On one hand, no, but on another, isn't that the point of the government? They exist to serve the people. Assuming the code is open source, audited, and done in a way that's completely open and transparent? yeah I think I would trust it.
- Government already taxes your income (between State and Federal taxes it was around 40c of every dollar I made last time I checked). - Government double dips and taxes corporations payroll tax in addition to your income tax - Government taxes a percent of any property you have, and if you don't pay that every year they will come to your door and evict you - Every time you stay at a hotel, go out to eat, or buy a beer, the government needs more taxes - If you want to invest money and save it, the government taxes that too - If I want to start a business or even a hobby, the government needs its taxes! - Government taxes everything you buy with a Sales Tax - Need to travel anywhere, government needs a hefty gas tax too
In exchange for all these taxes, on every dollar you make, every dollar you get, every dollar you spend, and every dollar you invest, you get: Failing schools, failing bridges and roads. A judicial system that's a joke, with years of case backlogs, high crime (Ironically in the cities and states that have the highest taxes). When you say, oh look at all these benefits of taxes, all I see are piles of waste and corruption, and a government stealing from its citizens while not fulfilling its end of the social contract. A government that you think should be entitled to even more money that it did not earn and does not deserve.
You should actuallty talk to someone in the industry before spreading FUD. The materials dumped from 50-60 years ago were much more dangerous and hard to break down than the waste produced today (Asbestos, Lead, etc). All the news stories about plastic taking hundreds or thousands of years to degrade is utter nonesense. In modern waste management, waste is composted and reaches extremely high temperatures where plastics readily break down. In fact most of it is turned into energy, since plastic comes from hydrocarbons. That is, of course, all the stuff that isn't recycled, since modern countries have great recycling infrastructure. As for the stuff out in the ocean? It photodegrades rapidly since the ultraviolet light of the sun breaks it apart.
The main problem with plastics is not people in Hawaii or California drinking out of plastic straws. It's third world countries that don't give a damn about the environment, don't recycle, and spew their waste everywhere. In fact most US Corporations do give a damn about product lifecycle because the people who work in, and own those corporations are Americans, and don't want to live in a polluted S***hole. That's why the US doesn't have garbage in the streets and generally has a good handle on waste management.
Actually, those very models (Tree rings, Ice cores) are constantly adjusted so that they better fit surface temperature records over the last hundred years. Specifically, the same surface data that showed significant cooling from the 1930s to 1970s and was massaged out of the record. Whenever someone finds a model that doesn't agree with the current consensus, they tweak and correct their models until they provide the conclusion they were seeking. e.g. Doctored Data, Not U.S. Temperatures, Set a Record This Year
. This happens, by the way, in much less politically charged scientific fields than climate science. P-Hacking is a frequent and constant challenge in much less politicized fields, including medicine and physics.
There's a great video out there by Tom Heller who calls out many of my own frustrations. I personally am a big believer in the scientific method and the scientific community in general. But it would be ignorant to claim that climate science was completely apolitical and there was no fraud or misrepresentation whatsoever.
Do Chinese Americans still face a lot of problems stemming from history? You know, given that Chinese were effectively slave labor in the late 1800s, or that most Americans were blatantly racist against Chinese people for the better part of two centuries? Actually no, they don't. That's because victim culture isn't part of their ethos. If you go back far enough we are all "descendants of slaves", or something equally as bad in one form or another. The Irish came to America to escape starvation and were then exploited. It was not uncommon for (white) women and children were effectively worked to death in textile mills in the 1800s and early 1900s. How are their descendants doing today? Do they blame all their problems on things "stemming from history"?
Slavery is over. It has been over for over 150 years. It was a terrible time in history, but guess what.. there are lots of them. Communism tortured, killed, and dehumanized millions of more people and is celebrated by the same people who support affirmative action and repatriations for slavery. How about, instead of blaming our current problems on long-dead generations past, maybe people of all races and backgrounds should be held accountable for their actions in the present?
Or..you know..we could continue to build out nuclear energy. Then I can run my A/C and not have to 'conserve' based on the position of the sun or the direction the wind. And as a bonus, it's scalable so a generating station the size of a small office building can power an entire city.
I've heard Venus is actually a better target for human settlement for several reasons, particularly floating colonies full of breathable air since they would float on top of the super dense atmosphere.
Miles above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is actually quite similar to Earth's and has both Earth-like air pressure and an Earth-like atmospheric temperature range (0 to 50 °C) provided you were at the right altitude. This means humans could live there without pressure suits. Additionally, the atmosphere above this point provides shielding against radiation similar to Earth. It's a wonder we've put all our focus on Mars and not our other neighbor.
