Because any reasonable person should expect injuries and fatalities as a result of the ensuing panic. Note that it's NOT a crime if there really is a fire.
I don't think this is being questioned because no one could understand the result. I think the result itself and why it is so certain is what is legitimately questionable.
Let's say I am in a theater. Someone beside me yells "FIRE!". My sense of smell is not impaired and I don't smell smoke. My vision is not impaired and I don't see flames. My hearing is not impaired and I don't hear the crackle of flames. Why should I assume he must be correct? If he is correct, why would I wait for him to point that out instead of acting on what I can perceive for myself?
The fact is, we as a society have decided that passing laws restricting certain types of speech is easier than teaching average people not to be such thoughtless, panicky herd animals. That's a shame, for it would be a most worthy goal. Of course those who could make this happen on a large scale would be deprived of a great deal of their political power if more people could think for themselves independently and were not easily frightened.
He was talking about "posting inaccurate information". See, it's right there in the post that was quoted before it was replied to.
Last I checked, posting inaccurate information is not an act of violence. How did two ACs in a row manage to miss this? Reading comprehension just isn't this hard.
To clarify what is apparently a point of great confusion, those actually rioting and smashing things and hurting people, they are doing violence. People who write about it on Facebook and say inappropriate things are not committing violence. I'm not sure why I bother with people who get so caught up with their emotions about an event that they need to have such a difference explained to them, but there you go.
This was maybe the best worded and best thought through reply I've gotten in a long, long time.
Which would not have happened except I see that you are on the right track, looking for the real meaning. I wasn't acting alone.
I saw also the same old story I see everywhere. It's the idiotic resistance and the failure to appreciate. To small minds, wisdom sounds very much like foolishness because it doesn't fit into anything they know. Since they imagine themselves to have all the answers, naturally anything that doesn't fit into their worldview is unwelcome. It's the difference between rationality and rationalization.
The small mind is small because it cannot entertain an alien idea long enough to see if it finds a home, nor can it easily shed beliefs that have served their purpose. I get tired of that, the mental and psychic envrionment it fosters, and of the discouragement it can cause.
Then I guess the question should be why they think it's fun to riot. Somehow, I wouldn't consider it fun.
You're asking the right questions, the deeper questions that come closer to a full understanding of how and why these things happen.
Unfortunately it is common to encounter resistance from people who are either small-minded and don't consider a fuller understanding to be possible, or are so preoccupied with their "shit hitting the fan" mentality that they are annoyed you don't share their sense of urgency. I suppose there's not much difference.
The real question is, why are so many young people so unhappy with their government and society that the smallest incident, such as the death of someone who apparently wasn't much of a loss, could trigger this kind of violent response.
It is likely the rioters haven't put much thought into it themselves. They just know that something is very wrong with a corporatocracy run by power-hungry sociopaths who routinely lie to them, that they have very little say in how their government is run, that there are no legitimate "working through the system" ways to effect meaningful social and political change, that those are only for the monied interests who are already running things.
It takes no insight or understanding to be unhappy and miserable with this, to feel like something is direly wrong someplace, to be tightly wound with anxiety and anger and require little to trigger the release. What takes understanding and insight is to see that none of this happens in a vacuum, that there are in fact reasons for it, that those reasons can be known and, if the people of the UK had the will to do it, could also be changed.
By contrast, the immature and stupid who are devoid of understanding will start blaming inanimate objects, like they always do, and will demand control and monitoring of technology. This time it's communications technology. Previously it was alcohol, drugs, guns, etc. The mentality is the same and reveals its short-sightedness and unwillingness to look at what is right in front of it with each iteration.
It reminds me of a wonderful quote from P.J. O'Rourke: "No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
"Rather than", used by the AC above, implies a choice between one or the other. "I'd rather drink tea than coffee" doesn't imply that I like them mixed together.
Yes. That means the person to whom I replied had a choice in the matter. He could go along with the AC's false dichotomy, or he could explain that the two options are not mutually exclusive.
He chose to go along with the false dichotomy. This led to me pointing out that it is, in fact, a false dichotomy, fallacy of the excluded middle, however you like to phrase it.
I don't share this desire to go along with false reasoning just because some AC thought it would be a good idea to frame the question that way. Thus, I can't understand why you feel a need to restate what the AC said.
You missed the non-caps lock part... widespread civil unrest benefits no-one when it is within your own state.
The AC has already done me the favor of pointing out your second instance of absurdity so I didn't have to.
Instead I'll take this a different direction.
The problem with not being enough of an adult to say "hey, that's interesting information I wasn't aware of before and/or didn't fully appreciate the significance of, thank you for pointing this out" is that your effort to save face just makes you look more ridiculous. Let's review.
Fact: you stated that there is no good reason why the government would want more riots. I advised that provoking the political groups they don't like until they do something they can actually be prosecuted for is a potential motivation. It's dirty and underhanded as hell, but it is a tactic that does happen from time to time. I mentioned that the people who do this are called agent provocateurs.
Fact: you were unaware of the full scope of how agent provocateurs are used. You had this false idea that they are rarely or never used domestically. I tried to correct you on this and explain that you are likely to mislead others when you speak regarding a subject you really don't know much about. Did you appreciate that, did you see how your actions led up to someone saying this to you? No, you didn't. You continued to insist that they tend to be used only for foreign governments.
Fact: I gave you some solid, well-documented, easily-researched examples of the domestic use of such agents. This falsifies your original notion. There is no middle ground or shade of grey here. Your initial notion was simply, plainly, demonstrably wrong.
Fact: you have neither the honesty nor the courage to admit you were wrong. Apparently you think admitting fault is a sign of weakness. No, it isn't, it's a sign of adulthood that you're willing to admit when you are wrong and correct the false notion. So you play the old "stick to your guns" tactic and with this most recent post, to which this is a response, you start repeating yourself as though that nullifies the evidence I have presented to you.
Do you think you're convincing anyone?
Anyway that's the problem with trying these lame, transparent stunts in an attempt to save face. The more you try to do this, the more ridiculous you look. Now if you admit fault you're admitting not only that you were wrong but also that you tried twice to hand-wave your way out of it and cover it up. That's worse than if you just admitted you were wrong the first time it was made obvious to everyone.
You're only embarassing yourself. Keep at it if, for some reason, you have an appetite for humiliation. As for me, I'm moving on. It sure does get tiresome when so many people keep trying to do this. I take no pleasure in it.
I'm well aware of agent provocateurs... however widespread civil unrest WITHIN YOUR OWN NATION is not generally the aim of agent provocateurs. Their use is normally to destabilise foreign sovereign nations, not your own.
The first thing that came up when I Googled this subject was the FBI's COINTELPRO operation. Guess who it targeted? US citizens. A US law enforcement agency using agent provocateurs to target US citizens. That should qualify as "within your own nation" (even without the caps lock). You talk like this is somehow unheard-of. It is not, not by a long shot.
COINTELPRO was intended to disrupt political groups within the US. These include the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, and others.
Oh, and the New York City police were known to use these tactics against the protesters of the 2004 National Republican Convention... in New York City. I'd say both of those are within the USA.
If you are a government official, your own nation is what you should be most concerned about. Whether you want to work towards martial law or whether you want to get rid of pesky opposition groups, this is logically the case once you have power-hungry people who love power for its own sake, whose only concern is whether something will obtain the results they desire.
The purpose of an agent provocateur is to cause someone to break the law. It's the kind of thing that would be called "entrapment" if a police officer openly did it. So they act through proxies. What you're thinking of is something similarly devious but with a different goal. What you're thinking of is more like the way the US used its intelligence agencies to destabilize Iran in the 1950s and overthrow its democratically elected government, replacing it with a dictator. Yes, that is one possible use of this kind of technique, but you limit yourself if you really do not see how it could be applied domestically.
