You're absolutely correct about GH, I didn't read the article enough to see where abouts in "Israel" it was supposed to be. I feel slightly dirty now. Thanks for the correction.
Yes... but... maybe she was genuinly kept in the dark, maybe she was more in on it than she says (I wouldn't be surprised, but I have no reason to believe that she was) but if you look at the whole thing surrounding Scooter Libby et al, you see that there were quite blatent cover ups, and that it wasn't purely a case of mistaken intelligence as she believes or at least claims to believe.
Err... I've seen a bunch of her interviews where she talks a lot of this before, but this is quite lengthy so might be missing what you're refering to. Wanna give me a search string to jump to?
I was wondering the same about the last lot too. It seems to be that the US government has no credibility left with the whole WMD fiasco. At the moment, I don't think the administration particularly wants to go to war with Iran, but I think there are definitely at least elements that want the option to, and want it to be known that there is the option to. So, as practically everybody is questioning the credibility of the US government, but practically nobody is questioning the credibility of the leaks, they would be the perfect "soft power" tool for shaping the minds of people, because nobody's questioning their authenticity... just... oh look, lots of people want to go to war with Iran... almost reminds me of a... coalition of the willing... hmm...
Does certainly make me wonder if there were any controlling elements behind the leaks.
You sound like you're stuck in a bubble. Try looking outside your bubble at other countries in the world, that's the only way you can draw a comparison.
But our ability to survive is affected by ability to attribute cause to effect, and I already listed a few visible effects of this. You may think that not understanding the sun has no effect, that it still rises and sets every day, but that's simply not true. At the basic level, understanding long term climate effects helps to increase crop yields, which has a direct effect on the amount of life that can be supported. At the more advanced end, we have the SOHO and SDO satellites trained on the sun to learn more about it, helping us protect our electricity delivery grids and communication systems against solar storms. A group of people who do not employ the scientific method of understanding will fail in the greater world amongst others who will do. Economies will go elsewhere, they will experience brain-drains, and they will collapse to be replaced by a more modern society. You can't stay backwards forever when the rest of the world is moving forwards.
We don't really need to do anything. Our survival stems from our evolved ability to correctly attribute cause to effect, and therefore be able to control effects by controlling causes. As soon as you remove this ability (by claiming simply that the cause is "god dun it") you remove the ability to control reality, which means removing the ability of self preservation. This is why countries where religion isn't rampant are able to run themselves in a more sustained way, right across the board, you'll tend to find fewer boom/bust cycles, fewer wars, fewer enemies, more renewable energy sources. This is because you can't expect somebody to be irrational only when it comes to their religion; their ability to believe things without reason infects their entire decision making process, as does the ability to escape personal responsibility (submitting to "god's will" rather than exercising ones own will to solve problems).
You're assuming everybody knows the process, which might stand if you had posters along the border fences with all the details on in languages people know and a button to read it out to people who can't read. Some people are just hungry, and have nothing, and think "over there it will be better". It's not scheming and devious. It's desperation. You're thinking that they're all people like you, who've had what you've had, and so know what you know. They're not. What about all the people who have just escaped from somewhere they knew was bad, they're just scared of being sent back, and they suffer because of it. Anyone who's scared of something can have that thing used against them.
"I expect to have an equal say in how other people's tax money is spent, even if their income (and therefore their tax contribution) is far greater than mine"
Of course, otherwise it becomes in everybody else's interest to keep you poor, especially if you have anything you disagree with them about. That's the reason why there's been some $2-3Bln spent on this election cycle's campaigns. That is basically rich people buying votes (via recruiting the uneducated)
Good point, although I think more people move by choice, or have some choice in where they move. Having no choice I think is rarer.
Not that I'm against your position btw, just the force based argument for it. People from America and here in the UK are responsible for a -lot- in the world. If people need to move here because we've screwed up over there, then we should damn well make them feel welcome.
"I don't know why people feel the need to pretend to be so selfless"
*whispers* some people aren't pretending! They actually think differently due to their brains having evolved in a slightly different way to your own, ie, they actually evolved.
"If you're so selfless, how about you move to Texas"
That's not selfless, that's more self sacrificing, abandoning your home, friends, family, people you care about (I'll give you a few seconds to look up the word 'care'... ya done?). Watch, the same works both ways, I could pick an untra-extreme to disprove your point too:
If you're not selfless, why don't you kill all those around you?
