"Jesus was a pretty rebellious and rock the boat sort of guy"
Guess that's why he banned slavery... oh, wait, he didn't.
Whatever else you have to say about religion and Christianity and Jesus in general or in the specific, while the man walked this earth he was never exactly in a position of political power where he could start handing down Bans On Slavery or things like that. So it's a very bad way to start an argument with mentioning this.
If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, and then sell it, you get whatever you can convince the buyer to pay for it.
In other words, lets worship rampant capitalism because this system is without flaws. I'm curious exactly what sort of logical transformation sequence allows you to equate these two sentences.
In other words, it's too hard to work out what someone's worth or work out how to distribute it to them, so let's not bother. In fact, it's fundamentally impossible to determine "what someone's worth" unambiguously. This is a philosophical and religious question to a variety of people have a variety of answers. A society which legislated a specific schedule of Worthiness is theoretically possible. It would be a theocracy (or some variant thereof).
You could also argue that, to some extent (plus or minus existing wealth inequities) society currently participates in determining what someone's worth in a democratic fashion: if a person think something's worth something, they contribute some of their own money to it. People, however, appear to be rather Selfish and Hedonistic, believing in practice (if not in principle) that things which bring them pleasure (like popular rock music) are more valuable than things like Teachers (or more "authentic", less-marketed rock artists). As such, I contend to you that any truly democratic scheme for the distribution of wealth would also fail to bring about the changes you desire: popular artists would still be millionaire.
It also tends to reduce the rewards for making Material Rewards so everyone ends up with less material reward in the end. The USSR had heavily socialized everything. For instance, socialized agriculture. There were no effective rewards for doing this agriculture effectively. The gross failure this was has been well documented. In a less extreme system, from the utilitarian perspective, yes, it is true: you can indeed gain utility by moving wealth from the rich to the not-so-rich. However, in all but the most extreme, oppressive cases in existence, there will in general be less wealth produced in total.
Information(such as hologram) doesn't exist outside the context of conscious systems able to interpret it. Light doesn't carry the information, the patterns are arising from temporal changes in light. Maybe from the Philosophical standpoint, but there are a variety of other uses of 'information', including some very specific ones in Physics, where it is strongly related to Entropy.
The artist "deserves" millions because people are willing and able to devote millions of dollars towards obtaining access to their works.
Material Rewards have never really been very well related to things of Intrinsic Moral Merit like education; rather, they are related to what sort of Material Benefit the person can come up with, and how well it is valued. If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, you get the use a guitar. If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, and then sell it, you get whatever you can convince the buyer to pay for it. The same holds for any product and service. Millions of people are willing to devote tens of dollars towards obtaining U2's music. Therefore they get millions and millions of dollars (minus whatever distribution deal stands in the way).
Linking material reward towards something as fuzzy as goodness and deservingness is a massive quagmire, as such things are impossible to measure, hotly debated, and subject to all sorts of abuse. It also tends to reduce the rewards for making Material Rewards so everyone ends up with less material reward in the end. (And the results on these techniques improving the "intrinsic goodness" of the people involved are mixed, at best.)
... I say the next techno movie plot shows how forwarding insipidly cute emails about kittens doing something pukingly cute causes your head to explode. You fool! There are sick, sick people out there who would try it, just to see what happens!
While I appreciate that there will be all sorts of concerns raised with the rise of biotechnology, do realize that Gattaca's world is a bit... oversimplified. Think about it. There are basically two classes of people: astronauts and janitors.
The real world is going to be more complicated than that. This is a good thing.
