It's democracy because 99.9% of the traffic goes to the top 1000 sites, voluntarily giving them the highest ad revenue/most influence in online penis-comparison contests, etc.
QED
The fact that this stifles individual voices and destroys the effective value of the individual just shows all the better that it's a real democracy, and is a shining example of why the U.S. isn't one, but is rather a republic with a specific charter protecting individual rights.
By the way, giving the little guy a voice is pretty much the precise opposite of democracy: majority rule, bub.
>If I made the right investments in an area and my competitor didn't, they lose money and I don't. If they had more resources than me, then they now have more resources than me, but to a lesser degree. This is good times.
>Cigarettes aren't really bad for you, in a manner that would cripple your productivity in business, unless you're some kind of professional athlete. And they contain a stimulant that aids concentration in the short term with addictive effects that are minimized by the high availability of the drug. So one guy gets to play with fire and relax, the other gets money to buy food for his family. Neither really suffers in the bargain. It's almost the textbook ideal free-market interaction.
>Yeah, the key term is reliable product. Most of the middling sized steel companies, for instance, post profits of around a billion dollars a year. This is after every engineer has been paid salary (100k/yr ish) and all the equipment maintained has been involved. And no one gets arrested or hunted down and shot by a jealous wife for making steel. And that steel is pretty much going to sell, and you'll get paid, whereas there's a chance that 100 new people won't go for c14li5 4 t3h w1n and you'll be starving for a month trying to come up with something better. Just because you can't keep up with spammers' income with that degree in computer science doesn't mean that people that make materials that people actually rely on can't do it either.
Good, because that means that my competition will just be out a bunch of money, while I (assumably the smarter guy regarding how my money is spent) derive the benefit from my investment. The free market concept doesn't just apply to incorporated distributors, you know. The philosophy is satisfied if the best man wins, regardless of their angle of approach to the system. Overall benefit to society is derived by the smarter shoppers actually meeting real dates, getting married and training the next generation to be smart with their money.
Personally, I liked the Matrix 2 & 3 better when i didn't get all the references (somewhat drunk... ok, really drunk at the time). Because they made a big deal out of litrary parallels that really weren't that significant, so it was like being talked down to about history by a 5-year-old (which I'll put up when I have my own 5-year-old, and not before).
Anyhow, I tend to enjoy games that present an increasing challenge as they progress, rather than just being an interactive exercise to tell a story. It's the increasing difficulty level that makes things entertaining, not necessarily how absolutely hard or easy a given level is.
If you played Myst all the way through and enjoyed it, then played Riven and found it too difficult, then you must have been doing some really heavy drinking between the two. (Myst was composed of difficult puzzles, Riven of pretty graphics, a better storyline, and easier collection-type puzzles).
Regardless, if you bought Riven you generally knew what you were getting into, because it was a sequel. No sympathy for your wasted 30$ here.
Is our hero!
(he's) gonna take pollution down to zero!
Seriously, though, that show served a valuable purpose, in that it had villains who cackled evilly as they dumped shit in the drinking water just for the hell of it. This caused kids to realize the obvious "no one is actually like that, that's fucking stupid", and resulted in later generations of environmental activists realizing that polluters are really normal people who aren't necessarily doing it from the sheer evil of their hearts. I actually think that this is the reason why environmentalism has actually made great strides recently: people are much more likely to cooperate with you when you acknowledge that they are a human being.
I see the pendulum swinging back the other way these days, where demonizing people just because they work in a corporation is no longer seen as, well, riciculously fucking cheesy and unrealistic. I'm hoping this is just because of my involvement with the local college, though, since uneducated random bigotry (albeit in leftist directions instead of the rightish ones) is more the norm.
So you're saying that the church is designed to focus the community and inspire thought about moral issues, but it doesn't magically transform the usual fallible human specimens into superhuman paragons of the christian ideal?
Imagine that. Welcome to 35 AD, when everyone else discovered this.
Your post is too damned long. Here, I'll summarize it for you:
"You don't necessarily need to be religious to have a morality, as long as you can accept that any morality is essentially arbitrary when you get right down to it.
