You are comparing disasters over a small zone to disasters over a large one, making for an unfair comparasin. You are comparing when the last disaster in JUST the SF bay area was to when the last disaster SOMEWHERE on the eastern seaboard, or SOMEWHERE in the midwest was. That's like trying to claim it's common to win the lottery because *someone* did it *somewhere*.
Randomly pick a small zone the size of the SF bay area and compare with that. Then you will get more comparable figures. Tornadoes sweep through the Midwest all the time, but they are very small in area covered compared to an earthquake. The likelyhood that some town will lose, say, 20 houses to a tornado strike somewhere is high. The likelyhood that it will be the specific town you live in is very low. I've watched tornadoes. I've been camping outside when one went by about a mile away that I could see. (that was exciting but scary. If the wind changed direction I could have been deeply screwed. There was nowhere good to go.) But because they cover such a tiny area, I can witness one live and not actually be in it. The same isn't true of an earthquake.
The Richter scale is not the only factor in how damaging an earthquake is to the buildings in the area. Saying that a 6.5 quake must necessarily be easier to build for than a 7.4 quake isn't true.
The magnitude of a quake is only one single measure. There's also measures of what the waveform looks like. Saying a 7.4 earthquake is always more damaging than a 6.5 is like saying a 74 decibel sound is always more deafening than a 65 decibel sound. (even if one is a low-pitch drone almost outside your hearing range and the other is a high-pitched crying baby.)
The LA quakes and the SF quakes tend not to have the same "pitch", so to speak.
The problem with frivolous lawsuit insurance would be that if it works anything like car insurance, people who engage in high-risk activities, such as actually having an opinion, and, say, being a vocal open-source comminity participant, would have huge premiums.
Nike didn't invent or amplify the "need" kids have to think they are wearing the latest "cool" or "in" clothing. What they did is try to get people to believe that their product fit this "need" in some way. (I don't understand how, but then again I'm too logical to follow trends that are based on nothing.) But kids thinking they need to be wearing the "right" clothing is not a new thing, not by a longshot.)
A better example of making a need from nothing is the Listerine / Halitosis thing mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Instead of being satisfied with just fitting their product to the existing need, "not having stinky breath for social reasons", they invented a brand new made-up need, "better health through curing the "condition" of bad breath." - turning bad breath into something people would think of as a health problem, and not just a social faux-pas.
Re:Society Only Appreciates Scientists In Movies
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 2
I've read Churchill's 6-volume history of WW2, which was done in the early 1950's, and in it he seems to pussyfoot around the issues of codebreaking, refering to it only obliquely, talking occasioanlly about knowing where the Germans were going to be next by way of "special intelligence" techniques. The word "Enigma" didn't even appear. Now, one might imagine that this is because the books were written at a very vague high-level, except that they *did* go into a lot of detail about a lot of other science projects being funded by the war effort, like the atom bomb, and all sorts of radar jamming and misdirection techniques. (Including a long-winded explanation of something that I think is what we call "chaff" today - a bunch of aluminum strips at just the right length to match the German radar wavelength, dropped from a few plane sto flutter down, would show up as a large group of planes on German radar screens, and this method was used to redirect fighter defenses to bogus locations as a diversionary measure, including during the landing on Normady. Great care was also made in the books to describe the fact that British radar engineers reverse-engineeed one of the German navigational radar becons used by nighttime bombers, and figured out how to not just jam it, but actually deflect the beacon a few degrees to trick bombers into dropping their payload onto empty fields instead of cities.
And yet, with all of that, no mention was made of Enigma, which should have equal or greater prominience to those projects.
So I do think there really was something to the claim that the Brits did't want to reveal too much about Enigma and that's why they kept silent about Turing's involvement.
Quick question: How much damage to a PC would a good soaking with coffee do? Fry anything?
That would depend on if the PC is turned on at the time. If it's on, I'm sure the numerous short curcuits through the liquid would ruin whatever ciruit boards it touched. If it was off at the time, then you could save it if you dab everything dry before it cakes into place. After it dries, I'm not sure. What is the condictivity of a coffee stain?
A lot of people confuse marketing with advertising. Marketing isn't about creating demand, but about researching to find out what demands exist out there.
But *advertising*, which is probably what the poster had in mind, often is about making a demand, or at the very least trying to increase the magnitude of minor demand into a major one.
