Maybe you need a refresher course on the Separation of Powers.
Way to sound pious without actually answering his very specific, reasonable, and important question. This isn't a separation of powers question, it's a is-FISA-even-about-this question. Arguably, it's not.
but to demand investigations in order to discover the identity of the leaker(s).
And what exactly is your problem with this? You can't honestly say that there should be no such thing as classified information, unless you'd like every poor SOB who's trying to keep on eye on various actually bad guys to be strung up and shot. The classification of intel methods and collected information exists specifically to allow it do what it has to do. If you tell Kim Jong Il what time of day the next high-altitude drone will be overhead which of his slave camps, or CC the lunatic president of Iran on the intel you're sharing with EU security people about his nuclear program... you're pretty much asking for the consequences, including the unpleasant deaths of the people living in those countries and working, with our spooks, to counter the influence/acts of the mullahs or the so-honorable KJI.
Assuming you don't actually refute the need for classified and covert activities on a number of fronts, then how can you complain about tracking down the people who deliberately leak such specific operational information? It sounds like you're more in the "classified is OK, but only on the stuff I think should be classified, and then definitely the administration should be investigating the people who leak it" camp. But that's not what you're saying, and should be. At which point, you should be more clearly spelling out what you think should, and should not be classified when it comes to intercepting a phone call from a known Al Queda-type contact in, say, Lahore, Pakistan to a used-only-once-ever cell phone that was in a batch of fifty or so bought with cash. You know, a cell phone that is untraceable to a person, will never be used again, and can never be part of a FISA warrant scenario by its very nature. Is reminding the guys using those phones that we know when the person in Lahore is dialing a number from that batch of disposable phones something you think should be leaked? Is that constructive, from your perspective?
considering you are porting to the internet, I can only assume you are a hyprocrite
Um... considering you're calling me a hypocrite, I can only assume you're missing my point. Micro-solutions like a kilowatt of juice or a kiloliter of water do not solve the structural problems of too many people living on too little workable land and working it in some of the least efficient ways possible. Problems like that require major shifts in culture, investment, and expectations. Then you get away from slash-and-burn farming. But walking up to a village that is living off of those techniques and (from TFA), making sure that they can have a 70-watt light bulb at night... that won't raise their crop yields per acre, or reduce the need for them to have so many children to use as labor. Yes, more children will live better and longer with that liter of cleaner water each, no question. But that's still just treating the symptom of having that many people living under those circumstances in the first place. It will do more to keep them under those circumstances than it will to lift them out of it. Leisure time, indeed.
I presume you mean that sewage treatment (or lack of same) is the problem? It is expensive to handle septic systems correctly (by poor rural standards), but not so if you don't have too many people per square foot doing it. Population is the problem, at least in terms of the load of it on the non-existant infrastructure. Stripping the local landscape down to nothing further reduces any normal ecosystem for dealing with animal waste, that's all. Those islands will never be able to keep up with the number of people they're trying to support, not if they just keep on trying to grow the population while (tiny local water filters not withstanding) not completely leap-frogging the surrounding economies and going right into high-efficiency, high-tech lifestyles. And that's not going to happen with a kilowatt-per-village and a kiloliter of potable water. In fact, all those things do is enable tiny, poor villages like that to stay that way. Much bigger, much more heavy duty infrastructure is the only thing that will turn around places like that village of 1500 that just got buried in the mud they just created by chopping down all of their trees.
Not begruding them a kilowatt. I'm remarking on how little a think a kilowatt will really do to actually change the huge structural problems that create vast, improvished rural areas in the first place. Inefficient farming is by far the worst problem. In terms of standards of living, mechanized farming would go a long way towards deducing the number of people needed to farm a given acre, which would reduce the pressure on farming families to have lots and lots of kids that they can only feed by... more inefficient farming. Letting those same families have an efficient 70 watt light bulb at night doesn't change the big picture. That's my point.
Clean, potable water will help them live more comfortably, or longer... but it has zero impact on the slash/burn and poor-rotation farming techniques that cause not only deforestation, but that render huge swaths of otherwise workable land useless for years. Areas like that produce only a tiny fraction of the food per acre that can be produced in spots where the science behind it applied correctly. That would do more to reduce the pressure on the land, and provide a surplus for the village, than being able to stay up at night with the 70-watt lightbulb. I'm all for clean water, but don't see it actually changing the foundational reasons for rural poverty and ruinous land use.
The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.
So now, instead of a village in the Phillipines using relatively clean water that's been percalating through a forested area, they will just burn even more of the trees to power their water cleaners, resulting in even more of this (which surviving local villagers said was due to illegal logging on the surrounding hills). Yes, TFA indicates that it's cow dung that will be burned... but that just means that the wholesome goodness of that dung is not going into agricultural fertilization, which means either shipping in artificial/processed fertilizers, or very inefficiently using more land for grazing and crop production... including cutting into forests (see above).
