When men don't get into 2 as many accidents as women. Sorry, but a corporate accountant has analyzed your criteria, and found that your penis is correlated with a higher rate of accidents. Enjoy your rate.
Your mistake is to assume that we can survive without an ecosystem replete with a shit-load of species whose impact on us is largely unknown. We're about to find out if we can survive with a drastically changed one.
Yep, I'm aware of union shops and right to work states. Just wanted to be sure what you were talking about, because your initial description told a much, much wilder story.
Because free markets do not exist, and capitalism is not a silver bullet to the world's problems (it may, however, be a silver bullet for the problems of the 1% to get more money, which is why quite a few people like it).
That said, I can't figure out if this is sarcasm, or if someone is serious. The political discussion in this country is seriously fucked.
By instituting rules that apply to how speech is created, and completely disassociated from the content of that speech.
Some examples: 1) You can't run ads that mention political candidates or parties 2 weeks before an election. 2) You can't contribute more than x money to the campaign of a single person/party for a specific election.
Does it leave concern-troll ads open? Sure does. It's not meant to be remove all influence of money on political speech. It just attempts to curtail the impact that a single large donor can have on the entire political process (witness Christie's pilgrimage to Adlai Stevenson's "political forum").
Yes, it means that political speech is impacted. Congratulations, you found out that sometimes, there's a trade-off in a decision that you make, and a perfect solution doesn't exist. It also means that you're capable of weighing the pros and cons of a decision.
Seriously, stop trying to undermine the entire concept of a democracy. Or, in your lingo, a republic (even if that means you think the US and China have the same form of electing leaders... oh, wait, that would explain a lot of things).
Keep in mind that in many states, union membership is required in order to get the job
Do you have a citation for that? The only thing I know is that some states allow union-membership to be automatic once you're hired into a particular position at a particular company. That is very, very different from being required to have a union membership to get a particular anywhere in the state.
Furthermore, the big difference is the scale. It's a lot harder to get a large group of people to agree on a political course of action than it is to get one person to agree with themselves. The entire point of democracy is to remove money and power as a tool for selecting a leader, and to instead trust the wisdom of the masses to make an orderly transition at the top. The current campaign finances remove that approach.
That said, union-membership requirements can go die in a fire. I understand the concept of free-loading, but I also understand the concept of not wanting to support a useless organization.
That's technically not a Net Neutrality argument, which is why the argument existed in the first place. To some extent, Comcast was right: it wasn't funneling as much data to Level 3 as Level 3 was funneling to it. What Comcast left out was that this problem was 100% of its own making, and impossible for Level 3 address: Comcast only sells highly asymmetric pipes to highly asymmetric users. It is actually illegal for its users to try to create a situation where it will funnel as much data to Level 3 as Level 3 funnels to it. Which is why techies were incensed by the argument.
That's the issue. All techies know the huge holes that have to exist in NN for the Internet to work. No one disagrees with any of those. The problem is that the principle of NN is all we have to concisely explain to people why Comcast is being an utter monopoly-rent-seeking shithead in this discussion, and how Comcast's attitude will break the Internet. Anything more requires delving into the depth of QoS, CDNs, dark fiber, roll-out subsidies, last-mile topologies, and barriers-to-entry in the website market to make a coherent argument. No one in the public sphere is going to listen to that.
That's why NN keeps being brought up. It's the only sound bite that's remotely applicable, and unfortunately, sound bites is what wins political wars.
If you'd read, you'd notice the pine borer beetle. There's the melting of the arctic permafrost, the increased acidification of the ocean and it's impact on marine ecosystems and fisheries... and that's just the ones that are happening right now, and are costing billions right now. Feel free to wait for more change.
Absolutely. However, I'd like to continue living without having to fight for all my daily resources. I'd also like to have kids, so that we may reach the stars one day.
Yep, it's selfish. All acts are selfish in one way or another. It's how we progress. So, yes, environmental change that a lot of species can't adapt to is bad for them and bad for me.
That'd be nice if that was the case. Production, especially heavy industries, was controlled by a very profitable set of private enterprises, some of which still exist today. Krupp is just one example, BMW another. As for control over Mass Media, that's an authoritarian concept. Otherwise, what do you call Fox News?
And, according to today's Republicans, Reagan, Nixon, Bush Sr, Goldwater and more are also leftists. It just means that today's republicans are so ignorant that they don't notice how close they are to Neo-nazis and how batshit insane their positions are.
