to anything you like, even binaries only, no source code.
However you cannot retroactively remove it from a previously published version... they can however just stop hosting old archives of the source code, stop making available old versions that are GPL, and flip everyone the bird while saying "the new version is a closed binary, suck it up or find another DB"
Hell, I could probably put a butt-plug on a pedestal with a picture of Lindsey Lohan on it, and call it social commentary about how we have pop culture rammed up our asses. Someone would laugh at it, thereby validating it as art.;-)
I'd call it art. But i dont think people should pay $10k for it, nor does it belong in a museum.
And following on. does the entire icanhascheezeburger network of websites count as art in your mind? Can an artist make something & never show it, and have it still considered art? (can the status of something as art be bestowed in absentia of the article itself?)
Unlike the current legal framework/arguments being used to punish people such as the one in the article. Also he was probably confused by the difference between the intent of the constitution and the current state of affairs.
Insightful point you make there. the idea of "Art as a Service" has ties back to the Renaissance and the practice of 'Patronage' which provided us with some of the greatest artistic works of human history. Where all the copyright stuff has gone wrong is the length of time and the parasitic middlemen organisations.
Hoarding just seems to go hand in hand with the idea 'of course that's still a useful part'. Its no wonder we never throw things away, we know they still work & have value. And your right, I've done big company corporate IT as a 'white collar desk jockey' way too long to want to spend another decade getting paid to sit on my ass and push WSUS patches and wondering how long till they realize they can probably make one of my team redundant and if it will be me.
There may not be a lot of the tiny pc repair shops left round my parts, but that's still some solid advice. Word of mouth truly is how the best businesses are built regardless of what they work in.
The market your talking about is one I have wanted to service for a long time.
Unfortunately the problem is a lot of these businesses dont think about the issue until it breaks, and will too frequently just take the vendor at their word that 'it cant be fixed' and are then forced to buy new gear for as GP said $150k or so when if they knew there were people who could fix it for less than $500 they would jump at the chance. Vendor practices like poor documentation on the equipment (no schematics etc) only make things worse.
I would imagine you didn't wind up servicing these businesses by saying "I know i can help these people" and then approaching them, most people I hear of who do work like this have collected the clients over years working on more modern things for people. But if you did set out to help them, I would love to hear how you managed to convince them to take up your services.
I worked for a company called Telstra (aussies will recognise it) Largest ISP in the country for those not local or familiar.
They used to have a promise "The first person you talk to will always be australian". Now Cut to the last few months of my employment. As we began to trial a new "Interactive Voice Response" system. Pretty damn smart one. It asked the users for ID info, built persistent profiles & was pretty much able to troubleshoot through the entire stock standard scripts the meat robots on the helpdesk were doing.
12 months later... The robot was now handling all 1st point of contact before automatically escalating to tier 2 where appropriate.
Yep were getting them at all international airports here in Australia. Just so we can make Uncle Sam happy and keep feeding the treats to our lapdog politicians.
The only sanity in the entire thing is that its not mandated for domestic travel. The moment they try that I'm taking a day off to politely ensure that my MPs in both houses know my opinion. Probably by standing in their office till they either drag me out or i get to talk to them. They arent far fortunately, I could do it in a lunch break but I want the extra time to guarantee i get to talk to them.
Yes but we did it with a goal of NOT putting that much dirt in the air. Specifically designed detonations of weapons would most certainly have the ability to seriously screw up everyone.
Read a little about the detonation scenarios for nuclear war and it becomes clear, they understand that if the goal is to deny a very big place. Buried weapons can work very well. Typically such scenarios are under the label of 'scorched earth tactics' and never considered useful. Its the reason they never went ahead with any of the 'nukes to make big holes for civil engineering' type projects. If Russia wanted to wrap the globe in nuclear winter. It has the capacity to do so without a single rocket.