So if we open up the borders and let anybody and their dog come in, what happens? Places like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Southern California near LA and San Diego have a bit of a hard time dealing with the population boom, especially as far as Schools are concerned. The Feds will probably bail them out. The wage for unskilled labor gets pushed down (good news for construction, bad news for construction workers... maybe LA can build a better transit system:P)... there's a small but significant rise in the number of doctors, scientists, and computer programmers - good news for tech/medicine companies, mediocre news for highly skilled technical workers, bad news for weakly-skilled technical workers. Some salaries may drop back down to just five figures again, instead of six. Between this and increased pressure on housing prices in the San Francisco / San Jose area, a few new mini-Silicon Valleys spring up where the cost of living is a lot lower. Places like the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina boom. Poughkeepsie, NY really booms. (Look at the Indian population that's already there for places like IBM). There's another real estate bubble, because some people just never learn about risk (and because they can get other people, like the government, to eat the costs of their folly), but it's not nearly as big and as bad as the last one. Umm... I'm trying to think of anything else.
Foreign Language becomes a useful skill again. The country gets more Multicultural.
Providing broadband for millions of people in a country where tens (hundreds?) of millions more are in deep poverty is a modern-day version of "trickle down" economics.
Is there something wrong with providing said broadband? Should the existence of said poverty preclude the building of broadband?
Does it add to the poverty? Must resources be diverted to the problem of such poverty before all else? Is this even possible? Would it be effective, if it was? If it is desirable, why not divert resources from elsewhere, like the United States? (Isn't that one thing that outsourcing accomplishes, to some extent?) If it is extremely desirable, why aren't you voluntarily diverting large(r) portions of your own income or wealth to said ends?
Not that this is the end-all, be-all of progress, but...
The lobbyists paint a picture of poorly-educated Americans so that Congress etc. will let them offshore Hold on. Why should they need to ask Congress for permission anyway? Why can't they just hire whoever the heck feels like working for them? Why should they be forced to use American labor? Is there something inferior about Indians?
Sounds like the American labor force has some pretty decent lobbying going on too.
Besides, in the long run, if American firms can't hire Indian workers to do work for cheap, then Indian firms will hire Indian workers and compete with the American firms that way.
You have a point, but as long as you've got fuel on board (and the fact that this thing doesn't anymore is notable) you can at least move its orbit around so you're not in the exact same space they'd be looking for you next time. Then, you might just be able to hide a little better for a while if you don't have as big a profile.
Basically they should outlaw any gun under five feet long. And bullets should be ridiculously priced, like $10k or something (although every 5ft or longer gun would come with one free bullet). That keeps the right for self defence but gets rid of the morons shooting at each other for fun.
What do I do if I'm attacked by a flock of grizzly b'ars in the mountains, then?
I think the grandparent poster's point is that you can't put satellites in orbit around 200km high because the atmosphere's air resistance will drag at them and they will eventually crash and burn. The figure of geosynchronous orbit was provided for comparison (now, geosync orbit is waaaay out there, and mostly interesting for communication satellites: it's way too far away for grand visual photography.)
Your criticism, however, is orthogonal to the point that I was making.
It's not that "Bush rocks!!!"... just that he's not the drooling idiot that so many people
like to pretend he is in their intellectual/political masturbation exercises.
I just wish people could take a step back from the constant war of agenda-pushing
every now and again.
For both engines to malfunction like this at the same time greatly seems to point to a fuel delivery problem.
This does not necessarily mean "running out of gas" - as a plane like this has multiple tanks, valves and pumps, all of which can be configured multiple different ways - which change during the flight.
Perhaps the electronics malfunctioned and stopped pumping the gas?
Yes. There are legitimate criticisms of GWBush. Some of your listings are among them.
(Others, like the state of the dollar, are only incidentally related - there, it's the
culmination of a long-standing trend, and criticisms of Greenspan would be more accurate than those of Bush).
P.S. Original poster gets + Insightfuls. I get - Offtopics and - Overrateds. I'll admit to Offtopicness, but I suspect
that the moderation was not, in fact, applied for Offtopicness so much as Disagreeingness and that some of the +Insightfulness
was just the "yay bush sucks!"ness.
P.P.S. in some vague notion of on-topicness (*waves a dead chicken over the post*):
this big Mars space program idea of his is a big stupid waste of money. Axe it, please.
(At least the asteroid idea has a modicum less nonsense to it.)