Actually, it used to be speculated that changes in nesting populations of Emperor Penguins might have been due to Climate Change. Instead, this particular research indicates that those changes might be fairly normal migrations between nesting sites.
What we have here is science using new data to falsify an old assumption. Science to the rescue! As is article-reading.
Without a doubt. The question is: is the environment changing faster than the species can adapt to it? We, the most adaptable species the earth has ever produced (if measured by how fast we can move into previously inhospitable environments) are still feeling significant effects from global climate change. The pine borer beetle, with its expanded range of warmer temperatures, is impacting whole chunks of communities that will have to adapt to brand new realities. What do you think is going to happen to species without opposable thumbs, a huge brain, and the ability to modify the environment on massive scales?
The assumption behind providing equal opportunity is that it will lead to equal outcomes, at least statistically speaking. By necessity, manipulating opportunities means manipulating outcomes (unless, of course, you assume that manipulation of opportunities has no impact on outcomes). So you're saying that you're for improving the opportunities for women, so long as it doesn't change the current outcomes? Sounds not much different from the men who complain that women are taking their jobs.
And then the girls learn #4 once the reach the workforce: 4 The old boys network is real, many men are threatened by women, and trying to succeed can very quickly become a fight against misogynists who think that women should make them sandwiches.
That's why these initiatives still exist: because too many people have first-hand experiences of what many women face in the workforce, and they're trying to fix it.
The good news is, initiatives like this give us a chance to find out whether it's the "girls don't code because computers require testosterone to operate", or whether it's "girls don't code because boy coders are, on average, idiots who can't deal with girls."
Even in a profitable gold rush, not everyone wants to find a stream and start panning.
The difference, again, is in how much effort is expended to move from one to the other. Gold panning is difficult and unpredictable. Bitcoin mining is very predictable (if you take into account current valuations), very easy to turn off, requires nothing you aren't already running, and its only downside is the impact of a drop in bitcoin valuation, which changes for how long you can run you mining rig before you want to ship it out.
People might start out thinking "I'm gonna sell shovels to the miners!", and then they quickly discover that they have created an automated shovel, and that the gold mine is in the electric outlet.
A 51% attack can't steal coins, generate more coins, or change the past in any way other than by generating a parallel blockchain.
What do you call it when someone doubles (or triples, or quadruples) an existing transaction? What do you call it when someone invalidates a transaction? And what do you call it when 51% of the network generates a parallel blockchain that it calls the one true blockchain? Yes, you can fork it and have two official block chains, but at that point, bitcoin WILL be dead to everyone. It'd be like there suddenly were two US of A governments, each distributing their own, slightly different dollars, but with hugely different printing rules.
Yeah, this 51% business is as bad as people make it out to be.
A market exists for mowing lawns. Do you consider John Deere too stupid to fuel up their own products and make a profit like that? A market exists for corn chips. Do you view the farmers as too stupid to grind and bake their own corn and bypass the middle men?
If John Deere could make a profit by rigging up its tractors in its factories to some pre-built servers, it would. If all it would take the farmers to make corn chips is to plug their corn silos into some pre-built servers, they would.
All your comparisons fail due to the huge difference in how easy it is to move from producing bit-coin machines to producing bitcoins. Especially if the bitcoin machines have to be tested with their final functionality, which is 100% indistinguishable from its end user utilization.
Now, could GAW or Butterfly potentially make more mining on their own gear? Currently, yes, they could. That doesn't mean they want that as a business model.
Why would they not? All they would have to do is to not unplug their bitcoin rigs from their testing harness. In short, it takes them more effort to stop being miners than it does to be miners. Why in god's name does anyone still think that there is some economic reason they don't mine bitcoins themselves? The only reason they even pretend they don't is because this way, they get up-front free capital for creating their own rigs. When the cost of a loan drops below the cost of servicing the miner purchases, that's when these operations will stop selling to end-users.
The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information.
A fairly significant nit-pick: the free market, as described by Adam Smith and associated with the invisible hand of the free market, is predicated on two things: 1) Zero cost of entry into a market 2) Perfect information about each entrant into the market is available to all consumers at all time.
