Right, because clearly beating somebody bloody with a baton is the only way they've ever handled it.
Most of these photos don't even depict abuse, rather they depict some derp acting like a jackass and then resisting arrest, and getting a knee to the neck. That's hardly what I'd call abuse, meanwhile the caption is "oh the humanity!"
Not every ISP is comcast. But anyways, I'm not saying it will for sure, however the doonsday scenario of some providers getting no traffic at all *probably* will not happen. If it does, I think we can do something about it, but for now it could very well not be a problem.
You'll have to understand I have little tolerance for activism. Typically activism is built around sensationalism, which is basically where you make a problem sound worse than it actually is (groups like PETA come to mind in the extreme cases.) I'm not really convinced that the internet will end without net neutrality. It could potentially make a few things inconvenient, but I'm not convinced that we need to get out our pitchforks and torches over it.
Besides, most of the people who make an issue of it vote for the same people who are actively working against it. That problem is especially pronounced here. Most people on Slashdot seem to love voting for Obama, yet while his administration seems to talk about wanting net neutrality, it only ever takes actions towards ending it (as well as services like Aereo, which his DOJ is actively fighting against.)
Kidney donation is already forbidden if there's even a slight chance of that happening. Those who have donated in the past are first in line as recipients for transplant.
This isn't a proposal by the way, the organ transplant system already operates this way in the US. They have other rules too like type O organs only go to type O recipients (otherwise type O people would only ever donate organs but never receive them.) It's a pretty well thought out system, but the supply is awful because nobody wants to participate.
Well, here's the main thing: I mostly don't have time to trudge through those man pages. The man pages frequently don't show example usage, which in many cases means you have to guess their syntax. Maybe not so bad if you code on a regular basis, but I don't.
I actually would love to be able to code in C, but every time I try to get around to it, one of the common things I'm told is that if you don't know C at this point already, then you really shouldn't bother with it, because there won't ever be any jobs that will ask for it unless you're writing device drivers (which is something I'll probably never do.)
If the learning curve wasn't so steep, I'd probably take a bigger interest in it. Instead though I have to deal with shits like you who talk down to anybody who isn't part of your clique, so I'm just not going to bother.
Net Neutrality is one of those things where I'm preferring a "wait and see" attitude. As a network engineer and as somebody who generally likes the status quo of uninhibited access to any content you want, my instinct says we need it, but then again I may also be wrong. Let me explain why...
One of my pet peeves about politics is how people make reactionary decisions to something they perceive as an imminent danger, but ends up not being one. One of the manifestations of this is the way we ban organ selling...In Iran, there are no shortages of organs, which is entirely the result of Iran allowing people to sell their organs. In the supposedly enlightened US, we tell people that getting paid for your kidneys is immoral. But look at it this way: Kidney dialysis has a high morbidity rate, and costs the government (via medicare) upwards of $100,000 per year for each patient who is on it, and they are on it for life. A kidney transplant on the other hand is a one time cost of $100,000 for the surgery followed by about $5,000 per year in drugs, results in much higher quality of life, and dramatically reduced morbidity. If you were to pay people $25,000 for a kidney, I'm sure you'd find many that would jump on it, and we'd save so much money on dialysis that it's not even funny. But somehow, the fact that they get paid money instead of donating for free, is considered immoral.
Whenever I propose that idea to people, they always suggest something to the effect of black markets arising where people get their kidneys stolen...but even in the days when organ selling was legal in the US, that never happened. Not even once. In fact, there are zero recorded cases of it ever happening period. There are all kinds of urban myths, even a Law & Order episode about it happening, but it never actually did. The reality is that you'll never in a million years find a transplant team who will participate in that. It's not an operation that just one doc can perform, it requires an entire team and a participating hospital to boot. Nobody is going to walk into a hospital with a bag of kidneys to sell.
The actual reason we got rid of organ selling in the US was because it made it almost impossible for non-rich to receive organs, because people would only sell them. There are all kinds of ways we can solve that problem without resorting to complete banishment; for example we could mandate that only the US government is permitted to buy, put a fixed price on it, or we could even do what Iran does where both the government and charitable organizations ensure that you'll always be able to afford to buy a kidney.
