Does anyone believe that VW didn't have technical managers? In the end, did it really make a difference?
I'd also argue requiring manager to come up from the ranks, while helpful in some respects, precludes the idea non-technical managers shouldn't have been attending bootcamps and the like in the first place. I'm expected to keep current in my field. Why should the bar be set so low for management not to learn about the department they are managing from day one?
That this is even under discussion highlights how utterly worthless most management is.
And in a even grander scheme of things, it makes me question the very notion of meritocracy. This is not the best and the brightest. This is barnacles on the engine of progress.
Not specific to the US, but how does the logic play out?
If Benz can't claim copyright on the Smart, how does "character" imbue the Batmobile with copyright protection? Couldn't Towle just wait for another to be built, and then copy that (not specific DC property) following the line "if a vehicle varies in its technical specification, then any external similarities are irrelevant".
It is a strange world where IP has more consideration than an actual creation.
As it is, you have had a long running attempt by shareholders to disciple corporate boards (read: gain more say in the operation of business) that has gone basically nowhere. On the other hand, you have corporate boards claiming short-sighted demands from shareholders irrevocably harming business.
And to be fair, both sides have merit, and both sides are corrupt, so exactly how to do you intend to pursue something as nebulous as accountability in such a scenario? It's wolves all the way down.
And in the unlikely scenario that criminal charges are leveled from this, you can almost be certain a degree of amnesty will be helped along from a few well placed campaign contributions. After all, (camera shot) you are hurting underlings that had nothing to do with this criminal activity.
The past few business scandals have made clear it is near impossible to address problems like these under current structures. At best, you can expect a slew of onerous compliance mandates, which even then, just end up fucking over the few honest players in this.
I mean I would delight if someone had a balanced approach to all this, but more and more it's just bad and worse threatening an even greater cesspool.
Except we know this to be a part of human nature, from the Milgram experiment to the Stanford Prison Experiment and onward. Most people tend to put their trust in authority figures, and it is the rare few who will say "I will not".
So while railing against people who aren't as ruggedly individualistic as you, keep in mind most people will never be tested in quite that way, so it's easy to pontificate what they would have done. If they were there. Except they weren't.
Basic training has a trope of "don't make a thief of your bunkmate", admonishing soldiers to keep valuables locked. Even the most upstanding person, someone who may later save your life, can be tempted under the right circumstances. The point is make certain those circumstances appear infrequently, so we can maintain this illusion of being fine moral agents, doing the right thing at least some of the time. Most would be horrified to learn how little it actual takes to subvert their stated morality. Luckily, most will never have the opportunity to find out either.
For most entitlement programs, 2/3 of the cost is in administrative overhead. Eliminate most of that and you are mostly there.
Plus there are other intangible benefits like being able to take time off to get further training, less poverty based crime, and, in part, a much needed simplification to both tax and labor.
There are HUGE benefits to this that end up costing less tax dollars overall than the constant bickering over a few percentage points of taxation.
Simplify the tax code (partial to land value tax myself) and you have actually reduced the size of government.
To be fair, today's archeologist dig through the garbage dumps from aeons ago. Don't doubt for an instant future archeologist won't be doing the same to the garbage dumps of today.
Not to mention it is insanely tricky to decide today what will be relevant in the future. I have a book of graffiti from Pompeii. That probably gives me more insight into the times there than any official account.
The standard-bearer is that people will preserve what's important to them (including the means of accessing it. You do have a few DOS floppies stashed, right?), disregarding any copyright law (and thank god a few copies of Nosferatu escaped destruction), and preservation becomes democratized, for better or worse (I do long for the web of yesteryear). There is strength in numbers.
Or corporate interest win out and digital mediums are only accessed and licensed, but never owned, and unless they develop perfect storage; everything developed becomes a blackhole.
The system responds to a set of inputs. It may be more complex than a single switch, but the function is little different than a power window that also has a lock to keep from being engaged. Oh noes! The car is deciding for me whether a window can be engaged or not! Apparently checking to see if the brakes or window is locked before engaging is decision making now. Pumping the brake I applied is apparently decision making now. Do you have any idea how absurd you sound? It's not like I can't perform the same function without the ABS.
