For all the talk that libertarians give about freedom, they sure don't seem to care about worker freedoms in the workplace. Those freedoms are out the door when you step through it.
Libertarians aren't about freedom (positive liberty), they are about (negative) liberty. What this means in practice is that if your oppressor isn't called "government", you're on your own.
There's a certain consistency to their position, since guaranteeing my positive liberty to not wear a collar like this removes my employers liberty to demand it as a condition of employment. The problem is that libertarianism vastly overestimates the government's share of power in modern society, and consequently underestimates that held by the private sector, and thus sets its priorities wrong. And of course true believers refuse to acknowledge that any priorities beyond ideological purity even exist.
A more cynical person might wonder if the movement isn't backed by the very oppressors who want to deflect would-be freedom fighters from themselves to windmills. But surely our corporate overlords wouldn't do something so dishonest.
No worries. I can order two at a restaurant, or microwave two at home.
That's okay. If the restaurant and shop charging you twice for two portions won't help, we'll just up the salt- sugar- and fat sin taxes until the majority of people can't afford to kill themselves with them anymore, thus curing the epidemic and the budget at the same time.
We're simply wired to love fat and sugar, some of us more than others. Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight our instincts and for the most part its an epic failure.
Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight billions of dollars of advertising by fast food firms and other death peddlers, not our instincts. The problem isn't that you're wired to love sugar, the problem is that greedy psychopaths add it to everything in otder to get you addicted and sell some more with no care for what the consequences will be.
Imagine if every food item came with added alcohol. Would you blame people's desire to get high as the reason for the resulting liver cirrhosis epidemic? It takes more effort to avoid foods with sugar, fat and salt added than to get them - that is the problem.
Then why do you use a pseudonym? Put your money where your mouth is and tell us your real name, street address, and other personally identifying information.
Or did you mean other people should be under surveillance at all times, but not you?
- If you do have something to hide, I'd recommend a nice little cabin somewhere way off the grid in rural Montana... If it's good enough for the Unabomber, then it's good enough for you...;)
If I don't want to stand naked before the Lidless Eye 24/7, I deserve the same as a murderer? The hell is wrong with you?
Even places like Italy and Greece are facing problems as the demands of a modern lifestyle mean that families don't have time to cook traditional foods and the same convenience foods are doing the same thing there as everywhere else.
Which, sadly, points to the need to start regulating the contents and portion size of prepared and restaurant meals. Free market had its chance and is hell-bent on selling food-labeled slow-acting suicide pills. Unhealthy food is a bigger health problem than cocaine nowadays, so it needs to be treated as or more seriously.
To start with, absolutely ban adding sugar in any form to anything.
Funny, you don't hear anybody talking about "Oxygen Pollution", even though oxygen makes up more of CO2 than carbon does, and in fact in high concentrations oxygen is poisonous, but carbon is not.
What "carbon pollution" refers to is obviously carbon dioxide, which is both poisonous (by your own criteria) and a pollutant.
Playing dumb should never be an acceptable tactic in any discussion.
But in general, by popular usage, when most people say "NoSQL" what they actually mean is "non-relational", like for example key-value data stores. But while most "NoSQL" databases are non-relational, using "NoSQL" to mean non-relational is just plain technically wrong. I admit it has been a popular thing to do, but so what? Astrology is popular too.
The meaning of words are defined by their popular usage, while the correctness of astrology is determined by whether its predictions are correct to a statistifically significant degree, therefore your analogy is false.
In this case, it means the per-task overhead for a process is a multiple of that for a thread. Of course, the code and data of the application itself may be bloated, but that is a another story.
No, it isn't. As is, Firefox with 200 tabs open will consume about 2GB+ (and is unusably slow and on the verge of crashing, presumably due to address space exhaustion). A multi-processed Firefox with 1 MB of overhead per process and one process per tab will consume 2.2GB (and likely still crash in a chain reaction if any of the tabs goes, but that's life with perpetual beta). That's 10% increase in memory use for an absurd amount of assumed overhead. So yes, code and data bloat absolutely matter by making everything else shrink into insignificance by comparison.
Everyone would probably benefit from basic knowledge on a number of things in today's world/civilization. Not everyone will benefit from advanced knowledge.
The question is: is coding basic or advanced knowledge?
I'd say it's quickly becoming basic knowledge. Information Age is just starting, and everything is getting automated - and programming is really just controlling automation. If you don't know it, you'll be more and more helpless as this age gets into gear.
Everyone doesn't need to know C++ templates, but everyone needs to know how to throw together a quick script or mobile app, or will soon enough.
