Sure, the problem is 'solved' until you are the one stuck trying to defend yourself without the proper tools because others wanted to not own a gun and have less of a chance of ever being caught in a situation where that decision would impact them. I consider each and every crime against a forcibly disarmed citizen to be an order of magnitude more a tragedy.
Yeah, sure, your one cherry-picked use case is awesome. To counter that, I recently tried putting together a wiki server using apt-get, and for some reason the apt-get installed an out of date version of the software that didn't work with the apt-get version of apache I was using, so I ended up having to manually download it anyway and patch a bunch of configuration files. The windows version just used an installer that set it all up right with a few clicks.
Maybe now you've 'outgrown' video games you can outgrow thinking that your user experience is authoritative. Better, nicer, whatever, these are all just words people use to praise things that they like.
But saying Linux / Unix has a lower barrier to entry than Windows is the kind of thing only a long-time Linux user can say with a straight face. Unless you are talking about money, and then, well... yeah.
If it was an attractive, well-muscled man who went by 'Food Hunk' and he used his appearance as part of his shtick, I don't think it would be changed much. But I don't think it has quite the same draw.
The first time I smoked marijuana I was 13 years old; prohibition doesn't work, and while MJ has its burdens, prohibition has far more. We should focus on treating the addicted as human beings needing help rather than criminals to be thrown into prison.
That's oversimplifying; couldn't we drastically reduce the number of automotive deaths by outlawing driving?
Marijuana isn't an absolute evil with no redeeming qualities, and prohibition brings along a bevy of its own problems. So then we're really talking about which method, legalization or prohibition, is better in the aggregate.
When I say that prohibition doesn't work, I'm talking literally; something like a third of people in the US have smoked marijuana, and a sizable percentage (including me, a productive salaried software developer) smoke regularly despite the potential legal ramifications. I've gone on vacation with no connects and found a dealer inside of a day, which is to say that no one who wants to smoke is being stopped by prohibition.
When you take that with all of the bad things that prohibition causes, I don't know how you can rationalize its continuation.
> People keep saying "prohibition didn't work" but I'm hard pressed to find a conclusive paper on the subject.
Assuming, arguendo, your suggestion that there is no conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of prohibition, then, given the money, lives, etc. that have been expended on prohibition, the absence of conclusive evidence of its effectiveness is, itself, a pretty strong reason not to keep tossing lives and treasure into that pit.
Actually, the cost of addiction recovery for all drugs other than alcohol is small, literally to the point of insignificance in most cases, compared to the cost of alcohol abuse and addiction, and ridiculously small compared to the cost of the Drug War.
in other words, by any rational measure, it's a risk worth taking.
Well, today we already have those costs, plus the even larger costs of law enforcement. The choice is not between "pot is illegal and nobody uses it" and "pot is legal and it causes social problems".
They treat you like an idiot when you first get in because for all intents and purposes that's exactly what you are, and exactly what they have to work with - a kid who will be entrusted with quite a bit of power, and you have to learn to respect the chain of command and listen to orders to avoid costly (and potentially life-threatening) mistakes. I hear that as you gain responsibility and rank a lot of the stupid things about the military start to be less of your concern, but I never stuck around to find out.
Don't try to rationalize it. There are plenty of jobs that incorporate high responsibilities in dangerous environments. Most of them work perfectly fine without the disregard for humans, the submission and the stupidity. Respect has to go both ways, not only upwards in the chain of command.
> You don't think the chain of command respects those under it?
There are plenty of things to suggest that, yes; from this particular article to, just for example, the news coming out of Guantanamo, or the way that military whistleblowers are treated, or the fallout from military atrocities in Vietnam (invariably blame was heaped upon the soldiers on the ground and not allowed to sully the sleeves of the officers who gave them their orders).
Of course "the military" is not a monolithic entity, and good people can both go into it and come out of it. But your "only chefs are allowed to judge food" argument is fallacious. At its worst, the military can and does do horrible, horrible things, and you don't need to serve to be able to see that.
No different to how any other institutional whistleblowers are treated.
>the fallout from military atrocities in Vietnam (invariably blame was heaped upon the soldiers on the ground and not allowed to sully the sleeves of the officers who gave them their orders
Do you live in an alternate reality? The only people court martialed over My Lai for example were officers, including a Colonel and a General (who was demoted).
So you think your cherry picked examples prove your point?
The military is made up of PEOPLE. Those people place themselves at great risk for little pay in horrible circumstances. They do a job that very few people are willing to do and your only opinion is a holier than thou diatribe against the US military IN PARTICULAR.
Why not use examples of the atrocities committed by other governments, terrorist orgs, even whole nations? There is a lot of evil in the world, my friend. You'd do well to avoid painting the hundreds of thousands of people in the services with the same brush you use for those who violate every principle we stand for as a nation.
Perhaps I should have qualified that more than I did. As I said elsewhere in these comments, my father served in the U.S. Army for 21 years, and he's one of the finest men I've known. Militaries, like all human institutions, are made up of good people and bad people and people just trying to get by, from the lowest ranks of the highest.
