Get over it already and accept your role as 3rd world resource extraction center. Like most of Africa.
I hope archive.org survives, because when school children learn how WW3 got started, that is a good example.
But of course you don't understand how utterly fucked up your attitude is. Or that this exact attitude after WW1 is what contributed massively to the rise of Hitler and the resulting WW2.
If I were Trump, I would call up Bernie and ask him if he wants to be my Vice President.
You know, just to fuck over the establishment, and anyway I'm Trump, I don't really give two shits about any of this politics, I'm in it for the laughs and giggles.
Russia will not honor any of its agreements, and is a dangerous aggressor.
One of the promises made to the USSR when the whole wall came down and Soviet Union dissolved and all that was that the NATO would not expand to the borders of Russia. Oh look, how we keep our promises.
If Russia would expand - peacefully, through alliances - to include Canada and Mexiko, how do you think the USA would react? Peacefully? Really, it's possible to be so stupid?
Germany was the world leader in renewable energy, until our government decided to shoot the whole thing in the knee. I'm quite certain bribes and promises of well-paid board positions were involved.
So we should stop buying stuff from Saudi Arabia (currently invading Jemen) immediately? I'm for it. From the USA of course, don't even have enough space here to list all the countries they have bombed and invaded in the past 50 years.
Russia? An aggressor? Sorry, which parallel universe do you live in?
Does Germany believe, Putin will be satisfied with Ukraine and the Baltic states?
How would the USA react if, say, Mexiko would join an economic and military alliance lead by Russia? Wait, we don't have to speculate, we know what would happen, because there is Cuba.
Actually, we should speculate, because Ukraine wasn't always a neighbouring country, it was a part of Russia not long ago. So let's speculate what would happen if Texas would declare independence and then a few years later makes big noise about how it wants to join an economic and military alliance lead by Russia. If you seriously think there wouldn't be US military action, I want some of the drugs you are taking.
Funny how the story changes completely across the Atlantic.
Here in local news (I live in Germany), the decision is largely painted as allowing fracking and the coalition partners are slammed for not having enough guts to outlaw it, which apparently was the original proposal before it was watered down.
The "if the states allow it" is the federal government cop-out if they can't find a solution. Because we have two houses as well, one elected by the people directly and one with representatives from all states, and because people sometimes vote differently in local vs. federal elections and because of different coalitions, holding a majority in one doesn't automatically mean holding one in the other, much like it is in the USA.
So when the coalition could push something through the Bundestag, but not through the Bundesrat, their solution is "leave it up to the states". Spineless cowards, all of them. Always change your opinion so you find a majority.
The important thing is that a lot of NGOs and opposition parties wanted a ban on fracking, and they didn't have the spine to do it. This is not a ban, it's basically a permission with the added bureaucracy that you need a local permission.
Unlike GM, which got a massive bailout, or VW which is partially owned by the (german) government, or virtually any other big car company who all get this or that benefit package.
You are right. Those are not subsidies. At least not by name.
Waiting patiently at the side until this emoji hype dies down when the current teens decide that they're no longer cool and someone at the Unicode consortium comes to work not on drugs that day and asks himself "why the fuck we did this?"
Can't wait to see the fireworks when we realize that it's not so easy to get rid of the shit.
Been saying that for almost two years now: The real future of self-driving cars is not to replace your car in your garage, but to replace taxis and busses. We have everything around it - we have taxis, we have rental cars and car-sharing. A self-driving car is the perfect merger of all of these. Summon when you need it, when you're done no need to search for parking, it just goes its merry way to the next customer or to find parking by itself if it needs to wait for one.
The first company to make this happen will replace Uber before they know what hit them.
They are not wasting money. They are ruining his life. He is in big debt now, with multiple court decisions against him, so a questionable legal history as well. What's he doing these days? Probably not making a great career.
And that's the point. They don't give much of a fuck about him - they want to make sure that the next one will be too afraid. The same reason Assange is locked up in an embassy and Snowden now lives in Russia. It's all a message to the next would-be-hero to think hard if you really want to throw away your life for a bit of digital freedom.
I do. Enough to know that there's a lot of bullshit in that. And don't get me started about Popper.
