I'm amassing firepower because I've seen what "you" do to people who are unarmed.
The key point about the Waco and Ruby Ridge episodes is that these were sepratists who retreated from society. YOU WENT AFTER THEM TO MURDER THEM.
That's what I'm afraid of.
Your post encapsulates the entire mindset perfectly. People like you are why people like me get this way. The idea that somebody, somewhere, might think differently, _and_ might want to defend themselves, is cause to decimate them? Really?
If you don't have anything but contempt and disgust for what your government did in Waco and Ruby Ridge then how are we supposed to talk about anything?
I beleive that I am born free, and that i have the right to arm myself however i like and for whatever reasons I choose. Until such time as I initiate force or violence against you, I'm a free and civil man who's done you no wrong; you have no reason to either be afraid or upset.
You, apparently, disagree.
Well, I'm right; you aren't; and when you come for me, I'm going to shoot back.
It's that simple.
So don't come.
The idea of ever having to use a gun for its intended purpose is terrifying and abhorrent. I hate to contemplate it. THe only thing that is more terrifying is _having_ that purpose and not being so equipped.
I've done my part. I've moved out of your city, where you have nothing to be afraid of.
Well, unlike everyone else, he actually IS a doctor, and has been one most of his life.
I won't get into the health issue here with you. You've decided to beleive what your pet politicians have told you; I'm beleiving mine. Suffice it to say, I'm familiar with the majority of every word he's written or spoken, and I agree nearly entirely with the guy.
The guy is very cognizant of what we're spending money on and what inflation is doing to us.. probably more so than anyone else.
And the thing people aren't latching onto is that he has the only real credible solution to stopping the bleeding w.r.t. spending... namely to shut-down the US foreign empire. We can shut that off _first_ and then republicans get the smaller government they now claim to want (ha ha) and peaceniks / BDS democrats can get out of the war that (until Obama decided to expand it) they were so angry about.
Once the US foreign empire is dismantled and we've put a tourniquet on federal spending, we can get to the REST of his plan -- like dismantling the social services that you rightly point out have become so expensive.
I would run a white supremacist over in my car without mercy, but I could not care less whether that life-form chose to live here, or 20,000 miles away - I would only care that he existed
That's very 1984 of you.
If a person, who happened to be a white supremecist, decided to commit an act of violence against someone else, who happened to be black, then I would arrest him and put him on trial, because he violated the intrinsic individual rights of a man... the right to not suffer the initiation of violence by the hands of his neighbor.
You, on the other hand, seem so very upset that somebody, somewhere, could have a thought that you disagree with, that the best course of action is pre-emptive murder.
Frankly, I'll take the white supremecists. There are only a few of them, and they're easy to spot and exclude.
Except to you, _I_ am one of those religious libertarian nutjobs.. and yes, I've been spending the last 2 years amassing firepower.
If you want to understand "us" better you'll need to understand that it's a bit bigger of a tent than you realize: I don't have any kind of TV service at all so I'm certainly not beholden to Fox News or Glenn Beck or whoever it is you claim programs me [wasn't it Bill O'Reilly 2 years ago, and Rush Limbaugh for the previous 15?].
Me, and others like me, also either didn't vote for GWB in 04 or did so regrettably to make sure that a blow-hard dipshit Kerry didn't ruin the country _even faster_ than GWB was doing.
What you're missing is that the angst in America didn't start when Obama won the election; it was in full swing when a lot of Americans realized that McCain was the "best" answer the establishment would give us to run against Obama. It was simmering back when GWB decided that "to save" America he would have to destroy everything that made it worth Saving.
It was uncomfortably hot -- and almost boiled over -- when Clinton and Reno _murdered_ families in Texas and Idaho -- and in the latter case, used soverign immunity to prevent the murderers [real ACTUAL murderers -- not like the Wikileaks disaster, btw] from facing the criminal charges that the soverign state govt of Idaho had filed against them.
Where was the outrage from "you" when fucking _tanks_ shot up a house full of children and burned it down? AMERICAN CITIZENS -- people that have the same right to a trial as you do. Is your hatered for anyone claiming any kind of religion so intense that you stand by happily when tanks and helicopters and machine guns murder doezens of women and children? Not "well, it's a war" accidental casualties, but actual coordinated assaults on isolated homes of people who just want to be left alone?
Was it a proud day for the left when "one more gun nut" had is wife taken out by a federal sniper _while she was holding a baby?_
For some of us, it started back when Reagan, who ran on a platform that included abolishing the ATF and ending the Dept of Education [check your history -- he actually ran and got elected on that platform!], failed to do anything of the sort and instead blew federal spending sky high and got is tangled up all over central America. To his credit, none of us have bomb shelters any more and the Warsaw Pact is a fading memory. We'd take him over any of the current crop of losers, but we hate the system so much that even he is now fair game for criticism.
I guess you and we agreed back during Nixon. Everyone agreed that Nixon sucked. He was a crook and a liar. But apart from having your headquarters broken into, I don't understand _your_ objection; Nixon got elected by promising food price controls and delivered wage controls as well. That's socialism 101, and that's what you guys want more than anything, right?
I want my church and my law to stay the hell away from each other -- but if I have to pick my church or YOUR chuch, well, I know which one I am picking.
I don't care WHAT you or the Texans are putting in school textbooks; I am homeschooling my kids because government controlled education is a dismal failure [after all, it made me, who you have written off as an unworthy moron]. _You_ will invariably want to control exactly how my kids are indoctrinated, I won't ever accept that. I'd literally shoot you first. If you want to terrorize kids with horseshit contradictory ideas that play out in some hybrid prison warden/lord of the flies petri dish, go ruin your _own_ children. Leave me and mine out of it.
The dilemma is unfolding roughly as follows. _Most_ people, left and right, want a big powerful government that gives them what they want and takes from others. But what many people on the right are finally realizing is that when "their team" is running the show, they don't actually get what they want. It turns out, their team was "small government" all alon
Better yet, why spend money to send people when we can send machines and do science?
Because while the contributions of our space program to science have been good, the contributions of our space program to _engineering_, and to a lesser extent, human ambition, have been legendary.
I'm not as interested in knowing the 1-true-origin of the Universe with higher resolution pixels than ever before. There are probably a zillion important discoveries done in NASA labs _every day_. I don't hear about them because I don't care -- and I'm one of the nerds.
I'm _very_ interested in a grainy, time delayed transmission of a human being, waving at the camera, with the Martian landscape in the background. Me and 7 billion other people. We want that. We will stop what we are doing. The whole world will stop, with baited breath.
Don't you want humans to do acheive something like that again? Don't you want it to be this country that does it? Don't you want to be the generation that said "Mr. President -- we disagree with you on a lot of things, but we're all united on this. Just give the order" ?
Our space program needs a mission that any idiot can understand and be inspired by. "human footprints on a different world" -- the ultimate inspiration.
If I ran nasa, I'd change the slogan to something like this:
"Shrinking the Science Fiction Section, One Mission at a Time"
There is almost nothing left in this country to be inspired by. Please give us back a real space program. Please remind us that somewhere, somebody in America can do something amazing.
If manned space is the new opiate of the masses, I'm fine being a junkie.
I live in North Dakota. We were the #1 wheat producer and the #1 honey producer last year. We'd _love_ a longer growing season. We had a huge crop that got snowed over last year. Bring the warmth baby!
