Couldn't disagree more. Neither party is in favor of freedom. The far right wishes for less taxes, and more freedom for business interests which in turn limit our personal freedom. The far left wishes for more control over businesses, limiting the freedom of those who run them and by proxy limiting our freedom for self-sufficiency.
It's funny you bring up China. The right wing is selling us out to China via enabling corporate exodus through tax loopholes and labor arbitrage. The left is selling us out to China by spending more money than individuals want/can afford to pay in taxes, thus raising taxes on corporations who simply move to the cheapest country.
Freedom from either party is very inconsistent and I believe an accident or pure politics in any case where you see it happening. The left is constantly trying to enhance gun control laws, and push minority agendas (which create "fairness" by impugning your freedom), the right is constantly shitting on social issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.), or trying to force their strange "christian" religion on us. There's no freedom here but what we vote in, usually by accident, in the form of split congress.
Net neutrality...even the NAME is ambiguous, I'm not sure if I'm for "net neutrality" or against it. What I want is for our telecom providers to hook me to the internet, make sure my packets get through 100% of the time, stay the hell out of the content and charge me for the size of the pipe they provide me. I'm pretty sure no side or faction of this issue in Washington actually is fighting for this, the government wants to wiretap, google wants lock it's business in, the carriers want a bigger cut and the ability to use their monopoly to play God, wireless companies want "a reason to invest" (other than the bags of money customers pay monthly).
No one is worried about your freedom there, other than you. And you may have an ally in me, provided we agree that this isn't a football game, and neither of us wins in the D vs. R superbowl.
And one has to wonder if it's actually the technology or the person on the other end of the computer that's causing lost sleep. If I spend an hour before I go to bed dealing with work email (which at this hour is largely generated in Taiwan/China), I don't sleep well, only because those idiots are screwing up and this comes back to me.
Whereas in the pre-computer era I guess you left work at a reasonable hour and had some down-time before bed. Although I hesitate to guess that one filling my job in this era would have been up equally long identifying and requesting fixes to mistakes made overseas and sending them a long, angry memo, before driving home and sleeping.
So maybe the real cause of lost sleep is the blurring line between work life and personal life and/or the increasing productivity demands of a shitty economy and a lack of viable options for employees?
I kind of think this "pulling a jordan" comment is pretty rude, and I'd expect it from a troll thread. Jordan died, most likely against his better judgement. I expect Martin shares our concerns about his potential expiry in the next decade, and also hopes that he doesn't die.
I understand the impatience, I love the series too, but I think this "pulling a jordan" mentality is hurting everyone. All 4 books have been great, I'd be more afraid that the next book will be a let-down than that the next book won't appear. Trainwrecking the series would be a worse fate than not seeing another entry.
Caprica could have been good, if it had a plotectomy. Somewhere around the time when Zoe was pit fighting WhateverHerNameWas in VR world, I was hoping SyFy would just cancel the show in mid-air and put Tom & Jerry on for the remaining time instead.
Thus far in my life, I have never gone to the bank and asked to make a withdrawal of money I had in account, and been denied. I think this is nearly unheard of. My great-grandmother told us some different stories (before and after 1913). My parents do not in their lifetime recall having been denied, nor did my grandmother who was born somewhere around 1928 (though during her early years it must certainly have been common, she would have been too young to recall it).
In my lifetime I recall 3 major economic downturns, each worse than the last, during which I personally experienced temporary devaluation of my investments, and generally slower growth than I might have expected based on prior data. In spite of this, all my investments are worth more than what I put in to them, even right now, though I do expect when dealing with "investments" that I may lose money. If I didn't want to lose money I wouldn't "invest", I'd put it in an insured bank account, or not trusting that, buy non-perishable commodities and try to hide them around the house.
So though I suspect your comment was snarky, I think we did put a stop to that. The question is have we let enough safeguards erode such that our overall economic stability might return us to my great-grandmothers time of bank panics and shortages.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese people don't want Green Dam and would happily agree to a C&D, but I'm pretty sure they don't care enough about it to stop the government that put it there. Similarly to how the US doesn't particularly like how we're sending our research, development and manufacturing overseas, but doesn't care enough to actually stop the corporate interests that bought the government that facilitate it.
