This is certainly a depressing chronicle of death and tragedy. But Rubio's statement stands up to scrutiny - at least for the recent past, as he framed it. Notably, three of the mass shootings took place in California, which already has strong gun laws including a ban on certain weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Gun-control advocates often point to the experience in other countries that have enacted gun laws that heavily restrict gun ownership; as we have shown, quantitative measures of cross-comparative crime statistics, especially where the crime is not consistently defined (i.e., "mass shooting"), usually end up being apples-to-oranges comparisons. It is possible that some gun-control proposals, such as a ban on large-capacity magazines, would reduce the number of dead in a future shooting, though the evidence for that is heavily disputed. But Rubio was speaking in the past, about specific incidents. He earns a rare Geppetto Checkmark.
If you're going to serve ads on your site, at least:
1 - Be responsible for them. 2 - Host them on your own domain.
The corollary being that if sites host ads on another domain they're not responsible for them and so you a) shouldn't trust they're not malicious code and b) should block them.
This is another one of those Fermat's Margin gambits isn't it? I.e. "I have proof that I'm right and you're wrong but it is too large to fit in this slashdot comment box"
V for Vendetta the book was 'fascists vs anarchists' with neither side being purely good or purely bad. As Alan Moore put it the film 'recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism' which he didn't approve of at all:
Alan Moore: At the time when I wrote it, it was of course for an English alternative comic magazine around about 1981. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her, by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in places that hadn't seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists groups, the National Front, the British National party, who were flexing their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might have thought had been eradicated back in the '30s. But they were reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with a bit more spin put upon them The friendly face of fascism.
So V for Vendetta originally came out of the fact I'd been asked to write a strip for David Lloyd to illustrate. We'd originally been talking about doing a 1930's noir strip and Dave had bolted that because I think he'd had enough of digging out '30's reference. We thought maybe we could get the same effect by rather than setting it in the near past, to set it in the near future. So it all evolved from several different sources, but it was playing into the fact that over here in England we've got quite a good tradition of villains and sociopaths as heroes. Like Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes and all the rest of them. And in our fiction, in British children's comics, there were as many sociopathic villains who'd got their own comic strips as there were heroes. Possibly more. The British have always had sympathy with a dashing villain.
So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.
The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.
Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis.
Starship Troopers the film is a parody of Starship Troopers the book. This is something people who like the book tend to ignore.
I like both myself. However they're telling different and in many ways opposite stories. In the book civilisation collapsed and rebooted and you ended up with a stratocracy which is actually pretty functional and probably the only way humans can survive. Democracy ended in anarchy and the universe is filled with hostile aliens.
In the film civilisation collapsed and you ended up with stratocracy which is very nasty - expansionist, Orwellian and not really militarily competent. The Federation's attack on Klendathu is clearly meant to analogous to the Nazis' hubristic and ultimately disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. It even implies that the story that the bugs started the war might not even be true - we know the bugs don't have interstellar travel and are on the other side of the galaxy so how could they have attacked Earth with a meteor? Do we really need to destroy them? Is the best way to do that by landing infantry with no armour and no airpower?
For what it's worth I think a stratocracy would lead to something really nasty - a sort of modern Sparta where the non citizens would be Helots. But who knows? Science fiction requires that you either suspend disbelief a little bit and accept that the premise produces the society depicted, or put the book down. Similarly once you realise that the film is structured so that you root for humans and later find out they're the bad guys - even though that doesn't make the bugs exactly 'good' - it's actually pretty enjoyable. There aren't that many action films that do that.
And actually satirical adaptations that invert the meaning of the source material aren't a bad thing. The book's society is a critique of what Heinlein saw 60's America turning into, and it's a good one. The film is critique of the idea that stratocracies would not end up as Sparta 2.0. You can like both.
Depends what you mean by 'social justice' really. Heinlein was a libertarian who believed in free love and equality between both genders and all races. On the other hand the left said the book was crypto fascist because the society in Starship Troopers is a stratocracy where only veterans can vote. It's not even clear if Heinlein actually thinks that stratocracy is a good thing, or if it's more like something humanity got forced into.
