Actually most of us who run barefoot find urban environments drastically easier and more comfortable than natural surfaces. The reason is simple. When your form is good, the hardness of the surface matters very little. You're generating less impact, and you're absorbing it with the muscles and tendons that are built to absorb it (mostly arch and calf).
It is sharp and irregular surfaces that are difficult to run on barefoot. Natural trails are very difficult for me, but I can easily run 11+ miles at a time on pavement barefoot, and I routinely do.
I ran the Boston Marathon yesterday in Vibram FiveFingers, which are like thin gloves for your feet. My marathon recovery is faster now that I run barefoot & nearly barefoot than it was in my shod days.
FWIW, I don't agree with all of Ron Paul's positions. But what makes me respect him is that he has principles and sticks to them. He would rather be right than popular. Quixotic, I know, but entertaining.
Ron Paul is awesome. He's the only person in congress who actually has principles and sticks with them, on every single vote. They call him "Mr. No" because he disapproves of almost everything congress does. His party has learned to just not bother trying to get him to stick to any kind of party line.
A voice in the wilderness, perhaps. But that's the best a principled person can do in that den of thieves and scoundrels.
Do you track your spending and try to stick to a budget? If not, you might be shocked to see how much better you can do if you try. Make some sacrifices and save money. Money in the bank gives you far more freedom.
Then you can quit and and use your savings as a cushion.
Interesting fact: The personal savings rate in the US has fallen so low that the only time it was lower was during the Great Depression. This does not bode well for our long term economic health.
Around the turn of the century the American Medical Association managed to get a government-mandated monopoly on health care. Naturally, they've used it to squash possible competition, limit the number of doctors, and drive up prices.
Is it any wonder that costs are out of control in our most highly regulated industry? We need medical deregulation.
Rather than an FDA that rules by force, we need a free market in medical decision making. Yes, people need advice from specialists. But they should choose who to listen to based on reputation - not because they're forced to.
Lest someone respond with "but people are too stupid for that", you'll need to explain how people too stupid to choose their own health care are supposed to intelligently evaluate and elect leaders capable of wisely choosing everyone's healthcare.
Subtle Economic Satire
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Any time they quote a price, it's given in Yuan - which is not a bad bet.:-)
Whether you charge consumers directly, or charge manufacturers, it is always the consumers who pay. Where do you think manufacturers get their money?
This is the same fallacy you hear when people talk about taxing employers rather than their employees. Nominally, your employer pays part of your social security taxes. But that's nothing but clever misdirection. The tax was taken into account when your salary was set, and if there was no such tax, your salary would be higher.
The same thing applies to sales taxes. When the intermediate stages of a product get taxed multiple times before finally getting sold to a consumer, it is the consumer who foots the bill for all those taxes - the producers can't just swallow the costs and expect to stay in business. That is why in many cases you're truly paying far more in sales tax than the nominal rate. You just don't see it because it's built into the price.
Market thinking excells at allocating scarce resources in the short term. For humanity to survive on a longer timeline, however, we need to embrace on a broad scale, biological processes, quit making 'waste' and start making 'food'.
That depends greatly on the nature of the people doing the thinking. And yes, the world today is full of people with stunted minds and incomplete characters.
200 years ago, everyone took it as a given that freedom and propserity hinge critically on the character of a people. Read Toqueville, for example. America achieved a previously unheard of level of liberty and wealth because its people were well-educated and habituated with self-reliance. Neither of those is remotely true anymore.
But it sounds like you believe freedom is the problem. Freedom is not the problem. Ignorance is the problem. You simply can't get around the ignorance, even if you eliminate the freedom. We've been steadily decreasing the freedom for 100 years, and it has only bred more ignorance and dependence.
Also, watch a movie called The End of Suburbia. More focused on oil, but still, totally worthwhile. When the revolution comes, don't say you weren't warned.
Here I can mostly agree with you. I don't know if peak oil will be the real problem, but what I do know is that Americans are likely to be blindsided by crisis in the not-very-distant future. TANSTAAFL. No gettin' around it.
Yeah, but they don't even have the capability anymore.
