Social Security could probably be done better if you handed the money back to people who were inclined to invest it.
The only thing that SS does for anyone is ensure that you're inputting into a retirement plan for yourself. It's pretty much deficient in every other way. That means that its only job is to prevent the stupid or the hand-to-mouth crowd from spending their retirement before they retire. I'm sure a lot of people benefit from SS, because money management is not a skill all humans are born with, but they'd have benefited more if that same amount of money had been invested in something that wasn't as horrendously run.
My problem with many government programs is not that they protect the poor (obviously), but that their method for doing so is to ensure that only the few people who can influence government policy can actually do any better than that. Even with a decent amount of payroll taxes taken out of my income, if I relied on SS to live on in my old age, I'd be impoverished. I barely care what I would get in those benefits at this point because it is laughably tiny.
"Private" advancements tend to only remain private long enough for competitors to hire on people who are familiar with the methods.
Logistics is a huge deal, and honestly, if it was taken more to heart by a lot of organizations is a key piece to that age old desire to "end hunger".
The existence of hunger today is caused by precisely two things: politics and logistical challenges. We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth. The politics are harder to sort out, and are the larger issue, but streamlining the crap out of logistics can make real strides. Amazon could make a huge difference if its methods can be brought to bear.
I don't think anyone knows how actual anarchy would work out. It presumably existed at some point in the past, but it is hard to draw parallels from the past to the world of today.
I'd guess there would be wage disparity, but perhaps not. Coordination should make such things uniform, but we've seen where central governments don't always create uniform regulations or are able to enforce them. There is the possibility that removing central government could allow a heretofore unknown or suppressed method of human social behavior to actually do a better job of regulation. That's merely wild speculation on my part, but I doubt we know if it is wishful thinking or not.
One, it is pointless because it won't happen. Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".
I have two words for you: "Bernie Sanders"
Yes, I don't think he's going to win, but it isn't impossible. You don't think he wants single payer health care? How is that precisely going to work without the government pretty much owning it?
And, he's just the tip of that spear. Government is the solution to all of our problems, if you're young and can't see what the government does with just about every other program. Lack of security is just a minor annoyance compared to the bureaucratic cock-up that we're looking forward to. The ACA is just the government doing what the government does best, fucking up. Political solutions where half-measures simply won't do.
And no, this is about security, not physician choice. And physicians fucking suck at security, or have we not been reading the news? They also suck at bureaucracy, and also at not charging an arm and a leg for their services.
At least they'll make the 1% pay for it, or something. That'll show those rich bastards.
Yes, she's what is known as a "provisional" billionaire. Until she can cash out and diversify a bit, her billions are a little light in the reality department.
If her company sinks, she's toast as well. However, if she's smart and remains unindicted, she might still be a millionaire at the end of it.
It is worth money to protect against enemies of the nation.
However, it is not work destroying their civil rights over it. No one has lost speech rights over the ability to ensure cars are safe. No one is at risk of secret surveillance.
Also, the money should be spent in relation to what it is preventing. Are we saving as many people with one million dollars invested in car safety as we are with one million dollars of terrorist hunting?
I'd agree that there is some minimum we should spend on threats like that, but should we be spending billions on terrorist threats? I think we're at a point where there is diminishing returns with how much we're spending on trying to attack terrorism. We certainly are individually threatened more by loss of civil rights than we are by any terrorist act.
It probably is bullshit. Who fucking mounts servers in another country to do the backups to directly?
You archive and compress that shit locally and then move it to the remote server. That prevents your daily backup from taking 48 hours to complete and helps considerably on those data transfer charges.
Having a simple archive and transfer via FTP or something alone could have prevented him from deleting the remotes with one command. I have trouble believing he set up a NFS or other remote volume to another country. Holy iowait, Batman.
Offsite, tape backups aren't even really all that necessary. You just need any backup that you can't use one command in the system to delete all of your data.
You could use AWS S3, and just use something like Glacier to back up your data. Since it takes like 4 hours for it to be rotated back into being online, you have about the same effect.
