Just toss these fuckers into the sea and the Great Whites will make them disappear.

But that would play straight to their hand. "Islamic State" is doing things like this because they're trying to tell a story: that they're a Caliphate straight from the dark ages. Treat their agents any differently than a common crazy murderer, and you're saying that you agree they are different, thus putting them a little bit closer towards having their story commonly accepted.

Here, let Littlefinger explain it.

So, what we must do is counter their story with our own: that they're nothing more than a bunch of brutal criminals. And we do that by treating them exactly like any other criminal. Counter the fantasy with banality, don't let them draw us into it. That's the mistake we did with Al-Qaeda: we allowed them to define themselves as "terrorists" rather than "murderers".

No, maximizing profit is the goal of a capitalist. An immoral capitalist has no problem with it if it maximizes profit. Now before you get your panties in a bunch, remember that any other immoral idealogue will also tend to have no problem with it if it maximizes their objectives.

The problem is, if you don't institutionalize morality, you get a situation which rewards the immoral psychopathic capitalist and punishes a moral and sane one, and if you do institutionalize it - for example in the form of welfare state - you get hordes of people howling that the state is interfering in the marketplace and creating inefficiencies, which of course is true but misses the point. Capitalism, like any social system, fails when it stops serving human needs and becomes an end to itself, since at that point is has betrayed its very purpose. And it's on the verge of just that.

The fact is slaves are shitty workers. They only work hard enough not to get whipped, and to get that you have to pay someone to hold the whip. Might as well pay them directly.

And yet this lesson still remains unlearnt. Just look at how most companies treat their employees, who respond by putting in the absolute minimum effort they can get away with, and sometimes with outright sabotage.

I think it's because we're still socialized to value domination over cooperation. "Putting someone in their place" feeds the ego of a manager, thus there's some amount of economic reward they're willing to give up to do so. And when every single one of them does the same thing, at every ladder of the hierarchy, you get a horribly ineffective organization.

All in all, a modern corporation is a pretty good approximation of a totalitarian dictatorship: peons are merely squeezed dry as long as they keep their heads down, leaders declare grandious and frankly delusional "visions" that nobody takes seriously but can't call out as completely unrealistic either, everyone inbetween concentrates either on covering their back or stabbing daggers in those of others, and random purges threaten all. Stalin would be right at home in the modern boardroom, and probably a darling and role model of the business world.

As for FDD... standard on the east coast USA and many other parts of the world. It works for unthinking peons but utterly fails for jobs that require imagination.

If you treat your employees like unthinking peons, they will respond by behaving like that - and that means turning a blind eye towards the innumerable small irregularities and problems a workforce that doesn't actively hate you could easily correct before they have a noticeable effect on production. That is the difference between workplaces where everything seems to work as if by magic and one that does a passable impression of being haunted by an evil spirit because it is, specifically yours.

There are no jobs that don't benefit from thinking about how it fits to the bigger picture.

But if you're afraid to do your job, it's because you have a problem with confidence in your own skills. Blaming management for such fears just takes the incompetence you exhibit to a whole new level of blame-gaming.

Unless it's not just you, but every one of your fellow employees. Then the problem is systematic in that workplace, and thus must be in the system itself.

The thing is, managers are humans and sometimes have serious issues or even outright mental problems, such as ego too powerful for them to handle. And sometimes they're simply afraid of their superiors. Competence only matters in a healthy organization where everyone is trying to meet its goals; in an ill one they concentrate on covering their ass, not just against mistakes but also against backstabbing.

It seems like you're extrapolating from that experience, to thinking "FDD" is a current trend. AFAIK it's not.

Sure it is. What's happening to programming is what happens to anything when there's more supply than demand: a race to the bottom. Personal computers used to be rare, so programmers could rely on their skills being so as well; now they're ubiquitous, and the industry is entering the same phase others did during the Industrial Revolution. The only known solution is to unionize and bargain collectively, but of course that requires giving up the cherished illusions of being able to make it on your own.

telling us the name, address and phone number of the human responding to the mail

I'm pretty sure Google is not allowed to give anyone's private information without proper court warrant, and I'm very sure that an email saying "I'm a Judge, honest!" is not a proper warrant.

Not replying to this email will result in a doubling of your fine.

Courts of law don't have the power to arbitrarily double the punishment because they happen to be feeling ornery. They can add contempt of court charges to the case, but it's highly questionable whether ignoring an e-mail - which can be from anyone - counts as contempt, especially when said e-mail seems to involve illegal action and blackmail.

What happens in low Earth Orbit and above is none of their business

Nice satellite you have there. Would be a shame if a laser beam hit it. Good thing I'm selling "insurance".

Those are all wonderful reasons for voluntary government certification: anybody who wants to can go to the government and get some government seal of approval; I as a rider can then make a voluntary choice whether that certification is useful information or whether I want to throw caution to the wind and ride with uncertified drivers.

But I, as Joe Driver, can't choose whether I want to share the road with a taxi driver who pulls 16-hour workdays out of greed or desperation. Unless, of course, some entity with sufficient power forces the taxi to take breaks.

And of course you're also ignoring the well-known fact that human beings are extremely bad at estimating risks. So no, you as a rider can't make an informed choice about whether getting a certified taxi is worth the hassle, especially since unlicensed taxi companies have every incentive to bombard you with misinformation, while bean-counters utilizing cold math can. So it's a choice between letting a preventable tragedy play out forever, or stopping it but possibly hurting someone's cherished delusions of grandieur.

What moral authority does the state have to stop consenting adults from forming their own contracts and doing business with each other?

Well, for starters, it's expected to enforce these contracts. Every legally binding contract has the state as a third party.

The treaty was stupid and anyone who signed it should be shot for gross incompetence. Simple fact is their are resources and unless we are one world communist country every damn thing in space will have a price tag attached.

No, every damn thing in space doesn't have a price tag attached, because they aren't actually owned by anyone. Or should I be able to simply declare the Moon my property and seek to extract rent from anyone who builds a base on it, possibly decades in the future?

The treaty exists to keep people and nations from getting into fights over claims on places they can't even reach.

Besides I'm German, and if I nad the capacity to mine gold on an asteroid I certainly woukd not 'land' it in a nation but in international waters.

I guess that's one way to make pirates leave cargo ships alone...

Why aren't the developers risking anything by putting their time in and at least demonstrating some ability to deliver?

Developers need to eat, that means they need day jobs to work on an unfunded game. That in turn means time spent developing it comes from their free time, which is already a precious commodity required for personal maintenance. So make that an hour a day at most for a sustainable rate.

Now, how many hours of development do you think even a simple game requires, even if we assume you're a renaissance man who can program, draw, compose, write, design levels, design characters, etc?

Conservationists tend to be rational, environmentalists are for the most part off their rocker.

People, for the most part, are perfectly rational but have been socialized to value power over any other goal. And prestige is a form of power. So any issue tends to turn into a power struggle where facts are cast aside in favour of "winning".

It doesn't help that "enviromentalism" - or any other group - has a subculture with its own value systems, which don't necessarily have anything to do with the nominal goal. Thus someone who identifies themselves as an enviromentalist inherits a set of default positions, such as antipathy towards nuclear power, and can't change them without expenditure of willpower, since that risks expulsion from the group.

So it's not that people are off their rocker, it's that human mind is bad at properly prioritizing things in its current environment. We've simply grown too powerful too fast for evolution to keep up.

I prefer to think of myself as sitting in cheapskate lala-land.

Everyone has their favorite fantasies. The problem is, some people become addicted to theirs and start to actually believe them.