But let's set that aside. Let's suppose I buy your absurd argument that "plants" will simply die off. Well, I'd need to not know that nuclear submarines don't stay submerged for months at a time. Or that people have lived in space for periods of time. I'd need to be ignorant of the fact that you can grow bananas in _Iceland_ thanks to modern efforts.
I beleive in man's ability to engineer his way out of problems. The only thing that has ever stopped that are people like you who fetch the ear of government.
I'm confident in my ability to feed myself, without your help. And I am even more confident that I can govern myself without your help.
Any global warming "solution" that doesn't involve actually lowering the CO2 level of the atmosphere isn't a solution.
I was waiting for someone to come out and say it.
What climate alarmists don't want is to preserve humanity and its only habitable world.
What they want is behavior modification.
I want a nice place for my children just as much as anyone. But for me, a nice place means "Free from oppressive coercion by know-it-all-assholes". In fact, a free place with no vegetation seems better than a serene landscape with a tyrant hiding behind every lovingly protected tree.
I value human freedom more than I value the myth of holding the planetscape constant.
So to turn your pompousness around, any "solution" that involves coercive behavior modification and a reduction in my quality of life -- quality as _I_ define it -- is no solution at all.
I don't particularly care about or buy into AGW alarmism, but I enjoy seeing technological approaches postulated -- because they act like an X-ray machine into the minds of the watermelon climate lobby.
You guys definitely want to fix "the problem". But the problem is that humans have too much freedom -- freedom to live life in a way differently than you'd design for them. So any solution that lets people continue to live their lives as they like doing is a non-solution to you.
My wife talks to her parents on facebook more than she does her friends from highschool.
The paradigm of communications and interactions on facebook are fundamentally different from the hand written letter, from the phone call, from the email, from the text message, from the face-to-face one on one, and from the hanging out in a physical space.
People use facebook differently to communicate than they use all of those things.
They are not looking to invent new technologies to segment themselves from prior generations. It's not like kids have STOPPED texting because of facebook.
Compare the attributes of various communications mechanisms. Single-cast vs. Multi-cast. Real-time interactive vs. store-and-forward. Immediate feedback vs. delayed feedback. Error-correction deferred response vs. errors sent in-band. Persisted by default vs. volitile by default. Single-media vs. multi-media. Collaborative response vs. isolated response.
Facebook has different attributes vs. a phone call, an email, an SMS, hanging out in person, etc. People use it differently.
For instance, there is no way for a kid to use a phone to do a 1:many broadcast of 5 lines of text of how they are feeling _right now_, and to get group-visible/collaborative responses on a time-disparate basis. (well, unless their phone can update facebook -- which many can).
And yet all of these services and technologies you mention are separate things, not connected to each other, and some of them require technical know-how to set up. You might have to buy hosting, install software, etc. And that's just so that *you* can have your own page. What about all your friends? Facebook has already done the legwork of creating all of that for you, so you can just focus on the content and sharing. And Facebook has it in one place.
How many different data stores, physical servers, etc do you think are involved in rendering your face book page?
Answer: lots
The questions, then, are: 1) why should one entity control _all_ of those data stores and their composition/aggregation 2) why should the way facebook.com wants that page to look be the only way all such pages look
Nobody is actually advocating a return to blogs. What I (and others) are saying is that blogs are one silo of the facebook experience, and there is a great diveristy of blogging software and hosters, with various levels of fine grained control for commenting, syndication, and so on.
The experience that I want is something that looks and works "similarly" to facebook, but is fully federated. I think that's technically possible -- without that much software work, honestly.
Obviously the social inertia is the big problem, but before facebook, there was no facebook.
Because of standards, people can have different [and competing] providers for phone service, cell service, email service, and so on.
Bell South customers can call NYNEX customers. Hotmail customers can email GMail customers.
What I want is for facebook and myspace users to be able to "friend" and "thumbs up" each other, as well as identities/content manged/controlled/hosted on other sites.
Well, my other post goes into this, but IMO, facebook is the most popular implementation of a new communication _mode_ or paradigm, like SMS, Email, cell phones, land lines, telegraphs, and snail mail before it.
The reason i say this is that the communication dynamics are different, and how people use it is different.
There are still a lot of people that don't use SMS. But nobody will deny that SMS is a pervasive communication technology, and that it has different connotations than a voice call or a hand written letter.
I think facebook "style" communications are the same: a new [or at least newly popular] paradigm of communication.
So while I currently don't "have" to use it; there is a social cost of not doing so. I simply miss out on some things that I'd otherwise like to be involved in or aware of.
To make this real and not theoretical, My wife is a facebook user; I am not. A co-worker of mine is a facebook "friend" of my wife. She approached me at work and wanted to discuss the latest thing my wife posted [which was a status update on our babies who are in the NICU right now].
Other people are hearing information about my own family before I am. And this isn't an isolated case.
I mentioend those out of convenience. They exist and solve their respective problems acceptably. I don't have a knee jerk opposition proprietary software and non-open-enough websites.
The point is that _i_ want to aggregate and orchestrate the component silos into the facets of "my" online existence. If I find the policies of flickr good enough, then why NOT use flickr for my photo publishing needs?
The key difference is that when I tire of flickr or its policies, I can migrate my data easily to some other photo publishing silo and update some pointers in my "profile" [which I fully own and control] and be done with it.
I don't want to use Facebook to be some sort of anonymous stalker of other peoples information, yet never share or publish anything myself. THat's not a meaningful connection. Certainly anon-to-anon social connections are interesting, but only in certain circumstances. Yes for survivalists, yes for crypto researchers, yes for sabotuers.
Sharing photos of family gatherings? Not so much.
The basic issue is this: IMO, facebook is fundamentally a new type of paradigm for communication, like SMS, and like email, and like the long distance phone call and the postal letter before it.
But facebook is merely an implementation of this new paradigm. What is the general case? How should it be created and adopted?
I want to communicate with my mother in law, using a technological/communication/social paradigm similar to facebook, the website.
I don't want facebook, the entity, to own the terms under which I do so.
Now, far be it from me to whine about how everyone else has to conform to my preferences, but there _is_ a legitimate problem here. Nothing that facebook does is especially interesting or novel. They don't even have first mover advantage. Yet they have the "normal person" social network graph locked up.
When one decomposes facebook into its constituent parts, one sees that each of them has equivalent or superior implementations elsewhere.
Isn't facebook really just an aggregation of parts, parts which having a best-of-breed alternative outside facebook? Yet this is what everyone is beholden to?
facebook reminds me a lot of classmates.com [which absorbed or was born from highschoolalumni.com].
I spent a lot of time trying to curate my highschool "social network graph" and for all my troubles, the company kept my data and then locked me out of it with a paywall. CDDB did the same thing.
So, fuck these companies who expect me to freely toil to build _their_ relevence, and then think they "own" my data and change their policies.
There is no reason _we_ should submit control of our social graphs to other entities. The shape of the problem is fully federated, with every relationship being potentially asymmetrical and many to many. And when one considers the "problems" that are solved in one spot with facebook [directory, content publishing, commenting, distribution groups, photo sharing, etc], there are superior solutions already out there.
What is needed is just a formalization of these technologies into a bag, and a variety of platforms/vendors that host an individuals online participation in this graph.