And as already demonstrated, I can choose whether to engage the ABS by simply taking my foot off the brake and reapplying. That is worlds apart from a vehicle deciding to brake for me. Where is my disengage mechanism?
No, this line of thinking follows in the line of computers are magic, where a degree of complexity is apparently deciding for you. It's bunk, and is a red herring to the real question of the brakes being automatically applied as I swerve out of the way, and the car becomes uncontrollable. I see many lawsuits in the future.
Following your line of logic, if you have electric windows, the car is deciding to open and close them, not you. If you have power brakes, the car is deciding to brake, not you. If you have cruise control, air conditioning, etc.
ABS modulates the brakes. That is more than fine hair away from deciding when you can and can not brake. Those of us who grew up without ABS still reflexively take our foot off the brakes when the wheel goes numb, and reapply because, get this, ABS only allows you to steer with locked brakes. Your actual stopping distance is longer than if you had applied the brakes short of engaging the ABS.
And you might have discovered the "1,2,3" past the "D" on an automatic transmission. Surprise! You can control the gearing just like a manual. The throttle body controls the throttle for automatic or manual.
But more to the point, implementation of automatic braking is going to be key. If it is noticeable for all the wrong reasons, it is just inviting people to disable it. And if it can't differentiate between a semi in front of me or a motorcycle, or when you happen to drafting on track days, several automakers could be facing lawsuits when sudden, unanticipated application of the brakes cause the vehicle to go out of control.
One of the economic problems brought about with the rise of trans-global companies is that capital is is fluid while labor is not. I'd be more than happy to live in an area that pays a lower wage as long as the cost of living was commensurately lower, but am disallowed to emigrate to another country. Funny how economist don't regard this as a distortion of the market, but the moment you mention tariffs, they throw their hands up in the air and talk about the evils of government meddling. Makes me want to go back to a gold standard just so they would have to pay for gold barges to pay their new staff. This disproportionality is somewhat addressed through the EU and other trade agreements, but is still looming as a crisis on the horizon: you can only slash and burn so often before you end up with banker's heads on pikes and Marx laughing from his grave.
Nor has economics made any inroads at addressing the problems with abundance. As many products of the tech boom are essentially digital, there is an unlimited supply which can only be profitable with artificial scarcity. Again, most economic theories I've read about are mostly silent about this distortion of the market, even going so far as to create abstractions like IP with a straight face.
It will be the height of irony if current capitalist models pave the way for market communism.
Small difference being unions are normally public in their associations and are a known entity when entering into negotiations, while agreements between businesses are private.
If any business wants to make it known to prospective employees they have agreements with other businesses to hold the cost on wages, fine.
Is it? I've noted this blind acceptance of this particular meme, while in the same breath demanding every iota of information (Facebook passwords, credit history, etc.) from prospective employees. And especially in this instance, no actual harm was done to Nintendo, so where is the justification?
People talking shop about their jobs is as old as the hills. The fact that this encompasses new technologies is maybe slightly different, but it is that gray area that the web inhabits between journalism and hobby.
And again, no harm was done by his disclosure.
But now Nintendo gets to look like paranoid control freak even more.
Use to work with several menopausal women who wanted things noticable cooler than the others, and ultimately it was agreed that either the women could walk around near nude or the rest could wear sweaters. Sweaters were the easiest compromise.
So by the researchers findings, is that ageist or sexist? I see that attempting to accomodate with the least amount of fuss is far too difficult in this PC age, and now the battle of the sexes is even fought with the thermostat.
Imagine my surprise when they didn't differentiate between older and younger women, upbringing (feral children are known to run naked in the snow, delighting in the cold, and those in northern climates tend to prefer things cooler than those in the south), or any of the numerous other factors that affect perception of temperature.
Related- why the hell would you want to innovate at a place that looks unfavorably upon independent thinking? The absolute best thing that could happen is for that business to die a flaming death, consumed by their own ineptitude and bureaucracy. Taking matters into your own hands only extends their reach, propping up their inefficiencies to suck the life out of even more people.