Nuclear scorched earth tactics can scale up in a big way and were all cactus if anyone tried them. How about gently melting a few nukes down under the Antarctic ice. Note the word melt, not drill, melting can be rather quiet and unlikely to be noticed seismically. Shift the entire west antarctic ice shelf perhaps? even part of it would work well given estimates of its likely runaway melting behavior. That would be an approximate 3m sea level rise. Several countries gone, and potential deniability if they wanted to be REAL dicks about how they played the game. It sounds like a stupid Bond movie plot, who would believe they actually did it? Not to mention the good old fashioned bury the nukes where they will kick up the most dirt, plan.
The sane response to this is to offer more money to buy these weapons as part of "helping these states disarm" for examples sake. which is more likely to stop terrorists using a Topol-M against the USA. A $1billion missile defense site/program or Offering to buy 100 Topol-M units off ex-soviet republics at $10million a piece. or A standing offer to outbid anyone trying to sell this hardware.
Im pretty sure people with an understanding of risk analysis will agree. If you offer to buy the damn hardware, you never have to worry about it again. Except for if your worried about ideological affiliations that may just GIVE the terrorist of the day such a weapon, in which case, well they will probably give a bit more help than just the weapon. I would imagine some area coverage info on USA BMD systems would be NATO information, and some innocuous transportation arrangements to a more 'useful' launch site would be likely too.
A BMD site anywhere doesnt 'stop the terrorists' because if you have the bomb you have the damn bomb. Its going to get used somewhere, even if the USA closed shop, borders & all, you cannot guarantee that they wont float the damn thing into Miami with a military quality Cuban drug submarine and sneak it to the target on land. Yes it would be hard. But guess what. If you have a 100% effective BMD, they will work out how to use the nuke some other way.... Simply because an unplanned mushroom cloud would be the ultimate method of inspiring abject terror in the minds of millions. Mostly because the average person doesnt know a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging device from a Cobalt 60 Irradiation device. Nuclear is scary to most people, ergo its perfect if you want to scare people. T
I use a pretty odd arrangement at work & it makes my work 'mouse behavior' very different. I use a trackball i bought myself at work and I've always been aware that having to move my arm less to use it seems to have increased the 'nervous tic' like mousing behaviors.
Best example of which is that if I'm working my way through a page of boring documentation, its quite likely (>25% probability) that I will be highlighting & un-highlighting bits of the paragraph as I read it for no reason at all. This behavior is completely context dependent. I only seem to start doing it when reading long sections of text, and not when for instance I'm reading a long section of text/code in my editor.
Your comments about noticing the tic has made me realize that i have several very distinct different patterns depending on what is going on. I wonder if this would throw off their algorithm due to passing a difference threshold that they cannot correlate against, such as the type of text I'm reading.
The lack of a single flat plate reflective surface (the face on profile of a typical V bottom hulled warship) means that the design of their hulls is much harder to find even when you give up your stealth and active ping for it. Its not going to be perfect, but between the hull design, the electric drive designs to reduce motor & shaft noise, and Sonar Absorbent Materials, this thing would be likely be very very deadly to lone submarines.... possibly more than a standard hunter sub even, but no one will ever know.
Just correcting a minor misconception. DICE admitted that they changed focus and developed primarily for consoles in the last few month. PC was't a 100% PC -> console port.
Also... they have the stupidest patching process ive ever met. They are only releasing a Patch every 3 months or so, so they (I'm quoting a lead dev at DICE) "aren't playing favorites" between PC, Xbox & PS3. (Consoles have a month or so QA process on games as big as BF3 apparently)
Yes, I really want to keep playing your game with brutally broken weapons... M26 MASS shotguns that are as deadly as tank cannons & as accurate as a laser... that i have to put up with till June or so when they put out the next patch...
Its the implied point. "You have the source code, if something doesnt work then you have no obstacles to fixing it yourself" and other such RMSish statements.
Not saying you should have to do it all. Just saying that the fact you "CAN" do it yourself is a significant part of the reason Linux was created and grew in the first place.
I am a Libertarian... who believes in the economic reality of universal healthcare. We do exist!
