Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really surprising, though: Apple has been making OS X a little worse with every iteration.
Tell me about it. I recently bit the bullet and upgraded to 10.10 after waiting for quite a while. Man... Firefox has been crashing regularly since then, the Mail.app will also crash every now and then, and to top it off, the system itself has crashed twice on me over the past... two weeks. Sigh
“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
361–370 of 559 posts
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Plowshare succeeded in it's practical applications. They wanted to dig big holes fast, and by god they did. That was when the indirect costs of applying the technology (namely, poisoning the world) became apparent and it was prudently abandoned.
I would use effective to describe what you are talking about. If it were practical, the utility would exceed the indirect costs.
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
But nukes are the reason there haven't been any direct wars between major powers since WWII. Isn't that a good thing?
That is way to utilitarian for my liking. I am also personally convinced that Hitler (sorry ) was good for the western world in the long run (I think the lesson learnt will have more impact in the long run than the damage done), but you won't ever see me defending anything like the third reich.
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
But nukes are the reason there haven't been any direct wars between major powers since WWII. Isn't that a good thing?
That is way to utilitarian for my liking. I am also personally convinced that Hitler (sorry ) was good for the western world in the long run (I think the lesson learnt will have more impact in the long run than the damage done), but you won't ever see me defending anything like the third reich.
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you missed my point. I'm talking about bundling all those countries so you can get an equivalent population and then make comparisons. I wasn't comparing Norway to the US, I mentioned it as part of a bundle of countries that get to an equivalent size of the US population. If you take the countries I mentioned you get something close to 300 million. The US population is a little less than 320m. Western Europe…
I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with the premise of picking the top outcomes in Europe, while ignoring the other half of Europe that represent quite poor outcomes. When comparing the US vs European nations, there are certain requirements to get a positive outcome for Europe. You have to drop most of the medium countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slo…
Now it depends on what comparison you want to make. I'm telling you you can find a portion of Europe that's all next to eachother and is the developed part of Europe, that has a population that is comparable to the US, and is an interesting basis for a discussion.
If you want to include previous Soviet Union countries, or countries that have been independent states for since 2008 like Kosovo which you mentioned, go for it.
I'm not interested in that discussion, nobody is, nobody is talking about how we should all move to Kosovo or how the US can learn from Kosovo, it's a joke of a discussion and one I'll easily concede the US comes out ahead (surprise surprise! Hell I've literally lived in countries in Africa that do much better than Kosovo, which isn't even recognised by half the world population's governments, let alone part of the EU).
May I ask a question by the way, have you ever lived in the EU?
I ask because of your extreme bias. Because I've shown you countless examples of you citing things without understanding them, or citing them wrongfully, all to make a point regardless of whether the information supports it.
Like say the US producing nobel prizes more than the EU. Guess how many the US produced? 350. The EU? 462. I mean it's a joke. You keep spitting out random blobs of information, many of them flat out false or simply missing the point entirely. (like your info on homicide rates in Amsterdam being a total joke). You switch to national numbers when it suits you, then per capita numbers when it suits you, then shift to individual cities to cherry pick particular variables, and switch between comparisons between the US and individual countries, or the EU or Europe as a whole (yeah let's put Germany and Kosovo in the same basket and compare it to the US, and let's compare a group of countries like Germany and Russia to the US, even though Germany and Russia are like the US and Iran to eachother right now, fighting each other with sanctions and economic warfare, because hey Germany and Russia are both in Europe right? They must be politically united like say the individual states of the US, fair comparison to compare outcomes! /s).
And you make the same mistakes you're attacking others for, calling it 'persistent intellectual fraud' to make faulty comparisons. So let's look at one you brought up: life expectancy The EU life expectancy at birth is slightly better than the US, but as you say, it's comparable. So fair enough, right? But you fail to mention the European Union has more than 500 million people, about the same as the population of all 23 countries in North America, fair comparison? Not so much.
