The Ubuntu Foundation announces, "We feel the keyboard is too complex and powerful for most users, so the next version of Ubuntu will support only a mouse by default." Meanwhile, in a boardroom at Infinite Loop, Steve Jobs asks, "Why didn't I think of that?" iPhone users everywhere say, "You already did, Steve. Welcome to our world, Linux users."
Not all federal prisons involve surprise butt sex. The one Bernie got sent to has been described as "like a college campus" (in which case there might still be butt sex, but it would hardly be a surprise).
The universe is, as far as we know, nondeterministic at some levels. Radioactive decay, for example, is a process for which there does not seem to exist anything beyond a statistical model. There is evidence that such nondeterminism extends to the neural level, with implications for free will.
Yes, atheism and personal responsibility are compatible. First off, atheism does not equal determinism. Even if it does, and a person is just a complex biochemical machine, society still benefits from having consequences for actions that are considered undesirable. For most people, those consequences (along with other biological impulses, such as a sense of fairness) lead them to behavior that is not directly harmful to others. For those people for whom the consequence be damned (i.e., for criminals), removal from mainstream society is the current best practice. "Blame" is irrelevant. Criminals are simply defective people who need to be warehoused until their impulses subside with age or the consequences of their actions become apparent enough to overcome their inability (or reluctance) to heed those consequences.
Yeah, and while you're at it, you might want to point out that a lot of those rich folks are Jews. Throw in a few references to the ZOG, and the whole diatribe against the rich and Goldman Sachs could easily be mistaken for a posting on Stormfront.
If someone is doing something truly disruptive or dangerous, I'd ask them to stop. I've never been one to worry too much about the feelings of others when pointing out what they're doing wrong. In the case of the cursing, crotch-grabbing guy, he piped down for a bit after the HR conversation, but went back to his "normal fucking ways" pretty quickly. As for the frequent self-adjustments, it was humorous more than anything, so rather than worrying about offending him, I mostly didn't want to ruin a good laugh, particularly as it was a long-standing joke around the office and one of the first things people warned you about before you met him.
This article reminds me of a couple of incidents earlier in my career:
I usually find the HR department to be pain in the ass, but there are times when they are indispensable. When I first started working, I was managing a team of fresh college graduates. They all went out together after work one Friday for "movie night." The next week, one of the women who worked for me came to my office very upset. Turns out that after movie night, she'd gone to a bar with her fellow team members, then taken him back to her place and had sex. She was worried about pregnancy and disease because the sex had been unprotected. She was also upset that he was "being cold to [her]" the first day back in the office. At that point, I just said, "this is a topic for our HR department" and walked her and her "movie night buddy" to the office of the HR rep for our area. The resolution was to have one of them volunteer to be transferred to another area, but there was subsequent drama anyway. Social ineptitude coupled with inexperience and raging hormones is an unusually bad combination.
I also worked with a programmer who cursed worse than a sailor and "adjusted himself" more frequently than an entire team of baseball players. We used to take bets on how many times he would grab his crotch during a conversation, and if the meeting was all guys, we'd all adjust ourselves for laughs and to see if he'd pick up on it--he was completely oblivious. For whatever reason it went on for years without anyone ever doing anything about it. On the cursing part, he did eventually get called in to HR and scolded for his language, to which I am told his exact response was "Holy shit, I'm so fucking sorry." He still kept his job, though.
It's pretty interesting that all of the focus here is on Rupert Murdock, whose politics don't exactly dovetail with those of the Slashdot crowd. TFA also mentioned (and quoted) the concurring opinion of Tom Curley, who was president and publisher of USA Today and is now president and CEO of the AP. Where's the seething hate for Curley, USA Today, and/or the AP? Surely they are just as worthy of derision. Why not suggest that the AP's content also be pulled from Google, or that the AP update their robot.txt file to prevent Google's indexing them? The focus on Murdock indicates that almost all are either too dumb/lazy to RTFA or so biased that they focus only on someone whose opinions they disagree with. Either way, such a lack of inquiry and balance shows that the average Slashdot reader/commenter has more in common with average Fox News viewer than he or she would like to admit.