Basically, if you have a wordpress/blogspot, a flickr/picassa, an email address/home page, you should be able to "plugin" to something that gives all the functionality of facebook.
Yet you would be free to expire/migrate/manage your data as you see fit.
There is already a market place for different facebook related tools. Imagine how that will expand as facebook is teased apart into its constituent parts and competing yet interoperable implementations show up.
Re-check your assumptions. This includes not only your code, but your emails and what you say during meetings. Infact, being precise in conversations is probably more important than writing good code. Nobody expects you to write perfect code. Everyone expects you to tell the truth.
The problems that you solve, by yourself, in isolation, that do not impact or educate other employees, are simply not interesting problems.
When you write emails, when you aren't sure, SAY SO. When you merely THINK it works like this, SAY SO, or, better yet, READ THE CODE and PASTE IT FOR CONTEXT.
What you don't want to be is a guy who makes mistakes casually and carelessly. It's fine to not know -- infact, it's wonderful to not know, because then you [and others] know what to do next [learn]. But it's awful to be wrong and to mislead others merely on account of intellectual laziness.
2) Become interested in your co-workers problems.
When a co-worker asks me about something, i HATE not knowing. I want to be indispensible. I want to be the go-to guy. That takes a lot of time, knowledge, and experience [some of which you may have already developed as a hobbyist or student]
A lot of what your co-workers ask you about isn't specific to their domain and their problems [after all, why would they ask you?]. Give them good answers, but make sure you understand the "real" question. Understand what they're trying to do. Very often, people have already taken 3 steps down the wrong path, and are asking you how to complete step 4. Your job is to help them back up and take 2 steps down the RIGHT path. Some of your co-workers will _always_ be taking the wrong path. Learn who they are and how to gracefully guide them.
When you cannot answer a question, you have two choices: - drop what you are doing, and try to pair-research with them to investiate the answer - tell them that you don't know any more than they do. Suggest who they go talk to or ask next, if at all possible. Coming to you needs to provide them with SOME value -- even if it's a "here's what I'd do next if i COULD work on this". Additionally, express interest and curiosity in the problem. Capstone the conversation by asking them to share the answer with you when they find it. This does a few things -- expresses confidence that they can solve this problem -- shows that you are interested in what they are doing -- when they return with the solution, you get some very cheap knowledge
3) try to keep things focused on your customers and your business
You will argue with people. Sometimes, both of you are smart and right, and perspective and context creates the distance between you.
Nobody gives a shit about your pride or need to be right all the time or anyting like that. Mostly, that will piss people off. Channel that energy into doing #1 and #2.
When it comes time to make decisions, it's all about what's best for the customer and/or business objectives. This ties into #1. Don't grand stand about what people want -- go to the data. When there isn't data, be as precise as possible about your anecdotes. Plan on losing some battles. Don't spend all of your political capital fighting for the unimportant victories.
Understand when you are on flimsy ground and retreat when appropriate.
It's ok for other people to be wrong. You want to work with strong minded people who have good ideas and are confident. This means you'll disagree sometimes and it will get vigorous. Don't be vincidctive if you are right; guide them to that conclusion.
When you are a zen master at this, people will start repeating your ideas as if they were their own.
4) Utilize your manager effectively. Raise co-worker concerns that you cannot resolve comfortably to them in private, so that everyone can have the best chance of saving face. Understand what makes her successful, and what your role is in acheiving that.
Well, the full paper is behind nag-ware, but here are the "top 3 findings"
Empirically, programming languages / frameworks do not have similar security postures when deployed in the field. They are shown to have moderately different vulnerabilities, with different frequency of occurrence, which are fixed in different amounts of time.
The size of a Web application's attack surface alone does not necessarily correlate to the volume and type of issues identified. For example Microsoft's.NET (ASPX) and Struts (DO), with near-average attack surfaces, turned in the two lowest historical vulnerability averages. ASPX and DO websites have had an average of 18.7 and 19.9 serious vulnerabilities respectively.
Perl (PL) had the highest average number of vulnerabilities found historically by a wide margin, at 44.8 per website and also the largest number currently at 11.8.ties have taken over 50 days to fix.
Gosh. To me that says that they found significant differences between the languages and platforms.
However, I am not ready to make any claims based on this, other than, they sampled a bunch of websites and then recorded information about vulnerabilities, and did "group by" on language/framework.
Isn't it likely that there is some selection bias here?
Rather than making claims about the intrinsic nature of some language or framework [like all of them are equal, or one is better than the others], don't you need to correct for the lack of control.. like same coders in the same organization trying to implement the same _type_ of application?
If I gave the same group of developers equal traning time, equal implementation time, and equal specs... and then said "do this in ASP.NET", and then "do it in Perl". And i did this with 10 groups of developers, and i changed the order of which application came first (i.e. some groups did perl first, some did asp.net first).
__then__ I would feel comfortable saying something about the relationship between language/framework and security vulnerabilities. What we really want to know is, given developers _like yours_, who've had equal training, expertise, and time, when trying to produce equivalent functionality.. how is _their_ production of security defects, and is there a difference between toolchains?
Now, I didn't read the PDF because if the nag-wall infront of it. But that doesn't sound like what they did here.
The goal out here in the real world is this: make an application that is secure-enough, cheaply-enough. "Cheaply-enough" means what caliber of people you need to hire, and how long it takes them to produce value-adding output. Secure enough means that the cost of fixing your bugs is higher than the cost of (risk of penetration * financial impact of penetration).
Actually my comment was not about the attributes of men but on the attributes of _societies_.
The OP, and a few others, posit that the US and UK dominated the world because of their better ability to enslave others and "plunder" their resources.
I disagree. The US and the UK dominated the world because their socio-political systems rewarded ambition and acheivement. The UK army didn't march into Iran and steal their oil.
Persia (and indeed, parts of the South America very _near_ the modern Venezuelan border, if not actually partially inside that border) had a rich history of scientific innovation. There was no geographic or genetic problem in these parts of the world; they were eclipsed because western socities were simply better organized to reward individual excellence at the period in world history where the industrial revolution took off.
Highly capitalist societies will nearly always out-innovate any other type of society. It's not that i think the genetic stock of western whites is better than anywhere else, it's that the US and UK "made the best" of the good people they had because their socities were setup to maximize individual potential.
So when I hear about "democratic" and "socialist" peoples revolts "reclaiming" resources from foreign capitalists, I tend to look at it as the losers using violence to retaliate against the ideological winners.
Before the West showed up, this oil was worth nothing. Without the ingenuity to get it out of the ground, it _wasn't_ a resource. That intellectual power _could_ have come from Persians but by and large it didn't. I don't blame that on genetics or race, I blame it on bad government.
I understand that the US and UK have committed many errors in propping up bad governments in other societies. That doesn't change the fact many of these socities are poor or repressed or whatever because of their own reluctance to have a US-style revolution and understand the real value of humanity: individual freedom and free will. When the government exists to enshrine and empower freedom and property, socities _win_.
I _do_ beleive in American exceptionalism. I don't beleive that gives us the right to go bomb the shit out of people, but when we partner with other nations I expect them to be clear about where the value is and to honor the commitments they sign. We could go bother someone else for oil; they MAY be able to bother someone else for expertise. It's a two way street and when one party decides the deal sucks, we by and large do NOT bomb them into the stone age.