See? It's a retarded point, it proves nothing, except the fact that you think in retarded terms.
"Why shouldn't poor Mexicans be able to come?"
More to the point, right now, why would they want to? Mexico's unemployed rate is half of the US's. America's basically falling apart, too many people like you who don't believe in looking after the things around you. Thinking that everything will stay completely fine for you if you neglect anything you don't know that you use directly, you end up neglecting things you don't know you're relying on until they fail and something stops working, whether they're levees, corrupt financial systems, or an education system. You can watch your own middle classes completely disapear and you just won't change a thing!
"When your standard of living goes to shit"
Ohh of course, that's why you won't solve problems, you're too busy blaming everybody else. Makes sense. Incredibly wrong, divorced from reality, but don't let that stop you.
"We as a society still waste enormous quantities of resources"
We do, and most people don't really seem to connect the consequences... a few unnecessary lights on or a few extra things into the landfill, there's plenty more where they came from. You just can't drill into some people that there's a price attached to everything, and in the west if we get something cheap, it's usually because somebody's suffering somewhere to make it that way. See no evil, huh. I even save cpu cycles in my code for the sake of saving tiny bits of energy here and there!
"South America will form a stronger union and throw of the yoke of US corporate imperialism even Columbia will finally be free"
This... I am beginning to enjoy seeing, Venezuala's obviously a really important key player here, you can tell by how much America hates the place it's elected "dictator", and America tends not to have too stronger feelings against countries unless they're at risk of being able to stand on their own two feet and look after their own interests first rather than America's. I know, of course they have their fair share of problems, but if America would keep their *&@! nose out and stop causing trouble, these problems would be far fewer. But yeah, the guy gave Bolivia's president a lot of support, bought a big chunk (third I think?) of Argentina's debt to free them from the IMF, I have a lot of hope for that little chunk of the world. They're really fighting for their democracy, and they don't need to fight each other quite so much with that much bigger enemy to the north which unites them pretty well. Just sickens me to see so many people buying the propaganda.
"safe happy drugs"
I'll drink (or "something") to that!
"it makes much more environmental sense than trying to buy your way to happiness"
Yeah, and lets you appreciate things that money people just never really get. My last gf came from a pretty well off family. I think I'd rather be with someone who hasn't. People who have had to just make do (such as myself) seem to be more resourceful, can make things work with less, things that weren't meant for something, but combined to achieve it. And it seems to bleed out into other things, like sense of humour, becomes more resourceful in that same way.
"Socialism forces people to work for the government and in return they get exactly what the government allows them to get"
No it doesn't. What you're talking about is something that doesn't exist. Just like you don't have true capitalism or a free market. Your idea is that even what you define as socialism can't exist because people are purely self serving and not interested in self improvement even for the sake of self improvement. I guess you must live amongst people that have given you only that impression of what people are like, and while I feel sorry for you that that's what your existence has been exposed to, I can't help but wonder if that's a result of the pro-"everybody for themselves" capitalism that you have there. You keep telling people that they are a certain way, they will believe you. You raise people on the other hand to share a social conscience, and you find that people will tend to have that more.
I think you're throwing the baby and the bath out with the bathwater though. I think capitalism is a result of rich people wanting to keep more and more of it to themselves, even though there's no way they could ever generate such wealth without the functioning society that exists around them. Rich people are far more able to convince people that they're right, or at least bribe people to act like they believe that, than poorer people are, which leads to the situation where you don't even question anymore the abuses that the top 1% of the population carry out at the expense of the rest. The reality is that you're wasting your time being all concerned about the bottom 5% of people abusing a system, despite the fact that their abuse is relatively minor compared to the abuse that the top 5% carry out, with all the resources they have, not just against your own people, but against the rest of the world.
People with a social conscience will always know that that's wrong, no matter how much you get paid to say that it's right.
Haha, I know, I'm pretty good at tailoring an argument to a specific crowd to get them onside huh! "Hmm, Slashdot, they seem like the kinds of people who will be against the rolling out of fiber optics for high speed internet", I should be in PR or something! Feel free to marvel;-)
"Nuclear power is proliferating, but even that will not compensate for increases in conventional pollution of cars and electrical generation"
And the fact that it's not renewable. Sure there's plenty uranium left, but the concentrations at which you will find it in rock is dropping considerably, because we go for the easiest to get stuff first.
