Comment Scylla and Charbdis (Score 2) 99
I'm no Doomsayer, but which group of really old people should I be rooting for to straighten out this proprietary nightmare: the Congress or the Supreme Court?
We all think we're smart here. Many of us are correct. Shit, you survive here as an outspoken conservative on what could be accurately described as a liberal forum... The important thing is, when things are argued properly on Slashdot, all sides are represented.
The best jury trials are like that, too.
One of the great moments of shame for me, was when an American citizen sought refuge in Soviet Russia. I understand. The US government has a real need to treat him like a cold war spy instead of an heroic whistleblower to retain any credibility on this ubiquitous unconstitutional eavesdropping, but darn it Beav, we used to stand for something. I think some of us still do. How do we fix for him?
And heck, we have Paypal already for that necessity.
My twenty-year-old son recently served for the first time on a local murder trial, no less, and it taught him quite a lot about how the judicial system works. He was proud of his service, and as you might imagine, had no trouble making the jury as seemingly everyone attempted to get out of it.
Heaven forbid one of us would ever have to stand trial, but I would hope all the competent, decent people didn't weasel out of service that day.
Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this. There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.
It will be brought up during the presidential debates at some point, assuming Mrs. Clinton runs as expected, but you've hit the nail on the head. The US political system is so polarized that many supporters are unable to gauge wrongdoings within their own party.
The over-the-top reaction from extremists on the other side parroting what some talking head said this morning drives the party faithful to circle the wagons. We have allowed them to divide and conquer us.
...and I'll bet pretty much any ranking politician does much the same, and thinks along the same lines - in any party, in any country, in any system of governance.
If I'm honest, I reckon to be a politician of any note, you pretty much have to be a bit under-handed from time to time, and you pretty much have to push the rules to their limits. If you just want to be a local politician, or even maybe a national politician that doesn't do much more than that (what we call 'back bench' here in the UK) then you can probably be fairly noble, if you really want to be. If you've got any sort of ambition though, then you've got to 'play the game' considerably harder than that, and so pushing boundaries of the rules/decency/morality start to become more of a requirement.
I've heard it said that we get the type of candidates for political office that we do because the system is not attractive to good and noble candidates.
It also rings true that we have lowered the bar of expectation with regard to decency and morality from our politicians.
Fortunately, we can both still vote in our respective nations to change this perversion. FWIW, there are many candidates for the upcoming presidential vacancy I would be less pleased to see in power than Mrs. Clinton.
Thing is, creating problems in need of a solution is what large concerns turn to Madison Avenue for when market saturation stagnates growth.
Every great inventor or developer imagines he or she might solve one of the World's great problems, and then most wind up working on cures for halitosis and erectile dysfunction or addictive phone games for the subway.
Possible heresy ahead: it is better at being the Bitcoin than the real McCoy.
a) We will always need power. b) We will run out of fossil fuel reserves. c)Generation by wind and s0lar means alone cannot provide reliable grid electricity as the World has come to appreciate it, and d)there is little public appetite for nuclear generation.
Storage technology and the resistance of equipment to decay in harsh sea climes are two factors likely to be improved by trial and error.
They probably thought the pipe had copper wire in it. There are lots of copper thieves.
Definitely, AT&T customers, then...
And you are down (-4) moderations, if we were keeping score.
If you infer from this example that even smart people are drawn to the superstitious and contrived, then at the very least, your reading comprehension skills are sound.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
