The guy's comment was that "the way things are going" (i.e. health insurance companies prevented from operating the real death panels, as opposed to the fictitious ones concocted by the Alaskan bimbo-in-chief) we are going to need social media to stage a revolution in the USA. "Retard" indeed!
Yeah, but when our government tries to help out with ousting dictators, we get a lot of bad press for it and are told not to interfere, by pretty much everyone (including the left wing types who fear a US dictatorship).
How many dictators have you actually ousted lately? Only one or two that I can think of, which is good, but you botched the follow-up operations so badly that your troops are still in the middle of those messes. On the other hand you have a history of ousting democratic governments and installing dictators in their place. Iran, Chile, Haiti, the list goes on, all the way up to propping up Mubarak himself for decades. You've installed or propped up more dictators than you've removed.
...the technology used to fuel democracy protests in Egypt...
The subtext of all this ubiquitous commentary is that technology invented in the USA is helping these poor plebs in less advanced countries to win their freedom and hence become more American-like.
It is, of course, a load of bollox.
The role of new media has been picked up by the mainstream western press and held up as if it would never have happened without this technology and hence allows the west to take credit for this uprising. The fact that the era of cheap food has come to an end, the demographics of the Arab world and the middle east has produced a massive generation of young people, and people are willing to organise by any means available including good old fashioned word-of-mouth doesn't have the same soundbite-friendly ring to it.
They way things are going we may need that here in the USA sometime in the next few years.
Don't tell me. Some dude with a blackboard told you about impending dictatorship?
I find nothing as amusing as the rage of the entitled. You live in the most free society on Earth (or so you're fond of bragging anyway) but as soon as the party that you don't support takes power or your income tax bill goes up a little (it probably hasn't, by the way, Obama has lowered middle class taxes, you're welcome) you're crying about being "oppressed". Yeah, right. Try telling that to people who have been unable to oust their dictator for 30 years and got hit with tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammo, and speeding vehicles when they tried to do something about it. Try telling that to people in other Middle Eastern countries who get the crap kicked out of them in the street when they protest about blatantly rigged elections. Try telling that to women marooned in Islamic theocratic dictatorships and prevented from going to school.
Americans being oppressed by their own government? Ha! Gimme a freaking break! Get out of your suburban bore-hole and travel a little in this world before you start complaining about the evils of government.
Anyone promoting mass transit in sprawling suburbs needs their head examined. Sprawling suburbs are beyond redemption. There is no hope for them. Your 75MPH road today will be down to 15 soon enough an you'll have to make them 20 lanes wide before the cycle of induced traffic begins again.
Er, driving is less efficient in a high density city but that's all the more reason to walk. Cities built around the car are not necessarily more efficient to drive in. LA has over a third of the surface area devoted to roads, highways and parking lots. Hardly a motorist's heaven though, is it?
I stand corrected if that's the case. I was speaking from my own experiences of using the system, but it's been a while since I lived in England. After BR I noticed a slight improvement in the quality of the services I used, but maybe that was an outlier. I'll check out that book. Thanks.
Good job TFA doesn't say there's going to be high speed rail in the midwest then.
Aaahh, so spending money from the Midwest is what's asinine.
Well it wasn't exactly the Midwest that was attacked on 9/11 and if AQ hits the USA again it's a good bet that the coasts are going to be higher on the target list than Salina, Kansas. Will we stop taking tax dollars from the flyover states to fund the military? The army will get a whole lot smaller.
This isn't a troll, I would really like someone to explain the situations where a high speed train is better than an airplane or a car.
The main advantage of a train is that they don't generally require acre upon acre of sprawling concrete infrastructure to be built outside of town just to interface with passengers. Passengers don't need to be shipped to these suburban monstrosities, you can build a train station slap bang in the middle of town within walking or short cab ride range of the final destinations. Over medium distances like between the main coastal cities, trains are faster than planes if you count the door-to-door journey time. Over longer distances like coast-to-coast then the plane makes more sense.
The security will be just as bad as at an airport if the government runs it, especially considering that just as many trains get bombed by terrorists as airplanes.
The "terrorist target" argument is getting a bit tiresome on/. If you're really that paranoid, sit in the house and don't move. High speed trains have been running all over the world for decades and I don't know of any that have been blown up.