No, they're not. Check out the Ghost Gunner. You can buy an 80% lower receiver for an AR-15, pop it in the "printer/CNC", load up the files, and it will drill everything out to finish it. You can then go and buy all the rest of the parts (Barrel, Grip, Muzzle, Upper), which can be purchased legally, unregulated, with cash if you'd like. They sell those parts off the shelf of most sporting goods stores. Put it all together and you have a rifle that's as good or better than one from a factory.
Russia may, or may not have had a hand in making social media posts or posting "Fake News" as the media calls it. But so what? It's a free country. You're allowed to publish whatever "News" you want, even if it's not true. CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and so on do it all the time, and to a much wider audience with more perceived (but undeserved) credibility.
Do you have a more impartial source for that than the New York Times. Preferably one that doesn't use language like "Not really", or "Yes, but not as much as the president said" with more definitive facts and figures?
I am ashamed of Slashdot for posting this. Scraping LinkedIn is not newsworthy. It's not an achievement or technically complex. Most people on this site could accomplish this inside a day or two. The only thing this accomplishes is the insinuation that people should take this information and use it to harass government employees, which is not only unethical but potentially criminal.
I'm usually not one to suggest that the government take over private services but it seems like it would make a lot of sense that local governments should publish street map data in a public format. After all, they're the ones who build the roads in the first place. It seems like the tools and current tools they use to do mapping and surveying is in ancient, scanned document formats, or sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere gathering dust.
Actually, yeah, there is plenty of proof. People have put these things behind an IDS and measure exactly when it connects to the internet and how much bandwidth it uses. They don't spy on you. If you are really so paranoid, you too, can use off the shelf network gear and free, open source software and prove this to yourself.
How does a discussion on baby boomers, in any logical way, lead you to a communist rant against capitalism?
Capitalism brings immense benefits to the world. Poverty around the world is less than any time in history. Energy is cheaper than it has ever been before. Technology, by proxy of microprocessors and Moore's law have brought down the cost of communications thousands of times. Food is cheaper than it has ever been in history. We're in less wars, and conflicts, as a planet, than any time ever before in history. In fact we have it so good, at least in the United States, that 90%+ of those in poverty have access to clean water, electricity, air conditioning, television, a mobile phone, and so on.
It takes a special kind of asshole to see the world as such a dark place. Blaming your own warped impression of the state of the world on the very forces that have brought us out of the darkness over the last hundred years is the ultimate form of entitlement.
You do not understand chronic depression, a chemical imbalance in the brain, at all
Neither do doctors, actually, since the primary mechanism of 'curing' depression in the 1st world is to pump patients full of poorly-understood pharmaceuticals with negative side effects. Our modern understanding of mental health not far from a 21st century form of bloodletting.
Do you think that CNN, or NBC, or anyone else outraged over this story actually cares about your privacy or rights online? This story will not kill Facebook, but it will be used as an excuse to monitor and lock down free and unfiltered online communications even further under the guise of privacy. I'm sure absurd legislation, and protests will follow. It's been the media's playbook for 2A rights and the 1st will be next.
A free market is as much about about profitability and survival as evolution is about making the perfect life-form. It doesn't have an end goal. It's simply an adaptation to the environment.
Markets converge on profitability but the market is not driven by profitability alone. Non-governmental non-profits and charities exist in a free-market system and take in billions of dollars. Even many for-profit businesses don't have an "end-goal" of profitability, and would rather focus on treating employees well, or building a high quality, low volume product, or focusing on future growth. A lot of times Innovation IS the end-goal. It is certainly the goal of Amazon, which has been holding back profitability from shareholders, and has been rewarded by investors for doing so. That's why, for example, it has a P/E of 200 per share, while General Electric, despite having a profit-to-earnings ratio of 14, has seen its stock price plummet, and cut over 12,000 jobs.
They absolutely did not recognize it as a right, that's not historically accurate. The sections dealing with slavery are specifically Article 1, Section 9, which banned congress from passing legislation barring states from importing persons until 1808, the three-fifths compromise (Which would eventually spark the civil war), and the fugitive slave clause.
At the time of the nation's founding several states had already made slavery illegal, and thus it was not a right. Most of the New England states banned slavery in the 1700s; Vermont in particular had laws against slavery on the books before it was recognized as a state. Without the compromises made between the free states and slave states, the union may have never been formed in the first place.
