Should Putin want to invade Ukraine, he'd conquer it in a week or two.
Which is what he already did to Crimea, and is now trying to do to East Ukraine. Putin is an evil overlord, not an idiot; he'll gobble up what he can without drawing too much aggro, then wait for the next opportunity.
The problem, of course, is that sooner or later he'll miscalculate the reaction, like Germany did in 1939, and then another world war will start.
1. Who disabled the safety lock, and on what authority?
2. Who fired the missile, and on what authority?
Putin's servants on Putin's authority. The real question is whether this was an intentional revenge for the sanctions, or merely typical Russian lack of concern for human lives. Either way, the poor bastards on the plane are simply collateral damage in Putin's Soviet Empire Rebuilding Project.
Second, given amount of hate western media spewing against Russians and China right now, I see the great war coming.
Dunno what China has to do with any of this, but if you fear a war is coming, maybe you should tell Putin to stop? Because he's the one hell-bent on conquering his neighbours, which is what this is about.
The automation at least gives the benefit of hiring engineers, but far less engineers are hired than the large number of low wage workers who are fired.
You know, we could solve all these problems with unconditional basic income sufficient to live tolerably on. Then we could remove minimum wage entirely and appreciate automation as liberator of humanity from toil rather than fearing it as a threat. At the same time, it would smooth out the boom-bust cycle by guaranteeing a level of economic demand.
Our current model of employment is an artifact of Industrial Era, and is quickly becoming obsolete in our post-Industrial one, which is the ultimate cause of our economic problems.
The jobs lost overseas are just lost. And not only low wage jobs are lost, because as the cost of living increases on the engineers then those jobs start to go away as well.
So basically, if you work for a living, you're screwed.
I dont believe that at all. one should not be paid 20 buck an hour to pick apples, or take an order at mcdonalds, the job is not worth that much, if it were our food would cost double and we would be in the same boat. just because you now make 50 grand instead of 25 sounds good, but if the cost of everything goes up to match that change, whats the point??
Well, for starters, if a McDonald's employee needs food stamps to live, then I'm subsidising McDonald's from my taxes: I'm paying part of the income of their employees. Same goes for apple-pickers, and every other job for that matter.
Allowing a company to pay a lower than living wage results in a massive market failure, and consequently waste of resources. It's much better to force McDonald's and your local apple farm to charge the customers the price of resources - including human resources - it actually takes to deliver their product, and let market decide if it's worth them. An employee must be able to live on his wage alone with a tolerable quality of life, otherwise the employer is simply a parasite upon the economy.
Remember that minimum wage does not just affect minimum wage workers and their employers. It affects everyone who pays for services done by people working minimum wage
And it also affects everyone who sells good and services, since these minimum wage workers can now afford more. That's usually considered a good thing.
It all ripples through the economy. High minimum wages eventually make everything more expensive, not just a McDonald's hamburger.
Higher demand drives up prices, which drives up supply, which drives prices back down. The only thing that actually changes is what level of employment - utilization of production resources - results in the balance.
The bottom line is that if raising minimum wage from $7 to $700 will have a bad effect on the economy, then so will increasing $7 to $7.25.
Which makes just as much sense as saying that if rising price of a product from $7 to $7.25 will increase profits, then so will increasing it to $700.
Without IAPs, what's the correct way to provide a limited playable version without offering the first episode without charge and offering additional episodes as IAPs?
Put the free limited and paid full versions in the store as separate apps.
But if you want some of the nasty shit, you usually know what you're about to get into. Not because school, teachers, priests or other fairy tale godmothers tell you about it. Because you effin' SEE what it does. Few people push their first time themselves. Most have some "help". From people who have been doing it for a while.
Or you mail order it from the Silk Road of the day. You keep on pushing the "dangerous drugs are used by desperate people" angle, but they're also used by people who simply want a thrill. And the fact is, at this point it's next to impossible to know how dangerous any particular substance really is. There's too much misinformation around. So people say "screw this", throw caution to the wind and do it.
And of course that's how it works with everything else, too. How many people still care about nutritional recommendations, which get revised every few years, rather than simply eating what they want?
Just take a moment to ponder how fucked up your life has to be that you consider a slow, agonizing death with a brief, occasional high a pleasant alternative.
And this is another thing: a typical drug-related death is not slow and agonizing, it's overdoze. Tobacco is the only exception I can think of, yet people who's lives are otherwise just fine smoke anyway.
If you are even slightly "high" you can not be pure and one with God.
