Again, the big mistake they made was in not shaming noisy holier then thou types that are often either misrepresenting or simply misinformed about the nature of the world.
Really? Because it seems that it was the NSA that made a grave miscalculation about "the nature of the world". All this talk about "holier than thou" is trying to assert that people are wrong to react like they do, as opposed to how you think they should. And to paper over this cognitive dissonance, you insist this is evidence of their hypocrisy, not you being wrong.
Your masters are still fighting the Cold War, and refuse to admit the world is changing. You aren't doing any favours to them by letting them stay delusional. The wakeup call will get louder and ruder the more times it needs to be repeated.
Unfortunately, low reportage is correlated with a mass of social ills (increase corruption for one), so I suspect this development is not welfare-improving in the long run.
Except that newspapers, having long since been consolidated into massive cartels, don't have any interest in reporting social ills, since the owners of those cartels benefit from the status quo. Why would I pay Murdoch for his propaganda?
But against foreign governments? The point of the NSA is to do that sort of thing.
The point of the NSA is make enemies of everyone?
Actually, that makes a lot of sense, from the military-industrial complex's point of view. If your continued existence depends on having enemies to fight, you'd better make some.
And anyone that thinks these other governments aren't doing the same thing back are kidding themselves.
Really? Because as recent events have shown, this kind of activities are not without a cost. Simply having your embassies read newspapers and watch television will fulfil the need for peacetime intelligence. What did the USA gain for going beyond this?
Also, you should not underestimate the impact watching the entire continent burn to ground left to European culture. The whole point of EU is to transform international relations from chaotic violence to ordered, law-based bureaucracy. People growing up in such a climate are not going to make a 180 degree turn when they join the local intelligence agency.
Except that in this analogy, low-quality food is free. Restaurants tried to compete by being more "efficient", in other words, lowering quality to make the same money with less customers. But of course all that accomplishes is driving away the remaining diners, since they no longer get a benefit for forking over the cash.
It's no one's fault, really, it's just that newspapers are obsolete.
If someone killed weev, the world would be a better place.
If your purpose was to demonstrate how this cancer infects even Slashdot, then congratulations. +4 Insightful my ass.
Also, you're wrong. When weev dies, another will simply take his place. A hierarchy is basically institutionalized bullying, and we are still indoctrinated into hierarchies. Weev is operating from the axioms thought to him by the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert, only the Internet has stripped away the facade of civility and revealed the dynamic as it really is: "Put up with my bullshit or get the choice between starving to death or going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison."
We should never allow misguided governments to harm peaceful people.
The problem is, any attempt by "we" to actually do this quickly turns us into another government.
And of course, the entire War on Drugs exist precisely because a lot of people are not only okay with but actively support harming peaceful people. It makes them feel though or something.
This is not a new kind of perception, it's a chemical illusion, no more valid than the brain chemistry that makes you hear voices, or makes you unable to stop obsessing on stupid shit.
It is true that altered states of consciousness produce a lot of garbage. But what does that matter? Once you sober up, you can separate gold from the gangue. And the very fact that it's possible to perceive the same thing in different ways can be an invaluable insight in itself.
It's also worth considering that our normal mode of consciousness evolved to keep us alive long enough to breed. There's no reason to assume it's the best possible for any other task. For example, we perceive space and time as separate rather than as unified spacetime.
It's likely that all or most oddball mind-altering effects of pot (other than the most obvious) are from various crap that was once commonly used in the preparation/preservation, and not THC.
Taxes and world government is EXACTLY what it is all about.
Do you think a globalized world could avoid a world government? Currently it's a primitive form of feudalism, where various hierarchical blocks compete and occasionally war with each other, and sometimes a strong leader emerges and enforces a Pax Whatever for a time. More advanced forms of "nation of nations" are beginning to form, such as the US and the EU, but for now they only hold sway over small parts of the world.
Rather than whine about the inevitable and frankly desirable end to the era of violent chaos in international affairs, how about seeking to control the process - impose your own values, wishes and desires on the system as it forms?
