I concede that the aggregate IMR in the US is surprisingly high, and then i discuss why that is (Based on the findings in the oft-cited research). I further explain that for premature babies, the US IMR is one of the best in the world.
I lay all of this out in my post.
I am very worried that you feel comfortable arguing with people based on pushing aggregate statistics from other sources when you have not displayed the ability to comprehend what you have read.
Or is this a reflection on healthcare differences in the UK vs the USA?
I had _twins_ born at 26 weeks gestation in April. THe claim that the UK doctors had never seen a baby born this early could only be true if one of the following were also true
- it was a very small hospital and they didn't have much prematurity experience - the stated age is incorrect. when you use relative gestational ages (i.e. 14 weeks early), people disagree on what the "end goal" is.. is it 40 weeks? 38 weeks? 37 weeks? SInce people count weeks from different starting points (start of menstrual cycle, post fertilization, etc), the total number of gestational weeks can be thought of differently. So if the age was "37 weeks minus 14 weeks, i.e. 23 weeks" then that is still an EARLY baby, but not the earliest recorded surviving baby (that honor is currently 21 weeks) - the quality of NICU care in the UK is so poor that they really don't see surviving babies this early
My wife's water broke at 24 weeks; the doctor told us at that time that if the kids were to be born immediately they'd have about a 20% chance of living and not having long term disabilities.
They were able to prevent labor for about 2 weeks, such that my children were born at 26 weeks, weighing right around 2 lbs each (2x the weight of the baby in the article.. who is statistically undersized for 26 weeks gestation)
I wonder if this is a reflection on differing medical care in various countries. The oft-cited report about infant mortality in the US leaves out some important factors -- namely that socio-economic diversity in the US, and racial heterogenoy correlate with and explain some of our increased infant mortality. But furthermore, that nearly 1 out of 8 babies in the US are born prematurely, wich is MUCH higher than developed european nations.
Finally, we measure mortality much differently here than do most other places. If the baby in this story had died, it would have counted as mortality here, but would not have counted as infant mortality in many developed nations.
Aggregately, our different demographics and our higher incidence of prematurity, combined with our more broad definition of mortality skew the infant mortality higher than some nations we rank against.
Yet the most interesting fact is that premature babies do better in the USA than anywhere else (with perhaps 1-2 scandavian countries ranking marginally better).
IOW, we have lots of premature babies, and they have a beter shot of surviving here than they do anywhere else.
I happen to live in a smallish city -- around 100k people, and we have two big hospitals, one of which has a helicopter.
Yet even in this small town in a remote part of the country, my twins, born at 26 weeks (allegedly the same age as the baby in this story) lived and came home after 100 days of NICU stay.
Incidentally, there was no need to use sandwhich bags to keep my kids alive.
A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about the US medical system. What I know is that 30 years ago, my children would have died, but in 2010, even in remote North Dakota, they lived. And statistically, they are living more and more often here.
Is this really what parents in the UK should expect if they go into pre-term labor? And if so, is that the kind of medical service we want here in the USA? With sandwhich bags?
You might want it. However, I'm glad my wife went into early labor in the US.
Thanks for posting this. The Colorado paper is the key thing to read.
Once I read that tor chose nodes according to an algorithm, and that the data used by that algorithm was not verified, and that this was done in the name of "performance", I could see where things were going in that paper. It was a "doh!" moment to be sure.
It strikes me that for the things I'd want to use tor for, _really_ important things (i.e. not media piracy), high bandwidth and low latency are both unimportant. Privacy is more important. I don't want to download a dvd over tor, I want to send a short encrypted email to my conspirators.
For such an application, I'd prefer onion routing that was buried in a covert channel.. something that didn't even look like a message at all. Something where the routing and the noise were both random, and the payload was simply lost in the mix. A factor of 10:1 or even 100:1 "Garbage" to "payload" would be fine for the average email or image.
I'm not sure my wife could name any of the programming languages that I have used in my career. And that doesn't bother me.
I don't need my partner to be interested in the specifics of my work. When I am upset or frustrated about work, or want to talk about what I did that day, generalities are fine, because honestly, unless you were on the same project I was on, it wouldn't make much sense no matter what level of vocabulary you had.
I've had the experience of dating a girl very seriously who was beautiful, highly intelligent, and an excellent system administrator. And our shared language and work/hobby interests did nothing to smooth over the rocky spots in our relationship, and while initially it made me much more attracted to her, in retrospect it was perhaps novelty more than anything else. IOW, her qualities as a person were considerably more important than her "job" as a sysadmin or her interests as "a geek", and our ideology and personality clashes eventually overshadowed our mutual geekyness.
_My_ advice to women who are interested in geeky guys is
1) be accessible. Women _baffle_ men, and geeks are used to being able to come up with valid mental models to predict the behavior of complex things. But this is regularly less successful than we would like when applied to girls. (See xkcd: http://xkcd.com/55/)
This means, when we work up the nerve to ask questions or chat, use accomodating body language. Listen, and ask clarifying questions to help draw us out more. Don't act like we have the plague -- we probably don't.
2) Expect to be challenged. Challenge back. Most geeks will want to have an authentic relationship. We will, like all asshole men, project our values, expectations, and ideas about women on to you, but we're better off if you challenge us when we do that. Not like "STFU you patriarch bastard", but actually engage us in a discussion about why we are wrong. You don't have to care about what we do, but you do need to demonstrate critical thinking skills. We, by and large, do not have serious relationships with people who are very beautiful but very dim and self centered. They are eye and arm candy, but not for serious relationships.
