Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Green Jobs Is a Joke (Score 2) 713

The whole reason manufacturers are interested in "working with the government" to push electric vehicles is that they are ultimately less labor intensive to manufacture. GM won't hire anyone to make electric motors in the USA. They'll just buy the motors from China and slap them in their vehicles. Meanwhile, everyone in Mexico and the USA working on 4 cylinder to 8 cylinder engines is going to be given the pink slip and Progressives working in banks and universities for a living casting everyone who is angry about this as some sort of a racist who should be ideally just going for the welfare program.

Comment "Heed the Science" is such a terrible thought. (Score 1) 252

Science doesn't tell us if something is right or wrong for each of us. It simply says what the effects of a course of action may be. There is nothing to heed. If I like daylight savings time and changing clocks, and the effects as determined by science are nearly not so bad to me or might even be beneficial, then I'm for the status quo. But, if I am in the camp where I have decided that the effects of daylight savings time are not worth the price, then I'd support doing away with it.

It's the same with global warming. Science is just about what experiments say what might happen, but, its up to each of us to decide if those are benefits for us or costs. So, if I lived on a hill in Kentucky and liked the ritual of changing clocks, it would be perfectly ok for me to say that I can live with rising levels and keeping daylight savings time. It's up to the political process, for all of us to say, what the law will be regarding the keeping of clocks and emissions.

Comment I live on a hill, so I'm cool. (Score 1) 77

I'm not really sure why crowded city coastlines should have the right to charge much less densely populated rural interiors for the urban sins of overbreeding. I live on a hill in Kentucky and I have 4 growing Giant Sequoias, with more on the way, and over my lifetime those trees will consume all the carbon that I could ever produce. So, why should I have to deal with an inconvenience to my lifestyle, when I live on a hill, am already carbon neutral. Seems to me, cities should think about nuclear power and walls. You aren't building windmills on my land. I think they are noisy and ugly, although I might have a smaller one and some solar panels for myself.

Comment Facebook / Twitter is Private Property (Score 1) 583

Nominally I would say that Twitter and Facebook are private property and in the United States your freedom of expression only pertains to public property. However, the complexity comes because the government both enables the idea of lawsuits against Twitter and Facebook and also bars them.

For the moment though, I would say my usual right wing admonition applies: If you don't like what Twitter and Facebook companies do, either find another company or start your own. It would be helpful if conservatives remembered that such a rule applies to them too. In general, it would be helpful if they remembered that shockingly everyone has a right to vote, that the Constitution applies to everyone, and they are not the only Americans and Patriots despite their own media telling them that.

It would be even more helpful if the left wing realized that its own speech is just as insightful. After all, the wave of violence and rioting protests that took place over the summer certainly was fueled by a steady diet of academic coursework, political punditry and media coursework designed to sell the idea that the entire country is racist and therefor everything is subject to destruction.

The question really is, if the flag is a national symbol and things like Best Buy and Rite Aid are legitimate targets for destruction in the name of protest and social justice, then why not the nation's capitol? The nuance is that, among Trump supporters, even though the mythology of this election is a fraud is laughably incorrect, there is also truth among that crowd of generations of abuse abetted by the government and on a number of policies, particularly linked to wars and resource extraction and abandonment. This is not dissimilar from blacks being lead to riot because everything wrong in their lives is because of white people, of whom a large portion either don't care, or, are actually working for immigrants and global multinational companies where race is essentially not a distinguishing marker of success.

The truth of the matter is, pushing racial and cultural buttons is profitable for left wing and right wing media alike, and the riots of the summer and the riots of this election are caused by the exact same type of person.

Comment The death of meritocracy (Score 1) 435

There's a lot of this business about "acting like a human being" floating around, but what we're really saying here is that the work product doesn't matter as much as the alignment to political objectives of whoever is paying the bill.

