I worry also that people vastly underestimate how much Rs dislike/hate Hillary
It's not hard to imagine Donnie v Hillary where people get out to vote against Hillary (and down-ticket candidates) while the ones who would have voted for Bernie stay home or if they do get out, they don't vote for her.
Way too many people are way too certain that there is no way Donnie will have a chance, and I fear they're shooting themselves, the country, and the world in the foot because of that.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
Reading this makes me wonder if I wasn't just being silly thinking that.
Regardless of that and whether or not it has anything to do with the story, I follow a few pro-Clinton people who seem to have an almost clinical compulsion to attacking Bernie (ironically typically about how negative he and his supporters are)
Maybe you're not from the US but here we haven't paid people in anything directly transferable for gold (or anything else in particular) since 1971
What you're suggesting is essentially what I'm saying and what we do now - people get paid for the value of their work. The exchange rate between US dollars (or Euros or Yen) and work units is just your hourly rate (or your effective hourly rate based on your salary).
There is really no reasonable way to exchange units of labor other than something on the spectrum that lies between the value of what your labor produces and directly converting between quantifiable amounts of work (be it time or energy expended or something similar). What we do now is somewhere in between and since you're not arguing that we should switch to the extreme of exchanging effort for effort, we're already there (at least to a first approximation).
If you're basing currency on work units then how can you assign different values to your time and my time? If you assign different values to our times then you're just relabeling currency as "work units" and the process for assigning value to them is interchangeable with the process for determining our hourly rates.
It's much better to base currency on work units directly rather than some arbitrary physical medium which is scarce until it's not... or abundant until someone decides to hoard it all.
So if I work for a thousand hours alphabetizing papers and you work for an hour writing a script that eliminates the need for my job, I should be paid 1000x more than you?
I can see that this could go on forever, but I'm game for one more round
I've already said I don't agree with the attempt to suppress the material in this case.
Sorry 'bout that - I wasn't trying to imply that you did.
The funny thing to me is that previously you said you didn't like proselyting, and yet here you're essentially telling me I need to proselyte. That's really all proselyting is: telling people about your religion.
They may seem the same to you, but there's all the difference in the world.
If you seek me out and make the effort to tell me something that I don't necessarily want to hear, that's proselyting.
In contrast, if you make information available to me online so that I can access it if I'm interested, or if I make the first move and come to you asking questions, then you're just being polite and providing information.
They seem pretty similar to me. You seem to be telling me that merely acting in a way that preserves privacy is grounds for suspicion.
I'm not saying it's grounds for suspicion - I'm just saying that part of the price of privacy is that when you keep things secret, people who are outside of the loop might speculate about what the secret is.
To be clear - I'm certainly not trying to make the (very badly false) argument that "if you have nothing to hide, then you don't need privacy". Just that if you do hide things, you're inviting speculation and gossip.
As long as it's polite, I think there's nothing wrong with simply volunteering information.
I have no real problem with that (as you've described it). My problem with it is more in cases where you have a situation of "You're sick and starving, so I'm gonna to give you food or medicine, and (being a human being) you're gonna feel obligated to listen to my spiel" or (worse) "I'm gonna give you food / medicine, but first, you're gonna listen to my spiel".
In addition to that, I've personally encountered a number of people of various faiths (yours included) who are very friendly and polite, but they get a bit of that telemarketer feel to them, where they basically force you to be rude and dismiss them, because anything short of that and they won't stop.
I've also been "ambushed" before, however, and that's never a pleasant experience.
This isn't really apropos to this discussion, but since you mention that and I'm writing anyway, I just wanted to share the worst case of "ambush" that I've ever had. Bizarrely, it started out as a very pleasant experience... before it turned ugly.
I was at the University of Hawaii on my first day of classes in a masters program. I don't know anyone, and I'm walking down the mall. A very cute girl comes up to me and starts flirting with me and chatting me up.
I'm elated, because this just doesn't happen to me as a general rule to begin with, and I'm in a new place where I don't know anyone.
After a few minutes of a nice little back and forth, she gently drops the bombshell on me - "you could come to my church this sunday".
We go a little further and it becomes painfully clear that the whole purpose of this exercise was to try to attract me... to become a member of her church.
That probably sounds kinda stupid, I've been hit up by other people many times before and since, but they didn't leave much of an impression. In contrast, this really bothered me, and (obviously) stuck with me for a long time after it happened (this was around a decade ago now).
