I even smiled - almost laughing out loud. That might be impacted by the nature of the way that I read Slashdot. I actually pay attention to the names of the posters.;-)
Actually, they're wound a bit tight sometimes but not bad people. I've seen enough of their posts to know that they're not even stupid. That puts them well ahead of a subset of registered users and a goodly portion of those who use the site anonymously.
Sure, the son of a bitches use register globals, it's in PHP, and buggy as all hell - never mind the security... I know, for a fact, they didn't sanity check anything.
I've never played but I've seen others "play." I am pretty sure you're supposed to light a candle and put it near the curtains at that point. It will save you from having to die slowly due to starvation.
You seem to be experiencing hallucinations and delusions. Would you like some help with that?
Hmm... Wait, maybe this means something about psychiatrists?
Though, maybe I was more insightful than introspection has insisted? Back when I was eating hallucinogenic drugs on a regular basis, I was reasonably certain (to the point of having an elaborate theory) about concentric circles being present everywhere. And, "Surely, surely there's a higher order to this. No, not a god - not like that. But, for lack of a better word, we can call it that. There must actually then be a purpose! There must be! Wait, what the hell were we talking about again?"
Yeah, I tried tripping once. For about ten years. I'm pretty old now so I don't trip nearly as often as I used to but I confess to liking to take my brain out for a refresher course every 12 to 18 months or so.
We're not in the simulation, we are the simulation. *nods*
When I was young and thought I was brilliant, I used to say, "Time is nothing but man's measurement for the passage of reality." I might have been right! Man, it led to all sorts of angst-y poetry. This was long before the emo had been invented. But not before Emo had been born...
Having played, a lot, with WordPress lately, I've noticed a few things...
It's easy if you just point and click. It's good for that. However, if you start digging into the framework then it's no longer easy and it really isn't designed that well. You can keep it reasonably secure but it takes some effort and you need to start the whole process with security in mind. I've installed a number of plugins but I've actually been really careful about it and have stopped to actually read each of them - and to at least skim their code, to make sure I know what I'm doing and what they are doing.
The thing is, I don't think people do that. I went through the list of the most popular stuff and I made it a few pages into the list. As I was reading them, I was thinking "WTF?" So, I looked at some of the code for some of them. I remained thinking, "WTF?" At one point, I was reading about some of the footer instances and I played with that for a bit. One of the pages I was reading had the advice, "If you get an error, just CHMOD the whole themes folder and the files in it to 777 and it should go away." Or something like that. That's not verbatim, I don't think.
So, there are a variety of problems. This is JUST a guess but it looks like someone originally wrote it just to do a few things. Then, someone decided to add plugins so they added that feature. Then, they added the next feature, then they added another feature, and now it is on 4.5.x and somewhere along the lines, it got popular. So, it looks like things have just been bolted on as they went.
Read through the WordPress Developer Resources site. Take a look at the functions list. Look at the things they do and how they're called. It's also capable of being a hell of a resource hog. I mean a whole lot of resources... It happily eats any RAM it can find and, best of all, they've got a plugin that will help you find and use all the RAM. You know, in case your hosting company limits RAM use per script or something and you don't want to live with those paltry resources - why not find a way to bypass that and push it to the limits? It's only shared hosting so that 500 error you see will get blamed on someone else unless the hosting company's admins actually look deep enough to see who was figuring out how to use more RAM than they were allotted. I mean, it's not like the hosting company had a good reason when they put those limits in there...
So, there are some issues and I really think WP would do well with a complete rewrite. I've actually read a whole lot of the code for WordPress. All in the past few months. I'm now well over 200 hours into it and that 200 hours is not including a whole bunch of hours spent on just researching. It probably would have been less time but I've not poked or played with much of anything since about 2007. I had a lot to relearn and a lot of new stuff to catch up on - I still do. It has changed, a lot.
> The amount of adults living with parents today has skyrocketed from 30 years ago.
I thought about this and actually came back to respond to this. It seems to me that *might* be just you misinterpreting the data. It could be willful but it might not be and I'll give you the benefit of doubt. That and, well, I can only explain part of this.
The period of time where young people struck out alone, without family, got married, purchased a home, had a white picket fence, and 2.5 children was actually more or less an anomaly. Historically, children have often remained living with their parents or extending the property a little to live very close. They've often lived with their parents, even staying in the same house after getting married and having children of their own. This is also fairly common across the globe.
In human history, the period where that was the norm is actually pretty short - even if you limit it to modern history. There was some uniquely American aspects to the commonality of that - where land was still plentiful and/or inexpensive.
I'd agree that such was a sign of affluence, on the part of the individual and of the nation as a whole, and that we're seemingly less so affluent today. But, even that could be argued. I don't know that we're really less affluent so much as we've greater availability of goods and services and now consider those services necessities or priorities.
An example is that you might say that your parents had greater spending power even though they made less money than you do. That's something we read here often. Yet, your parents weren't paying for four smart phones and their service plans, internet, computers for every home, cars with all the gadgets, televisions in every room, and $21 pitchers of craft beer. They were paying for a house with piss-poor R value, inefficient appliances that broke down often, cars with drum brakes and carburetors - and no airbags, infotainment center, GPS, anti-brakes, stability and traction control, etc...