Blah blah stuff stuff
In conclusion, I have not yet realized that Christianity has moved on since the middle ages, like every other human institution. I also seem to think that non-christians are somehow less a pack of murdering scum than christians, despite all historical evidence to the contrary. Sincerely, diablomonic"
I'll actually agree with you on the first part, with the addendum "therefore, god is a crutch for people so insecure that they can't maintain a moral code while accepting that it comes from themselves. But, humans being fallible, such insecurity is not necessarily a bad thing, and if you need the crutch, you should use it, not try to walk without one and fall flat on your face." The second part is, of course, complete silliness.
Considering that the CRIA release (somebody linked it above) says that it was a registration issue, I'd say that the fellow is most likely full of shit.
"My pawn shop wasn't shut down for trafficking in stolen goods, man. It's the man, man! He's trying to keep me down, 'cause of my independent mind, man."
Or, alternately, for those who actually respect crazy conspiracy theorists:
"They don't care about our continued support of Israel and our foreign policy toward their native countries. They're clearly attacking us because they hate our freedom."
I'm actually more shocked that the court's ruling was actually in line with the reality of the situation than that the Boy scouts don't want gay leaders. The latter seems fairly reasonable, actually, as it adds the potential for sexual activity which was implicitly removed by the normal standards of the group (no girls, etc).
The only two that are constitutionally protcted are race and sex, and are legal extensions of the sufferage amendments. Since Ethnicity is a vague concept completely without meaning these days, that's a hard one to justify giving protection to as well.
You already can. The division is just a civil agreement (in the sense of 'congenial'), not a legal one. However, private entities are allowed to enforce such civillity as they please, so while no one will bother you about it if you're reasonable in the application of the idea, if you make an ass of yourself you will probably get tossed out the door by the biggest pair of employees in the establishment.
No we don't. Why don't you look up who owns the mineral rights to your land and then come back and give us the 'total control' spiel. If you own your land's mineral rights, congrats, you're smarter than 99.9% of US homeowners.
However, had she drunk the coffee in the manner required to give herself such burns (glug glug), she would have merely demonstrated herself to be a dumbass, as any coffee drinker knows what temperature they like their coffee and wiat for it to cool. Even if this was her furst cup of coffee ever, you have inherent reactions to keep you from consuming near-boiling fluids. It wouldn't have caused her to crash her vehicle into things, as spilling the whole mess on her lap had the potential to do.
The thing about spilling the coffee on her lap is that it was also her fault, as I think most of us can agree that you put drinks in the damned cupholder before driving away from the window, to prevent, you know... spilling. I also think most of us can agree that attempting to drink hot beverages in a moving vehicle (the other situation with the potential to spill) is not a good idea, the fact that most of us do it anyway notwithstanding. Are we exceptionally intelligent people? No. That leaves the alternative, that the plaintiff was an exceptionally stupid person, and her injury was primarily the result of her own negligence.
The specific temperature of the coffee was irrelevant. Hot beverages go in the cupholder, period. This is why, barring circumstances wierd enough to have been quickly brought to the public attention regarding the case (Aliens, perhaps?), McD's was not liable in this situation. Thus, the general public (which isn't that stupid despite the ironic popular opinion) thinks the case was bogus.
Also, 180 degrees is a damned good temperature for coffee. It keeps it warm all the way back to your cube, and doesn't have to be discarded as often. Welcome to reality, I hope you enjoyed your brief visit here.
Actually that's not exactly true. While you're generally expected not to be a dumbass with where you point your weapons, the no trespassing sign allows you to use violence or threat of violence to expel trespassers to a degree. While there is still a possibility of violence carrying a legal penalty, it is reduced somewhat by giving a warning first, and the legal penalties of threat of violence disappear entirely ("get out now"/stroke shotgun).
It also means that if you hear rustling in your bushes and shoot at it thinking it's a stray dog or something and accidentally hit a trespasser instead, they're going to have a hard time pressing charges or even suing you if it was clearly marked that they weren't supposed to be there. So even though "No Tresspassing" doesn't give you carte blanche to use visitors as rifle targets, it does reduce the legal risks of home defense.
