While I agree with your sentiment I have a slightly different take. As you suggest there really isn't 'paying each other back' in international relations, but the US is a good ally to have, with capable armed forces and I will acknowledge that it is only because of US support that Western Europe did not end up if not occupied by the Soviets then certainly strongly within the Soviet sphere of influence. For that I am thankful to the US and the citizens who paid to keep us safe. That said US foreign policy is generally speaking a disaster, and not just under Bush. Not because it is too interventionist, I don't subscribe to the Berkely school of 'everything the US ever does abroad is always wrong'. It is a disaster because they pretend to be engaged in realpolitik when they really aren't, or at least are doing it very wrong. Realpolitik in the US seems to mean propping us corporate interests and right wing governments at the expense of democracy and social freedoms. Every once in a while this works (South Korea for instance) because reasonable economic conditions result in an expanding middle class who then demand democracy and social freedoms. But usually what you get is some asshole dictator whose corrupt government squanders any and all gains from having economic freedom. At the same time the US gets the reputation of propping up yet another dictator or of trying to overthrow a nominal democracy. Venezuela is a good example of the failures of this pollice. Chavez was an idiot and an arsehole. If the US hadn't made him seem under siege he would have been out of office by now. His policies were stupid and Venezuela, while not exactly a paragon of democracy, was democratic enough that it almost certainly would have replaced him. But the US had to strengthen his hand by supporting a coup that was never going to work. Now this is not to say your point about Europe basically fucking up the entire world isn't a fair cop. Heck I'm British, the TV new could basically be renamed 'a list of places Britain fucked up in some way' and it wouldn't be misleading. And if it wasn't us it was the Belgians or the French or the Spanish or in a few cases the Germans. But while this is a fair cop the scale at which Europe is fucking up right now is generally speaking smaller, partly because we just don't have the resources to fuck up on a grand scale any more. That said it isn't always easy, and sometimes people are going to accuse you of fucking up even when you do the right thing. Take Libya for instance. The US was instrumental in giving Libya a chance for freedom. In my opinion the US did the right thing there. They prevented what would have been termed 'the rape of Bengahzi' for a start. Even if we end up with a Jihadi state or some fascist dictator I still think the US did the right thing because international politics isn't easy. Same with the early stages of Vietnam before it became obvious the government in the South wasn't going to get it's act together and that the North would win. When the US fights for economic and social freedom it is a force for good in the world, and it is doing the right thing, even if it doesn't succeed. The problem is that often the US isn't fighting for these things, especially when the CIA is involved. Often the US is fighting not for justice, freedom and democracy, but for corporate interests or out of fear of the latest bogeyman. Basically what I'm saying is the US need to have more confidence in its ideals.
No it really isn't. One is an ontological statement "deities exist". The other is just expressing a preference "my life is worth living, regardless of deities existing". The number of assumptions you have to make to justify the first is far larger, and they are far less intuitive. To accept that I believe my life is worth living you have to accept that I exist, that I am alive, and that I think my life is worth living. I can provide evidence for all of these things that I suspect will meet your standards. You are unlikely to be able to provide me with sufficient evidence that deities exist.
Agreed. I also like to keep in mind that while we can be objective about the facts (almost all nuclear plants release hardly any extra radiations say, or that the rates of extreme failure modes (meltdowns, etc) have been repeatedly underestimated), we cant be objective when it comes to things like how much we value our children's future over our grandchildren's. These aren't really things which are objective and so even when we have all the facts we can still disagree about what the right course of action is. We also have to deal with the how many 'facts' aren't facts because people more interested in getting their own way than in truth have distorted the issue (from both sides, although more harmfully from the nuclear industry in my opinion). Whether it is the nuclear industry failing to disclose the real nature of accidents or environmentalists producing misleading estimates of extra cancer cases it seems hardly anyone cares about the truth in this issue any more and leaves me with serious doubts about what I can and cant trust.