3) We are usually not eye and arm candy.
(To be fair, we're not asking you to be either -- very often:))
If we need to shave more or dress better or whatever to meet your expectations regarding house-broken mammals, we will probably not understand, and we will probably resist any attempts by you to guilt us or shame us into complying. Explain why it is important to you _personally_, and work things from that angle. There will be some amount of ideological opposition, but usually you'll luck out by appealing to the pragmatist within us.
4) Don't be ashamed of who you are or what your interests are. The AMD lady's advice is pretty bad I think -- if you're not interested in CPU types, don't pretend to be. Some of us love explaining that stuff to anyone who will listen, and others would rather not tell you if you cannot be bothered to find out for yourself. But don't patronize us and imply that you are interested when you really aren't.
5) Many of the same problems between men and women apply to geek men and women. We have pride, we desperately want your respect, it is important (to varying degrees) to us to be approved of by you. Often, we are better at expressing our anger and frustration in words, but not always. Some of us are alcoholics, quick to anger, and some of us will hurt you, because after all, we're still men, even when we're not tan and not rippling with muscle mass.
(PS: many of us are still confused about how we fit into a world that has a traditional yet evolving idea of what a "man" is. Yes, our grandpas fought wars, our dads worked in factories and enjoyed a stiff drink. Yet some of us don't like going outside. Somewhere inside all of us is the need to be a bit macho at times, but we're not always sure how.
The right to vote isn't in the bill of rights; it isn't specially marked as a pre-existing right of individuals so critical that the government _must not_ infringe it.
RKBA is precisely that. Yet the feds and the states have _regularly_ infringed it with impunity.
It's inclusion in the BOR is why i compared it to free speech and soldier quartering, not voting, or retaining a security clearance, or getting certain government jobs.
Well, I am one of the people who thinks that the government shouldn't put it self in the business of keeping people from having guns -- after all, it says so right in our constitution. Yes, that applies to crazy people and felons. Look -- they're going to get them anyway. 100% of the gun laws on the books are for harassing innocent people and for slowly disarming the population. No exceptions.
I am sure there are many anecdotes about some gun law doing some act of good somewhere. I don't doubt it for a second. But the price of a truly free society is that dim people sometimes run with scissors. You try and identify those people early and stay clear.
The difference between ensuring that moral individuals in a free society retain weapons with which to fight a government run amok, and the idea that all countries are equally entitled to nuclear weapons, is this:
The majority of the violence in world history is initiated by politicians for political reasons. So while I think it is important that anyone free to roam the streets of America be able to carry a gun while doing so, i don't extend that same courtesy to any asshole politician. Politicians, generally, become politicians so they can be evil under the full protection and cover of law. Normal folks inclined to evil generally show their colors long before we have to worry about them getting "the bomb".
They're entering the market so late, what can they possibly offer consumers (I'm ignoring business use cases here, since it isn't for business anyways, or so they stated) that they can't already get from current offerings, and better?
I'd definitely agree here. After all, Microsoft wasn't 1st mover in any of the following markets: GUI operating systems, Web Browsers, Web Servers, managed virtual machine languages, spreadsheet software, word processors, game consoles
As a result, Windows, IE, IIS, C#, Excel, Word, and Xbox are all minor competitors in a crowded marketplace.
Maybe I'm criticizing where I need not to, so if this wasn't your in-built bias leaking through, and I just read you the wrong way... my apologies.
That aside:
hey asshole! Nice biases there!
You can safely assume that most truly rural folks -- you know, the farmers who depend on accurate predictions governing the sun and weather -- know a heck of a lot more about what the sun and earth do relative to each other than their urbanite counterparts -- who's knowledge of the cosmos is typically limited to how fashionably their scarves revolve around their fashionably-stubbled necks.
You will find stupid people wherever you find failure. Not just in rural places, not just in urban places, not attached to any race or age or nationality or anything else.
Anyone who thinks that he knows what is in another man's best interest
I was really excited as i started reading this! Yes! Yes! He gets it! Telling other people what to do makes you a statist jack booted thug! Come, Join us over in the libertarian party where we call out the JBTs for who and what they are! Here is your joint, your 5-oclock shadow, and your stained t-shirt! We've been expecting you!
But then I read this:
that other man lacks some skill or talent, and therefore would deny him suffrage, hasn't understood what democracy is about
It's interesting that universal suffrage was not a feature of the original United States government as designed by "the founding fathers". It's also illustrative that the word "democracy" never appears in the US constitution, nor does it appear in the Declaration of independence.
He's not completely psycho. Discovery's (TLC's) support of Jon and Kate Plus Eight, 19 Kids and Counting, etc is disgusting. Those parents should be in jail, not rolling in money
I see the "J" in your Meyers-Briggs classification is out today.
Now then: Why?
Why should "those parents" be in jail?
The situation between the Jon and Kate people and the 19 (or 20 or whatever) families are entirely different. Is having a larger than average family AND a TV show really grounds for incarceration?
Incidentally, I don't at all subscribe to the idea that the world has an overpopulation problem. THe world perhaps has a lack-of-ingenuity problem, but the antidote to that is more people with more freedom to excercize their minds.
At least in the case of the 20-kid family, the parents and kids aren't TV media whores, and are actually a strong close-knit family -- the best kind of environment for turning children into productive adults -- the ones that can close our ingenuity gap.
The problem is, there isn't a good home for the remaining few conservatives.
