Parents, teachers, etc need to get off their fat lazy asses and pay attention to what their kids are doing.
Yeah all those damn welfare mother breeding like rats, and all those unionized teachers who can't give undivided attention to 40 kids at once, they must be the problem.
Taking care of children used to be a social priority shared by all members of a society in a slowly changing world where the average work week was 18 hours. Since then we as a culture have decided (economics is something we choose to do, not something that just happens) that we all need to work 60 hours weeks and ignore each other and our kids just so we can have more stuff, faster than ever.
Some of us don't agree with this, and try to get away with one parent working "only" 40 hours a week. It is barely possible to do this in the west these days, even in a well paid profession like mine. Clients look at me like I am from Mars sometimes when I say this.
I say that if we as a society are going to choose to work so hard for such little gain, then we as a society need to share the burden of child rearing somehow. The amount of stuff produced and focused at my child is truly phenomenal these days, and the rights of it's producers are never questioned. But my right to be left alone and not marketed to unless I ask for it is somehow unimportant. Censorware is not the answer, but stopping all the marketing to our kids (Channel One anyone?) and reducing the amount of utter crap I have to filter for my son would help a lot.
And yes, I do believe it is my job to filter the world for my son until he is old enough to do it for himself. And I do believe that it is society's job to support me in that, if only by leaving us alone. And I do intend to let him see some of the crap and critique it as part of his learning process. But there is so much of it these days that if I let him see it all, he'd never have time to do useful things. Like learning to communicate, think, love himself and others and just generally have fun with the great gift of life (that is why we all work so hard, isn't it?)
One of John Cramer's Alternate View columns is about this topic both generally (what are the problems, who makes the lists and what is the public perception of science's unsolved problems) and specifically (seven unsolved problems that he thinks are important). It is interesting to note that there are overlaps between many of these lists.
One problem that Cramer mentions that no one else seems to, however, is the causality problem. I often wonder if science as a paradigm can even deal with this sort of problem as causality is implicit in experimentation.
Also the name of this/. post is "Prince gets wordy about Napster", but reading his article was shear hell....
I presume you mean "sheer"? Next time you slam someone for their writing, why don't you check your own first? And I mean use your brain and an awareness of the culture behind the language, not just your spell-checker.
Columbus knew that the world was round and so did every other educated person of the time. They even knew within about 10% how big it was because some Greek measured it in classical times. The folks in the church who were giving him a hard did so because they knew all this and Columbus had conveniently lost about 8000 miles out of the circumference of the Earth. Just enough as it turned out to put the Americas where he thought Cathay was. Lucky bastard, really.
So maybe this guy will succeed, and certainly we need to have people do this sort of thing. Columbus did find something, but he was so pigheaded that he never knew what he had found.
Schridonger's cat will be mightily relieved to hear that information does not require an observer. However, quantum physics (up to this point) would seem to differ.
The Copenhagen interpretation seems to differ, Other interpretations do not e.g. the Transactional interpretation. Everett-Wheeler was also an attempt to do away with such silliness.
That makes 3 observers, by my count. The reader, the protein processor, and the blue hair generator.
This begs the question of what is an observer. Blue is a social construct. To say that a piece of RNA "observes" the blueness of the result seems dubious to me. One can make a machine to classify colours, but we made the machine and told it what blue means to us. And as I recall, colour classifications are culturally bound.
The Mandelbrot Set, for example, does not depend on who looks at it, to be a fractal. THAT information is truly independent.
No, fractal is a definition that we use. The Mandelbrot Set just is.
Despite my quibbles, I actually do agree that information is a social construct and requires observers. Without us to classify things, they just are.
Now, where we get our ability to assign meaning is one of the Big Questions. Maybe we are just part of the whole mess, but even then I suspect that we are missing a big piece of the picture. Issues like causality and the current moment are intimately caught up with who and what we are, and physics has done little with them except assume them as axioms. One might even argue that the experimental method depends on them, so to attack them some other epistomology is required.
if Apple ultimately supported OS X native and Carbonized MacOS (through emulation - a recompile would be a killer) apps on an OS X Intel port, it would probably be a Good Thing
(WFIW, I write Mac software and I just finished Carbonizing a fairly large commercial application package.)