How much investment in Venezuela do you think has been written off post nationalization?
How much US techology transfer do you think we have done to China that wasn't really voluntary? Have you ever done a US-China "business partnership" ?
Thanks for your informative participation in this discussion.
DVD's, indeed, all storage and transmission media have a bounded bit-error rate. Symbol transposition is a known fault in some communication modes.
Probably the most interesting thing is that you executed the same query twice in a row. Presumably you were expecting a different result the second time.
Which race do you think I'm criticising that manages to include Persians, Venezuelans, and everywhere else that Western interests brought extraction technology and expertise?
The auto-invocation of "racism" as an argument is pathetic. It appears to be a good indicator that the invoker has no argument more coherent than "I don't like that".
A _useful_ reply would have been a quick summary of WHICH entities developed specific resources in the countries I mentioned. You could have told me to STFU by showing that the places I so carelessly disparaged DID manage to develop their natural resources without outside investment and expertise.
I don't think the difference between the two is especially subtle or hard to understand.
US independence: "we reject your authority and laws. _our_ blood, bodies, and ingenuity built all of this, after we arrived here".
Socialist Nationalization of foreign investment: "we reject OUR laws, because we now find them inconvenient. you came here, you built this for us, and we are going to take it because we no longer need you"
The real litmus test is always thus: how much oil and gas exploration and innovation is done by the "liberated" nationalized industries? How long before they go completely broke?
After the US broke away from Britain it _flourished_.
What happened to Iran after 1953? What's happening in Venezuela right now?
Oh and the US never refunded the British for their investment in developing the American colonies. The US confiscated stuff from those loyal to the British Empire and never gave it back. Makes it a little ironic when Americans bitch about their colonies rebelling and taking stuff from them. I guess Americans like to think that they themselves are the rebels, and can't understand that they are the empire.
Nationalizing a functioning oil industry in a place that previously didn't have _electricity_ is a little different than what the British "did for" the Americans.
The "generous crown" agreed to stop killing non-Anglicans if they moved to a different continent and continued to pay taxes. How noble of them.
If you have a real argument underneath your wink-wink, let's take everything I say for granted conversational style, I'd be more intersted.
Chavez is a buffoon; his only useful purpose is to remind pro-socialist ideologues that they should be embarassed. It's 2010. The guy is shutting down TV stations he doesn't like and there are dipshits in America that are claiming that this is the fault of US policy in South America.
Hayek's foundational literature is something like 70 years old now. There's simply no excuse.
There's a fine line between "America has overstepped the bounds of its Constitutional authority, and is involving itself in foreign adventurism that it ought not to", a positino i support, and "America can do no right".
Shit-hole countries around the world are NOT justified in laying all of their greivances at the feet of the ONLY "empire" in World History which came about from reluctantly solving the worlds problems as they overspilled their original boundaries...
I wish that the US (and Americans) were in a stronger positino to argue that we're still holding the torch of freedom, justice, etc. It's been generations since the US was really fully credible in its prevailing ideology and politics.
Problem is, even after such horrible decline, nobody else is doing it any better. What a sad world.
There's a lot to like about this post, even though you are getting modded into oblivion, but I do want to point out the other side of _this_ coin:
We invaded many Latin American countries because they kicked out US corporations and tried to reaffirm ownership of their own resources.
The US and Great Britain spent a ton of money and intellectual power _developing_ those resources in the shit-hole backwards nations that had them. After _WE_ did the _real_ work (the thinking), and developed the resources, and turned it into an ever-producing gravy train, THEN the knuckle-dragging locals start getting very upset about their "soverign rights". But they don't "soverignly" tear the pumping rigs and derricks and everything else down, do they?
Of course not.
When Venezuela decided to "nationalize" big portions of their oil industry they signed their death sentence. Nobody is going to invest in that rotten place any longer.
Now, I think there is a perfectly good case to be made that the US government shouldn't be throwing around its weight to "support" the private/corporate interests that were doing foreign resource development and had their assets stolen by foreign governments. I think if I were running the US I'd say "if you like our laws and the protections they give, do your resource investing _here_, or hire your own army to protect your activities outside of US soil".
I think there was a point in the history of the UK where the British Navy was doing it... "about right". In terms of, keeping ports and trade open for British interests, but not having boots on the ground in foreign lands. Obviously they got overzealous and collapsed.
We're, as you point out, on the same trajectory.
First world countries are usually first world countries because they have raped and pillaged the third world for labor and resources
I think this is only problematic in an argumentative sense, and your choice of words is meant more to emote than to inform. Dominant cultures arise because they socio-politically reward good ideas. Cultures that do not adopt better ideas as quickly will tend to lose out.
If there _must_ be conflict, I'm OK with the stack-ranking described above.
I don't know if the series producers intended to do this or not, but to me, the debate between the humans and the anti-spirals was actually a refutation of zero-sum economics.
The anti-spirals position was essentially, in order to create, you must destroy [zero sum]; in order to live, something must die. Living, essentially, was murder.
This is true only in the most animalistic and dehumanizing sense. The man of today lives perhaps only 2x as long as the earliest man. As an individual, we have not escaped death.
But as a society.. we have [so far].
The birds of today are _not_ different from the birds of 10,000 years ago. They still build nests out of what they can find. No bird has mastered the ability to live under water, or outside of the earth's atmosphere, and transferred this knowledge [and thus, capability] to _all other birds, forever_.
Yet humanity has put many of the peices in place to do just that. Because one human has shown that it can be done, I know that if not me, than my child, will be able to work and live in outer space. Maybe not indefinitely, but long enough to make it more probable for _his_ children. And eventually, our species will cast off the shackles that hold it to this planet. No other species on earth has or ever will do that. And what lets us acheive that is our true wealth.. our ideas.
The legacy and inheritance of mankind is his intellectual wealth, and wealth is not zero sum. The ingenuity of those who have come before never perishes; it is the foundation upon which tomorrow is built.
The key message I took away from the "cartoon philosophy" of Gurren Lagann is that, in effect, _ideas_ are not bound and shackled by the conservation of matter/energy, and so any sort of model which attempts to predict where humanity will "top out" is fundamentally flawed, because one of the variables - the collective ingenuity of the human species -- is _unbounded_. The power of man's ideas is _infinite_.
Every year the world grows more food than it did before, it supports more people than it did before, people live longer than they did before, and humanity becomes more intelligent than it was before. There are people who continue to say that there is a population problem or this problem or what have you. They are all wrong because they think man is an unthinking animal. All of their models neglect the most important, dominating term in the equation: ingenuity.
Man is the most amazing creature on this planet, _singularly_ fit to never perish, because man is a man of ideas, ideas which are only bound by the reality of our physical world until one day they aren't -- where each new discovery of man's mind means that we have re-made reality according to our desires.
The OP beleives that man's ideas count for nothing. He discounts the entire history of the human species. Yes, there has been much killing, and much of it over resources. But we are not birds or apes. The killing over resources in the past has taught us both how to kill less often, and how to kill less brutally. It has taught us how to use resources more efficiently. It has taught us how to avoid killing at all, in some cases. At the same time, it has taught us we have the ability to kill nearly all of us simultaneously... and that it's fruitless to do so.
The wealth of man, his true value-add.. his way forward... are his ideas. And his ideas are unbounded. The power of these ideas -- infinite power -- will become the high order term in every equation that we use to describe reality.