Mooch a paycheck if it is the only thing available, but definitely keep your best work under wraps. They've made it abundantly clear that's not what they are paying you for, so oblige them, even going so far as to gleefully compound their organizational problems. You'll probably get a promotion out of it, which will set yourself up better for finding another job.
And your entire argument is essentially framing the discourse into something no has demanded.
However, there is a bit of misrepresentation, as reddit originally posited that they were a bastion of free speech. And while it is fashionable to view it as reddit, out of the goodness of their hearts, provided a free platform for miscreants to corrupt the youth, the other side to that is users operated in good faith that reddit would keep their end of the agreement in creating free content.
Not like they can take their ball and go home now is it?
And regardless, criticizing reddit does fall under free speech, does it not? The government aspect is just a red herring.
Similarly, being in prison doesn't prevent you from voicing your opinions. Nor does being fined millions of dollars (just earn more money, citizen, so you too can enjoy the same freedoms of billionaires!) Nor does it prevent you from setting up a website to discuss controversial opinions.
Except when it does (funny how credit card companies refused to process donations to Wikileaks right after the release of the Afghan War Diary. But that was just private companies exercising their rights not to make a profit, and had nothing to do with government collusion. Nosiree!).
You might be a little slow on the uptake, but the definition of censorship doesn't specify government and non-government, and as there have been numerous other websites that were harangued by both governments and private companies being leaned on by governments.
You probably think a private company contracted by the government to doesn't abridge 4th amendment protections because, get this, it isn't the government doing it.
Except for the legislative framework that made it legal in the first place.
The essence of being a politician (in a representative democracy) is representing the interests of those who voted for you. Failure to do that is basically an abrogation of you duty. Otherwise we could just go with direct voting and cut out the middle-man.
Horse-trading is more in line with cutting deal. In a real world sense, it is the process of figuring out where your preferences lie. It may be a fine line, but it is there.
And neither have anything to do with the shady deals most politicians engage in. It is the pinnacle of moral relativism to excuse exercise of authority (and let's be frank, most of what happens in Congress is power for its own sake, with a thin veneer of regard to sell it) to betray, and name it just and good, and in the service of the public.
And especially that a politician would justify as such, especially after keeping a male prostitute while looking the other way at the imprisonment of others who would do the same, doesn't make you a paragon of real politic. It just means you are fucking corrupt.
Yeah, but this becomes more of an issue of moving the goalposts than anything else. If you say basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) can be addressed through welfare, someone always posits “but not everyone has a 1,000,000,000 Ferraris, so post-scarcity can’t exist!”, which was never the point in the first place. Is there enough over-production to cover food, clothes, and shelter? The answer is an emphatic yes.
And the most puzzling aspect is that working models have come from the right, with everything from negative income tax to basic income. And these were conceived as a means to reduce total welfare expenditure by making it more efficient.
So no, even Hayek endorsed a form of basic income, and not being forced to work to simply live changes the dynamic of business dramatically.
If anything, this whole debacle has made me question the Royal Society and UCL, It speaks poorly upon those organizations that they would go off half cocked without collecting evidence and performing a full investigation, which is the hallmark of good science.
And it makes me wonder how well they could handle a real controversy in the scientific community, when they can't weather a twitter storm of questionable origin. If you can't bear the slightest political intrigue, what makes you qualified to answer questions about the world? Just post the questions to twitter and let the masses decide the properties of time.
And especially now, when we have had similar occurrences in recent memory, with Donglegate and whatnot, I expect institutions of the pedigree of the Royal Society to show a little more discernment in handling situations like these. I mean christ, Sir Newton wasn't exactly an uncontroversial figure in his day, and that whole row was dealt with with more class and sobriety than this.
No, that's not true at all. The Libertarians do recognize the government as necessary — we just want its role to be as limited, as it was during the times of Jefferson and Franklin. It is to only play the roles given to it by the Constitution
Then strictly speaking, you aren't a libertarian, but a peculiar brand of constitutionalist that ignores the following 200 years of changes to the Constitution and evolution of the government. Turn back the hands of time, and you still end up with more government centuries later. You are living in the end result of that document.
