Hardly. You called them theistic fascists for deciding to wage war. For many of them, violence is the normal and possible response to their treatment by the West. We could solve the problem without violence, just as a little more flexibility between George III and Parliament could have avoided the American revolt.
I should also add a disclaimer that I'm in no way trying to paint America as worse than those countries. We simply hold America to higher standards. To give an analogy, in the family of the West, we sometimes frown on America's xenophobia, but basically we're all a family and have only disdain for the folks who live in the trailer park. Sorry for offending the entire Arab world, it's nothing personal, it's only historical.;)
Idiot. They have specific historical gripes and they deal with them differently. When they weren't being fucked by America, they weren't having goes at America. In the 50s and 60s, your average trigger-happy Arab used have a go at Israel, because the state was established. By the 80s, the coups meant it began to turn its attention to America, and basically the only change that's been going on since then is escalation.
That's odd. What I've read from a few accounts of British troops is that you couldn't trust them with gear; everytime they'd be on exercises with, say, the US Marines, half of them would have swapped their rifles with the Marines and the other half their boots. In the US Army, did it matter exactly what kind of rifle the soldier had to have on him, or just that he needed to have a rifle? Or was this just policy for when you were at base, and less enforced when you were on ops or exercises?
I disagree 100%. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from socializing (and collaborating) in college.
Only if you haven't picked them up before. And they certainly can be picked up before college from just hanging out with people outside your teenager age bracket. The most effective ways to learn the lessons you list in your post are: a. get a job, b. have real friends. And classmates and dormmates don't qualify in that latter category.
You say I wasted my money if I went to college and didn't learn about -- getting along with people from different backgrounds, collaborating effectively, "interpersonal skills" (could you put that in plain anglo-saxon words? I'd like to know what you really mean by it), experience in general. College didn't teach me anything new about any of those, but my job and my friends did, and so did good literature and biography and films. I can count how many worthwhile people I met that I keep in touch with from college on two hands.
Stop trying to fit in. If you're not the type to fit in, you won't benefit by it, though you may lull yourself into thinking that you do. Most friendships in America are superficial dross anyway. The people really worth meeting won't care much about social skills. If you're the type to fit in, then do it, not saying it's a bad thing.
It's virtually only about your connections. And not just for exec jobs either.
But you can get decent networking at middle-tier schools too. Not all the desirable jobs are held by rich folks. In fact, the rich folks really only hold the strings to executive/management jobs. Now I grant you those pay well, but most would drive any reasonable person who actually wants some satisfaction out of his work out of his mind. Really all that's required of a kid to land himself a decent job that he won't hate is a spark of ambition. Talent and social skills are secondary to this. Ambition or drive or what have you will get those contacts that he'll need for a decent job, and he'll probably end up leapfrogging ten people twice as talented as himself -- who nevertheless don't make nearly as good a worker as he does.
But there was no way I was emotionally ready for college. Yes, I could do all the work. Yes, I could force myself to study when I'd rather be playing.
BS. If you had the requisite self-discipline to study when you wanted to have fun, you had more than most college students do in all their 4 years at college.
You don't go to college to make friends with other idiots. You go there to study, end of story. You are under no obligation to socialise. If you meet people worth knowing, great, but that will be perhaps half a percent of the people you'll get to know. Actually, probably significantly less than that, I'm thinking in workplace terms.
Transition program? What the fuck! Just grow up already. It's enough to be placed in an environment with responsible people, but barring that, having your own sense of responsibility and proportion is enough. If you can't even get that (and I admit your average college dorm is not exactly the ideal place for that), just sit down with some good literature or film and try to get the right ideas from it (though I know only a few people who have done their "maturing" that way).
Now I will concede to you that academic performance isn't a good indicator of maturity. I just took your specific situation. There are various types that are good academically but immature: the upper-middle-class type with a pampered home life, the type without enough imagination to see beyond academics (invariably corrupted when thrown outside that bubble), the parental-ambition-proxy type, the overzealous type... However, by a fortunate twist, many of these have such spotless and boring records that they make it to good schools, and they sort of mature slowly into shape. Even these hopeless types will usually come out fine from an Ivy League university, although they will probably always remain in a slightly rarefied circle. As for those that really are ready, the other schools won't harm them either, they're capable enough to deal with the disadvantages and distractions you get at those schools.
Re:.SE's ASEA did this on trains in mid-1980's
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 1
The paternoster elevators aren't dangerous at the top or bottom of the loop. They don't even turn upside down. I used to go through them often as a kid at our local hospital (though if my parents knew, they would have been rather cross).
You're just using your private definitions here. Just about any reasonable definition of anarchy -- except, perhaps, the rather deluded "everybody lived happily ever after" anarchists believe in -- would define Somalia as one.