Which should actually be about as comforting as discovering that your septic tank has gone from full to empty without any actually needing to pump it out.
But that's okay, since there's a perfectly rational explanation: the septic pump's blown fuse had changed itself in the dead of night.
The problem is you confuse them with reality. Climate is not a social construct, it won't stop reacting to changes in atmospheric composition just because you tell a good story, or even a crazy conspiracy theory one.
Yes, and that "nation" you speak of that can't arrest or shoot you is called the Military Industrial Complex.
No, the nation I'm speaking of is the United States of America. The USA could disband the MIC any time it wanted. You simply don't want to. After all, that would be a combination of government interference on private business and hippie pacifism.
You know, the very same Complex that is now arming Sheriff Bubba Joe and his merry band of misfits in with armored troop carriers and other "necessities" to perform their job.
To be fair, as automation continues destroying the foundation of current economic model they probably will be necessities. Massive poverty + a culture that despises the poor = unrest.
Oh you mean the 51st State in the US? It's not on too many maps. Kind of hard to miss though, as it's a massive State. We call it Welfare.
A lot of US's problems originate with the fact that it's not a welfare state. When the entire basis of the culture is clawing your way on top, you shouldn't be surprised if various public organizations and servants reflect this same mentality, from NSA to Sheriff Bubba Joe.
The citizens don't give a shit anymore. Apathy controls them. You'll see that when the next voter turnout is half of what it was before.
Not caring doesn't relieve anyone from responsibility. If anything, it's damning evidence of just where the problem is.
And when elected positions are replaced with appointed Czars (a.k.a. the good ol' corrupt boys club), it's hard to convince anyone that any form of democracy still exists within our elected leadership today.
So who's appointing them? King George? Because last I checked it was your elected officials - who keep being re-elected. So blame the citizens for that one too.
Yeah, we have two choices (we can pretend there are more but let's stick to reality here)
And by "reality" you mean "most people approve of what R&D are doing and will vote for them"? Because that gets us straight back to "blame the citizens".
If that is what you call a defense, I'd sure as hell hate to see them on the offensive.
Burning books while a crowd of thousands cheers? For all their might, the Powers That Be are ultimately just figments of collective imagination. A nation can't arrest or shoot you, it needs someone to do so on its behalf. And if the only reason why anyone might obey is fear, the entire system is one realization away from collapse. What happened in the former Soviet block is an excellent demonstration of just how that works.
Even the Roman emperors knew their power stemmed from public support, not armed might, hence the need to provide bread and circuses.
Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that US is a democracy. You don't need a revolution to change the people in charge, you simply need to express support for someone else, and anonymously at that. So if the rulers approve of bullshit like this, and still get re-elected, then don't blame the Government, blame the citizens.
When there are companies specializing in providing custodial staff at costs lower than google could feasible hire them, why does it matter how they are employed?
Well, an obvious answer is that minimum wage gets you minimum loyalty, so if you actually need security, it might be a food iodea to pay your guards more than strictly needed to get warm bodies into uniforms - and the only way to ensure that is to pay them yourself.
So you have pointed out all of the problems but not offered a solution or any other workable ideas.
Also, one of the problems seems to be that it's hard to filter out students who don't agree with you. Or at least it's hard for me to see what other purpose knowing the student's values would serve.
Of course, the easiest solution would be to acknowledge that the world has changed, consequently everyone needs higher education, so supply needs to be increased until everyone gets in, because otherwise they graduate straight to unemployment line. Even burger flipping's going to be automated soon.
It is easy to test creativity in an objective way: confront the student with a situation they have never seen before but which they can solve with the science they have studied.
How do you know what situations a student might have seen, especially in the Internet Age?
Look dude, the concept isn't that hard but I'll explain it. To a person with no money, stealing food may not be immoral. To the person with money, someone stealing their food is immoral.