Given the modular architecture of Metrowerks' tools, I think this is a bit pessimistic. I expect that in about a year that this sort of development will be pretty simple, possibly even automatic. At the moment, one can usually generate targets for 68K, CFM68K, PPC and Carbon from each other with only a few days of work. In fact, as long as you don't use the Mac toolbox (!), you can generate x86.exes as well.
The biggest problem I can see porting a Carbon app to a different set of hardware is the endian issue. Data files will have to be converted, which could be a hassle, but even there, most data consists of resources in known formats and could be converted pretty easily. A pain, but I would be surprised if it turned out to be killer. In general, anyone who writes code depending on the byte layout of integers in memory needs to be hurt badly, but even if there was some sort of awful performance need, this would be quite rare and (presumably) heavily documented and easy to change.
They assume that we are capable of creating beings that have the ability to reason far better than us, yet we do not have the ability to give them morals.
And you assume that the folks doing the work care about this. Judging from the ethics of most corporate entities, I find this a bit naive.
Re:(Re)Legitimizing the Mac
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Rack An iMac
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· Score: 1
why should anyone even care what the comp looks like, to either extreme? tis what it does that makes the diff.
Dahling...it is better to look good than to feel good!
Economics cannot judge whether something is moral or not, that is left to other professions. But it can say whether some policy creates losses in value to individuals or society.
And how can it assign value without reference to a mechanism for assigning value?
A mandatory open sourcing of software (whether by government decree or societal pressure) will create net economic losses.
How are these losses measured? What value system are you using to measure them? If the society as a whole feels that the existence of open source is a value in and of itself, then this statement clearly wrong in the context of those values.
Your job security is much better when you're the guy behind the desk who isn't just hammering out the code for some guy's design, but you're actually making the design decisions.
Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises:P
Imagine what would happen if we were our employers.
I am not a big Linux user, but there is an aspect of this topic that has been discussed on RISKS recently that no one seems to be addressing. A virus does not need root permission to cause havok, just access to a few system resources. For example, user's email address list and the ability to create sockets could bring a network to its knees.
There are some practical objections to this (the biodiversity argument comes to mind) but I am not really sure how valid they are. While it would be nice if there were zillions of flavors of Linux in the world, the fact is that most installations will standardize simply to keep administration costs down. Biodiversity is not a given - especially when large number of people are involved (just go to any city park) - and to say that it will prevent problems seems somewhat naive to me.
1. Block unidentified calls (most telcos will offer this service). 2. Configured my answering machine to pick up on 6 rings. 3. Pick up unidentifiable calls on the 5th ring.
Most telemarketers only wait for 4 rings before giving up because this is the default for most answering machines. Those few unidentified calls that get by the block (from out of state or something) and are from telemarketers will hang up before you answer. Your long distance friends, however, are waiting for your answering machine and will be happy to get you.
Re:Who are the monkeys doing these reviews?
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The Sparrow
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· Score: 1
Take advice from Pournelle on how to write? That pompous, repetitive technofetishist? Yuk!
Re:Who are the monkeys doing these reviews?
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The Sparrow
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· Score: 1
Interesting.
I have read much of Mr. Heinlein's oeuvre and most of it is quite juvenile. His fertility obsession and his trite elitest philosophy make him almost unreadable. And as for character development, even Stranger in a Strange Land (arguably his best) while fairly entertaining was entirely full of smug static characters I wanted to hit over the head with a real moral dilemma that couldn't be solved with high school algebra.
Mr. Dick and Mr. Vonnegut, while much better writers, still tend to write about situations, not characters, so to damn Russell for only exploring one character fully when the writers you cite are largely uninterested in character seems a bit strange. And no one claimed that it was SF - the reviewer described it as somewhat unclassifiable.