Yes, most of us "burn things" for clean water (to extract from a well, or to run a municipal water treatment facility), but things like this at the local level strike me as putting a tiny, tiny bandage on the symptom of a much larger problem. To wit: too many freakin' people in areas not developed enough to sustain them without very poor land use. I mean... a kilowatt? Between solar, and perhaps some of the village kids taking turns in a big hamster wheel, you could do that without burning more stuff. And, for someone who included the notion of improving the "leisure time" of poor villagers, he's not thinking too clearly about the delightful aroma that comes with 24x7 burning of cow dung.
What I find insteresting, though, is that everything you said applies just as readily to individuals as it does to humans (subjectivity to changing laws, etc). I can't pollute, I can't hire some to be my housekeeper for $2/hour, I can't kill people, I can't defraud people, and so on. Sure businesses dealt in slaves 200 years ago, but so did individual people - and neither completely stopped until laws/force caused them to stop. That example shows that some people are evil or amoral... and certainly some people like that run some companies (or churches, or households), and that hasn't changed. But singling out groups of people (acting as a company) for the Evilness label (or even the Amoral label) doesn't make any more sense than saying that four neighbors are, as a neighborhood, amoral or evil.
More likely is that some other factor is introduced by lifestyle differences between the two major career paths.
I'd be curious to see how this study lines up with those that suggest that regular physical activity helps to fend off such degenerative neural problems. That might tie in with the more sedentary existence that many white-collar types find themselves living as they become "knowledge" workers sitting at a desk. You know: the types that, instead of a brisk walk, take a break from working in front of their computer by... spending 15 minutes on slashdot.
If I appeared to jump right into communism, it's because that's the natural direction he was headed. A free market implies all of the other things that go with it... like free association (including the ability for people to associate as a group and form a business that can outlive the death or departure of a particular person: a corporation). To imply that the groups people form are inherently evil, while conveniently ignoring that without individiual actions, investment, and transactions those groups wouldn't come into being or survive, is just silly.
Since he indicts corporations as an element of a large, inter-dependent economy, but doesn't indict the demand for the things/services that only large entities can produce and sustain, he's left with only one other option: government-directed/owned production. And since his language is loaded with all of the usual anti-fascist tones, we can assume that he wouldn't like the psuedo-fuedal framework of true fascism... and thus his unmentioned, but only alternative is socialism. Since he's not preaching a return to low population mom-and-pop agrarian life, that's the corner into which he's painted himself.
Or, he has one other option: he can acknowledge that he's actually incorrect as he paints his portrait of a rudderless, amoral economy populated by evil-doing corporations. But since he's so adamant about that vision of things, I pretty much ruled out any movement on his part towards that view. So: I went straight to the point.
If you expect people to respect your intellectual arguments, you should return the favor, and at least present the image of addressing their concerns
But what if I don't respect his argument (because I see him as factually incorrect, working with mixed/contradictory premises, and simply, in essence, whining), and don't think that his concerns (as he expresses) them, are meaningful (they are merely fashionable)? He's not coddling his intellectual opponents in is sweeping condemnation of large businesses in a market economy, so I'm not coddling him pointing out what's wrong with the alternative he leaved undescribed.
I have no doubt that in a society where the disincentive to commit murder was lower, you would have corporations dealing in it all the time. It would not surprise me if there were places in the world where human life is cheap, where this is the case today.
Or, instead of concocting hypotheticals that reinforce your dislike for a competitive market economy, you could look at social systems like communism, where an explicit condemnation of profit-driven behavior still happens to coincide with unparalleled rates of organized murder. Murder in the millions and millions. And even in the glare of modern media and information flow, you've got camps full of slave laborers, jailed journalists and academics, and rampant corruption.
Meanwhile, back in econcomic reality, people can choose which companies they want to work for, invest in, buy from, and pressure their legislatures to support through rational zoning, tax, and other policy positions. You're not bitching about "corporations," you're bitching about the choices that individuals make. Just come out and say that you're smarter, more wholesome, wiser, and Just Better than most people. That's what you mean, and shadow-boxing against illusions rather than just saying "people, other than me, are too dumb to take different jobs, make different investments, and buy from different vendors" is so transparently disengenuous as to be embarassing. Personally I'm glad to have corporations working for me, delivering things like the pipes we're both using to type and read this comment, the vaccinations that are probably responsible for us both being alive right now, and a jillion other things without which you wouldn't have the luxury to take the time to critique the very marketplace that's competing to make you comfortable and productive.
Since I live near DC, I can actively ignore, with extreme prejudice, both the online and the real-world pieces of this simultaneously! We live in amazing times.
So does every grandmother, labor union, charitable foundation, anyone else that owns a 401k or mutual fund that happens to include businesses that happen to do business in, around, or even indirectly related to any of the industries that play a role in the DOD's activities. Likewise, anyone with an interest in not having the global economy further disturbed, in the long term, by having thugs like Saddam not only running a major fuel source but invading neighboring countries to control more of it, benefit. I'm sure you think that people who are elected to office should be inexperienced paupers with no historical connection to any business, no interest in the success of the economy. Things would definitely have been tidier for Clinton if he hadn't been buddies with corrupt chicken farming industry types in the South, or hadn't handed out criminal pardons like candy to people sending checks to his campaigns and presidential library, too.
