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Steve D'Ippolito

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Everything posted by Steve D'Ippolito

  1. But I can! Очень приятно, Бениамин! (But it's not easy--I can't touch type on a Cyrillic layout and have to hunt for some of the letters by trial and error because of course my keyboard has the Latin alphabet painted on it. "Where the heck is И anyway? *presses V key, gets м. "Nope. How about this key?" *backspaces then presses B key, gets и. "Ah, there we go. Now for а. That one I remember, it's under F." [And ф is under the A key so those two are easy to remember.] And of course it all depends on knowing enough Russian to be able to write a useful sentence anyway. Since I've forgotten almost all of it, I won't be much of a hazard.) Welcome to OO.net, Бениамин. From what you said, it's obvious you've read more than just the Fountainhead (she doesn't talk much about capitalism there) so I'd be curious to know what you have read. Meanwhile I'll practice remembering that you press S to get ы. Fortunately, when one wants с (the Cyrillic S, for everyone else reading this) the correct thing to do is press C.
  2. Ha! Obviously someone doesn't buy into the "Selfish Gene" way of looking at it. Under this paradigm it's what is in the "interest" of the genes, not the cells, nor even the organism or entire freaking species, that counts. The genes don't care if only some cells can propagate them so long as they get propagated. Not that either cells or genes are moral agents.
  3. Iterestingly Michael Bennet, D-CO, has shown himself to be a dishonest politician. He doesn't stay bought. (He shows up in both lists and apparently made 2.3 million bucks off this controversy. Actually I would want to know how on earth they determined that these monies were tied to SOPA... those seem like enormous bribes for just one piece of legislation. (Clearly I got into the wrong racket. /sarcasm ) Furthermore, given that blatant bribery is illegal, how can one prove that that money was paid solely for that vote? Edit: removed part of quotation that was not germane.
  4. A couple of people told me they ran into the same problem. (I've already told DavidV about this.)
  5. Not if they aren't expecting social security, and/or some other pension. Which many do. (Not a rational strategy, to be sure!)
  6. That little teeny "CENSORED" all the way over to the right, nowhere near the name? Kind of inconspicuous.
  7. Also it makes little sense to save when inflation is higher than the nominal interest rate, resulting in a real negative interest rate.
  8. Google is planning to do something as well. I don't know what but if I had to guess: Perhaps putting a banner on their home page or something like that.
  9. According to the index of Viable Values, lying is discussed at length on pp 166-167 and 170-173. Herein she only discusses the impropriety of lying under normal circumstances, and does not mention the case where a thug has a gun to your head and demands to know where your daughter is. Turning to "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics" also by Tara Smith, pages 94-100 she endorses lying to someone who is using force against you. [i typed that out so it may have minor errors in it.] I personally would go so far as to say that by this reasoning there are cases where lying is not only permissible, but it is the only moral course of action. In other words, I can understand why you might think Dr. Smith said it was _never_ OK to lie, because Viable Values addresses only a normal context. But the fact is, when considering other contexts, Dr. Smith gets the right answer there too. The next paragraph after the one I quoted discusses the importance of remembering context when dealing with questions like this. Edit: Put the Tara Smith quote in a quote tag, and added the sentence at the end of the following paragraph.
  10. I think it depends somewhat on what your criterion of optimality was. If, instead of total energy output over the course of the day, you valued consistent power output for less than the cost of automated systems to rotate the cells, one could make an argument that it's better to have cells pointed in varying directions. Why would one value consistent output? It reduces the need for batteries in the system, and batteries basically suck. They are expensive and have to be replaced every few years because they cannot tolerate being discharged and recharged every day, and this will happen more often if you get often get crappy weather that forces you to draw them down deeply. Under the best of circumstances, you end up paying half as much for batteries as your electric bill would have been, and that's after plunking down multi-thousands for the initial system. For the same reason, the folks falling all over themselves to buy an electric car that costs twice as much as an IC vehicle are in for a rude awakening when their batteries stop holding a charge. (There is one kind of battery that's basically indestructible but it costs ten times as much.) Nonetheless there are limited circumstances where a solar system might make economic sense--for example, if you are building in a remote location and the power company wants $20,000 just to run power to you. So at that point you might briefly consider a system with panels that mechanically track the sun. It turns out, though, that it's cheaper to simply point the things south (or north for you folks in the southern hemisphere) and change their declination (tilt off vertical, along the meridian) manually twice or four times a year, and buy 30% more cells for the hit from not having them face on to the sun at all times of the day, than it is to mount them on a motorized tracking system. (And if you go this manual route, it turns out to be a waste of time to change the declination more than four times a year; you get less than 1% improvement.)