Wouldn't we be better served either putting that 53 Billion into our roads and infrastructure?
No. Roads fill to capacity no matter how big you build them. Add another lane and your commute might get a bit quicker for a few years, but road users will adapt. Developers spread their suburbs farther to the edge and people take advantage of the 'quick commute.' Before you know it's back to bumper-to-bumper again because a few thousand extra cars have appeared on this new road. Spending on adding new roads is a terrible waste.
Or not spending it at all?
Maybe. But deficit spending to get the economy moving is a whole lot more productive than deficit spending to get defence contractors rich at the cost of the US taxpayer's dollars and the Iraqi citizens' lives.
Not only that, but don't we owe China trillions of dollars? I'm not an economist, and I don't really want an answer to this right now, but if capitalism is so great and communism doesn't work, what in the heck happened here? Again, I'm not calling for a revolution and a Communist takeover of America, but apparently someone has royally screwed up.
China has ditched most of the tenets of Communism except for the dictatorship part.
Mass transport is a highly inefficient means of travel - I don't mean energy use. I mean time wasted at either end waiting for the damn bus or metro. As example:
My former boss took 1.5 hours to get to work on the VA train. It took me half an hour by car. The reason it took him longer was because of the half-hour walk to the station, and another half hour to the job.
I always prefer the faster route over the slower route (in terms of my personal travel time).
Depends on what kind of a settlement you live in. In a denser urban environment you're less likely to have that half-hour walk to the final destination.
I almost never advocate privatization, I consider myself to a socialist on many issues. But I would totally support dismantling Amtrak and turning the rails over to private companies. Amtrak and its staggeringly poor managment is the reason interstate rail is so terrible in the US. 3rd world countries have better long distance rail systems than the US.
I'm with you but kinda in the opposite way. The rails should be run by a non-profit which is accountable to government and subsidised by it, rolling stock can be privatised. Stations can be maintained by local authorities. Kinda like the system they have in the UK. British railways are not perfect, but that's got more to do with the legacy of the war (not enough destruction to be able to rebuild the system from scratch like they could in Germany, hence stuck with all the bottlenecks and medieval landmarks in the way) than it has to do with the ownership model. The 100% state-owned thing was tried and didn't work very well, nostalgia notwithstanding. The people who say "bring back British Rail" must have short memories, the system was a freaking disaster.
Back to the point, railways should be treated more like roads. In the US we have state agencies that are responsible for roads, and private companies like taxi firms and Greyhound bus get to make a profit by using that infrastructure. Why treat rails any different?
Pardon my French, but I think a few expletives are justified here:
...with a satellite receiver and a computer. Oh, and electricity. And probably enough food and water not to die before they get online.
Oh For Fuck's SAKE! How many more times does this clueless crap have to be debunked on/.? How do you think India and China have lifted all those millions of people out of poverty in the last 15 years? Fixing the plumbing in villages? Do you really think that the only way to generate wealth is through social programs? How come that idea gets pissed on when we're talking about the USA but advocated as regular as clockwork when we're talking about developing countries?
No he didn't. He meant "any civilian space tourism at all". He said that governments would not allow it. Which as you know is completely bogus as it has already happened and no government has stopped it.
Every time I read a story about technological advancement in some [non friendly to the US] nation it's always portrayed in the light of "Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology OMFG THEY'RE GONNA NUKE US"
It's nearly as bad when it's a friendly nation. Hence the billion redundant unfunny jokes about curry/unintelligible tech support/Kwik E Mart/funny accents if it's a story about a technical development in India. Then there's always the standard "they shouldn't be doing that, they should be spending that money on social programs to get running water to their poor first" idiotic comments. Funny how nobody ever insists on NASA being wound up until poverty in the US is eliminated and the last homeless American is housed.
The racist undercurrent in/. has toned down a little over the years, but it's still there and I keep a close eye on it.
Great blog article here about Buran. What might have been. Just goes to show that it's good to see the Russians still active in space exploration and how their different approach gets results. They've been kicking ass since Day 1.
(Yes, I want space tourism. But I kinda doubt it'll happen in my lifetime; the logistics and geopolitical issues conspire to make it bloody unlikely that governments will allow civilian space tourism....)
