When I heard this story on the radio this morning, the most surprising bit was that Syria is responsible for the rise of ISIS.
This is not what I said or meant and I'm pretty sure you know that.
I'm sure last week it was the destabilization of Iraq that was the cause of ISIS.
Yes, this is what happened but the thing is once a state the size of Iraq collapses into quasi-anarchy the conflict does not stay confined to the borders of said ex-state. Without the collapse of Iraq there'd be no isis, and without isis the situation in Syria wouldn't be as messy as it is now. There might and probably still would be a civil war in Syria, but right now that war is made a lot more complicated and bloody by isis, which is opposed by both Assad, Russia and the US but the defeat of which is made more complicated because said 3 factions are also opposed to each other. The US is trying to get rid of isis and Assad, Assad/Russia is trying to get rid of Isis and the rebels, and the rebels are trying to get rid of Assad and isis. There is no easy solution to this mess, because if the US removes Assad from power it's likely that Syria will be in even worse shape than it is now, as it is unclear which faction outside Assad's regime has the skills and the resources to maintain control of Syria.
Backing Assad means backing the sole Russian ally in the region which the US cannot do, but this also means that realistically speaking getting the conflict in Syria contained is extremely difficult, much more so than it would be if this was a war with only 2 sides.
Yes. when the US does it in its own interests, it's 'warmongering.' When the US does it at the behest of a NATO ally, it's still 'warmongering.' When anyone else does it, it's because of US 'warmongering.'
Well, if the US had not destabilized the entire region by failing at nation-building it's unlikely that any of the current events in Syria/Iraq would have occurred.
This doesn't mean the US bears responsibility for actions that other countries perform, but it's just a matter of fact that US warmongering has created a massive power-vacuum in the middle-east which has lead to the rise of the current clusterfuck of issues.
Using overseas wars as a distraction from domestic politics comes with a price.
I'm an active follower of youtube and watch a lot of Vlogs and podcasts and the likes. Rcenetly in the wake of the so called "PewPewdie scandal" youtube has apparently shifted to be more and more restricve about what kind of content they allow to be monetized. Certain tags and words appear to be banned from getting ad-revenue, (recently it came to light their new policy prohibits including 'atheist' in one's channel name, and in general old channels with atheism in their tittle have seen a huge drop in revenue. Have a look at their 'advertiser friendly content guidelines':
Content that is considered "not advertiser-friendly" includes, but is not limited to:
Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity and sexual humor Violence, including display of serious injury and events related to violent extremism Inappropriate language, including harassment, profanity and vulgar language Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown If any of the above describes any portion of your video, then the video may not be approved for monetization. If monetization is approved, your video may not be eligible for all available ad formats. YouTube reserves the right to not monetize a video, as well as suspend monetization features on channels that repeatedly submit videos violating our policies.
This is all very very strange from a business perspective. I understand that youtube/Google wants to give their paying customers - advertisers - more control over the kind of content their ads are displayed on. I understand that they want to compete more directly with services such as Netflix. However, I do not understand their decision to do this in this way. independent content has been the core of YT for a decade now. it's what lifted them to their current position. And now they want to actively reduce their range of content because a single streamer made some jokes some people/companies didn't like? Like, to me it just seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Besides, none of this applies to their corporate users, CNN and other news channels can still run content about terrorism and politics and keep getting ad-money, but if a private individual creates content on the same topic they don't get revenue? This is completely nonsensical. the correct move would be to allow advertisers determine whether or not they want their ads to be run just on 'approved' channels or on all kinds of videos. Hell, I can bet you that there are advertisers that would like to specifically target for example political videos or videos with black/vulgar humor or swears. The people who watch this type of content (myself included) are still consumers that buy items and services and they are a separate segment than those who prefer 'family friendly' content, so preventing advertising for this segment to me makes no sense whatsoever.
Instead of offering a more 'netflix-like' curated experience for those that want it and keeping the 'old youtube' as it is, they've now put in place guidelines which can be used to essentially destroy the majority of independent political vloggers for example. Sure, some of them can manage to keep going via services like Patreon allowing them to accept donationsfunding directly from the audience but that option is really only available to channels with a rather large following.
To me the great thing about YT has been the possibility it offers: if you create content that's appealing to people - whether it's in-depth political analysis, debates, silly animations or just guys s
Feel free to start a trade war, the US is only 4% of the worlds population and 20% of the worlds GDP. Asia is where all the real growth is, China is the biggest economy and growing, US firms could see themselves locked out of the Asian market. "Friends" of the USA have seen how Trump treats them, countries if they have any sense will be planning on what to do if the US is no longer there as a trading partner. Sure its going to hurt for a wee while, but everyone will recover. It will open opportunities for the likes of Airbus and Boeing gets sidelined, it will open up opportunities for EU companies to replace Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, HP, etc etc etc etc etc.
As a European I agree with this with one exception: it doesn't necessarily mean said companies will be 'replaced' by others. Multinational companies can re-locate themselves just as people can. If a trade war is started and Google & Co do the math and figure staying in the US will hurt their bottom line too much they'll move out and become European for example.
This is one of the main reasons why trade wars are stupid and counter--productive in this day and age. Capital and corporations can move across borders rapidly, and they will do so the moment said trade war will start hurting them too much. Trumpsters seem to be under the illusion there's some magical property making american companies forever american. Right now they are because currently the american stock market and environment is still the best place to do business from but if that changes these guys are not going to stay because they're patriots or some such nonsense. They care about money and making it, not the color of the flag waving atop their headquarter.
Often the most important factor in avoiding an accident is reaction time. For a human, the time between an event occurring, and the brake being depressed is 1500 ms or more. At 70mph, that is 150ft, before the reaction even starts. For a computer, the reaction time is about 1ms, which at 70mph is a few inches.
This, so much this. Most accidents occur because people either fail to observe their surroundings or they react to observations too late.
Modern cars already have numerous systems that do very similar thing: electronic breakforce distribution, emergency brake assist, electronic stability control, traction control system just to name a few. All of these are pretty standard features of modern vehicles and all of them are designed to let the computer counter the driver's lack of reaction speed and situational awareness. And they work; when I got my license here in Finland the first few winters were snow-heavy (by Finnish standards, which means tens of centimeters of snow) and I'm certain that on several occasions the ESC system kept me on the road/on the lane, because even though we're obviously trained to drive in winter conditions, it's a whole different deal to control the vehicle on an slippery test track or under the supervision of the trainer than it is to try and do so amidst traffic and poor weather/visibility. Reducing speed helps a lot obviously, but black ice and other factors come into play so it's possible to be driving just fine and hit a patch of black ice hidden under a layer of snow for example. Under such circumstances, these kinds of systems actually do their job and they end up saving lives.
When we're dealing with situations such as: "unless the trajectory of the vehicle is changed or breaks are applied within 0,5 seconds a crash is unavoidable" I want the vehicle to react and not wait for my slow-ass reflexes to kick in and slam me to a wall.
They also promote the image the company wants to project publicly in many cases.
Fun anecdote about this that happened to a friend who's a linux sysadmin at a midsize software house here in Finland. Much like me (and most people I know that don't have to be in regular customer contact). He usually wears hoodies, t-shirts, cargopants. You know, the typical 'casual and comfortable nerdy look" but for said meeting with a larger customer he was prepared to suit up, when his boss actually interrupted him and told him not to do that but wear his regular clothes.
The reason for this is that having your linux guy look slightly nerdish (while still being clean and professional) is something they wanted to do for image reasons.
I've never much like suits partially because being in a wheelchair getting into one takes a fuckton of time and I rather dress comfortably, so unless I'm outright ordered to do so by my superiors I'll wear what I always wear. And just recently I was in a joint meeting with several people, some guys from the army were along. Some people were wearing suits, one was wearing a woolen shirt, the officers were all in uniforms and I was in the corner wearing a Metallica-hoodie. If they did judge me for that they were very good at hiding it, because I sensed no disrespect from anyone, and never have, but I'd like to think that's because I know what I'm talking about and the respect is earned through actions and not based on appearance.