When a woman does something, extraordinary or not, she shouldn't have to put up with comments or concepts that reduce her to a baby factory.
Fair enough. Going from "I'm in love with person X due to their impressive skills and achievements" to "person X is just a baby factory" isn't. It's insane troll logic.
So if a woman has to fend off approaches or put up with sexualized comments every time they accomplish something, how long do you think they will continue to accomplish things? How is this any different then a boss suggesting the only way to get a raise is to show some skin- skin to win aside from it being about money?
Power. A random Slashdot commenter doesn't have the power to affect your future in any way, while your boss does. You can't abuse someone you have no power over. At most you could annoy them - and even that is unlikely here, since OPs comment was not actually directed to the woman in question but to OPs own social group.
It's not the actual act but the mentality behind it- objectifying women. It's no different to objectify someone for their body or mind when that single feature is the only thing you know about them or consider.
As long as human beings have needs that require or can use other human beings to fulfil, human beings are going to look at each other as objects to do so. And that's fine. The problems begin when people insist that the other person has no qualities beyond being such an object - that they're basically a human blow-up doll and nothing else. At that point their human dignity has been disregarded, which is wrong.
However, to be attracted to a particular feature of someone is not the same as denying the existence or importance of every other feature. It does not objectify someone to be attracted to them because they have a nice ass or a good sense of humor or m4d h4ck3r sk1llz. That requires going one step further and claiming that said quality is the only thing of importance to them - that they are just a nice ass, good sense of humour or mad hacker skills, rather than a human being with said quality.
Which is a good thing too, since otherwise shopping for groceries would be a choice between mortally insulting the cashier or spending hours at the checkout as every shop patron gets to know her before they can conduct business.
Just like finding out your daughter's boyfriend only asked her on a date because he saw her doing the splits or eating a banana makes him a lot creepy.
People ask other people on a date because they find them sexually attractive. A "date" is a human mating ritual specific to modern Western culture, which may or may not lead to actual sex but certainly aims that way. If you find that "creepy" that's your problem.
There is nothing wrong with desiring a woman's companionship for her impressive work if you know the person, there is when all you know about her is her impressive work or the shape of her boobs or the curve of her ass.
So finding people you don't personally know attractive makes you a bad person. Thank you, that's useful moral advice, at least for indulgence salesmen.
Enough snow to knock over a half dozen people, and to stun them, won't necessarily bury the tent - they were likely lying down, resting.
Any amount of snow must necessarily affect the tent to affect the people inside it. Unless they were chilling by a campfire when it hit, but then wouldn't they still be dressed for the outdoors, and thus not die of hypothermia? Also, wouldn't the Russian investigation had noticed massive blunt trauma?
"Raising the question" and "assuming the conclusion" are both valid interpretations of the phrase "begging the question". English is context-sensitive, so the same expression can mean multiple different things. And nothing you do will change that.
Well I am fine with giving the state money from the federal coffers to help the needy out. However building a 300ft tall penis\H\H\H\H\H\H tower that nobody is going to use is not going to help the plight of the poor in any way.
He's a Republican. If he gave money to the poor, who would it trickle down to?
An ideology of hating the poor and worshipping the rich ubermenschen tends to lead to some amounts of cognitive dissonance and accompanying weird decisions when your home state counts amongst the former.
Why do people keep trying to sustain the population that they can't sustain themselves?
I don't think I personally know your mother, so I can't be sure, but if I had to guess it would be a mix of paternal love and a hope that you'll eventually grow up and turn the energy you use for "edgy" shitposting into finding an actual job.
the driver can reasonably be responsible for avoiding an accident
They could, if they weren't busy eating, talking to their cellphone, playing with the radio, daydreaming, etc. Most people are unfit to handle the responsibility of driving, since they keep on downgrading their estimation of risk every time nothing bad happens and blaming someone else when it does, yet we can't keep them from driving, since modern city planning is pretty much built around the idea that people can drive.
Self-driving cars are a heavensend and need to be legally mandated ASAP. Make roads safe again by removing every "I'm a better than average driver" fucktard from them and letting them play at Gran Turismo or something.
I'm too lazy go Google it, but I clearly recall a study from a couple of years ago that showed that the cultures with the least incidence of peanut allergies are those that start feeding peanut containing foods the earliest, around 6 months of age IIRC.
It could simply be that everyone who has peanut allergy dies as a baby in those cultures.
Which requires communication. Which is why NSA and its ilk are so hell-bent on wiretapping everything: to ensure any rebellion is crushed in the bud. Which, in turn, gives various governments ever greater assurance that they'll face no opposition no matter what they do, thus encouraging them to go farther.
