I don't know where religios people get off trying to tell gay people that they don't have the right to share insurance, file taxes together, and visit each other in the hospital; which are about the only rights being legally married entitles you to anyway.
Well, I cannot speak for all religous people. And I happen to agree with you -- it shouldn't matter what religious people think of how any two people want to spend their time.
The problem is that being married has a specific set of legal implications that cause people to be required to legally act in certain compliant ways.
Because the government regulates all kinds of different businesses limiting their ability to discriminate, who and who may not enter into a legally defined/protected class is very much a political issue and very MUCH affects those who for whatever reason may want to continue to act in a discriminatory manner.
Essentially what it boils down to in my mind is that somepeople want to continue to discriminate. Government codification of homosexual marraige as a protected legal institution will either immeidately or slowly destroy the legal ability to discriminate against homosexuals.
You may think that is a great outcome and is reason alone for allowing it. I happen to be a very strong proponent of individual rights and think _all_ anti-discrimination laws are unethical and amount to tremendous invasion of someone's right to conduct their affairs, friendships, and business as they see fit.
Essentially, do you think Bible Thumper Baptists' Mutual Insurance should be legally obligated to take homosexual married couples as clients? If so, support legalized gay marraige.
When you consider the fan-out-effects of what amounts to defining gay couples as a legally protected class, there _are_ non homosexuals who WILL be forced to act in violation of their religious beleifs. The same goes for requiring doctors to perform abortions -- something else that many religous conservatives are against.
In my libertarian fantasy land, the way to solve problems like this is to ensure that monopoly and cartels do not take root. That way, for every discriminatory entity out there, many more can compete with it on a non-discriminatory (or counter-actingly discriminatory) basis. All customers are served and no-one acts in opposition to their own values under coercion.
Furthermore, since the government must serve _all_ people, some people will want to work or be served bythe government, and others will want to exclude those people. The government must side with the minority interest (which is usually inclusive) but will upset the majority. A practical solution is to reduce the scope and function of government as much as possible, so that the interactions of people with different value systems are not fought within the ranks of a singular beaurocratic governance which must be black and white on all such issues, but are instead not fought at all or are fought in a place where competition and specialization are vibrant and mutually productive.
The current idea of governance -- everything must be decided for everyone, and at a high level -- will always alienate and upset _somebody_. People have this idea that the government is the avenue for inflicting their value system on everyone. Apart from "murdering is bad" and "stealing/destroying somebody else's property bad", Americans don't actually have a huge set of values upon which they overwhelmingly agree.
Legislating minutae of values will continue to be a point of strife and bitterness in the US.
I may be misunderstanding you, but Authenticode is a technology used to verify the publisher of binaries so that there is some assurance "lol32.exe" is worth running.
As such, Authenticode isn't an anti-piracy feature insamuch as its an anti-malware feature. As and end user, you'd not want want this to be busted.
You may be thinking of WGA and WPA, the former being the "Genuine Advantage" stuff that Windows Update and MS Download center look for, and the latter being Product Activation [that cares about keys and key activation, etc].
The latter two are most certainly anti-piracy features and confer no functional/usability advantages to the enduser who isn't concerned with the legality/legitimacy of their installation.
First point -- the ABS in a racecar is an entirely different ball of wax than what you get in a production car. It's designed for people that operate closer (and past) the limits of the tires adhesion as their day job and tuned appropriately. Discount comparisons to race ABS to street systems.
On bikes with ABS and race riders going over uneven grip surfaces (i.e. pavement with standing watterpuddles), the ABS bike cut the stopping distance in _half_. That's huge.
On dry tarmac with a good driver, most _production_ ABS systems will not allow the cars to slowdown at their maximum rate, which is where the tires have their absolute _maximum_ grip of ~15% slower than indicated road speed... i.e. straddling the threshhold between lockup and rolling. An ABS system typically intervenes prior to this point.
It is possible for me to be able to get my wheels to begin to hum/howl during threshhold braking and ABS will not activate.
Another area where ABS is a detriment is that it doesn't tend to actually work the way you say it does. Suppose I am driving on an uneven road -- right side dry, left side icy. If I hit the brakes, the left side will want to lock up while the right side will have grip. But maximally activating the right side brakes as you suggest will cause the car to yaw, as the right side will slow down while the left will not. For passenger car systems ABS this is highly undesirable as the driver must now provide an immediate steering input.
So in effect, most production car ABS systems will release brake pressure on the dry side as well to prevent the car from yawing. A talented driver could brake and counter steer to correct the yaw.
I agree that ABS systems have gotten much better, but on passenger cars, they do not outperform qualified humans in _all_ conditions. I have road course experience in production cars with and without ABS and the only thing production-car ABS is good for on a race track is saving you a little tire money (i.e. it keeps you from flatspotting a tire)
The best way to think about ABS is that it makes the default reaction of most panicing drivers an acceptable one. It is little more than a brake-force attenuator. If you hadn't pushed the pedal as hard at that moment in time, it wouldn't have done anything.
My street cars have ABS and I leave it on, because even though I have done many track days and have excellent car control and "looking ahead" skills, I can occasionally be surprised by something. Most humans (including race drivers) have the same reaction/reflex time.. the difference is in conditioned response and more so than that, prediction/anticipation. It is difficult to be in the zone 100% of the time when commuting or driving on the street, and so I don't expect my abilities to be at the level they are at when I am on the track. Accordingly, I like the money I've saved from ABS and stability-management systems keeping me from wadding up the car around town.
Actually, Friedman and von Mises (or it might have been Murray Rothbard) wrote comprehensive works on the causes of the depression that were published right around 1962, IIRC.
Both implicated the Federal Reserve in greatly contributing to the impact of the Depression. Bernanke admits that the Fed is responsible making the depression worse and contributing to its deleterious effects, inspite of the fact that the creation of the Fed was supposed to stop a depression from happening in the first place.
I haven't watched much Fox news, but I cannot imagine them getting into the finer points of Chicago or Austrian Economic theory, which correctly places the fault of the depression on the myriad of factors which contributed to and excaborated it. But the idea that the Federal government was quite instrumental in bringing about the depression is neither new nor ignorant.
You do slashdot readers a great disservice by misunderstanding the causes of the depression, misunderstanding the body of written expert analysis on it, and then trying to distill the entire thing into the dubious "lack of regulation" refrain that is so popular with statist-technocrats.
