There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold. I predict similar reductions in rates of autism, AD(H)D in children, SAD, PTSD and video game induced violence.
First of all: violence has gone down consistently over the last coople of decades in all western societies despite a notable increase in violent media, so the link between violence and games/media is not as widely accepted by professionals as you seem to think, there was just recently a story about this here on Slashdot. Second of all, the illnesses/conditions you listed, especially autism, all well understood and documented.
This is akin to saying if you remove all the doctors no-one will get cancer because there's no-one to diagnose anyone. Sure you won't get reports and stats on it anymore, but that doesn't indicate you've actually done anything to alleviate the problem. '
The difficulty is what do you do with a group of people whose skillset seems primarily concerned with witchcraft and magic
So it's okay to brand an entire branch of modern science 'withcraft' because you lack any understanding of it? What the fuck?
People actually do get depressed. As someone with friends and family that have suffered from depression I can tell you it's not 'witchcraft' because you can se the difference in the individual's mood and behavior even without being a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The mind is the result of the electrochemical processes in the brain, and if those processes are disturbed, that affects the state of mind of the individual, often negatively and in ways that can actually be detected with imaging technology and effectively treated with clinical methods, both pharmacological and therapeutic, so claiming that the entire field of research studying these conditions and searching for cures is 'witchcraft' ranks among the most ignorant statements I've ever read on this site.
Your government just recently shut itself down despite one party controlling the house, the senate and the presidency. If that is not a textbook example of gross incompetence, I don't know what is. And just the tip of the iceberg.
As for corruption: well, for one thing the man who campaigned on 'draining the swamp' has appointed more bankers and wall street people into positions of power than any since the 20s. He recently shoved through a tax-cut for himself and the wealthiest americans, while raising taxes on the very poorest.This was done via legal means so it's not corrupt in the legal sense of the term, as you don't have to bribe a wealthy asshole to make him more likely to serve his own interests and fuck the rest, but it's certainly corrupt in the moral and political sense of the word as it is the polar opposite of what he said while he was campaigning.
You're the one whose decisions cannot be trusted if they are based on rumors and made up theories.
You do realize Trump claimed he invented the term 'fake' and his go-to defense against any and all criticism is simply stating that it's not true and ignoring any and all evidence that contradicts his position, right? The modus operandi of Trump is to make a decision first, and then come up with some pseudo-factual BS to justify it with or deflect criticism. The entire white house is currently ran on the basis of 'rumors and made up theories'. A quick list of just a few of the things that Trump has either completely made up and keeps repeating in absence of any factual evidence: his inauguration was the biggest ever, he won the popular vote, Obama bugged his residence, the 'last night in Sweden' statement referring to a terror attack that never happened, claiming you guys pay the most taxes in the world, and claiming that his own tax reform will cost him a lot.
These are all things Trump has pulled out of his ass. The way it looks and sounds to me is that he's not even doing it fully on purpose, the man seems to be incapable of using basic logic and grounding his arguments in reality. He can make a statement, and then a couple days later deny he ever said so even if he's on tape saying so. This is the sign of a man who's either a pathological liar, or slowly going senile due to the onset of Alzheimer's or dementia. My bet is on the latter option because the degradation of his speech pattern (slurring and pronouncing words incorrectly, not being able to stay on topic for an entire sentence, increased usage of general vague terms like 'some'. 'all, 'good', 'bad', 'things' etc that he has to keep inserting because he doesn't know/remember vocabulary) and the erratic nature of his personality wherein he seems to lack any impulse control and will outright make statements that hurt himself and his party with no regard to anything resembling a political strategy all point towards a man struggling with old age and a mind that's never been too sharp to begin with starting to go off its rails. And yes, I know he passed the 'cognitive test' of 'can you recognize a camel' but first of all that's not a proper diagnostic test for these illnesses, and secondly, if he is actually going senile there's no way the White House would admit to this on television.
That's just my 2 cents as an outsider who's followed US politics closely and has a grandparent dealing with Alzheimer's so I've seen people go down this path before.
We truly are the apex predator in this global the technology game, and anybody who believes otherwise is either using some goofy metric that has zero relevance for any given practical purpose, or they just simply have no fucking idea just how much today's American technology utterly pervades their entire livelihood.
While I agree with this sentiment overall, something I'd like to point out: you're the wealthiest country at the moment, and will remain so for another decade or so at least, China's inevitably going to bypass you on grounds of size, but in terms of per capita GDP you're going to remain on the top. This means that for commercialization purposes the US is indeed the top market for technology. However what's being discussed here is innovation, not commercialization. The medical side is a good example in a way: the US has the most commercialized medical system in the world, which means there's a lot of money to be made by selling medical tech and meds in the US. This drives the creation of products to the market, but that doesn't mean the research that goes into the solutions is solely American. Gene therapy for example is an area of huge research globally, with universities and companies in all advanced societies putting money into it. The current CRISPR/CAS9 basis for gene therapy was pioneered by 2 women, one of them being the American biochemist Jennifer Doudna working from Berkly California, and another one being the French biochemist Emmanuelle Charpantier who used to work in Sweden and now works in Germany. Similar examples can be found elsewhere in tech. You took up CPUs; the first commercially manufactured microprocessor by Intel, the Intel 4004, was designed under the lead of Frederico Faggin, an Italian. 2 indian engineers, Vinod Dham and Rajeev Chandtasekhar were part of the core team that developed the 486 chip. And so on.
I'm not trying to say you're incorrect in what you were saying about the end products of cutting edge tech often coming from American companies, that's obvious because you've got the most money which also means you're the source for most of the R & D money on the private sector. I'm just pointing out that the innovations and research that are needed to make those products possible are the result of a global effort of a multitude of scientists The vast majority of major american breakthroughs rely on people and knowledge from around the world, so they're not purely 'American' innovations in that sense.
From my experience, it seems obvious that whatever I'm exposed to a lot affects what I think about. What I think about a lot tends to affect what I do.
This is correct obviously, but there are 2 important distinctions that you left out that make a huge impact on the discussion about games/media and violence,
Firstly, as an avid gamer since my teens I've played a lot of violent games, and I find myself often thinking about them when I'm not playing, but those thoughts are not violent in nature. That's because I don't think of shooting a virtual enemy as an act of violence anymore so than I think about capturing a pawn on a chess board as an act of violence. I find myself thinking about stuff like level layouts, how to improve my use of cover, etc stuff that relates to my goal, which is completing the game. I don't play the games because they're violent, I play them because I enjoy puzzles and challenges, and games offer that. Some of them with a violence as a mechanic, some of them without it. I've never had violent thoughts towards real people as a result of playing a lot of games, because my mind is perfectly capable of discerning between actual violence, and a a virtual character on screen being 'shot' at.
Secondly, even if one's thinking about violence, that does not automatically mean one will become more likely to be violent. Here as an example I'll use my brother who in his teens was actually quite aggressive and short tempered as many young males especially are and often got into fights. Then he started kickboxing, which is an extremely violent sport by all metrics. Now, is he thinking more about violence these days than in his teens? Very likely so, he watches matches, practices a lot and teaches techniques etc. But he's not gotten into fights outside the ring since he became an adult because he's now found himself a 'game' in the real world that has given him an avenue to deal with violence in a manner that's more sensible, and also more rewarding as it is a competition. He's learned a lot about respecting other people via the sport. So for him not only thinking but actively engaging in more violence in a controlled setting has actually made him less likely to be a risk for others in the world. He's much more in tune with his emotional responses to situations now, and while he still gets angry and loud easily, he doesn't transition from yelling to actually punching someone but has instead learned to walk away from the situations before they spiral out of control. That self-control is entirely the rest of a combat sport (and good coaches) teaching him discipline.
The primary question with regards to games and media of a violent nature is therefore not 'does the media make people think about violence more?' because even if it does that's not necessarily a bad thing, but 'does the media lessen people's impulse control and/or dehumanize other individuals so that they're more likely to use violence in the real word?'. To me there's no evidence that this is the case. Violent crime has gone down and is going down in pretty much all advanced societies, even though the amount of violent media in different and more graphical forms (think Game of Thrones cutting of limbs and dicks and burning people alive, murdering children etc) has exploded.
Now it's also obvious that people with pre-existing violent tendencies still likely gravitate towards violent entertainment, but as is the case with my brother, I remain unconvinced that that is necessarily a bad thing, because these are precisely the people who in fact need to think about violence and their own relation to it more in order to attain control over their own impulses and behavior towards others, and it's far better for them to do it via something like a game or sport rather than actually getting themselves into violent situations.
"Global warming" does not mean everywhere on Earth gets uniformly warmer by some number.
I never claimed that. But it's clear at this point that continued warming will negatively affect the amount of arable land and food output in regions like sub-saharan Africa that are already suffering from shortages of quality land. Further up north some places will actually see an increase in arable land, but it's clear that for a chunk of the poorest people in the world the situation will get even worse increasing instability and conflicts.
