200 million people with small arms can put up a hell of a fight.
200 million people would need to agree that the government needs to be replaced to put up any kind of fight at all. And if they do, they can simply vote it out.
Unless, of course, we're not actually talking about a popular uprising of the masses, but about a bunch of guerillas "correcting" political decisions they don't like.
Because they have tachyon vision and thus effect can precede cause for them? Because I have a hard time seeing how else the reaction to police brutality could possibly be its cause.
But hey, kicking a dog and then playing the victim when it finally bites you back certainly deserves plenty of respect, amirite?
Ever watch a real cop show on tv? They do a raid or bust someone, they always say to the camera how happy they are all of their people got home fine.
Of course they say so, they're playing for the camera. Would you want to admit on national television that the pothead you just arrested was not a threat to anyone?
The problem is, pretending to be the chosen hero fighting against the forces of darkness can be addictive. The sorry state of our political system is a good example of that. And then you forget it's all just a fantasy for the fleeting moment it takes to pull the trigger, and then someone's dead. And then neither you nor your buddies can admit the truth, because that would mean admitting you're now a murderer.
The police's primary goal should be to make sure that innocent citizens get home fine. The cop's life should be secondary to that goal.
That's simply feeding the roleplaying fantasy which caused the problem in the first place.
I have all the passwords to every account on the system and I know every password you have used for the last five years. If you decide to get cute, I will publish your "Favorites,"
It is unwise to make threats. You are simply providing him with legal ammunition.
I assure you that those photos are being kept in safe places
They better be, seeing how you're in deep shit if they get published after hinting you would. Not that attempted extortion won't already put you deep enough.
Little bitches throw tantrums and storm out with bitter accusations to justify their immaturity.
So they should just stay with their pimp until he's done with them and suck it down, then?
It doesn't matter if the company would have ended things with less class. That's like saying, no I won't give a dollar to that homeless person because I don't think he would give me one if I was the one in a tough spot.
No, it's like refusing to pay for the Monopoly Man's latte.
You don't give notice because you give a shit about your (soon to be former) employer, you give notice because that's what a professional does. Walk out without notice and you declare "I am not a professional."
No, what you are declaring is that you don't consider the company greater than yourself. Two-week notice for one and having guards escort you to the door for the other are primarily an obedience ritual establishing and reinforcing society's power relations. "Professionalism" is really just our version of chivalry and bushido: a set of behaviours designed to transfer power from people to structures, all wrapped in philosophical bullshit which lets people pretend they're "professionals" or "honorable" rather than what they actually are: slaves.
Small wonder you can only get shitty jobs. You're a shitty employee.
Of course they are, just like George Washington and his merry band were shitty subjects to the English crown. People with a sense of self-worth tend to make for shitty subjects. It doesn't mean they're wrong, though.
You're not wrong in describing cause and effect, but you are wrong in taking this causal relation as an unalterable law of nature rather than a social construct which can be changed. An unconditional and livable citizen wage, for example, would instantly depotentate unemployment as a threat and thus make people more free, or at least less beholden to the soulless legal constructs known as companies we've given near-divine status in our society.
The English language is not a static language defined by pedants.
It's a language made to convey meaning without ambiguity.
No, that would be legalese. English, just like any human language, has plenty of ambiguity built right in, simply because context sensitivity makes communication far more efficient - it's a form of entropy encoding - and also because human thoughts and feelings are often pretty ambiguous.
As a side note, this is the reason why machine translation tends to be so terrible: current computers don't know the context and thus can't correctly decode and re-encode the message.
I think you've been spending too much time with your head in the jungle...
Which is precisely why I so dislike attempts to turn society into one.
Any relevant monkey analogies for our current government? Any suggestions on how to improve it without going bananas?
Stop electing people based on their ability fling poo. Improve yourselves and become people deserving of a better government. Stop treating politics like a goddamn D&D campaign.
No, of course you should be allowed to block the hurricane warning. At the same time, you should, if you choose to do so, not expect any kind of compensation from your insurance.
Your insurance won't pay if you won't listen to telemarketers? Maybe you should think the implications of your position through a bit more carefully.
Here is the problem, Liberals are saying "Clinton isn't guilty" (legal meaning) so they are going to vote for her, which sounds a lot like "I hired Casey Anthony to babysit" to me.
Liberals are going to vote for Hillary because she's the closest thing to a liberal that's available. "Not guilty" is relevant because it affects availability.