The most basic measure of space capability comes down to energy: how much deltaV can you impart to a given mass? Every practical aspect of exploration depends on this.
By this measure, NASA has regressed since the moon landings. They couldn't even go back today without starting from scratch.
Yes, the robotic probes have been interesting. But none of these missions required any fundamental improvement in space transport per se. NASA was able to piggyback on the rapid advances in computers to build some cool robots. But the rockets aren't getting any better.
... they make nothing but promises. Typical bureaucracy.
Opening up real space exploration would be simple: make it legal for private companies to build nuclear thermal rockets.
We're talking real space ships here. With that much power, you can afford to make them big, redundant, safe, and reusable. No more wimpy foam and composites - build it out of steel and have more engines than you need.
We, as humans create waste that no biological process can deal with. Now humanure can be composted and reused, but there's lots of stuff that is good for no living thing.
Tell that to all the anaerobic bacteria that produced our oxygen atmosphere. At the time, there were no living things that could use oxygen, and in fact it was poisonous to many of them.
Nevertheless, oxygen-using organisms evolved to take advantage of the situation, and ultimately took over, since aerobic respiration makes much more energy available for life.
We are a natural process. Our nuclear reactors are a natural process. The evolution of the Earth continues, through both biological and technological means (the line is blurring). It is simple arrogance to think we can direct the big picture to preserve some mythic pure state. The best we can do is make localized decisions that seem best to us as humans.
Before Gutenberg (the German, not the project), it was not possible to make money publishing books. After the Internet, the same has become true. The window has closed.
Many business models are only viable for a certain time period. Just like blacksmiths and candlemakers, the publishing industry is likely to survive only as a shadow of its former self.
In India, you can't just go and start a business, you need to get approval from a hideously obstructionist bureaucracy. China's economy is also subject to heavy government interference.
True. But both India and China are getting wealthier rather quickly. Both have a growing middle class. And historically, the rise of a middle class is the only route to lasting political freedom.
It benefits every consumer of the product in question. Fat profit margins don't last very long in a competitive market. That's why some companies are basically forced to outsource - their competitors are already passing lower costs on to customers.
When prices fall, every person is effectively a little bit richer, because the wealth they have will go farther. That is why free trade is a net win in the long run. One less dollar spent on software is one more dollar that can now be put to other use.
IBM just wants to make it's profit even bigger. By employing Indian's and sacking European's, they are doing just that. Sad but true.
Sad if you're a European. Excellent if you're an Indian.
How should a poor country try to get richer? By building up skills and capital to attract industry, which is exactly what India has done. More power to them. TANSTAAFL.
I find it amusing that many self-avowed liberals decry economic inequality, but then they complain when the market starts to shift wealth away from their own rich countries.
You misunderstand me. I'm not fighting one way or the other. I'm stating a fact. Hackers won't change, because hackers don't care.
I can assure you there are many people who use "hacker" and "to hack" frequently in their everyday language, and if you suggested that they abandon the term simply because John Q. Public uses it differently, they'd laugh at you.
All language is context sensitive. Know your audience and you'll be understood. It's pointless to critize BusinessWeek, but it's similarly pointless to criticize people who use the term among themselves for the older meaning.
I think you would be 100% more successful if you as a group decide to call yourselves something else and abandon the term hacker for what it has become.
That may be true. But it will never happen, because it is in the very nature of a hacker not to care what ignorant people think.
Every Tor node sets its own exit policy. But the default policy forbids any outbound connections on port 25.
So yes, you can become a spam relay. But it takes extra effort, and as of now there are no Tor nodes that actually allow it.
Exit policies are quite nice for other reasons too. If you want to just carry internal traffic and never expose yourself as an exit or entrance point, you can do that. If you want to restrict what kinds of outbound traffic you're willing to carrying, you can do that too.
If law enforcement had really stopped 108 nefarious terrorist plots, you can be sure we would be hearing about it nonstop. Because that's the surest way for the government to silence its critics - point out the threat. In reality, they've had to invent fictitious threats, like Iraq's WMD.
But you're still missing the key point here - even if all 108 cases were suspected terrorists nutjobs, that still can't justify unconstitutional searches, because they're just suspected. There's nothing to stop you from becoming a "suspected" terrorist too.
