Try understanding and compromising, instead of demonizing and neutralizing.
I'm not an American but having followed and participated in quite a few discussions about Trump and Trump supporters, here's the challenge with this: generally speaking anyone with enough intelligence can understand your point is correct, and that simply launching insults at people is not going to change anyone's mind.
But that's just it; to understand the value of civility and focusing on factual discussion instead of personal traits requires some education. The trump-base at this point consist of mostly uneducated people many of whom think for example that repealing Obamacare is a good thing when they're relying on it themselves but simply do not realize that the affordable care act and 'Obamacare' are one and the same thing. These are often extremely mis and disinformed people who are very easily manipulated with outright lies as their capability and willingness to do fact-checking is highly limited, which is why they're easy prey for all sorts of conspiracy theorists á la Alex turning the freaking frogs gay' Jones.
Now then, obviously mocking these people won't make them any smarter or get them to realize their errors, so doing that is a waste of time and resources. However at the same time 'understanding and compromising' is not something they're really all that capable of at this point because trump has effectively put them in this mindset of 'winning' vs 'losing'. In their minds, the 'losers' from the 'fake news' outlets are outraged that Trump won and are trying to sabotage him from every angle, so obviously the news are going to report negative things about him but that's just because they don't want him to "win." Like the conspiracy theorists, it doesn't really mater how much data you present to them to try and show them they're wrong because they' quite naturally ignore evidence that runs contrary to their understanding. Confirmation bias combined with Dunning-Kruger effect (Trump supporters largely overestimating their own knowledge and abilities) and curse of knowledge where the non-Trump side assumes that the Trump supporters have all the skills available to be able to understand why the concept of say climate change is not 'a Chinese conspiracy to make American corporations less competitive' as Trump claimed if someone just hands them the facts. But that's not how it goes, and anyone who's ever debated a conspiracy theorist or been one himself will know this.
In short: as long as you have a president in charge of the country whose main rhetorical devices are lying, insults and obfuscation, I'm afraid expecting the general level of political discussion to elevate itself to a higher level is probably futile. The only long lasting answer is to educate the poor people more, which the Trump administration certainly is not going to do because it thrives on ignorance.
Businesses would respond by moving out, spreading out, commuters would pay the true cost of access to downtown and business districts and consider rational alternatives.
It's not quite as straightforward.
'Spacing out' is expensive. The whole reasons businesses like cities and densely populated areas is that it makes the logistical chains easier to manage. Instead of having several smaller stores sprinkled around the suburbs you can have 1 or 2 larger stores in the centrum and save quite a lot on warehousing alone.
This is doable because people are willing to travel to a large city from quite far away as they can handle multiple types of purchases from many different types of specialized vendors at once. This is at the core of why cities developed in the first place (and also as an aside why in my native language the word for city is derived from the word 'to trade' (kaupata), so that the word for city (kaupunki) could in fact be translated as 'a place for trading')..
If you 'space out' an establishment now located in population centers you do 2 things: a) you increase the overheads of the companies as they have to spend more on transportation, management, warehousing, etc to maintain their sales and customers, this brings prices of the good up b) you increase people's need to travel from one place to another, further increasing overall time spent on traveling as well as money spent on fuel
People will have to drive more under this model, not less, to get what they want. This will not remove congestion, it will simply move it from one place (business districts) to other places (suburbs etc.). Even with a congestion fees, it's still going to be cheaper for people to pay the fee and go to the city to do their shopping rather than spending more time and gas driving around the suburbs to buy items at increased prices.
I'm in favor of using a tiered system of congestion fees to ease traffic, but precisely for opposite reasons as you. The data that we have available from such existing systems in for example Stockholm suggest that the stores don't space out and move out of the city for the reasons mentioned above. What instead happens is that people change their schedules: those who do not have to go get their errands done during rush-hour time will wait 'til after the rush is over and they can use the road for free, or use public transportation to avoid paying the fee. Quoting the study from 2012:
Much of the economically oriented literature is concerned with the question of the “winners” and “losers” of congestion charges (see e.g.(Eliasson and Mattsson, 2006)), and the influence such equity effects may have on acceptability. The three papers above (especially (Hårsman and Quigley, 2010)) confirm that individual costs and benefits affect acceptability in the expected way. But all the papers also show that acceptance depends on many more factors than just the “winners/losers” dimension. It is also apparent that the simplest versions of transport-economic theory neglect some crucial aspects related to “winner/loser” analysis:
1. The standard analysis of congestion charges underestimates the number of “winners” and the total benefit of congestion charging. This is because the standard “textbook” analysis neglects three things: dynamics, network effects and user heterogeneity. In a dynamic model, where users can adjust their departure time, users will not necessarily lose from a congestion pricing reform. In the simplest case with a single bottleneck, the optimal toll will shift travellers to arrive at a rate that never exceeds the bottleneck capacity. Hence, there will be no queue, the toll and rescheduling costs will not exceed time spent in queue before the toll, and no user will be worse off (see (Vic
Actually the standard is pretty clear. The officer perceives a threat (a person with a gun). He issues a lawful command to drop the weapon so he can sort out the reason the person is carrying. If said muppet doesn't drop the weapon he is under the law perceived as being hostile. Since he has a deadly weapon, deadly force is authorized.
The police are in a lose-lose scenario. If they dont shoot A) they can get killed or B) the muppet kills someone else and the public gets the pitchforks out or C) they shoot the threat... and the public gets the pitch forks out. Either way it sucks for the police and a large reason why areas are now NOT being policed properly as the cops are PEOPLE. People dislike sticking their dicks in a meat grinder if they can avoid it.
Its pretty simple solution. If you are CCW'ing or not. FOLLOW ALL ORDERS. Even ones that are 'wrong'. Do that and you wont get shot. You can always sue the next day. Can't do that if you are dead.
Except that's not what happened for example in the Castile case. If we break down the chain of events that lead to him dying from the video footage it goes like this;
1. The officer asks for a license and insurance (1:01 in the video). Castile hands over a part of it (either ID or insurance), and the cop returns it to him (1:08) and starts going for the rest. My guess is that he's going for the insurance papers from the glove box. 2. Before this, probably because the documents he's about to get are close/near the gun he informs the officer he has a weapon (1:09) so as not to scare the cop if the weapon becomes visible when he's getting the stuff that was asked for. He says: "Sir, I do have to inform you I do have a firearm on me" And here's where things go wrong 3. The cop acknowledges what Castile said, saying at first "Okay" (1:11) following it up with "Don't reach for it then". The cop has not ordered him to stop moving, or told him to stop going for his insurance papers or ID. He simply repeats 'Don't pull it out' (1:13). If you listen close you can hear Castile saying something after this, the audio is a bit bad but I thin it's: "I'm not a criminal" (1:14). It's also notable that Castile is stuttering, he's obviously nervous by having had what began as a peaceful exchange now turn immediately hostile even though he was trying to ensure the opposite by informing the officer about the gun. He apparently keeps going for his ID/insurance papers (again, something he was told to do and at this point has not been told to stop to do) at which point the officer yells a third time "Don't pull it out!" (1:15) and the immediately opens fire (1:16).
If you look at the timestamps, this goes from a point where Castile and the cop both think the situation is under control (the "okay' at the 1:11 mark) to deadly in 5 seconds. The officer does not give clear orders, if he wanted Castile to stop moving entirely he could've told him to freeze and then ask for the location of the weapon for example. Castile also should have told the officer where the weapon is, and I think he actually would have done so had the cop not immediately interrupted him by telling him the same thing 3 times in 4 seconds with increasing aggression. This is a clear case of a total failure in communication, and that's something that's entirely the fault of the officer.. Police are trained to handle these kind of situations and they're specifically trained to give clear commands and de-escalate, which is the exact opposite of what happened here. In this case instead of saying what he actually wants Castile to do (stop moving so he can know where the weapon is) he simply tells him what not to do, and Castile follows that order completely by not pulling the weapon out as he was told and still gets shot because he was unable to read the thoughts of the panicking police officer in the time span of 5 seconds that it took for the officer to escalate the entire situation
Really IMHO American corporations have themselves to blame for this. They have done a very good job of removing any kind of job security, chased profits for the sake of chasing profits, off-shored, out-sourced, missed en masse why claiming it was "necessary". Yeah I get it.
What did you expect them to do?
Back when global trade began to pick up speed corporations (not just American ones, everywhere) were completely happy using and selling slave labor. It should be pretty clear to people everywhere at this point that corporations as entities are not moral or immoral, they're amoral, driven by profit alone. They've never had any other purpose or goal. They don't even care about breaking laws if the costs incurred by the penalties or settlements are smaller than the profit to be made by doing so. I mean that's what happened in the '08 crisis. The major players settled, a lot of the costs were shifted to the tax-payers in the form of bailouts and many of the banks still made a profit. Why would you expect them to suddenly start acting differently?
And most importantly they've spent enough money lobbying politicians so that any talk of regulating companies is usually met with instant hatred by the defenders of 'the free market' who firmly believe that only by maximizing 'freedom' on the market through deregulation and giving the corporations even more power to act as they please and less responsibilities will everything be fixed.
But there's another side to this as well: it's not just the corporations, it's also the consumers. People want cheaper commodities and cutting out expensive western manufacturing labor is one way of meeting that demand. The majority of the products of off shoring production are sold back to western consumers.
Only in cases where it isn't practical to trade things.