You are wasting your time I'm afraid. There are just too many people out there who cant imagine how anyone could come to a different perspective on controversial issues and how abuse of rhetoric can be polarising. If you can please take comfort in the fact that while I disagree with your point of view I can understand how someone with different facts, experiences and values could come to a different conclusion about nuclear power to the one I have. I appreciate your efforts to keep the discourse civil.
H1b isn't immigration, it is indentured servitude. You want to take the H1b program and replace it by giving more green cards to skilled individuals we can talk.
You think companies using the government to distort the labour market and engaging in global price fixing is capitalism?
Scrap the H1B program and give more foreign tech workers green cards and we will talk about capitalism. Indentured servitude does not make a free market.
Stop government fixing currency rates for the express benefits of large corporations and to the detriment of smaller players and we will talk. Price fixing does not make a free market.
Stop taxing labour at a far higher rate than corporate activity thus making the labour market favour the buyer and we will talk. Effective monopsony pricing does not make a free market.
I'm running a custom kernel on my netbook because the integrated graphics on the shitty motherboard wasn't supported by the version in the then contemporary version of Ubuntu (or Mint, or a couple of other distros I was looking at). I know what a kernel is. I still run Ubuntu. I will probably switch my personal machines over to Mint next time I decide I want a change, but most of the time Ubuntu just works and the forums are useful and friendly. Probably because they aren't populated by people who don't consider someone who doesn't know what a kernel is a 'real' user.
You are justifying genocide, and to do it you are advocating tyranny. There is a difference between the computer programs I write and the people that YHWH mercilessly slaughters, the computer programs I write are not sentient. If I create twenty thousand synthetic intelligences and then delete them then I am guilty of genocide and an thoroughly unpleasant individual unworthy of worship. Why the quotes around genocide there by the way? If I intentionally slaughtered two entire cities worth of people and wiped out their culture what crime do you suggest I am guilty of? Besides YHWH is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, he cant 'fuck up'. Extermination and death as a punishment for failing to comply precisely with his instructions are part of his plan. And the reasoning you are espousing here has been used to justify wholesale slaughters through the years.
And this is exactly my point, one cannot simply avoid 'enduring' the Bible by not reading it. The reasoning it promotes, the beauty of it's poetry and allegory, the foundation of much of the Western tradition (for better and for worse) is infused with that documents legacy.
I've never read Twilight. I still have to endure it in the sense it is a part of wider culture. It is allowed to be a part of wider culture and I have to put up with it to the extent that this represents a collection of everyone else freedom of expression. I'm allowed to not be happy about it.
That said I agree there is some wisdom in the Bible, and some good poetry too. Same goes for the Quran and the Vedas and a whole bunch of other holy text. They didn't end up holy texts by accident.
On the other hand you quoted that nice poetic section of Ecclesiastes immediately after referencing us to a section in which YHWH commits one of his minor genocides and punishes a woman for the grave sin of checking over her shoulder. All this shortly before an act of incest which due to constraints of the lineage had to be an essential part of his plan. I'm sure there are some good bits in Twilight too, doesn't mean I don't consider it the female equivalent of rape porn.
No, as much as it would be nice to split things up like this the real world is messier.
You have implicitly labelled the UK as a constitutional monarchy, but it really isn't if we are going to be as literal as you are. It is more like a theocracy if we are talking about how the power is supposed to be derived. Of course how the power is *supposed* to be derived doesn't matter as much as how it is actually sourced, something you clearly recognise because you highlight the sovereign role of the people in a republic.
Both the UK and the US are a mixture of oligarchy, republic, democracy and theocracy, but they are by an large oligarchies. Ironically more so the US than the UK because the US has legalised bribery on a massive scale. Both have democratic components which can override the oligarchs wishes acting as a sort of ultimate veto, and in both the pretence of republican values have to be maintained which affects the politics.
The simplest thing to do is to label both the US and the UK as representative democracies and be done with it, recognising that the meaning of the word democracy here reflects the ultimate way in which power is distributed.
The Muslim Brotherhood are getting attacked because they are taking precisely the step necessary to ensure Egypt has one and only one free and fair election. Yes this move to free software is a good thing and indicates they aren't prepared to be tied to Western corporate control, but at the same time the new constitution and the resulting permanent sectarian divide it will set up is not good for Egypt. People in the West are criticising it because we have made similar mistakes in our past, and paid for them with dictatorships.
