And will have been paid to build the ship;) of course the point you're making is still valid, nobody is entirely responsible for their own achievements. The issue is that there seems to be a focus on the two extremes a) That 'great men' exist or b) that society is the cause of everyone's achievements. I strongly believe that the truth is, as is usually the case, somewhere in between: Luck, society and the influence of others play a huge part in the story of any 'great person' but their decisions and actions are what turned opportunity into reality. Trying to dismiss either sides of the equation does society no good.
Why are 3 ACs the only ones making the exact same redundant counter-argument here?
I know a pilot who started on the fast jet stream before being bumped for not being good enough. He did plenty of flying with a vastly more obstructive HUD than glass (a tiny box above the line you normally look through) often in circumstances with far smaller margins of error than a typical driver. I can think of no end of things a HUD could include that would make a typical driver safer so a blanket anti-HUD position makes very little sense.
Now obviously whether what this person was using glass for made her a less safe driver could be entirely different.
Israel deserves all the shit it gets and more, not because they are Jewish but because what they are doing shouldn't be tolerated from any country.
Find me a western country with half as much anti-Jewish sentiment as there is anti-Islamic sentiment in Israel and I'd happily ignore their opinion on the matter.
What I don't understand is why it can be stated, without being blanket refuted, that Israel is hated because Jews live there. Hell, if anything, I would think that the correlation is the other way. The actions of Israel may be fuelling hatred or at least dislike of Jews in some cases because people see what Israel does and make the false assumption that as Israelis are mostly Jews the actions of Israel are representative of Jews.
I listen to and read a lot of news and use Facebook very little. When I do the little news I do see is often wrong, misleading, hyperbolic or unimportant. Now maybe getting access to that is marginally better than no access to the news at all, however it certainly isn't better than even 10 mins of reading real news each day. Maybe people would have some awareness of what is happening from Facebook but they almost certainly don't get any insight into why it is happening which is vitally important.
Had they presented a down-to-earth, moderate candidate for the election, the Republicans would have won it by a landslide.
You know the really scary part though? Put Mitt next to almost any of the other contenders for the republican nomination and he looked incredibly moderate. A huge chunk of the party thinks that swinging further and further right is how they'll win elections and it simply doesn't work at the national level or in moderate or left leaning states.
The ACA was passed using Reconciliation(something that previously was only used for getting budgets passed)
I can think of multiple examples of reconciliation being used for non-budget purposes, by Republicans to pass tax cuts for example. Out of interest where did you get that line from, is that one of the various points Fox, or another partisan outfit, are spinning to try and make this look like it's Obama that's to blame for this?
They also re-elected a GOP majority in the House where funding bills start.
Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats. If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
ACA had to be passed into law and was. Republicans had the chance to stop it then and they have had the chance to stop it at any time since then. The budget should not be a matter of party politics because anything being funded should already have been accepted by the three branches of government.
If the Republicans manage to this without the public siding against them (which I'm dubious about) then just wait till the situation is reversed and the Democrats realise they can use this to get what they want on gun control, abortion, welfare etc by doing the same thing.
They've tried 41 times [huffingtonpost.com] already. Attaching it to this "must-pass" spending bill was attempt 42.
So what's your point. If you can't do something properly you should do whatever it takes instead? You can't ask someone you don't know 41 times to give you $1000 and if they refuse the 41st time tell them they need to give you the money or you'll key their car and then claim they are being unreasonable.
There's a democratic president who got elected on a platform including this bill, there's a democratic senate and the majority of voters voted for democratic congresspeople. The Republicans can't do this legitimately because the voters chose not to give them the power to run the country so they're using economic vandalism to try and get their way instead.
It doesn't cost nothing. It costs very very little but that isn't the same thing. The government isn't allowed to fund anything non-essential, nor can they accept volunteers for non-essential work. That means if the net effort of running the site is the power to keep that server running, or the cost of the data-connection they shouldn't fund it.
Now what is interesting is things like subscriptions. If there is a domain owned by the US government, other than a.gov one, which is due to run-out do they have to let it lapse?
Sure doesn't help when the president says I'll refuse to pass anything unless it's exactly what I want.
The people elected Obama when a central part of his campaign was 'Obamacare'. They re-elected him. If congress want to repeal Obamacare then they could, and should, try and pass a bill doing so; instead they are using the budget and the massive harm not passing it causes the country to try and hold a gun to Obama's head. They have a legitimate means to try and change things, but because doing that is too hard they'd rather sacrifice the US economy for political point scoring.
Would republican voters be happy if the next Republican president couldn't do anything the Democrats didn't like because the democrat led house or senate wouldn't pass a budget without demanding it be removed? Does anyone who has really thought about this want the budget to become a political nuclear weapon?