If you want to read more about some of the other chararcters in the book, you might have a look at the sequel Children of God.
Not for the faint of heart
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The Sparrow
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Our deacon recommended this book to me a few months back. In fact she (I'm Episcopalian) didn't stop pestering me until I read it. Since then I've made several folks read it from a wide variety of backgrounds, all of whom ate it up. This includes my wife who is ordinarily not very fond of SF.
Having said that, I should warn anyone who reads it that it is quite an emotional roller-coaster if you care about the characters. I usually describe the book to people as starting off as a mix of L'Engle and Sartre and eventually doing a sudden nose dive through Stephen King and ending up reading like Elie Weisel. She does truly awful things to some of her characters that make you have to put the book down and stare at a wall for a while.
The comparison with Weisel is also a good reason for recommending the sequel Children of God. Weisel's life did not stop at the end of Night , and Sandoz's does not stop at the end of The Sparrow. The end of his journey (and that of the other characters) is as important as the beginning.
I was just wondering how useful database pages are. I suppose some of them are (e.g. the local library) but most of them are BarnyCorp's list of useless widgets and I'm rather glad that the engines don't index that stuff...
I think it can be shown that most of the world's greatest literature and poetry, and to a lesser degree music, was created by severely maladjusted people. It is likely that have they been treated to become "normal", no masterpieces would have been created.
Greg Bear claims (in "Queen of Angels") that this is a myth. Bach comes to mind as a counterexample, Einstein was also a fairly normal guy and most mathematicians (my field) were well-adjusted (we will ignore Pal Erdos;-)). By contrast, Darwin did most of his later work in two hour stints between bouts of some sort of debilitating illness but as he was highly original before this happened, one gets the feeling that his disability limited his work rather than enhancing it. Given all this, I think genius often comes from quirkiness, but rarely from serious dysfunction.
So while I agree that classifying everyone as crazy is idiotic, I think that refusing to treat folks because they may be creative could be downright cruel.
And remember, the 20% they are talking about are mostly not hanging around on slashdot - they tend to be in and out of institutions, living on public assistance doing menial jobs, possibly living with family, or just out in the street (thanks Ronnie). For folks on slashdot to claim that their troubled adolescence makes them targets of a government drug conspiracy is downright arrogant and narcissistic. We shouldn't let them dope us up, but we need to deal with these folks.
This is about 80% bullshit. Let's look at the paragraph with the most claims:
Who the hell do these people think they are?
I was a participant in the labour march in Seattle on Tuesday. We are human beings. We are citizens. Sorry if our opinions are not important enough for you to listen to. It is that kind of elitist attitude that is behind a lot of the anger you see.
Its like people are needing to invent new reasons to riot because we haven't had a good hum-dinger in a while.
The vast majority of the folks at the various rallies and demonstrations were not violent or commiting vandalism. Many actually left the peaceful protests to try to help curtail the vandalism and violence. Again, your elitist implication is that all us plebes are bored from our affluence and need to get our rocks off. This is hardly the case, as even the corporate media are starting to realize.
We are going through some of the best times in the history of humanity right now... that is not debatable.
Yes it is.
Unemployment is at an all time low
First of all, those statistics are apples and oranges. In case you have forgotten, the Clinton administration changed the rules for unemployment stats in the mid 90s. The immediate result was a drop of 1-2 percentage points. The actual figures are probably closer to 10-12% as this has always been a dubious statistic.
Secondly, even if this were true, the fact that someone is employed is no indication of their well-being. Many of the poor have jobs. If I fire someone with a 40K job and hire 3 folks at 10K, unemployment has dropped dramatically, but I am making another 10K per year at the expense of the folks working for me.