Charitable giving being claimable has to do with the fact that donating to charity is meant to be giving to the needs of the community which is what Taxes are for as well, hence its kind of a "your helping more than you need to, so we wont take as much" type deal. And to be fair, I don't believe that churches should be tax exempt, I think that any genuine charitable work they do should be organised separately and then treated as a charitable non-profit. The group that pays for the house of worship & pays a living wage/salary to the ministers/priests/holy men/women, nope, not charity in my book. Non profit perhaps, but not a charity. Donations to them arent helping the community as a whole, they just help members of which is no different to being apart of some kind of social club, its not charity.
Thank you, just when I was starting to think I couldnt keep calling myself Libertarian, someone steps in and reminds me there are people that understand the balance properly. I typically call my opinions "Libertarian Socialist" but that sounds odd and the 'socialist' sounds superfluous when your talking about the principles of how to organize a society/country, you cannot discount a certain amount of collectivist thinking.
Bloated government = very bad... but... Basic services = Good for all. I favor allowing central government regulation of key things eg, FCC radio usage regulation (maybe not device compliance, but someone has to coordinate the radiofrequencies & FAA Air Traffic Control coordination. Sometimes a standard is good, but I've never met a corporate monopoly I would trust enough to be in control of something as important as either of the 2 examples above, so I'd rather be able to bloody vote out the people in charge of them.
I would say that if you were reforming things on such a huge scale as this would be, then from the start, the provision of health care should be universal. As you said, there is nothing wrong with something that favors no group over another. I would rather not throw away things like herd immunity or deal with the weaseling of an insurance company while in pain or try deciding the best approach to my treatment based on how expensive it is, or risk charities not being able to afford to vaccinate enough of "the poor" to provide effective herd immunity and there be a pandemic that shuts down half a city due to staff home sick or dead. Healthcare should have an across the board universal base standard of cover and paid for by the state. No elaborate private hospitals subsidized by the sate nonsense either. There are decades of evidence & academic study on the economic benefit of universal healthcare to a sovereign nation. I wouldn't say you have to be required to use it or any such nonsense. Freedom to setup & use a private hospital as you please, a hospital bed with silk gown & plasma TV awaits. But I would be more than happy to pay the cost of universal healthcare in my taxes. Knowing clearly that it will be in my best interests both as a member of society and as a statistical member of a population pool who will be X% likely to suffer from incidents in the set {requires medical care} despite my best efforts to avoid needing it.
You have me curious. As a fellow Libertarian and entrepreneur as well, how would removal of corporate charters and such things as limited liability affect commerce in your opinion. I could imagine doing away with most of the special stuff, but without a limited liability vehicle of some kind for group investment... how would you allow people to take risks with money?
An LLC could take the risks of space launches, the company is liable for a rocket booster landing on a house against all odds. While if the people who run it are responsible... well they would likely never get off the ground! The structure of some kind of limited liability is key in allowing any kind of safe handling of risk. If there is nowhere to stop the blame other than individuals. Then you wind up with a heavily risk averse paralysis condition freezing up high risk experimentation & investment.
While I agree, the problem here is that the counterpoint to your pleas that the data should not be 'misused" is the fact that corporations are built to misuse it.
Look at the details of the article about target knowing the teen was pregnant. Think about the situation from both sides. A certain amount of card info is required to process transactions. I want to have the convenience of a card... not exactly a huge ask in my opinion, a card is safer than keeping money in my wallet, not just from thieves but from an idle desire to spend. I can reach in and grab a $20. But i know my card has a record in my bank account, my partner can see, i can look back, i will not be able to forget that i bought *stupid shiny item* etc. Now on Target's side. They want to maximize the effect of their advertising & customer coupons, etc. This will naturally lead to statistical modeling with the unique track-able data points they have allowing better trending. Now the down side is when they use this without asking me. That's where the problem starts. I don't mind if Target use me as one of 500k data points in their internal modelling. At that scale my details are little more than noise. But when they start mailing coupons to me I didnt ask for because they somehow inferred my address which i didnt give them. Then I get annoyed.