The whole reason money exists is that the economy and people's needs have long been so complex that we realized thousands of years ago that it's way more efficient to use a common measure of value for trade instead of bartering.
Money is a highly useful mechanism which we should not get rid of even though the ways people acquire money will change drastically as full-time employment becomes less and less common with increasing automation.
Move to Linux. "Unsupportable" software becomes "support it ourselves if need be". You can't do that now, with MS, and you cannot do that in the future, with MS.
I fully agree with this as someone who works for IT side of the public health care sector of Finland. In fact the main project I'm currently in charge of which is an ERP overhaul project for hospital logistics is an Linux based project that saves us quite a lot money on the licensing costs alone. Most of the coding itself is done by a midsize Finnish software company.
However let me illuminate to you the difficulties of doing this at a large scale. A recent list I saw which is not comprehensive probably included 66 active systems currently in use by the hospital district. 6 of those, mine included, are Linux based, the rest are running on Windows. Why is this?
Well, the acquisition process itself is in its current shape such that it pretty much prevents small to midsize companies from bidding on major projects. The largest IT project going on at the moment is the replacement of the patient information system with a newer one that also unifies lab and imaging results systems and others directly to the patient files so that the treatment staff itself can access all relevant imaging lab and other data directly from the patient file itself without having to keep open several different systems at once like they still currently do.
We're a large hospital district, the largest in northern Europe. On a yearly basis we treat over a million people and as the most populated district in Finland we're also in charge of all highly specialized care. So needless to say that updating systems critical for the health and safety of over a million people is not exactly something to be done lightly.
Due to this projects of this size and scope are usually tendered out so that the tendering process itself contains a lot of terms and conditions limiting the size and type of companies that can even participate in the process. First of all they have to be on a stable enough basis monetarily, the financial/risk analysis by itself eliminates most smaller players directly from the game as they're deemed in too high risk of bankruptcy to be reliable.
The second thing that really cuts out the companies like the ones I'm currently working with from participating in these large scale projects past experience. Because the margin for error with acquisitions of this kind is so small, it is required that the companies have experience with providing similar systems using similar tech in the past 5 years to a similarly sized hospital area.
This pretty much narrows the options down a lot. And currently there are no open source players on the market that fill these conditions, as Linux based patient information systems are in their infancy at this point and have not been implemented at this scale yet.
Due to this the project is currently being developed by Epic Systems, an american megacorp. It's intended to enter use in 2019 with a total price tag of 385 million for the system itself, with a yearly price tag of around 40 million afterwards. How reliable these estimates are I cannot say, because outside proving technical support in the integration between logistics and the system itself I'm not involved in the management of the patient information system project itself and thus am going purely based on publicly available information.
The way forward here I think would be to set up a government owned IT company. Torvalds is Finnish after all so Linux is more widely used here than in many places so the expertise is there. The government could then pay for the development of large scale open source systems to be used by our public organizations. That's really the only feasible path to a more widespread adoption of open source systems in the public side, because the megacorporations currently in charge of this sphere - Epic included - are not going to be switching over to Linux and surrender their control of the product.
And I can only hope that governments are aware of the problem they create if they insist in putting a lid on certain speech. Hot air creates pressure. If that pressure cannot be vented, the pot will explode.
And that's why China's doing it differently. They've realized that outright limiting speech creates a lot of pressure so they do not ban/remove speech they just limit the visibility of 'problematic'/undesired content. The people are free to post and rant about their dissatisfaction with the rulers and policies, they may even get some likes, but if the post is deemed too volatile by the censors, most people will never see it.
That's not true. Muslim extremists are well know to the security services and are monitored for years. But they still get to murder and blow people up. Look at the recently weekly attacks in Europe. All are known, but "Human Rights" laws mean they can't be kicked out, or locked up until they've killed law enforcement or children at a pop concert.
This is just BS from start to finish. The phrase 'known to security services' is used a lot, but that does not mean these individuals are under 24/7 monitoring. 'Known to security services' just means their name has come up at some point during some check up, ie. that these people are not in the country illegally/without the permission of the officials. This group of 'known to officials' includes everyone vetted and cleared by the officials, as well as everyone with friends and family of a person that's ever been a person of interest. Say someone's brother or a friend travels over to Syria, these people are then likely interviewed/checked by the security officials and are now under the category of 'known to officials'.
Officials in Brittain and elsewhere have openly said one of the problems is there is not enough human resources to track/monitor every potential threat 24/7. Whether this is actually the case or whether the UK authorities simply want to use this as a leverage to gain more powers á la the Patriot act I do not know, Speaking about the London bridge attacker, assistant comissioner Mark Rowley said he "was known to the security services, but there was no evidence of "attack planning" by him." (source).
You're trying to insinuate that European and American intelligence agencies know well in advance who's going to attack and where and just can't do anything because of "human rights" (using air quotes as if the concept would be somehow difficult or vague to understand). If there's probable cause that someone's planning an attack, of course they're arrested and prosecuted. What's really going on is that the security services are doing their best to try and prevent/arrest people who're actually planning crimes but no system is 100 % perfect. If there is no evidence that someone is actively planning an attack there's simply no way in most countries for the authorities to have the money/legal power to keep these individuals under surveillance 24/7 'just in case'. So in the example mentioned earlier, if someone's interviewed because their friend/family member went to Syria and nothing of interest comes up during this check, they're not going to be put under 24 hour surveillance. If this individual years later self-radicalizes (in a fashion very similar to western born school shooters) and commits an attack, he/she was 'known to officials' but this obviously does not translate to 'the officials were watching them continuously and had exact details about the planned attack, however chose to do nothing because of the subject's 'human rights'" and anybody who thinks so is an idiot.
There seems to be a misconception in the west that the security services are somehow all knowing and all powerful (they're not, they just like to project that image) and could prevent all attacks if we just got rid of such pesky things such as the rule of law and gave the authorities the power to kick in doors and disappear people based on just their internet search history without any probable cause or a trial but I really would hope people on/. are smart enough and know enough history to understand why this is unwise.
Actually correcting myself because I rewatched the video just now. He doesn't say it's in the glovebox though that were it was. He uses a stupid phrasing of "I do have a firearm on me", and I think those 2 final words get him killed.
So I'll grant you that Philip's actions/choice of words partially account for this chain of events. However, still I think the response from the cop is not justified takin in the context of the situation as I originally said: it makes no rational sense for a man to declare he has a gun to a cop before trying to shoot him in a car with his wife and kid during a regular traffic stop.
Context matters. If this had happened after the guy had been fleeing the cops or something I'd understand. This kind of overreaction in this situation makes no sense to me,
In the video recordings, Reynolds can be heard disputing this from inside the car, saying that Castile, who had been asked for his license when the stop began, was reaching for his ID, not for a gun.
Yanez, though, said he believed Castile had grabbed a gun:
“I know he had an object and it was dark. And he was pulling it out with his right hand.
So a guy is asked for a license. In order to avoid scaring the cop before pulling his ID out he does the sensible thing and mentions he has a gun and that it's in his glovebox and then proceeds to get his license from his wallet, at which point the cop proceeds to shoot him even though it should be clear at this point he's not going for the gun.
It takes a gigantic idiot to even assume someone who's about to pull a gun an attempt to murder you in plain daylight is about to declare his intentions beforehand to an armed police officer right next to him.
If your hand has to go anywhere near the gun, tell the officer, let him acknowledge it - -
Sadly this individual did not.
But he did act exactly according to this rule. His hand never went near the gun which as he informed was in the glovebox, and he wasn't going for the glovebox, which he even confirmed a second time ('I'm not reaching for it'). The problem is the officer never listened or did not believe him that the gun was in the box and opened fire due to sheer panic and incompetence even though his hand was never near where the weapon was.
and he paid for not obeying the officer's instructions to not touch his firearm
Incorrect. He never touched his firearm at any point or even went near it. The officer thought he did, because the officer did not listen and/or believe him about the location of the gun.
Racism had nothing to do with it.
Agreed and mind you I never claimed it did. This is gross incompetence and lack of proper training. These kinds of individuals should not be working as mall cops let alone as police officers.
I'm not american and I know this is offtopic but I have karma to burn. I admit i laughed at first toó but this doesn't feel like much of a joke after just seeing the recent dashcam footage of a legal firearm owner being summarily executed by an incompetent cop with inadequate/improper training and getting acquitted.
Forget about the talk of 'racism', this goes far beyond such things. What confuses me the most however is the deafening silence of groups like the NRA who normally make so much noise about upholding gun rights, but now that a law abiding citizen who even lets the officer now he's carrying a firearm in his vehicle just gets 4 shots at him from point blank range nobody says anything.
Think about what this case is signalling: it doesn't matter if you do everything right. It doesn't matter if you're not hostile and have a license to carry a firearm. If the cop is twitchy and panics, whether it's because he's racist and scared of you simply due to your skin tone or because he's an incompetent asshole makes no difference, he can just shoot you dead on the spot and face no consequences. All it takes is for the cop to say that he felt as if he's in danger. As feelings are subjective it doesn't need to be justified in any way.