Marketers research the market. Advertisers then take that information and try to influence it. It's like the difference between weather prediction and weather control.
My keyboards are a dirty mess. I have an odd condition that begins with an "S", who's name I can't remember that essentially boils down to this: "I shed and replace my skin faster than most people". The process whereby the outer layers die and flake off, as new layers are built underneath happens about 2 or 3 times as fast with me as with most people. Most of the time I don't notice any detrimental effects from this. Most of the effects are mere quirks and not really disadvantages: When I get a sunburn, the burned skin all peals away in a matter of days and I'm back to my pasty-white self inside a week. When I wash my hair in the morning, I have dandruff again by the afternoon. And my keyboard "snows" flakes when I turn it upside down and shake it once every few days. <P> So in my case I can definately believe it that my keyboard has more germs living in it than a toilet seat. <P> But the point is, my keyboard is only used by *me*. I'm only being exposed to the germs that came out of my own body anyway. A toilet seat isn't like that. Toilet seats might be "cleaner", but they have more different people using them.
This is why the US desperately needs a "loser pays" system similar to that used in English courts. If you choose to sue someone and lose, you end up having to pay *their* legal fees as well as your own. Thus if you are a small business getting sued by an asinine large business with a suit that doesn't stand a chance in court, you don't have to cave in just because the court costs are large. If the evil know-nothings suing you lose, they have the responsibility of paying for wasting your time and the court's time. That would kill the evil business strategy of "patent something everyone already knows how to do and then scare people into paying you license fees to do what they already knew how to do on their own."
Of course, the system has to have some careful safeguards in place, such as a small maximum reasonable amount of court fees to be responsible for (so that, for example, Joe Schmo doesn't have to take on the risk of paying for Microsoft's expensive lawyers if they sue him - he only takes on the risk of possibly paying for more reasonably priced run-of-the-mill lawyers no more expensive than his own.)
Personally, the safeguard I would like to see is that you end up only being financially responsible for the opponents' lawywers up to the amount you paid for your OWN lawyers. So if your laywer cost $3,000, and your opponent's lawyer cost $500,000, you at most could end up paying $6,000 if you lose ($3,000 for your own, and $3,000 worth of the opponent's lawyer's fee) If you think the case is so incredibly frivolous that you can defend yourself, you don't incur any risk of paying for the opponent's lawyers at all.
Read up on the early soviet space program. Keeping all control at the ground and making the cosmonauts be essentially passengers was exactly how the "flight schools" for the cosmonauts were geared. This is pre-Buran days I'm talking about here. The fact that this put them ahead of the US in space flight by remote control was a side-effect of this decision, not the original reason for the decision.
.. Because even if the ice doesn't get that far south (which it probably won't - Nevada is too far south to be hit by the glaciers directly) it won't be in the middle of a desert anymore. It will be in the middle of a tundra, where a nice warm toasty area emitting heat won't be such a turn-off anymore to the people in the area. Consider, if the site ends up being, say, 90 degress farenhieght hotter than the surrounding countryside, that if the surrounding countryside is in the throws of a winter during an ice-age, where even Nevada would be having freezing temperatures, that would no longer be a deterrent - quite the opposite really.
Would the site still be uncomfortably hot if the earth was in an ice age at the time such that Nevada wasn't a desert at the time? Ice ages seem to happen once every 10,000 years or so, and we are past due for another by that metric.
We're talking about a long enough timeframe that the area wouldn't necessarily still be a desert. Trying to make it really hot by using black material won't keep people away if the climate is no longer a desert. Consider that in Earth's history there have recently been ice ages every 10,000 years or so.
Besides, ANYTHING that is obviously of artificial origin, that is mighty old, will be of interest to an archeologist. I think this project is doomed from the get-go because of that fact alone. Archeologists even get excited about finding old piles of trash of lost cultures because of the information about their daily life that the trash heaps can reveal.
Consider the odd statues on Easter Island. They communicate absolutely nothing other than a vague sense of sadness, and yet people find them exceedingly interesting.
The best way to keep future curious people away from the site is to bury the waste deep and *not* mark it in any way whatsoever - trying as hard as we can to *not* leave behind any evidence that the location has anything artificial there at all.