The problem shouldnt be framed around what they can know. It needs to be about how they may use it without my permission. And the basic restrictions on peoples lives being used against them. Like the principles of criminals having served their time being good members of society (recidivism aside) , why should a liberal teenager who posed nude for art class be disqualified from a Teaching job in the Arts?
Slashdot Mirror
As mentioned below, whether the rescuer will actually have time to apply the paint before entering is another matter.
The other good reason for a clear version is that it doesnt make you look funny/stupid if you have to wear it all day to be ready at a moments notice.
Provided it lasts as long as i would expect something intended for battlefield usage, they can apply it at the start of their shift and then their day is otherwise normal.
Intelligent people can still 'vote stupid' due to politics being treated like religion. The 'My dad always voted republican so I do to' line can come from remarkably intelligent individuals who simply havent bothered or dont care about politics.
It would be much better if you just added a requirement to explain your vote, then all the reasons as poorly formulated as 'just cause hes white/black/Asian/Muslim' or 'cause my daddy voted for his daddy' get tossed.
The problem is this is typically considered unfair, prejudiced, etc. I personally have no objection myself to anyone voting... provided they do a proper job of it by understanding & thinking about their choices for more than 5 minutes on voting day.
People like yourself give me hope that one day I will be able to enjoy a visit to a USA that wont keep my prints on file permanently just cause i wasnt born in the country. People should be able to come to the, 'land of the free', 'home of the brave' and marvel at the things accomplished by one of the greatest nations in history. Not feel like they are entering a suspicious surveillance state where as a foreigner they will be measured, details filed permanently away 'just in case', and tracked with advanced dragnet digital surveillance systems looking for key words regardless of who they are, be it 6 year old girl from France, 30 year old man from Japan, or 80 year old woman from Iraq, all because the people are too afraid to accept the reality of life that it includes risks, that bad things happen, bombs go off, people die, and more of their people die of heart disease, cancer and crossing the street than they ever lost in a war anywhere or on any stupid ideological invisible enemy.
Your Intelligent words have made me smile and reminded me why I grew up as a child admiring all the great things done by the USA and wanting to go see those places.
This is the part that intrigues me and I suspect it would be the real definer between 'soul raping' and 'just a job'.
How many places that have employees do this kind of work actually pay for the therapy?
If I had a therapist I could vent at couple of days, say on Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon just to break up the typical work week into neat halves, I think I would be perfectly capable of doing a job like this provided the pay was commensurate, since even with a therapist this is a definite hazard to ones (mental) health and hazardous jobs should pay more.
Doing this without a therapist ... yeah that's a recipe for disaster. I'd say its unethical for a company to use/abuse contractors in the way the guy was in TFA. Its like handling radioactive materials without a dosimeter. You shouldn't employ someone to do something likely to drive more than 90% of people nuts, and not provide a therapist that can in the very least tell the person 'I don't think its safe for you to keep doing this'
By gradually chipping away at the old code in every component until you can prove to the lawyers that you own the copyrights to the entire thing.
Then when you compile the next version. Your free to change the license to anything you like, even binaries only, no source code.
However you cannot retroactively remove it from a previously published version... they can however just stop hosting old archives of the source code, stop making available old versions that are GPL, and flip everyone the bird while saying "the new version is a closed binary, suck it up or find another DB"
Hell, I could probably put a butt-plug on a pedestal with a picture of Lindsey Lohan on it, and call it social commentary about how we have pop culture rammed up our asses. Someone would laugh at it, thereby validating it as art. ;-)
I'd call it art. But i dont think people should pay $10k for it, nor does it belong in a museum.
And following on. does the entire icanhascheezeburger network of websites count as art in your mind?
Can an artist make something & never show it, and have it still considered art? (can the status of something as art be bestowed in absentia of the article itself?)
Summed up nicely.
Unlike the current legal framework/arguments being used to punish people such as the one in the article. Also he was probably confused by the difference between the intent of the constitution and the current state of affairs.
