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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
That article was a pretty sickening read.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |I am flat out ashamed, embarrassed and scared to live in Bakersfield sadly.
It's pretty much the only hardcore republican county in the state, full of crazies, guns, brutal corrupt cops and meth labs.
But the worst part is cops reaction times, armed robbery outside a grocery store? 3 hour wait time for cops to show. Many times if you call the cops for something they flat out never show.
Hell I have a relative who works for the CHP and he hates working with the BPD for numerous reasons.
That article missed the recent cop who shot his wife or ran a meth lab or something then disappeared in the foothills, took a month to find him. And the media relations officer who was arrested for child porn. And many more things that have been reported about, I shudder to think what hasn't been reported.
edited 1st Dec '15 8:41:53 AM by Memers
@Sgamer; That's been going on for a while, actually. And considering that one Republican made the mistake of admitting on live TV that the Republicans were hammering that issue just to hurt Hillary's chances rather than out of an actual concern about the emails, it's been a non-issue since. You're a bit late to this particular non-scandal.
It's also something that it's been admitted, everyone else in the government does and feels like they have to do because the government email is slow, buggy, and frequently crashes during emergencies. The biggest villain in the piece is really HP who has been getting paid to give the government a functioning computer system for decades and has never really once succeeded.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. DickNot so many oil wells anymore, huge layoffs happened just this week like 1k people or something. The mountains separate the military stuff from the cities, it's ignored in general till the yearly air show at Edwards.
Oh yeah and the Bakersfield Business Conference, a republican thing.
edited 1st Dec '15 9:31:13 AM by Memers
Not sure how much that's HP's fault and how much of it is the fault of politicians who don't understand what the words "functioning computer system" actually means.
I've come to realize in my career as a Computer Guy that, as with many fields of expertise, you are either a Computer Guy or you are a Not Computer Guy. Not Computer Guys tend not to understand issues of technological efficiency. Business leaders go decades between updates to their software and then only sign off on them because a successful competitor is using them.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I don't know, my government is enforcing a single academic system for all colleges in the Union but every single one of them isn't comfortable with the idea of spending time and effort migrating all the data to implement the system according to their standards.
I've spent one semester and a half working at my college's IT department testing and helping with the versioning of our system, somehow the politicians who pushed the system thought it would be easy to do so, like it would take a month or so, instead it took nearly a whole fucking year and it is barely fully functional.
Inter arma enim silent legesMajor corporations aren't much better; my company is still struggling, after about five years, with the implementation of a new ERP platform, and it hasn't even been adopted by all of our internal divisions yet.
edited 1st Dec '15 11:09:34 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Exactly. Large computer networks still aren't a thing that have been mastered outside of a few tech companies. Hillary probably just had someone make her email that actually worked and then never thought about it again.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. DickA couple years ago at work, we finally upgraded... to a newer, yet not the newest, version of Internet Explorer.
Last year we finally updated to Windows 7.
What is with this damn fear of change? You'd think they were all autistic or something.
I've read that enterprise is really afraid of Windows 10 because of automatic updates.
Meanwhile, there's a summit on "gene editing" and "designer babies"
taking place now. I can easily see that becoming a political issue as this becomes more and more a reality.
It'll just become more of an issue of inequality, as things like poor eyesight, mental disabilities, heart disease, and other things of that nature will become a division between the poor and the wealthy.
Of course, rapid price decreases would, likely, level the playing field on that after a certain amount of time, so the differential could only be for a few decades.
And the other big thing regarding "designer babies" - what if the parents want to ensure they have a girl? Or boy? Or make sure their offspring will have a particular sexual-orientation when they grow up?
This is one of those cases where the Slippery Slope Fallacy could easily come into play, ditto for human augmentation - which I'd figured would be the next big debate, not this one.
edited 1st Dec '15 12:44:08 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
Well the science is dispute, but according to some studies(this is from a brief look into the issue), Genetics make up, at most, 40-60% of what causes one to be Gay, Bi, or whatever new letter they've added onto LGBTQWTFBBQ this week.
As for gender, that's already happened to some degree in China. There's 1.2 boys born in china to every girl, thanks to them killing off so many girls to stay in line with the one-child policy. There's some reports of a "bride shortage" in some areas. The repel of said policy will likely end most of that though.
I'm baaaaaaackWell, given that I think this whole "gene editing" thing isn't going to turn into magic do all thing nearly as soon as a lot of people think, I very much doubt that anyone will be able to determine from the start whether or not they have a girl or a boy. A lot of things will still be up to the random gene lottery. The article itself points out that there's still a lot they don't know. I don't think we're coming up to a generation of designer babies just yet.
Anyway, all the research so far is more interested in eliminating certain diseases with genetic factors. It wouldn't be that hard to (or rather, outside anyone's consideration as a political thing) to pursue making illegal anything that wasn't directly to do with the health of the child.
I think you underestimate the Religious Right, who would see such tampering as "interfering in God's Design", and will enthusiastically fight against anyone utilizing it (while generally not giving two shits about the outcome and/or resenting their being a "welfare leech" later in life).
I was referring to the last part of your post. It wouldn't be that hard to (or rather, outside anyone's consideration as a political thing) to pursue making illegal anything that wasn't directly to do with the health of the child. Because making it so that the child doesn't suffer from Downs' Syndrome, or Sickle-Cell Anemia, or any other medical ailment or birth defect would still be considered "interfering in God's Design".
edited 1st Dec '15 1:49:25 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Actually, I wasn't underestimating anything, just responding to the idea that there would be an explosion of people just making their babies super smart and shit.
So uh... yeah, you went off on a different tangent than I was on, fella, and thus didn't give a proper response to what I said.
edited 1st Dec '15 1:45:10 PM by AceofSpades

Eep. Why does California attract such law enforcement nightmares so frequently?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman