Re:More Democratic Market
on
The Long Tail
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· Score: 1
Which is fine, but just to re-iterate the earlier poster's point, it was a TV show *first*, and the books you read were derivative of that, and likely of standard movie-novelization caliber. (Which is to say, not very good, no matter who wrote them.)
IMO, the first two seasons of Red Dwarf were excellent. After that, they got a following, a budget, had to make some cast changes, abandoned any shred of continuity, and became boring. (But stayed popular enough to have 6 more seasons. So what do I know.) But the first two are well worth watching.
Feel free to not watch them, though. That's entirely your right.
I just find it amusing that there is all this argument about what the effects might be if gays were allowed to marry and raise children. When this has already been happening for a while, due to children from a previous marriage. (Which is the case with 2 different couples in my wife's immediate family.)
We don't have to guess--we can look at the outcomes right now. (Not that that will stop the arguing, of course.)
All I'm saying is that you are talking *about* statistics, without either pointing to them, or defining your terms well enough for anyone to find them.
Heck, you're being elliptical enough in your phrasing, I'm only about 90% sure which side of the argument you'd come down on.
But on a personal note, I think its absurd to think that a homosexual couple could do as good a job of raising an adopted kid as a heterosexual couple. But once that happens, we will all be forced to accept that the homosexual raised kid is normal.
You do understand that this is already happening, even without adoption. Many gay people try to pass as straight, which includes getting into a heterosexual marriage and having children. After they "realize" they are gay, they inevitably get divorced and enter into gay relationships. Gay couples are *already* raising children.
The kid says to the sex-ed teacher: "Which of my two daddies has a vagina? So boys don't have vaginas? So boys can't make babies? I was adopted? What?"
Oh please. Any confusion on this level would be cleared up by about age 3.
You misunderstand. Marriage has nothing to do with procreation. It does, on the other hand, have everything to do with good citizenship. Doubt me? Look at the statistics for successful people that come from a stable, healthy family structure versus a broken home and/or unmarried women. The statistics speak for themselves. Bluntly, a healthy family makes tomorrows healthy society. Period.
Hard to look at the statistics without knowing how you define "healthy family structure". My definition would be looking at eliminating violence, abuse, and neglect from the mix long before I looked at the gender of the parents, but maybe that's just me. (Heck, for that matter, I don't know how you are defining "success," either, but that's probably much less problematic.).
Why does this matter? Well, I think may have an significant impact on a young child to be raised in a home with gay parents. A lot of what we grow up with and learn about marriage would be significantly different - we learn gender roles from our parents (which is not always the same in all families, but it certainly sets our bearings as we grow up). We may eventually confront the issue of sex with our parents, and although most of us don't like to think of our parents as having sex, on another level, when we are first confronting the issue with them in our teens (probably), we have the tacit understanding that they are talking about the same kind of sex as I would be experiencing. This is not true in two cases: gay children with straight parents, and straight children with gay parents. Until now, we haven't had to consider the second option very often.
Actually not true.
Everyone keeps pretending that gay people aren't having their own biological children, but it's actually reasonably common. A lot of gays go through a stage where they desparately *want* to be straight, so they pretend that they are, get married, have kids, and only later "realize" that they are gay. Divorce inevitably ensues, and you end up with a gay/lesbian couple that, depending on custody arrangements, may very well be raising a child, at least part time.
Now, you can debate what affect this may or may not have on the children, but that fact is that gay couples are raising children, and will continue to raise children, in measurable numbers, no matter what ends up happening with gay marriage.
Actually, what you are talking about is the difference between private sector and public sector work.
For the private sector, it is all about cost/benefit and efficiency. Especially for small & medium sized benefits, "good enough" probably is.
With public sector, especially with data as sensitive as what we are talking about here, you want the job done completely right, even if it takes longer and costs more. If I lived in CO, I would certainly want them to be safeguarding my data to the utmost extent possible.
I'm a firm believer that efficiency is one of the most over-rated concepts at the present time. A truly efficient system is also a fragile one. I prefer to build in some redundancy.
(And having said all that, I realize that way too many times, when the government tries to do something they do it inefficiently *and* incorrectly. But that is a different problem.)