The reason people call it fake is that they act like they are fighting when they are not. No, this doesn't mean they aren't athletic. But their athleticism is the sort that comes from putting on a good stuntman show, not the kind that comes from actually wrestling. The part in the movie that felt fake is that in real life "pro" wrestling, there would have been choreography coaching beforehand since the "wrestlers" are just putting on a show, not really having a contest where they don't know who is going to win.
In the movie it was presented like it was a real contest between the participants.
Kids not paying attention too, it seems. If they're going to complaing about not seeing his mouth move inside the spandex they could at least check and see if ytheir accusations are true, because in this case the accusaion wasn't. *I* could see his mouth moving under the costume. I don't know what that kid was smoking.
...doesn't make him a nerd. You might consider somoene speaking out of turn to be socially unacceptable. You are right. But standing silent while someone dissemates lies to a crowd is even more socially unacceptable, so speaking out of turn is often the lesser of two evils. (Not always, but often).
This is a good thing. Not only did the business provide little if any value (Memorizing keywords to get to sites? That's what hostnames *are*!), but it was attempting to make a new namespace that would only be visible to IE users. I'm very glad it didn't catch on. If it did, we might have started seeing sites that didn't bother registering names in the DNS standard way and instead just mapped their IP addresses to this goofy scheme. Thank reason that didn't happen.
I was under the impression that there was some human control involved once the shuttle is in orbit, for operating the maneuvering jets to dock with space stations and hover "under" satellites for the robot arm. Also, I thought that while the landing proceedures may be automated, they are triggered at least by human hands on board. I don't think ground control could "take over" and force a landing.
And this was the big difference between the Russian space program and NASA. The Russians spent a lot of time perfecting remote control not because it was technically preferred, but because it was politically preferred. They didn't want cosmonauts to be pilots, they wanted them to be passengers, unable to, for example, defect and land wherever they want.
A side effect of this is that the Russians have a lot better understanding now of how to make unmanned space vehicles.
Putting the engines on the big tank means throwing away more work whenever you jettison the big tank (every mission). Putting the engines on the part that comes back and lands at the end of the mission means not having to rebuild them from scratch for every launch, which was sort of the whole point of the shuttle - stop throwing the whole vehicle away each time you have a launch.
Your example given was a bad use of passive voice only because the subject of the action was mentioned at the end, and passive voice was therefore unhelpful and needlessly wordy. But this does not mean that using passive voice a lot is a bad thing, as MS Word falsely assumes. Often passive voice is used a lot throughout a document because in that document the subject of the action isn't known. This tends to happen a lot in technical documents that explain what will happen if a particular action is performed, without really caring who it is that performs that action.
His comment is an excellent example of why discouraging passive voice is a dumb idea. His sentence and yours don't say the same thing. His sentence left it open as to who or what prefers the passive voice. You changed the meaning when you assumed falsely that he was talking only about why PEOPLE prefer it. He could just as easily have been talking about why the program prefers it. He left it vague on purpose, since he presumably doesn't know who it is that is preferring passive voice, and that's partly why he was asking.
I use passive voice because English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun for people (it has "it", but that's not meant for people), and it is considered bad form to overuse "you" as if the document is talking to the reader. So when I want to say things like "To make the Foo do Bar, you have to do Baz.", I render that as "Making the Foo do bar is accomplished by doing Baz.", or "Doing Baz will cause the Foo to do Bar". MS Word kept telling me I was overusing passive voice, so I just told it to go stuff itself and turned off the grammer checker until such a time as MS chooses to let me write technical documents at something above a grade school level.
Passive voice is not necessarily a bad thing.
A name should not be a bibliography
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Okay, RMS's GNU project deserves a heck of a lot of credit for everything it's done that is in Linux (highest on that list would be the gcc compiler, in my opinion), but why the hell does he keep insisting that this credit absolutely must be in the form of a transformation of the name Linux into a horribly unpronouncable mess? What the hell has gotten into him that makes him think "GNU/Linux" is a useable name? It's not. Besides, the name of a thing shouldn't be a bibliography of all the places it took pieces from.
I used to respect the guy a lot, but the longer he keeps up with this utterly stupid campaign to harp on the name and lambast people for preferring a usable name, the less I respect him. RMS needs to get back to evangelising stuff that actually matters.