It's a nasty vicious circle which could easily end up in another age of tyranny. It's why things like Tor and Freenet are so important: anonymous communication is the only way to organize effective resistance before things get so bad that lots of people are willing to risk death to fight, which in turn is the only way to keep things from getting that bad.
Of course, effective resistance also requires people to recognize a "divide and conquer" strategy when it's used against them. Which is why those in power are wish to discredit the concept of "class war": to keep the oppressed from having a group identity different from the oppressors. There is actually a class war going on, and has been for a while. The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.
That others need feeding compliments every five minutes
Not necessarily compliments, but confirmations that they're in good standing with the herd. If someone needs compliments constantly then either they have serious mental issues, or their actual need is for (job) security which is poorly addressed by compliments, thus the need for constant re-validation.
Maybe such people could be rewarded by legally binding extra days for period of notice for good work? It costs nothing, and would send a clear message that they're valued while simultaneously reducing a source of anxiety.
Money has an interesting effect on people. The more you have the more you want.
No. This is true for some people, but not most. Most will start looking for other things - family, respect, self-actualization, etc. - once their basic needs are secure. I suspect this is one of the reasons why society is so dysfunctional: the people who rise to the top are those with a broken motivational system which causes them to never stop wanting more money and power (or whatever it is they fixated on).
Nintendo did well betting on low prices, new input methods and low performance on the Wii;
It was the low price that did the trick. "New input methods" work for games designed around them, but most Wii games use of motion controls are limited to making "shake the controller" an extra button, which is simply annoying after the novelty wears off.
of the market at work, not God! Except when it is not.
Invisible Hand is, for all intents and purposes, a god: a mythological figure personifying certain aspects of human experience. It's also the god America worships, for what is Wall Street but a modern temple district? High priests - excuse me, economists - try to interpret "market movements" and tell us what kind of sacrifices we need to do to appease them, least bad things happen. Any attempt to control them is viewed as impious overreach of mere mortals into the mysterious workings of the sacred Invisible Hand, which must not be impeded. And so on and so on.
Religion never went anywhere and never will. A religion is a system of mythology that defines a worldview. Every person has a worldview, every worldview has its gods - whether Zeus, Invisible Hand, Jesus, a Bible snippet, USA, Materialism, etc - and everyone would do well to take a good, long look at what kind of gods they or their society worship and why.
The rot caused by this breakdown in law and order has clearly reached the military. How much longer will the US allow basic standards to slide?
US is powerless to do anything about cheating, because it's not caused by "breakdown in law and order" but by the basic nature of US itself. When you hold success to be the highest value, you get people doing whatever it takes to reach it, violating lesser values - such as honor - on the way. That's the price you pay for whatever benefits encouraging competition over cooperation brings.
And when there becomes a way of getting the same for free (i.e. piracy), then the laws will simply be cranked up to try and prevent it, just like we did in the wake of early file-sharing networks.
So how did that work out?
What's happening is that economy is moving from Industrial Age into Information Age. Copyrights are an attempt to force information to behave like physical goods, and fails because it's at odds with both reality and human nature.
The paradigm of the Industrial Age was collectivization: massive amounts of people working on large factories to mass-produce goods. Information age seems to be the reverse: small-scale production for individual needs. If the trend holds, the entire concept of employment - indeed, of trade and money with it - could be obsoleted.
Various Internet communities organized around producing and processing information seem to be the underpinnings of new economy. IP laws get in their way, so countries with strong IP laws - especially copyrights - will be out-competed and left behind. Which, a more cynical person might argue, is the real reason for the recent drive for "harmonizing" copyright laws between various countries: to ensure no one will have a competitive advantage that would prove the MAFIAA as the obsolete parasites they are.
Instead you die at 65 rather than 75 because of all the population in the air or water.
Or you die at 35 because you won the lung cancer lottery. But it's from inhaling soot rather than radioactivity, so it's an okay, non-scary cancer death.
Not that it matters, since the opposition to nuclear is ideological, not rational.
Slashdot Mirror
Libertarians aren't about freedom (positive liberty), they are about (negative) liberty. What this means in practice is that if your oppressor isn't called "government", you're on your own.
There's a certain consistency to their position, since guaranteeing my positive liberty to not wear a collar like this removes my employers liberty to demand it as a condition of employment. The problem is that libertarianism vastly overestimates the government's share of power in modern society, and consequently underestimates that held by the private sector, and thus sets its priorities wrong. And of course true believers refuse to acknowledge that any priorities beyond ideological purity even exist.
A more cynical person might wonder if the movement isn't backed by the very oppressors who want to deflect would-be freedom fighters from themselves to windmills. But surely our corporate overlords wouldn't do something so dishonest.
