The 2 things I remember from KTMA were MST3K and the annual New Years Watermelon Drop, you ever catch that? Positively absurd stuff; I wish I could get those on DVD... sigh.
Kieth Bilderbeck, the composer of Wereworlf (or Arizona Werewolf as it was called in production) is a friend of mine and is quite proud of his contribution.
I have worked on a few shows with Steve Kempster, who, before becoming Trevor Rabin's recording engineer among other more notable credits, recorded the end credit song for Space Mutiny. I once asked him about it and he nearly demanded that I never mention it again.
A few editors I worked with recently on High School Musical 3 had credits as assistants on Alien from LA. At the time they knew it was kindof goofy, but they really appreciated the director's vision and thought it was very Terry Gilliam-esque.
I love this town! It's easy to ridicule these films, and I love MST, but the really interesting stories are from how these films get made in the first place, and the fact that people often pour their hearts into the work, and they themselves may be very talented but other factors simply doom the thing.
Not to defend Golan-Globus of course. The last few Rhino box sets had interviews with actual cast and crew from some of the films on the DVD, and I really treasure these, as it gives me some perspective on my job. It's like a hacker reading about the Tech Model Railroad Club.
But no-one has advocated sterlilisation based on HIV suscpeptibility.
Uh, you said it should be "mandatory," contingent upon availing oneself of a lifesaving treatment. What are you going to do, handcuff people to the bed after the bone marrow transplant, so they don't skip the country before the sterilization? In the end, the choice you present to the afflicted is horrible: die of an fatal disease for which a cure exists, or survive in exchange for giving away a fundamental human right, really the animating human activity. You preach eugenics.
Sterilisation of those who otherwise would have been removed from the gene pool if it wasn't for genetic intervention is a very different thing. That is a measure to reduce our meddling.
And the un-meddling of the meddling, and the un-meddling of the other meddling, ad infinitum. The problem is that "meddling" is an artificial idea, and can be defined by any group to mean whatever they feel is "undesireable" in a "true" or "perfect" or "most optimal" human. No person should have the right to judge an other person's genotype for any reason; the only survivability criterion is survival, period. There is no handicapping for "artificial" "medical advances" or "modern society." Are ants cheating evolution by forming colonies and mutually aiding each other? How do you know that diseases are not stimulating our societies development and survivability by spreading vital knowledge memes, and that by breeding out variances due to some disease threat local in space and time (like HIV), you aren't compromising other factors? You tamper with a great machine.
In the end, the problem is political. Any regime that would force a reproductive choice upon an individual is wrong, no matter what justification or quid pro quo may be involved. It was wrong when states were paying "morons" to be sterilized, and it's still wrong.
The more consensual the organization, the less extreme it gets. Putting aside sterilization, many religions have very specific views about medical care, and no one claims that say, Christian Scientists are forcing their members not to get flu shots-- the children are an interesting case, and it always turns into a huge mess when the state tries to force the child of a CS family to take insulin for diabetes. OTOH, many religions also perform genital mutilations on children such as circumcision, and this is considered quite acceptable, whereas it would be an outrage if state power were involved.
Sterilization is interesting because it is so extreme, and I can't think of any religious groups that prescribe sterilization, but there are many cases where the government will not act while a family member acts for another member that lacks agency, such as children or the mentally unfit. The State shouldn't sterilize the retarded, but should it stop a family from having a retarded family member sterilized? They may have good reasons to their mind, like the retarded family member has been promiscuous and cannot be controlled, and though we all may not understand, who are we to pass judgement on the decisions of this family for on of their kin? There is a line there, and I'm not saying I'm calling it on exactly the right side, but it's a complex problem and you can't just look at it through the lens of foundational government-protected rights like those to life and property and integrity of ones body, because those only really apply to atomized actors in a a body politic, and within institutions like religions and families your "freedoms" are very different.
I regret to say that it appears almost impossible, through casual googling, to give the effective tax rates for anybody previous to 1979. I'd be curious about the effective rate for the highest quintile (which is >= about $300,000 nowadays) historically.