If most people don't want to kill other people, then it stands to reason that we don't need to worry so much about people getting killed by people.
This is complete crap. There are people that want to kill people. Some of them even manage to take over countries, and use that country's resources to that end. Just like we need cops who can deal with the small minority that kill, rape, steal, intimidate... we need a military that can deal with the that same behavior when it plays out on a larger scale. And just like cops have to know how and when to use deadly force, so does a soldier or marine.
war training turns normal people into psychotic lunatics
Don't know many military people, do you? This is such a twisted bit of misinformation as to be seriously insulting. Get out more.
The soldiers say in their own words that they play the music when they go on missions. One dude sings along. Of course, this doesn't mean that this one situation that Moore found is what all of the troops in Iraq are/were doing.
I think my main point is, "consider the source" (Moore) and his agenda, as it relates to an accurate, balanced presentation of how 100,000+ people conduct themselves. That doesn't mean that Metallica isn't a form of combat caffeine for young guys that are literally in mortal danger, or that some of them are not (gosh!) very mature at 19 years old. But if you ever spend any time that counts with actual active duty military folks (have you? I have) you'll realize that they represent a huge cross section of humanity, including dopes/geniuses, saints/bastards, psychos/stabilizers, teachers/fools, and all the rest. Moore will go looking for one type, and someone else will go looking for another, depending on the axe being ground.
I've worn a lot of hats over the years, including as an end user with a large university (the guy who needs stuff) and later as a guy working at a vendor who sells stuff. Here's the scoop.
As an end user, you've usually got four purchasing options:
1) Petty cash. For very tiny things. Pointless to this discussion, and still involves lots of careful receipt-handling rules.
2) School-issued credit cards. Only people way up the food chain get to use these. Purchasing agents in the school's procurement office get to use them, and sometimes people who work in travel offices, or that coordinate events, etc., do, or deans and whatnot. Generally there are very tight rules about how these can be used, and that's usually never for things like a shiny new computer monitor or the like.
3) Small, "casual" Purchase Orders. Usually these are limited to a few hundred dollars or so. The end user has to request the use of them, but then gets handed something more or less like a blank ticket that has a spending limit on it. Many vendors won't take these because they're not already assigned, by the school's procurement office, to the vendor... which means the there may be bumps in the road getting it actually paid.
4) Serious POs. These are the ones that come out of the procurement office after the purchasing agent has shopped around to make sure the end user is making a rational request, after some bids (either over the phone, or more formally on paper) have been reviewed, and so on. If you're wondering why these take so long, it's because when a state school (which is really the state government) decides to buy something, there are a jillion rules at play. Has the vendor been filing state taxes correctly? Has the vendor been keeping up with state regulations on hiring quotas, manadatory cardboard recycling, health insurance regs, etc? Yes: purchasing agents spending bigger-ticket amounts of tax money have to check ALL of that crap. And you can only imagine what happens if some of the funds involved happen in to include some federal support for the school's program(s). Suddenly the vendor has to pass all sorts of federal tests, as well. All of that has to be established before the PO is cut to the vendor. And if there's some comparison shopping to be done (this is usually required by law), the purchasing agent may have to actually advertise that the school's about to spend $50,000 on some capital item, and allow a certain amount of time to pass so that all potential vendors can respond with a proposal.
Now: suppose you're a vendor. Think of the time you've got to invest in presenting a friendly face to that process. Then, imagine that the school's policy is to review all shipments before even beginning to start the process of paying the bill to the vendor... but the purchasing agent can't certify that the shipment even GOT to the school, with the right stuff in the box, in good shape, until the end user (and/or his supervisor, dean, etc) signs off on the circulating paperwork. Never mind if the product has some OSHA issues, or HAZMAT considerations to slow all of that down. Finally, the end user's receipt paperwork gets back to the purchasing agent, who then sends the paperwork to the school's accounting people, who have to match it up with the filed invoice from the vendor, and then they schedule a payment for some number of days in the future... thus giving them time to check whether the vendor is or is not on some shit-list about some other transaction having gone well or poorly, thus holding up the payment.
You get the idea. The life cycle on these things is horrific, and vendors have to really want to do that business, and be willing to float the money, usually for months, before getting paid. If even ONE aspect of the end user's paperwork isn't just right, the vendor often does NOT get paid. Now, combine all of that with an industry like selling motherboards at very low margins... and remember that the company (like Newegg) has to honor (or even beat) their advertised
Even more so when you start to realize how phony this whole war on terra is, and how much it's driven by Cheney's stock options rather than any of the plentiful real threats that are facing us.
Nice myth-spinning there. But ignoring your regurgitated lefty talking points, how would you like to send armed forces into a situation when they are likely to be under fire? You know, like when they're working with the UN to disarm a bunch of Serbs slaughtering Muslims in Bosnia? Or when you have armed UN peacekeepers protecting the progress of an election in east Africa? Or would you rather that there were no armed forces other than those armed by the thugs, killers, cleptocracies, and medieval-minded extremist theocratic movements? If you cannot imagine any circumstance when western democracies might need to field armed forces, then you're spectacularly naive. If you do recognize the need for armed forces, then you have to recognize the need for the people in that role to be able to act to defend themselves and accomplish what they're setting out to accomplish. And sometimes that means shooting someone before they shoot you.
They were literally a bunch of kids who went around using real weapons like they were in a video game, complete with heavy metal music in the background.
You don't think, by any chance, that Moore (now rich from pushing as many sensationalized political/emotional buttons as possible) deliberately dug through thousands of hours of combat footage to show (and set to music) the stuff that would most make you take away that very impression? He was making a propoganda film, and he used all of the long-established tools of that trade.
That being said, there are sims and tools (like Forterra's) that are all about saving lives (on all sides) through giving trainees a more realistic sense of what actually works and doesn't in a situation like urban Iraq.
Companies like Forterra are producing tools that really do help soldiers (and medics and others) feel like they've "been there" before they really are there. This saves lives, something soldiers testing these systems assert. It's not about making some suburban kid into an automatic trigger-puller. It's about helping green troops to make snap decisions (with lethal consequences for either acting or not acting) with a little more confidence. Not to mention that products like Forterra's are all about live human voices - which allows MPs being trained to work at security checkpoints, etc., to experience working with a translator while an excitable avatar/taxi-driver in a gathering, cranky crowd lets that young MP start dealing with the pressure, mentally, before facing it while holding a gun.
Also of note: participators in these sims can sometimes be wounded vets, sitting in hospital on another continent, showing his soon-to-be replacement how not to walk into the ambush that he just barely survived.
Of course you're right. But the other thing that keeps ML-ism alive is the continuing willingness of some people to say that if they were just allowed to finally apply ML-ism correctly, the world would see that it's really the right way to live. That bit of nonsense keeps all forms of socialism afloat, and produces defenders that, confronted with the reality of ML-ism, wouldn't really know what to say. Modern socialism has been put into a nice warm, fuzzy wrapper - and it takes a twit like Huga Chavez to really remind us how insidious this stuff is. But I wouldn't want it banned, because I wouldn't want my way of thinking (or expressing) banned either. Nothing succeeds like success, and the freer markets will always have a way of producing prosperity where communism and totalitarianism cannot. Tough fight, though. You'd think that the collapse of the USSR would be enough of the ass-kicking you're referring to, but it's not. It's going to take the collapse of the current Chinese regime for that. Oh, and whatever time this year that Castro finally keels over in the middle of one of his long-winded speeches.
Our congressman are editing their own bios in wikipedia...
So... only their political opponents should be able to edit those bios? Remember the big flap over a Kennedy administration official whose Wikipedia bio implied that he was in on the asassination? The prevailing noise here on slashdot was that it was up to him to police his own Wiki bio.
Bush is requesting personal data from Google and the likes...
The DOJ is asking for aggregate search results to make a point about the availability of child porn. I think the law they're trying to get back into action (you know, the one that the Clinton administration first signed into law) isn't worth keeping, but at least get your basic facts straight. "Bush" isn't asking for any personal search data. Only aggregate result stats.
And quite some people are getting fired for blogging...
Maybe you should look at it this way: Quite some people have jobs that include agreements with their employers that they won't spill company secrets or badmouth the company in public. They're not being censored if they lose their jobs, they're simply experiencing exactly what they agreed to when they took that job. The difference in China is that it's the government we're talking about, not a private relationship between you and your boss.
And it is currently being seriously debated to extend this to outlaw publishing cartoons that a certain religion with angry followers doesn't like.
Snowhammad hopes that everyone will just cool down and leave the larger Danish population alone on this one.
I think that while the banning of Nazi-ish type stuff in certain European countries is a not very surprising result of there still being plenty of WWII (and concentration camp) survivors living there... this recent craziness over those Danish cartoons will quickly fade away. The only place it will recurr is where the local governments and religious leaders have a more direct influence over what happens in the streets (in terms of stirring up angry-looking made-for-TV protests). So, it will keep happening in Iran, Syria, and where groups like Hamas need more to be visibly angry about.
One hopes that the typical Muslim living in western Europe is more literate, better acquainted with the western tradition of not being killed for using humor/satire, and mostly... doesn't want to appear as crazy as the people throwing gas bombs at embassies, because they have to go to work the next day with their local European counterparts. One hopes.
I hope that the debate you're referring to is mostly just some people talking out loud about the issue so that everyone can say it's been talked about. If countries like Denmark, Norway, Germany, and so on further clamp down on simple things like political cartoons, the "clash of cultures" that we're all pretending isn't happening is going to become a lot more obvious - since I hope that there are at least a few Europeans who won't be in the mood to put up with such nonsense.
I do, though, like your sig. I've seen it many times, and lamented that the only people who get a smile out of it are the ones who know that the rest of them won't care anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you need a refresher course on the Separation of Powers.
Way to sound pious without actually answering his very specific, reasonable, and important question. This isn't a separation of powers question, it's a is-FISA-even-about-this question. Arguably, it's not.
but to demand investigations in order to discover the identity of the leaker(s).