Go read your Austrian economists. For the benefit of those easily swayed by unsubstantiated invective, never say anything else about the economy until you've finished reading. http://www.mises.org/ is a great start.
As for people getting over the "foolish idea" that health care is special, it's not going to happen. Most people thankfully prefer to live in a society where being healthy isn't a privilege reserved for the rich.
There is a logical disconnect here.
Healthcare costs money. There is no way around that.
The goal of healthcare (presumably), is to make people healthy.
No matter how much you spend, some people will never think themselves healthy, and some people will never actually be healthy. So how much should be spent on them?
I can certainly render an opinion on how I think other people ought to spend their money, but thankfully I am not in the position to actually make that decision for people. I should hope that no one eles ever thinks themselves in that position over me.
Who, but the individual, can decide how much their own health, wellbeing, or even life is worth?
In a situation where others pay the costs, the individual has no disincentive to economize around what care will make her most happy or most improved. The costs are unbounded because no one has an incentive not to ask for what is free.
Of course, because healthcare costs money, there is a limited supply of it. When there is a near-arbitrary demand for a resource that exists in limited supply, and when individual actors bear no portion of the cost (there is no price function), there must be some other mechanism of allocating care to individuals.
When the government pays for the costs of care, the government necessarily determines that allocation.
This results in all kinds of deleterious effects.
Many services must be rationed because the supply is fixed and the demand is unbounded. Everyone suffers under such a system. When everyone is suffering scapegoats will be found and made to pay their pennance. Smokers should not receive care because they injure themselves, costing all of "us" money if we are to pay for their well being. Same with drinkers. Same with skydivers. Same with motorcycle riders. Likewise with those who eat red meat, or do not take enough vitamins, or do not live in pleasant climates.
As the various factions of political influence attempt to decide who is worthy of receiving care and who is not, people continue not getting treated to _their_ satisfaction, through no fault of their own.
Everyone (well, a few people) have paid "their share" into the common pot yet they receive care they feel is insuffient while they feel smokers (or whomever is popular to criticze) continue to receive treatment they do not deserve.
Only an individual can know how important receiving a given treatment is to him or her. No one -- certainly not a government -- can properly decide that for him. There are stubborn people out there that would rather be sick twice as often but continue enjoying red meat than be barred from red meat but be only half as expensive to care for. There is no purely socialized healthcare system that can or should tolerate these people. There are some people that, no matter what is done for them, will continue to be in pain. Do you make them feel functional at $100/month, pretty good for $1000/month, or fantastic for $1,000,000/month? Who are you to decide? Why don't they get to decide?
I don't trust my government to do much of anything properly. I certainly don't trust them to act in the best interests of my health (especially since they have a long record of acting against my health.. for instance it is illegal to sue the federal government for environmental disasters they create), and I will not tolerate them telling me how my healthcare dollars should be allocated, and what services i am deserving of.
The only approach that is fair is to allow individuals to own completely the set of tradeoffs they make regarding care they receive, lifestyle changes they make, and realities they accept. But to allow individuals to completely own how much care they consume, those individuals _MUST_ shou
"The job" is for full-time employment doing software "development" at Microsoft. I interview for developers, testers, and program managers, and occasionally do screens for candidates that end up in other positions (i.e. hardware engineers).
For full time positions we tend to not care about specific skills, i.e. n years of C#, because in another n years C# won't matter, or because on day 1 we will be asking you to help create D#.
There's been a lot written about Microsoft interviews, products, and so on, so I won't repeat it here. The short version is that we're trying to understand if someone has the raw smarts and the drive to be successful doing whatever we throw at them.
You'd be shocked at how many people we talk to that can't develop an algorithm that isn't exactly like something they've already done at school or work. These are people with good GPAs, interesting sounding work experience, and competant answers to phone screen questions.
There's certainly a category of talent out there that for technical, economic, or politics/ideology reasons won't talk to us that would probably fly through our interviews. But they presumably do not represent the majority of the talent looking for work. And to be fair, the in-industry people who have been vetted or are the recognized leaders of their fields aren't going to be talking to people at my level about a job. I'm focusing on people who are junior to mid level in terms of career development but show a lot of promise or potential.. enough so that it makes sense for us to invest in their careers. And I concede that "sorting" people around that criteria is unfortuneately more subjective than anyone involved in the process would like.
Without going into what defines "religion", it is certainly true that the USA founded on the beleif that government was a regrettably necessary evil that was to be tolerated but only barely, and to be chained down and robbed of power by default.
The powers of the government were enumerated, not open ended, and it was held that by default individuals had power.
So you might say that the people who founded the USA beleived government to be evil, and designed ours to be inefficient on purpose, to slow the growth and impact of the resultant evil, and that the scope and responsibilities of the _federal_ government were intentionally limited so that other entities, be the private or state/local governments might tackle them _more_ efficiently.
Sadly, Americans by and large do not beleive in free markets. Probably because we haven't really seen one in a long time. The way you get big government in america is by convincing everyone that you're for small government.
Regarding the other point you made: there are a lot of economists that say a lot of things. There is no "consensus of opinion" amongst economists on a sole-source of failure, even if consensus were a desirable or relevant thing. There isn't even agreement that what we're seeing is a failure. I'd argue that what we're experiencing is potentially wondeful: stupid people that did stupid things are getting punished. Except that because of federal intervention, the wrong people are getting punished and the stupid people are getting sacks of money, so it wont really be seen as a market correction, it will be seen as a "market failure" (whatever that means).
In any case, your appeal to authority logical fallacy is poorly chosen and doesn't even name the authority you invoke.
Well, in the case of the united states, the way it did for the majority of its existance -- with no federal income tax.
The history of revenue of the US federal government may surprise you.
Remember the clinton years? Just 10 years ago? If we shrunk federal spending to what it was during the Clinton administration, the personal income tax could be eliminated _entirely_.
Life wasn't so primitive or bad 10 years ago was it? Wouldn't it be nice to not pay personal income tax?
