Oh, and one final thing: ALSA is broken for user switching. Whichever user grabs the sound device keeps it, and keeps playing audio while switched to another user. All other users are locked out of sound. That is completely broken behavior, and PulseAudio fixes it. Audio is now controlled by the current user, and all other users are muted.
Someone else already pointed out that dmix has been enabled by default in ALSA for at least six years now. It was available prior to that.
I have no problems with ALSA and multiple users. If I play three different mp3s from three different user accounts, all three mp3s play at the same time. Not really the best way to hear a song but the point is that it works and works automatically. There is no need and no reason to mute audio from anyone just because someone else is also using it. Needlessly muting users just for the privilege of having your sound go through a redundant layer of software is what I would call "completely broken behavior".
My experience with Pulseaudio on a friend's system is where I have had problems with multiple users. On a Fedora (Fedora 14) box Pulseaudio is the default sound system. For security reasons we set up a separate, restricted user account for Wine. Wine in its separate account had no audio capability whatsoever even though his normal account did. Since I have never personally used Pulseaudio this is where I discovered that unlike most daemons, it does not run system-wide. Each user must run their own instance of it.
His main user had Pulseaudio start up automatically upon login. The user account we created for Wine enjoyed no such privilege. I added a little line in his.bashrc file for that user to start the daemon. Trivial for me, but then I've been using Linux since the mid 1990s. This is something that would be a problem for users new to Linux. Even after that, we still occasionally need to kill off and re-run the daemon for no apparent reason. Incidentally, running "winecfg" and clicking the "Audio" tab revealed that Pulseaudio was the only option. You could not even change it to ALSA.
I could build a customized Wine from source to get around that, after first installing GCC etc. Again this isn't something new users are likely to tackle. It's even less likely that a Linux newbie is going to understand that they need to manually update anything they install outside the package manager.
Honestly I've had more problems with Pulseaudio in the last six months than I have ever experienced during 14+ years of using OSS and ALSA. That's really quite a feat considering I have never personally run Pulseaudio on my own computers. I can see no defensible reason why these useless, redundant, problem-causing sound daemons are defaults on binary distros, particularly those aimed at new users. I could understand a checkbox during installation stating something like "if you really need to play sound over a network, or (insert feature here that Pulseaudio can do that ALSA cannot), check this box" that is unchecked by default. But that's not the case.
I'd say you haven't thought this through, or you wouldn't have raised the point at all (and you should have used a more honest term like "the unwashed masses" instead of hiding your elitist and condescending view of people behind the "general public" label).
Unfortunately the "unwashed masses" exist and they exist in numbers. As proof I submit the fact that marketing and PR are used because they work and are extremely successful at steering a discussion away from the actual merits of a thing. There is nothing elitist about admitting this fact of life. Celebrating it, exploiting it, and using it as an excuse to think you're better than someone else.. now THAT would be elitist.
Of course people can handle this - they have always been able to do so. Just look at who is being dragged kicking/screaming into the future and who is doing the dragging. Hint: The "general public" are doing the dragging. Follow the sound of kicking and screaming to identify who can't handle the possibility of greater choice. This is about control, not the ability of people to choose for themselves.
You're absolutely right that it's about control. The kind of control it's about is simple: many people have tastes, preferences, and viewpoints (even passionate ones) that they only believe are their own. The way it would ideally work is that you determine your own needs based on realistic assessment and the marketers merely make you aware of competing offerings among which you choose based on merit and value. By contrast, the real art of the salesman or the marketer is to sell you something you otherwise would have never bought or believed while convincing you that the whole thing was your own idea. That's what this dubious "craft" is about, what its practitioners are trying to do.
Since this is a pathological state of parasitism where one class exerts emotional and mental control over another for the sake of profit or power, of course people can handle its opposite and have always been able to do so. Its opposite would represent health and a higher degree of freedom. It only seems painful or difficult because the pathology has gone on so long and affected so many.
The ability of people to choose for themselves is the object of control. It's not just those who want unhealthy control over markets and decisions who will do the kicking and screaming. It's also those who have formed an unhealthy dependence on them like the crackhead to the drug dealer and are afraid of the staggering possibilities of freedom and choice. That this is changing is ultimately a good thing, just don't expect change to be painless when the system that is changing is so deeply entrenched. There will be much kicking and screaming, sort of like the RIAA is doing because it refuses to cope with the information age.
Yet it really is changing and that part is frankly overdue. Unfortuntely I don't share your optimism that it's changing because people know better. I want to believe that but any dealing I have with the general public shows me how unplausible this can be. I think it's changing because it was never sustainable to begin with. Its decline and replacement was inevitable.
Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.
I think that constantly treating them like they can't, for the last few generations, has not only trained them to be the way they are now but also made everyone believe that this is normal. This is true for things a lot more important than TV. Few people have the individuality and the principles to do whatever they're going to do no matter how insultingly you treat them. For the masses, we tend to get what we expect.
A large population of passive people who hate introspection, do not want to develop refined tastes, and need an industry of marketers to tell them what they want is great if you're a multinational corporation. Then you can treat them as predictable units on a graph and cater to profitable trends, nice and dehumanized, neat and "individual just like everybody else". If you value any kind of intelligence or quality of life, then it isn't so great, not when so many are so artificially helpless and need to have basic things explained to them because they lost their drive and curiosity a long time ago.
Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!
I suppose it does when they are suddenly confronted with large amounts of it for the first time. The truth is that life is full of choices and always has been. It's just that many behaviors become so ingrained that we no longer understand they are choices.
I had problems with Pulseaudio breaking mplayer on a clean install of 10.10. Solution was to revert back to ALSA, which I've never had any problems with. Pulseaudio has never worked perfectly for me.
I have never heard a good reason why so many distros use Pulseaudio and other redundant sound daemons instead of straight ALSA. I have had to solve several quirks related to the use of such sound daemons that I have never experienced with ALSA. ALSA just works.
The few users who really need the features offered by something like Pulseaudio and absolutely cannot use straight ALSA are a tiny minority. Why are so many distro defaults geared towards this small minority when it makes everyone else have to put up with strange quirks related to a system that should be rock-freaking-solid? Especially Ubuntu and others that are purportedly aimed at the exact kind of user who just wants things to work. It makes no sense to me.
Personally I use Gentoo because I really like the ability to customize and I like not having to jump through hoops to use any codec I want, any drivers I want, and relatively bleeding-edge software. I also like the features of Hardened Gentoo, some of which do require building from source. On my own system I've never had sound daemons like Pulseaudio installed so I've never had the problems associated with them. But I know several people who just want it to work, are not hobbyists, and don't want to do the amount of tweaking and customization that Gentoo requires. On their systems I have seen stupid sound problems on well-supported hardware that just didn't have to happen. Where is the gigantic advantage that makes this look like a sound decision to the people who choose defaults for distros like Ubuntu?
PowerShell is a substandard imitation of what Unix shells have been providing for decades now
What is substandard about it? It provides pretty much ALL the functionality of Bash. Plus it allows you to do work on objects which means you can script actions on COM objects through it. The only people I see who call it substandard or whatever have usually not ever used it or used it maybe 6 years ago and ignore all the changes made since. Sort of like people who still bash Windows for things that haven't existed since Windows 95.
Actually someone else has began to illuminate its shortcomings so I need not bother replicating what he has already said. Part of the real power of Unix shells comes from a fundamental tenet of the Unix philosophy. Specifically, the rule of modularity. With Unix shells it is quite easy to connect multiple unrelated programs together to perform an overall task with a single command line, even if the programmers never anticipated that specific use scenario.
As I previously said, Microsoft has definitely made progress but they have not yet equalled the power of the Unix shell, let alone surpassed it. I am glad they don't talk so much about innovation anymore. It'd just be insulting to anyone who recognizes the way they are just recently getting around to things that Unix has done for decades. Literally, for decades.
Well of course nobody wants to continue to use a Windows CLI, it IS from the dark ages.
That's quite an understatement.
PowerShell is a substandard imitation of what Unix shells have been providing for decades now, but in terms of Microsoft's offerings at least it represents progress. Now if only they'd stop using primitive throwbacks like drive letters and provide file abstractions for devices then they'd be well on their way towards reimplementing Unix.
In fact researchers at MIT have come up with a combinatorial GUI to address this very problem. Each admin command is represented by an icon, with the desired information for subtasks connected to the command by a subicon for the parameter and a place to enter the value. You can just drag-and-drop the commands into a list which can be executed at a click of a button.
This is interesting and unfortunately I know little about it. My question very well may come from my ignorance about this system: does every possible argument to every command also have an icon? If so, how do you display all of them in an intelligible way using finite screen space? Imagine doing this with all the potential functions of, say, iptables or gcc.
