Oh who am I kidding? I find it all icky in the extreme, though there is some part of me that can appreciate the engineering elegance in not growing a whole cow if all you want is rumpsteak.
Howzabout if you try and grow a pair? Yeah some people are going to be disappeared. Yeah you might be one of them and once you go through the mirror the best you can hope for is to one day be dumped back, naked and stark raving mad, on some roadside in outer Albania. So? You're losing your freedoms because you're not using them. Being afraid won't help.
Why would it look horrific? I imagine it would be something like a bunch of steaks in Pyrex containers flowing slowly down a huge-ass conveyor belt between conditioning and feeding stations. Not horrific by any means - not worse than a normal slaughterhouse, in fact much better for the smell, sounds, cleanliness and general ick factor.
I'm quite sure you could zap and/or stretch vat-grown muscle once in a while to get it in shape. It's being done to comatose patients, why not to bits of cow?
A social network facilitates social interaction, including of the "pick up and leave" type. What you must realize is that although the tools have changed, the realities have mostly not.
For every Cory Doctorow out there who has hundreds of friends in 20 different timezones there are a million guys who wallow in a 30- or 40-strong social group that is strongly interconnected but has very few ties to the world at large. When these normal people pick up and go, they feel no pain. They all go at the same time to the next best thing, each of them loses a couple-three casual connections that are easily restored or forgotten. Their network, iow, remains largely intact.
AOL was full of old farts too, near the end. World+dog had figured how this newfangled AOL chat thing worked. The techs and the cool set had long since fled in horror, of course. And when I say "techs and hipsters" I mean "early adopters and influencers" - the two types of people you need if you want business to grow fast and then continue growing.
- they might pay an American company (or a European company, or a Chinese company - it's up to them, strangely enough) to dig the wells because we have the technology and the experience to do it [...] how that translates into a big fat oil pipeline to the United States is beyond me
It simply translates into money that is put in the accounts of the likes of Bechtel, Haliburton and BP. You admit as much, verbatim.
Oil extraction (especially from rich fields like those of Iraq) is not rocket surgery. Your claim that foreign companies are needed at all is ridiculous. Iraq extracted and sold oil between the two wars entirely on its own.
we have no leverage over them to make them pick an American company, because if we did and if we used it, the Brits might be pretty pissed off at us, since they had people in Iraq for a long time as well and BP is still pretty big.
You have got to be kidding me. The US military is occupying that country. Of course you have leverage. Of course you have to also pay your allies for their undying friendship.
Iraq hasn't expanded American influence - we have a lot of military infrastructure there, sure, but unless we're planning on invading Turkey anytime soon, our bases in Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan have been there for a lot longer.
That's not quite true. The US will be invading Iran before the decade is over. Kyrgyzstan is about Iran. Afghanistan is about Iran. Iraq is about Iran. It's called encirclement. The end game, the big prize, the thing that will tide America over into post-oil supremacy.
Iraq has been a huge expense for America and the return on our investment is questionable even for people who supported the idea in the first place.
Oh cry me a river. The White Man's burden, what?
If we were really running an Empire, we wouldn't be at the mercy of hundreds of sheiks and Iraqi politicians
The system as it was invented was called satrapy. Look it up. In later times, it has been applied with much success to the conquest and subsequent rule of India by British commercial interests.
they had a democratic election and we've chosen to respect that, even when it's clearly bad for Iraq.
The US is comfortable with any sort of government in Iraq, as long as the money keeps flowing and the bases remain in place. There is no need for "absolute control" as long as those two conditions remain fulfilled.
but I see why there are still brave men and women trying to make room for a stable government there
And why is that, pray tell? If it's not self-interest, then what? There are many other places where the people were worse-off than in Iraq when you guys invaded a second time, like, oh, I dunno, Somalia?
No cache was discovered in 2010 - it was quite well known for decades that Afghanistan sits on huge untapped mineral resources. What happened in 2010 is someone put a putative price tag on the deposits that were known to exist. Surely there is more out there, to be found when exploration begins in earnest.
The costs of running an empire are outrageous, to be sure. What's worse is not running it.
As for corruption and graft, Iraq ain't no Peoria either, yet corporations line up cap in hand in Washington, begging for a cut of the oil exploitation rights, the infrastructure contracts and what have you.
I grew up in Europe, where I was born, not surrounded by ignorant Southern hicks but rather in the capital city of a country that has had more actual historical events than yours has Civil War memorials (and that's a lot!).