Okay, can you cite a peer reviewed publication which makes that prediction (a new ice age) with the certainty you claim? Time magazine is not a peer reviewed publication and if you get your science from the media then you will just get bad science. Back in the 70s, even though global temperatures had been reasonably stable (or possibly declining) most scientists were predicting global warming would dominate global dimming. As the evidence of the last 40 years came in most scientists (who were defying the current trend of global temperatures) because almost all scientists, at least the ones who do climate research.
Your bad science teacher and the fact that science journalists aren't worth a piss in the ocean doesn't mean the scientists had it wrong. Go read the peer reviewed literature, I promise you for ever paper you have implying we may be approaching another ice age I can find 3 going the other way.
You know you don't have to rely on Time magazine and unnamed researchers (I actually know which ones you are referring to in so far as the ones proposing global dimming would have a significant effect, although Time couldn't get them to go on record to say what they wanted so they had to invent a source - 'climatalogical cassandras'). You can read the peer reviewed literature. You know the problem with doing that? As far back as the 1970s researchers were, broadly speaking, predicting global warming. There wasn't a consensus and they was plenty of doubt, but more thought the greenhouse effect would dominate.
You might want to go take a closer butchers at those cycles, the thing that amplifies them from little changes in temperature to big swings is CO2, precisely the gas we are now dumping into the atmosphere.
Agreed. I've used a fair chunk of languages and you can learn from each of them (although sometimes what you learn is 'don't do things this way', I'm looking at your early versions of Visual Basic and all versions of brainfuck (i still prefer brainfuck to VB though). Python isn't perfect and it isn't for everyone (some people get real grumpy about meaningful white space), but if you haven't programmed before then it is a good place to start. If not python then something designed with teaching in mind, say Pascal. You will eventually want to pick up something like C and you wont be a complete programmer till you've written at least one piece of software which is full of buffer overflows, misused pointers and mallocs that don't do what you think they do, but you don't have to start there. Also worth giving something like Haskell a go just to screw with your brain. But start with something like python.
We did. The result of the thinking and design process was the ILC. Now we have thought for a bit and come to the conclusion that to examine our thinking we need an accelerator. The ILC has been on the drawing board for a long time now, we have known we would need it since before the LHC even began construction. Now don't get me wrong, I would love it if your idea was put into practice, I'm a theoretician. But basic research needs experiments, I cant do everything on my own and funding me to the exclusion of my experimental peers would be a waste of the taxpayers money I'm sorry to say.
"This brings a whole slew of other laws into effect and you will likely not find a corporation that is declared a criminal gang or criminal organization."
This was precisely my point. A very large chunk of corporations have behaved like criminal gangs and are not treated as such. It may well be the correct application of the law, but it is again a classic example of one law for corporations and another for everyone else. HSBC have recently behaved like a criminal gang. They should be declared and treated like a criminal gang. If a small business owner had done what HSBC has done they would find themselves behind bars. If you would like to test your theory go set up an accountancy, have 90% of your customers be legit and 10% Mexican drug lords. I look forward to your treaties on how all business are treated the same from the wrong side of a jail cell.
"Firing someone, negotiating their contracts and so on is not an unethical act."
It is if you own the legal system. If corporations have to accept state representatives in court, if all donations to politicians are outlawed and our tax system is reformed so that providing a job is not artificially restricted then we can talk about agreements between employers and employee as though they were free agreements. You cant buy the legal system, buy the legislature and artificially inflate the price of labour to ensure employers have monopsony power then call the resulting labour market 'free'.
"See what I did there, I held you to the same assumptions you want to hold corporations to."
No, no you didn't. What you did was failed to appreciate the difference in context. Your next example does a perfect job of illustrating that because we have RICO laws to deal with gangsters but don't use them on corporate officers even when it is clearly appropriate. One rule for the black / latino / italian guy directing his employees to do illegal stuff and another for the white one because the white one hides behind a 'corporation'. Equal justice my arse.