To tell me you are well informed about this subject but had no idea it wasn't limited to only one very specific, narrow use... well, it sounds like an absurd attempt to save face.
At this point, regardless of individual beliefs... I'm sure that they would prefer to NOT have rioting than incite more riots.
They are called agent provocateurs. If you have never heard of them and have never read of instances in which they are known to have been used, and why, then no offense but you are ignorant about this subject and should not be stating your "certainties" lest you become the blind leading the blind...
Most people are blissfully unaware of just how devious their governments actually are. Also, "expanding government for the sake of power" is not an "individual belief". It is very much a shared ideal.
That's funny because when I was a kid, "go play in traffic" was an insult. The idea that they'd do this voluntarily... heh. That's really something.
When I lived in Marysville I was coming home from school one day in my 240SX and kids were playing the "throw the sticks in front of the cars and watch them run over them" game. One of the kids was super-little and looked super-overexcited, so I went real slow and sure enough, he threw a stick in front of my car and then ran RIGHT out in front of the car to get it. So after I almost shit myself (I was ready, but that didn't make it un-scary) I parked on the side of the road, took the kid by the hand, and had him take me to his house. Then I explained to his obviously tweaking father that I almost ran over his child because he was throwing sticks into the road with the other children.
There's a lot of total fucking derelicts out there who do not give one tenth of one shit about their children, probably because nobody cared about them. And letting these people continue to breed is seriously one of the greatest root problems we face. The best thing that we could do for this country is to make meth legal and add something that sterilizes the user to it. Bonus points for doing it with alcohol, too; if you can't make your own booze then you probably don't need to be drinking. AKA the nerd principle.
Of course in most places if you mention this, you're some kind of terrible heartless human being who hates anyone who has ever struggled...
But the way welfare and entitlements are done is designed to encourage this. The politicians themselves are cloistered. They won't have to suffer the effects of what they encourage. Their plan is to get these derelicts dependent on them for their basic needs, get paid more and more for each bastard child they neglect, and of course they will vote for the politicians who give them more.
It's a total perversion of any notion of a legitimate safety net. Yes, sometimes shit happens. Sometimes a person can be hard-working, conscientious, thoughtful, and intelligent, and suffer legitimate misfortune and be down on his luck. That person may need a hand up and it really is a better world where such people can find this. The way it's supposed to work is that person shows their gratitude for living in a society that cares by using as little assistance as possible and getting back on his feet as early as possible, so that welfare does not become a permanent lifestyle.
The way we do things encourages permanent, multi-generational dependency on government. There is no gratitude. There is no attempt to no longer need it. There is a screaming that it isn't good enough. There is a massive sense of entitlement. When these people have children, you get the kind of situation you experienced.
Just about any time I see a news story about some child that died a tragic accidental death, my very first question is "really, so where were the parents when this happened?" Too much of the time, they are like what you described.
Unless you can prove that it is real, I don't see how you could know it for certain. Of course, I choose not to waste my time questioning everything around me.
Sounds like you know for sure that this is a legitimate question. Otherwise you'd have no such uncertainty, no such willingness to admit the question.
You know for certain based upon an honest assessment of what really motivates you, who you are and what you really believe. If it withstands an honest test along these lines then you have proven it to yourself. Science is something different. Science is the ability to prove to anyone who performs the same set of procedures in a way they cannot easily deny. What I am talking about is something you are unlikely to demonstrate to someone who does not already understand it, not unless they are unusually open to entertaining such ideas.
That part isn't a matter of whether it is true. It is a matter of how to test its truth and whether you can handle the possibility that most won't agree. Most of science is based on a consensus among credientialed professionals, which is another way of saying a kind of authority (incidentally, the second I typed "authority" I heard the same word spoken in an album to which I am listening... does this kind of synchronicity frequently and routinely happen to anyone else?).
Back to my specific example... if you truly love someone, you really don't care if your neighbor agrees. If that isn't the case, you aren't talking about love.
I disagree. I think it is a "logic problem." If you can't prove the existence of absolute morals, then I really think you shouldn't state their existence as a fact. Just like with god. I don't know about you, but when it comes to the existence of something, I choose to rely on actual evidence to determine whether or not I believe in it.
If you take a dismissive view of religion, then "God' is whatever we don't know how to explain. Thunder and lightning were once the wrath of one kind of "god" or another. The problem is, even if you fully accept all materialistic theories as ultimately true, you still have to have something that caused the Big Bang. If there is nothing anywhere then there is nothing to cause a Big Bang. If there are other universes or something of that sort that caused the Big Bang, something had to cause them in turn. However many levels of indirection you like, there must be some ultimate cause that was not itself the effect of a cause. How do you begin to explain this in any sort of ultimate manner that doesn't create problems of its own?
So this whole thing is much more strange and mysterious than it may seem to be. Even if everything else is perfectly ordinary and mundane, which it surely is not. Plenty of other things make no sense, yet they are.
I didn't say that you can't act against those who you personally believe are doing wrong. And I didn't (intentionally) say that I knew for a fact whether or not absolute morals exist. I just said that there's no evidence either way and I choose to believe that there are no absolute morals because morals, to me, do not seem to be any different from normal opinions.
The difference is whether you believe legitimacy is the same as popularity. If so, you follow the majority. If you are raised in an environment where the majority believe stealing is acceptable, then as a follower of the majority you have no grounds by whcih to object. You are a product of your environment. If there were no other way to be, then moral relativism would be true.
If however, you feel a certain guilt when you do certain things and a certain joy when you make different decisions, and these are consistent no matter what most people think or do or say, then you have some basis other than consensus. What you'll eventually find is that when you do not follow fellow people, the way things end up is more in line with the way
If they ever actually accomplish anything, it just emboldens them, and they grab for more.
This point is inseparable from the next I shall make.
They may use the "but we're doing it for freedom" argument, but they're really just fucking up someone's business for their own gain, whether monetary or egotistical.
If by "their own gain" you mean "no discernable profit of any kind that you could inventory or itemize or sum up", except of course sending a message to people who think they have perfect impunity that they are in fact "touchable" and accountable, then okay. I suppose they are "egotistical" but man, that's a funny way to phrase things. I suppose Mohandas "Mahatma" Ghandi was an egotistical bastard, too. Oh and when Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes and was jailed as a result, I guess that was just for his own ego. After all, a good citizen pays his taxes no matter what, right? Fact is, those members of Anonymous/Lulz who do what they do know that they are risking serious jail time. That does not deter them. You have to wonder what could be more important to them than their own freedom.
You seem to have a mind to dismiss in the least favorable terms possible anyone who stands up and declares with action that they've had enough of the bullshit. I suppose likewise the British government referred to our Founding Fathers as something like terrorists and/or treasonous. From their point of view that was likely the case, but that doesn't mean the Founders had no good reasons for what they did. If the Founders had a peaceful "working through the system" method of effecting real change they would have used it. Likewise, if these vigilantes could take their grievances to a more legit authority and actually have them addressed in a meaningful way, I doubt they'd be committing so much hacking and online vandalism. The fact is, "working through the system" is for monied interests. If you're not in that club, you have no legal means to change anything.
I guess "good little citizens" would just accept their powerlessness and would never break any laws in an attempt to change that. Naturally you'd blame them for using the only option available to them other than grabbing their ankles and greasing up, rather than taking a hard look at a system that offers no other approved option. I am not sure what else to say to you. Any and all vigilanteism is the result of a failure of the legitimate system to take care of a situation before it rotted away. There are no exceptions.
Do I like what vigilantes do? No. It's ugly. It should never be necessary. I don't personally do these things. I deal with it differently. If I don't like Sony, then I refuse to ever do business with them for any reason under any circumstance. Does that mean I cannot understand why others would go farther? No. It doesn't. I'm tired of the powerlessness and disenfranchisement myself. That someone would be more extreme than I, would break laws I wouldn't personally break, well really that's so fucking predictable and foreseeable becaue the entire situation is a formula for producing it. You deal with that by having an un-fucked, unbroken system. Anything less than that will breed this kind of vigilante. But if you have a fucked, broken system, a few computer vigilantes are the very least of your problems.