Except they're starving because of assholes like Robert Mugabe not because of climate anything (or weather, for that matter.
I never said the climate is the only reason they're starving, nor the primary reason right now. But again, there's no doubt that continued warming will make the starvation worse in developing economies, areas that are already having difficulties feeding themselves.
Considering those brown people caused their own state of anarchy, Europeans are perfectly justified in demanding they stay the hell home and fix their own problems. A mass migration of millions is totally unjustified by any climate rhetoric,
Again, as I said to a previous poster who made the same mistake: I wasn't making an argument for (or against) immigration, but pointing out precisely that if we want to avoid triggering further massive movements of people, then the climate issue has to be taken seriously.
Africa has had more than enough food to feed itself, and not enough, and good years or bad, the worst problem is politics, not climate.
Even if one agrees with this 100 %, that still doesn't mean the climate will not be an issue that will become even worse than politics in the future, and while bad politics can be mitigated over time (and there are some African countries that are doing this and actually seeing progress), the climate cannot be reverted back.
The way I see it as an outsider is that Gamacho would be an improvement. I mean, here's a man that recognized his own limitations and did his best to get the smartest man alive to try and solve the issues they're facing because he knew he couldn't do so himself. That's actually a quality many leaders lack.
Meanwhile, Trump's a guy who bragged about passing his health exam. Dude recognized some animals from pictures and he know holds himself to be a certified genius that's 'like, really smart'. Because if there's one thing we know about smart people it's that they constantly tell everyone how really super duper smart they are.
Those brown people brought their anarchy ways with them and don't want to change Many don't respect the rule of law and the rights of others and are outright racist. Rotherham, hundreds of cars burned in France, especially on New Years Eve, the rape capital of the world, Finland. Most on welfare and do not want to work. They brought their shithole with them.
*facepalm*
First of all get your xenophobic talking points correct. I'm a Finn. The 'rape capital' -card is thrown about regarding Sweden, and is not even correct..
Thirdly, since you managed to somehow miss it even I was not making a pro/anti-immigration argument, I was making an argument for slowing down or containing the warming of the climate as much as we can because failure to do so puts all societies in increased risk of breakdown and lowers the standard of living for everyone. I don't care what your stance on immigration is, it has nothing to do the fact that unless the climate related challenges are solved, the situation is going to get worse for everyone. If you want to reduce the amount of people on the move, you're going to want to make sure they don't run out of food, which is what will happen if the heating continues. The point is precisely that if we don't want even more people being both internally and internationally displaced, then we cannot ignore the role that climate plays in societal stability.
I took it up precisely because I find it so baffling that many of the people making the most noise about the current refugee situation (mostly using incorrect and/or copypasted memes like you just did) are often also ones that don't think climate presents any kind of risk, when climate is one of the main drivers of massive movements of people.
The questions never been if we'll survive. Homo sapiens has survived several ice ages without modern technology. 'We'll' survive if by 'we' you mean that the genome of the species will live on, we're very adaptive. The question is at what cost? The climate heating up affects global stability by affecting economies and more importantly the global food production. Europe right now - as someone living here - is quite stirred up by the refugee crisis from the middle-east that's caused by the Syrian civil war. Now, the current refugee crisis is large, it's the largest since the 2nd world war, but it's small peanuts compared to what we're facing if nothing is done to mitigate climate change.
If we just go on with 'we'll survive' attitude, we - as in, the post-industrialised economies accustomed to a level of wealth, peace, comfort and ease unknown to anyone a couple of generations back - will be facing the Syrian crisis times a hundred. Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator, pushing hundreds of millions or more likely billions of people to move northwards in search of shelter and survival. It's not something we can just ignore. Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'. We're not isolated from the rest of the world, if the developing nations fall into civil wars and chaos as Syria did, we're going to feel the effects. Not immediately, but we will. Not to mention that the climate will directly affect our own food production and stability
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy, and many of the same people are going: 'huh, climate's changing, no big deal, we'll manage.' Of course we'll fucking manage, but that doesn't mean we'll manage at the same standard of living and enjoying the same relative peace as we have now. I don't want to spend the remainder of my life in a world where societies are doing what they can to wall themselves off from the global community and fighting for scraps while the wealthy lock themselves off in gated communities watching the rabble fight over the scraps of rationed food and emergency housing as coastlines are flooding and global trade grinds to a halt as every country wishes to secure well being for themselves and not for the rest. I certainly don't want my kids (if I ever have any) to inherit just such a world and tell them: 'yeah, I know it sucks, but hey, look on the bright side: the species will survive. None of you or your grandkids will likely ever enjoy the standard of living I had in my youth, but hey, we'll be alive. Now off you go and do some fishing, I'll fire up the generator so we can cook up some food in the evening. Watch out for looters!"
There's 7 billion of us on the planet right now, and that figure by all estimates is going to keep growing until at least 10 if not more before stabilising. Of those billions, the vast majority is already staring to be negatively affected by the current change, and it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something. We can't stop the warming altogether, it's way too late for that, but we can still affect whether or not the generations that come after us will occupy a 21st century society, or a dystopia of a few extremely well off people and billions in poverty and internal conflict. The difference made by a few degrees in the global average temperature is massive, because once the tipping
As a European you use the exact same system in the EU elections.
No we don't. The EU elections have no electoral college, it's a system of proportional representation and while individual countries are free to set some conditions of their own, the rules of the Union dictate that either a party list system or a single transferable vote system has to be used for selecting the members. Neither of these is present in the EC process of US presidential elections.
Secondly comparing the EU elections to the US presidential elections is foolish to begin with. The EU elections are used to select members for the parliament, not a single ruler with significant ruling power over the entire block of nations. The US presidency by itself is a much more powerful position than the whole of the EU parliament combined.
What you're really arguing is: The people living in a tent aren't affected by the distance to the building, the lack of running water, storm/earthquake proofing or individual rooms, so their vote is the same as people living in a building.
Nope, that's not what I'm saying, not at all. Of course the people living in the tents have a different situation than the people living in the building, but that statement does not get you to the conclusion that therefore the people in the tents should have the deciding vote on who rules over everyone. Living in a sparsely populated area does not mean you should automatically get more political power over decisions that affect everyone.
That's a misdirection: It doesn't, it affects the weight of the group. It's still plurality vote, which means it takes 75% of the tents to beat 66% of the building.
Yes, yes it does, because the weight of the group is made up of the votes of the individuals in it. Using the 'winner takes it all approach' 75 % of the smaller group can choose the ruler for the whole group of 10, meaning that each of those 3 votes is weighed at over 3 times that of everyone else's.
Or, if one counts 'losing' votes, which we should because "equality", 50% of the population to beat 50%. It's not so unequal now.
Nope. If you can get elected with 33 % total votes, that does not a 50-50 split make.
The whole setup makes even less sense when you consider that people can move and the size of the groups can change. If 3 out of the 4 people in said example move into the building, then the 1 remaining guy in the tents gets to choose the president every single time because his 'group' of 1 now controls the majority of electoral votes, which just further underlines the fault with such systems.
The Electoral College and Senate ensure that large concentrations of population with group think cannot dictate to the rest of the country. It distributes power in a more diverse way than what you're wanting.
This argument has never made any sense to me as a European and a proponent of democracy, especially for the electoral college because what the EC does is flip the situation upside down by giving a minority of people the right to elect a ruler of the country. How's that superior? It's now put you in a situation wherein some states are fundamentally worth more than others to candidates, and you can moneyball the entire election process by competing for those more valuable votes that decide the end result. It in fact makes you more susceptible to groupthink, because you now only have to manipulate a minority of the voterbase to believe you're on their side (as Trump successfully did) and you'll be elected. How does this 'ensure' you against anything? To me it's obvious at this point that it makes the system weaker to populism of the Trump kind, where all you have to do is make grandiose and baseless promises to a minority of people (and it's easier to fool a minority than a majority) and the groupthink of these people will help you get elected. As a 'safeguard' measure it's an utter failure, not to mention fundamentally undemocratic. You're all citizens of the same country, you all have the same president. Trump rules just as much over California than he does over Ohio, so why on earth should votes from Ohio be more important that votes from California? There is no rational justification for this.
People that cannot bother to empathize and think about why others have differing opinions should not be controlling the country.
Again, this statement has nothing to do with the fact that the EC is fundamentally undemocratic because what it does is it ties the significance of ones vote to one's geographic area, which is irrational and can in the end used to manipulate the result by either side. There is absolutely nothing about a person living in a given area that means he/she will think in a certain way or hold certain beliefs, yet the system as it now is treats people differently based simply on where they happen to live. Democracies have mechanisms which are meant to safeguard minorities from tyranny by the majority, the most important one usually being the constitution and that uphold it. On top of this you have the local elections on a city/state level giving people further influence over the governance of their immediate area, but what you're saying that certain people should have more power in selecting who rules over everyone simply because the happen to live in place X instead of place Y, and that to me is thoroughly irrational. Your place of residence does not determine your intelligence, your values, political beliefs or set them in stone, so it should also rightfully not affect the weight of ones vote.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario where 10 people set up a camp in the woods. 6 of them live in the same building, while 4 people set up tents further away. What you're saying is that those 4 people should get to decide who is elected as the leader of the camp simply on the merits that they're located in a different spot because you want to avoid 'the groupthink' of the 6. So your suggestion is 'hey, let's give power instead to this even smaller group of people, after all, a smaller group of people cannot possibly fall victim to groupthink' . It just makes no sense, from the perspective of equality and the western democratic principles. If indeed you hold, as many Americans so proudly proclaim 'that all Men are created equal', then this system is the very antithesis of that statement and should be done away with.
Uhm. Not too likely at this point. Fossil fuels make up a third of Russia's budget revenue and over half of its exports. (Source: Bank of Finland's Economies in Transition policy brief No. 5 from last year entitled Overview of Russia's oil and gas sector,the Bank of Finland keeps a pretty close eye on Russia, it being one of the largest trading partners we have and a major geopolitical question mark if unstability/collapse hits). Quoting the brief:
Oil and natural gas have been a key part of the Russian economy for decades, even though Russia is, strictly speaking, not an oil state. It is difficult to assess accurately the importance of oil and natural gas for the Russian economy but, according to the latest estimates, oil and natural gas have accounted for approximately one fifth of Russia’s GDP1 in the 2000s. They have accounted for nearly 30% of consolidated budget revenue and over half of export revenue. The largest Russian companies operate in the oil and gas sector, and their weighting in the Russian stock market index amounts to more than half. Both the Russian stock market and the ruble exchange rate therefore closely follow the development of the oil price. (pg. 4) - - . Russia’s oil production is dominated by 11 vertically integrated companies, whose share of oil production is nearly 90%. The largest of them is majority state-owned Rosneft, whose share of oil production has grown significantly in recent years through the acquisition of other companies in the sector. Including its most recent acquisition, Bashneft, Rosneft accounted for nearly half of Russia’s oil production last year. In addition, nearly 200 smaller companies operate in the oil production sector as well as three foreign companies within the framework of production-sharing agreements. Most experts, both international and Russian, have for a long time now expected the country’s oil production to begin to decline, so the continuation and even an acceleration of growth in last couple of years has come as a surprise to many of them. The decline in production of the traditional fields has been contained by better-than-expected improvements in production efficiency, and replacement production has been obtained from new fields more quickly than expected. Most forecasts, however, still expect production growth to at least level off in the next few years and for production even to decline (Figure 1) . It is expected that it will be possible to improve further the production efficiency of traditional fields, but this will become increasingly difficult and expensive, so investment would have to be increased. Production of many of the newer large fields is estimated to have already reached its peak level, so they, too, will no longer be able to maintain growth in the coming years. Completely new fields will be continually developed, but bringing them on-stream will take time and require investment. In recent years, the investment required to maintain growth has been limited by the decline oil prices, greater difficulty in obtaining financing, and the Western sanctions, which restrict the scope for purchasing the technology needed in oil production from abroad. The sharp weakening in the ruble, however, has significantly softened the impact of the decline in oil prices on Russian oil companies. In recent years, too, investment in oil and gas production has increased at a reasonably brisk annual rate of just over 10% (nominally), but due to high inflation the real growth of investment has been modest. (pg 5)
In connection with the state finances of oil producing countries, a budget break-even oil price is often spoken of. This refers to the oil price that balances the budget, namely the oil price at which budget revenue exactly covers budget expenditure. This indicator is, in principle, simple and easy to understand, b
Really, I would love Facebook to allow me to very directly configure what I see, because the options are so limited - if I didn't 'subscribe' to certain people, I'd never see them. I can't prioritize original posts, or text-only posts, or images over videos...all of which should absolutely be available.
If they did that in their current business model they'd start losing a lot of money. FB sells visibility on the users' feed at a premium, the whole core business is in being the largest and most in depth segmentation marketing platform on the planet. It's possible to do very precise targeting of ads these days on FB. Want to single out people in a certain geographical area that are re-enactors to sell them military gear? You can do that, but you can even take it further and only target your ad of a 2nd world war era boots/gear to only those people in said area that are interested in re-enactments of that era, as one Finnish military surplus store did by advertising British WW2 era boots only to British re-enactors and got good click-through/conversion rates for a really low price because the smaller the segment you're targeting to, the smaller the cost of buying visibility.
The general point is that the algorithm that decides what people see is their core product. So okay, they can't let users decide how much ads they see, but why not allow users to control everything else? Well, because the question from FB's perspective has to be: does giving the users total control over the content of their feed increase or decrease the effectiveness of the marketing? The likely answer is the latter, because imagining a situation where I only allowed say, text-only posts, those posts would be interrupted by ads with images/videos that would then stand out from the stream of content and make it obvious that they're ads, and the marketing industry has long known that ads work better if people don't think of them as ads, which is a lot easier to accomplish in an environment where you can 'slip' ad videos and other sponsored posts by companies and artists into a stream that already has a lot of different kind of content, making it stick out less and seem more natural.
However, there is a possible solution that would keep both FB and us control freaks satisfied: many people may deem it ridiculous idea but I'd actually be willing to consider: subscription-model for the users. I'd be willing to pay a few euros a month to get rid of the ads and gain total control over what I see. Hell, I already pay for a bunch of streaming services and podcasts, paying a few euros more to have a more pleasant social media experience wouldn't be that bad.
Eventually the Taxi will be self-driving. Why would anyone bother owning a self-driving car?
Money. The answer is money.
When you own a self-driving car it can make you money by doubling as a taxi when it's not needed by you.
Let me paint you a picture, say 15-20 years into the future: I own a self-driving car and take it to work in the morning, and it takes off to find a parking spot somewhere nearby. I've configured the car so that my close circle of friends can use it during my office hours for trips shorter than N kilometers for a distance based fee that covers the operating expense and maybe say, a 5 % margin. So at 10:30 my smartphone lets me know that the vehicle is on its way to pick up my friend and take him to his job interview or whatever, and once it's done I receive a payment from my friend.
At 11:30 the car is still on the other side of town charging itself, when a nearby unknown to me user of the app requests for my permission to use the car to get to the center of the city. I check out his profile and see that he's been well reviewed by other car owners, so I offer him a price on the trip and he agrees. He pays in advance, the car takes him to his destination and the returns to pick me from the office and take me home. In the evening as I'm watching a movie the app beeps, another friend is at a bar requesting pickup. Since I've no need for the car for the evening, I okay it and it leaves to take the fellow home via a drive through. Cheaper for him than taking a taxi, and I get some income.
I'm not saying this is the way everyone will do it, but the general point is that shared use of a vehicle with a group of friends for example is much cheaper than either everyone owning a car of their own, or everyone using taxies to go everywhere.
Why sue gas company instead of the car owner burning the gas?
Because it's quite clear at this point that the oil companies have been doing their utmost to obfuscate the discussion on climate change and spread outright misinformation.
Ask yourself this: why is the US the only developed country in which climate change is still a matter of 'debate'? Why is it that a matter of natural science that the experts of the relevant fields are in agreement about is being presented as an issue up for debate? Who benefits from there existing doubt over this? Who stands to lose if more strict actions are taken to control greenhouse gas emissions? The fossil fuel companies. The firms have a direct monetary incentive for there to be little or no environmental regulation. They also have vast wealth and hence vast lobbying power which they have used and are using to promote views and politicians that are entirely contrary to well understood science.
Tobacco companies a few decades past were doing the exact same deal and promoting false science to try and obfuscate the link between smoking and cancer, even though from internal documents it's quite clear that they were aware of the issue, and were actively promoting a view they knew to be false for their own economic benefit. This is no different. In fact a lot of the marketing companies that were in charge of the diversion tactics of the tobacco companies have since transitioned into the fossil fuel business. It's quite easy to do: you set up different 'think thanks' with environmentally friendly names, and you hire some scientists, often not even from relevant fields who're willing to shill for you. Then you produce non-peer reviewed pseudo-science papers on the matter. Then you drag these shills on tv and elsewhere into the media to advertise how there really is no problem and all the academics are just wrong. Once you've established enough doubt among the general public about the matter (I mean after all there was a 'scientist' on tv saying he doesn't think it's happening, so clearly it can't be settled right?) you spend some hundred or so million a year lobbying politicians to oppose any regulation on your industry. The fact that this strategy still works as well as it did in the past shows how easy it is to fool the majority of people who do not understand how science works.
