The first point is about as stupid and pointless as abstinence only sex education. People are going to engage in risky forms of behavior no matter what you tell them. Rather than telling them no to do something, it's better to explain that if they choose to engage in those behaviors what they really need to watch out for and when they need to get some outside help. In high school, I had a teacher that told us that while we shouldn't be out drinking, that if anyone of us ever got drunk at a party and needed a ride home, that he would come and get us. No judgement, no lecture, just a ride home and a few students had done so over the years. He knew that he wouldn't be able to stop teenagers from partying, but he might be able to stop a few from driving drunk.
The second one is really important though and I would add that they should never install any software that those websites tell them that they need. I would imagine that a majority of the people who have their machines infected ran an installer that told them that their flash player was out of date or something along those lines. For the third, I'd probably try to get it to run at times where it's unlikely to be obtrusive so that people don't cancel it. Anytime you've got a plan that counts on generally ignorant people doing the correct thing (which runs counter to their wants) then you're just introducing a major point of failure. In the ideal world, people would just listen and realize that they either need to become more knowledgeable and capable or that they should just do as they're told. But we don't live there and trying to pretend we do is as much folly on our parts as it is on those who ignore our good advice.
No one wants to pay for services online because they've become attached to "free" and yet all of these services and content still require resources to produce, so the ad model is one of the few approaches that work. Others (such as using your CPU to mine cryptocurrencies or a patronage model) have their own issues or don't scale well to large organizations.
So the natural demand is to figure out how to deliver ads to get a better return on them because the companies that advertise would like to spend less money on them and the companies that place the ads would like to get more people to click on them. Whether or not you think this looks stupid from the outside is irrelevant. Unless you're willing to pay AI researchers more money in order to do something else, they're going to go after the best paying jobs that they can get.
Lately? It's always been that way. Also, banning anonymous comments wouldn't fix anything either since there's nothing that stops a person from signing up for a new account. Look at all of the different creimer troll accounts that sprang up a while back, and there are a few around now that are trying to impersonate the editors.
If you don't want to wade through the mud, browse at 1 and you'll avoid most of it. Most of the really annoying spam posts get moderated down quite quickly, so unless you've set it to browse at -1, you'll see almost none of it. There are also a lot of good comments from anonymous posters as well. On some stories they're better than anything you get from a registered account.
TDD as a general concept is fine, but the textbook definition is crap. Writing one test at a time and then modifying the code to pass that test without regressing is asking for trouble for anything complicated. If you want to sit down and write a full set of unit tests first, though, that's generally a good idea. In trying to think of all the different ways the code could break, it helps a lot when it comes down actually writing it. It also ensures that test cases get written, because everyone knows that shit isn't getting done afterwards.
A lot of such people are led to believe that following the process - whether it's Scrum or waterfall or ITIL or something else - is a recipe for making your project or your team successful. Box-tickers, in other words.
Clearly you want some kind of process. Leaving everyone to their own devices tends not to work well. The trick is finding something that works well that you can get the entire team to buy into. Having a process that everyone hates and no one is really going to follow is about as bad as having nothing at all. However, that's no simple feat either. The kind of process that managers would love is the kind of process that developers will hate and vice versa. There's no magical solution that pleases everyone optimally and results in perfect working software.
That's just good business sense. It's straight out of Lean Manufacturing / Software Development. Put off decisions that are irreversible or difficult to change until the last possible moment in order to ensure that you have the best information.
At the same time, treating everything that way is foolhardy. There are some things you should spend a good deal of time thinking about or mulling over, but there's plenty of rote tasks that benefit in no way from being delayed. You're never going to really want to do the dishes, so you may as well get it done with. Getting those simple tasks out of the way ensures that you'll have plenty of time later to tackle the problems that need to be put off for a time in order to be given their due amount of thought.
There's a difference between someone stating something and happening to be correct (regardless of how good their reasoning may be for reaching that conclusion) and someone performing a randomized double blind experimental study to empirically validate a hypothesis.
If I were to read Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al. on other topics should I assume that they must be correct on those matters as well? The Romans were not fools. You don't get to create an empire and civilization like theirs by chance, but that does not make them automatically correct either.
I think the most recent Doom recaptured a lot of what made the originals enjoyable. Rather than loading the game with cut scenes and spending large chunks of time spouting exposition at the player (for a plot that's probably nowhere near as clever or engaging as the developers imagine) Doom cuts that to a minimum to allow people to actually play the game.