1. Sam's Club is a good place to try it out for starters. They tend to have a lot of big pallets and since the chips aren't cheap yet it's a good way to get the most for their money as they prove technology.
2. I understand that to not-do-business with Walmart is to await death. To do business with Walmart, however, is to invite death. (Seriously, they will put so much price pressure on you... and are not at all concerned with running you, as a supplier, into the ground, since there are plenty of other suppliers out there...)
You know what? I don't usually bother to post in response to things like this, but I think I will stab the groupthink one last time before the Elections are fully upon us.
George W Bush is many things. But he is not a fool.
Just because the New York Times et cetera all love to hate him, and always pick the stupidest-looking pictures from any speech or event, and love to harp on any verbal misstep ("is our children learning" et cetera). But that's not smartness or intelligence or even savvy, that's Speechmaking - and heck, Hitler was a great speechmaker, and look where it got him. I mean, from time to time I hear people (left-leaning anti-bush people) decrying politics as too pretentious and false, too many too-prepared speeches, but when it comes to Bush, they'll hang him for every little verbal typo.
It's The Media. You've been played. Your precious Fourth Estate (is that the term?) is what's convinced you otherwise - because Bush-hate sells, like hotcakes. No one but Fox ever got anywhere by saying anything good about the man - and Fox has issues, yes, but even as the liberal-leaning-lefty types decry it as playing to the sheep, they are themselves forming the worst Flock you ever did see.
If you're really about things like Independent Thought and Diversity and such, how come everyone over there seems to think the exact same way about the man? It's a real good pat-on-the-back for yourself to say "My enemy is a fool!!" but it's not really all that healthy of a thought process.
Bush is a decently intelligent man. He just believes in different things than you do, and has different priorities than you do.
Heck, he has different priorities than me. And he's undoubtedly Wrong about plenty of things, policy and otherwise. (So am I. and so are you.)
But the Left/Liberal/anti-Bush crowd does themselves and the world a disservice
with the "Bush is a zomgfool and an idjit" rhetoric and hate. It gets us nowhere.
It didn't even get him out of office in 2004. (And it won't get Hillary into office in 2008.)
We live at a time when many kids experience a lot of luxury in their upbringing (as people these days are richer than any time in history). Also, people tend to have kids later in life, so they have more money around. For the kids who grow up without having known much about frugality, adjusting to a lifestyle change can be difficult.
That said, not 30 days out of college I got a job for around the same base salary as my dad has as a department chair at a private university of some repute (though not as much as he actually makes). But then, I'm pretty good, considering. Others... are not always so good. Also, when I was a kid growing up the family didn't have any money, so I hardly know what to do with it. =)
What's truly interesting is the parallel you've just drawn between Religion and the environmentalist movement. I recall reading a short Michael Crichton speech on how the environmental movement is religious in nature (some Slashdotters will no doubt be familiar with this one) and while I didn't think he was entirely on the mark, there were some interesting points - in particular, how Environmentalism is often a moral imperative than a practical one. To demonstrate this, propose to your favorite strong environmentalist that a perfectly clean source of infinite energy was readily, cheaply available - would this be a good thing for the world, or a bad one? Some contend that this is the worst thing that could ever possibly happen (or otherwise Not Good). This is the religious/moral imperative angle.
I appreciate, to a certain extent, some of those best parts of the personal-level environmental-religious aesthetic - some sort of humility / thrift / not-wastefulness / self-denial of any individual's actions, but I do not approach them from the same environmental angle, make the same assumptions about the state of said environment, or attempt to push this agenda with it. And if these values are really important, people ought not tie them to a crisis (imagined or real) in the state of the environment, which I believe will some day (though not in any of our lifetimes) will be made utterly insignificant by technology.