When so called libertarians pay lip service to necessary government, it is always a given that the government services they think are needed are Good and Right, and everyone else who wants superfluous services, but when you get down to brass tacks, the situation isn't nearly as clear. Is public health a necessary government function? What about in a time of biological warfare? And when you speak of not having welfare in the time of Jefferson, are you forgetting An Act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen? What a terribly ignorant and romanticized view of history.
First of all, take the "will of the people" part off — that's just a better-sounding spin on the "mob rule".
Why? Do you believe the Constitution was transcribed from the mind of god? Any, organization of more than a few ends up with some form of government, or as you so euphemistically put it, mob rule.
The rest of us know it as the give and take of working within a group, and essentially "the will of the people" as opposed to "the will of the king". If your associations end in lynchings, I feel badly for you.
Second, the bigger the beast, the less tractable it is — and that's the point of the Libertarian teaching in general
As proven by monarchies being smaller than republics, therefore must be easier to control, no? Or are platitudes by someone who has never had to deal with a corrupt small town government pass as fact now?
We can further reduce the size of the Federal government by getting rid of the checks and balances. Or maybe there is a flaw in your logic.
Yes, "corporations" are the scary bogey-man of all Statists these days.
And with good reason. When a Mouse can buy legislation outright, nullifying that precious Constitution, you understand where real power lies.
It's not as if corporations or business are outside the realm of government, but inherent to it, and also compete with each other to insure the government reflects their own goals.
thus automatically less powerful than the government.
Except governments are at least localized, while corporations are trans-global. They can influence the polices of multitudes of governments.
The end, as you noted elsewhere, is to compel Reason into suspicious activity to its user base under trumped up charges. Not to mention what good is power unless you flaunt it every now and then?
The typical libertarian argument against government posits it as an all or nothing deal. The difficulty is not that the government gives you everything, it's that the beast must be tractable to, at a minimum, the rule of law and the will of the people. That holds true regardless of the size of government. Or corporation for that matter.
Not really. This is more a battle in Those Who Believe in the Rule of Law vs. The End Justifies the Means crowd.
A similar event happened when the NSA issued "official" letters to telecos demanding information. The NSA knew what they were asking for was illegal, the telecos also knew the requests were illegal, yet all complied except for Qwest. That didn't end well for them.
Of course. it is a different world now, where we can justify torture in the name of All-That-Is-Holy-And-Just, and the government regularly flaunts its power as it is accountable to no one.
What should be happening is an investigation into the Justice Department's request, and the rubber-stamping of the gag order. Not going to happen for small fry like Reason, but sends a clear message to those who question the status quo to mind your tongue. You are being monitored.
So I wonder what percentage of middle management this will push into hourly employees?
As it is, I've notice a seemingly endless half-days for them as they bitterly complain about those below them demanding comp. time as a minimum.
Now they are in the same boat. I see a lot of bloat being cut from their ranks.
Who am I kidding? They will just give raises to just clear the threshold of of being salaried while demanding even more time since everyone just got a raise.
This assumes that most of these girl specific initiatives intend to actually help girls. They aren't, and instead serve as flashpoints to draw money to charlatans, much like any of the "think of the children" campaigns from the last few decades.
I swear the similarities between modern feminism and the Satanism scare of the 80s are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
And the conclusion is correct- most of the women coders I know were, in part, goaded into familiarity by playing with their brothers.
On the other hand, only nerds know what Zork is. It's never made the leap out to the real world.
You've made essentially this same comment about other games in this thread, and I'm not sure it is a good metric to go by.
It would be like judging all of music by what is popular, since that is the only thing to have a real cultural impact (at least monetarily).
I'd rather if it were video game aficionado's pointing the way to the general public as to why these games are important, and perhaps how they shortchanged themselves by only following what is popular.
Too many forget we've been down this particular road before, and it ended with congress granting immunity to telecos for illegally supplying data without a warrant and woe be onto you if you question it like Quest.
That was the start of Obama's campaign, which he voted for immunity. Hilary as I recall voted against.