If I manufacture a product the use of which does harm not just to me, but the entire ecosystem of the planet and all civilizations, and I then knowingly and willingly try to misrepresent or hide the damage it's doing to further my own profit, that's deceitful and damaging to everyone. and it's definitely something that one should get sued over.
Thats what you get living in a third-world police state.
That doesnt happen Australia. or Canada. or the UK.
Move or shut up.
Eh... What? I'm presuming you're a fellow westerner and as such you're doing a fucking poor job in defending western values and people's right to govern themselves.
A police state is one in which the citizens have no means of changing the way they're ruled and policed. North-Korea being the most blatant example but there are plenty of others, like China, which is not a third world country (anymore) but is certainly totalitarian in its policing and the citizens don't have a say in this. Now for such countries I think as a European that the 'move or shut up' -card may actually be valid. That is, if I put myself into the shoes of a North-Korean who realises the state of things, I'd almost certainly attempt escape rather than try to change the regime because the only realistic way of doing so would be to have an uprising against a large army and a populace most of whom worships the leader as a demi-god because they don't know any better.
The US however is a quasi-democracy. In that the people have a say in who rules them, although currently the electoral collage makes it so that votes from people in some states are worth more than others which makes it possible to get elected as the leader of the country with a minority vote as has now happened twice in the 2000s, so it's not a strict democracy. Whether you consider this a feature or a bug is another thing but the point is they can change the system if they want to so telling them to 'move or shut up' is possibly the dumbest thing to do, especially since it's not trivial to move in and settle to another country.
The whole reason democracies are deemed superior is that they allow for people to change systems they find unjust. And the Americans have shown themselves to be quite capable of this on many social issues: gay marriage, the legalisation of weed and so on, which by itself destroys the argument of a 'police state'. However it's true based on what I've read here and elsewhere that the doctrine of actual policing is broken in the US in many places. The use of force has gone out of hand (the resent swatting incident for example) and the seizures of money are a problem and so on. So the US isn't a police state, it's a state with bad policing. The difference between the 2 is huge. And the important thing is that the bad policing can be changed by the people via voting.
Why do you think I mentioned in particularly that Liberals usually are for a free market and deregulation? Socialists usually do not like these things.
I know what you were going for yes, but the point made is that it doesn't make sense to have just a one dimensional line where you try to cram everyone into because my point was to try and illustrate that it's possible for people who're too often viewed to be at the different ends of the spectrum to actually have common ideals.
On top of that socialism does not mean opposing free market. Case and point: we have a state controlled monopoly on hard liquor. I'm opposed to that and would like to see the market being freed. And I'm a socialist, especially from an american perspective.
So rather than the one dimensional left/right, you have got a two dimensional economy/rights simplification.
Reality is multi-dimensional.
Of course reality is multi-dimensional, but that's precisely why a 2 dimensional plane is better than a 1 dimensional line. I'm not saying the 2 dimensional model is a perfect model either, but it's certainly superior to the line-version.
If better models come up, I'm entirely open to using or discussing them, but it's still clear that at the very least we need to transition away from a one dimensional simplification.
"Liberal democracies" does not mean the same in Europe as in the US. Over here Liberalism is almost the polar opposite of Socialism
Someone didn't stay awake during classes I see. It's true that in colloquial usage there's a bif difference in the way the word liberal is used on the 2 sides of the Atlantic but the root cause of confusion is that on both sides people have forgotten that the political spectrum is not a line, it's a grid. The X-axis from left to right describes one's attitude to the economy and the role of the government in it. The Y-axis is is the liberal-authoritarian axis that describes one's attitude to individual rights.
There are quite a few leftist liberals both in the US and Europe, myself among them. I'm actually on the same page with right-wing libertarians on many topics, because we share common ground on the Y-axis which is what makes us liberal. I believe adults should be able to decide for themselves which substances they wish to enjoy, I believe in strong freedom of speech (and do not support laws like this) and so on. I also oppose the authoritarian left that mainly fuels itself with identity politics. These are the people who in the name of 'equality' think it'd be a good idea for example to legislate mandatory quotas for sexes in corporate boards and so on which in my opinion goes against true egalitarian principles.
In the US the term 'liberal' is currently thrown about mainly to refer to the more authoritarian left because of "liberal values" that they hold, even though they're closer to the other side of the liberal-authoritarian divide, but understandably very few people self-identify as authoritarian. Here in Finland the small 'liberal party' is indeed a right-leaning libertarian party, but it should be noted that unlike their US counterparts, said right-wing liberals here do not for example oppose universal health care, because a from a liberal point of view the argument can easily be made that since individuals cannot determine their own conditions of birth, the belief in equality of individuals necessitates that it is not right to gate people's access to a life-saving basic service based on their wealth or the wealth of their family. Put another way: it is no-one's fault for being born into a poor family, so the individual that is born into such a circumstance should not be punished for the mistakes of his/her parents, as the child is not responsible for the (poor) choices of his parents. Now I have my disagreements with the liberal party here as to how said universal model is to be arranged. I'm in favor of the currently existing universal single payer model which has kept costs very much down and is working very well results-wise, the liberals want to lessen the role of the state and take in more private instances. So because I'm more to the left of the liberal party, we differ on implementation, not the principle.
And of course we're completely ignoring the root of all this nonsense - interference from Vladimir Putin
Vlad is certainly a factor here, he's been promoting different nationalist groups across Europe for a long time indirectly because the more anti-EU sentiments there are in Europe, the better it is for Russia as it weakens cohesion of the Union. However, the thing to note is that this will not be solved by stooping down to the same level with Vlad and starting to censor critics and those who speak bullshit. In fact that's precisely what the Kremlin wants. The very moment websites start to be censored because they're 'fake news' they will start hammering the martyrdom angle real hard, saying that 'the truth is being silenced because the politicians don't want you to know it", which will only re-enforce the animosity and work in their favor because they can then say that European leaders are not in line with what the values of the Union are, freedom of speech being among the core values of all western societies.
It's like making the trash collector your new company CEO.
I'd say it's even worse. It's like walking out the door, going to the hobo with the sign that says the aliens are coming because they probed him and making him the CEO. I'm not american but I've been following the shitstorm that is Trump pretty closely and I thought I'd have gotten used to the stupidity by now, but the guy's a walking embodiment of the phrase: 'if you make something idiot proof, God makes a better idiot.' I mean honestly, the guy literally bragged about the size of his nuclear launch BUTTON. Not even the missiles (which would still be moronic) but the damn button used to launch them. Like this is above and beyond idiocracy-levels of insane, And this guy has the launch codes? Like, that's the truly scary thing here for those of us outside the US. The man's very likely suffering from an early onset of alzheimer's, if you look a the way he speaks. He's never been a master of rhetoric, but if you compare his speech now to clips from him from earlier daces, he's clearly degraded even from that. He can't speak, he can't write, and he lacks the basic understanding of how governments and diplomacy functions. I'm fairly certain if you asked him to name the three branches of government he'd be able to name himself, maybe the legislative and then change the topic 'cause he doesn't remember the third one. And this man is at the helm of the largest military machine ever developed by man? Every time I think about that it sends shivers down my spine, so I mostly just try not to think about it.
The US presidency is a much more powerful position than most western presidencies, so if anything Trump illustrates that it would perhaps be a good thing to have the candidates go through a basic medical screening for obvious mental issues, because putting people like him into positions of power is a genuinely risky move. Not because they're evil, he's way too dumb to be intentionally evil but that makes it even worse. The silver lining here based on the quotes from the book is that apparently even his close circle recognizes that he's a baffoon, so at least they're vary of what kind of information he's given so as to not confuse/anger him too much.
The US produces some of the smartest minds on the planet, but when a major chunk of the voters is by and large uneducated about basic civics this is what happens and that's truly sad. Please do something about that for your own sake more than anything, but also for the sake of global stability.
Amazon doesn't have too much house brand stuff; but one assumes that its margins on some of what it sells are higher than on the rest; so it could consume its own advertising space by promoting that; or encouraging purchases on Amazon rather than elsewhere.
They could do that yes, but if they decided to go that route they'd be handing chips over to competitors like Google who have no qualms about selling ad space on these devices. The echo is the most popular device of its kind currently and I assume Amazon's plan is to keep it that way. Keep in mind they can and very likely still do advertise themselves on the platform, but I can see no reason why they'd want to close off the ad ecosystem entirely. I mean, if someone's looking for services that Amazon doesn't provide, like a restaurant or a dentist, if they can't serve ads for nearby restaurants and services they're essentially throwing out money.