And what exactly is your problem with this? You can't honestly say that there should be no such thing as classified information, unless you'd like every poor SOB who's trying to keep on eye on various actually bad guys to be strung up and shot. The classification of intel methods and collected information exists specifically to allow it do what it has to do. If you tell Kim Jong Il what time of day the next high-altitude drone will be overhead which of his slave camps, or CC the lunatic president of Iran on the intel you're sharing with EU security people about his nuclear program... you're pretty much asking for the consequences, including the unpleasant deaths of the people living in those countries and working, with our spooks, to counter the influence/acts of the mullahs or the so-honorable KJI.
Assuming you don't actually refute the need for classified and covert activities on a number of fronts, then how can you complain about tracking down the people who deliberately leak such specific operational information? It sounds like you're more in the "classified is OK, but only on the stuff I think should be classified, and then definitely the administration should be investigating the people who leak it" camp. But that's not what you're saying, and should be. At which point, you should be more clearly spelling out what you think should, and should not be classified when it comes to intercepting a phone call from a known Al Queda-type contact in, say, Lahore, Pakistan to a used-only-once-ever cell phone that was in a batch of fifty or so bought with cash. You know, a cell phone that is untraceable to a person, will never be used again, and can never be part of a FISA warrant scenario by its very nature. Is reminding the guys using those phones that we know when the person in Lahore is dialing a number from that batch of disposable phones something you think should be leaked? Is that constructive, from your perspective?
considering you are porting to the internet, I can only assume you are a hyprocrite
Um... considering you're calling me a hypocrite, I can only assume you're missing my point. Micro-solutions like a kilowatt of juice or a kiloliter of water do not solve the structural problems of too many people living on too little workable land and working it in some of the least efficient ways possible. Problems like that require major shifts in culture, investment, and expectations. Then you get away from slash-and-burn farming. But walking up to a village that is living off of those techniques and (from TFA), making sure that they can have a 70-watt light bulb at night... that won't raise their crop yields per acre, or reduce the need for them to have so many children to use as labor. Yes, more children will live better and longer with that liter of cleaner water each, no question. But that's still just treating the symptom of having that many people living under those circumstances in the first place. It will do more to keep them under those circumstances than it will to lift them out of it. Leisure time, indeed.
I presume you mean that sewage treatment (or lack of same) is the problem? It is expensive to handle septic systems correctly (by poor rural standards), but not so if you don't have too many people per square foot doing it. Population is the problem, at least in terms of the load of it on the non-existant infrastructure. Stripping the local landscape down to nothing further reduces any normal ecosystem for dealing with animal waste, that's all. Those islands will never be able to keep up with the number of people they're trying to support, not if they just keep on trying to grow the population while (tiny local water filters not withstanding) not completely leap-frogging the surrounding economies and going right into high-efficiency, high-tech lifestyles. And that's not going to happen with a kilowatt-per-village and a kiloliter of potable water. In fact, all those things do is enable tiny, poor villages like that to stay that way. Much bigger, much more heavy duty infrastructure is the only thing that will turn around places like that village of 1500 that just got buried in the mud they just created by chopping down all of their trees.
Not begruding them a kilowatt. I'm remarking on how little a think a kilowatt will really do to actually change the huge structural problems that create vast, improvished rural areas in the first place. Inefficient farming is by far the worst problem. In terms of standards of living, mechanized farming would go a long way towards deducing the number of people needed to farm a given acre, which would reduce the pressure on farming families to have lots and lots of kids that they can only feed by... more inefficient farming. Letting those same families have an efficient 70 watt light bulb at night doesn't change the big picture. That's my point.
Clean, potable water will help them live more comfortably, or longer... but it has zero impact on the slash/burn and poor-rotation farming techniques that cause not only deforestation, but that render huge swaths of otherwise workable land useless for years. Areas like that produce only a tiny fraction of the food per acre that can be produced in spots where the science behind it applied correctly. That would do more to reduce the pressure on the land, and provide a surplus for the village, than being able to stay up at night with the 70-watt lightbulb. I'm all for clean water, but don't see it actually changing the foundational reasons for rural poverty and ruinous land use.
The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.
So now, instead of a village in the Phillipines using relatively clean water that's been percalating through a forested area, they will just burn even more of the trees to power their water cleaners, resulting in even more of this (which surviving local villagers said was due to illegal logging on the surrounding hills). Yes, TFA indicates that it's cow dung that will be burned... but that just means that the wholesome goodness of that dung is not going into agricultural fertilization, which means either shipping in artificial/processed fertilizers, or very inefficiently using more land for grazing and crop production... including cutting into forests (see above).
Yes, most of us "burn things" for clean water (to extract from a well, or to run a municipal water treatment facility), but things like this at the local level strike me as putting a tiny, tiny bandage on the symptom of a much larger problem. To wit: too many freakin' people in areas not developed enough to sustain them without very poor land use. I mean... a kilowatt? Between solar, and perhaps some of the village kids taking turns in a big hamster wheel, you could do that without burning more stuff. And, for someone who included the notion of improving the "leisure time" of poor villagers, he's not thinking too clearly about the delightful aroma that comes with 24x7 burning of cow dung.
as readily to individuals as it does to humans
should read as readily to individuals as it does to companies/corporations
I should not eat lunch and watch the Olympics on TiVo while posting comments on weighty philosophical issues.