And now we're here, with everyone's data an open target.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone believe that VW didn't have technical managers? In the end, did it really make a difference?
I'd also argue requiring manager to come up from the ranks, while helpful in some respects, precludes the idea non-technical managers shouldn't have been attending bootcamps and the like in the first place. I'm expected to keep current in my field. Why should the bar be set so low for management not to learn about the department they are managing from day one?
That this is even under discussion highlights how utterly worthless most management is.
And in a even grander scheme of things, it makes me question the very notion of meritocracy. This is not the best and the brightest. This is barnacles on the engine of progress.
Not specific to the US, but how does the logic play out?
If Benz can't claim copyright on the Smart, how does "character" imbue the Batmobile with copyright protection? Couldn't Towle just wait for another to be built, and then copy that (not specific DC property) following the line "if a vehicle varies in its technical specification, then any external similarities are irrelevant".
It is a strange world where IP has more consideration than an actual creation.
As it is, you have had a long running attempt by shareholders to disciple corporate boards (read: gain more say in the operation of business) that has gone basically nowhere. On the other hand, you have corporate boards claiming short-sighted demands from shareholders irrevocably harming business.
And to be fair, both sides have merit, and both sides are corrupt, so exactly how to do you intend to pursue something as nebulous as accountability in such a scenario? It's wolves all the way down.
And in the unlikely scenario that criminal charges are leveled from this, you can almost be certain a degree of amnesty will be helped along from a few well placed campaign contributions. After all, (camera shot) you are hurting underlings that had nothing to do with this criminal activity.
The past few business scandals have made clear it is near impossible to address problems like these under current structures. At best, you can expect a slew of onerous compliance mandates, which even then, just end up fucking over the few honest players in this.
I mean I would delight if someone had a balanced approach to all this, but more and more it's just bad and worse threatening an even greater cesspool.
Except we know this to be a part of human nature, from the Milgram experiment to the Stanford Prison Experiment and onward. Most people tend to put their trust in authority figures, and it is the rare few who will say "I will not".
So while railing against people who aren't as ruggedly individualistic as you, keep in mind most people will never be tested in quite that way, so it's easy to pontificate what they would have done. If they were there. Except they weren't.
Basic training has a trope of "don't make a thief of your bunkmate", admonishing soldiers to keep valuables locked. Even the most upstanding person, someone who may later save your life, can be tempted under the right circumstances. The point is make certain those circumstances appear infrequently, so we can maintain this illusion of being fine moral agents, doing the right thing at least some of the time. Most would be horrified to learn how little it actual takes to subvert their stated morality. Luckily, most will never have the opportunity to find out either.
More-
For most entitlement programs, 2/3 of the cost is in administrative overhead. Eliminate most of that and you are mostly there.
Plus there are other intangible benefits like being able to take time off to get further training, less poverty based crime, and, in part, a much needed simplification to both tax and labor.
There are HUGE benefits to this that end up costing less tax dollars overall than the constant bickering over a few percentage points of taxation.
Simplify the tax code (partial to land value tax myself) and you have actually reduced the size of government.
To be fair, today's archeologist dig through the garbage dumps from aeons ago. Don't doubt for an instant future archeologist won't be doing the same to the garbage dumps of today.
Not to mention it is insanely tricky to decide today what will be relevant in the future. I have a book of graffiti from Pompeii. That probably gives me more insight into the times there than any official account.
The standard-bearer is that people will preserve what's important to them (including the means of accessing it. You do have a few DOS floppies stashed, right?), disregarding any copyright law (and thank god a few copies of Nosferatu escaped destruction), and preservation becomes democratized, for better or worse (I do long for the web of yesteryear). There is strength in numbers.
Or corporate interest win out and digital mediums are only accessed and licensed, but never owned, and unless they develop perfect storage; everything developed becomes a blackhole.
Right now, we are somewhere in-between.
Do you really want to go there?