And if you bring up Trump, I'll simply say... "pointing to bad behavior to justify bad behavior doesn't work on me"
"Work on you" in what sense? Surely you don't think anyone expects you to change your political identity no matter what.
In any case voting for Hillary because you think Trump is worse (or the other way around) is perfectly valid reasoning. After all, US voting system is set up so that one of them will get the presidency. Pick the lesser evil, whoever you think that is.
Government is a bunch of politicians, each one with their own agenda, each one trying to make some money/name for himself.[...]Tyranny of a collectivist government is worse than tyranny of a singular tyrant.
So which one is it? Is the government a bunch of individuals or a collective?
A tyrant can be taken down, even killed. How do you kill the hydra that is a collectivist government?
The fact that you can keep posting your rants about tyranny strongly implies you don't actually live under one.
But to answer your question: you can't. A society can't function without collective decision-making. No group of human beings can. And as the group becomes larger, coordinating its rules and activities becomes more complex and requires specialization, just like with any other task. At that point you need a government, and demonizing it doesn't make that need go away.
I think you are confusing libertarians with anarchists again. Libertarians support limited government and a means to collect revenue with which to operate it.
Anarchists are stupid but honest: they want to live in a jungle. Libertarians want that jungle to have a government which protects them from anyone bigger while leaving them free to eat anyone smaller. Neither of them understands that their ideologies are never going anywhere because humans evolved in a jungle so most people have instinctual understanding of what it's like living in one.
Budget burning as it is called is still wasteful if they keep the funds rather than send it back. For instance if your department has a 1 million surplus, that million can be used more effective either doing something else government should be doing or staying in the hands of taxpayers who will increase economic activity and thereby increase future revenue.
No, because money is not a limited resource. Having 1 million dollars sitting in your account means you have authorization to spend actual, limited resources if needed; it doesn't mean you're sitting on those resources themselves. Nothing whatsoever is stopping anyone from using those resources in whatever way they see fit. On the other hand, micromanaging a department's budget does use resources for pointless bureaucracy.
The limit to government spending is inflation, which is caused by inelastic demand exceeding the supply and ending up making ever higher bids for the same resources. Money sitting in accounts can not affect it.
ALL libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight. It's one of the only legitimate functions of government - contract enforcement.
You know, I've never really understood why libertarians want to move society's functions from democratic control to unelected plutocrats. Do you think it'll end up as an utopia(-ish) or do you simply think you'd end up on top?
Imagine if banking systems worked this way: they only way your bank can protect money in your account is to launch lawsuits at "cheat sites" which tell people how to steal money from other people's accounts.
According to what I've heard, American banks are pretty notorious for constantly stealing from their customers through overdraft fees and overdraft protection racket. So arguably they'd have a legitimate case of IP infringement against other thieves.
Such as using a torrent or The Pirate Bay causes a lost sale for a song or movie because torrents and TPB are common and word gets around.
Someone using The Pirate Bay Edition doesn't affect anyone else, now does it? They simply have a superior version with DRM and unskippable ramblings about downloading cars removed.
at what point will it be cheeping to sustain a human in space than a robot
Probably never, if only because nobody will weep for a dead robot. But that doesn't matter, because the real motive to put people into space is that we're living beings and life expands to fill all available habitats. "Space jobs" is simply a disguise to get that primal urge past capitalist bean counting.
How democratic the US may be in practice is a complex question. The biggest problem (greater than voter apathy) is the way the electorate is misinformed and manipulated.
This is the Age of the Internet. If the electorate is misinformed, it's because they choose to be. They aren't helpless victims but active participants in and consumers of deception. Voting based on fantasies or party identity is probably not going to end well, but the cause is lack of sanity, not lack of democracy.
There is a massive amount of government waste, I see it everyday while working within various government departments.
And there's a massive amount of waste on the private sector too. I see it every day in all jobs but my own. The reason is that I only see the surface of those other jobs from the outside. Every single time I've tried to do one, I've found out that there simply isn't any better way to do it - any possible speedup requires taking risks or shortcuts which will come back to bite you.
The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus.
It is ironic that the push for efficiency can lead to the opposite result. But the solution is not to push harder, but lighter. Let the department carry over their unused budget to the next fiscal year, and now they have an actual motive to save money because it's now "their" money - and it also means they can build up savings to use for emergencies and larger projects.