It's not the libertarian party -- those guys are caught up in procedural issues like "should candidates be required to wear shirt and shoes at our convention, or is that the malignant hand of the authoritarian state?" And a 3rd party won't succeed in the US. It can change and election but not win one. (Ross Perot)
It's not the Tea Party. Back in 2007 when it was a Ron Paul only thing, the Tea Party "movement" was looking like the good choice. But then dipshits like Scott Brown (R-MA) got involved.. people like Glenn Beck (die-hard Ron Paul critic, until he saw which way the wind was blowing) got involved. And so now the Tea Party is a hodge podge of people who are just pissed off..
There are so few people that stand for _anything at all_ that finding someone who stands for the right stuff is too much of a stretch to even consider.
That said, obviously Ron Paul is the politician i am happiest with by several orders of magnitude.
The conservative's main voter base (blue-collar, working class, middle-americans) are the ones hurt the most by Republican policy. And yet they vote for the same policies time after time out of a belief that liberal politicians are immoral, or anti-jesus, or hate families or something
Supposing for a moment that I agree with you (I don't, but let's put that aside):
Perhaps the sort of people who vote for republicans beleive that republicans will try to enact policies which are inline with their own sense of what is just, not what they think will be most lucrative of beneficial to them personally.
You seem to concede as much with your second point, but I'll expound on it a bit in the form of a question:
If conservative voters truly beleive that liberals are immoral, unethical, and tirelessly work to destroy things conservatives think are important, how would the liberal argument that they are "better" for the average republican voter be viewed as anything other than bribery by the forces of irredeemable evil?
If your conjecture is that conservative voters are simpletons who see things in old-fashioned terms like "good and evil", and are too stubborn to just accept what the smart folks tell them will make them better off, why should you be surprised that they then vote according to your characterizations?
Unless you have personal knowledge that this is true, as in, you've seen the Windows source code, and even know what a "networking stack" is, you should stop repeating this oft-made claim. I beleive what you are doing is called "heresey"
Hint #1: Windows had a multi-proc re-entrant networking layer (including driver model) long before any BSD did. How did they get that from BSD?
Hint #2: running "strings" on windows ftp.exe and finding the BSD copyright has nothing to do with "the network stack". Nobody cares about ftp.exe except unix folks like us, so it's nearly a straight port to winsock.
The other day i was sitting at a stop light, and i looked over at the pickup next to me, and hanging from the rear-view mirror was a picture of a naked woman with enormous breasts.
And i thought "hrm.. wonder what the guy who drives this truck looks like?"
And i noticed a man driving, and a woman sitting in the passenger seat, i.e., a couple.
My thoughts wondered about the dynamics of that situation. Was that a woman who lived in an oppressive relationship, where her sense of self, and her idea of self-worth, and her opinion, were all suppressed? Was she desperately looking for a way out? Was this the best she could do?
Or, did she just not care about such things at all? Has she gotten over the fact that men are visual animals with a natural lust for the physical form? Does she simply accept him at his nature, and realize that it isn't a reflection of her or what he thinks of her?
I would wager that 80% of the over-the-road trucks in the USA have a 2D naked woman somewhere in the cab. It's as much of being a trucker as the CB radio.
For some reason, its more acceptable in a trucker cab, because that is "more private" than the glass box of a pickup cab, and that is "more private" than a laptop screen (to some people).
But modern work/life dynamics (and trucking regulation -- thanks DOT) are such that the trucker is in his office less than the information worker is in his (i.e. their computer screen is on...)
But i also think there is a just-below-the-water insidiousness in these judgements. I see a naked woman in a pickup, and i shift my gaze to see what the person _looks like_ who's driving the truck. I have some kind of inbuilt bias about what kind of person lets me see that they have naked pictures.
I expect most slashdotters are like this -- we've been tought that naked pictures is something to "get caught with", and that someone who might display them publicly has something wrong with them, and as such, when we see them in public life, we wonder what kind of wrong-person is responsible.
There is this idea that truckers can have naked pictures in their offices, and that CEOs can't.
Why are CEOs held to a higher "moral" or "ethical" standard than truckers? Aren't both of them just people?
the only point of a government is to protect minorities. the majority, sans some restricting force, _always_ gets their way. that's called mob rule, and it's what democracy is.
many of our elected officials like to continue to perpetuate the falsehood you are spreading, that "democracy" is what makes America great, but this is false. _limited government_ is what made America what it is, namely, that YOU, the "majority", do NOT get to foist your desires on everyone.
To the extent that the US has turned into an arbitrarily powerful democracy, it has suffered greatly.
You are not only very angry, but you are very confused or misinformed about the structure of the US government.
people like yourself, and politicians, are complicit in violating the law, including laws governing elections and voting. We may not be able to vote them out. And if enough of the voters think like you do -- namely, that whatever the majority can agree upon, ought to be the law, then what's the point of voting at all?
It is for these reasons that the foudners of the nation wrote 2A, and why so many libertarians, who generally abhor violence, are strong 2A advocates.
The problem, though, is that people can no longer trust the government
That's really your whole post.
Although, was there a time when people _did_ trust the government? Not during the Whiskey Rebellion. Not when the IRS was created. Not during the Nixon adminsitration.
Is there some kind of average or poll whereby "the common man" says "I generally trust the government", and has that sentiment drifted overtime? Or have elements of society _always_ been distrustrful of government?
I'd assert that I am certianly much less trusting of government than I was when I was a kid growing up in a republican household. I've subsequently had too many examples of encounters with the "justice" system leaving me with a distinct feeling of injustice. And too many situations where "my" government not only isn't representing me, but isn't even listening to me, and isn't even following its _own_ laws and rules (but which it expects me to shut up about and follow blindly).