Christianity was never, not to this day, clean of the old testament, and especially the time before 1000 was much more guided by its brutal rules that are not too different from Sharia law than by the modern interpretation of forgiveness and love.
The protestants had some witch burnings, the catholic church had its inquisition.
And both had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. That is not to say that there was not study and academics within the church, much like Islam had periods of science and learning. But the christian version of knowledge was always aligned with church views and politics. Galileo is a good example, though for entirely different reasons than most people think, Feierabend makes a good argument about that particular case, unexpectedly siding with the church.
That the Enlightenment happened after the muslims had been thrown out of Europe was largely because they had brought ancient classical knowledge to Europe that had been forgotten and/or suppressed by the church before. That started the Renaissance, which later influenced the Enlightenment, to cut a very complex history exceedingly short.
Public education is low today for a multitude of mostly political reasons, none of which has to do with atheism or marxism. But that's an entire topic in itself.
Yes, more and more people don't have TV, same here.
So they invented the "public viewing", where people come to some central place and watch the games on huge video walls, with lots of party and alcohol, of course.
Right now it's still calm. But if your countries goes into the final rounds, you can not escape it without going into the mountains.
It's a choice, I didn't it's the only choice, but if you made that choice (and western societies have), you can't be regressive in one selected area. That's like being a virgin, but only on Mondays.
Everyone who is not a native american in the USA is an immigrant, or the child, grandchild, etc. of an immigrant.
Defending a society does not mean closing borders. A society is not a physical entity. Defending a society means enforcing the values that are central to it, and offering those who want to join it the choice of accepting those values, or not getting in.
To make a progressive society, you need to allow some space around the status quo, because new and different impulses can make the society better. New ideas need to come from somewhere. However, you need to remember two things. First, that you still need an idea of what your values are, even if you are ready to let them evolve. You can't replace it with anything goes. You need to clearly and openly and repeatedly state that this value is not up for discussion. In western societies, that is the basic human rights, for example. And secondly, you need to understand when someone is not bringing a slightly different point of view to the discussion, but wants to sabotage the discussion.
Just like a democracy needs to be wary against people who run in elections and play all the games, but their actual intention is to undo all of that once they are in power, a society needs to be wary of those whose intention is not to add to the culture, but to remove anything that is not theirs.
Moderate muslims are to blame, make no mistake. But not for suddenly turning into violent terrorists. They are to blame for providing the fertile grounds that breeds the terrorists, just like Christianity in the Dark Ages provided the fertile grounds for witch burnings and crusades, and the reason we don't have those anymore is that Christianity was forced to change, to drop all those rules in the old testament about whom to burn and whom to hang and focus on the new testament which is considerably less mentally insane. Being a christian today is not the same as being a christian in 916. And I say that as someone who despises Christianity.
But this change took centuries of extreme pressure from the Enlightenment, from humanism and philosophy, from advances in technology and society. Religions change extremely slowly, as one look into the arcanes of the Vatican will reveal.
So moderate muslims are responsible for terrorism in the same way that peasant farmers of Europe were responsible for witch burnings and crusades - they didn't do it themselves, and probably didn't know and never met even one person who did it, but without the lot of them, it would've never happened.
Some of us actually listened to the famous 2002 Dawkins speech about militant atheism. And the reason we are fighting religion is the same that black people fight racism - because it does hurt society even when it isn't hanging people up on trees. The special rights of churches everywhere, they don't come for free. The special significance that is put on religious morals (over, say, humanist morals) inhibits the evolution of ethics. The pressure on public figures to be religious spreads the disease and makes it more difficult for people who want out to do so. The fact that small children get indoctrinated, I could get on but I would only get angry.
I'm very happy to ignore all the thousand religions on this planet that don't affect me. But to claim that the major religions in the place where you live don't affect you would be delusional. If something bothers me (in the active sense, to bother someone), then I have every right to tell it to fuck off.
I dunno... I can't say I've heard people pontificate about their non-stamp-collecting, nor drone on about the evils of stamp collecting or how not collecting stamps is the only intelligent option.
Obviously you've never spoken to someone who is not a soccer fan during soccer world cup or some such event. Ok, this is for Europe, but let me assume you are smart enough to translate this to Superbowl or something if you're in the US.
