They did this in the new Outer Limits already... remember the old guy who just wouldn't die and wanted the heart corset instead of giving it to the teenage girl.:)
That's easy... you just sprinkle "perkele" and "vittu" around the sentence. Perkele is a kind of interjection, "vittu" can be used also as a modifier, as in "vitun..."
Can't be so. Did the stupid kids who are dropping the possessive suffix get their way or something? I mean, accusative and genetive have completely different semantic jobs regardless of being mostly syntactically identical... that's the most idiotic grammar-revisionist idea I've heard for a long time:(
Next, you'll be telling me Darth Vader is Luke's father or something...
How the fuck can a 15-year old girl's wealth generation ability be enough for some fancy artificial heart?? Her parents better have paid for it, or otherwise it distorted the market and reduced my ability to make more profits.
There was an excellent Outer Limits episode (1x05) of exactly this kind of an event, but of course Socialist propaganda was injected into it to make the ending morally repugnant.
Question 30 is cosmologically incorrect as well in the sense that there is no origin of the Big Bang anything is moving away from. Galaxies -- the right answer I presume -- move away from each other, but not from some zero-point...
After first reading, my first hopeful impression was further research was going to involve "screwing" the "local female population" in order to obtain "data"... I would love to donate my genes for observation as they flow down the line;)
IMO, capital gains are capital gains. If you stick some amount of real-world currency into a virtual economy and out of it comes a greater amount of real-world currency, you've made capital gains which are taxable in the usual manner. It's the increase of real-world currency that should be plugged into in the usual way, and not bring real-world taxation systems into the virtual world...
Glad you noticed. I was thinking about the same thing about Iraq today before reading your post. The Free Market was supposed to magically solve all of Iraq's problems overnight, and yet I read in the news that a huge number of Iraqis are at the moment in critical need for outside aid, as the whole society is essentially collapsing. I kind of believe that if there had been a little less ideological dogmatism involved, giving the Iraqis a generous oil-funded social democracy would have allowed for a dignified US exit from a pacified country; if you're politically so opposed to the idea, don't you think the Iraqi democracy would have sorted out the possible "inefficiencies" in due time, at their own pace?
It's quite remarkable how indoctrinated Americans are against the public sector. I think it's a self-reinforcing cultural feature though; when you believe from the outset it won't and can't work, and that it must not be allowed to work, it won't. It takes quite a bit of civic pride and involvement, which takes a long time to cultivate. I'm from Europe and a lot of the American ideas about how things work (or don't work) here seem to be to be just ideologically motivated scaremongering that has very little to do with reality... fundamentally, a public-sector organization is just like any other organization, and thus is vulnerable to the same kind of problems. They are taken care of by transparency and good management, just like anywhere else.
Of course a public sector has other goals besides profit-maximization (which is in turn the private sector's role), but that's the whole point really, so it is not an inherent weakness. And to all of those who drool at the prospect of the imminent economic collapse of pinko Europe because it's all unaffordable (and would be even more so in the world's supposedly richest country, the USA)... well.. we're doing better than ever economically, the USD is toilet paper compared to the Euro, my stock market investments in Europe are doing remarkably well... and I have no intent to diversify to the US, as I'm just watching the slow-motion train wreck develop around your questionable debt-fueled bubble economy, which is going to SO sink your regular Joe and Jane Consumer who are then going to die agonizing deaths when they catch something nasty and can't afford to get treated for it. A brutal fate unimaginable here.
I really prefer a bit of Socialism in my society, thank you very much..:P
I find it fascinating how "economic" reconstruction is mentioned first. The neocons just can't hide the fact that they're after the oil, and political reform is just a tool to that end.
All the USA would have had to do after toppling Saddam would have been to pretty much set up a democratic government without interfering too much in the general way the country was organized and run -- most of the structures could and should have been left in place. You would have ended up with an Arab-social-democracy funded by oil that the US would have bought just like anyone else. Sure, it wouldn't have been the beautiful, ideologically correct social darwinist dystopia where people make use of their Freedom to the fullest in order to survive, but I bet it would have been far better a reconstruction strategy than any after the fact aid strategy that the Iraqis would have ended up paying for anyway.