The culture of fear about the government is so bad now that people aren't doing basic useful things like _filling out the census_. But why should they? This information has been used for evil in the past -- when people trusted the government. The federal government has said that anyone with a Ron Paul bumper sticker is a possible terrorist. The government certainly doesn't trust Americans. It doesn't feel the need to protect their rights, and it doesn't feel the need to follow the laws binding its treatment of Americans on American soil.
It seems that at nearly ever level of governance, from the top on down to the local policeman, there is a sense of "us" and "them", where the politicians and other agents of the state hold the populace in contempt, and the populace holds the ruling class in equal (or greater) contempt.
The ruling class asserts its power ("legitimate" initiation of violence) nearly every day. The populace does so very, very rarely. There are more of "us", but we act infrequently.
I think it will come to ahead soon. It doesn't matter how many elected officials we replace, the CIA will still have the same people in it. Your local police department will still have the same cops taking bribes and curb-checking you for trying to video them. There aren't enough good people running for office to fill in the vacuum even if we could vote out all the bad ones.
but you've already agreed that regulatory regimes don't work, and don't prevent any of the problems you've mentioned.
Do you think Chernobyl was caused by greed and profit, and insufficient government oversight? (PS: It happened in _the Soviet Union_, land of small government and evil capitalists, right?)
Everything _does_ have a price. Everything.
Regarding Haiti: no, Haiti is nothing like what libertarians want. Haiti has an oppressive government with rampant corruption at every level, all the way down to the traffic cop. Authority invites corruption. Libertarians want fewer authorities. The result should be less corruption.
People, even basically good people, will behave predictably in the face of incentives. You've not addressed how you will change the incentives for corner cutting, non-compliance, and incompetence in regulatory regimes, so arguing that these regulatory regimes should be kept, strengthened, or expanded, isn't a reflection of a solution, but of an ideology.
That you are also unwilling to discuss things without resorting to insults does nothing to solidify your position.
I've read many of your posts; you're very angry, and very dismissive, but very short on arguments. It's fine to be angry and dismissive from time to time, but please show your work.
we have very different ideologies about things, but i agree with you entirely regarding the content of this post.
The regulators are in bed with those whom must be regulated. The amount of "regulating" going on is obviously going to be a joke.
But this isn't unique to the oil industry.
Why is it that regulators cycle in and out of the industries that they are supposed to regulate? It's a bit of a problem -- to be a really good regulator, do you need to be as knowledgable and as clever as the people you're regulating? In which case, why wouldn't you work for them where the money is better?
Regulation, in practice, is almost _always_ about brokering political power. The little guy doesn't get protected.
I'm not sure how you fix this problem because it is one of incentives. Someone who actually is harmed by BP has plenty of incentive to pursue damages against BP. Someone who merely has to "regulate" them doesn't. The incentives are much better for the regulator to accept bribes, look the other way, and expect a cushy industry job when he revolves back out of government service.
Instead of trying to front-load success via heavier regulation, why not put real teeth in how we let people go after companies (and governments!) for the disasters they create that harm people. And let's fix the tort system so that the huge payouts are reserved for gulf coasters who BP SHOULD compensate generously, instead of lawyers inventing class action suits that get settled, with customers getting $6 and lawyers getting $6 million....
If you were to say "we're not issuing licenses for offshore drilling unless you show up on day one with a $10b bond that we hold onto to seed your cleanup fund -- and we get to keep the interest. When you're all done, and you've managed to not wreck anything and there are no claims against you oustanding, you get the bond money back", there'd still be takers. And the incentives might be a bit better to do a proper fucking job of it all..
The point isn't necessarily to move to the moon and stay, the point is to move into a domain (space) where you can _keep moving_.
I understand that there are only a few plausible set-down locations _today_. But there is no more of Earth to discover. There _is_ more of the cosmos to discover and reach.
Besides, in times past, _occasionally_ a bunch of pioneering seperatists will successfully shrug off their distant masters. It only lasts for a few generations, but if you are in one of those generations... what a reward, what exhilaration!
Well, sure. Except that for some people practical independence isn't good enough, and ideological independence is the whole point.
But that aside, the idea isn't that the moon will be a free place where the rules don't apply. Not initially, and perhaps not ever.
The famous trans-atlantic and trans-oceanic voyages in european history had state backing. But now, any random individual can build a sailboat and pilot it wherever they like. Today, individuals can build the ships of world-wide passage. Today, individuals can cirumnavigate the globe.
For a long time into the future, anyone standing on the moon will have stood on the shoulders of giants on Earth to get there. But what about the 1st generation of Lunar-born folks? What about the first self-sufficient Lunar indistry? What about the 2nd, and 3rd, and 4th generation of Lunar-born folks?
In the future, but perhaps within 100 years, when the free individual can buy or build their own space-faring craft, and can navigate the cosmos without a state sponsor, what then?
Humanity will expand to fill every domain. First as explorers, then as settlers, then as civilization. There will always be a leading edge, and on that leading edge, in the settling phase, people may find the freedom, if only for a few generations, to try new political experiments, to have first-mover advantage, and to live as freely as they are able.
The earth is a finte space. If you want to live on land, there is no leading edge, beyond which adventure and freedom can still be found.
The cosmos is effectively infinite. It was once impossible to cross the appalachian mountains, but a great mystery and opportunity laid to the west. It was once impossible to cross earth's orbit, but mystery and opportunity await above us.
It is still, in human-life-time-terms, difficult to cross the solar system. But I don't think that will always be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Your reading comprehension is an abysmal joke.