When the fans turn the whole fucking world into a circus for their bullshit hobby for a month, sane people try to avoid it, when they are repeatedly forced to face it, sometimes they just can't stand it anymore and will tell you just what they think about this parade of tribal primitivism. And if you live near a stadium, you have plenty of stories to tell about the stupidity and sometimes evil of this bread & games circus.
No matter what you think about the civil rights aspect of our surveillance state, it is increasingly clear that it does not not work.
Of course not, and nobody ever thought that it would. But the people who want to take away our rights will use whatever is happening as a justification. If there is violence, they will say we need more control because of the violence. If there is peace, they will say we need more control to keep the peace.
It's how fascists operate. Or really, any extremists. Doesn't matter what happens, they don't try to view the world through facts, they try to fit the facts into their existing world-view.
The script kiddies of Anonymous will get one day of poking fun at ISIS out of this stunt, but a much better strategy would be for the NSA to quietly take over ISIS sites
So let each of them do their part. One does not exclude the other, you know?
We need to capture people like Mateen alive, so that their minds can be disassembled using the latest techniques to root out the ISIS command trees in Western countries. Every dead terrorist is a good terrorist, but it's also one we can't get information from.
You think of Daesh like a club, but it's more like a cult. They don't work the same way, and any people are easily replaced. See the Taliban - how many times has their chief been killed, only to be replaced by someone else?
No, that is not what they want to change. They cannot force you to buy from them, period, end of sentence.
Because that never happened in the history of the world. It's not like there was a time when you didn't have a choice in which operating system to buy, for example. Not that they forced you to buy one specific operating system when you bought a new computer or something. Unimaginable, such things.
Second, your "rights" to control other people's property don't matter. They don't exist.
As a matter of fact, they do exist. The constitution of my country says that property also brings with it duties and that having property also should serve the greater good. More specific laws then detail under which conditions your property rights are void, and what limits using your property has in which specific cases.
For example, just because I own a car doesn't mean I can do whatever I want with it. I can't drive any speed I want, I can't pour out the gasoline in a forest, I am even required by law to keep it in safe working condition.
Now you will be saying that's different and not what you mean. But where is the difference between owning a car and owning a factory? Oh wow, you can not do whatever the fuck you want with it.
So yes, there are rights to control other people's property.
You are stupid or what? We make trying to become the next Hitler illegal because even the chance that someone could succeed is too bad to allow it to happen.
Monopolies are the same. The reason we have anti-trust legislation in all civilized countries is precisely to stop companies from trying.
Control of one market is not the enemy of "freedom" in an entirely different market.
All law-makers of all civilized countries disagree with you. Which is why anti-trust legislation makes it illegal to leverage dominance in one market into a different one.
When did the world go to shit so much that the desire to not compete in a market, but control it completely isn't raising eyebrows even? When a company says that it wants to dominate a market, that's the same as some politician saying he wants to replace democracy with monarchy.
You don't have to buy from them
but that is exactly what they want to change. Corporations today don't want to be a competitor in a marketplace anymore. I've listened to CEOs talk in closed circles how there is only space for 3 companies in their market and everyone else will be made to go out of business.
Believing in private property is "extremist capitalist thinking",
No, believing that property rights are the only rights that matter is.
Some people chose those fascist governments. Perhaps a majority, perhaps merely a vocal minority, but not everyone;
That is true. The nature of our election systems - majority rule.
even out of those who did support it many were not making an informed choice.
You think so? You have evidence to back up that claim? Because it's so silly to always say that people who made decisions we don't like did so because they were stupid, or misinformed, or tricked. Maybe they weren't?
The government cannot claim ownership of the land either by homesteading or contract, and consequently is not in a position to demand that anyone leave.
True, all analogies break down somewhere. But the point is that in both cases, as long as you are inside of the system, those who run the system can tell you what to do. The GP claimed that corporations are totally different because you can leave, and I pointed out that you can leave countries, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Get over it already and accept your role as 3rd world resource extraction center. Like most of Africa.
I hope archive.org survives, because when school children learn how WW3 got started, that is a good example.
But of course you don't understand how utterly fucked up your attitude is. Or that this exact attitude after WW1 is what contributed massively to the rise of Hitler and the resulting WW2.