"They will continue to lose their competitiveness to the US, South America, China"
Perhaps. The other option is that because we look after our people better, we don't need so many of them to remain competative. I mean you have to look at why our population's dropping: educated females are prefering to have careers rather than just spit out children. This means we can achieve a higher % of our population that's available for work.
"Just for a laugh, I suppose you would claim that Iraq was not a resource war?"
In 1914 when we (Britain) first went in, it was certainly about resources. The most recent time, saying it was about resources is a little harder to justify. We already had their resources, we made sure it was the only thing Sadam could trade with the rest of the world. We weren't profiting from those resources as much as if they were owned by private American companies, sure, but that's about money. There is also of course the major threat of Sadam switching his O4F account from US dollars to Euros, citing "I will not use the currency of my enemy". This was the biggest threat of all, as if other OPEC nations followed suit and switched to other currencies, the USD would be in big trouble. Currently, America has a monopoly on producing the currency required to buy oil, and this helps them run up massive debts. An example needed to be set, because if people around the world all started flushing their dollars in order to buy whatever other currency they needed for oil... the federal government couldn't last a week. So again, this is more about money than oil, although it's easier to see the involvement of oil and just yell "it's about oil", I don't think it really serves the truth well.
All that and of course, Israel really wanted the war, and we all know how massive their lobby powers are in the states (but I'll say no more on that subject cuz we all know how sensitive Americans are on the subject)
Sure, and when we 100% recycle everything, we won't have any problems, we won't even need to dig anything new out of the ground. But we are digging stuff out the ground, because we don't recycle everything.
So sure, there'll become a point where we start digging up all our landfill sites, trying to find all those old mobile phones etc to extract the metals out of. The reason we're not doing it now? It's a lot more expensive than digging new stuff out of the ground! It requires more money, and more energy to do it. So, what does that say about what the money and energy costs or getting all that metal back that we just throw away? It's gonna strain our ability to use it, obviously.
I'm sure we had a story right here on/. within the last day or few about people losing their internets because of people stealing the copper out of the system to sell because of its rising value. The point is, it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse.
It's far more imbecilic to think that the argument's as simple as how you present it. Magic isn't a real thing, so you can't just rely on it to put copper into your hands when you need it. Try looking at the real world, and how it actually really works. You might be surprised by a thing or two.
It's simple. Take copper for example. Picking a nice easy round number just for demonstration, say we use 1Kg of copper per person per year, and we have 6.75Bln people on the planet. Unfortunately, if we average out all the copper trees to growing 1Kg of copper per tree per year, we see that we only have 4.5Bln copper trees. This is why we're having to roll out fiber optics for broadband instead of copper, because the copper trees are really tired. Why don't we just planet more copper trees? Well we are, but we don't have enough seeds. And so the cycle continues.
It's true that we do have plenty o' resources left to go before we have to worry about having used them all up, but merely looking at how much we have left to feel better about it is quite deceptive for one simple reason: we use the stuff that's easiest to get at first. When the stuff that's easiest to get at has been got at, we then move onto stuff that's slightly harder to get at. Go back a hundred years and you could find rocks with real high copper content lying around on the ground. But just think about what we have to do to get at copper now, imagine how much energy is involved in grinding up and melting an entire mountain, just to get at it's 1% copper.
The same goes for oil, there will become a point where we still have plenty of oil left, but where it will take more energy to get at the oil that we will actually get from the oil.
So, don't be sitting too smug, we can slow down the speed at which we eat up ip addresses with the NAT etc that's used in many places. Our earth resources on the other hand, not only are we increasing in our use of, but we are increasing at an often exponential rate, so when we run out of various things, it will hit us *really* hard.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely correct about GH, I didn't read the article enough to see where abouts in "Israel" it was supposed to be. I feel slightly dirty now. Thanks for the correction.
No, this story's from Israel, you're thinking of Soviet Russia.
Yes... but... maybe she was genuinly kept in the dark, maybe she was more in on it than she says (I wouldn't be surprised, but I have no reason to believe that she was) but if you look at the whole thing surrounding Scooter Libby et al, you see that there were quite blatent cover ups, and that it wasn't purely a case of mistaken intelligence as she believes or at least claims to believe.