But if we humour your definition and assume that tomorrow America became a land of magic cooperative anarchy, it wouldn't take 5 minutes for the power vacuum to devolve into Somalia.
I haven't been modded up much -- my original post has been torn between up and down modders, mostly because I called libertarians idiots.;)
The trouble with arguing libertarians is that it's a very slippery position. If you didn't claim an umbrella term like that, I could argue points you make. But the moment you just call yourself a libertarian, you get a wide chunk of possible opinions. Some libertarians are against any standing army, some libertarians are for it. Some are for taxation, some aren't. Some are for anarchy, some are for the status quo but on a smaller scale (the states' rights folks), and some are for a mostly federal government. I didn't know which one you represented, so I went with the most common libertarian position, the one that wants no standing US army. So sue me, you support an army, whoo-hoo. Doesn't invalidate my point about the Internet, but I'll get to that a few paragraphs down.
What power doesn't corrupt or something? it's cliche, and it's true. And i've stated, that the libertarian position (and mine) is not for anarchy, so i dunno wtf you rpoint is.
Yes, it's a cliche. "Power corrupts" is a cliche and not necessarily true. "Power corrupted George W. Bush" would be a factual argument and not a fatuous one. Also, do note that many libertarian positions are indeed for anarcy, though I'll admit that's mostly true of the British libertarians and not the American ones.
"After that many of you call for the smallest possible government, forgetting that it is impossible to have decent defence, universal education, research and development, and good infrastructure and universal healthcare (not that America really has that) without a strong central government."
You are just wrong. socialism has failed time and time again. Yet what thrives? free markets. people pursuing profits. we had better (in relative terms) healthcare in the US 50 years ago. Why? because we didn't have the government involved. was it perfect? no, but the system was superior than what we have today, and what any socialized system could bring. Our healthcare quality has gone up, with new technology and such, but that's inspite of, not because of government. I ought to ignore you after that. Total stinking rubbish. Look up health indicators for 50 years ago and now if you want. You can say it's technology but it's just as much Medicare. As for "what any socialised system could bring", why don't you look around the world, and see the far better health indicators from places like almost totally taxation-funded healthcare like Britain to those in the middle like France, to semi-private systems like Germany or Switzerland or Spain. All have far better indicators than the US is likely to achieve in its current broken private model.
Also, I didn't call for socialism, just for the government to provide regulation, defence, infrastructure, and back research and development, education and healthcare.
You ignored my point about the fact that you wouldn't be bitching here without the kind of government you want. A small army would not have gotten us the Internet, small government research would not have gotten us Berners-Lee and the Web, and you wouldn't have a cable at your house were it not for giant government subsidies to American telcos. Which point exactly are you arguing? Because if you are you're wrong.
Anyways, centralized planning does not work. cliche or not. Perhaps you have experience with that, at your own company even. How much does bureaucracy get in the way? Does your company succeed because of that bureaucracy, or in spite of it?
It's a measure of degree, you know. Do it like the USSR, total control, it fails. Do it like Russia today, no control, it fails. You need clever regulation to channel, temper or encourage market forces. (Incidentally don't call the X-Prize a market force, it's a prize and not an investment, even though it was privately put up.) At my company we have good management and good
What has the X-prize done so far? It hasn't even put people into space, or at most for a few minutes. It also happens to piggyback on about 60 years of government-funded theoretical and practical research, starting with the Germans and British in the war, and the intense US-USSR space race after that. As usual, states pay for ground-breaking research and private industry comes in afterwards and cleans up the profits.
The rest of your post is just cliches, not practical arguments. Your life expectancy in an anarchic state might be 40 years on average, though less has been common. Losing your life is one of the greater freedoms it is possible for you to use, so at least we can establish that we need government. After that many of you call for the smallest possible government, forgetting that it is impossible to have decent defence, universal education, research and development, and good infrastructure and universal healthcare (not that America really has that) without a strong central government. Or to put it more bluntly, with the kind of government you want, you wouldn't be bitching here, because there wouldn't be an Internet, a World Wide Web, and the cables that take them to your dwelling,
Your "slight change of terms" actually invalidates the point.:) Science has been the basis of most technological advancements, and liberalism (as it first appeared in the English Enlightenment) the basis of most social and political advancements. Religion definitely hasn't, and in fact has often kept things back -- to be fair, so have many other things and to a greater degree. And for full disclosure, I say this as a Christian, and I think that most Christian variants (with the exception of the Catholic Church) overall come up on the credit side of advancing humanity.
Libertarian -- and therefore idiot. You mayn't be an idiot, of course, but you're just parroting idiot arguments. You're not sanguine about government subsidies, but you think getting private industry into the act is a good thing. Right: how the hell do you think private industry is going to get into it, without the last 100 years of government research into how it's done and how you build the tools to do it, and the currently proposed subsidies for getting there? Private industry on its own wouldn't touch space with a barge-pole, not now and not in the next thousand years.