What? There's no evidence that I know of that proves the existence of absolute morals. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, but what it does mean is that if you try to state their existence as a fact, I probably won't believe you unless you present scientific evidence that proves their existence to a degree that I find satisfactory.
Science is like the logic and reason on which it depends. It works well for things within its domain. Specifically, that means material things which are deterministic and always turn out the same if the initial conditions are the same. The problem is knowing where it does not apply. Otherwise, you become like the person whose only tool is a hammer and now you think everything looks like a nail.
I say this as someone who really, truly loves reason and enjoys science and the power of discovery it can realize. But not all questions are scientific. For example, there is probably someone in your life, an old friend, a husband or wife, a family member, that you dearly love, whose wellbeing you value at least as much as your own. But you cannot prove scientifically that you love that person. You could never prove in a rigorous, mathematical way that your interest in them is not merely some kind of extended self-interest. That does not make your love less real. It merely means that science is the wrong tool for this job.
Morality is this way. It is not a logic problem. Therefore, logic won't elucidate it. Trying to do it that way is like trying to divide by zero and declaring that since you cannot do that, all of mathematics is invalid or isn't real. No system of logic can even demonstrate its own validity, by the way. Did you know that? That is because they are all ultimately axiomatic.
No, but I wasn't talking about me. Moral relativists can have their own moral code. Moral relativists simply don't believe in absolute morals (example: no one is inherently wrong for believing that it is okay to kill people for no reason). In other words, they're simply opinions. Believers of moral relativism don't necessarily believe that you can't act against those you believe are doing "wrong," either.
There is definitely an absolute truth. There are degrees to which any given person may approach this absolute truth, differences between how well they adhere to it and how well they can express it, and that is the only real relativity about it, but the ultimate reality whatever it may be is definitely real.
If you say there is no absolute truth, I have one question for you. It is a simple question: are you absolutely sure? You see, it is not even internally consistent. It contradicts itself. If you insist on everything being a scientific/logical/reason problem, then surely you must reject as false any line of reasoning that contradicts itself. This establishes that there is indeed an absolute truth. The question then becomes whether this truth is knowable and how accurately one may know it.
Moral relativists (the ones who do not merely fail to note the difference between freedom and license) simply confuse the need to avoid sitting in judgment of people who tend to bring about their own downfall through their ill-founded actions with the fantastical notion that there is no standard at all by which actions may be judged. The reason not to declare yourself judge, jury, and proverbial executioner of others is that this path leads to egotism and the belief that you are superior to others and all the corruption that brings. It is not because there are no criteria by which judgment could be made. It is the typical cart-before-horse thinking of most relativists.
The real fear of relativists everywhere is that an absolute standard means that various groups of people can be ranked in terms of how closely they adhere to it, that some would be inferior to others leading to a kind of pecking order. Fact is, we already live in a hierarchical society and it
Here is an even better radical idea....we offer $500 to any woman under 30 who'll take the contraceptive shot, $1000 if they get their tubes tied. This isn't targeting ANY race, no matter what the "poo poo"ers out there might say, because any woman that would be happy to sell her reproductive rights? Sure as hell ain't gonna be a good parent.
The only thing I would change is make it irresistable, say $5000 for the shot and $10,000 for the surgery. It would still be a bargain. Of course, this is such a great idea that it won't happen. Someone might get offended. And of 50.01% of the takers happen to be non-Anglo Saxon, this will be terribly racist even though all participants are entirely voluntary. Of course, if 90% of the takers are white women, no one will make a peep about it, because the mainstream tendency is to be hypocritical bastards about all of these hypersensitivity issues. After all, whites deserve all their suffering, even though they can't change what their distant ancestors did 200 years ago, even though most whites were too poor to own slaves, even though many whites were abolitionists, even though many whites died fighting against slavery, even though, even though...
Though we certainly live in some sad times. Many so-called adult people (called that for no reason except that they reach a certain age without kicking the bucket) truly can't understand that children don't "just happen" but are the result of their decisions. They can't understand that children are expensive and require a tremendous amount of energy and attention to raise, that it's so much better for everyone with two parents in a stable relationship, and that having a bunch of children you know you cannot afford (financially and emotionally) is a truly heinous and monstrous act that usually damns them to an unpleasant existence.
I see this in so many different areas. This is merely one of them, that's all. We have an entire generation of so-called adult people who cannot control their own lives. Well, "refuse to" is a better wording than "cannot" though the result is the same. They think everything that happens to them is the roll of some dice. They don't feel responsible for anything. They simply cannot see the glaringly obvious connection between their decision-making and the results they experience. This is unique to humans. In nature, an animal that acted this way would never survive long enough to reproduce. It would fail to recognize that lazily hanging out near its predators is a recipe for getting eaten and that would be that.
I mean fuck, even selfish people still love them and theirs. Even selfish assholes look after their own, even if they don't give a damn about anyone else other than themselves and their families. The kind of neglect these young idiots show for the children they obviously had by accident and obviously are unprepared to raise is a whole new level of useless depravity. Many animals in the wild do better.
Because I don't know about everyone else but I'm personally really getting tired of seeing 22 year olds with 4 or 5 kids that obviously don't pay attention to them or give a shit what they are doing. I've seen little kids playing in the streets, mama don't give a fuck,
That's funny because when I was a kid, "go play in traffic" was an insult. The idea that they'd do this voluntarily... heh. That's really something.
We gotta do something folks, because too many of our cities are becoming "Welcome To The Jungle" lands where even the cops won't go. what are we gonna do, wall them off like Escape From New York?
This doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Make it like its own sovereign nation within a nation (same way the Vatican is inside Italy), start them out with a 5 year supply of non-perishable food, fuel, viable (that means non-Monsanto) crop seeds, maybe some livestock, and water, and deport all violent felons there up
See folks, as our economy declines into a Third World one - no thanks to the Republicans and the TEA Party - we're going to see more civil unrest. Of course, the rich and powerful are scared shitless of this and they're going to have more and more of these rules put into place until we have a police state. Of course, there will be plenty of backing from our fellow peons - you know the "law and order" and "if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" Republicans.
I'd rather give away half then having it all taken away.
-Joseph P. Kennedy when asked why a super rich guy like him backed the Democrats
I agree with you except for the part where you don't perceive the Democrats as also being a coequal part of the problem.
The damage they do could not be done without you. Just like the damage the Republicans do couldn't be done without their own apologists.
It's time to recognize that they are two branches of a single party, the purpose of which is to monopolize political power and lock out all competitors who are not vetted by one of the two branches. It is very much like the trade guilds of old. Neither one gives a damn about you. Neither wants a prosperous, smoothly-running nation with no crises to solve, no fires to put out, nothing to be afraid of. Neither wants an empowered, politically active average person who can think critically and will stand on principle no matter what.
What they really want are a bunch of fat, stupid, dependent, needy, divided, emotionally immature people who bicker and play blame games. This means zero accountability. It also means that when someone cries foul, it is not taken seriously because everyone cries foul all the time. Everything is the other party's fault, except the members of the other party feel that way too.
"Not because it's true or might be true or would fit in with the long history of past abuses, mind you, but because people who are in denial want to feel comfortable about their denial and your doubts make that more difficult. When faced with such a situation, small-minded people will attack your character."
I don't know if it's refusal. I am beginning to suspect that they really just don't know how. The ability to think and act upon those thoughts is gone in most people. Something has gone wrong. Maybe it's the schools or maybe even the flouride. My money is on TV.