It's also worth pointing out that both Bushes and Clinton seem to meet the classic symptoms of ADD. They all seem to have found their own individual ways of channeling it, but it's one of those things to keep in mind when you're watching their behavior.
But then you're getting your news from a bunch of people who have absolutely no idea what's actually going on in the country.
No, that's not how it works.
The powerless have to learn how to understand the powerful, so that they can avoid getting stomped.
The powerful have no incentive to learn how the powerless think. (Or, not nearly as much.)
Therefore, as the US is "the only remaining superpower," reporters in other countries are likely to have a pretty good idea how things in the US work. But we in the US are much less likely to understand what's going on in, say, Botswana.
I am normally all in favor of industries cutting out the middleman. It tends to be the best way to keep prices low.
However, in this case my perspective is that of a Mac gamer. Since the chances of Steam working with the Mac are virtually nil, the more incentive Valve has to steer everything through Steam, the less chance there is that HL2 will ever be available for the Mac.
Not like I ever expected that it would be, given the history with the original Half-Life.
I would have greatly benefited from being able to go to work at a computer company for a very very small wage at the age of 11.
Unless you had made it to age 20, and then suddenly realized that you couldn't stand computers. And becuase of your narrowed educational focus, your prospects outside the field were very slim.
SCO is an example where the presence of alternative sources of information has served to minimize the damage that would have been done. Most aren't so fortunate. In the 80's there was a scam that went by the name ZZZZ Best. It was a stock pump scam that managed to persist for quite awhile untill it was exposed by the then editor of Barons Alan Abelson.
A bit off-topic, but I took a CPA class on Fraud that was taught by the Controller of ZZZZ Best. That was a very interesting case. And they got within just a few weeks of successfully pulling off their IPO, at which point they had a contract to take over all of Sears carpet cleaning business nationwide. At which point it would have been very difficult to uncover their fraud.
Their basic fraud method was the old classic of inventing contracts that didn't exist, and forging documents to make it look like they did. They also finessed the (amazingly few) site visits.
Barons might have been one of the first to report the story nationally, but the fraud was actually discovered by a Style reporter for an LA paper (probably the Times, but I don't remember for sure), who was doing a fluff piece on the management. She decided that she wanted there to be a picture of one of their job sites in the piece. She had a couple of names of their "clients" so she tried to go visit them, but they all turned out to be mail drops. At that point, they were caught.
You don't need to tell me. He's my Congressman. And you left out the fact that McDermott was on the ethics committee at the time he released that. So he should have known better.
And that is why I voted for the Green Party candidate who ran against him in the last election. (Or was that 2000. It blurs.)
If a credible, liberal Democrat ran against McDermott, he would lose in a heartbeat. But no one ever runs against him. (That aforementioned Green party candidate got ~33% of the vote, which I think proves my point. I don't think a Republican has bothered to run in that district for 6 years.)
Well, I don't know how anyone can call a fourteen page document written by a lawyer "clear," but that's another matter.
IANAL, I don't have the faintest idea whether the release of this information was legal or illegal. I'm not calling for anyone's head. (But believe me, I *always* get explicit permission before I access a computer. It's part of the ethical standards of my profession, whether or not there is any force of law behind it.)
All I was saying is that you can't defend his actions by saying he didn't break any laws to *access* the information. If releasing the information was illegal, it doesn't matter how he got it. Once again, I have no idea whether or not it is illegal, and don't even have an opinion on whether or not it *should* be illegal.
But most of your post was addressing whether or not it was ethical or moral. I don't know the ethical guidelines for congressional staffers (I'm cynical enough to believe there are none:) ), so I can't address that. (I would be interested in knowing if it was against ethical rules for a Congressman to direct his staff to release such information. I'd be willing to bet that there is a rule which appears to prevent it, but which has enough wiggle room in it that they can safely do it.)
I do believe that releasing the information was immoral, though. (And I would say the same thing with regards to your hypothetical example involving White House documents.) To my mind, there is a distinction between policy meetings and documents (what needs to be done) and strategy meetings and documents (how to go about doing it). I have no problem with policy being leaked. But I don't think strategy is anybody else's business (*unless* something about it is illegal). Is there a grey area there? Sure. But since this is my personal morality, I get to decide those on a case by case basis.
