Your post begs to be fisked, and I have the time and a good head of righteous anger built up, so here I go:
Slavory is still affecting us today. Segregration did not end until 1969. People are still alive from before 1969.
True enough. But are those pre-integration blacks the ones that are going to college and receiving promotions on account of AA, or are the beneficiaries the next generation, their children, those that have never known political repression?
And, of course, there are two sides to this - the state cannot GIVE to blacks without TAKING AWAY from whites. So the question remains: which whites? Well, no answer is given to this, because no attempt is made to find the guilty, nor is any attempt made to find the victims from among the blacks - a recent immigrant from Senegal gets the same credit as an elderly Alabaman. That is what makes your policy racist - you are assigning guilt to whites simply because they are white, and merit to blacks simply because they are black. This is the most serious argument that any advocate of affirmative action must answer.
My personal experience may be instructive here. I am a first-generation descendant of Estonian refugees that fled to the United States after the invasion by Soviet forces during WW2. No ancestors of mine ever owned slaves or participated in segregation - they lived in Syracuse and New England and mostly concerned themselves with rebuilding their lives and earning enough to send their children to college. And that is quite beside the point anyway, unless you believe that children should be held responsible for the crimes of their parents; the fact is that I myself have never harmed women or minorities, and the vast majority of white men living today can say the same. We are being punished not out of anything we ourselves did, but purely because our class is politically unpopular.
Finally, if historical persecution is reason enough for preferential treatment, why does affirmative action not apply to Japanese-Americans? Wartime internment is not sufficiently oppressive? A desire to protect the reputation of the sainted F.D.R.? Or is it really that Asians have committed the unpardonable sin of unexpectedly succeeding in society? Maybe you aren't all that interested in historical claims after all?
Women's sufferage did not happen until 1920.
Regrettable. But I fail to see how AA addresses this historical grievance - after all, it wasn't me that kept them from the polls, and I take no responsibility now for the crimes of some men in the distant past. Anyway, is preferential hiring really a substitute for the franchise? Why not instead give contemporary women two votes to compensate? No?
There are less woman mentors, teachers, and role-models because of this and sexist social traditions.
Huh? Is this even true? Leaving aside the poorly defined terms "mentor" and "role-model", which could apply to anybody you want them to, it is a commonplace that women are vastly overrepresented in the teaching profession, so much so that some areas are doing anything they can to lure male teachers and thus correct the imbalance. Teaching was regarded as "women's work" for centuries due to the belief that women are better with children and have some special nurturing qualities that make them uniquely qualified for the job - clearly a "sexist social tradition"! In fact, let us correct your statement thus: 'There are more women teachers because of sexist social traditions, not in spite of them'.
But, you cry, what about the lack of women doctors and engineers (as an engineer myself, I feel this lack acutely!)? What about the 70 cents on the dollar?!? Well, there are no legal or political impediments in the way of women now (in fact, legal and political encouragements have been in effect for decades). Nasty-evil-greedy males are not paying 30 cents more to other men just for the pleasure of hiring men - enough women are simply not entering lucrat
But that's just it - affirmative action does not penalize people for wrongdoing, nor does it reward any victims of such wrongdoing. The slaves are long dead, and so are the slaveowners. A. A. is pure racism: punishing whites because of the color of their skin, out of some theory of collective racial guilt. There is nothing else to it, and there never will be.
Actually, we know EVERYTHING about equality, at least everything that's worth knowing: We want only to protect everyone's rights equally (and do not accept soi-disant "rights" like the "right to a job" or the "right to healthcare"). The legitimate function of government is to protect the rights of all of its citizens, not to rob A to benefit B.
We also don't treat anyone "like shit", and if you step off the class-war battleground for two seconds and observe the actual behaviour of wealthy people and corporations, you will see that, in the main, they don't either. At worst, they treat the poor indifferently, or don't give them as much as you think they deserve. Really treating people like shit seems to be the domain of governments...
But the cliche of eeevil industrialists preying on the helpless is deeply implanted in modern minds by movies and television - so deeply, that many people don't seem to understand that corporate soldiers AREN'T running around with guns shooting at consumer advocates and the like.