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and sequels seems in some ways to be a critique of Starship Troopers - the eponymous hero wipes out the bugs without knowing he was doing it and then spends the rest of series trying to atone for it. On the other hand Orson Scott Card opposed gay marriage and is religious so the left said the book was in part a justification of Western expansion and genocide
If you actually read the books it's clear that the human/Formic war which resulted in near xenocide of the Formics was a caused by a couple of unfortunate misunderstandings on both sides - neither the humans nor the other side was even an entity which could be communicated with.
The writing of the short novel The Hive Queen showed that the Formics, once they realized that humans were sentient, deeply regretted their actions in the First and Second Formic Wars and decided not to send another colonization fleet to Earth. Their inability to communicate with the humans led to their utter destruction in the Third Invasion. This simple book slowly began to change public opinion, as they began to see the Formics as tragic creatures and see Ender Wiggin as a heinous mass-murderer, the Xenocide.
As Napoleon said with a wry chuckle on his return from Moscow. "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley"
The Culture is a post scarcity, post capitalist society. The problem is that post capitalist societies are much more likely to end up with a whole lot of scarcity. Still the books are worth reading - they're not just dry ideological lectures. E.g. look at Excession
It's ambiguous whether the ITG was right to intervene in the Affront's culture. Certainly the Excession seems to regard both The Culture and The Affront as being insufficiently enlightened to be worth contacting. And consider this
Genar-Hofoen returns to the Affront, having been rewarded by being physically transformed into a member of the Affront species (whose company he finds more stimulating than that of the Culture's people).
Affront society is described as being "a never-ending, self-perpetuating holocaust of pain and misery", where the strong prey upon weaker species and individuals. Among the Affront's technological accomplishments is an aptitude for genetic engineering, which they developed long before spaceflight. They use this skill almost exclusively on 'prey species', which tend to be changed so as to provide greater sport (and opportunity for sadism) during the communal hunts forming a major part of the Affront culture. Some examples of these changes include altering game animals to experience heightened levels of fear when recognizing the silhouette of an Affronter, or altering beasts of burden to panic when their masters are excited and thus induce them to pull vehicles faster. One of the few changes to their own species was the redesign of their females to make sex painful for them, a choice exemplary of the reasons they are considered abhorrent by the Culture. "Progress through Pain" i
I'm not really sure what you're alluding to here. Valve were great around the time of the Orange Box and seem to have gone downhill a lot since then. I don't really know too much about them before then.
Of course it might just be that I had the time and hardware to play games around the time of the Orange Box and haven't really had it since then.
You're probably right about the US. Every time I go there I go to NY or CA or the like and it's amazing how messed up the culture is politically. Luckily I can rant and rave on here to blow off steam.
It's not like this in the UK though. Or maybe I just go to places that are not as single party as NY and CA are in the US.
I put up with it because I need to build iOS applications from time to time, and Apple have carefully tied that to being able to run the latest macOS.
Just like back when I needed to build Windows applications I needed to have a machine which run the latest Visual Studio. Which meant you needed to use the latest version of Windows.
A while back I did some consultancy work for a company that made gaming machines. It was actually kind of interesting to go out to the companies who used them. Most of them still had a few engineers who were understandably fed up that their company had brought in an outside solution instead of the in house one they'd championed. However they had loads of executive types who spent their time having boozy pub lunches, usually ending in an angry political rant.
It's possible that there's something analogous happening with Google - once they worked out how to make piles of cash from ads and not from developing new software it all started to stagnate.
Or look at Valve. Valve used to make some very interesting video games, peaking around the Orange Box with Half Life II and Portal. However now they've got an income from Steam they too seem to produce less than they used to.
In Google's case it seems like they've hired a lot of smart people fresh out of good universities but most of them get stuck in a profoundly stagnant environment. So the politics starts up. Interestingly in Google it's not normal company politics - trying to bring down your rivals at work - but rather the sort of identity politics you see at elite universities. And a few people on the other side pointing out how silly this stuff is.
I think the reason Google can survive it for as long as it does is that it's profitable mostly because of ad revenues, not producing new software. Android and Chrome are free after all, and have become the default choice like Windows and Internet Explorer used to be.