Health care? They were paying for a dentist when they needed one, not for whitening, probably not braces, and they might also have been the same person who cut their hair. They weren't paying for an MRI, CT Scan, and were getting irradiated by the faulty x-ray equipment and even getting irradiated when they went to try on new shoes! They didn't even have much in the way of physical therapy, mental health care meant putting Aunt Sally in the attic and feeding her twice a day. If she was a true danger then she was a ward of the State. Taxes? They weren't paying for schools full of computers, one for each of the students to take home, safe buses, qualified bus drivers, gymnasiums, science labs with the modern equipment, cops with special cars, radar guns, less than lethal weapons, extra training in compassionate care (so that one made me chuckle too), stab proof jackets and bullet resistant vests. They got a magnetic light that plugged into the cigarette lighter, bias-ply tires, drum brakes, and a 440 CID engine that only put out 325 horsepower.
The list goes on...
I'm not really sure how far the list goes or even that the list has as much importance that it might have or as little importance as it might have but it's absolutely a metric that nobody ever wants to take into account. In the scope of things, we did pretty good for a little while but that was actually an exception to the rule and not the norm. Different societies do this at different times and it seems to be relatively cyclic in nature. Go back to that time and have a look at how poorly they were doing in Europe for a huge part of that time, for example. Shit, Spain was a fascist dictatorship until, what, 1978? They were cowering in fear of the USSR until the late 1980s. Living with their parents wasn't just expected in some areas but a necessity. That really wasn't that long ago. Now it is their turn to be a bit wealthier than they're used to and that seems to quickly be coming to an end. (Let us hope they don't go Full Europe and bomb
You know... You're probably right - you probably could lose your job for that.
You know... It might be worth having a meaningful discussion about legislating that non-criminal political activity is a protected class. You *should* be able to be lawfully politically active and retain your job though, I suppose, there would need to be some sort of balance to that as people are prone to wanting rights and liberties without accepting responsibility and accountability.
It would probably be hard to strike a meaningful balance, one that is politically viable in the current climes, and actually find the sweet spot. That's gonna need some thinking and is going to need input from other people. I've never really thought about it but it sure as hell seems like that should be something you're granted some protections for. At the same time, I'm pretty big on contracts and willful negotiations between two or more consenting adults and doing so with as little government encroachment/enforcement as is logical to accept.
That's a tough one and I don't say this often enough but it's sometimes good to have the ACs around. I've never been one to suggest they be barred but I've seen others who absolutely abhor the idea of people posting anonymously. Truth be told, the function is often used to less than stellar results. But...
Then there are times like this - which is why I'm a proponent and allow for it at my own sites. There are times when ACs say things that make you think about things you might not otherwise have considered. They're sometimes able to say things they would not be able to say without the benefits of anonymity. It's why I strongly support accepting the inferior AC posts and outright abusive AC posts.
But, I do not often say thank you. Or at least not often enough do I say so. So thanks. You've given me some mental bubble gum - it's a bit of a crossroads with my ideals and it's actually a more defining statement than one might think - where one comes down on the side of this sort of thing. Non-criminal political activity should have some protections. Those protections have been, largely, anonymity in the past - if you wanted. Or at least obfuscation and low chance of discovery.
With everything being uploaded, indexed, crawled, and made available for free or for price, that protection is no longer there or no longer as strong. So, do we need government intervention for such protections? It's imperative to keep in mind that it will be that same government deciding the nature of the act and if such is a criminal offense... There's really more to it, when you think about it, than initially appears and I'm not actually sure where I fall. I've never pondered it and I've not actually decided.
Yeah, I'm comfortable saying that I need to think about it a while longer.
But, the point is that your post is actually a good example of the value of anonymity, pseudonymity, and obfuscation-aminimity. (It's a word, I just made it up.) On top of that, your post also brings to light some additional things - like should their be protections for that so that you don't actually have to hide your political ideology and activities? If so, where should those protections come from? Should they be made by you, the employee, before you agree to exchange your labor for money? Should those protections come at the hands of a union? Should participation in that union, and thus funding, be mandatory or voluntary? If it's voluntary then is one obligated to the protections afforded by that union - is one still able to create one's own employment contract? Should that protection come with the force of law and at the barrel of a gun or by means of financial punishments or perhaps removal of one's physical freedoms?
Like I said, if you give it more than just a casual thought, there's more to it than meets the eye. So, thank you Mr. Anonymous Coward. Thank you.
I hate to say it but I think it's fast approaching the time where those who make the effort, those who consider the importance of not being seen, actually start to stand out more because of their lack of presence and activities.
I'm not in a position where I particularly give a shit about it. However, I could see it being problematic, down the road, if you appear to be a recluse. Surely, you must be a deviant or hiding something! (I'm guessing that's what people will think.) It is seemingly more and more abnormal for people to not have a web presence of some type, that's identifiable by name.
It's nice to just be able to say, "Screw off." I'm not so sure that most can do that. I read stories about people who claim that they've been turned down for jobs for lack of a social media presence but so far nobody has actually convinced me that this is true. They've not given me any reason to think they're using it as anything other than a crutch to blame their not getting hired. It's not like it's a protected class but none of them have indicated that they were told, directly, that they were not getting the job due to a lack of social media presence. (I'm not big on accepting things without some evidence.)
At some point, the question is going to (likely) be for some people; "Do I put up a bit of fake/light content to at least appear to be active in social media and at least try to maintain some control over what data then gets added?" Your point about the extended network, however invalid it should be, is also very valid. I imagine that we're all within one or two people from knowing some pretty poorly behaved people. Hell, some of us might even *be* the poorly behaved person. I've seen a few people here identify as felons and I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.