Of course, I'm talking about Texas here. In California I'm sure that a burglar could be raping your daughter as he robbed your house and strangled your dog while standing uninvited in your bedroom, and he could still press assault charges if you slapped him across the face. (that's my impression after living in both states, anyhow)
In the system's defense, if the man that invents the cure actually does it on his own (i.e. he's not part of a company of 100-1000 individuals workign on the thing, unlikely) then he can be the sole owner of the patent, retire, and buy a few baseball teams.
Yes, and stockpiling weapons (many of which were illegal, as they damn well knew with several experts among them) and keeping the community as separate as possible from the outside world (we learned that one the hard way with Scientology, remember? Oh, you probably don't) had nothing to do with it. And they definitely hadn't been under investigation months or years beforehand to ascertain wether they presented a danger to those around them. (/sarcasm)
But I'm sure he was a good guy at heart. After all, he walked to Wal-Mart. If that's the best thing someone can say about my life, I hope I get gunned down resisting arrest too.
Nah, it's a restriction of knowledge. Dumbing-down is the widespread acceptance of very much oversimplified models as the entire truth of the matter, like genetics/eugenics in the early century (didn't end well), evolutionary theory (didn't end well... for college applicants from Kansas city, anyhow), and economic theory in the 90s (i like to call what most people think of as the "internet bubble bursting" the "bunch of stupid investors crash of the 90s"). If most people just avoid the science, it doesn't really harm the people or the science (though it doesn't particularly help either). What I'm worried about is the masses embracing science and getting it wrong. Humility about our lack of knowledge, that's the key.
In the case of chemistry, of course, this would self-correct a lot faster than eugenics was, as individual amateurs can kill themselves a lot faster with organic chemicals than a set of bureaucratic machinery can churn out obviously stupid laws. That doesn't necessarily make it immune, though. Idiots try to mix their own explosives all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
It's democracy because 99.9% of the traffic goes to the top 1000 sites, voluntarily giving them the highest ad revenue/most influence in online penis-comparison contests, etc.
QED
The fact that this stifles individual voices and destroys the effective value of the individual just shows all the better that it's a real democracy, and is a shining example of why the U.S. isn't one, but is rather a republic with a specific charter protecting individual rights.
By the way, giving the little guy a voice is pretty much the precise opposite of democracy: majority rule, bub.
>If I made the right investments in an area and my competitor didn't, they lose money and I don't. If they had more resources than me, then they now have more resources than me, but to a lesser degree. This is good times.
>Cigarettes aren't really bad for you, in a manner that would cripple your productivity in business, unless you're some kind of professional athlete. And they contain a stimulant that aids concentration in the short term with addictive effects that are minimized by the high availability of the drug. So one guy gets to play with fire and relax, the other gets money to buy food for his family. Neither really suffers in the bargain. It's almost the textbook ideal free-market interaction.
>Yeah, the key term is reliable product. Most of the middling sized steel companies, for instance, post profits of around a billion dollars a year. This is after every engineer has been paid salary (100k/yr ish) and all the equipment maintained has been involved. And no one gets arrested or hunted down and shot by a jealous wife for making steel. And that steel is pretty much going to sell, and you'll get paid, whereas there's a chance that 100 new people won't go for c14li5 4 t3h w1n and you'll be starving for a month trying to come up with something better. Just because you can't keep up with spammers' income with that degree in computer science doesn't mean that people that make materials that people actually rely on can't do it either.
"It can be used for estimating simple things, its useless for complex problems and accuracy."
Good job describing every political and economic theory EVER.
Good, because that means that my competition will just be out a bunch of money, while I (assumably the smarter guy regarding how my money is spent) derive the benefit from my investment. The free market concept doesn't just apply to incorporated distributors, you know. The philosophy is satisfied if the best man wins, regardless of their angle of approach to the system. Overall benefit to society is derived by the smarter shoppers actually meeting real dates, getting married and training the next generation to be smart with their money.
Good thing viruii don't exist, and all we have to worry about are viruses.
Personally, I liked the Matrix 2 & 3 better when i didn't get all the references (somewhat drunk... ok, really drunk at the time). Because they made a big deal out of litrary parallels that really weren't that significant, so it was like being talked down to about history by a 5-year-old (which I'll put up when I have my own 5-year-old, and not before).