Russians would never confuse Ukraine with Russia. In Russia, the Ukrainians are seen as lazy and stupid.
If I were Trump, I would call up Bernie and ask him if he wants to be my Vice President.
You know, just to fuck over the establishment, and anyway I'm Trump, I don't really give two shits about any of this politics, I'm in it for the laughs and giggles.
Russia will not honor any of its agreements, and is a dangerous aggressor.
One of the promises made to the USSR when the whole wall came down and Soviet Union dissolved and all that was that the NATO would not expand to the borders of Russia. Oh look, how we keep our promises.
If Russia would expand - peacefully, through alliances - to include Canada and Mexiko, how do you think the USA would react? Peacefully? Really, it's possible to be so stupid?
2) develop renewable energy asap
Germany was the world leader in renewable energy, until our government decided to shoot the whole thing in the knee. I'm quite certain bribes and promises of well-paid board positions were involved.
But buying stuff from an aggressor
So we should stop buying stuff from Saudi Arabia (currently invading Jemen) immediately? I'm for it. From the USA of course, don't even have enough space here to list all the countries they have bombed and invaded in the past 50 years.
Russia? An aggressor? Sorry, which parallel universe do you live in?
Does Germany believe, Putin will be satisfied with Ukraine and the Baltic states?
How would the USA react if, say, Mexiko would join an economic and military alliance lead by Russia? Wait, we don't have to speculate, we know what would happen, because there is Cuba.
Actually, we should speculate, because Ukraine wasn't always a neighbouring country, it was a part of Russia not long ago. So let's speculate what would happen if Texas would declare independence and then a few years later makes big noise about how it wants to join an economic and military alliance lead by Russia. If you seriously think there wouldn't be US military action, I want some of the drugs you are taking.
Funny how the story changes completely across the Atlantic.
Here in local news (I live in Germany), the decision is largely painted as allowing fracking and the coalition partners are slammed for not having enough guts to outlaw it, which apparently was the original proposal before it was watered down.
The "if the states allow it" is the federal government cop-out if they can't find a solution. Because we have two houses as well, one elected by the people directly and one with representatives from all states, and because people sometimes vote differently in local vs. federal elections and because of different coalitions, holding a majority in one doesn't automatically mean holding one in the other, much like it is in the USA.
So when the coalition could push something through the Bundestag, but not through the Bundesrat, their solution is "leave it up to the states". Spineless cowards, all of them. Always change your opinion so you find a majority.
The important thing is that a lot of NGOs and opposition parties wanted a ban on fracking, and they didn't have the spine to do it. This is not a ban, it's basically a permission with the added bureaucracy that you need a local permission.
Unlike GM, which got a massive bailout, or VW which is partially owned by the (german) government, or virtually any other big car company who all get this or that benefit package.
You are right. Those are not subsidies. At least not by name.
Waiting patiently at the side until this emoji hype dies down when the current teens decide that they're no longer cool and someone at the Unicode consortium comes to work not on drugs that day and asks himself "why the fuck we did this?"
Can't wait to see the fireworks when we realize that it's not so easy to get rid of the shit.
Been saying that for almost two years now: The real future of self-driving cars is not to replace your car in your garage, but to replace taxis and busses. We have everything around it - we have taxis, we have rental cars and car-sharing. A self-driving car is the perfect merger of all of these. Summon when you need it, when you're done no need to search for parking, it just goes its merry way to the next customer or to find parking by itself if it needs to wait for one.
The first company to make this happen will replace Uber before they know what hit them.
You don't understand them.
They are not wasting money. They are ruining his life. He is in big debt now, with multiple court decisions against him, so a questionable legal history as well. What's he doing these days? Probably not making a great career.
And that's the point. They don't give much of a fuck about him - they want to make sure that the next one will be too afraid. The same reason Assange is locked up in an embassy and Snowden now lives in Russia. It's all a message to the next would-be-hero to think hard if you really want to throw away your life for a bit of digital freedom.
I invite you to read more about these matters.
I do. Enough to know that there's a lot of bullshit in that. And don't get me started about Popper.
Christianity was never, not to this day, clean of the old testament, and especially the time before 1000 was much more guided by its brutal rules that are not too different from Sharia law than by the modern interpretation of forgiveness and love.