I've been saying that for years. Government of the people by the people for the people can start to break down a little if "the people" are as thick as two short planks.
Let's face it, we, the US of A are a declining power and can't afford our former glory as a space pioneer.
Let's take Kennedy Space Center, turn it into an amusement park with the over priced tickets and food, get some sort of mascot like an alien, market it towards kids, and make some money.
Well, sounds like we have should have the environment in mind when we go about killing everyone else. Let's not do it for god, country or "freedom" any longer. Let's do it for the environment.
I highly recommend Conn Iggulden's historical fictional Genghis series. Starts off in at birth and shows you the tough conditions he was brought up in. When his family was left for dead on the steppe they did what they had to do to survive. There were no cops in those days, no rule of law. If you saw some people appearing on the horizon riding towards you, you had to make sure your bows were drawn and your aim was good, because there's a chance they were coming to take your food sources in a bid to survive and were gonna kill you in the process. Oftentimes it was a case of "kill or be killed". The most 'positive' thing you can say about the story is the fact that Genghis united previously warring tribes of Mongols and brought some semblance of order to the steppes. He cut out a lot of in-fighting, mostly by conquest or threatened annihilation. Where people didn't submit to his will, he massacred them. He even put manners on the Chin (Chinese) and stopped their political manipulations that were keeping the Mongols weak, divided, and at each others' throats. The account of the siege of Yenking (Peking) was pretty epic. He managed to extract tribute from them after a long siege, and they got away with not being slaughtered.
The thing about Genghis is people tend to apply modern standards of morality to him. But in his early career it's far to say that every life he took had a self defence or greater good attached to it. It's in his later years, like the destruction of the Tanguk kingdom, where you start thinking "Okay mate, you're getting a bit out of hand here. You could have spared the civilians in this case, or at least the women and children."
So yeah, Conn Iggulden's Genghis series. Great reading. It is historical fiction but he actually includes clarifications about where he took some liberties with the story (like combining characters or events) for the sake of brevity or fleshing out certain people, so if you read all that and do a bit of reading on wiki you can build up a reasonably clear picture of where the guy was coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy's comment was that "the way things are going" (i.e. health insurance companies prevented from operating the real death panels, as opposed to the fictitious ones concocted by the Alaskan bimbo-in-chief) we are going to need social media to stage a revolution in the USA. "Retard" indeed!
How many dictators have you actually ousted lately? Only one or two that I can think of, which is good, but you botched the follow-up operations so badly that your troops are still in the middle of those messes. On the other hand you have a history of ousting democratic governments and installing dictators in their place. Iran, Chile, Haiti, the list goes on, all the way up to propping up Mubarak himself for decades. You've installed or propped up more dictators than you've removed.
Go learn the difference between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein and then get back to me with some sort of relevant point.
The subtext of all this ubiquitous commentary is that technology invented in the USA is helping these poor plebs in less advanced countries to win their freedom and hence become more American-like.
It is, of course, a load of bollox.
The role of new media has been picked up by the mainstream western press and held up as if it would never have happened without this technology and hence allows the west to take credit for this uprising. The fact that the era of cheap food has come to an end, the demographics of the Arab world and the middle east has produced a massive generation of young people, and people are willing to organise by any means available including good old fashioned word-of-mouth doesn't have the same soundbite-friendly ring to it.
They way things are going we may need that here in the USA sometime in the next few years.
Don't tell me. Some dude with a blackboard told you about impending dictatorship?
I find nothing as amusing as the rage of the entitled. You live in the most free society on Earth (or so you're fond of bragging anyway) but as soon as the party that you don't support takes power or your income tax bill goes up a little (it probably hasn't, by the way, Obama has lowered middle class taxes, you're welcome) you're crying about being "oppressed". Yeah, right. Try telling that to people who have been unable to oust their dictator for 30 years and got hit with tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammo, and speeding vehicles when they tried to do something about it. Try telling that to people in other Middle Eastern countries who get the crap kicked out of them in the street when they protest about blatantly rigged elections. Try telling that to women marooned in Islamic theocratic dictatorships and prevented from going to school.
Americans being oppressed by their own government? Ha! Gimme a freaking break! Get out of your suburban bore-hole and travel a little in this world before you start complaining about the evils of government.