No I was talking about thin women with large natural breasts. You can tell the difference (they don't defy gravity). When I see these girls it always surprising me, because they don't have ANY fat anywhere else on their body - just in theri breasts.
When I see girls like this, it doesn't surprise me, but it sure does send me into sugardaddy mode.
Then shareholders should demand a bigger dividend if the stock's not going up. Right now the dividend yield is only 2.1%. The average dividend-paying stock in the S&L 500 has a 2.6% yield--with no growth prospects MSFT should pay higher than that. Otherwise, shareholders have a lot better investment options and should sell the shares until the price drops to a point at which the yield is reasonable.
Per my comment above, stockholders should start caring, because MSFT was higher back in 1998 than it is now. They only thing you're getting with MSFT is a 2.1% dividend yield with no long-term appreciation in share price whatsoever--except for the Nasdaq bubble and a couple of brief periods since then (at the end of the last bull market and the bottom of the crisis), the stock has sat between $20 and $30.
I never understand why people pay this idiot any attention, nor why shareholders continue to tolerate his "leadership." Yes, Microsoft continues to make a ton of money, and they pay a quarterly dividend and paid a big special dividend a few years ago. However, their share price has gone nowhere in 11 years. He should get "status quo" tattoo'd on his forehead, and perhaps "chair goes here" on his ass so he can remember where it goes after he's done throwing it.
Nice idea, but Corps would just give money to employees, who would then "donate" it to the Congress criitter. I suspect this already happens...
This definitely already happens. Pretty much every firm I've worked at on Wall St. has set up its own PAC and sends out annual emails "educating" the employees about it and "encouraging" them to make donations. They don't give you money specifically for that purpose, of course, but on Wall St. you're getting paid enough that $500-2,000 or whatever per year to the PAC is no big deal.
I'm actually quite for individual liberty, but I'm also for individual responsibility. As others have pointed out, a "sin tax" is a far preferable alternative to banning something outright. That way, when the exercise of a liberty has an indirect cost, that cost can be attributed and recouped. Liberty doesn't mean something has to be costless, and responsibility dictates that you should cover the costs that the exercise of your liberty imposes on others. I believe you should be able to do whatever you want so long as you don't impinge on the rights of others nor impose unpaid costs on others in the process.
Your point is well taken, though, that what is considered a "sin" will change over time. I was merely trying to point out that if a "sin tax" were considered valid in one case, there are other cases where it would also be valid.
My argument pre-supposed that we continue to move down the road of entitlements, because that's apparently what the majority of voters want (and will continue to remain that way as long as the majority of voters benefit from the entitlements and a minority bear the costs). As far as preserving freedom, most people are only in preserving freedom from responsibility and freedom from thought.
So, I actually agree with you entirely--in theory. As a practical matter, though, who is going to determine whether a particular medical condition is the result of lifestyle choices or simple misfortune. In extreme cases (the two-pack-a-day fat-ass vs. the 5-mile-run-a-day vegan), it will be clear, but for a person with "average" sins and virtues, it will be less clear and fodder for bureaucrats and lawyers.
Sin taxes are stupid. They allow rich people to "sin" more.
Pretty profound, except that having more money allows the rich to do many things moreso than others.
"Sin taxes" should be used only when the consumption of a product has an indirect, substantial cost to society. For poor people in particular, there is a cost to society from their consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and high-calorie, low-quality food. That cost comes about when they expect society to pay for medical treatments to remedy the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle. That expectation will only grow if plans for universal heathcare come to fruition.
Of course, the rich take actions that have societal costs, too, such as driving large luxury vehicles and flying private jets, which damage the environment disproportionately relative to the transportation modes of their less-wealthy fellows. Those products and actions are also legitimate targets of sin taxes.