But still, because of these perceived problems, we'll probably never have that happen here. Same thing for prostitution (which actually does quite well for Germany, but if you ask any American they automatically assume prostitution results in increased violent crime, STDs, and pimping.)
Now, that big huge (perhaps oversized) rant aside...What are the potential upsides of doing away with Net Neutrality? It could possibly happen that ISPs might actually upgrade their networks for once if they're getting paid more. Maybe, who knows. The big thing though is that we don't really know, because we've never truly been without Net Neutrality. I'd be fine with trying it for 5 years and seeing what happens. They could do one of those laws that has a sunset provision where after 5 years it has to either be permanently extended or permanently removed (none of this doc fix bullshit.)
What you're essentially asking for is to have a job where you're expected to get rocks and garbage thrown at you (yes, this is common at occupy events) and for you to just stand there and take it. That is exactly what happens prior to these incidents.
Cops are humans, and as such they don't want to have to be denigrated like that any more than you do.
Think about this: If you deliberately provoke a reaction, do you think it's possible that you just might succeed in getting one?
If that was really the case, then there are a lot more dangerous things in that crowd than a motorcycle cop that is essentially walking. Besides, he didn't seem to grab the only area of his body that contacted the bike, rather he just dropped straight to the ground and started acting like a 5 year old who you just denied desert. In fact after he hit the ground, he pushed his foot under the bike to make it look worse than it was.
His entire motive was to get attention from somebody like you. Maybe you should go pick him up and breastfeed him.
It's kind of obvious when that's happening because the person's eyes will appear to swell. In this case the guy just had a rather blank stare on his face.
The guy in the picture had no shirt on, yet he also had no visible scratches either. If he was treated roughly on bare concrete, there would be signs of it. In fact given that he resisted, I'm surprised there are none at all anyways.
One of these shows a police officer pinning a guy to the ground with his knee so that he can cuff him (presumably after the guy already did something wrong and tried to resist arrest.) That is hardly what I'd call brutality.
Also another one of these shows a guy laying on the ground screaming near a police motorcycle. I remember hearing about that, the motorcycle barely nudged him on accident and he deliberately dropped on the ground screaming like a 5 year old, way over-reacting to the incident. The guy (looked to be in his 50's or 60's) was acting like a baby trying to get attention and it was so cringe worthy that if I was there I would have been tempted to slap him and tell him to grow up for once in his life.
I understand that the police can go too far, but protesters and rioters certainly can and do go too far as well.
Obama did eventually capitulate. He signed the ACTA treaty without anybody else having any say in it, because he (and Hollywood) knew full well that it would get shot down like SOPA did if the public was aware of it. The constitution requires a vote in the senate for any treaty to be ratified, but NOBODY (not even the public) was allowed to read it until Obama himself ratified it. His argument was that since our laws already comply with it, he can ratify it by himself.
There is no precedent for that as it has never been done before (given the Constitution forbids it, it makes sense too.)
Anyways, Obama HAS been purchased, and he IS a Manchurian candidate if there ever was one.
Honestly this is a really bullshit line of thinking. Even if Romney wouldn't have been, then why on earth would you vote for either of them? Who cares if he would have been elected if Obama didn't? Look at the result: Instead of getting an unknown, you got the incumbent who you already know is bad.
We don't have a two party system because the "system" or any laws dictate it. The reason we havee a two party system is because our culture as a whole thinks exactly as you just did.
Voting for the lesser of two evils means you give that lesser evil your endorsement. There is no escaping that fact; you effectively went on the record as saying "I want this guy in office."
Honestly I've never found a good reason for any of the third party candidates either (no fucking way I'd ever want Nader or Paul in office either.) My solution is just to not even vote on an office where I have no preferred candidate. That's right, I left the presidential box empty. Instead I just voted on a referendum (legalizing medicinal marijuana) and a few other things and left the rest of the ballot empty.
I think voting for the wrong candidate, or not educating yourself on any of them first, is more harmful than not voting at all. This common message of "get out the vote" is bullshit and is the reason we're in the mess we are in today. People vote for shit they know nothing about.
Those who mock studying comparatively unlucrative subjects fail to understand that there are many types of people in the world.
Actually no that's not it. The main thing is that, at least in the broader context, jobs like these ultimately don't go anywhere for either yourself or those you're supposedly trying to help.