Did you realize that in most 2-income families, the 2nd earner's entire paycheck goes to cover the families' tax burden? In the average case, that means some poor woman who "cant afford" to stay home with her kids is going off to do some job she does't really like doing, all so she can be treated as a lower-class citizen (and get paid less) with respect to her asshole male co-workers. And when she gets home she'll be pissed off from her long shitty day at work, and see that none of the housekeeping was done to her standards (if at all), that she doesn't know who her children are (because daycare or public school are raising them instead), and that her marraige is empty and meaningless (becuase she doesn't have enough time to know who _she_ is, much less who her husband is).
Tell that woman that all of her toil and suffering goes towards the stupid shit our government wastes our money on. Tell her it isn't theft. Not just of her money, but of a significant measure of her quality of life.
Once upon a time people owned houses outright, everyone in a family didn't need to leave the house to go to work for some faceless master, and politicians were actually accountable to their constituents.
Seconded. I find it odd that the original bailout failed by a wide margin, but when the bill had a few billion in candy attached to it, it passed no problem. Who are "our" representatives representing?
Your post sounds great, but ideology tends to fail when it meets reality. Things aren't black & white -- such as health care. What do you think about state-provided health care? Sounds like another case of the "nanny state" -- but the only way for private healthcare to work efficiently is to DENY people access. Otherwise you get a freeloading / tragedy of the commons problem.
I am entirely against state provided healthcare. If you want to see how the US government would preside over healthcare, go visit a VA hospital.
Actually, the problem of effectiveness related to DENYing care happens in state systems, not private ones. Long waiting lists and treatment denials are quite common in the rest of the world, where because care has no direct cost to the consumer it MUST be rationed and the rationers are the governors.
I've read that in 1900s America that the working poor, especially 1st generation immigrants, were able to get housecalls from their doctors, even though they couldn't afford it at the time. It was common to work out payment arrangements with your physician, and the physician had a vested interest in seeing that you were healed enough to return to work as their paycheck depended on same:)
I think people need to get around the foolish idea that healthcare is "special". Healthcare _does_ cost money, and that cost needs to be explicit and in the face of those receiving care so that they can make decisions appropriately.
I haven't done an exhaustive study of pre-HMO healthcare in America but the reading I've done suggests that the system was much more affordable and that people got better care.
Note that I don't explicitly disagree with any of the points in your post -- except this: We're more than willing to dispense with the rule of law and to vote ourselves or our interests more powers than are strictly legal, should it so suit us.
I'm no history major, but I think that's a rose-colored look at the past. I do think our society is more consumption-focused than in the past, thanks to the technological progress and wealth that's been generated (and debt that's been used), but I chalk that up to more opportunity, not some fundamental shift in individual psychology.
The federal government of today has more powers than it is constitutionally authorized to have by the letter of the law and certainly more than it was intended to have by the spirit of the law.
How did this happen if we didn't vote for it?
The USA had no income tax for the majority of its existance. We now have the most progressive income tax structure in the world. What other explanation is there for this than the majority agreeing that they can use the coercion of government to steal from the minority? What difference does it make if populist politicians are moving the levers that make this happen? Ask the majority of people if they think the rich should bankroll them and they'll say yes. Ask the rich if they think the "little people" should bail them out because they're "so important" and they'll mean yes and say something else:)
How representative of the voting public was the Obama voter who said that Obama was going to forgive her mortgage and pay for all of her wellbeing? When did this become a job of the federal government?
I post-date the 60s by a wide margin, and most of what I recall reading about from the time period was that it sucked and most of the people who are memorable from that time period also sucked or are remembered for unacceptable behavior.
In my narrow understanding, the good points about the 60s are the Apollo program and not getting nuked by the Soviet Union. What are the other 60s values or ethics you think need to return? What made the 60s better than the 50s or the 70s? Or the 80s?
I agree wholeheartedly on the problems of corruption in governance. Unfortuneately, I don't think the answer can be found by choosing a better man as president, as that will last for a maximum of 8 years under normal circumstances. Instead, we have to limit the power of the office. There were corrupt politicians in the 1700s and the US constitution was in large part designed to route around such defects. We've strayed from that document in many regards and it has been entirely to our detriment.
Actually the interviews prescribe no particular programming language. We assume that the person can program or express an algorithm but are not choosy about which language they use.
We're mainly looking for people who convince us they're smart enough to do "the job", whatever that job may entail in the future.
Apologies for sounding snotty, but I wonder if you'd qualify? Your reading comprehension or attention to detail both seem to be a bit short, as my original message specifically mentioned that there were no salary discussions at this stage of the process, so clearly a hire recommendation isn't gated on someone being willing to work for $12.50/hr.
I handle making a recommendation regarding if a candidate is technical talent the company should pursue or not. Someone else decides what they get paid if later. If they don't get past me, it's not because they won't work for small money, it's because they're not useful to us at any plausible pricepoint.
We don't have many people that interview with us long enough to get an offer and then elect not to take it because the pay sucks. Some do, but not many.
Well, I wasn't that serious about that part of the message:) Inventing a new power of deportation-due-to-laziness would run afoul of some of the same ignoring-the-rule-of-law and scope-of-governance complaints I made in other paragraphs.
The point I was trying to make is that geography of birth doesn't make one American, nor does it entitle one to some sort of "American Promise", as our new president-elect is fond of calling it.
I would argue that ideological compatability regarding the rule of law, work ethic, and limited government is what traditionally defines one as American. And many foreigners have this in tremendous abundance compared to native-born n-generation "Americans".
So I'd like the USA to be the place where people who are ideologically compatible with what the American dream once was all choose to congregate and invest their life's efforts, irrespective of where they were born or what language they grew up speaking. Of course, that would probably require kicking out most Americans and nearly all American politicians first:/
I am for essentially open immigration into the US.... provided that we back way-off of the redistributionist, cradle-to-grave welfarism that our government has descended into.
The statue of liberty doesn't say "give me your top 1%, at any cost, and let them contribute to our tax base". It talks about the tired, the hungry, etc. If they're willing to work, I want them. If they want to be looked after, I don't. And I want the federal government to stop "looking after" people born within US borders first.
Ideally, foreign born people who work hard will come to the US and kick _out_ the lazy asses who were born here and expect to be waited on hand and foot by their government (which really means their harder working neighbors).
Unlike many other cultures or nationalities, definitionally, there is no common ethnicity, culture, bloodline, geography, or anything else that makes citizens of the USA "Americans". We are (historically) United only by our voluntary adherence to the rule of law. When we lose sight of our shared law, what are we? We have nothing else in common.