You point out corporations are already paying armies of lobbyists to avoid taxes. You really think a group of top tier capital owner class types wont employ an army or robots that looks much more like the armies of the past and simply refuse to pay the taxes? What does for example Amazon need the government for once they can hire/build their own fully automated asset protection?
The government is needed to afford the masses some means of income so that the businesses can keep their consumer base and keep operating.
Most consumer businesses will collapse under a system where the majority of individuals have no jobs and no alternative source of income. You may not like UBI but something like it is going to be a necessity if/when automation reaches a high enough point, because the economies cannot function without consumer demand, which in turn cannot exist without people having a source of income.
This is quite possibly the stupidest response to climate related issues I've ever seen. It's very very true that the change cannot be reversed or prevented altogether, but that still doesn't mean there aren't plenty of things we can - and should - do to mitigate the effects. We can't fix everything, but if we opt to do nothing and continue business as usual with the fossil fuels for example, we can make things a lot worse,
It's psychologically appealing to lift one's hands into the air and declare that it's all fucked already and we can do nothing but sit and wait for extinction, but it's also simultaneously the intellectual equivalent of 'well, my liver's already damaged from all this drinking, so might just as well keep drinking because who cares at this point?'
Call me an idealist if you wish but even though I may never end up having kids, I still care about the continued survival of the species past the point of my own death.
If the financial institutions knew this was bad paper they wouldn't have kept hundreds of billions of dollars worth of it on their own books.
The institutions responsible for creating said CDOs certainly knew, or at least had all the information required to know. I mean they intentionally took loans they knew would get bad credit rating and then used essentially a loophole in the regulations to get the rating higher than it should be. There's no way to argue that they didn't know what they were doing. At the same time, they obviously have to keep some of the papers themselves to maintain the appearance of it being a safe investment. I mean it'd be impossible to try and sell the subprime 'AAA' CDOs as a completely safe and a risk free product if you yourself kept none of it, it would look highly suspicious and reveal the scam to any potential buyer.
People like Michael Burry (a mathematician btw) were able to 'predict' the financial crisis simply by going through the contents of these instruments by hand and crunching the numbers. If a single smart investor is able to figure this out just by looking at the data, do you seriously expect me to believe the banks themselves that operated this scheme and agreed to settle and be fined for it were unaware that they were peddling bullshit? Huh? This obviously doesn't mean everyone at the banks knew what was going on, but certainly key people did, because they have to have knowledge on the kind of instruments they're themselves creating/selling. It's de facto impossible to argue that they didn't know.
Besides, the banks involved, including Bank of America, still made money even after factoring in the settlements they've had to pay since. The six largest players in the scheme have been fined approximately 150 billion for the scandal, while their combined profit over that time (2007-2014) totaled around 700 billion, that's the whole point of the argument I was making: the banks knew what they were up to, provably so, and they also knew they'd be able to turn a profit even if the scheme collapsed because by that time they'd have sold off most of these products.
You can kill 10 people and go to Jail, rape and kill in there too, and still get a sentence that's a fraction of the above with ability for parole. But trick an idiot company and take their money and you suddenly face up to 80 years jailtime?!
And yet, if instead of scamming some 100 million from a couple of companies the guy had been working for an investment bank or a credit rating agency and created purposefully misleading derivatives to help crash the global economy to the tune of billions in damages, he'd have gotten no jail time at all. Not a single bank executive has seen jailtime for causing the 2008 crisis, even though the extent of damages makes scams like this seem like pickpocketing and it's quite clear that the banks knew exactly what they were doing.when they started creating collateralized debt obligations from the subprime loans to circumvent the credit rating system. Quoting the wiki:
According to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, "the CDO became the engine that powered the mortgage supply chain",[7] promoting an increase in demand for mortgage-backed securities without which lenders would have "had less reason to push so hard to make" non-prime loans.[8] CDOs not only bought crucial tranches of subprime mortgage-backed securities, they provided cash for the initial funding of the securities.[7] Between 2003 and 2007, Wall Street issued almost $700 billion in CDOs that included mortgage-backed securities as collateral.[7] Despite this loss of diversification, CDO tranches were given the same proportion of high ratings by rating agencies[30] on the grounds that mortgages were diversified by region and so "uncorrelated"[31]—though those ratings were lowered after mortgage holders began to default.[32][33]
The rise of "ratings arbitrage"—i.e. pooling low-rated tranches to make CDOs—helped push sales of CDOs to about $500 billion in 2006,[14] with a global CDO market of over USD $1.5 trillion.[34] CDO was the fastest-growing sector of the structured finance market between 2003 and 2006; the number of CDO tranches issued in 2006 (9,278) was almost twice the number of tranches issued in 2005 (4,706)
(emphasis mine)
What it basically means is that if you tried creating a CDO using subprime loans from a single region it would have been rated badly (as it should, it's an extremely high risk product as many of the loans had been granted pretty much without any checks on the ability of the lender to pay for them), but if you take equally shitty loans from several different areas the credit rating agencies put a AAA stamp on it, because according to their logic at the time this means the default risk is now diversified, which is complete bullshit.
This should showcase the real issue with these cases: the courts - especially in the US but also elsewhere in the West - are keen to protect the interests of corporations. Embezzlement/fraud of corporate funds will lead to heavy jail time when caught. That's why Maddof is in jail: he scammed rich folks and corporations. However at the same time the courts go so far to protect corporate interests that megacorporations themselves can pretty much act with inpunity - cause a massive oilspill or an economic meltdown and you'll get fined, and you can write that down as yet another operational cost and keep doing business as usual.
I do not have a problem with large scale financial crime being punished heavily, because it has far reaching consequences and fines don't work against people and corporations with massive fortunes. However, the laws should be applied evenly to everyone, including the financial sector itself when it fucks up. Right now the US is basically letting WS do whatever it pleases and if shit hits the fan the costs are externalized to the taxpayer. And the City of London is no better,
If that were true, you wouldn't be talking about ads at all. Because your users don't want any ads in the product they bought
But they were not speaking about whether or not users want ads or not. The phrasing used was "putting in commercial opportunities that we think users don't want to interact with." (emphasis mine).
People generally do not like ads, but that does not mean they do not have an effect on them when exposed to ads. What ad firms like google are interested in is the likelihood of you being affected by an ad, they do not care whether or not the customer wants the ad or not. If I was given a choice by Steam for example I'd disable the desktop ads that it pushes once a day or so when starting Steam. However at the same time I've still bought a game once or twice from these ads if the discount is good enough. Same goes for telemarketing and spam: if you poll people, nearly 100 % of them would tell you they'd want to wipe these forms of advertising from the face of the planet, however since these are still effective they will keep getting used.
There's been a lot of research put into how ads effect people over the decades and the marketing industry has long since realized that subtlety is the key. Most consumers dislike direct ads so product placement and sponsored content is the way advertisers are heading into in this day and age where even relatively non-tech savy people are capable of installing ad-block. Moreover, the individual consumer is not the paying customer for Google, the advertisers are. So in fact, the statement is properly decoded from business-speak as: "We don't want to offer non-effective means of advertising to our customers".
In essence this means that what Google wants to avoid is 'old school' advertising where the user googles something like 'cheap laptops' and then starts to get spammed with different kinds of ads for laptops because while those work for some people, they're not nearly as effective as waiting for the user to pick a search result for a laptop, and then intervening with something like. "We've noticed you're interested in model X from manufacturer Y, here are listings for products with equivalent specs at lower prices:"
Most users will not feel this is an ad and are in fact likely to interact with such functionality because it offers them some value. However at the same time this is something that Google can easily sell to its existing customers (advertisers) because it fits in nicely with the keyword model and can be easily varied.
Your postings are just poorly masked "if you disagree with me you are an evil bigot".
Eh, what? I have no problem whatsoever with people diagreeing with me so long as they base their disagreement in facts. The whole reason I comment actively in places like/. is because I'm fine with discussion and open to new ideas so long as they're rationally justified.
Its people like you that prevent real progress from happening because it is more important to you to be liberal than to actually help people.
