Edit: let me clarify. This blog post is written by an infantile, narcissistic know-it-all and exudes the odor of vomit and feces. The fact that it appears here lowers my esteem of HN and further confirms my suspicion that the community is full of daft fight club-wannabe group-thinkers. Fuck you very much.
Sounds like things have not changed much in the dating world in the last ten years. Presumably the weekly standard prints this to boost page views. The PUA lifestyle has been a non-story for the last five years at least. And, yes, it is possible to seduce attractive women by creatively debasing yourself. sigh
Their focus on one particular famous guy makes it not that convincing, either. "Famous men have no trouble picking up women, even if they're jerks" hasn't ever been unusual.
Here is a fun trick: imagine Bernard Madoff, Kenneth Lay, or George Bush Jr. reading this. All of these people "went somewhere", but I certainly don't aspire to be any of them.
"What if you become a really lousy President of the United States" doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling argument for not trying to go somewhere.
Did George Bush go "somewhere"? Most people by going "somewhere", want to significantly grow from where their parents put them, which includes doing a lot better than their parents. George Bush's Dad was already president before him. Though I guess George Bush Jr. did manage 8 years rather than the 4 years is father did - this is only a modest improvement.
That's nothing, I understand that a paragliding philosopher has proven that both the original theory and the refutation are immaterial contributions to knowledge under his own theory of scientific progress, to be published soon.
Which would have all come to naught if a particle physicist stunt driver crack shot brain surgeon rockstar hadn't saved the world from alien annihilation in the early 80's.
Python is python. I wouldn't be surprised to see it ported to python 2.7 if it does work. At the moment I doubt it's production ready - lots of testing and validation before it goes live. I thing Guido explicitly said that removing the GIL is the sort of thing he would like to see in Python 2.X.
Actually, though I'm using 2.X in everything I'm doing, I'd rather see it only appear in 3.X. There has to be something that drives people to port stuff to 3.X or it's not going to happen. Dramatic speed improvements such as what this potentially provides would be extremely helpful in that regard. The other hope right now, is of course unladen swallow, which hasn't proved to be very significant yet, as far as I'm concerned.
3.X can be pretty awesome, but as long as projects want to maintain compatibility with 2.5 or earlier, it's going to be difficult to get some serious porting momentum going. Once 2.6+ becomes a practical development target, 3.x will be a much easier sell.
At least, that's my perspective after watching PHP 5 slowly catch on amongst PHPers, even though it had many more improvements (e.g. objects are no longer value types), and far fewer compatibility breaks.
People are lazy. I still hear people wanting Perl 5.8 compatibility for my modules, even though 5.10 is 2 years old and has 100% backwards and forwards compatibility with Perl 5.8. In other words, all your existing code will run unmodified, and any 5.10-specific features you use will cause 5.8 to die at compile time.
I use a lot of Perl 5.8 at the LoC because it's the only dynamic language that comes installed by default on Solaris 10. That, and because it is the primary language of a proprietary product that we have to use. I'd love to use Perl 5.10, but then I'd have to install it on all of the machines on which my code is expected to run. If I had that kind of control, I'd skip Perl and go straight to Python or Ruby. (Actually, that was a lie, I'd use Common Lisp if I could.) As it is, I've standardized on Perl 5.8.
The product I am talking about is Signiant:http://www.signiant.com/.
It's a file based workflow application that basically that is written in Perl in the same sense that emacs is written in emacs lisp. The idea is for people to write workflows in the embedded Perl environment which is the same across of the machines on which Signiant is installed. I could use another interpretor, but that would require extra work and I wouldn't be able to use a lot of the Signiant specific code.
A fascinating story, but singularly disheartening. One of the main characters regrets nothing of leading a life of crime, and the author is willing to give him the final say. This is moral laxity. He plays up the drama to the point where the story is entertainment, and therefore transmits nothing.
Let me write my own end then: some people will never regret their evil actions, even if they are caught. These people should be avoided because ruin travels closely on their heels.
Dealing marijuana doesn't make you an evil person. You should reconsider what you believe to be a "life of crime". He took advantage of a system that doesn't work (marijuana prohibition) and got rich for it.
Laws against marijuana don't make sense. Millions of people are incarcerated for simple possession. Prohibition simply raises the profit margins for it, pushing dealing to organized crime, and eventually violence.
Who in the story was hurt by marijuana directly? No one. No one was evil for dealing drugs, just young and stupid.
The cops even were portrayed as having this same attitude. They figured those kids weren't hurting anybody and were relatively harmless small potatoes; but because they became more successful, the situation grew more and more untenable due to the higher exposure to increasingly shadier people.
"Laws against marijuana don't make sense. Millions of people are incarcerated for simple possession. Prohibition simply raises the profit margins for it, pushing dealing to organized crime, and eventually violence."
