Sooo... JUST carbonated soft drinks? Does that mean he's banning beer, too? The phrase "beer gut" didn't just arbitrarily appear in dictionaries. What about those "fruit juices" spiked with fructose, the nicotine of food additives?
What a hypocrite.
Er, beer isn't a "soft drink."
And you got modded "insightful"? Who the hell is dishing out the mod points today? Whoever it is must be wasted.
Instead of banning something entirely (this is still a "free" country, right?), lets just educate consumers on what they're putting into their bodies. For example, if you want to buy a 64 oz. soda, you live in America, you get your big ass soda. However, put the nutrition info on the cup so you, at the very least, can learn that 64 oz. of Pepsi contains 800 calories, about 1/3 recommended daily intake, and 224 grams of carbs, about 3/4 recommended daily intake. That's disgusting and the problem is nobody realizes how disgusting that is.
The weight of the people around you is:: drum roll:: none of your business!
It's plenty of my business. If these fat-asses are making health care expensive for the rest of us then it's only fair that the rest of us, as expressed through our government that we elected, do something about it. This isn't about "being around fat people." This is about the externalized costs that fat people are imposing on the rest of society by their irresponsible actions.
Are people so fucking stupid now...they cannot fathom that behavior such as drinking a ton of sugared beverage a day....to wash down nothing but greasy, fat laden burgers...will make them fat?
Yes. They are that fucking stupid.
why is it the govts responsibility to protect stupid people from their own stupid actions?
Government's responsibility is whatever we say government's responsibility is. The old "government shouldn't be doing x because x isn't government's job" mantra is a circular argument. Government has long regulated the food industry and prevented it from poisoning its customers. We don't allow food producers to poison the people after all. Why is it okay for government to allow one type of harmful food into the system but not another? Just because high volume sugary drinks are slower to kill people than, say, cyanide, doesn't mean government should stay out of the way.
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?
Ja mine Fuhrer.
I've honestly started to wonder, with all the problems we're seeing in modern kids, autism on the rise...so many of them with food allergies (I never heard of anyone almost dying from PB&J sandwiches at school when I grew up, and we ALL ate them)...etc.
Maybe we ARE doing too much to protect weak genes in the pool....that might have weeded themselves out in the past....and allowing them to continue to proliferate?
Because people like you tried dabbling in Eugenics before and it wasn't considered moral?
Summary of most of the comments so far: "There are plenty of qualified Americans, companies just don't want to pay them the wage they deserve."
Our company once tried to hire graduates from American colleges as engineers and offered them plenty of money. It usually took them three days to do a 20-minute job. Once we started hiring people of the same age and same levels of experience from Europe and offering them the same money we filled the positions with qualified people who actually knew what they were doing.
Fix your broken education system and quit your whining about how downtrodden you are by these evil foreign workers "stealing" "your" jobs. If you'd spend more time getting your shit together and competing, and less time building Berlin Walls through the New Mexico desert, then maybe you'd get somewhere.
Oh yeah, and the usual xenophobic mods can suck my dick. I have karma to burn.
20K / year? I suspect a bit of exaggeration there. I came to the US as a H1B. I started on a pretty decent salary (which was twice what I was getting in the UK). Sure it wasn't 80k, but it wasn't far off and doesn't exactly compare with minimum wage which you're implying with your "next to nothing" quip. And as time wore on my salary increased very quickly to the point where I'm now getting slightly more than the going rate for the work I'm doing. And I stayed long enough to get my green card at great expense to myself as well as my employer after an epic six year wait.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
There is a reason every time something cool is done it's done in America first
First train? English. First commercial train service? Manchester to Liverpool. First car? German. First TV? Invented by a Scotsman. First TV broadcast service? English. First freeway/motorway/autobahn? German. First satellite? Russian. First man in space? Russian. First man to orbit the Earth? Russian. First woman in space? Russian. First moon rover? Russian. First space walk? Russian. First space station? Russian. (The ISS has a Salyut-derived core) First probe to land on another planet? Russian. Countless records broken for long duration stays in orbit? Russian. Inventor of the jet engine? English. Home of first electronic computer? Manchester, England. First supersonic airliner? Anglo-French. Inventor of the World Wide Web? An Englishman working in Switzerland.
to know that Obama can pay attention to the really important stuff while he deals with a trillion dollar budget deficit, a factious Congress, the European Debt crisis, the Iran nuclear crisis, China's disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea,...
... preventing women from accessing contraception, preventing consenting adults from getting married if it offends your religious sensibilities, giving teacher the right to teach nonsense in science class...