The upshot of which is, I have no opinion whether Mr Miranda should be fined or go to jail, but I do know that I would never hire him.
The English language needs gender neutral singular and possesive pronouns to refer to someone in the third person.:/
I agree, but we're already well on our way to allowing the third person plural pronouns to substitute. That usage is already ubiquitous. Within 20 years it will be deemed explicitly grammatical.
If Microsoft accidently puts their source code up for download on their webpage, is it "infiltration" if I download them?
No, but it may still be illegal.
IMO, this should be treated no differently than if that same information was left unattended in a labeled manila file folder on the front reception desk in the Senator's office. The question of whether or not it is illegal to distribute particular information is a completely separate question from whether illegal means were used to procure the information in the first place.
Or you can do like I'm going to do and vote Democratic, and hope that Kerry *dies*, so that Edwards becomes President.
OK, I'm not quite that cold. But I do consider VP to be the tie-breaker. (That, and who I think is going to control Congress--Republicans (or Democrats) in charge of everything is *bad*.)
Totally agreed. Oregon's on a much better track- if we ever have electronic voting, it will be over an SSL connection, because we already have no polling places left. Yes, folks, all the voters of Oregon are on the equivalent of permanent absentee voting; ain't no such thing as a polling place in the entire state, and we get two weeks to vote (ballots start going out October 13th). In the comfort of our homes, as Bill Bradbury says. And guess what- no discernable problems as of yet except for a few hanging chads in Washington County where they hasn't switched to scantron forms yet (they have now- our last two elections were scantron based).
Interestingly enough, I read a story in the Seattle P-I on Monday that was talking about the problems with increased absentee balloting. The main problem that they talked about was fraud (mostly in the theoretical, I don't think there were any proven examples)--problems ranging from ballots being pilfered from peoples mailboxes (either before or after being filled out), to citizens being pressured to vote for the correct person, or deliver their ballots to someone else. They're main suggestion was that this was not so much a problem with national elections, but could have a tremendous influence on local races.
But the thing that I really took notice of was their assertion that every place that absentee ballots had been expanded, voter turnout subsequently *dropped*. Thy didn't specifically mention Oregon, but I can only assume it is part of "everywhere."
As I recall, the best theory that they could come up for for that was that by separating voting from something that you have to do on a particular time and day, it gets deprioritized, and slips through the cracks of people's busy lives.
Personally, I hate absentee voting. I think it contributes to the sense of disconnectedness Americans feel from our civic duties. I like the ritual of going to the polls, and I always make sure and bring my kids with me, so that they will see it as one of those things that is part of a normal life. I sympathize with people who are "too busy" to go to the polls, but frankly, nothing I ever have to do is more important than voting. (Call me crazy. I'm really gung-ho about Jury Duty, too. Maybe one of these days I'll actually get to serve on one, instead of just sitting in the courtroom for an hour or two and then getting sent home.) Of course, I *do* think that Election Day should be a national holiday, so that employment concerns aren't ever an issue.
but since then we've been convinced that "government regulation is always good, mmmkay" and swallow this horseshit without a second thought.
I thought the current political meme was "government regulation is always bad."
Which is also untrue. Good regulations are good, and bad regulations are bad. The only problem is telling the two apart before they are enacted.
I volunteer to be the Supreme Neutral Arbiter of All Regulations. And remember, it'll be easier for me to be "fair" if you tell me who's paying me *before* I start ruling on these regulations.
Given enough information, the market can simply shun bad boys out of business, and if we expected to have to do that to make the system work, it would get done. If we knew that the FTC (e.g.) would simply dig out the information and post it on a page somewhere, and that we have to do the enforcement, we could do it and we could tailor our enforcement to our own (or our employers') ideas of what sort of punishment fits the crime.
Imagine that you pulled some shady deal, and now wherever you go, buyers are saying, "waitaminute, you have Sparkle Farkel on your board -- wasn't she in charge of Scamco when they cheated all those people? no thanks, I'll buy from someone else."