I've been discussing different approaches to drug policies and addiction and how results from the world compare to each other. It's pretty clear in light of the evidence to me that the US modelf of jailing people for long amounts of time for non-violent drug offenses is not helping anyone, the people jailed, or the society itself. So tell me again how I'm not interested in progress and helping people?
That ends up with hundreds of people being killed in Chicago violence every year and nothing done because Chicago is already "liberal" and "doing the right thing". So you just let mass murder continue because liberalism is FAR more important than actually helping anyone.
Again, all I can say is: how does pointing out that the model currently used by the US to combat drug-addiction and crimes is ineffective at achieving results translate to 'liberalism is FAR more important than actually helping anyone."?
As I said I'm a Finn so I'm not an expert in what's going on in Chicago, but it's my understanding that the high amount of crime currently going on is connected to the drug trade, which tends to drive such organized crime. Now my proposed solution is to allow people to acquire substances legally, which would destroy the ability of organized crime to rake in billions with the drug trade, and hence would also cut down on the amount of crime related to said black market business. I am of this opinion precisely because I'd want people to be helped, so I frankly do not understand how you manage to make such inferences.
Yes, and the right is also traditionally more religious so these are connected.
Punishment" bad right for wanting people to take responsibility for their lives.
The whole point the comment was to highlight that punishing people with jailtime for substance abuse is a non-functioning strategy for getting them to take responsibility for themselves. People use drugs for a variety of reasons, but taking addicts and putting them into what's likely even a worse environment than they're normally in and then releasing them with a criminal record that makes them integrating into society even harder is a sociologically and psychologically ineffective way of getting people out of addiction.
The idea of personal responsibility is not a bad thing at all, but the notion that personal responsibility can be instilled in people via means of imprisonment in this context is, because we know it does not work.
"War on drugs" blames the right.
The war on drugs is a right wing idea. Started by Nixon. Objectively speaking it is the right wing in the US that's been promoting this approach throughout the decades and this is just a political fact. The US is far more to the right than other western nations, and the US also jails the most people for non-violent drug offenses.
Even within the US if you look at the states that've been at the forefront of legalizing weed they tend to be states controlled by democrats.
Doesn't mention even though left has been just as involved. In fact only shows left in positive light
Just as involved? Huh? By what metric? Obama allowed legalization of weed on a state-by-state basis and now Trump and republicans are talking about possibly cracking down on it. I'm not saying there aren't people on the left who have equally backwards ideas of addiction and drugs as on the right, pr that there aren't libertarians on the right who agree that the war on drugs is a fool's errand and should be stopped. But in general terms it's true not just of the US but the world that right wing parties tend to favor jail sentences and other 'tough on crime' measures moreso than the left.
I'm a Finn myself, and from a US perspective we're very far to the left with out policies but our drug policies are not ideal either. We still jail people for it which I deem to be nonsensical and wrong, but the sentences are far lighter than in the US and we have better access to treatment/social programs, as a result of which we have less of a problem with drugs than say, the US.
So again: I'm not saying the left is or has been perfect, but just looking at policies from across the US and the world, the left has a better track record at the moment than the right.To ignore this is to ignore reality and claim that somehow countries outside the US with more left-leaning and liberal policies do not exist, Uruguay is the first country that's legalized the production, sale and use of cannabis entirely, and it did so in 2013 under José Mujica, a leftist president.
What could possibly have been said is all current political attempts at a solution aren't working
There's only really been 1 strategy that's been tried so far and that's essentially prohibition, which we should know by now is ineffective. It was ineffective for alcohol, and stats-wise it's just as if not more ineffective with other intoxicants.
Something like reduce or eliminate the laws against pot and put more funding into neurological research
Yes.
while continuing the fight against drug violence and support foreign governments attempts at stopping production.
No. This is where it goes wrong. The only permanently effective way to combat drug violence and
I stopped reading after your post brings in politics and makes the right evil while the left is savior of humanity.
What? If you had actually read my post rthrough you'd have noticed I did no such thing but specifically pointed out that both the left and the right have been by and large wrong in their approach.
The right is wrong in saying it's all about the individual. But the left is also wrong in saying it's nothing but chemicals and can be handled with medicine alone. That was the whole point of my post, and instead of bothering to read it you stopped after 4 sentences just to rave at me for essentially agreeing with you,
I'm sick and tired of people trying to shove their political leanings into everything now days.
Ironically enough, this is just what you yourself did by not reading through the argument that was presented.
The approach people take on addiction has a surprising connection to their political stance. For decades, the right has been approaching addiction as a mental/moral weakness: that those succumbing to addiction are not sick or diseased but mentally weak and need to be punished so that they will correct their behavior. This is the driving force behind the 'war on drugs':
Those on the left have taken more of a medical approach and insisted that addiction is a neurochemical issue which needs to be treated by doctors.
When we actually look at research and data it turns out the truth is slightly more complex than either of these models. Turns out, it's not just about character or chemicals, but the combination of addictive chemicals and the environment the individual is in. Around 20 % of US troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. However, upon returning to the States, only about 5 % of them continued using. This by itself has given researchers some insight into key components of addiction and the affect environment has on it. Quoting the link above:
Soon a comprehensive system was set up so that every enlisted man was tested for heroin addiction before he was allowed to return home. And in this population, Robins did find high rates of addiction: Around 20 percent of the soldiers self-identified as addicts.
Those who were addicted were kept in Vietnam until they dried out. When these soldiers finally did return to their lives back in the U.S., Robins tracked them, collecting data at regular intervals. And this is where the story takes a curious turn: According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.
"I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent," Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.
This flew in the face of everything everyone knew both about heroin and drug addiction generally. When addicts were treated in the U.S. and returned to their homes, relapse rates hovered around 90 percent. It didn't make sense.
"Everyone thought there was somehow she was lying, or she did something wrong, or she was politically influenced," Jaffe says. "She spent months, if not years, trying to defend the integrity of the study."
But 40 years later, the findings of this study are widely accepted. To explain why, you need to understand how the science of behavior change has itself changed.
"Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they've done it enough, their behavior doesn't follow their intentions," Neal explains.
Neal says this has to do with the way that over time, our physical environments come to shape our behavior.
"People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment," Neal says.
Outsourcing control over your behavior sounds a little funny. But consider what happens when you perform a very basic everyday behavior like getting into a car.
"Of course on one level, that seems like the simplest task possible," Neal says, "but if you break it down, there's really a myriad set of complex actions that are performed in sequence to do that."
You use a certain motion to put your key in the lock. And then physically manipulate your body to get into the seat. There is another set of motions to insert the key in the ignition.
"All of this is actually very complicated and someone who had never driven a car befo
Science has no problems with gray areas and unknown things.
I never claimed it does, I said that science doesn't entertain arguments which involve invisible/undetectable magical causes. You seem to be incapable of understanding the flaw in your position, you said: "You do not and cannot know whether that is all. It is highly unscientific to claim it." Which is incorrect because it's essentially saying that it's unscientific to dismiss supernatural causes and claims. It is not, because science deals with the natural world and observation. Lightning used to be considered a supernatural event that could not be explained by science. Once an explanation was discovered, it moved from the category of 'things that god(s) does' to 'things that nature does'.
Unless you have a method of scientifically testing for the existence of 'non-physical causes' for anything, arguing for those causes is no different from arguing that God causes lightning strikes.
Religion has.
Yes, and you're the one that has been making what is essentially a religious argument by claiming that because the current scientific model of the mind/consciousness is incomplete that somehow means supernatural/non-physical causes are likely to be behind the mind. This is not a scientific/rational argument but a theological one, and it's even more unfounded in reality now than it was back when Descartes made it.
You do not and cannot know whether that is all. It is highly unscientific to claim it.
It's not highly unscientific to claim that everything we observe in the universe has a physical cause (that is, a cause we can detect and observe) because science by its very nature deals only with observable reality. The idea that somehow because something is not fully understood we should assume a non-physical cause is illogical and goes against the principles of science.
Before you can argue for 'non-physical causes' you need to demonstrate that such exist, the burden of proof is on you to show that such processes are not only possible but actually real, and then further demonstrate how a non-physical process can be detected and how it can interact with the world. And if you did manage to somehow demonstrate such a cause and how it can be detected, guess what? At that point it's no longer a 'non-physical cause' but part of the natural world and the physical realm. This is precisely why substance dualism has not been taken seriously by anyone with half a brain for a couple of centuries: 'non-physical process' AKA 'soul' AKA magic is just a placeholder for 'things we do not yet understand."
You don't get to assert causes which have not been proven to exist and then claim that those causes are somehow responsible for things we have a thus far incomplete understanding of. That's a textbook case of argument from ignorance and the age-old theological argument rehashed:
Descartes's so-called dualism is often taken to represent a fundamental revolution in ideas and the starting point of modern philosophy....but in substance his work is... better understood as an attempt to conserve the old truths in the face of new threats. His dualism was in essence an armistice... between the established religion and the emerging science of his time....isolating the mind from the physical world... ensured that many of the central doctrines of orthodoxy—immortality of the soul, the freedom of will, and, in general, the "special" status of humankind—were rendered immune to any possible contravention by the scientific investigation of the physical world.... For men such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz, solving the mind-body problem was vital to preserving the theological and political order inherited from the Middle Ages... For Spinoza, it was a means of destroying that same order and discovering a new foundation for human worth.
-Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006)
Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions. As for their saying that human actions depend on the will, this is a mere phrase without any idea to correspond thereto.
When the core of your argument lies on premises that could be understood to be false by men living over 300 years ago, you know you're in need of education.
Poland and Finland wont anymore, but why should we put their people above our own families?
As a Finn: fuck you. We are not, and have never been, in NATO. We already pay for our own defense, every cent of it. We have compulsory military service for all men due to the size difference between us (5,4 million) and Russia (140 million). If push comes to shove we can muster nearly a trained million men into arms.
The strategy of defense for us is not to compete with Russia in a direct conflict. But when you scatter 800 000 soldiers to the woods with guns and (modern) equipment hidden all around the vast countryside, it's going to make Afghanistan look like a a walk in the park. The Russians have around 30 000 troops that they can mobilize rapidly across the border. That's nowhere near enough to take us on. An invasion would require them to start moving large amounts of troops from elsewhere, something they have very limited capacity to do at the moment because of funds and the ongoing conflicts in both Ukraine and Syria.
Which is to say: while we cannot singlehandedly defeat Russia, we can make occupying this country so costly to them in terms of lives and resources that they will have to think hard whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs. That's been the corner stone of the Finnish Defense Forces ever since the 2nd world war and so far the Russians have not desired to test just how serious we are about maintaining our independence, probably because they have some bad memories from the way the Winter War went for them.
But it's the only thing we can think of to employ Americans.
The problem in my view (as a non-american) with the military spending is that the military then has to be used to justify the gigantic cost of it. It creates a situation in which you pretty much have to be involved in perpetual conflicts because otherwise having 10 aircraft carrier groups, hundreds of bases outside the US and other tools designed to project insane amounts of force anywhere on the globe cannot be justified. Orwell had a point about this:
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
I am concerned that Google is attempting to act as a gatekeeper and arbiter of truth.
Why shouldn't they? I mean, it is a search engine, the point of which is to provide users accurate information. If a user googles something, they expect to be getting facts, no?
I mean, the algorithm already ranks pages by criteria. If you're arguing that Google shouldn't be doing this, you're essentially arguing they should allow people to push disinformation by manipulating search results by either Google bombing or just driving high amounts of traffic to misleading pages. If I'm a politician or a donor with enough money, should it be okay for me to hire a company or few to do some search engine optimization to make sure those googling my opponent will land on made up news stories or articles about them?
While holocaust denial is certainly appalling, what else are they going to censor? What if China decides that Tiananmen Square is offensive?
China already maintains that nothing especially interesting happened on Tiananmen square. The great firewall they use filters out search information about it. Do you see Google censoring these results in the west? Google went along with in China for a while, but stopped it in 2010 and their market share dropped from nearly 33 in 2009 to less than 2 % in 2013 as a result of the authorities heavily restricting access to Google.
Don't get me wrong, obviously Google has immense power, but at the end of the day it's their product and they have to decide what to do when people try to game their algorithms.
If your country is suffering grenade attacks in public places, you have a serious problem. If a particular segment of the population is directly responsible for that, then you also have a problem.
Of course. But this is something the Swedes themselves admit. The authorities admit that gang acitivyt has increased and become more violent which is a problem. Keep in mind though, the immigrants responsible for organized crime tend not to be muslims as much as they're from eastern Europe/former yugoslavia area. Running drugs and guns tends to be the area of the mafia, which does not traditionally mingle with muslims.
Now, Sweden's own crime reports says crime is going up. It [www.bra.se] doesn't [www.bra.se] what [www.bra.se] area of crime you're looking at, whether it be petty or violent. They've all gone up,
If you look at the stats for 2016 there's been an increase from 2015, but that's because 2015 saw a decline in crime.
“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.
“In 2016 for instance there was a lot of discussion about sexual assault and the relation between sexual assault and immigration. We know through research that those kind of years with more discussion of those subjects see the number of crimes reported increase.”
"The problem with explaining these figures is that very many variables not necessarily related to crime impact the figures. You have to be very careful, in particular if you look at changes on a year-to-year basis," he concluded.
Noting that from their own statistics estimated unreported sexual crimes have gone from ~160k/year to nearly 500k/year in a decade. That's not the : "The sexual act can be intercourse, but also other sexual acts because of coercion or other circumstances are serious offensive can lead to a person being convicted of rape." That's the violent assault of a person aka actual rape.
[CITATION NEEDED]
What information do you have to back up your claim that this estimate is not affected by the broadening of the definition of rape and the way the stats are calculated?
20% of the voting public isn't a statistically insignificant number.
I never said it was. I simply said that even at that level of polling it's far from clear at this point that they'll be able to win the elections and form a government.
The real question is, do you feel the same way with Nazism? After all it's an ideology, it's banned in most countries.
Yes, I do feel the same way about it. We're currently having a court-case coming here in Finland wherein the local (very small) nazi party is probably going to be banned because the party itself holds to principles which are against the constitution. I agree with that as well. See, in my view, it should not be a crime to just hold an opinion, and it isn't. That is, being a nazi, or being an islamist, is not and cannot be a crime but this doesn't mean nazi-organizations should be tolarated any more than we should tolerate jihadists groups. Actions - such as running a group based on violence - can be penalized, mere thoughts and opinions cannot.
you need your canary in the coalmine, I suggest looking in Sweden
As a Finn that lives next to sweden, speaks some of the language and has some friends there I suspect your idea of what exactly is going on in Sweden is not accurate. Sweden has had and is having some immigration related problems which are caused primarily by 2 things: the way they handled the housing and education reform has lead to the rise of suburbs with predominantly immigrant populations. This has made integration harder, leading to higher unemployment which in turn generally leads to increased crime, especially organized crime. So gang activity in immigrant-heavy areas is up, similarly to the situation in some american inner cities, But crime overall has not skyrocketed.
Violent crime in sweden has been relatively steady throughout the 2000s and is in fact down from the 70s and 80s. There's been a lot of talk made about the rape statistics coming from sweden but these numbers are hugely inflated by 2 factors: they changed the definition of rape to include many things that in other countries get charged under sexual harassment and more importantly the way they track the numbers differs from most other countries in that each incident of rape is counted separately. So if someone reports their boss as having sexually harassed them once a week for a year, it's possible that this is recorded as 52 incidents of suspected rape instead of as 1 case of sexual harassment as it would be in many other places.
Now this is a result of the left in sweden being more bent on the SJW-rhetoric than in most other places. So those blaming the left in sweden for the increased stats on rape are indeed correct, but the reason for this is not because rapes on the streets by raving jihadists gangs have suddenly exploded, it's that they've defined rape so broadly now, the rough translation of the current definition is: "The sexual act can be intercourse, but also other sexual acts because of coercion or other circumstances are serious offensive can lead to a person being convicted of rape. Anyone who exploits someone who is asleep, unconscious, drunk or under the influence of another drug, mentally disturbed, sick or otherwise is in a particularly vulnerable situation is also convicted of rape."
but those left-wing policies will ensure that the backlash will be something exceptionally bad -- because only those "far right" groups are the ones listening to people.
