Yes, the US is not a civilized country, and it's not like Europe or Russia. We like it that way. Congratulations for realizing that.
No, US is not a civilized country, or rather it's a country where one group after another embraces barbarism. And that is slowly but surely tearing it apart. From various attempts to enforce religious dogma in science class to racially motivated police brutality, the fracture lines of society are getting wider. Your post marks yet anothe phase in this process of disintegration, where the shame of failure is dealt with by reinterpreting said failures as badges of pride. As such attitudes spread, damage becomes chronic and impossible to revert, since that would require admitting it is indeed damage rather than a reasonable choice.
Oh well, Enlightenment will find more clients, and the US will go the way every country that rejects it must, to irrelevance and ruin. World history too has its phases, and it the current one, it's no longer possible to be a major power without. And US is nowhere near stable enough to survive the loss of that status.
Democracy is just a sham anyway. It only really works to your advantage if you happen to be one of the dumbest people in the country.
...I think someone needs to read up on world history and the relative performance of various political systems.
If you are of average or higher intelligence then enjoy the fact that your leaders will always be picked by people stupider than you, since you will be in the "minority".
Which is far preferable to leaders who are picked by birth, rule by divine authority and are answerable to no one. Or to violent chaos. Which are the only known alternatives to democracy.
If a country devalues its currency, it's no different from a massive tax on savings and a massive cut in wages.
Except it won't affect the price of domestic products, which typically includes everyday necessities like staple foods and rent. In fact, since imports go up in price, domestic production gets de facto protective tolls to help boost it across the board. And of course exports also become more profitable, giving economy a further boost. So it's almost completely different.
"Austerity" is just an attempt to simulate what would normally happen to a currency when a country goes as badly into debt as they did (average income exceeds average productivity, so the economy has to contract until these two are in balance again).
Austerity fails at that because when a currency devaluates, it makes imports more expensive which increases exports and boosts domestic production. Austerity, on the other hand, decreases all three. It's the exact wrong policy in pretty much every imaginable situation.
Had Greece still been on the Drachma when they went into debt, the value of the Drachma would have fallen against other currencies (much like the Argentine Peso has been doing), and the Greek economy would have shrunk until the artificial "growth" due to their previous (and current) overspending had been erased.
Had Greece still been on the Drachma when they went into debt, the value of Drachma would have fallen against other currencies, making Greek exporters more profitable, making Greece a better destination for tourists, and shielding domestic manufacture from foreign competition, thus quickly and efficiently rebalancing the economy. And of course they wouldn't had gone into debt but simply printed more Drachma's and let inflation deal with tax evasion.
It doesn't really matter anymore, Euro won't survive this crisis since it's its direct cause. The important question is: will the EU survive? If not, then Europe will return to its historical state of constant warfare.
It will be interesting to see how Greece gets out of their mess, when they run out of Euros.
They'll get another bailout, of course. The alternative is to let them leave the Euro, which would likely start a landslide and cause the whole project to collapse. At it's heart, the Euro is an attempt to institutionalize neoliberal economic ideas; as such, it lacks any way to deal with trade imbalances (since those should be automatically dealt with by the free market, according to the theory). And they are being dealt with, however this in practice means destroying the countries which can't compete and starving their population.
Of course no nation will simply stand by and watch this happen, thus the attempts to mitigate the problem with one-off fixes, which basically amount to bailouts. But since the ideology underlaying the Euro forbids admitting the problems are inherent to the system (since every set of countries will always have a weakest link), it also prevents creating any mechanisms to handle the problem long-term. So Greek gets just enough bailouts to keep it afloat, but not enough to pull it to the water, everyone else gets bill after bill, European economy continues spiraling downward, and everyone is getting fed up with being told they must tighten their belts for a project and ideology that's not beneftting them in any way.
Uncontrolled free markets had their day in the 1800's. That world has long since gone, and won't return, since universal suffrage makes it impossible to simply ignore everyone but the richest. Even in their heyday they never brought a golden age, just gilded. And now they can't bring even that.
Basically if you cannot hold your own money in your own hands but government holds it for you (directly or through proxy banks) you are fucked, you have nothing.