As for not having responsibility. Corporations need to make collectively and individually acting ethically a priority. At the moment they do the exact opposite. I will make you a deal, you show me a company where an employee cannot be fired or downsized or have their contract renegotiated while being able to leave whenever they like after a reasonable notice period, who have never had a recorded instance of a constructive dismissal for the tenure of the current batch of executive officers and I will agree that the corporate officers of that company are not in part responsible for the rogue actions of their employees. Corporations agree to stop operating like gangs and I will start judging them like families and friends.
"Imagine if the law decided that because you were the oldest of your siblings that you are responsible for all the acts of your brothers and sisters."
My brothers and sisters are not a corporation, I don't direct them, I have no authority over them. I'm talking about responsibility. If I run my family with a strong hierarchy and direct my brothers actions in a way which is likely to result in him doing something which harms others then you bet I'm responsible. If during the course of normal business activities your company creates a culture in which things like managing money for terrorist groups (as was the case with HSBC) occurs then yes, you are responsible.
If a gangster doesn't directly manage the money or drug running or protection rackets does that make them not responsible for the actions of the organisation?
All your examples have a theme in common, I'm not responsible for the actions of my friend and family. If your employee, acting within the incentives and controls you impose on them commits a crime and you neglect to keep records of it and benefit from it (directly or indirectly) then you are responsible. Do you have an example where you can direct another's actions then disavow yourself of the consequences in an area you have direct responsibility for?
Just because the odd token CEO goes to prison to placate the masses doesn't mean justice is even, look at what HSBC just got away with doing. Every company should have an individual identified as having responsibility for all actions. If you cant identify who is responsible for an action then the person with general responsibility is held accountable. Network goes down costing someones life? CTO goes to jail. Pension fund fails due to neglect? Financial officer goes to jail. That would at least go some way towards justifying their absurd salaries.
This entire exchange is a classic example of a Gish Gallop in which one fallacy after another is presented so rapidly it isn't possible for someone to address all of them at once. hsthompson69 will reply to this response with yet more fallacies in the hope of getting the last word. Unless a denialist like hsthompson provides you with an analysis of the full temperature record with a clear null hypothesis and the actual statistics necessary to back up their point I strongly advise extreme caution. If as here they make repeated conceptual mistakes in the maths then you know you are dealing with someone motivated to ignore the facts. He isn't looking for the science. He is looking to trip you up by making you fact check so many points at once the odds are good you will get one explanation wrong simply by a slip of the keyboard.
This entire exchange is a classic example of a Gish Gallop in which one fallacy after another is presented so rapidly it isn't possible for someone to address all of them at once. hsthompson69 will reply to this response with yet more fallacies in the hope of getting the last word. Unless a denialist like hsthompson provides you with an analysis of the full temperature record with a clear null hypothesis and the actual statistics necessary to back up their point I strongly advise extreme caution. If as here they make repeated conceptual mistakes in the maths then you know you are dealing with someone motivated to ignore the facts. He isn't looking for the science. He is looking to trip you up by making you fact check so many points at once the odds are good you will get one explanation wrong simply by a slip of the keyboard.
This entire exchange is a classic example of a Gish Gallop in which one fallacy after another is presented so rapidly it isn't possible for someone to address all of them at once. hsthompson69 will reply to this response with yet more fallacies in the hope of getting the last word. Unless a denialist like hsthompson provides you with an analysis of the full temperature record with a clear null hypothesis and the actual statistics necessary to back up their point I strongly advise extreme caution. If as here they make repeated conceptual mistakes in the maths then you know you are dealing with someone motivated to ignore the facts. He isn't looking for the science. He is looking to trip you up by making you fact check so many points at once the odds are good you will get one explanation wrong simply by a slip of the keyboard.
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Agreed.
While I agree with your sentiment I have a slightly different take. As you suggest there really isn't 'paying each other back' in international relations, but the US is a good ally to have, with capable armed forces and I will acknowledge that it is only because of US support that Western Europe did not end up if not occupied by the Soviets then certainly strongly within the Soviet sphere of influence. For that I am thankful to the US and the citizens who paid to keep us safe.