That is such a communist answer.
I kid, of course.
What I find insteresting, though, is that everything you said applies just as readily to individuals as it does to humans (subjectivity to changing laws, etc). I can't pollute, I can't hire some to be my housekeeper for $2/hour, I can't kill people, I can't defraud people, and so on. Sure businesses dealt in slaves 200 years ago, but so did individual people - and neither completely stopped until laws/force caused them to stop. That example shows that some people are evil or amoral... and certainly some people like that run some companies (or churches, or households), and that hasn't changed. But singling out groups of people (acting as a company) for the Evilness label (or even the Amoral label) doesn't make any more sense than saying that four neighbors are, as a neighborhood, amoral or evil.
More likely is that some other factor is introduced by lifestyle differences between the two major career paths.
I'd be curious to see how this study lines up with those that suggest that regular physical activity helps to fend off such degenerative neural problems. That might tie in with the more sedentary existence that many white-collar types find themselves living as they become "knowledge" workers sitting at a desk. You know: the types that, instead of a brisk walk, take a break from working in front of their computer by... spending 15 minutes on slashdot.
If I appeared to jump right into communism, it's because that's the natural direction he was headed. A free market implies all of the other things that go with it... like free association (including the ability for people to associate as a group and form a business that can outlive the death or departure of a particular person: a corporation). To imply that the groups people form are inherently evil, while conveniently ignoring that without individiual actions, investment, and transactions those groups wouldn't come into being or survive, is just silly.
Since he indicts corporations as an element of a large, inter-dependent economy, but doesn't indict the demand for the things/services that only large entities can produce and sustain, he's left with only one other option: government-directed/owned production. And since his language is loaded with all of the usual anti-fascist tones, we can assume that he wouldn't like the psuedo-fuedal framework of true fascism... and thus his unmentioned, but only alternative is socialism. Since he's not preaching a return to low population mom-and-pop agrarian life, that's the corner into which he's painted himself.
Or, he has one other option: he can acknowledge that he's actually incorrect as he paints his portrait of a rudderless, amoral economy populated by evil-doing corporations. But since he's so adamant about that vision of things, I pretty much ruled out any movement on his part towards that view. So: I went straight to the point.
If you expect people to respect your intellectual arguments, you should return the favor, and at least present the image of addressing their concerns
But what if I don't respect his argument (because I see him as factually incorrect, working with mixed/contradictory premises, and simply, in essence, whining), and don't think that his concerns (as he expresses) them, are meaningful (they are merely fashionable)? He's not coddling his intellectual opponents in is sweeping condemnation of large businesses in a market economy, so I'm not coddling him pointing out what's wrong with the alternative he leaved undescribed.
I have no doubt that in a society where the disincentive to commit murder was lower, you would have corporations dealing in it all the time. It would not surprise me if there were places in the world where human life is cheap, where this is the case today.
Or, instead of concocting hypotheticals that reinforce your dislike for a competitive market economy, you could look at social systems like communism, where an explicit condemnation of profit-driven behavior still happens to coincide with unparalleled rates of organized murder. Murder in the millions and millions. And even in the glare of modern media and information flow, you've got camps full of slave laborers, jailed journalists and academics, and rampant corruption.
Meanwhile, back in econcomic reality, people can choose which companies they want to work for, invest in, buy from, and pressure their legislatures to support through rational zoning, tax, and other policy positions. You're not bitching about "corporations," you're bitching about the choices that individuals make. Just come out and say that you're smarter, more wholesome, wiser, and Just Better than most people. That's what you mean, and shadow-boxing against illusions rather than just saying "people, other than me, are too dumb to take different jobs, make different investments, and buy from different vendors" is so transparently disengenuous as to be embarassing. Personally I'm glad to have corporations working for me, delivering things like the pipes we're both using to type and read this comment, the vaccinations that are probably responsible for us both being alive right now, and a jillion other things without which you wouldn't have the luxury to take the time to critique the very marketplace that's competing to make you comfortable and productive.
Parent is not flamebait. Parent is, alas, correct.
Since I live near DC, I can actively ignore, with extreme prejudice, both the online and the real-world pieces of this simultaneously! We live in amazing times.
Dick Cheney DOES in fact benefit from the war
So does every grandmother, labor union, charitable foundation, anyone else that owns a 401k or mutual fund that happens to include businesses that happen to do business in, around, or even indirectly related to any of the industries that play a role in the DOD's activities. Likewise, anyone with an interest in not having the global economy further disturbed, in the long term, by having thugs like Saddam not only running a major fuel source but invading neighboring countries to control more of it, benefit. I'm sure you think that people who are elected to office should be inexperienced paupers with no historical connection to any business, no interest in the success of the economy. Things would definitely have been tidier for Clinton if he hadn't been buddies with corrupt chicken farming industry types in the South, or hadn't handed out criminal pardons like candy to people sending checks to his campaigns and presidential library, too.