Mexico for example has a horrible life expectancy, even less than the West Bank for crying out loud. [0] Guess who is below Mexico even? Romania. Guess who invited Romania to join their union the past few years? The European Union. Now let's see what happens if the US builds a union in North America with countries like Mexico or say, Haiti, to get to the same 500 million people as the US, and watch what happens to your 'fair comparison'. You'd see variables drop extremely hard across the board. Again you're being a total hypocrite. Just because the EU happened to expand beyond western europe into a group of countries (not a country, but a group of independent states) way bigger than the US, allowing way poorer countries than Mexico for example to join, doesn't mean you can compare the EU to the US and then call 'intellectual fraud' when someone instead makes a more sensible comparison to western europe, or the original EU members. And don't get me started on the comparison to Europe, it's ONLY 750 million people, including hundreds of millions who are politically diametrically opposed and waging economic warfare and even a proxy war in the Ukraine right now. Makes total sense to compare their 'union' to the combination of the united states. And mentioning Kosovo, man I'm still laughing about that one, you're right though the US is totally better than Kosovo, I'm glad we put that controversy to rest.
[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leave to where? To a country where 1. a few rich people control the entire political process by buying out politicians. 2. where there are frequent shootings and you are never safe due to some idiotic Constitutional amendment. 3. where regularly unarmed minorities are shot dead by the police and the majority jury allow them to go unpunished. 4. where there is no mandate to give workers paid leave include those with a…
West != USA. Move to some European country if you dislike the US so much.
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leave to where? To a country where 1. a few rich people control the entire political process by buying out politicians. 2. where there are frequent shootings and you are never safe due to some idiotic Constitutional amendment. 3. where regularly unarmed minorities are shot dead by the police and the majority jury allow them to go unpunished. 4. where there is no mandate to give workers paid leave include those with a…
I'm not going to pretend that anywhere's perfect, but I think the Scandiwegian countries score pretty well on your "checklist".
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop enriching before it gets to weapons grade purity and it's fuel for a reactor. Fail.
You can make a campfire out of plastic explosives, too. You got an answer to your question and then moved the goalposts. Move on.
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#369Any technology can be used for both good and bad. There's nothing inherently wrong with technology.
No, that is not true. Look at the atomic bomb for example. The technology here is not just nuclear fission – the bomb itself has a lot of unique technology. There can be a lot inherently wrong with technology, and there quite often is.
Just a caveman assessment of "atom bomb bad, flower good" is intellectually weak. The atomic bomb created a balance of power, the destruction of which would have resulted in countless wars and deaths.
Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”
#370as a sidenote I encourage all people with talent to leave countries with suppressive regimes. I think they should be erased from their position. One way to do that is to encourage everyone to leave their country. One can argue that staying in a bad country may one day help to build it up again, but on the other hand, nothing hurts bad people in power more than complete brain drain.
Leave to where? To a country where 1. a few rich people control the entire political process by buying out politicians. 2. where there are frequent shootings and you are never safe due to some idiotic Constitutional amendment. 3. where regularly unarmed minorities are shot dead by the police and the majority jury allow them to go unpunished. 4. where there is no mandate to give workers paid leave include those with a…
in china, the politicians control the rich people, so they become rich instead - i don't think this is much better.
2. where there are frequent shootings and you are never safe due to some idiotic Constitutional amendment.
shootings are lower, but violence and crime are still a pretty big problem.
3. where regularly unarmed minorities are shot dead by the police and the majority jury allow them to go unpunished.
the chinese government's treatment of 'xiaosu mingzu' (officially recognized minorities) is absolutely reprehensible as well. perhaps not to the level of the american indians, and perhaps with military rather than police forces, but i don't see the big difference.
4. where there is no mandate to give workers paid leave include those with a newborn.
i googled "chinese newborn leave" and ... yeah
5. where lobbies can force the government into war and destroy lives around the world.
i guess within a socialist state lobbies are just different wings of the government. but i think you're misusing the precise term 'proxy war,' which is best applied to this point. here, china is beginning to exert its capital and buy influence among poorer countries esp. in africa. having these sorts of allies (read: puppets) sets china up well for the eventual proxy battles over africa's national resources.
6. where there is a high rate of incarceration, primarily due to the motivation of a proxy war against a certain group of people.
yes, USA is between 5-7x higher than china in terms of incarceration. but china is significantly more ... liberal with its use of the death penalty.
7. where the child abuse death rate is one of the highest in the world.
i direct you to point 4 above.
8. where life is just a gamble where you have "opportunity" to become super rich at the expense of everyone else?
welcome to late capitalism (and very few people even get that opportunity)