Yes, Yes, YES! I've been trying to find a way to phrase this concept for so long and you showed the quick one sentence way to describe it: "An idealist is just a farsighted pragmatist."
What people miscall a "pragmatist" is really "A short-sighted pragmatist that doesn't give a damn about the future fallout from his decision if it gives a little bit of temporary utility today."
Slashdot Mirror
You are comparing disasters over a small zone to disasters over a large one, making for an unfair comparasin. You are comparing when the last disaster in JUST the SF bay area was to when the last disaster SOMEWHERE on the eastern seaboard, or SOMEWHERE in the midwest was. That's like trying to claim it's common to win the lottery because *someone* did it *somewhere*.
Randomly pick a small zone the size of the SF bay area and compare with that. Then you will get more comparable figures. Tornadoes sweep through the Midwest all the time, but they are very small in area covered compared to an earthquake. The likelyhood that some town will lose, say, 20 houses to a tornado strike somewhere is high. The likelyhood that it will be the specific town you live in is very low. I've watched tornadoes. I've been camping outside when one went by about a mile away that I could see. (that was exciting but scary. If the wind changed direction I could have been deeply screwed. There was nowhere good to go.) But because they cover such a tiny area, I can witness one live and not actually be in it. The same isn't true of an earthquake.
The Richter scale is not the only factor in how damaging an earthquake is to the buildings in the area. Saying that a 6.5 quake must necessarily be easier to build for than a 7.4 quake isn't true.
The magnitude of a quake is only one single measure. There's also measures of what the waveform looks like. Saying a 7.4 earthquake is always more damaging than a 6.5 is like saying a 74 decibel sound is always more deafening than a 65 decibel sound. (even if one is a low-pitch drone almost outside your hearing range and the other is a high-pitched crying baby.)
The LA quakes and the SF quakes tend not to have the same "pitch", so to speak.
The problem with frivolous lawsuit insurance would be that if it works anything like car insurance, people who engage in high-risk activities, such as actually having an opinion, and, say, being a vocal open-source comminity participant, would have huge premiums.
Nike didn't invent or amplify the "need" kids have to think they are wearing the latest "cool" or "in" clothing. What they did is try to get people to believe that their product fit this "need" in some way. (I don't understand how, but then again I'm too logical to follow trends that are based on nothing.) But kids thinking they need to be wearing the "right" clothing is not a new thing, not by a longshot.)
A better example of making a need from nothing is the Listerine / Halitosis thing mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Instead of being satisfied with just fitting their product to the existing need, "not having stinky breath for social reasons", they invented a brand new made-up need, "better health through curing the "condition" of bad breath." - turning bad breath into something people would think of as a health problem, and not just a social faux-pas.
I've read Churchill's 6-volume history of WW2, which was done in the early 1950's, and in it he seems to pussyfoot around the issues of codebreaking, refering to it only obliquely, talking occasioanlly about knowing where the Germans were going to be next by way of "special intelligence" techniques. The word "Enigma" didn't even appear. Now, one might imagine that this is because the books were written at a very vague high-level, except that they *did* go into a lot of detail about a lot of other science projects being funded by the war effort, like the atom bomb, and all sorts of radar jamming and misdirection techniques. (Including a long-winded explanation of something that I think is what we call "chaff" today - a bunch of aluminum strips at just the right length to match the German radar wavelength, dropped from a few plane sto flutter down, would show up as a large group of planes on German radar screens, and this method was used to redirect fighter defenses to bogus locations as a diversionary measure, including during the landing on Normady. Great care was also made in the books to describe the fact that British radar engineers reverse-engineeed one of the German navigational radar becons used by nighttime bombers, and figured out how to not just jam it, but actually deflect the beacon a few degrees to trick bombers into dropping their payload onto empty fields instead of cities.
And yet, with all of that, no mention was made of Enigma, which should have equal or greater prominience to those projects.
So I do think there really was something to the claim that the Brits did't want to reveal too much about Enigma and that's why they kept silent about Turing's involvement.
Quick question: How much damage to a PC would a good soaking with coffee do? Fry anything?
That would depend on if the PC is turned on at the time. If it's on, I'm sure the numerous short curcuits through the liquid would ruin whatever ciruit boards it touched. If it was off at the time, then you could save it if you dab everything dry before it cakes into place. After it dries, I'm not sure. What is the condictivity of a coffee stain?