No doubt, when man and aliens make first contact, conflict will inevitably ensue, but it will not be final. Many people may perish, but mankind and its ideas will not. Eventually, those who remain, and the "aliens" will understand... collaborating is more efficient than competing.
Ideas are not zero sum. And they dominate reality.
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I'm amassing firepower because I've seen what "you" do to people who are unarmed.
The key point about the Waco and Ruby Ridge episodes is that these were sepratists who retreated from society. YOU WENT AFTER THEM TO MURDER THEM.
That's what I'm afraid of.
Your post encapsulates the entire mindset perfectly. People like you are why people like me get this way. The idea that somebody, somewhere, might think differently, _and_ might want to defend themselves, is cause to decimate them? Really?
If you don't have anything but contempt and disgust for what your government did in Waco and Ruby Ridge then how are we supposed to talk about anything?
I beleive that I am born free, and that i have the right to arm myself however i like and for whatever reasons I choose. Until such time as I initiate force or violence against you, I'm a free and civil man who's done you no wrong; you have no reason to either be afraid or upset.
You, apparently, disagree.
Well, I'm right; you aren't; and when you come for me, I'm going to shoot back.
It's that simple.
So don't come.
The idea of ever having to use a gun for its intended purpose is terrifying and abhorrent. I hate to contemplate it. THe only thing that is more terrifying is _having_ that purpose and not being so equipped.
I've done my part. I've moved out of your city, where you have nothing to be afraid of.
Leave me alone.
Well, unlike everyone else, he actually IS a doctor, and has been one most of his life.
I won't get into the health issue here with you. You've decided to beleive what your pet politicians have told you; I'm beleiving mine. Suffice it to say, I'm familiar with the majority of every word he's written or spoken, and I agree nearly entirely with the guy.
The guy is very cognizant of what we're spending money on and what inflation is doing to us.. probably more so than anyone else.
And the thing people aren't latching onto is that he has the only real credible solution to stopping the bleeding w.r.t. spending... namely to shut-down the US foreign empire. We can shut that off _first_ and then republicans get the smaller government they now claim to want (ha ha) and peaceniks / BDS democrats can get out of the war that (until Obama decided to expand it) they were so angry about.
Once the US foreign empire is dismantled and we've put a tourniquet on federal spending, we can get to the REST of his plan -- like dismantling the social services that you rightly point out have become so expensive.
Have a source for that?
He's been talking about this for a long time -- someone should have fact-checked it by now and called him on it.
[the way i heard it, was not "10 years ago", but "during the clintoln admnistration", 1994 iirc]
That's very 1984 of you.
If a person, who happened to be a white supremecist, decided to commit an act of violence against someone else, who happened to be black, then I would arrest him and put him on trial, because he violated the intrinsic individual rights of a man... the right to not suffer the initiation of violence by the hands of his neighbor.
You, on the other hand, seem so very upset that somebody, somewhere, could have a thought that you disagree with, that the best course of action is pre-emptive murder.
Frankly, I'll take the white supremecists. There are only a few of them, and they're easy to spot and exclude.
But you are everywhere. And _that_ is scary.
Actually, he said that if our annual spending was reduced to where it was at _10 years ago_, that the revenue from the income tax wouldn't be needed.
And the person he is "debating" with misses that point entirely.
And so did you.
Ron Paul is about the only politician I don't want to immediately strangle.
I agree with you completely.
Except to you, _I_ am one of those religious libertarian nutjobs.. and yes, I've been spending the last 2 years amassing firepower.
If you want to understand "us" better you'll need to understand that it's a bit bigger of a tent than you realize: I don't have any kind of TV service at all so I'm certainly not beholden to Fox News or Glenn Beck or whoever it is you claim programs me [wasn't it Bill O'Reilly 2 years ago, and Rush Limbaugh for the previous 15?].
Me, and others like me, also either didn't vote for GWB in 04 or did so regrettably to make sure that a blow-hard dipshit Kerry didn't ruin the country _even faster_ than GWB was doing.
What you're missing is that the angst in America didn't start when Obama won the election; it was in full swing when a lot of Americans realized that McCain was the "best" answer the establishment would give us to run against Obama. It was simmering back when GWB decided that "to save" America he would have to destroy everything that made it worth Saving.
It was uncomfortably hot -- and almost boiled over -- when Clinton and Reno _murdered_ families in Texas and Idaho -- and in the latter case, used soverign immunity to prevent the murderers [real ACTUAL murderers -- not like the Wikileaks disaster, btw] from facing the criminal charges that the soverign state govt of Idaho had filed against them.
Where was the outrage from "you" when fucking _tanks_ shot up a house full of children and burned it down? AMERICAN CITIZENS -- people that have the same right to a trial as you do. Is your hatered for anyone claiming any kind of religion so intense that you stand by happily when tanks and helicopters and machine guns murder doezens of women and children? Not "well, it's a war" accidental casualties, but actual coordinated assaults on isolated homes of people who just want to be left alone?
Was it a proud day for the left when "one more gun nut" had is wife taken out by a federal sniper _while she was holding a baby?_
For some of us, it started back when Reagan, who ran on a platform that included abolishing the ATF and ending the Dept of Education [check your history -- he actually ran and got elected on that platform!], failed to do anything of the sort and instead blew federal spending sky high and got is tangled up all over central America. To his credit, none of us have bomb shelters any more and the Warsaw Pact is a fading memory. We'd take him over any of the current crop of losers, but we hate the system so much that even he is now fair game for criticism.
I guess you and we agreed back during Nixon. Everyone agreed that Nixon sucked. He was a crook and a liar. But apart from having your headquarters broken into, I don't understand _your_ objection; Nixon got elected by promising food price controls and delivered wage controls as well. That's socialism 101, and that's what you guys want more than anything, right?
I want my church and my law to stay the hell away from each other -- but if I have to pick my church or YOUR chuch, well, I know which one I am picking.
I don't care WHAT you or the Texans are putting in school textbooks; I am homeschooling my kids because government controlled education is a dismal failure [after all, it made me, who you have written off as an unworthy moron]. _You_ will invariably want to control exactly how my kids are indoctrinated, I won't ever accept that. I'd literally shoot you first. If you want to terrorize kids with horseshit contradictory ideas that play out in some hybrid prison warden/lord of the flies petri dish, go ruin your _own_ children. Leave me and mine out of it.
The dilemma is unfolding roughly as follows. _Most_ people, left and right, want a big powerful government that gives them what they want and takes from others. But what many people on the right are finally realizing is that when "their team" is running the show, they don't actually get what they want. It turns out, their team was "small government" all alon
Because while the contributions of our space program to science have been good, the contributions of our space program to _engineering_, and to a lesser extent, human ambition, have been legendary.
I'm not as interested in knowing the 1-true-origin of the Universe with higher resolution pixels than ever before. There are probably a zillion important discoveries done in NASA labs _every day_. I don't hear about them because I don't care -- and I'm one of the nerds.
I'm _very_ interested in a grainy, time delayed transmission of a human being, waving at the camera, with the Martian landscape in the background. Me and 7 billion other people. We want that. We will stop what we are doing. The whole world will stop, with baited breath.