The closest thing to a market with zero cost of entry we have is lemonade stands and websites, and perfect information does not, will not, and cannot exist. Comcast is working very hard to significantly raise the cost of entry for websites (pay up, or no one wants to use your website), and actively lying to make sure #2 doesn't take place.
You're absolutely right in your conclusion, but it is important to understand the foundation of why Adam Smith thought the free market was so great. It explains a lot about the current failures of the market, and also explain why Smith himself understood the need for regulation.
Bullshit. The government has done more in my lifetime in the way of killing my dreams than any other single entity.
You are free to move to any of the great countries around the world that have a very small central government and whose reach barely extends past the capital. Wait, you're still here? It couldn't be because of the entirely predictable problems that those countries face, wouldn't it? No, I'm sure it's just because John Galt is still slaving away in some factory, held down by the man. It's just a matter of time - Galt's Gulch is just around the corner, I'm sure of it. And then you'll show us all poor sheeple just how awesome government-less life is, and how screwed we all are without you.
Go ahead, I'll wait. Just like I'm still waiting for the Communists to really do their thing.
Pedophiles are no worse than rapists, murderers and other criminals that cause physical harm to others.
Actually, they are. A murderer does not create a new murderer with his victim. Someone who shoots someone else in a spree might create PTSD, but generally does not fundamentally alter the person they harm. Pedophiles, when they act on their desires to rape children, do it generally more than once, and leave behind a train wreck of a person that will take decades to get over the trauma, if they ever do.
With murderers, the crime ends with the act. With child abuse, the crime frequently self-perpetuates in the victim.
And the most idiotic aspect of registering sex offenders is we just lump everyone together.
That's undeniably the worst aspect of current sex offender lists.
Personally, I was hoping that Google ushers in a whole new sense of what people are like: we're all sinners, we have all broken rules, and the only thing that matters is whether we persist in those crimes, and what those crimes EXACTLY where. Instead, people persist in hiding issues, going to great lengths to not face their own past or stop judging others.
Thanks - I didn't think it was actually malware since I didn't get any ads or anything similar, but turns out that I did install PureLeads. Looks like either Foxit, Handbrake or CDex had it bundled. Gah, and I thought I was pretty good at reading malware install prompts.
Slashdot Mirror
When men don't get into 2 as many accidents as women. Sorry, but a corporate accountant has analyzed your criteria, and found that your penis is correlated with a higher rate of accidents. Enjoy your rate.
Your mistake is to assume that we can survive without an ecosystem replete with a shit-load of species whose impact on us is largely unknown. We're about to find out if we can survive with a drastically changed one.
Yep, I'm aware of union shops and right to work states. Just wanted to be sure what you were talking about, because your initial description told a much, much wilder story.
Because free markets do not exist, and capitalism is not a silver bullet to the world's problems (it may, however, be a silver bullet for the problems of the 1% to get more money, which is why quite a few people like it).
That said, I can't figure out if this is sarcasm, or if someone is serious. The political discussion in this country is seriously fucked.
By instituting rules that apply to how speech is created, and completely disassociated from the content of that speech.
Some examples:
1) You can't run ads that mention political candidates or parties 2 weeks before an election.
2) You can't contribute more than x money to the campaign of a single person/party for a specific election.
Does it leave concern-troll ads open? Sure does. It's not meant to be remove all influence of money on political speech. It just attempts to curtail the impact that a single large donor can have on the entire political process (witness Christie's pilgrimage to Adlai Stevenson's "political forum").
Yes, it means that political speech is impacted. Congratulations, you found out that sometimes, there's a trade-off in a decision that you make, and a perfect solution doesn't exist. It also means that you're capable of weighing the pros and cons of a decision.
Because money is not speech.
Seriously, stop trying to undermine the entire concept of a democracy. Or, in your lingo, a republic (even if that means you think the US and China have the same form of electing leaders... oh, wait, that would explain a lot of things).
Keep in mind that in many states, union membership is required in order to get the job
Do you have a citation for that? The only thing I know is that some states allow union-membership to be automatic once you're hired into a particular position at a particular company. That is very, very different from being required to have a union membership to get a particular anywhere in the state.
Furthermore, the big difference is the scale. It's a lot harder to get a large group of people to agree on a political course of action than it is to get one person to agree with themselves. The entire point of democracy is to remove money and power as a tool for selecting a leader, and to instead trust the wisdom of the masses to make an orderly transition at the top. The current campaign finances remove that approach.