To put it into perspective: If everybody in the world picked careers in academia, then effectively everybody in the world would specialize in teaching, and no actual work would get done. You prefer to rent a flat instead of buy one...great, that's fine, nothing wrong with that at all. However if everybody did that, then nobody would build the flat to begin with, and you'd be living in a cave documenting your wonderful academic findings with finger paints (and given that the number of caves in the world is somewhat never changing, you presumably would have to fight for it too.)
Ultimately, academia serves no useful purpose if you don't get anything productive out of it, which goes back to my first point: Learning a profession that is only useful for teaching itself to other people doesn't help anybody.
Now, I'm not passing judgement mind you. The nice thing about capitalism (which by the way, I love capitalism, in spite of its faults) is that you can make choices like the one you've made so long as somebody is willing to pay you to do it (i.e. no party official tells you that you have to do something else.) You've obviously found somebody who is willing to pay you, so you are actually doing something that SOMEBODY wants, so you are in fact useful in spite of anything I've said above. In fact, the only true judge of the usefulness of your profession in capitalism is your customer.
Hmm...So it seems that if she was a white male, she never would have been appointed to SCOTUS because she never would have qualified as the standards are higher for them.
Hey I'm not the one saying this...it's just you know...common knowledge in this Affirmative Action world we live in.
Here's a question though: Who would you say is disadvantaged?
I ask because Princeton did a study and found that if they ended Affirmative Action, the number of black and latino students would drop significantly while the white students wouldn't materially increase. They did however estimate that four out of every five black and latino students would be replaced with an Asian student.
Aren't Asian's supposed to be among those disadvantaged? Because presently Affirmative Action seems to disadvantage them even further.
Honestly I'm really not sure how somebody like her gets appointed there to begin with. When you look at her opinions, she always votes in favor of any action that is about minority empowerment, regardless of whether or not it is fair. If not racism, that is at the very least a pretty clear indication of bias. Her background explains it too, she has the upbringing of a classic feminazi (though admittedly she doesn't act the part most of the time.)
That's the thing, at least in the case of college admissions anyways, is that this doesn't do what it claims it does.
It's been found that Affirmative Action doesn't hinder white students from gaining admissions. Instead, it mostly just hinders Asian students by replacing them with Black and Latino. Not by a little, but by a LOT. The root cause has to do with the percent of those applying doesn't match the percent of those members of the overall population. So they feel they need to correct it by dumping off a few perfectly qualified Asian students in favor of some potentially less qualified Black or Latino ones.
Somebody speak out if I'm wrong here, but in this age of "white privilege," how is it that Asians are any less disadvantaged than Blacks or Latinos? Historically, Asians have been every bit as downtrodden in western countries, and blacks aren't the only ones who can claim being victims of slavery in western countries either (few people seem to know that Irish slaves were also common in the Americas at one point; in fact during the mid 1600's, Ireland's population dropped by almost half due to slave exports.)
The only explanation I can come up with is that since Asians are culturally very disciplined, they tend to excel academically. Likewise, you see more of them apply, and thus see more of them do well. I think whites are only slightly less disciplined than Asians, so they come at a close second. I'm generalizing of course, but when you look at the kinds of values that black culture has, it does fit the narrative (Bill Cosby once lamented this, how he hears of other blacks who often describe being successful as "acting white," as if it was a bad thing.)
But what do I know, I'm just one of those white guys who deserves to have the word "privileged" written across my face in permanent marker and therefore I can't possibly see racism due to my color.
Because often times compiling things like this, especially what is essentially an entire fucking Linux distribution, and ESPECIALLY AGAIN one that requires cross compiling this, is rather a pain in the ass. Unless somebody has pre-built the toolchain for you, preconfigured it, etc, you're looking at at least 45 minutes of work, not counting the time for the compiler to do its actual work. That's also working under the assumption that you know how to operate the compiler (I'm assuming GCC) fairly well.
I don't know about you, but in spite of using Linux for over 10 years, unless an application I've downloaded in source form already has the build scripts configured, I'll never get the damn thing to compile. (Well, in cases where it's a single.c file with few dependencies it's not a huge deal, but even then cross compiling requires yet more work.)