Now, had you been so awfully concerned about the evil Socialism that would have crept into the system this way, surely you will also trust in democracy. The Iraqis would have privatized stuff in due time, at proper prices, in order to make their government more efficient. This would have been far more preferable to the looting laws the puppet government in the Green Zone is currently passing.
Had there been a little bit less ideology, a lot of people would have survived, a lot of Iraqis would be much happier, and Iraq would face a much brighter future...
If someone is really planning on seriously web-developing anything, it shouldn't be an issue to set up a Linux development environment on their own. They might actually learn something about how stuff works in the process.
RoR in general is weird like this -- yes, you might be able to "create a blogging application in 2 minutes" by calling some appropriate code-generation wizards, but does that really make you a developer who is able to actually do something on his own outside the scope of what is provided out of the box?
I don't think I said anywhere I do not want to give people the freedom over their own bodies. Of course they have the right to refuse treatment if they so choose; but I also can have my own point of view regarding whether such a choice is a rational one, and whether pushing such a POV that outright demonizes treatment through organizations I'm involved in is something I think we should be doing!
Objectively speaking, I'd rather not be disabled. It is not such a crucial part of who I am that I couldn't leave it behind given the chance. I can't force people to feel otherwise, but I can offer them the chance to be honest about it.
I'd rather not "wait for a cure" but mobilize resources for finding one. And in the meantime while we don't have it, we can certainly seek to spend our time on more immediate-term projects that improve quality of life... and yes, society's attitudes are a big part of it. Accessibility, for example, enables so much and helps one to help oneself. My problem with the social-model style semantic trickery is that it a) turns a "simple and contained" and possibly resolvable medical issue into one that is rather oppressively all around the individual, pretty much everywhere and b) it makes communication with outsiders so much more difficult because of the impenetrable jargon and conceptualizing...
You're sounding a lot like some of the activist friends I have who start blaming me for wanting power over them when I'm saying that they might just consider the fact that they are not bound by honor or a desire to seem like some disabled heroes (a bit of a cult within the disabled activist community). They just actively miss the point, like you do.
It's an interesting issue I have come across as I've been involved in the (European) disability rights movement. Some people within it are VERY much against treating disability as a "medical flaw" in the person that is in need of a cure; they have internalized disability so deeply, that it almost offends their identity to suggest disability is something a cure should be sought for. Instead, according to the so-called "social model" of disability, the hindrances are not caused by the disability, but because there is a mismatch between the person's abilities and the surrounding society.
I've had long discussions about this with a certain otherwise bright girl with CP who is nevertheless an unyielding hippie and who claims that seriously, she wouldn't want to be cured even if a cure were available, as it would alter who she is. And this is a person who is in a wheelchair. Considering that I am a wheelchair-using cripple too, that kind of a position is hard to comprehend. Make my bones not break easily and give me some 50cm more height and my life would be much easier, and I don't think I would lose anything I particularly love about my life!
Of course, the whole medical/social model of disability discussion which unfortunately seems to preoccupy so much of the minds involved in the disability movement is just semantic bullshit that seeks to shift the "blame" for the issue away from the person, and make us feel less like medical objects that need to be conformant to some ideal we don't fit. IMO, while there is limited sense in arguing that people have the right to be who they are, mostly this seems to just expose insecurities in disabled thought... there is a need to be so defensive of our disability, that we end up actually hurting our own cause by saying that the problem doesn't really even exist, and that attempts to make things better on a personal, "individual-altering" basis are "wrong"! Worse yet, producing sociology papers on this topic is such huge intellectual masturbation that I am absolutely certain the time and effort could be better used trying to find actual, pragmatic solutions to issues...
I guess some people are just so traumatized by the almost imagined "blame" and medical "objectification" that they just aren't able to see that it would be OK to accept a cure... at least to me to be able to say that is liberating. My disability is not "my identity"; it's very much a mere medical issue, nothing else. And as such, it is hopefully treatable in the future, if not in my case, but in some future person's case. (But let's not go here to the fact that for my diagnosis the "cure" tends to be abortion these days, and I'm around because fetal diagnostics weren't there in 1979...)