The fact is that Americans and Chinese are similar: we're more or less content and won't rock the boat until a crisis comes. Then when it's too late, we'll be rioting on the streets demanding an overthrow of whatever poor sucker happens to be in charge.
Or you use a copyrighted image for fb that you don't own the copyright to (and thus couldn't have implictly given to Facebook), wait untill the lawsuits start! I think this idea won't get too far.
While I agree that experience should, of course, count towards salary
I disagree. The only thing that should be important in your salary is your ability to do the job asked of you. If during the interview your skills are assessed at a junior level for the task at hand, regardless of your years of service, you deserve to be paid accordingly. If your experience is in fact valuable, that should fall out of the assessment process.
I do question whether a college fresh out has the ability to work within a corporate environment with a large team, screwy marketing requirements while also maintaining his code, maintaining the builds and source control etc. as well as someone with more experience. One would hope that a company is considering all of these things when assessing skills and salary levels, but these things have a way of working themselves out (not always for the best).
But it's ok to attack "the science media" right? I mean, the Minnesota Star Tribune is definitely science media and deliberately created this confusion to generate a chorus of golf claps amidst a sea of hysteria. These are all facts in evidence, right? I mean the reasonable assessment may be that an astronomer may not necessarily be an expert in astrology, and either the journalist/editor who created the article didn't realize this (yikes) or didn't bother to fact check. But clearly this is the work of a conspiracy.
All around the world scientists routinely gather around discussing with each other the various ways in which to improve their self-esteem by making random attacks on such well grounded theories as astrology, creationism, intelligent design, homeopathy, rain dancing, accupuncture and braille gynecology, because these are such strong and compelling branches of human knowledge that without the occasional slap in the face, science would surely fail, and research funding would disappear. Right? Or maybe it's the red-headed stepchild mentality, science may be strong but to collectively feel good about ourselves, we periodically slap around an astrologists for shits and giggles?
Is any of this triggering your sense of the ridiculous yet? Because my suspension of disbelief hasn't been this high since the last Rocky movie.
We also dump on creationism and Intelligent Design, and can't be bothered to read on them either. Take your righteous indignation and get in line behind the animists and the homeopaths.
I'm saying if you place no value on classic literature or the pieces therein which make it "great", it is stupid on a relative basis to literature you do read which you value, which may or may not involve phasers.
A summer blockbuster movie is certainly a hit or miss affair, however going in to it you know you're going to get some action, explosions, and unlikely love matchups. Or for the same time/money you can try to see "a film". Even a bad blockbuster will deliver what you went in expecting. A bad "film", however, will suck your soul dry, as you endure 2 hours of unending boredom and soul crushing agony. At least to my tastes. Films and blockbusters have roughly the same ratio of good:bad. For me, seeing a film is thus a stupid decision, as I am more likely to walk away bitter and disappointed. Not all people feel as I do of course, some would rather sit through a noble attempt and try to find the good in it, rather than be gee-whizzed. To each his own.
"Stupid" is in the eye of the beholder. Books with high literary value, but limited entertainment value don't normally rate high on my pleasure reading list. Anything Steinbeck ever wrote falls easily beneath this threshold, I might consider terrorism before I read East of Eden again. However my sister might sit around reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and be enthralled, hold debates with people performing intelligent analysis of the characters and speculating about what the author might have been doing. The girl barely made it through algebra and thinks photons are a made up thing for Star Trek, but the depth of study she can perform on some of these books is impressive.
"Stupid" in the sense of "unintelligent" is unfair, but "stupid" in the sense of "a poor relative benefit" probably applies.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't disagree more. Neither party is in favor of freedom. The far right wishes for less taxes, and more freedom for business interests which in turn limit our personal freedom. The far left wishes for more control over businesses, limiting the freedom of those who run them and by proxy limiting our freedom for self-sufficiency.
It's funny you bring up China. The right wing is selling us out to China via enabling corporate exodus through tax loopholes and labor arbitrage. The left is selling us out to China by spending more money than individuals want/can afford to pay in taxes, thus raising taxes on corporations who simply move to the cheapest country.