I back up my conclusion by another bit of critical thinking that you may find too deft for your provincialism.
Huck is, indeed, very much a product of his upbringing and environment - the quintessential white trash boy in a deeply-prejudiced South. On the other hand, Jim is an adult, very mature and wise in his outlook, so he can see that Huck means no harm and isn't being "insensitive", quite the contrary. To me, the nature of the relationship between them is what makes the book so poignant.
Twain was showing how basic human decency - on both sides- can transcend even such a culture that tries to rob everyone even of the proper means of expressing themselves. He does this by using Huck's "voice" throughout, a voice which is just like that of other white trash (an injurious term invented in the South, mind you!), yet his story and what it says about Huck's character moves us and endears us, a lot.
That's Twain's genius at work there and you as a proud USian should not let it be demeaned by some two-bit latter-days Bowdler.
Hey, it's not my nation (mine's fucked up in other ways and anyway it's old enough that some of the ugly stuff really is so old that no-one actually cares anymore; you care).
I learned about all this cowboys-and-indians stuff from world history books (required reading in my third-world country's educational system). I have no horse in this race and neither did those who educated me.
It's known in the psychiatric profession that the kids of Holocaust survivors grew into screwed-up and unhappy adults because their parents suffered from PTSD. Now it's becoming apparent that even the third generation has inherited a burden of pain.
I was not suggesting that institutionalized rape and genocide happened in America within living memory and I apologize if it sounded that way, although it was unintentional.
I hate to suggest this, but maybe your own attitude isn't all "learn, recover, grow"? What I know about USians suggests that you may have had some difficulty with racists and bigots growing up and it may have soured you some.
This genocide stuff is hard, ugly and evil and doesn't dilute all that easily, not for the victims, not for the perpetrators. A positive attitude helps, but so does talking to others in your situation. Have you tried that?
I'd mod you informative if i had points. That being said, this little fact has always amazed me. It seems the casinos could be easily taken to court for fraudulent advertising.
Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here
Surely you mean blended with as in isolated in concentration camps, lived with as in genocided, reproduced with as in raped and learned from as in destroyed the cultural inheritance and stole the cultural artifacts of?
Other than that, a fine post, sir or madam, and a touching sentiment.
Attempts have been made, esp. during Victorian times. The resulting texts are no more and no less informative and/or entertaining than the originals - i.e. not much at all.
He could not have done that. The use in context is intentionally injurious to blacks and it's this injurious attitude that Twain was portraying and criticizing. Idiot.
(Recent) history and science are much better uses of precious educational time and scarce resources. We need to fit workers to compete in the world economy. Literature and the arts should be left to those who are enthusiasts and enjoy them as hobbies. There is no time for hobbies without a JOB.
Going a bit OT here but I like your premise. So, What Would the Romans Have Done in Afghanistan?
Going by the historical record, I believe they would have built roads and bridges throughout the valleys in that godforsaken country, massacred one tenth of the population in "war", enslaved another tenth and demoralized the rest through torture, public mass executions and destruction of the local religious and/or political elite, followed by replacement with a friendly local satrapy that would take its orders from a Roman (pro-)consul. Then they would have split the country roughly in half, with them holding tight the reins of only the resource-rich bits and everything else left to rot in carefully nurtured anarchy, economic despondency and in-fighting. Then, the life of the new colony would begin in earnest, with rich Roman patricians in control of colonist-run resource operations such as export of valuable minerals and agricultural products.
What war zone? The US is not at war with Iraq, last I checked. You, sir, are spouting 100-proof bona-fide all-American bullshit.
What you see there, from the point of view of international law, is the US military killing unarmed civilians in a country it is currently occupying.
Radovan Karadzic is doing time in Scheveningen for exactly this kind of thing. Milosevic died in prison before he could be condemned for the same type of actions - but imprisoned he was, not left free to publish a book about his presidency.
If anything, the full version was worse. There's a lull of about ten minutes in which the helicopter guys just hang around and wait for something to move so they can shoot it. The edited-out bits about the girl are also horrific, showing blatant disregard for civilians from the US military (the shot-up girl is denied medical aid, basically).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh who am I kidding? I find it all icky in the extreme, though there is some part of me that can appreciate the engineering elegance in not growing a whole cow if all you want is rumpsteak.
Howzabout if you try and grow a pair? Yeah some people are going to be disappeared. Yeah you might be one of them and once you go through the mirror the best you can hope for is to one day be dumped back, naked and stark raving mad, on some roadside in outer Albania. So? You're losing your freedoms because you're not using them. Being afraid won't help.