We seem to be in agreement... I for one do not really care one bit which language(s) someone else speaks, and thus do not extend my own subjective valuations to others. Meaning that I am not in the other zealot camp, IMO. Minorities' rights are valuable up to the point where they are free to uphold their own subjective valuations regarding their own identity, but they do not extend to a right to eliminate the minority position through making the majority express the same identity, as tends to happen in Finland.
I was not really commenting on the underlying issue itself, it's off-topic, but the tactics used -- my criticism of SFP's right to define for me what I am supposedly like all too often is turned into an example of "hate speech".
Lived the first 15 years of my life in Sievi, so at least the Finnish-speaking part of Ostrobothnia is very familiar to me... my father's side of the family comes from Northern Karelia, I studied in Helsinki and now am settled in Nurmijärvi. Been to most parts of the country during my lifetime... got some Swedish-speaking friends, the smarter of them are capable of discussing this, although from their annoyingly typical POV that just simply refuses to see the Finnish-speaker's side of the coin. When it doesn't exist on their mental map, it's not worth commenting on. The less friendly encounters have seen someone from the tiny one-party Swedish-speaking towns on the coast bursting "I DESPISE KARELIANS!!" straight at my face. A really smart move considering that I have a lot of Karelians in the family tree who certainly never spoke a word of Swedish.
I've raised the issue personally enough times with people to see very clearly that accusing critics of "hating the minority" seems to be a general strategy -- after all, emotional manipulation is a good tactic; also, just see how SFP [Swedish-speakers' party] handles the issue in the media. People like Henrik Lax [one of their political heavyweights] are always whining about how he's being oppressed when not everyone else is like him. FST [the Fenno-Swedes' politically loaded channel within our public broadcaster] ran a hit-piece on internet discussions branding them as "incitement against the minority"... sure, there is a lot of garbage (against Finnish-speakers too), but there are people actually seeking to counter the liturgical bullshit as well, and we get our fair share of mindless accusations. We're pretty close to having the whole issue censored in this country, although the reality is quite different from what our policy is supposedly "upholding".
For an outside observer it would probably be most interesting to take home the point that in our discussion climate on the topic, a Finnish-speaker becomes intolerant of a Fenno-Swede through mere assertion of his existence. Because the law says the country is bilingual -- and as it is strangely being read as "everyone has to be Finnish-Swedish bilingual" -- if you don't fit the picture, you, or at least your offspring, must be molded to fit it. Considering that this is done to preserve a certain language group's "rights" and "special character" or whatever, one needs to wonder if it is not just wee bit hypocritical to suggest that someone just has "issues with minority rights" if they don't play along when their own "self" is being co-opted in the name of tolerance. Who exactly is having issues with whom?
Speaking of bigotry... love the way how you point out that in Vaasa reasonable intelligence and bilinguality correlate;) From there, there is just a small step to that staple of Fenno-Swedish fantasy that we hear of often.. that in order to increase Finnish-speakers' intelligence, they must be taught Swedish from an early age. It's a half-racist idea, but there you go. Personally, my experiences of Vaasa and people from there are nowhere near the Fenno-Swedish concept of it being a bilingual utopia, but perhaps I just haven't looked deep enough... or more likely, there is a selection bias due to what kind of people one meets.
Anyway, I am really proud I haven't bought into the bullshit but think for myself, am a "reasonably intelligent" person, and am getting my third language fluent. None of them are Swedish, none of my international acquaintances have never shunned me because of my mother tongue (cue Henrik Lax about Finnish being an "alien language in Europe"), and I plan on being living proof till the end of my days that this isn't the 1800s anymore:P
Slashdot Mirror
They did this in the new Outer Limits already... remember the old guy who just wouldn't die and wanted the heart corset instead of giving it to the teenage girl. :)
That's easy... you just sprinkle "perkele" and "vittu" around the sentence. Perkele is a kind of interjection, "vittu" can be used also as a modifier, as in "vitun ..."
HTH
Nooooooooooooooooo!!