You know...
That does make me think... If you didn't like someone then it'd be easy to create a fake social media account for some particularly bad person (though not one too famous) and then insert yourself into a number of their friends lists on multiple sites and through multiple ways - enough to make it appear that there's a connection even though there is none and there may be no such person. Slashdot, for example, enables me to add you to my friends list and there's jack shit you can do about that.
As an aside, and a petty aside at that, I consider it a badge of honor when someone adds me to their foes list for what they felt was a meaningful reason. I can usually tell which post(s) it was that I'll have made that encouraged them to do so. I'm often quite proud of holding those views and I'm quite comfortable holding those views up to scrutiny. If they're unable to find flaws and have to resort to, "Well then I just don't like you!" Then it means I'm on the right track.
I'm not exceptional, by any means, but I am one of those people who holds their views up to inspection and is willing to change their mind when they're presented with new information. I'll even *gasp* admit when I'm mistaken but I'll also so that I'm sorry if I am sorry. So yes, yes it *does* strike me as a badge of honor when I click that notification and see someone's added me to their foe list. I'm not sure what I'm winning but I'm winning something! Oddly, quite a few of 'em end up removing me from their foes list. That was really strange when I first saw that happen but it has happened quite a few times. Sometimes I wonder if they're just not able to understand what I write? I'm too verbose and not very articulate. It's actually something I sort of work on.
Slashdot is very much a social networking site. It has user submitted content. It has friends, foes, and journals. It has public lists of who your friends are and shows other friends/foes related to them - in their social network. There's a poorly enabled mechanism for private communication as well as the ability to post in each other's journals.
Slashdot is not only a social networking site but it was among the first social networking sites that gained popularity. I've even met numerous people, in real life, from this very site - including just last New Years.
Not to mention that Ford's just gonna write the whole thing off as a business expense. The income that was made and then spent to buy the car will be untaxed income - they'll even get to write off the expense for registering it, insuring it, and paying the State taxes on it. I'm actually kind of surprised that they paid State taxes - I'd think they'd have a tax exempt ID number on file with 'em.
Musk has given the patents for the EV aspects of their cars to the public domain. They are free to use by anyone who wants to make use of them, no cost and not even a demand to return any advances on those patents to the public domain should anyone do so.
Musk doesn't get to make those decisions on his own. He opted to go with the IPO and now a number of us own shares in the company. I believe Musk only owns 1/5 of TSLA.
I suppose then Stalin's incarcerations, that resulted in millions of deaths in the labor camps, are what happens when you leave safety up to government? Or is that only convenient when you want to use it to try to demonstrate a point that you feel is important?
Hmm... How do you know the kid next door's porn viewing habits?!? Or is that a euphemism for you and you just don't want to admit you whack of to porn?
Dude, we're pretty much all guys here and we all know the internet was built for porn. I don't know anyone who actually watches porn for the good acting and I suspect they all sit around whacking off while watching porn. Sort if...
See, I did have a couple of friends who had a porn video playing, all the time, in their VCR. They'd even acquired a movie rewinder from a video store. They both had girlfriends but neither of the girlfriends lived with them. They both lived off-base and even had porn playing when they had their girlfriends over or company over. I don't recall there ever being a time when I was there that they did not have a video playing for any significant length of time and it was always porn. They'd both been in for a number of years and had traveled a lot by then, so they'd amassed a huge porn collection between the two of them.
I have no idea what happened to them or their vast stores of porn. This was before the days of the internet for regular people. I'd not be remotely surprised to find out that they somehow were still living the same sort of lifestyle with now mountainous volumes of porn on everything from laser disk to flash media storage. They both expected to do their full 20 and bounce so they'd have a fairly decent pension and might even have lined their walls with LCDs and have a whole room of porn.
I don't believe either of them ever had any family come to visit them, they were both from up near Ohio, Michigan, or something like that. I don't think they were gay or the likes - they routinely had females and were dating people. The porn never stopped playing and it wasn't gay porn or the likes. I'm honestly not sure if they'd have turned off the porn and "cleaned up their act" if they'd had family come down to visit. It was really one of the more unusual circumstances I've been in and I've been in some pretty fucked up circumstances.
It was just what they watched. They often had the sound turned down and the radio on and would actively pay attention and give a running commentary or pretend dialogue - almost like the MST3k stuff only predating that show. They'd do so as a matter of dialogue between them, complete with sound effects or mimicking the typical porn music background noises. I should also mention that they were frequently drunk but I'm not sure that had any impact on their choice of video.
As near as I know, they did not sit around and whack off while watching porn. They're the exception that proves the rule, I guess. It really was a rather odd experience but you just got used to it after a while. I was also often drunk when I visited. Actually, I want to say that I was drunk every time I went to their apartment or soon after getting to their apartment. Titties and beer, I guess.
If little Timmy wants to see age-appropriate content then I suspect that would be child pornography.:/ It'd be just little Timmy being interested in seeing naked bodies of people his same age. When I was a little kid, I distinctly recollect wanting to see naked girls. I'd see naked adults and they were hairy beasts and actually not that appealing as a very young lad. It was much more interesting playing Doctor with Suzie who was my age.
Yeah, we had pretty shitty porn back then. They were often pretty beastly looking things, at least they were in my visage then and they are in my recollection today. I found some of my older brother's porn at a fairly young age so this would have been at least 50 years ago. I am not really able to be completely certain of how they actually looked but I recall fat and hairy being the majority of it.