My dear libertarian friend, please realise that government isn't evil, it's a necessity and basically a good thing. Without it we'd have anarchy -- like Somalia. Nobody wants to see levels of control like in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but that's why we work to make it better, not to get rid of it.
What's that got to do with anything? We're talking about plagiarism, not copyright. It would be just as bad if she were plagiarising Goethe, who's long been in the public domain.
Your assertion that to do anything worthwile and creative outside movies only requires the capital investment in a word processor is startlingly ignorant. Perhaps to produce the sort of drivel this German writer has -- it'll be forgotten in one or twenty years. But worthwile books or plays or even blog posts need a lot of effort put into them for research if they're going to be of value. Most such worthwhile books take years or decades to write. Or do you think time isn't money? Even purely fictional works like Harry Potter required an enormous amount of effort from the author and the publishers to keep the plot consistent over seven longish books, readable and interesting. Many more man-hours went into it than you'll ever put in during your full-time career -- so is your life's worth worth just "$300US"?
That's fine, but in X, you don't need the keyboard to copy and paste. Just select and middle-click. Oh, and ditch dragging for selection -- that's just so terrible it drives me nuts when I use whatever terminal comes with OS X on colleagues' machines. (I'm glad PuTTY got it right!) Namely, double-click on the start of what you want to select, right-click at the end. Unfortunately, most modern apps have ditched this great piece of X design in favour of a more Windows-like (and to me, more broken) model of selection and copy and paste.
As a few other posters have pointed out, my Debian Lenny (that's Debian stable, so probably about 15 years out of date) version of Gimp will show text on the image as you type. Just checked and it's version 2.4.7. I also seem to recall it being in Debian Etch which I used a couple of years ago.
It isn't much above it. They volunteered for danger, which is something, certainly. But just because decades of training were invested in the Apollo astronauts doesn't mean they did anything original that was remembered. I haven't much admiration for them.
It isn't jadedness. I have the deepest admiration for people who did do original things. Some shook the world with what they did, like Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, The Beatles, Charles Dickens, George Patton, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, Alan Turing... Some didn't, but they did break out of the average and turn things for the better, and I admire them just as much. This last group (the "minor heroes", though I admire them just as much) has many names, less remembered by history: Douglas Bader, Ernest Shackleton and RV Jones are a few that come to mind immediately, though I'd have to think a bit to remember more people in this group.
I also admire extraordinary spirit or courage in non-original duties, from people like Kathleen Ferrier to soldiers like Michael Torrens-Spence, whom I was reading about a few days ago.
But anyway, I really can't see what claim to admiration or amazement or whatnot the Apollo or Columbia astronauts have. For being in the right place at the right time? Notice I did not mention some pretty famous people who were merely in the right place at the right time: Captain Cook comes to mind immediately, especially that one of the shuttles was named after his ship, as I recall.
It wasn't until I asked where I have to go to inform the authorities that I was going to change my place of residence that I got weird looks.
Your local DOL. You have to inform them within 10 days of an address change in most states, and definitely 10 days if you cross a state line. If you're a foreigner, you also have to inform the INS. Think the US doesn't have equally invasive legislation? It does, and I've been on both sides of the ol' Atlantic. Actually England is one of the freer countries in this respect, from what I've heard from friends.
Neither of us were amazing. They were just doing their job. Kennedy was perhaps amazing for launching the project, but beyond that everyone was just doing their job. I think people who start novel projects and do new things with them are amazing, but in Apollo, you could only apply that with any justice to Kennedy.
And in a nice bit of irony, the best defence against missiles is guns again -- albeit very small, very rapidly-firing ones, not the big naval guns of the past.
But seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if gunnery made a comeback in the next 50 years. Shells are cheap, missiles are expensive. Just send half a dozen or a dozen low-cost unmanned attacking drones against, say, a destroyer and it suddenly it runs out of missiles and it's toast. But the same destroyer can carry thousands and thousands of shells, which only need to have a hit rate of a hundredth of the missile to be just as effective. A shell also doesn't worry about radar locks. You just fire it at one part of the sky and it'll go off at a certain distance -- in some new shells, the gun can even set a timer electronically just before firing. Guns have quietly come so far in the pat half-century, that when they become a useful alternative to SAMs, people will be taken by surprise.
You forget that it was the arms race with the US (which the US could afford with the greatest ease) which originally led to the total unworkability and collapse of the Soviet Union (in the long run, of course). Nowadays Russia has more money (due to oil), so it wouldn't go unworkable, but good weapons still need money, and the US has still got much more.
A lot of cliches but not much original or accurate thinking. Let's see.
For offensive operations, I'd agree with you. I completely disagree that national defense cannot be accomplished with a small cadre of national ground troops (perhaps 50K), plus a good navy and air force, a strong national guard and a well-armed and civilian population. During WWII, Admiral Yamamoto is supposed to have said "You cannot invade the mainland United States, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass". Whether he actually said it or not, it was true, and it is true.