The protestants had some witch burnings, the catholic church had its inquisition.
And both had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. That is not to say that there was not study and academics within the church, much like Islam had periods of science and learning. But the christian version of knowledge was always aligned with church views and politics. Galileo is a good example, though for entirely different reasons than most people think, Feierabend makes a good argument about that particular case, unexpectedly siding with the church.
That the Enlightenment happened after the muslims had been thrown out of Europe was largely because they had brought ancient classical knowledge to Europe that had been forgotten and/or suppressed by the church before. That started the Renaissance, which later influenced the Enlightenment, to cut a very complex history exceedingly short.
Public education is low today for a multitude of mostly political reasons, none of which has to do with atheism or marxism. But that's an entire topic in itself.
Yes, more and more people don't have TV, same here.
So they invented the "public viewing", where people come to some central place and watch the games on huge video walls, with lots of party and alcohol, of course.
Right now it's still calm. But if your countries goes into the final rounds, you can not escape it without going into the mountains.
Why should society be progressive?
It's a choice, I didn't it's the only choice, but if you made that choice (and western societies have), you can't be regressive in one selected area. That's like being a virgin, but only on Mondays.
Everyone who is not a native american in the USA is an immigrant, or the child, grandchild, etc. of an immigrant.
Defending a society does not mean closing borders. A society is not a physical entity. Defending a society means enforcing the values that are central to it, and offering those who want to join it the choice of accepting those values, or not getting in.
To make a progressive society, you need to allow some space around the status quo, because new and different impulses can make the society better. New ideas need to come from somewhere. However, you need to remember two things. First, that you still need an idea of what your values are, even if you are ready to let them evolve. You can't replace it with anything goes. You need to clearly and openly and repeatedly state that this value is not up for discussion. In western societies, that is the basic human rights, for example. And secondly, you need to understand when someone is not bringing a slightly different point of view to the discussion, but wants to sabotage the discussion.
Just like a democracy needs to be wary against people who run in elections and play all the games, but their actual intention is to undo all of that once they are in power, a society needs to be wary of those whose intention is not to add to the culture, but to remove anything that is not theirs.
Gun users. You can steal guns and so on. And you can own guns without using them.
But the whole discussion is kind of stupid. In fact, so stupid that the band Queen solved the whole thing in 1982 (!!!) song "Put out the Fire":
You know a gun never killed nobody
You can ask anyone
People get shot by people
People with guns
That is nonsense.
Moderate muslims are to blame, make no mistake. But not for suddenly turning into violent terrorists. They are to blame for providing the fertile grounds that breeds the terrorists, just like Christianity in the Dark Ages provided the fertile grounds for witch burnings and crusades, and the reason we don't have those anymore is that Christianity was forced to change, to drop all those rules in the old testament about whom to burn and whom to hang and focus on the new testament which is considerably less mentally insane. Being a christian today is not the same as being a christian in 916. And I say that as someone who despises Christianity.
But this change took centuries of extreme pressure from the Enlightenment, from humanism and philosophy, from advances in technology and society. Religions change extremely slowly, as one look into the arcanes of the Vatican will reveal.
So moderate muslims are responsible for terrorism in the same way that peasant farmers of Europe were responsible for witch burnings and crusades - they didn't do it themselves, and probably didn't know and never met even one person who did it, but without the lot of them, it would've never happened.
Some of us actually listened to the famous 2002 Dawkins speech about militant atheism. And the reason we are fighting religion is the same that black people fight racism - because it does hurt society even when it isn't hanging people up on trees. The special rights of churches everywhere, they don't come for free. The special significance that is put on religious morals (over, say, humanist morals) inhibits the evolution of ethics. The pressure on public figures to be religious spreads the disease and makes it more difficult for people who want out to do so. The fact that small children get indoctrinated, I could get on but I would only get angry.
I'm very happy to ignore all the thousand religions on this planet that don't affect me. But to claim that the major religions in the place where you live don't affect you would be delusional. If something bothers me (in the active sense, to bother someone), then I have every right to tell it to fuck off.
I dunno... I can't say I've heard people pontificate about their non-stamp-collecting, nor drone on about the evils of stamp collecting or how not collecting stamps is the only intelligent option.
