You can thank the FDR administration for setting us down this path with New Deal legislation explicitly designed to make food production more like factories, with standardized, homogenized output -- to say nothing of the price-supports and other handouts to big agribusiness which continue to this day...

Nor is there any direct relationship between the recruiter who's emailing you and your resume. Place key information about your career objectives (e.g. "i want you to get me a visa to work in $location") within the first paragraph and watch it be gleefully ignored, not just by the usual spammer suspects but by a variety of guys with a coherent pitch and several major tech shops like Amazon, Facebook, et cetera. :(

I mean, have you ever met a normal one? Case closed.

Good point! You need to teach these kids about socialization and how to interact with other people in the world around them. After all, you wouldn't want your children to grow up into judgemental assholes making invidious generalizations about some minority out-group of people they're barely familiar with, just because they're a little outside the mainstream.

hey wait a minute ...

Sorry to break it to ya, dude, but you're the "special little snowflake". Your points are just anecdotical. Not everyone is a miserable loser like you,

See, now, we need to send children to public school so that they'll be better socialized.

I mean, haven't you ever met a homeschooled kid? Your kid needs to be properly socialized in a structured environment.

Well, I take it by your friendly, social tone (*cough*) that you're offering yourself up as the example, here?

Science did not tell us to avoid natural fats in our diet, it was the: USDA, FDA, AMA, etc. etc. It was government and industry associations, sensational journalists who won't or can't deal with basic stats, not scientists. ... The jump to connecting this to climate change had zero supporting evidence in this article.

Psst. When most Americans hear about climate change, it's either policy proposals and advocacy from politicians in the government, or the EPA, solar industry, et cetera... or it's sensationalist news coverage, much like diet fads.

It's a testament to something that more people aren't skeptical/denialist given the sort of marketing that is involved, but I'm not sure what exactly.

clearly it was a false-flag operation by the Secret Service themselves </tinfoilhat>

Nah, when a citizen gets murdered, there's supposed to be a trial.

Okay. You're alleging racist treatments of minorities based on prosecutors failing to indict cops who kill black people.

There's supposed to get a trial when a prosecutor thinks that he can convict the guy of some crime. "Police officer shoots random innocent in what appears to be a tragic accident possibly involving negligence" is apparently not one of those cases, for some reason or another -- probably the cozy relationship between prosecutors and the police, which is dubious enough.

But I want to contend that it's not really racist: they really wouldn't hold a trial in a similar case if the guy shot was white, and if you keep playing at it for racial reasons you will fail to effect meaningful policy changes that will address the issue, which would be more unfortunate for minorities than it would for me or most Slashdot readers (because we're demographically less likely to come into contact with law enforcement, in part because we're fancy computer programmer types who make a lot of money and can afford to live in neighborhoods which aren't riddled with crime).

I love the concept in theory, but a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world. Western societies are clearly incapable of even providing the current levels of welfare let alone a vastly larger level.

Well, to be fair to the basic-income schemes people propose, they're supposed to turn the current levels of overall welfare spending into more effective levels of welfare by disintermediating the funds from the millions of government employees who are paid to manage it (and paid reasonably well, at that).

What needs to die are the network equipment manufacturers who change the meaning of OIDs on minor firmware version updates (because they're autogenerated from some XML somewhere and someone deleted an element in the middle of a list).

Oh really? Broken-window fallacy much? Think of what our economy could do if these people spent that laptop cash on something better...

It's particularly lovely in this case because you need to record not just the customer's location and the tax rate there, but also some corroborating evidence that the customer is in fact in that location, then register with the appropriate authority in that location. The reporting burden is going to mean fewer small sites capable of doing their own checkout process.

If %G is good enough for Twitter, it's good enough for me!

It's Capitalism 101.

While the general snark in this comment is evident, I have to protest about conflating private ownership of the means of production with government agencies wasting money doing useless tasks (to say nothing of the risks associated with it).

Perhaps the inability to differentiate these two is actually something that's common these days, though, which would explain a lot about modern discourse on the topic -- likewise the conflation of "jobs" and "wealth" (the former being a means to an end).

I have switched from air to train travel in Europe because flying has become too uncomfortable for tall people.

From my preliminary understanding of things, you wouldn't be using Qatar Airways for flights within Europe anyway. They're more of a long-haul hub-and-spoke model airline that could take you from Europe to Africa or east Asia with a one-stop trip. For intra-European air travel you'd use a different airline, and probably a different model of airplane, optimized for fuel efficiency on shorter-haul trips (and possibly a narrowbody plane, if the airports in question aren't so busy that they're trying to max out every landing slot).