The entire premise of this is bizarre. The Russians want Americans to have more freedoms? We better watch out because next thing you know they'll be using the bots to advocate for other crazy ideas like free-market capitalism, freedom of speech, and the right to due process.
Every automaker loses money on the initial run of a new model line. It's not a big secret. It costs billions to produce the tooling and R&D to manufacture a new car. Over time, the automakers scale up and improve their processes to produce them at less cost.
No, actually this is how the government is intended to operate.
The FBI is not the Fourth Branch of Government. They're a function of the Executive branch. Hence why it was stacked with Democrats during the Obama administration. The president has total authority over the FBI, and citizens (By proxy of voting) have the authority to elect a president. If you don't like the way the President is running the executive, you're free to vote for someone else in the next election.
Republicans are alleging that FISA was abused. If that's true, regardless the reasons or motivations, it only re-affirms what a lot of us were thinking would happen when the warrantless wiretapping program and "unmasking" was made public back in 2005.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you build a giant surveillance machine with limited checks and balances and without regard for the constitution, things like what the memo alleges are eventually going to occur. It's human nature. What's more disturbing than the memo is that BOTH Democrat and Republican lawmakers allowed this sort of surveillance to proceed. There is no place for a FISA (Secret Courts) in a free society.
You're right but not really from an orbital mechanics perspective. "Local Neighborhood" is a somewhat nebulous term, in that the Delta-V to get to Mars is not that much more (in some cases less in a flyby!) than landing on the moon. It depends on a lot of factors such as how much aerobraking you can take advantage of when you get there, and the positioning of Earth and Mars. Most of the infrastructure you need to get out of our gravity well will take you to Mars without much more effort.
Secondly, Mars has a lot of things that the Moon doesn't. It has an abundant supply of water locked up in ice we can easily use to create both water and oxygen. It has an atmosphere (albeit weak) that can somewhat protect from solar radiation, and can allow for slimmer, more mobile pressure suits. It has much stronger gravity, reducing the physiological impact of a long-term mission.
California is not "Out of the hole". They have a state-wide $769 billion pension shortage, and a $6 billion dollar surplus. If you actually included California's obligations in your accounting, it would be considered to be in a deep deficit on top of a revenue slowdown. You don't have to take my word for it, it's well reported in outlets like Forbes, Washington Post, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
On one hand, no, but on another, isn't that the point of the government? They exist to serve the people. Assuming the code is open source, audited, and done in a way that's completely open and transparent? yeah I think I would trust it.
- Government already taxes your income (between State and Federal taxes it was around 40c of every dollar I made last time I checked).
- Government double dips and taxes corporations payroll tax in addition to your income tax
- Government taxes a percent of any property you have, and if you don't pay that every year they will come to your door and evict you
- Every time you stay at a hotel, go out to eat, or buy a beer, the government needs more taxes
- If you want to invest money and save it, the government taxes that too
- If I want to start a business or even a hobby, the government needs its taxes!
- Government taxes everything you buy with a Sales Tax
- Need to travel anywhere, government needs a hefty gas tax too
In exchange for all these taxes, on every dollar you make, every dollar you get, every dollar you spend, and every dollar you invest, you get: Failing schools, failing bridges and roads. A judicial system that's a joke, with years of case backlogs, high crime (Ironically in the cities and states that have the highest taxes). When you say, oh look at all these benefits of taxes, all I see are piles of waste and corruption, and a government stealing from its citizens while not fulfilling its end of the social contract. A government that you think should be entitled to even more money that it did not earn and does not deserve.
You should actuallty talk to someone in the industry before spreading FUD. The materials dumped from 50-60 years ago were much more dangerous and hard to break down than the waste produced today (Asbestos, Lead, etc). All the news stories about plastic taking hundreds or thousands of years to degrade is utter nonesense. In modern waste management, waste is composted and reaches extremely high temperatures where plastics readily break down. In fact most of it is turned into energy, since plastic comes from hydrocarbons. That is, of course, all the stuff that isn't recycled, since modern countries have great recycling infrastructure. As for the stuff out in the ocean? It photodegrades rapidly since the ultraviolet light of the sun breaks it apart.
The main problem with plastics is not people in Hawaii or California drinking out of plastic straws. It's third world countries that don't give a damn about the environment, don't recycle, and spew their waste everywhere. In fact most US Corporations do give a damn about product lifecycle because the people who work in, and own those corporations are Americans, and don't want to live in a polluted S***hole. That's why the US doesn't have garbage in the streets and generally has a good handle on waste management.