If you can't trust the local government, either because it's corrupt or because it doesn't exist, you're fucked anyway. Not only is your cash not safe from theft (or forgery - let's not forget that), but you also can't trade efficiently since there's no way to enforce deals.
If you can't trust the local government to enforce your claims of ownership, they're utterly meaningless.
If an unbalanced gender ratio is all you need to prove sexism, then doesn't it follow that the Nursing and Elementary Education fields are even MORE sexist than STEM (and even more in need of attention)?
If women are underpresented in some field, then of course they must be overpresented in some other, or underpresented in the workforce as a whole. So yes, not having enough men in Nursing and Elementary Education is part of the same problem. And Elementary Education is indeed a more important field to focus on, because it's where children get their first touch with Real World.
By your silly "you must tell all the truth anyone would want to know, regarless of the questions asked" implication, anyone found guilty in court who didn't confess, should have perjury added to their sentence.
Well, isn't that what plea bargains are all about? Confess or your punishment will be increased?
Polygraphs are NOT scams, they are but a tool you can use to try and determine if somebody is lying or not. But like any tool, they have their limitations.
Polygraphs are like e-meters: they measure something, but that something has nothing to do with their stated purpose, making them scams.
End the antiquated requirement for anonymous ballots, and the technical solution becomes very easy.
End anonymous ballots and you end democracy.
But neither should you be able to check an individuals vote anonymously. Coercing or discriminating against someone for their vote needs to become a serious crime before any of this could be put into place though.
How do you prove you were "encouraged" to vote a certain way? You can't, and even an attempt to sue for example your employer will affect your future in sufficiently negative way to make the prospect daunting. Nor can you prove someone wasn't so influenced. So the election result has zero credibility, thus delegitimazing the entire system. Which, of course, is the goal of various non-anonymous voting schemes that people suggest from time to time.
Simply put, if Apple wants A123's tech and it can simply provide key A123 employees an offer they can't refuse,
An offer they can't refuse? Did Apple threaten to break their kneecaps? Or did Apple simply promise to pay more?
A company the size of Apple is able to do this many times over and it simply becomes an unstoppable monopoly which goes against the the whole spirit of capitalism when one company can control everything.
The spirit of capitalism is that resources should go to those who can extract most value out of them, determined by being willing to pay most for them. If Apple can afford to pay those engineers more than A123, then Apple can apparently get more value out of them, and thus should have them.
You don't get to approve when employees have to compete for employers, yet turn around and start whining on the odd occasion when the tables are turned and employers need to compete for employees. Not unless you're willing to abandon even the pretense of fairness and equality before the law. Which, you should note, will eventually lead to a revolution.
The very fact that A123 brought a suit like this is evidence that the system is breaking down and degenerating into feudalism. Property gets "poached". That A123 uses such terms in regards to human beings should get its executives on some kind of watch list.
everyone has a price, and if you have the dollars, you can use the dollars from your monopoly to poach anyone. This isn't an anti-collusion suit; this is a civil suit about monopoly abuses.
And by "monopoly abuse" you mean "paying the best price". But don't worry, I'm sure lobbyists are already busy at work to fix this strange bug in capitalism that caused it to momentarily benefit people, rather than corporations and stockholders.
On 14 February 1989, the day of the funeral of his close friend Bruce Chatwin, a fatwà requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam" (chapter IV of the book depicts the character of an Imam in exile who returns to incite revolt from the people of his country with no regard for their safety).
So Ayatollah Khomeini was butthurt over his portrayal by proxy, and decided to abuse his power to murder his critic. What does that have to do with Islam, or any religion whatsoever?
This has nothing at all to do with a 'normal distribution', and everything to do with officially sanctioned violence.
Which, in turn, has nothing at all to do with religion. It's state officials - or someone who wishes to replace them - organizing violence using religion as a smokescreen, since it happened to be handy. But any excuse would have served a tyrant, or those wanting to be them.
The real enemy is the memetic complex that combines a hierarchy of power with the idea that violence and violations of everyday morality are okay when done in service to a cause. Whether this blood-soaked pyramid is dressed up as Islamic, Christian, nationalistic or ideological decorations is irrelevant. Not perceiving this underlaying structure is what leads people to give up their freedom and their very selves to act it out in a largely meaningless conflict. Thus 9/11 led to Patriot Act and Iraq War, which then led to ISIS. The real enemy is still there, and will remain until someone figures out how to bomb the noosphere. Until then, it would be wise to avoid feeding it by buying in to the lie and newest $ENEMY.