Also, while offsite backups are useful, for a host with 1,535 customers, who are all making changes, even if you have a daily offsite tape backup, you could find yourself missing a lot of changes. I suppose it is better than losing all of the sites, but I'd think that some simple precautions to ensure your online backups were not immediately delete-able with one easy command would pay much higher dividends.
Fusion is constantly overrunning costs and deadlines, but ultimately, its a matter of being able to find the right materials and ignition method for a fusion plant. We already know fusion works and we know that it is about as renewable as the so called renewables, we just keep being overly optimistic about the engineering challenges. We're also not spending all that much money on it. We're barely breaking the equivalent of 1978 spending levels on it.
For instance, ITER sounds really expensive, until you realize that it only costs about the same as a handful of bombers. I'm not against bombers or military expenditure, but a energy source like fusion would be a big strategic advantage, easily worth spending the money on.
I imagine that they weren't really lacking for crippled people to try it out on. It's not like paralysis is a scare resource.
They got a test subject, and this patient now has the ability to eventually get a device that will allow their paralysis to be overcome. Not a shitty deal, really.
Setting aside that it is unclear that 100% of cartographers believed anything like that, considering that it was known since Ancient Greece that the Earth was round, a cartographer, particularly in that period, did not work under the scientific method.
In any case, I am less concerned with the truth of the statement as I am with the effects and the proposed solutions. There's some pretty crazy shit out there for how people want to deal with the issue, some of it impossible unless you end modern civilization.
If the effect is that we get some more tornadoes and hurricanes and ice melt and all of that, its a problem but not insurmountable. We'd have to move people away from the seacoasts a bit and some island nations would cease to exist above the waves. Not good, but not worth chucking civilization for, since even more people would die or be extremely inconvenienced without it. We've dealt with climate change before as humans lived through Ice Ages and a Little Ice Age in recent memory. So, let's not go doing anything rash.
If it means we end up like Venus, that's a much bigger problem. I don't think anyone is suggesting that, however.
A little different. A dog was never a synonym for duck.
Using a synonym of an existing word to convey a different understanding of the original is a lot different from simply mislabeling two different things as one thing.
No one disputes that there is a difference between men and women anatomically. What they are trying to convey is the notion that maleness or femaleness has a mental or environmental component by using a similar word in a new way.
That is not to suggest that notion is correct, or helpful, but if you're going to attack the concept, you need to attack the idea behind it and not ignore it.
For instance, you can say that you believe the ideas that they call "gender" are bogus and do not represent a real thing. That will then, hopefully, lead the argument down the path of evaluating some evidence, or at the very least, a real understanding of the root cause of the argument. You're never going to convince the already-convinced that they are wrong by simply saying that you refuse their redefinition. Everyone knows what gender used to mean. I think we all care more about what people are trying to make it mean *now*.
Although you have to admit, his release was pretty egregious.
You could argue that Hillary was just clueless, which is not a huge surprise for a government political appointee. Not saying that excuses her, but still.
Oh the other hand, she is arguing in her campaign that she has the "experience" to run the country. She certainly as been in a number of roles, but if she just half-arsed her way through them, that "experience" may not really count as more than "time in job".
Admittedly, mostly by dismissing the Secretary, but still, a private email server and circumventing classified information handling isn't 'misfiling'. It's intentional according to the publicized information I have read.
So you actually mean there really is nearly nothing that can be done about it, because you just don't dismiss a senior cabinet secretary for something like this. You cover it up or try and brush it off. Sort of like Obama is doing now, because even after that person is gone, you don't want to deal with the fallout on your administration.
Thanks to Manning and Snowden, we know what happens when lots of top secret stuff gets dumped into public view, and it's not that bad.
You're wrong, it's bad. Just try and do business with Europeans these days. You think there has been no effect on US business interests? Think again. What a gigantic pain the ass this has all been. And we don't we keep private information on our system, unless some doofus on the customer side decides to embed that stuff into a file. I can't even imagine the crap that the people who actually do handle personal data have had to go through.
That would probably end this debate. I don't see a good way of doing so otherwise. Everyone gets their own stall, although it would be annoying to now have to share a bathroom with women because the lines will be ungodly long at the bar.