It is my opinion that the current generation of Americans (and who knows how many prior generations) are hardly Americans at all. We're more than willing to dispense with the rule of law and to vote ourselves or our interests more powers than are strictly legal, should it so suit us. The new generation of Americans thinks themselves something different than those bound by a common constitution that is applicable to any man who chooses to live under it. And the result is that we're back to the same old tricks of juding people based on where their parents came from, rather than how hard they work and how well they can keep our laws.
Rules regarding how much a man can sell his labor for (i.e. minimum wage laws) are some of the most insidious repressants of the poorest and least talented members of society.
The H1B system is quite odd: people who are talented wage earners cannot afford to float between jobs looking for something better and must jump at unattractive positions in order to stay employed. Yet people who are low-skilled or who elect not to work at all are not deported, and if they score the trifecta and add _another_ dependant entity to our welfare system (i.e. they have a kid) then they have cemented their place in the US legally.
As usual, our foolish government meddling works against us. We ensure that unemployed people stay in the US and "in the system". And we make it hard for high-skilled people to negotiate effectively for their true worth.
Finally, I do a fair bit of tech interviewing. There is a real shortage of US-born/US-resident workers that meet our requirements. I'm not talking about a shortage of people that will work for the palrty wage we're offering: I'm talking about people that we're willing to make an offer to at all. We look for them anywhere and everywhere, and I interviewed 25 people at a college campus recently. Half of them where white-bread America and half of them were foreign-born US students.
Her: "Is there a way you can save videos off of youtube and watch them later?" Me: "i'm sure there's some browser plugin or other 3rd party tool that lets you do it, but I don't think youtube allows it explicitly. Why?" Her: "I want to download and save all of the Obama videos. I'm worried that they're going to change or disappear later"
There are a surprising number of videos that get axed from youtube for what would appear to be politically motivated reasons.
The ease of changing or erasing information in the digital domain is offset by the ease of replicating it. But if something curtails the ease of replication, digital information is potetially much more amenable to disinformation or manipulation.
My company has been on the receiving end of all kinds of arbitrary government action. We have had to produce thousands and thousands of pages of documentation at the request of various governments. There are all kinds of Americans asking for very specific documents that the government refuses to release and has refused to release for years and years.
For example, you may be familiar with the notion of a "congressional earmark". Here's a nice article about how, even after the earmark attribution rules changed, it is still very difficult to figure out who wrote what earmark spending into a bill because the congresspeople are being intentionally coy about it.
When a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly pointed out how difficult it remains to pull all the information together, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the committee that drafts the defense bill, had a quick answer: "Tough shit."
Do you still feel that your government is accountable to you? That the "discourse" and transparency is there? These guys are stealing your money, and when we try and enact rules that force them to at least tell us what they're wasting it on, they circumvent the rules and do so arrogantly and belligerantly.
But in that case the person is subject to public scrutiny and applicable laws...
I see. Presumably you point this out because you beleive that corporations act entirely outside the law and beyond the gaze of public scrutiny?
The main topic here is about the role of regulation in internet service. Suppose that you were getting internet service from the most awful, immoral, reprehensible company possible. You could always cancel your service and stop financially supporting this company.
Try cancelling your government sometime. Typically, you get "cancelled" instead.
It's a good thing that the human propensity to seek power and do evil only exists when that human works at a company, and never when that human works in government.
We're really lucky this is the case, since if someone in government were ever corrupt, they could fine you speciously, jail you without trial or due process, seize your home via eminent domain, or just plain kill.
Actually, I do have a DVI->HDMI adapter that goes from my HTPC to my projector, but as far as any peice of content or playback system that involves protection, I just don't play.
I have a very good IPTV service that gets me content from all over the world that I cannot easily get via other means.
It's called bittorrent, and it just works.
I do not pay for content that doesn't play the way I want it to. It's that simple.
IIRC, classmates.com bought-out highschoolalumni.com. The former was a 100% free site and I encouraged a few of my highschool classmates to settle on "that one" as the place to go to try and stay in touch. (I used to run a majordomo of people I went to school with, but that got unweildy and fizzled out)
It was really damn frustrating to have all of this data entry we did end up being locked away in someone else's pay-ware database after the fact.
I have basically eschewed all social networking sites since that time. I'm not interested in investing anything into it, only to have someone else try and figure out how to monetize my effort. Usually by spamming me.
- no state occupational licensure - no criminalization of "substances" - no restrictions on what kind of machines a person can own
Killing people will still be illegal. Same with destroying someone else's property. We expect you to be smart enough not to do it.
The human animal is such that it will always find newer and more "ingenious" ways of hurting itself, at a rate that vastly outpaces the ability of a few governors to dream up and criminalize risky behaviors ahead of time. The futility of such an endeavour in governance is not lost on us, even were we to think it a meritous end.
While i am onboard with legalized prostitution from a libertarian perspective, your joke isn't as funny as it sounds. There was a story of a woman in germany who went to the unemployment office and was referred to several pimps, essentially.
No idea if it is a true story or not. It has all the makings of a snopes special, but it does bear some consideration: what are the other legal effects of widespread legalized prostitution?
Look at the date. September of 2003. That's when Ron Paul, the only guy in DC that is being honest with us about monetary policy and central banks, laid out just how bad the government was fucking us by letting the Fed prop up fannie and freddie.
Letting financial institutions that make poor choices fail IS a market correction and IS part of a market dynamic. When the market is distorted by government intervention -- as Paul explains above -- naturally the problem will get worse before it will get better, and it will become "our" problem instead of the problem of one bank and its investors.
isn't one of the core tenets of Keynesianism that the government, via careful picking of winners and losers (i.e. investment) creates a "multiplier effect", known commonly as the "multiplier" ? And didn't Milton Friedman, former Keynesian-turned-libertarian (and a nobel prize winning economist, btw), pretty much bury Keynesianism in all but name?
To the extent that liberalism no longer seems like Keynes is probably a reflection of modern liberals being unashamed socialists and not even pretending to beleive in markets any more.
Cray have and have had their own custom UNIX distribution since before slashdot existed.
