Actually, since at least Ayn Rand, most free marketers beleive that free markets are the only MORAL arrangement of human society. One complaint she had about republicans is that they never articulated the ethical case for free enterprise, only the utilitarian efficiency argument. That style of thought suggests that if someone can convince you some other arrangment might have a better number here or there, then it is worth trying.
Infact, the morality argument is the correct defense of the unregulated free market. The arrangement(s) which globally minimize the coercion of individual actors within it are the objectively morally superior arrangement(s).
So far, this is free enterprise, aka capitalism.
Now then, as far as the rest of your post: you're wrong. Libetarians and free market actors do not posit any such baloney about all actors being ethical. If the market didn't recognize a need to deal violence to bad actors, citizens wouldn't universally agree they wanted to pay for cops, and private security firms would not exist. Infact, people value their safety and security and are willing to pay to try and retain it.
The dodos who beleive somehow in the goodness of humans are squarely the statists, who beleive that positions of arbitrary power and priviledge within government can be created, from the most feared autocrat to the most menial licensing inspector.. and that somehow only a superior stock of uncorruptible, perfectly moral human will occupy these positinos of power and priviledge.
It is precisely because libertarians and anarchists reject that some have "legitimate" violent coercive power over others and will inevitably abuse that power because of human frailty that opponents of large government seek to minimize government power or eliminate it entirely.
The error in your thinking is to presume that a monopoly of folks toting guns is the only way to solve legitimate societal concerns like the competency of physicians or the trustworthyness of bridges. Which is quite ridiculous for two reasons.
1) firstly, your statist gun-orgy of government thugs guarantees nothing. kids still die from medical incompetence and bridges still collapse.
2) providing these services via government costs money, and money has to be extracted from people via taxation, and people generally hate taxation. politicians who continually spend tax dollars on things _nobody_ in society would be willing to pay for do not tend to last long. Yet the fact that we _have_ bridge inspectors and occupational licensure suggests that some, perhaps even a large portion of people, are willing to pay for such things.
The question then is, setting the efficiency arguments aside for a moment: are the gains in freedom worth the hypothetical loss in "Efficiency" that would result when replacing monopoly government services with competing private implementations?
My claim is that, in general; yes. I'm willing to acccept a lower standard of living if it means more absolute freedom. Am I willing to accept every possible tuple of trading off more of one for less than the other? Of course not.
Naturally, I _do_ actually think that in general, eliminating government results in higher utilitarian efficiencies and better economic outcomes for all participants. But that isn't the appropriate defense of freedom: freedom is its own moral end, and should be defended as such.
Everything in life is a cost/benefit tradeoff. The notion of building perfect software "at any cost" is similar to how Rolls Royce thought about building cars. Making something the absolute best possible it can be is a praiseworthy ideology, but there is obviously an associated cost for doing so.
The world is fortuneate that the Henry Ford's of the world _also_ got into the car business, and decided NOT to compete with Rolls Royce on quality, functionality, etc.
Supposing that there are two possible software development methodologies, which differ in cost, time to market, and objective quality upon release, it is of course not a foregone conclusion that the higher quality methodology is the one which should be chosen.
The target customer in question may prefer the lower-quality item sooner and for less money.
Everything done at a business needs to have a business case. That includes improving quality.
People who embark on improving software quality who categorically reject doing a cost/benefit analysis tend to not ship.
Think of all of the software products you use. All of them have bugs that the team decided to not fix. They may fix them in future, they may never fix them at all. They may make modifications to their engineering to attempt to prevent these bugs or find them earlier, or they may not.
Humans must consume resources to progress. The typical malthusan approach to statist environmentalism is that we must STOP consuming resources now to maintain our current (or usually, a greatly reduced) standard of existance.
A different argument is that we must consume the right resources as fast as possible in the right way, so that we, for instance, move past fossil fuels, or that we can increase agricultural yeilds consistently, or so that we can mass produce medicines.
The fact of the matter is that different socities -- differentiated primarily by wealth and industrial sophistication -- will be impacted differently by whatever climactic changes and calamities may occur over the future.
We cannot be sure what will happen to whom and when.
We _can_ be sure of one thing: a society that has greatly increased its wealth and standard of living, via the correct social attitudes and practices, will be in a much better position to deal with (and hopefully avoid!) whatever comes than one which is stuck in a counter-productive regressive past.
I contend that rather than freeze or reverse the growth in the worlds standard of living, we accelerate it and distribute it far and wide, so that we have more capable minds (because IMO, intelligence is distributed vastly across the world, but access to making a difference is NOT) in a position to tackle problems.
I want a nice environment. And I'm willing to pay for it. But I want to be choosy about how I spend my dollars and what I'll be getting. I suspect if you polled the majority of Americans, they'd accept a 1ft sea level rise in 100 years if it meant not having a calamitous impact on their way of life, way of government, etc.
This is not morally problematic unless you consider the impact on impoverished coastal societies. And my contention is that as a planet, we are more likely to raise the standard of living of ALL humans in 100 years than we are to turn back the clock of world progress. We may acheive the latter, but it will probably coincide with vastly more human suffering than if we just let some nations flood - even assuming we did nothing to help those nations progress in the interim.
Progress takes resources. But progress leads to more efficient usage of resources. We are not suffering under the hardship of "Peak Whale", even though at one time in our history the number of remaining whales left put a dire forecast on our abilities to create heat and light. Mankind adapted and moved forward.
We can adapt and move forward, so long as we live in socities that allow for the creation of wealth and the execution of great ideas.
I am not suggesting the USA of 2011 is the right place to foster the innovation (primarily in attitudes, btw) we need to lift the entire planet out of destitution, but it certainly could be.
On the occasions where my 4 year old is somewhere that he watches TV, the way he looks and acts while doing it just makes my heart sink.
He doesn't move. He is completely fixated on the screen. He needs me to make several attempts before his attention is diverted from the screen. He can look away breifly to talk to you but is trying to glance back at the screen.
We have no TV service and no occasion for him to watch TV. We do have a small handful of movies we let him watch occasionally.
One thing that he enjoys and that we let him do (usually one or two days a week) is watch the "Mighty Machines" movies, some of which you can stream off netflix. These are at least modestly interesting, as he is very interested in machines of all types.
Another thing we do together is watch youtube videos of things hes interested in. Whether its trains or rockets or consturction equipment or car racing -- theres always something your child is interested in and usually a youtube video of it. But that is a two-person activity -- you and your child can ask questions about what you are watching, pause, replay, etc.
The best thing you can do for your kids is read to them constantly, in an interactive way From an early age. Ask them what things are in books they know. Ask them more questions about the world their books create.
Listen to the questions they ask. Never tell them to shut up when they are asking questions.
When you say "I don't know", make sure you control your tone. Your tone should say "I don't know the answer to that, but now that you mention it, I'm curious too!" instead of "your question isn't important enough to answer"
My 4 year old is an excellent reader, quite good at adding, counting by intervals, subtraction, etc. He likes to play "Angry Birds" on my wifes phone, although we limit that quite heavily. He knows how to login to my desktop machine, start up mspaint, start up wordpad, etc. He has some "Jumpstart" edu-games that he can play by himself.