Doubt if you can shoot one out of a potato cannon - the central hole of the CD will either be too large, and the expanding gases will escape through it, or the CD will shatter. If it did work, range would be poor as well, for aerodynamic reasons.
I did see an episode of Mythbusters in which the boys built some penny launching guns (the penny flew in frisbee fashion) - perhaps you could scale up something like that. One of them was an aluminum block with a thin slot for the penny on the end of a.22 rifle. You could put something like that on the end of a potato gun, maybe.
Motorize one of the old-style push-powered lawnmowers. Quiet, and even healthier for the grass.
Yeah, I've heard that they produce better results. I imagine that sort of thing should be pretty safe as well - just keep the roll of blades somewhat enclosed...
Bullsh*t. 1984 was about totalitarianism. Yes Orwell was solidly anti-communist, and yes 1984 was an inference to communist governments.
Well, about that "solidly anti-communist" thing... Orwell in fact was fairly solidly pro-communist for a few years there (in his Wigan Pier and Down and Out days). He saw the light probably because of his bad experiences with the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War.
But note that there were social classes in 1984's society (proles, outer circle, inner circle), and the need to maintain control over the populace by constantly fomenting war, and using nationalism and fear to keep them in line.
There were social classes in Soviet Russia as well. Don't accept that classless society crap at face-value - the communist ideal never happened because it is at odds with the nature of reality. In the SU the classes were a matter of Party membership; the terms "inner circle", "outer circle" and "proles" could very easily be applied to any actual communist society.
Finally, "fomenting war" and "using nationalism and fear" are by no means excluded from the communist dictator toolkit, no matter what they may CLAIM. These are just the inevitable expedients to which all totalitarians must turn.
The safe way to do it is to have the thing run with very low power, and just nibble at the lawn, but do it all day. The big gas engine on the top of your push mower is really for the convenience of the operator, so that he can mow tall grass without stalling the thing or slowing down.
But if you mowed the grass yourself, one time, and then let loose your robot to simply maintain the height with a low power electric motor and some relatively safe blades, etc.... After all, it can stay out there all damn day!
You don't have to read the article to know that - a railgun is not a magic weapon: any projectile of non-zero mass will follow a parabolic arc. Of course, at very high velocities and short distances, the curve may be negligible, but you can fire it a long distance in the standard artillery style; hence the discussion of below-the-horizon strikes.
This kind of thing is almost always fired from a huge bank of caps. After all, you don't really NEED continuous fire! Actually, the fire rate of a railgun is probably going to be limited by heat at the rails anyway. Which is not to mention rail erosion which will limit how many times you can fire...
There's no call for that! I went far out of my way to ensure that I would not be misunderstood in this way, and I am a bit baffled that you would respond in such fashion.
I was merely answering what seemed to be your belief that the CIA would have been leery of Turing's homosexuality out of pure bigotry (and not of a at least somewhat reasonable fear)- a common charge to be leveled at such organizations these days. That does not denigrate the great man's work, nor his character; I was very careful to do neither. It also does not excuse anything that was actually done to Turing by the British government, most of which had nothing to do with any intelligence agency, but was simply UK law at the time. In this, Turing deserves great respect as he was not able to use his status as an unknown hero of the war in his legal defense, but put up with his persecution in silence.
Furthermore, I agree that there is nothing ethically wrong with being gay. Indeed, it was exactly the "pressure applied by society" and the fear of being exposed that made homosexuality a real security risk, which I took pains to mention. Would that the west had been more enlightened then, and we would not be having this argument now.
Come to think of it, why are we having this argument? It is rather a pity to see that knee-jerk criticisms like yours would stifle discussion by painting me as a homophobe. Are you willing to consider ideas that are, after all, only slightly different than yours, or did you merely want to see a lot of heads nodding up and down in unison as you spoke?
"The Nazis were about as far right as you can get"
Is that so? Try making the same statement with the official name for the Nazi party:
"The National Socialists were about as far right as you can get"
Or try this: "basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same". That was said by Hitler in 1941.