And, for a less topical aside, as for your reference to indulgences, it could be said that to give of your money, to give of your labors, is to give of yourself, and while the Catholic church has never generally held that one achieves salvation through one's own actions but rather by the grace of God, giving is nevertheless a good and desirable thing. One can and should condemn the charlatans who preyed on the ignorant in this regard, corruption in their sales from the clergy, wastefulness of funds, and other degenerations of the practice. However, one should be prepared to acknowledge that while the idea that one can obtain some measure of God's grace from giving is certainly not universally accepted or necessarily true, is at least reasonable and plausible. (I leave aside for this post the Protestant-related objections of the authority of the Church to authorize them.) The common knee-jerk reaction that the matter of indulgences is one altogether deplorable, utterly unholy, or otherwise intrinsically wrong is naught but simple narrow-minded religious and ideological intolerance: never a healthy foundation for an agenda or ideological exercise.
If you haven't looked at Firefox 3 beta, there are some crazy new bookmark features, including "smart" bookmarks generated from frequently-visited sites and such. There's also bookmark tagging. This must fit in very nicely with the "weave" strategy.
I'd be worried if I were del.icio.us. Not panicked, just worried.:)
Why not have a voluntary certification program, and require people not certified to disclaim that they aren't? You could easily have the best of both worlds.
What if I want to go set up a little computer forensics business and employ my own genius employees that I know and trust? Why should I have to submit to a board comprised of my competitors, deal with licensing requirements which seriously may (now or in the future) risk being outdated, not applicable to many specialized sorts of work, or which provide a false sense of security by being utterly trivial? What happens when the board requires you use Microsoft-certified tools only and bans grep et cetera?
Some economists hold that labor market regulations such as these are among the primary long-term threats that hamper economic growth. (Some places require you to get a license to arrange flowers.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Jesus was a pretty rebellious and rock the boat sort of guy"
Guess that's why he banned slavery ... oh, wait, he didn't.
Whatever else you have to say about religion and Christianity and Jesus in general or in the specific, while the man walked this earth he was never exactly in a position of political power where he could start handing down Bans On Slavery or things like that. So it's a very bad way to start an argument with mentioning this.You never banned slavery either.
In other words, lets worship rampant capitalism because this system is without flaws. I'm curious exactly what sort of logical transformation sequence allows you to equate these two sentences. In other words, it's too hard to work out what someone's worth or work out how to distribute it to them, so let's not bother. In fact, it's fundamentally impossible to determine "what someone's worth" unambiguously. This is a philosophical and religious question to a variety of people have a variety of answers. A society which legislated a specific schedule of Worthiness is theoretically possible. It would be a theocracy (or some variant thereof).
You could also argue that, to some extent (plus or minus existing wealth inequities) society currently participates in determining what someone's worth in a democratic fashion: if a person think something's worth something, they contribute some of their own money to it. People, however, appear to be rather Selfish and Hedonistic, believing in practice (if not in principle) that things which bring them pleasure (like popular rock music) are more valuable than things like Teachers (or more "authentic", less-marketed rock artists). As such, I contend to you that any truly democratic scheme for the distribution of wealth would also fail to bring about the changes you desire: popular artists would still be millionaire.
It also tends to reduce the rewards for making Material Rewards so everyone ends up with less material reward in the end. The USSR had heavily socialized everything. For instance, socialized agriculture. There were no effective rewards for doing this agriculture effectively. The gross failure this was has been well documented. In a less extreme system, from the utilitarian perspective, yes, it is true: you can indeed gain utility by moving wealth from the rich to the not-so-rich. However, in all but the most extreme, oppressive cases in existence, there will in general be less wealth produced in total.Material Rewards have never really been very well related to things of Intrinsic Moral Merit like education; rather, they are related to what sort of Material Benefit the person can come up with, and how well it is valued. If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, you get the use a guitar. If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, and then sell it, you get whatever you can convince the buyer to pay for it. The same holds for any product and service. Millions of people are willing to devote tens of dollars towards obtaining U2's music. Therefore they get millions and millions of dollars (minus whatever distribution deal stands in the way).