People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance or other arguments that are a little lazier than they should be, while forgetting that Doom (and later the Quake series) were at the time major drivers of graphical improvement themselves.
I don't think that every game needs to be like Doom in order to be enjoyable. Sometimes a good narrative is exactly what a game needs, but by the same token their also need to be games like Doom where your just fighting hordes of demons and enjoying the visceral experience of tearing through the legions of hell-spawn. For a long time there was an absence of that as the FPS genre had evolved away from the type of game. However, I'm glad that it's back now.
Why bother doing that. Legos are probably a half decent way of sequestering carbon. The oil that they don't lock up into tiny plastic bricks is just going to go into some asshole's Hummer. Legos are so expensive now (and the old sets are worth a good amount as collectors items) that no one with half a brain is going to throw them out as trash. They just get passed on to your own kids or nieces and nephews.
Sure, make the packaging better for the environment because that's going to get tossed, but the bricks themselves could stay as they are. The recycled plastic idea isn't bad. There's probably enough in the Pacific garbage patch for the next several thousand years. However, unless we get some breakthroughs in regards to plant fibers, they'll just end up with something that degrades and ends up getting thrown out and needs replacement, which is probably worse from an energy use perspective (but not so bad as a business model) than making something that will still be getting inadvertently sucked up by vacuums on judgement day.
I don't think there are many people (even among strong free speech proponents) who will deny that hate speech (or perhaps hateful speech if one wanted to get truly technical) exists. Rather the position is that even though it may be hateful, offensive, or otherwise displeasing to some people, there is still no reason for the government to prohibit someone from uttering it.
Free speech (and the desire to protect it) is necessary precisely because there are things like hate speech.
There's no such thing as a lack of job insecurity. A lot of the jobs that people have today didn't exist 100 years ago and there are loads of jobs from 100 years ago that people aren't doing anymore. About the only time you see good job security is when someone has a monopoly and the rest of the market is captive to their business whether they like it or not. Since those are generally bad for consumers, we're going to have to accept that businesses will rise and fall and the labor force with them.
You're not going to cry over the lack of job security for the horse and buggy whip makers, so please tell me why the workers of today are special. If they were all secure in their jobs we'd have loads of wasted labor sitting around doing things that are no productive. The world doesn't owe anyone a job, let alone one that they can feel secure and comfortable in.
You can't just look at wealth inequality (or even the rate of change) and conclude anything. Consider the following examples:
There is a country where everyone has $100. They're all equally wealthy, but all equally poor.
There is another country where 90% of the people have $10,000 each and the remaining 10% have $10,000,000 each. There's vastly more inequality in the second country, but everyone is much better off. Further you could look at that second country 20 years later and see that 90% of the people have $15,000 each, but the remaining 10% now have $30,000,000 each. You could certainly say that it's become even less equitable, and yet everyone is still better off than they were 20 years ago.
Yes, Norway created a sovereign wealth fund out of nationalizing their oil industry. Of course they could have done the same if they sold the extraction rights to private companies. Also, they didn't take the usual route of nationalizing an existing industry that had been privately established. Rather they just decided that the government would run the extraction for their newly discovered offshore oil. This was pretty easy to do since it's pretty hard for any individual to claim mineral rights on a patch of ocean.
However, for a large portion of its history, they weren't spending any of it, which was quite wise of them. Only more recently did they tap into it (and there are limits to how much they can spend) and in their newest budgets they're trying to cut what they're spending out of it. There was a lot of criticism of the Conservative government leadership spending a lot of that money out in order to get reelected, which I suspect is behind the efforts to curtail the spending. However, they'll claim that they only did this to ease revenue shortfalls as a result of the collapse in oil prices.
The other funny thing about Norway is that their top marginal tax rate is lower than the top rate in the U.S. Also the Scandinavian countries in general don't really have a "tax the rich" type of approach the social democrats (or democratic socialists) seem to spout on about. They tax everyone quite highly. You only need to earn about 1.5 times the national average income to fall into the top bracket in the Scandinavian countries, whereas it's over 8 times as much in the U.S. If you look specifically at Norway their top marginal tax rate is 38.52% (compared to the U.S. at 37%) and both Norway and Denmark have lower rates now than they did 10 years ago, whereas the U.S. actually has higher rates, even though they were recently lowered (from ~39%).