That said US foreign policy is generally speaking a disaster, and not just under Bush. Not because it is too interventionist, I don't subscribe to the Berkely school of 'everything the US ever does abroad is always wrong'. It is a disaster because they pretend to be engaged in realpolitik when they really aren't, or at least are doing it very wrong. Realpolitik in the US seems to mean propping us corporate interests and right wing governments at the expense of democracy and social freedoms. Every once in a while this works (South Korea for instance) because reasonable economic conditions result in an expanding middle class who then demand democracy and social freedoms. But usually what you get is some asshole dictator whose corrupt government squanders any and all gains from having economic freedom. At the same time the US gets the reputation of propping up yet another dictator or of trying to overthrow a nominal democracy.
Venezuela is a good example of the failures of this pollice. Chavez was an idiot and an arsehole. If the US hadn't made him seem under siege he would have been out of office by now. His policies were stupid and Venezuela, while not exactly a paragon of democracy, was democratic enough that it almost certainly would have replaced him. But the US had to strengthen his hand by supporting a coup that was never going to work.
Now this is not to say your point about Europe basically fucking up the entire world isn't a fair cop. Heck I'm British, the TV new could basically be renamed 'a list of places Britain fucked up in some way' and it wouldn't be misleading. And if it wasn't us it was the Belgians or the French or the Spanish or in a few cases the Germans. But while this is a fair cop the scale at which Europe is fucking up right now is generally speaking smaller, partly because we just don't have the resources to fuck up on a grand scale any more.
That said it isn't always easy, and sometimes people are going to accuse you of fucking up even when you do the right thing. Take Libya for instance. The US was instrumental in giving Libya a chance for freedom. In my opinion the US did the right thing there. They prevented what would have been termed 'the rape of Bengahzi' for a start. Even if we end up with a Jihadi state or some fascist dictator I still think the US did the right thing because international politics isn't easy. Same with the early stages of Vietnam before it became obvious the government in the South wasn't going to get it's act together and that the North would win.
When the US fights for economic and social freedom it is a force for good in the world, and it is doing the right thing, even if it doesn't succeed. The problem is that often the US isn't fighting for these things, especially when the CIA is involved. Often the US is fighting not for justice, freedom and democracy, but for corporate interests or out of fear of the latest bogeyman.
Basically what I'm saying is the US need to have more confidence in its ideals.
How is that purpose in any way objective? What thing is it a property of?
Properties of minds are subjective, your deity has a mind, ergo your purpose is subjective. Objective purpose makes as much sense as elephant beaks.
No it really isn't. One is an ontological statement "deities exist". The other is just expressing a preference "my life is worth living, regardless of deities existing". The number of assumptions you have to make to justify the first is far larger, and they are far less intuitive. To accept that I believe my life is worth living you have to accept that I exist, that I am alive, and that I think my life is worth living. I can provide evidence for all of these things that I suspect will meet your standards. You are unlikely to be able to provide me with sufficient evidence that deities exist.
Agreed. I also like to keep in mind that while we can be objective about the facts (almost all nuclear plants release hardly any extra radiations say, or that the rates of extreme failure modes (meltdowns, etc) have been repeatedly underestimated), we cant be objective when it comes to things like how much we value our children's future over our grandchildren's. These aren't really things which are objective and so even when we have all the facts we can still disagree about what the right course of action is.
We also have to deal with the how many 'facts' aren't facts because people more interested in getting their own way than in truth have distorted the issue (from both sides, although more harmfully from the nuclear industry in my opinion). Whether it is the nuclear industry failing to disclose the real nature of accidents or environmentalists producing misleading estimates of extra cancer cases it seems hardly anyone cares about the truth in this issue any more and leaves me with serious doubts about what I can and cant trust.
You are wasting your time I'm afraid. There are just too many people out there who cant imagine how anyone could come to a different perspective on controversial issues and how abuse of rhetoric can be polarising. If you can please take comfort in the fact that while I disagree with your point of view I can understand how someone with different facts, experiences and values could come to a different conclusion about nuclear power to the one I have. I appreciate your efforts to keep the discourse civil.