The way I look at Amazon's strategy as someone with a business background (though I'm not a marketing specialist) on the retail side is that they don't want to be seen as picking favorites. See the thing is that you're not quite correct about Amazon not having house brands. They own a wide variety of brands already that most people don't even realize are owned by them, because they haven't slapped their name on them. In addition there are several companies (mostly clothing companies, also listed in the above link) that only sell items via Amazon and have no other online presence anywhere and are all incorporated in the same address in Delaware. While these are not directly owned by Amazon, it's very likely that these too are 'covert house brands' hidden behind holding companies. The intent behind hiding the house brands is quite clear: Amazon wants to be seen as a neutral marketplace where you have a lot of options. If they only advertised products and brands that they own directly it would make the marketing of these covert brands impossible, as well as give up the game as it would highlight to consumers what these brands are, and this is not desirable for Amazon in the current position.
'Pay no heed to the man behind the curtain' is the way Amazon's brand management works on the retail side and they're quite successful at it. This decision fits perfectly with that strategy.
Now is apparently the time that the term "Weather isn't climate." will be reversed without scientific rigor, so long as the claim is in the right direction.
No, that's not what's being done here and anyone who reads this like that is scientifically illiterate.
The entire 'weather is climate' argument is used by the denialist baffoons to try and discredit the entire concept of climate change. It's essentially saying 'since it happens to be very cold outside the climate cannot be warming.' This is not that in reverse, because the scientists are not trying to prove that the climate is warming by pointing at singular weather events, they don't need to do that because the fact that the global climate is warming has been proven a long time ago by the data and the scientific consensus on the topic is very clear.
They're not claiming that 'weather equals climate', but the entire core of the issue of climate change is that climate affects the weather, that's the whole reason it's a problem. Heating of the entire climate is predicted to increase extreme weather phenomena on both ends of the spectrum (meaning: extreme cold and heat) as well as storms.
It's right there in the damn summary:
Over the last few years, dozens of studies have investigated the influence of climate change on events ranging from the Russian heat wave of 2010 to the California drought, evaluating the extent to which global warming has made them more severe or more likely to occur.
No-one's saying that these events were solely caused by global warming but it's pretty clear at this point that the continued warming of the atmosphere is bound to make heat waves and droughts both more common and more severe. Why anyone would think that studying how big of an affect the added energy is having on these events somehow means the experts in the field are 'reversing' the definitions of the term is beyond me.
The reason it's good that this is done is because there exists a misconception both among the general public as well as politicians that climate change is somehow a threat that solely exists in the future. But seeing as how nearly every year in the 2000s so far has broken the record for the hottest year, it's obvious that we're already seeing/feeling the effects of a warming climate, so in my opinion it's very good that this is brought to people's attention so that the sort of 'oh well, we'll deal with the problem later' attitude that some people seem to have can be countered. The problem is already here, and it's already affecting the global populace's health, economy and food production.
On a related note, the talk of climate change 'alarmists' has always seem moronic to me. It's not 'alarmism' to point out facts such as the global average temp is going up year after year, or that there are more and more extreme weather phenomenon. Take an analogy from medicine. Saying you wake up one day with a cough that gets increasingly worse as the days go by, until one day you spike a fever and start coughing blood. You go to the doctor who says they're going to need to do some tests on you, because the symptoms clearly indicate that something is wrong with your body and you may be in danger if that's left unchecked.
If one takes the same attitude in this scenario that many people seem to take towards climate change you'd stand up, laugh, and go 'ahahaha, you're just one of those 'human health alarmists'. Plenty of people have coughed blood and not died, so what do you know? Clearly nothing, so I'm just going to go home." Now the thing to understand here is that the skeptic maybe right, but we need to consider the game theory of the situation: if your goal is to live longer, then your chances of survival are drastically increased by seeking medical attention, even though it is possible that your body will heal on its own without outside help. Put yourself in this situation and ask, would you rather choose a doctor who wants to ru
Coming from the government that was able to get a screen shot of what anyone in a public internet cafe was doing in real time 10 years ago.
This is not coming from the government. This is coming from the company.
It's perfectly possible that everything they've said is accurate, they only stated that they themselves are not monitoring the chats, they never claimed that they've not given the government access to the data for them to be able to do monitoring, which is certainly happening.
Pushing for more free speech isn't pushing for more "hate speech". Sure, you probably end up getting more "hate speech", but so what?
Not that I'm in favor of hate speech laws although they exist in most countries here in Europe but I'm gonna present a counter-argument to the 'so what'.
Speech that incites violence is illegal everywhere, including the States to my understanding. That is, no-one can go stand up on a soapbox and declare that all members of [insert ethnic or a political group/religious group/etc] must be killed. However, you can incite mobs to act in violent ways without directly calling out for violence if you essentially dehumanize your opposition hard enough. This is how most totalitarian states have done it in the past. They've not come out the gates right away and said that the enemies of the state need to be killed, but they've began by amping up propaganda about how said group is evil, vile and immoral and doing damage. That riles up the populace, so that when you finally bring out the death squads and the mass executions they'll be tolerated because after all, they're only killing the scumbags.
I agree with you that just screeching 'hate speech!" at someone is not an argument, and often it's thrown about when it's not even applicable and is instead used as an attempt to silence valid criticisms of ideologies or religions. However, actual hate speech, meaning the kind that portrays a group of people as somehow less than humans is in fact dangerous because it fuels lone wolf attackers and lunatics of all sorts. True hate speech is the kind that's semi-effectively used by terrorist organizations in their propaganda for example, but it's not limited to only that. Both the left and the right at times engage in hate speech to varying degrees of success. The goal is always to paint the opposition as scum, whether it be 'nazis' or 'antifa/marxists' or any other group being targeted.
The point here is not to say that hate speech will go away with more laws. One of the reasons I'm more in favor of a US-style approach to free speech is that the hate speech laws themselves have an inbuilt problem: utilizing them will make the targeted individual/group gain a sort of martyrdom status and can even unintentionally re-enforce the hateful message. That is, if you ban radicals from spouting their BS the leaders can turn to their following and go: 'see, see, they're trying to silence us because they're afraid of us, keep going!"
But that being said it doesn't mean one shouldn't be concerned over increasing polarization and hate speech because the more vitriol that's spread around, the easier it is for all sorts of internal conflicts to escalate and different kinds of strongman-led violent movements to spring up once more and more people start to hold onto the view that the $OTHER_SIDE are all raving lunatics that can be hit, shot, ran over with a car or blown to bits without doing anything wrong. This is why the Kremlin is supporting extremists movements on both ends of the political spectrum in Europe, directly and indirectly. They're not interested in picking winners and losers, just like they weren't in the american elections, they're interested in creating more chaos and division in western countries because that's the most effective way of sabotaging free and open societies and causing them to stagnate.
The only way to effectively counter bad ideas is with better ideas and actual conversations, not finger pointing and demonizing.
Bitcoin is much more like art - it's value is defined by 'experts' and demand.
Wrong. Bitcoin has production costs that keep rising over time as the math to solve blocks get harder and harder by design. These costs set a bottom price for the coin that has to be paid for anyone to do any mining. Depending on the price of electricity and what kind of equipment one is using, that price is anywhere from a 500 to 1500 dollars per coin mined (not including hardware costs, that's just the electricity the actual costs with hardware are higher), and it's going to keep going up. You can't get the coins below this pricepoint, because at that price producing the coins will mean losses for the miners.
So the system has a built-in design factor that causes the costs to go up over time. This means there's much more than just 'experts' and demand at play when it comes to the price of the coin. If the value people assign to bitcoin drops below the costs of production, mining will seize and transactions will become impossible.
Basquiat painting sold for over 100 million - and it's worse than average graffiti you see in cities. Is art in a bubble too?
A more apt comparison to BTC would be if Basquait was creating and selling one such painting every 5 days, because at the current BTC market price (13 376 euros per coin) 100 million euros worth of new coins are created approximately every 100 hours.
If that was the case, his art would certainly be a bubble, as is bitcoin.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all: violence has gone down consistently over the last coople of decades in all western societies despite a notable increase in violent media, so the link between violence and games/media is not as widely accepted by professionals as you seem to think, there was just recently a story about this here on Slashdot. Second of all, the illnesses/conditions you listed, especially autism, all well understood and documented.
This is akin to saying if you remove all the doctors no-one will get cancer because there's no-one to diagnose anyone. Sure you won't get reports and stats on it anymore, but that doesn't indicate you've actually done anything to alleviate the problem.
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So it's okay to brand an entire branch of modern science 'withcraft' because you lack any understanding of it? What the fuck?
People actually do get depressed. As someone with friends and family that have suffered from depression I can tell you it's not 'witchcraft' because you can se the difference in the individual's mood and behavior even without being a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The mind is the result of the electrochemical processes in the brain, and if those processes are disturbed, that affects the state of mind of the individual, often negatively and in ways that can actually be detected with imaging technology and effectively treated with clinical methods, both pharmacological and therapeutic, so claiming that the entire field of research studying these conditions and searching for cures is 'witchcraft' ranks among the most ignorant statements I've ever read on this site.