This kind of abuse of statistics is another thing that we all are complaining about. We are told that we all have jobs, so we should stop complaining. The same is true of most slaves.
information and education is available to almost everyone seeking it,
Nonsense. Try the public schools in Hartford Conneticut for example.
the vast majority of epople are optomistic about their future,
True, but they are also very anxious about the present. Perhaps part of their optimism comes from feeling that they can actually change things. As you indicated at the end of your post, this is still possible and a Good Thing.
education is easier and available to more people than ever, travel is easier and cheaper than ever (so you can leave if you don't like it),
Because of globalization, it is no longer possible to leave. The destruction of this part of the American mythos that is behind some of the frustration in this country. Besides, if we have a better way, it is our democratic right to articulate it and implement it. if you don't like it, you can leave.
crime has been in decline for over a decade,
True. Not that you would know it from the corporate media. The reporting in Seattle is a good example...
social budgets are higher than ever,
In total dollars, yes. In per capita expenses, no.
wages are at an all time high,
Nonsense. It has been repeatedly shown that wages have been slipping for the majority of Americans for the last 30 years. Last year wages finally recovered to 1989 levels - all this in the midst of the longest recovery in US history.
employer sponsered profit sharing plans are growing at a fast rate,
This is a good thing. I wait for the day when companies are democratically run. Until then, it is still a case of some pigs being more equal than others. And before you call this utopianism, there are many companies run this way in the world today. Mine is one of them.
investing in general has opened itself to a wide aray of more people and classes,
Not in any meaningful way. 80% of the wealth in the US is still controlled by less than 10% of the population. When you add in the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that money == speech, you can see why the other 90% of us have to take to the streets to be heard.
people are living longer and healthier,
Yup. This is mostly due to public health projects from the turn of the century.
retiring earlier,
Huh? They just raised the retirement age for Social Security to 67 from 65!
environmental initiatives are going through at a faster rate than ever
Here in Washington I watch them get gutted by property rights activists all the time, so I rather doubt that this means anything.
and the general state of living for every single class in our society has gone up.
Measured how? 60 hour average work weeks? Two hour commutes? Lower job security? Nonexistent health insurance? Oh, I forgot. We all have washers and driers now. How nice. Do our bosses just have another $500 of appliances too? Or are they buying bigger mansions with our sweat again?
A bit off topic, but I thought the proverb impaired might enjoy the whole story.
The proverb is the legend of the creation of chess. The King in question was about to fight a war with his neighbor and asked his Wasir (counsellor) to come up with a means of avoiding an actual battle. The Wasir invented the game of chess and had the two kings play a game instead of fighting. The game was a draw which made the two kings realize it was a bad idea to fight each other for real as they were so evenly matched as tacticians and the war was thus averted.
In gratitude, the first king then asked the Wasir to choose a reward and he chose the grain reward described in the original post.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking care of children used to be a social priority shared by all members of a society in a slowly changing world where the average work week was 18 hours. Since then we as a culture have decided (economics is something we choose to do, not something that just happens) that we all need to work 60 hours weeks and ignore each other and our kids just so we can have more stuff, faster than ever.
Some of us don't agree with this, and try to get away with one parent working "only" 40 hours a week. It is barely possible to do this in the west these days, even in a well paid profession like mine. Clients look at me like I am from Mars sometimes when I say this.
I say that if we as a society are going to choose to work so hard for such little gain, then we as a society need to share the burden of child rearing somehow. The amount of stuff produced and focused at my child is truly phenomenal these days, and the rights of it's producers are never questioned. But my right to be left alone and not marketed to unless I ask for it is somehow unimportant. Censorware is not the answer, but stopping all the marketing to our kids (Channel One anyone?) and reducing the amount of utter crap I have to filter for my son would help a lot.
And yes, I do believe it is my job to filter the world for my son until he is old enough to do it for himself. And I do believe that it is society's job to support me in that, if only by leaving us alone. And I do intend to let him see some of the crap and critique it as part of his learning process. But there is so much of it these days that if I let him see it all, he'd never have time to do useful things. Like learning to communicate, think, love himself and others and just generally have fun with the great gift of life (that is why we all work so hard, isn't it?)
One of John Cramer's Alternate View columns is about this topic both generally (what are the problems, who makes the lists and what is the public perception of science's unsolved problems) and specifically (seven unsolved problems that he thinks are important). It is interesting to note that there are overlaps between many of these lists.