That said, union-membership requirements can go die in a fire. I understand the concept of free-loading, but I also understand the concept of not wanting to support a useless organization.
That's technically not a Net Neutrality argument, which is why the argument existed in the first place. To some extent, Comcast was right: it wasn't funneling as much data to Level 3 as Level 3 was funneling to it. What Comcast left out was that this problem was 100% of its own making, and impossible for Level 3 address: Comcast only sells highly asymmetric pipes to highly asymmetric users. It is actually illegal for its users to try to create a situation where it will funnel as much data to Level 3 as Level 3 funnels to it. Which is why techies were incensed by the argument.
That's the issue. All techies know the huge holes that have to exist in NN for the Internet to work. No one disagrees with any of those. The problem is that the principle of NN is all we have to concisely explain to people why Comcast is being an utter monopoly-rent-seeking shithead in this discussion, and how Comcast's attitude will break the Internet. Anything more requires delving into the depth of QoS, CDNs, dark fiber, roll-out subsidies, last-mile topologies, and barriers-to-entry in the website market to make a coherent argument. No one in the public sphere is going to listen to that.
That's why NN keeps being brought up. It's the only sound bite that's remotely applicable, and unfortunately, sound bites is what wins political wars.
If you'd read, you'd notice the pine borer beetle. There's the melting of the arctic permafrost, the increased acidification of the ocean and it's impact on marine ecosystems and fisheries... and that's just the ones that are happening right now, and are costing billions right now. Feel free to wait for more change.
Absolutely. However, I'd like to continue living without having to fight for all my daily resources. I'd also like to have kids, so that we may reach the stars one day.
Yep, it's selfish. All acts are selfish in one way or another. It's how we progress. So, yes, environmental change that a lot of species can't adapt to is bad for them and bad for me.
That'd be nice if that was the case. Production, especially heavy industries, was controlled by a very profitable set of private enterprises, some of which still exist today. Krupp is just one example, BMW another. As for control over Mass Media, that's an authoritarian concept. Otherwise, what do you call Fox News?
And, according to today's Republicans, Reagan, Nixon, Bush Sr, Goldwater and more are also leftists. It just means that today's republicans are so ignorant that they don't notice how close they are to Neo-nazis and how batshit insane their positions are.
Actually, it used to be speculated that changes in nesting populations of Emperor Penguins might have been due to Climate Change. Instead, this particular research indicates that those changes might be fairly normal migrations between nesting sites.
What we have here is science using new data to falsify an old assumption. Science to the rescue! As is article-reading.
Without a doubt. The question is: is the environment changing faster than the species can adapt to it? We, the most adaptable species the earth has ever produced (if measured by how fast we can move into previously inhospitable environments) are still feeling significant effects from global climate change. The pine borer beetle, with its expanded range of warmer temperatures, is impacting whole chunks of communities that will have to adapt to brand new realities. What do you think is going to happen to species without opposable thumbs, a huge brain, and the ability to modify the environment on massive scales?
The assumption behind providing equal opportunity is that it will lead to equal outcomes, at least statistically speaking. By necessity, manipulating opportunities means manipulating outcomes (unless, of course, you assume that manipulation of opportunities has no impact on outcomes). So you're saying that you're for improving the opportunities for women, so long as it doesn't change the current outcomes? Sounds not much different from the men who complain that women are taking their jobs.
And then the girls learn #4 once the reach the workforce:
4 The old boys network is real, many men are threatened by women, and trying to succeed can very quickly become a fight against misogynists who think that women should make them sandwiches.
That's why these initiatives still exist: because too many people have first-hand experiences of what many women face in the workforce, and they're trying to fix it.
The good news is, initiatives like this give us a chance to find out whether it's the "girls don't code because computers require testosterone to operate", or whether it's "girls don't code because boy coders are, on average, idiots who can't deal with girls."
Even in a profitable gold rush, not everyone wants to find a stream and start panning.
The difference, again, is in how much effort is expended to move from one to the other. Gold panning is difficult and unpredictable. Bitcoin mining is very predictable (if you take into account current valuations), very easy to turn off, requires nothing you aren't already running, and its only downside is the impact of a drop in bitcoin valuation, which changes for how long you can run you mining rig before you want to ship it out.
People might start out thinking "I'm gonna sell shovels to the miners!", and then they quickly discover that they have created an automated shovel, and that the gold mine is in the electric outlet.
