If you want to talk about something somebody else said, perhaps you can quote them
Well obviously my comments are part of a thread, in response to someone's rhetorical assertion that the people who form and own businesses can't have feelings ("How can a corporation have feelings?"), and that indicating otherwise is beyond the pale ("Why is this utterly ridiculous kind of false expression accepted in society?"). I responded to those silly questions with a rhetorical exercise asking the person holding that view to point out when people who happen to run a corporation can no longer have feelings because they are now running a corporation. That was unambiguously his point, and I called him on it.
Are you arguing that an appeal for someone on death row is pointless?
No, merely that it IS pointless in many cases. Especially the automatic appeals that are generated not by the convicted murderer or his counsel, but by state (or federal) law even when guilt is not only 100% established (say, video showing the unmistakable suspect beating someone to death) and when the murderer acknowledges committing the crime.
But your previous comment doesn't address any of that.
Because that goes without saying. How can anyone be even involved in this discussion and not be aware of the basic facts? Nobody in the US is sentenced to death for causing an accident in a car. But they might be for deliberately aiming a car at their hated ex-spouse, running her over, backing up to do it a few more times, and then expressing no remorse in front of the jury.
Surely you can understand the difference between a person who negligently fell asleep behind the wheel and kills someone, vs. someone who without remorse plans and sets out specifically to kill someone? I suppose there are surviving family members who might prefer that a poor driver responsible for a death get the ultimate punishment, but I doubt you'd ever find a jury to agree.
We rarely impose the death penalty. That's the whole point. It's reserved for people who demonstrate not bad driving, but for purposefully and without remorse ending someone else's innocent life. Juries wrestle under very difficult conditions to make the distinction between someone who is, in your example, a bad driver... vs. someone who is an unnredeemable, remorseless, purposeful taker of other people's lives.
Your juvenile notion that being prosperous can only happen when someone else is made miserable... oh, never mind. You know that's complete crap.
When someone decides to kill other people essentially for sport, they have waived any claim to continued life on their part. If they were killed on the spot while committing (or trying to) such an act, it would be considered entirely reasonable. Murder is what they are doing. Delivering to them the consequences of their assertion that they think other people should die for their amusement or trivial gain is not murder. It's consequence, and a direct result of their own assertion about the value of their own life, including their own. Demonstrate that you think you have the right to end someone else's innocent life for the sake of ending it, and you've abandoned any claim on your own future existence. Demonstrate to a jury that you have no remorse or prospect for redemption, and there's no reason they shouldn't take you at your word.
What if the death peanalty is an escape for people who commit those types of serious crimes. Have you considered that they want to die and that their way of acheiving notoriety is by commiting grusome crimes?
There are some (very infrequent) situations where that is clearly the case. But the vast majority of such offenders use every opportunity to drag out their appeals process and use every opportunity (even when they've completely confessed to the hideous crime that got them the death penalty!) to put that day off. Surely that doesn't surprise you. They'd rather live - even in prison - than not. They didn't give someone ELSE that option of course - they considered that innocent person's life to be disposable, even as they'd like to preserve their own. It's that very perspective on their part (generally, the demonstrated lack of remorse) that earns them the jury's fairly rare death penalty decision.
The truth is, you don't know anybody who has denied any and all moral culpability for actions simply because it was more convenient than feeling guilt.
What does that have to do with whether or not that person happens to work for a business (as opposed to being self-employed, or a charity case, or anything else)?
Maybe your experience varies, but a conscience? Lots of people lack that, amorality is all too common.
Again, in the context of my comment and the comment to which I was responding, what does that have to do with how they are employed, or the size of the company they own or work for? How does that support the GP's people-who-run-businesses-can't-have-feelings BS assertion?
Such people are routinely found to be NOT mentally ill, just cruel SOBs who really don't care what you think about what they do. Mental illness, per se, is rarely behind brutal killings (especially those of multiple people). We don't really consider sociopaths to be mentally ill, just a real pain in the ass. Some of them, just like some portion of people in almost every condition, harbor a world view that makes killing other people something they think they can get away with, or which they simply feel entitled to do. Lengthy article in today's WaPo, actually, addressing this specific issue (conclusion: most mass killers are NOT mentally ill).