H1b isn't immigration, it is indentured servitude. You want to take the H1b program and replace it by giving more green cards to skilled individuals we can talk.
You think companies using the government to distort the labour market and engaging in global price fixing is capitalism?
Scrap the H1B program and give more foreign tech workers green cards and we will talk about capitalism. Indentured servitude does not make a free market.
Stop government fixing currency rates for the express benefits of large corporations and to the detriment of smaller players and we will talk. Price fixing does not make a free market.
Stop taxing labour at a far higher rate than corporate activity thus making the labour market favour the buyer and we will talk. Effective monopsony pricing does not make a free market.
Capitalism my arse.
I'm running a custom kernel on my netbook because the integrated graphics on the shitty motherboard wasn't supported by the version in the then contemporary version of Ubuntu (or Mint, or a couple of other distros I was looking at). I know what a kernel is. I still run Ubuntu. I will probably switch my personal machines over to Mint next time I decide I want a change, but most of the time Ubuntu just works and the forums are useful and friendly. Probably because they aren't populated by people who don't consider someone who doesn't know what a kernel is a 'real' user.
Context? For genocide.
You are justifying genocide, and to do it you are advocating tyranny. There is a difference between the computer programs I write and the people that YHWH mercilessly slaughters, the computer programs I write are not sentient. If I create twenty thousand synthetic intelligences and then delete them then I am guilty of genocide and an thoroughly unpleasant individual unworthy of worship.
Why the quotes around genocide there by the way? If I intentionally slaughtered two entire cities worth of people and wiped out their culture what crime do you suggest I am guilty of?
Besides YHWH is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, he cant 'fuck up'. Extermination and death as a punishment for failing to comply precisely with his instructions are part of his plan. And the reasoning you are espousing here has been used to justify wholesale slaughters through the years.
And this is exactly my point, one cannot simply avoid 'enduring' the Bible by not reading it. The reasoning it promotes, the beauty of it's poetry and allegory, the foundation of much of the Western tradition (for better and for worse) is infused with that documents legacy.
I've never read Twilight. I still have to endure it in the sense it is a part of wider culture. It is allowed to be a part of wider culture and I have to put up with it to the extent that this represents a collection of everyone else freedom of expression. I'm allowed to not be happy about it.
That said I agree there is some wisdom in the Bible, and some good poetry too. Same goes for the Quran and the Vedas and a whole bunch of other holy text. They didn't end up holy texts by accident.
On the other hand you quoted that nice poetic section of Ecclesiastes immediately after referencing us to a section in which YHWH commits one of his minor genocides and punishes a woman for the grave sin of checking over her shoulder. All this shortly before an act of incest which due to constraints of the lineage had to be an essential part of his plan. I'm sure there are some good bits in Twilight too, doesn't mean I don't consider it the female equivalent of rape porn.
No, as much as it would be nice to split things up like this the real world is messier.
You have implicitly labelled the UK as a constitutional monarchy, but it really isn't if we are going to be as literal as you are. It is more like a theocracy if we are talking about how the power is supposed to be derived. Of course how the power is *supposed* to be derived doesn't matter as much as how it is actually sourced, something you clearly recognise because you highlight the sovereign role of the people in a republic.
Both the UK and the US are a mixture of oligarchy, republic, democracy and theocracy, but they are by an large oligarchies. Ironically more so the US than the UK because the US has legalised bribery on a massive scale. Both have democratic components which can override the oligarchs wishes acting as a sort of ultimate veto, and in both the pretence of republican values have to be maintained which affects the politics.
The simplest thing to do is to label both the US and the UK as representative democracies and be done with it, recognising that the meaning of the word democracy here reflects the ultimate way in which power is distributed.