What you're saying, it sounds like, is that we should tell people who just lost their homes to fires that they shouldn't worry about buying a *new* house because houses never burn down
What I'm saying is we should tell people to go ahead and buy new houses because this time we're committed to properly funding the fire department and we've arrested all the actuaries who were claiming houses never go on fire and selling insurance on that basis.
You sure forced sterilization, particularly by the State, isn't extreme? The thing about natural selection is just that, it's natural; our genotype is able to maximize survival criterion quite well without our rather blunt meddeling. If you're sterilizing HIV suceptibles, why not people with Down's syndrome, or sickle-cell anemia? These also are diseases that cost society; it's very difficult to justify your proposal in principle without justifying a host of other sterilization criteria. The whole point of medicine is to maximize quantity and quality of life, not to kick people and genotypes off the boat when they get to be too costly.
I dare say it, but I think all of liberal western politics and culture since WW2 is based on the belief that any person of good will, no matter their frailties, can, may, and will contribute more than any cost they lay upon the rest of us.
The thing is however, he wants to ADD in programs. LOTS of them. One of them being 100 hours towards 4000 credit. That is 40 bucks an hour. Where does THAT money come from? Even if 100k in students take him up on the offer that is 400 million. That is just 1 program.
It's a really bad idea for the government to not spend money during a recession; as I and other have pointed out, Hoover's taxing + austerity during the 1932 recession were a major cause of the Great Depression, along with the dust bowl and other factors. Money from education programs generally comes back as taxes, since you train people to get higher-paying jobs, and thus they make more money, thus more taxes. It's a bit of a wager, but at least its a wager on people's success and prosperity; I'm not saying it always works, either, but there is good justification-- it's not just a system to buy votes from the poor and stupid, despite the arguments of some. The same thing applies to infrastructure projects like bridges, roads, dams. It's a chunk of change but it's a much better way of fostering long-term economic growth than regressive tax cuts.
I know of drug addicts who take their SS check and buy crack with it. Then barter the food stamps for more crack. THIS is what our government allows. These people need real help instead we are giving them money to keep making themselves worse.
If you see someone doing something illegal, like say, purchasing and consuming crack cocaine, you can call the cops, nay, it's your responsibility to call the cops. But I doubt you've actually seen an individual walk out of a SSA office with a check, cash it at a liquor store, and then purchase crack with it. This sort of experience lives only in redstater email listservs. Not saying it doesn't happen, but you might do your argument some service by being a bit more ingenuous.
As brother posters on this thread have pointed out, the real disaster of Hoover was his austerity; the Federal deficit simply isn't as important as getting the economy operating again.
Yes the US $10 trillion, but over the last few months something like $30 trillion in assets has disappeared. The primary issue that must be adressed now is people's faith in investment, that the property they hold in the form of stock and the real estate is as secure in its value as any other appreciating/depreciating asset, and not subject to the vissitudes of manipulators and profiteers.
This is true. And it's also true that there is a three word phrase, extensively used by Democrats over the last few years, which will -vanish- from their vocabularies henceforth.
That phrase is "the Federal deficit".
On what basis do you make that statement? Democrats have been consistent defict hawks for a decade, and have particular credibility since Clinton was able to bring the government into surplus, even given the anemic taxation levels of the 1990s.
That said, it would be a disatser if they made defict reduction a priority before the economy was growing again. So yeah, it'll disappear for a few years, in the way they peopl don't talk about their flu when they've just had their arm cut off.
Try promising improvement and you'll get my attention.
Two years of debates, at least 20 in the primary and three in the general. Unremitting press coverage. Two books, one specifically on Obama's political philosophy, written by the candidate in his own hand. Huge websites with encyclopedic overview of everything the candidate intends to do. This country's (to date) most expensive political television ad compaign, with issue ads, attack ads, 527s, the whole schmear.
I admit I am having trouble finding the "promise of improvement," but then again I can never see the Angeles national forest when I drive through it: there's too many trees on either side of the road and they obscure the view.