Some users are even reporting improved performance through keyboard shortcuts for the commonly used commands. They've cleverly given them short forms so they can be entered easily (e.g. 'creat', 'ps -ef | grep'). Admin productivity in this new Visual Command Environment seems to be accelerating, generating incredible ROI for those who are flexible enough to learn proactively.
Honestly, if you are able to learn proactively and aren't allergic to performing a bit of basic research, you would have no problems using a CLI. I hope this new GUI system matures into something useful and helpful. Yet if they are targeting the users who don't resent learning new things, the people who recognize an obvious connection between a willingness to make an effort and a better experience, they are going to have a small audience.
Ever see an NFS server not work because the config file had a space instead of a tab?
That's what we call bad design. Bad design can and has severely screwed up GUI interfaces as well. You had to specifically choose NFS because you are no doubt aware that the vast overwhelming majority of text config files do not care about whitespace and would not have this problem. This is an instance of the exception that proves the rule. It actually weakens your case when this is put into perspective.
How about something not working because you picked two options that conflict with each other? A gui would not allow that.
A CLI won't allow that either -- you'll get an error message when you run the program with a faulty config file.
Thankfully apache split httpd.conf into multiple files because it was getting several thousand lines long.
More cherry-picking that doesn't represent the majority of command-line tools. You have an opinion and I get that. The need to validate it by cherry-picking only those examples that reinforce it is known as confirmation bias. It'd be a lot more intellectually honest to acknowledge that what you have is a mere preference, that others are not bothered by the things about which you raise objections. In fact, others downright like them and think you're perfectly entitled to agree or disagree with their tastes.
Apache is a versatile daemon that can do many different things. There are GUI tools both commercial and open source that can configure an Apache server. Webmin is a free open source tool that can do that among many other things. Apache-GUI is a commercial tool. There are others beyond those two examples. If you are editing the Apache config files with a text editor on the command line it's because you are choosing the method that suits you.
Incidentally a long config file doesn't bother me. Hitting page down a few times is a similar amount of work to me compared to closing the file I'm working on and loading the next one in the text editor. The search function of any decent text editor is how you jump to the section you want instantly. I'll add that most users don't need to tweak every possible option of a complex daemon. Many times, you can use a small config file containing just the options you need. The long-form config files provided by default tend to be configuration examples for reference, with the majority of the content being comments to document them.
A gui could have all those options in a few tabs and a hovering help box if you really wanted.
And if you really want, you can normally use a GUI that ultimately produces the same text config file you could have also made on the command line with a text editor. Most common programs have at least one available; many have several from which to choose. You still retain all the advantages of a human-readable text file that can be easily backed up, can be easily edited if something happens to your GUI or it is unavailable (i.e. an SSH session that doesn't have X), can easily be copied to other systems when you need to replicate settings, etc.
Yeah yeah scripting blah blah, multiple setups, how about taking a screenshot of the gui?
If the GUI could accept that screenshot as input and automatically check all the boxes for you, so that the GUI now matches perfectly the contents of the screenshot, that might be useful. Otherwise you're back to doing it manually and you're back to doing it the way you prefer -- CLI or GUI.
Use whichever one floats your boat. Really. I won't try to stop you. I don't need to feel secure about myself by converting you to my way of doing things. That's why I don't need to pretend like my way is
This has nothing to do with male pattern baldness despite the grand title. It only allows showed the hair loss specifically related to stress to be reversed -- which actually can also happen on its own if you remove the stressor(s) that are causing it to occur.
So this is yet another way we can try to get more comfortable with highly stressful, burn-out lifestyles instead of questioning whether the destruction of our quality of life is providing anything worthwhile? Awesome.
I have a better idea, let's turn anything into a political discussion for no reason!
Oh wait, that's right, we only say that when it's not a socialist who's turning something political.
I notice that the American brand of leftism (which is a type of ends-justify-the-means authoritarianism the way they want to manifest it) is very, very good at presenting itself as a mainstream representation of what the plurality of people want. It likes to portrays itself as "the" default position, with every other idea being a minority who dissents. The fact that most mainstream media personnel are sympathetic to it (Fox being a notable exception) helps make this seem plausible without a doubt. The truth is that even if you consider the false dichotomy of "left vs. right" to be valid, it's more like 50/50 in terms of representation of the general population. Not that this does us any good, however. That neatly lends itself to divide-and-conquer strategies which are used because they work, while everyone seems to downplay the fact that individuality and personal liberty is on the decline.
Sometimes I can almost envy those who desire more government power, more micromanagement of daily life, more authoritarianism, more pointless overseas conflicts, and more double standards when it comes to corporate rights versus individual liberties. I don't really envy them and in fact I consider them to be something like Soviet-style brainwashed (inflict or allow a trauma and then implant a suggestion, find a crisis and rush to solve it, problem reaction solution, thesis antithesis synthesis for those who are learned)... but at least they get to watch the news and feel like they are getting what they want. I really wonder what that feels like.
Remember Mirapex? It was a drug that stopped you from getting the "crazy legs" at night (technical name: Restless Leg Syndrome). Only problem was it also turned off all self control, and some recipients ended up with total gambling addictions.
Now, I'm no doctor. I'm just a person with sense. Here's a fact: there were no reported cases of "restless leg syndrome" until after the commercials for it started airing. None whatsoever. After the commercials started to air there were suddenly lots of reported cases. What you are seeing there is the power of marketing and the impressiveness of official-looking actors wearing lab coats who pretend to be doctors.
See the way it's supposed to work is that people notice a health problem and the doctors and pharmaceutical companies come up with a treatment/cure for that problem in response. It works in reverse too, unfortunately. The holy grail of marketing is to sell you the solution to a problem you didn't even know you had. What, you think this suddenly stops being the truth because the marketers happen to work for a drug company? Simply put, there is one serious drawback to all pharmaceutical companies: they cannot make money from healthy people.
That this drug caused real harm to people in order to treat a phony condition is just monstrous. Of course no one will be prosecuted for it. If that did happen, the rest would buy some laws to make sure it didn't happen again. If you think the RIAA/MPAA can lobby Congress it's because you have no idea what the pharmaceutical companies can afford to do.
It reminds me of the ADD epidemic among children. We'd rather drug up the children since they have little ability to resist that or make a case against it, certainly nothing like the well-articulated school bureaucracy. That's easier for us than taking a hard look at the psychologically hostile environments of most public schools and asking whether the escapism of inattention or other behavioral problems might be a natural response to it, especially among bright/gifted kids who can add extreme boredom to the mix. In the more unpleasant corporate environments where everyone has to be phony, really speaking your mind could get you fired, and the sociopaths rise to the top, you see the adult form of the same condition.
No one seems to want to address hard questions like "why didn't previous generations have so many of these problems?" That wouldn't be as profitable as a designer disease. You know that the very idea of directly advertising prescription-only drugs to the general public to create demand contradicts the way interaction with your doctor is supposed to work. You're supposed to go to your doctor and tell him that something is a problem for you; the doctor then makes a diagnosis and uses the diagnosis to determine the best method of treatment which may or may not involve taking a drug. The direct drug advertising is an attempt to circumvent this process, to undermine the crucial role of a good diagnosis by a qualified physician.
Just as the military-industrial complex needs new wars to sustain its profits, the medical-pharmaceutical complex needs new diseases. I don't dispute for a moment that the tanks and fighter jets produced by the military-industrial complex function as designed. Likewise I don't dispute that the pharmaceuticals function as designed. What I am talking about is whether they are being used wisely out of genuine need or whether the perceived need is coming from those who stand to profit from it.
So you'd be happy leaving old people that hadn't figured this out to starve and rot in the streets?
You say that as though there were no such thing as family members, welfare, churches, and private charities. My parents supported me when I was unable to support myself (due to being a child). You think I wouldn't do the same for them if they needed me, why, because it might not always be easy or convenient? I bet the sacrifices they made for me weren't always easy or convenient. You think I never donate to charity so that people who really need it might be helped? Where did you get those ideas about me? Certainly you didn't hear them from me. Near as I can tell, you made them up on the spot and you see nothing wrong with that because you don't like what I said and apparently that's all the justification you need. How nice.
The difference is that all those things I mentioned are voluntary. I don't need a tax collector to threaten me with force to make me do these things. That is truly for selfish people.
The other difference is I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and get personally involved. I don't passively wait for a faceless government bureaucracy to do it for me. What's the excuse of those who do?
Because it turns out that a lot of people are stupid, and a lot of people don't prepare.
And where did they get the notion that stupidity won't be painful, that it doesn't matter whether you prepare, that stupidity and a refusal to learn the fable of the ant and the grasshopper would never have any negative consequences?
People are that way because we work so hard to encourage it and make it comfortable. It's hard to imagine a greater ultimate disservice. You can add deception to that too, making it doubly worse, because on the surface it looks so good and noble and compassionate. The people who are enabling that kind of stupidity get to pat themselves on the back and feel good about doing it while flinging mud at anyone who values personal responsibility. That's the really sick part.