Can't be so. Did the stupid kids who are dropping the possessive suffix get their way or something? I mean, accusative and genetive have completely different semantic jobs regardless of being mostly syntactically identical... that's the most idiotic grammar-revisionist idea I've heard for a long time :(
Next, you'll be telling me Darth Vader is Luke's father or something...
Deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics!
Champollion is rolling in his grave in frustration because he didn't think of this...
It's just the attention and that he gets to suck on something which takes the mind off the teething issues...
In other words, Objectivism is bullshit.
:)
I knew that already though.
How the fuck can a 15-year old girl's wealth generation ability be enough for some fancy artificial heart?? Her parents better have paid for it, or otherwise it distorted the market and reduced my ability to make more profits.
There was an excellent Outer Limits episode (1x05) of exactly this kind of an event, but of course Socialist propaganda was injected into it to make the ending morally repugnant.
Question 30 is cosmologically incorrect as well in the sense that there is no origin of the Big Bang anything is moving away from. Galaxies -- the right answer I presume -- move away from each other, but not from some zero-point...
It's not tar, it's probably "salmiakki".
No, we're not. We can't imagine anything more boring than watching sap drip out of a birch.
Yeah, you tell him and make it so he takes it back!. The GP is such an insensitive clod...
Lasers!!
After first reading, my first hopeful impression was further research was going to involve "screwing" the "local female population" in order to obtain "data"... I would love to donate my genes for observation as they flow down the line ;)
Just imagine the amount of mail the poor guy is getting when apparently all replies on slashdot go to him!
IMO, capital gains are capital gains. If you stick some amount of real-world currency into a virtual economy and out of it comes a greater amount of real-world currency, you've made capital gains which are taxable in the usual manner. It's the increase of real-world currency that should be plugged into in the usual way, and not bring real-world taxation systems into the virtual world...
Glad you noticed. I was thinking about the same thing about Iraq today before reading your post. The Free Market was supposed to magically solve all of Iraq's problems overnight, and yet I read in the news that a huge number of Iraqis are at the moment in critical need for outside aid, as the whole society is essentially collapsing. I kind of believe that if there had been a little less ideological dogmatism involved, giving the Iraqis a generous oil-funded social democracy would have allowed for a dignified US exit from a pacified country; if you're politically so opposed to the idea, don't you think the Iraqi democracy would have sorted out the possible "inefficiencies" in due time, at their own pace?
:P
It's quite remarkable how indoctrinated Americans are against the public sector. I think it's a self-reinforcing cultural feature though; when you believe from the outset it won't and can't work, and that it must not be allowed to work, it won't. It takes quite a bit of civic pride and involvement, which takes a long time to cultivate. I'm from Europe and a lot of the American ideas about how things work (or don't work) here seem to be to be just ideologically motivated scaremongering that has very little to do with reality... fundamentally, a public-sector organization is just like any other organization, and thus is vulnerable to the same kind of problems. They are taken care of by transparency and good management, just like anywhere else.
Of course a public sector has other goals besides profit-maximization (which is in turn the private sector's role), but that's the whole point really, so it is not an inherent weakness. And to all of those who drool at the prospect of the imminent economic collapse of pinko Europe because it's all unaffordable (and would be even more so in the world's supposedly richest country, the USA)... well.. we're doing better than ever economically, the USD is toilet paper compared to the Euro, my stock market investments in Europe are doing remarkably well... and I have no intent to diversify to the US, as I'm just watching the slow-motion train wreck develop around your questionable debt-fueled bubble economy, which is going to SO sink your regular Joe and Jane Consumer who are then going to die agonizing deaths when they catch something nasty and can't afford to get treated for it. A brutal fate unimaginable here.
I really prefer a bit of Socialism in my society, thank you very much..
Wasn't there an episode with a truck-mounted superlaser or something? :)
I find it fascinating how "economic" reconstruction is mentioned first. The neocons just can't hide the fact that they're after the oil, and political reform is just a tool to that end.