I concede that the aggregate IMR in the US is surprisingly high, and then i discuss why that is (Based on the findings in the oft-cited research). I further explain that for premature babies, the US IMR is one of the best in the world.
I lay all of this out in my post.
I am very worried that you feel comfortable arguing with people based on pushing aggregate statistics from other sources when you have not displayed the ability to comprehend what you have read.
Or is this a reflection on healthcare differences in the UK vs the USA?
I had _twins_ born at 26 weeks gestation in April. THe claim that the UK doctors had never seen a baby born this early could only be true if one of the following were also true
- it was a very small hospital and they didn't have much prematurity experience
- the stated age is incorrect. when you use relative gestational ages (i.e. 14 weeks early), people disagree on what the "end goal" is.. is it 40 weeks? 38 weeks? 37 weeks? SInce people count weeks from different starting points (start of menstrual cycle, post fertilization, etc), the total number of gestational weeks can be thought of differently. So if the age was "37 weeks minus 14 weeks, i.e. 23 weeks" then that is still an EARLY baby, but not the earliest recorded surviving baby (that honor is currently 21 weeks)
- the quality of NICU care in the UK is so poor that they really don't see surviving babies this early
My wife's water broke at 24 weeks; the doctor told us at that time that if the kids were to be born immediately they'd have about a 20% chance of living and not having long term disabilities.
They were able to prevent labor for about 2 weeks, such that my children were born at 26 weeks, weighing right around 2 lbs each (2x the weight of the baby in the article.. who is statistically undersized for 26 weeks gestation)
I wonder if this is a reflection on differing medical care in various countries. The oft-cited report about infant mortality in the US leaves out some important factors -- namely that socio-economic diversity in the US, and racial heterogenoy correlate with and explain some of our increased infant mortality. But furthermore, that nearly 1 out of 8 babies in the US are born prematurely, wich is MUCH higher than developed european nations.
Finally, we measure mortality much differently here than do most other places. If the baby in this story had died, it would have counted as mortality here, but would not have counted as infant mortality in many developed nations.
Aggregately, our different demographics and our higher incidence of prematurity, combined with our more broad definition of mortality skew the infant mortality higher than some nations we rank against.
Yet the most interesting fact is that premature babies do better in the USA than anywhere else (with perhaps 1-2 scandavian countries ranking marginally better).
IOW, we have lots of premature babies, and they have a beter shot of surviving here than they do anywhere else.
I happen to live in a smallish city -- around 100k people, and we have two big hospitals, one of which has a helicopter.
Yet even in this small town in a remote part of the country, my twins, born at 26 weeks (allegedly the same age as the baby in this story) lived and came home after 100 days of NICU stay.
Incidentally, there was no need to use sandwhich bags to keep my kids alive.
A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about the US medical system. What I know is that 30 years ago, my children would have died, but in 2010, even in remote North Dakota, they lived. And statistically, they are living more and more often here.
Is this really what parents in the UK should expect if they go into pre-term labor? And if so, is that the kind of medical service we want here in the USA? With sandwhich bags?
You might want it. However, I'm glad my wife went into early labor in the US.
Thanks for posting this. The Colorado paper is the key thing to read.
Once I read that tor chose nodes according to an algorithm, and that the data used by that algorithm was not verified, and that this was done in the name of "performance", I could see where things were going in that paper. It was a "doh!" moment to be sure.
It strikes me that for the things I'd want to use tor for, _really_ important things (i.e. not media piracy), high bandwidth and low latency are both unimportant. Privacy is more important. I don't want to download a dvd over tor, I want to send a short encrypted email to my conspirators.
For such an application, I'd prefer onion routing that was buried in a covert channel.. something that didn't even look like a message at all. Something where the routing and the noise were both random, and the payload was simply lost in the mix. A factor of 10:1 or even 100:1 "Garbage" to "payload" would be fine for the average email or image.
I'm not sure my wife could name any of the programming languages that I have used in my career. And that doesn't bother me.
I don't need my partner to be interested in the specifics of my work. When I am upset or frustrated about work, or want to talk about what I did that day, generalities are fine, because honestly, unless you were on the same project I was on, it wouldn't make much sense no matter what level of vocabulary you had.
I've had the experience of dating a girl very seriously who was beautiful, highly intelligent, and an excellent system administrator. And our shared language and work/hobby interests did nothing to smooth over the rocky spots in our relationship, and while initially it made me much more attracted to her, in retrospect it was perhaps novelty more than anything else. IOW, her qualities as a person were considerably more important than her "job" as a sysadmin or her interests as "a geek", and our ideology and personality clashes eventually overshadowed our mutual geekyness.
_My_ advice to women who are interested in geeky guys is
1) be accessible. Women _baffle_ men, and geeks are used to being able to come up with valid mental models to predict the behavior of complex things. But this is regularly less successful than we would like when applied to girls. (See xkcd: http://xkcd.com/55/)
This means, when we work up the nerve to ask questions or chat, use accomodating body language. Listen, and ask clarifying questions to help draw us out more. Don't act like we have the plague -- we probably don't.
2) Expect to be challenged. Challenge back. Most geeks will want to have an authentic relationship. We will, like all asshole men, project our values, expectations, and ideas about women on to you, but we're better off if you challenge us when we do that. Not like "STFU you patriarch bastard", but actually engage us in a discussion about why we are wrong. You don't have to care about what we do, but you do need to demonstrate critical thinking skills. We, by and large, do not have serious relationships with people who are very beautiful but very dim and self centered. They are eye and arm candy, but not for serious relationships.