Your government just recently shut itself down despite one party controlling the house, the senate and the presidency. If that is not a textbook example of gross incompetence, I don't know what is. And just the tip of the iceberg.
As for corruption: well, for one thing the man who campaigned on 'draining the swamp' has appointed more bankers and wall street people into positions of power than any since the 20s. He recently shoved through a tax-cut for himself and the wealthiest americans, while raising taxes on the very poorest.This was done via legal means so it's not corrupt in the legal sense of the term, as you don't have to bribe a wealthy asshole to make him more likely to serve his own interests and fuck the rest, but it's certainly corrupt in the moral and political sense of the word as it is the polar opposite of what he said while he was campaigning.
You do realize Trump claimed he invented the term 'fake' and his go-to defense against any and all criticism is simply stating that it's not true and ignoring any and all evidence that contradicts his position, right? The modus operandi of Trump is to make a decision first, and then come up with some pseudo-factual BS to justify it with or deflect criticism. The entire white house is currently ran on the basis of 'rumors and made up theories'. A quick list of just a few of the things that Trump has either completely made up and keeps repeating in absence of any factual evidence: his inauguration was the biggest ever, he won the popular vote, Obama bugged his residence, the 'last night in Sweden' statement referring to a terror attack that never happened, claiming you guys pay the most taxes in the world, and claiming that his own tax reform will cost him a lot.
These are all things Trump has pulled out of his ass. The way it looks and sounds to me is that he's not even doing it fully on purpose, the man seems to be incapable of using basic logic and grounding his arguments in reality. He can make a statement, and then a couple days later deny he ever said so even if he's on tape saying so. This is the sign of a man who's either a pathological liar, or slowly going senile due to the onset of Alzheimer's or dementia. My bet is on the latter option because the degradation of his speech pattern (slurring and pronouncing words incorrectly, not being able to stay on topic for an entire sentence, increased usage of general vague terms like 'some'. 'all, 'good', 'bad', 'things' etc that he has to keep inserting because he doesn't know/remember vocabulary) and the erratic nature of his personality wherein he seems to lack any impulse control and will outright make statements that hurt himself and his party with no regard to anything resembling a political strategy all point towards a man struggling with old age and a mind that's never been too sharp to begin with starting to go off its rails. And yes, I know he passed the 'cognitive test' of 'can you recognize a camel' but first of all that's not a proper diagnostic test for these illnesses, and secondly, if he is actually going senile there's no way the White House would admit to this on television.
That's just my 2 cents as an outsider who's followed US politics closely and has a grandparent dealing with Alzheimer's so I've seen people go down this path before.
While I agree with this sentiment overall, something I'd like to point out: you're the wealthiest country at the moment, and will remain so for another decade or so at least, China's inevitably going to bypass you on grounds of size, but in terms of per capita GDP you're going to remain on the top. This means that for commercialization purposes the US is indeed the top market for technology. However what's being discussed here is innovation, not commercialization. The medical side is a good example in a way: the US has the most commercialized medical system in the world, which means there's a lot of money to be made by selling medical tech and meds in the US. This drives the creation of products to the market, but that doesn't mean the research that goes into the solutions is solely American. Gene therapy for example is an area of huge research globally, with universities and companies in all advanced societies putting money into it. The current CRISPR/CAS9 basis for gene therapy was pioneered by 2 women, one of them being the American biochemist Jennifer Doudna working from Berkly California, and another one being the French biochemist Emmanuelle Charpantier who used to work in Sweden and now works in Germany. Similar examples can be found elsewhere in tech. You took up CPUs; the first commercially manufactured microprocessor by Intel, the Intel 4004, was designed under the lead of Frederico Faggin, an Italian. 2 indian engineers, Vinod Dham and Rajeev Chandtasekhar were part of the core team that developed the 486 chip. And so on.
I'm not trying to say you're incorrect in what you were saying about the end products of cutting edge tech often coming from American companies, that's obvious because you've got the most money which also means you're the source for most of the R & D money on the private sector. I'm just pointing out that the innovations and research that are needed to make those products possible are the result of a global effort of a multitude of scientists The vast majority of major american breakthroughs rely on people and knowledge from around the world, so they're not purely 'American' innovations in that sense.
This is correct obviously, but there are 2 important distinctions that you left out that make a huge impact on the discussion about games/media and violence,
Firstly, as an avid gamer since my teens I've played a lot of violent games, and I find myself often thinking about them when I'm not playing, but those thoughts are not violent in nature. That's because I don't think of shooting a virtual enemy as an act of violence anymore so than I think about capturing a pawn on a chess board as an act of violence. I find myself thinking about stuff like level layouts, how to improve my use of cover, etc stuff that relates to my goal, which is completing the game. I don't play the games because they're violent, I play them because I enjoy puzzles and challenges, and games offer that. Some of them with a violence as a mechanic, some of them without it. I've never had violent thoughts towards real people as a result of playing a lot of games, because my mind is perfectly capable of discerning between actual violence, and a a virtual character on screen being 'shot' at.
Secondly, even if one's thinking about violence, that does not automatically mean one will become more likely to be violent. Here as an example I'll use my brother who in his teens was actually quite aggressive and short tempered as many young males especially are and often got into fights. Then he started kickboxing, which is an extremely violent sport by all metrics. Now, is he thinking more about violence these days than in his teens? Very likely so, he watches matches, practices a lot and teaches techniques etc. But he's not gotten into fights outside the ring since he became an adult because he's now found himself a 'game' in the real world that has given him an avenue to deal with violence in a manner that's more sensible, and also more rewarding as it is a competition. He's learned a lot about respecting other people via the sport. So for him not only thinking but actively engaging in more violence in a controlled setting has actually made him less likely to be a risk for others in the world. He's much more in tune with his emotional responses to situations now, and while he still gets angry and loud easily, he doesn't transition from yelling to actually punching someone but has instead learned to walk away from the situations before they spiral out of control. That self-control is entirely the rest of a combat sport (and good coaches) teaching him discipline.
The primary question with regards to games and media of a violent nature is therefore not 'does the media make people think about violence more?' because even if it does that's not necessarily a bad thing, but 'does the media lessen people's impulse control and/or dehumanize other individuals so that they're more likely to use violence in the real word?'. To me there's no evidence that this is the case. Violent crime has gone down and is going down in pretty much all advanced societies, even though the amount of violent media in different and more graphical forms (think Game of Thrones cutting of limbs and dicks and burning people alive, murdering children etc) has exploded.
Now it's also obvious that people with pre-existing violent tendencies still likely gravitate towards violent entertainment, but as is the case with my brother, I remain unconvinced that that is necessarily a bad thing, because these are precisely the people who in fact need to think about violence and their own relation to it more in order to attain control over their own impulses and behavior towards others, and it's far better for them to do it via something like a game or sport rather than actually getting themselves into violent situations.
I never claimed that. But it's clear at this point that continued warming will negatively affect the amount of arable land and food output in regions like sub-saharan Africa that are already suffering from shortages of quality land. Further up north some places will actually see an increase in arable land, but it's clear that for a chunk of the poorest people in the world the situation will get even worse increasing instability and conflicts.
I never said the climate is the only reason they're starving, nor the primary reason right now. But again, there's no doubt that continued warming will make the starvation worse in developing economies, areas that are already having difficulties feeding themselves.
Again, as I said to a previous poster who made the same mistake: I wasn't making an argument for (or against) immigration, but pointing out precisely that if we want to avoid triggering further massive movements of people, then the climate issue has to be taken seriously.
Even if one agrees with this 100 %, that still doesn't mean the climate will not be an issue that will become even worse than politics in the future, and while bad politics can be mitigated over time (and there are some African countries that are doing this and actually seeing progress), the climate cannot be reverted back.
The way I see it as an outsider is that Gamacho would be an improvement. I mean, here's a man that recognized his own limitations and did his best to get the smartest man alive to try and solve the issues they're facing because he knew he couldn't do so himself. That's actually a quality many leaders lack.
Meanwhile, Trump's a guy who bragged about passing his health exam. Dude recognized some animals from pictures and he know holds himself to be a certified genius that's 'like, really smart'. Because if there's one thing we know about smart people it's that they constantly tell everyone how really super duper smart they are.
*facepalm*
First of all get your xenophobic talking points correct. I'm a Finn. The 'rape capital' -card is thrown about regarding Sweden, and is not even correct..
Thirdly, since you managed to somehow miss it even I was not making a pro/anti-immigration argument, I was making an argument for slowing down or containing the warming of the climate as much as we can because failure to do so puts all societies in increased risk of breakdown and lowers the standard of living for everyone. I don't care what your stance on immigration is, it has nothing to do the fact that unless the climate related challenges are solved, the situation is going to get worse for everyone. If you want to reduce the amount of people on the move, you're going to want to make sure they don't run out of food, which is what will happen if the heating continues. The point is precisely that if we don't want even more people being both internally and internationally displaced, then we cannot ignore the role that climate plays in societal stability.