All the USA would have had to do after toppling Saddam would have been to pretty much set up a democratic government without interfering too much in the general way the country was organized and run -- most of the structures could and should have been left in place. You would have ended up with an Arab-social-democracy funded by oil that the US would have bought just like anyone else. Sure, it wouldn't have been the beautiful, ideologically correct social darwinist dystopia where people make use of their Freedom to the fullest in order to survive, but I bet it would have been far better a reconstruction strategy than any after the fact aid strategy that the Iraqis would have ended up paying for anyway.
Now, had you been so awfully concerned about the evil Socialism that would have crept into the system this way, surely you will also trust in democracy. The Iraqis would have privatized stuff in due time, at proper prices, in order to make their government more efficient. This would have been far more preferable to the looting laws the puppet government in the Green Zone is currently passing.
Had there been a little bit less ideology, a lot of people would have survived, a lot of Iraqis would be much happier, and Iraq would face a much brighter future...
No, the downstream tribe will get rid of its sense of entitlement and start selling some ass to the upstream tribepeople. It's the free market baby!
If someone is really planning on seriously web-developing anything, it shouldn't be an issue to set up a Linux development environment on their own. They might actually learn something about how stuff works in the process.
RoR in general is weird like this -- yes, you might be able to "create a blogging application in 2 minutes" by calling some appropriate code-generation wizards, but does that really make you a developer who is able to actually do something on his own outside the scope of what is provided out of the box?
And actually doing something to advance the existence a cure will at least give people the choice faster.
I don't think I said anywhere I do not want to give people the freedom over their own bodies. Of course they have the right to refuse treatment if they so choose; but I also can have my own point of view regarding whether such a choice is a rational one, and whether pushing such a POV that outright demonizes treatment through organizations I'm involved in is something I think we should be doing!
Objectively speaking, I'd rather not be disabled. It is not such a crucial part of who I am that I couldn't leave it behind given the chance. I can't force people to feel otherwise, but I can offer them the chance to be honest about it.
I'd rather not "wait for a cure" but mobilize resources for finding one. And in the meantime while we don't have it, we can certainly seek to spend our time on more immediate-term projects that improve quality of life... and yes, society's attitudes are a big part of it. Accessibility, for example, enables so much and helps one to help oneself. My problem with the social-model style semantic trickery is that it a) turns a "simple and contained" and possibly resolvable medical issue into one that is rather oppressively all around the individual, pretty much everywhere and b) it makes communication with outsiders so much more difficult because of the impenetrable jargon and conceptualizing...
You're sounding a lot like some of the activist friends I have who start blaming me for wanting power over them when I'm saying that they might just consider the fact that they are not bound by honor or a desire to seem like some disabled heroes (a bit of a cult within the disabled activist community). They just actively miss the point, like you do.
It's an interesting issue I have come across as I've been involved in the (European) disability rights movement. Some people within it are VERY much against treating disability as a "medical flaw" in the person that is in need of a cure; they have internalized disability so deeply, that it almost offends their identity to suggest disability is something a cure should be sought for. Instead, according to the so-called "social model" of disability, the hindrances are not caused by the disability, but because there is a mismatch between the person's abilities and the surrounding society.
I've had long discussions about this with a certain otherwise bright girl with CP who is nevertheless an unyielding hippie and who claims that seriously, she wouldn't want to be cured even if a cure were available, as it would alter who she is. And this is a person who is in a wheelchair. Considering that I am a wheelchair-using cripple too, that kind of a position is hard to comprehend. Make my bones not break easily and give me some 50cm more height and my life would be much easier, and I don't think I would lose anything I particularly love about my life!
Of course, the whole medical/social model of disability discussion which unfortunately seems to preoccupy so much of the minds involved in the disability movement is just semantic bullshit that seeks to shift the "blame" for the issue away from the person, and make us feel less like medical objects that need to be conformant to some ideal we don't fit. IMO, while there is limited sense in arguing that people have the right to be who they are, mostly this seems to just expose insecurities in disabled thought... there is a need to be so defensive of our disability, that we end up actually hurting our own cause by saying that the problem doesn't really even exist, and that attempts to make things better on a personal, "individual-altering" basis are "wrong"! Worse yet, producing sociology papers on this topic is such huge intellectual masturbation that I am absolutely certain the time and effort could be better used trying to find actual, pragmatic solutions to issues...