The Obama tax plan reaffirms the Bush tax cuts on all but the highest brackets past 2010; the salient change is that the $250k bracket simply returns to where it was when Bush took office: see here. In the end, the total tax rate of the country is still below where it was during the Reagan administration. It's astonishing to think we went through the first decade of expansion this century without collecting any money to pay down our debt; through the 50s, the highest brakcet had a marginal tax rate of over 90%, in order to pay down our war debt, and that was a tax code submitted by a Republican congress and signed by Eisenhower. At the time thus amounted to a huge wealth redistribution since the paper on the war debt was in war bonds, which were universally subscribed, not to mention the costs of the GI Bill and Marshall plan, which educated millions and could also be considered a form of debt repayment or infrastructure invetment.
When Hoover raised taxes in 1932, it caused a complete economic collapse of an already precarious situation.
It didn't help that he wasn't spending much; if we trim up taxation while spending gobs on infrastructure like in 1933. Of course back then, they didn't have $10 trillion in debt.
This is not an uncommon use of a.gov domain. Just look at the Dem and GOP House Caucus sites. The GOP caucus has a nice set of articles on "THE COST OF THE DEMOCRAT CONGRESS" and the Dem site, while not containing any hit pieces, has a lot of advocacy.
Not saying it's appropriate, just there's a precedent for it and it's not beyond any pale of anything.
PHP is "unsurprising" in the sense that it's obsequious; it smiles and agrees when in fact it doesn't understand what you mean. I know it's great when you need to write the drupal plugin (god help you), but I'd never elect to use it over Ruby; it just does too much DWIM.
You actually bring up one of the reasons I stopped using php. One day I was trying to put elements onto an array by assigning items to a particular subscript, and then pop them off as like a queue, but it never seemed to get the right order. Then I recognized that when I was doing $arr[$i] = $item, at some point $i was changing from (integer) a string of "(integer)", and so I was making a hastable of strings -> items instead of an ordered list.
I picked up Ruby and it was a revelation -- these people actually use a different object for dictionaries and arrays! And of course you can insert/remove items without using anything resembling a function syntax.
That's not true; when you break out of loop, you explicitly leave the local scope of the break and return to the scope of the containing block. Break always pops scope, thus it's guaranteed that you'll never jump into the code after a declaration. Goto does not guarantee this behavior, and as a practical matter goto lets you jump into all kinds of nasty places. Every time you add a goto label, you're adding an entry point to your function and making comprehension more difficult.
I guess you can argue the whole "programmers-misusing the-tools" side, but really gotos are quite un-ergonomic. Better to use breaks, and Exceptions in languages that support it. The only time I ever use gotos is in languages where you can't throw an exception.
Slashdot Mirror
We Martians must consider all vehicles a threat, even the incompetent ones...
Beagle 2 - lander - LOC during landing, dead
Mars Climate Orbiter - Orbiter - confused pounds and newtons, lost during aerobraking for Mars orbital insertion.
Some background on Bob Bagadonuts and the KTMA Watermelon Drop for the curious. Good times. I watched MST on KTMA so many times I have ads for Davani's pizza and Brandyderry's burned into my brain.
The 2 things I remember from KTMA were MST3K and the annual New Years Watermelon Drop, you ever catch that? Positively absurd stuff; I wish I could get those on DVD... sigh.
At the time, big things were expected of Albert Pyun...
True stories:
I love this town! It's easy to ridicule these films, and I love MST, but the really interesting stories are from how these films get made in the first place, and the fact that people often pour their hearts into the work, and they themselves may be very talented but other factors simply doom the thing.
Not to defend Golan-Globus of course. The last few Rhino box sets had interviews with actual cast and crew from some of the films on the DVD, and I really treasure these, as it gives me some perspective on my job. It's like a hacker reading about the Tech Model Railroad Club.
Sorry it's OT, just thought I'd share.
I quiver at your touch, Larry Csonka.
sigh. ATDT8005551212,,,,8666666666,,1,,+++ATH
OK
Gotcha.
Uh, you said it should be "mandatory," contingent upon availing oneself of a lifesaving treatment. What are you going to do, handcuff people to the bed after the bone marrow transplant, so they don't skip the country before the sterilization? In the end, the choice you present to the afflicted is horrible: die of an fatal disease for which a cure exists, or survive in exchange for giving away a fundamental human right, really the animating human activity. You preach eugenics.