We limit how much computer time he gets --- even when it is educational software.
I don't think anything (Besides normal TV) is intrinsically bad for kids in reasonable amounts. What parents should NOT do is use technology to babysit. What parents and kids benefit from is a variety of different experiences, all in reasonable duration and frequency.
A person doesn't have the right to drag me out of my house and shoot me. How do 10, 100, 1000, or 100,000,000 people acquire that right when as individuals they do not possess it?
They don't acquire that right; their actions never acquire a veneer of morality. They merely assert violence. And they are moral monsters.
The US is not foundationally a democracy, by the way. But I've explained this to you before. The nature of who and how the laws are made is basically irrelevant to the moral correctness of a society; there was originally some debate as to whether or not George Washington ought to be our first King as opposed to our first president.
By "half the population", I refer of course to the half that actually fund the federal government. The dependant half obviously never have anything pointed at them except fistfulls of my money. Those of us who provide may see the value in doing basic fundamental research and may already be funding it independantly of the amount that is currently coercively extracted.
That doesn't change the basic claim that I made: that currently, the US government pays for science via the veiled threat of breaking into homes and dragging people out, guns drawn.
Gary Johnson would be someone who would agree with much of what I say; he's a two-term governor and has climbed the highest mountain on most (if not all) the world's continents. I don't know who you think you know in "my" movement but I am happy with the physical and intellectual abilities of the few I'd consider my comrades.
For that matter, Ron Paul, now in his late 70s, challenged the other GOP "contenders" to a bike race through Houston in the summer heat. Nobody took him up on it.
In my conversations with you and others, a theme reoccurs. Nobody attempts to justify the morality of what they endorse, nobody questions the ethics of what I am suggesting. Everyone instead bitches about things I haven't discussed and may or may not agree with, and they posit that my stements represent an irrelevant marginal portion of society.
I don't mind being in the minority; I find that most of the progress of humanity has been the case of better ideas held in small numbers slowly overcoming poorer ideas held in larger numbers.
When you can explain to me why you think federal government funding of science is constitutional or ethical, I'd be happy to hear your explanation. But if history is any guide, the best you'll do is tell me that my ideas don't matter and I'm going to be stuck with yours whether I like it or not. And while you're probably correct, you still won't have answered the challenge, nor will you have successfully blanketed your naked opportunistic murderous lust for power with any veneer of morality at all.
Ron Paul appeals to those who have failed economics, civics, and government in high school. I have yet to see someone who has any form of formal education champion his crap.
I have a modest 4 year state-university education. I did not fail any classes in highschool.
If you think there is any value in standardized tests, I'll mention that I always rank in the top 1 or 2% in all of them I take. So by that problematic metric, I'm not the dumbest person in America.
I agree with everything Ron Paul stands for. While I happen to think he is right regarding the increased prosperity,and peace we'd see with his plans, that's not the primary reason for engaging in them.
I beleive his policies are simply more ethical than what anyone else in government is suggesting. Less compulsion of the individual via a violent state is a more moral basic premise than any other system that posits a more interventionist role for the state.
What Paul critics who ascribe to him all of the ills of the standard republican party often fail to realize is that Paul in his way is a much stronger advocate for the "little guy" than anyone currently in major office.
Paul rightly concludes that government all too often colludes with the "private" sector, and that instead of government working to rein in corporate malfeasance, government often encourages and rewards it.
The approach then is not to blindly distrust the private sector, as many on the American political left seem to, but to intelligently distrust the government, as Ron Paul does, and to view the intersection of public and private affairs with great scrutiny and concern, and to the extent possible, minimize it.
You may be right about the things you extrapolated about the OP and her/her organization, but there is a lot of mal-reaction to the idea of putting people in a slightly different context during an interview.
I think that's an inappropriate reaction, depending on the type of company you are in and the type of hiring decisions you make.
I have never hired someone based on their skills in any particular programming language. My view of software engineering is that the majority of the job, and what a candidate must really have to be successful, is figuring out how to decompose the problem and then figuring out how to express a solution as something a machine could go and do.
The language of either part of that is irrelevant, and at least for the positions I've looked for, I am less interested in someone who is a "great C programmer" and more interested in someone who is a "great programmer".
A big part of what makes you successful where I work is dealing with ambiguity. We really don't have a lot of use for people who are highly specialized but who wouldn't be productive outside of their specialization. Often, we hire them as vendors for a time limited basis.
I take kind of the opposite approach as the OP when I ask coding questions. I tell people I don't care what language they use, and that I'm not going to dock them for syntax errors, and if they'd like, pseudo-code is perfectly fine. But they had better be able to explain everything they wrote / invented when I ask them what it does.
This is valuable actually, as I want to hire people that make good decisions when there is autonomy and underspecification, and who can justify those decisions when challenged.
I also ask questions that are intentionally vague. People sometimes assume I am asking them a much harder problem than I actually am, and then struggle. If people don't get clarity on the problem, on expectations, and if they don't push back or ask bounding-type questions, they won't be successful at my company and they won't be successful in my interviews.
Finally, the oft-maligned brain teaser had a valid purpose but is basically toxic in modern interviewing fashion.
The purpose was to challenge people with problems they didn't already know how to solve and to observe their problem solving _approach_. The point wasn't the right answer (although that was nice), the point was to listen to the candidate talk through their problem solving approach. Can someone tackle a problem they've never seen before? How do they do it? If they get stuck, what is their strategy for getting unstuck? If they get a hint, can they make use of it?
It was admittedly artificial. So is everything. We've stopped using them because the stigma around them has overshadowed whatever utility they had.
Something I like doing much better is asking someone to write a solution to a problem my team recently faced. I have plenty of problems that should be solvable within 1 hour. Some of them I haven't actually coded up before; I've figured out roughly what to do in my head but haven't had a chance to write it up yet. Scaling the problem difficulty up or down based on how the candidate is doing is also a great technique for deciding how _much_ you like a candidate or how they can differentiate themselves from other people you've spoken with.
The problem with that is that bees are more important for commercial pollination then they are as honey producers. Most commercial bee keepers make their best money by renting bees to farmers who need pollination. California almonds come to mind. THe bees are trucked to where the pollination is required. The farmers pay for this because it is essential.
My wife is a backyard beekeeper. CCD is a big deal and nobody is sure what's causing it. And it does not affect just large honey operations.
You are waxing a bit too poetic about bees. There are all kinds of pathogens that bees don't "self manage" away: Varroa, tracheal mites, wax moths, not to mention mice, etc.
The interesting thing about hives that have had CCD strike is that _nothing_ wnats anything to do with the hives. We've had a colony get weak before and nearly immediatley , wasps and other bees were robbing the hives while the remaining bees tried in vain to defend it. The yellowjackets can smell the larvae and wreack havoc all over the hive.
Normally if a colony gets weak or otherwise leaves a hive, all kinds of critters move in and take the various parts that are interesting to them.