And as far as the "magic of the market" folks who oppose something like sin taxes, there's only one thing to say: Grow up. The market does not magically give you what you want just because you have the money to buy it. Companies sell you whatever they see to be in their interests to sell you. If a company sees a new product (like a "healthy drink") being detrimental to its existing cash-cow product lines (perhaps because the new product is less profitable due to higher production costs relative to its viable price of sale), they simply won't offer that product or will limit its distribution to "upscale" markets where they don't see it cannibalizing their core profits. Of course, some "scrappy start-up" could try to offer the new product, but such a company may be too small in scale to produce and/or distribute it widely and profitably. And that's when you have a market failure: When the existing companies in a market do not see it in their interest to offer new products, and when new companies cannot viably compete or can do so only marginally, the market has failed. Of course, whether a sin tax will actually remedy that favor is another question entirely.
N.B. As far as "market failures", they can also result when a new product has a very high R&D cost that an industry in unable or unwilling to bear. For example, the development of alternative fuel automobiles has largely stalled because automakers had no interest in producing them, even though consumers had an interest in buying them. An automaker had two alternatives: It could fund a development cycle in some new area (e.g., fuel cells). That might fail expensively and entirely. If it did produce a viable product, the cars would initially be very expensive and have a limited market due to high production costs, low yield (new assembly lines), etc. If the new cars found an enthusiastic consumer base, the costs could be brought down, production ramped up, until such vehicles could be real alternatives to current automobiles. Or, the manufacturers could just shrug, say its not worth the risk, and keep doing what they're doing. New car companies could try to produce the alternative fuel vehicles, of course, but they'd lack the budget to fund the R&D and the distribution network (dealers) for the products. This example becomes even more complicated when one considers that in order for such a vehicle to be viable, energy companies must actually distribute the fuel for it. They may have no interest in doing so for the same reasons I outline above. When you get such an interplay in established industries where each has enormous self-interests and little, perhaps conflicting incentives to innovate, the market is not going to "sort itself out."
Slashdot Mirror
These politicians need to dig deeper.
They are...into your pockets.
Actually, he'd refuse it on the basis that he'd have to shower, shave and wear a suit to accept it.
Richard Stallman is bristling with righteous indignation that this proposal was not for a co-nomination!
The Ubuntu Foundation announces, "We feel the keyboard is too complex and powerful for most users, so the next version of Ubuntu will support only a mouse by default." Meanwhile, in a boardroom at Infinite Loop, Steve Jobs asks, "Why didn't I think of that?" iPhone users everywhere say, "You already did, Steve. Welcome to our world, Linux users."
Not all federal prisons involve surprise butt sex. The one Bernie got sent to has been described as "like a college campus" (in which case there might still be butt sex, but it would hardly be a surprise).
The universe is, as far as we know, nondeterministic at some levels. Radioactive decay, for example, is a process for which there does not seem to exist anything beyond a statistical model. There is evidence that such nondeterminism extends to the neural level, with implications for free will.
Yes, atheism and personal responsibility are compatible. First off, atheism does not equal determinism. Even if it does, and a person is just a complex biochemical machine, society still benefits from having consequences for actions that are considered undesirable. For most people, those consequences (along with other biological impulses, such as a sense of fairness) lead them to behavior that is not directly harmful to others. For those people for whom the consequence be damned (i.e., for criminals), removal from mainstream society is the current best practice. "Blame" is irrelevant. Criminals are simply defective people who need to be warehoused until their impulses subside with age or the consequences of their actions become apparent enough to overcome their inability (or reluctance) to heed those consequences.
...we've still got 75 years left!
Love it. But you misspelled "Government Sachs".
Yeah, and while you're at it, you might want to point out that a lot of those rich folks are Jews. Throw in a few references to the ZOG, and the whole diatribe against the rich and Goldman Sachs could easily be mistaken for a posting on Stormfront.
The first game I played on a PC was Star Trek. Those old text-based BASIC games were the best!
If someone is doing something truly disruptive or dangerous, I'd ask them to stop. I've never been one to worry too much about the feelings of others when pointing out what they're doing wrong. In the case of the cursing, crotch-grabbing guy, he piped down for a bit after the HR conversation, but went back to his "normal fucking ways" pretty quickly. As for the frequent self-adjustments, it was humorous more than anything, so rather than worrying about offending him, I mostly didn't want to ruin a good laugh, particularly as it was a long-standing joke around the office and one of the first things people warned you about before you met him.