That's okay. If the restaurant and shop charging you twice for two portions won't help, we'll just up the salt- sugar- and fat sin taxes until the majority of people can't afford to kill themselves with them anymore, thus curing the epidemic and the budget at the same time.
Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight billions of dollars of advertising by fast food firms and other death peddlers, not our instincts. The problem isn't that you're wired to love sugar, the problem is that greedy psychopaths add it to everything in otder to get you addicted and sell some more with no care for what the consequences will be.
Imagine if every food item came with added alcohol. Would you blame people's desire to get high as the reason for the resulting liver cirrhosis epidemic? It takes more effort to avoid foods with sugar, fat and salt added than to get them - that is the problem.
Then why do you use a pseudonym? Put your money where your mouth is and tell us your real name, street address, and other personally identifying information.
Or did you mean other people should be under surveillance at all times, but not you?
If I don't want to stand naked before the Lidless Eye 24/7, I deserve the same as a murderer? The hell is wrong with you?
Which, sadly, points to the need to start regulating the contents and portion size of prepared and restaurant meals. Free market had its chance and is hell-bent on selling food-labeled slow-acting suicide pills. Unhealthy food is a bigger health problem than cocaine nowadays, so it needs to be treated as or more seriously.
To start with, absolutely ban adding sugar in any form to anything.
What "carbon pollution" refers to is obviously carbon dioxide, which is both poisonous (by your own criteria) and a pollutant.
Playing dumb should never be an acceptable tactic in any discussion.
The meaning of words are defined by their popular usage, while the correctness of astrology is determined by whether its predictions are correct to a statistifically significant degree, therefore your analogy is false.
No, it isn't. As is, Firefox with 200 tabs open will consume about 2GB+ (and is unusably slow and on the verge of crashing, presumably due to address space exhaustion). A multi-processed Firefox with 1 MB of overhead per process and one process per tab will consume 2.2GB (and likely still crash in a chain reaction if any of the tabs goes, but that's life with perpetual beta). That's 10% increase in memory use for an absurd amount of assumed overhead. So yes, code and data bloat absolutely matter by making everything else shrink into insignificance by comparison.
The question is: is coding basic or advanced knowledge?
I'd say it's quickly becoming basic knowledge. Information Age is just starting, and everything is getting automated - and programming is really just controlling automation. If you don't know it, you'll be more and more helpless as this age gets into gear.
Everyone doesn't need to know C++ templates, but everyone needs to know how to throw together a quick script or mobile app, or will soon enough.
Fair enough. Going from "I'm in love with person X due to their impressive skills and achievements" to "person X is just a baby factory" isn't. It's insane troll logic.
Power. A random Slashdot commenter doesn't have the power to affect your future in any way, while your boss does. You can't abuse someone you have no power over. At most you could annoy them - and even that is unlikely here, since OPs comment was not actually directed to the woman in question but to OPs own social group.
As long as human beings have needs that require or can use other human beings to fulfil, human beings are going to look at each other as objects to do so. And that's fine. The problems begin when people insist that the other person has no qualities beyond being such an object - that they're basically a human blow-up doll and nothing else. At that point their human dignity has been disregarded, which is wrong.
However, to be attracted to a particular feature of someone is not the same as denying the existence or importance of every other feature. It does not objectify someone to be attracted to them because they have a nice ass or a good sense of humor or m4d h4ck3r sk1llz. That requires going one step further and claiming that said quality is the only thing of importance to them - that they are just a nice ass, good sense of humour or mad hacker skills, rather than a human being with said quality.
Which is a good thing too, since otherwise shopping for groceries would be a choice between mortally insulting the cashier or spending hours at the checkout as every shop patron gets to know her before they can conduct business.
People ask other people on a date because they find them sexually attractive. A "date" is a human mating ritual specific to modern Western culture, which may or may not lead to actual sex but certainly aims that way. If you find that "creepy" that's your problem.
So finding people you don't personally know attractive makes you a bad person. Thank you, that's useful moral advice, at least for indulgence salesmen.
Any amount of snow must necessarily affect the tent to affect the people inside it. Unless they were chilling by a campfire when it hit, but then wouldn't they still be dressed for the outdoors, and thus not die of hypothermia? Also, wouldn't the Russian investigation had noticed massive blunt trauma?
Was it?
"Raising the question" and "assuming the conclusion" are both valid interpretations of the phrase "begging the question". English is context-sensitive, so the same expression can mean multiple different things. And nothing you do will change that.
He's a Republican. If he gave money to the poor, who would it trickle down to?