This notion that the Nordic model is some great socialist system is just nonsense. Up until the recent changes from Congress, every single one of those countries had lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., and by a wide margin as well. All of them had been in the low 20% for years now (the U.S. was at 35%, but now we're much closer to them) and every single one of those countries had been gradually lowering corporate tax rates over the last decade as well. These supposed socialist states, are anything but and if you look at how many of them have been adjusting their taxes, they're moving away from what the kind of people who think they're socialist countries would make them socialist countries. I think people just see the healthcare system and assume everything must be socialist.
The Alberta Heritage fund got raided because there weren't enough protections put in place to stop asshole politicians from putting their fingers in the pie and they eventually quit paying into it and spent the money instead. I don't think North Dakota has spent any of their oil fund (Legacy Fund) money yet. I think they're just having issues because they probably got used to having all of that oil money in their budget and the price collapse left them in a lurch. Random side note, but from a certain perspective North Dakota is the most socialist state in the U.S. in that they have the only state-owned bank. Maybe it's all the Norwegian farmers.
That may not even be necessary for China. They already have limitations in place for many industries as to how much of it can be foreign owned. Since a lot of them cap out a 50%, it means that regardless of which company comes out on top, Chinese investors will benefit. There's no point in trying to ban foreign competition when you guarantee that it's actually half-local competition.
The ACA is really quite toothless when it comes down to it though.
The government says that they'll make you pay a fee, but the reality is that the only way for them to collect it is to take it out of your tax refund. However, there's nothing to stop you from setting up your taxes such that nothing is withheld for you and that you always need to pay in rather than paying too much in initially and getting a refund later. As stated on the U.S. government site for the ACA: "There are no liens, levies, or criminal penalties for failing to pay the fee."
So, no, the government can't really force you to engage in commerce against your will. Unless you're a baker who doesn't like gay weddings. Maybe. They're still trying to work that one out.
Maybe it's actually good now. Social media and social networks that grow too large seem to end up attracting too many idiots and the signal-to-noise ratio suffers horribly. Eventually you just get a lowest common denominator deluge of cat memes and moronic whinging. Maybe September finally ended for them.
Nope, I checked and it's still mostly crap. Wonderful articles such as "Jaden Smith Wants You To Dress Like A Superhero", "Holy Crap, Here's Why You Always Lock Your Car Door When Lions Are Around", "This Is, Hands Down, The Worst Pool Delivery In History", and "Neopets Let Me Be A Gay Kid Online" make up the bulk of the front page. Stories like this one we're discussing here seem to be more of an accident.
Most stories only have single or low double digit diggs though, so I'm guessing that the user base is incredibly small, or that it's mainly lurkers that don't participate.
Unfortunately, the number of people who can live in such an arrangement is small relative to the overall population. You would likely think a person sounded utterly ridiculous if they used your line of reasoning to pretend that poverty didn't exist because it didn't affect them personally and that anyone could escape it simply by making more careful decisions.
I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that you lived in a rent controlled property, which tends to be pretty common in a lot of cities. It's a great deal for whoever gets to live there because their rates are artificially low, but it also keeps people from developing new properties which contributes to the problem of a lack of housing in the places that people want to live. I also suspect that no one would be able to tear down that town house or those three-flats in order to build an apartment complex that would let more people live closer to their work.
You can't have both historical districts (or rent controls) and short commutes. Cities often seem to push for the former, even though it makes the latter worse and everyone complains about long commutes quite a bit. Maybe it won't be so bad when we get self-driving cars, but looking at it from a value proposition, people spend a lot of their lives stuck in traffic. You're lucky to have escaped that fate, but you should realize that you're the exception to the rule and that it is not possible for most people to have that experience. When the number of jobs in an area greatly outstrips that number of places to live, it's impossible to avoid commutes.
I don't think that this is anything new. First of all, most people at any point in history weren't making any kind of new revelations of any sort. I suspect that the common person back then would have needed the same sort of fix (and we're assuming this is true and necessary, but we'll just go with that for now) as that modern conspiracy theorists are purported to need.
However, I think you point out the own flaw in your own reasoning about conspiracy theories now filling this void. You can just as easily fill it by debugging software. Your brain probably doesn't care whether or not the revelation is of profound importance to humanity or if it's just satisfying for you any more than it would care about whether or not it's true, or at least you whether you believe it is with sufficient sincerity. No everyone can debug software, but I think that everyone can get a hobby to help occupy their minds.
I think conspiracy theories are just an easy outlet, but I suspect that they fill other needs as well. I tend to lump them in with the same magical thinking that I attribute religion to along with other similar things. I wonder if there's a lot of overlap between people who tend to be deeply religious (or capable of it) and conspiratorial thinking.