Millions for simple possession..really?
Unless you are dealing, most cops will not bother you. Many states now also will only slap you with a fine.
Anything illegal will have a black-market behind it. Prostitution, gambling, and even illegal fireworks. The only way to get rid of the organized crime and violence is to legalize everything that is illegal..which isn't very practical.
It's not really prohibition. It's illegal. Alcohol prohibition only lasted for 13 years. Marijuana and many other drugs have been illegal for 70+ years. Otherwise, we would say there is a prohibition on rape and murder.
Sorry, your points made no sense to me. Prohibition means prohibited which means illegal. Marijuana has been used throughout human history over thousands of years, and all of a sudden in 1920s its illegal. Legalizing and regulating things is actually quite practical. The government regulates tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical drugs, our food, the toys our children play with, etc.
You don't see organized crime killing each other over the alcohol and tobacco markets, thats because theres no profit for them, big companies scale better. Illicit drugs however, pay well.
As for the incarceration numbers: "According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 -- more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent -- some 696,074 Americans -- were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.
These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged."
Today, in the USA, dealing marijuana is a crime. Making a (highly profitable) living off dealing marijuana is, at the very least, a "career of crime".
The individuals in this story did much more than deal in marijuana - they set up a business, made huge amounts of money, wasted it, acted irresponsibly, and were finally caught. Furthermore, they celebrated their exploits. The point isn't that dealing marijuana is crime, the point is that no light has penetrated the thick skulls of these young men. It seems to me that it is possible but unlikely that they will come to see the error of their ways.
I think that you should refrain from calling them "evil actions." He was just a pot dealer/smuggler that got rich, then got caught because a rival 'kingpin' decided to escalate things to the next level. If anything it was the guy that escalated things (and ended up dead) that should be pointed to as the 'evil' one as well as the guys that he hired to hit his rivals.
If they had moved into dealing harder drugs, I might agree with calling their actions 'evil,' but not much comes out of pot other than a possible psychological addition.
> One of the main characters regrets nothing of leading a life of crime, and the author is willing to give him the final say. This is moral laxity.
You're also reading an article written for Rolling Stone magazine. Have you never heard the term "Sex, Drugs and Rock'n Roll?" Is it any wonder the tone of the article? I don't turn on Fox News and expect to hear things with a liberal slant to them.
You also seem to be falling into the trap of reading an article that has a spin on it that is the opposite of your own principles and wishing the article author to write the article with a spin on it that you approve of. Shouldn't we just be looking for journalism that has no (or little) bias in it rather than arguing which is the correct bias to use?
{update} As an addendum, do you consider the people that ran illegal alcohol operations during Prohibition to be evil people? What about the people that run/ran legal alcohol operations after Prohibition? Does your definition of 'evil' come down to "what the government deems to be legal/illegal?"
Ah, evil. Such an interesting concept. What is right and wrong, not only now but what will be looked upon as wrong in the future?
I would bet that pyre is right - these dealer/smugglers will not be considered evil if you look back on the situation in 100 years. Just as we do not consider someone running a speakeasy during Prohibition to be evil.
What will be considered evil is a very interesting concept. International oppression for resources, drastically different living standards based on luck and geography, over-consumption and waste?
But perhaps other items that you would not even expect. Elimination of languages and distinct cultures? Holding dolphins in captivity if we discover they are as intelligent as us but just lack the ability to use tools? The use of plastics?
Whatever the answers are - what the government deems to be legal/illegal is irrelevant when looking from that perspective.
In this article, Rolling Stone abused its cultural influence by glorifying career criminals. Young people read this magazine, and the technical quality of the articles is very very high. In my opinion, if you are going to write a crime story, then you have a moral obligation to conclude that crime does not pay. The article concludes that crime is an exciting adventure! Ridiculous!
Articles like this give pundits on the right fuel for the argument that liberals lack morals.
Making millions of dollars by dealing drugs, wasting money, and buying guns to protect your illegal operations is wrong.
> In my opinion, if you are going to write a crime story, then you have a moral obligation to conclude that crime does not pay.
What if you are writing an article about a criminal that got away with their crime due to gaming the system? Do you have a moral obligation to lie/distort the truth to try and show your audience that "crime does not pay?" Is so, then how is that any different than rewriting the history books to suit the social agendas that you want to achieve?
I like this sentence because it suggests a guilt-by-association argument. However, you would have to be living under a rock to not notice that individual rights in the USA are gone, and they aren't coming back.
Edit: let me clarify. This blog post is written by an infantile, narcissistic know-it-all and exudes the odor of vomit and feces. The fact that it appears here lowers my esteem of HN and further confirms my suspicion that the community is full of daft fight club-wannabe group-thinkers. Fuck you very much.