Well, I wouldn't say it's looking like there'll be a major 'backlash' right now. Even with the recent influx of refugees, the average of the recent polls puts the rightmost populist party (Sweden Democrats) at approximately 20 % support. They currently have 49 seats in the parliament. Getting 20 % of the votes would increase that to around 70 which is an increase but it's still a far cry from them winning the lection or even getting to form a government.
Getting rid of Islam won't solve the issue. Just look at Russia, asshats like Erdogan or Putin can use stupid peoples desire for strong leadership and simple solutions to get into power and remove and resemblance of democracy without relying on religion.
Exactly. More to the point 'getting rid of islam' is itself something that paves the way for authoritarianism. I mean, we're essentially talking about banning beliefs and an ideology. This is the definition of thought crime and pretty much the least liberal thing one could do. If this is done, if we admit that the state has the power to regulate what people are allowed to believe, then the banning of other ideologies and other thoughts can naturally follow. Both Turkey and Russia have laws in place right now which criminalize critiquing the ruling powers. Trump is talking about media as 'the opposition party' because the media dares to highlight when he's not using facts.
Wahabbism treats those who oppose it as enemies of god. Right wing demagogs replace god with the nation state and deem those in opposition to them as 'enemies of the state', or 'un-*insert national adjective*'. Two sides of the same coin.
The second component is profit moving - the resultant profits can be moved between the resident company and the non-resident company at no (or extremely low) taxes, but moving the money out of the EU to the external HQ would be taxed heavily from Ireland. However, this is not taxed heavily in Holland (due to historical attachments to the Dutch Antilles). So the organization move the money to Holland (inter-EU transfer, low tax), and from that subsidiary to the tax haven (Dutch law, low tax) and then have it in a tax haven for a very low cost. Where they sit on it because the US tax is punishing.
Thank you for the accurate clarification, this is indeed so and I should have explained it in more detail but I was running out of time and had to post an insufficient explanation of the scheme.
The solution is not higher taxes, it's closing these gaps that companies exploit.
You are indeed correct. This case (and other like it) revolve around whether or not the companies can be taxed for using those loopholes (which are now either closed or being closed) in the past. In other words what's being debated is whether or not the national Dutch/Irish laws that have been exploited for this effect were in line with EU laws and agreements,
Apple doesn't transfer U.S. profits to to the EU, so how is it fair for the E.U. to tax Apple on U.S. profits again exactly?
To my understanding this is not about US profits. The 14 billion comes from Apple applying what's known as the double Irish tax loophole that used to exist in Irish law, allowing them to effectively dodge paying taxes to either the EU or the US. Quoting the wiki:
two Irish companies are used in the arrangement. One of these companies is tax resident in a tax haven, such as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. Irish tax law currently [NOTE: not anymore, wiki wording is out of date] provides that a company is tax resident where its central management and control is located, not where it is incorporated, so that it is possible for the first Irish company not to be tax resident in Ireland. This company is the offshore entity which owns the valuable non US rights that are then licensed to a second Irish company (and this one is tax resident in Ireland) in return for substantial royalties or other fees. The second Irish company receives income from the use of the asset in countries outside the United States, but its taxable profits are low because the royalties or fees paid to the first Irish company are tax-deductible expenses. The remaining profits are taxed at the Irish rate of 12.5%.
For companies whose ultimate ownership is located in the United States, the payments between the two related Irish companies might be non-tax-deferrable and subject to current taxation as Subpart F income under the Internal Revenue Service's controlled foreign corporation regulations if the structure is not set up properly. This is avoided by organizing the second Irish company as a fully owned subsidiary of the first Irish company resident in the tax haven, and then making an entity classification election for the second Irish company to be disregarded as a separate entity from its owner, the first Irish company. The payments between the two Irish companies are then ignored for American tax purposes.
The loophole was closed last year:
Under Finance Act 2015, a new system has been introduced whereby innovative companies who choose to incorporate in Ireland can now benefit from the introduction of the Knowledge Development Box (the “KDB”) in Ireland, the scheme is seen as a replacement for the “double-Irish” tax system which was recently closed. An effective tax rate of 6.25% can be obtained on qualifying profits generated in periods commencing on or after 1 January 2016.
So Apple (and other large tech companies) have been using both the double irish as well as its other variant the Dutch Sandwhich which functions similarly, to dodge taxes on both sides of the Atlantic, while claiming to European tax-authorities that they're paying tax to the US, and to the US that they're being taxed in Europe, while in reality the majority of the income is not taxed in either. The EC is arguing that the use of these loopholes goes against EU regulations and that they now want these companies to pay what they actually should have been paying all the time. This is going to drag in courts for a long time, and Apple is going to claim that since it functioned within Irish law (at the time) it shouldn't have to pay anything. The EC on the other hand, is going to build their case on the grounds that the Irish law itself that allowed for this arrangement was in breach of EU law and cannot be followed and back-taxes are owned.
This whole case is one of several ongoing ones regarding the use of tax-havens to dodge corporate taxes, which has been (and still is in some senses) relatively easy to do for large multinationals. The EU is currently trying to crack down on it, whereas the US, especially now under Trump's heavily wall street backed cabinet, is g
Slashdot Mirror
This is not what I said or meant and I'm pretty sure you know that.
Yes, this is what happened but the thing is once a state the size of Iraq collapses into quasi-anarchy the conflict does not stay confined to the borders of said ex-state. Without the collapse of Iraq there'd be no isis, and without isis the situation in Syria wouldn't be as messy as it is now. There might and probably still would be a civil war in Syria, but right now that war is made a lot more complicated and bloody by isis, which is opposed by both Assad, Russia and the US but the defeat of which is made more complicated because said 3 factions are also opposed to each other. The US is trying to get rid of isis and Assad, Assad/Russia is trying to get rid of Isis and the rebels, and the rebels are trying to get rid of Assad and isis. There is no easy solution to this mess, because if the US removes Assad from power it's likely that Syria will be in even worse shape than it is now, as it is unclear which faction outside Assad's regime has the skills and the resources to maintain control of Syria.
Backing Assad means backing the sole Russian ally in the region which the US cannot do, but this also means that realistically speaking getting the conflict in Syria contained is extremely difficult, much more so than it would be if this was a war with only 2 sides.
Well, if the US had not destabilized the entire region by failing at nation-building it's unlikely that any of the current events in Syria/Iraq would have occurred.
This doesn't mean the US bears responsibility for actions that other countries perform, but it's just a matter of fact that US warmongering has created a massive power-vacuum in the middle-east which has lead to the rise of the current clusterfuck of issues.
Using overseas wars as a distraction from domestic politics comes with a price.
I'm an active follower of youtube and watch a lot of Vlogs and podcasts and the likes. Rcenetly in the wake of the so called "PewPewdie scandal" youtube has apparently shifted to be more and more restricve about what kind of content they allow to be monetized. Certain tags and words appear to be banned from getting ad-revenue, (recently it came to light their new policy prohibits including 'atheist' in one's channel name, and in general old channels with atheism in their tittle have seen a huge drop in revenue. Have a look at their 'advertiser friendly content guidelines':
This is all very very strange from a business perspective. I understand that youtube/Google wants to give their paying customers - advertisers - more control over the kind of content their ads are displayed on. I understand that they want to compete more directly with services such as Netflix. However, I do not understand their decision to do this in this way. independent content has been the core of YT for a decade now. it's what lifted them to their current position. And now they want to actively reduce their range of content because a single streamer made some jokes some people/companies didn't like? Like, to me it just seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Besides, none of this applies to their corporate users, CNN and other news channels can still run content about terrorism and politics and keep getting ad-money, but if a private individual creates content on the same topic they don't get revenue? This is completely nonsensical. the correct move would be to allow advertisers determine whether or not they want their ads to be run just on 'approved' channels or on all kinds of videos. Hell, I can bet you that there are advertisers that would like to specifically target for example political videos or videos with black/vulgar humor or swears. The people who watch this type of content (myself included) are still consumers that buy items and services and they are a separate segment than those who prefer 'family friendly' content, so preventing advertising for this segment to me makes no sense whatsoever.