Isn't it a cliche at this point that ancient prophets were high? Which, a more cynical person might think, is the real reason many drugs are prohibited: one possible effect is "seeing God". Whether such visions are "real" in some sense or not, they tend to prompt re-evaluation of one's life from a different - often larger - perspective. For someone who's life revolves around dominating others, what could be more frightening than for all the little plebs - or "consumers" - to suddenly see that the roles you've assigned them are, in fact, options to be chosen or discarded?
If Joe Sixpack sees God then Joe might start comparing that vision to Uncle Sam or the Invisible Hand and ask himself if these things, for all intents and purposes treated as divinely ordained in our society, are really good matches. He might even start to question whether memorizing answers to trivia questions is a good model for religion, and whether it makes sense to assume that the Creator of the Universe is obsessed with gay sex. And that might lead to some uncomfortable questions about who various religious leaders actually serve.
Well, it's also a problem if it harms your health, and I am forced to pay for your heathcare!
I am forced to pay for law and order, and the cost goes up when various jackasses stir up hatred of jews/blacks/immigrants/whatever. So should we ban free speech?
If it was entirely YOUR responsibility to pay for your health care (as it should be), then it wouldn't be a problem.
I am also forced to pay the opportunity costs of potential customers and employees being less capable due to losing their health. And, more generally, the opportunity costs associated with every stupid ideology that insists every man is an island in the sea of economy that exists independent of them.
And a lot more people would voluntarily give up smoking!
I have a hard time imagining anyone caring more about the costs of treating their lung cancer than about getting that cancer in the first place.
I am surprised at how strenuous the naysayers are and how much they seem to lack even basic technical curiousity about this new technology.
No one likes to admit they're wrong, and the more strongly you've committed to a position, the stupider you'll feel when the evidence becomes undeniable. That's why, at some point, it always stops being about issues and starts being about persons: people are not defending their position anymore, they're defending themselves. It's one of the more annoying failure modes of human intellect.
I hear a lot of talk about bitcoins, but not much about who has any sizable assets in bitcoins so I sometimes question if the entire market might just be 1 random guy scamming us all.
Who are you going to scam if you're the only one in a market? Yourself?
What would be really nice is a CAPTCHA for phones. So if someone calls me, they get a message that says "press seven if you are a human", and my phone only rings if they pass the test. It would also need to have a whitelist, since I get legitimate robo-calls from my kids' school.
Or just plain whitelist: if the calling number is on my phonebook, the call gets accepted and the phone rings, otherwise it's silently ignored.
You say it like it's a good thing.. a big country isolated, hated and full of unhappy people. What could go wrong?
The difference between then and now is that now Russia has more resources, and thus poses more of a threat. It already keeps on trying to conquer its neighbours, directly and indirectly, every chance it gets.
I live right next door to them, and I'd much rather see them happy and enjoying life, because that way they'd probably be lot less likely to start new conflicts.
I'd rather see them become a peaceful democracy too, but I don't think it's going to happen. Modern Russia is simply a new iteration of Soviet Russia, which was a new iteration of Russian Empire. It keeps on rising leaders like Putin, since they match the true spirit of the nation, and it keeps on being a threat to everyone around it, being hell-bent on empire-building as it is.
To agents in the NSA: It doesn't matter if 999 of 1000 of you are honest. All it takes is one G. Gordon Liddy type who ignores requirements for warrants to listen in on political opponents, and the whole thing is worthless.
It takes one agent who gets paid in gold and 999 who get paid in security and convenience. The exact same as with police or Catholic Church's abuse scandal. That's the way systematic corruption works: one bad apple didn't make the tree rotten, the tree was always rotten and the bad apple just gave it a chance to demonstrate that. And all it takes is one Snowden to blow it all wide open.
So Putin, who is responsible for arming these terrorists with missiles capable of bringing down airliners at cruising altitude has just killed 23 US citizens. Let's hope that US & EU sanctions get truly serious in response.
They won't. The problem is that Russia supplies much of Europe's fossile fuels, specifically oil and gas. That's yet another reason to stop using them.
With any luck, this crisis might serve to start a long-term program to achieve energy independence for Europe, after which Russia can be isolated like the rogue nation hated by all its neighbours it is. But right now that's impossible.
Have my computer remember all my passwords, and still have to write them all down for when I am out of the house.
If you don't worry about a random computer having a keylogger, why would you worry about writing your passwords down? At least you have a chance of noticing a pickpocket.
The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. There's no point in closing the barn door after the horses have ran away. Etc. etc.
I can think of a simple counter to this statement, RSA (or any other major encryption scheme) are published algorithms whose security is decided by the strength of the keys used.