Seriously? You think if I don't let anyone that wants to come to my marriage it's evidence that I'm "doing something wonky"?
That's not what I said at all. It doesn't constitute evidence that you are, but if you're going to hide things, then you can't reasonably blame people for drawing their own conclusions.
How is privacy supposed to survive as a concept if any attempt to exercise privacy constitutes evidence that you have something to hide?
Again - I never said that. All I said is that if I exercise my right to privacy and do something exclusive, it is utterly absurd for me to expect people not to speculate about it.
Everyone has the right to believe Mormons are a Satanic cult that eats babies. That doesn't mean it would me morally or intellectually defensible to think so.
Oh come now - you have to admit that's just a slight bit of a strawman.
There is a huge range between being benign and being a satanic cult that eats babies.
That said, quite frankly, in my opinion, many of the things that I'm sure you'd consider to be "good works" are actually damaging and harmful. I don't like proselytization, and I find it particularly objectionable when you go out into the world and help people with an undercurrent of "you should join my religion".
When it comes to comparing other religions (and I do like to learn about other religions) I think you need to apply Stendahl's rules:
(1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
I think (1) means you should at least ask a Mormon to explain why they don't allow everyone into their temple rather than asking an enemy. Of course you don't necessarily have to believe whatever the Mormon tells you, but you ought to at least ask them first.
That is precisely what I am asking you to do.
What I am suggesting is that you could make an effort to educate not only me, but everyone else, about your religion rather than getting all huffy and trying to suppress your "enemies" who are publishing your copyrighted works.
Further, I'm saying that if you don't do that much, then it's your own fault when people start going to your "enemies" and taking everything they say at face value.
There's a huge difference between individual and group privacy.
I don't expect full disclosure - nor should anyone - that'd be totally unreasonable... but it's just as unreasonable for you to expect someone outside of your church not to think that you might be doing something wonky during your wedding ceremony if you're not going to let outsiders in.
So long as they're not infringing on anyone else's rights, I think people should be free to do or think or practice whatever they want, but, as you said, that comes at the price of everybody else being able to do the same.
You think Christianity in the time of Christ wasn't weird? All new religions are weird. Weird is just a way of saying "different from the norm".
Just for the record - I think Christianity in the present is weird (as well as Mormonism, and probably every other religion; just because people are more used to the weirdness of one religion doesn't make it any less weird).
Addressing one of the GP's points - if you're afraid of things being taken out of context, then I think you're far better off providing context rather than trying to suppress information.
From the perspective of human nature - if you have nothing to hide, I think that hiding things is probably not the best strategy. If South Park got things horribly wrong, you'd be far better off making an effort to educate people and correcting their mistakes. Trying to suppress something like this makes people think there's something there.
If I were in your position, and I believed I was right, my response would be to make all such LDS documents available to the public (so long as they don't contain private information about individual people). I'd make things as open and transparent as possible to the outside world.
Rather than trying to hide things, why not just go out of your way to provide context? "The best response to 'bad' speech is 'good' speech, not less speech".
On the other hand, the fact that DRM makes something like this necessary is truly infuriating
I was under the impression that iTunes allowed music sharing to other Macs and PCs with iTunes. Shouldn't you just be able to use that? and, if so, is the DRM really hurting that much?
You're already modded 5 but I just wanted to echo the sentiment.
I've used other smart phones and mobiles and, for my taste, the iPhone's UI is simply the best. Browsing is much easier and more intuitive, and although it does lack a few nice features like voice dialing, the standard phone functions are better laid out and more intuitive than most other mobiles.
No need to go to a rest home - just go to a friend's home.
If someone has a system with a DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player, a VCR, a DVR, a cable or satellite tuner and audio piped through their stereo, just figuring out how to turn the damned thing on for the first time can be a major pain in the ass (and I'm fairly young and reasonably and technologically savvy)
no one has tied relativity to quantum mechanics yet
Just a small point of clarification - no one has tied General relativity to quantum mechanics yet (and even that's not strictly speaking true).
Quantum field theory ties quantum mechanics to special relativity. It's part of the Standard Model and is very well understood and accurately predicts experimental measurements with absurdly good precision.
I wouldn't expect it for some protracted tortuous period piece where the guy is slowly dying, but for a mindless roller-coaster ride like Armageddon, or something stupid-funny like Jackass or American Pie, a bunch of enthusiastic people in the audience reacting to what's on the screen can really take a 2 to a 10 (the same thing happens on a real roller-coaster for that matter).