Violent lunatics - and even or perhaps especially suicide bombers - are not the real enemy. Neither is their nominal cause. What's actually going on is that the idea that this kind of behavior is okay in the service of a cause somehow came to exist and, by an unfortunate accident of cultural evolution, happens to cause behavior that helps perpetuate and escalate conflict, which in turn perpetuates it. Thus we have a cultural virus that basically uses your own power and instincts for self-defence to enslave you. Nasty stuff.
If you change "male" to "female" then that's exactly what feminists were saying back in the 60s. You can fix the problem by adopting feminist ideals. Feminists want the same liberation for men, always have.
No, you can't, because grandparent isn't talking about oppression, he's talking about sexual attraction. I have no idea if he's right, but if he is, you can't (or at least shouldn't) fix being unattractive by changing others. You can change yourself, but you could also use pornography to relieve your urges and go play Distant Worlds or something. And it seems a lot of people are taking the latter option.
This is what they mean by the patriarchy. Not men in charge or dominating, but a society where both men and women feel that they have to be something they are not. Something that existed as an ideal historically, and which needs to be abandoned.
And this is another thing: every society has a limited number of predefined roles people can adapt. "The Patriarchy" might be associated with particularly onerous ones, but getting rid of it won't free people to be themselves, because othe people still expect them to be conservatists, liberals, rock stars, peons, soldiers, or whatever, all of which have their associated stereotypes and official and/or unofficial punishments for violating them. Feminism is promising something it can't possibly deliver here.
"Their standards" in aggregate, and the societal norms, are the same thing. If enough individuals shift their standards, the societal norm for standards shifts in aggregate.
No, because people have no magical way of knowing that aggregate, but must observe other members of the group to learn it. And, being social animals, people tend to hide any action that goes against the perceived norms of the group. Thus you can easily end up in a situation where the societal norms of the group, as perceived by group members, are very different from the standards of any particular individual within it.
It's a shame more people don't understand this and how it affects women's mating strategy.
I understand it means there's no problem: some people get their kicks out of video games and pornography and the rest get them from either having or being part of a harem. Everybody wins.
No employer can force you to carry their phone when you are not working.
Maybe in some socialist hellhole they can't. But in the Land of the Free, you'll do what ever your masters tell you to, or live the rest of your life on the streets.
Maybe "living off the land" should become an official school subject? It's not like the situation is going to improve.
This was about money, plain and simple. And any fucking moron who wants to stand up and claim otherwise will earn their title of fucking moron for assuming the rest of us are as dumb and ignorant as they are.
They don't assume you'll believe the lie, they simply assume you'll go along with it, because what else are you going to do, comrade?
Instead, U.S. workers must compete against foreign workers in labor,
No, they don't. US is a democracy, however flawed; those workers voluntarily keep voting for people who represent the interests of the rich over theirs. And they do so because they believe they are temporarily embarassed millionaires and want to ensure they'll get to stomp their boots on a few faces in time.
America is a living Hell because that's what Americans want it to be. All those metaphorical lava lakes and pits of brimstone are there because they'll vote for anyone promising to punish the damned even harder. As far as they're concerned, the only thing wrong with that picture is which end of the pitchfork they're at.
And since when, do you think, patent trolls represent capitalism?
Ever since someone realized they can make money from patent trolling. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
You don't get to pick and choose only the positive results of profit motive as representing "real" capitalism. The system works great at finding the local optimum; it's flaw is that it both calls for but can't handle clever pyschopaths. And that flaw turns to a fatal one when people fall in love with capitalism and refuse any attempts to mitigate less desirable effects in the name of economic efficiency - or religious orthodoxy, which is what I suspect it really is for a lot of people.
Well some of still believe huge multinational businesses aren't human beings therefore do not need or deserve forgiveness.
Then they don't deserve punishment either. You can't have it both ways. Anything that's a valid target for revenge/punishment/whatever is also a valid target for forgiveness, because the first approximation of forgiveness means cancelling or at least mitigating said negative consequences.