This article reminds me of a couple of incidents earlier in my career:
I usually find the HR department to be pain in the ass, but there are times when they are indispensable. When I first started working, I was managing a team of fresh college graduates. They all went out together after work one Friday for "movie night." The next week, one of the women who worked for me came to my office very upset. Turns out that after movie night, she'd gone to a bar with her fellow team members, then taken him back to her place and had sex. She was worried about pregnancy and disease because the sex had been unprotected. She was also upset that he was "being cold to [her]" the first day back in the office. At that point, I just said, "this is a topic for our HR department" and walked her and her "movie night buddy" to the office of the HR rep for our area. The resolution was to have one of them volunteer to be transferred to another area, but there was subsequent drama anyway. Social ineptitude coupled with inexperience and raging hormones is an unusually bad combination.
I also worked with a programmer who cursed worse than a sailor and "adjusted himself" more frequently than an entire team of baseball players. We used to take bets on how many times he would grab his crotch during a conversation, and if the meeting was all guys, we'd all adjust ourselves for laughs and to see if he'd pick up on it--he was completely oblivious. For whatever reason it went on for years without anyone ever doing anything about it. On the cursing part, he did eventually get called in to HR and scolded for his language, to which I am told his exact response was "Holy shit, I'm so fucking sorry." He still kept his job, though.
Apparently China's firewall is a lot better than their drywall.
You mean RapidShare has something else besides porn on it? I'm going to have to grab my other joystick!
It's pretty interesting that all of the focus here is on Rupert Murdock, whose politics don't exactly dovetail with those of the Slashdot crowd. TFA also mentioned (and quoted) the concurring opinion of Tom Curley, who was president and publisher of USA Today and is now president and CEO of the AP. Where's the seething hate for Curley, USA Today, and/or the AP? Surely they are just as worthy of derision. Why not suggest that the AP's content also be pulled from Google, or that the AP update their robot.txt file to prevent Google's indexing them? The focus on Murdock indicates that almost all are either too dumb/lazy to RTFA or so biased that they focus only on someone whose opinions they disagree with. Either way, such a lack of inquiry and balance shows that the average Slashdot reader/commenter has more in common with average Fox News viewer than he or she would like to admit.
No I was talking about thin women with large natural breasts. You can tell the difference (they don't defy gravity). When I see these girls it always surprising me, because they don't have ANY fat anywhere else on their body - just in theri breasts.
When I see girls like this, it doesn't surprise me, but it sure does send me into sugardaddy mode.
Prizes to those who...have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.
If that's the case, I'll have to dig through all of the checks for my patented penis enlargement pills to find the check from the Nobel Foundation.
Oh wait, the invention has to actually work?!?
Then shareholders should demand a bigger dividend if the stock's not going up. Right now the dividend yield is only 2.1%. The average dividend-paying stock in the S&L 500 has a 2.6% yield--with no growth prospects MSFT should pay higher than that. Otherwise, shareholders have a lot better investment options and should sell the shares until the price drops to a point at which the yield is reasonable.
Per my comment above, stockholders should start caring, because MSFT was higher back in 1998 than it is now. They only thing you're getting with MSFT is a 2.1% dividend yield with no long-term appreciation in share price whatsoever--except for the Nasdaq bubble and a couple of brief periods since then (at the end of the last bull market and the bottom of the crisis), the stock has sat between $20 and $30.
I never understand why people pay this idiot any attention, nor why shareholders continue to tolerate his "leadership." Yes, Microsoft continues to make a ton of money, and they pay a quarterly dividend and paid a big special dividend a few years ago. However, their share price has gone nowhere in 11 years. He should get "status quo" tattoo'd on his forehead, and perhaps "chair goes here" on his ass so he can remember where it goes after he's done throwing it.
Nice idea, but Corps would just give money to employees, who would then "donate" it to the Congress criitter. I suspect this already happens...
This definitely already happens. Pretty much every firm I've worked at on Wall St. has set up its own PAC and sends out annual emails "educating" the employees about it and "encouraging" them to make donations. They don't give you money specifically for that purpose, of course, but on Wall St. you're getting paid enough that $500-2,000 or whatever per year to the PAC is no big deal.