Insightful point you make there.
the idea of "Art as a Service" has ties back to the Renaissance and the practice of 'Patronage' which provided us with some of the greatest artistic works of human history.
Where all the copyright stuff has gone wrong is the length of time and the parasitic middlemen organisations.
Hoarding just seems to go hand in hand with the idea 'of course that's still a useful part'. Its no wonder we never throw things away, we know they still work & have value. And your right, I've done big company corporate IT as a 'white collar desk jockey' way too long to want to spend another decade getting paid to sit on my ass and push WSUS patches and wondering how long till they realize they can probably make one of my team redundant and if it will be me.
There may not be a lot of the tiny pc repair shops left round my parts, but that's still some solid advice.
Word of mouth truly is how the best businesses are built regardless of what they work in.
The market your talking about is one I have wanted to service for a long time.
Unfortunately the problem is a lot of these businesses dont think about the issue until it breaks, and will too frequently just take the vendor at their word that 'it cant be fixed' and are then forced to buy new gear for as GP said $150k or so when if they knew there were people who could fix it for less than $500 they would jump at the chance. Vendor practices like poor documentation on the equipment (no schematics etc) only make things worse.
I would imagine you didn't wind up servicing these businesses by saying "I know i can help these people" and then approaching them, most people I hear of who do work like this have collected the clients over years working on more modern things for people. But if you did set out to help them, I would love to hear how you managed to convince them to take up your services.
I worked for a company called Telstra (aussies will recognise it) Largest ISP in the country for those not local or familiar.
They used to have a promise "The first person you talk to will always be australian". Now Cut to the last few months of my employment. As we began to trial a new "Interactive Voice Response" system. Pretty damn smart one. It asked the users for ID info, built persistent profiles & was pretty much able to troubleshoot through the entire stock standard scripts the meat robots on the helpdesk were doing.
12 months later... The robot was now handling all 1st point of contact before automatically escalating to tier 2 where appropriate.
Citation for the predictions?
I'm curious to read these for myself.
Yep were getting them at all international airports here in Australia.
Just so we can make Uncle Sam happy and keep feeding the treats to our lapdog politicians.
The only sanity in the entire thing is that its not mandated for domestic travel.
The moment they try that I'm taking a day off to politely ensure that my MPs in both houses know my opinion.
Probably by standing in their office till they either drag me out or i get to talk to them. They arent far fortunately, I could do it in a lunch break but I want the extra time to guarantee i get to talk to them.
Yes but we did it with a goal of NOT putting that much dirt in the air. Specifically designed detonations of weapons would most certainly have the ability to seriously screw up everyone.
Read a little about the detonation scenarios for nuclear war and it becomes clear, they understand that if the goal is to deny a very big place. Buried weapons can work very well. Typically such scenarios are under the label of 'scorched earth tactics' and never considered useful. Its the reason they never went ahead with any of the 'nukes to make big holes for civil engineering' type projects. If Russia wanted to wrap the globe in nuclear winter. It has the capacity to do so without a single rocket.
Nuclear scorched earth tactics can scale up in a big way and were all cactus if anyone tried them. How about gently melting a few nukes down under the Antarctic ice. Note the word melt, not drill, melting can be rather quiet and unlikely to be noticed seismically. Shift the entire west antarctic ice shelf perhaps? even part of it would work well given estimates of its likely runaway melting behavior. That would be an approximate 3m sea level rise. Several countries gone, and potential deniability if they wanted to be REAL dicks about how they played the game. It sounds like a stupid Bond movie plot, who would believe they actually did it?
Not to mention the good old fashioned bury the nukes where they will kick up the most dirt, plan.
The sane response to this is to offer more money to buy these weapons as part of "helping these states disarm"
for examples sake.
which is more likely to stop terrorists using a Topol-M against the USA.
A $1billion missile defense site/program
or
Offering to buy 100 Topol-M units off ex-soviet republics at $10million a piece.
or
A standing offer to outbid anyone trying to sell this hardware.
