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Comment Re:Remeber (Score 1) 123

Of course, he was writing to kings, most of whom had an interest in keeping their country runnning for mutiple generations.

Except they didn't. Kings of old didn't give a shit about what happened to their countries after they died. Why would they had? They were divinely appointed to their office, so whatever happened as a result of said appointment wasn't really their problem. Peasant's starving because the king sold all of nation's wheat to fund a war waged for his ego? God's will.

And of course this is still the case with the modern aristocrats. Shut down the only factory in a city and kicked all the workers to the roadside? No problem, the Invisible Hand will sort the worthy from the undeserving. A homeless guy asks for money? Hell no, he's suffering penance for his sins - if he had some marketable skills or connections he'd be sleeping in a mansion. Roads crumbling from lack of repair? Invisible Hand must be getting ready to release a flying car. The planet getting warmer? No worries, the Invisible Hand will surely save such devoted servants! And figure out some way to kick that homeless man some more in the process for being economically worthless.

There comes a point of no return, when the damage already inflicted makes it impossible to rise funds to stop more from occurring. The question is, can this pathological secularized religion be removed from power before the damn cult dooms the entire country, and possibly whole West?

Comment Re:More religious whackjobs (Score 1) 286

"citation?"

Citation? You aren't likely to find that as government PR spin but actions speak louder than words. So review native american treaties, the acquisition of Texas, the rest of the southwest, and California.

New mexico for instance was invaded, ownership by claim of might equals right was recognized by the US, the US purchased it for a song then didn't actually pay the bill to Mexico because the US was strong enough to get away with it.

Comment Re:More religious whackjobs (Score 2) 286

"Natives as a group have the lowest standard of living in the state."

Like he said... "They are better off than anyone else in Polynesia, and have one of the highest standards of living in the world."

Just because it's a low standard by Hawaiian standards doesn't mean its a low standard with any reasonable perspective.

Comment Re:More religious whackjobs (Score 1) 286

"The reason why these whackjobs's opinions matter is the US is an invading and occupying colonial power who has given the vote to illegal settlers and who has appropriated this Hawaiian land, manifest destiny and all. I get that all of the native American treaties are void and most of the US should be legally reverted to native control and the illegal settlers expelled; but natives don't have nukes or numbers only casinos at the whim of the occupying power."

Oh please. No human beings are the genuine natives of a single square inch of the planet and all of it has passed in possession from hand to hand. There isn't a single person within Hawaii who was there when it wasn't part of the US and they are all born US citizens. Along with all the other native americans. The treaties were nothing more than kindness to people with leaders too stupid to surrender before getting everyone they were responsible for protecting slaughtered.

A treaty is no different than any other contract, you break it when the benefits outweigh the consequences. It's no different than breaking a cell phone contract when the new offer outweighs the cancellation fee. I have native blood (Blackfoot, not Hawaiian) and I have friends who are full blooded and some of them refuse to take the money from those casinos. They don't feel they are entitled to any special treatment just because of the accident of birth.

Comment Re:Innate Value (Score 1) 253

"That needs not be the case."

That's a common misunderstanding. It does need to be the case and has been mathematically proven that it needs to be the case. Bitcoin miners are performing work, specifically, they are validating transactions. If they were doing something else instead the blockchain wouldn't be guaranteed to be valid and bitcoin could be counterfeited.

Today bitcoin would be a perfect choice for exchanging value between two untrusting parties, even governments. You could have an entity set up a mining operation and control all mining of a bitcoin clone and then distribute based on some other work being performed but then you are back to trusting the entity doing the mining.

If you disagree and think the math is flawed you are welcome to dazzle us all and build the solution. People do things that aren't supposed to be possible every day.

Comment Re:Can he win? (Score 1) 395

Our country's finances have always been the fault of the congress and its creature, the Federal Reserve.

No. The fault lies with voters who want both low taxes for themselves and a high developmental level for their country. Infrastructure, whether social or physical, is expensive; if you don't pay it with taxes you'll end up paying in some other way, such as through ever-growing debt and its consequences, whatever those will eventually turn out to be.

Comment Re:(URGENT REQUIREMENT IN DETROIT!!!!!, etc) (Score 1) 227

It's an example and all, but as developer born and raised in Detroit (the city proper) and a current resident of the city, is it necessary to kick the place even more?

Losers need to be made look bad at every opportunity, otherwise the winners might start wondering just what kind of society lets such things happen to innocent people. I mean, they might even suggest government should help pull them up from the ditch, and that's blashphemy against the Invisible Hand and the Church of Free Market.

Don't take it personally, it's not really Anonymous Coward speaking, but the voices - internalized memetic structures - in their head fighting for survival and territory.

Comment Re:unexamined prejudice (Score 1) 301

Men are constantly portrayed in both advertising and entertainment as buffoons and simpletons when they are anywhere near the kitchen, the kids, or the laundry.

Men having to do women's work is pretty funny, yes. But at least even this poor bastard doesn't have enough experience to be good at it. So he just fell into the metaphorical open sewer manhole rather than having to actually live in one.

Everyone laughs when a man is kicked in the balls by a woman in a TV show/commercial. Where's the fake outrage about that violent sexisim in the name of humour?

Here in Finland we have a long tradition of military farces. It's because we live right next to (Soviet) Russia, so Finnish military is pretty bloody obviously vital for the country's continued existence, and valued accordingly. So why does such a society tolerate - and even support - subversions of it? Because they aren't subversions. Those military farces are actually subverting the scenario they show - that military is full of incompetent buffoons - by presenting it as ridiculous.