Instead of offering a more 'netflix-like' curated experience for those that want it and keeping the 'old youtube' as it is, they've now put in place guidelines which can be used to essentially destroy the majority of independent political vloggers for example. Sure, some of them can manage to keep going via services like Patreon allowing them to accept donationsfunding directly from the audience but that option is really only available to channels with a rather large following.
To me the great thing about YT has been the possibility it offers: if you create content that's appealing to people - whether it's in-depth political analysis, debates, silly animations or just guys s
As a European I agree with this with one exception: it doesn't necessarily mean said companies will be 'replaced' by others. Multinational companies can re-locate themselves just as people can. If a trade war is started and Google & Co do the math and figure staying in the US will hurt their bottom line too much they'll move out and become European for example.
This is one of the main reasons why trade wars are stupid and counter--productive in this day and age. Capital and corporations can move across borders rapidly, and they will do so the moment said trade war will start hurting them too much. Trumpsters seem to be under the illusion there's some magical property making american companies forever american. Right now they are because currently the american stock market and environment is still the best place to do business from but if that changes these guys are not going to stay because they're patriots or some such nonsense. They care about money and making it, not the color of the flag waving atop their headquarter.
This, so much this. Most accidents occur because people either fail to observe their surroundings or they react to observations too late.
Modern cars already have numerous systems that do very similar thing: electronic breakforce distribution, emergency brake assist, electronic stability control, traction control system just to name a few. All of these are pretty standard features of modern vehicles and all of them are designed to let the computer counter the driver's lack of reaction speed and situational awareness. And they work; when I got my license here in Finland the first few winters were snow-heavy (by Finnish standards, which means tens of centimeters of snow) and I'm certain that on several occasions the ESC system kept me on the road/on the lane, because even though we're obviously trained to drive in winter conditions, it's a whole different deal to control the vehicle on an slippery test track or under the supervision of the trainer than it is to try and do so amidst traffic and poor weather/visibility. Reducing speed helps a lot obviously, but black ice and other factors come into play so it's possible to be driving just fine and hit a patch of black ice hidden under a layer of snow for example. Under such circumstances, these kinds of systems actually do their job and they end up saving lives.
When we're dealing with situations such as: "unless the trajectory of the vehicle is changed or breaks are applied within 0,5 seconds a crash is unavoidable" I want the vehicle to react and not wait for my slow-ass reflexes to kick in and slam me to a wall.
Fun anecdote about this that happened to a friend who's a linux sysadmin at a midsize software house here in Finland. Much like me (and most people I know that don't have to be in regular customer contact). He usually wears hoodies, t-shirts, cargopants. You know, the typical 'casual and comfortable nerdy look" but for said meeting with a larger customer he was prepared to suit up, when his boss actually interrupted him and told him not to do that but wear his regular clothes.
The reason for this is that having your linux guy look slightly nerdish (while still being clean and professional) is something they wanted to do for image reasons.
I've never much like suits partially because being in a wheelchair getting into one takes a fuckton of time and I rather dress comfortably, so unless I'm outright ordered to do so by my superiors I'll wear what I always wear. And just recently I was in a joint meeting with several people, some guys from the army were along. Some people were wearing suits, one was wearing a woolen shirt, the officers were all in uniforms and I was in the corner wearing a Metallica-hoodie. If they did judge me for that they were very good at hiding it, because I sensed no disrespect from anyone, and never have, but I'd like to think that's because I know what I'm talking about and the respect is earned through actions and not based on appearance.
The government is needed to afford the masses some means of income so that the businesses can keep their consumer base and keep operating.
Most consumer businesses will collapse under a system where the majority of individuals have no jobs and no alternative source of income. You may not like UBI but something like it is going to be a necessity if/when automation reaches a high enough point, because the economies cannot function without consumer demand, which in turn cannot exist without people having a source of income.
This is quite possibly the stupidest response to climate related issues I've ever seen. It's very very true that the change cannot be reversed or prevented altogether, but that still doesn't mean there aren't plenty of things we can - and should - do to mitigate the effects. We can't fix everything, but if we opt to do nothing and continue business as usual with the fossil fuels for example, we can make things a lot worse,
It's psychologically appealing to lift one's hands into the air and declare that it's all fucked already and we can do nothing but sit and wait for extinction, but it's also simultaneously the intellectual equivalent of 'well, my liver's already damaged from all this drinking, so might just as well keep drinking because who cares at this point?'
Call me an idealist if you wish but even though I may never end up having kids, I still care about the continued survival of the species past the point of my own death.
The institutions responsible for creating said CDOs certainly knew, or at least had all the information required to know. I mean they intentionally took loans they knew would get bad credit rating and then used essentially a loophole in the regulations to get the rating higher than it should be. There's no way to argue that they didn't know what they were doing. At the same time, they obviously have to keep some of the papers themselves to maintain the appearance of it being a safe investment. I mean it'd be impossible to try and sell the subprime 'AAA' CDOs as a completely safe and a risk free product if you yourself kept none of it, it would look highly suspicious and reveal the scam to any potential buyer.
People like Michael Burry (a mathematician btw) were able to 'predict' the financial crisis simply by going through the contents of these instruments by hand and crunching the numbers. If a single smart investor is able to figure this out just by looking at the data, do you seriously expect me to believe the banks themselves that operated this scheme and agreed to settle and be fined for it were unaware that they were peddling bullshit? Huh? This obviously doesn't mean everyone at the banks knew what was going on, but certainly key people did, because they have to have knowledge on the kind of instruments they're themselves creating/selling. It's de facto impossible to argue that they didn't know.
Besides, the banks involved, including Bank of America, still made money even after factoring in the settlements they've had to pay since. The six largest players in the scheme have been fined approximately 150 billion for the scandal, while their combined profit over that time (2007-2014) totaled around 700 billion, that's the whole point of the argument I was making: the banks knew what they were up to, provably so, and they also knew they'd be able to turn a profit even if the scheme collapsed because by that time they'd have sold off most of these products.
And yet, if instead of scamming some 100 million from a couple of companies the guy had been working for an investment bank or a credit rating agency and created purposefully misleading derivatives to help crash the global economy to the tune of billions in damages, he'd have gotten no jail time at all. Not a single bank executive has seen jailtime for causing the 2008 crisis, even though the extent of damages makes scams like this seem like pickpocketing and it's quite clear that the banks knew exactly what they were doing.when they started creating collateralized debt obligations from the subprime loans to circumvent the credit rating system. Quoting the wiki:
(emphasis mine)
What it basically means is that if you tried creating a CDO using subprime loans from a single region it would have been rated badly (as it should, it's an extremely high risk product as many of the loans had been granted pretty much without any checks on the ability of the lender to pay for them), but if you take equally shitty loans from several different areas the credit rating agencies put a AAA stamp on it, because according to their logic at the time this means the default risk is now diversified, which is complete bullshit.
This should showcase the real issue with these cases: the courts - especially in the US but also elsewhere in the West - are keen to protect the interests of corporations. Embezzlement/fraud of corporate funds will lead to heavy jail time when caught. That's why Maddof is in jail: he scammed rich folks and corporations. However at the same time the courts go so far to protect corporate interests that megacorporations themselves can pretty much act with inpunity - cause a massive oilspill or an economic meltdown and you'll get fined, and you can write that down as yet another operational cost and keep doing business as usual.
I do not have a problem with large scale financial crime being punished heavily, because it has far reaching consequences and fines don't work against people and corporations with massive fortunes. However, the laws should be applied evenly to everyone, including the financial sector itself when it fucks up. Right now the US is basically letting WS do whatever it pleases and if shit hits the fan the costs are externalized to the taxpayer. And the City of London is no better,
But they were not speaking about whether or not users want ads or not. The phrasing used was "putting in commercial opportunities that we think users don't want to interact with." (emphasis mine).