But apparently in CCD hives, that doesn't happen. It's like all of the normal pests/predators can tell something is wrong. It's a literal overnight ghost town. There will be hundreds of pounds of honey sitting in there and nobody wants it.
I don't think you want to have a conversation with me about how to pay for things -- since I'd be perfectly content to do away with government and coercive revenue entirely.
But that's not the world we live in; today we live in a world of people dickering over how to slice up an increasingly mythical budget. So that's the context I'm writing in.
Either our federal spending is constitutionally enumerated or it is up to the whims of representatives.
Either way, manned space flight has a stronger case for it than unmanned. We can justify manned flight much more easily than basic science research under the guise of the federal power over the navy. And if we instead say that the feds can do whatever the hell they want so long as it gets people re-elected, that too favors manned programs with glamour and fanfare and national attention.
You are talking about "benefit" in some sort of way that you aren't stating but merely assuming I agree with.
Putting more humans in space IS the benefit. It is not a means to some scientific end. It IS the end. If you think doing 100 unmanned missions is the best way to get more humans into space on a larger scale, by all means, I'm listening.
I'm not interested in space science ("hey, i wonder"). I'm interested in space engineering : ("here's the goal, now make it happen").
My stated objective is putting gobs of humans in space long term or even indefinitely. I'm sure a lot of science will get done along the way. But its not my goal.
People who postulate voluntary extinction of the species do not count as "thinkers" in my book.
I have no inclination to shackle anyone.
If you choose not to have descendants that's a fine choice for you. If your basic POV is that you have no interest whatsoever in the descandants of humanity in general, then you are entirely useless to me. Enjoy playing shuffleboard or whatever.
I don't expect to go into space in my lifetime. But I'd like my kids to have a better chance than I did.
I want humans to venture forth from Earth in every direction towards every destination. We can work towards that goal even if we have no idea when we'll acheive it. And doing so is worthwhile even when we have so many other challenges closer to home.
The fact of the matter is that no matter how much time and money we spend, we will not "cure" hunger, poverty, and war. These attributes are baked into the human condition. So long as man has free will, some men will choose destructive ends.
Ultimately, humanity must escape the cradle of Earth and venture forth, to provide assurance that we will not be snuffed out by destruction -- self-made or otherwise.
Finally, the exploration of frontiers unknown brings out the best our kind has to offer. It is why we exist. When we navel gaze we are not fulfilling our purpose. We are not leaving the legacy our descandants deserve.
The ENTIRE APOLLO PROGRAM cost 160 billion in ADJUSTED 2005 Dollars!!
That's all missions over the entire program, all support technologies that had to be invented for it, -- everything, the whole enchilada.
So, _every year_ we spend about 6 _APOLLO PROGRAMS_ blowing up people that don't even matter to us. We borrow 9 APOLLO PROGRAMS every _year_.
I recommend 1 "Apollo Program" as the new unit of measure of government stupidity. All things the federal government does should be measured in terms of Apollo programs and then the question should be asked, "was that as awesome as how many apollo programs it just cost us? No? then get rid of it"
I'm one of these irritating libertarian/anarchist types that hates government, but damn if I don't have a soft spot for the space program. If we're going to have a huge federal monster it might as well do things that pay dividends (unlike bombing foreign brown people -- or giving domestic brown people "free" iphones)
I don't know much about the modern difficultues within NASA. I'm sure that it is surrounded by a bunch of flagellate "private" corporations who bilk NASA and uncle sam for every penny they can and do substandard work. And I suspect it is filled internally with fiefdoms and micro-politicians who care much more about maintaing clout than working towards some overarching shared goal.
I want to understand what NASA was doing right in the 60s and re-institute that culture, environment, and most importantly, operational excellence. And I want to utilize the exiciting private work that has finally started happening in space exploration.
I don't care how it gets done, I want more American boots on foreign worlds instead of foreign battlefieds. If we need to call it the militarization of space to make it strictly constitutional, so be it. There was a different article about what to do with old satellites. Hell, blow them up. Develop our anti-satellite missile systems and space-based lasers to the point that we can safely dispose of satellites whenever cleanup would be most convenient. We can bill foreign entities to dispose of their stuff for them (at discount rates, since we're doing it to perfect our capabilities).
The point is, its embarassing that our national priorities seem to focus entirely on blowing up poor people abroad and creating a cycle of dependant poor people domestically.
Let's instead focus on growing the small fraction of people who still look towards the infinite skies and dream of what the human race can acheive.
(or the men, as the industry tends to move towards gender parity)
Firstly, like any profession, people have an idea of what is attractive about that profession, yet that represents some tiny fraction of people actually in that profession.
It's already been mentioned that everyone will want to "get into computers" to "make games", but that is a tiny fraction of people doing CS, CompE, and just plain programming (not to mention IT or SQA).
Similarly, people think they might want to be a lawyer and imagine themselves stunning juries and proving the marginalized innocent, or perhaps helping the downtrodden or just making an asston of money from rich criminals.
But the majority of legal work is mind numbingly stupid paperwork. Almost nothing goes to trial and even less goes to jury trial. People who want to be lawyers need to expect to be loading up Word templates for wills, real estate purchases, etc and filling in the details and then hitting print.
The majority of IT and programming folks do not even work for software pure-plays. You want to know where a lot of programmers work? Insurance companies. Banks. Large organizations that have legally required information management problems. Just like the majority of people who go into law do not spend their days recreating Perry Mason TV episodes, the majority of people who want to "do computers" do not make games and do not even work on something recognizable like Windows or iPhone. You're going to spend your time making underwriting software, or web portals that help your sales people or field agents or back office folks or whomever do their jobs more efficiently.
If you're really good, you have a lot more choices about what you work on and who you do it for. And unlike law and most other professions, computing work is still much more a meritocracy than a seniority or priviledge based system. So that's good.
The main thing I'd tell highschool folks is that if you have an inclination to tinker with things and are good at solving word problems, IT & software work is very safe, and tends to pay very well. And in 5-10 years when most people are over their sleeping around and getting drunk years, potential mates are going to be looking for people with stable jobs and above average financial health.
And so unlike the people currently popular and fashionable in highschool, 99% of whom will be irrelevant history in fewer than 4 years, people who figure out how to provide value in the modern information economy will be above-average candidates for potential mates, and will enjoy increased disposable income and have an almost zero chance of facing a permanant injury or disfigurement on the job*
So yeah, being a computer nerd now isn't the best way to find a mate, but in the future it pays off.
*(carpal tunnel notwisthanding, although you can mitigate that by pre-investing in ergonomic seating and input devices, which frankly you should be happy to pay for out of your own pocket if you are concerned about those risks and plan on being a professional in the industry)
I'm undoing my mod points to post this. I can't beleive nobody has responded to you.
I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget, it would appear the potential savings are enormous?
He does. _All the time_. If you knew anything about him or his plan, you'd know that.
He is fighting the entire republican establishment on this point, and has been his entire career. He has more anti-war credibility than ANYONE in national politics and has for 30 years.
The situation is this: our country is bankrupt. If we don't turn around its spending habits, we will come apart in a disorderly chaotic way.