Obviously you've never spoken to someone who is not a soccer fan during soccer world cup or some such event. Ok, this is for Europe, but let me assume you are smart enough to translate this to Superbowl or something if you're in the US.
When the fans turn the whole fucking world into a circus for their bullshit hobby for a month, sane people try to avoid it, when they are repeatedly forced to face it, sometimes they just can't stand it anymore and will tell you just what they think about this parade of tribal primitivism. And if you live near a stadium, you have plenty of stories to tell about the stupidity and sometimes evil of this bread & games circus.
No matter what you think about the civil rights aspect of our surveillance state, it is increasingly clear that it does not not work.
Of course not, and nobody ever thought that it would. But the people who want to take away our rights will use whatever is happening as a justification. If there is violence, they will say we need more control because of the violence. If there is peace, they will say we need more control to keep the peace.
It's how fascists operate. Or really, any extremists. Doesn't matter what happens, they don't try to view the world through facts, they try to fit the facts into their existing world-view.
The script kiddies of Anonymous will get one day of poking fun at ISIS out of this stunt, but a much better strategy would be for the NSA to quietly take over ISIS sites
So let each of them do their part. One does not exclude the other, you know?
We need to capture people like Mateen alive, so that their minds can be disassembled using the latest techniques to root out the ISIS command trees in Western countries. Every dead terrorist is a good terrorist, but it's also one we can't get information from.
You think of Daesh like a club, but it's more like a cult. They don't work the same way, and any people are easily replaced. See the Taliban - how many times has their chief been killed, only to be replaced by someone else?
No, that is not what they want to change. They cannot force you to buy from them, period, end of sentence.
Because that never happened in the history of the world. It's not like there was a time when you didn't have a choice in which operating system to buy, for example. Not that they forced you to buy one specific operating system when you bought a new computer or something. Unimaginable, such things.
Second, your "rights" to control other people's property don't matter. They don't exist.
As a matter of fact, they do exist. The constitution of my country says that property also brings with it duties and that having property also should serve the greater good. More specific laws then detail under which conditions your property rights are void, and what limits using your property has in which specific cases.
For example, just because I own a car doesn't mean I can do whatever I want with it. I can't drive any speed I want, I can't pour out the gasoline in a forest, I am even required by law to keep it in safe working condition.
Now you will be saying that's different and not what you mean. But where is the difference between owning a car and owning a factory? Oh wow, you can not do whatever the fuck you want with it.
So yes, there are rights to control other people's property.
So what? It they want to try, go for it.
You are stupid or what? We make trying to become the next Hitler illegal because even the chance that someone could succeed is too bad to allow it to happen.
Monopolies are the same. The reason we have anti-trust legislation in all civilized countries is precisely to stop companies from trying.
Control of one market is not the enemy of "freedom" in an entirely different market.
All law-makers of all civilized countries disagree with you. Which is why anti-trust legislation makes it illegal to leverage dominance in one market into a different one.
But hey, don't let facts get into your way.
Of course they do.
When did the world go to shit so much that the desire to not compete in a market, but control it completely isn't raising eyebrows even? When a company says that it wants to dominate a market, that's the same as some politician saying he wants to replace democracy with monarchy.
You don't have to buy from them
but that is exactly what they want to change. Corporations today don't want to be a competitor in a marketplace anymore. I've listened to CEOs talk in closed circles how there is only space for 3 companies in their market and everyone else will be made to go out of business.
Believing in private property is "extremist capitalist thinking",
No, believing that property rights are the only rights that matter is.
Some people chose those fascist governments. Perhaps a majority, perhaps merely a vocal minority, but not everyone;
That is true. The nature of our election systems - majority rule.
even out of those who did support it many were not making an informed choice.
You think so? You have evidence to back up that claim? Because it's so silly to always say that people who made decisions we don't like did so because they were stupid, or misinformed, or tricked. Maybe they weren't?
The government cannot claim ownership of the land either by homesteading or contract, and consequently is not in a position to demand that anyone leave.
True, all analogies break down somewhere. But the point is that in both cases, as long as you are inside of the system, those who run the system can tell you what to do. The GP claimed that corporations are totally different because you can leave, and I pointed out that you can leave countries, too.