One problem that Cramer mentions that no one else seems to, however, is the causality problem. I often wonder if science as a paradigm can even deal with this sort of problem as causality is implicit in experimentation.
I presume you mean "sheer"? Next time you slam someone for their writing, why don't you check your own first? And I mean use your brain and an awareness of the culture behind the language, not just your spell-checker.
Corporate balance sheets are quite flexible. To say that there is only one way of finding the money is ludicrous.
Bogosity alert.
Columbus knew that the world was round and so did every other educated person of the time. They even knew within about 10% how big it was because some Greek measured it in classical times. The folks in the church who were giving him a hard did so because they knew all this and Columbus had conveniently lost about 8000 miles out of the circumference of the Earth. Just enough as it turned out to put the Americas where he thought Cathay was. Lucky bastard, really.
So maybe this guy will succeed, and certainly we need to have people do this sort of thing. Columbus did find something, but he was so pigheaded that he never knew what he had found.
Despite my quibbles, I actually do agree that information is a social construct and requires observers. Without us to classify things, they just are.
Now, where we get our ability to assign meaning is one of the Big Questions. Maybe we are just part of the whole mess, but even then I suspect that we are missing a big piece of the picture. Issues like causality and the current moment are intimately caught up with who and what we are, and physics has done little with them except assume them as axioms. One might even argue that the experimental method depends on them, so to attack them some other epistomology is required.
ALL DATA THAT CAN BE REACHED VIA THE INTERNET IS AT RISK OF UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE.
Who said it had to be accessible via the net?
if Apple ultimately supported OS X native and Carbonized MacOS (through emulation - a recompile would be a killer) apps on an OS X Intel port, it would probably be a Good Thing
.exes as well.
(WFIW, I write Mac software and I just finished Carbonizing a fairly large commercial application package.)
Given the modular architecture of Metrowerks' tools, I think this is a bit pessimistic. I expect that in about a year that this sort of development will be pretty simple, possibly even automatic. At the moment, one can usually generate targets for 68K, CFM68K, PPC and Carbon from each other with only a few days of work. In fact, as long as you don't use the Mac toolbox (!), you can generate x86
The biggest problem I can see porting a Carbon app to a different set of hardware is the endian issue. Data files will have to be converted, which could be a hassle, but even there, most data consists of resources in known formats and could be converted pretty easily. A pain, but I would be surprised if it turned out to be killer. In general, anyone who writes code depending on the byte layout of integers in memory needs to be hurt badly, but even if there was some sort of awful performance need, this would be quite rare and (presumably) heavily documented and easy to change.
Very well put, but...
They assume that we are capable of creating beings that have the ability to reason far better than us, yet we do not have the ability to give them morals.
And you assume that the folks doing the work care about this. Judging from the ethics of most corporate entities, I find this a bit naive.
why should anyone even care what the comp looks like, to either extreme? tis what it does that makes the diff.
Dahling...it is better to look good than to feel good!
- Another clueless pomo Mac hacker...
Economics cannot judge whether something is moral or not, that is left to other professions. But it can say whether some policy creates losses in value to individuals or society.
And how can it assign value without reference to a mechanism for assigning value?
A mandatory open sourcing of software (whether by government decree or societal pressure) will create net economic losses.
How are these losses measured? What value system are you using to measure them? If the society as a whole feels that the existence of open source is a value in and of itself, then this statement clearly wrong in the context of those values.
Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises :P
Imagine what would happen if we were our employers.
I am not a big Linux user, but there is an aspect of this topic that has been discussed on RISKS recently that no one seems to be addressing. A virus does not need root permission to cause havok, just access to a few system resources. For example, user's email address list and the ability to create sockets could bring a network to its knees.
There are some practical objections to this (the biodiversity argument comes to mind) but I am not really sure how valid they are. While it would be nice if there were zillions of flavors of Linux in the world, the fact is that most installations will standardize simply to keep administration costs down. Biodiversity is not a given - especially when large number of people are involved (just go to any city park) - and to say that it will prevent problems seems somewhat naive to me.