Err... I've seen a bunch of her interviews where she talks a lot of this before, but this is quite lengthy so might be missing what you're refering to. Wanna give me a search string to jump to?
I was wondering the same about the last lot too. It seems to be that the US government has no credibility left with the whole WMD fiasco. At the moment, I don't think the administration particularly wants to go to war with Iran, but I think there are definitely at least elements that want the option to, and want it to be known that there is the option to. So, as practically everybody is questioning the credibility of the US government, but practically nobody is questioning the credibility of the leaks, they would be the perfect "soft power" tool for shaping the minds of people, because nobody's questioning their authenticity... just... oh look, lots of people want to go to war with Iran... almost reminds me of a... coalition of the willing... hmm...
Does certainly make me wonder if there were any controlling elements behind the leaks.
Then I shall too! Mine's gonna be "RubberLeaks".
Crap, he's already done that one too :-/
"He purposely takes a world view of the issue"
An very incomplete one though, I don't think it can really be called "a world view".
You sound like you're stuck in a bubble. Try looking outside your bubble at other countries in the world, that's the only way you can draw a comparison.
But our ability to survive is affected by ability to attribute cause to effect, and I already listed a few visible effects of this. You may think that not understanding the sun has no effect, that it still rises and sets every day, but that's simply not true. At the basic level, understanding long term climate effects helps to increase crop yields, which has a direct effect on the amount of life that can be supported. At the more advanced end, we have the SOHO and SDO satellites trained on the sun to learn more about it, helping us protect our electricity delivery grids and communication systems against solar storms. A group of people who do not employ the scientific method of understanding will fail in the greater world amongst others who will do. Economies will go elsewhere, they will experience brain-drains, and they will collapse to be replaced by a more modern society. You can't stay backwards forever when the rest of the world is moving forwards.
We don't really need to do anything. Our survival stems from our evolved ability to correctly attribute cause to effect, and therefore be able to control effects by controlling causes. As soon as you remove this ability (by claiming simply that the cause is "god dun it") you remove the ability to control reality, which means removing the ability of self preservation. This is why countries where religion isn't rampant are able to run themselves in a more sustained way, right across the board, you'll tend to find fewer boom/bust cycles, fewer wars, fewer enemies, more renewable energy sources. This is because you can't expect somebody to be irrational only when it comes to their religion; their ability to believe things without reason infects their entire decision making process, as does the ability to escape personal responsibility (submitting to "god's will" rather than exercising ones own will to solve problems).
"If you can't be bothered to follow the process"
You're assuming everybody knows the process, which might stand if you had posters along the border fences with all the details on in languages people know and a button to read it out to people who can't read. Some people are just hungry, and have nothing, and think "over there it will be better". It's not scheming and devious. It's desperation. You're thinking that they're all people like you, who've had what you've had, and so know what you know. They're not. What about all the people who have just escaped from somewhere they knew was bad, they're just scared of being sent back, and they suffer because of it. Anyone who's scared of something can have that thing used against them.
"I expect to have an equal say in how other people's tax money is spent, even if their income (and therefore their tax contribution) is far greater than mine"
Of course, otherwise it becomes in everybody else's interest to keep you poor, especially if you have anything you disagree with them about. That's the reason why there's been some $2-3Bln spent on this election cycle's campaigns. That is basically rich people buying votes (via recruiting the uneducated)
Good point, although I think more people move by choice, or have some choice in where they move. Having no choice I think is rarer.
Not that I'm against your position btw, just the force based argument for it. People from America and here in the UK are responsible for a -lot- in the world. If people need to move here because we've screwed up over there, then we should damn well make them feel welcome.
"or to negotiate trade and other deals that benefit other countries to our demise"
hahahahahahahahaaaa yeah you wouldn't want that to happen, would ya? *lol*
*cough* china *cough* israel *cough*
Yurp, it's a good job no one born in America is corruptable, imagine the damage that could be done if they could be bought by outsiders!
"I don't know why people feel the need to pretend to be so selfless"
*whispers* some people aren't pretending! They actually think differently due to their brains having evolved in a slightly different way to your own, ie, they actually evolved.