Think about the stupidity of the argument in this specific case: they essentially convinced a jury that the officer in question hears the man saying he has a firearm and thought process in the immediate seconds following this statement is: "shit, this guy just informed me he has a legal firearm, the next thing he's probably going to do is pull it out and unload on me with his wife and kid in the car, that's how all the gangsters always operate. Best err on the side of caution and go directly to LETHAL FORCE'. You can clearly see in the video that the cop panics. He hears the word 'firearm' and goes from 'okay' to 'don't pull it out then' to four shots to the chest in like less than 5 seconds. The guy even mentions that the weapon is in his glove box. so there's no practical way for the him to get to his gun fast enough in order for him to present any actual danger to the officer. And the jury's like 'Oh that makes sense, he had reasonable cause'. What? This behavior would make more sense in a country like Japan where guns are banned almost entirely and the cops don't usually have to deal with armed citizenry. I was under the impression that american police training would deal with these kinds of cases a lot because you have the most guns per capita so these kind of encounters should be standard procedure for the cops.
Can anybody argue after this that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is not infringed if carrying one legally gets you killed by the law for doing nothing except following the rules?
Yet people go around saying stuff like "I believe in science" or "so and so doesn't believe in science." Fuck 'em. They have no idea what they're talking about. You don't "believe" in science,
You're absolutely correct. However here's the problem with trying to get many people to understand this: the vast majority of people have no ability to even understand simple scientific abstracts, or even the news summaries written about them, let alone actually test anything. For many laymen it's a choice between believing what the folks in the white robes using cryptic symbols and vast machines are saying or not. So they make the exact same point you did, which is that this reminds them of the clergy, and as the clergy's clearly spouting bullshit these guys must be too, right?
I was recently trying to explain to someone on facebook why we have clear evidence for the climate warming up. The guy, who obviously didn't have much beyond an elementary school education, kept coming back to "Do you just believe it, or did you check it yourself?" Essentially, his point was that as I haven't gone through the vast majority of the scientific papers involving climate change myself and verified the results of thousands upon thousands of researchers whose skills exceed my own by several orders of magnitude, I have not in fact checked anything and am simply 'taking the scientists on faith.'
Even if I really wanted to, I couldn't do all the math again and check all the models and data used myself, I just don't have the skills (let alone the time and equipment) to do that. So there is a level of faith involved, but there's a clear difference between the kind oi religious faith he was talking about and you mentioned, and the kind of 'faith' most of us have in qualified experts and peer-reviewed research. Most of us who're not medical professionals won't understand the lab results ourselves, we tend to believe the doctor, or if we want to be extra sure we ask for additional information from another expert.
Science itself is a method, but there is such a thing as scientific consensus, which unlike religious consensus is subject to change. I'm not a cancer researcher for example nor can I claim to have the skills to understand and critique the papers written on the connections between say smoking and cancer, but I have enough 'faith' in the institution of modern medicine to believe, with a very very high certainty, that the expert opinion is correct and smoking causes cancer. Would I go as far as to say I know this to be true? Yes, yes I would because I trust the source, in this case the consensus of the relevant fields that's been refined over the decades.
Knowledge requires belief because knowledge is a subset of belief. Knowledge is the type of belief which is justified by evidence. Science is the tool used by experts to gather said evidence and the best tool we have devised to separate false beliefs from justified, true beliefs. Those of us who have a scientific view of the world (which I think here on/. constitutes most if not all of us) still believe things without understanding all the evidence personally, but that's because we believe the scientists. Not individual scientists mind you, but the community.
When phrases like "X doesn't believe in science" are used, they refer to people like the guy I was talking to who cannot understand any evidence to begin with because they do not even want to. It doesn't matter how many articles and different expert opinions you hand him, since it doesn't make any sense for him and in his head he thinks it's all just a cult that needs to be taken on 'faith' he will ignore them and keep occupying his own reality. '
I largely agree with your comment and reasoning, but the above is false. The EC has nothing to do with securing the nomination. Party nominations are done through party-specific processes which admittedly include delegate systems that look sort of EC-ish, except that those delegates actually do exercise free will in casting their ballots, so function more like the EC was intended to function. But changing or abolishing the EC would have no effect on the nomination processes.
I think you misunderstood what I meant because I somewhat accidentally used the word nomination. I wasn't referring to the primaries, I was referring to the actual election and winning the presidency. I should have worded it '...to secure the presidency' but my brain misfired. That is, that the current setup makes it so that a populist candidate needs less of the popular vote to win the election.
get rid of the Electoral college and a few big cities run the nation
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules. The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
ensuring a broad nationwide support for the President, not just a few High population centers.
Please explain to me how having less than a third of the populace support the president translates to 'a broad, nationwide support'?
First you state that the democratic will of the people is sometimes wrong and the electoral college should correct it
No, I did not say that's what I think, I said I'm under the impression that that's the reason behind EC's existence. But to clarify yes the people can sometimes be cheated into voting for candidates that should not be allowed to rule because they hold immoral/unconstitutional views (see, third reich among other things, Adolf was democratucally elected). HOWEVER, this is not the case now as what's happened in the 2000s is that the EC does the reverse, helping to automatically nominate a person that gets less of the votes without it having anything to do with consideration of the candidates but simply following preset rules.
Then you say that the populist vote should win no matter what in a democracy.
These are conflicting.
No they are not. See, what I'm saying is precisely that the EC does not prevent a populist from winning in is current shape, it makes it easier by shrinking the amount of the popular vote one needs to secure to win the nomination. The EC on paper is an organ of governance which is supposed to be able to affect the outcome of the election based on their own judgement of the candidates, but it does not do so under any circumstances so it's just become an automated engine for wannabe-populists to gain power by winning the 'right' votes. This makes no sense and is in contradiction with what I understand to be the point of something like the EC.
The declaration of independence is not a legal document
I never claimed it is legally binding, I just loaned the phrase from there to reflect the fact that i do not think the EC in its current function serves the american ideal of people being equal.
f we went full democratic, only a handful of counties in the country out of thousands would have their values respected and listened to while the rest will be ignored or abused. Clearly not a good outcome,
They won't be ignored or abused. In a popular vote the vote of everyone counts the same, no matter the location. The idea of a democracy is that everyone has an equal say in the matter on the vote. The fact that a city has millions of people living in it does not logically translate to 'therefore the people in the countryside need to have more votes." The geographical location you inhabit should not bear any weight in a democratic vote in my view, It doesn't do so here (Finland) or anywhere else in the west, and you don't see the people in the countryside being 'ignored or abused'. The people in the countryside hold power in proportion to their numbers and still have the local municipal governments to represent them on a national level.
and so people in different states do have different weighting by design: to ensure the people that produce the food which everyone survives with gets to have their say in how the country is run.
But this turns the system on its head giving undue power to those people. Why should someone living on the countryside have any more say in who rules over the entire country? The people in the cities are just as much citizens as the people in the countryside. Just because someone lives in a sparsely populated area does not mean their opinion of who should rule should count any more. That's what equality means, that's what democracy as a decision making method means.
There are other means of making sure that the majority cannot override the rights of the minorities. That's why countries have constitutions which guarantee rights to people and protect them from being eaten by majority votes. You're arguing that in addition to this the people on the countryside deserve to get to choose the president moreso than the people in the cities, which makes no sense to me.
I understand why the system is the way it is, I just think it'
Not an american but you guys should seriously consider getting rid of the electoral college. I'm no expert on american political history but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant. That is, the founding fathers were smart enough to understand that there are times in which the democratic will of the people may be hijacked, and this is where the electoral college could step in and make a more rational choice.
However, has it ever actually worked that way? No. Has the electoral college ever actually had any will of their own? No. It's simply made american elections to be this weird-ass game in which it's possible to win by getting less of the popular vote b y playing essentially moneyball with the election as Trump successfully did. Twice in the 2000s the EC has resulted in the candidate with less votes winning the nomination. It's a catch 22: supposing the candidate that wins the popular vote wins the EC as well, the EC cannot then vote against the candidate even if there's good cause to suspect he/she is a risk to the nation because that would go against the will of the people. If the candidate that wins the EC and loses the popular vote as with Trump the EC still can't do its job and vote any differently because that would be seen as 'changing the system" and there'd be a massive outcry over a hijacked election.
Now think about it, Trump would have been a perfect case for the EC to step in: he's clearly an unstable individual, lacks any political experience and his 'proposals' are for the most part rather insane and there's a good case to be made that he may in fact be suffering from an onset of Alzheimer's (disjointed speech, erratic personality, highly limited covabulary and repeated use of generic words such as something, anything etc.). Less then third of the country actually supported him and the other candidate in fact got MORE votes, so the EC siding against Trump because he's unfit to rule and siding with the majority of the voters would be rationally and democratically justified. Like, a more clear-cut example case of why the electoral college exists cannot be found in recent history. However did they do it? No, because as I said the EC has just become a stamping mechanism which currently makes the votes of individuals count less in some states than in others. In fact when this possibility was brought up aqfter the elections it was held as layghable by most. "What, actually electing the person who got the most votes? Don't be kidding, we have to elect the unstable raving orange dude, I mean, he won 'the system'. Nothing we can do. Rules is rules." And because they cannot deviate from voting according to the rules of the game, the people in the EC might just as well be kicked out and the system changed so that votes are valued differently based on the states. I mean, it'd be de facto the same thing as the current model. It makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of democracy, and it does not further the benefit of the american people, from my view.
It should not be possible in a democracy for a person to be elected into the most powerful seat in the land by getting less votes. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...", if your vote counts less than someone else's because you live in California and not Ohio, you are not equal. The system that was originally pout in place to safeguard the republic from tyranny has now been morphed into something which actually makes it easier for any would-be tyrants to step in because you don't even have to win the popular vote.