It's sort of like what happens when a parent spoils a child from an early age. They get to think they are being a great parent, working hard to give their kid everything he wants. What they're really doing is raising someone who is unprepared to be an adult and will likely be selfish, petty, immature, and think he's entitled to take from others just because he wants something. Parents like this are usually shocked and appalled when their children don't respect them, as though that were not predictable. Apparently to many people it is not predictable even though it's really quite simple.
At some point the child has to grow up and face the consequences of his own decisions, be they good or bad. If you deprive people of that, you end up with a 30-something who never really grew up. It's just government playing the role of surrogate parent, taking over from the people who originally spoiled him.
Because it turns out that a lot of people are stupid, and a lot of people don't prepare. Or they lose it all defending a frivolous lawsuit, of get screwed over by a spouse in a divorce, or see repeated periodic market crashes when their investments mature, or... a million and one other things that leave them needing help.
Yes, sometimes terrible things happen even to people who use foresight and operate in good faith. You'll find though that people who understand delayed gratification, are prudent, live within their means, have good judgment, are not impulsive, and make sound decisions almost never end up in this predicament. For those who do because of sheer bad luck, that's precisely why we have safety nets. The difference is, safety nets are not a lifestyle to encourage. They are not a substitute for the use of foresight and good faith.
I do not fear libertarianism. I revile it as the sick and selfish philosophy it truly is.
No. The next president will be about the same. And the one after. And the one after. *shrug*.
It's not the President that is important. It's the political and financial machinery that puts a candidate into the Presidency that matters.
Compared to that, the President himself is little more than a puppet figurehead, a mouthpiece, a distraction away from the actual exercise of power.
Matthew Parris was talking about television when he said, "...is it dishonest for the presenter to imply that the pundit in the chair is free to offer any opinion, when the truth is that fifty pundits were telephoned, but only the fellow prepared to offer the requisite opinion was invited?"
Presidential politics is like that. The President is free to take any action, but only the fellows prepared to offer the requisite actions were given the funding and support that it takes to win an election.
The rest of the western world has more government-provided services, generally has less government intrusion and, interestingly, spends less doing so. All of this is because they don't have a pathological fear of government that forces everything to be done below-board and half-assed.
To put it succinctly, America has the government is citizens deserve.
I'd say a huge part of the difference is that most of the rest of the Western world has a parliamentary system of government. That means minority parties can actually get on the ballot and actually stand a chance of winning an election. It also means there are such things as votes of no confidence that can be used to prematurely remove incompetent leaders. Some also use systems like the single transferrable vote which again helps to provide real choice.
The USA is entirely dominated by a political duopoly. That's as good for politics as a corporate duopoly is good for a marketplace -- not one bit, though the two corporations might disagree. The political duopoly has no real competition because they have raised the barriers to entry for any potential competitor. Even with lots of money, it's extremely difficult to get a third-party candidate on the ballot in the USA. It amazes me that the American public would quickly see what's wrong with a duopoly controlling an important market (when it's about money) and would demand that something be done about it, but cannot extend the same principle to politics (when it's about both money and power, making it even worse). That inability to apply concepts is one of the real "triumphs" of the public school system.
All US federal politics are artificially restricted to what is quite literally one-dimensional thinking; two points and a line covers it all. You have the extreme left at one point and the extreme right at another point and a linear spectrum in-between. I am reminded of that saying by Einstein: "the world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them". One-dimensional thought recognizing only two cookie-cutter solutions to every conceivable problem is quite a low level. That's why our government really does tend to do things below-board and half-assed in terms of any performance or cost-effectiveness metric, though they do an absolutely fantastic job in terms of expanding and centralizing political power.
Both US parties are authoritarian in nature. The choice they offer is which brand of authoritarianism you like. That's not much of a choice.
No, the Libertarian call is "If you want to get yours, get it. But don't cry about wanting mine because you couldn't be bothered to get yours."
If you are too fucking stupid to save up for retirement and you were too busy spending money to go on vacations or buy a boat to put money aside to retire on, then that's your fucking problem.
Thanks, I tend to be verbose so you saved me a reply to this cookie-cutter stereotype. It reminds me of that saying, "the fear of libertarianism is the terror the mediocre feel at the possibility of being judged on their merits."
I am by no means rich but the math here is very simple. If I start at a young age and put aside a rather small percentage of my income, placing it into interest-bearing accounts, then by the time I reach retirement age I will have a healthy nest-egg. It's called compound interest. I for one can figure out on my own that, barring some fatal accident that prematurely ends my life, I will one day grow old and wish to retire. The time to start preparing for that is right now. I have no idea why that realization is so difficult for so many because it's bleedin' obvious to me.
It would also help if the IRA contribution limits were increased, so nobody is at the mercy of lame 401k's (which is most of them).
I'd be interested in knowing the reason for the contribution limits. I cannot, but if I could afford to put 90% of my income into a 401(k) what's the rationale behind stopping me? Who would be harmed by that?
It's funny how tea partiers take govt money like Mary Rakovich taking Medicare and Joe Miller's wife getting unemployment when he campaigned saying unemployment insurance was unconstitutional
If an idiot is handing out free money, take the money and run. Especially when you know the idiot will have to be back to collect 10x the amount later to make up for the free money they gave out.
It's perfectly fine to point out stupidity while taking advantage of it.
Not if your goal is to reduce the overall amount of stupidity. Not if you're among those who will have to pay the 10x collection, much of which will happen in the form of inflation (the most regressive tax of them all).
Do we need to cut anything? Think hard about where money comes from - under the fractional reserve system, banks can multiply deposits by 10. Why shouldn't govt do the same?
They are doing that. It's called inflation and it's the biggest hidden tax of them all. For those who consider this a top priority, it's also an incredibly regressive tax. That's because most wealthy people have their money tied up in appreciating assets that scale with inflation. Most everyone else has their money in bank accounts. It's hard to live within your means, slowly build wealth, and move up when the money you are saving is constantly devalued. It's one of many forces that help to limit upward mobility and ensure that those who work hard and are not currently wealthy are unlikely to become wealthy.
The economic problem is not the central problem of mankind. The advance of knowledge and innovation is. How can we encourage the natural curiosity and sense of wonder that leads to creative solutions? The mentality of "Katie bar the door" is not conducive to invention.
The problem with that is that when a nation starts going bankrupt, the majority population becomes so busy trying to do things like avoid starvation that there remains little time and energy to advance knowledge and invent new things.
What govt should do is provide a basic income (as founding father Tom Paine proposed in 1795's "Agrarian Justice") and stimulate innovation through challenges (of course private businesses such as Google, Netflix etc. can hold challenges too).
If it would work that would be nice. There are a few problems that quickly come to mind and there are likely more than that. One is that this would require a huge investment of trust in the government. Providing a realistic income to every last adult in the nation would require a government even larger and more powerful (legally and economically) than the one we have now. I look at the assholes in power and I see little more than incompetence and insatiable hunger for power. If we are going to put this much more trust in our politicians then we need better politicians.
The other problem is that very large systems based on extremely centralized micromanagement of human behavior tend not to work out. The only reason corporations can pull that off is because they are dictatorships and each member is relatively easy to eliminate and replace. Then consider that the only challenges that would receive funding are those you can get large, bureaucratic committees staffed with politicians to agree with and support. Proposals involving a scientific discipline are exceedingly unlikely to be reviewed and approved by people who actually understand the science. Then you'd still have all the usual problems of cronyism in which the politicians' buddies and supporters have an easier time getting a challenge approved.
In conclusion, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter, Alexander Hamilton held that debt is a blessing, Lincoln printed over $400 million greenbacks, and the Panic of 1837 followed Jackson's paying off the national debt.
Reagan proved that most corporations who are given generous tax breaks would rather give that money to their shareholders than the rank-and-file employees actually performing the work. Hamilton was a supporter of centralized banks and fiat currency and debt is an integral and unavoidable component of that arrangement. Lincoln's greenbacks were interest-free currency because Lincoln was wise enough to foresee the inevitable collapse of a system in which money has interest attached at the moment it is created, namely because there is never enough money in circulation to pay back the debt.
The Panice of 1837 wasn't caused by Jackson paying off the national debt. The Panic was caused by drastic inflation that happened over a length of time that was followed by sudden intense defla
An investment firm is hiring mathematicians. After the first round of interviews, three hopeful recent graduates - a pure mathematician, an applied mathematician, and a graduate in mathematical finance - are asked what starting salary they are expecting. The pure mathematician: "Would $30,000 be too much?" The applied mathematician: "I think $60,000 would be OK." The math finance person: "What about $300,000?" The personnel officer is flabberghasted: "Do you know that we have a graduate in pure mathematics who is willing to do the same work for a tenth of what you are demanding!?" "Well, I thought of $135,000 for me, $135,000 for you - and $30,000 for the pure mathematician who will do the work."
Same principle applies here, I suppose.