Actually, as the name implies, the N.S. ideology was a mix of lefty socialism and righty nationalism, as opposed to the internationalism advocated by other Marxists of the time (and quickly abandoned even by Stalin when he needed Russians to fight for "the Motherland"). It, was, therefore, profoundly illiberal, and reserved its greatest hatred for Anglo-American liberalism and commercialism. Also, the growth of the N.S. party was largely due to the efforts of left organizations in Germany and elsewhere; only, as in 1917 Russia, once the necessary revolutionary climate had been established, the nastiest, most brutal faction (Nazis in Germany, Bolsheviks in Russia) took control of the country. I highly recommend Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_ as an introduction to this history.
But I tire of this label-slinging! Let us end meaningless talk of left and right (both of which offer us only self-contradictory and idiotic platforms) and dedicate ourselves instead to what is truly liberal: individual liberty, free enterprise, reason, and optimism.
Probably not. However, at the risk of being hounded to death myself as a Homophobe, and meaning no respect to the very great Turing or to any other homosexuals that suffered public disapproval or worse at this time, I suggest that the CIA would not have been entirely wrong in finding such a situation worrisome. It is now well known that the KGB emphasized recruitment of gays with sensitive knowledge, believing that they were consumed with bitterness toward their own cultures (and not without reason, either. Gays were treated even worse behind the Iron Curtain, but that was probably not known in the west at the time) and ready to defect. Indeed, 3 of the Cambridge ring were homo- or bi-sexual, as were many other burnt spies of the time. Denying security clearance to gays on such grounds was common enough for Clinton to issue an executive order banning the practice in 1995.
Note: there is no evidence to indicate that Turing ever worked as an enemy spy, or that the CIA was involved in his death or was even worried about his loyalty. I am only suggesting that, in this case, the CIA would not have been acting out of pure bigotry, but out of a somewhat reasonable fear of exposure.
Indeed! Has anyone done a study on the damage done to American productivity when horny geeks are prevented from legal access to whores? Isn't it time to roll back that law and let the most intelligent part of our workforce stop worrying about girls, stop wasting all of its time in barbaric practices like dating, and get back to work?
As the tech for several real estate offices in Palm Beach county, Florida, I've had a nightmare dealing with one of these "web enabled" applications. For years they had a pretty awful windows app for accessing the county-wide MLS database. Couple years ago they switched to the web; some yahoos called FNIS sold them a platform named REXplorer.
First, it only works in the most recent version of IE. To make matters worse, it installs some kind of patch, and runs an ActiveX control to make sure that only IE 6 users are using it. They actually have the gall to tell mac users to run an windows emulator! Of course, no mention at all is made of any other OS.
And finally, the most shocking thing of all - IE must be run under an administrative user in XP to access this simple web site! Incredible but true! I thought perhaps I could assign a limited user write access to specific directories, or something like that. I called up and down their organization until I finally got the answer: they can't get it to work either! The admin I reached complained himself that his users all had admin priviledges and were installing spyware and making a mess of things, but his hands were tied because the app simply can't be made to work under a limited user!
Because MLS access is the most important thing in this business, I have been forced to grant unlimited access to all users for almost all of the computers in five offices of this company! It is a truly absurd situation. Unfortunately, there is no breaking the lock this FNIS has on the county real estate association (which is a kind of cartel, actually - I have told the owners of this company that the real estate business will not survive if it continues to define itself as an information monopoly with the magic keys to the MLS, but to no avail) so I am stuck having to support this godawful excuse for a web application.
First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs)
You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Evidence that came out later indicated that much of the so-called "missile-gap" was imaginary.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
I can't believe you are congratulating a communist/fascist force for their success in shooting down the stealth fighter. That simply disgusts me - so I will assume I am misunderstanding you.
And as jgoemat states, "if you fill enough of the sky with flak you will eventually hit something."
This reminds me of the circumstances of the soviet interception of Gary Power's U2 - it later came out that they had fired something like 10 missiles at the plane before they hit it, and one of those errant shots brought down a pursuing a MIG!
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Not true. The US shuttle can be landed completely automatically, by software, and it HAS been done. The fact that it routinely is landed manually is due to the fact that American pilots insist on this control, not to any absurd inferiority to soviet technology.