Linking material reward towards something as fuzzy as goodness and deservingness is a massive quagmire, as such things are impossible to measure, hotly debated, and subject to all sorts of abuse. It also tends to reduce the rewards for making Material Rewards so everyone ends up with less material reward in the end. (And the results on these techniques improving the "intrinsic goodness" of the people involved are mixed, at best.)
Now, if only they had modded you up as something other than Funny, it'd be worth something. :)
... I say the next techno movie plot shows how forwarding insipidly cute emails about kittens doing something pukingly cute causes your head to explode. You fool! There are sick, sick people out there who would try it, just to see what happens!The real world is going to be more complicated than that. This is a good thing.
(They hate it when you do that.)
Foreign Language becomes a useful skill again. The country gets more Multicultural.
Is there something wrong with providing said broadband? Should the existence of said poverty preclude the building of broadband? Does it add to the poverty? Must resources be diverted to the problem of such poverty before all else? Is this even possible? Would it be effective, if it was? If it is desirable, why not divert resources from elsewhere, like the United States? (Isn't that one thing that outsourcing accomplishes, to some extent?) If it is extremely desirable, why aren't you voluntarily diverting large(r) portions of your own income or wealth to said ends?
Not that this is the end-all, be-all of progress, but...
Sounds like the American labor force has some pretty decent lobbying going on too.
Besides, in the long run, if American firms can't hire Indian workers to do work for cheap, then Indian firms will hire Indian workers and compete with the American firms that way.
You have a point, but as long as you've got fuel on board (and the fact that this thing doesn't anymore is notable) you can at least move its orbit around so you're not in the exact same space they'd be looking for you next time. Then, you might just be able to hide a little better for a while if you don't have as big a profile.
Where's my -1, Paranoid Conspiracy Theory moderation?
Basically they should outlaw any gun under five feet long. And bullets should be ridiculously priced, like $10k or something (although every 5ft or longer gun would come with one free bullet). That keeps the right for self defence but gets rid of the morons shooting at each other for fun.
What do I do if I'm attacked by a flock of grizzly b'ars in the mountains, then?I think the grandparent poster's point is that you can't put satellites in orbit around 200km high because the atmosphere's air resistance will drag at them and they will eventually crash and burn. The figure of geosynchronous orbit was provided for comparison (now, geosync orbit is waaaay out there, and mostly interesting for communication satellites: it's way too far away for grand visual photography.)
Your criticism, however, is orthogonal to the point that I was making. It's not that "Bush rocks!!!" ... just that he's not the drooling idiot that so many people
like to pretend he is in their intellectual/political masturbation exercises.
I just wish people could take a step back from the constant war of agenda-pushing
every now and again.
This does not necessarily mean "running out of gas" - as a plane like this has multiple tanks, valves and pumps, all of which can be configured multiple different ways - which change during the flight.
Perhaps the electronics malfunctioned and stopped pumping the gas?Yes. There are legitimate criticisms of GWBush. Some of your listings are among them. (Others, like the state of the dollar, are only incidentally related - there, it's the culmination of a long-standing trend, and criticisms of Greenspan would be more accurate than those of Bush).
P.S. Original poster gets + Insightfuls. I get - Offtopics and - Overrateds. I'll admit to Offtopicness, but I suspect that the moderation was not, in fact, applied for Offtopicness so much as Disagreeingness and that some of the +Insightfulness was just the "yay bush sucks!"ness.
P.P.S. in some vague notion of on-topicness (*waves a dead chicken over the post*):
this big Mars space program idea of his is a big stupid waste of money. Axe it, please.
(At least the asteroid idea has a modicum less nonsense to it.)
2. I understand that to not-do-business with Walmart is to await death. To do business with Walmart, however, is to invite death. (Seriously, they will put so much price pressure on you... and are not at all concerned with running you, as a supplier, into the ground, since there are plenty of other suppliers out there...)
You know what? I don't usually bother to post in response to things like this, but I think I will stab the groupthink one last time before the Elections are fully upon us.
George W Bush is many things. But he is not a fool.