Paul is making deep hard cuts beacuse they are needed. You'll note that unlike most GOPers, he's not going after entitlements that people are dependant upon with this plan. He's going after things that can be cut without directly and immediately impacting people.
These departments can either be eliminated in a controlled way, as Paul intends to do, or they will be eliminated when the entire global economy crashes down on top of the worthless USD.
If you want a controlled landing, with the possibility of it being a touch-and-go, challenge yourself to learn more about Paul and the principles he abides by.
It's a shame he's running as a republican. He left the republican party after 1988 when his personal friend and ally, Ronald Reagan, whom he helped get elected, showed that the republican establishment was simply incapable of doing the right things. Reagan had a lot of good ideas, and campaigned (and WON) on some of the same things in the Paul plan (like eliminating entire departments). But then he didn't do those things, and instead he got us into military conflicts and raised taxes and blew the debt up. To his credit, we didn't all die at the hands of the USSR.
Of course, when Paul ran as a libertarian because of his disillusionment with the ability of visionary republicans to get anything done, he got no ballot access, no media access, no nothing.
The game is rigged. Paul is fighting the media, the 2 party system, the GOP establishment, the Fed, the corportist media. He's against all of it and he is getting people to think about the things that their corporate and government masters don't want them to think about.
I'd like you to think about them as well.
Libertarianism is not for everyone, and it takes several years for many people to really come to grips with the ramifications of its principles. But if nothing else, it would be beneficial to all Americans to ask these questions more often:
"Is this really a left/right, binary argument paradigm?" "Is this really a job for the federal government? Based on what?" "Is this really something we need a law for? A federal law?" "If i had a chance to vote on that, I wouldn't have voted for it. Why is it a law? Is it even a law, or just some regulation somewhere? Who votes on regulations?"
Paul's contention isn't that the NOAA isn't a nice thing to have. His contention is that we won't have it -- or anything else -- if we continue to wreck the economy. And unlike the defense budget (which he wants to axe), the NOAA isn't plainly constitutional. And unlike the unconstitutional welfare and SS programs, the loss of the NOAA doesn't directly impact people's ability to eat.
Don't you suppose that weather.com and a few other places would largely fill the gaps left by a gutted NOAA? Maybe not everything. Maybe not as good. But the critical functions that really make a difference in peoples lives (and the bottom line) will be picked up whether the NOAA lives on or not.
It's always hard to cut something from a budget. But we HAVE to. And we have to cut A LOT.
Microsoft has been burned too many times in the past when there are "unauthorized" disclosures about company directions, plans, features, etc.
Suppose we talk about a feature or capability that ends up not shipping? That erodes enthusiasm for the product, it ruins customer relationships, it hurts the bottom line of partners and competitors alike.
There are other aspects of this, like marketing/advertising people who, say what you will about them, try to figure out how to manage information disclosures in such a way so as to generate maximum buzz, excitement, etc. They think about the right schedule, what to disclose when, where it should hit first, etc.
We have no steve jobs and attendant RDF; accordingly we have to pay people to think of how to make things like compilers and word processors sound exciting. That's an art in and of itself. And well intentioned employees who are excited about what they are working on or what the company is doing can throw a tremendous wrench in all of that.
The employees generally have lots of enthusiasm about what they're working on, and so it is incredibly frustrating for us to read stuff here (and elsewhere) that we can share some expertise on and address questions, concerns, falsehoods -- whatever. But we just have to wait until the bits are out there, and then the queued up blog posts and other stuff start coming in rapid succession.
I was at a university agriculture-department extension event this weekend. Basically a bunch of PhDs and grad students running a petting zoo and farm yard:)
But while I was there, I saw a _fantastic_ poster. It showed a bunch of animal rights actvists protesting, holding up signs, etc.
And the caption of the photo was roughly, "Thanks to us [people doing animal & drug science], you'll live to protest an average of 20.8 years longer"
I was talking with a friend a while back about the kinds of things you could do to NPCs in urban-setting sandbox games. The key thing would be to make them persistent actors with relations to other NPCs in the world.
In games like GTA4 or the Saints Row games, there are NPC "city dwellers" all over the place, but they "fade in" and "fade out" of view as you move around the city. But what if they didn't? What if each NPC was a persistent entity and had a routine (i.e. a9-5 job, getting lunch in the resturant district, going to see a movie after work, etc).
Furthermore, waht if NPCs had relationships to each other (is a custoemr of, is a friend of, is married to, etc).
Imagine then, how that might change things when you decide to play Urban Sniper.
Instead of _all_ people running and screaming, there'd be a variety of behaviors. The girlfriend/boyfriend would stay with the victim, and freak out.. you know those movies of people screaming and crying and coming unglued in the face of tragedy? Have the friend/relative/significant other who was with the person you just offed start doing that.
What about "good samaritan" types who will be near by? Some will run over and try to help, or to pull the body to safety. Some will try and find out where you are; they'll call the cops; they'll point you out to cops when they arrive.
Maybe there are people doing concealed carry in the crowd? Maybe someone sees you running around with a weapon in hand and they just shoot your dumbass pre-emptively?
I think games where you play an up-and-coming criminal would be more interesting if the riskyness of your behavior were more in line with reality.
I remember the first time I played GTA3, I was stopping at stop lights until a friend told me not to. There are cops everywhere, and they chase you. Why don't they chase you when you blow through intersections at 90mph? Why do they give up after 2 blocks if they _do_ chase you?
I cannot tell you how long i have "survived" in police standoffs in these games. It gets boring eventually. The way that works in the real world is that there is a police sniper 75 yds away with a bolt action rifle and he can hit a dime sized target at that distance _every time_. If you so much as show your head in a window, you are over, immediately, and forever.
Would that make police standoffs in game more fun? I doubt it. But there must be some "middle ground" between that and the current situation, where you can go hide in a parking garage with a rifle and a rocket launcher and just pile up the bodies and vehicles and they never get any smarter; they never get you.
I live in North Dakota, which has the highest air quality in the united states. Despite the fact that we love coal and oil here.
As a practical matter, our ability to detect minute levels of contaminants increases every year. People do not understand very small or very large numbers. I am sure you can find irradiated substances here in my own state from every nuclear test done anywhere above ground.
But I don't care _at all_, because the answer to pollution is _dilution_.
It's fine to say that contaminants released into the atmosphere elsehwere are _detectable_. It's overreaching to the point of uselessness to say that they are categorically impactful.
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I'm not confusing anything.
Let's pick a regulation you mentioned: being required to post the price of gas outside a gas station.
Suppose I'm a gas station owner, and I decide I don't want to follow this regulation?
What happens to me?
Show me an example of government regulation not backed up by the threat of violence.
Actually, since at least Ayn Rand, most free marketers beleive that free markets are the only MORAL arrangement of human society. One complaint she had about republicans is that they never articulated the ethical case for free enterprise, only the utilitarian efficiency argument. That style of thought suggests that if someone can convince you some other arrangment might have a better number here or there, then it is worth trying.