At any rate, the fact that the soviets stole such an awful design as the shuttle (and any child can see that the buran is an obvious copy) is testament to their own lack of engineering judgement and sense of technological inferiority.
But you SHOULD disagree. It is true that the store owner can put whatever video cameras, ID requirements, retina scanners, strip searches, etc. that he wants. But the second the store is REQUIRED to do so by the state (for dubious and vague purposes, I might add), freedom-loving people ought to mobilize.
Slashdot Mirror
HAHA - "practicing 0G docking maneuvers", eh? Mod parent up!
Slavory is still affecting us today. Segregration did not end until 1969. People are still alive from before 1969.
True enough. But are those pre-integration blacks the ones that are going to college and receiving promotions on account of AA, or are the beneficiaries the next generation, their children, those that have never known political repression?
And, of course, there are two sides to this - the state cannot GIVE to blacks without TAKING AWAY from whites. So the question remains: which whites? Well, no answer is given to this, because no attempt is made to find the guilty, nor is any attempt made to find the victims from among the blacks - a recent immigrant from Senegal gets the same credit as an elderly Alabaman. That is what makes your policy racist - you are assigning guilt to whites simply because they are white, and merit to blacks simply because they are black. This is the most serious argument that any advocate of affirmative action must answer.
My personal experience may be instructive here. I am a first-generation descendant of Estonian refugees that fled to the United States after the invasion by Soviet forces during WW2. No ancestors of mine ever owned slaves or participated in segregation - they lived in Syracuse and New England and mostly concerned themselves with rebuilding their lives and earning enough to send their children to college. And that is quite beside the point anyway, unless you believe that children should be held responsible for the crimes of their parents; the fact is that I myself have never harmed women or minorities, and the vast majority of white men living today can say the same. We are being punished not out of anything we ourselves did, but purely because our class is politically unpopular.
Finally, if historical persecution is reason enough for preferential treatment, why does affirmative action not apply to Japanese-Americans? Wartime internment is not sufficiently oppressive? A desire to protect the reputation of the sainted F.D.R.? Or is it really that Asians have committed the unpardonable sin of unexpectedly succeeding in society? Maybe you aren't all that interested in historical claims after all?
Women's sufferage did not happen until 1920.
Regrettable. But I fail to see how AA addresses this historical grievance - after all, it wasn't me that kept them from the polls, and I take no responsibility now for the crimes of some men in the distant past. Anyway, is preferential hiring really a substitute for the franchise? Why not instead give contemporary women two votes to compensate? No?
There are less woman mentors, teachers, and role-models because of this and sexist social traditions.
Huh? Is this even true? Leaving aside the poorly defined terms "mentor" and "role-model", which could apply to anybody you want them to, it is a commonplace that women are vastly overrepresented in the teaching profession, so much so that some areas are doing anything they can to lure male teachers and thus correct the imbalance. Teaching was regarded as "women's work" for centuries due to the belief that women are better with children and have some special nurturing qualities that make them uniquely qualified for the job - clearly a "sexist social tradition"! In fact, let us correct your statement thus: 'There are more women teachers because of sexist social traditions, not in spite of them'.
But, you cry, what about the lack of women doctors and engineers (as an engineer myself, I feel this lack acutely!)? What about the 70 cents on the dollar?!? Well, there are no legal or political impediments in the way of women now (in fact, legal and political encouragements have been in effect for decades). Nasty-evil-greedy males are not paying 30 cents more to other men just for the pleasure of hiring men - enough women are simply not entering lucrat
But that's just it - affirmative action does not penalize people for wrongdoing, nor does it reward any victims of such wrongdoing. The slaves are long dead, and so are the slaveowners. A. A. is pure racism: punishing whites because of the color of their skin, out of some theory of collective racial guilt. There is nothing else to it, and there never will be.
Heh, they're actually not green, but "watermelons": green on the outside, RED on the inside!
Actually, we know EVERYTHING about equality, at least everything that's worth knowing: We want only to protect everyone's rights equally (and do not accept soi-disant "rights" like the "right to a job" or the "right to healthcare"). The legitimate function of government is to protect the rights of all of its citizens, not to rob A to benefit B.