Why would it look horrific? I imagine it would be something like a bunch of steaks in Pyrex containers flowing slowly down a huge-ass conveyor belt between conditioning and feeding stations. Not horrific by any means - not worse than a normal slaughterhouse, in fact much better for the smell, sounds, cleanliness and general ick factor.
I'm quite sure you could zap and/or stretch vat-grown muscle once in a while to get it in shape. It's being done to comatose patients, why not to bits of cow?
A social network facilitates social interaction, including of the "pick up and leave" type. What you must realize is that although the tools have changed, the realities have mostly not.
For every Cory Doctorow out there who has hundreds of friends in 20 different timezones there are a million guys who wallow in a 30- or 40-strong social group that is strongly interconnected but has very few ties to the world at large. When these normal people pick up and go, they feel no pain. They all go at the same time to the next best thing, each of them loses a couple-three casual connections that are easily restored or forgotten. Their network, iow, remains largely intact.
AOL was full of old farts too, near the end. World+dog had figured how this newfangled AOL chat thing worked. The techs and the cool set had long since fled in horror, of course. And when I say "techs and hipsters" I mean "early adopters and influencers" - the two types of people you need if you want business to grow fast and then continue growing.
- they might pay an American company (or a European company, or a Chinese company - it's up to them, strangely enough) to dig the wells because we have the technology and the experience to do it [...] how that translates into a big fat oil pipeline to the United States is beyond me
It simply translates into money that is put in the accounts of the likes of Bechtel, Haliburton and BP. You admit as much, verbatim.
Oil extraction (especially from rich fields like those of Iraq) is not rocket surgery. Your claim that foreign companies are needed at all is ridiculous. Iraq extracted and sold oil between the two wars entirely on its own.
we have no leverage over them to make them pick an American company, because if we did and if we used it, the Brits might be pretty pissed off at us, since they had people in Iraq for a long time as well and BP is still pretty big.
You have got to be kidding me. The US military is occupying that country. Of course you have leverage. Of course you have to also pay your allies for their undying friendship.
Iraq hasn't expanded American influence - we have a lot of military infrastructure there, sure, but unless we're planning on invading Turkey anytime soon, our bases in Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan have been there for a lot longer.
That's not quite true. The US will be invading Iran before the decade is over. Kyrgyzstan is about Iran. Afghanistan is about Iran. Iraq is about Iran. It's called encirclement. The end game, the big prize, the thing that will tide America over into post-oil supremacy.
Iraq has been a huge expense for America and the return on our investment is questionable even for people who supported the idea in the first place.
Oh cry me a river. The White Man's burden, what?
If we were really running an Empire, we wouldn't be at the mercy of hundreds of sheiks and Iraqi politicians
The system as it was invented was called satrapy. Look it up. In later times, it has been applied with much success to the conquest and subsequent rule of India by British commercial interests.
they had a democratic election and we've chosen to respect that, even when it's clearly bad for Iraq.
The US is comfortable with any sort of government in Iraq, as long as the money keeps flowing and the bases remain in place. There is no need for "absolute control" as long as those two conditions remain fulfilled.
but I see why there are still brave men and women trying to make room for a stable government there
And why is that, pray tell? If it's not self-interest, then what? There are many other places where the people were worse-off than in Iraq when you guys invaded a second time, like, oh, I dunno, Somalia?
Obvious troll is obvious.
I'm not American. I'm not liberal.
No cache was discovered in 2010 - it was quite well known for decades that Afghanistan sits on huge untapped mineral resources. What happened in 2010 is someone put a putative price tag on the deposits that were known to exist. Surely there is more out there, to be found when exploration begins in earnest.
The costs of running an empire are outrageous, to be sure. What's worse is not running it.
As for corruption and graft, Iraq ain't no Peoria either, yet corporations line up cap in hand in Washington, begging for a cut of the oil exploitation rights, the infrastructure contracts and what have you.
What shadow conspiracy? It's all in the open.
Robinson Crusoe. IN SPACE! Take your stories and make them into a movie script. You'll make millions in Hollywood with such a tried-and-true recipe.
I grew up in Europe, where I was born, not surrounded by ignorant Southern hicks but rather in the capital city of a country that has had more actual historical events than yours has Civil War memorials (and that's a lot!).
I back up my conclusion by another bit of critical thinking that you may find too deft for your provincialism.