That might work if you had a choice of buying from EvilCo and GoodCorp, but what happens when your choices are between buying from a company that profits from foreign child labor, a company that is actively destroying the rain forest, and a company that hires a con artist as its CEO? Once the choice comes down to a lesser of evils or to a cause of the month, public sentiment doesn't have any power. Plus there is the problem of information overload. Individuals would have a hard time keeping track of who they should be "punishing" with each purchase. If you've hung around with people who take boycotts seriously, you know what I mean.
One of my friends figured out how to pick the lock to the cafeteria using one of those metal shelf-holders. We successfully used that technique for months, going in to get the occasional soda or piece of fruit. (Our rationalization for doing so was that we missed a lot of meals on our food plan (which was unlimited food, but only at certain times of the day) by sleeping through breakfast. So they "owed" us the food.)
Unfortuanately he showed his roommated how to do it, and soon after that he got drunk on a Saturday night, and proceeded to invite the whole dorm in. They ravaged the place. I distinctly remember one guy taking a 20lb tub of chocolate pudding back to his dorm room.
Needless to say, the locks got changed that Monday, and our free sodas were history.
Morning Edition begins broadcasting at ~5AM Pacific time, and repeats its programming several times during its timeslot. (At least here in Seattle.)
Many people's morning commute does not involve a car. The radio reception I got on the bus was always really crappy, so I've given up listening to a lot of radio. This might be a solution.
Actually I would *highly* reccommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. It's about the colonization of mars. He probably comes off as confused to you because he is able to articulate well several contradictory points of view--I would call that one of his strengths. It means you don't know what the "right" side of the argument as he has the history unfolding.
I also loved one of his early novels, _Icehenge_, which I'll admit probably isn't quite as good as I remember it being. But still well worth reading.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the first two seasons of Red Dwarf were excellent. After that, they got a following, a budget, had to make some cast changes, abandoned any shred of continuity, and became boring. (But stayed popular enough to have 6 more seasons. So what do I know.) But the first two are well worth watching.
Feel free to not watch them, though. That's entirely your right.
I just find it amusing that there is all this argument about what the effects might be if gays were allowed to marry and raise children. When this has already been happening for a while, due to children from a previous marriage. (Which is the case with 2 different couples in my wife's immediate family.)
We don't have to guess--we can look at the outcomes right now. (Not that that will stop the arguing, of course.)
Heck, you're being elliptical enough in your phrasing, I'm only about 90% sure which side of the argument you'd come down on.
You do understand that this is already happening, even without adoption. Many gay people try to pass as straight, which includes getting into a heterosexual marriage and having children. After they "realize" they are gay, they inevitably get divorced and enter into gay relationships. Gay couples are *already* raising children.
The kid says to the sex-ed teacher: "Which of my two daddies has a vagina? So boys don't have vaginas? So boys can't make babies? I was adopted? What?"
Oh please. Any confusion on this level would be cleared up by about age 3.
Not to mention the not-insignificant number of children from a previous heterosexual marriage.
Hard to look at the statistics without knowing how you define "healthy family structure". My definition would be looking at eliminating violence, abuse, and neglect from the mix long before I looked at the gender of the parents, but maybe that's just me. (Heck, for that matter, I don't know how you are defining "success," either, but that's probably much less problematic.).
Actually not true.
Everyone keeps pretending that gay people aren't having their own biological children, but it's actually reasonably common. A lot of gays go through a stage where they desparately *want* to be straight, so they pretend that they are, get married, have kids, and only later "realize" that they are gay. Divorce inevitably ensues, and you end up with a gay/lesbian couple that, depending on custody arrangements, may very well be raising a child, at least part time.
Now, you can debate what affect this may or may not have on the children, but that fact is that gay couples are raising children, and will continue to raise children, in measurable numbers, no matter what ends up happening with gay marriage.
For the private sector, it is all about cost/benefit and efficiency. Especially for small & medium sized benefits, "good enough" probably is.