Configuring make scripts and all of that crap are just not my thing. I've never been into programming anything beyond interpreted languages to be honest. Stuff like writing Bash scripts is easy for me, but I don't like to mess with C mainly because when compilers throw errors I often don't know jack shit about how to solve them, and asking for help on them usually results in me getting trolled or somebody pointing me to one of those god awful man pages.
Erm... that's not a very good example. There are actually good reasons to learn Chinese, namely China being a huge and growing economy. Lots of Chinese people only speak Chinese and don't know English. You're missing out a lot of potential customers and employees.
What? That's an absurd argument. There's no need to speak their language when you can just hire one single person to translate your product labeling for you. Besides, Chinese really isn't much of a language; in fact even within Cantonese or Mandarin, they have so many wildly varying and unintelligible dialects that they can't even understand one another even though they technically speak the same language.
To give you an idea, see if you can understand this video very well:
Having money in US banks is risky anyways. If you can't account for a large sum of money, government organizations are known for just outright taking the whole damn thing. Not even taxing, it, just fucking outright taking ALL of it away. I even know people who had the police confiscate cash (in one case, $5,000) and just flat out keep it if they can't provide receipts showing where it came from. I honestly don't blame the super rich for hiding money in offshore accounts; you never know what the government will suddenly and irrevocably decide is "theirs," and public opinion will never be on your side either if you ever made an issue of it (popular opinion seems to be that the wealthy are only wealthy if they steal or inherit, in spite of some 70% of the forbes 400 not having wealthy parents.)
and it sounds like someone touched a nerve to get that response from you
The post itself didn't, the "5 Insightful" it received did, however. It has been addressed though.
pointing out an anachronism which is actively hurting the US's participation in the world stage is not bashing
Try looking at the content of his post, it was much more than "pointing out." Anyways, it isn't hurting the US's participation any more than our use of the English language is. In fact, a simple unit conversion is much more surmountable to the everyday person than a language barrier. Going into your comparison, you may as well argue that since a larger population of the world speaks Hindi and Chinese, we ought to use those languages instead. Few people speak German, yet Germany doesn't seem to get excluded. Furthermore, we don't see people making posts that say "Lol, danke, wtf is this, the 17th century? Oh wait. Germany." and have them get modded as insightful.
Middle Class is also large, but shrinking. Middle class is defined by a quality of life factor. Usually defined by owning home, reasonably functional somewhat newer vehicles, being able to take a moderate vacation (Disneyworld, international travel, cruise, etc, periodically), having a safety net, retirement accounts, etc. Upper end may have a small vacation home.
That's a very broad definition. I make less than $10,000 per year right now, yet all of that applies to me. No rich parents gave it to me either; rather I'm just VERY good at money management.
For example, I drive in a 2005 Buick Regal that I got for some trivial amount some 5 years ago (I think $1,500?) It's a pretty damn nice car too. Sure it doesn't have an infotainment system, but I've never found myself needing one (my tablets and smartphones seem to do a better job at those tasks.) It's a salvage title car, but you'd never know that without looking at the paperwork, and I've never had to make any serious repairs to it. Once when I was in a fender bender, I had to drive a 2011 (or 2010? don't recall exact year) Dodge Sebring. Compared to my car, it was a piece of shit, yet it had a bluebook value some 8 times of what my car was. Strangely enough, people pay this money for those turds.
Things like the above are all about money management; I spend very effectively.
Often do not have to do work, simply manage investments and resources.
That's not a very reasonable distinction. The jobs I've had rarely involve any physical work as they generally involve not much more than me simply making decisions and executing them. In the end, what's the difference?
Or perhaps Aviation, which uses US units in aircraft design all around the world. Could have something to do with heavier than air flight originating in the US, as well as the US having what is by far the largest aerospace manufacturing industry. That, and slashdot is *gasp* an American website? If you had any awareness of anything outside of your own narrow viewpoint you might realize both of those.
Anyways, an obvious troll and/or flamebait post modded insightful? Why...because bashing America is always a good thing, right? Enough of this "well the rest of the world does it differently..." bullshit. Every country in the world has something unique about it, so there's a "well the rest of the world" statement that can be made about everybody. Get off of your high horse and go mow your lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because clearly beating somebody bloody with a baton is the only way they've ever handled it.