At the same time that it's amazing what people can do when they really have to, it's also shameful that most won't until the condition of "really have to" is satisfied.
It's mostly the schools. If not for them, people would know how to critically think and deconstruct what they see on TV, how to put it into perspective, how to recognize the various propaganda and rhetorical techniques. Though I'll add that if we didn't live in an anti-intellectual culture, if being intelligent and perceptive and wise were "cool", we'd hardly know this problem at all.
John Taylor Gatto is the finest available resource for this subject. An entire book of his, The Underground History of American Education explains a great deal of the problem. I highly recommend reading it. It's something everyone should read, particularly parents but also anyone who really wants to understand how we ended up with the society we know today. It is the product of much social engineering, not the way people inherently are.
I still think the problem is a little deeper. It's not that people aren't taught how to think. It's that people are passive followers who won't learn how to think until and unless someone else decides to give them that knowledge. They will not take it and claim it as their birthright whether anyone likes it or not. It is not unwise to stand between them and it. There is no self-sufficiency in most of them. They don't know how to assert control of their own education. Instead they entrust it to strangers. Just think about that. The average person wouldn't trust a $100 bill to a bunch of unaccountable strangers. Their education and the degree that it determines how their lives will be is vastly more important.
You'd think the world would have learned the lesson about investing in Microsoft-only technologies after IE6 and ActiveX. It seems a lot of people are in fact learning disabled.
I think they have. The lesson the guys who decide which technology to use have learned is that if you invest in MS technologies and put them in your customers you'll have several good years. Then Microsoft will outdate those technologies soon and give you another round at the same consulting money.
That sounds a lot like the broken window fallacy to me. It's a way to redistribute wealth to the consultants but everyone overall ends up a bit poorer in the process because no new value is being created.
Financially speaking, how much pain has IE6/ActiveX caused for corporations around the world? Has anyone tried to add it all up or even produce an estimate? How much less would average customers be paying for various products and services if that cost never happened?
Well, yeah. You independently evaluated your own needs and chose the solution that was a best-fit. You did not jump on a bandwagon and learn a whole new skillset because "everybody's doing it" or merely because a vendor would like to push it on you.
It's hard to be wrong when you do things this way.
It's amazing how many problems and complaints would be solved if every ToS, EULA, and online agreement required some kind of electronic signature to be valid. It should be something that would take more than a quick mouse-click to apply. Also if any amendments to existing agreements had to come with a statement to the effect of, "The amended agreement is identical to the previous one in every way, except the following:" which could be covered in a couple of paragraphs, rather than reading tens of pages of legalese to find what has changed.
See, thats the rub.. they DON'T WANT you to understand it.. They KNOW nobody is going to go out and spend $$$ on getting a lawyer to check any ToS/EULA, unless of course, you are a large company and have a flotilla of on-staff lawyers just standing around molting.. In that case, the company in question makes a under-the-table "exception" for $LARGE_COMPANY, and both fleets of lawyers pat each other on the back and go off to cocktail hour together... Meanwhile back with $JOE_DEVELOPER, who doesn't have a lawyer on-staff and doesn't have the $$$ to go rent one, he simply reads it as best as he can, and hopes there are no ticking timebombs in it, and prays.. So I wouldn't hold my breath for the above "streamlining" of ToS/EULA's...
It is for this reason that you'll never hear me claim "unfairness" when this becomes a PR shitstorm for said companies. I am hoping it will become more common for them to be called out in a very public way for these shenanigans. This is even more likely when it involves developers and not average end-users.
I never claimed that companies will streamline EULAs etc. voluntarily. Only that, voluntarily or otherwise, this wouldn't be a difficult problem to resolve.
I'm sure someone will post the obligatory XKCD... but it truly is amazing how many of the user's problems the technician solves by reading the documentation. Of course, the user has convinced themselves that this stuff is impenetrable, and so the words are just so much line noise to them. Oh and by the way, they have no idea what a line is, or what noise is. Best to just enjoy job security because the world is complicated, people specialize because you can't learn everything, and at the end of the day, not all of us can be geeks. Whether that's a good or bad thing, we could debate until 1 became 0.
The commentary was more about the way human beings choose to deal with the world, their refusal to invest anything in it, the fact they are still so willing to complain, etc. Job security wasn't what I was addressing.
The difference between a technician and a babysitter is more like what I was writing about. Many, many "babies" are well into middle age...
Firstly, note the unnecessary and repetitive use of derogatory terms for customers and general profanity. Hardly professional.
Right or wrong, I can tell you from where that originates.
Most people would never fault a paraplegic, who is in a wheelchair, for being unable to do jumping jacks. He would probably love to do them. He really cannot. It is "cannot", not "will not". Likewise, most people would not fault a diagnosed mentally retarded person for being unable to understand simple things. Chances are, no one has a harder time not hating that than he. There is no point and no profit in blaming either of those, and doing so would indicate extreme heartlessness and lack of understanding.
The problem is, there are large masses of people who have no disabilities of any kind. They are capable of abstract thought, of following simple instructions, of performing at least a minimal search for something and only asking for help if that doesn't find what they are looking for. They can do all of these things. Yet, a great many of them refuse to think. They don't want to use whatever thinking they can perform. By that I don't mean anything extreme or over-the-top or unreasonable. By that I mean an unnaturally high degree of helplessness, a freakishly strong desire for handholding even when this would take much more time than a two-minute Google search they are more than capable of performing.
Thinking is for "the help". That's grunt work for the computer janitors to do for them. It would not even occur to them to try. Thus, for most tech support lines, the one person who truly has a real problem that really does require the attention of a technician gets to wait on hold for 10-45 minutes because the lines are tied up by people who failed to read page 1 of the manual, the help file, the README file, the FAQ, the Web site, and the last e-mail they received.
This is the mentality with which you are dealing. You can gloss over it and cover it up with your grand notions of service, but you're patting yourself on the back to forget how much youre tempted to apply a cat-o-nine-tails to theirs. In a way, it truly is a trophy to be able to deal with that without getting a severe headache. After a while you can start to believe that you're just that eager to serve. I consider it a coping mechanism. The truth is, that mentality invites failure, asks for failure, begs for preventable problems, and tries very hard to defeat itself with problems of its own creation. It just so happens that they hired you to stand between themselves and any such consequences.
So you end up having to defend a network from both outside threats and the self-defeating, shortsighted actions of insiders who meant well. This isn't a fun position in which to find oneself. Oh, and if you lock it down too much, you will be swamped with complaints about functionality. It's like trying to simultaneously satisfy multiple contradictory conditions.
Most of those conditions wouldn't be contradictory if only users would attain the slightest clue pertaining to the tools they use every day. I am not talking about the knowledge of a skilled mechanic. I am talking about knowing how to drive. Lots of highway accidents didn't require an auto mechanic to prevent; they required a driver who understood how to drive. IT is like this. I do not refer to the skill needed to smelt iron ore, forge pig iron, and craft a hammer. I refer to the fact that a carpenter knows how to use his tools, even though they are not the goal of his job. So it is with workers who use computers but should not need to become experts. They only need to know basics. They refuse to learn them in a way that a driver could never refuse to learn to drive and expect to get away with.
Just as there's no point in being well-adjusted to a sick society, there's no point in seeing all of this and telling yourself that it is normal and should not change. The crux of the matter is whether you can know how fucked up it is and still deal with it patiently, educating those who will be educated and assisting the rest as much as you can. Making excuses for it and debasing yourself is just weak.
Honestly,
Had I no family ties out here on the left coast I would work for NSA.
There are a lot of things I can do (not that I'm a maestro by any stretch) that would help them, and since I'm really just a total nerd at heart, all they'd have to do is pay me enough to keep me in toys.
Sadly, I doubt they allow working remotely, and I really can't leave where I'm at. I have a good enough gig in a multinational corp in R&D/security already. It scratches most of the itches.