You're right that the concept of a propagandist is not new at all.
However you're incorrect in saying that only the commercial monetization is new. The social media technologies in use globally bring an entirely new dimension to propaganda, namely: customization and targeting of the message on a user-by-user basis. No longer do you have to think about crafting propaganda which will appeal to a broad base of people, you can write several different angles on the same story and disseminate them so that different versions are only visible to a target audience that's most likely to buy that version of it. Quoting the report itself:
We didn’t directly interact with Boryou’s sales agents, but we can understand their pricing models by measuring it against a comparable service, the Yunjing Public Opinion Monitoring System, Yunjing's service monitors news sites (Chinese and English), forums, blogs, search engines, and regional sites and applications like Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging site, and WeChat, China’s prevalent social media platform. It claims to be capable of analyzing Weibo in order to find or create “opinion leaders” and provide customers information that include their region as well aspost, repost, and comment count.
Yunjing charges its customer per keyword. The price ranges from RMB 12,800 ($1,850) for 10 keywords to RMB 28,800 ($4,175) for 20 keywords. The service comes packaged with analytics reports for WeChat, Weibo, and special or customer-defined topics.
This level of segmentation of your target audience would never have been possible in the age of tv or newspaper lead propaganda. Also crowdsourcing has now entered the game:
What’s notable in the Russian underground, however, is how it leverages crowdsourcing to manipulate public opinion. It works just like any crowdsourcing effort would—funding projects by sourcing them from the contributions of a sizeable number of people—except that the contributions amount to the promotion of profiles, subscribers, and likes. By adopting this model, the barriers of entry for disseminating fake news and manipulating public opinion are practically lowered to completing tasks and promoting other content with little to no monetary capital involved.
Case in point: VTope—a multiparty, online collaborative system with a throng of over 2,000,000 mostly real users and support for platforms such as VKontakte (VK), Ok.com, YouTube, Twitter, Ask.fm, Facebook, and Instagram. Its workflow comprises implementing tasks (liking or following a profile or a post, joining a group, etc.) that incentivizes users with points, which they can resell or use for self-promotion. VTope’s service is initially free of charge, and participants can earn points by completing tasks. Points can also be purchased as coupons that can be bought on-site, but they are also widely available in underground marketplaces where they're often cheaper than on VTope. For instance, a coupon worth 10,000 points is sold for RUB 1,190 ($21) on VTope, and RUB 500 ($8) in the underground. A coupon worth 50,000 points costs RUB 3,490 ($62). - -
like4u takes crowdsourcing up another notch by touting its capability to control the speed of promotion and set up time limits for tasks, which helps avoid bans from the media. Such tasks per time limits come in a choice of 5 or 15 minutes, or 1, 4, or 24 hours. like4u’s customers can also decide between using dedicated bots or real people for their promotional efforts. It similarly uses a point system, which can be bought from RUB 11 to RUB 4,500. ($0.2 to $80).
And so on. The game is changing rapidly because traditional news channels are no longer the primary channel of information delivery to most people. If you can get a piece of propaganda out on social media before commentary hits on the news, you have a huge advantgae: you've already primed the targeted audience with preconceptions
Couldn't they just do the same things people up north do to keep the snow from flooding their basements, install a pump? Maybe a few pumps, so there's some redundancy in the system?
They're using pumps as redundancy now, but that's really not really how the vault is supposed to work. It's intended to survive without human maintenance in case of global catastrophes. Quoting the article:
“The whole reason for the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard in the permafrost area is it has to be self sufficient, in case of a really big disaster in the world,” he said. “[If] all the humans in the lower part of the world are destroyed, perhaps a 100 years later the survivors can come here and find the seeds. The seeds will be OK as they are in the [deep] permafrost layer. But as it is today, the whole entrance will be filled up with water and this will freeze and it will be blocked after a few years, so it will not be possible to get into the seed vault. There will be a big iceberg in the tunnel.”
“The solution is easy and I give it for free,” Kristofferson said. “Make a new access tunnel going upward so the water can run out, not into the seed bank. It is not very hard, but it will cost a lot of money.”
You are totally right, in fact I think you should visit some of these Islamic Countries of Peace, just to prove a point.
How the fuck did you manage to read my comment and construe my argument as saying that the islamic countries are tolerant? I never made that claim and I certainly do not think that's the case.
My whole point is that the islam of today is essentially 'as tolerant' as the catholicism of the middle-ages, which is to say not at all, but the solution to this has to lie in educating the younger muslims because that is the only reliable tool with which they can oppose the ideology, The catholics did not become tolerant because the bible says love your enemy, it's been saying that all along and that didn't stop the wars and the genocides. The catholics are becoming more tolerant because the individuals no longer rely on the church for their source of information, but have access to actual education.
I'm an atheist, in fact you could call me an anti-theist. But just because I'd like to see organized religions disappear does not mean the sensible thing to do is to demonize all of the muslims. The muslims currently trapped in conflict zones and under oppressive regimes aren't going to get the education and the information they need to oppose the cancerous dogma that's being fed into them by staying where they are. So if your imagined solution is "just block them all from the west and all will be well" (which is not doable anyway because there are plenty of western muslims) then you're essentially acting exactly as the extremist imams want you to act.
Keep in mind this also doesn't mean we need to bring everyone of them here to the west, but if we are to take a moral high ground on this matter and claim that western humanist values (sometimes mistakenly referred to as 'christian values') are better, then we cannot adopt the stance of: "oh, you're someone living under the oppressive theocracy of religious fanatics. Too bad, stay there and die, we don't care". That will only benefit the opposing side in the long term.
It's called the Holy See, and operates from the Vatican City state. No such rules or laws like that exist within the Holy See. If religion is the problem, how come stuff like this doesn't also occur within the Holy See? Be honest and admit that fundamentalist Islam is the problem here. It's why there are stupid laws like death sentences for blasphemy and evils like ISIL. Before you point to things like the Crusades and the Inquisition, those are in the distant past and are considered regrettable by Christianity in the present day. Fundamentalist Islam is the problem, plain and simple.
Hold the fuck on, what kind of an argument is this?! So when fundamentalist catholics hundreds of years ago used their interpretation in the past to justify war, slavery and genocide, that's not the fault of the religion because they've stopped now? What? Do you not understand youi just refuted your own argument essentially: ANY faith/doctrine easily turns into a tool of violent politics when it's taken fundamentally. Fundamentalism by its nature is the problem.
And even if we ignore the crusades, the catholic church openly supported the third reich, took one side over the other in the Rwandan genocide, not to even speak of the still ongoing tendency of the church to protect pedophiles it employs from facing criminal prosecution and so on. The church has done a lot of evil just within the lifespan of people who're still alive.
Now don't get me wrong, the catholic church today has certainly come a long way from the catholic church that burned witches at the stake and murdered their way through the levant in the name of their faith so I'm not comparing modern day catholic church to isis. But what I'm doing is trying to point out to you that the texts haven't changed. The same bible that was used to justify the enslavement, death and torture of millions because 'god wills it' (the catholic variant of allahu akbar) is still in use today. Attitudes have changed and the church has been slowly stripped of power by the secular states that rose to limit the power of the Holy see.
Do you think the popes of the past willingly wanted to give away their lands and essentially their position as one of the most powerful men in the world over to nation states and politicians? No. They had to because the enlightenment arrived and slowly christians started the lurch towards tolerating other christian sects. After the 2nd world war what little credibility the church had left was lost completely when they sided with Hitler because they were afraid. Yeah, the man supposedly selected by the overlord of all of existence was so scared of an angry German corporal that he did what apparently in his view Jesus would have done, which is join hands with this guy and his intent to kill all the jews and the gays and the cripples.
People don't realize this but christianity is essentially still in the process of being dragged from the middle-ages to the modern day and so is Islam. It's just that we've had a centuries upon centuries more time to try to beat the mantra of 'No don't slaughter the infidels, bad Pope, bad Pope!" into their heads. it's important to note that christianity was allowed to mellow down at the same pace with the surrounding societies, so while the dogma of christianity eventually turned against the mass slaughter of unbelievers no single christian individual went from 'death to the infidels' to 'love and respect for everyone regardless of their faith' during their lifetimes. The change was gradual.
Now we don't have centuries to deal with islam which is a genuine problem. The nature of the islamic holy texts is also different from the bible which is an additional problem. That is, unlike the bible which contains very small parts of god supposedly directly speaking to people and even the christians have long agreed that the bible is the work of erran
Joo, kylla sulla on paskanmarjat. Ei niita ryssia nyt jokapaikassa piileskele...
Ahahahahahahaa. Translation: "You're talking bullshit. the Russians are not hiding everywhere."
Firstly: did I say they're everywhere? Nope. Finland and the US are both strategic targets for Russian information warfare for rather obvious reasons. Second of all, they're not doing that good a job of hiding in the first place, the comments are often quite easy to spot- Thirdly, there's been journalism done that exposes these kinds of operations here and elsewhere in the Nordics, google is your friend.
So you've effectively been spotted, but it's okay, you still managed to mess up the US elections pretty effectively so it wasn't all for nothing, Calm down Comrade and have some chai and pirogi.;)
The other day, someone posted on/. that they noticed an increase in pro-Russia/Putin/Russian agenda type posts over the past couple of years. My first thought was, "That's a cute conspiracy theory." But now I'm seriously wondering if it's true.