Freedom from either party is very inconsistent and I believe an accident or pure politics in any case where you see it happening. The left is constantly trying to enhance gun control laws, and push minority agendas (which create "fairness" by impugning your freedom), the right is constantly shitting on social issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.), or trying to force their strange "christian" religion on us. There's no freedom here but what we vote in, usually by accident, in the form of split congress.
Net neutrality...even the NAME is ambiguous, I'm not sure if I'm for "net neutrality" or against it. What I want is for our telecom providers to hook me to the internet, make sure my packets get through 100% of the time, stay the hell out of the content and charge me for the size of the pipe they provide me. I'm pretty sure no side or faction of this issue in Washington actually is fighting for this, the government wants to wiretap, google wants lock it's business in, the carriers want a bigger cut and the ability to use their monopoly to play God, wireless companies want "a reason to invest" (other than the bags of money customers pay monthly).
No one is worried about your freedom there, other than you. And you may have an ally in me, provided we agree that this isn't a football game, and neither of us wins in the D vs. R superbowl.
And one has to wonder if it's actually the technology or the person on the other end of the computer that's causing lost sleep. If I spend an hour before I go to bed dealing with work email (which at this hour is largely generated in Taiwan/China), I don't sleep well, only because those idiots are screwing up and this comes back to me.
Whereas in the pre-computer era I guess you left work at a reasonable hour and had some down-time before bed. Although I hesitate to guess that one filling my job in this era would have been up equally long identifying and requesting fixes to mistakes made overseas and sending them a long, angry memo, before driving home and sleeping.
So maybe the real cause of lost sleep is the blurring line between work life and personal life and/or the increasing productivity demands of a shitty economy and a lack of viable options for employees?
Its belt matches its shoes.
I kind of think this "pulling a jordan" comment is pretty rude, and I'd expect it from a troll thread. Jordan died, most likely against his better judgement. I expect Martin shares our concerns about his potential expiry in the next decade, and also hopes that he doesn't die.
I understand the impatience, I love the series too, but I think this "pulling a jordan" mentality is hurting everyone. All 4 books have been great, I'd be more afraid that the next book will be a let-down than that the next book won't appear. Trainwrecking the series would be a worse fate than not seeing another entry.
which probably isn't an accident.
Except as he poitned out in the summary, it's not even all expenses paid.
He's going to Utah. No drinking, no sex, strong religious message. It's kind of like your employer giving you an all expenses paid trip to a convent.
difficult to do without knowing the purchase price, which I assume is what they want to recoup. I can't imagine owning a .org domain is that expensive.
Caprica could have been good, if it had a plotectomy. Somewhere around the time when Zoe was pit fighting WhateverHerNameWas in VR world, I was hoping SyFy would just cancel the show in mid-air and put Tom & Jerry on for the remaining time instead.
Thus far in my life, I have never gone to the bank and asked to make a withdrawal of money I had in account, and been denied. I think this is nearly unheard of. My great-grandmother told us some different stories (before and after 1913). My parents do not in their lifetime recall having been denied, nor did my grandmother who was born somewhere around 1928 (though during her early years it must certainly have been common, she would have been too young to recall it).
In my lifetime I recall 3 major economic downturns, each worse than the last, during which I personally experienced temporary devaluation of my investments, and generally slower growth than I might have expected based on prior data. In spite of this, all my investments are worth more than what I put in to them, even right now, though I do expect when dealing with "investments" that I may lose money. If I didn't want to lose money I wouldn't "invest", I'd put it in an insured bank account, or not trusting that, buy non-perishable commodities and try to hide them around the house.
So though I suspect your comment was snarky, I think we did put a stop to that. The question is have we let enough safeguards erode such that our overall economic stability might return us to my great-grandmothers time of bank panics and shortages.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese people don't want Green Dam and would happily agree to a C&D, but I'm pretty sure they don't care enough about it to stop the government that put it there. Similarly to how the US doesn't particularly like how we're sending our research, development and manufacturing overseas, but doesn't care enough to actually stop the corporate interests that bought the government that facilitate it.