The "ballkicks as comedy" scenario is sexists, and propaganda besides, just armored in such a way as to give plausable deniability and deflect criticism. They're like a joke where the punchline is that a Jew doesn't want to eat Christian babies, or a black man doesn't want to rape white women, or a US cop lets that black man live: not funny, unless you have specific prejudices, which in turn get reinforced by watching their inverse being represented as the world being out of whack.

None of this is (necessarily) intentional on the writer's part. They're simply writing what the cultural "programs" they have acquired from their surroundings suggest. And programs that suggest actions that spread themselves become endemic, which is usually a good thing since it allows humans to predict each other's actions, but can also be a huge problem when one such program happens to be akin to a malevolent virus, like sexism and racism are. Not much can be done about them but to produce and release counter-memes which hopefully block the spread of such viruses but will of course also have other effects on their own, at least on the current developmental level of psychology.

Comment Re:Error in headline (Score 1) 301

The paper in on how the female experience is not the same as the male experience. It's less. Thus it makes sense to suggest an actual female researcher contribute to the effort.

Either your conclusions follow from your data with reasonable certainty, or they don't. A lack of female researcher might limit the scope of your conclusions - that is, you're missing something you could had reasonably concluded from the data - but it cannot invalidate an otherwise valid conclusion, unless your entire study was fatally flawed from the start, in which case adding one wouldn't help either.

And that third reviewer.. good lord what a tool. I'm not even sure i /want/ to read his review because you can't context any non offensive meaning out of that snippet.

How about the obvious: he's too lazy to analyze the conclusions of the paper based on evidence presented and just wants to rubber-stamp it?

Comment Re:39/100 is the new passing grade. (Score 1) 174

Sounds an awful lot like that other "soft science", Economics.

The key difference between psychology and economics is that there's money in getting psychology correct (because it'll help you sell crap), while there's money in "proving" whatever economical hypothesis benefits the current elite.

Liars study psychology and practice economics.

Some researchers are finally getting away from the 'revealed wisdom' of Friedman and company, and hopefully Chicago School Economics will soon end up in the dust bin of history with phrenology and vital humors.

It doesn't really matter. Some other excuse for why the rich getting richer and the poor poorer is really in the best interests of those poor will take its place. And people will eat it right up, since it also excuses their dreams of getting rich themselves and lording it over the rest, who don't deserve it. And it doesn't help that Cold War mixed economics with nationalism to the point where people actually developed religious attachments to particular economical positions.

After all, phrenology might be in the dustbin of history, but the cause it served - dividing people into winners and losers so the former might be kept too busy oppressing the latter to start thinking for themselves rather than just doing what they're told - is still alive, as it has been for most of recorded history. It's like a memetic parasite living on noosphere and feeding on humanity generation after generation. Our future depends on killing it before advancing technology makes even losers able to destroy the world.

Comment Re:Simple (Score 1) 141

How many times would you have to get punched in the face before you started taking it out on them?

And if I did, I'd be taking out the predations of some punch-happy psycho on innocent people because I was too scared to confront the real culprit. That might make me a fine citizen for such bastions of greatness as North Korea or East Germany, but in the West, it just makes me a collaborator - a traitor to myself, my country, and humanity.

It's one thing to be a coward, it's another to internalize a lie and start actively serving it. At that point you've basically joined a cult, and all your perceptions get twisted by being filtered through its dogma; and because of such induced insanity, joining a cult sometimes ends very, very badly. As we have seen numerous times in the recent past.

Comment Re:MORE BLOAT! (Score 1) 81

A "lean" OS an OS where you easily add/enable just the pieces you want/need, not one that comes with everything and the kitchen sink preinstalled and enabled "just in case somebody needs it".

First implies the second. It can hardly get easier than installing drivers for everything under the Sun and letting unused ones lie waiting for their device to be connected.

The rest of the world is going faster, developing software for uses that you couldn't ever anticipate, on hardware that's not typical, and that's possbile only if your OS is a simple and reliable building block that scales well up and down and doesn't get in the way of doing unusual things.

Right, so how does software use this hardware? Either directly (we tried that; it was a bad idea), through proprietary interfaces (Glide, CUDA) or through standard interfaces (OpenGL, OpenCL). The last is best for end users but requires actively promoting these standard interfaces. So packaging their common bits into the OS makes perfect sense.

The basic failing of your argument is that you want an OS that doesn't make any tradeoffs at all, one that's perfectly tailorable to every possible use case. But in the real world, you make programs for specific use cases, and an OS is ultimately just a program. It too is designed with the needs of some small group of archetypical users in mind; the bigger and more varied this group, the less customized it is to anyone in particular.

TL;DR If every bit is precious to you, you'll just have to make your own custom OS with a hex editor.

Comment Re:The good news is... (Score 1) 211

I doubt it. It's too easy NOT to be.

But the thing is, an efficient department might not be in the manager's best interests. How do you show constant improvement if everything is already at 100%? Either push people beyond 100% - and accept that this will lead to everyone who can leaving and the rest spending all their time and effort looking busy and covering their ass - or make pointless changes to make yourself seem good.

It's easy to be a good manager, but almost impossible to be a good and ambitious one. First requires letting people do their jobs in peace, the second making changes. So if the boss cares about their career, whatever they're leading will usually be a complete mess, because they'll tinker with it to show off their skillz to their higher-ups, consequences be damned.

It's amazing your average corporation gets anything at all done, considering all the internal strife and associated disorganized chaos.

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