The word has been redefined into the desired meaning by those who use it in that manner. It is a synonym for sex (anatomical) that was useful for the new concept that it is being used to express.
That said, there is nothing wrong with that, since word redefinition does happen over time. Let's all just not pretend that the dictionary gets to define reality and we'll all be on a lot firmer ground.
The real argument is whether Gender (as defined as meaning one's image of one's self) is a concept that makes sense from a legal, ethical, and health perspective. And the definitions aren't going to help with that, since everyone has decided to use their own.
Well, that only works if the number of LGBT and supporters is enough to drastically shift the balance against the business which acts against the group in question. Otherwise, they will go, "Good, all the gays and their supporters have left, and when this blows over, we could probably just do a sale and get a quarter of the non-gay supporters back too."
So, I suspect that a boycott like that in NC is probably not a dire threat. And the xHamster situation is more a statement than anything else. After all, I doubt that anyone going to the porn site to begin with has much in the way of scruples about how they reconcile their public opinions with their porn viewing habits. They'll all just say that they are totally against the law to get to the porn, or they'll go to the host of other porn sites out there.
There is such a thing as a minority that does not have significant amount of power to affect change through direct action like that. Not sure what the numbers are like in NC.
Yeah, but they've been stewing up until now. Now they have a standard-bearer and are really making a showing where before they felt like no one at that level would listen. That's worthy of note if this spirals out of control somehow. Or in the unlikely event Trump wins.
Also, when major US parties implode, as it happens every century or so, the proximate reason for it is usually noted in the history books.
Art insurers *will* often do just that. This sort of art is very pricey and the pay out is very large. Offering rewards and also employing investigators is something insurers will regularly do in this sort of case.
Slashdot Mirror
Social Security could probably be done better if you handed the money back to people who were inclined to invest it.
The only thing that SS does for anyone is ensure that you're inputting into a retirement plan for yourself. It's pretty much deficient in every other way. That means that its only job is to prevent the stupid or the hand-to-mouth crowd from spending their retirement before they retire. I'm sure a lot of people benefit from SS, because money management is not a skill all humans are born with, but they'd have benefited more if that same amount of money had been invested in something that wasn't as horrendously run.
My problem with many government programs is not that they protect the poor (obviously), but that their method for doing so is to ensure that only the few people who can influence government policy can actually do any better than that. Even with a decent amount of payroll taxes taken out of my income, if I relied on SS to live on in my old age, I'd be impoverished. I barely care what I would get in those benefits at this point because it is laughably tiny.
And no one is ever going to learn from Amazon?
"Private" advancements tend to only remain private long enough for competitors to hire on people who are familiar with the methods.
Logistics is a huge deal, and honestly, if it was taken more to heart by a lot of organizations is a key piece to that age old desire to "end hunger".
The existence of hunger today is caused by precisely two things: politics and logistical challenges. We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth. The politics are harder to sort out, and are the larger issue, but streamlining the crap out of logistics can make real strides. Amazon could make a huge difference if its methods can be brought to bear.
I don't think anyone knows how actual anarchy would work out. It presumably existed at some point in the past, but it is hard to draw parallels from the past to the world of today.
I'd guess there would be wage disparity, but perhaps not. Coordination should make such things uniform, but we've seen where central governments don't always create uniform regulations or are able to enforce them. There is the possibility that removing central government could allow a heretofore unknown or suppressed method of human social behavior to actually do a better job of regulation. That's merely wild speculation on my part, but I doubt we know if it is wishful thinking or not.
One, it is pointless because it won't happen. Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".
I have two words for you: "Bernie Sanders"
Yes, I don't think he's going to win, but it isn't impossible. You don't think he wants single payer health care? How is that precisely going to work without the government pretty much owning it?
And, he's just the tip of that spear. Government is the solution to all of our problems, if you're young and can't see what the government does with just about every other program. Lack of security is just a minor annoyance compared to the bureaucratic cock-up that we're looking forward to. The ACA is just the government doing what the government does best, fucking up. Political solutions where half-measures simply won't do.