"If you're so selfless, how about you move to Texas"
That's not selfless, that's more self sacrificing, abandoning your home, friends, family, people you care about (I'll give you a few seconds to look up the word 'care'... ya done?). Watch, the same works both ways, I could pick an untra-extreme to disprove your point too:
If you're not selfless, why don't you kill all those around you?
See? It's a retarded point, it proves nothing, except the fact that you think in retarded terms.
"Why shouldn't poor Mexicans be able to come?"
More to the point, right now, why would they want to? Mexico's unemployed rate is half of the US's. America's basically falling apart, too many people like you who don't believe in looking after the things around you. Thinking that everything will stay completely fine for you if you neglect anything you don't know that you use directly, you end up neglecting things you don't know you're relying on until they fail and something stops working, whether they're levees, corrupt financial systems, or an education system. You can watch your own middle classes completely disapear and you just won't change a thing!
"When your standard of living goes to shit"
Ohh of course, that's why you won't solve problems, you're too busy blaming everybody else. Makes sense. Incredibly wrong, divorced from reality, but don't let that stop you.
Is that you Israel?? I didn't recognise you with that userid!
"Or you don't see anything wrong with taking peoples money through threat of force and giving them fuck all in return?"
They forced you to move there???
"A local community deciding it's own rules. Isn't that what the Tea Party/GOP has been spouting off about for years?"
Haha, you can't even spell "homosexual"!!
"We as a society still waste enormous quantities of resources"
We do, and most people don't really seem to connect the consequences... a few unnecessary lights on or a few extra things into the landfill, there's plenty more where they came from. You just can't drill into some people that there's a price attached to everything, and in the west if we get something cheap, it's usually because somebody's suffering somewhere to make it that way. See no evil, huh. I even save cpu cycles in my code for the sake of saving tiny bits of energy here and there!
"South America will form a stronger union and throw of the yoke of US corporate imperialism even Columbia will finally be free"
This... I am beginning to enjoy seeing, Venezuala's obviously a really important key player here, you can tell by how much America hates the place it's elected "dictator", and America tends not to have too stronger feelings against countries unless they're at risk of being able to stand on their own two feet and look after their own interests first rather than America's. I know, of course they have their fair share of problems, but if America would keep their *&@! nose out and stop causing trouble, these problems would be far fewer. But yeah, the guy gave Bolivia's president a lot of support, bought a big chunk (third I think?) of Argentina's debt to free them from the IMF, I have a lot of hope for that little chunk of the world. They're really fighting for their democracy, and they don't need to fight each other quite so much with that much bigger enemy to the north which unites them pretty well. Just sickens me to see so many people buying the propaganda.
"safe happy drugs"
I'll drink (or "something") to that!
"it makes much more environmental sense than trying to buy your way to happiness"
Yeah, and lets you appreciate things that money people just never really get. My last gf came from a pretty well off family. I think I'd rather be with someone who hasn't. People who have had to just make do (such as myself) seem to be more resourceful, can make things work with less, things that weren't meant for something, but combined to achieve it. And it seems to bleed out into other things, like sense of humour, becomes more resourceful in that same way.
"Socialism forces people to work for the government and in return they get exactly what the government allows them to get"
No it doesn't. What you're talking about is something that doesn't exist. Just like you don't have true capitalism or a free market. Your idea is that even what you define as socialism can't exist because people are purely self serving and not interested in self improvement even for the sake of self improvement. I guess you must live amongst people that have given you only that impression of what people are like, and while I feel sorry for you that that's what your existence has been exposed to, I can't help but wonder if that's a result of the pro-"everybody for themselves" capitalism that you have there. You keep telling people that they are a certain way, they will believe you. You raise people on the other hand to share a social conscience, and you find that people will tend to have that more.
I think you're throwing the baby and the bath out with the bathwater though. I think capitalism is a result of rich people wanting to keep more and more of it to themselves, even though there's no way they could ever generate such wealth without the functioning society that exists around them. Rich people are far more able to convince people that they're right, or at least bribe people to act like they believe that, than poorer people are, which leads to the situation where you don't even question anymore the abuses that the top 1% of the population carry out at the expense of the rest. The reality is that you're wasting your time being all concerned about the bottom 5% of people abusing a system, despite the fact that their abuse is relatively minor compared to the abuse that the top 5% carry out, with all the resources they have, not just against your own people, but against the rest of the world.