We also don't treat anyone "like shit", and if you step off the class-war battleground for two seconds and observe the actual behaviour of wealthy people and corporations, you will see that, in the main, they don't either. At worst, they treat the poor indifferently, or don't give them as much as you think they deserve. Really treating people like shit seems to be the domain of governments...
But the cliche of eeevil industrialists preying on the helpless is deeply implanted in modern minds by movies and television - so deeply, that many people don't seem to understand that corporate soldiers AREN'T running around with guns shooting at consumer advocates and the like.
I did see an episode of Mythbusters in which the boys built some penny launching guns (the penny flew in frisbee fashion) - perhaps you could scale up something like that. One of them was an aluminum block with a thin slot for the penny on the end of a .22 rifle. You could put something like that on the end of a potato gun, maybe.
Yeah, I've heard that they produce better results. I imagine that sort of thing should be pretty safe as well - just keep the roll of blades somewhat enclosed...
Well, about that "solidly anti-communist" thing... Orwell in fact was fairly solidly pro-communist for a few years there (in his Wigan Pier and Down and Out days). He saw the light probably because of his bad experiences with the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War.
But note that there were social classes in 1984's society (proles, outer circle, inner circle), and the need to maintain control over the populace by constantly fomenting war, and using nationalism and fear to keep them in line.There were social classes in Soviet Russia as well. Don't accept that classless society crap at face-value - the communist ideal never happened because it is at odds with the nature of reality. In the SU the classes were a matter of Party membership; the terms "inner circle", "outer circle" and "proles" could very easily be applied to any actual communist society.
Finally, "fomenting war" and "using nationalism and fear" are by no means excluded from the communist dictator toolkit, no matter what they may CLAIM. These are just the inevitable expedients to which all totalitarians must turn.The safe way to do it is to have the thing run with very low power, and just nibble at the lawn, but do it all day. The big gas engine on the top of your push mower is really for the convenience of the operator, so that he can mow tall grass without stalling the thing or slowing down.
But if you mowed the grass yourself, one time, and then let loose your robot to simply maintain the height with a low power electric motor and some relatively safe blades, etc.... After all, it can stay out there all damn day!
I think they'll listen to Reason!
You don't have to read the article to know that - a railgun is not a magic weapon: any projectile of non-zero mass will follow a parabolic arc. Of course, at very high velocities and short distances, the curve may be negligible, but you can fire it a long distance in the standard artillery style; hence the discussion of below-the-horizon strikes.
This kind of thing is almost always fired from a huge bank of caps. After all, you don't really NEED continuous fire! Actually, the fire rate of a railgun is probably going to be limited by heat at the rails anyway. Which is not to mention rail erosion which will limit how many times you can fire...
Indeed, this is the kind of shit I've come to expect from "socially conscious" acts like them.
I suspect this is not the work of the Boys, but of the record company - in this case, you ought to expect an apology from the band, I guess.
But more likely they are yet another bunch of lefties opposed to all private property except their own...
I can't use this rule of thumb. I live in Florida - EVERY antenna is built on low, wet, marshy land! :)
I was merely answering what seemed to be your belief that the CIA would have been leery of Turing's homosexuality out of pure bigotry (and not of a at least somewhat reasonable fear)- a common charge to be leveled at such organizations these days. That does not denigrate the great man's work, nor his character; I was very careful to do neither. It also does not excuse anything that was actually done to Turing by the British government, most of which had nothing to do with any intelligence agency, but was simply UK law at the time. In this, Turing deserves great respect as he was not able to use his status as an unknown hero of the war in his legal defense, but put up with his persecution in silence.
Furthermore, I agree that there is nothing ethically wrong with being gay. Indeed, it was exactly the "pressure applied by society" and the fear of being exposed that made homosexuality a real security risk, which I took pains to mention. Would that the west had been more enlightened then, and we would not be having this argument now.
Come to think of it, why are we having this argument? It is rather a pity to see that knee-jerk criticisms like yours would stifle discussion by painting me as a homophobe. Are you willing to consider ideas that are, after all, only slightly different than yours, or did you merely want to see a lot of heads nodding up and down in unison as you spoke?