Twitter isn't for expressing ideas, Twitter is for posting news, some of general interest, some not. Twitter's popular for that precisely because it's not possible to post long rants there, and because condensed stupidity tends to at least be quotable.
Twitter is a "sensory stream", not thought stream.
The cloud is the most evil and easily exploited thing ever created.
"The cloud" is like the Internet: it's the logical and, frankly, desirable endpoint of certain technological developments. Just like the Internet is ubiquitous communication, the Cloud is ubiquitous - or at least ubiquitously available - computing. Just like the Internet means you don't need a dedicated line to Slashdot, but use a virtual connection which runs on whatever actual hardware happens to be available, most of it not under your control, the Cloud lets you use a virtual server rather than a dedicated physical box, which makes having a server something ordinary people can afford and easily arrange.
And yes, ubiquitous computing is easily exploited, for good or ill, just like ubiquitous communication is, and just like the postal system, the road system, etc are. No matter what your political beliefs are, it's irrational to blame actions - real or imagined - of humans on lifeless objects.
And prison shouldn't be club med. It's supposed to teach you a lesson to not commit crime, not a resort where you get free perks.
I didn't want to believe life in America sucked so hard prisons are considered clubs and resorts. But I suppose it must be true, considering the number of people who I've seen expressing resentment towards the apparently relatively luxurious living conditions of inmates. How the mighty have fallen...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it gives SWAT teams an excuse to go in guns blazing. So, epic fail.
So you don't know the facts but do know the conclusion?
200 million people would need to agree that the government needs to be replaced to put up any kind of fight at all. And if they do, they can simply vote it out.
Unless, of course, we're not actually talking about a popular uprising of the masses, but about a bunch of guerillas "correcting" political decisions they don't like.
Because they have tachyon vision and thus effect can precede cause for them? Because I have a hard time seeing how else the reaction to police brutality could possibly be its cause.
But hey, kicking a dog and then playing the victim when it finally bites you back certainly deserves plenty of respect, amirite?
Of course they say so, they're playing for the camera. Would you want to admit on national television that the pothead you just arrested was not a threat to anyone?
The problem is, pretending to be the chosen hero fighting against the forces of darkness can be addictive. The sorry state of our political system is a good example of that. And then you forget it's all just a fantasy for the fleeting moment it takes to pull the trigger, and then someone's dead. And then neither you nor your buddies can admit the truth, because that would mean admitting you're now a murderer.
That's simply feeding the roleplaying fantasy which caused the problem in the first place.
It is unwise to make threats. You are simply providing him with legal ammunition.
They better be, seeing how you're in deep shit if they get published after hinting you would. Not that attempted extortion won't already put you deep enough.
So they should just stay with their pimp until he's done with them and suck it down, then?
No, it's like refusing to pay for the Monopoly Man's latte.
No, what you are declaring is that you don't consider the company greater than yourself. Two-week notice for one and having guards escort you to the door for the other are primarily an obedience ritual establishing and reinforcing society's power relations. "Professionalism" is really just our version of chivalry and bushido: a set of behaviours designed to transfer power from people to structures, all wrapped in philosophical bullshit which lets people pretend they're "professionals" or "honorable" rather than what they actually are: slaves.
Of course they are, just like George Washington and his merry band were shitty subjects to the English crown. People with a sense of self-worth tend to make for shitty subjects. It doesn't mean they're wrong, though.
You're not wrong in describing cause and effect, but you are wrong in taking this causal relation as an unalterable law of nature rather than a social construct which can be changed. An unconditional and livable citizen wage, for example, would instantly depotentate unemployment as a threat and thus make people more free, or at least less beholden to the soulless legal constructs known as companies we've given near-divine status in our society.
No, that would be legalese. English, just like any human language, has plenty of ambiguity built right in, simply because context sensitivity makes communication far more efficient - it's a form of entropy encoding - and also because human thoughts and feelings are often pretty ambiguous.
As a side note, this is the reason why machine translation tends to be so terrible: current computers don't know the context and thus can't correctly decode and re-encode the message.
Which is precisely why I so dislike attempts to turn society into one.
Stop electing people based on their ability fling poo. Improve yourselves and become people deserving of a better government. Stop treating politics like a goddamn D&D campaign.
Your insurance won't pay if you won't listen to telemarketers? Maybe you should think the implications of your position through a bit more carefully.