You can already get Linux on CRAY hardware -- the SGI Altix series. I haven't kept up on the offerings, but I beleive there are other *nix based offerings as well.
The value proposition of something like this is that people who are better at science than programming (you know, most super computer users) get something that makes them more productive than they'd otherwise be. The operating system on a super computer is almost irrelevant as it is customized so completely for the needs of the client. The value add in something like this is the developer productivity and toolchain on offer.
There are some seriously brainy people at MS working on the software side of HPC/scientific computing. Some of them are ex Cray employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I cannot speak for all religous people. And I happen to agree with you -- it shouldn't matter what religious people think of how any two people want to spend their time.
The problem is that being married has a specific set of legal implications that cause people to be required to legally act in certain compliant ways.
Because the government regulates all kinds of different businesses limiting their ability to discriminate, who and who may not enter into a legally defined/protected class is very much a political issue and very MUCH affects those who for whatever reason may want to continue to act in a discriminatory manner.
Essentially what it boils down to in my mind is that somepeople want to continue to discriminate. Government codification of homosexual marraige as a protected legal institution will either immeidately or slowly destroy the legal ability to discriminate against homosexuals.
You may think that is a great outcome and is reason alone for allowing it. I happen to be a very strong proponent of individual rights and think _all_ anti-discrimination laws are unethical and amount to tremendous invasion of someone's right to conduct their affairs, friendships, and business as they see fit.
Essentially, do you think Bible Thumper Baptists' Mutual Insurance should be legally obligated to take homosexual married couples as clients? If so, support legalized gay marraige.
When you consider the fan-out-effects of what amounts to defining gay couples as a legally protected class, there _are_ non homosexuals who WILL be forced to act in violation of their religious beleifs. The same goes for requiring doctors to perform abortions -- something else that many religous conservatives are against.
In my libertarian fantasy land, the way to solve problems like this is to ensure that monopoly and cartels do not take root. That way, for every discriminatory entity out there, many more can compete with it on a non-discriminatory (or counter-actingly discriminatory) basis. All customers are served and no-one acts in opposition to their own values under coercion.
Furthermore, since the government must serve _all_ people, some people will want to work or be served bythe government, and others will want to exclude those people. The government must side with the minority interest (which is usually inclusive) but will upset the majority. A practical solution is to reduce the scope and function of government as much as possible, so that the interactions of people with different value systems are not fought within the ranks of a singular beaurocratic governance which must be black and white on all such issues, but are instead not fought at all or are fought in a place where competition and specialization are vibrant and mutually productive.
The current idea of governance -- everything must be decided for everyone, and at a high level -- will always alienate and upset _somebody_. People have this idea that the government is the avenue for inflicting their value system on everyone. Apart from "murdering is bad" and "stealing/destroying somebody else's property bad", Americans don't actually have a huge set of values upon which they overwhelmingly agree.
Legislating minutae of values will continue to be a point of strife and bitterness in the US.
I may be misunderstanding you, but Authenticode is a technology used to verify the publisher of binaries so that there is some assurance "lol32.exe" is worth running.
As such, Authenticode isn't an anti-piracy feature insamuch as its an anti-malware feature. As and end user, you'd not want want this to be busted.
You may be thinking of WGA and WPA, the former being the "Genuine Advantage" stuff that Windows Update and MS Download center look for, and the latter being Product Activation [that cares about keys and key activation, etc].
The latter two are most certainly anti-piracy features and confer no functional/usability advantages to the enduser who isn't concerned with the legality/legitimacy of their installation.
The answer is, it depends.
First point -- the ABS in a racecar is an entirely different ball of wax than what you get in a production car. It's designed for people that operate closer (and past) the limits of the tires adhesion as their day job and tuned appropriately. Discount comparisons to race ABS to street systems.
On bikes with ABS and race riders going over uneven grip surfaces (i.e. pavement with standing watterpuddles), the ABS bike cut the stopping distance in _half_. That's huge.
On dry tarmac with a good driver, most _production_ ABS systems will not allow the cars to slowdown at their maximum rate, which is where the tires have their absolute _maximum_ grip of ~15% slower than indicated road speed... i.e. straddling the threshhold between lockup and rolling. An ABS system typically intervenes prior to this point.
It is possible for me to be able to get my wheels to begin to hum/howl during threshhold braking and ABS will not activate.
Another area where ABS is a detriment is that it doesn't tend to actually work the way you say it does. Suppose I am driving on an uneven road -- right side dry, left side icy. If I hit the brakes, the left side will want to lock up while the right side will have grip. But maximally activating the right side brakes as you suggest will cause the car to yaw, as the right side will slow down while the left will not. For passenger car systems ABS this is highly undesirable as the driver must now provide an immediate steering input.
So in effect, most production car ABS systems will release brake pressure on the dry side as well to prevent the car from yawing. A talented driver could brake and counter steer to correct the yaw.
I agree that ABS systems have gotten much better, but on passenger cars, they do not outperform qualified humans in _all_ conditions. I have road course experience in production cars with and without ABS and the only thing production-car ABS is good for on a race track is saving you a little tire money (i.e. it keeps you from flatspotting a tire)
The best way to think about ABS is that it makes the default reaction of most panicing drivers an acceptable one. It is little more than a brake-force attenuator. If you hadn't pushed the pedal as hard at that moment in time, it wouldn't have done anything.
My street cars have ABS and I leave it on, because even though I have done many track days and have excellent car control and "looking ahead" skills, I can occasionally be surprised by something. Most humans (including race drivers) have the same reaction/reflex time.. the difference is in conditioned response and more so than that, prediction/anticipation. It is difficult to be in the zone 100% of the time when commuting or driving on the street, and so I don't expect my abilities to be at the level they are at when I am on the track. Accordingly, I like the money I've saved from ABS and stability-management systems keeping me from wadding up the car around town.
Actually, Friedman and von Mises (or it might have been Murray Rothbard) wrote comprehensive works on the causes of the depression that were published right around 1962, IIRC.
Both implicated the Federal Reserve in greatly contributing to the impact of the Depression. Bernanke admits that the Fed is responsible making the depression worse and contributing to its deleterious effects, inspite of the fact that the creation of the Fed was supposed to stop a depression from happening in the first place.