Liberty cannot survive in a system where there are two classes of people: normal people with rights, and terrorists. Rights exist specifically to protect people accused to heinous things.
Small children required to stand at attention, swearing oats they don't understand. Small children learning obidience to elders, to an organisation out of their parents control.
Scouting is entirely within their parents control, because nobody can sign up without parental permission, and the vast majority of the people running things are parents.
You comment does apply to public school however, where parents truly lack control, and children are truly taught to love and obey the State.
For me, scouting was an excellent antidote to school. I got to accomplish real things. Unlike in school.
A public school, like any bureaucracy, has its financial incentives backwards: the more they fail, the better their chances of arguing for a bigger budget next year.
In my home town it happens the same every year. The school board screams that if they don't get more money, they'll need to cancel <favorite program X>. Then they hand out pink slips to the teachers -- it's all a big show. Then they use the funds to hire their friends and family.
I've learnedenoughabout our education system to know I don't want my kids in the typical public school.
The obsession with design documents is a dogma that refuses to die. But it should.
It is folly to think anyone can sit down and plan out all the important parts of a complex piece of software without actually building and testing the ideas first.
You won't find your faulty thinking until you try to build it. So the goal should be building a working prototype as fast a possible. Using a powerful, high-level language makes this easier.
Start by building the primitive pieces you think you'll need, and continue by combining primitive pieces into higher level pieces. You'll frequently realize that some of your pieces need to change in order to fit together nicely, but the changes are small and local. That's the whole point.
You will change your design over time, if you want it to be any good. So don't waste time on elaborate design documents, and write your software with changeability (and as a corollary, readability) as your highest priority.
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Actually most of us who run barefoot find urban environments drastically easier and more comfortable than natural surfaces. The reason is simple. When your form is good, the hardness of the surface matters very little. You're generating less impact, and you're absorbing it with the muscles and tendons that are built to absorb it (mostly arch and calf).
It is sharp and irregular surfaces that are difficult to run on barefoot. Natural trails are very difficult for me, but I can easily run 11+ miles at a time on pavement barefoot, and I routinely do.
I ran the Boston Marathon yesterday in Vibram FiveFingers, which are like thin gloves for your feet. My marathon recovery is faster now that I run barefoot & nearly barefoot than it was in my shod days.
Why ask me, use the power of the Internet.
FWIW, I don't agree with all of Ron Paul's positions. But what makes me respect him is that he has principles and sticks to them. He would rather be right than popular. Quixotic, I know, but entertaining.
Ron Paul is awesome. He's the only person in congress who actually has principles and sticks with them, on every single vote. They call him "Mr. No" because he disapproves of almost everything congress does. His party has learned to just not bother trying to get him to stick to any kind of party line.
A voice in the wilderness, perhaps. But that's the best a principled person can do in that den of thieves and scoundrels.
Do you track your spending and try to stick to a budget? If not, you might be shocked to see how much better you can do if you try. Make some sacrifices and save money. Money in the bank gives you far more freedom.
Then you can quit and and use your savings as a cushion.
Interesting fact: The personal savings rate in the US has fallen so low that the only time it was lower was during the Great Depression. This does not bode well for our long term economic health.
North America still has significant wild megafauna.
I just got back from Denali National Park where I saw several moose, caribou, Dall sheep, and four grizzly bears - all in one day.
Around the turn of the century the American Medical Association managed to get a government-mandated monopoly on health care. Naturally, they've used it to squash possible competition, limit the number of doctors, and drive up prices.
Is it any wonder that costs are out of control in our most highly regulated industry? We need medical deregulation.
Rather than an FDA that rules by force, we need a free market in medical decision making. Yes, people need advice from specialists. But they should choose who to listen to based on reputation - not because they're forced to.
Lest someone respond with "but people are too stupid for that", you'll need to explain how people too stupid to choose their own health care are supposed to intelligently evaluate and elect leaders capable of wisely choosing everyone's healthcare.
Any time they quote a price, it's given in Yuan - which is not a bad bet. :-)
The era of a dollar-dominated world is ending.