And no, this is about security, not physician choice. And physicians fucking suck at security, or have we not been reading the news? They also suck at bureaucracy, and also at not charging an arm and a leg for their services.
At least they'll make the 1% pay for it, or something. That'll show those rich bastards.
Or at least "allegedly brilliant female entrepreneur" anyway. It's good journalism to not jump to any conclusions, right?
Yes, she's what is known as a "provisional" billionaire. Until she can cash out and diversify a bit, her billions are a little light in the reality department.
If her company sinks, she's toast as well. However, if she's smart and remains unindicted, she might still be a millionaire at the end of it.
It is worth money to protect against enemies of the nation.
However, it is not work destroying their civil rights over it. No one has lost speech rights over the ability to ensure cars are safe. No one is at risk of secret surveillance.
Also, the money should be spent in relation to what it is preventing. Are we saving as many people with one million dollars invested in car safety as we are with one million dollars of terrorist hunting?
I'd agree that there is some minimum we should spend on threats like that, but should we be spending billions on terrorist threats? I think we're at a point where there is diminishing returns with how much we're spending on trying to attack terrorism. We certainly are individually threatened more by loss of civil rights than we are by any terrorist act.
It probably is bullshit. Who fucking mounts servers in another country to do the backups to directly?
You archive and compress that shit locally and then move it to the remote server. That prevents your daily backup from taking 48 hours to complete and helps considerably on those data transfer charges.
Having a simple archive and transfer via FTP or something alone could have prevented him from deleting the remotes with one command. I have trouble believing he set up a NFS or other remote volume to another country. Holy iowait, Batman.
Offsite, tape backups aren't even really all that necessary. You just need any backup that you can't use one command in the system to delete all of your data.
You could use AWS S3, and just use something like Glacier to back up your data. Since it takes like 4 hours for it to be rotated back into being online, you have about the same effect.
Also, while offsite backups are useful, for a host with 1,535 customers, who are all making changes, even if you have a daily offsite tape backup, you could find yourself missing a lot of changes. I suppose it is better than losing all of the sites, but I'd think that some simple precautions to ensure your online backups were not immediately delete-able with one easy command would pay much higher dividends.
Says Greenpeace.
There's only one group that matters when you talk about China and that is the Party and they are building plants. We will see how the predictions go.
Fusion is constantly overrunning costs and deadlines, but ultimately, its a matter of being able to find the right materials and ignition method for a fusion plant. We already know fusion works and we know that it is about as renewable as the so called renewables, we just keep being overly optimistic about the engineering challenges. We're also not spending all that much money on it. We're barely breaking the equivalent of 1978 spending levels on it.
For instance, ITER sounds really expensive, until you realize that it only costs about the same as a handful of bombers. I'm not against bombers or military expenditure, but a energy source like fusion would be a big strategic advantage, easily worth spending the money on.
I imagine that they weren't really lacking for crippled people to try it out on. It's not like paralysis is a scare resource.
They got a test subject, and this patient now has the ability to eventually get a device that will allow their paralysis to be overcome. Not a shitty deal, really.
Setting aside that it is unclear that 100% of cartographers believed anything like that, considering that it was known since Ancient Greece that the Earth was round, a cartographer, particularly in that period, did not work under the scientific method.
In any case, I am less concerned with the truth of the statement as I am with the effects and the proposed solutions. There's some pretty crazy shit out there for how people want to deal with the issue, some of it impossible unless you end modern civilization.
If the effect is that we get some more tornadoes and hurricanes and ice melt and all of that, its a problem but not insurmountable. We'd have to move people away from the seacoasts a bit and some island nations would cease to exist above the waves. Not good, but not worth chucking civilization for, since even more people would die or be extremely inconvenienced without it. We've dealt with climate change before as humans lived through Ice Ages and a Little Ice Age in recent memory. So, let's not go doing anything rash.
If it means we end up like Venus, that's a much bigger problem. I don't think anyone is suggesting that, however.
A little different. A dog was never a synonym for duck.
Using a synonym of an existing word to convey a different understanding of the original is a lot different from simply mislabeling two different things as one thing.