Anyone promoting mass transit in sprawling suburbs needs their head examined. Sprawling suburbs are beyond redemption. There is no hope for them. Your 75MPH road today will be down to 15 soon enough an you'll have to make them 20 lanes wide before the cycle of induced traffic begins again.
Er, driving is less efficient in a high density city but that's all the more reason to walk. Cities built around the car are not necessarily more efficient to drive in. LA has over a third of the surface area devoted to roads, highways and parking lots. Hardly a motorist's heaven though, is it?
I stand corrected if that's the case. I was speaking from my own experiences of using the system, but it's been a while since I lived in England. After BR I noticed a slight improvement in the quality of the services I used, but maybe that was an outlier. I'll check out that book. Thanks.
Foxomatic
Good job TFA doesn't say there's going to be high speed rail in the midwest then.
Aaahh, so spending money from the Midwest is what's asinine.
Well it wasn't exactly the Midwest that was attacked on 9/11 and if AQ hits the USA again it's a good bet that the coasts are going to be higher on the target list than Salina, Kansas. Will we stop taking tax dollars from the flyover states to fund the military? The army will get a whole lot smaller.
Spending money on rail in the Midwest is asinine.
Good job TFA doesn't say there's going to be high speed rail in the midwest then.
The main advantage of a train is that they don't generally require acre upon acre of sprawling concrete infrastructure to be built outside of town just to interface with passengers. Passengers don't need to be shipped to these suburban monstrosities, you can build a train station slap bang in the middle of town within walking or short cab ride range of the final destinations. Over medium distances like between the main coastal cities, trains are faster than planes if you count the door-to-door journey time. Over longer distances like coast-to-coast then the plane makes more sense.
The "terrorist target" argument is getting a bit tiresome on /. If you're really that paranoid, sit in the house and don't move. High speed trains have been running all over the world for decades and I don't know of any that have been blown up.
No. Roads fill to capacity no matter how big you build them. Add another lane and your commute might get a bit quicker for a few years, but road users will adapt. Developers spread their suburbs farther to the edge and people take advantage of the 'quick commute.' Before you know it's back to bumper-to-bumper again because a few thousand extra cars have appeared on this new road. Spending on adding new roads is a terrible waste.
Maybe. But deficit spending to get the economy moving is a whole lot more productive than deficit spending to get defence contractors rich at the cost of the US taxpayer's dollars and the Iraqi citizens' lives.
Not only that, but don't we owe China trillions of dollars? I'm not an economist, and I don't really want an answer to this right now, but if capitalism is so great and communism doesn't work, what in the heck happened here? Again, I'm not calling for a revolution and a Communist takeover of America, but apparently someone has royally screwed up.
China has ditched most of the tenets of Communism except for the dictatorship part.
Ok...and exactly WHAT orifice is Obama going to pull this spare $63B out of?
Unless you start cutting some spending...quit fucking trying to spend more!!!!
Bring the troops home then. Deal?
Mass transport is a highly inefficient means of travel - I don't mean energy use. I mean time wasted at either end waiting for the damn bus or metro. As example:
My former boss took 1.5 hours to get to work on the VA train. It took me half an hour by car. The reason it took him longer was because of the half-hour walk to the station, and another half hour to the job.
I always prefer the faster route over the slower route (in terms of my personal travel time).
Depends on what kind of a settlement you live in. In a denser urban environment you're less likely to have that half-hour walk to the final destination.
I almost never advocate privatization, I consider myself to a socialist on many issues. But I would totally support dismantling Amtrak and turning the rails over to private companies. Amtrak and its staggeringly poor managment is the reason interstate rail is so terrible in the US. 3rd world countries have better long distance rail systems than the US.
I'm with you but kinda in the opposite way. The rails should be run by a non-profit which is accountable to government and subsidised by it, rolling stock can be privatised. Stations can be maintained by local authorities. Kinda like the system they have in the UK. British railways are not perfect, but that's got more to do with the legacy of the war (not enough destruction to be able to rebuild the system from scratch like they could in Germany, hence stuck with all the bottlenecks and medieval landmarks in the way) than it has to do with the ownership model. The 100% state-owned thing was tried and didn't work very well, nostalgia notwithstanding. The people who say "bring back British Rail" must have short memories, the system was a freaking disaster.