The system responds to a set of inputs. It may be more complex than a single switch, but the function is little different than a power window that also has a lock to keep from being engaged. Oh noes! The car is deciding for me whether a window can be engaged or not! Apparently checking to see if the brakes or window is locked before engaging is decision making now. Pumping the brake I applied is apparently decision making now. Do you have any idea how absurd you sound? It's not like I can't perform the same function without the ABS.
And as already demonstrated, I can choose whether to engage the ABS by simply taking my foot off the brake and reapplying. That is worlds apart from a vehicle deciding to brake for me. Where is my disengage mechanism?
No, this line of thinking follows in the line of computers are magic, where a degree of complexity is apparently deciding for you. It's bunk, and is a red herring to the real question of the brakes being automatically applied as I swerve out of the way, and the car becomes uncontrollable. I see many lawsuits in the future.
God you are dense.
Following your line of logic, if you have electric windows, the car is deciding to open and close them, not you. If you have power brakes, the car is deciding to brake, not you. If you have cruise control, air conditioning, etc.
ABS modulates the brakes. That is more than fine hair away from deciding when you can and can not brake. Those of us who grew up without ABS still reflexively take our foot off the brakes when the wheel goes numb, and reapply because, get this, ABS only allows you to steer with locked brakes. Your actual stopping distance is longer than if you had applied the brakes short of engaging the ABS.
And you might have discovered the "1,2,3" past the "D" on an automatic transmission. Surprise! You can control the gearing just like a manual. The throttle body controls the throttle for automatic or manual.
But more to the point, implementation of automatic braking is going to be key. If it is noticeable for all the wrong reasons, it is just inviting people to disable it. And if it can't differentiate between a semi in front of me or a motorcycle, or when you happen to drafting on track days, several automakers could be facing lawsuits when sudden, unanticipated application of the brakes cause the vehicle to go out of control.
One of the economic problems brought about with the rise of trans-global companies is that capital is is fluid while labor is not. I'd be more than happy to live in an area that pays a lower wage as long as the cost of living was commensurately lower, but am disallowed to emigrate to another country. Funny how economist don't regard this as a distortion of the market, but the moment you mention tariffs, they throw their hands up in the air and talk about the evils of government meddling. Makes me want to go back to a gold standard just so they would have to pay for gold barges to pay their new staff. This disproportionality is somewhat addressed through the EU and other trade agreements, but is still looming as a crisis on the horizon: you can only slash and burn so often before you end up with banker's heads on pikes and Marx laughing from his grave.
Nor has economics made any inroads at addressing the problems with abundance. As many products of the tech boom are essentially digital, there is an unlimited supply which can only be profitable with artificial scarcity. Again, most economic theories I've read about are mostly silent about this distortion of the market, even going so far as to create abstractions like IP with a straight face.
It will be the height of irony if current capitalist models pave the way for market communism.
Small difference being unions are normally public in their associations and are a known entity when entering into negotiations, while agreements between businesses are private.
If any business wants to make it known to prospective employees they have agreements with other businesses to hold the cost on wages, fine.
Otherwise what you are describing is fraud.
Is it? I've noted this blind acceptance of this particular meme, while in the same breath demanding every iota of information (Facebook passwords, credit history, etc.) from prospective employees. And especially in this instance, no actual harm was done to Nintendo, so where is the justification?
People talking shop about their jobs is as old as the hills. The fact that this encompasses new technologies is maybe slightly different, but it is that gray area that the web inhabits between journalism and hobby.
And again, no harm was done by his disclosure.
But now Nintendo gets to look like paranoid control freak even more.
Well played.
Use to work with several menopausal women who wanted things noticable cooler than the others, and ultimately it was agreed that either the women could walk around near nude or the rest could wear sweaters. Sweaters were the easiest compromise.
So by the researchers findings, is that ageist or sexist? I see that attempting to accomodate with the least amount of fuss is far too difficult in this PC age, and now the battle of the sexes is even fought with the thermostat.
Imagine my surprise when they didn't differentiate between older and younger women, upbringing (feral children are known to run naked in the snow, delighting in the cold, and those in northern climates tend to prefer things cooler than those in the south), or any of the numerous other factors that affect perception of temperature.
Nope, just sexism.