Most of these photos don't even depict abuse, rather they depict some derp acting like a jackass and then resisting arrest, and getting a knee to the neck. That's hardly what I'd call abuse, meanwhile the caption is "oh the humanity!"
Not every ISP is comcast. But anyways, I'm not saying it will for sure, however the doonsday scenario of some providers getting no traffic at all *probably* will not happen. If it does, I think we can do something about it, but for now it could very well not be a problem.
You'll have to understand I have little tolerance for activism. Typically activism is built around sensationalism, which is basically where you make a problem sound worse than it actually is (groups like PETA come to mind in the extreme cases.) I'm not really convinced that the internet will end without net neutrality. It could potentially make a few things inconvenient, but I'm not convinced that we need to get out our pitchforks and torches over it.
Besides, most of the people who make an issue of it vote for the same people who are actively working against it. That problem is especially pronounced here. Most people on Slashdot seem to love voting for Obama, yet while his administration seems to talk about wanting net neutrality, it only ever takes actions towards ending it (as well as services like Aereo, which his DOJ is actively fighting against.)
Kidney donation is already forbidden if there's even a slight chance of that happening. Those who have donated in the past are first in line as recipients for transplant.
This isn't a proposal by the way, the organ transplant system already operates this way in the US. They have other rules too like type O organs only go to type O recipients (otherwise type O people would only ever donate organs but never receive them.) It's a pretty well thought out system, but the supply is awful because nobody wants to participate.
Well, here's the main thing: I mostly don't have time to trudge through those man pages. The man pages frequently don't show example usage, which in many cases means you have to guess their syntax. Maybe not so bad if you code on a regular basis, but I don't.
I actually would love to be able to code in C, but every time I try to get around to it, one of the common things I'm told is that if you don't know C at this point already, then you really shouldn't bother with it, because there won't ever be any jobs that will ask for it unless you're writing device drivers (which is something I'll probably never do.)
If the learning curve wasn't so steep, I'd probably take a bigger interest in it. Instead though I have to deal with shits like you who talk down to anybody who isn't part of your clique, so I'm just not going to bother.
Net Neutrality is one of those things where I'm preferring a "wait and see" attitude. As a network engineer and as somebody who generally likes the status quo of uninhibited access to any content you want, my instinct says we need it, but then again I may also be wrong. Let me explain why...
One of my pet peeves about politics is how people make reactionary decisions to something they perceive as an imminent danger, but ends up not being one. One of the manifestations of this is the way we ban organ selling...In Iran, there are no shortages of organs, which is entirely the result of Iran allowing people to sell their organs. In the supposedly enlightened US, we tell people that getting paid for your kidneys is immoral. But look at it this way: Kidney dialysis has a high morbidity rate, and costs the government (via medicare) upwards of $100,000 per year for each patient who is on it, and they are on it for life. A kidney transplant on the other hand is a one time cost of $100,000 for the surgery followed by about $5,000 per year in drugs, results in much higher quality of life, and dramatically reduced morbidity. If you were to pay people $25,000 for a kidney, I'm sure you'd find many that would jump on it, and we'd save so much money on dialysis that it's not even funny. But somehow, the fact that they get paid money instead of donating for free, is considered immoral.
Whenever I propose that idea to people, they always suggest something to the effect of black markets arising where people get their kidneys stolen...but even in the days when organ selling was legal in the US, that never happened. Not even once. In fact, there are zero recorded cases of it ever happening period. There are all kinds of urban myths, even a Law & Order episode about it happening, but it never actually did. The reality is that you'll never in a million years find a transplant team who will participate in that. It's not an operation that just one doc can perform, it requires an entire team and a participating hospital to boot. Nobody is going to walk into a hospital with a bag of kidneys to sell.
The actual reason we got rid of organ selling in the US was because it made it almost impossible for non-rich to receive organs, because people would only sell them. There are all kinds of ways we can solve that problem without resorting to complete banishment; for example we could mandate that only the US government is permitted to buy, put a fixed price on it, or we could even do what Iran does where both the government and charitable organizations ensure that you'll always be able to afford to buy a kidney.
But still, because of these perceived problems, we'll probably never have that happen here. Same thing for prostitution (which actually does quite well for Germany, but if you ask any American they automatically assume prostitution results in increased violent crime, STDs, and pimping.)