If most people don't want to kill other people, then it stands to reason that we don't need to worry so much about people getting killed by people.
This is complete crap. There are people that want to kill people. Some of them even manage to take over countries, and use that country's resources to that end. Just like we need cops who can deal with the small minority that kill, rape, steal, intimidate... we need a military that can deal with the that same behavior when it plays out on a larger scale. And just like cops have to know how and when to use deadly force, so does a soldier or marine.
war training turns normal people into psychotic lunatics
Don't know many military people, do you? This is such a twisted bit of misinformation as to be seriously insulting. Get out more.
The soldiers say in their own words that they play the music when they go on missions. One dude sings along. Of course, this doesn't mean that this one situation that Moore found is what all of the troops in Iraq are/were doing.
I think my main point is, "consider the source" (Moore) and his agenda, as it relates to an accurate, balanced presentation of how 100,000+ people conduct themselves. That doesn't mean that Metallica isn't a form of combat caffeine for young guys that are literally in mortal danger, or that some of them are not (gosh!) very mature at 19 years old. But if you ever spend any time that counts with actual active duty military folks (have you? I have) you'll realize that they represent a huge cross section of humanity, including dopes/geniuses, saints/bastards, psychos/stabilizers, teachers/fools, and all the rest. Moore will go looking for one type, and someone else will go looking for another, depending on the axe being ground.
I've worn a lot of hats over the years, including as an end user with a large university (the guy who needs stuff) and later as a guy working at a vendor who sells stuff. Here's the scoop.
As an end user, you've usually got four purchasing options:
1) Petty cash. For very tiny things. Pointless to this discussion, and still involves lots of careful receipt-handling rules.
2) School-issued credit cards. Only people way up the food chain get to use these. Purchasing agents in the school's procurement office get to use them, and sometimes people who work in travel offices, or that coordinate events, etc., do, or deans and whatnot. Generally there are very tight rules about how these can be used, and that's usually never for things like a shiny new computer monitor or the like.
3) Small, "casual" Purchase Orders. Usually these are limited to a few hundred dollars or so. The end user has to request the use of them, but then gets handed something more or less like a blank ticket that has a spending limit on it. Many vendors won't take these because they're not already assigned, by the school's procurement office, to the vendor... which means the there may be bumps in the road getting it actually paid.
4) Serious POs. These are the ones that come out of the procurement office after the purchasing agent has shopped around to make sure the end user is making a rational request, after some bids (either over the phone, or more formally on paper) have been reviewed, and so on. If you're wondering why these take so long, it's because when a state school (which is really the state government) decides to buy something, there are a jillion rules at play. Has the vendor been filing state taxes correctly? Has the vendor been keeping up with state regulations on hiring quotas, manadatory cardboard recycling, health insurance regs, etc? Yes: purchasing agents spending bigger-ticket amounts of tax money have to check ALL of that crap. And you can only imagine what happens if some of the funds involved happen in to include some federal support for the school's program(s). Suddenly the vendor has to pass all sorts of federal tests, as well. All of that has to be established before the PO is cut to the vendor. And if there's some comparison shopping to be done (this is usually required by law), the purchasing agent may have to actually advertise that the school's about to spend $50,000 on some capital item, and allow a certain amount of time to pass so that all potential vendors can respond with a proposal.
Now: suppose you're a vendor. Think of the time you've got to invest in presenting a friendly face to that process. Then, imagine that the school's policy is to review all shipments before even beginning to start the process of paying the bill to the vendor... but the purchasing agent can't certify that the shipment even GOT to the school, with the right stuff in the box, in good shape, until the end user (and/or his supervisor, dean, etc) signs off on the circulating paperwork. Never mind if the product has some OSHA issues, or HAZMAT considerations to slow all of that down. Finally, the end user's receipt paperwork gets back to the purchasing agent, who then sends the paperwork to the school's accounting people, who have to match it up with the filed invoice from the vendor, and then they schedule a payment for some number of days in the future... thus giving them time to check whether the vendor is or is not on some shit-list about some other transaction having gone well or poorly, thus holding up the payment.
You get the idea. The life cycle on these things is horrific, and vendors have to really want to do that business, and be willing to float the money, usually for months, before getting paid. If even ONE aspect of the end user's paperwork isn't just right, the vendor often does NOT get paid. Now, combine all of that with an industry like selling motherboards at very low margins... and remember that the company (like Newegg) has to honor (or even beat) their advertised
Even more so when you start to realize how phony this whole war on terra is, and how much it's driven by Cheney's stock options rather than any of the plentiful real threats that are facing us.
Nice myth-spinning there. But ignoring your regurgitated lefty talking points, how would you like to send armed forces into a situation when they are likely to be under fire? You know, like when they're working with the UN to disarm a bunch of Serbs slaughtering Muslims in Bosnia? Or when you have armed UN peacekeepers protecting the progress of an election in east Africa? Or would you rather that there were no armed forces other than those armed by the thugs, killers, cleptocracies, and medieval-minded extremist theocratic movements? If you cannot imagine any circumstance when western democracies might need to field armed forces, then you're spectacularly naive. If you do recognize the need for armed forces, then you have to recognize the need for the people in that role to be able to act to defend themselves and accomplish what they're setting out to accomplish. And sometimes that means shooting someone before they shoot you.