3) We are usually not eye and arm candy.
(To be fair, we're not asking you to be either -- very often :))
If we need to shave more or dress better or whatever to meet your expectations regarding house-broken mammals, we will probably not understand, and we will probably resist any attempts by you to guilt us or shame us into complying. Explain why it is important to you _personally_, and work things from that angle. There will be some amount of ideological opposition, but usually you'll luck out by appealing to the pragmatist within us.
4) Don't be ashamed of who you are or what your interests are. The AMD lady's advice is pretty bad I think -- if you're not interested in CPU types, don't pretend to be. Some of us love explaining that stuff to anyone who will listen, and others would rather not tell you if you cannot be bothered to find out for yourself. But don't patronize us and imply that you are interested when you really aren't.
5) Many of the same problems between men and women apply to geek men and women. We have pride, we desperately want your respect, it is important (to varying degrees) to us to be approved of by you. Often, we are better at expressing our anger and frustration in words, but not always. Some of us are alcoholics, quick to anger, and some of us will hurt you, because after all, we're still men, even when we're not tan and not rippling with muscle mass.
(PS: many of us are still confused about how we fit into a world that has a traditional yet evolving idea of what a "man" is. Yes, our grandpas fought wars, our dads worked in factories and enjoyed a stiff drink. Yet some of us don't like going outside. Somewhere inside all of us is the need to be a bit macho at times, but we're not always sure how.
The right to vote isn't in the bill of rights; it isn't specially marked as a pre-existing right of individuals so critical that the government _must not_ infringe it.
RKBA is precisely that. Yet the feds and the states have _regularly_ infringed it with impunity.
It's inclusion in the BOR is why i compared it to free speech and soldier quartering, not voting, or retaining a security clearance, or getting certain government jobs.
Why do felons retain the right of free speech, and the right to be free from quartering soldiers, but not the RKBA ?
I said what my preference is. The government can always "decide" that legally, it has certain powers that I don't think it should.
Well, I am one of the people who thinks that the government shouldn't put it self in the business of keeping people from having guns -- after all, it says so right in our constitution. Yes, that applies to crazy people and felons. Look -- they're going to get them anyway. 100% of the gun laws on the books are for harassing innocent people and for slowly disarming the population. No exceptions.
I am sure there are many anecdotes about some gun law doing some act of good somewhere. I don't doubt it for a second. But the price of a truly free society is that dim people sometimes run with scissors. You try and identify those people early and stay clear.
The difference between ensuring that moral individuals in a free society retain weapons with which to fight a government run amok, and the idea that all countries are equally entitled to nuclear weapons, is this:
The majority of the violence in world history is initiated by politicians for political reasons. So while I think it is important that anyone free to roam the streets of America be able to carry a gun while doing so, i don't extend that same courtesy to any asshole politician. Politicians, generally, become politicians so they can be evil under the full protection and cover of law. Normal folks inclined to evil generally show their colors long before we have to worry about them getting "the bomb".
I'd definitely agree here. After all, Microsoft wasn't 1st mover in any of the following markets:
GUI operating systems, Web Browsers, Web Servers, managed virtual machine languages, spreadsheet software, word processors, game consoles
As a result, Windows, IE, IIS, C#, Excel, Word, and Xbox are all minor competitors in a crowded marketplace.
Where is my sarcasm tag?
http://wimp.com/thegovernment
Maybe I'm criticizing where I need not to, so if this wasn't your in-built bias leaking through, and I just read you the wrong way... my apologies.
That aside:
hey asshole! Nice biases there!
You can safely assume that most truly rural folks -- you know, the farmers who depend on accurate predictions governing the sun and weather -- know a heck of a lot more about what the sun and earth do relative to each other than their urbanite counterparts -- who's knowledge of the cosmos is typically limited to how fashionably their scarves revolve around their fashionably-stubbled necks.
You will find stupid people wherever you find failure. Not just in rural places, not just in urban places, not attached to any race or age or nationality or anything else.
Mouth agape.
I was really excited as i started reading this! Yes! Yes! He gets it! Telling other people what to do makes you a statist jack booted thug! Come, Join us over in the libertarian party where we call out the JBTs for who and what they are! Here is your joint, your 5-oclock shadow, and your stained t-shirt! We've been expecting you!
But then I read this:
It's interesting that universal suffrage was not a feature of the original United States government as designed by "the founding fathers". It's also illustrative that the word "democracy" never appears in the US constitution, nor does it appear in the Declaration of independence.
Maybe those guys knew what they were doing?
Zettai Ryouiki!!
Not to discredit the idea that domestic and off-shore drilling and oil recovery should be as safe as possible... but
It still kills fewer americans than getting oil from other places... like the middle east.
I see the "J" in your Meyers-Briggs classification is out today.
Now then: Why?
Why should "those parents" be in jail?
The situation between the Jon and Kate people and the 19 (or 20 or whatever) families are entirely different. Is having a larger than average family AND a TV show really grounds for incarceration?
Incidentally, I don't at all subscribe to the idea that the world has an overpopulation problem. THe world perhaps has a lack-of-ingenuity problem, but the antidote to that is more people with more freedom to excercize their minds.
At least in the case of the 20-kid family, the parents and kids aren't TV media whores, and are actually a strong close-knit family -- the best kind of environment for turning children into productive adults -- the ones that can close our ingenuity gap.
All I can think of is this:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/
As an ex-republican, I agree with you completely.
The problem is, there isn't a good home for the remaining few conservatives.