Infact, the morality argument is the correct defense of the unregulated free market. The arrangement(s) which globally minimize the coercion of individual actors within it are the objectively morally superior arrangement(s).
So far, this is free enterprise, aka capitalism.
Now then, as far as the rest of your post: you're wrong. Libetarians and free market actors do not posit any such baloney about all actors being ethical. If the market didn't recognize a need to deal violence to bad actors, citizens wouldn't universally agree they wanted to pay for cops, and private security firms would not exist. Infact, people value their safety and security and are willing to pay to try and retain it.
The dodos who beleive somehow in the goodness of humans are squarely the statists, who beleive that positions of arbitrary power and priviledge within government can be created, from the most feared autocrat to the most menial licensing inspector.. and that somehow only a superior stock of uncorruptible, perfectly moral human will occupy these positinos of power and priviledge.
It is precisely because libertarians and anarchists reject that some have "legitimate" violent coercive power over others and will inevitably abuse that power because of human frailty that opponents of large government seek to minimize government power or eliminate it entirely.
The error in your thinking is to presume that a monopoly of folks toting guns is the only way to solve legitimate societal concerns like the competency of physicians or the trustworthyness of bridges. Which is quite ridiculous for two reasons.
1) firstly, your statist gun-orgy of government thugs guarantees nothing. kids still die from medical incompetence and bridges still collapse.
2) providing these services via government costs money, and money has to be extracted from people via taxation, and people generally hate taxation. politicians who continually spend tax dollars on things _nobody_ in society would be willing to pay for do not tend to last long. Yet the fact that we _have_ bridge inspectors and occupational licensure suggests that some, perhaps even a large portion of people, are willing to pay for such things.
The question then is, setting the efficiency arguments aside for a moment: are the gains in freedom worth the hypothetical loss in "Efficiency" that would result when replacing monopoly government services with competing private implementations?
My claim is that, in general; yes. I'm willing to acccept a lower standard of living if it means more absolute freedom. Am I willing to accept every possible tuple of trading off more of one for less than the other? Of course not.
Naturally, I _do_ actually think that in general, eliminating government results in higher utilitarian efficiencies and better economic outcomes for all participants. But that isn't the appropriate defense of freedom: freedom is its own moral end, and should be defended as such.
actually, I think you're quite wrong.
Everything in life is a cost/benefit tradeoff. The notion of building perfect software "at any cost" is similar to how Rolls Royce thought about building cars. Making something the absolute best possible it can be is a praiseworthy ideology, but there is obviously an associated cost for doing so.
The world is fortuneate that the Henry Ford's of the world _also_ got into the car business, and decided NOT to compete with Rolls Royce on quality, functionality, etc.
Supposing that there are two possible software development methodologies, which differ in cost, time to market, and objective quality upon release, it is of course not a foregone conclusion that the higher quality methodology is the one which should be chosen.
The target customer in question may prefer the lower-quality item sooner and for less money.
Everything done at a business needs to have a business case. That includes improving quality.
People who embark on improving software quality who categorically reject doing a cost/benefit analysis tend to not ship.
Think of all of the software products you use. All of them have bugs that the team decided to not fix. They may fix them in future, they may never fix them at all. They may make modifications to their engineering to attempt to prevent these bugs or find them earlier, or they may not.
environmentalism has a monetary and resource cost.
A "good envirohnment" is a luxury good. It exists somewhere on the taxonomy of needs.
http://mises.org/daily/5586/Environmental-Protection-Is-a-Consumption-Good
Humans must consume resources to progress. The typical malthusan approach to statist environmentalism is that we must STOP consuming resources now to maintain our current (or usually, a greatly reduced) standard of existance.
A different argument is that we must consume the right resources as fast as possible in the right way, so that we, for instance, move past fossil fuels, or that we can increase agricultural yeilds consistently, or so that we can mass produce medicines.
The fact of the matter is that different socities -- differentiated primarily by wealth and industrial sophistication -- will be impacted differently by whatever climactic changes and calamities may occur over the future.
We cannot be sure what will happen to whom and when.
We _can_ be sure of one thing: a society that has greatly increased its wealth and standard of living, via the correct social attitudes and practices, will be in a much better position to deal with (and hopefully avoid!) whatever comes than one which is stuck in a counter-productive regressive past.
I contend that rather than freeze or reverse the growth in the worlds standard of living, we accelerate it and distribute it far and wide, so that we have more capable minds (because IMO, intelligence is distributed vastly across the world, but access to making a difference is NOT) in a position to tackle problems.
I want a nice environment. And I'm willing to pay for it. But I want to be choosy about how I spend my dollars and what I'll be getting. I suspect if you polled the majority of Americans, they'd accept a 1ft sea level rise in 100 years if it meant not having a calamitous impact on their way of life, way of government, etc.
This is not morally problematic unless you consider the impact on impoverished coastal societies. And my contention is that as a planet, we are more likely to raise the standard of living of ALL humans in 100 years than we are to turn back the clock of world progress. We may acheive the latter, but it will probably coincide with vastly more human suffering than if we just let some nations flood - even assuming we did nothing to help those nations progress in the interim.
Progress takes resources. But progress leads to more efficient usage of resources. We are not suffering under the hardship of "Peak Whale", even though at one time in our history the number of remaining whales left put a dire forecast on our abilities to create heat and light. Mankind adapted and moved forward.
We can adapt and move forward, so long as we live in socities that allow for the creation of wealth and the execution of great ideas.
I am not suggesting the USA of 2011 is the right place to foster the innovation (primarily in attitudes, btw) we need to lift the entire planet out of destitution, but it certainly could be.
Your internet stalking powers are weak, grasshopper.
I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid. I mean, it didn't kill me or anything like that. But if I think about it, it was mostly about passing time.
The first few years of your child's life are the most critical for determining what kind of person they will be. Spend them wisely.
On the occasions where my 4 year old is somewhere that he watches TV, the way he looks and acts while doing it just makes my heart sink.
He doesn't move. He is completely fixated on the screen. He needs me to make several attempts before his attention is diverted from the screen. He can look away breifly to talk to you but is trying to glance back at the screen.
We have no TV service and no occasion for him to watch TV. We do have a small handful of movies we let him watch occasionally.
One thing that he enjoys and that we let him do (usually one or two days a week) is watch the "Mighty Machines" movies, some of which you can stream off netflix. These are at least modestly interesting, as he is very interested in machines of all types.
Another thing we do together is watch youtube videos of things hes interested in. Whether its trains or rockets or consturction equipment or car racing -- theres always something your child is interested in and usually a youtube video of it. But that is a two-person activity -- you and your child can ask questions about what you are watching, pause, replay, etc.
The best thing you can do for your kids is read to them constantly, in an interactive way From an early age. Ask them what things are in books they know. Ask them more questions about the world their books create.
Listen to the questions they ask. Never tell them to shut up when they are asking questions.