Actually, those very models (Tree rings, Ice cores) are constantly adjusted so that they better fit surface temperature records over the last hundred years. Specifically, the same surface data that showed significant cooling from the 1930s to 1970s and was massaged out of the record. Whenever someone finds a model that doesn't agree with the current consensus, they tweak and correct their models until they provide the conclusion they were seeking. e.g. Doctored Data, Not U.S. Temperatures, Set a Record This Year . This happens, by the way, in much less politically charged scientific fields than climate science. P-Hacking is a frequent and constant challenge in much less politicized fields, including medicine and physics.
There's a great video out there by Tom Heller who calls out many of my own frustrations. I personally am a big believer in the scientific method and the scientific community in general. But it would be ignorant to claim that climate science was completely apolitical and there was no fraud or misrepresentation whatsoever.
Do Chinese Americans still face a lot of problems stemming from history? You know, given that Chinese were effectively slave labor in the late 1800s, or that most Americans were blatantly racist against Chinese people for the better part of two centuries? Actually no, they don't. That's because victim culture isn't part of their ethos. If you go back far enough we are all "descendants of slaves", or something equally as bad in one form or another. The Irish came to America to escape starvation and were then exploited. It was not uncommon for (white) women and children were effectively worked to death in textile mills in the 1800s and early 1900s. How are their descendants doing today? Do they blame all their problems on things "stemming from history"?
Slavery is over. It has been over for over 150 years. It was a terrible time in history, but guess what.. there are lots of them. Communism tortured, killed, and dehumanized millions of more people and is celebrated by the same people who support affirmative action and repatriations for slavery. How about, instead of blaming our current problems on long-dead generations past, maybe people of all races and backgrounds should be held accountable for their actions in the present?
Or..you know..we could continue to build out nuclear energy. Then I can run my A/C and not have to 'conserve' based on the position of the sun or the direction the wind. And as a bonus, it's scalable so a generating station the size of a small office building can power an entire city.
I've heard Venus is actually a better target for human settlement for several reasons, particularly floating colonies full of breathable air since they would float on top of the super dense atmosphere.
Miles above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is actually quite similar to Earth's and has both Earth-like air pressure and an Earth-like atmospheric temperature range (0 to 50 °C) provided you were at the right altitude. This means humans could live there without pressure suits. Additionally, the atmosphere above this point provides shielding against radiation similar to Earth. It's a wonder we've put all our focus on Mars and not our other neighbor.
No, they're not. Check out the Ghost Gunner. You can buy an 80% lower receiver for an AR-15, pop it in the "printer/CNC", load up the files, and it will drill everything out to finish it. You can then go and buy all the rest of the parts (Barrel, Grip, Muzzle, Upper), which can be purchased legally, unregulated, with cash if you'd like. They sell those parts off the shelf of most sporting goods stores. Put it all together and you have a rifle that's as good or better than one from a factory.
Russia didn't manipulate anyone's vote.
Russia may, or may not have had a hand in making social media posts or posting "Fake News" as the media calls it. But so what? It's a free country. You're allowed to publish whatever "News" you want, even if it's not true. CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and so on do it all the time, and to a much wider audience with more perceived (but undeserved) credibility.
Do you have a more impartial source for that than the New York Times. Preferably one that doesn't use language like "Not really", or "Yes, but not as much as the president said" with more definitive facts and figures?
I am ashamed of Slashdot for posting this. Scraping LinkedIn is not newsworthy. It's not an achievement or technically complex. Most people on this site could accomplish this inside a day or two. The only thing this accomplishes is the insinuation that people should take this information and use it to harass government employees, which is not only unethical but potentially criminal.
I'm usually not one to suggest that the government take over private services but it seems like it would make a lot of sense that local governments should publish street map data in a public format. After all, they're the ones who build the roads in the first place. It seems like the tools and current tools they use to do mapping and surveying is in ancient, scanned document formats, or sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere gathering dust.
Actually, yeah, there is plenty of proof. People have put these things behind an IDS and measure exactly when it connects to the internet and how much bandwidth it uses. They don't spy on you. If you are really so paranoid, you too, can use off the shelf network gear and free, open source software and prove this to yourself.
How does a discussion on baby boomers, in any logical way, lead you to a communist rant against capitalism?
Capitalism brings immense benefits to the world. Poverty around the world is less than any time in history. Energy is cheaper than it has ever been before. Technology, by proxy of microprocessors and Moore's law have brought down the cost of communications thousands of times. Food is cheaper than it has ever been in history. We're in less wars, and conflicts, as a planet, than any time ever before in history. In fact we have it so good, at least in the United States, that 90%+ of those in poverty have access to clean water, electricity, air conditioning, television, a mobile phone, and so on.
