xxovercastxx US

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Birthdate: November 22nd, 1978 (45 years old)

Member Since: February 23, 2007
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Comments to xxovercastxx

15 Comments

enoch says...

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/Confucius" title="member since June 17th, 2009" class="profilelink">Confucius
Since you are (rightly) concerned about the girl's history being posted online and since enoch has seemingly (as far as I can see) removed said history, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to edit your comment to do the same.


when i decide to go stupid i dont fuck around.

eric3579 says...

Thanks but this looks a bit different. Any ideas how to fix it?



edit - that didnt send the full embed

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
I had a harness for my cat that I bought when I moved from NY to MO as I figured he was going to need to make some "rest stops" along the way. He wasn't a fan of having it on, but he did walk around even when the leash was clipped on.

@eric3579: Change "autoplay=1" in the embed to "autoplay=0"

Crosswords says...

Modern medicine is extremely effect, especially when compared to none, for every vegetable hooked up to life support there are thousands of people who would otherwise be unproductive that have had their productive years extended. I don't view medicine as unnatural for people because it is an extension of our natural ability to understand and manipulate our environment. Just as regulation is something we can use to manipulate the market to avoid undesirable situations while allowing for continued prosperity.

That is not to say we always regulate properly or fairly, or that everyone in the market benefits equally. The problem with the bailouts was while they averted catastrophic consequences for the majority of people, and inconvenience for the richest.

And therein lies the crux of the problem, the people with the most, those who really created the problem are nothing more than inconvenienced, even if they lose millions they still have enough left to live comfortably, while the average worker who had little to do with the with the shifty policies suddenly have nothing. Further more there are many who benefited greatly by the practices proving if you've got the right acumen, or at least that's the illusion, you can make a lot of money.

Do the majority of people share some blame for what happened, of course, but when you look at who suffers and who had the most to do with the unscrupulous practices, those who had the least to do with it suffer the most. Those who have the most control suffer the least, or worse come out for the better, so why should they change their practices?

And that's why I think regulation has its place, when properly applied it acts as a deterrent for those who would otherwise have little to lose from unscrupulous practices, and gives those who have little control some method of petitioning for change.

As I said before I agree with you in that our regulations piecemeal conglomeration of polices that rob each other of efficacy. However I feel in free market situation you describe the people with the least amount of control suffer the most and the wealth continually gets concentrated in the hands of fewer ad fewer.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
Regulation, in my natural selection analogy, is like modern medicine: It can sustain companies that should be dead, making those invested in the company happy but having negative effects on the system as a whole.

When the bailouts were fresh news, there were a lot of cries that the free market didn't work. In truth, the free market was working. Those banks had unsustainable practices and they were going down because of it. Would it have been catastrophic when they failed? Yeah. But the recovery process would have started then and there and any banks still standing would have had good reason not to repeat the others' mistakes. Instead the government propped them up and they are back to fucking us.

The auto industry situation isn't much better. Regulation imposes tariffs on foreign cars that get passed on to us in the price. Why? Because American cars suck ass and can't compete on a level playing field. Even with the deck stacked in their favor, the big 3 tank anyway. The government bails them out because of some misguided sense of national pride. They justify it with talk about lost jobs, but it's all nonsense. The demand for cars doesn't go down because car makers go out of business, people who would have bought from the big 3 just have to buy from someone else now. Toyota already employs more Americans than the big 3 combined. The textile manufacturers see no change in business volume as the other car manufacturers increase production to fill in the gap left by the big 3.

Let them tank. Let the jobs migrate. Let failed companies stand as examples to the rest.

I really feel like people are somewhat spoiled. They're no longer willing to see or endure anything "bad", but the old and sick must die to make way for new life, both in nature and in business, and things can get real ugly when you try to stand in the way of that.

I don't think everyone needs to be professionals at any level of market freedom. Even the most ignorant person knows they're being screwed at some point and there's nothing that says the free market can't contain professional advisers and watchdog groups.