If the husband and wife who killed all those people in San Bernadino recently had been caught instead of shot full of holes, would you consider them to be mentally ill, rather than simply having chosen (as they proclaimed, and after lengthy planning and preparation) to be serving their religion?
So, the person who has shown a willingness to break into a house, tie somebody up, steal their stuff, and then on the way out the door, decide to carve them up to death just for fun, and then hang around until the kids get home from school and kill them too... and then expresses zero remorse for those actions - that's the person you expect to turn back out onto the street for another chance? No? How about in another year? Maybe ten years? What if that person has a history of doing such things repeatedly, and has never shown remorse or any inclination to change his ways? Which new chance is it that you think is going to make that person someone you'd send back out into the world?
No, they're not. Or are you imagining some sort of dungeon they're thrown into until they starve to death after a few weeks? If you're not, then consider that such prisoners are actually part of a large culture within the facility where they're detained. Their needs are seen to by large numbers of people who are very much part of the wider society, and the wider society very much has to spend part of every day producing the goods and services needed to keep that person alive. If they were removed from society, then society would have none those burdens. And no, for many people, it's NOT enough to lock them up, because they still get to live and carry on and read novels and watch movies and be fed and cared for - possibly for several decades - while the person whose life they snuffed out cannot, and the lives impacted by that are forever robbed of what was taken. And yet they get to support the person who took that life, every day.
You asked a snarky, ignorant question intended to push some agenda of yours that characterizes the people who own and run businesses as being unable to have feelings. That was an absurd posture on your part. I gave you something to react to. Feel free, instead of resorting to lazy ad hominem, to point out where in the chain of events you just read the transition occurs to the person running a business no longer being able to have feelings. Be specific, or consider no longer trying to paint that whiny Corporations Are Evil Robots image you were lamely hoping to get across.
If you think a corporation like Pfizer is comparable to any small business you have a serious problem with your ability to think
So, at what point do the people running the business stop being people? Be specific. Is it when the company is made of 2 people? 20? 200? 2,000? 20,000? Be specific about the number, and by what mechanism you think that the people making the decisions are no longer themselves, no longer able to consider their values, and no longer have feelings. Explain why one person LESS than the size you think is some robotic non-feeling entity is still able to have feelings, but one person MORE than that number no longer is. Talk about what happens when that one extra person comes on board. No, really. See if you can coherently explain your theory, and how it applies to one person more, and less than the number that you think scales human decision making from one mode to another.
The truth is, you don't even know anybody who has successfully launched and grown a business to the point where there are hundreds or thousands of people involved. Because you can't rely on a personal experience of having sat down and actually talked to someone like that, you're conjuring up a fantasy notion of who they become, so that you have something abstract to hate, since that what makes you tick. That whole "get help" BS? It's called "projection," dude. Look it up.
Because it's made up of people. Strange that you don't actually understand that. Here's an experiment for you.
1) Start mowing lawns for some spare cash.
2) Notice that you're good at it, and start landscaping for a living.
3) Recognize that there are some good reasons to start functioning as a business, instead of having customers make out a check to you personally.
4) Take on bigger customers now that you're not just Jimmy with a lawn mower.
5) Grow to the point where you've got employees, a fleet of trucks, and customers who really rely on your services.
6) On the advice of your lawyer and your accountant, incorporate your business so that it can do things like continue to operate even after you get hit by a bus, and so that if one of your employees crashes a tractor into a client's propane tanks and burns down their dentist's office, you don't lose your house.
7) Congrats, you are now in charge of an Eeeeeeevil Corporation.
8) Look in the mirror. Did you lose your "feelings?" Do you suddenly not care about all of the things you used to care about?
Yeah. Funny about that. Consider forming your world view by talking to actual people instead of assuming that all businesses are run by comic book villains.