Morality is about what choices you should make. Being a victim of a crime is not "immoral" since it wasn't your choice. Your response, however, might be moral or immoral. So apparently the concept is indeed too hard for you to grasp.
Hate speech itself is the problem because it's defined so loosely that virtually anything that pings on someone's nerve is called hate speech whether it be directed and hostile language or simply a difference of opinion.
"Obama sucks." -opinion
"Obama should be killed." -hate speech
A good rule of thumb is that if saying it about a sitting president would make the FBI get very interested in you, you probably shouldn't be saying it about anyone else, either.
And that's why barbeque starts with a slaughter. Getting pre-killed pieces of meat from a supermarket just wouldn't do.
And when it comes to it, and the choice is between eating a dead person or dying, there are plenty of examples to show people in that situation pretty gladly chow down on the longpig.
Evidence also suggests people will cut off their hand or leg rather than die. That doesn't mean there isn't pretty strong psychological aversion to it, it just means emergencies are emergencies.
We are in the first world, so generally we can afford higher morales (not necessarily high morales).
Not stealing food when you aren't hungry doesn't mean you have higher morality than someone who does because he's starving. The circumstances aren't even remotely the same, so the choices aren't comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Because it seems that it was the NSA that made a grave miscalculation about "the nature of the world". All this talk about "holier than thou" is trying to assert that people are wrong to react like they do, as opposed to how you think they should. And to paper over this cognitive dissonance, you insist this is evidence of their hypocrisy, not you being wrong.
Your masters are still fighting the Cold War, and refuse to admit the world is changing. You aren't doing any favours to them by letting them stay delusional. The wakeup call will get louder and ruder the more times it needs to be repeated.
Except that newspapers, having long since been consolidated into massive cartels, don't have any interest in reporting social ills, since the owners of those cartels benefit from the status quo. Why would I pay Murdoch for his propaganda?
The point of the NSA is make enemies of everyone?
Actually, that makes a lot of sense, from the military-industrial complex's point of view. If your continued existence depends on having enemies to fight, you'd better make some.
Really? Because as recent events have shown, this kind of activities are not without a cost. Simply having your embassies read newspapers and watch television will fulfil the need for peacetime intelligence. What did the USA gain for going beyond this?
Also, you should not underestimate the impact watching the entire continent burn to ground left to European culture. The whole point of EU is to transform international relations from chaotic violence to ordered, law-based bureaucracy. People growing up in such a climate are not going to make a 180 degree turn when they join the local intelligence agency.
So does the Earth. 47 terawatts is a considerable amount.
Except that in this analogy, low-quality food is free. Restaurants tried to compete by being more "efficient", in other words, lowering quality to make the same money with less customers. But of course all that accomplishes is driving away the remaining diners, since they no longer get a benefit for forking over the cash.
It's no one's fault, really, it's just that newspapers are obsolete.
If your purpose was to demonstrate how this cancer infects even Slashdot, then congratulations. +4 Insightful my ass.
Also, you're wrong. When weev dies, another will simply take his place. A hierarchy is basically institutionalized bullying, and we are still indoctrinated into hierarchies. Weev is operating from the axioms thought to him by the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert, only the Internet has stripped away the facade of civility and revealed the dynamic as it really is: "Put up with my bullshit or get the choice between starving to death or going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison."
The problem is, any attempt by "we" to actually do this quickly turns us into another government.
And of course, the entire War on Drugs exist precisely because a lot of people are not only okay with but actively support harming peaceful people. It makes them feel though or something.
No reason to imagine, psychedelics have been with us for all our history. And as it happens, weed has mild psychedelic effects.
It is true that altered states of consciousness produce a lot of garbage. But what does that matter? Once you sober up, you can separate gold from the gangue. And the very fact that it's possible to perceive the same thing in different ways can be an invaluable insight in itself.
It's also worth considering that our normal mode of consciousness evolved to keep us alive long enough to breed. There's no reason to assume it's the best possible for any other task. For example, we perceive space and time as separate rather than as unified spacetime.
Why do you think so?
