Comment ICBM (Score 1) 272
Inter-continental Ballistic Monkey
"I C what you did there." plus thinking objectively he had class
You're thinking of Stroustrup.
Like all govt interference in the free market, the colleges will all raise their prices by $8000 in response
This inference is so stupid I gave up my mod points in this article just to point out that the inference you are making is COLOSALLY stupid. Like most glibertarian shibboleths, it has zero basis in fact.
You may disagree, but I think vim is right about that cause and effect - if a significant percentage of college entrants have subsidies, the price of tuition will tend to increase. Colleges are going to tend to charge as much as they can get away with, and that's not necessarily a bad thing - they want good salaries to attract good teachers and have good lab equipment. It's not "glib" to point out these tradeoffs. Most debated issues involve tradeoffs.
It's exactly that, a necessity. I'm not sure why you are comparing it to the death penalty..well that's not true, I do know. It's because you're an ignorant ass.
If you want people to participate in society, then they need communication tools. And since rural area aren't profitable enough to corporation, the government gives them money specifically so rural area can participate.
I live in a rural area and the best speed I can get is 1.5mbps dsl. I used to get wdsl from a local provider but it was very unreliable. I have much slower speeds than people in town, but it's my choice. It doesn't keep me from "participating in society". We have several computers/devices in the house and the biggest hardship we have is that we can only have one video stream going at a time. I feel like I'm fully participating in the internet society - I bank online, buy stuff online, watch netflix, my children create videos and game levels and share them. I just don't see the need for a subsidy. If I weren't into gaming, and could live with a the lag, I might have gone with satellite, which offers comparable speeds to what I have now. There may still be places that can't get DSL, but as far as I know, there is nowhere in the country where you can't get satellite.
You know, every time I hear various parties say "get government out of business" and all that, I think "okay... maybe... but some regulation is needed because when there isn't, big business ends up raping the country." But then again, I never heard parties say "we need government to stop giving subsidies to business..."
I think the next time I see the argument "keep government out of business" I will ask what their position is on subsidies to business is.
As it turns out, there are far more subsidies going on than any of us are collectively aware of. I am well aware of corn subsidies and the like, but telephone subsidies? That's news. Seems the phone business is a huge public rapist and they are getting subsidies too?
Yeah, it's time to stop paying the rapists.
You make a good point, and many conservatives would agree with you. Subsidies aren't free market. If you subsidize something, that will tend to cause more production than the free market would dictate. The consumers will buy more and pay a lower price, while the producers sell more at a higher price. It almost sounds good except that the subsidy has to come out of the consumers' pockets in some way, so they (as a group) are actually paying more than they would have for something they wouldn't have wanted (or wanted that much of) at that price. It will typically work out to income redistribution. The people who pay more taxes are funding the lower prices for everyone and the increased profits for the subsidized businesses.
... this proves that the ozone problem is bipolar.
I should thank you for giving me the opportunity to brag about myself a bit.
My point was basically to be humble enough to question yourself. There's an old joke that someone with a B.S. degree thinks they know everything, someone with a M.S. knows they don't know anything, and someone with a Ph.D. knows they don't know anything -- but neither does anyone else. You may write me off as a "useless twit", but I am a good programmer, and I am good at learning foreign languages (and BTW, I suspect those two skills are related).
Let's just say they are exactly the same except for the differences, and leave it at that.
No, it's "religion".
Try deleting one of the other and seeing whether the statement still holds.
Okay: "Organizations like to pretend they are the font of moral wisdom, but history simply doesn't bear that truth out. That stance is merely a pretense to control their flock, to get them to do what they want them to do".
Yup, sounds good to me.
You don't need to have religion to think you are a font of moral wisdom, as evidenced by about half the posts in this thread.
On the Abraham story, there's a few important details that often get left out. First of all, recall that when Isaac was conceived Abraham was 99 years old and his wife was 90. Previously they were unable to conceive and his wife laughed when an angel told her she would have a son. The only reason they had that child at all was due to a miracle. Later in the Bible it was pointed out that Abraham saw a kind of resurrection regarding his and his wife's reproductive abilities. So through that experience Abraham knew that by extension God had the ability to raise the dead.
Secondly, God had promised Abraham that his family would grow to a huge number and that it would be through that same son Isaac that it would happen.
This only explains that Abraham had reason to believe his son would be raised up if he did kill him as God commanded. But it doesn't excuse the abhorrence of the command that was given.
The third part, which is very crucial is that the story is intended to offend. It's in the Bible for a very good reason, not to teach us "Kill your kids for God" but to make you think "That's terrible! I would never kill my kid for anyone!" Because you're supposed to feel that, you're supposed to be angry and then you're supposed to learn that Abraham and Isaac foreshadowed Jesus' sacrifice when his father sent him down to earth knowing exactly how it would end.
It's supposed to teach us a little bit of empathy and have an appreciation that it wasn't an easy thing for even God himself to do. That's why immediately after Jesus died there were earthquakes that threw the dead out of their graves, the sun blacked out and the huge curtain in the temple was ripped in half. He was actually holding back but letting us know that "Yes I felt that".
So Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son but didn't have to go through with it. God was willing to sacrifice his son for us, and did go through with it. That's the lesson.
People tend to look at the Bible stories as all having a moral and as if all actions of the "good guys" are sanctioned by default if they are not explicitly condemned. I believe many of the stories are just intended to be records of events. The point isn't that you *should* be willing to kill if God tells you to, but that Abraham *was* willing to give up his own son for God, and for Christians it ties into the fact that God *did* give up his son for humanity in general. It is also relevant to Abraham's character, and the story in general, that in other cultures at the time people would sacrifice their children to appease gods, so in historical context the request is not as shocking and the fact that God stops the sacrifice shows him as being a different God than people were used to at the time.
A future economy which has essentially eliminated the scarcity and/or labor cost of material needs requires full scale automation of agriculture and manufacturing. This is at odds with two shibboleths of society: the family farm and unions. The former can't afford to automate (and it would ruin their bucolic romanticism if they did), and the latter is fundamentally opposed to it on the grounds that it would be outside of the immediate best interests of their constituency and their own organizational existence. The other aspect that people don't want to have to face is... whither stupidity? If we automate all the labor-intensive work that fuels the essential material needs of civilization, what are we going to do with all the janitors and nut-tighteners? Is it truly optimal to create a future economy where perhaps less than 30% of people do useful work and more than 70% of people who are too dumb for anything else simply wander around between bread and circuses provided by their robot slaves? There are solutions to the problem, but not ones that people are likely to accept (anymore than they would the transition). We are rapidly approaching a point where we could genetically engineer a more intelligent baseline and institute controls on having unmodified children, but the masses would scream "eugenics!" and out would come the pitchforks. (Being a libertarian I too would be opposed to an imposition on the right of private persons to have children on their own terms.) So your utopian economy is more or less impossible in the current social reality. Maybe a few generations after the singularity when people are more used to the positive aspects of genetic modification it might be possible.
RE: whither stupidity
No, nothing so extreme in the other direction either. How about, oh say putting up a non-troll image that represents Windows. Say the four color window icon.
Have you seen the windows topic icon? It's not much better.
I know haters will hate and Slashdotters love to hate Microsoft, but honestly, what the hell does open source tools have to do with the Borg Face?
That sounds like something the Borg would say.
FTA:
The perfect union between Star Trek and Star Wars would be if Captain Kirk and Princess Leia were to ran off together pursued by Chewbakka.
So in conclusion
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