It's not the libertarian party -- those guys are caught up in procedural issues like "should candidates be required to wear shirt and shoes at our convention, or is that the malignant hand of the authoritarian state?" And a 3rd party won't succeed in the US. It can change and election but not win one. (Ross Perot)
It's not the Tea Party. Back in 2007 when it was a Ron Paul only thing, the Tea Party "movement" was looking like the good choice. But then dipshits like Scott Brown (R-MA) got involved.. people like Glenn Beck (die-hard Ron Paul critic, until he saw which way the wind was blowing) got involved. And so now the Tea Party is a hodge podge of people who are just pissed off..
There are so few people that stand for _anything at all_ that finding someone who stands for the right stuff is too much of a stretch to even consider.
That said, obviously Ron Paul is the politician i am happiest with by several orders of magnitude.
Supposing for a moment that I agree with you (I don't, but let's put that aside):
Perhaps the sort of people who vote for republicans beleive that republicans will try to enact policies which are inline with their own sense of what is just, not what they think will be most lucrative of beneficial to them personally.
You seem to concede as much with your second point, but I'll expound on it a bit in the form of a question:
If conservative voters truly beleive that liberals are immoral, unethical, and tirelessly work to destroy things conservatives think are important, how would the liberal argument that they are "better" for the average republican voter be viewed as anything other than bribery by the forces of irredeemable evil?
If your conjecture is that conservative voters are simpletons who see things in old-fashioned terms like "good and evil", and are too stubborn to just accept what the smart folks tell them will make them better off, why should you be surprised that they then vote according to your characterizations?
Unless you have personal knowledge that this is true, as in, you've seen the Windows source code, and even know what a "networking stack" is, you should stop repeating this oft-made claim. I beleive what you are doing is called "heresey"
Hint #1: Windows had a multi-proc re-entrant networking layer (including driver model) long before any BSD did. How did they get that from BSD?
Hint #2: running "strings" on windows ftp.exe and finding the BSD copyright has nothing to do with "the network stack". Nobody cares about ftp.exe except unix folks like us, so it's nearly a straight port to winsock.
The other day i was sitting at a stop light, and i looked over at the pickup next to me, and hanging from the rear-view mirror was a picture of a naked woman with enormous breasts.
And i thought "hrm.. wonder what the guy who drives this truck looks like?"
And i noticed a man driving, and a woman sitting in the passenger seat, i.e., a couple.
My thoughts wondered about the dynamics of that situation. Was that a woman who lived in an oppressive relationship, where her sense of self, and her idea of self-worth, and her opinion, were all suppressed? Was she desperately looking for a way out? Was this the best she could do?
Or, did she just not care about such things at all? Has she gotten over the fact that men are visual animals with a natural lust for the physical form? Does she simply accept him at his nature, and realize that it isn't a reflection of her or what he thinks of her?
I would wager that 80% of the over-the-road trucks in the USA have a 2D naked woman somewhere in the cab. It's as much of being a trucker as the CB radio.
For some reason, its more acceptable in a trucker cab, because that is "more private" than the glass box of a pickup cab, and that is "more private" than a laptop screen (to some people).
But modern work/life dynamics (and trucking regulation -- thanks DOT) are such that the trucker is in his office less than the information worker is in his (i.e. their computer screen is on...)
But i also think there is a just-below-the-water insidiousness in these judgements. I see a naked woman in a pickup, and i shift my gaze to see what the person _looks like_ who's driving the truck. I have some kind of inbuilt bias about what kind of person lets me see that they have naked pictures.
I expect most slashdotters are like this -- we've been tought that naked pictures is something to "get caught with", and that someone who might display them publicly has something wrong with them, and as such, when we see them in public life, we wonder what kind of wrong-person is responsible.
There is this idea that truckers can have naked pictures in their offices, and that CEOs can't.
Why are CEOs held to a higher "moral" or "ethical" standard than truckers? Aren't both of them just people?
we don't live in a democracy, we live in a constitutional republic. look it up some time.
http://wimp.com/thegovernment
the only point of a government is to protect minorities. the majority, sans some restricting force, _always_ gets their way. that's called mob rule, and it's what democracy is.
many of our elected officials like to continue to perpetuate the falsehood you are spreading, that "democracy" is what makes America great, but this is false. _limited government_ is what made America what it is, namely, that YOU, the "majority", do NOT get to foist your desires on everyone.
To the extent that the US has turned into an arbitrarily powerful democracy, it has suffered greatly.
You are not only very angry, but you are very confused or misinformed about the structure of the US government.
people like yourself, and politicians, are complicit in violating the law, including laws governing elections and voting. We may not be able to vote them out. And if enough of the voters think like you do -- namely, that whatever the majority can agree upon, ought to be the law, then what's the point of voting at all?
It is for these reasons that the foudners of the nation wrote 2A, and why so many libertarians, who generally abhor violence, are strong 2A advocates.
That's really your whole post.
Although, was there a time when people _did_ trust the government? Not during the Whiskey Rebellion. Not when the IRS was created. Not during the Nixon adminsitration.
Is there some kind of average or poll whereby "the common man" says "I generally trust the government", and has that sentiment drifted overtime? Or have elements of society _always_ been distrustrful of government?
I'd assert that I am certianly much less trusting of government than I was when I was a kid growing up in a republican household. I've subsequently had too many examples of encounters with the "justice" system leaving me with a distinct feeling of injustice. And too many situations where "my" government not only isn't representing me, but isn't even listening to me, and isn't even following its _own_ laws and rules (but which it expects me to shut up about and follow blindly).