I'm actually quite for individual liberty, but I'm also for individual responsibility. As others have pointed out, a "sin tax" is a far preferable alternative to banning something outright. That way, when the exercise of a liberty has an indirect cost, that cost can be attributed and recouped. Liberty doesn't mean something has to be costless, and responsibility dictates that you should cover the costs that the exercise of your liberty imposes on others. I believe you should be able to do whatever you want so long as you don't impinge on the rights of others nor impose unpaid costs on others in the process.
Your point is well taken, though, that what is considered a "sin" will change over time. I was merely trying to point out that if a "sin tax" were considered valid in one case, there are other cases where it would also be valid.
My argument pre-supposed that we continue to move down the road of entitlements, because that's apparently what the majority of voters want (and will continue to remain that way as long as the majority of voters benefit from the entitlements and a minority bear the costs). As far as preserving freedom, most people are only in preserving freedom from responsibility and freedom from thought.
So, I actually agree with you entirely--in theory. As a practical matter, though, who is going to determine whether a particular medical condition is the result of lifestyle choices or simple misfortune. In extreme cases (the two-pack-a-day fat-ass vs. the 5-mile-run-a-day vegan), it will be clear, but for a person with "average" sins and virtues, it will be less clear and fodder for bureaucrats and lawyers.
Sin taxes are stupid. They allow rich people to "sin" more.
Pretty profound, except that having more money allows the rich to do many things moreso than others.
"Sin taxes" should be used only when the consumption of a product has an indirect, substantial cost to society. For poor people in particular, there is a cost to society from their consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and high-calorie, low-quality food. That cost comes about when they expect society to pay for medical treatments to remedy the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle. That expectation will only grow if plans for universal heathcare come to fruition.
Of course, the rich take actions that have societal costs, too, such as driving large luxury vehicles and flying private jets, which damage the environment disproportionately relative to the transportation modes of their less-wealthy fellows. Those products and actions are also legitimate targets of sin taxes.
And as far as the "magic of the market" folks who oppose something like sin taxes, there's only one thing to say: Grow up. The market does not magically give you what you want just because you have the money to buy it. Companies sell you whatever they see to be in their interests to sell you. If a company sees a new product (like a "healthy drink") being detrimental to its existing cash-cow product lines (perhaps because the new product is less profitable due to higher production costs relative to its viable price of sale), they simply won't offer that product or will limit its distribution to "upscale" markets where they don't see it cannibalizing their core profits. Of course, some "scrappy start-up" could try to offer the new product, but such a company may be too small in scale to produce and/or distribute it widely and profitably. And that's when you have a market failure: When the existing companies in a market do not see it in their interest to offer new products, and when new companies cannot viably compete or can do so only marginally, the market has failed. Of course, whether a sin tax will actually remedy that favor is another question entirely.
N.B. As far as "market failures", they can also result when a new product has a very high R&D cost that an industry in unable or unwilling to bear. For example, the development of alternative fuel automobiles has largely stalled because automakers had no interest in producing them, even though consumers had an interest in buying them. An automaker had two alternatives: It could fund a development cycle in some new area (e.g., fuel cells). That might fail expensively and entirely. If it did produce a viable product, the cars would initially be very expensive and have a limited market due to high production costs, low yield (new assembly lines), etc. If the new cars found an enthusiastic consumer base, the costs could be brought down, production ramped up, until such vehicles could be real alternatives to current automobiles. Or, the manufacturers could just shrug, say its not worth the risk, and keep doing what they're doing. New car companies could try to produce the alternative fuel vehicles, of course, but they'd lack the budget to fund the R&D and the distribution network (dealers) for the products. This example becomes even more complicated when one considers that in order for such a vehicle to be viable, energy companies must actually distribute the fuel for it. They may have no interest in doing so for the same reasons I outline above. When you get such an interplay in established industries where each has enormous self-interests and little, perhaps conflicting incentives to innovate, the market is not going to "sort itself out."
...trying to think of a clever comment, but now I forgot it!