I just said this here last week: The Russians post comments on Finnish news sites and forums in Finnish. If they have the time and the resources to do propaganda on sites with readerships that are a tiny tiny fraction of/.'s, there's absolutely no doubt that they're actively posting and moderating here as well.
The way they operate in the social media is by having vast amounts of bots/fake accounts, usually with western names. Then they push out articles through their own media corps directly (RT etc,) or via 3rd parties like different conspiracy sites and communities that then share these on FB & al. Then they use the bots to 'moderate' these post for high visibility with likes and shares. In here, probably some of their people just gather mod points and then other write posts which the modders then vote up.
“What criminologists do is to look at the 10-year, 20-year development. Then we can see the trends. Year to year, it’s impossible to judge why changes occur,” he added.
An example of a figure from Brå’s statistics which paints one picture in isolation but a different one with further context is that the number of rapes reported in Sweden increased by 13 percent in 2016 to 6,560.
But when that number is compared to 2014, where the number of reported rapes was 6,700, then a slight decrease can actually be seen. In other words, the number of reported rapes in Sweden dipped in 2015 (down by 12 percent to 5,920) then in 2016 it returned to around the same level as 2014.
Seen over a ten-year period, the number of reported rapes has gone up from 4,208 in 2006, partly because of legislative changes in the previous year and in 2013 broadening the definition, according to Brå.
According to Brå's figures, 10,500 incidents of sexual molestation were reported in the country in 2016 – a striking increase of 20 percent on 2015 (when 8,840 were reported).
But once again, 2015 was a year when reported sexual molestation had dropped significantly – it was down by eight percent that year compared to 2014, when 9,640 incidents were reported.
“The number of crimes reported can depend very much on the propensity to report,” Sarnecki noted.
The definition of rape in >weden is broader than elsewhere in the west, including stuff that elsewhere would be charged under sexual harassment. Secondly the reporting works differently in that they estimate the total amount of offenses: So if a wife reports that her husband has been having sex with her against her will dozens of times, in most places it's filed as a single case of suspected rape for the national crime stats, but in Sweden they count each suspected instance separately meaning that a single case can easily generate tens or hundreds of incidents of rape for the stats. This means comparing Swedish stats to other western nations directly is not really sensible.
You wouldn't if you lived in Sweden. They put people in prison if they say it.
Lol, I can guarantee you've never lived in Sweden (me neither but I live next door in Finland and visit regularly and have friends there) . There's extensive discussion about crime stats as there's one party in the parliament that's trying to do exactly what you're trying to do, which is to insinuate that the fluctuation in the numbers is due to immigrants somehow raping people en masse on the streets, which is simply not true.
The funniest (in the "makes you cry" sense) thing is that it tends to be "progressive", "leftist", "labour", "of-the-people" kind of politicians that complain the loudest about "populism". It basically says that they know what's best for the people only as long as the people happen to agree with them, and therefore disagreeing with them must be disallowed.
You're correct that the left these days in Europe (and I say this as a Finnish leftist myself) is more worried about populism because right wing populism is on the rise. However, you're wrong if you think this means I - or the left in general - think disagreement or in fact populism itself should be disallowed. There's nothing wrong with being a populist. I mean, the point of a politician after all is to try and enact the will of the people who elected him, so populism in a sense is central to western politics.
The problem with populism is that the more complicated a topic, the easier it is for populists to oversimplify the issue and paint an entirely skewed picture to the voters. And this is not a partisan issue, the same faults and problems are entirely possible on the left itself, it's just that right now the right has embraced this kind of populism more.
Much like you're arguing that the people cannot be trusted to vote for the right thing. Or, you know, cannot be trusted to see through the murky bullshit politicians spout. Again, it's an argument to do away with democracy because it doesn't work
No. I'm saying that if you're having a vote on an important and complex issue there should be impartial information handed out to the voters about the outcomes. In Switzerland (arguably the nation curently furthest in implementing direct democracy) whenever they have these votes on matters of policy, they get beforehand an information package that contains the pros and cons of both sides. Look at the amount of information and material that the Swiss get before they head to the polls on any issue:
National referendum government information booklet National referendum ballot (5 issues) Cantonal referendum government information booklet Cantonal referendum ballot (2 issues) Municipal referendum government information booklet Municipal referendum ballot (4 issues) Municipal election ballot for the city government (5 seats including the mayor) Municipal election ballot for the mayor of Berne Municipal election government information booklet Municipal election ballots for the city parliament (80 seats). Preprinted ballots for all party lists and one empty ballot are provided. Voters may cast only one ballot. Return envelope for postal voting. To vote by mail, voters must insert the sealed ballot envelope (13) and the signed voter identification card (12) into the return envelope and mail it to the city chancellery for counting. Voter identification card. It must be signed in order for a mail vote to be valid. It is discarded after validation and before the ballot envelope (13) is opened, so as to preserve the secrecy of the ballot. Ballot envelope. Mail voters must insert their ballots and seal the envelope. Election advertising material produced by the parties. Each party is restricted to one brochure of a prescribed format to be delivered to voters this way.
So yes, they get marketing material in retsricted amounts by the parties, but they also get booklets constructed by the government about the pros and cons of the issue. This way, the parties cannot easly make wild assertions in their marketing of the issue because the opposing side can easily say: "check the numbers from the booklet, their claim is false." and you will lose the vote.
If the information about the vote is left for the campaigns of both sides and no facts whatsoever are established in the mind of the populace, then certainly the people cannot be trusted to vote correctly because they might
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an American but having followed and participated in quite a few discussions about Trump and Trump supporters, here's the challenge with this: generally speaking anyone with enough intelligence can understand your point is correct, and that simply launching insults at people is not going to change anyone's mind.
But that's just it; to understand the value of civility and focusing on factual discussion instead of personal traits requires some education. The trump-base at this point consist of mostly uneducated people many of whom think for example that repealing Obamacare is a good thing when they're relying on it themselves but simply do not realize that the affordable care act and 'Obamacare' are one and the same thing. These are often extremely mis and disinformed people who are very easily manipulated with outright lies as their capability and willingness to do fact-checking is highly limited, which is why they're easy prey for all sorts of conspiracy theorists á la Alex turning the freaking frogs gay' Jones.
Now then, obviously mocking these people won't make them any smarter or get them to realize their errors, so doing that is a waste of time and resources. However at the same time 'understanding and compromising' is not something they're really all that capable of at this point because trump has effectively put them in this mindset of 'winning' vs 'losing'. In their minds, the 'losers' from the 'fake news' outlets are outraged that Trump won and are trying to sabotage him from every angle, so obviously the news are going to report negative things about him but that's just because they don't want him to "win." Like the conspiracy theorists, it doesn't really mater how much data you present to them to try and show them they're wrong because they' quite naturally ignore evidence that runs contrary to their understanding. Confirmation bias combined with Dunning-Kruger effect (Trump supporters largely overestimating their own knowledge and abilities) and curse of knowledge where the non-Trump side assumes that the Trump supporters have all the skills available to be able to understand why the concept of say climate change is not 'a Chinese conspiracy to make American corporations less competitive' as Trump claimed if someone just hands them the facts. But that's not how it goes, and anyone who's ever debated a conspiracy theorist or been one himself will know this.
In short: as long as you have a president in charge of the country whose main rhetorical devices are lying, insults and obfuscation, I'm afraid expecting the general level of political discussion to elevate itself to a higher level is probably futile. The only long lasting answer is to educate the poor people more, which the Trump administration certainly is not going to do because it thrives on ignorance.
It's not quite as straightforward.
'Spacing out' is expensive. The whole reasons businesses like cities and densely populated areas is that it makes the logistical chains easier to manage. Instead of having several smaller stores sprinkled around the suburbs you can have 1 or 2 larger stores in the centrum and save quite a lot on warehousing alone.
This is doable because people are willing to travel to a large city from quite far away as they can handle multiple types of purchases from many different types of specialized vendors at once. This is at the core of why cities developed in the first place (and also as an aside why in my native language the word for city is derived from the word 'to trade' (kaupata), so that the word for city (kaupunki) could in fact be translated as 'a place for trading')..
If you 'space out' an establishment now located in population centers you do 2 things:
a) you increase the overheads of the companies as they have to spend more on transportation, management, warehousing, etc to maintain their sales and customers, this brings prices of the good up
b) you increase people's need to travel from one place to another, further increasing overall time spent on traveling as well as money spent on fuel
People will have to drive more under this model, not less, to get what they want. This will not remove congestion, it will simply move it from one place (business districts) to other places (suburbs etc.). Even with a congestion fees, it's still going to be cheaper for people to pay the fee and go to the city to do their shopping rather than spending more time and gas driving around the suburbs to buy items at increased prices.
I'm in favor of using a tiered system of congestion fees to ease traffic, but precisely for opposite reasons as you. The data that we have available from such existing systems in for example Stockholm suggest that the stores don't space out and move out of the city for the reasons mentioned above. What instead happens is that people change their schedules: those who do not have to go get their errands done during rush-hour time will wait 'til after the rush is over and they can use the road for free, or use public transportation to avoid paying the fee. Quoting the study from 2012:
Except that's not what happened for example in the Castile case. If we break down the chain of events that lead to him dying from the video footage it goes like this;
1. The officer asks for a license and insurance (1:01 in the video). Castile hands over a part of it (either ID or insurance), and the cop returns it to him (1:08) and starts going for the rest. My guess is that he's going for the insurance papers from the glove box.