Liberals are going to vote for Hillary because she's the closest thing to a liberal that's available. "Not guilty" is relevant because it affects availability.
"Work on you" in what sense? Surely you don't think anyone expects you to change your political identity no matter what.
In any case voting for Hillary because you think Trump is worse (or the other way around) is perfectly valid reasoning. After all, US voting system is set up so that one of them will get the presidency. Pick the lesser evil, whoever you think that is.
So which one is it? Is the government a bunch of individuals or a collective?
The fact that you can keep posting your rants about tyranny strongly implies you don't actually live under one.
But to answer your question: you can't. A society can't function without collective decision-making. No group of human beings can. And as the group becomes larger, coordinating its rules and activities becomes more complex and requires specialization, just like with any other task. At that point you need a government, and demonizing it doesn't make that need go away.
tl;dr Grow up.
Anarchists are stupid but honest: they want to live in a jungle. Libertarians want that jungle to have a government which protects them from anyone bigger while leaving them free to eat anyone smaller. Neither of them understands that their ideologies are never going anywhere because humans evolved in a jungle so most people have instinctual understanding of what it's like living in one.
No, because money is not a limited resource. Having 1 million dollars sitting in your account means you have authorization to spend actual, limited resources if needed; it doesn't mean you're sitting on those resources themselves. Nothing whatsoever is stopping anyone from using those resources in whatever way they see fit. On the other hand, micromanaging a department's budget does use resources for pointless bureaucracy.
The limit to government spending is inflation, which is caused by inelastic demand exceeding the supply and ending up making ever higher bids for the same resources. Money sitting in accounts can not affect it.
You know, I've never really understood why libertarians want to move society's functions from democratic control to unelected plutocrats. Do you think it'll end up as an utopia(-ish) or do you simply think you'd end up on top?
How so? What needs of passenger trains conflict with those of cargo?
According to what I've heard, American banks are pretty notorious for constantly stealing from their customers through overdraft fees and overdraft protection racket. So arguably they'd have a legitimate case of IP infringement against other thieves.
Someone using The Pirate Bay Edition doesn't affect anyone else, now does it? They simply have a superior version with DRM and unskippable ramblings about downloading cars removed.
Probably never, if only because nobody will weep for a dead robot. But that doesn't matter, because the real motive to put people into space is that we're living beings and life expands to fill all available habitats. "Space jobs" is simply a disguise to get that primal urge past capitalist bean counting.
This is the Age of the Internet. If the electorate is misinformed, it's because they choose to be. They aren't helpless victims but active participants in and consumers of deception. Voting based on fantasies or party identity is probably not going to end well, but the cause is lack of sanity, not lack of democracy.
And there's a massive amount of waste on the private sector too. I see it every day in all jobs but my own. The reason is that I only see the surface of those other jobs from the outside. Every single time I've tried to do one, I've found out that there simply isn't any better way to do it - any possible speedup requires taking risks or shortcuts which will come back to bite you.
It is ironic that the push for efficiency can lead to the opposite result. But the solution is not to push harder, but lighter. Let the department carry over their unused budget to the next fiscal year, and now they have an actual motive to save money because it's now "their" money - and it also means they can build up savings to use for emergencies and larger projects.
Twitter isn't for expressing ideas, Twitter is for posting news, some of general interest, some not. Twitter's popular for that precisely because it's not possible to post long rants there, and because condensed stupidity tends to at least be quotable.
Twitter is a "sensory stream", not thought stream.
"The cloud" is like the Internet: it's the logical and, frankly, desirable endpoint of certain technological developments. Just like the Internet is ubiquitous communication, the Cloud is ubiquitous - or at least ubiquitously available - computing. Just like the Internet means you don't need a dedicated line to Slashdot, but use a virtual connection which runs on whatever actual hardware happens to be available, most of it not under your control, the Cloud lets you use a virtual server rather than a dedicated physical box, which makes having a server something ordinary people can afford and easily arrange.
And yes, ubiquitous computing is easily exploited, for good or ill, just like ubiquitous communication is, and just like the postal system, the road system, etc are. No matter what your political beliefs are, it's irrational to blame actions - real or imagined - of humans on lifeless objects.
I didn't want to believe life in America sucked so hard prisons are considered clubs and resorts. But I suppose it must be true, considering the number of people who I've seen expressing resentment towards the apparently relatively luxurious living conditions of inmates. How the mighty have fallen...