Now, that big huge (perhaps oversized) rant aside...What are the potential upsides of doing away with Net Neutrality? It could possibly happen that ISPs might actually upgrade their networks for once if they're getting paid more. Maybe, who knows. The big thing though is that we don't really know, because we've never truly been without Net Neutrality. I'd be fine with trying it for 5 years and seeing what happens. They could do one of those laws that has a sunset provision where after 5 years it has to either be permanently extended or permanently removed (none of this doc fix bullshit.)
What you're essentially asking for is to have a job where you're expected to get rocks and garbage thrown at you (yes, this is common at occupy events) and for you to just stand there and take it. That is exactly what happens prior to these incidents.
Cops are humans, and as such they don't want to have to be denigrated like that any more than you do.
Think about this: If you deliberately provoke a reaction, do you think it's possible that you just might succeed in getting one?
If that was really the case, then there are a lot more dangerous things in that crowd than a motorcycle cop that is essentially walking. Besides, he didn't seem to grab the only area of his body that contacted the bike, rather he just dropped straight to the ground and started acting like a 5 year old who you just denied desert. In fact after he hit the ground, he pushed his foot under the bike to make it look worse than it was.
His entire motive was to get attention from somebody like you. Maybe you should go pick him up and breastfeed him.
It's kind of obvious when that's happening because the person's eyes will appear to swell. In this case the guy just had a rather blank stare on his face.
The guy in the picture had no shirt on, yet he also had no visible scratches either. If he was treated roughly on bare concrete, there would be signs of it. In fact given that he resisted, I'm surprised there are none at all anyways.
should be considered a success.
Isn't that what they did? The police commissioner said he welcomes the attention, so it doesn't seem like NYPD is objecting to it.
One of these shows a police officer pinning a guy to the ground with his knee so that he can cuff him (presumably after the guy already did something wrong and tried to resist arrest.) That is hardly what I'd call brutality.
Also another one of these shows a guy laying on the ground screaming near a police motorcycle. I remember hearing about that, the motorcycle barely nudged him on accident and he deliberately dropped on the ground screaming like a 5 year old, way over-reacting to the incident. The guy (looked to be in his 50's or 60's) was acting like a baby trying to get attention and it was so cringe worthy that if I was there I would have been tempted to slap him and tell him to grow up for once in his life.
I understand that the police can go too far, but protesters and rioters certainly can and do go too far as well.
And a reminder of this:
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/...
Obama did eventually capitulate. He signed the ACTA treaty without anybody else having any say in it, because he (and Hollywood) knew full well that it would get shot down like SOPA did if the public was aware of it. The constitution requires a vote in the senate for any treaty to be ratified, but NOBODY (not even the public) was allowed to read it until Obama himself ratified it. His argument was that since our laws already comply with it, he can ratify it by himself.
There is no precedent for that as it has never been done before (given the Constitution forbids it, it makes sense too.)
Anyways, Obama HAS been purchased, and he IS a Manchurian candidate if there ever was one.
Honestly this is a really bullshit line of thinking. Even if Romney wouldn't have been, then why on earth would you vote for either of them? Who cares if he would have been elected if Obama didn't? Look at the result: Instead of getting an unknown, you got the incumbent who you already know is bad.
We don't have a two party system because the "system" or any laws dictate it. The reason we havee a two party system is because our culture as a whole thinks exactly as you just did.
Voting for the lesser of two evils means you give that lesser evil your endorsement. There is no escaping that fact; you effectively went on the record as saying "I want this guy in office."
Honestly I've never found a good reason for any of the third party candidates either (no fucking way I'd ever want Nader or Paul in office either.) My solution is just to not even vote on an office where I have no preferred candidate. That's right, I left the presidential box empty. Instead I just voted on a referendum (legalizing medicinal marijuana) and a few other things and left the rest of the ballot empty.
I think voting for the wrong candidate, or not educating yourself on any of them first, is more harmful than not voting at all. This common message of "get out the vote" is bullshit and is the reason we're in the mess we are in today. People vote for shit they know nothing about.
Those who mock studying comparatively unlucrative subjects fail to understand that there are many types of people in the world.
Actually no that's not it. The main thing is that, at least in the broader context, jobs like these ultimately don't go anywhere for either yourself or those you're supposedly trying to help.