Why do you think that not getting to live out your life for decades after you've (for example) raped a child and cut her to pieces while she's alive isn't justice? Is it justice that the family of that girl gets to wake up every morning and look at her empty chair at the table before they head off to work to spend a bit of each day working so that some of their income can buy for her killer the breakfast she'll never again have? Spending decades providing food, medical care, education, housing, and entertainment for the person who, say, killed your mom with a knife in the gut in order to steal $5 from her purse - that's your idea of justice?
Dear business owners, stop being greedy fucks and start paying higher wages
Which is different than "Dear 20-something coders, stop being greedy fucks and demanding lots of money from someone that doesn't care if you're stoned or not"... how, exactly? There are two parties to the paycheck transaction.
Whether or not there are more unhappy people doesn't change the physiology of addiction. Ask a true alcoholic or someone hooked on opiates to give up those substances on the spot if you "change their circumstances," and watch what happens. You'll change your thoughts on the subject.
The whole problem is going to become far worse as more states legalize marijuana.
Why? People who don't get stoned really won't care.
marijuana does not impact a persons health, cognative abilities
Other than its demonstrated impact on developing brains, even into their twenties, and the plain-as-day stoner bearing and general mindset that anyone with one eye open and any intellectual honesty has to confirm witnessing over and over again - at least often enough to give lie to the "has no impact" notion.
nor is the cost to society in general anywhere near as high as alachol
So, the cost isn't AS high as the huge cost of a different substance, so let's not give it another thought? Alcohol is more widespread than, say, heroin... but would you say that alcohol's impact on people is more, or less of an issue than is addition to meth or opiates? If opiates are worse, we can just say never mind about alcohol, right? No? I see.
and they can be still considered "under the influence" even days later when they are 100% sober, according to current law. Does that shit make sense?
Yes, it makes sense. Because the tests can't distinguish clearly between someone who's simply still got it in their system, and someone who is impaired. A person who works with people's lives on the line knows that, and needs to take that into account. You know, by not putting themselves in a position where their judgement can't be measured as they stick a knife into someone's chest for a living.
No, that wouldn't surprise me at all. Doesn't change the fact that someone who makes the conscious decision to use the plural form in an English sentence is completely understanding the concept of "plural"... but then makes the odd choice to go out of their way to drop in a possessive apostrophe? Why go to all of that trouble?
Fluid? I just paused to gape at the extra work done to insert an apostrophe where doing so makes no sense. How can anyone make it out of middle school and end up spending their time on a technically-oriented web site and not have the understanding that there's a difference between the plural and possessive? We all use plural and possessive forms every day while speaking, so the concept isn't foreign to anyone here, even if English isn't their native tongue. Who goes to the extra trouble to deploy an apostrophe when they mean "more than one?" It's baffling. But it only happens because people SEE other people doing it, and the only way to stop the vicious circle of backwards, incorrect use is to point it out.
Please list the names of bankers who committed crimes, and the specific crimes they committed (it would be helpful if you mentioned the actual statutes they violated). Then point out when the DoJ became aware of these specific crimes but refused to indict. Thanks for the details. If you're aware of specific financial crimes that the DoJ does NOT know about, why aren't you making phone calls?
I remember how Joe Biden, in describing the huge undertaking by hundreds of intelligence and support people, along with the on-the-scene deployment of SEAL Team 6 to actually do the deed of killing Bin Laden in his Pakistani sanctuary... Biden described Obama's decision to follow the intel team's advice as "the gutsiest thing I've ever seen." That word appears to be in danger of no longer meaning anything at all like it used to, and might be worth a second thought on the part of editors and public figures, if this is how it's going to be put to use. Thank you for reading this gutsy comment.
Amazon is up over 940% since I bought my shares. So, your main complain is that you weren't smart enough to do the same, and you're really complaining about yourself? Thought so.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to talk about something somebody else said, perhaps you can quote them
Well obviously my comments are part of a thread, in response to someone's rhetorical assertion that the people who form and own businesses can't have feelings ("How can a corporation have feelings?"), and that indicating otherwise is beyond the pale ("Why is this utterly ridiculous kind of false expression accepted in society?"). I responded to those silly questions with a rhetorical exercise asking the person holding that view to point out when people who happen to run a corporation can no longer have feelings because they are now running a corporation. That was unambiguously his point, and I called him on it.