The real surprise would have been to learn that it doesn't matter - considering that we are social creatures, after all.
The problem with that logic (as with any anecdotal evidence) is sampling bias.
Unreal as it may seem, it is at least possible that Microsoft has more than 10% of the market, but you and I (and a lot of people here) just happen to not come into contact with the vast majority of those people who actually buy Zunes.
... of course, that's not to say that I would blindly accept the 10% number, or that I think they have much of a chance of ever dominating (at least not before the current incarnation of portable music players become as marginalized as the old Walkman).
I'm in the US at a major university with a student population of around ~60k.
While it's true that I don't interact with *that* many people, and anecdotes aren't worth the paper they're printed on, I've seen one Zune, and the only people I've ever heard talk about them were geeks mocking them.
Meanwhile, it seems that the vast majority of people are walking around with an iPod, with a sprinkling of Archos, and Rios, and the occasional weird Chinese brand of player that I've never heard of.
But the point remains that in a busy theater you'll often end up with at least one person who needs the manager solution
At first, perhaps.
After awhile though, people would just realize that if they answer their phones, they will be unceremoniously ejected with no refund, and they'll knock it off, without having to screw things up for people who need to stay in touch or who arrive 5 minutes before the previews and want to fire off a text while they're waiting.
As for the coffee shops and restaurants, I think that ship has sailed... and, frankly, I'm fine with that. My only complaint in those settings is that so many people refuse to talk at a conversational level. At best, I think there's just a small niche market for places
I simply refuse to believe that the appropriate way to deal with with a few assholes is to put chicken-wire in your walls.
It's much simpler than that. If you own a theater or a restaurant and don't want your customers answering their phones, just make it a policy and enforce it.
If you're a customer and it bothers you when people answer their phones, you shouldn't even really have to deal with it - complain to the manager and demand your money back or tell them that as long as that sort of thing is permitted, they've lost your business. It shouldn't take many people doing that at your local theater before they decide it's good business to make it their policy and to enforce it.
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I worry also that people vastly underestimate how much Rs dislike/hate Hillary
It's not hard to imagine Donnie v Hillary where people get out to vote against Hillary (and down-ticket candidates) while the ones who would have voted for Bernie stay home or if they do get out, they don't vote for her.
Way too many people are way too certain that there is no way Donnie will have a chance, and I fear they're shooting themselves, the country, and the world in the foot because of that.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
Reading this makes me wonder if I wasn't just being silly thinking that.
Regardless of that and whether or not it has anything to do with the story, I follow a few pro-Clinton people who seem to have an almost clinical compulsion to attacking Bernie (ironically typically about how negative he and his supporters are)
Just adding another "me too".
lack of automatic boxing of primitive types anyone
I'd agree with you but those were both fixed in Java 5.
About the only thing I'm aware of that Java is really missing relative to C# is LINQ (not that that's by any means a small thing)
Maybe you're not from the US but here we haven't paid people in anything directly transferable for gold (or anything else in particular) since 1971
What you're suggesting is essentially what I'm saying and what we do now - people get paid for the value of their work. The exchange rate between US dollars (or Euros or Yen) and work units is just your hourly rate (or your effective hourly rate based on your salary).
There is really no reasonable way to exchange units of labor other than something on the spectrum that lies between the value of what your labor produces and directly converting between quantifiable amounts of work (be it time or energy expended or something similar). What we do now is somewhere in between and since you're not arguing that we should switch to the extreme of exchanging effort for effort, we're already there (at least to a first approximation).
Not an intentional misunderstanding at all.
If you're basing currency on work units then how can you assign different values to your time and my time? If you assign different values to our times then you're just relabeling currency as "work units" and the process for assigning value to them is interchangeable with the process for determining our hourly rates.
Not exactly graduate level economics.
The Obama team may be exercising due diligence in looking across the board for cost savings
The same thought occurred to me and I really hope that's the case. I guess that time will tell.
It's much better to base currency on work units directly rather than some arbitrary physical medium which is scarce until it's not... or abundant until someone decides to hoard it all.
So if I work for a thousand hours alphabetizing papers and you work for an hour writing a script that eliminates the need for my job, I should be paid 1000x more than you?
Seems like a great plan.
Just wanted to make a "me too" post.
I love Git and use it for just about everything that I'm doing on my own, but the lack of (usable) IDE integration is a killer for group projects.