Can you do RSA in your head? Because once you're willing to use a computer for password management, you can as well simply use a keyring app with password generation and not worry about any of this.
Also, I think you meant a hashing scheme, not encryption, since making the algorithm one-way would seem to be a very desirable property.
Company Stores and scripts are an abuse of power. Here is what I said about abuses of power...
" Libertarianism oppose to abuses of power, and only want a government big enough to stop abuses of power. "
No government is big enough to stop all abuses of power. The current one, for example, is failing to stop a new iteration of company script. Then there's domino effect, like the current financial crisis, where a few greedy and disproportionately powerful people or institutions manage to screw the entire economy and everyone who operates in it. So while this is a fine principle, it sadly doesn't really guide us.
The fact that these types of "company towns" operated, with impunity was simply because government was NOT doing its job properly.
Specifically, it merely guaranteed property rights and enforcement of contracts (you know, the libertarian ideal), thus allowing those with more property than average to use the associated power to gather even more, until they had enough to dictate any terms they wanted for the rest. A government that doesn't restrict concentration of economic power cannot stop the majority of people from becoming beholden to the will of those who control the resources.
For the record, my ideal solution for this would be unconditional citizen pay sufficient to live on. Let those who can stand to spend the rest of their life in their beds do so; it's not like they were likely contributing much anyway. And let those institutions who need the whip to get anyone to serve them die off; what were they ever, but soul-crushing slavemasters? We're moving to post-industrial economy and have little if any need for human robots to man the assembly line, so why stick to an economic model designed to make people just that? People enjoy building and accomplishing things, so why not simultaneously encourage that by removing the sting from failure and depotentate economic power as a tool of abuse?
However, I would suggest to you that the Government taxes and fees and whatnot amount to the same " no longer free, and it's just ugly and messy." you complain about in Libertarianism. We are serfs to the Government masters.
How do you propose a government to perform any function, proper or not, without resources? And I have a hard time imagining what way of getting them wouldn't cause far more problems than taxation.
But yes, our societies are still suffering from hierarchical power structures, of having masters and serfs. As far as I can tell, Libertarianism wold make them worse, not better. After all, a government is, at least in theory, beholden to me; a company is not.
I love people who don't know or understand Libertarianism try to describe it.
We do, that's why we don't vote for them. Rand Paul does as well, that's why he's focusing on CEOs, who he can reasonably guess are more likely to have bloated egos than the average.
I want unbridled liberty. It is messy, ugly and free.
At least until the only employer around (since there's no anti-monopoly laws anymore) will only pay to you with company script (since there's nothing stopping them anymore). Then you're no longer free, and it's just ugly and messy. But at least the company store gets a captive customer base.
Liberals are people who see "Excellence" and think "That's not fair" and want to make the playing field "level" for the players that don't work and practice hard. So they saddle those that do work hard with extra weight "because they deserve it for taking advantage" of those that don't work hard.
So, workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains? Or is this yet another bizarre example of saying "work hard" when you meant "getting dividends"?
In other words we are not National Socialists..... like you.
I think this here sums up libertarianism nicely, as well as how anyone who isn't a true believer can expect to be treated should they ever win. Most might not be so blunt about it, but it's the idea behind all the sweet words about liberty. A movement that believes everyone who isn't them are Nazis can't settle for compromise or tolerate dissent, so it's fundamentally incompatible with anyone actually having liberty. And that, in turn, makes it fundamentally incompatible with such things as democracy or freedom of speech - or even of thought.
And it's interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what Nazis themselves, or hard-line communists, or really any totalitarians spouted. Just replace the name of the enemy with something appropriate.
This is not my password but it's an example of how I create one:
And this is why the algorithm method won't work: people can't keep their mouths shut. Letting everyone know how clever you are is a drive that's almost impossible to resist, because it simultaneously helps your group and demonstrates your value to it, so it's selected for double strength. Consequently, the only way to have secure passwords is to generate them randomly and just write them down. Heck, just generate them for the user and tell them to use "save password" option on the browser - it's safe unless the machine gets infected, in which case it's gonna leak anyway.
and another site like a bank site that I want higher entrophy on will use a different algorithm
If a bank lets its customers pick their own passwords, that should be your cue that the bank thinks it won't be on the hook for any online thefts. After all, a lot of those passwords will be "password".
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Which is what he already did to Crimea, and is now trying to do to East Ukraine. Putin is an evil overlord, not an idiot; he'll gobble up what he can without drawing too much aggro, then wait for the next opportunity.
The problem, of course, is that sooner or later he'll miscalculate the reaction, like Germany did in 1939, and then another world war will start.