Whether you charge consumers directly, or charge manufacturers, it is always the consumers who pay. Where do you think manufacturers get their money?
This is the same fallacy you hear when people talk about taxing employers rather than their employees. Nominally, your employer pays part of your social security taxes. But that's nothing but clever misdirection. The tax was taken into account when your salary was set, and if there was no such tax, your salary would be higher.
The same thing applies to sales taxes. When the intermediate stages of a product get taxed multiple times before finally getting sold to a consumer, it is the consumer who foots the bill for all those taxes - the producers can't just swallow the costs and expect to stay in business. That is why in many cases you're truly paying far more in sales tax than the nominal rate. You just don't see it because it's built into the price.
Market thinking excells at allocating scarce resources in the short term. For humanity to survive on a longer timeline, however, we need to embrace on a broad scale, biological processes, quit making 'waste' and start making 'food'.
That depends greatly on the nature of the people doing the thinking. And yes, the world today is full of people with stunted minds and incomplete characters.
200 years ago, everyone took it as a given that freedom and propserity hinge critically on the character of a people. Read Toqueville, for example. America achieved a previously unheard of level of liberty and wealth because its people were well-educated and habituated with self-reliance. Neither of those is remotely true anymore.
But it sounds like you believe freedom is the problem. Freedom is not the problem. Ignorance is the problem. You simply can't get around the ignorance, even if you eliminate the freedom. We've been steadily decreasing the freedom for 100 years, and it has only bred more ignorance and dependence.
Also, watch a movie called The End of Suburbia. More focused on oil, but still, totally worthwhile. When the revolution comes, don't say you weren't warned.
Here I can mostly agree with you. I don't know if peak oil will be the real problem, but what I do know is that Americans are likely to be blindsided by crisis in the not-very-distant future. TANSTAAFL. No gettin' around it.
It's not like they went to the Moon or anything.
Yeah, but they don't even have the capability anymore.
The most basic measure of space capability comes down to energy: how much deltaV can you impart to a given mass? Every practical aspect of exploration depends on this.
By this measure, NASA has regressed since the moon landings. They couldn't even go back today without starting from scratch.
Yes, the robotic probes have been interesting. But none of these missions required any fundamental improvement in space transport per se. NASA was able to piggyback on the rapid advances in computers to build some cool robots. But the rockets aren't getting any better.
... they make nothing but promises. Typical bureaucracy.
Opening up real space exploration would be simple: make it legal for private companies to build nuclear thermal rockets.
We're talking real space ships here. With that much power, you can afford to make them big, redundant, safe, and reusable. No more wimpy foam and composites - build it out of steel and have more engines than you need.
We, as humans create waste that no biological process can deal with. Now humanure can be composted and reused, but there's lots of stuff that is good for no living thing.
Tell that to all the anaerobic bacteria that produced our oxygen atmosphere. At the time, there were no living things that could use oxygen, and in fact it was poisonous to many of them.
Nevertheless, oxygen-using organisms evolved to take advantage of the situation, and ultimately took over, since aerobic respiration makes much more energy available for life.
We are a natural process. Our nuclear reactors are a natural process. The evolution of the Earth continues, through both biological and technological means (the line is blurring). It is simple arrogance to think we can direct the big picture to preserve some mythic pure state. The best we can do is make localized decisions that seem best to us as humans.
Before Gutenberg (the German, not the project), it was not possible to make money publishing books. After the Internet, the same has become true. The window has closed.
Many business models are only viable for a certain time period. Just like blacksmiths and candlemakers, the publishing industry is likely to survive only as a shadow of its former self.
In India, you can't just go and start a business, you need to get approval from a hideously obstructionist bureaucracy. China's economy is also subject to heavy government interference.
True. But both India and China are getting wealthier rather quickly. Both have a growing middle class. And historically, the rise of a middle class is the only route to lasting political freedom.
We live in interesting times...
So who does it benefit?
It benefits every consumer of the product in question. Fat profit margins don't last very long in a competitive market. That's why some companies are basically forced to outsource - their competitors are already passing lower costs on to customers.
When prices fall, every person is effectively a little bit richer, because the wealth they have will go farther. That is why free trade is a net win in the long run. One less dollar spent on software is one more dollar that can now be put to other use.