-nB
To be blunt, the fact that I have a conscience would prevent me from working with such an organization. I don't really care what cool toys they can hook me up with. Toys are to be enjoyed after essentials (like not dealing with the devil) are established.
Hey, it's the anonymous Android troll who posts in every single Android article. I like how you ignore the part where Amazon publicly states a 20% payment, even for free apps, but then slips in the 0% figure at the bottom of an email, guarded by restrictive clauses preventing public discussion of the deal.
Yes, it's almost as though they wouldn't be proud to declare it openly...
So you don't think it's fishy how Amazon publicly advertises 20% even for free apps? And in the screenshot, Amazon told them they received $54,805.14 in earnings that day? As stated in the article's comments section, the terms are confusing and fuzzy.
Not to mention that it takes more effort to make them confusing and fuzzy than it would to make them simple and clear. While it proves nothing, it strongly suggests that this is intentional.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this is being questioned because no one could understand the result. I think the result itself and why it is so certain is what is legitimately questionable.
Let's say I am in a theater. Someone beside me yells "FIRE!". My sense of smell is not impaired and I don't smell smoke. My vision is not impaired and I don't see flames. My hearing is not impaired and I don't hear the crackle of flames. Why should I assume he must be correct? If he is correct, why would I wait for him to point that out instead of acting on what I can perceive for myself?
The fact is, we as a society have decided that passing laws restricting certain types of speech is easier than teaching average people not to be such thoughtless, panicky herd animals. That's a shame, for it would be a most worthy goal. Of course those who could make this happen on a large scale would be deprived of a great deal of their political power if more people could think for themselves independently and were not easily frightened.
"nonviolent"?
Fecking troll.
He was talking about "posting inaccurate information". See, it's right there in the post that was quoted before it was replied to.
Last I checked, posting inaccurate information is not an act of violence. How did two ACs in a row manage to miss this? Reading comprehension just isn't this hard.
To clarify what is apparently a point of great confusion, those actually rioting and smashing things and hurting people, they are doing violence. People who write about it on Facebook and say inappropriate things are not committing violence. I'm not sure why I bother with people who get so caught up with their emotions about an event that they need to have such a difference explained to them, but there you go.
This was maybe the best worded and best thought through reply I've gotten in a long, long time.
Which would not have happened except I see that you are on the right track, looking for the real meaning. I wasn't acting alone.
I saw also the same old story I see everywhere. It's the idiotic resistance and the failure to appreciate. To small minds, wisdom sounds very much like foolishness because it doesn't fit into anything they know. Since they imagine themselves to have all the answers, naturally anything that doesn't fit into their worldview is unwelcome. It's the difference between rationality and rationalization.
The small mind is small because it cannot entertain an alien idea long enough to see if it finds a home, nor can it easily shed beliefs that have served their purpose. I get tired of that, the mental and psychic envrionment it fosters, and of the discouragement it can cause.
In this I am happy to be of service.
Then I guess the question should be why they think it's fun to riot. Somehow, I wouldn't consider it fun.
You're asking the right questions, the deeper questions that come closer to a full understanding of how and why these things happen.
Unfortunately it is common to encounter resistance from people who are either small-minded and don't consider a fuller understanding to be possible, or are so preoccupied with their "shit hitting the fan" mentality that they are annoyed you don't share their sense of urgency. I suppose there's not much difference.
The real question is, why are so many young people so unhappy with their government and society that the smallest incident, such as the death of someone who apparently wasn't much of a loss, could trigger this kind of violent response.
It is likely the rioters haven't put much thought into it themselves. They just know that something is very wrong with a corporatocracy run by power-hungry sociopaths who routinely lie to them, that they have very little say in how their government is run, that there are no legitimate "working through the system" ways to effect meaningful social and political change, that those are only for the monied interests who are already running things.
It takes no insight or understanding to be unhappy and miserable with this, to feel like something is direly wrong someplace, to be tightly wound with anxiety and anger and require little to trigger the release. What takes understanding and insight is to see that none of this happens in a vacuum, that there are in fact reasons for it, that those reasons can be known and, if the people of the UK had the will to do it, could also be changed.
By contrast, the immature and stupid who are devoid of understanding will start blaming inanimate objects, like they always do, and will demand control and monitoring of technology. This time it's communications technology. Previously it was alcohol, drugs, guns, etc. The mentality is the same and reveals its short-sightedness and unwillingness to look at what is right in front of it with each iteration.
It reminds me of a wonderful quote from P.J. O'Rourke: "No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
"Rather than", used by the AC above, implies a choice between one or the other. "I'd rather drink tea than coffee" doesn't imply that I like them mixed together.
Yes. That means the person to whom I replied had a choice in the matter. He could go along with the AC's false dichotomy, or he could explain that the two options are not mutually exclusive.
He chose to go along with the false dichotomy. This led to me pointing out that it is, in fact, a false dichotomy, fallacy of the excluded middle, however you like to phrase it.
I don't share this desire to go along with false reasoning just because some AC thought it would be a good idea to frame the question that way. Thus, I can't understand why you feel a need to restate what the AC said.
You missed the non-caps lock part... widespread civil unrest benefits no-one when it is within your own state.
The AC has already done me the favor of pointing out your second instance of absurdity so I didn't have to.
Instead I'll take this a different direction.
The problem with not being enough of an adult to say "hey, that's interesting information I wasn't aware of before and/or didn't fully appreciate the significance of, thank you for pointing this out" is that your effort to save face just makes you look more ridiculous. Let's review.
Fact: you stated that there is no good reason why the government would want more riots. I advised that provoking the political groups they don't like until they do something they can actually be prosecuted for is a potential motivation. It's dirty and underhanded as hell, but it is a tactic that does happen from time to time. I mentioned that the people who do this are called agent provocateurs.
Fact: you were unaware of the full scope of how agent provocateurs are used. You had this false idea that they are rarely or never used domestically. I tried to correct you on this and explain that you are likely to mislead others when you speak regarding a subject you really don't know much about. Did you appreciate that, did you see how your actions led up to someone saying this to you? No, you didn't. You continued to insist that they tend to be used only for foreign governments.
Fact: I gave you some solid, well-documented, easily-researched examples of the domestic use of such agents. This falsifies your original notion. There is no middle ground or shade of grey here. Your initial notion was simply, plainly, demonstrably wrong.
Fact: you have neither the honesty nor the courage to admit you were wrong. Apparently you think admitting fault is a sign of weakness. No, it isn't, it's a sign of adulthood that you're willing to admit when you are wrong and correct the false notion. So you play the old "stick to your guns" tactic and with this most recent post, to which this is a response, you start repeating yourself as though that nullifies the evidence I have presented to you.
Do you think you're convincing anyone?
Anyway that's the problem with trying these lame, transparent stunts in an attempt to save face. The more you try to do this, the more ridiculous you look. Now if you admit fault you're admitting not only that you were wrong but also that you tried twice to hand-wave your way out of it and cover it up. That's worse than if you just admitted you were wrong the first time it was made obvious to everyone.
You're only embarassing yourself. Keep at it if, for some reason, you have an appetite for humiliation. As for me, I'm moving on. It sure does get tiresome when so many people keep trying to do this. I take no pleasure in it.
I'm well aware of agent provocateurs... however widespread civil unrest WITHIN YOUR OWN NATION is not generally the aim of agent provocateurs. Their use is normally to destabilise foreign sovereign nations, not your own.
The first thing that came up when I Googled this subject was the FBI's COINTELPRO operation. Guess who it targeted? US citizens. A US law enforcement agency using agent provocateurs to target US citizens. That should qualify as "within your own nation" (even without the caps lock). You talk like this is somehow unheard-of. It is not, not by a long shot.
... well, it sounds like an absurd attempt to save face.
COINTELPRO was intended to disrupt political groups within the US. These include the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, and others.