Im pretty sure people with an understanding of risk analysis will agree. If you offer to buy the damn hardware, you never have to worry about it again.
Except for if your worried about ideological affiliations that may just GIVE the terrorist of the day such a weapon, in which case, well they will probably give a bit more help than just the weapon. I would imagine some area coverage info on USA BMD systems would be NATO information, and some innocuous transportation arrangements to a more 'useful' launch site would be likely too.
A BMD site anywhere doesnt 'stop the terrorists' because if you have the bomb you have the damn bomb.
Its going to get used somewhere, even if the USA closed shop, borders & all, you cannot guarantee that they wont float the damn thing into Miami with a military quality Cuban drug submarine and sneak it to the target on land. Yes it would be hard. But guess what. If you have a 100% effective BMD, they will work out how to use the nuke some other way....
Simply because an unplanned mushroom cloud would be the ultimate method of inspiring abject terror in the minds of millions. Mostly because the average person doesnt know a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging device from a Cobalt 60 Irradiation device. Nuclear is scary to most people, ergo its perfect if you want to scare people.
T
I use a pretty odd arrangement at work & it makes my work 'mouse behavior' very different. I use a trackball i bought myself at work and I've always been aware that having to move my arm less to use it seems to have increased the 'nervous tic' like mousing behaviors.
Best example of which is that if I'm working my way through a page of boring documentation, its quite likely (>25% probability) that I will be highlighting & un-highlighting bits of the paragraph as I read it for no reason at all. This behavior is completely context dependent. I only seem to start doing it when reading long sections of text, and not when for instance I'm reading a long section of text/code in my editor.
Your comments about noticing the tic has made me realize that i have several very distinct different patterns depending on what is going on. I wonder if this would throw off their algorithm due to passing a difference threshold that they cannot correlate against, such as the type of text I'm reading.
The Sea Shadow has a pretty strait forward advantage over a submarine, a lower active sonar signature.
The side 'spars' are using a design known as SWATH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_waterplane_area_twin_hull
The lack of a single flat plate reflective surface (the face on profile of a typical V bottom hulled warship) means that the design of their hulls is much harder to find even when you give up your stealth and active ping for it. Its not going to be perfect, but between the hull design, the electric drive designs to reduce motor & shaft noise, and Sonar Absorbent Materials, this thing would be likely be very very deadly to lone submarines.... possibly more than a standard hunter sub even, but no one will ever know.
Just correcting a minor misconception. DICE admitted that they changed focus and developed primarily for consoles in the last few month.
PC was't a 100% PC -> console port.
Also... they have the stupidest patching process ive ever met.
They are only releasing a Patch every 3 months or so, so they (I'm quoting a lead dev at DICE) "aren't playing favorites" between PC, Xbox & PS3. (Consoles have a month or so QA process on games as big as BF3 apparently)
Yes, I really want to keep playing your game with brutally broken weapons... M26 MASS shotguns that are as deadly as tank cannons & as accurate as a laser... that i have to put up with till June or so when they put out the next patch...
Its the implied point. "You have the source code, if something doesnt work then you have no obstacles to fixing it yourself" and other such RMSish statements.
Not saying you should have to do it all. Just saying that the fact you "CAN" do it yourself is a significant part of the reason Linux was created and grew in the first place.
Defeating the point of linux that ... you can do it all yourself.
I am a Libertarian ... who believes in the economic reality of universal healthcare.
We do exist!
Charitable giving being claimable has to do with the fact that donating to charity is meant to be giving to the needs of the community which is what Taxes are for as well, hence its kind of a "your helping more than you need to, so we wont take as much" type deal.
And to be fair, I don't believe that churches should be tax exempt, I think that any genuine charitable work they do should be organised separately and then treated as a charitable non-profit. The group that pays for the house of worship & pays a living wage/salary to the ministers/priests/holy men/women, nope, not charity in my book. Non profit perhaps, but not a charity. Donations to them arent helping the community as a whole, they just help members of which is no different to being apart of some kind of social club, its not charity.