Little Suzie (name changed) was my best friend's sister. That was much more interesting than seeing naked old people that were covered in hair and fat. I dunno, is it unhealthy for little Timmy to be interested in seeing naked people his own age? It seems to me that it's probably a fairly typical goal and desire.
Even with the dissimilarities betwixt the two, this should still say that I'm thinking?
If I point a gun at you and tell you to give me $100 you will be angry. If I point a gun at you and tell you to give me $100 and you are righteously indignant so I relent and only take $50 from you then you're both relieved and happy that you won that battle.
That is, of course, a generic "you" and not you personally. It's also important to note that I've no desire to steal your money. The concepts are not dissimilar.
The government does this often. They want X. They propose X, Y, and Z. They compromise and "settle" for "just" X and Y. The populous is elated because they see it as a win.
I think you'll find that even the religious conservatives are able to understand the fundamental difference between gratuitous violence and depictions of historical (or believed to be historical) events and they're often not that bright. I'm not exactly sure what that says about you or where it places you on the scale...
I picked only one of your topics, I went with the silliest sounding one. That means I put hair loss masturbation and scientific study into a search engine and pounded on the enter key until the words changed. I then read through a few of them and there are lots of references to there being a correlation between whacking off and baldness but I did not find any actual evidence to support it - it would appear some guy did a study on Reddit and still lost the same amount of hair but he's still convinced there's a connection.
I didn't bother with the rest of your statements. I figured I'd just start with that one and if it came back positive then I'd see what the next one had to say.
So, that leads me to this...
[citation_needed]
'Cause there's a whole bunch of shit you said that I really, really want to believe is true.
> Later studies have shown that the places with the most and best internet connections[1] have the lowest number of rape cases.
This is an excellent time to remind everyone that correlation is not causation. Those places with the best 'net connections are also the most stable societies, the wealthier societies, etc... I suspect those have far more influence on the number of criminal sex offenses than the access to speedy porn. Just a hunch...
I bet you can probably say that those countries also have, on average, a greater availability of clean water. Surely, it's the clean water that's preventing the rape!
> Personally I'd like to see a total ban on all smoking tobacco.
Not to worry, that's just your inner petty tyrant trying to be let free. Fortunately, you and your "there ought to be a law" ilk are *usually* just laughed at and openly mocked. I suppose next you'll be wanting to ban all sex, except for the purpose of procreation and only in the missionary position? We might as well try that whole banning alcohol thing.
'Cause, you know, banning is effective and your need to control other people is insatiable. "Stop doing things I don't like!"
Disclosure: I do smoke cigars but you'd be unlikely to actually witness me smoking unless you were in my home. Can't have me enjoying my cigars now, can we?
Now, now... This is a matter of great importance and involves national security. We need to ensure the safety of the citizens. Surely then, this must be a bipartisan bill?
On an actually serious note, can you imagine if they tried to write a law that made *all* types of malware illegal? You'd end up with something that said something along the lines of; "Causing any unwanted or unexpected behavior." Half the people would be cheering for this. The other half would be trying to figure out how to get their least favorite OS vendors arrested.
Just install uMatrix and be done with it. It will take a little while to figure out how to use it and you build up your whitelist as you go. Just keep your settings files backed up and reasonably current and you can use them across multiple computers and multiple browsers. Block everything you don't need. I may refresh a screen a dozen or so times before I get the settings for that site right but it's always the least permissions and I only have to do it for that site once. It's amazing how many sites I don't even bother with doing it for them at all.
I may not have full functionality but I'm only going to visit that news site once - I don't need to have their dynamic content of their latest weather updates loaded in the upper left, a dozen trackers in the bottom, an optimizely script to make sure I get the correct display on a mobile, or anything like that. If I want a script to run then I enable it and refresh. I generally don't want it to run. If I do then I want it and only it to run. I also want it to be selective between sites. (Things a hosts file can't do.)
So, I use uMatrix and get along just fine. It took a little while to figure out how it works. I then figured out that I should save the results. (It's just a single click.) I then realized that exporting them was possible and a good idea - I use multiple computers. I then realized that I could load even fewer things. I then realized it had a way to set the defaults if I wanted to enable them - so I let CSS and straight images (no scripts) display.
I've yet to have to enable a third party cookie, for example, on *any* site for *any* functionality. If a site wants to load too many things then I just don't bother - I've a limit to what I'll allow for code to run on my computer. It's mine. I control it. I say no.
It's really just an easier way to practice safe hex. It's what you should be doing anyhow. I don't have to go through all of the things you're doing. I don't need to use a VM. I don't have to worry about infections if code doesn't run. I let first party stuff load by default. That's it. I often won't allow any third party content at all. That's how you get nasties... I don't want nasties. There is no content so meaningful that I am going to enable people who aren't me to run random things on my computer. There's no site worth it.
I'm building out a site right now - actually in another tab. There is third party content. Every bit of it is optional and the site retains full functionality without it. There's no need to enable any active scripting, of any type, to make full use of the site. You can even use it just fine in Lynx.
By the way, if you're using Windows there's a really neat browser you can try. It's called OffByOne. It doesn't do much except browse pages. There's no scripting allowed. None. There's no way to make it work, last time I used it.