Is that so? Try making the same statement with the official name for the Nazi party:
"The National Socialists were about as far right as you can get"
Or try this: "basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same". That was said by Hitler in 1941.
Actually, as the name implies, the N.S. ideology was a mix of lefty socialism and righty nationalism, as opposed to the internationalism advocated by other Marxists of the time (and quickly abandoned even by Stalin when he needed Russians to fight for "the Motherland"). It, was, therefore, profoundly illiberal, and reserved its greatest hatred for Anglo-American liberalism and commercialism. Also, the growth of the N.S. party was largely due to the efforts of left organizations in Germany and elsewhere; only, as in 1917 Russia, once the necessary revolutionary climate had been established, the nastiest, most brutal faction (Nazis in Germany, Bolsheviks in Russia) took control of the country. I highly recommend Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_ as an introduction to this history.But I tire of this label-slinging! Let us end meaningless talk of left and right (both of which offer us only self-contradictory and idiotic platforms) and dedicate ourselves instead to what is truly liberal: individual liberty, free enterprise, reason, and optimism.
Note: there is no evidence to indicate that Turing ever worked as an enemy spy, or that the CIA was involved in his death or was even worried about his loyalty. I am only suggesting that, in this case, the CIA would not have been acting out of pure bigotry, but out of a somewhat reasonable fear of exposure.
Well put. Exactly for that reason, I take the Szasz-ian view that forced treatment of mental illness is a bad idea in any case.
Indeed! Has anyone done a study on the damage done to American productivity when horny geeks are prevented from legal access to whores? Isn't it time to roll back that law and let the most intelligent part of our workforce stop worrying about girls, stop wasting all of its time in barbaric practices like dating, and get back to work?
First, it only works in the most recent version of IE. To make matters worse, it installs some kind of patch, and runs an ActiveX control to make sure that only IE 6 users are using it. They actually have the gall to tell mac users to run an windows emulator! Of course, no mention at all is made of any other OS.
And finally, the most shocking thing of all - IE must be run under an administrative user in XP to access this simple web site! Incredible but true! I thought perhaps I could assign a limited user write access to specific directories, or something like that. I called up and down their organization until I finally got the answer: they can't get it to work either! The admin I reached complained himself that his users all had admin priviledges and were installing spyware and making a mess of things, but his hands were tied because the app simply can't be made to work under a limited user!
Because MLS access is the most important thing in this business, I have been forced to grant unlimited access to all users for almost all of the computers in five offices of this company! It is a truly absurd situation. Unfortunately, there is no breaking the lock this FNIS has on the county real estate association (which is a kind of cartel, actually - I have told the owners of this company that the real estate business will not survive if it continues to define itself as an information monopoly with the magic keys to the MLS, but to no avail) so I am stuck having to support this godawful excuse for a web application.
You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Evidence that came out later indicated that much of the so-called "missile-gap" was imaginary.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
I can't believe you are congratulating a communist/fascist force for their success in shooting down the stealth fighter. That simply disgusts me - so I will assume I am misunderstanding you.
And as jgoemat states, "if you fill enough of the sky with flak you will eventually hit something." This reminds me of the circumstances of the soviet interception of Gary Power's U2 - it later came out that they had fired something like 10 missiles at the plane before they hit it, and one of those errant shots brought down a pursuing a MIG!
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Not true. The US shuttle can be landed completely automatically, by software, and it HAS been done. The fact that it routinely is landed manually is due to the fact that American pilots insist on this control, not to any absurd inferiority to soviet technology. At any rate, the fact that the soviets stole such an awful design as the shuttle (and any child can see that the buran is an obvious copy) is testament to their own lack of engineering judgement and sense of technological inferiority.
A portable EMP device in your pocket? Make sure to don your tinfoil underwear first.
But you SHOULD disagree. It is true that the store owner can put whatever video cameras, ID requirements, retina scanners, strip searches, etc. that he wants. But the second the store is REQUIRED to do so by the state (for dubious and vague purposes, I might add), freedom-loving people ought to mobilize.
Richard Gere made it clear for us all - we simply had to bombard Deng Xiaopiang with pyschic rays!
I can't be exactly sure, but I really hope that was sarcasm.