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scrodon The Caging of America

When he posted a comment in which he said essentially that, and in which he referenced a one-sided article that goes to extreme lengths to attack blue collar workers' retirement plans and their own collective efforts at bettering their economic self-interest.

The point should be clear as day by now; if you can't extract the basic message and argument from his comment then you have no basis for inserting yourself into the debate. Please don't waste any more of my time.

scrodon The Caging of America

It makes his point irrelevant; those workers' interests pale in comparison to that of the owning interests of those corporations. He presents unions as the sole cause of the problem, which is not only intellectually deceitful, but quite incorrect. More importantly, it reveals an underlying agenda that needs to be challenged as strongly as possible in civic discourse.

In fact, private prisons and unionized guards aren't even on the same side, due to the former hiring largely non-union labor. And the private prison industry has been growing and lobbying faster than ever:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-privat...

scrodon The Caging of America

This article should be accompanied by another New Yorker piece from a couple of years ago:

Hellhole: Is long-term solitary confinement torture?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...

scrodon The Caging of America

Private prison companies such as Wackenhut stand to profit in the billions from increased rates of incarceration. There is absolutely no question about who benefits the most. Please take your blatant anti-worker agenda and shove it.

scrodon Why Objective-C is Hard

>However, they're also adding to the language in ways that makes the code expressed in Objective-C simpler:

>Synthesizing properties

>Dot-syntax for accessing getters/setters

>Garbage Collection

>Blocks (closures)

>Automatic Reference Counting

>Weak references

Sorry, but none of these things make the language any simpler — they all add yet another style of doing things that only raises the bar and the learning curve for new developers when reading existing code, in precisely the same way that C++ and Perl have done. And this is true even of garbage collection (which, by the way, is deprecated in 10.8), because it needs to coexist with other frameworks and code that might not be garbage-collected, and more importantly because all heap-allocated C buffers consequently require their own low-level wrappers (e.g., NSAllocateCollectable, objc_memmove_collectable, etc.).

scrodon Google blocking all FastSpring stores

I sincerely hope you realized that my suggestion was entirely facetious.

scrodon Google blocking all FastSpring stores

Don't worry, this problem is easily solved by moving to Google Checkout!

scrodon Lthread - C coroutine lib with multicore support

You should stick with GPL. It's your software and you get to license it on your terms.

scrodon Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead.

It's really not that difficult. Adjust the income tax brackets and raise the rates. Oh yeah, and go flush your disgusting self-serving libertarian/objectivist philosophy down the drain, too.

scrodon Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

That's great. Now install one of those on Lion. And you can't run anything earlier than Lion on any Mac sold today.

scrodon Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

Nope, don't try to shift the issue. We're talking about simply allowing others to compile code for PPC — not releasing brand new operating systems. Apple isn't merely ignoring it — they're going out of their way to prevent even third-parties from supporting it.

scrodon Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

I'm not really concerned with Apple's financial interests. I'm concerned with their software tools and their demonstrated willingness to support the hardware they sell.

scrodon Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

Yes, I'm aware. It's Apple's LLVM that lacks PowerPC code generation:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7137480/how-do-i-add-ppc-...

http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/xcode/299924-no-ppc-from...

scrodon Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

I'll install Apple's LLVM frontend when I can use it to generate ppc object code.

scrodon Stop the paranoia: it doesn't matter if Google reads our email

>But, that doesn't mean anyone would potentially read your email and they don't.

Oh yes it does — they can, and they do.

http://gawker.com/5637234/

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=12048

scrodon FileSonic disables all filesharing

How many more lessons do you need that centralization of information leads to centralization of control?

scrodon Disqus Commenting System Goes Down; Leaves All Blogs Comment-Less

And this is the only response in the thread worth discussing.

scrodon Trust is Fragile

No, as information professionals, we should be building tools that enable users to store and manage their data privately, without asking them to trust some anonymous system administrator. Allowing them to become complacent and implicitly accepting of remotely-hosted services does users and society as a whole a great disservice.

scrodon My Call to Senator Schumer’s Office on PIPA: It’s So Much Worse Than I Thought

You need to go to the press with this conversation ASAP.

scrodon Alexis Ohanian and Dan Kaminsky will address Congress on Jan 18th

That actually comes far closer the censorship measures currently being considered across the middle-east, not to mention China's Great Firewall.

scrodon Uncloaking a Slumlord Conspiracy with Social Network Analysis

Imagine how much easier this is when the subjects openly declare their connections on Facebook.

scrodon BitTorrent takes on Dropbox with personal file sharing

I've been using it on my computers as well as with a friend for at least a few months now — it works pretty well. And it uses disk space only to store your own files plus those that others share with you, the same as Dropbox.

scrodon BitTorrent takes on Dropbox with personal file sharing

>The system isn’t up and running yet, but the idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.

This is how Wuala works, if I understand correctly. And let's not forget AeroFS. While these products are somewhat similar, I absolutely love seeing apps of this nature (syncing distributed P2P) proliferate.

scrodon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward.

Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".

scrodon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

>One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.

That fact doesn't validate Austrian-school-thinking — merely that it worked better than Soviet central-planning given the global political and economic environment at the time, which says almost nothing. And even if you're arguing merely in favor of increased economic liberalization, this comparison still holds no value because social democracy has nothing to do with central planning! The points don't even exist along a linear axis — they are apples and oranges. The debate all over the world right now is about how best to implement social democracy, and comparing those two extreme economic philosophies doesn't contribute anything at all. To pretend it does is disingenuous.

The worst thing about right-wing followers of Austrian school thinking is that they refuse to consider the social outcomes when "market freedom" is taken too far; they are bent on destroying society as it exists and recreating a weak image of it inside their economic framework. Even von Hayek himself acknowledged the need for a basic social support system. This type of thinking is highly simplified, almost always ideologically-applied, and extremely toxic to our social fabric.

scrodon Gold, silver, platinum: experts can't distinguish the difference in sound

In related news, expert violinists can't distinguish between Stradivarius violins and newer ones:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/01/02/1444828...

scrodon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

>West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way.

One of the most predictable things about Austrian advocates is their inability to conceive of alternatives beyond some kind of cartoon-stereotype Soviet command-economy. You seem to be aware of social democracy, so you are knowingly assuming a false dichotomy to make your point. I'd say it's even more intellectually dishonest when one considers that no one ever argues for a centrally-planned economy. At the very best, such a comparison holds no value today in evaluating Austrian-school thinking.

scrodon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

>I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough.

Well, then I'm glad to find someone else who isn't under the impression that continuing and intensifying de-regulation and privatization will somehow solve our present economic crisis.

scrodon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek.

Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.

scrodon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

>The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough.

You see, that's funny, because a much more obvious example can be found in free-market austrian-school economic policies.