It's staggering to consider how accurate that really is. It's rare for a compact post to contain so much real-world truth. This neatly explains much of both government and large corporations.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
It's something of a myth that government is incompetent or can't get a job done well. It's just that their priorities are quite different from ours. Those first two programs you mention are very good at accomplishing their primary purpose which is to buy votes. They fail miserably at other things such as solvency but that's no concern to the politicians as long as the primary purpose fulfilled.
Retirees tend to vote, consistently, and in very large homogeneous blocs. No legislator who wants to be re-elected would dare touch either Medicaid or Social Security no matter how bankrupt they become. Like the majority of retirees, most legislators are old enough and selfish enough that the insurmountable debt they're leaving future generations is of no personal concern to them. They won't be around to see it collapse, they won't have to pick up the pieces and to them that makes it okay. Then there's the scope creep effect. The bigger and more expensive these programs become, the more bureaucracy it takes to manage them. Once that is in place, it will inevitably be declared indispensable.
Social Security wouldn't be difficult to overhaul in any practical sense, even if that's nearly impossible in any political sense. I'd rather the money taken out of my paycheck for Social Security be placed into a fund of some kind, with my name on it, that I own. The fund could be like a 401(k) in which all monies are placed into a "guaranteed fund", or it could be invested into long-term government bonds. Almost everyone could retire as a multimillionaire with such an arrangement even with a modest income. This system wouldn't ever depend on future generations to pay current debts since you own the account and you get out what you put in, plus interest. The only cost to the taxpayers would be the small overhead of managing the accounts, similar to that of private employers who offer IRAs.
Of course that won't happen for another reason. That would make people more independent and less needy of government to take care of them. Politicians really don't like that idea. They need to be needed and fear irrelevancy. If the average retiree were a financially secure multimillionaire they would quickly run out of retirement and health care crises to solve. This has the added undesirable (to the politicians) side effect of limiting the expansion of government, since a crisis is easily the most efficient way to do that. It's certainly easier than convincing everyone that your proposal is a truly sound and sustainable idea in the absence of a crisis.
Defense would be easy to cut. That one is ridiculously simple: stop trying to be the world's police, stick to using military force primarily against nations which launch unprovoked attacks against us, and reduce our weaponry to only 3-5 times the world's second-best military. Note that "using our secret agencies to overthrow their democratically elected leaders and replacing them with dictators who play ball" as we like to do in the Middle East and South America does not count as "unprovoked". If our standing army starts getting bored they can be put to work patrolling the border with Mexico. Cue the brainwashed idiots who think that wanting immigrants to respect our laws is the exact same thing as being anti-immigrant.
As I explained before, liberal means generous, and generosity is a good thing.
It's easy to be generous with someone else's money, isn't it? Forced generosity adminstered by confiscatory taxation isn't generosity at all. Generosity is always voluntary. Perhaps you want to be a modern Robin Hood but you need to call it something else. If you really value generosity so much, persuade those around you to voluntarily help others. Explain to them what enlightened self-interest is all about so they understand that when those around them suffer less, they suffer less. That would be actual generosity.
Economic freedom will not exist without a guaranteed national income, like some European Democratic socialist states have.
The minimum wage is a way to put a floor on income.
Flat out take from the rich and give to the poor. Anything else leads to domination by the ultra wealthy.
The reason the ultra wealthy are so dominant is because money can buy political influence. If they simply owned wealth other people could also build wealth and own it too. They don't. They own wealth and they own the political system. They can give their buddies tax breaks and favorable policies while simultaneously raising the barriers to entry for anyone who would compete.
What I'd like to see is the complete elimination of the ruling class. The most practical way to accomplish that is to give all politicians a very generous allocation of public money with which to run their campaigns. Then expand the definition of treason (which has a death penalty) to include bribery of any public official, with "bribery" considered any gift that has any sort of monetary value. Then you can have more wealth than Bill Gates and it won't help you get someone elected.
The so-called "fair tax" is anything but. It is regressive, meaning that a poor person pays a larger percentage of their income in taxes than a rich person, even though the rich person is obviously getting more for their money.
Why is it that the people who are against the Fair Tax know so little about it? It is simply the most researched piece of legislation in all of history and that's no exaggeration. Simple objections you can make in five minutes have been settled. The Fair Tax includes a monthly tax rebate for all basics such as food. It is designed so that anyone at the poverty level effectively pays zero in taxes.
It also guarantees that the rich pay much more in taxes. Simply put, rich people buy more things than poor people and thus would be paying a lot more of the sales tax.
The only real opposition of the Fair Tax is coming from politicians who stand to lose a tremendous amount of power if it were passed. The income tax gives them the ability to manipulate behavior using carrot-and-stick methods. If they don't want you to do something, it is more heavily taxed. If they want you to do something, they provide tax breaks. There is a good reason a Constitutional amendment had to be passed to allow an income tax at all. It was not because the Founding Fathers never heard of income taxes.
People do not need a contract with the state to love someone. They need a contract to protect their rights. Without such a contract, they will not have inheritance rights, joint property rights, hospital visitation rights, and about 1,000 other rights that come along with marriage.
Really? I can make sure that anyone I want inherits my property after I die. It's called a will. Married or not, if you don't have one it's because you don't care. I can share property with anyone I want. All I have to do is either directly give it to them for most household objects, or put their name on the title/deed for things like real estate and cars. If there is some law stating that I am not allowed to tell a hospital "I want this person to be able to visi
I already have a do-not-track. It's called adblock. It's not perfect and it isn't a certainty that I can't be tracked by advertisers and others (in fact, it's a certainty that I can be, I'm sure). At least I can avoid ads and a significant portion of tracking, though.
Adblock is a really good partial solution. Not only does it make you more difficult to track (since much of that is done by ad networks) but it also speeds up browsing and removes the more obnoxious ads. What you said makes me think of this line from the summary:
The previous solution was for users to opt-out via a link to a central opt-out page referenced in each participating news site's privacy policy.
That's the previous non-solution. Implicit in this idea is the notion that we're completely at the mercy of the sites doing the tracking, that the only way to disable the tracking is with their consent and active participation. That's simply false and its falsehood is not difficult to demonstrate.
I prefer a combination of Adblock, Noscript, BetterPrivacy, RequestPolicy, RefControl, CS Lite and a comprehensive/etc/hosts file (concatenated and uniq'ed from several available for download). I have no problem with a given site knowing that my IP address visited it at a certain time. That's like the convenience store clerk who sees me walk into his store. The rest is none of their business and is more like the convenience store clerk hiring someone to follow me around and record every store I visit.
I do not recognize anyone's entitlement to do that and I refuse to participate. That's all it really takes. I am unconcerned with whether the sites in question like that or wish to help that or want to resist that. I'm not giving them a choice in the matter.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Seriously, liberal and homosexual are good things.
What is now called "classical liberalism" i.e. something a lot like libertarianism is a great thing. It's one of the few ideologies that doesn't make the gigantic mistake of drawing an artificial distinction between personal freedom and economic freedom. The result of that false distinction is that anyone with a realistic chance of winning an election is going to restrict freedom of some kind.
Unless you're really worried about population then homosexuality isn't some inherently virtuous affair, no more than heterosexuality. I personally consider what consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes to be none of my business and by extension, none of the state's business. I am not striving to make homosexuals approve of my heterosexuality. If it disgusts them, I am indifferent to that and believe their are entitled to their opinion, wasted effort though it may be.
Likewise, any concern any of them have about whether heterosexuals approve of their homosexuality is useless and a complete waste of effort. The only thing that matters is that government doesn't invade the privacy of our homes and tell us what we are and aren't allowed to do there. Far as marriage goes, I can't say there's any really good reason why the state is involved in it at all, for either heteros or homos.
I'd rather marriage be a personal and/or religious affair. A sane tax code, i.e. getting rid of all income taxes and replacing them with sales taxes would make that much more clear (c.f. Fair Tax Act). You can share ownership of property with someone whether or not you're married to them; for example multiple names can be on the deed to a home or the title of a car or the owner of a bank account. All of the couples who currently co-habitate but are not officially married understand this. So what's the overriding reason why anyone requires a legal contract with the state government in order to love someone? None, unless you accept "that's the way we've always done it" as a solid reason. Would not the recognition of that and a respect for the freedom of adults eliminate all the phoney controversies about gay marriage?
Actually, shocking as it may seem, virtually all U.S. Federal Judges (and indeed, the vast majority of U.S. judges generally), were once lawyers, "fighting on one side of a case."
Most lawyers have never been lobbyists. This judge was a lobbyist employed by the RIAA. You see, the issue here is that she was recently a lobbyist. Not that she is a lawyer.
I just told you what you could have learned on your own with a little reading comprehension. The information necessary to determine that your post is a waste is contained in the SUMMARY. Fuck man, it's contained in the headline and in the titlebar of your browser. You remind me of the people who have no comprehension of the issues and no understanding of civics who for some reason still insist on voting.