A lot of people confuse marketing with advertising. Marketing isn't about creating demand, but about researching to find out what demands exist out there.
But *advertising*, which is probably what the poster had in mind, often is about making a demand, or at the very least trying to increase the magnitude of minor demand into a major one.
Marketers research the market. Advertisers then take that information and try to influence it. It's like the difference between weather prediction and weather control.
My keyboards are a dirty mess. I have an odd condition that begins with an "S", who's name I can't remember that essentially boils down to this: "I shed and replace my skin faster than most people". The process whereby the outer layers die and flake off, as new layers are built underneath happens about 2 or 3 times as fast with me as with most people. Most of the time I don't notice any detrimental effects from this. Most of the effects are mere quirks and not really disadvantages: When I get a sunburn, the burned skin all peals away in a matter of days and I'm back to my pasty-white self inside a week. When I wash my hair in the morning, I have dandruff again by the afternoon. And my keyboard "snows" flakes when I turn it upside down and shake it once every few days.
<P>
So in my case I can definately believe it that my keyboard has more germs living in it than a toilet seat.
<P>
But the point is, my keyboard is only used by *me*. I'm only being exposed to the germs that came out of my own body anyway. A toilet seat isn't like that. Toilet seats might be "cleaner", but they have more different people using them.
This is why the US desperately needs a "loser pays" system similar to that used in English courts. If you choose to sue someone and lose, you end up having to pay *their* legal fees as well as your own. Thus if you are a small business getting sued by an asinine large business with a suit that doesn't stand a chance in court, you don't have to cave in just because the court costs are large. If the evil know-nothings suing you lose, they have the responsibility of paying for wasting your time and the court's time. That would kill the evil business strategy of "patent something everyone already knows how to do and then scare people into paying you license fees to do what they already knew how to do on their own."
Of course, the system has to have some careful safeguards in place, such as a small maximum reasonable amount of court fees to be responsible for (so that, for example, Joe Schmo doesn't have to take on the risk of paying for Microsoft's expensive lawyers if they sue him - he only takes on the risk of possibly paying for more reasonably priced run-of-the-mill lawyers no more expensive than his own.)
Personally, the safeguard I would like to see is that you end up only being financially responsible for the opponents' lawywers up to the amount you paid for your OWN lawyers. So if your laywer cost $3,000, and your opponent's lawyer cost $500,000, you at most could end up paying $6,000 if you lose ($3,000 for your own, and $3,000 worth of the opponent's lawyer's fee) If you think the case is so incredibly frivolous that you can defend yourself, you don't incur any risk of paying for the opponent's lawyers at all.
Read up on the early soviet space program. Keeping all control at the ground and making the cosmonauts be essentially passengers was exactly how the "flight schools" for the cosmonauts were geared. This is pre-Buran days I'm talking about here. The fact that this put them ahead of the US in space flight by remote control was a side-effect of this decision, not the original reason for the decision.
.. Because even if the ice doesn't get that far south (which it probably won't - Nevada is too far south to be hit by the glaciers directly) it won't be in the middle of a desert anymore. It will be in the middle of a tundra, where a nice warm toasty area emitting heat won't be such a turn-off anymore to the people in the area. Consider, if the site ends up being, say, 90 degress farenhieght hotter than the surrounding countryside, that if the surrounding countryside is in the throws of a winter during an ice-age, where even Nevada would be having freezing temperatures, that would no longer be a deterrent - quite the opposite really.
Would the site still be uncomfortably hot if the earth was in an ice age at the time such that Nevada wasn't a desert at the time?
Ice ages seem to happen once every 10,000 years
or so, and we are past due for another by that metric.
We're talking about a long enough timeframe that the area wouldn't necessarily still be a desert. Trying to make it really hot by using black material won't keep people away if the climate is no longer a desert. Consider that in Earth's history there have recently been ice ages every 10,000 years or so.
Besides, ANYTHING that is obviously of artificial origin, that is mighty old, will be of interest to an archeologist. I think this project is doomed from the get-go because of that fact alone. Archeologists even get excited about finding old piles of trash of lost cultures because of the information about their daily life that the trash heaps can reveal.
Consider the odd statues on Easter Island. They communicate absolutely nothing other than a vague sense of sadness, and yet people find them exceedingly interesting.