2. Before this, probably because the documents he's about to get are close/near the gun he informs the officer he has a weapon (1:09) so as not to scare the cop if the weapon becomes visible when he's getting the stuff that was asked for. He says: "Sir, I do have to inform you I do have a firearm on me"
And here's where things go wrong
3. The cop acknowledges what Castile said, saying at first "Okay" (1:11) following it up with "Don't reach for it then". The cop has not ordered him to stop moving, or told him to stop going for his insurance papers or ID. He simply repeats 'Don't pull it out' (1:13). If you listen close you can hear Castile saying something after this, the audio is a bit bad but I thin it's: "I'm not a criminal" (1:14). It's also notable that Castile is stuttering, he's obviously nervous by having had what began as a peaceful exchange now turn immediately hostile even though he was trying to ensure the opposite by informing the officer about the gun. He apparently keeps going for his ID/insurance papers (again, something he was told to do and at this point has not been told to stop to do) at which point the officer yells a third time "Don't pull it out!" (1:15) and the immediately opens fire (1:16).
If you look at the timestamps, this goes from a point where Castile and the cop both think the situation is under control (the "okay' at the 1:11 mark) to deadly in 5 seconds. The officer does not give clear orders, if he wanted Castile to stop moving entirely he could've told him to freeze and then ask for the location of the weapon for example. Castile also should have told the officer where the weapon is, and I think he actually would have done so had the cop not immediately interrupted him by telling him the same thing 3 times in 4 seconds with increasing aggression. This is a clear case of a total failure in communication, and that's something that's entirely the fault of the officer.. Police are trained to handle these kind of situations and they're specifically trained to give clear commands and de-escalate, which is the exact opposite of what happened here. In this case instead of saying what he actually wants Castile to do (stop moving so he can know where the weapon is) he simply tells him what not to do, and Castile follows that order completely by not pulling the weapon out as he was told and still gets shot because he was unable to read the thoughts of the panicking police officer in the time span of 5 seconds that it took for the officer to escalate the entire situation
What did you expect them to do?
Back when global trade began to pick up speed corporations (not just American ones, everywhere) were completely happy using and selling slave labor. It should be pretty clear to people everywhere at this point that corporations as entities are not moral or immoral, they're amoral, driven by profit alone. They've never had any other purpose or goal. They don't even care about breaking laws if the costs incurred by the penalties or settlements are smaller than the profit to be made by doing so. I mean that's what happened in the '08 crisis. The major players settled, a lot of the costs were shifted to the tax-payers in the form of bailouts and many of the banks still made a profit. Why would you expect them to suddenly start acting differently?
And most importantly they've spent enough money lobbying politicians so that any talk of regulating companies is usually met with instant hatred by the defenders of 'the free market' who firmly believe that only by maximizing 'freedom' on the market through deregulation and giving the corporations even more power to act as they please and less responsibilities will everything be fixed.
But there's another side to this as well: it's not just the corporations, it's also the consumers. People want cheaper commodities and cutting out expensive western manufacturing labor is one way of meeting that demand. The majority of the products of off shoring production are sold back to western consumers.
The whole reason money exists is that the economy and people's needs have long been so complex that we realized thousands of years ago that it's way more efficient to use a common measure of value for trade instead of bartering.
Money is a highly useful mechanism which we should not get rid of even though the ways people acquire money will change drastically as full-time employment becomes less and less common with increasing automation.
I fully agree with this as someone who works for IT side of the public health care sector of Finland. In fact the main project I'm currently in charge of which is an ERP overhaul project for hospital logistics is an Linux based project that saves us quite a lot money on the licensing costs alone. Most of the coding itself is done by a midsize Finnish software company.
However let me illuminate to you the difficulties of doing this at a large scale. A recent list I saw which is not comprehensive probably included 66 active systems currently in use by the hospital district. 6 of those, mine included, are Linux based, the rest are running on Windows. Why is this?
Well, the acquisition process itself is in its current shape such that it pretty much prevents small to midsize companies from bidding on major projects. The largest IT project going on at the moment is the replacement of the patient information system with a newer one that also unifies lab and imaging results systems and others directly to the patient files so that the treatment staff itself can access all relevant imaging lab and other data directly from the patient file itself without having to keep open several different systems at once like they still currently do.
We're a large hospital district, the largest in northern Europe. On a yearly basis we treat over a million people and as the most populated district in Finland we're also in charge of all highly specialized care. So needless to say that updating systems critical for the health and safety of over a million people is not exactly something to be done lightly.
Due to this projects of this size and scope are usually tendered out so that the tendering process itself contains a lot of terms and conditions limiting the size and type of companies that can even participate in the process. First of all they have to be on a stable enough basis monetarily, the financial/risk analysis by itself eliminates most smaller players directly from the game as they're deemed in too high risk of bankruptcy to be reliable.
The second thing that really cuts out the companies like the ones I'm currently working with from participating in these large scale projects past experience. Because the margin for error with acquisitions of this kind is so small, it is required that the companies have experience with providing similar systems using similar tech in the past 5 years to a similarly sized hospital area.
This pretty much narrows the options down a lot. And currently there are no open source players on the market that fill these conditions, as Linux based patient information systems are in their infancy at this point and have not been implemented at this scale yet.
Due to this the project is currently being developed by Epic Systems, an american megacorp. It's intended to enter use in 2019 with a total price tag of 385 million for the system itself, with a yearly price tag of around 40 million afterwards. How reliable these estimates are I cannot say, because outside proving technical support in the integration between logistics and the system itself I'm not involved in the management of the patient information system project itself and thus am going purely based on publicly available information.
The way forward here I think would be to set up a government owned IT company. Torvalds is Finnish after all so Linux is more widely used here than in many places so the expertise is there. The government could then pay for the development of large scale open source systems to be used by our public organizations. That's really the only feasible path to a more widespread adoption of open source systems in the public side, because the megacorporations currently in charge of this sphere - Epic included - are not going to be switching over to Linux and surrender their control of the product.
And that's why China's doing it differently. They've realized that outright limiting speech creates a lot of pressure so they do not ban/remove speech they just limit the visibility of 'problematic'/undesired content. The people are free to post and rant about their dissatisfaction with the rulers and policies, they may even get some likes, but if the post is deemed too volatile by the censors, most people will never see it.
Fucked up the source for the quote. Fixed.
Sorry about that.
This is just BS from start to finish. The phrase 'known to security services' is used a lot, but that does not mean these individuals are under 24/7 monitoring. 'Known to security services' just means their name has come up at some point during some check up, ie. that these people are not in the country illegally/without the permission of the officials. This group of 'known to officials' includes everyone vetted and cleared by the officials, as well as everyone with friends and family of a person that's ever been a person of interest. Say someone's brother or a friend travels over to Syria, these people are then likely interviewed/checked by the security officials and are now under the category of 'known to officials'.
Officials in Brittain and elsewhere have openly said one of the problems is there is not enough human resources to track/monitor every potential threat 24/7. Whether this is actually the case or whether the UK authorities simply want to use this as a leverage to gain more powers á la the Patriot act I do not know, Speaking about the London bridge attacker, assistant comissioner Mark Rowley said he "was known to the security services, but there was no evidence of "attack planning" by him." (source).
You're trying to insinuate that European and American intelligence agencies know well in advance who's going to attack and where and just can't do anything because of "human rights" (using air quotes as if the concept would be somehow difficult or vague to understand). If there's probable cause that someone's planning an attack, of course they're arrested and prosecuted. What's really going on is that the security services are doing their best to try and prevent/arrest people who're actually planning crimes but no system is 100 % perfect. If there is no evidence that someone is actively planning an attack there's simply no way in most countries for the authorities to have the money/legal power to keep these individuals under surveillance 24/7 'just in case'. So in the example mentioned earlier, if someone's interviewed because their friend/family member went to Syria and nothing of interest comes up during this check, they're not going to be put under 24 hour surveillance. If this individual years later self-radicalizes (in a fashion very similar to western born school shooters) and commits an attack, he/she was 'known to officials' but this obviously does not translate to 'the officials were watching them continuously and had exact details about the planned attack, however chose to do nothing because of the subject's 'human rights'" and anybody who thinks so is an idiot.
There seems to be a misconception in the west that the security services are somehow all knowing and all powerful (they're not, they just like to project that image) and could prevent all attacks if we just got rid of such pesky things such as the rule of law and gave the authorities the power to kick in doors and disappear people based on just their internet search history without any probable cause or a trial but I really would hope people on /. are smart enough and know enough history to understand why this is unwise.
Actually correcting myself because I rewatched the video just now. He doesn't say it's in the glovebox though that were it was. He uses a stupid phrasing of "I do have a firearm on me", and I think those 2 final words get him killed.
So I'll grant you that Philip's actions/choice of words partially account for this chain of events. However, still I think the response from the cop is not justified takin in the context of the situation as I originally said: it makes no rational sense for a man to declare he has a gun to a cop before trying to shoot him in a car with his wife and kid during a regular traffic stop.
Context matters. If this had happened after the guy had been fleeing the cops or something I'd understand. This kind of overreaction in this situation makes no sense to me,
Except that's not even what the cops claimed was happening.. He said the gun is in his glove box. Was he reaching for the glove box? No.
He was reaching for his ID which he was asked to produce.
So a guy is asked for a license. In order to avoid scaring the cop before pulling his ID out he does the sensible thing and mentions he has a gun and that it's in his glovebox and then proceeds to get his license from his wallet, at which point the cop proceeds to shoot him even though it should be clear at this point he's not going for the gun.