The culture of fear about the government is so bad now that people aren't doing basic useful things like _filling out the census_. But why should they? This information has been used for evil in the past -- when people trusted the government. The federal government has said that anyone with a Ron Paul bumper sticker is a possible terrorist. The government certainly doesn't trust Americans. It doesn't feel the need to protect their rights, and it doesn't feel the need to follow the laws binding its treatment of Americans on American soil.
It seems that at nearly ever level of governance, from the top on down to the local policeman, there is a sense of "us" and "them", where the politicians and other agents of the state hold the populace in contempt, and the populace holds the ruling class in equal (or greater) contempt.
The ruling class asserts its power ("legitimate" initiation of violence) nearly every day. The populace does so very, very rarely. There are more of "us", but we act infrequently.
I think it will come to ahead soon. It doesn't matter how many elected officials we replace, the CIA will still have the same people in it. Your local police department will still have the same cops taking bribes and curb-checking you for trying to video them. There aren't enough good people running for office to fill in the vacuum even if we could vote out all the bad ones.
but you've already agreed that regulatory regimes don't work, and don't prevent any of the problems you've mentioned.
Do you think Chernobyl was caused by greed and profit, and insufficient government oversight? (PS: It happened in _the Soviet Union_, land of small government and evil capitalists, right?)
Everything _does_ have a price. Everything.
Regarding Haiti: no, Haiti is nothing like what libertarians want. Haiti has an oppressive government with rampant corruption at every level, all the way down to the traffic cop. Authority invites corruption. Libertarians want fewer authorities. The result should be less corruption.
People, even basically good people, will behave predictably in the face of incentives. You've not addressed how you will change the incentives for corner cutting, non-compliance, and incompetence in regulatory regimes, so arguing that these regulatory regimes should be kept, strengthened, or expanded, isn't a reflection of a solution, but of an ideology.
That you are also unwilling to discuss things without resorting to insults does nothing to solidify your position.
I've read many of your posts; you're very angry, and very dismissive, but very short on arguments. It's fine to be angry and dismissive from time to time, but please show your work.
we have very different ideologies about things, but i agree with you entirely regarding the content of this post.
The regulators are in bed with those whom must be regulated. The amount of "regulating" going on is obviously going to be a joke.
But this isn't unique to the oil industry.
Why is it that regulators cycle in and out of the industries that they are supposed to regulate? It's a bit of a problem -- to be a really good regulator, do you need to be as knowledgable and as clever as the people you're regulating? In which case, why wouldn't you work for them where the money is better?
Regulation, in practice, is almost _always_ about brokering political power. The little guy doesn't get protected.
I'm not sure how you fix this problem because it is one of incentives. Someone who actually is harmed by BP has plenty of incentive to pursue damages against BP. Someone who merely has to "regulate" them doesn't. The incentives are much better for the regulator to accept bribes, look the other way, and expect a cushy industry job when he revolves back out of government service.
Instead of trying to front-load success via heavier regulation, why not put real teeth in how we let people go after companies (and governments!) for the disasters they create that harm people. And let's fix the tort system so that the huge payouts are reserved for gulf coasters who BP SHOULD compensate generously, instead of lawyers inventing class action suits that get settled, with customers getting $6 and lawyers getting $6 million....
If you were to say "we're not issuing licenses for offshore drilling unless you show up on day one with a $10b bond that we hold onto to seed your cleanup fund -- and we get to keep the interest. When you're all done, and you've managed to not wreck anything and there are no claims against you oustanding, you get the bond money back", there'd still be takers. And the incentives might be a bit better to do a proper fucking job of it all..
The point isn't necessarily to move to the moon and stay, the point is to move into a domain (space) where you can _keep moving_.
I understand that there are only a few plausible set-down locations _today_. But there is no more of Earth to discover. There _is_ more of the cosmos to discover and reach.
Besides, in times past, _occasionally_ a bunch of pioneering seperatists will successfully shrug off their distant masters. It only lasts for a few generations, but if you are in one of those generations... what a reward, what exhilaration!
Well, sure. Except that for some people practical independence isn't good enough, and ideological independence is the whole point.
But that aside, the idea isn't that the moon will be a free place where the rules don't apply. Not initially, and perhaps not ever.
The famous trans-atlantic and trans-oceanic voyages in european history had state backing. But now, any random individual can build a sailboat and pilot it wherever they like. Today, individuals can build the ships of world-wide passage. Today, individuals can cirumnavigate the globe.
For a long time into the future, anyone standing on the moon will have stood on the shoulders of giants on Earth to get there. But what about the 1st generation of Lunar-born folks? What about the first self-sufficient Lunar indistry? What about the 2nd, and 3rd, and 4th generation of Lunar-born folks?
In the future, but perhaps within 100 years, when the free individual can buy or build their own space-faring craft, and can navigate the cosmos without a state sponsor, what then?
Humanity will expand to fill every domain. First as explorers, then as settlers, then as civilization. There will always be a leading edge, and on that leading edge, in the settling phase, people may find the freedom, if only for a few generations, to try new political experiments, to have first-mover advantage, and to live as freely as they are able.
The earth is a finte space. If you want to live on land, there is no leading edge, beyond which adventure and freedom can still be found.
The cosmos is effectively infinite. It was once impossible to cross the appalachian mountains, but a great mystery and opportunity laid to the west. It was once impossible to cross earth's orbit, but mystery and opportunity await above us.
It is still, in human-life-time-terms, difficult to cross the solar system. But I don't think that will always be the case.