Huck is, indeed, very much a product of his upbringing and environment - the quintessential white trash boy in a deeply-prejudiced South. On the other hand, Jim is an adult, very mature and wise in his outlook, so he can see that Huck means no harm and isn't being "insensitive", quite the contrary. To me, the nature of the relationship between them is what makes the book so poignant.
Twain was showing how basic human decency - on both sides- can transcend even such a culture that tries to rob everyone even of the proper means of expressing themselves. He does this by using Huck's "voice" throughout, a voice which is just like that of other white trash (an injurious term invented in the South, mind you!), yet his story and what it says about Huck's character moves us and endears us, a lot.
That's Twain's genius at work there and you as a proud USian should not let it be demeaned by some two-bit latter-days Bowdler.
Hey, it's not my nation (mine's fucked up in other ways and anyway it's old enough that some of the ugly stuff really is so old that no-one actually cares anymore; you care).
I learned about all this cowboys-and-indians stuff from world history books (required reading in my third-world country's educational system). I have no horse in this race and neither did those who educated me.
It's known in the psychiatric profession that the kids of Holocaust survivors grew into screwed-up and unhappy adults because their parents suffered from PTSD. Now it's becoming apparent that even the third generation has inherited a burden of pain.
I was not suggesting that institutionalized rape and genocide happened in America within living memory and I apologize if it sounded that way, although it was unintentional.
I hate to suggest this, but maybe your own attitude isn't all "learn, recover, grow"? What I know about USians suggests that you may have had some difficulty with racists and bigots growing up and it may have soured you some.
This genocide stuff is hard, ugly and evil and doesn't dilute all that easily, not for the victims, not for the perpetrators. A positive attitude helps, but so does talking to others in your situation. Have you tried that?
I'd mod you informative if i had points. That being said, this little fact has always amazed me. It seems the casinos could be easily taken to court for fraudulent advertising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Afghanistan
What, you thought this war was about politics?
Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here
Surely you mean blended with as in isolated in concentration camps, lived with as in genocided, reproduced with as in raped and learned from as in destroyed the cultural inheritance and stole the cultural artifacts of?
Other than that, a fine post, sir or madam, and a touching sentiment.
Attempts have been made, esp. during Victorian times. The resulting texts are no more and no less informative and/or entertaining than the originals - i.e. not much at all.
He could not have done that. The use in context is intentionally injurious to blacks and it's this injurious attitude that Twain was portraying and criticizing.
Idiot.
(Recent) history and science are much better uses of precious educational time and scarce resources. We need to fit workers to compete in the world economy. Literature and the arts should be left to those who are enthusiasts and enjoy them as hobbies. There is no time for hobbies without a JOB.
Quoth the Morlock: nevermore!
Going a bit OT here but I like your premise. So, What Would the Romans Have Done in Afghanistan?
Going by the historical record, I believe they would have built roads and bridges throughout the valleys in that godforsaken country, massacred one tenth of the population in "war", enslaved another tenth and demoralized the rest through torture, public mass executions and destruction of the local religious and/or political elite, followed by replacement with a friendly local satrapy that would take its orders from a Roman (pro-)consul. Then they would have split the country roughly in half, with them holding tight the reins of only the resource-rich bits and everything else left to rot in carefully nurtured anarchy, economic despondency and in-fighting. Then, the life of the new colony would begin in earnest, with rich Roman patricians in control of colonist-run resource operations such as export of valuable minerals and agricultural products.
Oh, wait...
IR lasers are better.
There are semi-decent protocols being developed for ad-hoc wireless networks.
It would be more like Intel if the cake turned out to be real enough until you tried to divide it.
I posted on this thread, but you sir would have gotten my +1 Insightful otherwise, no questions asked.
What war zone? The US is not at war with Iraq, last I checked. You, sir, are spouting 100-proof bona-fide all-American bullshit.
What you see there, from the point of view of international law, is the US military killing unarmed civilians in a country it is currently occupying.
Radovan Karadzic is doing time in Scheveningen for exactly this kind of thing. Milosevic died in prison before he could be condemned for the same type of actions - but imprisoned he was, not left free to publish a book about his presidency.
If anything, the full version was worse. There's a lull of about ten minutes in which the helicopter guys just hang around and wait for something to move so they can shoot it. The edited-out bits about the girl are also horrific, showing blatant disregard for civilians from the US military (the shot-up girl is denied medical aid, basically).