Slashdot Mirror
I even smiled - almost laughing out loud. That might be impacted by the nature of the way that I read Slashdot. I actually pay attention to the names of the posters. ;-)
Actually, they're wound a bit tight sometimes but not bad people. I've seen enough of their posts to know that they're not even stupid. That puts them well ahead of a subset of registered users and a goodly portion of those who use the site anonymously.
Sure, the son of a bitches use register globals, it's in PHP, and buggy as all hell - never mind the security... I know, for a fact, they didn't sanity check anything.
I've never played but I've seen others "play." I am pretty sure you're supposed to light a candle and put it near the curtains at that point. It will save you from having to die slowly due to starvation.
You seem to be experiencing hallucinations and delusions. Would you like some help with that?
Hmm... Wait, maybe this means something about psychiatrists?
Though, maybe I was more insightful than introspection has insisted? Back when I was eating hallucinogenic drugs on a regular basis, I was reasonably certain (to the point of having an elaborate theory) about concentric circles being present everywhere. And, "Surely, surely there's a higher order to this. No, not a god - not like that. But, for lack of a better word, we can call it that. There must actually then be a purpose! There must be! Wait, what the hell were we talking about again?"
Yeah, I tried tripping once. For about ten years. I'm pretty old now so I don't trip nearly as often as I used to but I confess to liking to take my brain out for a refresher course every 12 to 18 months or so.
We're not in the simulation, we are the simulation. *nods*
When I was young and thought I was brilliant, I used to say, "Time is nothing but man's measurement for the passage of reality." I might have been right! Man, it led to all sorts of angst-y poetry. This was long before the emo had been invented. But not before Emo had been born...
Having played, a lot, with WordPress lately, I've noticed a few things...
It's easy if you just point and click. It's good for that. However, if you start digging into the framework then it's no longer easy and it really isn't designed that well. You can keep it reasonably secure but it takes some effort and you need to start the whole process with security in mind. I've installed a number of plugins but I've actually been really careful about it and have stopped to actually read each of them - and to at least skim their code, to make sure I know what I'm doing and what they are doing.
The thing is, I don't think people do that. I went through the list of the most popular stuff and I made it a few pages into the list. As I was reading them, I was thinking "WTF?" So, I looked at some of the code for some of them. I remained thinking, "WTF?" At one point, I was reading about some of the footer instances and I played with that for a bit. One of the pages I was reading had the advice, "If you get an error, just CHMOD the whole themes folder and the files in it to 777 and it should go away." Or something like that. That's not verbatim, I don't think.
So, there are a variety of problems. This is JUST a guess but it looks like someone originally wrote it just to do a few things. Then, someone decided to add plugins so they added that feature. Then, they added the next feature, then they added another feature, and now it is on 4.5.x and somewhere along the lines, it got popular. So, it looks like things have just been bolted on as they went.
Read through the WordPress Developer Resources site. Take a look at the functions list. Look at the things they do and how they're called. It's also capable of being a hell of a resource hog. I mean a whole lot of resources... It happily eats any RAM it can find and, best of all, they've got a plugin that will help you find and use all the RAM. You know, in case your hosting company limits RAM use per script or something and you don't want to live with those paltry resources - why not find a way to bypass that and push it to the limits? It's only shared hosting so that 500 error you see will get blamed on someone else unless the hosting company's admins actually look deep enough to see who was figuring out how to use more RAM than they were allotted. I mean, it's not like the hosting company had a good reason when they put those limits in there...
So, there are some issues and I really think WP would do well with a complete rewrite. I've actually read a whole lot of the code for WordPress. All in the past few months. I'm now well over 200 hours into it and that 200 hours is not including a whole bunch of hours spent on just researching. It probably would have been less time but I've not poked or played with much of anything since about 2007. I had a lot to relearn and a lot of new stuff to catch up on - I still do. It has changed, a lot.
> The amount of adults living with parents today has skyrocketed from 30 years ago.
I thought about this and actually came back to respond to this. It seems to me that *might* be just you misinterpreting the data. It could be willful but it might not be and I'll give you the benefit of doubt. That and, well, I can only explain part of this.
The period of time where young people struck out alone, without family, got married, purchased a home, had a white picket fence, and 2.5 children was actually more or less an anomaly. Historically, children have often remained living with their parents or extending the property a little to live very close. They've often lived with their parents, even staying in the same house after getting married and having children of their own. This is also fairly common across the globe.
In human history, the period where that was the norm is actually pretty short - even if you limit it to modern history. There was some uniquely American aspects to the commonality of that - where land was still plentiful and/or inexpensive.
I'd agree that such was a sign of affluence, on the part of the individual and of the nation as a whole, and that we're seemingly less so affluent today. But, even that could be argued. I don't know that we're really less affluent so much as we've greater availability of goods and services and now consider those services necessities or priorities.
An example is that you might say that your parents had greater spending power even though they made less money than you do. That's something we read here often. Yet, your parents weren't paying for four smart phones and their service plans, internet, computers for every home, cars with all the gadgets, televisions in every room, and $21 pitchers of craft beer. They were paying for a house with piss-poor R value, inefficient appliances that broke down often, cars with drum brakes and carburetors - and no airbags, infotainment center, GPS, anti-brakes, stability and traction control, etc...