  11. There are a couple of homophobes on this forum, and I expect they'll be by shortly.
  12. Ah. Yeah given that my point doesn't apply. This also makes some sense. Generally a perjury conviction would involve being caught _willfully_ lying, i.e., intending to mislead the court. That's a high bar; after all the witness whose testimony ended up being disregarded by the jury could simply be mistaken, or their memory may be unreliable. There have been countless demonstrations of how unreliable witnesses can be even when they are trying their darnedest to be honest. If all the witnesses testifying on the "losing" side of a trial got a perjury conviction slapped on them every time, no one would ever be willing to testify; the risk of going to jail for five years "because some smooth-talking lawyer suckered the jury" would be too great even if people were _positive_ about what had happened. Also, if the defendant is found not guilty, it is not a pronouncement that everyone who saw him do it is wrong and lying, it's just that the state failed to amass enough evidence to convict. So there really is no implied statement about whether the witnesses were right or not.
  13. This is already the case, at least partially. The penalty for perjury for example is quite stiff. In addition, judges, etc., tend to take a harsh attitude towards people they perceive as abusing the system for their own ends (e.g., the person with a vendetta against another who brings trumped up charges, etc.)
  14. Not caring about what happens after you die would be tantamount to having no values whatsoever outside one's self. If there are some people you value, surely you would want them to do well in your absence; the attitude that the world--including all that you value--ends when you die, taken to its logical extreme, is really a primacy of consciousness error.
  15. Even if bribery never disappears, I'd rather have a system where the only time a government official can squeeze you for a bribe is when you are caught committing a real crime, rather than in most countries, where you can be hit up for a bribe for the "crime" of simply trying to run a business or use one's own property.
  16. What we have today is what one might call "crony capitalism" where large companies jockey for government favors to get money, lucrative contracts, or directly smack down their competitors (including smaller innovative companies) via regulation--they can afford to comply but the smaller companies cannot. Smaller companies in turn join forces with anti "big" demagogues to pass other regulations. Even companies that _want_ to compete and do business without government "help" have to spend their time in defensive lobbying (please DON'T pass that rule, government!) and may even end up seeking favors because failing to do so puts them at a huge disadvantage. To put it in bumper sticker form, Both Objectivists and Occupiers see problems with this arrangement, but their diagnosis differs. Objectivists want to remove the "crony" from "crony capitalism" while the Occupiers want to remove the "capitalism".
  17. They'll ask what your most recent job was. At which point you have to tell them.
  18. I think you partially misconstrue this article. As I read it, the _name_ given to Christian Dominionism is based on one word of the Bible, not that the CD's entire theology springs from that word. The whole Old Testament is full of armies doing the will of god, a bunch of laws handed down by god that are to be binding on his people, and a lot of ranting about the consequences of abandoning god and his law. All of that is grist for the mill of the CDs who will say "look at the terrible things god has in store for you if you ignore his demands" Nevertheless, I agree that the radical Muslims are even more obnoxious. We happen to live in a country where there are far fewer of them and they exist within a minority (recruiting ground, sympathizers, others who ultimately find themselves unable to argue with them) that is comparatively even smaller. But even so the radical Muslims work tirelessly and mostly nonviolently (for now!) to alter our culture; goal number one is to make it at the very least a breach of decorum to mock or even complain about radical Muslims or radical Islam; that's one of the planks of Sharia: in a country under Sharia law no one is allowed to criticize Islam. In spite of their minority status, they are succeeding in large part.
  19. When you try to do that, the quarry you intend to work for will reject you as overqualifed for a job busting rocks because, after all, you could go off and be a professional architect.
  20. Possibly he is trying to claim that the _lyrics_ express Objectivist ideas and values? (Note that I have not listened to either the music samples provided or the podcast.)
  21. Someone finally summed this whole mess up as efficiently as possible. (Well, at eight characters it ties with another word I could use but that word is less printable.)
  22. It is interesting that the answer to this question has depended on what the person answering the question particularly values (or what they were taught to value when looking at history). Some pick the biggest (Mongol) or longest lasting empire (Egypt) or some mix of the two (Rome was both big and long-lasting); some go after a philosophy most like ours in the ancient world (Greece) or scientific advance (again Greece) and now we have someone selecting the best traders of antiquity (Phoenicia). (Apparently Pythagoras was not Phoenician, by the way, and most credit Democritus and Leucippus for the first atomic theory. Moschus, on the other hand, actually was a Phoenician, allegedly pre-Trojan War, but very few people today think that he was the creator of the atomic hypothesis. Newton did, based on Posidonus and Strabo's statements, but those are so far after the fact that it may be legend. Of course Newton also thought Moschus was Moses.)
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