My liberal educators taught me that the ends don't justify the means.
Did your liberal educators give you no insight into situations where all decisions have what would normally be unacceptable consequences, or did they just suggest you stick your head between your legs and hope it goes away?
Many absolutely can be in favour of a decision that leads to deaths if it avoids something worse, if that is something you are unwilling or unable to do then let us hope that you are never put in a situation where it matters.
This AC is exactly right. There's no way the name "hacker scouts" wasn't inspired by the boy scouts and frankly it could well mislead people into thinking their is a relationship between the two organisations. It isn't bullying when you rip off someone else and they ask you to stop.
I'm not sure all those issues are completely lost causes but you are right that a lot of important subjects in our area of interest have very little neutral ground and too much voting based on whether the opinion is shared.
As you correctly say though any kind of moderation system is going to have that issue. Perhaps Slashdot could try and rate the quality of moderators or have a small pool of moderation moderators whose job it is to evaluate whether people are moderating correctly; but I'm not sure it's really viable and trying to evaluate who is taking a issue neutral position would be tough.
Maybe if they also decreased the weighting of every mod point given but the system seems to work pretty well now. Perhaps make it easier for posts to reach 2-3 ratings but increase the requirement for 4/5. It seems that posts either tend to stay at 1-2 or rapidly ascend to 4/5.
I'd quite like it if they regularly gave users the ability to moderate specific posts (highlight them when reading the thread). This could be used to get moderation on posts that seem to be ignored and could be used to weight who gets mod points in future. It would also limit the bias towards moderating the early posts on a thread etc.
Good points well made. There are definitely some posts that get down-voted because they go against the common opinion of the site but as you say better posts that go against the norm are normally ok. It does seem hard to get a postly highly rated if it goes against some of the stronger memes (suggesting punishing piracy isn't morally wrong for example) but that's why people with good posting records get rated up automatically.
What people tend to ignore is that 90%+ of the time two opposing views can exist on Slashdot without one side being modded to hell. At least one of the responses to your post was someone saying it was basically a load of bollocks and at the moment both your post and his are equally rated, which is a pretty good sign that group-think doesn't define anything.
He wasn't saying it should happen. He was saying why he and most other people don't care.
As to your hypothesised scenario where they vanish people off to Gitmo or some such. Do you really think that if they could do that to pretty much any American citizen that them being able to see that you forgot to declare a $5 ebay purchase for sales tax is going to make it possible when they otherwise couldn't?
It is wrong, and I do care, but lets not go pretending that intrusive government surveillance is what makes illegal rendition, falsifying evidence or harassment by the state a problem.
“We’re parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it’s like,” Blair said.
Except that when he was 5 years old (the age of his oldest kid) it was 1991. The game-boy was out, cassettes were common place, many houses would have ataris or similar.
There's nothing wrong with doing what they are doing but it seems very strange to me to try and live in some arbitrary time period; if anything it sounds more like it is being done because the parents want to and for novelty than anything else. I bet they won't be turning down any medical advances since the mid-1980s should the need arise and I wonder whether they have given up on all appliances and home comforts that have improved since then. Was the car they used to navigate by map also missing any of the advancements in car tech since then? Somehow I doubt it.
Rolls Royce, BP, British Sugar, London Luton and East Midlands airports, ADAS are examples of ones I have used or work with that benefited considerably from the government getting out of the way.
I'm fed up of people re-imagining the national bodies as though they were popular and effective before privatisation. Far too many people note that the cost of using the service is high and assume that is private companies gouging them when they are completely ignoring the fact that we were simply pouring huge amounts of money into them as taxpayers, via government funding, before.
And that is why traditional agriculture died out and everything is grown in multi-story, controlled environment greenhouses today...
Unless you're suggesting that there is a conspiracy to stop hydroponics then the very fact that it is the exception and not the norm is evidence enough; however if you're sure that it is so much more profitable then by all means set up a firm and make a killing and I'll be the first to admit that Khyber was not, in fact, making shit up.
Cities clearly require interaction between people on a larger scale than in a pre-civilized culture. With that larger scale goes loss of anonymity across that larger scale.
Anonymity can't be measured that simplistically. If I lived in a city then hiding an affair is far simpler than in a village where everyone knows everyone. I could walk into 5 different hardware shops and buy bomb making supplies with cash and it would be far less likely to be spotted than in a small village with only one shop. If I go away for a couple of days no one in my city would bat an eyelid, in a village an unexplained absence of one of the small population would be noticed.