Oh, and the New York City police were known to use these tactics against the protesters of the 2004 National Republican Convention... in New York City. I'd say both of those are within the USA.
If you are a government official, your own nation is what you should be most concerned about. Whether you want to work towards martial law or whether you want to get rid of pesky opposition groups, this is logically the case once you have power-hungry people who love power for its own sake, whose only concern is whether something will obtain the results they desire.
The purpose of an agent provocateur is to cause someone to break the law. It's the kind of thing that would be called "entrapment" if a police officer openly did it. So they act through proxies. What you're thinking of is something similarly devious but with a different goal. What you're thinking of is more like the way the US used its intelligence agencies to destabilize Iran in the 1950s and overthrow its democratically elected government, replacing it with a dictator. Yes, that is one possible use of this kind of technique, but you limit yourself if you really do not see how it could be applied domestically.
To tell me you are well informed about this subject but had no idea it wasn't limited to only one very specific, narrow use
rather than the underlying causes of social unrest.
What should they do when your home gets robbed? catch the burglars or get the the underlying cause of what makes people rob other people's home?
Why wouldn't you attempt both? You have heard of the false dichotomy, correct?
At this point, regardless of individual beliefs... I'm sure that they would prefer to NOT have rioting than incite more riots.
They are called agent provocateurs. If you have never heard of them and have never read of instances in which they are known to have been used, and why, then no offense but you are ignorant about this subject and should not be stating your "certainties" lest you become the blind leading the blind...
Most people are blissfully unaware of just how devious their governments actually are. Also, "expanding government for the sake of power" is not an "individual belief". It is very much a shared ideal.
That's funny because when I was a kid, "go play in traffic" was an insult. The idea that they'd do this voluntarily... heh. That's really something.
When I lived in Marysville I was coming home from school one day in my 240SX and kids were playing the "throw the sticks in front of the cars and watch them run over them" game. One of the kids was super-little and looked super-overexcited, so I went real slow and sure enough, he threw a stick in front of my car and then ran RIGHT out in front of the car to get it. So after I almost shit myself (I was ready, but that didn't make it un-scary) I parked on the side of the road, took the kid by the hand, and had him take me to his house. Then I explained to his obviously tweaking father that I almost ran over his child because he was throwing sticks into the road with the other children.
There's a lot of total fucking derelicts out there who do not give one tenth of one shit about their children, probably because nobody cared about them. And letting these people continue to breed is seriously one of the greatest root problems we face. The best thing that we could do for this country is to make meth legal and add something that sterilizes the user to it. Bonus points for doing it with alcohol, too; if you can't make your own booze then you probably don't need to be drinking. AKA the nerd principle.
Of course in most places if you mention this, you're some kind of terrible heartless human being who hates anyone who has ever struggled...
But the way welfare and entitlements are done is designed to encourage this. The politicians themselves are cloistered. They won't have to suffer the effects of what they encourage. Their plan is to get these derelicts dependent on them for their basic needs, get paid more and more for each bastard child they neglect, and of course they will vote for the politicians who give them more.
It's a total perversion of any notion of a legitimate safety net. Yes, sometimes shit happens. Sometimes a person can be hard-working, conscientious, thoughtful, and intelligent, and suffer legitimate misfortune and be down on his luck. That person may need a hand up and it really is a better world where such people can find this. The way it's supposed to work is that person shows their gratitude for living in a society that cares by using as little assistance as possible and getting back on his feet as early as possible, so that welfare does not become a permanent lifestyle.
The way we do things encourages permanent, multi-generational dependency on government. There is no gratitude. There is no attempt to no longer need it. There is a screaming that it isn't good enough. There is a massive sense of entitlement. When these people have children, you get the kind of situation you experienced.
Just about any time I see a news story about some child that died a tragic accidental death, my very first question is "really, so where were the parents when this happened?" Too much of the time, they are like what you described.
Sounds like you know for sure that this is a legitimate question. Otherwise you'd have no such uncertainty, no such willingness to admit the question.
You know for certain based upon an honest assessment of what really motivates you, who you are and what you really believe. If it withstands an honest test along these lines then you have proven it to yourself. Science is something different. Science is the ability to prove to anyone who performs the same set of procedures in a way they cannot easily deny. What I am talking about is something you are unlikely to demonstrate to someone who does not already understand it, not unless they are unusually open to entertaining such ideas.
That part isn't a matter of whether it is true. It is a matter of how to test its truth and whether you can handle the possibility that most won't agree. Most of science is based on a consensus among credientialed professionals, which is another way of saying a kind of authority (incidentally, the second I typed "authority" I heard the same word spoken in an album to which I am listening... does this kind of synchronicity frequently and routinely happen to anyone else?).
Back to my specific example... if you truly love someone, you really don't care if your neighbor agrees. If that isn't the case, you aren't talking about love.
If you take a dismissive view of religion, then "God' is whatever we don't know how to explain. Thunder and lightning were once the wrath of one kind of "god" or another. The problem is, even if you fully accept all materialistic theories as ultimately true, you still have to have something that caused the Big Bang. If there is nothing anywhere then there is nothing to cause a Big Bang. If there are other universes or something of that sort that caused the Big Bang, something had to cause them in turn. However many levels of indirection you like, there must be some ultimate cause that was not itself the effect of a cause. How do you begin to explain this in any sort of ultimate manner that doesn't create problems of its own?
So this whole thing is much more strange and mysterious than it may seem to be. Even if everything else is perfectly ordinary and mundane, which it surely is not. Plenty of other things make no sense, yet they are.
The difference is whether you believe legitimacy is the same as popularity. If so, you follow the majority. If you are raised in an environment where the majority believe stealing is acceptable, then as a follower of the majority you have no grounds by whcih to object. You are a product of your environment. If there were no other way to be, then moral relativism would be true.
If however, you feel a certain guilt when you do certain things and a certain joy when you make different decisions, and these are consistent no matter what most people think or do or say, then you have some basis other than consensus. What you'll eventually find is that when you do not follow fellow people, the way things end up is more in line with the way
This point is inseparable from the next I shall make.
If by "their own gain" you mean "no discernable profit of any kind that you could inventory or itemize or sum up", except of course sending a message to people who think they have perfect impunity that they are in fact "touchable" and accountable, then okay. I suppose they are "egotistical" but man, that's a funny way to phrase things. I suppose Mohandas "Mahatma" Ghandi was an egotistical bastard, too. Oh and when Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes and was jailed as a result, I guess that was just for his own ego. After all, a good citizen pays his taxes no matter what, right? Fact is, those members of Anonymous/Lulz who do what they do know that they are risking serious jail time. That does not deter them. You have to wonder what could be more important to them than their own freedom.
You seem to have a mind to dismiss in the least favorable terms possible anyone who stands up and declares with action that they've had enough of the bullshit. I suppose likewise the British government referred to our Founding Fathers as something like terrorists and/or treasonous. From their point of view that was likely the case, but that doesn't mean the Founders had no good reasons for what they did. If the Founders had a peaceful "working through the system" method of effecting real change they would have used it. Likewise, if these vigilantes could take their grievances to a more legit authority and actually have them addressed in a meaningful way, I doubt they'd be committing so much hacking and online vandalism. The fact is, "working through the system" is for monied interests. If you're not in that club, you have no legal means to change anything.
I guess "good little citizens" would just accept their powerlessness and would never break any laws in an attempt to change that. Naturally you'd blame them for using the only option available to them other than grabbing their ankles and greasing up, rather than taking a hard look at a system that offers no other approved option. I am not sure what else to say to you. Any and all vigilanteism is the result of a failure of the legitimate system to take care of a situation before it rotted away. There are no exceptions.