I haven't watched much Fox news, but I cannot imagine them getting into the finer points of Chicago or Austrian Economic theory, which correctly places the fault of the depression on the myriad of factors which contributed to and excaborated it. But the idea that the Federal government was quite instrumental in bringing about the depression is neither new nor ignorant.
You do slashdot readers a great disservice by misunderstanding the causes of the depression, misunderstanding the body of written expert analysis on it, and then trying to distill the entire thing into the dubious "lack of regulation" refrain that is so popular with statist-technocrats.
Go read your Austrian economists. For the benefit of those easily swayed by unsubstantiated invective, never say anything else about the economy until you've finished reading. http://www.mises.org/ is a great start.
There is a logical disconnect here.
Healthcare costs money. There is no way around that.
The goal of healthcare (presumably), is to make people healthy.
No matter how much you spend, some people will never think themselves healthy, and some people will never actually be healthy. So how much should be spent on them?
I can certainly render an opinion on how I think other people ought to spend their money, but thankfully I am not in the position to actually make that decision for people. I should hope that no one eles ever thinks themselves in that position over me.
Who, but the individual, can decide how much their own health, wellbeing, or even life is worth?
In a situation where others pay the costs, the individual has no disincentive to economize around what care will make her most happy or most improved. The costs are unbounded because no one has an incentive not to ask for what is free.
Of course, because healthcare costs money, there is a limited supply of it. When there is a near-arbitrary demand for a resource that exists in limited supply, and when individual actors bear no portion of the cost (there is no price function), there must be some other mechanism of allocating care to individuals.
When the government pays for the costs of care, the government necessarily determines that allocation.
This results in all kinds of deleterious effects.
Many services must be rationed because the supply is fixed and the demand is unbounded. Everyone suffers under such a system. When everyone is suffering scapegoats will be found and made to pay their pennance. Smokers should not receive care because they injure themselves, costing all of "us" money if we are to pay for their well being. Same with drinkers. Same with skydivers. Same with motorcycle riders. Likewise with those who eat red meat, or do not take enough vitamins, or do not live in pleasant climates.
As the various factions of political influence attempt to decide who is worthy of receiving care and who is not, people continue not getting treated to _their_ satisfaction, through no fault of their own.
Everyone (well, a few people) have paid "their share" into the common pot yet they receive care they feel is insuffient while they feel smokers (or whomever is popular to criticze) continue to receive treatment they do not deserve.
Only an individual can know how important receiving a given treatment is to him or her. No one -- certainly not a government -- can properly decide that for him. There are stubborn people out there that would rather be sick twice as often but continue enjoying red meat than be barred from red meat but be only half as expensive to care for. There is no purely socialized healthcare system that can or should tolerate these people. There are some people that, no matter what is done for them, will continue to be in pain. Do you make them feel functional at $100/month, pretty good for $1000/month, or fantastic for $1,000,000/month? Who are you to decide? Why don't they get to decide?
I don't trust my government to do much of anything properly. I certainly don't trust them to act in the best interests of my health (especially since they have a long record of acting against my health.. for instance it is illegal to sue the federal government for environmental disasters they create), and I will not tolerate them telling me how my healthcare dollars should be allocated, and what services i am deserving of.
The only approach that is fair is to allow individuals to own completely the set of tradeoffs they make regarding care they receive, lifestyle changes they make, and realities they accept. But to allow individuals to completely own how much care they consume, those individuals _MUST_ shou
"The job" is for full-time employment doing software "development" at Microsoft. I interview for developers, testers, and program managers, and occasionally do screens for candidates that end up in other positions (i.e. hardware engineers).
For full time positions we tend to not care about specific skills, i.e. n years of C#, because in another n years C# won't matter, or because on day 1 we will be asking you to help create D#.
There's been a lot written about Microsoft interviews, products, and so on, so I won't repeat it here. The short version is that we're trying to understand if someone has the raw smarts and the drive to be successful doing whatever we throw at them.
You'd be shocked at how many people we talk to that can't develop an algorithm that isn't exactly like something they've already done at school or work. These are people with good GPAs, interesting sounding work experience, and competant answers to phone screen questions.
There's certainly a category of talent out there that for technical, economic, or politics/ideology reasons won't talk to us that would probably fly through our interviews. But they presumably do not represent the majority of the talent looking for work. And to be fair, the in-industry people who have been vetted or are the recognized leaders of their fields aren't going to be talking to people at my level about a job. I'm focusing on people who are junior to mid level in terms of career development but show a lot of promise or potential.. enough so that it makes sense for us to invest in their careers. And I concede that "sorting" people around that criteria is unfortuneately more subjective than anyone involved in the process would like.
Without going into what defines "religion", it is certainly true that the USA founded on the beleif that government was a regrettably necessary evil that was to be tolerated but only barely, and to be chained down and robbed of power by default.
The powers of the government were enumerated, not open ended, and it was held that by default individuals had power.
So you might say that the people who founded the USA beleived government to be evil, and designed ours to be inefficient on purpose, to slow the growth and impact of the resultant evil, and that the scope and responsibilities of the _federal_ government were intentionally limited so that other entities, be the private or state/local governments might tackle them _more_ efficiently.
Sadly, Americans by and large do not beleive in free markets. Probably because we haven't really seen one in a long time. The way you get big government in america is by convincing everyone that you're for small government.
Regarding the other point you made: there are a lot of economists that say a lot of things. There is no "consensus of opinion" amongst economists on a sole-source of failure, even if consensus were a desirable or relevant thing. There isn't even agreement that what we're seeing is a failure. I'd argue that what we're experiencing is potentially wondeful: stupid people that did stupid things are getting punished. Except that because of federal intervention, the wrong people are getting punished and the stupid people are getting sacks of money, so it wont really be seen as a market correction, it will be seen as a "market failure" (whatever that means).
In any case, your appeal to authority logical fallacy is poorly chosen and doesn't even name the authority you invoke.
Well, in the case of the united states, the way it did for the majority of its existance -- with no federal income tax.
The history of revenue of the US federal government may surprise you.
Remember the clinton years? Just 10 years ago? If we shrunk federal spending to what it was during the Clinton administration, the personal income tax could be eliminated _entirely_.
Life wasn't so primitive or bad 10 years ago was it? Wouldn't it be nice to not pay personal income tax?