And the un-meddling of the meddling, and the un-meddling of the other meddling, ad infinitum. The problem is that "meddling" is an artificial idea, and can be defined by any group to mean whatever they feel is "undesireable" in a "true" or "perfect" or "most optimal" human. No person should have the right to judge an other person's genotype for any reason; the only survivability criterion is survival, period. There is no handicapping for "artificial" "medical advances" or "modern society." Are ants cheating evolution by forming colonies and mutually aiding each other? How do you know that diseases are not stimulating our societies development and survivability by spreading vital knowledge memes, and that by breeding out variances due to some disease threat local in space and time (like HIV), you aren't compromising other factors? You tamper with a great machine.
In the end, the problem is political. Any regime that would force a reproductive choice upon an individual is wrong, no matter what justification or quid pro quo may be involved. It was wrong when states were paying "morons" to be sterilized, and it's still wrong.
The more consensual the organization, the less extreme it gets. Putting aside sterilization, many religions have very specific views about medical care, and no one claims that say, Christian Scientists are forcing their members not to get flu shots-- the children are an interesting case, and it always turns into a huge mess when the state tries to force the child of a CS family to take insulin for diabetes. OTOH, many religions also perform genital mutilations on children such as circumcision, and this is considered quite acceptable, whereas it would be an outrage if state power were involved.
Sterilization is interesting because it is so extreme, and I can't think of any religious groups that prescribe sterilization, but there are many cases where the government will not act while a family member acts for another member that lacks agency, such as children or the mentally unfit. The State shouldn't sterilize the retarded, but should it stop a family from having a retarded family member sterilized? They may have good reasons to their mind, like the retarded family member has been promiscuous and cannot be controlled, and though we all may not understand, who are we to pass judgement on the decisions of this family for on of their kin? There is a line there, and I'm not saying I'm calling it on exactly the right side, but it's a complex problem and you can't just look at it through the lens of foundational government-protected rights like those to life and property and integrity of ones body, because those only really apply to atomized actors in a a body politic, and within institutions like religions and families your "freedoms" are very different.
I regret to say that it appears almost impossible, through casual googling, to give the effective tax rates for anybody previous to 1979. I'd be curious about the effective rate for the highest quintile (which is >= about $300,000 nowadays) historically.
What I'm saying is we should tell people to go ahead and buy new houses because this time we're committed to properly funding the fire department and we've arrested all the actuaries who were claiming houses never go on fire and selling insurance on that basis.
You sure forced sterilization, particularly by the State, isn't extreme? The thing about natural selection is just that, it's natural; our genotype is able to maximize survival criterion quite well without our rather blunt meddeling. If you're sterilizing HIV suceptibles, why not people with Down's syndrome, or sickle-cell anemia? These also are diseases that cost society; it's very difficult to justify your proposal in principle without justifying a host of other sterilization criteria. The whole point of medicine is to maximize quantity and quality of life, not to kick people and genotypes off the boat when they get to be too costly.
I dare say it, but I think all of liberal western politics and culture since WW2 is based on the belief that any person of good will, no matter their frailties, can, may, and will contribute more than any cost they lay upon the rest of us.
It's a really bad idea for the government to not spend money during a recession; as I and other have pointed out, Hoover's taxing + austerity during the 1932 recession were a major cause of the Great Depression, along with the dust bowl and other factors. Money from education programs generally comes back as taxes, since you train people to get higher-paying jobs, and thus they make more money, thus more taxes. It's a bit of a wager, but at least its a wager on people's success and prosperity; I'm not saying it always works, either, but there is good justification-- it's not just a system to buy votes from the poor and stupid, despite the arguments of some. The same thing applies to infrastructure projects like bridges, roads, dams. It's a chunk of change but it's a much better way of fostering long-term economic growth than regressive tax cuts.
If you see someone doing something illegal, like say, purchasing and consuming crack cocaine, you can call the cops, nay, it's your responsibility to call the cops. But I doubt you've actually seen an individual walk out of a SSA office with a check, cash it at a liquor store, and then purchase crack with it. This sort of experience lives only in redstater email listservs. Not saying it doesn't happen, but you might do your argument some service by being a bit more ingenuous.