Discussion?
Here's what I did:
1. Block unidentified calls (most telcos will offer this service).
2. Configured my answering machine to pick up on 6 rings.
3. Pick up unidentifiable calls on the 5th ring.
Most telemarketers only wait for 4 rings before giving up because this is the default for most answering machines. Those few unidentified calls that get by the block (from out of state or something) and are from telemarketers will hang up before you answer. Your long distance friends, however, are waiting for your answering machine and will be happy to get you.
Take advice from Pournelle on how to write? That pompous, repetitive technofetishist? Yuk!
Interesting.
I have read much of Mr. Heinlein's oeuvre and most of it is quite juvenile. His fertility obsession and his trite elitest philosophy make him almost unreadable. And as for character development, even Stranger in a Strange Land (arguably his best) while fairly entertaining was entirely full of smug static characters I wanted to hit over the head with a real moral dilemma that couldn't be solved with high school algebra.
Mr. Dick and Mr. Vonnegut, while much better writers, still tend to write about situations, not characters, so to damn Russell for only exploring one character fully when the writers you cite are largely uninterested in character seems a bit strange. And no one claimed that it was SF - the reviewer described it as somewhat unclassifiable.
If you want to read more about some of the other chararcters in the book, you might have a look at the sequel Children of God.
Our deacon recommended this book to me a few months back. In fact she (I'm Episcopalian) didn't stop pestering me until I read it. Since then I've made several folks read it from a wide variety of backgrounds, all of whom ate it up. This includes my wife who is ordinarily not very fond of SF.
Having said that, I should warn anyone who reads it that it is quite an emotional roller-coaster if you care about the characters. I usually describe the book to people as starting off as a mix of L'Engle and Sartre and eventually doing a sudden nose dive through Stephen King and ending up reading like Elie Weisel. She does truly awful things to some of her characters that make you have to put the book down and stare at a wall for a while.
The comparison with Weisel is also a good reason for recommending the sequel Children of God. Weisel's life did not stop at the end of Night , and Sandoz's does not stop at the end of The Sparrow. The end of his journey (and that of the other characters) is as important as the beginning.
So please read it, but brace yourself.
I was just wondering how useful database pages are. I suppose some of them are (e.g. the local library) but most of them are BarnyCorp's list of useless widgets and I'm rather glad that the engines don't index that stuff...
I think it can be shown that most of the world's greatest literature and poetry, and to a lesser degree music, was created by severely maladjusted people. It is likely that have they been treated to become "normal", no masterpieces would have been created.
;-)). By contrast, Darwin did most of his later work in two hour stints between bouts of some sort of debilitating illness but as he was highly original before this happened, one gets the feeling that his disability limited his work rather than enhancing it. Given all this, I think genius often comes from quirkiness, but rarely from serious dysfunction.
Greg Bear claims (in "Queen of Angels") that this is a myth. Bach comes to mind as a counterexample, Einstein was also a fairly normal guy and most mathematicians (my field) were well-adjusted (we will ignore Pal Erdos
So while I agree that classifying everyone as crazy is idiotic, I think that refusing to treat folks because they may be creative could be downright cruel.
And remember, the 20% they are talking about are mostly not hanging around on slashdot - they tend to be in and out of institutions, living on public assistance doing menial jobs, possibly living with family, or just out in the street (thanks Ronnie). For folks on slashdot to claim that their troubled adolescence makes them targets of a government drug conspiracy is downright arrogant and narcissistic. We shouldn't let them dope us up, but we need to deal with these folks.
I agree, a hard line to draw.
This is about 80% bullshit. Let's look at the paragraph with the most claims:
Who the hell do these people think they are?
I was a participant in the labour march in Seattle on Tuesday. We are human beings. We are citizens. Sorry if our opinions are not important enough for you to listen to. It is that kind of elitist attitude that is behind a lot of the anger you see.
Its like people are needing to invent new reasons to riot because we haven't had a good hum-dinger in a while.