Thank you, just when I was starting to think I couldnt keep calling myself Libertarian, someone steps in and reminds me there are people that understand the balance properly. I typically call my opinions "Libertarian Socialist" but that sounds odd and the 'socialist' sounds superfluous when your talking about the principles of how to organize a society/country, you cannot discount a certain amount of collectivist thinking.
Bloated government = very bad ... but... Basic services = Good for all.
I favor allowing central government regulation of key things eg, FCC radio usage regulation (maybe not device compliance, but someone has to coordinate the radiofrequencies & FAA Air Traffic Control coordination. Sometimes a standard is good, but I've never met a corporate monopoly I would trust enough to be in control of something as important as either of the 2 examples above, so I'd rather be able to bloody vote out the people in charge of them.
I would say that if you were reforming things on such a huge scale as this would be, then from the start, the provision of health care should be universal.
As you said, there is nothing wrong with something that favors no group over another. I would rather not throw away things like herd immunity or deal with the weaseling of an insurance company while in pain or try deciding the best approach to my treatment based on how expensive it is, or risk charities not being able to afford to vaccinate enough of "the poor" to provide effective herd immunity and there be a pandemic that shuts down half a city due to staff home sick or dead. Healthcare should have an across the board universal base standard of cover and paid for by the state. No elaborate private hospitals subsidized by the sate nonsense either. There are decades of evidence & academic study on the economic benefit of universal healthcare to a sovereign nation. I wouldn't say you have to be required to use it or any such nonsense. Freedom to setup & use a private hospital as you please, a hospital bed with silk gown & plasma TV awaits. But I would be more than happy to pay the cost of universal healthcare in my taxes. Knowing clearly that it will be in my best interests both as a member of society and as a statistical member of a population pool who will be X% likely to suffer from incidents in the set {requires medical care} despite my best efforts to avoid needing it.
That's a rather clever bit of psychology there.
Your commentary deserves to be modded higher, alas I have no points with which to do it myself.
You have me curious.
As a fellow Libertarian and entrepreneur as well, how would removal of corporate charters and such things as limited liability affect commerce in your opinion.
I could imagine doing away with most of the special stuff, but without a limited liability vehicle of some kind for group investment... how would you allow people to take risks with money?
An LLC could take the risks of space launches, the company is liable for a rocket booster landing on a house against all odds. While if the people who run it are responsible... well they would likely never get off the ground! The structure of some kind of limited liability is key in allowing any kind of safe handling of risk. If there is nowhere to stop the blame other than individuals. Then you wind up with a heavily risk averse paralysis condition freezing up high risk experimentation & investment.
While I agree, the problem here is that the counterpoint to your pleas that the data should not be 'misused" is the fact that corporations are built to misuse it.
Look at the details of the article about target knowing the teen was pregnant. Think about the situation from both sides.
A certain amount of card info is required to process transactions. I want to have the convenience of a card... not exactly a huge ask in my opinion, a card is safer than keeping money in my wallet, not just from thieves but from an idle desire to spend. I can reach in and grab a $20. But i know my card has a record in my bank account, my partner can see, i can look back, i will not be able to forget that i bought *stupid shiny item* etc.
Now on Target's side. They want to maximize the effect of their advertising & customer coupons, etc. This will naturally lead to statistical modeling with the unique track-able data points they have allowing better trending. Now the down side is when they use this without asking me. That's where the problem starts.
I don't mind if Target use me as one of 500k data points in their internal modelling. At that scale my details are little more than noise. But when they start mailing coupons to me I didnt ask for because they somehow inferred my address which i didnt give them. Then I get annoyed.
The problem shouldnt be framed around what they can know. It needs to be about how they may use it without my permission. And the basic restrictions on peoples lives being used against them. Like the principles of criminals having served their time being good members of society (recidivism aside) , why should a liberal teenager who posed nude for art class be disqualified from a Teaching job in the Arts?