Are you arguing that an appeal for someone on death row is pointless?
No, merely that it IS pointless in many cases. Especially the automatic appeals that are generated not by the convicted murderer or his counsel, but by state (or federal) law even when guilt is not only 100% established (say, video showing the unmistakable suspect beating someone to death) and when the murderer acknowledges committing the crime.
But your previous comment doesn't address any of that.
Because that goes without saying. How can anyone be even involved in this discussion and not be aware of the basic facts? Nobody in the US is sentenced to death for causing an accident in a car. But they might be for deliberately aiming a car at their hated ex-spouse, running her over, backing up to do it a few more times, and then expressing no remorse in front of the jury.
Surely you can understand the difference between a person who negligently fell asleep behind the wheel and kills someone, vs. someone who without remorse plans and sets out specifically to kill someone? I suppose there are surviving family members who might prefer that a poor driver responsible for a death get the ultimate punishment, but I doubt you'd ever find a jury to agree.
We rarely impose the death penalty. That's the whole point. It's reserved for people who demonstrate not bad driving, but for purposefully and without remorse ending someone else's innocent life. Juries wrestle under very difficult conditions to make the distinction between someone who is, in your example, a bad driver ... vs. someone who is an unnredeemable, remorseless, purposeful taker of other people's lives.
Your juvenile notion that being prosperous can only happen when someone else is made miserable ... oh, never mind. You know that's complete crap.
When someone decides to kill other people essentially for sport, they have waived any claim to continued life on their part. If they were killed on the spot while committing (or trying to) such an act, it would be considered entirely reasonable. Murder is what they are doing. Delivering to them the consequences of their assertion that they think other people should die for their amusement or trivial gain is not murder. It's consequence, and a direct result of their own assertion about the value of their own life, including their own. Demonstrate that you think you have the right to end someone else's innocent life for the sake of ending it, and you've abandoned any claim on your own future existence. Demonstrate to a jury that you have no remorse or prospect for redemption, and there's no reason they shouldn't take you at your word.
What if the death peanalty is an escape for people who commit those types of serious crimes. Have you considered that they want to die and that their way of acheiving notoriety is by commiting grusome crimes?
There are some (very infrequent) situations where that is clearly the case. But the vast majority of such offenders use every opportunity to drag out their appeals process and use every opportunity (even when they've completely confessed to the hideous crime that got them the death penalty!) to put that day off. Surely that doesn't surprise you. They'd rather live - even in prison - than not. They didn't give someone ELSE that option of course - they considered that innocent person's life to be disposable, even as they'd like to preserve their own. It's that very perspective on their part (generally, the demonstrated lack of remorse) that earns them the jury's fairly rare death penalty decision.
The truth is, you don't know anybody who has denied any and all moral culpability for actions simply because it was more convenient than feeling guilt.
What does that have to do with whether or not that person happens to work for a business (as opposed to being self-employed, or a charity case, or anything else)?
Maybe your experience varies, but a conscience? Lots of people lack that, amorality is all too common.
Again, in the context of my comment and the comment to which I was responding, what does that have to do with how they are employed, or the size of the company they own or work for? How does that support the GP's people-who-run-businesses-can't-have-feelings BS assertion?
Executions aren't expensive. Pointless decades-long appeals processes are expensive.
Such people are routinely found to be NOT mentally ill, just cruel SOBs who really don't care what you think about what they do. Mental illness, per se, is rarely behind brutal killings (especially those of multiple people). We don't really consider sociopaths to be mentally ill, just a real pain in the ass. Some of them, just like some portion of people in almost every condition, harbor a world view that makes killing other people something they think they can get away with, or which they simply feel entitled to do. Lengthy article in today's WaPo, actually, addressing this specific issue (conclusion: most mass killers are NOT mentally ill).