The vast majority of the folks at the various rallies and demonstrations were not violent or commiting vandalism. Many actually left the peaceful protests to try to help curtail the vandalism and violence. Again, your elitist implication is that all us plebes are bored from our affluence and need to get our rocks off. This is hardly the case, as even the corporate media are starting to realize.
We are going through some of the best times in the history of humanity right now... that is not debatable.
Yes it is.
Unemployment is at an all time low
First of all, those statistics are apples and oranges. In case you have forgotten, the Clinton administration changed the rules for unemployment stats in the mid 90s. The immediate result was a drop of 1-2 percentage points. The actual figures are probably closer to 10-12% as this has always been a dubious statistic.
Secondly, even if this were true, the fact that someone is employed is no indication of their well-being. Many of the poor have jobs. If I fire someone with a 40K job and hire 3 folks at 10K, unemployment has dropped dramatically, but I am making another 10K per year at the expense of the folks working for me.
This kind of abuse of statistics is another thing that we all are complaining about. We are told that we all have jobs, so we should stop complaining. The same is true of most slaves.
information and education is available to almost everyone seeking it,
Nonsense. Try the public schools in Hartford Conneticut for example.
the vast majority of epople are optomistic about their future,
True, but they are also very anxious about the present. Perhaps part of their optimism comes from feeling that they can actually change things. As you indicated at the end of your post, this is still possible and a Good Thing.
education is easier and available to more people than ever, travel is easier and cheaper than ever (so you can leave if you don't like it),
Because of globalization, it is no longer possible to leave. The destruction of this part of the American mythos that is behind some of the frustration in this country. Besides, if we have a better way, it is our democratic right to articulate it and implement it. if you don't like it, you can leave.
crime has been in decline for over a decade,
True. Not that you would know it from the corporate media. The reporting in Seattle is a good example...
social budgets are higher than ever,
In total dollars, yes. In per capita expenses, no.
wages are at an all time high,
Nonsense. It has been repeatedly shown that wages have been slipping for the majority of Americans for the last 30 years. Last year wages finally recovered to 1989 levels - all this in the midst of the longest recovery in US history.
employer sponsered profit sharing plans are growing at a fast rate,
This is a good thing. I wait for the day when companies are democratically run. Until then, it is still a case of some pigs being more equal than others. And before you call this utopianism, there are many companies run this way in the world today. Mine is one of them.
investing in general has opened itself to a wide aray of more people and classes,
Not in any meaningful way. 80% of the wealth in the US is still controlled by less than 10% of the population. When you add in the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that money == speech, you can see why the other 90% of us have to take to the streets to be heard.
people are living longer and healthier,
Yup. This is mostly due to public health projects from the turn of the century.
retiring earlier,
Huh? They just raised the retirement age for Social Security to 67 from 65!
environmental initiatives are going through at a faster rate than ever
Here in Washington I watch them get gutted by property rights activists all the time, so I rather doubt that this means anything.
and the general state of living for every single class in our society has gone up.
Measured how? 60 hour average work weeks? Two hour commutes? Lower job security? Nonexistent health insurance? Oh, I forgot. We all have washers and driers now. How nice. Do our bosses just have another $500 of appliances too? Or are they buying bigger mansions with our sweat again?
I have to get back to work now...
I wonder when they chose the server software?
A bit off topic, but I thought the proverb impaired might enjoy the whole story.
The proverb is the legend of the creation of chess. The King in question was about to fight a war with his neighbor and asked his Wasir (counsellor) to come up with a means of avoiding an actual battle. The Wasir invented the game of chess and had the two kings play a game instead of fighting. The game was a draw which made the two kings realize it was a bad idea to fight each other for real as they were so evenly matched as tacticians and the war was thus averted.
In gratitude, the first king then asked the Wasir to choose a reward and he chose the grain reward described in the original post.
Then again, some of us geeks have black belts in Tae-Kwon-Do...
There are rumors that one can set one up under MacOS X server, but I just use a Linux box myself.