Conversely, living in a city means that what I am doing is being observed by far more people. Currently that is largely meaningless as the information isn't tied together, however as linking that information together and to me as an individual the balance changes entirely.
I suppose what I am saying is that in a village you are less observed but less anonymous. In a city you are more observed but also more anonymous, until someone has a reason to put the work in to tie the observations together (and the observations continue to increase and tying it together is becoming easier).
Wel... Erm... They don't exist. So why not stop posting about things you clearly aren't informed about? Golden Rice has been offered for free to subsistence farmers without restriction and with the right to store and re-plant seed, the cut-off is a revenue of $10,000 which is a huge amount revenue for an small African farmer, especially after all the crop they will eat themselves.
Let me restate that, this particular plant is OWNED by a private company.
Who license it for free to people making $10,000 a year or less from it they don't have to pay and have the right to re-use their seed. By the time your average small farmer in Africa is making enough rice to feed his family and earn $10,000 a year he will have the money to decide whether he wants to pay for GM seed or use the money to buy other nutritious foods and go back to non-GM seed. So why stop that farmer from having access to golden rice and the chance to stop his kids going blind or dying?
We tinkered around with our food system and 2/3 of the population is over-weight and 1/3 is obese. We suffer from heart disease, diabetes and related problems in epidemic proportions.
Which has sweet fuck all to do with GMO and everything to do with the American government bringing in subsidies to discount the production of corn. America as a country is actively encouraging people to eat unhealthy food. It might be stupid, and it might be something worth discussing, but it has nothing at all to do with people dying or going blind in Africa and Asia.
We're not going around looking for problems you dumb cunt, millions of people are dying and millions are going blind, we've already found a monstrously big problem and ignorance is stopping a viable solution from being used.
I find it interesting that you think changing agricultural practice and diet across a gigantic swathe of the globe is 'simple'.
If Norman Borlaug had tried to introduce more efficient crops instead of developing dwarf wheat he would not have saved hundreds of millions of lives and been awarded one of the most appropriate nobel peace prizes for his work.
Golden rice is licensed freely to small farmers and they are free to re-use seed so there's no typical lock-in risk.
We know the modifications that have been made to the rice. We know the nutritional and organic content of the rice produced. There's no credible reason to believe that golden rice will have negative health consequences; but we know for damn sure that people are dying and going blind now.
So yes, "golden rice" might solve a problem, in the sense that it would fool culturally-bound people who are unwilling to forego rice as their staple food. But it's hardly the only way. And I do remain highly suspicious of the long-term risk/benefit scenario with GMOs.
It would solve the problem of insufficient vitamin A and virtually instantly; I really can't see how that point is debatable, even by people who think it is a bad idea for other reasons.
There are dozens of possible solutions, virtually all of which have been available for decades now. They aren't being applied. Moving people to 'golden rice' is a trivial change comparative to trying to change the diet of hundreds of millions of people, the crops of millions of farmers and the supply chain for millions of tonnes of food.
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And will have been paid to build the ship ;) of course the point you're making is still valid, nobody is entirely responsible for their own achievements. The issue is that there seems to be a focus on the two extremes a) That 'great men' exist or b) that society is the cause of everyone's achievements. I strongly believe that the truth is, as is usually the case, somewhere in between: Luck, society and the influence of others play a huge part in the story of any 'great person' but their decisions and actions are what turned opportunity into reality. Trying to dismiss either sides of the equation does society no good.
Why are 3 ACs the only ones making the exact same redundant counter-argument here?
I know a pilot who started on the fast jet stream before being bumped for not being good enough. He did plenty of flying with a vastly more obstructive HUD than glass (a tiny box above the line you normally look through) often in circumstances with far smaller margins of error than a typical driver. I can think of no end of things a HUD could include that would make a typical driver safer so a blanket anti-HUD position makes very little sense.
Now obviously whether what this person was using glass for made her a less safe driver could be entirely different.
Israel deserves all the shit it gets and more, not because they are Jewish but because what they are doing shouldn't be tolerated from any country.
Find me a western country with half as much anti-Jewish sentiment as there is anti-Islamic sentiment in Israel and I'd happily ignore their opinion on the matter.
What I don't understand is why it can be stated, without being blanket refuted, that Israel is hated because Jews live there. Hell, if anything, I would think that the correlation is the other way. The actions of Israel may be fuelling hatred or at least dislike of Jews in some cases because people see what Israel does and make the false assumption that as Israelis are mostly Jews the actions of Israel are representative of Jews.
I listen to and read a lot of news and use Facebook very little. When I do the little news I do see is often wrong, misleading, hyperbolic or unimportant. Now maybe getting access to that is marginally better than no access to the news at all, however it certainly isn't better than even 10 mins of reading real news each day. Maybe people would have some awareness of what is happening from Facebook but they almost certainly don't get any insight into why it is happening which is vitally important.
You know the really scary part though? Put Mitt next to almost any of the other contenders for the republican nomination and he looked incredibly moderate. A huge chunk of the party thinks that swinging further and further right is how they'll win elections and it simply doesn't work at the national level or in moderate or left leaning states.
I can think of multiple examples of reconciliation being used for non-budget purposes, by Republicans to pass tax cuts for example. Out of interest where did you get that line from, is that one of the various points Fox, or another partisan outfit, are spinning to try and make this look like it's Obama that's to blame for this?
Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats. If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
ACA had to be passed into law and was. Republicans had the chance to stop it then and they have had the chance to stop it at any time since then. The budget should not be a matter of party politics because anything being funded should already have been accepted by the three branches of government.
If the Republicans manage to this without the public siding against them (which I'm dubious about) then just wait till the situation is reversed and the Democrats realise they can use this to get what they want on gun control, abortion, welfare etc by doing the same thing.
So what's your point. If you can't do something properly you should do whatever it takes instead? You can't ask someone you don't know 41 times to give you $1000 and if they refuse the 41st time tell them they need to give you the money or you'll key their car and then claim they are being unreasonable.
There's a democratic president who got elected on a platform including this bill, there's a democratic senate and the majority of voters voted for democratic congresspeople. The Republicans can't do this legitimately because the voters chose not to give them the power to run the country so they're using economic vandalism to try and get their way instead.
It doesn't cost nothing. It costs very very little but that isn't the same thing. The government isn't allowed to fund anything non-essential, nor can they accept volunteers for non-essential work. That means if the net effort of running the site is the power to keep that server running, or the cost of the data-connection they shouldn't fund it.
.gov one, which is due to run-out do they have to let it lapse?
Now what is interesting is things like subscriptions. If there is a domain owned by the US government, other than a
The people elected Obama when a central part of his campaign was 'Obamacare'. They re-elected him. If congress want to repeal Obamacare then they could, and should, try and pass a bill doing so; instead they are using the budget and the massive harm not passing it causes the country to try and hold a gun to Obama's head. They have a legitimate means to try and change things, but because doing that is too hard they'd rather sacrifice the US economy for political point scoring.
Would republican voters be happy if the next Republican president couldn't do anything the Democrats didn't like because the democrat led house or senate wouldn't pass a budget without demanding it be removed? Does anyone who has really thought about this want the budget to become a political nuclear weapon?
Did your liberal educators give you no insight into situations where all decisions have what would normally be unacceptable consequences, or did they just suggest you stick your head between your legs and hope it goes away?
Many absolutely can be in favour of a decision that leads to deaths if it avoids something worse, if that is something you are unwilling or unable to do then let us hope that you are never put in a situation where it matters.
This AC is exactly right. There's no way the name "hacker scouts" wasn't inspired by the boy scouts and frankly it could well mislead people into thinking their is a relationship between the two organisations. It isn't bullying when you rip off someone else and they ask you to stop.
I'm not sure all those issues are completely lost causes but you are right that a lot of important subjects in our area of interest have very little neutral ground and too much voting based on whether the opinion is shared.
As you correctly say though any kind of moderation system is going to have that issue. Perhaps Slashdot could try and rate the quality of moderators or have a small pool of moderation moderators whose job it is to evaluate whether people are moderating correctly; but I'm not sure it's really viable and trying to evaluate who is taking a issue neutral position would be tough.
Maybe if they also decreased the weighting of every mod point given but the system seems to work pretty well now. Perhaps make it easier for posts to reach 2-3 ratings but increase the requirement for 4/5. It seems that posts either tend to stay at 1-2 or rapidly ascend to 4/5.
I'd quite like it if they regularly gave users the ability to moderate specific posts (highlight them when reading the thread). This could be used to get moderation on posts that seem to be ignored and could be used to weight who gets mod points in future. It would also limit the bias towards moderating the early posts on a thread etc.
Good points well made. There are definitely some posts that get down-voted because they go against the common opinion of the site but as you say better posts that go against the norm are normally ok. It does seem hard to get a postly highly rated if it goes against some of the stronger memes (suggesting punishing piracy isn't morally wrong for example) but that's why people with good posting records get rated up automatically.
What people tend to ignore is that 90%+ of the time two opposing views can exist on Slashdot without one side being modded to hell. At least one of the responses to your post was someone saying it was basically a load of bollocks and at the moment both your post and his are equally rated, which is a pretty good sign that group-think doesn't define anything.
He wasn't saying it should happen. He was saying why he and most other people don't care.
As to your hypothesised scenario where they vanish people off to Gitmo or some such. Do you really think that if they could do that to pretty much any American citizen that them being able to see that you forgot to declare a $5 ebay purchase for sales tax is going to make it possible when they otherwise couldn't?
It is wrong, and I do care, but lets not go pretending that intrusive government surveillance is what makes illegal rendition, falsifying evidence or harassment by the state a problem.
Except that when he was 5 years old (the age of his oldest kid) it was 1991. The game-boy was out, cassettes were common place, many houses would have ataris or similar.
There's nothing wrong with doing what they are doing but it seems very strange to me to try and live in some arbitrary time period; if anything it sounds more like it is being done because the parents want to and for novelty than anything else. I bet they won't be turning down any medical advances since the mid-1980s should the need arise and I wonder whether they have given up on all appliances and home comforts that have improved since then. Was the car they used to navigate by map also missing any of the advancements in car tech since then? Somehow I doubt it.
Rolls Royce, BP, British Sugar, London Luton and East Midlands airports, ADAS are examples of ones I have used or work with that benefited considerably from the government getting out of the way.
I'm fed up of people re-imagining the national bodies as though they were popular and effective before privatisation. Far too many people note that the cost of using the service is high and assume that is private companies gouging them when they are completely ignoring the fact that we were simply pouring huge amounts of money into them as taxpayers, via government funding, before.
And that is why traditional agriculture died out and everything is grown in multi-story, controlled environment greenhouses today...
Unless you're suggesting that there is a conspiracy to stop hydroponics then the very fact that it is the exception and not the norm is evidence enough; however if you're sure that it is so much more profitable then by all means set up a firm and make a killing and I'll be the first to admit that Khyber was not, in fact, making shit up.
Anonymity can't be measured that simplistically. If I lived in a city then hiding an affair is far simpler than in a village where everyone knows everyone. I could walk into 5 different hardware shops and buy bomb making supplies with cash and it would be far less likely to be spotted than in a small village with only one shop. If I go away for a couple of days no one in my city would bat an eyelid, in a village an unexplained absence of one of the small population would be noticed.
Conversely, living in a city means that what I am doing is being observed by far more people. Currently that is largely meaningless as the information isn't tied together, however as linking that information together and to me as an individual the balance changes entirely.
I suppose what I am saying is that in a village you are less observed but less anonymous. In a city you are more observed but also more anonymous, until someone has a reason to put the work in to tie the observations together (and the observations continue to increase and tying it together is becoming easier).
Wel... Erm... They don't exist. So why not stop posting about things you clearly aren't informed about? Golden Rice has been offered for free to subsistence farmers without restriction and with the right to store and re-plant seed, the cut-off is a revenue of $10,000 which is a huge amount revenue for an small African farmer, especially after all the crop they will eat themselves.
Who license it for free to people making $10,000 a year or less from it they don't have to pay and have the right to re-use their seed. By the time your average small farmer in Africa is making enough rice to feed his family and earn $10,000 a year he will have the money to decide whether he wants to pay for GM seed or use the money to buy other nutritious foods and go back to non-GM seed. So why stop that farmer from having access to golden rice and the chance to stop his kids going blind or dying?
Which has sweet fuck all to do with GMO and everything to do with the American government bringing in subsidies to discount the production of corn. America as a country is actively encouraging people to eat unhealthy food. It might be stupid, and it might be something worth discussing, but it has nothing at all to do with people dying or going blind in Africa and Asia.
We're not going around looking for problems you dumb cunt, millions of people are dying and millions are going blind, we've already found a monstrously big problem and ignorance is stopping a viable solution from being used.
I find it interesting that you think changing agricultural practice and diet across a gigantic swathe of the globe is 'simple'.
If Norman Borlaug had tried to introduce more efficient crops instead of developing dwarf wheat he would not have saved hundreds of millions of lives and been awarded one of the most appropriate nobel peace prizes for his work.
Golden rice is licensed freely to small farmers and they are free to re-use seed so there's no typical lock-in risk.
We know the modifications that have been made to the rice. We know the nutritional and organic content of the rice produced. There's no credible reason to believe that golden rice will have negative health consequences; but we know for damn sure that people are dying and going blind now.
It would solve the problem of insufficient vitamin A and virtually instantly; I really can't see how that point is debatable, even by people who think it is a bad idea for other reasons.
There are dozens of possible solutions, virtually all of which have been available for decades now. They aren't being applied. Moving people to 'golden rice' is a trivial change comparative to trying to change the diet of hundreds of millions of people, the crops of millions of farmers and the supply chain for millions of tonnes of food.