To put it into perspective: If everybody in the world picked careers in academia, then effectively everybody in the world would specialize in teaching, and no actual work would get done. You prefer to rent a flat instead of buy one...great, that's fine, nothing wrong with that at all. However if everybody did that, then nobody would build the flat to begin with, and you'd be living in a cave documenting your wonderful academic findings with finger paints (and given that the number of caves in the world is somewhat never changing, you presumably would have to fight for it too.)
Ultimately, academia serves no useful purpose if you don't get anything productive out of it, which goes back to my first point: Learning a profession that is only useful for teaching itself to other people doesn't help anybody.
Now, I'm not passing judgement mind you. The nice thing about capitalism (which by the way, I love capitalism, in spite of its faults) is that you can make choices like the one you've made so long as somebody is willing to pay you to do it (i.e. no party official tells you that you have to do something else.) You've obviously found somebody who is willing to pay you, so you are actually doing something that SOMEBODY wants, so you are in fact useful in spite of anything I've said above. In fact, the only true judge of the usefulness of your profession in capitalism is your customer.
Hmm...So it seems that if she was a white male, she never would have been appointed to SCOTUS because she never would have qualified as the standards are higher for them.
Hey I'm not the one saying this...it's just you know...common knowledge in this Affirmative Action world we live in.
Here's a question though: Who would you say is disadvantaged?
I ask because Princeton did a study and found that if they ended Affirmative Action, the number of black and latino students would drop significantly while the white students wouldn't materially increase. They did however estimate that four out of every five black and latino students would be replaced with an Asian student.
Aren't Asian's supposed to be among those disadvantaged? Because presently Affirmative Action seems to disadvantage them even further.
Honestly I'm really not sure how somebody like her gets appointed there to begin with. When you look at her opinions, she always votes in favor of any action that is about minority empowerment, regardless of whether or not it is fair. If not racism, that is at the very least a pretty clear indication of bias. Her background explains it too, she has the upbringing of a classic feminazi (though admittedly she doesn't act the part most of the time.)
That's the thing, at least in the case of college admissions anyways, is that this doesn't do what it claims it does.
It's been found that Affirmative Action doesn't hinder white students from gaining admissions. Instead, it mostly just hinders Asian students by replacing them with Black and Latino. Not by a little, but by a LOT. The root cause has to do with the percent of those applying doesn't match the percent of those members of the overall population. So they feel they need to correct it by dumping off a few perfectly qualified Asian students in favor of some potentially less qualified Black or Latino ones.
Somebody speak out if I'm wrong here, but in this age of "white privilege," how is it that Asians are any less disadvantaged than Blacks or Latinos? Historically, Asians have been every bit as downtrodden in western countries, and blacks aren't the only ones who can claim being victims of slavery in western countries either (few people seem to know that Irish slaves were also common in the Americas at one point; in fact during the mid 1600's, Ireland's population dropped by almost half due to slave exports.)
The only explanation I can come up with is that since Asians are culturally very disciplined, they tend to excel academically. Likewise, you see more of them apply, and thus see more of them do well. I think whites are only slightly less disciplined than Asians, so they come at a close second. I'm generalizing of course, but when you look at the kinds of values that black culture has, it does fit the narrative (Bill Cosby once lamented this, how he hears of other blacks who often describe being successful as "acting white," as if it was a bad thing.)
But what do I know, I'm just one of those white guys who deserves to have the word "privileged" written across my face in permanent marker and therefore I can't possibly see racism due to my color.
Because often times compiling things like this, especially what is essentially an entire fucking Linux distribution, and ESPECIALLY AGAIN one that requires cross compiling this, is rather a pain in the ass. Unless somebody has pre-built the toolchain for you, preconfigured it, etc, you're looking at at least 45 minutes of work, not counting the time for the compiler to do its actual work. That's also working under the assumption that you know how to operate the compiler (I'm assuming GCC) fairly well.
I don't know about you, but in spite of using Linux for over 10 years, unless an application I've downloaded in source form already has the build scripts configured, I'll never get the damn thing to compile. (Well, in cases where it's a single .c file with few dependencies it's not a huge deal, but even then cross compiling requires yet more work.)