I don't think that it's a case that the political far right is somehow incapable of using these same tactics. The alt-right and the people pushing for an ethno-state are clearly using the same identity driven tribalism, but are just pointing it from the opposite side. You don't have to look too far back in history to see other instances of this type of ideology coming from far-right political groups either.
However, what we're seeing today in the U.S. and other western democracies is clearly coming out of the far left (you don't hear conservatives, or even moderate liberals for that matter, spouting crap like "racism = power + privilege", complaining about cultural appropriation, or just rambling off other nonsense about there being 72+ genders and need to represent them all). To some degree the emergence of this from the left is what's causing the use of the same tactics by the alt-right that we're seeing. However, regardless of who's doing it, it's a bad strategy to take out of the box. You can be a Liberal, a Democrat, or more generally a progressive without resorting to identity politics and all political groups would do well to exorcise it from their ranks where they find it.
I don't think it's limited to conservatism or the political right in the U.S. as the other side went to shit as well. Part of the reason that the Democrats lost the last election is that they abandoned the blue collar working class in favor of ultra progressivism. They claim that they want to help fix the issues surrounding the extreme poverty that inner city blacks face, but at the same time are in favor of mass immigration that is going to hurt the people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder the hardest. They claim to want healthcare for everyone, but when they had the chance ended up enacting what was essentially a Republican healthcare solution that just doesn't work.
The heart of the issue comes down to the first past the post voting system used in the U.S. This is guaranteed to result in a two party system and they will start to define themselves not in terms of their own belief structures, but instead as enemies of each other. I think that this explains things like the political lefts strange defense of Islam. Normally you would not expect a political party that is supposed to be the champions of rights for women and homosexuals ally itself with a group of people that have some of the worst stances towards those groups of people. It isn't that the liberals in the U.S. care about Islam, but that the conservatives are opposed to it and in order to show everyone how unlike those dirty conservatives they are, liberals rush to the defense of Islam.
And this isn't unique to Democrats either and you see the same thing on the other side of the aisle. You should expect that it would be the conservatives that are in favor of more immigration as immigrants are often hard working and willing to work for less money. The party of business and free markets should be overjoyed at the chance to have access to a larger labor supply. However, because the liberals really like multiculturalism and immigrants, conservatives have to show everyone how unlike those dirty liberals they are, conservatives end up chanting crap about building a wall.
Both parties have become massive balls of ideological inconsistency, but as long as we have a first past the post voting system, there's no way to escape from this outcome. We need to change to a system that allows for more parties to grow and thrive so that people have a chance to find something that works for them and we can get a more representative government. Once you get a half dozen or so different political parties, it's far more difficult for the us vs. them mentality to take hold. Odds are that most of the "them" parties will agree with you on a few, but different topics. Even that small amount of common ground would be enough to reduce the outright animosity that we tend to see today.
I think that time is a pretty important element as well. Sturgeon's law is pretty much correct: 90% of everything is crap. Most people aren't willing to sift through the crap in a genre of music that they're not particularly passionate about. However, if you give something enough time, eventually the good stuff sifts out and if you've got a big enough genre, you probably end up getting the best 10% of the 10% that isn't crap. For example, I probably couldn't stand to listen to 95% of jazz music. It just doesn't do a lot for me, or tends to do the type of things that I find rather grating musically. However, the other 5% of jazz music I find amazing and the top.01% of jazz music is among my favorite music to listen to even though I tend to enjoy other genres more if I were to have to pick out a radio station.
Games like GTA that create curated lists (some of the stations are fairly specific in terms of both genre and time) have the ability to pick out some of the best songs or even to add a few deep cuts that most people wouldn't normally be able to find on their own. I think the other aspect of it is that when you do expose people to some of the best a genre has to offer, they'll start to pick up on it, especially as they're exposed to small bits of it when they first get in a vehicle and it defaults to that station. Because there are a limited number of songs, eventually you'll be able to identify a few of them and might even start to listen to them for a bit longer.
That would be the problem with people at the political extremes. They are so far to their own side that everything else looks far left or far right by comparison.
I think that these people tend to be the noisiest as well, which makes those extremes appear far larger or more important than they really are.
Yes, we know they tend to promote their own services ahead of their competition. So if Google owned their own news site and were pushing their own Trump is Crap content ahead of the Trump is Crap content from every other site, you might have a point.