I took it up precisely because I find it so baffling that many of the people making the most noise about the current refugee situation (mostly using incorrect and/or copypasted memes like you just did) are often also ones that don't think climate presents any kind of risk, when climate is one of the main drivers of massive movements of people.
The questions never been if we'll survive. Homo sapiens has survived several ice ages without modern technology. 'We'll' survive if by 'we' you mean that the genome of the species will live on, we're very adaptive. The question is at what cost? The climate heating up affects global stability by affecting economies and more importantly the global food production. Europe right now - as someone living here - is quite stirred up by the refugee crisis from the middle-east that's caused by the Syrian civil war. Now, the current refugee crisis is large, it's the largest since the 2nd world war, but it's small peanuts compared to what we're facing if nothing is done to mitigate climate change.
If we just go on with 'we'll survive' attitude, we - as in, the post-industrialised economies accustomed to a level of wealth, peace, comfort and ease unknown to anyone a couple of generations back - will be facing the Syrian crisis times a hundred. Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator, pushing hundreds of millions or more likely billions of people to move northwards in search of shelter and survival. It's not something we can just ignore. Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'. We're not isolated from the rest of the world, if the developing nations fall into civil wars and chaos as Syria did, we're going to feel the effects. Not immediately, but we will. Not to mention that the climate will directly affect our own food production and stability
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy, and many of the same people are going: 'huh, climate's changing, no big deal, we'll manage.' Of course we'll fucking manage, but that doesn't mean we'll manage at the same standard of living and enjoying the same relative peace as we have now. I don't want to spend the remainder of my life in a world where societies are doing what they can to wall themselves off from the global community and fighting for scraps while the wealthy lock themselves off in gated communities watching the rabble fight over the scraps of rationed food and emergency housing as coastlines are flooding and global trade grinds to a halt as every country wishes to secure well being for themselves and not for the rest. I certainly don't want my kids (if I ever have any) to inherit just such a world and tell them: 'yeah, I know it sucks, but hey, look on the bright side: the species will survive. None of you or your grandkids will likely ever enjoy the standard of living I had in my youth, but hey, we'll be alive. Now off you go and do some fishing, I'll fire up the generator so we can cook up some food in the evening. Watch out for looters!"
There's 7 billion of us on the planet right now, and that figure by all estimates is going to keep growing until at least 10 if not more before stabilising. Of those billions, the vast majority is already staring to be negatively affected by the current change, and it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something. We can't stop the warming altogether, it's way too late for that, but we can still affect whether or not the generations that come after us will occupy a 21st century society, or a dystopia of a few extremely well off people and billions in poverty and internal conflict. The difference made by a few degrees in the global average temperature is massive, because once the tipping
No we don't. The EU elections have no electoral college, it's a system of proportional representation and while individual countries are free to set some conditions of their own, the rules of the Union dictate that either a party list system or a single transferable vote system has to be used for selecting the members. Neither of these is present in the EC process of US presidential elections.
Secondly comparing the EU elections to the US presidential elections is foolish to begin with. The EU elections are used to select members for the parliament, not a single ruler with significant ruling power over the entire block of nations. The US presidency by itself is a much more powerful position than the whole of the EU parliament combined.
Nope, that's not what I'm saying, not at all. Of course the people living in the tents have a different situation than the people living in the building, but that statement does not get you to the conclusion that therefore the people in the tents should have the deciding vote on who rules over everyone. Living in a sparsely populated area does not mean you should automatically get more political power over decisions that affect everyone.
Yes, yes it does, because the weight of the group is made up of the votes of the individuals in it. Using the 'winner takes it all approach' 75 % of the smaller group can choose the ruler for the whole group of 10, meaning that each of those 3 votes is weighed at over 3 times that of everyone else's.
Nope. If you can get elected with 33 % total votes, that does not a 50-50 split make.
The whole setup makes even less sense when you consider that people can move and the size of the groups can change. If 3 out of the 4 people in said example move into the building, then the 1 remaining guy in the tents gets to choose the president every single time because his 'group' of 1 now controls the majority of electoral votes, which just further underlines the fault with such systems.
This argument has never made any sense to me as a European and a proponent of democracy, especially for the electoral college because what the EC does is flip the situation upside down by giving a minority of people the right to elect a ruler of the country. How's that superior? It's now put you in a situation wherein some states are fundamentally worth more than others to candidates, and you can moneyball the entire election process by competing for those more valuable votes that decide the end result. It in fact makes you more susceptible to groupthink, because you now only have to manipulate a minority of the voterbase to believe you're on their side (as Trump successfully did) and you'll be elected. How does this 'ensure' you against anything? To me it's obvious at this point that it makes the system weaker to populism of the Trump kind, where all you have to do is make grandiose and baseless promises to a minority of people (and it's easier to fool a minority than a majority) and the groupthink of these people will help you get elected. As a 'safeguard' measure it's an utter failure, not to mention fundamentally undemocratic. You're all citizens of the same country, you all have the same president. Trump rules just as much over California than he does over Ohio, so why on earth should votes from Ohio be more important that votes from California? There is no rational justification for this.
Again, this statement has nothing to do with the fact that the EC is fundamentally undemocratic because what it does is it ties the significance of ones vote to one's geographic area, which is irrational and can in the end used to manipulate the result by either side. There is absolutely nothing about a person living in a given area that means he/she will think in a certain way or hold certain beliefs, yet the system as it now is treats people differently based simply on where they happen to live. Democracies have mechanisms which are meant to safeguard minorities from tyranny by the majority, the most important one usually being the constitution and that uphold it. On top of this you have the local elections on a city/state level giving people further influence over the governance of their immediate area, but what you're saying that certain people should have more power in selecting who rules over everyone simply because the happen to live in place X instead of place Y, and that to me is thoroughly irrational. Your place of residence does not determine your intelligence, your values, political beliefs or set them in stone, so it should also rightfully not affect the weight of ones vote.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario where 10 people set up a camp in the woods. 6 of them live in the same building, while 4 people set up tents further away. What you're saying is that those 4 people should get to decide who is elected as the leader of the camp simply on the merits that they're located in a different spot because you want to avoid 'the groupthink' of the 6. So your suggestion is 'hey, let's give power instead to this even smaller group of people, after all, a smaller group of people cannot possibly fall victim to groupthink' . It just makes no sense, from the perspective of equality and the western democratic principles. If indeed you hold, as many Americans so proudly proclaim 'that all Men are created equal', then this system is the very antithesis of that statement and should be done away with.
Uhm. Not too likely at this point. Fossil fuels make up a third of Russia's budget revenue and over half of its exports. (Source: Bank of Finland's Economies in Transition policy brief No. 5 from last year entitled Overview of Russia's oil and gas sector,the Bank of Finland keeps a pretty close eye on Russia, it being one of the largest trading partners we have and a major geopolitical question mark if unstability/collapse hits). Quoting the brief:
If they did that in their current business model they'd start losing a lot of money. FB sells visibility on the users' feed at a premium, the whole core business is in being the largest and most in depth segmentation marketing platform on the planet. It's possible to do very precise targeting of ads these days on FB. Want to single out people in a certain geographical area that are re-enactors to sell them military gear? You can do that, but you can even take it further and only target your ad of a 2nd world war era boots/gear to only those people in said area that are interested in re-enactments of that era, as one Finnish military surplus store did by advertising British WW2 era boots only to British re-enactors and got good click-through/conversion rates for a really low price because the smaller the segment you're targeting to, the smaller the cost of buying visibility.
The general point is that the algorithm that decides what people see is their core product. So okay, they can't let users decide how much ads they see, but why not allow users to control everything else? Well, because the question from FB's perspective has to be: does giving the users total control over the content of their feed increase or decrease the effectiveness of the marketing? The likely answer is the latter, because imagining a situation where I only allowed say, text-only posts, those posts would be interrupted by ads with images/videos that would then stand out from the stream of content and make it obvious that they're ads, and the marketing industry has long known that ads work better if people don't think of them as ads, which is a lot easier to accomplish in an environment where you can 'slip' ad videos and other sponsored posts by companies and artists into a stream that already has a lot of different kind of content, making it stick out less and seem more natural.
However, there is a possible solution that would keep both FB and us control freaks satisfied: many people may deem it ridiculous idea but I'd actually be willing to consider: subscription-model for the users. I'd be willing to pay a few euros a month to get rid of the ads and gain total control over what I see. Hell, I already pay for a bunch of streaming services and podcasts, paying a few euros more to have a more pleasant social media experience wouldn't be that bad.
Money. The answer is money.
When you own a self-driving car it can make you money by doubling as a taxi when it's not needed by you.