Anyhow, I tend to enjoy games that present an increasing challenge as they progress, rather than just being an interactive exercise to tell a story. It's the increasing difficulty level that makes things entertaining, not necessarily how absolutely hard or easy a given level is.
If you played Myst all the way through and enjoyed it, then played Riven and found it too difficult, then you must have been doing some really heavy drinking between the two. (Myst was composed of difficult puzzles, Riven of pretty graphics, a better storyline, and easier collection-type puzzles).
Regardless, if you bought Riven you generally knew what you were getting into, because it was a sequel. No sympathy for your wasted 30$ here.
Is our hero!
(he's) gonna take pollution down to zero!
Seriously, though, that show served a valuable purpose, in that it had villains who cackled evilly as they dumped shit in the drinking water just for the hell of it. This caused kids to realize the obvious "no one is actually like that, that's fucking stupid", and resulted in later generations of environmental activists realizing that polluters are really normal people who aren't necessarily doing it from the sheer evil of their hearts. I actually think that this is the reason why environmentalism has actually made great strides recently: people are much more likely to cooperate with you when you acknowledge that they are a human being.
I see the pendulum swinging back the other way these days, where demonizing people just because they work in a corporation is no longer seen as, well, riciculously fucking cheesy and unrealistic. I'm hoping this is just because of my involvement with the local college, though, since uneducated random bigotry (albeit in leftist directions instead of the rightish ones) is more the norm.
So you're saying that the church is designed to focus the community and inspire thought about moral issues, but it doesn't magically transform the usual fallible human specimens into superhuman paragons of the christian ideal?
Imagine that. Welcome to 35 AD, when everyone else discovered this.
Your post is too damned long. Here, I'll summarize it for you:
"You don't necessarily need to be religious to have a morality, as long as you can accept that any morality is essentially arbitrary when you get right down to it.
Blah blah stuff stuff
In conclusion, I have not yet realized that Christianity has moved on since the middle ages, like every other human institution. I also seem to think that non-christians are somehow less a pack of murdering scum than christians, despite all historical evidence to the contrary. Sincerely, diablomonic"
I'll actually agree with you on the first part, with the addendum "therefore, god is a crutch for people so insecure that they can't maintain a moral code while accepting that it comes from themselves. But, humans being fallible, such insecurity is not necessarily a bad thing, and if you need the crutch, you should use it, not try to walk without one and fall flat on your face." The second part is, of course, complete silliness.
I have never in my life said "I believe in god". Thank you now for giving me a concise way to explain this to people when they bug me about it.
"Well, you wouldn't say 'I believe in gravity', would you?"
(I realize that it's unlikely that this was what you were going for with your post, but it's what I got out of it, so thanks anyhow.)
Considering that the CRIA release (somebody linked it above) says that it was a registration issue, I'd say that the fellow is most likely full of shit.
"My pawn shop wasn't shut down for trafficking in stolen goods, man. It's the man, man! He's trying to keep me down, 'cause of my independent mind, man."
Or, alternately, for those who actually respect crazy conspiracy theorists:
"They don't care about our continued support of Israel and our foreign policy toward their native countries. They're clearly attacking us because they hate our freedom."
You understand that US-style foreign policy is not unique, and has been the standard since before the US was anything resembling a significant nation?
/smiley
Who let you into slashdot?
I'm actually more shocked that the court's ruling was actually in line with the reality of the situation than that the Boy scouts don't want gay leaders. The latter seems fairly reasonable, actually, as it adds the potential for sexual activity which was implicitly removed by the normal standards of the group (no girls, etc).
The only two that are constitutionally protcted are race and sex, and are legal extensions of the sufferage amendments. Since Ethnicity is a vague concept completely without meaning these days, that's a hard one to justify giving protection to as well.
Then the suit should have been made under tort law. since it wasn't, the dude lost. QED.
You already can. The division is just a civil agreement (in the sense of 'congenial'), not a legal one. However, private entities are allowed to enforce such civillity as they please, so while no one will bother you about it if you're reasonable in the application of the idea, if you make an ass of yourself you will probably get tossed out the door by the biggest pair of employees in the establishment.
No we don't. Why don't you look up who owns the mineral rights to your land and then come back and give us the 'total control' spiel. If you own your land's mineral rights, congrats, you're smarter than 99.9% of US homeowners.