The only real question is whether you are really that clumsy and careless or whether you have some kind of pro-RIAA bias yourself, some kind of sympathy for their cause that makes you want to whitewash the whole affair.
Lots of judges who hear criminal cases in the U.S. were once prosecutors or defense lawyers. Should they be excluded because of potential bias?
No. The purpose of a defense lawyer is to ensure that the accused receives a fair trial, even if the accused is guilty. As an officer of the court a lawyer is expected to do this job professionally, whoever their client may be. Even scoundrels who are guilty as sin deserve a fair trial. That is how the system is supposed to work. Defense attorneys are an important part of making this happen. It is a higher ideal than whether they happen to like the client personally. It is based on principle, not fleeting sentiment.
Should a judge who once made a career as a plaintiff's attorney in medical malpractice suits be barred from hearing cases in that arena?
If they spent years lobbying Congress on behalf of that plaintiff, and were well-compensated for it, then yes the judge should recuse herself from the next medical malpractice case involving that same plaintiff. Not all medical malpractice cases, but the ones involving that particular plaintiff. That's because in this case, the judge's bias is known and has a demonstrable history. It is not hearsay or supposition.
This judge has ties to the RIAA. This is demonstrable history. Unlike legal representation, no one is entitled to lobbyists. The state does not pay for a lobbyist if you are unable to afford one of your own, like the state would pay for a public defender. This judge would have had to favor the RIAA or else she'd have refused to be their marketer before Congress. There is no higher ideal that would motivate someone to lobby.
A judge with any integrity wouldn't want there to be even the question of bias. This case involves the very same organization for whom she lobbied Congress. Not a different organization with the same vague type of "case in that arena" (your attempt to muddy the waters has failed). The exact same one. If it were entirely up to me, this judge would be impeached and a new trial would take place. I take the prospect of overwhelming state power being used against citizens that seriously. If it needs to be done, it needs to be done correctly with no obvious questions of bias.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, nailed it in one!
I didn't come up with anything there. I merely observed what is true knowing that it is not true merely because I say so.
Yet, you are among the minority who really understand what I'm talking about. Bless you for that.
Someone else already pointed out that dmix has been enabled by default in ALSA for at least six years now. It was available prior to that.
I have no problems with ALSA and multiple users. If I play three different mp3s from three different user accounts, all three mp3s play at the same time. Not really the best way to hear a song but the point is that it works and works automatically. There is no need and no reason to mute audio from anyone just because someone else is also using it. Needlessly muting users just for the privilege of having your sound go through a redundant layer of software is what I would call "completely broken behavior".
My experience with Pulseaudio on a friend's system is where I have had problems with multiple users. On a Fedora (Fedora 14) box Pulseaudio is the default sound system. For security reasons we set up a separate, restricted user account for Wine. Wine in its separate account had no audio capability whatsoever even though his normal account did. Since I have never personally used Pulseaudio this is where I discovered that unlike most daemons, it does not run system-wide. Each user must run their own instance of it.
His main user had Pulseaudio start up automatically upon login. The user account we created for Wine enjoyed no such privilege. I added a little line in his .bashrc file for that user to start the daemon. Trivial for me, but then I've been using Linux since the mid 1990s. This is something that would be a problem for users new to Linux. Even after that, we still occasionally need to kill off and re-run the daemon for no apparent reason. Incidentally, running "winecfg" and clicking the "Audio" tab revealed that Pulseaudio was the only option. You could not even change it to ALSA.
I could build a customized Wine from source to get around that, after first installing GCC etc. Again this isn't something new users are likely to tackle. It's even less likely that a Linux newbie is going to understand that they need to manually update anything they install outside the package manager.
Honestly I've had more problems with Pulseaudio in the last six months than I have ever experienced during 14+ years of using OSS and ALSA. That's really quite a feat considering I have never personally run Pulseaudio on my own computers. I can see no defensible reason why these useless, redundant, problem-causing sound daemons are defaults on binary distros, particularly those aimed at new users. I could understand a checkbox during installation stating something like "if you really need to play sound over a network, or (insert feature here that Pulseaudio can do that ALSA cannot), check this box" that is unchecked by default. But that's not the case.
Unfortunately the "unwashed masses" exist and they exist in numbers. As proof I submit the fact that marketing and PR are used because they work and are extremely successful at steering a discussion away from the actual merits of a thing. There is nothing elitist about admitting this fact of life. Celebrating it, exploiting it, and using it as an excuse to think you're better than someone else .. now THAT would be elitist.
You're absolutely right that it's about control. The kind of control it's about is simple: many people have tastes, preferences, and viewpoints (even passionate ones) that they only believe are their own. The way it would ideally work is that you determine your own needs based on realistic assessment and the marketers merely make you aware of competing offerings among which you choose based on merit and value. By contrast, the real art of the salesman or the marketer is to sell you something you otherwise would have never bought or believed while convincing you that the whole thing was your own idea. That's what this dubious "craft" is about, what its practitioners are trying to do.
Since this is a pathological state of parasitism where one class exerts emotional and mental control over another for the sake of profit or power, of course people can handle its opposite and have always been able to do so. Its opposite would represent health and a higher degree of freedom. It only seems painful or difficult because the pathology has gone on so long and affected so many.
The ability of people to choose for themselves is the object of control. It's not just those who want unhealthy control over markets and decisions who will do the kicking and screaming. It's also those who have formed an unhealthy dependence on them like the crackhead to the drug dealer and are afraid of the staggering possibilities of freedom and choice. That this is changing is ultimately a good thing, just don't expect change to be painless when the system that is changing is so deeply entrenched. There will be much kicking and screaming, sort of like the RIAA is doing because it refuses to cope with the information age.
Yet it really is changing and that part is frankly overdue. Unfortuntely I don't share your optimism that it's changing because people know better. I want to believe that but any dealing I have with the general public shows me how unplausible this can be. I think it's changing because it was never sustainable to begin with. Its decline and replacement was inevitable.
I think that constantly treating them like they can't, for the last few generations, has not only trained them to be the way they are now but also made everyone believe that this is normal. This is true for things a lot more important than TV. Few people have the individuality and the principles to do whatever they're going to do no matter how insultingly you treat them. For the masses, we tend to get what we expect.
A large population of passive people who hate introspection, do not want to develop refined tastes, and need an industry of marketers to tell them what they want is great if you're a multinational corporation. Then you can treat them as predictable units on a graph and cater to profitable trends, nice and dehumanized, neat and "individual just like everybody else". If you value any kind of intelligence or quality of life, then it isn't so great, not when so many are so artificially helpless and need to have basic things explained to them because they lost their drive and curiosity a long time ago.
I suppose it does when they are suddenly confronted with large amounts of it for the first time. The truth is that life is full of choices and always has been. It's just that many behaviors become so ingrained that we no longer understand they are choices.
I had problems with Pulseaudio breaking mplayer on a clean install of 10.10. Solution was to revert back to ALSA, which I've never had any problems with. Pulseaudio has never worked perfectly for me.
I have never heard a good reason why so many distros use Pulseaudio and other redundant sound daemons instead of straight ALSA. I have had to solve several quirks related to the use of such sound daemons that I have never experienced with ALSA. ALSA just works.
The few users who really need the features offered by something like Pulseaudio and absolutely cannot use straight ALSA are a tiny minority. Why are so many distro defaults geared towards this small minority when it makes everyone else have to put up with strange quirks related to a system that should be rock-freaking-solid? Especially Ubuntu and others that are purportedly aimed at the exact kind of user who just wants things to work. It makes no sense to me.
Personally I use Gentoo because I really like the ability to customize and I like not having to jump through hoops to use any codec I want, any drivers I want, and relatively bleeding-edge software. I also like the features of Hardened Gentoo, some of which do require building from source. On my own system I've never had sound daemons like Pulseaudio installed so I've never had the problems associated with them. But I know several people who just want it to work, are not hobbyists, and don't want to do the amount of tweaking and customization that Gentoo requires. On their systems I have seen stupid sound problems on well-supported hardware that just didn't have to happen. Where is the gigantic advantage that makes this look like a sound decision to the people who choose defaults for distros like Ubuntu?
PowerShell is a substandard imitation of what Unix shells have been providing for decades now
What is substandard about it? It provides pretty much ALL the functionality of Bash. Plus it allows you to do work on objects which means you can script actions on COM objects through it. The only people I see who call it substandard or whatever have usually not ever used it or used it maybe 6 years ago and ignore all the changes made since. Sort of like people who still bash Windows for things that haven't existed since Windows 95.
Actually someone else has began to illuminate its shortcomings so I need not bother replicating what he has already said. Part of the real power of Unix shells comes from a fundamental tenet of the Unix philosophy. Specifically, the rule of modularity. With Unix shells it is quite easy to connect multiple unrelated programs together to perform an overall task with a single command line, even if the programmers never anticipated that specific use scenario.
