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Comment Re:Government is a tool (Score 2) 243

Government is only a corporate tool. Corporations are the shadow actors created by the super-rich to give themselves vehicles for action that are both superior to the state, and state-sanctioned legitimacy in this superiority.

Hating the "Government" is like pig-iron hating the hammer and the forge - not the Blacksmith.

Comment Google Can And Should Be Blamed (Score 5, Insightful) 243

Google can't be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that benefit its shareholders,

Yes, they can, and should, be blamed for this. Pro-social corporations should be rewarded for their behavior. Anti-social corporations should be punished. This is a pretty basic part of free market theory and the power of the purse. Stop repeating this sociopath-loving dogma as though it had any relation to healthy free market economics. Public backlash against despotic corporations is a very important correcting force in the free market.

Comment Re:I would think (Score 5, Insightful) 379

disagree: mocking people for making mistakes that they should know better is a way to help that person permanently try harder to avoid those mistakes in the future.

with failure, comes mockery, especially if you are skilled and it should never have happened.

mistakes can't go unpunished, even if the person doing the punishing is yourself, you can't tell other people to back off, you deserve it, sit back and take it on the chin and try harder next time otherwise people won't have any reason to try, because the penalty for failure is barely noticeable.

That's the old-school view, in which one's self-esteem is based on achievement of some kind. Those who achieve little or nothing had low self-esteem and this was a principal incentive to identify one's own weaknesses and overcome them with directed effort. The extreme form is Japanese students throwing themselves off buildings (etc.) because their grades didn't quite measure up, making them nobodies.

The newer view is that everyone is a special snowflake. No matter what. The extreme form is shown by the public schools that play soccer without keeping score, because scoring implies winners and losers and that might hurt someone's feelings.

I mostly agree with you in that actions have consequences and you should accept the consequences of your own actions. Otherwise nothing really matters and there is no reason to improve yourself and you turn into one of these "perpetual victims" who never take responsibility for anything while simultaneously wondering why nothing ever changes. But that should be tempered with the fact that some mistakes are much more preventable (less understandable) than others, and as Orlando Battista once said, an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

There's no reason to metaphorically crucify someone for an honest mistake, but certainly there is going to be a reaction to it and people aren't going to like it. That's to be expected. It's reasonable to expect someone to accept that and yes, it is an incentive to learn something from the experience and be more careful in the future. If I were a programmer and found that completely unacceptable, I could always choose not to work on such an important project critical to the security of so many.

As an aside: I think replying to you is much more edifying than being like the cowards who modded you down to -1 without once putting forth their own viewpoint which they clearly think is superior. There's too much of that going on at this site. There is no "-1 Disagree" mod for a reason.

Comment Re:I would think (Score 2) 379

As for why so many bugs, "so many eyes" only works if you still have tons of people actively participating in the project's development. At a glance, it seems like the OpenBSD guys are saying the OpenSSL project was getting stale. Stale projects do not have anywhere near as many eyes going through their code nor as many people actively looking for potential bugs to fix before they get reported in the wild.

Yes the "logic" used by many in this thread is specious at best.

Premise: when there are many eyes looking at open source, it leads to more bugs getting fixed.

Faulty reasoning (of too many people): this project didn't have many eyes, therefore the premise is false. Herp derp.

Correct reasoning: when the condition of "many eyes" was met, the premise is shown to be true.

Conclusion: some people dislike Open Source for ideological reasons and saw this as a chance to take cheap shots at it and show everyone how clever they are ... and failed because of faulty reasoning. Just like what you see in politics - if you happen not to like something, it must be BAD!! and cannot possibly have merits that you simply don't value.

Comment Counter? (Score 1) 7

"By holding up modern China as an example of Communism, Smith expressly shows us that he is fucking propagandist scum inhabiting the more clever of propagandist echelons as the peon is then seemingly left with NO OPTIONS as to how they could potentially reorder or rethink their society."

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2014/04/open-thread-2014-10.html#c6a00d8341c640e53ef01a73dae40f4970d

The Almighty Buck

Journal Journal: Abraham Lincoln 2

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Comment Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score 1) 397

I don't know if this is nuts. I'd have to see the full arguments on both sides, and so far what we have to go on is a one-sided summary.

If the *only* effect of the proposed regulation would be to increase beer prices, then sure, I agree with you 100%: government is being stupid. But if there's a good reason for the regulation, then I'd disagree with you.

Reading the article, it seems like the idea that this regulation will cause beer prices to spike dramatically seems a bit alarmist. The regulations would require brewers who send waste to farmers as animal feed to keep records. It seems hard to believe that this would significantly raise the price of beer or whiskey given that alcohol production is already highly regulated. On the other hand, it seems like there is no specific concern related to breweries. They were just caught up in a law that was meant to address animal feed.

If you want an example of a regulation free utopia, look no further than China, where adulteration of the food chain is a common problem. If the choice were a regulatory regime that slightly complicates brewers lives, and a regime that allows melamine and cyanuric acid into human food, I'd live with higher beer prices.

Fortunately, we don't have to live with either extreme. We can regulate food adulteration and write exceptions into the regulations for situations that pose little risk. Since presumably the ingredients used in brewing are regulated to be safe for human consumption, the byproducts of brewing are likely to pose no risk in the human food chain.

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