I suppose its easy for the SJW types to run and around scream virtue and all of that, but seriously, what value do all these basket weaving wanna be sociologists actually add to anything? Zero point zero. I get it, we don't want people running around to be Communists or Nazis or Rapists, but, there's a lot of grey area around that. To a great extent the point is lost, that, while the SJW puritans claim to defend the marginalized, they've lost site of the fact that people like Stallman and others in the field were basically marginalized people themselves. Marginalized people sometimes do things that get them marginalized, but we're all kicking -them- out, as if having built a great deal of the ecosystem we have meant nothing, so that, other marginalized people can get in?

At least, when work was judged on merit, and your personality was stripped from it entirely, you could make a living in computer science. But now that it's all about whose political rear you have to kiss, we're not going to be as effective as a field.

Like everything else they have touched, Progressives are ruining technology with all of their puritanical crap. Trading one set of marginalized people for another is not social justice, it's a power play.

Comment Disputing the Free Market (Score 2) 250

The whole problem that neither the free market or the socialized system completely solves is the basic reality is that people don't want to work and shucks, no one really wants to compete, either.

Competition is a lot of work and the simplest way to make money is to try and be in a business that can avoid it. The easiest way to do that is to churn out intellectual property and rely on the regulated monopoly to attract investment in that property. In systems where there is no intellectual property, then, the next best way to avoid competition is through scale. In fact, big companies make use of both today - they invest capital enough to differentiate themselves, and then they sit on it as long as they can. If a company wins completely in the marketplace, the smartest move is to raise prices. If you have a nimbler competitor, he or she might just instead simply sell out, because, again, most people don't want to work.

In socialized systems, there's never a part where you get to get rich and sell out, and then not work, so the easiest way to avoid work is to simply do as little as one can get away with. Since everyone is doing as little as one can get away with, smart people with no opportunity for advancement figure out exactly what is just enough to move them ahead commensurate to what the risk is, and social stagnation ensues. But pretty much, the end game of either a free market sector that is mature versus one that is run by the government, is a bunch of people sitting on top of a monopoly sufficient to last their lives, they hope, so they can get paid and not have to work all that much.

Comment That Walmart Bit... (Score 1) 940

I would say that Walmart is subsidizing the welfare system more than the other way around. People that are on welfare and work at Walmart wouldn't have any job, most likely, if Walmart didn't exist. After all, who actually has the scale that allows the formation of a job of a greeter that waves when you walk in. Only a big store can do that and carry a profit. Speaking of which, Walmart actually doesn't make a great profit margin. It just has lots of big stores.

Comment I vote for Gridlock! (Score 1) 819

The very thing needed for a democracy to genuinely work at a national level is for people to be of one mind. That is obviously not the case in the United States and hasn't been since, well, ever. Even the American Revolution was driven by the minority of the population, as was, quite frankly, the Civil War. Today, the country is pretty sharply polarized, and no group really trusts each other and nor should they. We have liberals and other statists (including neoconservatives), evangelicals, libertarians, anarchists, all of them who have an idealized life that is completely different. Add to the mix of wide political outlooks that include continual race and gender based politics and political argument, and you've basically a country that can't help but be in a continual state of gridlock.

My ideal case is to deconstruct anything about the government. I resent that the courts have so much power over my family that they have soured my ability to trust any kind of governmental power whatsoever and my only answer is to vote to shut it down. This libertarian idea is impossible to reach, so the best bet is to let the powers that be bash each other, so, I always vote for divided government. Shut it all down, I say, at the Federal Level, then break up the states next!

Comment Calibration matters? (Score 1) 425

Well let's say there's some degree of error between the calorie in general and the calorie for you. I would think that, it's some multiplier, and that, you should be able to adjust it by monitoring your diet and the consistency with what you eat. Like, if you gain 1 lb a week, and eat 10000 calories during that time, then regardless of what the measure is, you need to either adjust your intake down, or increase your burn rate, or both. I hate to be barbaric about it, but you never see fat people in gulags and concentration camps. Sooner or later, calories DO matter.

Slashdot Top Deals

Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.

Working...