It takes a gigantic idiot to even assume someone who's about to pull a gun an attempt to murder you in plain daylight is about to declare his intentions beforehand to an armed police officer right next to him.
But he did act exactly according to this rule. His hand never went near the gun which as he informed was in the glovebox, and he wasn't going for the glovebox, which he even confirmed a second time ('I'm not reaching for it'). The problem is the officer never listened or did not believe him that the gun was in the box and opened fire due to sheer panic and incompetence even though his hand was never near where the weapon was.
Incorrect. He never touched his firearm at any point or even went near it. The officer thought he did, because the officer did not listen and/or believe him about the location of the gun.
Agreed and mind you I never claimed it did. This is gross incompetence and lack of proper training. These kinds of individuals should not be working as mall cops let alone as police officers.
I'm not american and I know this is offtopic but I have karma to burn. I admit i laughed at first toó but this doesn't feel like much of a joke after just seeing the recent dashcam footage of a legal firearm owner being summarily executed by an incompetent cop with inadequate/improper training and getting acquitted.
Forget about the talk of 'racism', this goes far beyond such things. What confuses me the most however is the deafening silence of groups like the NRA who normally make so much noise about upholding gun rights, but now that a law abiding citizen who even lets the officer now he's carrying a firearm in his vehicle just gets 4 shots at him from point blank range nobody says anything.
Think about what this case is signalling: it doesn't matter if you do everything right. It doesn't matter if you're not hostile and have a license to carry a firearm. If the cop is twitchy and panics, whether it's because he's racist and scared of you simply due to your skin tone or because he's an incompetent asshole makes no difference, he can just shoot you dead on the spot and face no consequences. All it takes is for the cop to say that he felt as if he's in danger. As feelings are subjective it doesn't need to be justified in any way.
Think about the stupidity of the argument in this specific case: they essentially convinced a jury that the officer in question hears the man saying he has a firearm and thought process in the immediate seconds following this statement is: "shit, this guy just informed me he has a legal firearm, the next thing he's probably going to do is pull it out and unload on me with his wife and kid in the car, that's how all the gangsters always operate. Best err on the side of caution and go directly to LETHAL FORCE'. You can clearly see in the video that the cop panics. He hears the word 'firearm' and goes from 'okay' to 'don't pull it out then' to four shots to the chest in like less than 5 seconds. The guy even mentions that the weapon is in his glove box. so there's no practical way for the him to get to his gun fast enough in order for him to present any actual danger to the officer. And the jury's like 'Oh that makes sense, he had reasonable cause'. What? This behavior would make more sense in a country like Japan where guns are banned almost entirely and the cops don't usually have to deal with armed citizenry. I was under the impression that american police training would deal with these kinds of cases a lot because you have the most guns per capita so these kind of encounters should be standard procedure for the cops.
Can anybody argue after this that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is not infringed if carrying one legally gets you killed by the law for doing nothing except following the rules?
You're absolutely correct. However here's the problem with trying to get many people to understand this: the vast majority of people have no ability to even understand simple scientific abstracts, or even the news summaries written about them, let alone actually test anything. For many laymen it's a choice between believing what the folks in the white robes using cryptic symbols and vast machines are saying or not. So they make the exact same point you did, which is that this reminds them of the clergy, and as the clergy's clearly spouting bullshit these guys must be too, right?
I was recently trying to explain to someone on facebook why we have clear evidence for the climate warming up. The guy, who obviously didn't have much beyond an elementary school education, kept coming back to "Do you just believe it, or did you check it yourself?" Essentially, his point was that as I haven't gone through the vast majority of the scientific papers involving climate change myself and verified the results of thousands upon thousands of researchers whose skills exceed my own by several orders of magnitude, I have not in fact checked anything and am simply 'taking the scientists on faith.'
Even if I really wanted to, I couldn't do all the math again and check all the models and data used myself, I just don't have the skills (let alone the time and equipment) to do that. So there is a level of faith involved, but there's a clear difference between the kind oi religious faith he was talking about and you mentioned, and the kind of 'faith' most of us have in qualified experts and peer-reviewed research. Most of us who're not medical professionals won't understand the lab results ourselves, we tend to believe the doctor, or if we want to be extra sure we ask for additional information from another expert.
Science itself is a method, but there is such a thing as scientific consensus, which unlike religious consensus is subject to change. I'm not a cancer researcher for example nor can I claim to have the skills to understand and critique the papers written on the connections between say smoking and cancer, but I have enough 'faith' in the institution of modern medicine to believe, with a very very high certainty, that the expert opinion is correct and smoking causes cancer. Would I go as far as to say I know this to be true? Yes, yes I would because I trust the source, in this case the consensus of the relevant fields that's been refined over the decades.
Knowledge requires belief because knowledge is a subset of belief. Knowledge is the type of belief which is justified by evidence. Science is the tool used by experts to gather said evidence and the best tool we have devised to separate false beliefs from justified, true beliefs. Those of us who have a scientific view of the world (which I think here on /. constitutes most if not all of us) still believe things without understanding all the evidence personally, but that's because we believe the scientists. Not individual scientists mind you, but the community.
When phrases like "X doesn't believe in science" are used, they refer to people like the guy I was talking to who cannot understand any evidence to begin with because they do not even want to. It doesn't matter how many articles and different expert opinions you hand him, since it doesn't make any sense for him and in his head he thinks it's all just a cult that needs to be taken on 'faith' he will ignore them and keep occupying his own reality.
'
I think you misunderstood what I meant because I somewhat accidentally used the word nomination. I wasn't referring to the primaries, I was referring to the actual election and winning the presidency. I should have worded it '...to secure the presidency' but my brain misfired. That is, that the current setup makes it so that a populist candidate needs less of the popular vote to win the election.
My apologies for the confusion.
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules. The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
Please explain to me how having less than a third of the populace support the president translates to 'a broad, nationwide support'?
No, I did not say that's what I think, I said I'm under the impression that that's the reason behind EC's existence. But to clarify yes the people can sometimes be cheated into voting for candidates that should not be allowed to rule because they hold immoral/unconstitutional views (see, third reich among other things, Adolf was democratucally elected). HOWEVER, this is not the case now as what's happened in the 2000s is that the EC does the reverse, helping to automatically nominate a person that gets less of the votes without it having anything to do with consideration of the candidates but simply following preset rules.
No they are not. See, what I'm saying is precisely that the EC does not prevent a populist from winning in is current shape, it makes it easier by shrinking the amount of the popular vote one needs to secure to win the nomination. The EC on paper is an organ of governance which is supposed to be able to affect the outcome of the election based on their own judgement of the candidates, but it does not do so under any circumstances so it's just become an automated engine for wannabe-populists to gain power by winning the 'right' votes. This makes no sense and is in contradiction with what I understand to be the point of something like the EC.
I never claimed it is legally binding, I just loaned the phrase from there to reflect the fact that i do not think the EC in its current function serves the american ideal of people being equal.
They won't be ignored or abused. In a popular vote the vote of everyone counts the same, no matter the location. The idea of a democracy is that everyone has an equal say in the matter on the vote. The fact that a city has millions of people living in it does not logically translate to 'therefore the people in the countryside need to have more votes." The geographical location you inhabit should not bear any weight in a democratic vote in my view, It doesn't do so here (Finland) or anywhere else in the west, and you don't see the people in the countryside being 'ignored or abused'. The people in the countryside hold power in proportion to their numbers and still have the local municipal governments to represent them on a national level.
But this turns the system on its head giving undue power to those people. Why should someone living on the countryside have any more say in who rules over the entire country? The people in the cities are just as much citizens as the people in the countryside. Just because someone lives in a sparsely populated area does not mean their opinion of who should rule should count any more. That's what equality means, that's what democracy as a decision making method means.
There are other means of making sure that the majority cannot override the rights of the minorities. That's why countries have constitutions which guarantee rights to people and protect them from being eaten by majority votes. You're arguing that in addition to this the people on the countryside deserve to get to choose the president moreso than the people in the cities, which makes no sense to me.
I understand why the system is the way it is, I just think it'
Not an american but you guys should seriously consider getting rid of the electoral college. I'm no expert on american political history but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant. That is, the founding fathers were smart enough to understand that there are times in which the democratic will of the people may be hijacked, and this is where the electoral college could step in and make a more rational choice.
However, has it ever actually worked that way? No. Has the electoral college ever actually had any will of their own? No. It's simply made american elections to be this weird-ass game in which it's possible to win by getting less of the popular vote b y playing essentially moneyball with the election as Trump successfully did. Twice in the 2000s the EC has resulted in the candidate with less votes winning the nomination. It's a catch 22: supposing the candidate that wins the popular vote wins the EC as well, the EC cannot then vote against the candidate even if there's good cause to suspect he/she is a risk to the nation because that would go against the will of the people. If the candidate that wins the EC and loses the popular vote as with Trump the EC still can't do its job and vote any differently because that would be seen as 'changing the system" and there'd be a massive outcry over a hijacked election.