No one disputes that there is a difference between men and women anatomically. What they are trying to convey is the notion that maleness or femaleness has a mental or environmental component by using a similar word in a new way.
That is not to suggest that notion is correct, or helpful, but if you're going to attack the concept, you need to attack the idea behind it and not ignore it.
For instance, you can say that you believe the ideas that they call "gender" are bogus and do not represent a real thing. That will then, hopefully, lead the argument down the path of evaluating some evidence, or at the very least, a real understanding of the root cause of the argument. You're never going to convince the already-convinced that they are wrong by simply saying that you refuse their redefinition. Everyone knows what gender used to mean. I think we all care more about what people are trying to make it mean *now*.
That will depend a lot on how easy it is to spoof the authentication.
And it makes me wonder if this also could become a way of locking cheaper, but still legit cable makers out of the market.
So, again, much depends on the implementation.
Although you have to admit, his release was pretty egregious.
You could argue that Hillary was just clueless, which is not a huge surprise for a government political appointee. Not saying that excuses her, but still.
Oh the other hand, she is arguing in her campaign that she has the "experience" to run the country. She certainly as been in a number of roles, but if she just half-arsed her way through them, that "experience" may not really count as more than "time in job".
Admittedly, mostly by dismissing the Secretary, but still, a private email server and circumventing classified information handling isn't 'misfiling'. It's intentional according to the publicized information I have read.
So you actually mean there really is nearly nothing that can be done about it, because you just don't dismiss a senior cabinet secretary for something like this. You cover it up or try and brush it off. Sort of like Obama is doing now, because even after that person is gone, you don't want to deal with the fallout on your administration.
Thanks to Manning and Snowden, we know what happens when lots of top secret stuff gets dumped into public view, and it's not that bad.
You're wrong, it's bad. Just try and do business with Europeans these days. You think there has been no effect on US business interests? Think again. What a gigantic pain the ass this has all been. And we don't we keep private information on our system, unless some doofus on the customer side decides to embed that stuff into a file. I can't even imagine the crap that the people who actually do handle personal data have had to go through.
No, they're probably 100% evil. That doesn't mean they can't have good PR, right?
I think that's probably the best solution for this, but will be hard to manage in existing multi-stall occupant bathrooms.
That would probably end this debate. I don't see a good way of doing so otherwise. Everyone gets their own stall, although it would be annoying to now have to share a bathroom with women because the lines will be ungodly long at the bar.
The word has been redefined into the desired meaning by those who use it in that manner. It is a synonym for sex (anatomical) that was useful for the new concept that it is being used to express.
That said, there is nothing wrong with that, since word redefinition does happen over time. Let's all just not pretend that the dictionary gets to define reality and we'll all be on a lot firmer ground.
The real argument is whether Gender (as defined as meaning one's image of one's self) is a concept that makes sense from a legal, ethical, and health perspective. And the definitions aren't going to help with that, since everyone has decided to use their own.
Well, that only works if the number of LGBT and supporters is enough to drastically shift the balance against the business which acts against the group in question. Otherwise, they will go, "Good, all the gays and their supporters have left, and when this blows over, we could probably just do a sale and get a quarter of the non-gay supporters back too."
So, I suspect that a boycott like that in NC is probably not a dire threat. And the xHamster situation is more a statement than anything else. After all, I doubt that anyone going to the porn site to begin with has much in the way of scruples about how they reconcile their public opinions with their porn viewing habits. They'll all just say that they are totally against the law to get to the porn, or they'll go to the host of other porn sites out there.
There is such a thing as a minority that does not have significant amount of power to affect change through direct action like that. Not sure what the numbers are like in NC.
Yeah, but they've been stewing up until now. Now they have a standard-bearer and are really making a showing where before they felt like no one at that level would listen. That's worthy of note if this spirals out of control somehow. Or in the unlikely event Trump wins.
Also, when major US parties implode, as it happens every century or so, the proximate reason for it is usually noted in the history books.
Art insurers *will* often do just that. This sort of art is very pricey and the pay out is very large. Offering rewards and also employing investigators is something insurers will regularly do in this sort of case.