When you say "I don't know", make sure you control your tone. Your tone should say "I don't know the answer to that, but now that you mention it, I'm curious too!" instead of "your question isn't important enough to answer"
My 4 year old is an excellent reader, quite good at adding, counting by intervals, subtraction, etc. He likes to play "Angry Birds" on my wifes phone, although we limit that quite heavily. He knows how to login to my desktop machine, start up mspaint, start up wordpad, etc. He has some "Jumpstart" edu-games that he can play by himself.
We limit how much computer time he gets --- even when it is educational software.
I don't think anything (Besides normal TV) is intrinsically bad for kids in reasonable amounts. What parents should NOT do is use technology to babysit. What parents and kids benefit from is a variety of different experiences, all in reasonable duration and frequency.
Again, you dodge a moral defense of your position, this time attempting to avoid it with humor.
Your ideas rest on the premise that you and your friends get to murder me if I don't do what you say.
Please explain why this is ethical.
You and I have been over this before.
A person doesn't have the right to drag me out of my house and shoot me. How do 10, 100, 1000, or 100,000,000 people acquire that right when as individuals they do not possess it?
They don't acquire that right; their actions never acquire a veneer of morality. They merely assert violence. And they are moral monsters.
The US is not foundationally a democracy, by the way. But I've explained this to you before. The nature of who and how the laws are made is basically irrelevant to the moral correctness of a society; there was originally some debate as to whether or not George Washington ought to be our first King as opposed to our first president.
By "half the population", I refer of course to the half that actually fund the federal government. The dependant half obviously never have anything pointed at them except fistfulls of my money. Those of us who provide may see the value in doing basic fundamental research and may already be funding it independantly of the amount that is currently coercively extracted.
That doesn't change the basic claim that I made: that currently, the US government pays for science via the veiled threat of breaking into homes and dragging people out, guns drawn.
Gary Johnson would be someone who would agree with much of what I say; he's a two-term governor and has climbed the highest mountain on most (if not all) the world's continents. I don't know who you think you know in "my" movement but I am happy with the physical and intellectual abilities of the few I'd consider my comrades.
For that matter, Ron Paul, now in his late 70s, challenged the other GOP "contenders" to a bike race through Houston in the summer heat. Nobody took him up on it.
In my conversations with you and others, a theme reoccurs. Nobody attempts to justify the morality of what they endorse, nobody questions the ethics of what I am suggesting. Everyone instead bitches about things I haven't discussed and may or may not agree with, and they posit that my stements represent an irrelevant marginal portion of society.
I don't mind being in the minority; I find that most of the progress of humanity has been the case of better ideas held in small numbers slowly overcoming poorer ideas held in larger numbers.
When you can explain to me why you think federal government funding of science is constitutional or ethical, I'd be happy to hear your explanation. But if history is any guide, the best you'll do is tell me that my ideas don't matter and I'm going to be stuck with yours whether I like it or not. And while you're probably correct, you still won't have answered the challenge, nor will you have successfully blanketed your naked opportunistic murderous lust for power with any veneer of morality at all.
Your move.
I have a modest 4 year state-university education. I did not fail any classes in highschool.
If you think there is any value in standardized tests, I'll mention that I always rank in the top 1 or 2% in all of them I take. So by that problematic metric, I'm not the dumbest person in America.
I agree with everything Ron Paul stands for. While I happen to think he is right regarding the increased prosperity,and peace we'd see with his plans, that's not the primary reason for engaging in them.
I beleive his policies are simply more ethical than what anyone else in government is suggesting. Less compulsion of the individual via a violent state is a more moral basic premise than any other system that posits a more interventionist role for the state.
What Paul critics who ascribe to him all of the ills of the standard republican party often fail to realize is that Paul in his way is a much stronger advocate for the "little guy" than anyone currently in major office.
Paul rightly concludes that government all too often colludes with the "private" sector, and that instead of government working to rein in corporate malfeasance, government often encourages and rewards it.
The approach then is not to blindly distrust the private sector, as many on the American political left seem to, but to intelligently distrust the government, as Ron Paul does, and to view the intersection of public and private affairs with great scrutiny and concern, and to the extent possible, minimize it.
So if I threaten to drag you out of your house and throw you in jail if you don't fund my pet project, I'm crowdsourcing?
For every single act of government -- without fail -- there is a gun around a corner waiting to remind you why you do what government asks.
Holding half the population at gunpoint to get science done may be a historically effective approach, but it is hardly a harmless or moral one.
You may be right about the things you extrapolated about the OP and her/her organization, but there is a lot of mal-reaction to the idea of putting people in a slightly different context during an interview.
I think that's an inappropriate reaction, depending on the type of company you are in and the type of hiring decisions you make.
I have never hired someone based on their skills in any particular programming language. My view of software engineering is that the majority of the job, and what a candidate must really have to be successful, is figuring out how to decompose the problem and then figuring out how to express a solution as something a machine could go and do.
The language of either part of that is irrelevant, and at least for the positions I've looked for, I am less interested in someone who is a "great C programmer" and more interested in someone who is a "great programmer".
A big part of what makes you successful where I work is dealing with ambiguity. We really don't have a lot of use for people who are highly specialized but who wouldn't be productive outside of their specialization. Often, we hire them as vendors for a time limited basis.
I take kind of the opposite approach as the OP when I ask coding questions. I tell people I don't care what language they use, and that I'm not going to dock them for syntax errors, and if they'd like, pseudo-code is perfectly fine. But they had better be able to explain everything they wrote / invented when I ask them what it does.
This is valuable actually, as I want to hire people that make good decisions when there is autonomy and underspecification, and who can justify those decisions when challenged.
I also ask questions that are intentionally vague. People sometimes assume I am asking them a much harder problem than I actually am, and then struggle. If people don't get clarity on the problem, on expectations, and if they don't push back or ask bounding-type questions, they won't be successful at my company and they won't be successful in my interviews.
Finally, the oft-maligned brain teaser had a valid purpose but is basically toxic in modern interviewing fashion.
The purpose was to challenge people with problems they didn't already know how to solve and to observe their problem solving _approach_. The point wasn't the right answer (although that was nice), the point was to listen to the candidate talk through their problem solving approach. Can someone tackle a problem they've never seen before? How do they do it? If they get stuck, what is their strategy for getting unstuck? If they get a hint, can they make use of it?
It was admittedly artificial. So is everything. We've stopped using them because the stigma around them has overshadowed whatever utility they had.
Something I like doing much better is asking someone to write a solution to a problem my team recently faced. I have plenty of problems that should be solvable within 1 hour. Some of them I haven't actually coded up before; I've figured out roughly what to do in my head but haven't had a chance to write it up yet. Scaling the problem difficulty up or down based on how the candidate is doing is also a great technique for deciding how _much_ you like a candidate or how they can differentiate themselves from other people you've spoken with.
The problem with that is that bees are more important for commercial pollination then they are as honey producers. Most commercial bee keepers make their best money by renting bees to farmers who need pollination. California almonds come to mind. THe bees are trucked to where the pollination is required. The farmers pay for this because it is essential.
My wife is a backyard beekeeper. CCD is a big deal and nobody is sure what's causing it. And it does not affect just large honey operations.