You seriously think the Dems are the only people who can multitask?
I just changed my mailing address with the VA. The phone call took me over an hour (had to wait a half hour on hold only to make an appointment for them to call me back later). The man informed me to change my address for any medical benefits or education benefits, I'd have to call them (was a bit vague on who "they" were..) because it's three separate databases.
WTF?! It's all the Department of Veterans Affairs! Why do they have my data stored in THREE different databases?! And why can't this guy submit the request for it to be changed in all three?
I see you and I raise you. Before I defected to a credit union, any time I made a dreaded call to Bank of America customer service I typically had to spend over an hour on the phone with them. Every time I spoke to someone new I had to start at the top, beginning with identifying myself and proving that I was who I said I was. On one call I got passed around five departments (one of them twice) because nobody had a fucking clue who was doing what and who could help me.
Oh and my local DMV works with efficiency that would put any bank to shame. In and out in 15 minutes without an appointment, 5 minutes with an appointment, and most services available online and eliminating the need to go into the office. Not bad for a service that only ten years ago was a half-day ordeal for even trivial transactions.
Bottom line: there are efficient private businesses and inefficient private businesses. There are efficient government departments and inefficient government departments.
. He is saying that someone has to get "information across different government programs" in order to find the info they want. I don't see how creating mobile apps helps that,
Well then you're very silly.
If this was a corporation creating mobile apps to make information more accessible there would be no controversy about it. But as soon as the government applies the same modernizing technology the anti-government knee-jerkers just can't help themselves but get another little dig in.
PS, this interweb thing you're posting on? Government invented that.
The fact that users are forced to navigate a labyrinth means that the government is trying to do to much.
Yeah. If only we could have the same government that a small chain of pre-industrial agrarian settlements had on the East coast a few centuries back. That'd work so much better in today's world, right?
Sample of some European car ads that I've seen in my day:
Couple are driving through town in a small Italian car. Guy keeps checking out chicks, she gets pissed, and eventually pulls over and makes out with a random guy. Lesson learned.
Angry woman storms out of a house throwing away various clothing items, pieces of jewelry, and other reminders of what we assume is her ex. She's about to ditch the car keys into the drain, but hesitates, changes her demeanor, becomes more determined, and proudly marches to her little German car and drives off to the tune of more upbeat music.
Girl walks up to a guy and says "nice car, wanna show me what it can do?" She gets in with him and they go for a drive. She sinks into the comfortable seats, hangs on to the nice door handles and they zip along through the country while she gets all hot and worked up. They end up in his house, running upstairs, throwing down and ready to do it when they hear the door closing. They panic, look around like they're about to be busted, and two kids come running in greeting them as mom and dad.
Sample of US car commercials:
Unseen driver in a silver vehicle drives at unsafe speeds on a country road with no traffic to the tune of loud rock music, and at the end there's a picture of the car and a marketing guy reading out some catchy sales slogan.
Unseen driver in a silver vehicle drives at unsafe speeds on a city street with no traffic to the tune of loud rock music, and at the end there's a picture of the car and a marketing guy reading out some catchy sales slogan.
Unseen driver in a silver vehicle drives at unsafe speeds on a city street where the traffic all moves at the speed of light, to the tune of loud rock music, and at the end there's a picture of the car and a marketing guy reading out some catchy sales slogan.
Donald Downs, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on the First Amendment, says that it would be very tough to pass something like Israel's law in the US Congress. 'In the US, it would be hard to justify this type of law on either legal or normative policy grounds,' says Downs. 'The Israeli law is paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term.'"
Who gives a fuck what the US congress would do? Last time I checked Israel had its own constitution and its own parliament, and it's not a US state no matter how some politicians try to act as if it is. Other countries choose to do things differently than the USA and we're surprised?
Hell there's plenty of laws that get passed in the USA that wouldn't stand a chance in Europe (death penalty, discrimination against gays, letting any eejit carry a gun etc.) but I don't see every post on American politics turn into a big discussion among Europeans about whether or not they approve. And somehow I don't think USAians would pay much heed to what the outside world thinks anyway. Why get hung up about what a sovereign democratic government decides to do inside its own borders? So in Europe and in Israel people have a different approach to free speech. So what?
One man's freedom of speech can have the power to deprive another man of his right to life. If the North American continent had been devastated by global war at the behest of a movement that abused its "freedom of speech" in the 1930s (as happened in Germany) then maybe the "all speech must be free regardless of the consequences" mantra would be a bit less of a convincing argument in the USA too.