With public sector, especially with data as sensitive as what we are talking about here, you want the job done completely right, even if it takes longer and costs more. If I lived in CO, I would certainly want them to be safeguarding my data to the utmost extent possible.
I'm a firm believer that efficiency is one of the most over-rated concepts at the present time. A truly efficient system is also a fragile one. I prefer to build in some redundancy.
(And having said all that, I realize that way too many times, when the government tries to do something they do it inefficiently *and* incorrectly. But that is a different problem.)
But then you're getting your news from a bunch of people who have absolutely no idea what's actually going on in the country.
No, that's not how it works.
The powerless have to learn how to understand the powerful, so that they can avoid getting stomped.
The powerful have no incentive to learn how the powerless think. (Or, not nearly as much.)
Therefore, as the US is "the only remaining superpower," reporters in other countries are likely to have a pretty good idea how things in the US work. But we in the US are much less likely to understand what's going on in, say, Botswana.
However, in this case my perspective is that of a Mac gamer. Since the chances of Steam working with the Mac are virtually nil, the more incentive Valve has to steer everything through Steam, the less chance there is that HL2 will ever be available for the Mac.
Not like I ever expected that it would be, given the history with the original Half-Life.
Unless you had made it to age 20, and then suddenly realized that you couldn't stand computers. And becuase of your narrowed educational focus, your prospects outside the field were very slim.
A bit off-topic, but I took a CPA class on Fraud that was taught by the Controller of ZZZZ Best. That was a very interesting case. And they got within just a few weeks of successfully pulling off their IPO, at which point they had a contract to take over all of Sears carpet cleaning business nationwide. At which point it would have been very difficult to uncover their fraud.
Their basic fraud method was the old classic of inventing contracts that didn't exist, and forging documents to make it look like they did. They also finessed the (amazingly few) site visits.
Barons might have been one of the first to report the story nationally, but the fraud was actually discovered by a Style reporter for an LA paper (probably the Times, but I don't remember for sure), who was doing a fluff piece on the management. She decided that she wanted there to be a picture of one of their job sites in the piece. She had a couple of names of their "clients" so she tried to go visit them, but they all turned out to be mail drops. At that point, they were caught.
And that is why I voted for the Green Party candidate who ran against him in the last election. (Or was that 2000. It blurs.)
If a credible, liberal Democrat ran against McDermott, he would lose in a heartbeat. But no one ever runs against him. (That aforementioned Green party candidate got ~33% of the vote, which I think proves my point. I don't think a Republican has bothered to run in that district for 6 years.)
IANAL, I don't have the faintest idea whether the release of this information was legal or illegal. I'm not calling for anyone's head. (But believe me, I *always* get explicit permission before I access a computer. It's part of the ethical standards of my profession, whether or not there is any force of law behind it.)
All I was saying is that you can't defend his actions by saying he didn't break any laws to *access* the information. If releasing the information was illegal, it doesn't matter how he got it. Once again, I have no idea whether or not it is illegal, and don't even have an opinion on whether or not it *should* be illegal.
But most of your post was addressing whether or not it was ethical or moral. I don't know the ethical guidelines for congressional staffers (I'm cynical enough to believe there are none :) ), so I can't address that. (I would be interested in knowing if it was against ethical rules for a Congressman to direct his staff to release such information. I'd be willing to bet that there is a rule which appears to prevent it, but which has enough wiggle room in it that they can safely do it.)
I do believe that releasing the information was immoral, though. (And I would say the same thing with regards to your hypothetical example involving White House documents.) To my mind, there is a distinction between policy meetings and documents (what needs to be done) and strategy meetings and documents (how to go about doing it). I have no problem with policy being leaked. But I don't think strategy is anybody else's business (*unless* something about it is illegal). Is there a grey area there? Sure. But since this is my personal morality, I get to decide those on a case by case basis.
The upshot of which is, I have no opinion whether Mr Miranda should be fined or go to jail, but I do know that I would never hire him.
I agree, but we're already well on our way to allowing the third person plural pronouns to substitute. That usage is already ubiquitous. Within 20 years it will be deemed explicitly grammatical.
No, but it may still be illegal.