I.e. the resource curse has allowed them to survive despite having a culture which is more about student politics than having to deliver anything to critical customers on time.
the premature removal of all USB 3.0 type A ports,
Forcing people to buy a dongle, probably from the Apple store.
the removal of headphone jacks on the latest iPhones
May we recommend our new AirPods? A snip at only $159!!
the soldering of RAM on motherboards
Thus forcing people to buy more when they order the machine, and do so at whatever price Apple decide to charge. E.g. Apple charge $200 for an 8 to 16GB upgrade and $800 to upgrade a 128GB SSD to 1TB.
the lack of decent Mac mini and Macbook Air updates.
This is probably just laziness. Then again their captive audience will buy the old machines anyway, so I guess they spent less on engineering and got the same sales.
All this stuff is bad for the consumer, but it improves Apple's profitability .
It's a shame really, I'd have bought a new Macbook Pro if they hadn't pulled the trick of soldering the Ram using proprietary SSDs. An extra $1000 on a machine that costs $1299 already is a horrible rip off. Last generation I spent $1099 on a machine and then a few hundred bucks on more Ram and an SSD from Crucial when it got slow. Having to either spend a grand at Apple at the start or never have the possibility of upgrading significantly sours the deal.
Natural selection is inherently 'a breeding race'. It doesn't matter whether you think you're in one or not - groups that breed above the replacement rate will end up outnumbering ones who don't.
Or, as someone put it 'demographics is destiny'. At current trends Germany in 50-100 years time will look at lot different from Germany now. Of course if you don't have kids, that doesn't affect you. But if you do have kids it will affect them, or their kids.
You seem to be saying that the problem isn't that there aren't enough children, just not the right type of children. I asked why you thought the rate needed to be higher and you responded by describing the breeders.
If the end result of SJW culture is that the SJWs don't have enough kids to be survive that's not a problem with me. Well it's not in the US at least because US Christian religious conservatives will replace them. If they get replaced with Muslim religious conservatives - and that's the most likely outcome in Europe - that's a huge problem.
Not least for the SJWs because Muslims are a lot less tolerant of their social agenda than I am. All those LGBT types are going to end up getting the ISIS Free Water slides For Homosexuals treatment (Water slide and pool under construction )
The US outcome is more benign - a world where Ben Shapiro types are the majority is not going to being throwing people off building for being gay.
I.e. just saying 'the birth rate is fine' is missing the point. If some groups are breeding above the replacement rate and others are breeding way below it, that will affect the makeup of the society in the long run.
Amusingly the only people who deny this are the secular liberal types. Who are not the ones breeding above replacement rate. Of course they're also keen on bringing in third worlders who tend to breed above the replacement rate.
I see a little pink slip for a man, Scaramucci, Scaramucci, Will you do the Fandango? Twitterstorm and firing very very frightening me! But I'm just a poor Mooch, Wife doesn't love me, He's just a poor Mooch from a rich family, Spare him his job from this monstrosity! Easy come quick to go will you let him go? Bismillah! NO! WE HAD TO LET HIM GO! Trump has a firing set aside for me, For me, For MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Penned to commemorate his first sacking from the White House.
Slashdot Mirror
No it wouldn't
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/12/10/marco-rubios-claim-that-no-recent-mass-shootings-would-have-been-prevented-by-gun-laws/
The Pinocchio Test
This is certainly a depressing chronicle of death and tragedy. But Rubio's statement stands up to scrutiny - at least for the recent past, as he framed it. Notably, three of the mass shootings took place in California, which already has strong gun laws including a ban on certain weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Gun-control advocates often point to the experience in other countries that have enacted gun laws that heavily restrict gun ownership; as we have shown, quantitative measures of cross-comparative crime statistics, especially where the crime is not consistently defined (i.e., "mass shooting"), usually end up being apples-to-oranges comparisons. It is possible that some gun-control proposals, such as a ban on large-capacity magazines, would reduce the number of dead in a future shooting, though the evidence for that is heavily disputed. But Rubio was speaking in the past, about specific incidents. He earns a rare Geppetto Checkmark.
He's a good boy. He was probably just taking care of those drugs and firearms for one of the older boys.
