There are many places where protesting means they'll just shoot you and then forget you exist. Libya was one example and North Korea is an example now; where the government is perfectly happy to shoot as many people as it takes, even if it kills half the country as long as it keeps them in power.
Your advice only works in America, and only because the government and the people in power don't want to win badly enough that they're willing to risk their skins. The reason they don't want to win badly enough is that they're fairly comfortable and that the OWS movement still has the implicit assumption that they can push back just as violently as the Libyan people if cornered.
In the end, unless the people involved suddenly grow a conscience; societal change is about having enough power to back up your demands, if only in theory. If you can't do that; there are people who are quite happy to reduce others to the level of slaves. They will sleep perfectly well at night afterward.
Also, there's no point in appealing to the media when the media is controlled in whole by the very people you're fighting against. They will always report the very worst, even if they have to make it up from scratch. This happens everywhere, China, Libya, North Korea, Egypt and America.
After seeing some of the posts in recent threads; I'm tempted to agree. I come to slashdot to see opinions of people who have personal experience in subjects relating to stories they're commenting on. It's great when it happens but it seems to be fairly rare.
It's interesting that prejudgment is a logical fallacy but implicitly assuming that you're better than everyone and that they're all sheep is not a fallacy. Tell me straight, can you honestly say that previous law breaking doesn't correlate at all with future law breaking?
Because they use translating as their main source of income, and want to do a proper job like they do any other project? That means that while they work on this they aren't earning money from any other source.
It's not strange either, when we want something done in day to day life, we pay someone to do it. Especially if it's important to us and we want it done quickly; I've already donated 15 pounds.
So what you're saying is that their decision to add video support was a good call that cemented Flash's dominance for a number of years and enabled all kinds of new ideas to hit the market? Would that be a fair summary of your opinion?;)
As other posters have pointed out, many nations are poor because economic factors are set up to keep them that way. One of the reasons that Cuba fought so hard to push out capitalist industry was because wages and living conditions were kept artificially low by multiple companies working together; a situation that's occurring in many other places across the globe right now. It's not that these countries are at their limit, they are starving because they cannot use their own resources to their fullest extent. Once every country is fully developed and we are still running out of food, that will be the point when someone can legitimately bring up mass starvation as the possible solution to anything.
Not that such a point will come around. With 7 billion people working to solve the resource problem, we will find solutions that seem to be impossible with our current brainpower.
There is a basic concept, if you have a resource, trade it for a resource you do not have, and that includes money. If there is an entire nation that has no resources to trade and they are not capable of growing their own food, then the population will starve, the population will go down, and things balance out. Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help? The world as a whole does not need money pits, and the world as a whole does not need a "food pit" that will never be able to trade resources for food.
The UN and other countries aren't working now. Keeping people in camps, selling food that undercuts the local farmers and deploying troops that end up raping the locals but cannot be charged due to immunities isn't helping. There's no political will to actually work to fix these problems because the solutions don't look particularly appetizing from a moment's look. For example, if the UN worked to shoot the warlords and bandit kings causing destruction by rampaging through their respective countries, the first thing those warlords would do is scream about how the west was imposing their oppressive cultural values onto them against their will, much like how you are doing right now. Likewise if the UN had harsh and immediate penalties for soldiers caught taking advantage of the locals in their battalions the countries providing those soldiers would likely withdraw support from the UN and make a fuss about their rights being violated.
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole. If you want to adopt people and bring them into your own country, then fine, bring them in, and make them productive.
This argument has been around a long time for everything from the space program to R&D. So has it's counter. "You didn't do shit for those people before we started doing x, and you're not planning to do shit for them if x stops, so cut the crap."
What's my solution? Laws need to be passed that prevent corporations from taking advantages of countries that they outsource to; these laws need to have teeth. Corporations always complained about new labour laws, from equal pay to child exploitation legislation; they're going to cope just fine. More importantly the influx of capital will allow the countries being outsourced in to more fully develop their economies. The UN should make an effort to sell food at just a higher price than local farmers in poor countries in order to insure that the local industry doesn't go bankrupt every time they visit. Free surgery is good, but no one's going to start any farms as long as you're going to pop by and undercut them on a bi-yearly basis. The UN army needs to be disciplined properly to prevent the current abuses against the people they're supposed to be protecting and then cut loose to deal with the bandit problems. There's local culture and then there's mass murder and we need to have a global understanding that the second is not just a funny thing that those people do but a blight to be stamped out brutally. Those suffering nations are quite capable of having the same food production as western nations.