I'm not advocating holding petty grudges, but I'm saying we need not anthropomorphize corporations. Corporations are simply limited liability constructs created to facilitate the concentration of capital for investment purposes, not living entities that can have their feelings hurt.
I'm not so sure of it. Biology has a term called superorganism, which seems to fit human organisations. That is, a corporation - or a club, a church, a nation, or whatever - is a kind if distributed organism that piggybacks on its member's brains; a kind of memetic lifeform, if you will. Furthermore, as technology and culture advance these superorganisms seem to be getting more efficient and coordinated. I suspect we'll reach true maturity as a species when the process leads them to gain self-awareness, and us meatbags to recognize which parts of our mind are actually manifestations of, say, the American spirit or Anonymous.
But whatever the truth about the metaphysical status of organizations might be, it can nonetheless be quite useful to anthropomorphize them. A person who's merely pursuing his self-interest will end up using corporate veil to act as a psychopath, because it shields him from consequences; whereas one who's proud to serve Coffee Business, Inc. might well turn down a DRM scheme on the grounds that it'd insult his patron's honour, even if it would seem to be profitable in the short term.
It's usually more efficient to work with human instincts than against them. And one of the strongest human instincts is the desire to belong to a tribe. So, why not anthropomorphize a company? That way, it can and will be held to the same moral standards as any human being, and in return get some of the same loyalty as nation-states get, as long as it treats its employees decently. It's refusal to anthropomorphize that's the odd aberration, which has led to byzantine and ever-expanding legal texts attempting (and failing) to enumerate badness.
Slashdot Mirror
No, US is not a civilized country, or rather it's a country where one group after another embraces barbarism. And that is slowly but surely tearing it apart. From various attempts to enforce religious dogma in science class to racially motivated police brutality, the fracture lines of society are getting wider. Your post marks yet anothe phase in this process of disintegration, where the shame of failure is dealt with by reinterpreting said failures as badges of pride. As such attitudes spread, damage becomes chronic and impossible to revert, since that would require admitting it is indeed damage rather than a reasonable choice.
Oh well, Enlightenment will find more clients, and the US will go the way every country that rejects it must, to irrelevance and ruin. World history too has its phases, and it the current one, it's no longer possible to be a major power without. And US is nowhere near stable enough to survive the loss of that status.
...I think someone needs to read up on world history and the relative performance of various political systems.
Which is far preferable to leaders who are picked by birth, rule by divine authority and are answerable to no one. Or to violent chaos. Which are the only known alternatives to democracy.
Except it won't affect the price of domestic products, which typically includes everyday necessities like staple foods and rent. In fact, since imports go up in price, domestic production gets de facto protective tolls to help boost it across the board. And of course exports also become more profitable, giving economy a further boost. So it's almost completely different.
Austerity fails at that because when a currency devaluates, it makes imports more expensive which increases exports and boosts domestic production. Austerity, on the other hand, decreases all three. It's the exact wrong policy in pretty much every imaginable situation.
Had Greece still been on the Drachma when they went into debt, the value of Drachma would have fallen against other currencies, making Greek exporters more profitable, making Greece a better destination for tourists, and shielding domestic manufacture from foreign competition, thus quickly and efficiently rebalancing the economy. And of course they wouldn't had gone into debt but simply printed more Drachma's and let inflation deal with tax evasion.
It doesn't really matter anymore, Euro won't survive this crisis since it's its direct cause. The important question is: will the EU survive? If not, then Europe will return to its historical state of constant warfare.
They'll get another bailout, of course. The alternative is to let them leave the Euro, which would likely start a landslide and cause the whole project to collapse. At it's heart, the Euro is an attempt to institutionalize neoliberal economic ideas; as such, it lacks any way to deal with trade imbalances (since those should be automatically dealt with by the free market, according to the theory). And they are being dealt with, however this in practice means destroying the countries which can't compete and starving their population.
Of course no nation will simply stand by and watch this happen, thus the attempts to mitigate the problem with one-off fixes, which basically amount to bailouts. But since the ideology underlaying the Euro forbids admitting the problems are inherent to the system (since every set of countries will always have a weakest link), it also prevents creating any mechanisms to handle the problem long-term. So Greek gets just enough bailouts to keep it afloat, but not enough to pull it to the water, everyone else gets bill after bill, European economy continues spiraling downward, and everyone is getting fed up with being told they must tighten their belts for a project and ideology that's not beneftting them in any way.