I'm glad you said something about that because every place I look I see this being called a "first" as if satellite viruses were a new thing.
How is it that this post wasn't modded up?
I can see that this could go on forever, but I'm game for one more round
I've already said I don't agree with the attempt to suppress the material in this case.Sorry 'bout that - I wasn't trying to imply that you did.
The funny thing to me is that previously you said you didn't like proselyting, and yet here you're essentially telling me I need to proselyte. That's really all proselyting is: telling people about your religion.They may seem the same to you, but there's all the difference in the world.
If you seek me out and make the effort to tell me something that I don't necessarily want to hear, that's proselyting.
In contrast, if you make information available to me online so that I can access it if I'm interested, or if I make the first move and come to you asking questions, then you're just being polite and providing information.
They seem pretty similar to me. You seem to be telling me that merely acting in a way that preserves privacy is grounds for suspicion.I'm not saying it's grounds for suspicion - I'm just saying that part of the price of privacy is that when you keep things secret, people who are outside of the loop might speculate about what the secret is.
To be clear - I'm certainly not trying to make the (very badly false) argument that "if you have nothing to hide, then you don't need privacy". Just that if you do hide things, you're inviting speculation and gossip.
As long as it's polite, I think there's nothing wrong with simply volunteering information.I have no real problem with that (as you've described it). My problem with it is more in cases where you have a situation of "You're sick and starving, so I'm gonna to give you food or medicine, and (being a human being) you're gonna feel obligated to listen to my spiel" or (worse) "I'm gonna give you food / medicine, but first, you're gonna listen to my spiel".
In addition to that, I've personally encountered a number of people of various faiths (yours included) who are very friendly and polite, but they get a bit of that telemarketer feel to them, where they basically force you to be rude and dismiss them, because anything short of that and they won't stop.
I've also been "ambushed" before, however, and that's never a pleasant experience.This isn't really apropos to this discussion, but since you mention that and I'm writing anyway, I just wanted to share the worst case of "ambush" that I've ever had. Bizarrely, it started out as a very pleasant experience... before it turned ugly.
I was at the University of Hawaii on my first day of classes in a masters program. I don't know anyone, and I'm walking down the mall. A very cute girl comes up to me and starts flirting with me and chatting me up.
I'm elated, because this just doesn't happen to me as a general rule to begin with, and I'm in a new place where I don't know anyone.
After a few minutes of a nice little back and forth, she gently drops the bombshell on me - "you could come to my church this sunday".
We go a little further and it becomes painfully clear that the whole purpose of this exercise was to try to attract me... to become a member of her church.
That probably sounds kinda stupid, I've been hit up by other people many times before and since, but they didn't leave much of an impression. In contrast, this really bothered me, and (obviously) stuck with me for a long time after it happened (this was around a decade ago now).
That's not what I said at all. It doesn't constitute evidence that you are, but if you're going to hide things, then you can't reasonably blame people for drawing their own conclusions.
How is privacy supposed to survive as a concept if any attempt to exercise privacy constitutes evidence that you have something to hide?Again - I never said that. All I said is that if I exercise my right to privacy and do something exclusive, it is utterly absurd for me to expect people not to speculate about it.
Everyone has the right to believe Mormons are a Satanic cult that eats babies. That doesn't mean it would me morally or intellectually defensible to think so.Oh come now - you have to admit that's just a slight bit of a strawman.
There is a huge range between being benign and being a satanic cult that eats babies.
That said, quite frankly, in my opinion, many of the things that I'm sure you'd consider to be "good works" are actually damaging and harmful. I don't like proselytization, and I find it particularly objectionable when you go out into the world and help people with an undercurrent of "you should join my religion".
When it comes to comparing other religions (and I do like to learn about other religions) I think you need to apply Stendahl's rules: (1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies. I think (1) means you should at least ask a Mormon to explain why they don't allow everyone into their temple rather than asking an enemy. Of course you don't necessarily have to believe whatever the Mormon tells you, but you ought to at least ask them first.That is precisely what I am asking you to do.
What I am suggesting is that you could make an effort to educate not only me, but everyone else, about your religion rather than getting all huffy and trying to suppress your "enemies" who are publishing your copyrighted works.
Further, I'm saying that if you don't do that much, then it's your own fault when people start going to your "enemies" and taking everything they say at face value.
There's a huge difference between individual and group privacy.