In essence your opinion is that we shouldn't stand up for truth because there are worse people out there and the perfectly innocent government will beat the tar out of us. That's a wonderful reason to do nothing; I wonder why wikileaks exists. You should tell them your idea:D.
Yeah, I have nothing against recycling excrement into food; just as long as it's done by way of plants. This would have been a better discovery if the conversion had come by way of some really tasty mushrooms.:P
The reason people fought against euthensia was the fear that it might be abused. People would pressure other people into it "for the good of the family" or that elderly would feel pressured to do it themselves so they wouldn't burden their relatives. When the BBC Documentary on the subject came out, this was precisely the vibe I got from them. There's no way that this won't be abused to get rid of people who are considered a "burden".
You're confusing a practical issue for a political one. Once you've outsourced all the actual work to another country, trained their locals how to do whatever it is you do and only keeping the management on shore; why would they need you anymore? Those workers will quit, start their own companies with the skills you taught them and compete against you.
This is what happens to many companies that outsource to China. The reason that knockoffs are so pervasive is that the very factories that make their own stuff are also cranking out the knockoffs.
That sounds like an excellent reason to panic. This isn't something I'm comfortable with them thinking they can get away with; having someone think they can dictate terms to you never leads to anything good.
You mean because it's such a wonderful place to live thanks to the actions of those aforementioned organizations? Considering the chinese have recently had problems with their watermelons exploding thanks to their use of untested "growth agents", I'm thankful for our oversight.
For the purposes of this exercise, let's assume that no one stores their credit card numbers on their computer in plaintext; even though we all know that's not true.
The porn thing is one thing I never understood, why would anyone bother? It's like they've never heard of the internet. I figure that some people will take anything not nailed down, a pretty solid reason that Dropbox should not give it's employees access to the user's stuff at all.
That's all true but there's two issues in this particular case.
-- We've heard stories about computer repair technicians stealing everything up to and including porn off the computers they're servicing. There's a pretty low threshold for important when the data's sitting right there for the taking.
-- They're lying to get ahead in the market. That's something we need to discourage.
He is onto something though. Its not unreasonable that he be irritated by inane stuff, no one likes listening to stories about a trip they weren't on and have nothing to do with, not from friends and not from family. Small talk has to be about stuff that both of you have an interest in or at least be interesting in and of itself. I can totally believe that his coworkers haven't mastered that.
Just to be clear. Are you saying that it's FUD for someone to claim that getting support for free software (free as in beer) is dependent on other people providing you support?
That sounds nice in theory. In practice there's no university that only teaches narrow skills. In fact I'm especially grateful to my university for teaching theory and practical application, not only do I see how my skills are applied in the real world but I also have something to fall back on should I need to. There's nothing as empowering as being able to use your skills to build something for yourself. I'm sure a painter feels the same way.
The Arts students are a better example of what happens when you're not taught application. They had all of these skills, but didn't put any consideration into using them to get what they wanted.
How dare they want to learn a skill to make money? The outrage.
More to the point, while arts degrees might claim that they help students understand the world; from my experience with arts students themselves the only things the degrees seem to do is teach them how to act pretentious while parroting back what they were taught by rote. Remember that practically any additional information triggers the *ding* feeling of having improved your understanding, even if it isn't true or makes no sense at all in a larger context.
We don't have arts courses at our university anymore, not since two years ago. What was really telling was the way that the students dealt with it before their courses were shut down...
No impassioned orations in front of the students and academics No clever legal wrangling
They just sort of whinged about it; we had people handing out leaflets about how only the arts courses could teach us about the world. The leaflet spokesmen couldn't say what precisely those courses would teach us, only that our own courses were pitfully inadequate for making us full people. Depressingly, for all their enlightened understanding they didn't even put in the few seconds of thought to realize that this approach wasn't likely to endear them to anyone. Additionally, they timed their protests to coincide with exam times; by the first two weeks we were counting down the time until they were gone.
Yeah, there are a few downsides. On the other hand it's more efficient than possibly losing stamps or not being able to send a letter in time because you have to detour to get more stamps. Personally my biggest problem is that it requires yet another centralized server and the phone system. When we lose power; the local stores can still accept cash, unless they keep printing stamps, there won't be a fallback like that here.
Useless for purchasing things from overseas, but far more useful for companies wanting to export. There's a reason why China undervalues their currency on purpose. I've heard suggestions that one of the reasons China is so interested in US treasury bonds is that they want to pump up the Dollar's value relative to their own.