As brother posters on this thread have pointed out, the real disaster of Hoover was his austerity; the Federal deficit simply isn't as important as getting the economy operating again.
Yes the US $10 trillion, but over the last few months something like $30 trillion in assets has disappeared. The primary issue that must be adressed now is people's faith in investment, that the property they hold in the form of stock and the real estate is as secure in its value as any other appreciating/depreciating asset, and not subject to the vissitudes of manipulators and profiteers.
On what basis do you make that statement? Democrats have been consistent defict hawks for a decade, and have particular credibility since Clinton was able to bring the government into surplus, even given the anemic taxation levels of the 1990s.
That said, it would be a disatser if they made defict reduction a priority before the economy was growing again. So yeah, it'll disappear for a few years, in the way they peopl don't talk about their flu when they've just had their arm cut off.
Two years of debates, at least 20 in the primary and three in the general. Unremitting press coverage. Two books, one specifically on Obama's political philosophy, written by the candidate in his own hand. Huge websites with encyclopedic overview of everything the candidate intends to do. This country's (to date) most expensive political television ad compaign, with issue ads, attack ads, 527s, the whole schmear.
I admit I am having trouble finding the "promise of improvement," but then again I can never see the Angeles national forest when I drive through it: there's too many trees on either side of the road and they obscure the view.
The Obama tax plan reaffirms the Bush tax cuts on all but the highest brackets past 2010; the salient change is that the $250k bracket simply returns to where it was when Bush took office: see here. In the end, the total tax rate of the country is still below where it was during the Reagan administration. It's astonishing to think we went through the first decade of expansion this century without collecting any money to pay down our debt; through the 50s, the highest brakcet had a marginal tax rate of over 90%, in order to pay down our war debt, and that was a tax code submitted by a Republican congress and signed by Eisenhower. At the time thus amounted to a huge wealth redistribution since the paper on the war debt was in war bonds, which were universally subscribed, not to mention the costs of the GI Bill and Marshall plan, which educated millions and could also be considered a form of debt repayment or infrastructure invetment.
It didn't help that he wasn't spending much; if we trim up taxation while spending gobs on infrastructure like in 1933. Of course back then, they didn't have $10 trillion in debt.
This is not an uncommon use of a .gov domain. Just look at the Dem and GOP House Caucus sites. The GOP caucus has a nice set of articles on "THE COST OF THE DEMOCRAT CONGRESS" and the Dem site, while not containing any hit pieces, has a lot of advocacy.
Not saying it's appropriate, just there's a precedent for it and it's not beyond any pale of anything.
your post is non-responsive to my argument. None of your points correspond to mine. Your post belongs as a response to GGGP.
PHP is "unsurprising" in the sense that it's obsequious; it smiles and agrees when in fact it doesn't understand what you mean. I know it's great when you need to write the drupal plugin (god help you), but I'd never elect to use it over Ruby; it just does too much DWIM.
Let it also be said, that with Objective-C, a good IDE with message name completion makes the long typing manageable.
You actually bring up one of the reasons I stopped using php. One day I was trying to put elements onto an array by assigning items to a particular subscript, and then pop them off as like a queue, but it never seemed to get the right order. Then I recognized that when I was doing $arr[$i] = $item, at some point $i was changing from (integer) a string of "(integer)", and so I was making a hastable of strings -> items instead of an ordered list.
I picked up Ruby and it was a revelation -- these people actually use a different object for dictionaries and arrays! And of course you can insert/remove items without using anything resembling a function syntax.
If you're doing that, you might as well make it ^_^ or :)
That's not true; when you break out of loop, you explicitly leave the local scope of the break and return to the scope of the containing block. Break always pops scope, thus it's guaranteed that you'll never jump into the code after a declaration. Goto does not guarantee this behavior, and as a practical matter goto lets you jump into all kinds of nasty places. Every time you add a goto label, you're adding an entry point to your function and making comprehension more difficult.
I guess you can argue the whole "programmers-misusing the-tools" side, but really gotos are quite un-ergonomic. Better to use breaks, and Exceptions in languages that support it. The only time I ever use gotos is in languages where you can't throw an exception.