People generally do not like ads, but that does not mean they do not have an effect on them when exposed to ads. What ad firms like google are interested in is the likelihood of you being affected by an ad, they do not care whether or not the customer wants the ad or not. If I was given a choice by Steam for example I'd disable the desktop ads that it pushes once a day or so when starting Steam. However at the same time I've still bought a game once or twice from these ads if the discount is good enough. Same goes for telemarketing and spam: if you poll people, nearly 100 % of them would tell you they'd want to wipe these forms of advertising from the face of the planet, however since these are still effective they will keep getting used.
There's been a lot of research put into how ads effect people over the decades and the marketing industry has long since realized that subtlety is the key. Most consumers dislike direct ads so product placement and sponsored content is the way advertisers are heading into in this day and age where even relatively non-tech savy people are capable of installing ad-block. Moreover, the individual consumer is not the paying customer for Google, the advertisers are. So in fact, the statement is properly decoded from business-speak as: "We don't want to offer non-effective means of advertising to our customers".
In essence this means that what Google wants to avoid is 'old school' advertising where the user googles something like 'cheap laptops' and then starts to get spammed with different kinds of ads for laptops because while those work for some people, they're not nearly as effective as waiting for the user to pick a search result for a laptop, and then intervening with something like. "We've noticed you're interested in model X from manufacturer Y, here are listings for products with equivalent specs at lower prices:"
Most users will not feel this is an ad and are in fact likely to interact with such functionality because it offers them some value. However at the same time this is something that Google can easily sell to its existing customers (advertisers) because it fits in nicely with the keyword model and can be easily varied.
Eh, what? I have no problem whatsoever with people diagreeing with me so long as they base their disagreement in facts. The whole reason I comment actively in places like /. is because I'm fine with discussion and open to new ideas so long as they're rationally justified.
I've been discussing different approaches to drug policies and addiction and how results from the world compare to each other. It's pretty clear in light of the evidence to me that the US modelf of jailing people for long amounts of time for non-violent drug offenses is not helping anyone, the people jailed, or the society itself. So tell me again how I'm not interested in progress and helping people?
Again, all I can say is: how does pointing out that the model currently used by the US to combat drug-addiction and crimes is ineffective at achieving results translate to 'liberalism is FAR more important than actually helping anyone."?
As I said I'm a Finn so I'm not an expert in what's going on in Chicago, but it's my understanding that the high amount of crime currently going on is connected to the drug trade, which tends to drive such organized crime. Now my proposed solution is to allow people to acquire substances legally, which would destroy the ability of organized crime to rake in billions with the drug trade, and hence would also cut down on the amount of crime related to said black market business. I am of this opinion precisely because I'd want people to be helped, so I frankly do not understand how you manage to make such inferences.
Yes, and the right is also traditionally more religious so these are connected.
The whole point the comment was to highlight that punishing people with jailtime for substance abuse is a non-functioning strategy for getting them to take responsibility for themselves. People use drugs for a variety of reasons, but taking addicts and putting them into what's likely even a worse environment than they're normally in and then releasing them with a criminal record that makes them integrating into society even harder is a sociologically and psychologically ineffective way of getting people out of addiction.
The idea of personal responsibility is not a bad thing at all, but the notion that personal responsibility can be instilled in people via means of imprisonment in this context is, because we know it does not work.
The war on drugs is a right wing idea. Started by Nixon. Objectively speaking it is the right wing in the US that's been promoting this approach throughout the decades and this is just a political fact. The US is far more to the right than other western nations, and the US also jails the most people for non-violent drug offenses.
Even within the US if you look at the states that've been at the forefront of legalizing weed they tend to be states controlled by democrats.
Just as involved? Huh? By what metric? Obama allowed legalization of weed on a state-by-state basis and now Trump and republicans are talking about possibly cracking down on it. I'm not saying there aren't people on the left who have equally backwards ideas of addiction and drugs as on the right, pr that there aren't libertarians on the right who agree that the war on drugs is a fool's errand and should be stopped. But in general terms it's true not just of the US but the world that right wing parties tend to favor jail sentences and other 'tough on crime' measures moreso than the left.
I'm a Finn myself, and from a US perspective we're very far to the left with out policies but our drug policies are not ideal either. We still jail people for it which I deem to be nonsensical and wrong, but the sentences are far lighter than in the US and we have better access to treatment/social programs, as a result of which we have less of a problem with drugs than say, the US.
So again: I'm not saying the left is or has been perfect, but just looking at policies from across the US and the world, the left has a better track record at the moment than the right.To ignore this is to ignore reality and claim that somehow countries outside the US with more left-leaning and liberal policies do not exist, Uruguay is the first country that's legalized the production, sale and use of cannabis entirely, and it did so in 2013 under José Mujica, a leftist president.
There's only really been 1 strategy that's been tried so far and that's essentially prohibition, which we should know by now is ineffective. It was ineffective for alcohol, and stats-wise it's just as if not more ineffective with other intoxicants.
Yes.
No. This is where it goes wrong. The only permanently effective way to combat drug violence and
What? If you had actually read my post rthrough you'd have noticed I did no such thing but specifically pointed out that both the left and the right have been by and large wrong in their approach.
The right is wrong in saying it's all about the individual. But the left is also wrong in saying it's nothing but chemicals and can be handled with medicine alone. That was the whole point of my post, and instead of bothering to read it you stopped after 4 sentences just to rave at me for essentially agreeing with you,
Ironically enough, this is just what you yourself did by not reading through the argument that was presented.
The approach people take on addiction has a surprising connection to their political stance. For decades, the right has been approaching addiction as a mental/moral weakness: that those succumbing to addiction are not sick or diseased but mentally weak and need to be punished so that they will correct their behavior. This is the driving force behind the 'war on drugs':
Those on the left have taken more of a medical approach and insisted that addiction is a neurochemical issue which needs to be treated by doctors.
When we actually look at research and data it turns out the truth is slightly more complex than either of these models. Turns out, it's not just about character or chemicals, but the combination of addictive chemicals and the environment the individual is in. Around 20 % of US troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. However, upon returning to the States, only about 5 % of them continued using. This by itself has given researchers some insight into key components of addiction and the affect environment has on it. Quoting the link above:
I do not.
I never claimed it does, I said that science doesn't entertain arguments which involve invisible/undetectable magical causes. You seem to be incapable of understanding the flaw in your position, you said: "You do not and cannot know whether that is all. It is highly unscientific to claim it." Which is incorrect because it's essentially saying that it's unscientific to dismiss supernatural causes and claims. It is not, because science deals with the natural world and observation. Lightning used to be considered a supernatural event that could not be explained by science. Once an explanation was discovered, it moved from the category of 'things that god(s) does' to 'things that nature does'.
Unless you have a method of scientifically testing for the existence of 'non-physical causes' for anything, arguing for those causes is no different from arguing that God causes lightning strikes.
Yes, and you're the one that has been making what is essentially a religious argument by claiming that because the current scientific model of the mind/consciousness is incomplete that somehow means supernatural/non-physical causes are likely to be behind the mind. This is not a scientific/rational argument but a theological one, and it's even more unfounded in reality now than it was back when Descartes made it.
It's not highly unscientific to claim that everything we observe in the universe has a physical cause (that is, a cause we can detect and observe) because science by its very nature deals only with observable reality. The idea that somehow because something is not fully understood we should assume a non-physical cause is illogical and goes against the principles of science.
Before you can argue for 'non-physical causes' you need to demonstrate that such exist, the burden of proof is on you to show that such processes are not only possible but actually real, and then further demonstrate how a non-physical process can be detected and how it can interact with the world. And if you did manage to somehow demonstrate such a cause and how it can be detected, guess what? At that point it's no longer a 'non-physical cause' but part of the natural world and the physical realm. This is precisely why substance dualism has not been taken seriously by anyone with half a brain for a couple of centuries: 'non-physical process' AKA 'soul' AKA magic is just a placeholder for 'things we do not yet understand."
You don't get to assert causes which have not been proven to exist and then claim that those causes are somehow responsible for things we have a thus far incomplete understanding of. That's a textbook case of argument from ignorance and the age-old theological argument rehashed:
-Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006)
-Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677).