Slashdot Mirror
The first point is about as stupid and pointless as abstinence only sex education. People are going to engage in risky forms of behavior no matter what you tell them. Rather than telling them no to do something, it's better to explain that if they choose to engage in those behaviors what they really need to watch out for and when they need to get some outside help. In high school, I had a teacher that told us that while we shouldn't be out drinking, that if anyone of us ever got drunk at a party and needed a ride home, that he would come and get us. No judgement, no lecture, just a ride home and a few students had done so over the years. He knew that he wouldn't be able to stop teenagers from partying, but he might be able to stop a few from driving drunk.
The second one is really important though and I would add that they should never install any software that those websites tell them that they need. I would imagine that a majority of the people who have their machines infected ran an installer that told them that their flash player was out of date or something along those lines. For the third, I'd probably try to get it to run at times where it's unlikely to be obtrusive so that people don't cancel it. Anytime you've got a plan that counts on generally ignorant people doing the correct thing (which runs counter to their wants) then you're just introducing a major point of failure. In the ideal world, people would just listen and realize that they either need to become more knowledgeable and capable or that they should just do as they're told. But we don't live there and trying to pretend we do is as much folly on our parts as it is on those who ignore our good advice.
No one wants to pay for services online because they've become attached to "free" and yet all of these services and content still require resources to produce, so the ad model is one of the few approaches that work. Others (such as using your CPU to mine cryptocurrencies or a patronage model) have their own issues or don't scale well to large organizations.
So the natural demand is to figure out how to deliver ads to get a better return on them because the companies that advertise would like to spend less money on them and the companies that place the ads would like to get more people to click on them. Whether or not you think this looks stupid from the outside is irrelevant. Unless you're willing to pay AI researchers more money in order to do something else, they're going to go after the best paying jobs that they can get.
Lately? It's always been that way. Also, banning anonymous comments wouldn't fix anything either since there's nothing that stops a person from signing up for a new account. Look at all of the different creimer troll accounts that sprang up a while back, and there are a few around now that are trying to impersonate the editors.
If you don't want to wade through the mud, browse at 1 and you'll avoid most of it. Most of the really annoying spam posts get moderated down quite quickly, so unless you've set it to browse at -1, you'll see almost none of it. There are also a lot of good comments from anonymous posters as well. On some stories they're better than anything you get from a registered account.
TDD as a general concept is fine, but the textbook definition is crap. Writing one test at a time and then modifying the code to pass that test without regressing is asking for trouble for anything complicated. If you want to sit down and write a full set of unit tests first, though, that's generally a good idea. In trying to think of all the different ways the code could break, it helps a lot when it comes down actually writing it. It also ensures that test cases get written, because everyone knows that shit isn't getting done afterwards.
A lot of such people are led to believe that following the process - whether it's Scrum or waterfall or ITIL or something else - is a recipe for making your project or your team successful. Box-tickers, in other words.
Clearly you want some kind of process. Leaving everyone to their own devices tends not to work well. The trick is finding something that works well that you can get the entire team to buy into. Having a process that everyone hates and no one is really going to follow is about as bad as having nothing at all. However, that's no simple feat either. The kind of process that managers would love is the kind of process that developers will hate and vice versa. There's no magical solution that pleases everyone optimally and results in perfect working software.
another girlfriend which he kicked
I think that should be "another girlfriend whom he kicked". Don't you know that women don't want to be treated like objects.
My guess is that was also this guy's problem. Then again he could just be a straight up asshole psychopath to everyone.
That's just good business sense. It's straight out of Lean Manufacturing / Software Development. Put off decisions that are irreversible or difficult to change until the last possible moment in order to ensure that you have the best information.
At the same time, treating everything that way is foolhardy. There are some things you should spend a good deal of time thinking about or mulling over, but there's plenty of rote tasks that benefit in no way from being delayed. You're never going to really want to do the dishes, so you may as well get it done with. Getting those simple tasks out of the way ensures that you'll have plenty of time later to tackle the problems that need to be put off for a time in order to be given their due amount of thought.
There's a difference between someone stating something and happening to be correct (regardless of how good their reasoning may be for reaching that conclusion) and someone performing a randomized double blind experimental study to empirically validate a hypothesis.
If I were to read Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al. on other topics should I assume that they must be correct on those matters as well? The Romans were not fools. You don't get to create an empire and civilization like theirs by chance, but that does not make them automatically correct either.
I think the most recent Doom recaptured a lot of what made the originals enjoyable. Rather than loading the game with cut scenes and spending large chunks of time spouting exposition at the player (for a plot that's probably nowhere near as clever or engaging as the developers imagine) Doom cuts that to a minimum to allow people to actually play the game.