What I think government's biggest role ought to be is enforcing a level of transparency so that we all have legit information to make our decisions on. The FDA requires ingredients to be listed on all food items. Some people don't pay any attention to it, but it's there. I'd like to see that sort of thing everywhere.

Crosswords says...

If you view free market as a processes like natural selection, then everything counts including regulation. Regulation is simply an adaptation to market conditions by certain segments of a population. It is an ability to exert control on the market while avoiding the volatile, risky and harmful consequences other methods might accrue.

There will always be someone/something trying to control market forces in their favor. If you were to eliminate any regulation you would be eliminating one side's ability to exert control, they would be at the mercy of those who control the resources. So I guess in rebuttal to your argument, we either already have free-market working as intended or it doesn't exist and can't exist because anytime you put in a stipulation that you can't do X you're regulating someone's ability to exert control over the market forces.

As far as consumers go, I'm torn by the desire to see people acting more personally responsible and the opinion that you shouldn't have to be a professional in everything. You just can't compete when you're trying to know everything so you can make the right decisions, against someone who specialize in a specific area. At some point you're going to have to appeal to an expert. Unfortunately we have become so used to appealing to the experts its become increasingly easy for the experts to take advantage of everyone else.

Also:
I really think there are numerous systems which can successfully regulate a market but we've got these bits and pieces of several of them that don't work together. The people we've put in charge of this stuff all have such deep emotional attachments to their one economic gospel that they're often unwilling to even honestly discuss things with anyone from a different church.
I can't help but feel that is an exceptionally true statement. Our system of regulations has been cobbled together and broken apart by various ideologues over the years as painful a process it might be I wish we could redo everything in a manner that makes sense for the current market.


In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
A totally free market runs on the same principals as natural selection. It's totally possible. The question is whether it's desirable. The problem with both is that you have to be willing to deal with some chaos and most people are not willing to.

My own tastes are for a somewhat high degree of market freedom, with with a handful of absolutes protected by regulation. A bill of rights for the market, if you will. I admit, though, that this is closer to a gut feeling than a detailed plan.

A healthy free market requires responsible consumers. I made a comment about this just a couple days ago so I won't rehash it here.

In reply to this comment by Crosswords:
Well many of us don't think there is such a thing as a 'free market'. Not just that there isn't one now, but that the idea of a free market is only possible conceptually. We see it as a chimera, a mythical beast constructed of other animals, that does not exist and cannot be created. So while individual pieces exist, lions, eagles, supply, demand, the combination of these pieces into some self balancing force seems impossible.

So I guess to put it another way when we hear the words free market we think about the human factor, those people actually exerting their control and manipulating market forces and the basic hierarchy for control goes something like this:
1% > next 4% >> government >>>> everyone else.
So when we hear free-market we usually think of the people who can exert the most control.

As for the free market or the 1% giving us child labor laws, that was government regulation in the form of the Fair Labor Standards Act. If you want to call government regulation free-market corrections go ahead.


ChaosEngine says...

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
I'm curious what the go-to languages are these days, in your opinion. I have a programming background (high school and the local community college) but have spent the last 15 years in networking and servers. I've done some scripting in Perl and really enjoyed it. I've got Python on my todo list. What else do you think might be worth a look?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.


I guess it depends on what you want to create. For windows apps, it's hard to go past C# for front or back end. For web based stuff, Ruby or php. Python is really useful and if you want something to really change the way you look at programming, Haskell or LISP. Java is still quite popular, but I personally never warmed to it.

And then, of course there's objective-c for iOS.

bareboards2 says...

The reason I started these playlists was to gather data -- how often are dupes made in error? And how often are dupes completed all the way in error?

So these belong. The very fact that the Siftlords had to step in is exactly why that vid is on the playlist.

I have been surprised at how few vids were duped in error. I thought I would find a lot more.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
This one's got a bad dupeof on it but it wasn't isduped:
http://videosift.com/video/Little-Britain-Muscle-Men-Express-Their-M
anhood

This one was rescued by the SiftLords, so not sure if it should stay on the list:
http://videosift.com/video/Even-More-Problems-with-Jeggings

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