It takes a special kind of asshole to see the world as such a dark place. Blaming your own warped impression of the state of the world on the very forces that have brought us out of the darkness over the last hundred years is the ultimate form of entitlement.
You do not understand chronic depression, a chemical imbalance in the brain, at all
Neither do doctors, actually, since the primary mechanism of 'curing' depression in the 1st world is to pump patients full of poorly-understood pharmaceuticals with negative side effects. Our modern understanding of mental health not far from a 21st century form of bloodletting.
Do you think that CNN, or NBC, or anyone else outraged over this story actually cares about your privacy or rights online? This story will not kill Facebook, but it will be used as an excuse to monitor and lock down free and unfiltered online communications even further under the guise of privacy. I'm sure absurd legislation, and protests will follow. It's been the media's playbook for 2A rights and the 1st will be next.
If people would just switch to UNIX time we wouldn't have this problem.
A free market is as much about about profitability and survival as evolution is about making the perfect life-form. It doesn't have an end goal. It's simply an adaptation to the environment.
Markets converge on profitability but the market is not driven by profitability alone. Non-governmental non-profits and charities exist in a free-market system and take in billions of dollars. Even many for-profit businesses don't have an "end-goal" of profitability, and would rather focus on treating employees well, or building a high quality, low volume product, or focusing on future growth. A lot of times Innovation IS the end-goal. It is certainly the goal of Amazon, which has been holding back profitability from shareholders, and has been rewarded by investors for doing so. That's why, for example, it has a P/E of 200 per share, while General Electric, despite having a profit-to-earnings ratio of 14, has seen its stock price plummet, and cut over 12,000 jobs.
They absolutely did not recognize it as a right, that's not historically accurate. The sections dealing with slavery are specifically Article 1, Section 9, which banned congress from passing legislation barring states from importing persons until 1808, the three-fifths compromise (Which would eventually spark the civil war), and the fugitive slave clause.
At the time of the nation's founding several states had already made slavery illegal, and thus it was not a right. Most of the New England states banned slavery in the 1700s; Vermont in particular had laws against slavery on the books before it was recognized as a state. Without the compromises made between the free states and slave states, the union may have never been formed in the first place.
The entire premise of this is bizarre. The Russians want Americans to have more freedoms? We better watch out because next thing you know they'll be using the bots to advocate for other crazy ideas like free-market capitalism, freedom of speech, and the right to due process.
Every automaker loses money on the initial run of a new model line. It's not a big secret. It costs billions to produce the tooling and R&D to manufacture a new car. Over time, the automakers scale up and improve their processes to produce them at less cost.
No, actually this is how the government is intended to operate.
The FBI is not the Fourth Branch of Government. They're a function of the Executive branch. Hence why it was stacked with Democrats during the Obama administration. The president has total authority over the FBI, and citizens (By proxy of voting) have the authority to elect a president. If you don't like the way the President is running the executive, you're free to vote for someone else in the next election.
Republicans are alleging that FISA was abused. If that's true, regardless the reasons or motivations, it only re-affirms what a lot of us were thinking would happen when the warrantless wiretapping program and "unmasking" was made public back in 2005.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you build a giant surveillance machine with limited checks and balances and without regard for the constitution, things like what the memo alleges are eventually going to occur. It's human nature. What's more disturbing than the memo is that BOTH Democrat and Republican lawmakers allowed this sort of surveillance to proceed. There is no place for a FISA (Secret Courts) in a free society.
You're right but not really from an orbital mechanics perspective. "Local Neighborhood" is a somewhat nebulous term, in that the Delta-V to get to Mars is not that much more (in some cases less in a flyby!) than landing on the moon. It depends on a lot of factors such as how much aerobraking you can take advantage of when you get there, and the positioning of Earth and Mars. Most of the infrastructure you need to get out of our gravity well will take you to Mars without much more effort.
Secondly, Mars has a lot of things that the Moon doesn't. It has an abundant supply of water locked up in ice we can easily use to create both water and oxygen. It has an atmosphere (albeit weak) that can somewhat protect from solar radiation, and can allow for slimmer, more mobile pressure suits. It has much stronger gravity, reducing the physiological impact of a long-term mission.
California is not "Out of the hole". They have a state-wide $769 billion pension shortage, and a $6 billion dollar surplus. If you actually included California's obligations in your accounting, it would be considered to be in a deep deficit on top of a revenue slowdown. You don't have to take my word for it, it's well reported in outlets like Forbes, Washington Post, etc.