A growing percentage of our GDP is going to taking care of senior citizens. A growing percentage of our GDP is going to health care. A growing percentage of our GDP is going to the military.
Either find ways to spend less on the above, increase income dramatically or deal with decreasing other services. Fourth option is a combinationation of the first three. I see no other choices.
The Titanic may have been a very large ship in 1912 , but in 2012 it would considered very small.
Would it? Modern car ferries plying the Irish Sea are smaller. Some cruise ships are smaller. Until the Carnival Destiny was built, no purpose-built cruise ship was bigger than the old ocean liners.
Not much detail in the article about how similar it would be to the original. I would hope that it would be "every bit as luxurious" as modern uniclass cruise ships which are more comfortable than first class was in the old Olympic class liners and Cunard queens. Today's passengers would probably prefer to have a bathroom in their own cabin rather than having to go down the hall.
I wonder what they're going to do below decks. Steerage accommodation probably wouldn't be much of a tourist attraction, unless there's going to be a handful of steerage rooms in the old style just for people to look at and "get a feel" for it without having to actually stay in it, like the cell block at Alcatraz.
Then there's the matter of propulsion. Obviously it'd have to be a diesel engine. I'd be interested in seeing a replica of the old boiler-turbine setup though. James Cameron's film showed the ship as having piston engines, but I suspect that was more for dramatic effect. That baby had a steam turbine.
Religion is a minority pursuit in the UK. It wasn't so long ago that Tony Blair was nearly laughed out of the House of Commons while he was PM when word got out that he sought inspiration from prayer.
I saw a meme doing the rounds this morning that showed EA getting into the semi finals of a worst company competition. I had a look at TFA but it didn't say what people have against EA besides a cursory reference to "nickel and diming" their customers. As a non gamer I'm curious about why people (religious fundamentalist nutjobs aside) are upset by this company.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooo... JUST carbonated soft drinks? Does that mean he's banning beer, too? The phrase "beer gut" didn't just arbitrarily appear in dictionaries. What about those "fruit juices" spiked with fructose, the nicotine of food additives?
What a hypocrite.
Er, beer isn't a "soft drink."
And you got modded "insightful"? Who the hell is dishing out the mod points today? Whoever it is must be wasted.
Instead of banning something entirely (this is still a "free" country, right?), lets just educate consumers on what they're putting into their bodies. For example, if you want to buy a 64 oz. soda, you live in America, you get your big ass soda. However, put the nutrition info on the cup so you, at the very least, can learn that 64 oz. of Pepsi contains 800 calories, about 1/3 recommended daily intake, and 224 grams of carbs, about 3/4 recommended daily intake. That's disgusting and the problem is nobody realizes how disgusting that is.
Educate Americans? You must be new here.
The weight of the people around you is :: drum roll :: none of your business!
It's plenty of my business. If these fat-asses are making health care expensive for the rest of us then it's only fair that the rest of us, as expressed through our government that we elected, do something about it. This isn't about "being around fat people." This is about the externalized costs that fat people are imposing on the rest of society by their irresponsible actions.
That's not an argument for government control over soda, it's an argument against socialized healthcare.
How this got modded "insightful" I do not know. It sounds to me like a perfectly good argument in favour of socialised health care.
Are people so fucking stupid now...they cannot fathom that behavior such as drinking a ton of sugared beverage a day....to wash down nothing but greasy, fat laden burgers...will make them fat?
Yes. They are that fucking stupid.
why is it the govts responsibility to protect stupid people from their own stupid actions?
Government's responsibility is whatever we say government's responsibility is. The old "government shouldn't be doing x because x isn't government's job" mantra is a circular argument. Government has long regulated the food industry and prevented it from poisoning its customers. We don't allow food producers to poison the people after all. Why is it okay for government to allow one type of harmful food into the system but not another? Just because high volume sugary drinks are slower to kill people than, say, cyanide, doesn't mean government should stay out of the way.
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?
Ja mine Fuhrer.
I've honestly started to wonder, with all the problems we're seeing in modern kids, autism on the rise...so many of them with food allergies (I never heard of anyone almost dying from PB&J sandwiches at school when I grew up, and we ALL ate them)...etc.
Maybe we ARE doing too much to protect weak genes in the pool....that might have weeded themselves out in the past....and allowing them to continue to proliferate?
Because people like you tried dabbling in Eugenics before and it wasn't considered moral?
There are such things as 20minute engineering job? If it takes that long, that's technician work.
See what I mean?
80k a year? Hmmm. Live for 30k, save 50k a year, so you must have 300k saved. Why not move back to the UK and live off that?