People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance or other arguments that are a little lazier than they should be, while forgetting that Doom (and later the Quake series) were at the time major drivers of graphical improvement themselves.
I don't think that every game needs to be like Doom in order to be enjoyable. Sometimes a good narrative is exactly what a game needs, but by the same token their also need to be games like Doom where your just fighting hordes of demons and enjoying the visceral experience of tearing through the legions of hell-spawn. For a long time there was an absence of that as the FPS genre had evolved away from the type of game. However, I'm glad that it's back now.
Why bother doing that. Legos are probably a half decent way of sequestering carbon. The oil that they don't lock up into tiny plastic bricks is just going to go into some asshole's Hummer. Legos are so expensive now (and the old sets are worth a good amount as collectors items) that no one with half a brain is going to throw them out as trash. They just get passed on to your own kids or nieces and nephews.
Sure, make the packaging better for the environment because that's going to get tossed, but the bricks themselves could stay as they are. The recycled plastic idea isn't bad. There's probably enough in the Pacific garbage patch for the next several thousand years. However, unless we get some breakthroughs in regards to plant fibers, they'll just end up with something that degrades and ends up getting thrown out and needs replacement, which is probably worse from an energy use perspective (but not so bad as a business model) than making something that will still be getting inadvertently sucked up by vacuums on judgement day.
I don't think there are many people (even among strong free speech proponents) who will deny that hate speech (or perhaps hateful speech if one wanted to get truly technical) exists. Rather the position is that even though it may be hateful, offensive, or otherwise displeasing to some people, there is still no reason for the government to prohibit someone from uttering it.
Free speech (and the desire to protect it) is necessary precisely because there are things like hate speech.
There's no such thing as a lack of job insecurity. A lot of the jobs that people have today didn't exist 100 years ago and there are loads of jobs from 100 years ago that people aren't doing anymore. About the only time you see good job security is when someone has a monopoly and the rest of the market is captive to their business whether they like it or not. Since those are generally bad for consumers, we're going to have to accept that businesses will rise and fall and the labor force with them.
You're not going to cry over the lack of job security for the horse and buggy whip makers, so please tell me why the workers of today are special. If they were all secure in their jobs we'd have loads of wasted labor sitting around doing things that are no productive. The world doesn't owe anyone a job, let alone one that they can feel secure and comfortable in.
You can't just look at wealth inequality (or even the rate of change) and conclude anything. Consider the following examples:
There is a country where everyone has $100. They're all equally wealthy, but all equally poor.
There is another country where 90% of the people have $10,000 each and the remaining 10% have $10,000,000 each. There's vastly more inequality in the second country, but everyone is much better off. Further you could look at that second country 20 years later and see that 90% of the people have $15,000 each, but the remaining 10% now have $30,000,000 each. You could certainly say that it's become even less equitable, and yet everyone is still better off than they were 20 years ago.
Yes, Norway created a sovereign wealth fund out of nationalizing their oil industry. Of course they could have done the same if they sold the extraction rights to private companies. Also, they didn't take the usual route of nationalizing an existing industry that had been privately established. Rather they just decided that the government would run the extraction for their newly discovered offshore oil. This was pretty easy to do since it's pretty hard for any individual to claim mineral rights on a patch of ocean.
However, for a large portion of its history, they weren't spending any of it, which was quite wise of them. Only more recently did they tap into it (and there are limits to how much they can spend) and in their newest budgets they're trying to cut what they're spending out of it. There was a lot of criticism of the Conservative government leadership spending a lot of that money out in order to get reelected, which I suspect is behind the efforts to curtail the spending. However, they'll claim that they only did this to ease revenue shortfalls as a result of the collapse in oil prices.
The other funny thing about Norway is that their top marginal tax rate is lower than the top rate in the U.S. Also the Scandinavian countries in general don't really have a "tax the rich" type of approach the social democrats (or democratic socialists) seem to spout on about. They tax everyone quite highly. You only need to earn about 1.5 times the national average income to fall into the top bracket in the Scandinavian countries, whereas it's over 8 times as much in the U.S. If you look specifically at Norway their top marginal tax rate is 38.52% (compared to the U.S. at 37%) and both Norway and Denmark have lower rates now than they did 10 years ago, whereas the U.S. actually has higher rates, even though they were recently lowered (from ~39%).
