Meanwhile, in Greece...

You can't fix stupid. So they will fail in every attempt to "solve homelessness". But OP wasn't talking about homelessness. Bitsy Boffin was talking about America and how much he hates it. The homelessness tack is incidental.

Indeed! "What about the chiiiiiiiiildren?" It works for both conservatives and liberals.

There are millions of stories of stupid, lazy people doing stupid, lazy things that screw up their own lives and the lives of their victims. And then, once in a blue moon, one of these losers spawns a genius. It is the proverbial pearl in a mountain of shit. But if you stare deeply into that pearl, allowing it to fill your vision entirely, then you can feel inspired enough to write a heartwarming human interest story. Maybe that story will be so powerful that you will inspire people to say, "But what about the chiiiiiiiildren?" and ignore the masses of stupid, lazy people out there making life worse for everyone.

Yes, it sucks that other kids had a trust fund and we didn't. (Likewise, it also sucks that we were born in the US as opposed to, say, North Korea or Uganda, but let's stay focused on our first-world problems.)

How would you imagine "fixing" this problem? Ignore for the time being that you can no longer bequeath your wealth to your children, or to anyone else that you like, for that matter. When someone dies, all of their wealth is sized by the government to be "spread equally" among ... who exactly? Everyone? How do you imagine that working out in practice? Well, since we will elect angels, not fallible humans, to government positions, then they will be perfect and show absolutely no favoritism or individual biases about what is most worthy of "investment", right? Of course not, because angels don't exist, power corrupts, and we're talking about pigs who now have a individual's wealth to divvy up as best as they see fit. This is actually a much faster method of turning the US into a neo-feudal society, with all wealth from someone seized when someone dies (accidentally?) and spread out as best as our rulers see fit (Now! With GULAG!).

Maybe you should re-read the book _Animal Farm_ knowing that it was written by a socialist. Notice how I used the word "pigs" to describe our rulers? It wasn't a throwaway insult. It's a reference to that book.

Just don't call it "class warfare"!

You can't. The pathway between the body cavity and the scrotum is dark.

On the one hand, you say it's a "canard" that government is force. On the other hand, you say that government "needs" force, and that's a good thing. Which is it?

Of course government is force. That's what makes it government. The only difference between government and any other individual or group is that the government has the legal right to use deadly force to achieve its goals. That's what government is, period. The discussions of how is is moral or not that this force will be used is called "politics".

And I hate your claim that if it weren't for government then we would all be "anarchist barbarians killing and raping and stealing at will". I resent the notion that I would go out and kill, rape, and steal if it weren't for your blessed God Government telling me not to. If suddenly government told you that it wasn't going to enforce those laws, would you immediately go out and rape a baby to death? You sound like a conservative who claims that we would all be shooting up heroin if it weren't for God Government telling us not to do it. I am completely capable of determining for myself what is right, what is wrong, and what is appropriate conduct toward other people, and anyone who insists otherwise is an asshole!

Go read "The Tragedy of the Commons". You might also consider that farming lions is the best way to save the species. Disagree? Consider the populations of cows and chickens compared to the populations of lions and zebras. Common property doesn't work. Either someone owns it or nobody does.

Bull feathers and hen's teeth. Socialism, like Christianity, is entirely about denying self-ownership. In Socialism, you belong to "society" through a "social contract" (Accept it or DIE!). In Christianity, you are "made in God's image" and are "God's child". Both evil ideologies hate the notion of individualism and say that selfishness is evil, where "selfishness" means "not doing what I told you to do". As long as I am not depriving any other individual of their life, liberty, or property, then nothing I do is wrong or should be illegal. And it's rich of you to accuse other of "controlling public thought" when you know very well that socialism wants to control the way people think, act, spend, and live. For the good of "society" and the "social contract". You're no better than a fundamentalist Christian. It's the same evil nanny state with a different stupid God and the connected party members living high on the graft. You suck! I can't tell if you're a Boxer or an aspirant pig -- and go read _Animal Farm_ if you don't know what I'm talking about. Either way, I hate you.