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There are many places where protesting means they'll just shoot you and then forget you exist. Libya was one example and North Korea is an example now; where the government is perfectly happy to shoot as many people as it takes, even if it kills half the country as long as it keeps them in power.
Your advice only works in America, and only because the government and the people in power don't want to win badly enough that they're willing to risk their skins. The reason they don't want to win badly enough is that they're fairly comfortable and that the OWS movement still has the implicit assumption that they can push back just as violently as the Libyan people if cornered.
In the end, unless the people involved suddenly grow a conscience; societal change is about having enough power to back up your demands, if only in theory. If you can't do that; there are people who are quite happy to reduce others to the level of slaves. They will sleep perfectly well at night afterward.
Also, there's no point in appealing to the media when the media is controlled in whole by the very people you're fighting against. They will always report the very worst, even if they have to make it up from scratch. This happens everywhere, China, Libya, North Korea, Egypt and America.
After seeing some of the posts in recent threads; I'm tempted to agree. I come to slashdot to see opinions of people who have personal experience in subjects relating to stories they're commenting on. It's great when it happens but it seems to be fairly rare.
If you thought your argument had merit, why did you end up posting anonymously?
It's interesting that prejudgment is a logical fallacy but implicitly assuming that you're better than everyone and that they're all sheep is not a fallacy. Tell me straight, can you honestly say that previous law breaking doesn't correlate at all with future law breaking?
We don't want to be tracked but still want to be able to talk to people; which is why people carry phones in the first place.
Because they use translating as their main source of income, and want to do a proper job like they do any other project? That means that while they work on this they aren't earning money from any other source.
It's not strange either, when we want something done in day to day life, we pay someone to do it. Especially if it's important to us and we want it done quickly; I've already donated 15 pounds.
So what you're saying is that their decision to add video support was a good call that cemented Flash's dominance for a number of years and enabled all kinds of new ideas to hit the market? Would that be a fair summary of your opinion? ;)
Not that such a point will come around. With 7 billion people working to solve the resource problem, we will find solutions that seem to be impossible with our current brainpower.
There is a basic concept, if you have a resource, trade it for a resource you do not have, and that includes money. If there is an entire nation that has no resources to trade and they are not capable of growing their own food, then the population will starve, the population will go down, and things balance out. Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help? The world as a whole does not need money pits, and the world as a whole does not need a "food pit" that will never be able to trade resources for food.
The UN and other countries aren't working now. Keeping people in camps, selling food that undercuts the local farmers and deploying troops that end up raping the locals but cannot be charged due to immunities isn't helping. There's no political will to actually work to fix these problems because the solutions don't look particularly appetizing from a moment's look. For example, if the UN worked to shoot the warlords and bandit kings causing destruction by rampaging through their respective countries, the first thing those warlords would do is scream about how the west was imposing their oppressive cultural values onto them against their will, much like how you are doing right now. Likewise if the UN had harsh and immediate penalties for soldiers caught taking advantage of the locals in their battalions the countries providing those soldiers would likely withdraw support from the UN and make a fuss about their rights being violated.
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole. If you want to adopt people and bring them into your own country, then fine, bring them in, and make them productive.
This argument has been around a long time for everything from the space program to R&D. So has it's counter. "You didn't do shit for those people before we started doing x, and you're not planning to do shit for them if x stops, so cut the crap."
What's my solution? Laws need to be passed that prevent corporations from taking advantages of countries that they outsource to; these laws need to have teeth. Corporations always complained about new labour laws, from equal pay to child exploitation legislation; they're going to cope just fine. More importantly the influx of capital will allow the countries being outsourced in to more fully develop their economies. The UN should make an effort to sell food at just a higher price than local farmers in poor countries in order to insure that the local industry doesn't go bankrupt every time they visit. Free surgery is good, but no one's going to start any farms as long as you're going to pop by and undercut them on a bi-yearly basis. The UN army needs to be disciplined properly to prevent the current abuses against the people they're supposed to be protecting and then cut loose to deal with the bandit problems. There's local culture and then there's mass murder and we need to have a global understanding that the second is not just a funny thing that those people do but a blight to be stamped out brutally. Those suffering nations are quite capable of having the same food production as western nations.
Funny, but often true. It's useful knowing enough to know what your translators are actually telling them you said.
In essence your opinion is that we shouldn't stand up for truth because there are worse people out there and the perfectly innocent government will beat the tar out of us. That's a wonderful reason to do nothing; I wonder why wikileaks exists. You should tell them your idea :D.