IBM just wants to make it's profit even bigger. By employing Indian's and sacking European's, they are doing just that. Sad but true.
Sad if you're a European. Excellent if you're an Indian.
How should a poor country try to get richer? By building up skills and capital to attract industry, which is exactly what India has done. More power to them. TANSTAAFL.
I find it amusing that many self-avowed liberals decry economic inequality, but then they complain when the market starts to shift wealth away from their own rich countries.
You misunderstand me. I'm not fighting one way or the other. I'm stating a fact. Hackers won't change, because hackers don't care.
I can assure you there are many people who use "hacker" and "to hack" frequently in their everyday language, and if you suggested that they abandon the term simply because John Q. Public uses it differently, they'd laugh at you.
All language is context sensitive. Know your audience and you'll be understood. It's pointless to critize BusinessWeek, but it's similarly pointless to criticize people who use the term among themselves for the older meaning.
I think you would be 100% more successful if you as a group decide to call yourselves something else and abandon the term hacker for what it has become.
That may be true. But it will never happen, because it is in the very nature of a hacker not to care what ignorant people think.
You could possibly use it to spam as well.
Every Tor node sets its own exit policy. But the default policy forbids any outbound connections on port 25.
So yes, you can become a spam relay. But it takes extra effort, and as of now there are no Tor nodes that actually allow it.
Exit policies are quite nice for other reasons too. If you want to just carry internal traffic and never expose yourself as an exit or entrance point, you can do that. If you want to restrict what kinds of outbound traffic you're willing to carrying, you can do that too.
If law enforcement had really stopped 108 nefarious terrorist plots, you can be sure we would be hearing about it nonstop. Because that's the surest way for the government to silence its critics - point out the threat. In reality, they've had to invent fictitious threats, like Iraq's WMD.
But you're still missing the key point here - even if all 108 cases were suspected terrorists nutjobs, that still can't justify unconstitutional searches, because they're just suspected. There's nothing to stop you from becoming a "suspected" terrorist too.
Liberty cannot survive in a system where there are two classes of people: normal people with rights, and terrorists. Rights exist specifically to protect people accused to heinous things.
The downside is that it creates a whole new class of ways that a corrupt government official could screw you over.
Power corrupts. And we keep adding to the power.
If everyone in the government was always both honest and competent, we would have no need for liberty.
Actually, the Catholic church is on record as being OK with evolution.
(Although they have some specific reservations about "ensoulment" - ie people somehow got souls whereas other life forms didn't.)
The vocally anti-evolution Christians are almost all Protestants, not Catholics.
Small children required to stand at attention, swearing oats they don't understand. Small children learning obidience to elders, to an organisation out of their parents control.
Scouting is entirely within their parents control, because nobody can sign up without parental permission, and the vast majority of the people running things are parents.
You comment does apply to public school however, where parents truly lack control, and children are truly taught to love and obey the State.
For me, scouting was an excellent antidote to school. I got to accomplish real things. Unlike in school.
A public school, like any bureaucracy, has its financial incentives backwards: the more they fail, the better their chances of arguing for a bigger budget next year.
In my home town it happens the same every year. The school board screams that if they don't get more money, they'll need to cancel <favorite program X>. Then they hand out pink slips to the teachers -- it's all a big show. Then they use the funds to hire their friends and family.
I've learned enough about our education system to know I don't want my kids in the typical public school.
Three words for you: bottom up design.
The obsession with design documents is a dogma that refuses to die. But it should.
It is folly to think anyone can sit down and plan out all the important parts of a complex piece of software without actually building and testing the ideas first.
You won't find your faulty thinking until you try to build it. So the goal should be building a working prototype as fast a possible. Using a powerful, high-level language makes this easier.
Start by building the primitive pieces you think you'll need, and continue by combining primitive pieces into higher level pieces. You'll frequently realize that some of your pieces need to change in order to fit together nicely, but the changes are small and local. That's the whole point.
You will change your design over time, if you want it to be any good. So don't waste time on elaborate design documents, and write your software with changeability (and as a corollary, readability) as your highest priority.