How's that ROI going? Well, if the "R" in question is votes, then it's probably going pretty well.

This will come as a shock to many Boxers (but not many pigs or aspirant pigs -- read _Animal Farm_ to know what I'm talking about), but paying people not to work will incentivize them not to work.

"...should be required reading"? Check.
Freshly-graduated from college? Check.
What's good for me is good for everybody? Check.
What I don't prefer is excrement? Check.
Dismissive and angry in general? Check.

Yes, I bash (the shell, not the petulant behavior). Yes, I know regexes. Yes, I used E16. Yes, I was a zealot of class-A caliber. I see me in you. An angry, condescending, spiteful me. Slashdot is a back-slapping, high-fiving cesspool of that kind of me. It's why your very hackneyed post was modded up as "insightful": it validates very common anti-social, us-versus-them attitude that permeates this place. It's why my own post will be modded down as "flamebait", because I am refusing to validate this very same spiteful, self-satisfied group of people, as hungry for validation as I used to be. Am I better than that now? Somehow superior? No. Just less angry. More accepting of myself and different preferences in others. Less needy of punishing and feeling self-satisfied for having done so. More aware that happiness it the birthright and responsibility of every individual, and that computer UIs are a preference which exist solely to serve humanity's needs, and only after that are a technical (not moral) issue. Maybe when you see your two year-old child working an iPad you'll feel a little bit more merciful, but something tells me that parenthood is light-years away from your radar.

These kinds of stories sicken me. "No link". "No correlation". So what if there was? Correlation does not imply causation.

Yet "linked" and "correlated" appear everywhere in medicine. Why is our culture like this? I think it must be a kind of secular religion -- kind of like the faith we have in peer review.

Indeed. Quite opposed to corporations, trade unions, churches, scientists, public interest groups, police departments, community organizers, universities, charities, and individuals, all of which advance and defend their interests with 100% honesty and lamb-like innocence.

I was still in college and my becoming of a full-blown Linux nerd was a function of my seething hatred for Microsoft. Back then, "News for nerds, stuff that matters" was an anthem for my people. The nerdy ones. I wanted to be esoteric, abstract, intelligent, and I wanted respect for all the things that I liked that had been so commonly mocked and derided during high school. Slashdot filled that void in a very special way: it was new, it was on the web, it was underground, it was filled with people like me: young, male, nerdy. Who was I to know that "Lord of the Rings" would one day win best picture? Back then, "Revenge of the Nerds" was a movie I remember in the theater.

Watching Slashdot grow up wasn't as interesting as watching myself grow up. I became a parent. I learned how to cook. I stopped hating Microsoft so much (I remember feeling ever so slightly conflicted about buying an Xbox). I even returned to my "Apple roots" when I forsook my aging, whirring linux box for an iMac a few years ago. "It's UNIX", I told myself. Funny how priorities change. My coworker, who is in his mid-20s, calls me "old". I call him "post-Jedi", referring to the movie after which he was born. I saw Star Wars in the theater, but I was too young to remember it.

Slashdot is special and will always be. Thank you, Rob, for being there for all of us. And Emacs still sucks.

In 1998, I think.

When I want to feel nostalgic, I look at the BillG as borg logo, and remember when I truly did hate Microsoft and think they were such a terrible threat. I like to think about the Halloween documents and how exciting and subversive all that was.

Yep, sorry, meant the Civil Rights Act. I mentioned nothing about wanting one party over another. The point I was _trying_ to make is that anyone who really pulls for one party over the other is an ignorant jackass. It is much easier, and honest, to be against one or both. For what it's worth, LBJ did say upon signing the Civil Rights Act that the Democrats had effectively lost the South. And you know what? He was right. The Dems who fought the Act were correct politically. Totally wrong morally. If you think that I came across as pro Democrat, man did I fuck up.