Don't you want humans to do acheive something like that again? Don't you want it to be this country that does it? Don't you want to be the generation that said "Mr. President -- we disagree with you on a lot of things, but we're all united on this. Just give the order" ?
Our space program needs a mission that any idiot can understand and be inspired by. "human footprints on a different world" -- the ultimate inspiration.
If I ran nasa, I'd change the slogan to something like this:
"Shrinking the Science Fiction Section, One Mission at a Time"
There is almost nothing left in this country to be inspired by. Please give us back a real space program. Please remind us that somewhere, somebody in America can do something amazing.
If manned space is the new opiate of the masses, I'm fine being a junkie.
If the USAF couldn't have predicted Sony deciding to fuck its customers, I'm a bit concerned about its ability to predict much of anything.
Really? That's all you've got?
I live in North Dakota. We were the #1 wheat producer and the #1 honey producer last year. We'd _love_ a longer growing season. We had a huge crop that got snowed over last year. Bring the warmth baby!
But let's set that aside. Let's suppose I buy your absurd argument that "plants" will simply die off. Well, I'd need to not know that nuclear submarines don't stay submerged for months at a time. Or that people have lived in space for periods of time. I'd need to be ignorant of the fact that you can grow bananas in _Iceland_ thanks to modern efforts.
I beleive in man's ability to engineer his way out of problems. The only thing that has ever stopped that are people like you who fetch the ear of government.
I'm confident in my ability to feed myself, without your help. And I am even more confident that I can govern myself without your help.
I was waiting for someone to come out and say it.
What climate alarmists don't want is to preserve humanity and its only habitable world.
What they want is behavior modification.
I want a nice place for my children just as much as anyone. But for me, a nice place means "Free from oppressive coercion by know-it-all-assholes". In fact, a free place with no vegetation seems better than a serene landscape with a tyrant hiding behind every lovingly protected tree.
I value human freedom more than I value the myth of holding the planetscape constant.
So to turn your pompousness around, any "solution" that involves coercive behavior modification and a reduction in my quality of life -- quality as _I_ define it -- is no solution at all.
I don't particularly care about or buy into AGW alarmism, but I enjoy seeing technological approaches postulated -- because they act like an X-ray machine into the minds of the watermelon climate lobby.
You guys definitely want to fix "the problem". But the problem is that humans have too much freedom -- freedom to live life in a way differently than you'd design for them. So any solution that lets people continue to live their lives as they like doing is a non-solution to you.
I think you've got it completely wrong.
My wife talks to her parents on facebook more than she does her friends from highschool.
The paradigm of communications and interactions on facebook are fundamentally different from the hand written letter, from the phone call, from the email, from the text message, from the face-to-face one on one, and from the hanging out in a physical space.
People use facebook differently to communicate than they use all of those things.
They are not looking to invent new technologies to segment themselves from prior generations. It's not like kids have STOPPED texting because of facebook.
Compare the attributes of various communications mechanisms. Single-cast vs. Multi-cast. Real-time interactive vs. store-and-forward. Immediate feedback vs. delayed feedback. Error-correction deferred response vs. errors sent in-band. Persisted by default vs. volitile by default. Single-media vs. multi-media. Collaborative response vs. isolated response.
Facebook has different attributes vs. a phone call, an email, an SMS, hanging out in person, etc. People use it differently.
For instance, there is no way for a kid to use a phone to do a 1:many broadcast of 5 lines of text of how they are feeling _right now_, and to get group-visible/collaborative responses on a time-disparate basis. (well, unless their phone can update facebook -- which many can).
How many different data stores, physical servers, etc do you think are involved in rendering your face book page?
Answer: lots
The questions, then, are:
1) why should one entity control _all_ of those data stores and their composition/aggregation
2) why should the way facebook.com wants that page to look be the only way all such pages look
Nobody is actually advocating a return to blogs. What I (and others) are saying is that blogs are one silo of the facebook experience, and there is a great diveristy of blogging software and hosters, with various levels of fine grained control for commenting, syndication, and so on.
The experience that I want is something that looks and works "similarly" to facebook, but is fully federated. I think that's technically possible -- without that much software work, honestly.
Obviously the social inertia is the big problem, but before facebook, there was no facebook.
Because of standards, people can have different [and competing] providers for phone service, cell service, email service, and so on.
Bell South customers can call NYNEX customers. Hotmail customers can email GMail customers.
What I want is for facebook and myspace users to be able to "friend" and "thumbs up" each other, as well as identities/content manged/controlled/hosted on other sites.
Well, my other post goes into this, but IMO, facebook is the most popular implementation of a new communication _mode_ or paradigm, like SMS, Email, cell phones, land lines, telegraphs, and snail mail before it.
The reason i say this is that the communication dynamics are different, and how people use it is different.
There are still a lot of people that don't use SMS. But nobody will deny that SMS is a pervasive communication technology, and that it has different connotations than a voice call or a hand written letter.
I think facebook "style" communications are the same: a new [or at least newly popular] paradigm of communication.
So while I currently don't "have" to use it; there is a social cost of not doing so. I simply miss out on some things that I'd otherwise like to be involved in or aware of.
To make this real and not theoretical, My wife is a facebook user; I am not. A co-worker of mine is a facebook "friend" of my wife. She approached me at work and wanted to discuss the latest thing my wife posted [which was a status update on our babies who are in the NICU right now].
Other people are hearing information about my own family before I am. And this isn't an isolated case.
I mentioend those out of convenience. They exist and solve their respective problems acceptably. I don't have a knee jerk opposition proprietary software and non-open-enough websites.
The point is that _i_ want to aggregate and orchestrate the component silos into the facets of "my" online existence. If I find the policies of flickr good enough, then why NOT use flickr for my photo publishing needs?
The key difference is that when I tire of flickr or its policies, I can migrate my data easily to some other photo publishing silo and update some pointers in my "profile" [which I fully own and control] and be done with it.
I don't want to use Facebook to be some sort of anonymous stalker of other peoples information, yet never share or publish anything myself. THat's not a meaningful connection. Certainly anon-to-anon social connections are interesting, but only in certain circumstances. Yes for survivalists, yes for crypto researchers, yes for sabotuers.
Sharing photos of family gatherings? Not so much.
The basic issue is this: IMO, facebook is fundamentally a new type of paradigm for communication, like SMS, and like email, and like the long distance phone call and the postal letter before it.
But facebook is merely an implementation of this new paradigm. What is the general case? How should it be created and adopted?
I want to communicate with my mother in law, using a technological/communication/social paradigm similar to facebook, the website.
I don't want facebook, the entity, to own the terms under which I do so.
I don't.
Problem is, everyone else does.
Now, far be it from me to whine about how everyone else has to conform to my preferences, but there _is_ a legitimate problem here. Nothing that facebook does is especially interesting or novel. They don't even have first mover advantage. Yet they have the "normal person" social network graph locked up.
When one decomposes facebook into its constituent parts, one sees that each of them has equivalent or superior implementations elsewhere.
Isn't facebook really just an aggregation of parts, parts which having a best-of-breed alternative outside facebook? Yet this is what everyone is beholden to?
facebook reminds me a lot of classmates.com [which absorbed or was born from highschoolalumni.com].
I spent a lot of time trying to curate my highschool "social network graph" and for all my troubles, the company kept my data and then locked me out of it with a paywall. CDDB did the same thing.