The Muslim Brotherhood are getting attacked because they are taking precisely the step necessary to ensure Egypt has one and only one free and fair election. Yes this move to free software is a good thing and indicates they aren't prepared to be tied to Western corporate control, but at the same time the new constitution and the resulting permanent sectarian divide it will set up is not good for Egypt. People in the West are criticising it because we have made similar mistakes in our past, and paid for them with dictatorships.
Okay, can you cite a peer reviewed publication which makes that prediction (a new ice age) with the certainty you claim? Time magazine is not a peer reviewed publication and if you get your science from the media then you will just get bad science. Back in the 70s, even though global temperatures had been reasonably stable (or possibly declining) most scientists were predicting global warming would dominate global dimming. As the evidence of the last 40 years came in most scientists (who were defying the current trend of global temperatures) because almost all scientists, at least the ones who do climate research.
Your bad science teacher and the fact that science journalists aren't worth a piss in the ocean doesn't mean the scientists had it wrong. Go read the peer reviewed literature, I promise you for ever paper you have implying we may be approaching another ice age I can find 3 going the other way.
You know you don't have to rely on Time magazine and unnamed researchers (I actually know which ones you are referring to in so far as the ones proposing global dimming would have a significant effect, although Time couldn't get them to go on record to say what they wanted so they had to invent a source - 'climatalogical cassandras'). You can read the peer reviewed literature. You know the problem with doing that? As far back as the 1970s researchers were, broadly speaking, predicting global warming. There wasn't a consensus and they was plenty of doubt, but more thought the greenhouse effect would dominate.
You might want to go take a closer butchers at those cycles, the thing that amplifies them from little changes in temperature to big swings is CO2, precisely the gas we are now dumping into the atmosphere.
Agreed. I've used a fair chunk of languages and you can learn from each of them (although sometimes what you learn is 'don't do things this way', I'm looking at your early versions of Visual Basic and all versions of brainfuck (i still prefer brainfuck to VB though). Python isn't perfect and it isn't for everyone (some people get real grumpy about meaningful white space), but if you haven't programmed before then it is a good place to start. If not python then something designed with teaching in mind, say Pascal. You will eventually want to pick up something like C and you wont be a complete programmer till you've written at least one piece of software which is full of buffer overflows, misused pointers and mallocs that don't do what you think they do, but you don't have to start there. Also worth giving something like Haskell a go just to screw with your brain. But start with something like python.
We did. The result of the thinking and design process was the ILC. Now we have thought for a bit and come to the conclusion that to examine our thinking we need an accelerator. The ILC has been on the drawing board for a long time now, we have known we would need it since before the LHC even began construction. Now don't get me wrong, I would love it if your idea was put into practice, I'm a theoretician. But basic research needs experiments, I cant do everything on my own and funding me to the exclusion of my experimental peers would be a waste of the taxpayers money I'm sorry to say.
"This brings a whole slew of other laws into effect and you will likely not find a corporation that is declared a criminal gang or criminal organization."
This was precisely my point. A very large chunk of corporations have behaved like criminal gangs and are not treated as such. It may well be the correct application of the law, but it is again a classic example of one law for corporations and another for everyone else. HSBC have recently behaved like a criminal gang. They should be declared and treated like a criminal gang. If a small business owner had done what HSBC has done they would find themselves behind bars. If you would like to test your theory go set up an accountancy, have 90% of your customers be legit and 10% Mexican drug lords. I look forward to your treaties on how all business are treated the same from the wrong side of a jail cell.
"Firing someone, negotiating their contracts and so on is not an unethical act."
It is if you own the legal system. If corporations have to accept state representatives in court, if all donations to politicians are outlawed and our tax system is reformed so that providing a job is not artificially restricted then we can talk about agreements between employers and employee as though they were free agreements. You cant buy the legal system, buy the legislature and artificially inflate the price of labour to ensure employers have monopsony power then call the resulting labour market 'free'.
"See what I did there, I held you to the same assumptions you want to hold corporations to."
No, no you didn't. What you did was failed to appreciate the difference in context. Your next example does a perfect job of illustrating that because we have RICO laws to deal with gangsters but don't use them on corporate officers even when it is clearly appropriate. One rule for the black / latino / italian guy directing his employees to do illegal stuff and another for the white one because the white one hides behind a 'corporation'. Equal justice my arse.