I guess some people are just so traumatized by the almost imagined "blame" and medical "objectification" that they just aren't able to see that it would be OK to accept a cure... at least to me to be able to say that is liberating. My disability is not "my identity"; it's very much a mere medical issue, nothing else. And as such, it is hopefully treatable in the future, if not in my case, but in some future person's case. (But let's not go here to the fact that for my diagnosis the "cure" tends to be abortion these days, and I'm around because fetal diagnostics weren't there in 1979...)
We seem to be in agreement... I for one do not really care one bit which language(s) someone else speaks, and thus do not extend my own subjective valuations to others. Meaning that I am not in the other zealot camp, IMO. Minorities' rights are valuable up to the point where they are free to uphold their own subjective valuations regarding their own identity, but they do not extend to a right to eliminate the minority position through making the majority express the same identity, as tends to happen in Finland.
I was not really commenting on the underlying issue itself, it's off-topic, but the tactics used -- my criticism of SFP's right to define for me what I am supposedly like all too often is turned into an example of "hate speech".
Lived the first 15 years of my life in Sievi, so at least the Finnish-speaking part of Ostrobothnia is very familiar to me... my father's side of the family comes from Northern Karelia, I studied in Helsinki and now am settled in Nurmijärvi. Been to most parts of the country during my lifetime... got some Swedish-speaking friends, the smarter of them are capable of discussing this, although from their annoyingly typical POV that just simply refuses to see the Finnish-speaker's side of the coin. When it doesn't exist on their mental map, it's not worth commenting on. The less friendly encounters have seen someone from the tiny one-party Swedish-speaking towns on the coast bursting "I DESPISE KARELIANS!!" straight at my face. A really smart move considering that I have a lot of Karelians in the family tree who certainly never spoke a word of Swedish.
;) From there, there is just a small step to that staple of Fenno-Swedish fantasy that we hear of often.. that in order to increase Finnish-speakers' intelligence, they must be taught Swedish from an early age. It's a half-racist idea, but there you go. Personally, my experiences of Vaasa and people from there are nowhere near the Fenno-Swedish concept of it being a bilingual utopia, but perhaps I just haven't looked deep enough... or more likely, there is a selection bias due to what kind of people one meets.
:P
I've raised the issue personally enough times with people to see very clearly that accusing critics of "hating the minority" seems to be a general strategy -- after all, emotional manipulation is a good tactic; also, just see how SFP [Swedish-speakers' party] handles the issue in the media. People like Henrik Lax [one of their political heavyweights] are always whining about how he's being oppressed when not everyone else is like him. FST [the Fenno-Swedes' politically loaded channel within our public broadcaster] ran a hit-piece on internet discussions branding them as "incitement against the minority"... sure, there is a lot of garbage (against Finnish-speakers too), but there are people actually seeking to counter the liturgical bullshit as well, and we get our fair share of mindless accusations. We're pretty close to having the whole issue censored in this country, although the reality is quite different from what our policy is supposedly "upholding".
For an outside observer it would probably be most interesting to take home the point that in our discussion climate on the topic, a Finnish-speaker becomes intolerant of a Fenno-Swede through mere assertion of his existence. Because the law says the country is bilingual -- and as it is strangely being read as "everyone has to be Finnish-Swedish bilingual" -- if you don't fit the picture, you, or at least your offspring, must be molded to fit it. Considering that this is done to preserve a certain language group's "rights" and "special character" or whatever, one needs to wonder if it is not just wee bit hypocritical to suggest that someone just has "issues with minority rights" if they don't play along when their own "self" is being co-opted in the name of tolerance. Who exactly is having issues with whom?
Speaking of bigotry... love the way how you point out that in Vaasa reasonable intelligence and bilinguality correlate
Anyway, I am really proud I haven't bought into the bullshit but think for myself, am a "reasonably intelligent" person, and am getting my third language fluent. None of them are Swedish, none of my international acquaintances have never shunned me because of my mother tongue (cue Henrik Lax about Finnish being an "alien language in Europe"), and I plan on being living proof till the end of my days that this isn't the 1800s anymore