You are waxing a bit too poetic about bees. There are all kinds of pathogens that bees don't "self manage" away: Varroa, tracheal mites, wax moths, not to mention mice, etc.
The interesting thing about hives that have had CCD strike is that _nothing_ wnats anything to do with the hives. We've had a colony get weak before and nearly immediatley , wasps and other bees were robbing the hives while the remaining bees tried in vain to defend it. The yellowjackets can smell the larvae and wreack havoc all over the hive.
Normally if a colony gets weak or otherwise leaves a hive, all kinds of critters move in and take the various parts that are interesting to them.
But apparently in CCD hives, that doesn't happen. It's like all of the normal pests/predators can tell something is wrong. It's a literal overnight ghost town. There will be hundreds of pounds of honey sitting in there and nobody wants it.
I don't think you want to have a conversation with me about how to pay for things -- since I'd be perfectly content to do away with government and coercive revenue entirely.
But that's not the world we live in; today we live in a world of people dickering over how to slice up an increasingly mythical budget. So that's the context I'm writing in.
Either our federal spending is constitutionally enumerated or it is up to the whims of representatives.
Either way, manned space flight has a stronger case for it than unmanned. We can justify manned flight much more easily than basic science research under the guise of the federal power over the navy. And if we instead say that the feds can do whatever the hell they want so long as it gets people re-elected, that too favors manned programs with glamour and fanfare and national attention.
You are talking about "benefit" in some sort of way that you aren't stating but merely assuming I agree with.
Putting more humans in space IS the benefit. It is not a means to some scientific end. It IS the end. If you think doing 100 unmanned missions is the best way to get more humans into space on a larger scale, by all means, I'm listening.
I'm not interested in space science ("hey, i wonder"). I'm interested in space engineering : ("here's the goal, now make it happen").
My stated objective is putting gobs of humans in space long term or even indefinitely. I'm sure a lot of science will get done along the way. But its not my goal.
People who postulate voluntary extinction of the species do not count as "thinkers" in my book.
I have no inclination to shackle anyone.
If you choose not to have descendants that's a fine choice for you. If your basic POV is that you have no interest whatsoever in the descandants of humanity in general, then you are entirely useless to me. Enjoy playing shuffleboard or whatever.
Somebody has to be the first.
I don't expect to go into space in my lifetime. But I'd like my kids to have a better chance than I did.
I want humans to venture forth from Earth in every direction towards every destination. We can work towards that goal even if we have no idea when we'll acheive it. And doing so is worthwhile even when we have so many other challenges closer to home.
The fact of the matter is that no matter how much time and money we spend, we will not "cure" hunger, poverty, and war. These attributes are baked into the human condition. So long as man has free will, some men will choose destructive ends.
Ultimately, humanity must escape the cradle of Earth and venture forth, to provide assurance that we will not be snuffed out by destruction -- self-made or otherwise.
Finally, the exploration of frontiers unknown brings out the best our kind has to offer. It is why we exist. When we navel gaze we are not fulfilling our purpose. We are not leaving the legacy our descandants deserve.
Here here!
The ENTIRE APOLLO PROGRAM cost 160 billion in ADJUSTED 2005 Dollars!!
That's all missions over the entire program, all support technologies that had to be invented for it, -- everything, the whole enchilada.
So, _every year_ we spend about 6 _APOLLO PROGRAMS_ blowing up people that don't even matter to us. We borrow 9 APOLLO PROGRAMS every _year_.
I recommend 1 "Apollo Program" as the new unit of measure of government stupidity. All things the federal government does should be measured in terms of Apollo programs and then the question should be asked, "was that as awesome as how many apollo programs it just cost us? No? then get rid of it"
I'm one of these irritating libertarian/anarchist types that hates government, but damn if I don't have a soft spot for the space program. If we're going to have a huge federal monster it might as well do things that pay dividends (unlike bombing foreign brown people -- or giving domestic brown people "free" iphones)
I don't know much about the modern difficultues within NASA. I'm sure that it is surrounded by a bunch of flagellate "private" corporations who bilk NASA and uncle sam for every penny they can and do substandard work. And I suspect it is filled internally with fiefdoms and micro-politicians who care much more about maintaing clout than working towards some overarching shared goal.
I want to understand what NASA was doing right in the 60s and re-institute that culture, environment, and most importantly, operational excellence. And I want to utilize the exiciting private work that has finally started happening in space exploration.
I don't care how it gets done, I want more American boots on foreign worlds instead of foreign battlefieds. If we need to call it the militarization of space to make it strictly constitutional, so be it. There was a different article about what to do with old satellites. Hell, blow them up. Develop our anti-satellite missile systems and space-based lasers to the point that we can safely dispose of satellites whenever cleanup would be most convenient. We can bill foreign entities to dispose of their stuff for them (at discount rates, since we're doing it to perfect our capabilities).
The point is, its embarassing that our national priorities seem to focus entirely on blowing up poor people abroad and creating a cycle of dependant poor people domestically.
Let's instead focus on growing the small fraction of people who still look towards the infinite skies and dream of what the human race can acheive.
(or the men, as the industry tends to move towards gender parity)
Firstly, like any profession, people have an idea of what is attractive about that profession, yet that represents some tiny fraction of people actually in that profession.
It's already been mentioned that everyone will want to "get into computers" to "make games", but that is a tiny fraction of people doing CS, CompE, and just plain programming (not to mention IT or SQA).
Similarly, people think they might want to be a lawyer and imagine themselves stunning juries and proving the marginalized innocent, or perhaps helping the downtrodden or just making an asston of money from rich criminals.
But the majority of legal work is mind numbingly stupid paperwork. Almost nothing goes to trial and even less goes to jury trial. People who want to be lawyers need to expect to be loading up Word templates for wills, real estate purchases, etc and filling in the details and then hitting print.
The majority of IT and programming folks do not even work for software pure-plays. You want to know where a lot of programmers work? Insurance companies. Banks. Large organizations that have legally required information management problems. Just like the majority of people who go into law do not spend their days recreating Perry Mason TV episodes, the majority of people who want to "do computers" do not make games and do not even work on something recognizable like Windows or iPhone. You're going to spend your time making underwriting software, or web portals that help your sales people or field agents or back office folks or whomever do their jobs more efficiently.
If you're really good, you have a lot more choices about what you work on and who you do it for. And unlike law and most other professions, computing work is still much more a meritocracy than a seniority or priviledge based system. So that's good.
The main thing I'd tell highschool folks is that if you have an inclination to tinker with things and are good at solving word problems, IT & software work is very safe, and tends to pay very well. And in 5-10 years when most people are over their sleeping around and getting drunk years, potential mates are going to be looking for people with stable jobs and above average financial health.
And so unlike the people currently popular and fashionable in highschool, 99% of whom will be irrelevant history in fewer than 4 years, people who figure out how to provide value in the modern information economy will be above-average candidates for potential mates, and will enjoy increased disposable income and have an almost zero chance of facing a permanant injury or disfigurement on the job*
So yeah, being a computer nerd now isn't the best way to find a mate, but in the future it pays off.