Now think about it, Trump would have been a perfect case for the EC to step in: he's clearly an unstable individual, lacks any political experience and his 'proposals' are for the most part rather insane and there's a good case to be made that he may in fact be suffering from an onset of Alzheimer's (disjointed speech, erratic personality, highly limited covabulary and repeated use of generic words such as something, anything etc.). Less then third of the country actually supported him and the other candidate in fact got MORE votes, so the EC siding against Trump because he's unfit to rule and siding with the majority of the voters would be rationally and democratically justified. Like, a more clear-cut example case of why the electoral college exists cannot be found in recent history. However did they do it? No, because as I said the EC has just become a stamping mechanism which currently makes the votes of individuals count less in some states than in others. In fact when this possibility was brought up aqfter the elections it was held as layghable by most. "What, actually electing the person who got the most votes? Don't be kidding, we have to elect the unstable raving orange dude, I mean, he won 'the system'. Nothing we can do. Rules is rules." And because they cannot deviate from voting according to the rules of the game, the people in the EC might just as well be kicked out and the system changed so that votes are valued differently based on the states. I mean, it'd be de facto the same thing as the current model. It makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of democracy, and it does not further the benefit of the american people, from my view.
It should not be possible in a democracy for a person to be elected into the most powerful seat in the land by getting less votes. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...", if your vote counts less than someone else's because you live in California and not Ohio, you are not equal. The system that was originally pout in place to safeguard the republic from tyranny has now been morphed into something which actually makes it easier for any would-be tyrants to step in because you don't even have to win the popular vote.
You're right that the concept of a propagandist is not new at all.
However you're incorrect in saying that only the commercial monetization is new. The social media technologies in use globally bring an entirely new dimension to propaganda, namely: customization and targeting of the message on a user-by-user basis. No longer do you have to think about crafting propaganda which will appeal to a broad base of people, you can write several different angles on the same story and disseminate them so that different versions are only visible to a target audience that's most likely to buy that version of it. Quoting the report itself:
This level of segmentation of your target audience would never have been possible in the age of tv or newspaper lead propaganda. Also crowdsourcing has now entered the game:
And so on. The game is changing rapidly because traditional news channels are no longer the primary channel of information delivery to most people. If you can get a piece of propaganda out on social media before commentary hits on the news, you have a huge advantgae: you've already primed the targeted audience with preconceptions
They're using pumps as redundancy now, but that's really not really how the vault is supposed to work. It's intended to survive without human maintenance in case of global catastrophes. Quoting the article:
How the fuck did you manage to read my comment and construe my argument as saying that the islamic countries are tolerant? I never made that claim and I certainly do not think that's the case.
My whole point is that the islam of today is essentially 'as tolerant' as the catholicism of the middle-ages, which is to say not at all, but the solution to this has to lie in educating the younger muslims because that is the only reliable tool with which they can oppose the ideology, The catholics did not become tolerant because the bible says love your enemy, it's been saying that all along and that didn't stop the wars and the genocides. The catholics are becoming more tolerant because the individuals no longer rely on the church for their source of information, but have access to actual education.
I'm an atheist, in fact you could call me an anti-theist. But just because I'd like to see organized religions disappear does not mean the sensible thing to do is to demonize all of the muslims. The muslims currently trapped in conflict zones and under oppressive regimes aren't going to get the education and the information they need to oppose the cancerous dogma that's being fed into them by staying where they are. So if your imagined solution is "just block them all from the west and all will be well" (which is not doable anyway because there are plenty of western muslims) then you're essentially acting exactly as the extremist imams want you to act.
Keep in mind this also doesn't mean we need to bring everyone of them here to the west, but if we are to take a moral high ground on this matter and claim that western humanist values (sometimes mistakenly referred to as 'christian values') are better, then we cannot adopt the stance of: "oh, you're someone living under the oppressive theocracy of religious fanatics. Too bad, stay there and die, we don't care". That will only benefit the opposing side in the long term.
Hold the fuck on, what kind of an argument is this?! So when fundamentalist catholics hundreds of years ago used their interpretation in the past to justify war, slavery and genocide, that's not the fault of the religion because they've stopped now? What? Do you not understand youi just refuted your own argument essentially: ANY faith/doctrine easily turns into a tool of violent politics when it's taken fundamentally. Fundamentalism by its nature is the problem.
And even if we ignore the crusades, the catholic church openly supported the third reich, took one side over the other in the Rwandan genocide, not to even speak of the still ongoing tendency of the church to protect pedophiles it employs from facing criminal prosecution and so on. The church has done a lot of evil just within the lifespan of people who're still alive.
Now don't get me wrong, the catholic church today has certainly come a long way from the catholic church that burned witches at the stake and murdered their way through the levant in the name of their faith so I'm not comparing modern day catholic church to isis. But what I'm doing is trying to point out to you that the texts haven't changed. The same bible that was used to justify the enslavement, death and torture of millions because 'god wills it' (the catholic variant of allahu akbar) is still in use today. Attitudes have changed and the church has been slowly stripped of power by the secular states that rose to limit the power of the Holy see.
Do you think the popes of the past willingly wanted to give away their lands and essentially their position as one of the most powerful men in the world over to nation states and politicians? No. They had to because the enlightenment arrived and slowly christians started the lurch towards tolerating other christian sects. After the 2nd world war what little credibility the church had left was lost completely when they sided with Hitler because they were afraid. Yeah, the man supposedly selected by the overlord of all of existence was so scared of an angry German corporal that he did what apparently in his view Jesus would have done, which is join hands with this guy and his intent to kill all the jews and the gays and the cripples.
People don't realize this but christianity is essentially still in the process of being dragged from the middle-ages to the modern day and so is Islam. It's just that we've had a centuries upon centuries more time to try to beat the mantra of 'No don't slaughter the infidels, bad Pope, bad Pope!" into their heads. it's important to note that christianity was allowed to mellow down at the same pace with the surrounding societies, so while the dogma of christianity eventually turned against the mass slaughter of unbelievers no single christian individual went from 'death to the infidels' to 'love and respect for everyone regardless of their faith' during their lifetimes. The change was gradual.
Now we don't have centuries to deal with islam which is a genuine problem. The nature of the islamic holy texts is also different from the bible which is an additional problem. That is, unlike the bible which contains very small parts of god supposedly directly speaking to people and even the christians have long agreed that the bible is the work of erran
Ahahahahahahaa. Translation: "You're talking bullshit. the Russians are not hiding everywhere."
Firstly: did I say they're everywhere? Nope. Finland and the US are both strategic targets for Russian information warfare for rather obvious reasons. Second of all, they're not doing that good a job of hiding in the first place, the comments are often quite easy to spot- Thirdly, there's been journalism done that exposes these kinds of operations here and elsewhere in the Nordics, google is your friend.
So you've effectively been spotted, but it's okay, you still managed to mess up the US elections pretty effectively so it wasn't all for nothing, Calm down Comrade and have some chai and pirogi. ;)
I just said this here last week: The Russians post comments on Finnish news sites and forums in Finnish. If they have the time and the resources to do propaganda on sites with readerships that are a tiny tiny fraction of /.'s, there's absolutely no doubt that they're actively posting and moderating here as well.
The way they operate in the social media is by having vast amounts of bots/fake accounts, usually with western names. Then they push out articles through their own media corps directly (RT etc,) or via 3rd parties like different conspiracy sites and communities that then share these on FB & al. Then they use the bots to 'moderate' these post for high visibility with likes and shares. In here, probably some of their people just gather mod points and then other write posts which the modders then vote up.
Did you know that this claim is total BS? Look at the numbers:
The definition of rape in >weden is broader than elsewhere in the west, including stuff that elsewhere would be charged under sexual harassment. Secondly the reporting works differently in that they estimate the total amount of offenses: So if a wife reports that her husband has been having sex with her against her will dozens of times, in most places it's filed as a single case of suspected rape for the national crime stats, but in Sweden they count each suspected instance separately meaning that a single case can easily generate tens or hundreds of incidents of rape for the stats. This means comparing Swedish stats to other western nations directly is not really sensible.
Lol, I can guarantee you've never lived in Sweden (me neither but I live next door in Finland and visit regularly and have friends there) . There's extensive discussion about crime stats as there's one party in the parliament that's trying to do exactly what you're trying to do, which is to insinuate that the fluctuation in the numbers is due to immigrants somehow raping people en masse on the streets, which is simply not true.
You're correct that the left these days in Europe (and I say this as a Finnish leftist myself) is more worried about populism because right wing populism is on the rise. However, you're wrong if you think this means I - or the left in general - think disagreement or in fact populism itself should be disallowed. There's nothing wrong with being a populist. I mean, the point of a politician after all is to try and enact the will of the people who elected him, so populism in a sense is central to western politics.
The problem with populism is that the more complicated a topic, the easier it is for populists to oversimplify the issue and paint an entirely skewed picture to the voters. And this is not a partisan issue, the same faults and problems are entirely possible on the left itself, it's just that right now the right has embraced this kind of populism more.
No. I'm saying that if you're having a vote on an important and complex issue there should be impartial information handed out to the voters about the outcomes. In Switzerland (arguably the nation curently furthest in implementing direct democracy) whenever they have these votes on matters of policy, they get beforehand an information package that contains the pros and cons of both sides. Look at the amount of information and material that the Swiss get before they head to the polls on any issue:
So yes, they get marketing material in retsricted amounts by the parties, but they also get booklets constructed by the government about the pros and cons of the issue. This way, the parties cannot easly make wild assertions in their marketing of the issue because the opposing side can easily say: "check the numbers from the booklet, their claim is false." and you will lose the vote.
If the information about the vote is left for the campaigns of both sides and no facts whatsoever are established in the mind of the populace, then certainly the people cannot be trusted to vote correctly because they might