As I previously said, Microsoft has definitely made progress but they have not yet equalled the power of the Unix shell, let alone surpassed it. I am glad they don't talk so much about innovation anymore. It'd just be insulting to anyone who recognizes the way they are just recently getting around to things that Unix has done for decades. Literally, for decades.
Well of course nobody wants to continue to use a Windows CLI, it IS from the dark ages.
That's quite an understatement.
PowerShell is a substandard imitation of what Unix shells have been providing for decades now, but in terms of Microsoft's offerings at least it represents progress. Now if only they'd stop using primitive throwbacks like drive letters and provide file abstractions for devices then they'd be well on their way towards reimplementing Unix.
This is interesting and unfortunately I know little about it. My question very well may come from my ignorance about this system: does every possible argument to every command also have an icon? If so, how do you display all of them in an intelligible way using finite screen space? Imagine doing this with all the potential functions of, say, iptables or gcc.
Honestly, if you are able to learn proactively and aren't allergic to performing a bit of basic research, you would have no problems using a CLI. I hope this new GUI system matures into something useful and helpful. Yet if they are targeting the users who don't resent learning new things, the people who recognize an obvious connection between a willingness to make an effort and a better experience, they are going to have a small audience.
That's what we call bad design. Bad design can and has severely screwed up GUI interfaces as well. You had to specifically choose NFS because you are no doubt aware that the vast overwhelming majority of text config files do not care about whitespace and would not have this problem. This is an instance of the exception that proves the rule. It actually weakens your case when this is put into perspective.
A CLI won't allow that either -- you'll get an error message when you run the program with a faulty config file.
More cherry-picking that doesn't represent the majority of command-line tools. You have an opinion and I get that. The need to validate it by cherry-picking only those examples that reinforce it is known as confirmation bias. It'd be a lot more intellectually honest to acknowledge that what you have is a mere preference, that others are not bothered by the things about which you raise objections. In fact, others downright like them and think you're perfectly entitled to agree or disagree with their tastes.
Apache is a versatile daemon that can do many different things. There are GUI tools both commercial and open source that can configure an Apache server. Webmin is a free open source tool that can do that among many other things. Apache-GUI is a commercial tool. There are others beyond those two examples. If you are editing the Apache config files with a text editor on the command line it's because you are choosing the method that suits you.
Incidentally a long config file doesn't bother me. Hitting page down a few times is a similar amount of work to me compared to closing the file I'm working on and loading the next one in the text editor. The search function of any decent text editor is how you jump to the section you want instantly. I'll add that most users don't need to tweak every possible option of a complex daemon. Many times, you can use a small config file containing just the options you need. The long-form config files provided by default tend to be configuration examples for reference, with the majority of the content being comments to document them.
And if you really want, you can normally use a GUI that ultimately produces the same text config file you could have also made on the command line with a text editor. Most common programs have at least one available; many have several from which to choose. You still retain all the advantages of a human-readable text file that can be easily backed up, can be easily edited if something happens to your GUI or it is unavailable (i.e. an SSH session that doesn't have X), can easily be copied to other systems when you need to replicate settings, etc.
If the GUI could accept that screenshot as input and automatically check all the boxes for you, so that the GUI now matches perfectly the contents of the screenshot, that might be useful. Otherwise you're back to doing it manually and you're back to doing it the way you prefer -- CLI or GUI.
Use whichever one floats your boat. Really. I won't try to stop you. I don't need to feel secure about myself by converting you to my way of doing things. That's why I don't need to pretend like my way is
This has nothing to do with male pattern baldness despite the grand title. It only allows showed the hair loss specifically related to stress to be reversed -- which actually can also happen on its own if you remove the stressor(s) that are causing it to occur.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stress-and-hair-loss/AN01442
So this is yet another way we can try to get more comfortable with highly stressful, burn-out lifestyles instead of questioning whether the destruction of our quality of life is providing anything worthwhile? Awesome.
I have a better idea, let's turn anything into a political discussion for no reason!
Oh wait, that's right, we only say that when it's not a socialist who's turning something political.
I notice that the American brand of leftism (which is a type of ends-justify-the-means authoritarianism the way they want to manifest it) is very, very good at presenting itself as a mainstream representation of what the plurality of people want. It likes to portrays itself as "the" default position, with every other idea being a minority who dissents. The fact that most mainstream media personnel are sympathetic to it (Fox being a notable exception) helps make this seem plausible without a doubt. The truth is that even if you consider the false dichotomy of "left vs. right" to be valid, it's more like 50/50 in terms of representation of the general population. Not that this does us any good, however. That neatly lends itself to divide-and-conquer strategies which are used because they work, while everyone seems to downplay the fact that individuality and personal liberty is on the decline.
Sometimes I can almost envy those who desire more government power, more micromanagement of daily life, more authoritarianism, more pointless overseas conflicts, and more double standards when it comes to corporate rights versus individual liberties. I don't really envy them and in fact I consider them to be something like Soviet-style brainwashed (inflict or allow a trauma and then implant a suggestion, find a crisis and rush to solve it, problem reaction solution, thesis antithesis synthesis for those who are learned) ... but at least they get to watch the news and feel like they are getting what they want. I really wonder what that feels like.
Remember Mirapex? It was a drug that stopped you from getting the "crazy legs" at night (technical name: Restless Leg Syndrome). Only problem was it also turned off all self control, and some recipients ended up with total gambling addictions.
Now, I'm no doctor. I'm just a person with sense. Here's a fact: there were no reported cases of "restless leg syndrome" until after the commercials for it started airing. None whatsoever. After the commercials started to air there were suddenly lots of reported cases. What you are seeing there is the power of marketing and the impressiveness of official-looking actors wearing lab coats who pretend to be doctors.
See the way it's supposed to work is that people notice a health problem and the doctors and pharmaceutical companies come up with a treatment/cure for that problem in response. It works in reverse too, unfortunately. The holy grail of marketing is to sell you the solution to a problem you didn't even know you had. What, you think this suddenly stops being the truth because the marketers happen to work for a drug company? Simply put, there is one serious drawback to all pharmaceutical companies: they cannot make money from healthy people.
That this drug caused real harm to people in order to treat a phony condition is just monstrous. Of course no one will be prosecuted for it. If that did happen, the rest would buy some laws to make sure it didn't happen again. If you think the RIAA/MPAA can lobby Congress it's because you have no idea what the pharmaceutical companies can afford to do.
It reminds me of the ADD epidemic among children. We'd rather drug up the children since they have little ability to resist that or make a case against it, certainly nothing like the well-articulated school bureaucracy. That's easier for us than taking a hard look at the psychologically hostile environments of most public schools and asking whether the escapism of inattention or other behavioral problems might be a natural response to it, especially among bright/gifted kids who can add extreme boredom to the mix. In the more unpleasant corporate environments where everyone has to be phony, really speaking your mind could get you fired, and the sociopaths rise to the top, you see the adult form of the same condition.
No one seems to want to address hard questions like "why didn't previous generations have so many of these problems?" That wouldn't be as profitable as a designer disease. You know that the very idea of directly advertising prescription-only drugs to the general public to create demand contradicts the way interaction with your doctor is supposed to work. You're supposed to go to your doctor and tell him that something is a problem for you; the doctor then makes a diagnosis and uses the diagnosis to determine the best method of treatment which may or may not involve taking a drug. The direct drug advertising is an attempt to circumvent this process, to undermine the crucial role of a good diagnosis by a qualified physician.
Just as the military-industrial complex needs new wars to sustain its profits, the medical-pharmaceutical complex needs new diseases. I don't dispute for a moment that the tanks and fighter jets produced by the military-industrial complex function as designed. Likewise I don't dispute that the pharmaceuticals function as designed. What I am talking about is whether they are being used wisely out of genuine need or whether the perceived need is coming from those who stand to profit from it.
You say that as though there were no such thing as family members, welfare, churches, and private charities. My parents supported me when I was unable to support myself (due to being a child). You think I wouldn't do the same for them if they needed me, why, because it might not always be easy or convenient? I bet the sacrifices they made for me weren't always easy or convenient. You think I never donate to charity so that people who really need it might be helped? Where did you get those ideas about me? Certainly you didn't hear them from me. Near as I can tell, you made them up on the spot and you see nothing wrong with that because you don't like what I said and apparently that's all the justification you need. How nice.
The difference is that all those things I mentioned are voluntary. I don't need a tax collector to threaten me with force to make me do these things. That is truly for selfish people.
The other difference is I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and get personally involved. I don't passively wait for a faceless government bureaucracy to do it for me. What's the excuse of those who do?
And where did they get the notion that stupidity won't be painful, that it doesn't matter whether you prepare, that stupidity and a refusal to learn the fable of the ant and the grasshopper would never have any negative consequences?