Rubbish. No amount of enthusiasts with Springfields will hold off a few tanks and helicopters.
You also mention the National Guard, or at any rate a million-strong reserve force trained with modern weaponry. I don't know if it's escaped your notice, but that is a standing army.
The problem with this view is that we no longer feel the need to abide by what you call the "real constitution", either. It's all malleable, changeable at almost the whim of the current leadership. We hardly even pay lip service to it. One administration flouts the law and the next presidential candidate decries the actions until he's in power, when he embraces and expands them. Congress does nothing but bluster, and not even that for long.
No, what I call the real constitution of a country is simply how it's run, not some ideal. Therefore there is no question of adhering to it. Yes, it is malleable, changeable; it can change from one day to the next. That's just life. The British constitution is unwritten, and yet Britain has historically been a more liberal country because it has strong traditions of liberty, as compared to the US, which was founded by Puritans and businessmen, groups not famous for their ideas on liberty.
The federal government continues to accumulate power to the point that states are effectively just administrative regions and, even worse, the executive continues to tighten its hold on the central government. The famed system of checks and balances has eroded almost beyond recognition.
Yes. These changes all took place between two centuries to a century ago. There's nothing particularly wrong with them as long as the man in the street fares better, and he certainly has more freedoms today than in the oligarchic phase of the US, when there were no laws regulating workers and union protesters were liable to get shot. Which brings me to your next assertion...
Perhaps the constitution is brittle. I suppose republics are brittle, as perhaps are democracies of any form. Oligarchies are robust and flexible, and dictatorships supremely efficient (even if you rotate dictators every eight years).
Personally, I'll take brittle and hard to maintain over what we're heading towards.
Again rubbish. Oligarchies and dictatorships are far more brittle than democracies. In the First World War, Britain began rationing immediately; Germany never. In the Second, Germany only got onto a full war footing in 1944 -- Britain in 1938. Centrally planned economies are generally inefficient, more free economies generally efficient. America, for most of the nineteenth century, was an oligarchy, and it is only becoming less so very recently; in the half-century, except for the 80s.
You say you'll take brittle and hard to maintain -- the trouble is, it won't. If some system is brittle or hard, people won't maintain it. They never have and never will -- not for any amount of time that matters. They'll just move on, silently, as America did a couple of decades after its founding, with all the federalist arguments, imperial expeditions, warmongering and rampant corruption. But that's a good thing; America as laid out in the constitution isn't a democracy or real republic. I'd hate to be still living in times where no women had the vote, slaves only counted for three-fifths of a vote, etc. Sometimes (but only twenty-odd times) the changes happened via formal amendments. Most often, by working around the documents or just by making entirely new rules up as people went along. That's life. What America is or was on paper has never been what it is in reality (incidentally this misleads the optimistic immigrants, but that's good for it).
Because in the 21st century we no longer care about the Rule of Law?
Nice try, but no. Because in the 21st century, an "on-demand" army or a volunteer militia doesn't work. In fact, it hasn't worked since the 19th century. Wars now involve much greater degrees of technology, distance and speed. Therefore if you have the remotest plans to be in a war, whether defensive or offensive, you must have a standing, well-trained army, established command, technological parity with or superiority over your possible opponents, and stockpiles of weapons. In most cases you also need nuclear weapons.
I'm not arguing with you how the change to the Constitution must be implemented, whether by silently ignoring it or trying an amendment each time (a very laborious and politically difficult task -- one of the reasons the US constitution is so brittle). But the fact is, if you took the current text and all its amendments at face value, you could not run a modern country -- you could run something at the level of Somalia. Times change and circumstances change.
If we can't muster the political will for an amendment, well, perhaps we should consider what that means.
It means that it was ill-designed. I don't know how long the US will survive with the constitution at its nominal core, but the "Constitution" is now only a small part of and often in contradiction with its real constitution, i.e. the body of written law, common law and political precedent that really determine how it is run. The fact that this is so is really a reflection on the fact that it was designed to be too brittle. This was intended as a precaution against its modification, but of course paper cannot stand against human will. If the people want a liberal system, they will keep one; if they don't, they won't, and the authority of the Constitution is merely a fiction, as powerful as the amount of belief in it. Today, belief in some parts of it is strong because it agrees with what we think should be right -- freedom of association, for instance. Belief in other parts of it is nonexistent -- the parts about a standing army, the separation of church and state. Free press/speech is in the middle -- some people believe in it and some don't -- and that's why the state of free speech and press is pretty murky in this country today.