Health care? They were paying for a dentist when they needed one, not for whitening, probably not braces, and they might also have been the same person who cut their hair. They weren't paying for an MRI, CT Scan, and were getting irradiated by the faulty x-ray equipment and even getting irradiated when they went to try on new shoes! They didn't even have much in the way of physical therapy, mental health care meant putting Aunt Sally in the attic and feeding her twice a day. If she was a true danger then she was a ward of the State. Taxes? They weren't paying for schools full of computers, one for each of the students to take home, safe buses, qualified bus drivers, gymnasiums, science labs with the modern equipment, cops with special cars, radar guns, less than lethal weapons, extra training in compassionate care (so that one made me chuckle too), stab proof jackets and bullet resistant vests. They got a magnetic light that plugged into the cigarette lighter, bias-ply tires, drum brakes, and a 440 CID engine that only put out 325 horsepower.
The list goes on...
I'm not really sure how far the list goes or even that the list has as much importance that it might have or as little importance as it might have but it's absolutely a metric that nobody ever wants to take into account. In the scope of things, we did pretty good for a little while but that was actually an exception to the rule and not the norm. Different societies do this at different times and it seems to be relatively cyclic in nature. Go back to that time and have a look at how poorly they were doing in Europe for a huge part of that time, for example. Shit, Spain was a fascist dictatorship until, what, 1978? They were cowering in fear of the USSR until the late 1980s. Living with their parents wasn't just expected in some areas but a necessity. That really wasn't that long ago. Now it is their turn to be a bit wealthier than they're used to and that seems to quickly be coming to an end. (Let us hope they don't go Full Europe and bomb
You know... You're probably right - you probably could lose your job for that.
You know... It might be worth having a meaningful discussion about legislating that non-criminal political activity is a protected class. You *should* be able to be lawfully politically active and retain your job though, I suppose, there would need to be some sort of balance to that as people are prone to wanting rights and liberties without accepting responsibility and accountability.
It would probably be hard to strike a meaningful balance, one that is politically viable in the current climes, and actually find the sweet spot. That's gonna need some thinking and is going to need input from other people. I've never really thought about it but it sure as hell seems like that should be something you're granted some protections for. At the same time, I'm pretty big on contracts and willful negotiations between two or more consenting adults and doing so with as little government encroachment/enforcement as is logical to accept.
That's a tough one and I don't say this often enough but it's sometimes good to have the ACs around. I've never been one to suggest they be barred but I've seen others who absolutely abhor the idea of people posting anonymously. Truth be told, the function is often used to less than stellar results. But...
Then there are times like this - which is why I'm a proponent and allow for it at my own sites. There are times when ACs say things that make you think about things you might not otherwise have considered. They're sometimes able to say things they would not be able to say without the benefits of anonymity. It's why I strongly support accepting the inferior AC posts and outright abusive AC posts.
But, I do not often say thank you. Or at least not often enough do I say so. So thanks. You've given me some mental bubble gum - it's a bit of a crossroads with my ideals and it's actually a more defining statement than one might think - where one comes down on the side of this sort of thing. Non-criminal political activity should have some protections. Those protections have been, largely, anonymity in the past - if you wanted. Or at least obfuscation and low chance of discovery.
With everything being uploaded, indexed, crawled, and made available for free or for price, that protection is no longer there or no longer as strong. So, do we need government intervention for such protections? It's imperative to keep in mind that it will be that same government deciding the nature of the act and if such is a criminal offense... There's really more to it, when you think about it, than initially appears and I'm not actually sure where I fall. I've never pondered it and I've not actually decided.
Yeah, I'm comfortable saying that I need to think about it a while longer.
But, the point is that your post is actually a good example of the value of anonymity, pseudonymity, and obfuscation-aminimity. (It's a word, I just made it up.) On top of that, your post also brings to light some additional things - like should their be protections for that so that you don't actually have to hide your political ideology and activities? If so, where should those protections come from? Should they be made by you, the employee, before you agree to exchange your labor for money? Should those protections come at the hands of a union? Should participation in that union, and thus funding, be mandatory or voluntary? If it's voluntary then is one obligated to the protections afforded by that union - is one still able to create one's own employment contract? Should that protection come with the force of law and at the barrel of a gun or by means of financial punishments or perhaps removal of one's physical freedoms?
Like I said, if you give it more than just a casual thought, there's more to it than meets the eye. So, thank you Mr. Anonymous Coward. Thank you.
> The importance of "not being seen" so to speak.
I hate to say it but I think it's fast approaching the time where those who make the effort, those who consider the importance of not being seen, actually start to stand out more because of their lack of presence and activities.
I'm not in a position where I particularly give a shit about it. However, I could see it being problematic, down the road, if you appear to be a recluse. Surely, you must be a deviant or hiding something! (I'm guessing that's what people will think.) It is seemingly more and more abnormal for people to not have a web presence of some type, that's identifiable by name.
It's nice to just be able to say, "Screw off." I'm not so sure that most can do that. I read stories about people who claim that they've been turned down for jobs for lack of a social media presence but so far nobody has actually convinced me that this is true. They've not given me any reason to think they're using it as anything other than a crutch to blame their not getting hired. It's not like it's a protected class but none of them have indicated that they were told, directly, that they were not getting the job due to a lack of social media presence. (I'm not big on accepting things without some evidence.)
At some point, the question is going to (likely) be for some people; "Do I put up a bit of fake/light content to at least appear to be active in social media and at least try to maintain some control over what data then gets added?" Your point about the extended network, however invalid it should be, is also very valid. I imagine that we're all within one or two people from knowing some pretty poorly behaved people. Hell, some of us might even *be* the poorly behaved person. I've seen a few people here identify as felons and I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.