Isn't that a bit of a security risk?
E.g. this app requires you enter a bunch of data. And then it scans your passport
https://play.google.com/store/...
At which point it knows everything about you. What's to stop is sending the data off to someone who sells it on the internet to identity thieves?
If it was some pure open source thing I might trust it. However even though this library is open source
http://jmrtd.org/ ... The ReadID app is not. So you don't know what they do with the data they collect.
If you're going to serve ads on your site, at least:
1 - Be responsible for them.
2 - Host them on your own domain.
The corollary being that if sites host ads on another domain they're not responsible for them and so you a) shouldn't trust they're not malicious code and b) should block them.
Communist propaganda! It'll be a new world, pitiless and pure! Everything will be super!
This is another one of those Fermat's Margin gambits isn't it? I.e. "I have proof that I'm right and you're wrong but it is too large to fit in this slashdot comment box"
Some of my best friends are civic nationalists.
V for Vendetta the book was 'fascists vs anarchists' with neither side being purely good or purely bad. As Alan Moore put it the film 'recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism' which he didn't approve of at all :
http://web.archive.org/web/200...
Alan Moore: At the time when I wrote it, it was of course for an English alternative comic magazine around about 1981. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her, by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in places that hadn't seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists groups, the National Front, the British National party, who were flexing their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might have thought had been eradicated back in the '30s. But they were reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with a bit more spin put upon them The friendly face of fascism.
So V for Vendetta originally came out of the fact I'd been asked to write a strip for David Lloyd to illustrate. We'd originally been talking about doing a 1930's noir strip and Dave had bolted that because I think he'd had enough of digging out '30's reference. We thought maybe we could get the same effect by rather than setting it in the near past, to set it in the near future. So it all evolved from several different sources, but it was playing into the fact that over here in England we've got quite a good tradition of villains and sociopaths as heroes. Like Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes and all the rest of them. And in our fiction, in British children's comics, there were as many sociopathic villains who'd got their own comic strips as there were heroes. Possibly more. The British have always had sympathy with a dashing villain.
So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.
The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.
Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis.
Starship Troopers the film is a parody of Starship Troopers the book. This is something people who like the book tend to ignore.
I like both myself. However they're telling different and in many ways opposite stories. In the book civilisation collapsed and rebooted and you ended up with a stratocracy which is actually pretty functional and probably the only way humans can survive. Democracy ended in anarchy and the universe is filled with hostile aliens.
In the film civilisation collapsed and you ended up with stratocracy which is very nasty - expansionist, Orwellian and not really militarily competent. The Federation's attack on Klendathu is clearly meant to analogous to the Nazis' hubristic and ultimately disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. It even implies that the story that the bugs started the war might not even be true - we know the bugs don't have interstellar travel and are on the other side of the galaxy so how could they have attacked Earth with a meteor? Do we really need to destroy them? Is the best way to do that by landing infantry with no armour and no airpower?
For what it's worth I think a stratocracy would lead to something really nasty - a sort of modern Sparta where the non citizens would be Helots. But who knows? Science fiction requires that you either suspend disbelief a little bit and accept that the premise produces the society depicted, or put the book down. Similarly once you realise that the film is structured so that you root for humans and later find out they're the bad guys - even though that doesn't make the bugs exactly 'good' - it's actually pretty enjoyable. There aren't that many action films that do that.
And actually satirical adaptations that invert the meaning of the source material aren't a bad thing. The book's society is a critique of what Heinlein saw 60's America turning into, and it's a good one. The film is critique of the idea that stratocracies would not end up as Sparta 2.0. You can like both.
An ejaculation releases 250 million sperm. Each sperm contains 3234 Mbp. Each basepair contains 2 bits. Male orgasms take 5-22 seconds on average.
So we can work out the bit rate. (( 250 million * 3234 million * 2bits)/13.5 seconds) in petabytes per second = 14.9722222 petabytes per second.
Aww yeah! Bandwidth, baby!