Related- why the hell would you want to innovate at a place that looks unfavorably upon independent thinking? The absolute best thing that could happen is for that business to die a flaming death, consumed by their own ineptitude and bureaucracy. Taking matters into your own hands only extends their reach, propping up their inefficiencies to suck the life out of even more people.
Mooch a paycheck if it is the only thing available, but definitely keep your best work under wraps. They've made it abundantly clear that's not what they are paying you for, so oblige them, even going so far as to gleefully compound their organizational problems. You'll probably get a promotion out of it, which will set yourself up better for finding another job.
And your entire argument is essentially framing the discourse into something no has demanded.
However, there is a bit of misrepresentation, as reddit originally posited that they were a bastion of free speech. And while it is fashionable to view it as reddit, out of the goodness of their hearts, provided a free platform for miscreants to corrupt the youth, the other side to that is users operated in good faith that reddit would keep their end of the agreement in creating free content.
Not like they can take their ball and go home now is it?
And regardless, criticizing reddit does fall under free speech, does it not? The government aspect is just a red herring.
Brilliant!
Similarly, being in prison doesn't prevent you from voicing your opinions. Nor does being fined millions of dollars (just earn more money, citizen, so you too can enjoy the same freedoms of billionaires!) Nor does it prevent you from setting up a website to discuss controversial opinions.
Except when it does (funny how credit card companies refused to process donations to Wikileaks right after the release of the Afghan War Diary. But that was just private companies exercising their rights not to make a profit, and had nothing to do with government collusion. Nosiree!).
You might be a little slow on the uptake, but the definition of censorship doesn't specify government and non-government, and as there have been numerous other websites that were harangued by both governments and private companies being leaned on by governments.
You probably think a private company contracted by the government to doesn't abridge 4th amendment protections because, get this, it isn't the government doing it.
Except for the legislative framework that made it legal in the first place.
Idiot.
The essence of being a politician (in a representative democracy) is representing the interests of those who voted for you. Failure to do that is basically an abrogation of you duty. Otherwise we could just go with direct voting and cut out the middle-man.
Horse-trading is more in line with cutting deal. In a real world sense, it is the process of figuring out where your preferences lie. It may be a fine line, but it is there.
And neither have anything to do with the shady deals most politicians engage in. It is the pinnacle of moral relativism to excuse exercise of authority (and let's be frank, most of what happens in Congress is power for its own sake, with a thin veneer of regard to sell it) to betray, and name it just and good, and in the service of the public.
And especially that a politician would justify as such, especially after keeping a male prostitute while looking the other way at the imprisonment of others who would do the same, doesn't make you a paragon of real politic. It just means you are fucking corrupt.
Yeah, but this becomes more of an issue of moving the goalposts than anything else. If you say basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) can be addressed through welfare, someone always posits “but not everyone has a 1,000,000,000 Ferraris, so post-scarcity can’t exist!”, which was never the point in the first place. Is there enough over-production to cover food, clothes, and shelter? The answer is an emphatic yes.
And the most puzzling aspect is that working models have come from the right, with everything from negative income tax to basic income. And these were conceived as a means to reduce total welfare expenditure by making it more efficient.
So no, even Hayek endorsed a form of basic income, and not being forced to work to simply live changes the dynamic of business dramatically.
If anything, this whole debacle has made me question the Royal Society and UCL, It speaks poorly upon those organizations that they would go off half cocked without collecting evidence and performing a full investigation, which is the hallmark of good science.
And it makes me wonder how well they could handle a real controversy in the scientific community, when they can't weather a twitter storm of questionable origin. If you can't bear the slightest political intrigue, what makes you qualified to answer questions about the world? Just post the questions to twitter and let the masses decide the properties of time.
And especially now, when we have had similar occurrences in recent memory, with Donglegate and whatnot, I expect institutions of the pedigree of the Royal Society to show a little more discernment in handling situations like these. I mean christ, Sir Newton wasn't exactly an uncontroversial figure in his day, and that whole row was dealt with with more class and sobriety than this.
The scary future is here.