You know...
That does make me think... If you didn't like someone then it'd be easy to create a fake social media account for some particularly bad person (though not one too famous) and then insert yourself into a number of their friends lists on multiple sites and through multiple ways - enough to make it appear that there's a connection even though there is none and there may be no such person. Slashdot, for example, enables me to add you to my friends list and there's jack shit you can do about that.
As an aside, and a petty aside at that, I consider it a badge of honor when someone adds me to their foes list for what they felt was a meaningful reason. I can usually tell which post(s) it was that I'll have made that encouraged them to do so. I'm often quite proud of holding those views and I'm quite comfortable holding those views up to scrutiny. If they're unable to find flaws and have to resort to, "Well then I just don't like you!" Then it means I'm on the right track.
I'm not exceptional, by any means, but I am one of those people who holds their views up to inspection and is willing to change their mind when they're presented with new information. I'll even *gasp* admit when I'm mistaken but I'll also so that I'm sorry if I am sorry. So yes, yes it *does* strike me as a badge of honor when I click that notification and see someone's added me to their foe list. I'm not sure what I'm winning but I'm winning something! Oddly, quite a few of 'em end up removing me from their foes list. That was really strange when I first saw that happen but it has happened quite a few times. Sometimes I wonder if they're just not able to understand what I write? I'm too verbose and not very articulate. It's actually something I sort of work on.
Slashdot is very much a social networking site. It has user submitted content. It has friends, foes, and journals. It has public lists of who your friends are and shows other friends/foes related to them - in their social network. There's a poorly enabled mechanism for private communication as well as the ability to post in each other's journals.
Slashdot is not only a social networking site but it was among the first social networking sites that gained popularity. I've even met numerous people, in real life, from this very site - including just last New Years.
Most people don't even know what "hemi" means or understand what the purpose is.
Not to mention that Ford's just gonna write the whole thing off as a business expense. The income that was made and then spent to buy the car will be untaxed income - they'll even get to write off the expense for registering it, insuring it, and paying the State taxes on it. I'm actually kind of surprised that they paid State taxes - I'd think they'd have a tax exempt ID number on file with 'em.
Musk has given the patents for the EV aspects of their cars to the public domain. They are free to use by anyone who wants to make use of them, no cost and not even a demand to return any advances on those patents to the public domain should anyone do so.
Musk doesn't get to make those decisions on his own. He opted to go with the IPO and now a number of us own shares in the company. I believe Musk only owns 1/5 of TSLA.
I suppose then Stalin's incarcerations, that resulted in millions of deaths in the labor camps, are what happens when you leave safety up to government? Or is that only convenient when you want to use it to try to demonstrate a point that you feel is important?
Hmm... How do you know the kid next door's porn viewing habits?!? Or is that a euphemism for you and you just don't want to admit you whack of to porn?
Dude, we're pretty much all guys here and we all know the internet was built for porn. I don't know anyone who actually watches porn for the good acting and I suspect they all sit around whacking off while watching porn. Sort if...
See, I did have a couple of friends who had a porn video playing, all the time, in their VCR. They'd even acquired a movie rewinder from a video store. They both had girlfriends but neither of the girlfriends lived with them. They both lived off-base and even had porn playing when they had their girlfriends over or company over. I don't recall there ever being a time when I was there that they did not have a video playing for any significant length of time and it was always porn. They'd both been in for a number of years and had traveled a lot by then, so they'd amassed a huge porn collection between the two of them.
I have no idea what happened to them or their vast stores of porn. This was before the days of the internet for regular people. I'd not be remotely surprised to find out that they somehow were still living the same sort of lifestyle with now mountainous volumes of porn on everything from laser disk to flash media storage. They both expected to do their full 20 and bounce so they'd have a fairly decent pension and might even have lined their walls with LCDs and have a whole room of porn.
I don't believe either of them ever had any family come to visit them, they were both from up near Ohio, Michigan, or something like that. I don't think they were gay or the likes - they routinely had females and were dating people. The porn never stopped playing and it wasn't gay porn or the likes. I'm honestly not sure if they'd have turned off the porn and "cleaned up their act" if they'd had family come down to visit. It was really one of the more unusual circumstances I've been in and I've been in some pretty fucked up circumstances.
It was just what they watched. They often had the sound turned down and the radio on and would actively pay attention and give a running commentary or pretend dialogue - almost like the MST3k stuff only predating that show. They'd do so as a matter of dialogue between them, complete with sound effects or mimicking the typical porn music background noises. I should also mention that they were frequently drunk but I'm not sure that had any impact on their choice of video.
As near as I know, they did not sit around and whack off while watching porn. They're the exception that proves the rule, I guess. It really was a rather odd experience but you just got used to it after a while. I was also often drunk when I visited. Actually, I want to say that I was drunk every time I went to their apartment or soon after getting to their apartment. Titties and beer, I guess.
If little Timmy wants to see age-appropriate content then I suspect that would be child pornography. :/ It'd be just little Timmy being interested in seeing naked bodies of people his same age. When I was a little kid, I distinctly recollect wanting to see naked girls. I'd see naked adults and they were hairy beasts and actually not that appealing as a very young lad. It was much more interesting playing Doctor with Suzie who was my age.
Yeah, we had pretty shitty porn back then. They were often pretty beastly looking things, at least they were in my visage then and they are in my recollection today. I found some of my older brother's porn at a fairly young age so this would have been at least 50 years ago. I am not really able to be completely certain of how they actually looked but I recall fat and hairy being the majority of it.