If the husband and wife who killed all those people in San Bernadino recently had been caught instead of shot full of holes, would you consider them to be mentally ill, rather than simply having chosen (as they proclaimed, and after lengthy planning and preparation) to be serving their religion?
So, the person who has shown a willingness to break into a house, tie somebody up, steal their stuff, and then on the way out the door, decide to carve them up to death just for fun, and then hang around until the kids get home from school and kill them too ... and then expresses zero remorse for those actions - that's the person you expect to turn back out onto the street for another chance? No? How about in another year? Maybe ten years? What if that person has a history of doing such things repeatedly, and has never shown remorse or any inclination to change his ways? Which new chance is it that you think is going to make that person someone you'd send back out into the world?
They're removed from society.
No, they're not. Or are you imagining some sort of dungeon they're thrown into until they starve to death after a few weeks? If you're not, then consider that such prisoners are actually part of a large culture within the facility where they're detained. Their needs are seen to by large numbers of people who are very much part of the wider society, and the wider society very much has to spend part of every day producing the goods and services needed to keep that person alive. If they were removed from society, then society would have none those burdens. And no, for many people, it's NOT enough to lock them up, because they still get to live and carry on and read novels and watch movies and be fed and cared for - possibly for several decades - while the person whose life they snuffed out cannot, and the lives impacted by that are forever robbed of what was taken. And yet they get to support the person who took that life, every day.
Is this what you do?
You asked a snarky, ignorant question intended to push some agenda of yours that characterizes the people who own and run businesses as being unable to have feelings. That was an absurd posture on your part. I gave you something to react to. Feel free, instead of resorting to lazy ad hominem, to point out where in the chain of events you just read the transition occurs to the person running a business no longer being able to have feelings. Be specific, or consider no longer trying to paint that whiny Corporations Are Evil Robots image you were lamely hoping to get across.
If you think a corporation like Pfizer is comparable to any small business you have a serious problem with your ability to think
So, at what point do the people running the business stop being people? Be specific. Is it when the company is made of 2 people? 20? 200? 2,000? 20,000? Be specific about the number, and by what mechanism you think that the people making the decisions are no longer themselves, no longer able to consider their values, and no longer have feelings. Explain why one person LESS than the size you think is some robotic non-feeling entity is still able to have feelings, but one person MORE than that number no longer is. Talk about what happens when that one extra person comes on board. No, really. See if you can coherently explain your theory, and how it applies to one person more, and less than the number that you think scales human decision making from one mode to another.
The truth is, you don't even know anybody who has successfully launched and grown a business to the point where there are hundreds or thousands of people involved. Because you can't rely on a personal experience of having sat down and actually talked to someone like that, you're conjuring up a fantasy notion of who they become, so that you have something abstract to hate, since that what makes you tick. That whole "get help" BS? It's called "projection," dude. Look it up.
How can a corporation have feelings?
Because it's made up of people. Strange that you don't actually understand that. Here's an experiment for you.
1) Start mowing lawns for some spare cash.
2) Notice that you're good at it, and start landscaping for a living.
3) Recognize that there are some good reasons to start functioning as a business, instead of having customers make out a check to you personally.
4) Take on bigger customers now that you're not just Jimmy with a lawn mower.
5) Grow to the point where you've got employees, a fleet of trucks, and customers who really rely on your services.
6) On the advice of your lawyer and your accountant, incorporate your business so that it can do things like continue to operate even after you get hit by a bus, and so that if one of your employees crashes a tractor into a client's propane tanks and burns down their dentist's office, you don't lose your house.
7) Congrats, you are now in charge of an Eeeeeeevil Corporation.
8) Look in the mirror. Did you lose your "feelings?" Do you suddenly not care about all of the things you used to care about?
Yeah. Funny about that. Consider forming your world view by talking to actual people instead of assuming that all businesses are run by comic book villains.