I do think the chain of command is inclined to respect the majority of soldiers who do their jobs competently and don't cause trouble--people like my father; it's not necessarily a bad thing. But the chain of command doesn't like it when people rock the boat, even if they have a good reason; and it doesn't like it when people make their superiors look bad, even if they did it while following orders.
Of course I'm generalizing. Certainly officers with real integrity exist at every level. But I do think my examples demonstrate that there's a real cultural problem there, and I don't think enough is done to address. The fact that even worse groups also exist doesn't excuse that.
And yes, I'm speaking of the US military in particular. I don't know enough to either praise or condemn any other. I'm not railing against terrorists and rogue states, because there's no reason to point out that water is wet. No one expects terrorists to be decent people. But we should expect, and demand, better of the people who are tasked with keeping us safe at night, who are supposed to be the best of us.
> "But we should expect, and demand, better of the people who are tasked with keeping us safe at night, who are supposed to be the best of us."
The vast, vast, vast majority of people who serve in the armed forces of the US do so honorably and with a level of commitment that belies the importance of their jobs. They're young kids, not even old enough to drink, and in large part they come from circumstances where they had little opportunity or were surrounded by an environment that didn't respect following the rules, doing good work, and working well with others.
SO when you talk about the cultural problem you believe exists within the military, I'd like to remind you that the military is largely composed of people who are not far removed from the civilian culture they grew up in. You get former gang-bangers in the Army, religious nuts in the Air Force, and so on.
So if there are problems in our military culture, it's because there are problems in our culture as a whole. The military doesn't change points of view, correct deep psychological problems or reverse trauma, eliminate racist leanings or homophobia. It does NONE of those things. What it does effectively is train people to work as a team and follow rules to get things done. It's VERY effective at that.
To take one of your examples: Guantanamo. When was the last time you heard the actual voting public railing to get that gulag closed? Did you hear about a write-in campaign to Congress? How about a media blast to educate the public about what it's really like there?
You didn't. That's because the public wants it to exist. Congress made it impossible to close Guantanamo based on the politics of giving people actual trials in the USA.
You seem to labor under the idea that the military goes off on its own and decides to do things that shock the conscience. It doesn't. It follows orders from the civilian leadership. The CIVILIAN leadership. And that leadership often sucks ass. From the President to the Congress, getting good leaders that care about how the military goes about doing its job and HOW it does it is so rare as to be an anomaly in my country's history.
The bottom of the ocean is generally a very good 'containment system'. That's not to say there won't be environmental damage, but we do have some examples to go off of to indicate how much.
None of these examples were worst case scenario. How well does the ocean absorbs the ionizing radiation from a meltdown or some other extreme event? Would part of the ocean's water become radioactive and spread through currents? Are the oceans so voluminous that the effect would be only a minor increase in radiation levels?
Well the mantle of the Earth (including its radioactive components that power plate tectonics) is literally pouring forth into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean (in the valleys of the mid-Atlantic Ridge) and that seems to have not caused noticeable calamities... which is because yes, the ocean really is that voluminous.
As it turns out the ocean is also really good at both shielding radiation (water is what the nuclear experts use in large amounts, after all) and diluting radioactive contaminants, if it came to that, until the radionuclides themselves decay away and become stable.
Additionally it's not as if radioactivity is infectious or permanent. If something is radioactive here and I move it over there, it can't be radioactive in both places, which is why dilution is so effective.
You seem to imply that I haven't heard of this. Does this contradict anything I said and if so, how?
Before you answer, you might want to compare "biological half-life" with "radiological half-life" (as they are usually far different), and why the same issue of bioaccumulation has noted caused famine from hazardous materials that we know to have been dumped into the ocean in orders of magnitude much larger quantities. How many oil spills have fisheries survived in general?
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster gives a good approximation of what that would look like. "Pretty well", "yes, but well below what's considered safe limits", "yes, detectable but minor."
What I was always told when I worked as a nuclear power operator in the Navy is that it's not so much that the people could not be found and trained, it was that on anything smaller than a carrier the engine room crew ended up being half the crew of the ship. The larger engine room crew size necessitated designing the entire ship around a larger ship crew, which introduces a whole lot of other logistical and practical concerns.
We are specifically discussing the games industry, which has a much higher than average rate of bullshit that gets hurled at the devs from across the internet. There are links scattered all over this discussion thread that show that.
If the argument is that women receive more than men on average and that the threats include sexual violence (which it rarely does against men), I won't argue that.
"Sometimes, things get worse than just angry emails and tweets – one developer said that the threats that made him lose sleep were the ones that involved his children. Sometimes people start saying that they know a developer’s home address. Bowling says that he started receiving suspicious packages – never a good sign in the modern era."
I follow a few twitter accounts of a few prominent game devs (both male and female), and I've noticed that the more attention (i.e., followers) they have, the more regularly you can expect to see threats and insults as a reply to practically anything they say. I think the same kind of people that would troll a male dev by calling him a 'fag' would probably be the same kind that would issue a rape threat to a female dev, and probably think there is nothing wrong with either.
On an related note, if I do ever make games, I won't have a public twitter account, facebook account, or personal blog. Something about the nature of that industry just brings out the worst in people.