People with a social conscience will always know that that's wrong, no matter how much you get paid to say that it's right.
"Win"
Haha, I know, I'm pretty good at tailoring an argument to a specific crowd to get them onside huh! "Hmm, Slashdot, they seem like the kinds of people who will be against the rolling out of fiber optics for high speed internet", I should be in PR or something! Feel free to marvel ;-)
"Nuclear power is proliferating, but even that will not compensate for increases in conventional pollution of cars and electrical generation"
And the fact that it's not renewable. Sure there's plenty uranium left, but the concentrations at which you will find it in rock is dropping considerably, because we go for the easiest to get stuff first.
"They will continue to lose their competitiveness to the US, South America, China"
Perhaps. The other option is that because we look after our people better, we don't need so many of them to remain competative. I mean you have to look at why our population's dropping: educated females are prefering to have careers rather than just spit out children. This means we can achieve a higher % of our population that's available for work.
"Just for a laugh, I suppose you would claim that Iraq was not a resource war?"
In 1914 when we (Britain) first went in, it was certainly about resources. The most recent time, saying it was about resources is a little harder to justify. We already had their resources, we made sure it was the only thing Sadam could trade with the rest of the world. We weren't profiting from those resources as much as if they were owned by private American companies, sure, but that's about money. There is also of course the major threat of Sadam switching his O4F account from US dollars to Euros, citing "I will not use the currency of my enemy". This was the biggest threat of all, as if other OPEC nations followed suit and switched to other currencies, the USD would be in big trouble. Currently, America has a monopoly on producing the currency required to buy oil, and this helps them run up massive debts. An example needed to be set, because if people around the world all started flushing their dollars in order to buy whatever other currency they needed for oil... the federal government couldn't last a week. So again, this is more about money than oil, although it's easier to see the involvement of oil and just yell "it's about oil", I don't think it really serves the truth well.
All that and of course, Israel really wanted the war, and we all know how massive their lobby powers are in the states (but I'll say no more on that subject cuz we all know how sensitive Americans are on the subject)
Sure, and when we 100% recycle everything, we won't have any problems, we won't even need to dig anything new out of the ground. But we are digging stuff out the ground, because we don't recycle everything.
So sure, there'll become a point where we start digging up all our landfill sites, trying to find all those old mobile phones etc to extract the metals out of. The reason we're not doing it now? It's a lot more expensive than digging new stuff out of the ground! It requires more money, and more energy to do it. So, what does that say about what the money and energy costs or getting all that metal back that we just throw away? It's gonna strain our ability to use it, obviously.
I'm sure we had a story right here on /. within the last day or few about people losing their internets because of people stealing the copper out of the system to sell because of its rising value. The point is, it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse.
It's far more imbecilic to think that the argument's as simple as how you present it. Magic isn't a real thing, so you can't just rely on it to put copper into your hands when you need it. Try looking at the real world, and how it actually really works. You might be surprised by a thing or two.
It's simple. Take copper for example. Picking a nice easy round number just for demonstration, say we use 1Kg of copper per person per year, and we have 6.75Bln people on the planet. Unfortunately, if we average out all the copper trees to growing 1Kg of copper per tree per year, we see that we only have 4.5Bln copper trees. This is why we're having to roll out fiber optics for broadband instead of copper, because the copper trees are really tired. Why don't we just planet more copper trees? Well we are, but we don't have enough seeds. And so the cycle continues.
Hope this helps.
It's true that we do have plenty o' resources left to go before we have to worry about having used them all up, but merely looking at how much we have left to feel better about it is quite deceptive for one simple reason: we use the stuff that's easiest to get at first. When the stuff that's easiest to get at has been got at, we then move onto stuff that's slightly harder to get at. Go back a hundred years and you could find rocks with real high copper content lying around on the ground. But just think about what we have to do to get at copper now, imagine how much energy is involved in grinding up and melting an entire mountain, just to get at it's 1% copper.
The same goes for oil, there will become a point where we still have plenty of oil left, but where it will take more energy to get at the oil that we will actually get from the oil.
So, don't be sitting too smug, we can slow down the speed at which we eat up ip addresses with the NAT etc that's used in many places. Our earth resources on the other hand, not only are we increasing in our use of, but we are increasing at an often exponential rate, so when we run out of various things, it will hit us *really* hard.