Why do you think that not getting to live out your life for decades after you've (for example) raped a child and cut her to pieces while she's alive isn't justice? Is it justice that the family of that girl gets to wake up every morning and look at her empty chair at the table before they head off to work to spend a bit of each day working so that some of their income can buy for her killer the breakfast she'll never again have? Spending decades providing food, medical care, education, housing, and entertainment for the person who, say, killed your mom with a knife in the gut in order to steal $5 from her purse - that's your idea of justice?
Dear business owners, stop being greedy fucks and start paying higher wages
Which is different than "Dear 20-something coders, stop being greedy fucks and demanding lots of money from someone that doesn't care if you're stoned or not" ... how, exactly? There are two parties to the paycheck transaction.
Whether or not there are more unhappy people doesn't change the physiology of addiction. Ask a true alcoholic or someone hooked on opiates to give up those substances on the spot if you "change their circumstances," and watch what happens. You'll change your thoughts on the subject.
The whole problem is going to become far worse as more states legalize marijuana.
Why? People who don't get stoned really won't care.
marijuana does not impact a persons health, cognative abilities
Other than its demonstrated impact on developing brains, even into their twenties, and the plain-as-day stoner bearing and general mindset that anyone with one eye open and any intellectual honesty has to confirm witnessing over and over again - at least often enough to give lie to the "has no impact" notion.
nor is the cost to society in general anywhere near as high as alachol
So, the cost isn't AS high as the huge cost of a different substance, so let's not give it another thought? Alcohol is more widespread than, say, heroin ... but would you say that alcohol's impact on people is more, or less of an issue than is addition to meth or opiates? If opiates are worse, we can just say never mind about alcohol, right? No? I see.
Drug Users Struggle to Find Employers Who Don't Require Drug Tests
Fixed THAT for you.
and they can be still considered "under the influence" even days later when they are 100% sober, according to current law. Does that shit make sense?
Yes, it makes sense. Because the tests can't distinguish clearly between someone who's simply still got it in their system, and someone who is impaired. A person who works with people's lives on the line knows that, and needs to take that into account. You know, by not putting themselves in a position where their judgement can't be measured as they stick a knife into someone's chest for a living.
No, that wouldn't surprise me at all. Doesn't change the fact that someone who makes the conscious decision to use the plural form in an English sentence is completely understanding the concept of "plural" ... but then makes the odd choice to go out of their way to drop in a possessive apostrophe? Why go to all of that trouble?
Fluid? I just paused to gape at the extra work done to insert an apostrophe where doing so makes no sense. How can anyone make it out of middle school and end up spending their time on a technically-oriented web site and not have the understanding that there's a difference between the plural and possessive? We all use plural and possessive forms every day while speaking, so the concept isn't foreign to anyone here, even if English isn't their native tongue. Who goes to the extra trouble to deploy an apostrophe when they mean "more than one?" It's baffling. But it only happens because people SEE other people doing it, and the only way to stop the vicious circle of backwards, incorrect use is to point it out.
Please list the names of bankers who committed crimes, and the specific crimes they committed (it would be helpful if you mentioned the actual statutes they violated). Then point out when the DoJ became aware of these specific crimes but refused to indict. Thanks for the details. If you're aware of specific financial crimes that the DoJ does NOT know about, why aren't you making phone calls?
I remember how Joe Biden, in describing the huge undertaking by hundreds of intelligence and support people, along with the on-the-scene deployment of SEAL Team 6 to actually do the deed of killing Bin Laden in his Pakistani sanctuary ... Biden described Obama's decision to follow the intel team's advice as "the gutsiest thing I've ever seen." That word appears to be in danger of no longer meaning anything at all like it used to, and might be worth a second thought on the part of editors and public figures, if this is how it's going to be put to use. Thank you for reading this gutsy comment.
Pull the factory's out
Pull the factory's what out? What does the factory have that needs pulling out, and out of where? Do many factories have this problem?
Amazon is up over 940% since I bought my shares. So, your main complain is that you weren't smart enough to do the same, and you're really complaining about yourself? Thought so.