Back to the point, railways should be treated more like roads. In the US we have state agencies that are responsible for roads, and private companies like taxi firms and Greyhound bus get to make a profit by using that infrastructure. Why treat rails any different?
Pardon my French, but I think a few expletives are justified here:
...with a satellite receiver and a computer. Oh, and electricity. And probably enough food and water not to die before they get online.
Oh For Fuck's SAKE! How many more times does this clueless crap have to be debunked on /.? How do you think India and China have lifted all those millions of people out of poverty in the last 15 years? Fixing the plumbing in villages? Do you really think that the only way to generate wealth is through social programs? How come that idea gets pissed on when we're talking about the USA but advocated as regular as clockwork when we're talking about developing countries?
Get a fucking grip!
Idiot!
He meant "civilian space tourism for cheap"
No he didn't. He meant "any civilian space tourism at all". He said that governments would not allow it. Which as you know is completely bogus as it has already happened and no government has stopped it.
Every time I read a story about technological advancement in some [non friendly to the US] nation it's always portrayed in the light of "Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology OMFG THEY'RE GONNA NUKE US"
It's nearly as bad when it's a friendly nation. Hence the billion redundant unfunny jokes about curry/unintelligible tech support/Kwik E Mart/funny accents if it's a story about a technical development in India. Then there's always the standard "they shouldn't be doing that, they should be spending that money on social programs to get running water to their poor first" idiotic comments. Funny how nobody ever insists on NASA being wound up until poverty in the US is eliminated and the last homeless American is housed.
The racist undercurrent in /. has toned down a little over the years, but it's still there and I keep a close eye on it.
Great blog article here about Buran. What might have been. Just goes to show that it's good to see the Russians still active in space exploration and how their different approach gets results. They've been kicking ass since Day 1.
(Yes, I want space tourism. But I kinda doubt it'll happen in my lifetime; the logistics and geopolitical issues conspire to make it bloody unlikely that governments will allow civilian space tourism....)
Er, what?
I've been saying that for years. Government of the people by the people for the people can start to break down a little if "the people" are as thick as two short planks.
"Evolutionists"? Are these similar to "spherical Earthists" and "heliocentricists"?
Let's face it, we, the US of A are a declining power and can't afford our former glory as a space pioneer.
Let's take Kennedy Space Center, turn it into an amusement park with the over priced tickets and food, get some sort of mascot like an alien, market it towards kids, and make some money.
They're already doing it.
Well, sounds like we have should have the environment in mind when we go about killing everyone else. Let's not do it for god, country or "freedom" any longer. Let's do it for the environment.
I highly recommend Conn Iggulden's historical fictional Genghis series. Starts off in at birth and shows you the tough conditions he was brought up in. When his family was left for dead on the steppe they did what they had to do to survive. There were no cops in those days, no rule of law. If you saw some people appearing on the horizon riding towards you, you had to make sure your bows were drawn and your aim was good, because there's a chance they were coming to take your food sources in a bid to survive and were gonna kill you in the process. Oftentimes it was a case of "kill or be killed". The most 'positive' thing you can say about the story is the fact that Genghis united previously warring tribes of Mongols and brought some semblance of order to the steppes. He cut out a lot of in-fighting, mostly by conquest or threatened annihilation. Where people didn't submit to his will, he massacred them. He even put manners on the Chin (Chinese) and stopped their political manipulations that were keeping the Mongols weak, divided, and at each others' throats. The account of the siege of Yenking (Peking) was pretty epic. He managed to extract tribute from them after a long siege, and they got away with not being slaughtered.
The thing about Genghis is people tend to apply modern standards of morality to him. But in his early career it's far to say that every life he took had a self defence or greater good attached to it. It's in his later years, like the destruction of the Tanguk kingdom, where you start thinking "Okay mate, you're getting a bit out of hand here. You could have spared the civilians in this case, or at least the women and children."
So yeah, Conn Iggulden's Genghis series. Great reading. It is historical fiction but he actually includes clarifications about where he took some liberties with the story (like combining characters or events) for the sake of brevity or fleshing out certain people, so if you read all that and do a bit of reading on wiki you can build up a reasonably clear picture of where the guy was coming from.