As for not having responsibility. Corporations need to make collectively and individually acting ethically a priority. At the moment they do the exact opposite. I will make you a deal, you show me a company where an employee cannot be fired or downsized or have their contract renegotiated while being able to leave whenever they like after a reasonable notice period, who have never had a recorded instance of a constructive dismissal for the tenure of the current batch of executive officers and I will agree that the corporate officers of that company are not in part responsible for the rogue actions of their employees. Corporations agree to stop operating like gangs and I will start judging them like families and friends.
"Imagine if the law decided that because you were the oldest of your siblings that you are responsible for all the acts of your brothers and sisters."
My brothers and sisters are not a corporation, I don't direct them, I have no authority over them. I'm talking about responsibility. If I run my family with a strong hierarchy and direct my brothers actions in a way which is likely to result in him doing something which harms others then you bet I'm responsible. If during the course of normal business activities your company creates a culture in which things like managing money for terrorist groups (as was the case with HSBC) occurs then yes, you are responsible.
If a gangster doesn't directly manage the money or drug running or protection rackets does that make them not responsible for the actions of the organisation?
All your examples have a theme in common, I'm not responsible for the actions of my friend and family. If your employee, acting within the incentives and controls you impose on them commits a crime and you neglect to keep records of it and benefit from it (directly or indirectly) then you are responsible. Do you have an example where you can direct another's actions then disavow yourself of the consequences in an area you have direct responsibility for?
Just because the odd token CEO goes to prison to placate the masses doesn't mean justice is even, look at what HSBC just got away with doing. Every company should have an individual identified as having responsibility for all actions. If you cant identify who is responsible for an action then the person with general responsibility is held accountable. Network goes down costing someones life? CTO goes to jail. Pension fund fails due to neglect? Financial officer goes to jail. That would at least go some way towards justifying their absurd salaries.
To the interested reader you are referred further up this exchange http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3303957&cid=42240095.
This entire exchange is a classic example of a Gish Gallop in which one fallacy after another is presented so rapidly it isn't possible for someone to address all of them at once. hsthompson69 will reply to this response with yet more fallacies in the hope of getting the last word. Unless a denialist like hsthompson provides you with an analysis of the full temperature record with a clear null hypothesis and the actual statistics necessary to back up their point I strongly advise extreme caution. If as here they make repeated conceptual mistakes in the maths then you know you are dealing with someone motivated to ignore the facts. He isn't looking for the science. He is looking to trip you up by making you fact check so many points at once the odds are good you will get one explanation wrong simply by a slip of the keyboard.
To the interested reader you are referred further up this exchange http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3303957&cid=42240095.
This entire exchange is a classic example of a Gish Gallop in which one fallacy after another is presented so rapidly it isn't possible for someone to address all of them at once. hsthompson69 will reply to this response with yet more fallacies in the hope of getting the last word. Unless a denialist like hsthompson provides you with an analysis of the full temperature record with a clear null hypothesis and the actual statistics necessary to back up their point I strongly advise extreme caution. If as here they make repeated conceptual mistakes in the maths then you know you are dealing with someone motivated to ignore the facts. He isn't looking for the science. He is looking to trip you up by making you fact check so many points at once the odds are good you will get one explanation wrong simply by a slip of the keyboard.
To the interested reader you are referred further up this exchange http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3303957&cid=42240095.
This entire exchange is a classic example of a Gish Gallop in which one fallacy after another is presented so rapidly it isn't possible for someone to address all of them at once. hsthompson69 will reply to this response with yet more fallacies in the hope of getting the last word. Unless a denialist like hsthompson provides you with an analysis of the full temperature record with a clear null hypothesis and the actual statistics necessary to back up their point I strongly advise extreme caution. If as here they make repeated conceptual mistakes in the maths then you know you are dealing with someone motivated to ignore the facts. He isn't looking for the science. He is looking to trip you up by making you fact check so many points at once the odds are good you will get one explanation wrong simply by a slip of the keyboard.