An ideology of hating the poor and worshipping the rich ubermenschen tends to lead to some amounts of cognitive dissonance and accompanying weird decisions when your home state counts amongst the former.
Then how come the Lidless Eye is still open?
I don't think I personally know your mother, so I can't be sure, but if I had to guess it would be a mix of paternal love and a hope that you'll eventually grow up and turn the energy you use for "edgy" shitposting into finding an actual job.
They could, if they weren't busy eating, talking to their cellphone, playing with the radio, daydreaming, etc. Most people are unfit to handle the responsibility of driving, since they keep on downgrading their estimation of risk every time nothing bad happens and blaming someone else when it does, yet we can't keep them from driving, since modern city planning is pretty much built around the idea that people can drive.
Self-driving cars are a heavensend and need to be legally mandated ASAP. Make roads safe again by removing every "I'm a better than average driver" fucktard from them and letting them play at Gran Turismo or something.
It could simply be that everyone who has peanut allergy dies as a baby in those cultures.
Which requires communication. Which is why NSA and its ilk are so hell-bent on wiretapping everything: to ensure any rebellion is crushed in the bud. Which, in turn, gives various governments ever greater assurance that they'll face no opposition no matter what they do, thus encouraging them to go farther.
It's a nasty vicious circle which could easily end up in another age of tyranny. It's why things like Tor and Freenet are so important: anonymous communication is the only way to organize effective resistance before things get so bad that lots of people are willing to risk death to fight, which in turn is the only way to keep things from getting that bad.
Of course, effective resistance also requires people to recognize a "divide and conquer" strategy when it's used against them. Which is why those in power are wish to discredit the concept of "class war": to keep the oppressed from having a group identity different from the oppressors. There is actually a class war going on, and has been for a while. The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.
Not necessarily compliments, but confirmations that they're in good standing with the herd. If someone needs compliments constantly then either they have serious mental issues, or their actual need is for (job) security which is poorly addressed by compliments, thus the need for constant re-validation.
Maybe such people could be rewarded by legally binding extra days for period of notice for good work? It costs nothing, and would send a clear message that they're valued while simultaneously reducing a source of anxiety.
No. This is true for some people, but not most. Most will start looking for other things - family, respect, self-actualization, etc. - once their basic needs are secure. I suspect this is one of the reasons why society is so dysfunctional: the people who rise to the top are those with a broken motivational system which causes them to never stop wanting more money and power (or whatever it is they fixated on).
It was the low price that did the trick. "New input methods" work for games designed around them, but most Wii games use of motion controls are limited to making "shake the controller" an extra button, which is simply annoying after the novelty wears off.
Invisible Hand is, for all intents and purposes, a god: a mythological figure personifying certain aspects of human experience. It's also the god America worships, for what is Wall Street but a modern temple district? High priests - excuse me, economists - try to interpret "market movements" and tell us what kind of sacrifices we need to do to appease them, least bad things happen. Any attempt to control them is viewed as impious overreach of mere mortals into the mysterious workings of the sacred Invisible Hand, which must not be impeded. And so on and so on.
Religion never went anywhere and never will. A religion is a system of mythology that defines a worldview. Every person has a worldview, every worldview has its gods - whether Zeus, Invisible Hand, Jesus, a Bible snippet, USA, Materialism, etc - and everyone would do well to take a good, long look at what kind of gods they or their society worship and why.
US is powerless to do anything about cheating, because it's not caused by "breakdown in law and order" but by the basic nature of US itself. When you hold success to be the highest value, you get people doing whatever it takes to reach it, violating lesser values - such as honor - on the way. That's the price you pay for whatever benefits encouraging competition over cooperation brings.
So how did that work out?
What's happening is that economy is moving from Industrial Age into Information Age. Copyrights are an attempt to force information to behave like physical goods, and fails because it's at odds with both reality and human nature.
The paradigm of the Industrial Age was collectivization: massive amounts of people working on large factories to mass-produce goods. Information age seems to be the reverse: small-scale production for individual needs. If the trend holds, the entire concept of employment - indeed, of trade and money with it - could be obsoleted.
Various Internet communities organized around producing and processing information seem to be the underpinnings of new economy. IP laws get in their way, so countries with strong IP laws - especially copyrights - will be out-competed and left behind. Which, a more cynical person might argue, is the real reason for the recent drive for "harmonizing" copyright laws between various countries: to ensure no one will have a competitive advantage that would prove the MAFIAA as the obsolete parasites they are.
Or you die at 35 because you won the lung cancer lottery. But it's from inhaling soot rather than radioactivity, so it's an okay, non-scary cancer death.
Not that it matters, since the opposition to nuclear is ideological, not rational.