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Comment Re:So is yours! (Score 3) 87

If you want to help X, help them because of the value of X, not because there exists some Y who is >>> X.

I agree with that.

However inequality in practice has been called the most important problem.

Here is a quote from wikipedia:

2013 Economics Nobel prize winner Robert J. Shiller said that rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the most important problem.[108] Increasing inequality harms economic growth.[109] High and persistent unemployment, in which inequality increases, has a negative effect on subsequent long-run economic growth. Unemployment can harm growth not only because it is a waste of resources, but also because it generates redistributive pressures and subsequent distortions, drives people to poverty, constrains liquidity limiting labor mobility, and erodes self-esteem promoting social dislocation, unrest and conflict. Policies aiming at controlling unemployment and in particular at reducing its inequality-associated effects support economic growth.[6]

The effects of inequality are massive and effect almost every facet of life. It would be hard to find a bigger problem than inequality.

The other part of my post was due to comments I have seen regularly that state that 'If someone doesn't have a job then I shouldn't have to give a penny to them. They can die because of evolution, they are unfit to live' type posts. Your post seemed like one of those because saying inequality is good is a prerequisite for such views and it may be a veiled attempt at excusing terrible conditions for the poor. Those comments may well not be aimed at your previous post, unless you are actually espousing those views. Not saying you are.

If anyone has any problems with a Wikipedia link, then I would like to remind them that the article has plenty of references which are a click away.

Comment Re:So is yours! (Score 2) 87

I cannot agree with this if this is used as an excuse to have people in poverty. If someone is okay to have someone in poverty because, for instance if they don't have work, then it shows that you don't think that someone is worth anything except for what you can get out of them. A rapist doesn't give any value to their victims lives, just what they can get from them. Which puts one who doesn't care about the economic welfare of other people in the same boat as rapists. This includes people saying 'it is okay for people to be very unequal economically because people are unequal' as a way to excuse terrible living conditions for the less well off, because they see no value in their lives, otherwise they wouldn't be pushing that view.

Comment Re:Who cares if it ain't yours? (Score 1) 282

You don't understand where this person is coming from. He is considering himself superior than other people, this is the quote from the same author:

I am the alpha male you dummy. It's OK if my wife carried, out of our 7 children, say 2 or 3 from other guys because I was too busy procreating 50 or more kids with other women.

Here is the link if you want to see his quote for yourself.

Comment Re:trumpet winsock:win95:cygwin bash:win10 (Score 1) 160

You can run unsigned scripts by default, they just cannot be remote scripts (such as on a shared drive) or a file that a browser has marked as downloaded from the internet (via NTFS file stream).

Although using something like SCCM 2012 I could not run even signed scripts in it because SCCM put spaces at the end of the script when it saved, rendering the signature invalid. Hope that bug is fixed now.

Comment What came before the initial seizure of Jan 2012 (Score 5, Informative) 98

Interestingly Kim Dotcom was creating his own much fairer music service/label before the seizure of the servers etc in January 2012.

Here is the best article I could find on google about it and the MegaUpload song takedown on YouTube.

There were questions about whether this was the real reason the takedown happened. For anyone who doesn't remember.

Comment Re:Slashdot UI faces extinction (Score 1) 294

The new UI changes are brain dead. If I was someone coming to Slashdot for the first time I am much more likely to think it is just a list of stories with summaries since the comments link is not obvious. This would cause me to either treat the site as something to quickly scan for a list of stories and leave, or just forget about. I have found the comments section to be the most interesting part of this site (helped massively by the fairly unique moderation method). It should have the link to the comments section as one of the most prominent features of a story, not just tucked into a little icon on the top right of a story.

Comment Re:HOWTO (Score 1) 1081

Do you think I think the words don't matter in describing those two situations you gave, of course not!

Then why did you treat them that way?

Because your example is completely different. In the original comments case he used murder to describe executions, any reader would still know it is an execution, the word 'murder' just carries emotional connotations in this case. In your example I guess the words you would be referring to is 'I got $10000', so if someone said this to someone they would not know how they got it. If it was option 1 from your post, then the audience would have no idea that it was from bashing an old lady over the head. Or if option two, given the money. That answer is not analogous, it only looks the similar in the most superficial way.

It is interesting that you had to make that stuff up to answer me

It's perfectly reasonable to take your rhetorical construction and to apply it to another scenario so you can see the flaws in what you said.

As I have answered previously, it is not the same. A construct, like a program, does not have to be valid on all inputs. The example you gave, wasn't alike. The construct was not the same either, you replaced it with a generalization for all words, it was specific to that case. I am repeating this but, in the original comment 'murder' carried an emotional connotation, in your example the audience would not have had a clue what really happened.

is totally irrelevant, using the word 'murder' does not change the information someone reading that comment gets from it

Of course it matters. Words mean things. The reason we have different expressions to convey the concept of murder and the concept of the execution of a death sentence carried out against someone who chose to commit murder is: those are not the same things! Labeling them as if they are, and tainting your communication with the connotation of a word chosen when you know it's an inaccurate, agenda-loaded word choice meant to bias understanding of what's said, is not just some breezy situation to dismiss as if it's some linguistic quirk or just the act of someone who's got a childlike vocabulary and doesn't know better.

One chooses the word "murder" to describe an act because one thinks the act is actually murder, and wants to persuade others to perceive it the same way. Don't play dumb like you can't tell the difference.

If you wanted to use neutral language, then you would use 'unlawful deliberate killing' for what the criminal did and 'lawful deliberate killing' for what the state did. But generally people don't talk like that. Most people can cope with communication that has emotional connotations with it.

Comment Re:HOWTO (Score 1) 1081

No, I'm saying that making a guy spend part of every day working to feed and house the person who raped is wife to death is evil.

It is a tax burden that everyone shares, you'd be crazy to think someone was deliberately making the victim pay it, that statement about making the victim spend part of every working day paying the murderer is hyperbole. Do you think it will be that much better for the hypothetical husband if the hypothetical murderer was put to death? I don't. It won't be sunshine and roses for the husband, we both know that. Compensating the victim is a much better thing for them than having the perpetrator executed, and the victim would have gained money then, much more than their own taxes go to the murderer, so it wouldn't be like having the victim pay the perp at all. Yes, it is at a small expense to individual taxpayers, but it is nice to have a social security net.

I do believe having inalienable basic rights for everyone including the right to life, trumps the cost of keeping the criminals locked up rather than having them executed. The cost of keeping a dangerous person in jail does give me pause for thought, also whether someone's life in jail is any good. It isn't convincing me at the moment, simply because the cost does not seem all that great, compared to throwing basic rights away.

Also, I noticed you skipped the bit about judging a life to be worth a pretty small amount, you do seem eager to have people killed.

Also, this discussion has been about the worst murderers, because those are the only examples you gave, so you could give them the vilest description. These are not the only people on death row. There are people who are on death row because they trafficked drugs for example, yes this is in another country. The discussion is far from complete without mentioning this.

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