This notion that the Nordic model is some great socialist system is just nonsense. Up until the recent changes from Congress, every single one of those countries had lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., and by a wide margin as well. All of them had been in the low 20% for years now (the U.S. was at 35%, but now we're much closer to them) and every single one of those countries had been gradually lowering corporate tax rates over the last decade as well. These supposed socialist states, are anything but and if you look at how many of them have been adjusting their taxes, they're moving away from what the kind of people who think they're socialist countries would make them socialist countries. I think people just see the healthcare system and assume everything must be socialist.
The Alberta Heritage fund got raided because there weren't enough protections put in place to stop asshole politicians from putting their fingers in the pie and they eventually quit paying into it and spent the money instead. I don't think North Dakota has spent any of their oil fund (Legacy Fund) money yet. I think they're just having issues because they probably got used to having all of that oil money in their budget and the price collapse left them in a lurch. Random side note, but from a certain perspective North Dakota is the most socialist state in the U.S. in that they have the only state-owned bank. Maybe it's all the Norwegian farmers.
That may not even be necessary for China. They already have limitations in place for many industries as to how much of it can be foreign owned. Since a lot of them cap out a 50%, it means that regardless of which company comes out on top, Chinese investors will benefit. There's no point in trying to ban foreign competition when you guarantee that it's actually half-local competition.
The ACA is really quite toothless when it comes down to it though.
The government says that they'll make you pay a fee, but the reality is that the only way for them to collect it is to take it out of your tax refund. However, there's nothing to stop you from setting up your taxes such that nothing is withheld for you and that you always need to pay in rather than paying too much in initially and getting a refund later. As stated on the U.S. government site for the ACA: "There are no liens, levies, or criminal penalties for failing to pay the fee."
So, no, the government can't really force you to engage in commerce against your will. Unless you're a baker who doesn't like gay weddings. Maybe. They're still trying to work that one out.
Maybe it's actually good now. Social media and social networks that grow too large seem to end up attracting too many idiots and the signal-to-noise ratio suffers horribly. Eventually you just get a lowest common denominator deluge of cat memes and moronic whinging. Maybe September finally ended for them.
Nope, I checked and it's still mostly crap. Wonderful articles such as "Jaden Smith Wants You To Dress Like A Superhero", "Holy Crap, Here's Why You Always Lock Your Car Door When Lions Are Around", "This Is, Hands Down, The Worst Pool Delivery In History", and "Neopets Let Me Be A Gay Kid Online" make up the bulk of the front page. Stories like this one we're discussing here seem to be more of an accident.
Most stories only have single or low double digit diggs though, so I'm guessing that the user base is incredibly small, or that it's mainly lurkers that don't participate.
Unfortunately, the number of people who can live in such an arrangement is small relative to the overall population. You would likely think a person sounded utterly ridiculous if they used your line of reasoning to pretend that poverty didn't exist because it didn't affect them personally and that anyone could escape it simply by making more careful decisions.
I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that you lived in a rent controlled property, which tends to be pretty common in a lot of cities. It's a great deal for whoever gets to live there because their rates are artificially low, but it also keeps people from developing new properties which contributes to the problem of a lack of housing in the places that people want to live. I also suspect that no one would be able to tear down that town house or those three-flats in order to build an apartment complex that would let more people live closer to their work.
You can't have both historical districts (or rent controls) and short commutes. Cities often seem to push for the former, even though it makes the latter worse and everyone complains about long commutes quite a bit. Maybe it won't be so bad when we get self-driving cars, but looking at it from a value proposition, people spend a lot of their lives stuck in traffic. You're lucky to have escaped that fate, but you should realize that you're the exception to the rule and that it is not possible for most people to have that experience. When the number of jobs in an area greatly outstrips that number of places to live, it's impossible to avoid commutes.
I don't think that this is anything new. First of all, most people at any point in history weren't making any kind of new revelations of any sort. I suspect that the common person back then would have needed the same sort of fix (and we're assuming this is true and necessary, but we'll just go with that for now) as that modern conspiracy theorists are purported to need.
However, I think you point out the own flaw in your own reasoning about conspiracy theories now filling this void. You can just as easily fill it by debugging software. Your brain probably doesn't care whether or not the revelation is of profound importance to humanity or if it's just satisfying for you any more than it would care about whether or not it's true, or at least you whether you believe it is with sufficient sincerity. No everyone can debug software, but I think that everyone can get a hobby to help occupy their minds.
I think conspiracy theories are just an easy outlet, but I suspect that they fill other needs as well. I tend to lump them in with the same magical thinking that I attribute religion to along with other similar things. I wonder if there's a lot of overlap between people who tend to be deeply religious (or capable of it) and conspiratorial thinking.