I don't mean to cruelly burst any bubbles, but you know perfectly well that that's reality -- words on paper are only as strong as the amount of belief in them.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. You called them theistic fascists for deciding to wage war. For many of them, violence is the normal and possible response to their treatment by the West. We could solve the problem without violence, just as a little more flexibility between George III and Parliament could have avoided the American revolt.
I should also add a disclaimer that I'm in no way trying to paint America as worse than those countries. We simply hold America to higher standards. To give an analogy, in the family of the West, we sometimes frown on America's xenophobia, but basically we're all a family and have only disdain for the folks who live in the trailer park. Sorry for offending the entire Arab world, it's nothing personal, it's only historical. ;)
Idiot. They have specific historical gripes and they deal with them differently. When they weren't being fucked by America, they weren't having goes at America. In the 50s and 60s, your average trigger-happy Arab used have a go at Israel, because the state was established. By the 80s, the coups meant it began to turn its attention to America, and basically the only change that's been going on since then is escalation.
That's odd. What I've read from a few accounts of British troops is that you couldn't trust them with gear; everytime they'd be on exercises with, say, the US Marines, half of them would have swapped their rifles with the Marines and the other half their boots. In the US Army, did it matter exactly what kind of rifle the soldier had to have on him, or just that he needed to have a rifle? Or was this just policy for when you were at base, and less enforced when you were on ops or exercises?
I disagree 100%. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from socializing (and collaborating) in college.
Only if you haven't picked them up before. And they certainly can be picked up before college from just hanging out with people outside your teenager age bracket. The most effective ways to learn the lessons you list in your post are: a. get a job, b. have real friends. And classmates and dormmates don't qualify in that latter category.
You say I wasted my money if I went to college and didn't learn about -- getting along with people from different backgrounds, collaborating effectively, "interpersonal skills" (could you put that in plain anglo-saxon words? I'd like to know what you really mean by it), experience in general. College didn't teach me anything new about any of those, but my job and my friends did, and so did good literature and biography and films. I can count how many worthwhile people I met that I keep in touch with from college on two hands.
Stop trying to fit in. If you're not the type to fit in, you won't benefit by it, though you may lull yourself into thinking that you do. Most friendships in America are superficial dross anyway. The people really worth meeting won't care much about social skills. If you're the type to fit in, then do it, not saying it's a bad thing.
It's virtually only about your connections. And not just for exec jobs either.
But you can get decent networking at middle-tier schools too. Not all the desirable jobs are held by rich folks. In fact, the rich folks really only hold the strings to executive/management jobs. Now I grant you those pay well, but most would drive any reasonable person who actually wants some satisfaction out of his work out of his mind. Really all that's required of a kid to land himself a decent job that he won't hate is a spark of ambition. Talent and social skills are secondary to this. Ambition or drive or what have you will get those contacts that he'll need for a decent job, and he'll probably end up leapfrogging ten people twice as talented as himself -- who nevertheless don't make nearly as good a worker as he does.
But there was no way I was emotionally ready for college. Yes, I could do all the work. Yes, I could force myself to study when I'd rather be playing.
BS. If you had the requisite self-discipline to study when you wanted to have fun, you had more than most college students do in all their 4 years at college.
You don't go to college to make friends with other idiots. You go there to study, end of story. You are under no obligation to socialise. If you meet people worth knowing, great, but that will be perhaps half a percent of the people you'll get to know. Actually, probably significantly less than that, I'm thinking in workplace terms.
Transition program? What the fuck! Just grow up already. It's enough to be placed in an environment with responsible people, but barring that, having your own sense of responsibility and proportion is enough. If you can't even get that (and I admit your average college dorm is not exactly the ideal place for that), just sit down with some good literature or film and try to get the right ideas from it (though I know only a few people who have done their "maturing" that way).
Now I will concede to you that academic performance isn't a good indicator of maturity. I just took your specific situation. There are various types that are good academically but immature: the upper-middle-class type with a pampered home life, the type without enough imagination to see beyond academics (invariably corrupted when thrown outside that bubble), the parental-ambition-proxy type, the overzealous type... However, by a fortunate twist, many of these have such spotless and boring records that they make it to good schools, and they sort of mature slowly into shape. Even these hopeless types will usually come out fine from an Ivy League university, although they will probably always remain in a slightly rarefied circle. As for those that really are ready, the other schools won't harm them either, they're capable enough to deal with the disadvantages and distractions you get at those schools.
The paternoster elevators aren't dangerous at the top or bottom of the loop. They don't even turn upside down. I used to go through them often as a kid at our local hospital (though if my parents knew, they would have been rather cross).
You're just using your private definitions here. Just about any reasonable definition of anarchy -- except, perhaps, the rather deluded "everybody lived happily ever after" anarchists believe in -- would define Somalia as one.
But if we humour your definition and assume that tomorrow America became a land of magic cooperative anarchy, it wouldn't take 5 minutes for the power vacuum to devolve into Somalia.
I haven't been modded up much -- my original post has been torn between up and down modders, mostly because I called libertarians idiots. ;)
The trouble with arguing libertarians is that it's a very slippery position. If you didn't claim an umbrella term like that, I could argue points you make. But the moment you just call yourself a libertarian, you get a wide chunk of possible opinions. Some libertarians are against any standing army, some libertarians are for it. Some are for taxation, some aren't. Some are for anarchy, some are for the status quo but on a smaller scale (the states' rights folks), and some are for a mostly federal government. I didn't know which one you represented, so I went with the most common libertarian position, the one that wants no standing US army. So sue me, you support an army, whoo-hoo. Doesn't invalidate my point about the Internet, but I'll get to that a few paragraphs down.
What power doesn't corrupt or something? it's cliche, and it's true. And i've stated, that the libertarian position (and mine) is not for anarchy, so i dunno wtf you rpoint is.
Yes, it's a cliche. "Power corrupts" is a cliche and not necessarily true. "Power corrupted George W. Bush" would be a factual argument and not a fatuous one. Also, do note that many libertarian positions are indeed for anarcy, though I'll admit that's mostly true of the British libertarians and not the American ones.
"After that many of you call for the smallest possible government, forgetting that it is impossible to have decent defence, universal education, research and development, and good infrastructure and universal healthcare (not that America really has that) without a strong central government." You are just wrong. socialism has failed time and time again. Yet what thrives? free markets. people pursuing profits. we had better (in relative terms) healthcare in the US 50 years ago. Why? because we didn't have the government involved. was it perfect? no, but the system was superior than what we have today, and what any socialized system could bring. Our healthcare quality has gone up, with new technology and such, but that's inspite of, not because of government.
I ought to ignore you after that. Total stinking rubbish.
Look up health indicators for 50 years ago and now if you want. You can say it's technology but it's just as much Medicare. As for "what any socialised system could bring", why don't you look around the world, and see the far better health indicators from places like almost totally taxation-funded healthcare like Britain to those in the middle like France, to semi-private systems like Germany or Switzerland or Spain. All have far better indicators than the US is likely to achieve in its current broken private model.
Also, I didn't call for socialism, just for the government to provide regulation, defence, infrastructure, and back research and development, education and healthcare.
You ignored my point about the fact that you wouldn't be bitching here without the kind of government you want. A small army would not have gotten us the Internet, small government research would not have gotten us Berners-Lee and the Web, and you wouldn't have a cable at your house were it not for giant government subsidies to American telcos. Which point exactly are you arguing? Because if you are you're wrong.
Anyways, centralized planning does not work. cliche or not. Perhaps you have experience with that, at your own company even. How much does bureaucracy get in the way? Does your company succeed because of that bureaucracy, or in spite of it?
It's a measure of degree, you know. Do it like the USSR, total control, it fails. Do it like Russia today, no control, it fails. You need clever regulation to channel, temper or encourage market forces. (Incidentally don't call the X-Prize a market force, it's a prize and not an investment, even though it was privately put up.) At my company we have good management and good
What has the X-prize done so far? It hasn't even put people into space, or at most for a few minutes. It also happens to piggyback on about 60 years of government-funded theoretical and practical research, starting with the Germans and British in the war, and the intense US-USSR space race after that. As usual, states pay for ground-breaking research and private industry comes in afterwards and cleans up the profits.
The rest of your post is just cliches, not practical arguments. Your life expectancy in an anarchic state might be 40 years on average, though less has been common. Losing your life is one of the greater freedoms it is possible for you to use, so at least we can establish that we need government. After that many of you call for the smallest possible government, forgetting that it is impossible to have decent defence, universal education, research and development, and good infrastructure and universal healthcare (not that America really has that) without a strong central government. Or to put it more bluntly, with the kind of government you want, you wouldn't be bitching here, because there wouldn't be an Internet, a World Wide Web, and the cables that take them to your dwelling,
Astroturfing? How out of touch can you get?
:) Science has been the basis of most technological advancements, and liberalism (as it first appeared in the English Enlightenment) the basis of most social and political advancements. Religion definitely hasn't, and in fact has often kept things back -- to be fair, so have many other things and to a greater degree. And for full disclosure, I say this as a Christian, and I think that most Christian variants (with the exception of the Catholic Church) overall come up on the credit side of advancing humanity.
Your "slight change of terms" actually invalidates the point.
Libertarian -- and therefore idiot. You mayn't be an idiot, of course, but you're just parroting idiot arguments. You're not sanguine about government subsidies, but you think getting private industry into the act is a good thing. Right: how the hell do you think private industry is going to get into it, without the last 100 years of government research into how it's done and how you build the tools to do it, and the currently proposed subsidies for getting there? Private industry on its own wouldn't touch space with a barge-pole, not now and not in the next thousand years.
My dear libertarian friend, please realise that government isn't evil, it's a necessity and basically a good thing. Without it we'd have anarchy -- like Somalia. Nobody wants to see levels of control like in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but that's why we work to make it better, not to get rid of it.
What's that got to do with anything? We're talking about plagiarism, not copyright. It would be just as bad if she were plagiarising Goethe, who's long been in the public domain.
Your assertion that to do anything worthwile and creative outside movies only requires the capital investment in a word processor is startlingly ignorant. Perhaps to produce the sort of drivel this German writer has -- it'll be forgotten in one or twenty years. But worthwile books or plays or even blog posts need a lot of effort put into them for research if they're going to be of value. Most such worthwhile books take years or decades to write. Or do you think time isn't money? Even purely fictional works like Harry Potter required an enormous amount of effort from the author and the publishers to keep the plot consistent over seven longish books, readable and interesting. Many more man-hours went into it than you'll ever put in during your full-time career -- so is your life's worth worth just "$300US"?
That's fine, but in X, you don't need the keyboard to copy and paste. Just select and middle-click. Oh, and ditch dragging for selection -- that's just so terrible it drives me nuts when I use whatever terminal comes with OS X on colleagues' machines. (I'm glad PuTTY got it right!) Namely, double-click on the start of what you want to select, right-click at the end. Unfortunately, most modern apps have ditched this great piece of X design in favour of a more Windows-like (and to me, more broken) model of selection and copy and paste.
As a few other posters have pointed out, my Debian Lenny (that's Debian stable, so probably about 15 years out of date) version of Gimp will show text on the image as you type. Just checked and it's version 2.4.7. I also seem to recall it being in Debian Etch which I used a couple of years ago.
It isn't much above it. They volunteered for danger, which is something, certainly. But just because decades of training were invested in the Apollo astronauts doesn't mean they did anything original that was remembered. I haven't much admiration for them.
It isn't jadedness. I have the deepest admiration for people who did do original things. Some shook the world with what they did, like Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, The Beatles, Charles Dickens, George Patton, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, Alan Turing... Some didn't, but they did break out of the average and turn things for the better, and I admire them just as much. This last group (the "minor heroes", though I admire them just as much) has many names, less remembered by history: Douglas Bader, Ernest Shackleton and RV Jones are a few that come to mind immediately, though I'd have to think a bit to remember more people in this group.
I also admire extraordinary spirit or courage in non-original duties, from people like Kathleen Ferrier to soldiers like Michael Torrens-Spence, whom I was reading about a few days ago.
But anyway, I really can't see what claim to admiration or amazement or whatnot the Apollo or Columbia astronauts have. For being in the right place at the right time? Notice I did not mention some pretty famous people who were merely in the right place at the right time: Captain Cook comes to mind immediately, especially that one of the shuttles was named after his ship, as I recall.
It wasn't until I asked where I have to go to inform the authorities that I was going to change my place of residence that I got weird looks.
Your local DOL. You have to inform them within 10 days of an address change in most states, and definitely 10 days if you cross a state line. If you're a foreigner, you also have to inform the INS. Think the US doesn't have equally invasive legislation? It does, and I've been on both sides of the ol' Atlantic. Actually England is one of the freer countries in this respect, from what I've heard from friends.
Neither of us were amazing. They were just doing their job. Kennedy was perhaps amazing for launching the project, but beyond that everyone was just doing their job. I think people who start novel projects and do new things with them are amazing, but in Apollo, you could only apply that with any justice to Kennedy.
These people died doing something amazing, and thus they too were amazing.
No.
And in a nice bit of irony, the best defence against missiles is guns again -- albeit very small, very rapidly-firing ones, not the big naval guns of the past.
But seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if gunnery made a comeback in the next 50 years. Shells are cheap, missiles are expensive. Just send half a dozen or a dozen low-cost unmanned attacking drones against, say, a destroyer and it suddenly it runs out of missiles and it's toast. But the same destroyer can carry thousands and thousands of shells, which only need to have a hit rate of a hundredth of the missile to be just as effective. A shell also doesn't worry about radar locks. You just fire it at one part of the sky and it'll go off at a certain distance -- in some new shells, the gun can even set a timer electronically just before firing. Guns have quietly come so far in the pat half-century, that when they become a useful alternative to SAMs, people will be taken by surprise.
You forget that it was the arms race with the US (which the US could afford with the greatest ease) which originally led to the total unworkability and collapse of the Soviet Union (in the long run, of course). Nowadays Russia has more money (due to oil), so it wouldn't go unworkable, but good weapons still need money, and the US has still got much more.
A lot of cliches but not much original or accurate thinking. Let's see.