Just because the New York Times et cetera all love to hate him, and always pick the stupidest-looking pictures from any speech or event, and love to harp on any verbal misstep ("is our children learning" et cetera). But that's not smartness or intelligence or even savvy, that's Speechmaking - and heck, Hitler was a great speechmaker, and look where it got him. I mean, from time to time I hear people (left-leaning anti-bush people) decrying politics as too pretentious and false, too many too-prepared speeches, but when it comes to Bush, they'll hang him for every little verbal typo.
It's The Media. You've been played. Your precious Fourth Estate (is that the term?) is what's convinced you otherwise - because Bush-hate sells, like hotcakes. No one but Fox ever got anywhere by saying anything good about the man - and Fox has issues, yes, but even as the liberal-leaning-lefty types decry it as playing to the sheep, they are themselves forming the worst Flock you ever did see. If you're really about things like Independent Thought and Diversity and such, how come everyone over there seems to think the exact same way about the man? It's a real good pat-on-the-back for yourself to say "My enemy is a fool!!" but it's not really all that healthy of a thought process.
Bush is a decently intelligent man. He just believes in different things than you do, and has different priorities than you do. Heck, he has different priorities than me. And he's undoubtedly Wrong about plenty of things, policy and otherwise. (So am I. and so are you.) But the Left/Liberal/anti-Bush crowd does themselves and the world a disservice with the "Bush is a zomgfool and an idjit" rhetoric and hate. It gets us nowhere. It didn't even get him out of office in 2004. (And it won't get Hillary into office in 2008.)
That said, not 30 days out of college I got a job for around the same base salary as my dad has as a department chair at a private university of some repute (though not as much as he actually makes). But then, I'm pretty good, considering. Others... are not always so good. Also, when I was a kid growing up the family didn't have any money, so I hardly know what to do with it. =)
I appreciate, to a certain extent, some of those best parts of the personal-level environmental-religious aesthetic - some sort of humility / thrift / not-wastefulness / self-denial of any individual's actions, but I do not approach them from the same environmental angle, make the same assumptions about the state of said environment, or attempt to push this agenda with it. And if these values are really important, people ought not tie them to a crisis (imagined or real) in the state of the environment, which I believe will some day (though not in any of our lifetimes) will be made utterly insignificant by technology.
And, for a less topical aside, as for your reference to indulgences, it could be said that to give of your money, to give of your labors, is to give of yourself, and while the Catholic church has never generally held that one achieves salvation through one's own actions but rather by the grace of God, giving is nevertheless a good and desirable thing. One can and should condemn the charlatans who preyed on the ignorant in this regard, corruption in their sales from the clergy, wastefulness of funds, and other degenerations of the practice. However, one should be prepared to acknowledge that while the idea that one can obtain some measure of God's grace from giving is certainly not universally accepted or necessarily true, is at least reasonable and plausible. (I leave aside for this post the Protestant-related objections of the authority of the Church to authorize them.) The common knee-jerk reaction that the matter of indulgences is one altogether deplorable, utterly unholy, or otherwise intrinsically wrong is naught but simple narrow-minded religious and ideological intolerance: never a healthy foundation for an agenda or ideological exercise.
Because I always wanted fluorescent transplant organs! :)
If you haven't looked at Firefox 3 beta, there are some crazy new bookmark features, including "smart" bookmarks generated from frequently-visited sites and such. There's also bookmark tagging. This must fit in very nicely with the "weave" strategy.
I'd be worried if I were del.icio.us. Not panicked, just worried. :)
What if I want to go set up a little computer forensics business and employ my own genius employees that I know and trust? Why should I have to submit to a board comprised of my competitors, deal with licensing requirements which seriously may (now or in the future) risk being outdated, not applicable to many specialized sorts of work, or which provide a false sense of security by being utterly trivial? What happens when the board requires you use Microsoft-certified tools only and bans grep et cetera?
Some economists hold that labor market regulations such as these are among the primary long-term threats that hamper economic growth. (Some places require you to get a license to arrange flowers.)