Uncontrolled free markets had their day in the 1800's. That world has long since gone, and won't return, since universal suffrage makes it impossible to simply ignore everyone but the richest. Even in their heyday they never brought a golden age, just gilded. And now they can't bring even that.
US has the second highest incarceration rate in the world. So please explain exactly what liberty are you talking about?
If you can't trust the local government, either because it's corrupt or because it doesn't exist, you're fucked anyway. Not only is your cash not safe from theft (or forgery - let's not forget that), but you also can't trade efficiently since there's no way to enforce deals.
If you can't trust the local government to enforce your claims of ownership, they're utterly meaningless.
If women are underpresented in some field, then of course they must be overpresented in some other, or underpresented in the workforce as a whole. So yes, not having enough men in Nursing and Elementary Education is part of the same problem. And Elementary Education is indeed a more important field to focus on, because it's where children get their first touch with Real World.
Well, isn't that what plea bargains are all about? Confess or your punishment will be increased?
Polygraphs are like e-meters: they measure something, but that something has nothing to do with their stated purpose, making them scams.
End anonymous ballots and you end democracy.
How do you prove you were "encouraged" to vote a certain way? You can't, and even an attempt to sue for example your employer will affect your future in sufficiently negative way to make the prospect daunting. Nor can you prove someone wasn't so influenced. So the election result has zero credibility, thus delegitimazing the entire system. Which, of course, is the goal of various non-anonymous voting schemes that people suggest from time to time.
An offer they can't refuse? Did Apple threaten to break their kneecaps? Or did Apple simply promise to pay more?
The spirit of capitalism is that resources should go to those who can extract most value out of them, determined by being willing to pay most for them. If Apple can afford to pay those engineers more than A123, then Apple can apparently get more value out of them, and thus should have them.
You don't get to approve when employees have to compete for employers, yet turn around and start whining on the odd occasion when the tables are turned and employers need to compete for employees. Not unless you're willing to abandon even the pretense of fairness and equality before the law. Which, you should note, will eventually lead to a revolution.
The very fact that A123 brought a suit like this is evidence that the system is breaking down and degenerating into feudalism. Property gets "poached". That A123 uses such terms in regards to human beings should get its executives on some kind of watch list.
And by "monopoly abuse" you mean "paying the best price". But don't worry, I'm sure lobbyists are already busy at work to fix this strange bug in capitalism that caused it to momentarily benefit people, rather than corporations and stockholders.
So Ayatollah Khomeini was butthurt over his portrayal by proxy, and decided to abuse his power to murder his critic. What does that have to do with Islam, or any religion whatsoever?
Which, in turn, has nothing at all to do with religion. It's state officials - or someone who wishes to replace them - organizing violence using religion as a smokescreen, since it happened to be handy. But any excuse would have served a tyrant, or those wanting to be them.
The real enemy is the memetic complex that combines a hierarchy of power with the idea that violence and violations of everyday morality are okay when done in service to a cause. Whether this blood-soaked pyramid is dressed up as Islamic, Christian, nationalistic or ideological decorations is irrelevant. Not perceiving this underlaying structure is what leads people to give up their freedom and their very selves to act it out in a largely meaningless conflict. Thus 9/11 led to Patriot Act and Iraq War, which then led to ISIS. The real enemy is still there, and will remain until someone figures out how to bomb the noosphere. Until then, it would be wise to avoid feeding it by buying in to the lie and newest $ENEMY.
Violent lunatics - and even or perhaps especially suicide bombers - are not the real enemy. Neither is their nominal cause. What's actually going on is that the idea that this kind of behavior is okay in the service of a cause somehow came to exist and, by an unfortunate accident of cultural evolution, happens to cause behavior that helps perpetuate and escalate conflict, which in turn perpetuates it. Thus we have a cultural virus that basically uses your own power and instincts for self-defence to enslave you. Nasty stuff.
No, you can't, because grandparent isn't talking about oppression, he's talking about sexual attraction. I have no idea if he's right, but if he is, you can't (or at least shouldn't) fix being unattractive by changing others. You can change yourself, but you could also use pornography to relieve your urges and go play Distant Worlds or something. And it seems a lot of people are taking the latter option.