Because A you cannot live for 30K per year in Silicon Valley, and B I don't want to go back to the UK, you amusingly stupid mucksavage.
Summary of most of the comments so far: "There are plenty of qualified Americans, companies just don't want to pay them the wage they deserve."
Our company once tried to hire graduates from American colleges as engineers and offered them plenty of money. It usually took them three days to do a 20-minute job. Once we started hiring people of the same age and same levels of experience from Europe and offering them the same money we filled the positions with qualified people who actually knew what they were doing.
Fix your broken education system and quit your whining about how downtrodden you are by these evil foreign workers "stealing" "your" jobs. If you'd spend more time getting your shit together and competing, and less time building Berlin Walls through the New Mexico desert, then maybe you'd get somewhere.
Oh yeah, and the usual xenophobic mods can suck my dick. I have karma to burn.
20K / year? I suspect a bit of exaggeration there. I came to the US as a H1B. I started on a pretty decent salary (which was twice what I was getting in the UK). Sure it wasn't 80k, but it wasn't far off and doesn't exactly compare with minimum wage which you're implying with your "next to nothing" quip. And as time wore on my salary increased very quickly to the point where I'm now getting slightly more than the going rate for the work I'm doing. And I stayed long enough to get my green card at great expense to myself as well as my employer after an epic six year wait.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying
I did have to think about it for a second, but I don't find that phrase particularly field specific. YMMV
Well bully for you.
There is a reason every time something cool is done it's done in America first
First train? English.
First commercial train service? Manchester to Liverpool.
First car? German.
First TV? Invented by a Scotsman.
First TV broadcast service? English.
First freeway/motorway/autobahn? German.
First satellite? Russian.
First man in space? Russian.
First man to orbit the Earth? Russian.
First woman in space? Russian.
First moon rover? Russian.
First space walk? Russian.
First space station? Russian. (The ISS has a Salyut-derived core)
First probe to land on another planet? Russian.
Countless records broken for long duration stays in orbit? Russian.
Inventor of the jet engine? English.
Home of first electronic computer? Manchester, England.
First supersonic airliner? Anglo-French.
Inventor of the World Wide Web? An Englishman working in Switzerland.
to know that Obama can pay attention to the really important stuff while he deals with a trillion dollar budget deficit, a factious Congress, the European Debt crisis, the Iran nuclear crisis, China's disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea, ...
... preventing women from accessing contraception, preventing consenting adults from getting married if it offends your religious sensibilities, giving teacher the right to teach nonsense in science class...
You seriously think the Dems are the only people who can multitask?
I just changed my mailing address with the VA. The phone call took me over an hour (had to wait a half hour on hold only to make an appointment for them to call me back later). The man informed me to change my address for any medical benefits or education benefits, I'd have to call them (was a bit vague on who "they" were..) because it's three separate databases.
WTF?! It's all the Department of Veterans Affairs! Why do they have my data stored in THREE different databases?! And why can't this guy submit the request for it to be changed in all three?
I see you and I raise you. Before I defected to a credit union, any time I made a dreaded call to Bank of America customer service I typically had to spend over an hour on the phone with them. Every time I spoke to someone new I had to start at the top, beginning with identifying myself and proving that I was who I said I was. On one call I got passed around five departments (one of them twice) because nobody had a fucking clue who was doing what and who could help me.
Oh and my local DMV works with efficiency that would put any bank to shame. In and out in 15 minutes without an appointment, 5 minutes with an appointment, and most services available online and eliminating the need to go into the office. Not bad for a service that only ten years ago was a half-day ordeal for even trivial transactions.
Bottom line: there are efficient private businesses and inefficient private businesses. There are efficient government departments and inefficient government departments.
. He is saying that someone has to get "information across different government programs" in order to find the info they want. I don't see how creating mobile apps helps that,
Well then you're very silly.
If this was a corporation creating mobile apps to make information more accessible there would be no controversy about it. But as soon as the government applies the same modernizing technology the anti-government knee-jerkers just can't help themselves but get another little dig in.
PS, this interweb thing you're posting on? Government invented that.
The fact that users are forced to navigate a labyrinth means that the government is trying to do to much.
Yeah. If only we could have the same government that a small chain of pre-industrial agrarian settlements had on the East coast a few centuries back. That'd work so much better in today's world, right?
Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.
Guess what the National Weather Service's radar loops use.
I give up. What do they use?