People are that way because we work so hard to encourage it and make it comfortable. It's hard to imagine a greater ultimate disservice. You can add deception to that too, making it doubly worse, because on the surface it looks so good and noble and compassionate. The people who are enabling that kind of stupidity get to pat themselves on the back and feel good about doing it while flinging mud at anyone who values personal responsibility. That's the really sick part.
It's sort of like what happens when a parent spoils a child from an early age. They get to think they are being a great parent, working hard to give their kid everything he wants. What they're really doing is raising someone who is unprepared to be an adult and will likely be selfish, petty, immature, and think he's entitled to take from others just because he wants something. Parents like this are usually shocked and appalled when their children don't respect them, as though that were not predictable. Apparently to many people it is not predictable even though it's really quite simple.
At some point the child has to grow up and face the consequences of his own decisions, be they good or bad. If you deprive people of that, you end up with a 30-something who never really grew up. It's just government playing the role of surrogate parent, taking over from the people who originally spoiled him.
Yes, sometimes terrible things happen even to people who use foresight and operate in good faith. You'll find though that people who understand delayed gratification, are prudent, live within their means, have good judgment, are not impulsive, and make sound decisions almost never end up in this predicament. For those who do because of sheer bad luck, that's precisely why we have safety nets. The difference is, safety nets are not a lifestyle to encourage. They are not a substitute for the use of foresight and good faith.
It's not the President that is important. It's the political and financial machinery that puts a candidate into the Presidency that matters.
Compared to that, the President himself is little more than a puppet figurehead, a mouthpiece, a distraction away from the actual exercise of power.
Matthew Parris was talking about television when he said, "...is it dishonest for the presenter to imply that the pundit in the chair is free to offer any opinion, when the truth is that fifty pundits were telephoned, but only the fellow prepared to offer the requisite opinion was invited?"
Presidential politics is like that. The President is free to take any action, but only the fellows prepared to offer the requisite actions were given the funding and support that it takes to win an election.
The rest of the western world has more government-provided services, generally has less government intrusion and, interestingly, spends less doing so. All of this is because they don't have a pathological fear of government that forces everything to be done below-board and half-assed.
To put it succinctly, America has the government is citizens deserve.
I'd say a huge part of the difference is that most of the rest of the Western world has a parliamentary system of government. That means minority parties can actually get on the ballot and actually stand a chance of winning an election. It also means there are such things as votes of no confidence that can be used to prematurely remove incompetent leaders. Some also use systems like the single transferrable vote which again helps to provide real choice.
The USA is entirely dominated by a political duopoly. That's as good for politics as a corporate duopoly is good for a marketplace -- not one bit, though the two corporations might disagree. The political duopoly has no real competition because they have raised the barriers to entry for any potential competitor. Even with lots of money, it's extremely difficult to get a third-party candidate on the ballot in the USA. It amazes me that the American public would quickly see what's wrong with a duopoly controlling an important market (when it's about money) and would demand that something be done about it, but cannot extend the same principle to politics (when it's about both money and power, making it even worse). That inability to apply concepts is one of the real "triumphs" of the public school system.
All US federal politics are artificially restricted to what is quite literally one-dimensional thinking; two points and a line covers it all. You have the extreme left at one point and the extreme right at another point and a linear spectrum in-between. I am reminded of that saying by Einstein: "the world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them". One-dimensional thought recognizing only two cookie-cutter solutions to every conceivable problem is quite a low level. That's why our government really does tend to do things below-board and half-assed in terms of any performance or cost-effectiveness metric, though they do an absolutely fantastic job in terms of expanding and centralizing political power.
Both US parties are authoritarian in nature. The choice they offer is which brand of authoritarianism you like. That's not much of a choice.
No, the Libertarian call is "If you want to get yours, get it. But don't cry about wanting mine because you couldn't be bothered to get yours."
If you are too fucking stupid to save up for retirement and you were too busy spending money to go on vacations or buy a boat to put money aside to retire on, then that's your fucking problem.
Thanks, I tend to be verbose so you saved me a reply to this cookie-cutter stereotype. It reminds me of that saying, "the fear of libertarianism is the terror the mediocre feel at the possibility of being judged on their merits."
I am by no means rich but the math here is very simple. If I start at a young age and put aside a rather small percentage of my income, placing it into interest-bearing accounts, then by the time I reach retirement age I will have a healthy nest-egg. It's called compound interest. I for one can figure out on my own that, barring some fatal accident that prematurely ends my life, I will one day grow old and wish to retire. The time to start preparing for that is right now. I have no idea why that realization is so difficult for so many because it's bleedin' obvious to me.
I'd be interested in knowing the reason for the contribution limits. I cannot, but if I could afford to put 90% of my income into a 401(k) what's the rationale behind stopping me? Who would be harmed by that?
It's funny how tea partiers take govt money like Mary Rakovich taking Medicare and Joe Miller's wife getting unemployment when he campaigned saying unemployment insurance was unconstitutional
If an idiot is handing out free money, take the money and run. Especially when you know the idiot will have to be back to collect 10x the amount later to make up for the free money they gave out.
It's perfectly fine to point out stupidity while taking advantage of it.
Not if your goal is to reduce the overall amount of stupidity. Not if you're among those who will have to pay the 10x collection, much of which will happen in the form of inflation (the most regressive tax of them all).
They are doing that. It's called inflation and it's the biggest hidden tax of them all. For those who consider this a top priority, it's also an incredibly regressive tax. That's because most wealthy people have their money tied up in appreciating assets that scale with inflation. Most everyone else has their money in bank accounts. It's hard to live within your means, slowly build wealth, and move up when the money you are saving is constantly devalued. It's one of many forces that help to limit upward mobility and ensure that those who work hard and are not currently wealthy are unlikely to become wealthy.
The problem with that is that when a nation starts going bankrupt, the majority population becomes so busy trying to do things like avoid starvation that there remains little time and energy to advance knowledge and invent new things.
If it would work that would be nice. There are a few problems that quickly come to mind and there are likely more than that. One is that this would require a huge investment of trust in the government. Providing a realistic income to every last adult in the nation would require a government even larger and more powerful (legally and economically) than the one we have now. I look at the assholes in power and I see little more than incompetence and insatiable hunger for power. If we are going to put this much more trust in our politicians then we need better politicians.
The other problem is that very large systems based on extremely centralized micromanagement of human behavior tend not to work out. The only reason corporations can pull that off is because they are dictatorships and each member is relatively easy to eliminate and replace. Then consider that the only challenges that would receive funding are those you can get large, bureaucratic committees staffed with politicians to agree with and support. Proposals involving a scientific discipline are exceedingly unlikely to be reviewed and approved by people who actually understand the science. Then you'd still have all the usual problems of cronyism in which the politicians' buddies and supporters have an easier time getting a challenge approved.
Reagan proved that most corporations who are given generous tax breaks would rather give that money to their shareholders than the rank-and-file employees actually performing the work. Hamilton was a supporter of centralized banks and fiat currency and debt is an integral and unavoidable component of that arrangement. Lincoln's greenbacks were interest-free currency because Lincoln was wise enough to foresee the inevitable collapse of a system in which money has interest attached at the moment it is created, namely because there is never enough money in circulation to pay back the debt.
The Panice of 1837 wasn't caused by Jackson paying off the national debt. The Panic was caused by drastic inflation that happened over a length of time that was followed by sudden intense defla
An investment firm is hiring mathematicians. After the first round of interviews, three hopeful recent graduates - a pure mathematician, an applied mathematician, and a graduate in mathematical finance - are asked what starting salary they are expecting.
The pure mathematician: "Would $30,000 be too much?"
The applied mathematician: "I think $60,000 would be OK."
The math finance person: "What about $300,000?"
The personnel officer is flabberghasted: "Do you know that we have a graduate in pure mathematics who is willing to do the same work for a tenth of what you are demanding!?"
"Well, I thought of $135,000 for me, $135,000 for you - and $30,000 for the pure mathematician who will do the work."
Same principle applies here, I suppose.
It's staggering to consider how accurate that really is. It's rare for a compact post to contain so much real-world truth. This neatly explains much of both government and large corporations.
Well done, sir!
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
It's something of a myth that government is incompetent or can't get a job done well. It's just that their priorities are quite different from ours. Those first two programs you mention are very good at accomplishing their primary purpose which is to buy votes. They fail miserably at other things such as solvency but that's no concern to the politicians as long as the primary purpose fulfilled.
Retirees tend to vote, consistently, and in very large homogeneous blocs. No legislator who wants to be re-elected would dare touch either Medicaid or Social Security no matter how bankrupt they become. Like the majority of retirees, most legislators are old enough and selfish enough that the insurmountable debt they're leaving future generations is of no personal concern to them. They won't be around to see it collapse, they won't have to pick up the pieces and to them that makes it okay. Then there's the scope creep effect. The bigger and more expensive these programs become, the more bureaucracy it takes to manage them. Once that is in place, it will inevitably be declared indispensable.