Configuring make scripts and all of that crap are just not my thing. I've never been into programming anything beyond interpreted languages to be honest. Stuff like writing Bash scripts is easy for me, but I don't like to mess with C mainly because when compilers throw errors I often don't know jack shit about how to solve them, and asking for help on them usually results in me getting trolled or somebody pointing me to one of those god awful man pages.
Erm... that's not a very good example. There are actually good reasons to learn Chinese, namely China being a huge and growing economy. Lots of Chinese people only speak Chinese and don't know English. You're missing out a lot of potential customers and employees.
What? That's an absurd argument. There's no need to speak their language when you can just hire one single person to translate your product labeling for you. Besides, Chinese really isn't much of a language; in fact even within Cantonese or Mandarin, they have so many wildly varying and unintelligible dialects that they can't even understand one another even though they technically speak the same language.
To give you an idea, see if you can understand this video very well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's technically English. Or at least, it very closely resembles what was once called English.
Here's a comparison of the two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Having money in US banks is risky anyways. If you can't account for a large sum of money, government organizations are known for just outright taking the whole damn thing. Not even taxing, it, just fucking outright taking ALL of it away. I even know people who had the police confiscate cash (in one case, $5,000) and just flat out keep it if they can't provide receipts showing where it came from. I honestly don't blame the super rich for hiding money in offshore accounts; you never know what the government will suddenly and irrevocably decide is "theirs," and public opinion will never be on your side either if you ever made an issue of it (popular opinion seems to be that the wealthy are only wealthy if they steal or inherit, in spite of some 70% of the forbes 400 not having wealthy parents.)
Remember slashdot is a US based website, that should be spelled "tsktsktsktsk"
and it sounds like someone touched a nerve to get that response from you
The post itself didn't, the "5 Insightful" it received did, however. It has been addressed though.
pointing out an anachronism which is actively hurting the US's participation in the world stage is not bashing
Try looking at the content of his post, it was much more than "pointing out." Anyways, it isn't hurting the US's participation any more than our use of the English language is. In fact, a simple unit conversion is much more surmountable to the everyday person than a language barrier. Going into your comparison, you may as well argue that since a larger population of the world speaks Hindi and Chinese, we ought to use those languages instead. Few people speak German, yet Germany doesn't seem to get excluded. Furthermore, we don't see people making posts that say "Lol, danke, wtf is this, the 17th century? Oh wait. Germany." and have them get modded as insightful.
Middle Class is also large, but shrinking. Middle class is defined by a quality of life factor. Usually defined by owning home, reasonably functional somewhat newer vehicles, being able to take a moderate vacation (Disneyworld, international travel, cruise, etc, periodically), having a safety net, retirement accounts, etc. Upper end may have a small vacation home.
That's a very broad definition. I make less than $10,000 per year right now, yet all of that applies to me. No rich parents gave it to me either; rather I'm just VERY good at money management.
For example, I drive in a 2005 Buick Regal that I got for some trivial amount some 5 years ago (I think $1,500?) It's a pretty damn nice car too. Sure it doesn't have an infotainment system, but I've never found myself needing one (my tablets and smartphones seem to do a better job at those tasks.) It's a salvage title car, but you'd never know that without looking at the paperwork, and I've never had to make any serious repairs to it. Once when I was in a fender bender, I had to drive a 2011 (or 2010? don't recall exact year) Dodge Sebring. Compared to my car, it was a piece of shit, yet it had a bluebook value some 8 times of what my car was. Strangely enough, people pay this money for those turds.
Things like the above are all about money management; I spend very effectively.
Often do not have to do work, simply manage investments and resources.
That's not a very reasonable distinction. The jobs I've had rarely involve any physical work as they generally involve not much more than me simply making decisions and executing them. In the end, what's the difference?
Or perhaps Aviation, which uses US units in aircraft design all around the world. Could have something to do with heavier than air flight originating in the US, as well as the US having what is by far the largest aerospace manufacturing industry. That, and slashdot is *gasp* an American website? If you had any awareness of anything outside of your own narrow viewpoint you might realize both of those.
Anyways, an obvious troll and/or flamebait post modded insightful? Why...because bashing America is always a good thing, right? Enough of this "well the rest of the world does it differently..." bullshit. Every country in the world has something unique about it, so there's a "well the rest of the world" statement that can be made about everybody. Get off of your high horse and go mow your lawn.