The best way to keep future curious people away from the site is to bury the waste deep and *not* mark it in any way whatsoever -
trying as hard as we can to *not* leave behind any evidence that the location has anything artificial there at all.
The reason people call it fake is that they act like they are fighting when they are not. No, this doesn't mean they aren't athletic. But their athleticism is the sort that comes from putting on a good stuntman show, not the kind that comes from actually wrestling. The part in the movie that felt fake is that in real life "pro" wrestling, there would have been choreography coaching beforehand since the "wrestlers" are just putting on a show, not really having a contest where they don't know who is going to win.
In the movie it was presented like it was a real contest between the participants.
Kids not paying attention too, it seems. If they're going to complaing about not seeing his mouth move inside the spandex they could at least check and see if ytheir accusations are true, because in this case the accusaion wasn't. *I* could see his mouth moving under the costume. I don't know what that kid was smoking.
...doesn't make him a nerd. You might consider somoene speaking out of turn to be socially unacceptable. You are right. But standing silent while someone dissemates lies to a crowd is even more socially unacceptable, so speaking out of turn is often the lesser of two evils.
(Not always, but often).
This is a good thing. Not only did the business provide little if any value (Memorizing keywords to get to sites? That's what hostnames *are*!), but it was attempting to make a new namespace that would only be visible to IE users. I'm very glad it didn't catch on. If it did, we might have started seeing sites that didn't bother registering names in the DNS standard way and instead just mapped their IP addresses to this goofy scheme. Thank reason that didn't happen.
The tens digit has nothing to do with spurs versus bypasses or throughways. I think you meant to say the *hundreds* digit.
I was under the impression that there was some human control involved once the shuttle is in orbit, for operating the maneuvering jets to dock with space stations and hover "under" satellites for the robot arm. Also, I thought that while the landing proceedures may be automated, they are triggered at least by human hands on board. I don't think ground control could "take over" and force a landing.
And this was the big difference between the Russian space program and NASA. The Russians spent a lot of time perfecting remote control not because it was technically preferred, but because it was politically preferred. They didn't want cosmonauts to be pilots, they wanted them to be passengers, unable to, for example, defect and land wherever they want.
A side effect of this is that the Russians have a lot better understanding now of how to make unmanned space vehicles.
Putting the engines on the big tank means throwing away more work whenever you jettison the big tank (every mission). Putting the engines on the part that comes back and lands at the end of the mission means not having to rebuild them from scratch for every launch, which was sort of the whole point of the shuttle - stop throwing the whole vehicle away each time you have a launch.
Your example given was a bad use of passive voice only because the subject of the action was mentioned at the end, and passive voice was therefore unhelpful and needlessly wordy. But this does not mean that using passive voice a lot is a bad thing, as MS Word falsely assumes. Often passive voice is used a lot throughout a document because in that document the subject of the action isn't known. This tends to happen a lot in technical documents that explain what will happen if a particular action is performed, without really caring who it is that performs that action.
His comment is an excellent example of why discouraging passive voice is a dumb idea. His sentence and yours don't say the same thing. His sentence left it open as to who or what prefers the passive voice. You changed the meaning when you assumed falsely that he was talking only about why PEOPLE prefer it. He could just as easily have been talking about why the program prefers it. He left it vague on purpose, since he presumably doesn't know who it is that is preferring passive voice, and that's partly why he was asking.
Avoiding passive voice universally is a bad idea.
I use passive voice because English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun for people (it has "it", but that's not meant for people), and it is considered bad form to overuse "you" as if the document is talking to the reader. So when I want to say things like "To make the Foo do Bar, you have to do Baz.", I render that as "Making the Foo do bar is accomplished by doing Baz.", or "Doing Baz will cause the Foo to do Bar". MS Word kept telling me I was overusing passive voice, so I just told it to go stuff itself and turned off the grammer checker until such a time as MS chooses to let me write technical documents at something above a grade school level.
Passive voice is not necessarily a bad thing.
I used to respect the guy a lot, but the longer he keeps up with this utterly stupid campaign to harp on the name and lambast people for preferring a usable name, the less I respect him. RMS needs to get back to evangelising stuff that actually matters.
What people miscall a "pragmatist" is really "A short-sighted pragmatist that doesn't give a damn about the future fallout from his decision if it gives a little bit of temporary utility today."