And this is another thing: every society has a limited number of predefined roles people can adapt. "The Patriarchy" might be associated with particularly onerous ones, but getting rid of it won't free people to be themselves, because othe people still expect them to be conservatists, liberals, rock stars, peons, soldiers, or whatever, all of which have their associated stereotypes and official and/or unofficial punishments for violating them. Feminism is promising something it can't possibly deliver here.
No, because people have no magical way of knowing that aggregate, but must observe other members of the group to learn it. And, being social animals, people tend to hide any action that goes against the perceived norms of the group. Thus you can easily end up in a situation where the societal norms of the group, as perceived by group members, are very different from the standards of any particular individual within it.
I understand it means there's no problem: some people get their kicks out of video games and pornography and the rest get them from either having or being part of a harem. Everybody wins.
Maybe in some socialist hellhole they can't. But in the Land of the Free, you'll do what ever your masters tell you to, or live the rest of your life on the streets.
Maybe "living off the land" should become an official school subject? It's not like the situation is going to improve.
They're spent on tracking every other dollar. Bureaucracy isn't cheap.
Most third world countries are developing, not declining. But otherwise yes.
They don't assume you'll believe the lie, they simply assume you'll go along with it, because what else are you going to do, comrade?
No, they don't. US is a democracy, however flawed; those workers voluntarily keep voting for people who represent the interests of the rich over theirs. And they do so because they believe they are temporarily embarassed millionaires and want to ensure they'll get to stomp their boots on a few faces in time.
America is a living Hell because that's what Americans want it to be. All those metaphorical lava lakes and pits of brimstone are there because they'll vote for anyone promising to punish the damned even harder. As far as they're concerned, the only thing wrong with that picture is which end of the pitchfork they're at.
American workers are getting what they tried to do each other. "Union membership had been declining in the US since 1954, and since 1967, as union membership rates decreased, middle class incomes shrank correspondingly." It's hard to feel sorry for someone who suffers because he refuses to help himself because it might also help some other, undeserving person.
Ever since someone realized they can make money from patent trolling. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
You don't get to pick and choose only the positive results of profit motive as representing "real" capitalism. The system works great at finding the local optimum; it's flaw is that it both calls for but can't handle clever pyschopaths. And that flaw turns to a fatal one when people fall in love with capitalism and refuse any attempts to mitigate less desirable effects in the name of economic efficiency - or religious orthodoxy, which is what I suspect it really is for a lot of people.
Then they don't deserve punishment either. You can't have it both ways. Anything that's a valid target for revenge/punishment/whatever is also a valid target for forgiveness, because the first approximation of forgiveness means cancelling or at least mitigating said negative consequences.
I'm not so sure of it. Biology has a term called superorganism, which seems to fit human organisations. That is, a corporation - or a club, a church, a nation, or whatever - is a kind if distributed organism that piggybacks on its member's brains; a kind of memetic lifeform, if you will. Furthermore, as technology and culture advance these superorganisms seem to be getting more efficient and coordinated. I suspect we'll reach true maturity as a species when the process leads them to gain self-awareness, and us meatbags to recognize which parts of our mind are actually manifestations of, say, the American spirit or Anonymous.
But whatever the truth about the metaphysical status of organizations might be, it can nonetheless be quite useful to anthropomorphize them. A person who's merely pursuing his self-interest will end up using corporate veil to act as a psychopath, because it shields him from consequences; whereas one who's proud to serve Coffee Business, Inc. might well turn down a DRM scheme on the grounds that it'd insult his patron's honour, even if it would seem to be profitable in the short term.
It's usually more efficient to work with human instincts than against them. And one of the strongest human instincts is the desire to belong to a tribe. So, why not anthropomorphize a company? That way, it can and will be held to the same moral standards as any human being, and in return get some of the same loyalty as nation-states get, as long as it treats its employees decently. It's refusal to anthropomorphize that's the odd aberration, which has led to byzantine and ever-expanding legal texts attempting (and failing) to enumerate badness.
We can't leave a mission of such important to misfits. This clearly requires politicians, lobbyists and corporate executives.