I don't think that it's a case that the political far right is somehow incapable of using these same tactics. The alt-right and the people pushing for an ethno-state are clearly using the same identity driven tribalism, but are just pointing it from the opposite side. You don't have to look too far back in history to see other instances of this type of ideology coming from far-right political groups either.
However, what we're seeing today in the U.S. and other western democracies is clearly coming out of the far left (you don't hear conservatives, or even moderate liberals for that matter, spouting crap like "racism = power + privilege", complaining about cultural appropriation, or just rambling off other nonsense about there being 72+ genders and need to represent them all). To some degree the emergence of this from the left is what's causing the use of the same tactics by the alt-right that we're seeing. However, regardless of who's doing it, it's a bad strategy to take out of the box. You can be a Liberal, a Democrat, or more generally a progressive without resorting to identity politics and all political groups would do well to exorcise it from their ranks where they find it.
They'll probably think you're younger as well, which probably helps your prospects quite a bit.
I don't think it's limited to conservatism or the political right in the U.S. as the other side went to shit as well. Part of the reason that the Democrats lost the last election is that they abandoned the blue collar working class in favor of ultra progressivism. They claim that they want to help fix the issues surrounding the extreme poverty that inner city blacks face, but at the same time are in favor of mass immigration that is going to hurt the people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder the hardest. They claim to want healthcare for everyone, but when they had the chance ended up enacting what was essentially a Republican healthcare solution that just doesn't work.
The heart of the issue comes down to the first past the post voting system used in the U.S. This is guaranteed to result in a two party system and they will start to define themselves not in terms of their own belief structures, but instead as enemies of each other. I think that this explains things like the political lefts strange defense of Islam. Normally you would not expect a political party that is supposed to be the champions of rights for women and homosexuals ally itself with a group of people that have some of the worst stances towards those groups of people. It isn't that the liberals in the U.S. care about Islam, but that the conservatives are opposed to it and in order to show everyone how unlike those dirty conservatives they are, liberals rush to the defense of Islam.
And this isn't unique to Democrats either and you see the same thing on the other side of the aisle. You should expect that it would be the conservatives that are in favor of more immigration as immigrants are often hard working and willing to work for less money. The party of business and free markets should be overjoyed at the chance to have access to a larger labor supply. However, because the liberals really like multiculturalism and immigrants, conservatives have to show everyone how unlike those dirty liberals they are, conservatives end up chanting crap about building a wall.
Both parties have become massive balls of ideological inconsistency, but as long as we have a first past the post voting system, there's no way to escape from this outcome. We need to change to a system that allows for more parties to grow and thrive so that people have a chance to find something that works for them and we can get a more representative government. Once you get a half dozen or so different political parties, it's far more difficult for the us vs. them mentality to take hold. Odds are that most of the "them" parties will agree with you on a few, but different topics. Even that small amount of common ground would be enough to reduce the outright animosity that we tend to see today.
I think that time is a pretty important element as well. Sturgeon's law is pretty much correct: 90% of everything is crap. Most people aren't willing to sift through the crap in a genre of music that they're not particularly passionate about. However, if you give something enough time, eventually the good stuff sifts out and if you've got a big enough genre, you probably end up getting the best 10% of the 10% that isn't crap. For example, I probably couldn't stand to listen to 95% of jazz music. It just doesn't do a lot for me, or tends to do the type of things that I find rather grating musically. However, the other 5% of jazz music I find amazing and the top .01% of jazz music is among my favorite music to listen to even though I tend to enjoy other genres more if I were to have to pick out a radio station.
Games like GTA that create curated lists (some of the stations are fairly specific in terms of both genre and time) have the ability to pick out some of the best songs or even to add a few deep cuts that most people wouldn't normally be able to find on their own. I think the other aspect of it is that when you do expose people to some of the best a genre has to offer, they'll start to pick up on it, especially as they're exposed to small bits of it when they first get in a vehicle and it defaults to that station. Because there are a limited number of songs, eventually you'll be able to identify a few of them and might even start to listen to them for a bit longer.
That would be the problem with people at the political extremes. They are so far to their own side that everything else looks far left or far right by comparison.
I think that these people tend to be the noisiest as well, which makes those extremes appear far larger or more important than they really are.
Yes, we know they tend to promote their own services ahead of their competition. So if Google owned their own news site and were pushing their own Trump is Crap content ahead of the Trump is Crap content from every other site, you might have a point.