IMO, this should be treated no differently than if that same information was left unattended in a labeled manila file folder on the front reception desk in the Senator's office. The question of whether or not it is illegal to distribute particular information is a completely separate question from whether illegal means were used to procure the information in the first place.
Because if we can't convince our allies that invasion is the right course, it probably isn't.
Pin me down, and I'd say that "UN support" is a very good policy, but not a 100% requirement. But I'm a CPA, and we don't give 100% to *anything*.
OK, I'm not quite that cold. But I do consider VP to be the tie-breaker. (That, and who I think is going to control Congress--Republicans (or Democrats) in charge of everything is *bad*.)
Interestingly enough, I read a story in the Seattle P-I on Monday that was talking about the problems with increased absentee balloting. The main problem that they talked about was fraud (mostly in the theoretical, I don't think there were any proven examples)--problems ranging from ballots being pilfered from peoples mailboxes (either before or after being filled out), to citizens being pressured to vote for the correct person, or deliver their ballots to someone else. They're main suggestion was that this was not so much a problem with national elections, but could have a tremendous influence on local races.
But the thing that I really took notice of was their assertion that every place that absentee ballots had been expanded, voter turnout subsequently *dropped*. Thy didn't specifically mention Oregon, but I can only assume it is part of "everywhere."
As I recall, the best theory that they could come up for for that was that by separating voting from something that you have to do on a particular time and day, it gets deprioritized, and slips through the cracks of people's busy lives.
Personally, I hate absentee voting. I think it contributes to the sense of disconnectedness Americans feel from our civic duties. I like the ritual of going to the polls, and I always make sure and bring my kids with me, so that they will see it as one of those things that is part of a normal life. I sympathize with people who are "too busy" to go to the polls, but frankly, nothing I ever have to do is more important than voting. (Call me crazy. I'm really gung-ho about Jury Duty, too. Maybe one of these days I'll actually get to serve on one, instead of just sitting in the courtroom for an hour or two and then getting sent home.) Of course, I *do* think that Election Day should be a national holiday, so that employment concerns aren't ever an issue.
I thought the current political meme was "government regulation is always bad."
Which is also untrue. Good regulations are good, and bad regulations are bad. The only problem is telling the two apart before they are enacted.
I volunteer to be the Supreme Neutral Arbiter of All Regulations. And remember, it'll be easier for me to be "fair" if you tell me who's paying me *before* I start ruling on these regulations.
Imagine that you pulled some shady deal, and now wherever you go, buyers are saying, "waitaminute, you have Sparkle Farkel on your board -- wasn't she in charge of Scamco when they cheated all those people? no thanks, I'll buy from someone else."
That might work if you had a choice of buying from EvilCo and GoodCorp, but what happens when your choices are between buying from a company that profits from foreign child labor, a company that is actively destroying the rain forest, and a company that hires a con artist as its CEO? Once the choice comes down to a lesser of evils or to a cause of the month, public sentiment doesn't have any power. Plus there is the problem of information overload. Individuals would have a hard time keeping track of who they should be "punishing" with each purchase. If you've hung around with people who take boycotts seriously, you know what I mean.
One of my friends figured out how to pick the lock to the cafeteria using one of those metal shelf-holders. We successfully used that technique for months, going in to get the occasional soda or piece of fruit. (Our rationalization for doing so was that we missed a lot of meals on our food plan (which was unlimited food, but only at certain times of the day) by sleeping through breakfast. So they "owed" us the food.)
Unfortuanately he showed his roommated how to do it, and soon after that he got drunk on a Saturday night, and proceeded to invite the whole dorm in. They ravaged the place. I distinctly remember one guy taking a 20lb tub of chocolate pudding back to his dorm room.
Needless to say, the locks got changed that Monday, and our free sodas were history.
Morning Edition begins broadcasting at ~5AM Pacific time, and repeats its programming several times during its timeslot. (At least here in Seattle.)
Many people's morning commute does not involve a car. The radio reception I got on the bus was always really crappy, so I've given up listening to a lot of radio. This might be a solution.
I also loved one of his early novels, _Icehenge_, which I'll admit probably isn't quite as good as I remember it being. But still well worth reading.