Do you think a globalized world could avoid a world government? Currently it's a primitive form of feudalism, where various hierarchical blocks compete and occasionally war with each other, and sometimes a strong leader emerges and enforces a Pax Whatever for a time. More advanced forms of "nation of nations" are beginning to form, such as the US and the EU, but for now they only hold sway over small parts of the world.
Rather than whine about the inevitable and frankly desirable end to the era of violent chaos in international affairs, how about seeking to control the process - impose your own values, wishes and desires on the system as it forms?
But that's okay, since there's a perfectly rational explanation: the septic pump's blown fuse had changed itself in the dead of night.
The problem is you confuse them with reality. Climate is not a social construct, it won't stop reacting to changes in atmospheric composition just because you tell a good story, or even a crazy conspiracy theory one.
No, the nation I'm speaking of is the United States of America. The USA could disband the MIC any time it wanted. You simply don't want to. After all, that would be a combination of government interference on private business and hippie pacifism.
To be fair, as automation continues destroying the foundation of current economic model they probably will be necessities. Massive poverty + a culture that despises the poor = unrest.
A lot of US's problems originate with the fact that it's not a welfare state. When the entire basis of the culture is clawing your way on top, you shouldn't be surprised if various public organizations and servants reflect this same mentality, from NSA to Sheriff Bubba Joe.
Not caring doesn't relieve anyone from responsibility. If anything, it's damning evidence of just where the problem is.
So who's appointing them? King George? Because last I checked it was your elected officials - who keep being re-elected. So blame the citizens for that one too.
And by "reality" you mean "most people approve of what R&D are doing and will vote for them"? Because that gets us straight back to "blame the citizens".
Burning books while a crowd of thousands cheers? For all their might, the Powers That Be are ultimately just figments of collective imagination. A nation can't arrest or shoot you, it needs someone to do so on its behalf. And if the only reason why anyone might obey is fear, the entire system is one realization away from collapse. What happened in the former Soviet block is an excellent demonstration of just how that works.
Even the Roman emperors knew their power stemmed from public support, not armed might, hence the need to provide bread and circuses.
Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that US is a democracy. You don't need a revolution to change the people in charge, you simply need to express support for someone else, and anonymously at that. So if the rulers approve of bullshit like this, and still get re-elected, then don't blame the Government, blame the citizens.
No, because it's not the 17-year old's fault someone let a minor control a dangerous machine. They're a minor for a reason.
If you are a shareholder, ask the company yourself. If you aren't, why do you care?
Well, an obvious answer is that minimum wage gets you minimum loyalty, so if you actually need security, it might be a food iodea to pay your guards more than strictly needed to get warm bodies into uniforms - and the only way to ensure that is to pay them yourself.
Also, one of the problems seems to be that it's hard to filter out students who don't agree with you. Or at least it's hard for me to see what other purpose knowing the student's values would serve.
Of course, the easiest solution would be to acknowledge that the world has changed, consequently everyone needs higher education, so supply needs to be increased until everyone gets in, because otherwise they graduate straight to unemployment line. Even burger flipping's going to be automated soon.
How do you know what situations a student might have seen, especially in the Internet Age?
Morality is about what choices you should make. Being a victim of a crime is not "immoral" since it wasn't your choice. Your response, however, might be moral or immoral. So apparently the concept is indeed too hard for you to grasp.
"Obama sucks." -opinion
"Obama should be killed." -hate speech
A good rule of thumb is that if saying it about a sitting president would make the FBI get very interested in you, you probably shouldn't be saying it about anyone else, either.
And that's why barbeque starts with a slaughter. Getting pre-killed pieces of meat from a supermarket just wouldn't do.
Evidence also suggests people will cut off their hand or leg rather than die. That doesn't mean there isn't pretty strong psychological aversion to it, it just means emergencies are emergencies.
Not stealing food when you aren't hungry doesn't mean you have higher morality than someone who does because he's starving. The circumstances aren't even remotely the same, so the choices aren't comparable.