Did you realize that in most 2-income families, the 2nd earner's entire paycheck goes to cover the families' tax burden? In the average case, that means some poor woman who "cant afford" to stay home with her kids is going off to do some job she does't really like doing, all so she can be treated as a lower-class citizen (and get paid less) with respect to her asshole male co-workers. And when she gets home she'll be pissed off from her long shitty day at work, and see that none of the housekeeping was done to her standards (if at all), that she doesn't know who her children are (because daycare or public school are raising them instead), and that her marraige is empty and meaningless (becuase she doesn't have enough time to know who _she_ is, much less who her husband is).
Tell that woman that all of her toil and suffering goes towards the stupid shit our government wastes our money on. Tell her it isn't theft. Not just of her money, but of a significant measure of her quality of life.
Once upon a time people owned houses outright, everyone in a family didn't need to leave the house to go to work for some faceless master, and politicians were actually accountable to their constituents.
Ok, i made the last one up :)
Seconded. I find it odd that the original bailout failed by a wide margin, but when the bill had a few billion in candy attached to it, it passed no problem. Who are "our" representatives representing?
I am entirely against state provided healthcare. If you want to see how the US government would preside over healthcare, go visit a VA hospital.
Actually, the problem of effectiveness related to DENYing care happens in state systems, not private ones. Long waiting lists and treatment denials are quite common in the rest of the world, where because care has no direct cost to the consumer it MUST be rationed and the rationers are the governors.
I've read that in 1900s America that the working poor, especially 1st generation immigrants, were able to get housecalls from their doctors, even though they couldn't afford it at the time. It was common to work out payment arrangements with your physician, and the physician had a vested interest in seeing that you were healed enough to return to work as their paycheck depended on same :)
I think people need to get around the foolish idea that healthcare is "special". Healthcare _does_ cost money, and that cost needs to be explicit and in the face of those receiving care so that they can make decisions appropriately.
I haven't done an exhaustive study of pre-HMO healthcare in America but the reading I've done suggests that the system was much more affordable and that people got better care.
The federal government of today has more powers than it is constitutionally authorized to have by the letter of the law and certainly more than it was intended to have by the spirit of the law.
How did this happen if we didn't vote for it?
The USA had no income tax for the majority of its existance. We now have the most progressive income tax structure in the world. What other explanation is there for this than the majority agreeing that they can use the coercion of government to steal from the minority? What difference does it make if populist politicians are moving the levers that make this happen? Ask the majority of people if they think the rich should bankroll them and they'll say yes. Ask the rich if they think the "little people" should bail them out because they're "so important" and they'll mean yes and say something else :)
How representative of the voting public was the Obama voter who said that Obama was going to forgive her mortgage and pay for all of her wellbeing? When did this become a job of the federal government?
I post-date the 60s by a wide margin, and most of what I recall reading about from the time period was that it sucked and most of the people who are memorable from that time period also sucked or are remembered for unacceptable behavior.
In my narrow understanding, the good points about the 60s are the Apollo program and not getting nuked by the Soviet Union. What are the other 60s values or ethics you think need to return? What made the 60s better than the 50s or the 70s? Or the 80s?
I agree wholeheartedly on the problems of corruption in governance. Unfortuneately, I don't think the answer can be found by choosing a better man as president, as that will last for a maximum of 8 years under normal circumstances. Instead, we have to limit the power of the office. There were corrupt politicians in the 1700s and the US constitution was in large part designed to route around such defects. We've strayed from that document in many regards and it has been entirely to our detriment.
Actually the interviews prescribe no particular programming language. We assume that the person can program or express an algorithm but are not choosy about which language they use.
We're mainly looking for people who convince us they're smart enough to do "the job", whatever that job may entail in the future.
Apologies for sounding snotty, but I wonder if you'd qualify? Your reading comprehension or attention to detail both seem to be a bit short, as my original message specifically mentioned that there were no salary discussions at this stage of the process, so clearly a hire recommendation isn't gated on someone being willing to work for $12.50/hr.
I handle making a recommendation regarding if a candidate is technical talent the company should pursue or not. Someone else decides what they get paid if later. If they don't get past me, it's not because they won't work for small money, it's because they're not useful to us at any plausible pricepoint.
We don't have many people that interview with us long enough to get an offer and then elect not to take it because the pay sucks. Some do, but not many.
Well, I wasn't that serious about that part of the message :) Inventing a new power of deportation-due-to-laziness would run afoul of some of the same ignoring-the-rule-of-law and scope-of-governance complaints I made in other paragraphs.
The point I was trying to make is that geography of birth doesn't make one American, nor does it entitle one to some sort of "American Promise", as our new president-elect is fond of calling it.
I would argue that ideological compatability regarding the rule of law, work ethic, and limited government is what traditionally defines one as American. And many foreigners have this in tremendous abundance compared to native-born n-generation "Americans".
So I'd like the USA to be the place where people who are ideologically compatible with what the American dream once was all choose to congregate and invest their life's efforts, irrespective of where they were born or what language they grew up speaking. Of course, that would probably require kicking out most Americans and nearly all American politicians first :/
I am for essentially open immigration into the US. ... provided that we back way-off of the redistributionist, cradle-to-grave welfarism that our government has descended into.
The statue of liberty doesn't say "give me your top 1%, at any cost, and let them contribute to our tax base". It talks about the tired, the hungry, etc. If they're willing to work, I want them. If they want to be looked after, I don't. And I want the federal government to stop "looking after" people born within US borders first.
Ideally, foreign born people who work hard will come to the US and kick _out_ the lazy asses who were born here and expect to be waited on hand and foot by their government (which really means their harder working neighbors).
Unlike many other cultures or nationalities, definitionally, there is no common ethnicity, culture, bloodline, geography, or anything else that makes citizens of the USA "Americans". We are (historically) United only by our voluntary adherence to the rule of law. When we lose sight of our shared law, what are we? We have nothing else in common.
It is my opinion that the current generation of Americans (and who knows how many prior generations) are hardly Americans at all. We're more than willing to dispense with the rule of law and to vote ourselves or our interests more powers than are strictly legal, should it so suit us. The new generation of Americans thinks themselves something different than those bound by a common constitution that is applicable to any man who chooses to live under it. And the result is that we're back to the same old tricks of juding people based on where their parents came from, rather than how hard they work and how well they can keep our laws.
