Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment If you don't like a company... (Score 1) 336

The Republicans are so very disappointing on this. The conservative rule here is simple. In a free society, if you do not like what a company offers you as a service, either find another business, or start your own. Trying to have the Feds pressure private businesses for deplatforming for any reason is wrong. Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave. If someone can refuse to bake a cake because they don't like you, find another bakery, or bake your own cake. If someone kicks you off their web site because you piss off all the other people on their - which is what this is about, then, go find another one, or make your own web site.

Comment Re:Let me guess... (Score 1) 118

Once again, its not your money. The government doesn't "give money" to people through tax reductions. Instead, it steals less.

Sorry about Foxconn, but I guess the issue was, perhaps, if Trump supporters and BLM activists decided to hit the books and learn how to do something useful, instead of begging the Feds for crap, they'd all be better off.

Comment Green Jobs Is a Joke (Score 2) 713

The whole reason manufacturers are interested in "working with the government" to push electric vehicles is that they are ultimately less labor intensive to manufacture. GM won't hire anyone to make electric motors in the USA. They'll just buy the motors from China and slap them in their vehicles. Meanwhile, everyone in Mexico and the USA working on 4 cylinder to 8 cylinder engines is going to be given the pink slip and Progressives working in banks and universities for a living casting everyone who is angry about this as some sort of a racist who should be ideally just going for the welfare program.

Comment "Heed the Science" is such a terrible thought. (Score 1) 252

Science doesn't tell us if something is right or wrong for each of us. It simply says what the effects of a course of action may be. There is nothing to heed. If I like daylight savings time and changing clocks, and the effects as determined by science are nearly not so bad to me or might even be beneficial, then I'm for the status quo. But, if I am in the camp where I have decided that the effects of daylight savings time are not worth the price, then I'd support doing away with it.

It's the same with global warming. Science is just about what experiments say what might happen, but, its up to each of us to decide if those are benefits for us or costs. So, if I lived on a hill in Kentucky and liked the ritual of changing clocks, it would be perfectly ok for me to say that I can live with rising levels and keeping daylight savings time. It's up to the political process, for all of us to say, what the law will be regarding the keeping of clocks and emissions.

Comment I live on a hill, so I'm cool. (Score 1) 77

I'm not really sure why crowded city coastlines should have the right to charge much less densely populated rural interiors for the urban sins of overbreeding. I live on a hill in Kentucky and I have 4 growing Giant Sequoias, with more on the way, and over my lifetime those trees will consume all the carbon that I could ever produce. So, why should I have to deal with an inconvenience to my lifestyle, when I live on a hill, am already carbon neutral. Seems to me, cities should think about nuclear power and walls. You aren't building windmills on my land. I think they are noisy and ugly, although I might have a smaller one and some solar panels for myself.

Comment Facebook / Twitter is Private Property (Score 1) 583

Nominally I would say that Twitter and Facebook are private property and in the United States your freedom of expression only pertains to public property. However, the complexity comes because the government both enables the idea of lawsuits against Twitter and Facebook and also bars them.

For the moment though, I would say my usual right wing admonition applies: If you don't like what Twitter and Facebook companies do, either find another company or start your own. It would be helpful if conservatives remembered that such a rule applies to them too. In general, it would be helpful if they remembered that shockingly everyone has a right to vote, that the Constitution applies to everyone, and they are not the only Americans and Patriots despite their own media telling them that.

It would be even more helpful if the left wing realized that its own speech is just as insightful. After all, the wave of violence and rioting protests that took place over the summer certainly was fueled by a steady diet of academic coursework, political punditry and media coursework designed to sell the idea that the entire country is racist and therefor everything is subject to destruction.

The question really is, if the flag is a national symbol and things like Best Buy and Rite Aid are legitimate targets for destruction in the name of protest and social justice, then why not the nation's capitol? The nuance is that, among Trump supporters, even though the mythology of this election is a fraud is laughably incorrect, there is also truth among that crowd of generations of abuse abetted by the government and on a number of policies, particularly linked to wars and resource extraction and abandonment. This is not dissimilar from blacks being lead to riot because everything wrong in their lives is because of white people, of whom a large portion either don't care, or, are actually working for immigrants and global multinational companies where race is essentially not a distinguishing marker of success.

The truth of the matter is, pushing racial and cultural buttons is profitable for left wing and right wing media alike, and the riots of the summer and the riots of this election are caused by the exact same type of person.

User Journal

Journal Journal: How are you all doing through this? 2

Myself, I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home, so that is not a problem. I know several of my friends in Meat Space aren't quite as fortunate. :(

How are you all passing the time?

Comment The death of meritocracy (Score 1) 435

There's a lot of this business about "acting like a human being" floating around, but what we're really saying here is that the work product doesn't matter as much as the alignment to political objectives of whoever is paying the bill.

I suppose its easy for the SJW types to run and around scream virtue and all of that, but seriously, what value do all these basket weaving wanna be sociologists actually add to anything? Zero point zero. I get it, we don't want people running around to be Communists or Nazis or Rapists, but, there's a lot of grey area around that. To a great extent the point is lost, that, while the SJW puritans claim to defend the marginalized, they've lost site of the fact that people like Stallman and others in the field were basically marginalized people themselves. Marginalized people sometimes do things that get them marginalized, but we're all kicking -them- out, as if having built a great deal of the ecosystem we have meant nothing, so that, other marginalized people can get in?

At least, when work was judged on merit, and your personality was stripped from it entirely, you could make a living in computer science. But now that it's all about whose political rear you have to kiss, we're not going to be as effective as a field.

Like everything else they have touched, Progressives are ruining technology with all of their puritanical crap. Trading one set of marginalized people for another is not social justice, it's a power play.

Comment Simple solution (Score 1) 149

Well, if I'm not allowed to repair my machine on my own (if I'm so inclined), then I guess I don't have to worry about paying to have the broken product taken to the dump. I can just drop it on the sidewalk of these "authorised repair" facilities and get something else. They want to control the stupid thing that badly, they can take care of its disposal.

The other alternative is to jerry-rig a fix anyway. If they don't like it, too damned bad.

User Journal

Journal Journal: The more you know, the less you know

I started off 2018 by finally getting my Amateur Radio license. I went in with nothing and came out with General class.

I finished the year by going for Amateur Extra, and I passed. I was a little surprised, but it took a lot of work to learn what I needed to know for the exam.

Twitter

President Trump Accuses Twitter of Political Bias (bloomberg.com) 468

President Donald Trump has accused Twitter of targeting his followers for removal from the social media platform, amid complaints by conservatives that social media companies have been discriminating against right-wing voices. From a report: "Twitter has removed many people from my account and, more importantly, they have seemingly done something that makes it much harder to join -- they have stifled growth to a point where it is obvious to all," Trump said in a tweet Friday. "A few weeks ago it was a Rocket Ship, now it is a Blimp! Total Bias?" Trump and some other Republicans have complained that Facebook, Alphabet's Google and Twitter have censored or suppressed conservative voices. Democrats have called that a diversion from concern over Russia's use of social-media platforms to influence the 2016 presidential election and over the proliferation of offensive content. In his opening remarks during a meeting with state attorneys general in September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions raised concerns that social media companies have a political agenda and have the power to manipulate public opinion, according to Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh.

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

Working...