So, fuck these companies who expect me to freely toil to build _their_ relevence, and then think they "own" my data and change their policies.
There is no reason _we_ should submit control of our social graphs to other entities. The shape of the problem is fully federated, with every relationship being potentially asymmetrical and many to many. And when one considers the "problems" that are solved in one spot with facebook [directory, content publishing, commenting, distribution groups, photo sharing, etc], there are superior solutions already out there.
What is needed is just a formalization of these technologies into a bag, and a variety of platforms/vendors that host an individuals online participation in this graph.
Basically, if you have a wordpress/blogspot, a flickr/picassa, an email address/home page, you should be able to "plugin" to something that gives all the functionality of facebook.
Yet you would be free to expire/migrate/manage your data as you see fit.
There is already a market place for different facebook related tools. Imagine how that will expand as facebook is teased apart into its constituent parts and competing yet interoperable implementations show up.
1) Do _Excellent_ work.
Re-check your assumptions. This includes not only your code, but your emails and what you say during meetings. Infact, being precise in conversations is probably more important than writing good code. Nobody expects you to write perfect code. Everyone expects you to tell the truth.
The problems that you solve, by yourself, in isolation, that do not impact or educate other employees, are simply not interesting problems.
When you write emails, when you aren't sure, SAY SO. When you merely THINK it works like this, SAY SO, or, better yet, READ THE CODE and PASTE IT FOR CONTEXT.
What you don't want to be is a guy who makes mistakes casually and carelessly. It's fine to not know -- infact, it's wonderful to not know, because then you [and others] know what to do next [learn]. But it's awful to be wrong and to mislead others merely on account of intellectual laziness.
2) Become interested in your co-workers problems.
When a co-worker asks me about something, i HATE not knowing. I want to be indispensible. I want to be the go-to guy. That takes a lot of time, knowledge, and experience [some of which you may have already developed as a hobbyist or student]
A lot of what your co-workers ask you about isn't specific to their domain and their problems [after all, why would they ask you?]. Give them good answers, but make sure you understand the "real" question. Understand what they're trying to do. Very often, people have already taken 3 steps down the wrong path, and are asking you how to complete step 4. Your job is to help them back up and take 2 steps down the RIGHT path. Some of your co-workers will _always_ be taking the wrong path. Learn who they are and how to gracefully guide them.
When you cannot answer a question, you have two choices:
- drop what you are doing, and try to pair-research with them to investiate the answer
- tell them that you don't know any more than they do. Suggest who they go talk to or ask next, if at all possible. Coming to you needs to provide them with SOME value -- even if it's a "here's what I'd do next if i COULD work on this". Additionally, express interest and curiosity in the problem. Capstone the conversation by asking them to share the answer with you when they find it. This does a few things
-- expresses confidence that they can solve this problem
-- shows that you are interested in what they are doing
-- when they return with the solution, you get some very cheap knowledge
3) try to keep things focused on your customers and your business
You will argue with people. Sometimes, both of you are smart and right, and perspective and context creates the distance between you.
Nobody gives a shit about your pride or need to be right all the time or anyting like that. Mostly, that will piss people off. Channel that energy into doing #1 and #2.
When it comes time to make decisions, it's all about what's best for the customer and/or business objectives. This ties into #1. Don't grand stand about what people want -- go to the data. When there isn't data, be as precise as possible about your anecdotes. Plan on losing some battles. Don't spend all of your political capital fighting for the unimportant victories.
Understand when you are on flimsy ground and retreat when appropriate.
It's ok for other people to be wrong. You want to work with strong minded people who have good ideas and are confident. This means you'll disagree sometimes and it will get vigorous. Don't be vincidctive if you are right; guide them to that conclusion.
When you are a zen master at this, people will start repeating your ideas as if they were their own.
4) Utilize your manager effectively. Raise co-worker concerns that you cannot resolve comfortably to them in private, so that everyone can have the best chance of saving face. Understand what makes her successful, and what your role is in acheiving that.
Understand that from her perspective, the rest of
Well, the full paper is behind nag-ware, but here are the "top 3 findings"
Gosh. To me that says that they found significant differences between the languages and platforms.
However, I am not ready to make any claims based on this, other than, they sampled a bunch of websites and then recorded information about vulnerabilities, and did "group by" on language/framework.
Isn't it likely that there is some selection bias here?
Rather than making claims about the intrinsic nature of some language or framework [like all of them are equal, or one is better than the others], don't you need to correct for the lack of control.. like same coders in the same organization trying to implement the same _type_ of application?
If I gave the same group of developers equal traning time, equal implementation time, and equal specs... and then said "do this in ASP.NET", and then "do it in Perl". And i did this with 10 groups of developers, and i changed the order of which application came first (i.e. some groups did perl first, some did asp.net first).
__then__ I would feel comfortable saying something about the relationship between language/framework and security vulnerabilities. What we really want to know is, given developers _like yours_, who've had equal training, expertise, and time, when trying to produce equivalent functionality.. how is _their_ production of security defects, and is there a difference between toolchains?
Now, I didn't read the PDF because if the nag-wall infront of it. But that doesn't sound like what they did here.
The goal out here in the real world is this: make an application that is secure-enough, cheaply-enough. "Cheaply-enough" means what caliber of people you need to hire, and how long it takes them to produce value-adding output. Secure enough means that the cost of fixing your bugs is higher than the cost of (risk of penetration * financial impact of penetration).
Actually my comment was not about the attributes of men but on the attributes of _societies_.
The OP, and a few others, posit that the US and UK dominated the world because of their better ability to enslave others and "plunder" their resources.
I disagree. The US and the UK dominated the world because their socio-political systems rewarded ambition and acheivement. The UK army didn't march into Iran and steal their oil.
Persia (and indeed, parts of the South America very _near_ the modern Venezuelan border, if not actually partially inside that border) had a rich history of scientific innovation. There was no geographic or genetic problem in these parts of the world; they were eclipsed because western socities were simply better organized to reward individual excellence at the period in world history where the industrial revolution took off.
Highly capitalist societies will nearly always out-innovate any other type of society. It's not that i think the genetic stock of western whites is better than anywhere else, it's that the US and UK "made the best" of the good people they had because their socities were setup to maximize individual potential.
So when I hear about "democratic" and "socialist" peoples revolts "reclaiming" resources from foreign capitalists, I tend to look at it as the losers using violence to retaliate against the ideological winners.
Before the West showed up, this oil was worth nothing. Without the ingenuity to get it out of the ground, it _wasn't_ a resource. That intellectual power _could_ have come from Persians but by and large it didn't. I don't blame that on genetics or race, I blame it on bad government.
I understand that the US and UK have committed many errors in propping up bad governments in other societies. That doesn't change the fact many of these socities are poor or repressed or whatever because of their own reluctance to have a US-style revolution and understand the real value of humanity: individual freedom and free will. When the government exists to enshrine and empower freedom and property, socities _win_.
I _do_ beleive in American exceptionalism. I don't beleive that gives us the right to go bomb the shit out of people, but when we partner with other nations I expect them to be clear about where the value is and to honor the commitments they sign. We could go bother someone else for oil; they MAY be able to bother someone else for expertise. It's a two way street and when one party decides the deal sucks, we by and large do NOT bomb them into the stone age.
How much investment in Venezuela do you think has been written off post nationalization?