Then strictly speaking, you aren't a libertarian, but a peculiar brand of constitutionalist that ignores the following 200 years of changes to the Constitution and evolution of the government. Turn back the hands of time, and you still end up with more government centuries later. You are living in the end result of that document.
When so called libertarians pay lip service to necessary government, it is always a given that the government services they think are needed are Good and Right, and everyone else who wants superfluous services, but when you get down to brass tacks, the situation isn't nearly as clear. Is public health a necessary government function? What about in a time of biological warfare? And when you speak of not having welfare in the time of Jefferson, are you forgetting An Act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen? What a terribly ignorant and romanticized view of history.
Why? Do you believe the Constitution was transcribed from the mind of god? Any, organization of more than a few ends up with some form of government, or as you so euphemistically put it, mob rule.
The rest of us know it as the give and take of working within a group, and essentially "the will of the people" as opposed to "the will of the king". If your associations end in lynchings, I feel badly for you.
As proven by monarchies being smaller than republics, therefore must be easier to control, no? Or are platitudes by someone who has never had to deal with a corrupt small town government pass as fact now?
We can further reduce the size of the Federal government by getting rid of the checks and balances. Or maybe there is a flaw in your logic.
And with good reason. When a Mouse can buy legislation outright, nullifying that precious Constitution, you understand where real power lies.
It's not as if corporations or business are outside the realm of government, but inherent to it, and also compete with each other to insure the government reflects their own goals.
Except governments are at least localized, while corporations are trans-global. They can influence the polices of multitudes of governments.
You might rethink your notion of monopoly.
The end, as you noted elsewhere, is to compel Reason into suspicious activity to its user base under trumped up charges. Not to mention what good is power unless you flaunt it every now and then?
The typical libertarian argument against government posits it as an all or nothing deal. The difficulty is not that the government gives you everything, it's that the beast must be tractable to, at a minimum, the rule of law and the will of the people. That holds true regardless of the size of government. Or corporation for that matter.
Not really. This is more a battle in Those Who Believe in the Rule of Law vs. The End Justifies the Means crowd.
A similar event happened when the NSA issued "official" letters to telecos demanding information. The NSA knew what they were asking for was illegal, the telecos also knew the requests were illegal, yet all complied except for Qwest. That didn't end well for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course. it is a different world now, where we can justify torture in the name of All-That-Is-Holy-And-Just, and the government regularly flaunts its power as it is accountable to no one.
What should be happening is an investigation into the Justice Department's request, and the rubber-stamping of the gag order. Not going to happen for small fry like Reason, but sends a clear message to those who question the status quo to mind your tongue. You are being monitored.
Welcome to Police State 2.0.
So I wonder what percentage of middle management this will push into hourly employees?
As it is, I've notice a seemingly endless half-days for them as they bitterly complain about those below them demanding comp. time as a minimum.
Now they are in the same boat. I see a lot of bloat being cut from their ranks.
Who am I kidding? They will just give raises to just clear the threshold of of being salaried while demanding even more time since everyone just got a raise.
This assumes that most of these girl specific initiatives intend to actually help girls. They aren't, and instead serve as flashpoints to draw money to charlatans, much like any of the "think of the children" campaigns from the last few decades.
I swear the similarities between modern feminism and the Satanism scare of the 80s are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
And the conclusion is correct- most of the women coders I know were, in part, goaded into familiarity by playing with their brothers.
On the other hand, only nerds know what Zork is. It's never made the leap out to the real world.
You've made essentially this same comment about other games in this thread, and I'm not sure it is a good metric to go by.
It would be like judging all of music by what is popular, since that is the only thing to have a real cultural impact (at least monetarily).
I'd rather if it were video game aficionado's pointing the way to the general public as to why these games are important, and perhaps how they shortchanged themselves by only following what is popular.
And a vote for Sini-Star.
Oh, it gets better.
Too many forget we've been down this particular road before, and it ended with congress granting immunity to telecos for illegally supplying data without a warrant and woe be onto you if you question it like Quest.
That was the start of Obama's campaign, which he voted for immunity. Hilary as I recall voted against.
And now we're here, with everyone's data an open target.