*(carpal tunnel notwisthanding, although you can mitigate that by pre-investing in ergonomic seating and input devices, which frankly you should be happy to pay for out of your own pocket if you are concerned about those risks and plan on being a professional in the industry)
I'm undoing my mod points to post this. I can't beleive nobody has responded to you.
He does. _All the time_. If you knew anything about him or his plan, you'd know that.
He is fighting the entire republican establishment on this point, and has been his entire career. He has more anti-war credibility than ANYONE in national politics and has for 30 years.
The situation is this: our country is bankrupt. If we don't turn around its spending habits, we will come apart in a disorderly chaotic way.
Paul is making deep hard cuts beacuse they are needed. You'll note that unlike most GOPers, he's not going after entitlements that people are dependant upon with this plan. He's going after things that can be cut without directly and immediately impacting people.
These departments can either be eliminated in a controlled way, as Paul intends to do, or they will be eliminated when the entire global economy crashes down on top of the worthless USD.
If you want a controlled landing, with the possibility of it being a touch-and-go, challenge yourself to learn more about Paul and the principles he abides by.
It's a shame he's running as a republican. He left the republican party after 1988 when his personal friend and ally, Ronald Reagan, whom he helped get elected, showed that the republican establishment was simply incapable of doing the right things. Reagan had a lot of good ideas, and campaigned (and WON) on some of the same things in the Paul plan (like eliminating entire departments). But then he didn't do those things, and instead he got us into military conflicts and raised taxes and blew the debt up. To his credit, we didn't all die at the hands of the USSR.
Of course, when Paul ran as a libertarian because of his disillusionment with the ability of visionary republicans to get anything done, he got no ballot access, no media access, no nothing.
The game is rigged. Paul is fighting the media, the 2 party system, the GOP establishment, the Fed, the corportist media. He's against all of it and he is getting people to think about the things that their corporate and government masters don't want them to think about.
I'd like you to think about them as well.
Libertarianism is not for everyone, and it takes several years for many people to really come to grips with the ramifications of its principles. But if nothing else, it would be beneficial to all Americans to ask these questions more often:
"Is this really a left/right, binary argument paradigm?"
"Is this really a job for the federal government? Based on what?"
"Is this really something we need a law for? A federal law?"
"If i had a chance to vote on that, I wouldn't have voted for it. Why is it a law? Is it even a law, or just some regulation somewhere? Who votes on regulations?"
Paul's contention isn't that the NOAA isn't a nice thing to have. His contention is that we won't have it -- or anything else -- if we continue to wreck the economy. And unlike the defense budget (which he wants to axe), the NOAA isn't plainly constitutional. And unlike the unconstitutional welfare and SS programs, the loss of the NOAA doesn't directly impact people's ability to eat.
Don't you suppose that weather.com and a few other places would largely fill the gaps left by a gutted NOAA? Maybe not everything. Maybe not as good. But the critical functions that really make a difference in peoples lives (and the bottom line) will be picked up whether the NOAA lives on or not.
It's always hard to cut something from a budget. But we HAVE to. And we have to cut A LOT.
Microsoft has been burned too many times in the past when there are "unauthorized" disclosures about company directions, plans, features, etc.
Suppose we talk about a feature or capability that ends up not shipping? That erodes enthusiasm for the product, it ruins customer relationships, it hurts the bottom line of partners and competitors alike.
There are other aspects of this, like marketing/advertising people who, say what you will about them, try to figure out how to manage information disclosures in such a way so as to generate maximum buzz, excitement, etc. They think about the right schedule, what to disclose when, where it should hit first, etc.
We have no steve jobs and attendant RDF; accordingly we have to pay people to think of how to make things like compilers and word processors sound exciting. That's an art in and of itself. And well intentioned employees who are excited about what they are working on or what the company is doing can throw a tremendous wrench in all of that.
The employees generally have lots of enthusiasm about what they're working on, and so it is incredibly frustrating for us to read stuff here (and elsewhere) that we can share some expertise on and address questions, concerns, falsehoods -- whatever. But we just have to wait until the bits are out there, and then the queued up blog posts and other stuff start coming in rapid succession.
I was at a university agriculture-department extension event this weekend. Basically a bunch of PhDs and grad students running a petting zoo and farm yard :)
But while I was there, I saw a _fantastic_ poster. It showed a bunch of animal rights actvists protesting, holding up signs, etc.
And the caption of the photo was roughly, "Thanks to us [people doing animal & drug science], you'll live to protest an average of 20.8 years longer"
I was talking with a friend a while back about the kinds of things you could do to NPCs in urban-setting sandbox games. The key thing would be to make them persistent actors with relations to other NPCs in the world.
In games like GTA4 or the Saints Row games, there are NPC "city dwellers" all over the place, but they "fade in" and "fade out" of view as you move around the city. But what if they didn't? What if each NPC was a persistent entity and had a routine (i.e. a9-5 job, getting lunch in the resturant district, going to see a movie after work, etc).
Furthermore, waht if NPCs had relationships to each other (is a custoemr of, is a friend of, is married to, etc).
Imagine then, how that might change things when you decide to play Urban Sniper.
Instead of _all_ people running and screaming, there'd be a variety of behaviors. The girlfriend/boyfriend would stay with the victim, and freak out.. you know those movies of people screaming and crying and coming unglued in the face of tragedy? Have the friend/relative/significant other who was with the person you just offed start doing that.
What about "good samaritan" types who will be near by? Some will run over and try to help, or to pull the body to safety. Some will try and find out where you are; they'll call the cops; they'll point you out to cops when they arrive.
Maybe there are people doing concealed carry in the crowd? Maybe someone sees you running around with a weapon in hand and they just shoot your dumbass pre-emptively?
I think games where you play an up-and-coming criminal would be more interesting if the riskyness of your behavior were more in line with reality.
I remember the first time I played GTA3, I was stopping at stop lights until a friend told me not to. There are cops everywhere, and they chase you. Why don't they chase you when you blow through intersections at 90mph? Why do they give up after 2 blocks if they _do_ chase you?
I cannot tell you how long i have "survived" in police standoffs in these games. It gets boring eventually. The way that works in the real world is that there is a police sniper 75 yds away with a bolt action rifle and he can hit a dime sized target at that distance _every time_. If you so much as show your head in a window, you are over, immediately, and forever.
Would that make police standoffs in game more fun? I doubt it. But there must be some "middle ground" between that and the current situation, where you can go hide in a parking garage with a rifle and a rocket launcher and just pile up the bodies and vehicles and they never get any smarter; they never get you.
I live in North Dakota, which has the highest air quality in the united states. Despite the fact that we love coal and oil here.
As a practical matter, our ability to detect minute levels of contaminants increases every year. People do not understand very small or very large numbers. I am sure you can find irradiated substances here in my own state from every nuclear test done anywhere above ground.
But I don't care _at all_, because the answer to pollution is _dilution_.
It's fine to say that contaminants released into the atmosphere elsehwere are _detectable_. It's overreaching to the point of uselessness to say that they are categorically impactful.