Putin's servants on Putin's authority. The real question is whether this was an intentional revenge for the sanctions, or merely typical Russian lack of concern for human lives. Either way, the poor bastards on the plane are simply collateral damage in Putin's Soviet Empire Rebuilding Project.
Dunno what China has to do with any of this, but if you fear a war is coming, maybe you should tell Putin to stop? Because he's the one hell-bent on conquering his neighbours, which is what this is about.
You know, we could solve all these problems with unconditional basic income sufficient to live tolerably on. Then we could remove minimum wage entirely and appreciate automation as liberator of humanity from toil rather than fearing it as a threat. At the same time, it would smooth out the boom-bust cycle by guaranteeing a level of economic demand.
Our current model of employment is an artifact of Industrial Era, and is quickly becoming obsolete in our post-Industrial one, which is the ultimate cause of our economic problems.
So basically, if you work for a living, you're screwed.
Well, for starters, if a McDonald's employee needs food stamps to live, then I'm subsidising McDonald's from my taxes: I'm paying part of the income of their employees. Same goes for apple-pickers, and every other job for that matter.
Allowing a company to pay a lower than living wage results in a massive market failure, and consequently waste of resources. It's much better to force McDonald's and your local apple farm to charge the customers the price of resources - including human resources - it actually takes to deliver their product, and let market decide if it's worth them. An employee must be able to live on his wage alone with a tolerable quality of life, otherwise the employer is simply a parasite upon the economy.
And it also affects everyone who sells good and services, since these minimum wage workers can now afford more. That's usually considered a good thing.
Higher demand drives up prices, which drives up supply, which drives prices back down. The only thing that actually changes is what level of employment - utilization of production resources - results in the balance.
Which makes just as much sense as saying that if rising price of a product from $7 to $7.25 will increase profits, then so will increasing it to $700.
Economics: the "science" of fitting the data to whatever theory you happen to favour for ideological reasons.
Sadly, quite easy to conceive.
Put the free limited and paid full versions in the store as separate apps.
Or you mail order it from the Silk Road of the day. You keep on pushing the "dangerous drugs are used by desperate people" angle, but they're also used by people who simply want a thrill. And the fact is, at this point it's next to impossible to know how dangerous any particular substance really is. There's too much misinformation around. So people say "screw this", throw caution to the wind and do it.
And of course that's how it works with everything else, too. How many people still care about nutritional recommendations, which get revised every few years, rather than simply eating what they want?
And this is another thing: a typical drug-related death is not slow and agonizing, it's overdoze. Tobacco is the only exception I can think of, yet people who's lives are otherwise just fine smoke anyway.
Isn't it a cliche at this point that ancient prophets were high? Which, a more cynical person might think, is the real reason many drugs are prohibited: one possible effect is "seeing God". Whether such visions are "real" in some sense or not, they tend to prompt re-evaluation of one's life from a different - often larger - perspective. For someone who's life revolves around dominating others, what could be more frightening than for all the little plebs - or "consumers" - to suddenly see that the roles you've assigned them are, in fact, options to be chosen or discarded?
If Joe Sixpack sees God then Joe might start comparing that vision to Uncle Sam or the Invisible Hand and ask himself if these things, for all intents and purposes treated as divinely ordained in our society, are really good matches. He might even start to question whether memorizing answers to trivia questions is a good model for religion, and whether it makes sense to assume that the Creator of the Universe is obsessed with gay sex. And that might lead to some uncomfortable questions about who various religious leaders actually serve.
I am forced to pay for law and order, and the cost goes up when various jackasses stir up hatred of jews/blacks/immigrants/whatever. So should we ban free speech?
I am also forced to pay the opportunity costs of potential customers and employees being less capable due to losing their health. And, more generally, the opportunity costs associated with every stupid ideology that insists every man is an island in the sea of economy that exists independent of them.
I have a hard time imagining anyone caring more about the costs of treating their lung cancer than about getting that cancer in the first place.
No one likes to admit they're wrong, and the more strongly you've committed to a position, the stupider you'll feel when the evidence becomes undeniable. That's why, at some point, it always stops being about issues and starts being about persons: people are not defending their position anymore, they're defending themselves. It's one of the more annoying failure modes of human intellect.
Who are you going to scam if you're the only one in a market? Yourself?
Or just plain whitelist: if the calling number is on my phonebook, the call gets accepted and the phone rings, otherwise it's silently ignored.
The difference between then and now is that now Russia has more resources, and thus poses more of a threat. It already keeps on trying to conquer its neighbours, directly and indirectly, every chance it gets.