Yeah, I have nothing against recycling excrement into food; just as long as it's done by way of plants. This would have been a better discovery if the conversion had come by way of some really tasty mushrooms. :P
The reason people fought against euthensia was the fear that it might be abused. People would pressure other people into it "for the good of the family" or that elderly would feel pressured to do it themselves so they wouldn't burden their relatives. When the BBC Documentary on the subject came out, this was precisely the vibe I got from them. There's no way that this won't be abused to get rid of people who are considered a "burden".
You're confusing a practical issue for a political one. Once you've outsourced all the actual work to another country, trained their locals how to do whatever it is you do and only keeping the management on shore; why would they need you anymore? Those workers will quit, start their own companies with the skills you taught them and compete against you.
This is what happens to many companies that outsource to China. The reason that knockoffs are so pervasive is that the very factories that make their own stuff are also cranking out the knockoffs.
That sounds like an excellent reason to panic. This isn't something I'm comfortable with them thinking they can get away with; having someone think they can dictate terms to you never leads to anything good.
You mean because it's such a wonderful place to live thanks to the actions of those aforementioned organizations? Considering the chinese have recently had problems with their watermelons exploding thanks to their use of untested "growth agents", I'm thankful for our oversight.
Probably because that never occurred to any of us... except for you. ;)
It's an example of something no-one would give a damn about that people take anyway; because it's there.
For the purposes of this exercise, let's assume that no one stores their credit card numbers on their computer in plaintext; even though we all know that's not true.
The porn thing is one thing I never understood, why would anyone bother? It's like they've never heard of the internet. I figure that some people will take anything not nailed down, a pretty solid reason that Dropbox should not give it's employees access to the user's stuff at all.
That's all true but there's two issues in this particular case.
-- We've heard stories about computer repair technicians stealing everything up to and including porn off the computers they're servicing. There's a pretty low threshold for important when the data's sitting right there for the taking.
-- They're lying to get ahead in the market. That's something we need to discourage.
He is onto something though. Its not unreasonable that he be irritated by inane stuff, no one likes listening to stories about a trip they weren't on and have nothing to do with, not from friends and not from family. Small talk has to be about stuff that both of you have an interest in or at least be interesting in and of itself. I can totally believe that his coworkers haven't mastered that.
Just to be clear. Are you saying that it's FUD for someone to claim that getting support for free software (free as in beer) is dependent on other people providing you support?
That sounds nice in theory. In practice there's no university that only teaches narrow skills. In fact I'm especially grateful to my university for teaching theory and practical application, not only do I see how my skills are applied in the real world but I also have something to fall back on should I need to. There's nothing as empowering as being able to use your skills to build something for yourself. I'm sure a painter feels the same way.
The Arts students are a better example of what happens when you're not taught application. They had all of these skills, but didn't put any consideration into using them to get what they wanted.
How dare they want to learn a skill to make money? The outrage.
More to the point, while arts degrees might claim that they help students understand the world; from my experience with arts students themselves the only things the degrees seem to do is teach them how to act pretentious while parroting back what they were taught by rote. Remember that practically any additional information triggers the *ding* feeling of having improved your understanding, even if it isn't true or makes no sense at all in a larger context.
We don't have arts courses at our university anymore, not since two years ago. What was really telling was the way that the students dealt with it before their courses were shut down...
No impassioned orations in front of the students and academics
No clever legal wrangling
They just sort of whinged about it; we had people handing out leaflets about how only the arts courses could teach us about the world. The leaflet spokesmen couldn't say what precisely those courses would teach us, only that our own courses were pitfully inadequate for making us full people. Depressingly, for all their enlightened understanding they didn't even put in the few seconds of thought to realize that this approach wasn't likely to endear them to anyone. Additionally, they timed their protests to coincide with exam times; by the first two weeks we were counting down the time until they were gone.
Yeah, there are a few downsides. On the other hand it's more efficient than possibly losing stamps or not being able to send a letter in time because you have to detour to get more stamps. Personally my biggest problem is that it requires yet another centralized server and the phone system. When we lose power; the local stores can still accept cash, unless they keep printing stamps, there won't be a fallback like that here.
Useless for purchasing things from overseas, but far more useful for companies wanting to export. There's a reason why China undervalues their currency on purpose. I've heard suggestions that one of the reasons China is so interested in US treasury bonds is that they want to pump up the Dollar's value relative to their own.