Social Security wouldn't be difficult to overhaul in any practical sense, even if that's nearly impossible in any political sense. I'd rather the money taken out of my paycheck for Social Security be placed into a fund of some kind, with my name on it, that I own. The fund could be like a 401(k) in which all monies are placed into a "guaranteed fund", or it could be invested into long-term government bonds. Almost everyone could retire as a multimillionaire with such an arrangement even with a modest income. This system wouldn't ever depend on future generations to pay current debts since you own the account and you get out what you put in, plus interest. The only cost to the taxpayers would be the small overhead of managing the accounts, similar to that of private employers who offer IRAs.
Of course that won't happen for another reason. That would make people more independent and less needy of government to take care of them. Politicians really don't like that idea. They need to be needed and fear irrelevancy. If the average retiree were a financially secure multimillionaire they would quickly run out of retirement and health care crises to solve. This has the added undesirable (to the politicians) side effect of limiting the expansion of government, since a crisis is easily the most efficient way to do that. It's certainly easier than convincing everyone that your proposal is a truly sound and sustainable idea in the absence of a crisis.
Defense would be easy to cut. That one is ridiculously simple: stop trying to be the world's police, stick to using military force primarily against nations which launch unprovoked attacks against us, and reduce our weaponry to only 3-5 times the world's second-best military. Note that "using our secret agencies to overthrow their democratically elected leaders and replacing them with dictators who play ball" as we like to do in the Middle East and South America does not count as "unprovoked". If our standing army starts getting bored they can be put to work patrolling the border with Mexico. Cue the brainwashed idiots who think that wanting immigrants to respect our laws is the exact same thing as being anti-immigrant.
It's easy to be generous with someone else's money, isn't it? Forced generosity adminstered by confiscatory taxation isn't generosity at all. Generosity is always voluntary. Perhaps you want to be a modern Robin Hood but you need to call it something else. If you really value generosity so much, persuade those around you to voluntarily help others. Explain to them what enlightened self-interest is all about so they understand that when those around them suffer less, they suffer less. That would be actual generosity.
The minimum wage is a way to put a floor on income.
The reason the ultra wealthy are so dominant is because money can buy political influence. If they simply owned wealth other people could also build wealth and own it too. They don't. They own wealth and they own the political system. They can give their buddies tax breaks and favorable policies while simultaneously raising the barriers to entry for anyone who would compete.
What I'd like to see is the complete elimination of the ruling class. The most practical way to accomplish that is to give all politicians a very generous allocation of public money with which to run their campaigns. Then expand the definition of treason (which has a death penalty) to include bribery of any public official, with "bribery" considered any gift that has any sort of monetary value. Then you can have more wealth than Bill Gates and it won't help you get someone elected.
Why is it that the people who are against the Fair Tax know so little about it? It is simply the most researched piece of legislation in all of history and that's no exaggeration. Simple objections you can make in five minutes have been settled. The Fair Tax includes a monthly tax rebate for all basics such as food. It is designed so that anyone at the poverty level effectively pays zero in taxes.
It also guarantees that the rich pay much more in taxes. Simply put, rich people buy more things than poor people and thus would be paying a lot more of the sales tax.
The only real opposition of the Fair Tax is coming from politicians who stand to lose a tremendous amount of power if it were passed. The income tax gives them the ability to manipulate behavior using carrot-and-stick methods. If they don't want you to do something, it is more heavily taxed. If they want you to do something, they provide tax breaks. There is a good reason a Constitutional amendment had to be passed to allow an income tax at all. It was not because the Founding Fathers never heard of income taxes.
Really? I can make sure that anyone I want inherits my property after I die. It's called a will. Married or not, if you don't have one it's because you don't care. I can share property with anyone I want. All I have to do is either directly give it to them for most household objects, or put their name on the title/deed for things like real estate and cars. If there is some law stating that I am not allowed to tell a hospital "I want this person to be able to visi
I already have a do-not-track. It's called adblock. It's not perfect and it isn't a certainty that I can't be tracked by advertisers and others (in fact, it's a certainty that I can be, I'm sure). At least I can avoid ads and a significant portion of tracking, though.
Adblock is a really good partial solution. Not only does it make you more difficult to track (since much of that is done by ad networks) but it also speeds up browsing and removes the more obnoxious ads. What you said makes me think of this line from the summary:
That's the previous non-solution. Implicit in this idea is the notion that we're completely at the mercy of the sites doing the tracking, that the only way to disable the tracking is with their consent and active participation. That's simply false and its falsehood is not difficult to demonstrate.
I prefer a combination of Adblock, Noscript, BetterPrivacy, RequestPolicy, RefControl, CS Lite and a comprehensive /etc/hosts file (concatenated and uniq'ed from several available for download). I have no problem with a given site knowing that my IP address visited it at a certain time. That's like the convenience store clerk who sees me walk into his store. The rest is none of their business and is more like the convenience store clerk hiring someone to follow me around and record every store I visit.
I do not recognize anyone's entitlement to do that and I refuse to participate. That's all it really takes. I am unconcerned with whether the sites in question like that or wish to help that or want to resist that. I'm not giving them a choice in the matter.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Seriously, liberal and homosexual are good things.
What is now called "classical liberalism" i.e. something a lot like libertarianism is a great thing. It's one of the few ideologies that doesn't make the gigantic mistake of drawing an artificial distinction between personal freedom and economic freedom. The result of that false distinction is that anyone with a realistic chance of winning an election is going to restrict freedom of some kind.
Unless you're really worried about population then homosexuality isn't some inherently virtuous affair, no more than heterosexuality. I personally consider what consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes to be none of my business and by extension, none of the state's business. I am not striving to make homosexuals approve of my heterosexuality. If it disgusts them, I am indifferent to that and believe their are entitled to their opinion, wasted effort though it may be.
Likewise, any concern any of them have about whether heterosexuals approve of their homosexuality is useless and a complete waste of effort. The only thing that matters is that government doesn't invade the privacy of our homes and tell us what we are and aren't allowed to do there. Far as marriage goes, I can't say there's any really good reason why the state is involved in it at all, for either heteros or homos.
I'd rather marriage be a personal and/or religious affair. A sane tax code, i.e. getting rid of all income taxes and replacing them with sales taxes would make that much more clear (c.f. Fair Tax Act). You can share ownership of property with someone whether or not you're married to them; for example multiple names can be on the deed to a home or the title of a car or the owner of a bank account. All of the couples who currently co-habitate but are not officially married understand this. So what's the overriding reason why anyone requires a legal contract with the state government in order to love someone? None, unless you accept "that's the way we've always done it" as a solid reason. Would not the recognition of that and a respect for the freedom of adults eliminate all the phoney controversies about gay marriage?
Most lawyers have never been lobbyists. This judge was a lobbyist employed by the RIAA. You see, the issue here is that she was recently a lobbyist. Not that she is a lawyer.
I just told you what you could have learned on your own with a little reading comprehension. The information necessary to determine that your post is a waste is contained in the SUMMARY. Fuck man, it's contained in the headline and in the titlebar of your browser. You remind me of the people who have no comprehension of the issues and no understanding of civics who for some reason still insist on voting.
The only real question is whether you are really that clumsy and careless or whether you have some kind of pro-RIAA bias yourself, some kind of sympathy for their cause that makes you want to whitewash the whole affair.
No. The purpose of a defense lawyer is to ensure that the accused receives a fair trial, even if the accused is guilty. As an officer of the court a lawyer is expected to do this job professionally, whoever their client may be. Even scoundrels who are guilty as sin deserve a fair trial. That is how the system is supposed to work. Defense attorneys are an important part of making this happen. It is a higher ideal than whether they happen to like the client personally. It is based on principle, not fleeting sentiment.
If they spent years lobbying Congress on behalf of that plaintiff, and were well-compensated for it, then yes the judge should recuse herself from the next medical malpractice case involving that same plaintiff. Not all medical malpractice cases, but the ones involving that particular plaintiff. That's because in this case, the judge's bias is known and has a demonstrable history. It is not hearsay or supposition.
This judge has ties to the RIAA. This is demonstrable history. Unlike legal representation, no one is entitled to lobbyists. The state does not pay for a lobbyist if you are unable to afford one of your own, like the state would pay for a public defender. This judge would have had to favor the RIAA or else she'd have refused to be their marketer before Congress. There is no higher ideal that would motivate someone to lobby.
A judge with any integrity wouldn't want there to be even the question of bias. This case involves the very same organization for whom she lobbied Congress. Not a different organization with the same vague type of "case in that arena" (your attempt to muddy the waters has failed). The exact same one. If it were entirely up to me, this judge would be impeached and a new trial would take place. I take the prospect of overwhelming state power being used against citizens that seriously. If it needs to be done, it needs to be done correctly with no obvious questions of bias.