Sample of some European car ads that I've seen in my day:
Couple are driving through town in a small Italian car. Guy keeps checking out chicks, she gets pissed, and eventually pulls over and makes out with a random guy. Lesson learned.
Angry woman storms out of a house throwing away various clothing items, pieces of jewelry, and other reminders of what we assume is her ex. She's about to ditch the car keys into the drain, but hesitates, changes her demeanor, becomes more determined, and proudly marches to her little German car and drives off to the tune of more upbeat music.
Girl walks up to a guy and says "nice car, wanna show me what it can do?" She gets in with him and they go for a drive. She sinks into the comfortable seats, hangs on to the nice door handles and they zip along through the country while she gets all hot and worked up. They end up in his house, running upstairs, throwing down and ready to do it when they hear the door closing. They panic, look around like they're about to be busted, and two kids come running in greeting them as mom and dad.
Sample of US car commercials:
Unseen driver in a silver vehicle drives at unsafe speeds on a country road with no traffic to the tune of loud rock music, and at the end there's a picture of the car and a marketing guy reading out some catchy sales slogan.
Unseen driver in a silver vehicle drives at unsafe speeds on a city street with no traffic to the tune of loud rock music, and at the end there's a picture of the car and a marketing guy reading out some catchy sales slogan.
Unseen driver in a silver vehicle drives at unsafe speeds on a city street where the traffic all moves at the speed of light, to the tune of loud rock music, and at the end there's a picture of the car and a marketing guy reading out some catchy sales slogan.
Donald Downs, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on the First Amendment, says that it would be very tough to pass something like Israel's law in the US Congress. 'In the US, it would be hard to justify this type of law on either legal or normative policy grounds,' says Downs. 'The Israeli law is paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term.'"
Who gives a fuck what the US congress would do? Last time I checked Israel had its own constitution and its own parliament, and it's not a US state no matter how some politicians try to act as if it is. Other countries choose to do things differently than the USA and we're surprised?
Hell there's plenty of laws that get passed in the USA that wouldn't stand a chance in Europe (death penalty, discrimination against gays, letting any eejit carry a gun etc.) but I don't see every post on American politics turn into a big discussion among Europeans about whether or not they approve. And somehow I don't think USAians would pay much heed to what the outside world thinks anyway. Why get hung up about what a sovereign democratic government decides to do inside its own borders? So in Europe and in Israel people have a different approach to free speech. So what?
One man's freedom of speech can have the power to deprive another man of his right to life. If the North American continent had been devastated by global war at the behest of a movement that abused its "freedom of speech" in the 1930s (as happened in Germany) then maybe the "all speech must be free regardless of the consequences" mantra would be a bit less of a convincing argument in the USA too.
A growing percentage of our GDP is going to taking care of senior citizens.
A growing percentage of our GDP is going to health care.
A growing percentage of our GDP is going to the military.
Either find ways to spend less on the above, increase income dramatically or deal with decreasing other services. Fourth option is a combinationation of the first three. I see no other choices.
Stick it on the credit card. Easy!
I stand corrected.
The Titanic may have been a very large ship in 1912 , but in 2012 it would considered very small.
Would it? Modern car ferries plying the Irish Sea are smaller. Some cruise ships are smaller. Until the Carnival Destiny was built, no purpose-built cruise ship was bigger than the old ocean liners.
Not much detail in the article about how similar it would be to the original. I would hope that it would be "every bit as luxurious" as modern uniclass cruise ships which are more comfortable than first class was in the old Olympic class liners and Cunard queens. Today's passengers would probably prefer to have a bathroom in their own cabin rather than having to go down the hall.
I wonder what they're going to do below decks. Steerage accommodation probably wouldn't be much of a tourist attraction, unless there's going to be a handful of steerage rooms in the old style just for people to look at and "get a feel" for it without having to actually stay in it, like the cell block at Alcatraz.
Then there's the matter of propulsion. Obviously it'd have to be a diesel engine. I'd be interested in seeing a replica of the old boiler-turbine setup though. James Cameron's film showed the ship as having piston engines, but I suspect that was more for dramatic effect. That baby had a steam turbine.
US and UK are mostly protestant, right?
Religion is a minority pursuit in the UK. It wasn't so long ago that Tony Blair was nearly laughed out of the House of Commons while he was PM when word got out that he sought inspiration from prayer.
I saw a meme doing the rounds this morning that showed EA getting into the semi finals of a worst company competition. I had a look at TFA but it didn't say what people have against EA besides a cursory reference to "nickel and diming" their customers. As a non gamer I'm curious about why people (religious fundamentalist nutjobs aside) are upset by this company.