However, had she drunk the coffee in the manner required to give herself such burns (glug glug), she would have merely demonstrated herself to be a dumbass, as any coffee drinker knows what temperature they like their coffee and wiat for it to cool. Even if this was her furst cup of coffee ever, you have inherent reactions to keep you from consuming near-boiling fluids. It wouldn't have caused her to crash her vehicle into things, as spilling the whole mess on her lap had the potential to do.
The thing about spilling the coffee on her lap is that it was also her fault, as I think most of us can agree that you put drinks in the damned cupholder before driving away from the window, to prevent, you know... spilling. I also think most of us can agree that attempting to drink hot beverages in a moving vehicle (the other situation with the potential to spill) is not a good idea, the fact that most of us do it anyway notwithstanding. Are we exceptionally intelligent people? No. That leaves the alternative, that the plaintiff was an exceptionally stupid person, and her injury was primarily the result of her own negligence.
The specific temperature of the coffee was irrelevant. Hot beverages go in the cupholder, period. This is why, barring circumstances wierd enough to have been quickly brought to the public attention regarding the case (Aliens, perhaps?), McD's was not liable in this situation. Thus, the general public (which isn't that stupid despite the ironic popular opinion) thinks the case was bogus.
Also, 180 degrees is a damned good temperature for coffee. It keeps it warm all the way back to your cube, and doesn't have to be discarded as often. Welcome to reality, I hope you enjoyed your brief visit here.
Actually that's not exactly true. While you're generally expected not to be a dumbass with where you point your weapons, the no trespassing sign allows you to use violence or threat of violence to expel trespassers to a degree. While there is still a possibility of violence carrying a legal penalty, it is reduced somewhat by giving a warning first, and the legal penalties of threat of violence disappear entirely ("get out now" /stroke shotgun).
It also means that if you hear rustling in your bushes and shoot at it thinking it's a stray dog or something and accidentally hit a trespasser instead, they're going to have a hard time pressing charges or even suing you if it was clearly marked that they weren't supposed to be there. So even though "No Tresspassing" doesn't give you carte blanche to use visitors as rifle targets, it does reduce the legal risks of home defense.
Of course, I'm talking about Texas here. In California I'm sure that a burglar could be raping your daughter as he robbed your house and strangled your dog while standing uninvited in your bedroom, and he could still press assault charges if you slapped him across the face. (that's my impression after living in both states, anyhow)
/looks at galvanic series chart
Oh, yeah. You're right. Redox goes the other way. My bad.
In the system's defense, if the man that invents the cure actually does it on his own (i.e. he's not part of a company of 100-1000 individuals workign on the thing, unlikely) then he can be the sole owner of the patent, retire, and buy a few baseball teams.
Yes, and stockpiling weapons (many of which were illegal, as they damn well knew with several experts among them) and keeping the community as separate as possible from the outside world (we learned that one the hard way with Scientology, remember? Oh, you probably don't) had nothing to do with it. And they definitely hadn't been under investigation months or years beforehand to ascertain wether they presented a danger to those around them. (/sarcasm)
But I'm sure he was a good guy at heart. After all, he walked to Wal-Mart. If that's the best thing someone can say about my life, I hope I get gunned down resisting arrest too.
Nah, it's a restriction of knowledge. Dumbing-down is the widespread acceptance of very much oversimplified models as the entire truth of the matter, like genetics/eugenics in the early century (didn't end well), evolutionary theory (didn't end well... for college applicants from Kansas city, anyhow), and economic theory in the 90s (i like to call what most people think of as the "internet bubble bursting" the "bunch of stupid investors crash of the 90s"). If most people just avoid the science, it doesn't really harm the people or the science (though it doesn't particularly help either). What I'm worried about is the masses embracing science and getting it wrong. Humility about our lack of knowledge, that's the key.
In the case of chemistry, of course, this would self-correct a lot faster than eugenics was, as individual amateurs can kill themselves a lot faster with organic chemicals than a set of bureaucratic machinery can churn out obviously stupid laws. That doesn't necessarily make it immune, though. Idiots try to mix their own explosives all the time.
Speaking as a chemical engineer, designing the failsafes is half of the fun. That is all.