They were literally a bunch of kids who went around using real weapons like they were in a video game, complete with heavy metal music in the background.
You don't think, by any chance, that Moore (now rich from pushing as many sensationalized political/emotional buttons as possible) deliberately dug through thousands of hours of combat footage to show (and set to music) the stuff that would most make you take away that very impression? He was making a propoganda film, and he used all of the long-established tools of that trade.
That being said, there are sims and tools (like Forterra's) that are all about saving lives (on all sides) through giving trainees a more realistic sense of what actually works and doesn't in a situation like urban Iraq.
Companies like Forterra are producing tools that really do help soldiers (and medics and others) feel like they've "been there" before they really are there. This saves lives, something soldiers testing these systems assert. It's not about making some suburban kid into an automatic trigger-puller. It's about helping green troops to make snap decisions (with lethal consequences for either acting or not acting) with a little more confidence. Not to mention that products like Forterra's are all about live human voices - which allows MPs being trained to work at security checkpoints, etc., to experience working with a translator while an excitable avatar/taxi-driver in a gathering, cranky crowd lets that young MP start dealing with the pressure, mentally, before facing it while holding a gun.
Also of note: participators in these sims can sometimes be wounded vets, sitting in hospital on another continent, showing his soon-to-be replacement how not to walk into the ambush that he just barely survived.
Of course you're right. But the other thing that keeps ML-ism alive is the continuing willingness of some people to say that if they were just allowed to finally apply ML-ism correctly, the world would see that it's really the right way to live. That bit of nonsense keeps all forms of socialism afloat, and produces defenders that, confronted with the reality of ML-ism, wouldn't really know what to say. Modern socialism has been put into a nice warm, fuzzy wrapper - and it takes a twit like Huga Chavez to really remind us how insidious this stuff is. But I wouldn't want it banned, because I wouldn't want my way of thinking (or expressing) banned either. Nothing succeeds like success, and the freer markets will always have a way of producing prosperity where communism and totalitarianism cannot. Tough fight, though. You'd think that the collapse of the USSR would be enough of the ass-kicking you're referring to, but it's not. It's going to take the collapse of the current Chinese regime for that. Oh, and whatever time this year that Castro finally keels over in the middle of one of his long-winded speeches.
Our congressman are editing their own bios in wikipedia...
So... only their political opponents should be able to edit those bios? Remember the big flap over a Kennedy administration official whose Wikipedia bio implied that he was in on the asassination? The prevailing noise here on slashdot was that it was up to him to police his own Wiki bio.
Bush is requesting personal data from Google and the likes...
The DOJ is asking for aggregate search results to make a point about the availability of child porn. I think the law they're trying to get back into action (you know, the one that the Clinton administration first signed into law) isn't worth keeping, but at least get your basic facts straight. "Bush" isn't asking for any personal search data. Only aggregate result stats.
And quite some people are getting fired for blogging...
Maybe you should look at it this way: Quite some people have jobs that include agreements with their employers that they won't spill company secrets or badmouth the company in public. They're not being censored if they lose their jobs, they're simply experiencing exactly what they agreed to when they took that job. The difference in China is that it's the government we're talking about, not a private relationship between you and your boss.
And it is currently being seriously debated to extend this to outlaw publishing cartoons that a certain religion with angry followers doesn't like.
Snowhammad hopes that everyone will just cool down and leave the larger Danish population alone on this one.
I think that while the banning of Nazi-ish type stuff in certain European countries is a not very surprising result of there still being plenty of WWII (and concentration camp) survivors living there... this recent craziness over those Danish cartoons will quickly fade away. The only place it will recurr is where the local governments and religious leaders have a more direct influence over what happens in the streets (in terms of stirring up angry-looking made-for-TV protests). So, it will keep happening in Iran, Syria, and where groups like Hamas need more to be visibly angry about.
One hopes that the typical Muslim living in western Europe is more literate, better acquainted with the western tradition of not being killed for using humor/satire, and mostly... doesn't want to appear as crazy as the people throwing gas bombs at embassies, because they have to go to work the next day with their local European counterparts. One hopes.
I hope that the debate you're referring to is mostly just some people talking out loud about the issue so that everyone can say it's been talked about. If countries like Denmark, Norway, Germany, and so on further clamp down on simple things like political cartoons, the "clash of cultures" that we're all pretending isn't happening is going to become a lot more obvious - since I hope that there are at least a few Europeans who won't be in the mood to put up with such nonsense.
I think the whole article is flamebait
No doubt. Please also post later tomorrow so you can link to an article showing how those scientists have refused the awards and recognition, etc.
Skipping to tomorrow: <crickets chirping>
Dude. That's, like, a lot to read.
omg lol
I do, though, like your sig. I've seen it many times, and lamented that the only people who get a smile out of it are the ones who know that the rest of them won't care anyway.