I'd rather see them become a peaceful democracy too, but I don't think it's going to happen. Modern Russia is simply a new iteration of Soviet Russia, which was a new iteration of Russian Empire. It keeps on rising leaders like Putin, since they match the true spirit of the nation, and it keeps on being a threat to everyone around it, being hell-bent on empire-building as it is.
It takes one agent who gets paid in gold and 999 who get paid in security and convenience. The exact same as with police or Catholic Church's abuse scandal. That's the way systematic corruption works: one bad apple didn't make the tree rotten, the tree was always rotten and the bad apple just gave it a chance to demonstrate that. And all it takes is one Snowden to blow it all wide open.
Or so you were told, anyway. Welcome to reality, third-class citizen.
They won't. The problem is that Russia supplies much of Europe's fossile fuels, specifically oil and gas. That's yet another reason to stop using them.
With any luck, this crisis might serve to start a long-term program to achieve energy independence for Europe, after which Russia can be isolated like the rogue nation hated by all its neighbours it is. But right now that's impossible.
If you don't worry about a random computer having a keylogger, why would you worry about writing your passwords down? At least you have a chance of noticing a pickpocket.
The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. There's no point in closing the barn door after the horses have ran away. Etc. etc.
Can you do RSA in your head? Because once you're willing to use a computer for password management, you can as well simply use a keyring app with password generation and not worry about any of this.
Also, I think you meant a hashing scheme, not encryption, since making the algorithm one-way would seem to be a very desirable property.
No government is big enough to stop all abuses of power. The current one, for example, is failing to stop a new iteration of company script. Then there's domino effect, like the current financial crisis, where a few greedy and disproportionately powerful people or institutions manage to screw the entire economy and everyone who operates in it. So while this is a fine principle, it sadly doesn't really guide us.
Specifically, it merely guaranteed property rights and enforcement of contracts (you know, the libertarian ideal), thus allowing those with more property than average to use the associated power to gather even more, until they had enough to dictate any terms they wanted for the rest. A government that doesn't restrict concentration of economic power cannot stop the majority of people from becoming beholden to the will of those who control the resources.
For the record, my ideal solution for this would be unconditional citizen pay sufficient to live on. Let those who can stand to spend the rest of their life in their beds do so; it's not like they were likely contributing much anyway. And let those institutions who need the whip to get anyone to serve them die off; what were they ever, but soul-crushing slavemasters? We're moving to post-industrial economy and have little if any need for human robots to man the assembly line, so why stick to an economic model designed to make people just that? People enjoy building and accomplishing things, so why not simultaneously encourage that by removing the sting from failure and depotentate economic power as a tool of abuse?
How do you propose a government to perform any function, proper or not, without resources? And I have a hard time imagining what way of getting them wouldn't cause far more problems than taxation.
But yes, our societies are still suffering from hierarchical power structures, of having masters and serfs. As far as I can tell, Libertarianism wold make them worse, not better. After all, a government is, at least in theory, beholden to me; a company is not.
We do, that's why we don't vote for them. Rand Paul does as well, that's why he's focusing on CEOs, who he can reasonably guess are more likely to have bloated egos than the average.
At least until the only employer around (since there's no anti-monopoly laws anymore) will only pay to you with company script (since there's nothing stopping them anymore). Then you're no longer free, and it's just ugly and messy. But at least the company store gets a captive customer base.
So, workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains? Or is this yet another bizarre example of saying "work hard" when you meant "getting dividends"?
I think this here sums up libertarianism nicely, as well as how anyone who isn't a true believer can expect to be treated should they ever win. Most might not be so blunt about it, but it's the idea behind all the sweet words about liberty. A movement that believes everyone who isn't them are Nazis can't settle for compromise or tolerate dissent, so it's fundamentally incompatible with anyone actually having liberty. And that, in turn, makes it fundamentally incompatible with such things as democracy or freedom of speech - or even of thought.
And it's interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what Nazis themselves, or hard-line communists, or really any totalitarians spouted. Just replace the name of the enemy with something appropriate.
And this is why the algorithm method won't work: people can't keep their mouths shut. Letting everyone know how clever you are is a drive that's almost impossible to resist, because it simultaneously helps your group and demonstrates your value to it, so it's selected for double strength. Consequently, the only way to have secure passwords is to generate them randomly and just write them down. Heck, just generate them for the user and tell them to use "save password" option on the browser - it's safe unless the machine gets infected, in which case it's gonna leak anyway.
If a bank lets its customers pick their own passwords, that should be your cue that the bank thinks it won't be on the hook for any online thefts. After all, a lot of those passwords will be "password".