When the core of your argument lies on premises that could be understood to be false by men living over 300 years ago, you know you're in need of education.
As a Finn: fuck you. We are not, and have never been, in NATO. We already pay for our own defense, every cent of it. We have compulsory military service for all men due to the size difference between us (5,4 million) and Russia (140 million). If push comes to shove we can muster nearly a trained million men into arms.
The strategy of defense for us is not to compete with Russia in a direct conflict. But when you scatter 800 000 soldiers to the woods with guns and (modern) equipment hidden all around the vast countryside, it's going to make Afghanistan look like a a walk in the park. The Russians have around 30 000 troops that they can mobilize rapidly across the border. That's nowhere near enough to take us on. An invasion would require them to start moving large amounts of troops from elsewhere, something they have very limited capacity to do at the moment because of funds and the ongoing conflicts in both Ukraine and Syria.
Which is to say: while we cannot singlehandedly defeat Russia, we can make occupying this country so costly to them in terms of lives and resources that they will have to think hard whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs. That's been the corner stone of the Finnish Defense Forces ever since the 2nd world war and so far the Russians have not desired to test just how serious we are about maintaining our independence, probably because they have some bad memories from the way the Winter War went for them.
The problem in my view (as a non-american) with the military spending is that the military then has to be used to justify the gigantic cost of it. It creates a situation in which you pretty much have to be involved in perpetual conflicts because otherwise having 10 aircraft carrier groups, hundreds of bases outside the US and other tools designed to project insane amounts of force anywhere on the globe cannot be justified. Orwell had a point about this:
Why shouldn't they? I mean, it is a search engine, the point of which is to provide users accurate information. If a user googles something, they expect to be getting facts, no?
I mean, the algorithm already ranks pages by criteria. If you're arguing that Google shouldn't be doing this, you're essentially arguing they should allow people to push disinformation by manipulating search results by either Google bombing or just driving high amounts of traffic to misleading pages. If I'm a politician or a donor with enough money, should it be okay for me to hire a company or few to do some search engine optimization to make sure those googling my opponent will land on made up news stories or articles about them?
China already maintains that nothing especially interesting happened on Tiananmen square. The great firewall they use filters out search information about it. Do you see Google censoring these results in the west? Google went along with in China for a while, but stopped it in 2010 and their market share dropped from nearly 33 in 2009 to less than 2 % in 2013 as a result of the authorities heavily restricting access to Google.
Don't get me wrong, obviously Google has immense power, but at the end of the day it's their product and they have to decide what to do when people try to game their algorithms.
Of course. But this is something the Swedes themselves admit. The authorities admit that gang acitivyt has increased and become more violent which is a problem. Keep in mind though, the immigrants responsible for organized crime tend not to be muslims as much as they're from eastern Europe/former yugoslavia area. Running drugs and guns tends to be the area of the mafia, which does not traditionally mingle with muslims.
If you look at the stats for 2016 there's been an increase from 2015, but that's because 2015 saw a decline in crime.
(Source
[CITATION NEEDED]
What information do you have to back up your claim that this estimate is not affected by the broadening of the definition of rape and the way the stats are calculated?
I never said it was. I simply said that even at that level of polling it's far from clear at this point that they'll be able to win the elections and form a government.
Yes, I do feel the same way about it. We're currently having a court-case coming here in Finland wherein the local (very small) nazi party is probably going to be banned because the party itself holds to principles which are against the constitution. I agree with that as well. See, in my view, it should not be a crime to just hold an opinion, and it isn't. That is, being a nazi, or being an islamist, is not and cannot be a crime but this doesn't mean nazi-organizations should be tolarated any more than we should tolerate jihadists groups. Actions - such as running a group based on violence - can be penalized, mere thoughts and opinions cannot.
As a Finn that lives next to sweden, speaks some of the language and has some friends there I suspect your idea of what exactly is going on in Sweden is not accurate. Sweden has had and is having some immigration related problems which are caused primarily by 2 things: the way they handled the housing and education reform has lead to the rise of suburbs with predominantly immigrant populations. This has made integration harder, leading to higher unemployment which in turn generally leads to increased crime, especially organized crime. So gang activity in immigrant-heavy areas is up, similarly to the situation in some american inner cities, But crime overall has not skyrocketed.
Violent crime in sweden has been relatively steady throughout the 2000s and is in fact down from the 70s and 80s. There's been a lot of talk made about the rape statistics coming from sweden but these numbers are hugely inflated by 2 factors: they changed the definition of rape to include many things that in other countries get charged under sexual harassment and more importantly the way they track the numbers differs from most other countries in that each incident of rape is counted separately. So if someone reports their boss as having sexually harassed them once a week for a year, it's possible that this is recorded as 52 incidents of suspected rape instead of as 1 case of sexual harassment as it would be in many other places.
Now this is a result of the left in sweden being more bent on the SJW-rhetoric than in most other places. So those blaming the left in sweden for the increased stats on rape are indeed correct, but the reason for this is not because rapes on the streets by raving jihadists gangs have suddenly exploded, it's that they've defined rape so broadly now, the rough translation of the current definition is: "The sexual act can be intercourse, but also other sexual acts because of coercion or other circumstances are serious offensive can lead to a person being convicted of rape. Anyone who exploits someone who is asleep, unconscious, drunk or under the influence of another drug, mentally disturbed, sick or otherwise is in a particularly vulnerable situation is also convicted of rape."
Well, I wouldn't say it's looking like there'll be a major 'backlash' right now. Even with the recent influx of refugees, the average of the recent polls puts the rightmost populist party (Sweden Democrats) at approximately 20 % support. They currently have 49 seats in the parliament. Getting 20 % of the votes would increase that to around 70 which is an increase but it's still a far cry from them winning the lection or even getting to form a government.
Exactly. More to the point 'getting rid of islam' is itself something that paves the way for authoritarianism. I mean, we're essentially talking about banning beliefs and an ideology. This is the definition of thought crime and pretty much the least liberal thing one could do. If this is done, if we admit that the state has the power to regulate what people are allowed to believe, then the banning of other ideologies and other thoughts can naturally follow. Both Turkey and Russia have laws in place right now which criminalize critiquing the ruling powers. Trump is talking about media as 'the opposition party' because the media dares to highlight when he's not using facts.
Wahabbism treats those who oppose it as enemies of god. Right wing demagogs replace god with the nation state and deem those in opposition to them as 'enemies of the state', or 'un-*insert national adjective*'. Two sides of the same coin.
Thank you for the accurate clarification, this is indeed so and I should have explained it in more detail but I was running out of time and had to post an insufficient explanation of the scheme.
You are indeed correct. This case (and other like it) revolve around whether or not the companies can be taxed for using those loopholes (which are now either closed or being closed) in the past. In other words what's being debated is whether or not the national Dutch/Irish laws that have been exploited for this effect were in line with EU laws and agreements,
To my understanding this is not about US profits. The 14 billion comes from Apple applying what's known as the double Irish tax loophole that used to exist in Irish law, allowing them to effectively dodge paying taxes to either the EU or the US. Quoting the wiki:
The loophole was closed last year:
So Apple (and other large tech companies) have been using both the double irish as well as its other variant the Dutch Sandwhich which functions similarly, to dodge taxes on both sides of the Atlantic, while claiming to European tax-authorities that they're paying tax to the US, and to the US that they're being taxed in Europe, while in reality the majority of the income is not taxed in either. The EC is arguing that the use of these loopholes goes against EU regulations and that they now want these companies to pay what they actually should have been paying all the time. This is going to drag in courts for a long time, and Apple is going to claim that since it functioned within Irish law (at the time) it shouldn't have to pay anything. The EC on the other hand, is going to build their case on the grounds that the Irish law itself that allowed for this arrangement was in breach of EU law and cannot be followed and back-taxes are owned.
This whole case is one of several ongoing ones regarding the use of tax-havens to dodge corporate taxes, which has been (and still is in some senses) relatively easy to do for large multinationals. The EU is currently trying to crack down on it, whereas the US, especially now under Trump's heavily wall street backed cabinet, is g