Do I like what vigilantes do? No. It's ugly. It should never be necessary. I don't personally do these things. I deal with it differently. If I don't like Sony, then I refuse to ever do business with them for any reason under any circumstance. Does that mean I cannot understand why others would go farther? No. It doesn't. I'm tired of the powerlessness and disenfranchisement myself. That someone would be more extreme than I, would break laws I wouldn't personally break, well really that's so fucking predictable and foreseeable becaue the entire situation is a formula for producing it. You deal with that by having an un-fucked, unbroken system. Anything less than that will breed this kind of vigilante. But if you have a fucked, broken system, a few computer vigilantes are the very least of your problems.
Science is like the logic and reason on which it depends. It works well for things within its domain. Specifically, that means material things which are deterministic and always turn out the same if the initial conditions are the same. The problem is knowing where it does not apply. Otherwise, you become like the person whose only tool is a hammer and now you think everything looks like a nail.
I say this as someone who really, truly loves reason and enjoys science and the power of discovery it can realize. But not all questions are scientific. For example, there is probably someone in your life, an old friend, a husband or wife, a family member, that you dearly love, whose wellbeing you value at least as much as your own. But you cannot prove scientifically that you love that person. You could never prove in a rigorous, mathematical way that your interest in them is not merely some kind of extended self-interest. That does not make your love less real. It merely means that science is the wrong tool for this job.
Morality is this way. It is not a logic problem. Therefore, logic won't elucidate it. Trying to do it that way is like trying to divide by zero and declaring that since you cannot do that, all of mathematics is invalid or isn't real. No system of logic can even demonstrate its own validity, by the way. Did you know that? That is because they are all ultimately axiomatic.
There is definitely an absolute truth. There are degrees to which any given person may approach this absolute truth, differences between how well they adhere to it and how well they can express it, and that is the only real relativity about it, but the ultimate reality whatever it may be is definitely real.
If you say there is no absolute truth, I have one question for you. It is a simple question: are you absolutely sure? You see, it is not even internally consistent. It contradicts itself. If you insist on everything being a scientific/logical/reason problem, then surely you must reject as false any line of reasoning that contradicts itself. This establishes that there is indeed an absolute truth. The question then becomes whether this truth is knowable and how accurately one may know it.
Moral relativists (the ones who do not merely fail to note the difference between freedom and license) simply confuse the need to avoid sitting in judgment of people who tend to bring about their own downfall through their ill-founded actions with the fantastical notion that there is no standard at all by which actions may be judged. The reason not to declare yourself judge, jury, and proverbial executioner of others is that this path leads to egotism and the belief that you are superior to others and all the corruption that brings. It is not because there are no criteria by which judgment could be made. It is the typical cart-before-horse thinking of most relativists.
The real fear of relativists everywhere is that an absolute standard means that various groups of people can be ranked in terms of how closely they adhere to it, that some would be inferior to others leading to a kind of pecking order. Fact is, we already live in a hierarchical society and it
The only thing I would change is make it irresistable, say $5000 for the shot and $10,000 for the surgery. It would still be a bargain. Of course, this is such a great idea that it won't happen. Someone might get offended. And of 50.01% of the takers happen to be non-Anglo Saxon, this will be terribly racist even though all participants are entirely voluntary. Of course, if 90% of the takers are white women, no one will make a peep about it, because the mainstream tendency is to be hypocritical bastards about all of these hypersensitivity issues. After all, whites deserve all their suffering, even though they can't change what their distant ancestors did 200 years ago, even though most whites were too poor to own slaves, even though many whites were abolitionists, even though many whites died fighting against slavery, even though, even though...
Though we certainly live in some sad times. Many so-called adult people (called that for no reason except that they reach a certain age without kicking the bucket) truly can't understand that children don't "just happen" but are the result of their decisions. They can't understand that children are expensive and require a tremendous amount of energy and attention to raise, that it's so much better for everyone with two parents in a stable relationship, and that having a bunch of children you know you cannot afford (financially and emotionally) is a truly heinous and monstrous act that usually damns them to an unpleasant existence.
I see this in so many different areas. This is merely one of them, that's all. We have an entire generation of so-called adult people who cannot control their own lives. Well, "refuse to" is a better wording than "cannot" though the result is the same. They think everything that happens to them is the roll of some dice. They don't feel responsible for anything. They simply cannot see the glaringly obvious connection between their decision-making and the results they experience. This is unique to humans. In nature, an animal that acted this way would never survive long enough to reproduce. It would fail to recognize that lazily hanging out near its predators is a recipe for getting eaten and that would be that.
I mean fuck, even selfish people still love them and theirs. Even selfish assholes look after their own, even if they don't give a damn about anyone else other than themselves and their families. The kind of neglect these young idiots show for the children they obviously had by accident and obviously are unprepared to raise is a whole new level of useless depravity. Many animals in the wild do better.
That's funny because when I was a kid, "go play in traffic" was an insult. The idea that they'd do this voluntarily... heh. That's really something.
This doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Make it like its own sovereign nation within a nation (same way the Vatican is inside Italy), start them out with a 5 year supply of non-perishable food, fuel, viable (that means non-Monsanto) crop seeds, maybe some livestock, and water, and deport all violent felons there up
See folks, as our economy declines into a Third World one - no thanks to the Republicans and the TEA Party - we're going to see more civil unrest. Of course, the rich and powerful are scared shitless of this and they're going to have more and more of these rules put into place until we have a police state. Of course, there will be plenty of backing from our fellow peons - you know the "law and order" and "if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" Republicans.
I'd rather give away half then having it all taken away. -Joseph P. Kennedy when asked why a super rich guy like him backed the Democrats
I agree with you except for the part where you don't perceive the Democrats as also being a coequal part of the problem.
The damage they do could not be done without you. Just like the damage the Republicans do couldn't be done without their own apologists.
It's time to recognize that they are two branches of a single party, the purpose of which is to monopolize political power and lock out all competitors who are not vetted by one of the two branches. It is very much like the trade guilds of old. Neither one gives a damn about you. Neither wants a prosperous, smoothly-running nation with no crises to solve, no fires to put out, nothing to be afraid of. Neither wants an empowered, politically active average person who can think critically and will stand on principle no matter what.
What they really want are a bunch of fat, stupid, dependent, needy, divided, emotionally immature people who bicker and play blame games. This means zero accountability. It also means that when someone cries foul, it is not taken seriously because everyone cries foul all the time. Everything is the other party's fault, except the members of the other party feel that way too.
Apparently you missed this part of my post:
"Not because it's true or might be true or would fit in with the long history of past abuses, mind you, but because people who are in denial want to feel comfortable about their denial and your doubts make that more difficult. When faced with such a situation, small-minded people will attack your character."
Nice of you to self-identify, AC.
Yet, a great many of them refuse to think.
I don't know if it's refusal. I am beginning to suspect that they really just don't know how. The ability to think and act upon those thoughts is gone in most people. Something has gone wrong. Maybe it's the schools or maybe even the flouride. My money is on TV.
At the same time that it's amazing what people can do when they really have to, it's also shameful that most won't until the condition of "really have to" is satisfied.
It's mostly the schools. If not for them, people would know how to critically think and deconstruct what they see on TV, how to put it into perspective, how to recognize the various propaganda and rhetorical techniques. Though I'll add that if we didn't live in an anti-intellectual culture, if being intelligent and perceptive and wise were "cool", we'd hardly know this problem at all.
John Taylor Gatto is the finest available resource for this subject. An entire book of his, The Underground History of American Education explains a great deal of the problem. I highly recommend reading it. It's something everyone should read, particularly parents but also anyone who really wants to understand how we ended up with the society we know today. It is the product of much social engineering, not the way people inherently are.