For offensive operations, I'd agree with you. I completely disagree that national defense cannot be accomplished with a small cadre of national ground troops (perhaps 50K), plus a good navy and air force, a strong national guard and a well-armed and civilian population. During WWII, Admiral Yamamoto is supposed to have said "You cannot invade the mainland United States, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass". Whether he actually said it or not, it was true, and it is true.
Rubbish. No amount of enthusiasts with Springfields will hold off a few tanks and helicopters.
You also mention the National Guard, or at any rate a million-strong reserve force trained with modern weaponry. I don't know if it's escaped your notice, but that is a standing army.
The problem with this view is that we no longer feel the need to abide by what you call the "real constitution", either. It's all malleable, changeable at almost the whim of the current leadership. We hardly even pay lip service to it. One administration flouts the law and the next presidential candidate decries the actions until he's in power, when he embraces and expands them. Congress does nothing but bluster, and not even that for long.
No, what I call the real constitution of a country is simply how it's run, not some ideal. Therefore there is no question of adhering to it. Yes, it is malleable, changeable; it can change from one day to the next. That's just life. The British constitution is unwritten, and yet Britain has historically been a more liberal country because it has strong traditions of liberty, as compared to the US, which was founded by Puritans and businessmen, groups not famous for their ideas on liberty.
The federal government continues to accumulate power to the point that states are effectively just administrative regions and, even worse, the executive continues to tighten its hold on the central government. The famed system of checks and balances has eroded almost beyond recognition.
Yes. These changes all took place between two centuries to a century ago. There's nothing particularly wrong with them as long as the man in the street fares better, and he certainly has more freedoms today than in the oligarchic phase of the US, when there were no laws regulating workers and union protesters were liable to get shot. Which brings me to your next assertion...
Perhaps the constitution is brittle. I suppose republics are brittle, as perhaps are democracies of any form. Oligarchies are robust and flexible, and dictatorships supremely efficient (even if you rotate dictators every eight years). Personally, I'll take brittle and hard to maintain over what we're heading towards.
Again rubbish. Oligarchies and dictatorships are far more brittle than democracies. In the First World War, Britain began rationing immediately; Germany never. In the Second, Germany only got onto a full war footing in 1944 -- Britain in 1938. Centrally planned economies are generally inefficient, more free economies generally efficient. America, for most of the nineteenth century, was an oligarchy, and it is only becoming less so very recently; in the half-century, except for the 80s.
You say you'll take brittle and hard to maintain -- the trouble is, it won't. If some system is brittle or hard, people won't maintain it. They never have and never will -- not for any amount of time that matters. They'll just move on, silently, as America did a couple of decades after its founding, with all the federalist arguments, imperial expeditions, warmongering and rampant corruption. But that's a good thing; America as laid out in the constitution isn't a democracy or real republic. I'd hate to be still living in times where no women had the vote, slaves only counted for three-fifths of a vote, etc. Sometimes (but only twenty-odd times) the changes happened via formal amendments. Most often, by working around the documents or just by making entirely new rules up as people went along. That's life. What America is or was on paper has never been what it is in reality (incidentally this misleads the optimistic immigrants, but that's good for it).
Because in the 21st century we no longer care about the Rule of Law?
Nice try, but no. Because in the 21st century, an "on-demand" army or a volunteer militia doesn't work. In fact, it hasn't worked since the 19th century. Wars now involve much greater degrees of technology, distance and speed. Therefore if you have the remotest plans to be in a war, whether defensive or offensive, you must have a standing, well-trained army, established command, technological parity with or superiority over your possible opponents, and stockpiles of weapons. In most cases you also need nuclear weapons.
I'm not arguing with you how the change to the Constitution must be implemented, whether by silently ignoring it or trying an amendment each time (a very laborious and politically difficult task -- one of the reasons the US constitution is so brittle). But the fact is, if you took the current text and all its amendments at face value, you could not run a modern country -- you could run something at the level of Somalia. Times change and circumstances change.
If we can't muster the political will for an amendment, well, perhaps we should consider what that means.
It means that it was ill-designed. I don't know how long the US will survive with the constitution at its nominal core, but the "Constitution" is now only a small part of and often in contradiction with its real constitution, i.e. the body of written law, common law and political precedent that really determine how it is run. The fact that this is so is really a reflection on the fact that it was designed to be too brittle. This was intended as a precaution against its modification, but of course paper cannot stand against human will. If the people want a liberal system, they will keep one; if they don't, they won't, and the authority of the Constitution is merely a fiction, as powerful as the amount of belief in it. Today, belief in some parts of it is strong because it agrees with what we think should be right -- freedom of association, for instance. Belief in other parts of it is nonexistent -- the parts about a standing army, the separation of church and state. Free press/speech is in the middle -- some people believe in it and some don't -- and that's why the state of free speech and press is pretty murky in this country today.
I don't mean to cruelly burst any bubbles, but you know perfectly well that that's reality -- words on paper are only as strong as the amount of belief in them.