Depends what you mean by 'social justice' really. Heinlein was a libertarian who believed in free love and equality between both genders and all races. On the other hand the left said the book was crypto fascist because the society in Starship Troopers is a stratocracy where only veterans can vote. It's not even clear if Heinlein actually thinks that stratocracy is a good thing, or if it's more like something humanity got forced into.
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and sequels seems in some ways to be a critique of Starship Troopers - the eponymous hero wipes out the bugs without knowing he was doing it and then spends the rest of series trying to atone for it. On the other hand Orson Scott Card opposed gay marriage and is religious so the left said the book was in part a justification of Western expansion and genocide
If you actually read the books it's clear that the human/Formic war which resulted in near xenocide of the Formics was a caused by a couple of unfortunate misunderstandings on both sides - neither the humans nor the other side was even an entity which could be communicated with.
http://enderverse.wikia.com/wi...
The writing of the short novel The Hive Queen showed that the Formics, once they realized that humans were sentient, deeply regretted their actions in the First and Second Formic Wars and decided not to send another colonization fleet to Earth. Their inability to communicate with the humans led to their utter destruction in the Third Invasion. This simple book slowly began to change public opinion, as they began to see the Formics as tragic creatures and see Ender Wiggin as a heinous mass-murderer, the Xenocide.
As Napoleon said with a wry chuckle on his return from Moscow. "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley"
The Culture is a post scarcity, post capitalist society. The problem is that post capitalist societies are much more likely to end up with a whole lot of scarcity. Still the books are worth reading - they're not just dry ideological lectures. E.g. look at Excession
It's ambiguous whether the ITG was right to intervene in the Affront's culture. Certainly the Excession seems to regard both The Culture and The Affront as being insufficiently enlightened to be worth contacting. And consider this
http://theculture.wikia.com/wi...
Genar-Hofoen returns to the Affront, having been rewarded by being physically transformed into a member of the Affront species (whose company he finds more stimulating than that of the Culture's people).
The Affront seemed pretty loathsome to me
http://theculture.wikia.com/wi...
Affront society is described as being "a never-ending, self-perpetuating holocaust of pain and misery", where the strong prey upon weaker species and individuals. Among the Affront's technological accomplishments is an aptitude for genetic engineering, which they developed long before spaceflight. They use this skill almost exclusively on 'prey species', which tend to be changed so as to provide greater sport (and opportunity for sadism) during the communal hunts forming a major part of the Affront culture. Some examples of these changes include altering game animals to experience heightened levels of fear when recognizing the silhouette of an Affronter, or altering beasts of burden to panic when their masters are excited and thus induce them to pull vehicles faster. One of the few changes to their own species was the redesign of their females to make sex painful for them, a choice exemplary of the reasons they are considered abhorrent by the Culture. "Progress through Pain" i
Good point. Still there are some gaping plot holes in the French adaptation. I'd like to see those plugged in a new one.
I'm not really sure what you're alluding to here. Valve were great around the time of the Orange Box and seem to have gone downhill a lot since then. I don't really know too much about them before then.
Of course it might just be that I had the time and hardware to play games around the time of the Orange Box and haven't really had it since then.
You're probably right about the US. Every time I go there I go to NY or CA or the like and it's amazing how messed up the culture is politically. Luckily I can rant and rave on here to blow off steam.
It's not like this in the UK though. Or maybe I just go to places that are not as single party as NY and CA are in the US.
And it's certainly not like this in Taiwan.
I put up with it because I need to build iOS applications from time to time, and Apple have carefully tied that to being able to run the latest macOS.
Just like back when I needed to build Windows applications I needed to have a machine which run the latest Visual Studio. Which meant you needed to use the latest version of Windows.
A while back I did some consultancy work for a company that made gaming machines. It was actually kind of interesting to go out to the companies who used them. Most of them still had a few engineers who were understandably fed up that their company had brought in an outside solution instead of the in house one they'd championed. However they had loads of executive types who spent their time having boozy pub lunches, usually ending in an angry political rant.
It reminded me a bit of the idea of a 'resource curse', the notion that 'that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources'.
It's possible that there's something analogous happening with Google - once they worked out how to make piles of cash from ads and not from developing new software it all started to stagnate.