I still think the problem is a little deeper. It's not that people aren't taught how to think. It's that people are passive followers who won't learn how to think until and unless someone else decides to give them that knowledge. They will not take it and claim it as their birthright whether anyone likes it or not. It is not unwise to stand between them and it. There is no self-sufficiency in most of them. They don't know how to assert control of their own education. Instead they entrust it to strangers. Just think about that. The average person wouldn't trust a $100 bill to a bunch of unaccountable strangers. Their education and the degree that it determines how their lives will be is vastly more important.
You'd think the world would have learned the lesson about investing in Microsoft-only technologies after IE6 and ActiveX. It seems a lot of people are in fact learning disabled.
I think they have. The lesson the guys who decide which technology to use have learned is that if you invest in MS technologies and put them in your customers you'll have several good years. Then Microsoft will outdate those technologies soon and give you another round at the same consulting money.
That sounds a lot like the broken window fallacy to me. It's a way to redistribute wealth to the consultants but everyone overall ends up a bit poorer in the process because no new value is being created.
Financially speaking, how much pain has IE6/ActiveX caused for corporations around the world? Has anyone tried to add it all up or even produce an estimate? How much less would average customers be paying for various products and services if that cost never happened?
Asked "why should I use this"?
Couldn't come up with a good answer.
Went back to Win32 and C++
Could it be that maybe I was right?
Well, yeah. You independently evaluated your own needs and chose the solution that was a best-fit. You did not jump on a bandwagon and learn a whole new skillset because "everybody's doing it" or merely because a vendor would like to push it on you.
It's hard to be wrong when you do things this way.
It's amazing how many problems and complaints would be solved if every ToS, EULA, and online agreement required some kind of electronic signature to be valid. It should be something that would take more than a quick mouse-click to apply. Also if any amendments to existing agreements had to come with a statement to the effect of, "The amended agreement is identical to the previous one in every way, except the following:" which could be covered in a couple of paragraphs, rather than reading tens of pages of legalese to find what has changed.
See, thats the rub.. they DON'T WANT you to understand it.. They KNOW nobody is going to go out and spend $$$ on getting a lawyer to check any ToS/EULA, unless of course, you are a large company and have a flotilla of on-staff lawyers just standing around molting.. In that case, the company in question makes a under-the-table "exception" for $LARGE_COMPANY, and both fleets of lawyers pat each other on the back and go off to cocktail hour together... Meanwhile back with $JOE_DEVELOPER, who doesn't have a lawyer on-staff and doesn't have the $$$ to go rent one, he simply reads it as best as he can, and hopes there are no ticking timebombs in it, and prays.. So I wouldn't hold my breath for the above "streamlining" of ToS/EULA's...
It is for this reason that you'll never hear me claim "unfairness" when this becomes a PR shitstorm for said companies. I am hoping it will become more common for them to be called out in a very public way for these shenanigans. This is even more likely when it involves developers and not average end-users.
I never claimed that companies will streamline EULAs etc. voluntarily. Only that, voluntarily or otherwise, this wouldn't be a difficult problem to resolve.
I'm sure someone will post the obligatory XKCD... but it truly is amazing how many of the user's problems the technician solves by reading the documentation. Of course, the user has convinced themselves that this stuff is impenetrable, and so the words are just so much line noise to them. Oh and by the way, they have no idea what a line is, or what noise is. Best to just enjoy job security because the world is complicated, people specialize because you can't learn everything, and at the end of the day, not all of us can be geeks. Whether that's a good or bad thing, we could debate until 1 became 0.
The commentary was more about the way human beings choose to deal with the world, their refusal to invest anything in it, the fact they are still so willing to complain, etc. Job security wasn't what I was addressing.
The difference between a technician and a babysitter is more like what I was writing about. Many, many "babies" are well into middle age...
Right or wrong, I can tell you from where that originates.
Most people would never fault a paraplegic, who is in a wheelchair, for being unable to do jumping jacks. He would probably love to do them. He really cannot. It is "cannot", not "will not". Likewise, most people would not fault a diagnosed mentally retarded person for being unable to understand simple things. Chances are, no one has a harder time not hating that than he. There is no point and no profit in blaming either of those, and doing so would indicate extreme heartlessness and lack of understanding.
The problem is, there are large masses of people who have no disabilities of any kind. They are capable of abstract thought, of following simple instructions, of performing at least a minimal search for something and only asking for help if that doesn't find what they are looking for. They can do all of these things. Yet, a great many of them refuse to think. They don't want to use whatever thinking they can perform. By that I don't mean anything extreme or over-the-top or unreasonable. By that I mean an unnaturally high degree of helplessness, a freakishly strong desire for handholding even when this would take much more time than a two-minute Google search they are more than capable of performing.
Thinking is for "the help". That's grunt work for the computer janitors to do for them. It would not even occur to them to try. Thus, for most tech support lines, the one person who truly has a real problem that really does require the attention of a technician gets to wait on hold for 10-45 minutes because the lines are tied up by people who failed to read page 1 of the manual, the help file, the README file, the FAQ, the Web site, and the last e-mail they received.
This is the mentality with which you are dealing. You can gloss over it and cover it up with your grand notions of service, but you're patting yourself on the back to forget how much youre tempted to apply a cat-o-nine-tails to theirs. In a way, it truly is a trophy to be able to deal with that without getting a severe headache. After a while you can start to believe that you're just that eager to serve. I consider it a coping mechanism. The truth is, that mentality invites failure, asks for failure, begs for preventable problems, and tries very hard to defeat itself with problems of its own creation. It just so happens that they hired you to stand between themselves and any such consequences.
So you end up having to defend a network from both outside threats and the self-defeating, shortsighted actions of insiders who meant well. This isn't a fun position in which to find oneself. Oh, and if you lock it down too much, you will be swamped with complaints about functionality. It's like trying to simultaneously satisfy multiple contradictory conditions.
Most of those conditions wouldn't be contradictory if only users would attain the slightest clue pertaining to the tools they use every day. I am not talking about the knowledge of a skilled mechanic. I am talking about knowing how to drive. Lots of highway accidents didn't require an auto mechanic to prevent; they required a driver who understood how to drive. IT is like this. I do not refer to the skill needed to smelt iron ore, forge pig iron, and craft a hammer. I refer to the fact that a carpenter knows how to use his tools, even though they are not the goal of his job. So it is with workers who use computers but should not need to become experts. They only need to know basics. They refuse to learn them in a way that a driver could never refuse to learn to drive and expect to get away with.
Just as there's no point in being well-adjusted to a sick society, there's no point in seeing all of this and telling yourself that it is normal and should not change. The crux of the matter is whether you can know how fucked up it is and still deal with it patiently, educating those who will be educated and assisting the rest as much as you can. Making excuses for it and debasing yourself is just weak.
Honestly, Had I no family ties out here on the left coast I would work for NSA. There are a lot of things I can do (not that I'm a maestro by any stretch) that would help them, and since I'm really just a total nerd at heart, all they'd have to do is pay me enough to keep me in toys. Sadly, I doubt they allow working remotely, and I really can't leave where I'm at. I have a good enough gig in a multinational corp in R&D/security already. It scratches most of the itches. -nB
To be blunt, the fact that I have a conscience would prevent me from working with such an organization. I don't really care what cool toys they can hook me up with. Toys are to be enjoyed after essentials (like not dealing with the devil) are established.
Hey, it's the anonymous Android troll who posts in every single Android article. I like how you ignore the part where Amazon publicly states a 20% payment, even for free apps, but then slips in the 0% figure at the bottom of an email, guarded by restrictive clauses preventing public discussion of the deal.
Yes, it's almost as though they wouldn't be proud to declare it openly...
So you don't think it's fishy how Amazon publicly advertises 20% even for free apps? And in the screenshot, Amazon told them they received $54,805.14 in earnings that day? As stated in the article's comments section, the terms are confusing and fuzzy.
Not to mention that it takes more effort to make them confusing and fuzzy than it would to make them simple and clear. While it proves nothing, it strongly suggests that this is intentional.