And some libertarians still think that gold has any intrinsic value. Ask me how much your gold is worth when I put a gun to your head.
A 51% attack can't steal coins, generate more coins, or change the past in any way other than by generating a parallel blockchain.
What do you call it when someone doubles (or triples, or quadruples) an existing transaction? What do you call it when someone invalidates a transaction? And what do you call it when 51% of the network generates a parallel blockchain that it calls the one true blockchain? Yes, you can fork it and have two official block chains, but at that point, bitcoin WILL be dead to everyone. It'd be like there suddenly were two US of A governments, each distributing their own, slightly different dollars, but with hugely different printing rules.
Yeah, this 51% business is as bad as people make it out to be.
A market exists for mowing lawns. Do you consider John Deere too stupid to fuel up their own products and make a profit like that? A market exists for corn chips. Do you view the farmers as too stupid to grind and bake their own corn and bypass the middle men?
If John Deere could make a profit by rigging up its tractors in its factories to some pre-built servers, it would. If all it would take the farmers to make corn chips is to plug their corn silos into some pre-built servers, they would.
All your comparisons fail due to the huge difference in how easy it is to move from producing bit-coin machines to producing bitcoins. Especially if the bitcoin machines have to be tested with their final functionality, which is 100% indistinguishable from its end user utilization.
Now, could GAW or Butterfly potentially make more mining on their own gear? Currently, yes, they could. That doesn't mean they want that as a business model.
Why would they not? All they would have to do is to not unplug their bitcoin rigs from their testing harness. In short, it takes them more effort to stop being miners than it does to be miners. Why in god's name does anyone still think that there is some economic reason they don't mine bitcoins themselves? The only reason they even pretend they don't is because this way, they get up-front free capital for creating their own rigs. When the cost of a loan drops below the cost of servicing the miner purchases, that's when these operations will stop selling to end-users.
The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information.
A fairly significant nit-pick: the free market, as described by Adam Smith and associated with the invisible hand of the free market, is predicated on two things:
1) Zero cost of entry into a market
2) Perfect information about each entrant into the market is available to all consumers at all time.
The closest thing to a market with zero cost of entry we have is lemonade stands and websites, and perfect information does not, will not, and cannot exist. Comcast is working very hard to significantly raise the cost of entry for websites (pay up, or no one wants to use your website), and actively lying to make sure #2 doesn't take place.
You're absolutely right in your conclusion, but it is important to understand the foundation of why Adam Smith thought the free market was so great. It explains a lot about the current failures of the market, and also explain why Smith himself understood the need for regulation.
Bullshit. The government has done more in my lifetime in the way of killing my dreams than any other single entity.
You are free to move to any of the great countries around the world that have a very small central government and whose reach barely extends past the capital. Wait, you're still here? It couldn't be because of the entirely predictable problems that those countries face, wouldn't it? No, I'm sure it's just because John Galt is still slaving away in some factory, held down by the man. It's just a matter of time - Galt's Gulch is just around the corner, I'm sure of it. And then you'll show us all poor sheeple just how awesome government-less life is, and how screwed we all are without you.
Go ahead, I'll wait. Just like I'm still waiting for the Communists to really do their thing.
Pedophiles are no worse than rapists, murderers and other criminals that cause physical harm to others.
Actually, they are. A murderer does not create a new murderer with his victim. Someone who shoots someone else in a spree might create PTSD, but generally does not fundamentally alter the person they harm. Pedophiles, when they act on their desires to rape children, do it generally more than once, and leave behind a train wreck of a person that will take decades to get over the trauma, if they ever do.
With murderers, the crime ends with the act. With child abuse, the crime frequently self-perpetuates in the victim.
And the most idiotic aspect of registering sex offenders is we just lump everyone together.
That's undeniably the worst aspect of current sex offender lists.
Personally, I was hoping that Google ushers in a whole new sense of what people are like: we're all sinners, we have all broken rules, and the only thing that matters is whether we persist in those crimes, and what those crimes EXACTLY where. Instead, people persist in hiding issues, going to great lengths to not face their own past or stop judging others.
Thanks - I didn't think it was actually malware since I didn't get any ads or anything similar, but turns out that I did install PureLeads. Looks like either Foxit, Handbrake or CDex had it bundled. Gah, and I thought I was pretty good at reading malware install prompts.