Rules regarding how much a man can sell his labor for (i.e. minimum wage laws) are some of the most insidious repressants of the poorest and least talented members of society.
The H1B system is quite odd: people who are talented wage earners cannot afford to float between jobs looking for something better and must jump at unattractive positions in order to stay employed. Yet people who are low-skilled or who elect not to work at all are not deported, and if they score the trifecta and add _another_ dependant entity to our welfare system (i.e. they have a kid) then they have cemented their place in the US legally.
As usual, our foolish government meddling works against us. We ensure that unemployed people stay in the US and "in the system". And we make it hard for high-skilled people to negotiate effectively for their true worth.
Finally, I do a fair bit of tech interviewing. There is a real shortage of US-born/US-resident workers that meet our requirements. I'm not talking about a shortage of people that will work for the palrty wage we're offering: I'm talking about people that we're willing to make an offer to at all. We look for them anywhere and everywhere, and I interviewed 25 people at a college campus recently. Half of them where white-bread America and half of them were foreign-born US students.
Her: "Is there a way you can save videos off of youtube and watch them later?"
Me: "i'm sure there's some browser plugin or other 3rd party tool that lets you do it, but I don't think youtube allows it explicitly. Why?"
Her: "I want to download and save all of the Obama videos. I'm worried that they're going to change or disappear later"
There are a surprising number of videos that get axed from youtube for what would appear to be politically motivated reasons.
The ease of changing or erasing information in the digital domain is offset by the ease of replicating it. But if something curtails the ease of replication, digital information is potetially much more amenable to disinformation or manipulation.
Who _gave_ your local telco a monopoly?
My company has been on the receiving end of all kinds of arbitrary government action. We have had to produce thousands and thousands of pages of documentation at the request of various governments. There are all kinds of Americans asking for very specific documents that the government refuses to release and has refused to release for years and years.
For example, you may be familiar with the notion of a "congressional earmark". Here's a nice article about how, even after the earmark attribution rules changed, it is still very difficult to figure out who wrote what earmark spending into a bill because the congresspeople are being intentionally coy about it.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008257178_favorfactory12.html
Here's the salient quote:
Do you still feel that your government is accountable to you? That the "discourse" and transparency is there? These guys are stealing your money, and when we try and enact rules that force them to at least tell us what they're wasting it on, they circumvent the rules and do so arrogantly and belligerantly.
I see. Presumably you point this out because you beleive that corporations act entirely outside the law and beyond the gaze of public scrutiny?
The main topic here is about the role of regulation in internet service. Suppose that you were getting internet service from the most awful, immoral, reprehensible company possible. You could always cancel your service and stop financially supporting this company.
Try cancelling your government sometime. Typically, you get "cancelled" instead.
It's a good thing that the human propensity to seek power and do evil only exists when that human works at a company, and never when that human works in government.
We're really lucky this is the case, since if someone in government were ever corrupt, they could fine you speciously, jail you without trial or due process, seize your home via eminent domain, or just plain kill.
Absolutely.
Actually, I do have a DVI->HDMI adapter that goes from my HTPC to my projector, but as far as any peice of content or playback system that involves protection, I just don't play.
I have a very good IPTV service that gets me content from all over the world that I cannot easily get via other means.
It's called bittorrent, and it just works.
I do not pay for content that doesn't play the way I want it to. It's that simple.
IIRC, classmates.com bought-out highschoolalumni.com. The former was a 100% free site and I encouraged a few of my highschool classmates to settle on "that one" as the place to go to try and stay in touch. (I used to run a majordomo of people I went to school with, but that got unweildy and fizzled out)
It was really damn frustrating to have all of this data entry we did end up being locked away in someone else's pay-ware database after the fact.
I have basically eschewed all social networking sites since that time. I'm not interested in investing anything into it, only to have someone else try and figure out how to monetize my effort. Usually by spamming me.
In Galt's Gulch we'll have
- no state occupational licensure
- no criminalization of "substances"
- no restrictions on what kind of machines a person can own
Killing people will still be illegal. Same with destroying someone else's property. We expect you to be smart enough not to do it.
The human animal is such that it will always find newer and more "ingenious" ways of hurting itself, at a rate that vastly outpaces the ability of a few governors to dream up and criminalize risky behaviors ahead of time. The futility of such an endeavour in governance is not lost on us, even were we to think it a meritous end.
While i am onboard with legalized prostitution from a libertarian perspective, your joke isn't as funny as it sounds. There was a story of a woman in germany who went to the unemployment office and was referred to several pimps, essentially.
No idea if it is a true story or not. It has all the makings of a snopes special, but it does bear some consideration: what are the other legal effects of widespread legalized prostitution?
I've got some upsetting news for you:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul128.html
Look at the date. September of 2003. That's when Ron Paul, the only guy in DC that is being honest with us about monetary policy and central banks, laid out just how bad the government was fucking us by letting the Fed prop up fannie and freddie.
Letting financial institutions that make poor choices fail IS a market correction and IS part of a market dynamic. When the market is distorted by government intervention -- as Paul explains above -- naturally the problem will get worse before it will get better, and it will become "our" problem instead of the problem of one bank and its investors.
isn't one of the core tenets of Keynesianism that the government, via careful picking of winners and losers (i.e. investment) creates a "multiplier effect", known commonly as the "multiplier" ? And didn't Milton Friedman, former Keynesian-turned-libertarian (and a nobel prize winning economist, btw), pretty much bury Keynesianism in all but name?
To the extent that liberalism no longer seems like Keynes is probably a reflection of modern liberals being unashamed socialists and not even pretending to beleive in markets any more.
Cray have and have had their own custom UNIX distribution since before slashdot existed.
You can already get Linux on CRAY hardware -- the SGI Altix series. I haven't kept up on the offerings, but I beleive there are other *nix based offerings as well.
The value proposition of something like this is that people who are better at science than programming (you know, most super computer users) get something that makes them more productive than they'd otherwise be. The operating system on a super computer is almost irrelevant as it is customized so completely for the needs of the client. The value add in something like this is the developer productivity and toolchain on offer.
There are some seriously brainy people at MS working on the software side of HPC/scientific computing. Some of them are ex Cray employees.
I got a 503: Unavailable. These guys should get a Cray or something to run their webserver on