Little Suzie (name changed) was my best friend's sister. That was much more interesting than seeing naked old people that were covered in hair and fat. I dunno, is it unhealthy for little Timmy to be interested in seeing naked people his own age? It seems to me that it's probably a fairly typical goal and desire.
Even with the dissimilarities betwixt the two, this should still say that I'm thinking?
If I point a gun at you and tell you to give me $100 you will be angry. If I point a gun at you and tell you to give me $100 and you are righteously indignant so I relent and only take $50 from you then you're both relieved and happy that you won that battle.
That is, of course, a generic "you" and not you personally. It's also important to note that I've no desire to steal your money. The concepts are not dissimilar.
The government does this often. They want X. They propose X, Y, and Z. They compromise and "settle" for "just" X and Y. The populous is elated because they see it as a win.
I think you'll find that even the religious conservatives are able to understand the fundamental difference between gratuitous violence and depictions of historical (or believed to be historical) events and they're often not that bright. I'm not exactly sure what that says about you or where it places you on the scale...
I picked only one of your topics, I went with the silliest sounding one. That means I put hair loss masturbation and scientific study into a search engine and pounded on the enter key until the words changed. I then read through a few of them and there are lots of references to there being a correlation between whacking off and baldness but I did not find any actual evidence to support it - it would appear some guy did a study on Reddit and still lost the same amount of hair but he's still convinced there's a connection.
I didn't bother with the rest of your statements. I figured I'd just start with that one and if it came back positive then I'd see what the next one had to say.
So, that leads me to this...
[citation_needed]
'Cause there's a whole bunch of shit you said that I really, really want to believe is true.
> Later studies have shown that the places with the most and best internet connections[1] have the lowest number of rape cases.
This is an excellent time to remind everyone that correlation is not causation. Those places with the best 'net connections are also the most stable societies, the wealthier societies, etc... I suspect those have far more influence on the number of criminal sex offenses than the access to speedy porn. Just a hunch...
I bet you can probably say that those countries also have, on average, a greater availability of clean water. Surely, it's the clean water that's preventing the rape!
> Personally I'd like to see a total ban on all smoking tobacco.
Not to worry, that's just your inner petty tyrant trying to be let free. Fortunately, you and your "there ought to be a law" ilk are *usually* just laughed at and openly mocked. I suppose next you'll be wanting to ban all sex, except for the purpose of procreation and only in the missionary position? We might as well try that whole banning alcohol thing.
'Cause, you know, banning is effective and your need to control other people is insatiable. "Stop doing things I don't like!"
Disclosure: I do smoke cigars but you'd be unlikely to actually witness me smoking unless you were in my home. Can't have me enjoying my cigars now, can we?
Now, now... This is a matter of great importance and involves national security. We need to ensure the safety of the citizens. Surely then, this must be a bipartisan bill?
On an actually serious note, can you imagine if they tried to write a law that made *all* types of malware illegal? You'd end up with something that said something along the lines of; "Causing any unwanted or unexpected behavior." Half the people would be cheering for this. The other half would be trying to figure out how to get their least favorite OS vendors arrested.
Just install uMatrix and be done with it. It will take a little while to figure out how to use it and you build up your whitelist as you go. Just keep your settings files backed up and reasonably current and you can use them across multiple computers and multiple browsers. Block everything you don't need. I may refresh a screen a dozen or so times before I get the settings for that site right but it's always the least permissions and I only have to do it for that site once. It's amazing how many sites I don't even bother with doing it for them at all.
I may not have full functionality but I'm only going to visit that news site once - I don't need to have their dynamic content of their latest weather updates loaded in the upper left, a dozen trackers in the bottom, an optimizely script to make sure I get the correct display on a mobile, or anything like that. If I want a script to run then I enable it and refresh. I generally don't want it to run. If I do then I want it and only it to run. I also want it to be selective between sites. (Things a hosts file can't do.)
So, I use uMatrix and get along just fine. It took a little while to figure out how it works. I then figured out that I should save the results. (It's just a single click.) I then realized that exporting them was possible and a good idea - I use multiple computers. I then realized that I could load even fewer things. I then realized it had a way to set the defaults if I wanted to enable them - so I let CSS and straight images (no scripts) display.
I've yet to have to enable a third party cookie, for example, on *any* site for *any* functionality. If a site wants to load too many things then I just don't bother - I've a limit to what I'll allow for code to run on my computer. It's mine. I control it. I say no.
It's really just an easier way to practice safe hex. It's what you should be doing anyhow. I don't have to go through all of the things you're doing. I don't need to use a VM. I don't have to worry about infections if code doesn't run. I let first party stuff load by default. That's it. I often won't allow any third party content at all. That's how you get nasties... I don't want nasties. There is no content so meaningful that I am going to enable people who aren't me to run random things on my computer. There's no site worth it.
I'm building out a site right now - actually in another tab. There is third party content. Every bit of it is optional and the site retains full functionality without it. There's no need to enable any active scripting, of any type, to make full use of the site. You can even use it just fine in Lynx.
By the way, if you're using Windows there's a really neat browser you can try. It's called OffByOne. It doesn't do much except browse pages. There's no scripting allowed. None. There's no way to make it work, last time I used it.
How about this very subject until they just recently changed it? I should think that would be an adequate example of one such instance, yes?