I don't expect full disclosure - nor should anyone - that'd be totally unreasonable... but it's just as unreasonable for you to expect someone outside of your church not to think that you might be doing something wonky during your wedding ceremony if you're not going to let outsiders in.
So long as they're not infringing on anyone else's rights, I think people should be free to do or think or practice whatever they want, but, as you said, that comes at the price of everybody else being able to do the same.
Just for the record - I think Christianity in the present is weird (as well as Mormonism, and probably every other religion; just because people are more used to the weirdness of one religion doesn't make it any less weird).
Addressing one of the GP's points - if you're afraid of things being taken out of context, then I think you're far better off providing context rather than trying to suppress information.
From the perspective of human nature - if you have nothing to hide, I think that hiding things is probably not the best strategy. If South Park got things horribly wrong, you'd be far better off making an effort to educate people and correcting their mistakes. Trying to suppress something like this makes people think there's something there.
If I were in your position, and I believed I was right, my response would be to make all such LDS documents available to the public (so long as they don't contain private information about individual people). I'd make things as open and transparent as possible to the outside world.
Rather than trying to hide things, why not just go out of your way to provide context? "The best response to 'bad' speech is 'good' speech, not less speech".
I was under the impression that iTunes allowed music sharing to other Macs and PCs with iTunes. Shouldn't you just be able to use that? and, if so, is the DRM really hurting that much?
You're already modded 5 but I just wanted to echo the sentiment.
I've used other smart phones and mobiles and, for my taste, the iPhone's UI is simply the best. Browsing is much easier and more intuitive, and although it does lack a few nice features like voice dialing, the standard phone functions are better laid out and more intuitive than most other mobiles.
No need to go to a rest home - just go to a friend's home.
If someone has a system with a DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player, a VCR, a DVR, a cable or satellite tuner and audio piped through their stereo, just figuring out how to turn the damned thing on for the first time can be a major pain in the ass (and I'm fairly young and reasonably and technologically savvy)
Just a small point of clarification - no one has tied General relativity to quantum mechanics yet (and even that's not strictly speaking true).
Quantum field theory ties quantum mechanics to special relativity. It's part of the Standard Model and is very well understood and accurately predicts experimental measurements with absurdly good precision.
I wouldn't expect it for some protracted tortuous period piece where the guy is slowly dying, but for a mindless roller-coaster ride like Armageddon, or something stupid-funny like Jackass or American Pie, a bunch of enthusiastic people in the audience reacting to what's on the screen can really take a 2 to a 10 (the same thing happens on a real roller-coaster for that matter).
The real surprise would have been to learn that it doesn't matter - considering that we are social creatures, after all.
The problem with that logic (as with any anecdotal evidence) is sampling bias.
Unreal as it may seem, it is at least possible that Microsoft has more than 10% of the market, but you and I (and a lot of people here) just happen to not come into contact with the vast majority of those people who actually buy Zunes.
... of course, that's not to say that I would blindly accept the 10% number, or that I think they have much of a chance of ever dominating (at least not before the current incarnation of portable music players become as marginalized as the old Walkman).
I'm in the US at a major university with a student population of around ~60k.
While it's true that I don't interact with *that* many people, and anecdotes aren't worth the paper they're printed on, I've seen one Zune, and the only people I've ever heard talk about them were geeks mocking them.
Meanwhile, it seems that the vast majority of people are walking around with an iPod, with a sprinkling of Archos, and Rios, and the occasional weird Chinese brand of player that I've never heard of.
At first, perhaps.
After awhile though, people would just realize that if they answer their phones, they will be unceremoniously ejected with no refund, and they'll knock it off, without having to screw things up for people who need to stay in touch or who arrive 5 minutes before the previews and want to fire off a text while they're waiting.
As for the coffee shops and restaurants, I think that ship has sailed... and, frankly, I'm fine with that. My only complaint in those settings is that so many people refuse to talk at a conversational level. At best, I think there's just a small niche market for places
I simply refuse to believe that the appropriate way to deal with with a few assholes is to put chicken-wire in your walls.
It's much simpler than that. If you own a theater or a restaurant and don't want your customers answering their phones, just make it a policy and enforce it.
If you're a customer and it bothers you when people answer their phones, you shouldn't even really have to deal with it - complain to the manager and demand your money back or tell them that as long as that sort of thing is permitted, they've lost your business. It shouldn't take many people doing that at your local theater before they decide it's good business to make it their policy and to enforce it.