The fact is that Americans and Chinese are similar: we're more or less content and won't rock the boat until a crisis comes. Then when it's too late, we'll be rioting on the streets demanding an overthrow of whatever poor sucker happens to be in charge.
tl;dr version: hurr :), durr :), derp :)
What does it say when I have only 24 facebook friends and I'm still stressed out by all the "noise".
Or you use a copyrighted image for fb that you don't own the copyright to (and thus couldn't have implictly given to Facebook), wait untill the lawsuits start! I think this idea won't get too far.
No, not every time, here's one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
I want my whiskey back.
While I agree that experience should, of course, count towards salary
I disagree. The only thing that should be important in your salary is your ability to do the job asked of you. If during the interview your skills are assessed at a junior level for the task at hand, regardless of your years of service, you deserve to be paid accordingly. If your experience is in fact valuable, that should fall out of the assessment process.
I do question whether a college fresh out has the ability to work within a corporate environment with a large team, screwy marketing requirements while also maintaining his code, maintaining the builds and source control etc. as well as someone with more experience. One would hope that a company is considering all of these things when assessing skills and salary levels, but these things have a way of working themselves out (not always for the best).
But it's ok to attack "the science media" right? I mean, the Minnesota Star Tribune is definitely science media and deliberately created this confusion to generate a chorus of golf claps amidst a sea of hysteria. These are all facts in evidence, right? I mean the reasonable assessment may be that an astronomer may not necessarily be an expert in astrology, and either the journalist/editor who created the article didn't realize this (yikes) or didn't bother to fact check. But clearly this is the work of a conspiracy.
All around the world scientists routinely gather around discussing with each other the various ways in which to improve their self-esteem by making random attacks on such well grounded theories as astrology, creationism, intelligent design, homeopathy, rain dancing, accupuncture and braille gynecology, because these are such strong and compelling branches of human knowledge that without the occasional slap in the face, science would surely fail, and research funding would disappear. Right? Or maybe it's the red-headed stepchild mentality, science may be strong but to collectively feel good about ourselves, we periodically slap around an astrologists for shits and giggles?
Is any of this triggering your sense of the ridiculous yet? Because my suspension of disbelief hasn't been this high since the last Rocky movie.
Don't come a knockin' when the 7th house is a rockin', mars is in venus and neptune's aligned with uranus.
We also dump on creationism and Intelligent Design, and can't be bothered to read on them either. Take your righteous indignation and get in line behind the animists and the homeopaths.
As a former Taurus, I'm now an Aries. If you can teach a bull to fly, you can be sure the bullshit is about to hit the fan.
I could care less, but that would take effort.
I'm saying if you place no value on classic literature or the pieces therein which make it "great", it is stupid on a relative basis to literature you do read which you value, which may or may not involve phasers.
A summer blockbuster movie is certainly a hit or miss affair, however going in to it you know you're going to get some action, explosions, and unlikely love matchups. Or for the same time/money you can try to see "a film". Even a bad blockbuster will deliver what you went in expecting. A bad "film", however, will suck your soul dry, as you endure 2 hours of unending boredom and soul crushing agony. At least to my tastes. Films and blockbusters have roughly the same ratio of good:bad. For me, seeing a film is thus a stupid decision, as I am more likely to walk away bitter and disappointed. Not all people feel as I do of course, some would rather sit through a noble attempt and try to find the good in it, rather than be gee-whizzed. To each his own.
Actually "Refried Strüdel". But I think this may be the exception...
"Stupid" is in the eye of the beholder. Books with high literary value, but limited entertainment value don't normally rate high on my pleasure reading list. Anything Steinbeck ever wrote falls easily beneath this threshold, I might consider terrorism before I read East of Eden again. However my sister might sit around reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and be enthralled, hold debates with people performing intelligent analysis of the characters and speculating about what the author might have been doing. The girl barely made it through algebra and thinks photons are a made up thing for Star Trek, but the depth of study she can perform on some of these books is impressive.
"Stupid" in the sense of "unintelligent" is unfair, but "stupid" in the sense of "a poor relative benefit" probably applies.