How much US techology transfer do you think we have done to China that wasn't really voluntary? Have you ever done a US-China "business partnership" ?
Thanks for your informative participation in this discussion.
DVD's, indeed, all storage and transmission media have a bounded bit-error rate. Symbol transposition is a known fault in some communication modes.
Probably the most interesting thing is that you executed the same query twice in a row. Presumably you were expecting a different result the second time.
What did Einstein call that? :)
Which race do you think I'm criticising that manages to include Persians, Venezuelans, and everywhere else that Western interests brought extraction technology and expertise?
The auto-invocation of "racism" as an argument is pathetic. It appears to be a good indicator that the invoker has no argument more coherent than "I don't like that".
A _useful_ reply would have been a quick summary of WHICH entities developed specific resources in the countries I mentioned. You could have told me to STFU by showing that the places I so carelessly disparaged DID manage to develop their natural resources without outside investment and expertise.
But you didn't.
I don't think the difference between the two is especially subtle or hard to understand.
US independence: "we reject your authority and laws. _our_ blood, bodies, and ingenuity built all of this, after we arrived here".
Socialist Nationalization of foreign investment: "we reject OUR laws, because we now find them inconvenient. you came here, you built this for us, and we are going to take it because we no longer need you"
The real litmus test is always thus: how much oil and gas exploration and innovation is done by the "liberated" nationalized industries? How long before they go completely broke?
After the US broke away from Britain it _flourished_.
What happened to Iran after 1953?
What's happening in Venezuela right now?
Nationalizing a functioning oil industry in a place that previously didn't have _electricity_ is a little different than what the British "did for" the Americans.
The "generous crown" agreed to stop killing non-Anglicans if they moved to a different continent and continued to pay taxes. How noble of them.
If you have a real argument underneath your wink-wink, let's take everything I say for granted conversational style, I'd be more intersted.
Chavez is a buffoon; his only useful purpose is to remind pro-socialist ideologues that they should be embarassed. It's 2010. The guy is shutting down TV stations he doesn't like and there are dipshits in America that are claiming that this is the fault of US policy in South America.
Hayek's foundational literature is something like 70 years old now. There's simply no excuse.
There's a fine line between "America has overstepped the bounds of its Constitutional authority, and is involving itself in foreign adventurism that it ought not to", a positino i support, and "America can do no right".
Shit-hole countries around the world are NOT justified in laying all of their greivances at the feet of the ONLY "empire" in World History which came about from reluctantly solving the worlds problems as they overspilled their original boundaries...
I wish that the US (and Americans) were in a stronger positino to argue that we're still holding the torch of freedom, justice, etc. It's been generations since the US was really fully credible in its prevailing ideology and politics.
Problem is, even after such horrible decline, nobody else is doing it any better. What a sad world.
There's a lot to like about this post, even though you are getting modded into oblivion, but I do want to point out the other side of _this_ coin:
The US and Great Britain spent a ton of money and intellectual power _developing_ those resources in the shit-hole backwards nations that had them. After _WE_ did the _real_ work (the thinking), and developed the resources, and turned it into an ever-producing gravy train, THEN the knuckle-dragging locals start getting very upset about their "soverign rights". But they don't "soverignly" tear the pumping rigs and derricks and everything else down, do they?
Of course not.
When Venezuela decided to "nationalize" big portions of their oil industry they signed their death sentence. Nobody is going to invest in that rotten place any longer.
Now, I think there is a perfectly good case to be made that the US government shouldn't be throwing around its weight to "support" the private/corporate interests that were doing foreign resource development and had their assets stolen by foreign governments. I think if I were running the US I'd say "if you like our laws and the protections they give, do your resource investing _here_, or hire your own army to protect your activities outside of US soil".
I think there was a point in the history of the UK where the British Navy was doing it... "about right". In terms of, keeping ports and trade open for British interests, but not having boots on the ground in foreign lands. Obviously they got overzealous and collapsed.
We're, as you point out, on the same trajectory.
I think this is only problematic in an argumentative sense, and your choice of words is meant more to emote than to inform. Dominant cultures arise because they socio-politically reward good ideas. Cultures that do not adopt better ideas as quickly will tend to lose out.
If there _must_ be conflict, I'm OK with the stack-ranking described above.
Queue up the Dr. Ferris speech about the real purpose of the law.
Controlling people. Not even for their own good, but merely for the sake of weilding control.
That is politics in America today.
And didn't pay attention to the ending.
I don't know if the series producers intended to do this or not, but to me, the debate between the humans and the anti-spirals was actually a refutation of zero-sum economics.
The anti-spirals position was essentially, in order to create, you must destroy [zero sum]; in order to live, something must die. Living, essentially, was murder.
This is true only in the most animalistic and dehumanizing sense. The man of today lives perhaps only 2x as long as the earliest man. As an individual, we have not escaped death.
But as a society.. we have [so far].
The birds of today are _not_ different from the birds of 10,000 years ago. They still build nests out of what they can find. No bird has mastered the ability to live under water, or outside of the earth's atmosphere, and transferred this knowledge [and thus, capability] to _all other birds, forever_.
Yet humanity has put many of the peices in place to do just that. Because one human has shown that it can be done, I know that if not me, than my child, will be able to work and live in outer space. Maybe not indefinitely, but long enough to make it more probable for _his_ children. And eventually, our species will cast off the shackles that hold it to this planet. No other species on earth has or ever will do that. And what lets us acheive that is our true wealth.. our ideas.
The legacy and inheritance of mankind is his intellectual wealth, and wealth is not zero sum. The ingenuity of those who have come before never perishes; it is the foundation upon which tomorrow is built.
The key message I took away from the "cartoon philosophy" of Gurren Lagann is that, in effect, _ideas_ are not bound and shackled by the conservation of matter/energy, and so any sort of model which attempts to predict where humanity will "top out" is fundamentally flawed, because one of the variables - the collective ingenuity of the human species -- is _unbounded_. The power of man's ideas is _infinite_.
Every year the world grows more food than it did before, it supports more people than it did before, people live longer than they did before, and humanity becomes more intelligent than it was before. There are people who continue to say that there is a population problem or this problem or what have you. They are all wrong because they think man is an unthinking animal. All of their models neglect the most important, dominating term in the equation: ingenuity.
Man is the most amazing creature on this planet, _singularly_ fit to never perish, because man is a man of ideas, ideas which are only bound by the reality of our physical world until one day they aren't -- where each new discovery of man's mind means that we have re-made reality according to our desires.
The OP beleives that man's ideas count for nothing. He discounts the entire history of the human species. Yes, there has been much killing, and much of it over resources. But we are not birds or apes. The killing over resources in the past has taught us both how to kill less often, and how to kill less brutally. It has taught us how to use resources more efficiently. It has taught us how to avoid killing at all, in some cases. At the same time, it has taught us we have the ability to kill nearly all of us simultaneously... and that it's fruitless to do so.
The wealth of man, his true value-add.. his way forward... are his ideas. And his ideas are unbounded. The power of these ideas -- infinite power -- will become the high order term in every equation that we use to describe reality.
No doubt, when man and aliens make first contact, conflict will inevitably ensue, but it will not be final. Many people may perish, but mankind and its ideas will not. Eventually, those who remain, and the "aliens" will understand... collaborating is more efficient than competing.
Ideas are not zero sum. And they dominate reality.