Or look at Valve. Valve used to make some very interesting video games, peaking around the Orange Box with Half Life II and Portal. However now they've got an income from Steam they too seem to produce less than they used to.
In Google's case it seems like they've hired a lot of smart people fresh out of good universities but most of them get stuck in a profoundly stagnant environment. So the politics starts up. Interestingly in Google it's not normal company politics - trying to bring down your rivals at work - but rather the sort of identity politics you see at elite universities. And a few people on the other side pointing out how silly this stuff is.
So the sort of insanity that played out at Evergreen and Harvard and Yale now plays out at Google.
I think the reason Google can survive it for as long as it does is that it's profitable mostly because of ad revenues, not producing new software. Android and Chrome are free after all, and have become the default choice like Windows and Internet Explorer used to be.
I.e. the resource curse has allowed them to survive despite having a culture which is more about student politics than having to deliver anything to critical customers on time.
Delayed gratification is a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Good times man. Good times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGoU7urNTbI
Full speed ahead and let's pray the shields hold up!
It hasn't happened yet. However there are rumours he might come back to the White House. Which means a second sacking is all but inevitable.
the premature removal of all USB 3.0 type A ports,
Forcing people to buy a dongle, probably from the Apple store.
the removal of headphone jacks on the latest iPhones
May we recommend our new AirPods? A snip at only $159!!
the soldering of RAM on motherboards
Thus forcing people to buy more when they order the machine, and do so at whatever price Apple decide to charge. E.g. Apple charge $200 for an 8 to 16GB upgrade and $800 to upgrade a 128GB SSD to 1TB.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...
the lack of decent Mac mini and Macbook Air updates.
This is probably just laziness. Then again their captive audience will buy the old machines anyway, so I guess they spent less on engineering and got the same sales.
All this stuff is bad for the consumer, but it improves Apple's profitability .
It's a shame really, I'd have bought a new Macbook Pro if they hadn't pulled the trick of soldering the Ram using proprietary SSDs. An extra $1000 on a machine that costs $1299 already is a horrible rip off. Last generation I spent $1099 on a machine and then a few hundred bucks on more Ram and an SSD from Crucial when it got slow. Having to either spend a grand at Apple at the start or never have the possibility of upgrading significantly sours the deal.
Natural selection is inherently 'a breeding race'. It doesn't matter whether you think you're in one or not - groups that breed above the replacement rate will end up outnumbering ones who don't.
Or, as someone put it 'demographics is destiny'. At current trends Germany in 50-100 years time will look at lot different from Germany now. Of course if you don't have kids, that doesn't affect you. But if you do have kids it will affect them, or their kids.
You seem to be saying that the problem isn't that there aren't enough children, just not the right type of children. I asked why you thought the rate needed to be higher and you responded by describing the breeders.
If the end result of SJW culture is that the SJWs don't have enough kids to be survive that's not a problem with me. Well it's not in the US at least because US Christian religious conservatives will replace them. If they get replaced with Muslim religious conservatives - and that's the most likely outcome in Europe - that's a huge problem.
Not least for the SJWs because Muslims are a lot less tolerant of their social agenda than I am. All those LGBT types are going to end up getting the ISIS Free Water slides For Homosexuals treatment (Water slide and pool under construction )
The US outcome is more benign - a world where Ben Shapiro types are the majority is not going to being throwing people off building for being gay.
I.e. just saying 'the birth rate is fine' is missing the point. If some groups are breeding above the replacement rate and others are breeding way below it, that will affect the makeup of the society in the long run.
Amusingly the only people who deny this are the secular liberal types. Who are not the ones breeding above replacement rate. Of course they're also keen on bringing in third worlders who tend to breed above the replacement rate.
I'll clean her pipes for her.
I see a little pink slip for a man,
Scaramucci, Scaramucci,
Will you do the Fandango?
Twitterstorm and firing very very frightening me!
But I'm just a poor Mooch, Wife doesn't love me,
He's just a poor Mooch from a rich family,
Spare him his job from this monstrosity!
Easy come quick to go will you let him go?
Bismillah! NO! WE HAD TO LET HIM GO!
Trump has a firing set aside for me,
For me,
For MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Penned to commemorate his first sacking from the White House.