Let me paint you a picture, say 15-20 years into the future: I own a self-driving car and take it to work in the morning, and it takes off to find a parking spot somewhere nearby. I've configured the car so that my close circle of friends can use it during my office hours for trips shorter than N kilometers for a distance based fee that covers the operating expense and maybe say, a 5 % margin. So at 10:30 my smartphone lets me know that the vehicle is on its way to pick up my friend and take him to his job interview or whatever, and once it's done I receive a payment from my friend.
At 11:30 the car is still on the other side of town charging itself, when a nearby unknown to me user of the app requests for my permission to use the car to get to the center of the city. I check out his profile and see that he's been well reviewed by other car owners, so I offer him a price on the trip and he agrees. He pays in advance, the car takes him to his destination and the returns to pick me from the office and take me home. In the evening as I'm watching a movie the app beeps, another friend is at a bar requesting pickup. Since I've no need for the car for the evening, I okay it and it leaves to take the fellow home via a drive through. Cheaper for him than taking a taxi, and I get some income.
I'm not saying this is the way everyone will do it, but the general point is that shared use of a vehicle with a group of friends for example is much cheaper than either everyone owning a car of their own, or everyone using taxies to go everywhere.
Just something to think about.
Because it's quite clear at this point that the oil companies have been doing their utmost to obfuscate the discussion on climate change and spread outright misinformation.
Ask yourself this: why is the US the only developed country in which climate change is still a matter of 'debate'? Why is it that a matter of natural science that the experts of the relevant fields are in agreement about is being presented as an issue up for debate? Who benefits from there existing doubt over this? Who stands to lose if more strict actions are taken to control greenhouse gas emissions? The fossil fuel companies. The firms have a direct monetary incentive for there to be little or no environmental regulation. They also have vast wealth and hence vast lobbying power which they have used and are using to promote views and politicians that are entirely contrary to well understood science.
Tobacco companies a few decades past were doing the exact same deal and promoting false science to try and obfuscate the link between smoking and cancer, even though from internal documents it's quite clear that they were aware of the issue, and were actively promoting a view they knew to be false for their own economic benefit. This is no different. In fact a lot of the marketing companies that were in charge of the diversion tactics of the tobacco companies have since transitioned into the fossil fuel business. It's quite easy to do: you set up different 'think thanks' with environmentally friendly names, and you hire some scientists, often not even from relevant fields who're willing to shill for you. Then you produce non-peer reviewed pseudo-science papers on the matter. Then you drag these shills on tv and elsewhere into the media to advertise how there really is no problem and all the academics are just wrong. Once you've established enough doubt among the general public about the matter (I mean after all there was a 'scientist' on tv saying he doesn't think it's happening, so clearly it can't be settled right?) you spend some hundred or so million a year lobbying politicians to oppose any regulation on your industry. The fact that this strategy still works as well as it did in the past shows how easy it is to fool the majority of people who do not understand how science works.
If I manufacture a product the use of which does harm not just to me, but the entire ecosystem of the planet and all civilizations, and I then knowingly and willingly try to misrepresent or hide the damage it's doing to further my own profit, that's deceitful and damaging to everyone. and it's definitely something that one should get sued over.
Eh... What? I'm presuming you're a fellow westerner and as such you're doing a fucking poor job in defending western values and people's right to govern themselves.
A police state is one in which the citizens have no means of changing the way they're ruled and policed. North-Korea being the most blatant example but there are plenty of others, like China, which is not a third world country (anymore) but is certainly totalitarian in its policing and the citizens don't have a say in this. Now for such countries I think as a European that the 'move or shut up' -card may actually be valid. That is, if I put myself into the shoes of a North-Korean who realises the state of things, I'd almost certainly attempt escape rather than try to change the regime because the only realistic way of doing so would be to have an uprising against a large army and a populace most of whom worships the leader as a demi-god because they don't know any better.
The US however is a quasi-democracy. In that the people have a say in who rules them, although currently the electoral collage makes it so that votes from people in some states are worth more than others which makes it possible to get elected as the leader of the country with a minority vote as has now happened twice in the 2000s, so it's not a strict democracy. Whether you consider this a feature or a bug is another thing but the point is they can change the system if they want to so telling them to 'move or shut up' is possibly the dumbest thing to do, especially since it's not trivial to move in and settle to another country.
The whole reason democracies are deemed superior is that they allow for people to change systems they find unjust. And the Americans have shown themselves to be quite capable of this on many social issues: gay marriage, the legalisation of weed and so on, which by itself destroys the argument of a 'police state'. However it's true based on what I've read here and elsewhere that the doctrine of actual policing is broken in the US in many places. The use of force has gone out of hand (the resent swatting incident for example) and the seizures of money are a problem and so on. So the US isn't a police state, it's a state with bad policing. The difference between the 2 is huge. And the important thing is that the bad policing can be changed by the people via voting.
I know what you were going for yes, but the point made is that it doesn't make sense to have just a one dimensional line where you try to cram everyone into because my point was to try and illustrate that it's possible for people who're too often viewed to be at the different ends of the spectrum to actually have common ideals.
On top of that socialism does not mean opposing free market. Case and point: we have a state controlled monopoly on hard liquor. I'm opposed to that and would like to see the market being freed. And I'm a socialist, especially from an american perspective.
Of course reality is multi-dimensional, but that's precisely why a 2 dimensional plane is better than a 1 dimensional line. I'm not saying the 2 dimensional model is a perfect model either, but it's certainly superior to the line-version.
If better models come up, I'm entirely open to using or discussing them, but it's still clear that at the very least we need to transition away from a one dimensional simplification.
Someone didn't stay awake during classes I see. It's true that in colloquial usage there's a bif difference in the way the word liberal is used on the 2 sides of the Atlantic but the root cause of confusion is that on both sides people have forgotten that the political spectrum is not a line, it's a grid. The X-axis from left to right describes one's attitude to the economy and the role of the government in it. The Y-axis is is the liberal-authoritarian axis that describes one's attitude to individual rights.
There are quite a few leftist liberals both in the US and Europe, myself among them. I'm actually on the same page with right-wing libertarians on many topics, because we share common ground on the Y-axis which is what makes us liberal. I believe adults should be able to decide for themselves which substances they wish to enjoy, I believe in strong freedom of speech (and do not support laws like this) and so on. I also oppose the authoritarian left that mainly fuels itself with identity politics. These are the people who in the name of 'equality' think it'd be a good idea for example to legislate mandatory quotas for sexes in corporate boards and so on which in my opinion goes against true egalitarian principles.
In the US the term 'liberal' is currently thrown about mainly to refer to the more authoritarian left because of "liberal values" that they hold, even though they're closer to the other side of the liberal-authoritarian divide, but understandably very few people self-identify as authoritarian. Here in Finland the small 'liberal party' is indeed a right-leaning libertarian party, but it should be noted that unlike their US counterparts, said right-wing liberals here do not for example oppose universal health care, because a from a liberal point of view the argument can easily be made that since individuals cannot determine their own conditions of birth, the belief in equality of individuals necessitates that it is not right to gate people's access to a life-saving basic service based on their wealth or the wealth of their family. Put another way: it is no-one's fault for being born into a poor family, so the individual that is born into such a circumstance should not be punished for the mistakes of his/her parents, as the child is not responsible for the (poor) choices of his parents. Now I have my disagreements with the liberal party here as to how said universal model is to be arranged. I'm in favor of the currently existing universal single payer model which has kept costs very much down and is working very well results-wise, the liberals want to lessen the role of the state and take in more private instances. So because I'm more to the left of the liberal party, we differ on implementation, not the principle.
Vlad is certainly a factor here, he's been promoting different nationalist groups across Europe for a long time indirectly because the more anti-EU sentiments there are in Europe, the better it is for Russia as it weakens cohesion of the Union. However, the thing to note is that this will not be solved by stooping down to the same level with Vlad and starting to censor critics and those who speak bullshit. In fact that's precisely what the Kremlin wants. The very moment websites start to be censored because they're 'fake news' they will start hammering the martyrdom angle real hard, saying that 'the truth is being silenced because the politicians don't want you to know it", which will only re-enforce the animosity and work in their favor because they can then say that European leaders are not in line with what the values of the Union are, freedom of speech being among the core values of all western societies.
Freedom of speech however is not freedom from con
I'd say it's even worse. It's like walking out the door, going to the hobo with the sign that says the aliens are coming because they probed him and making him the CEO. I'm not american but I've been following the shitstorm that is Trump pretty closely and I thought I'd have gotten used to the stupidity by now, but the guy's a walking embodiment of the phrase: 'if you make something idiot proof, God makes a better idiot.' I mean honestly, the guy literally bragged about the size of his nuclear launch BUTTON. Not even the missiles (which would still be moronic) but the damn button used to launch them. Like this is above and beyond idiocracy-levels of insane, And this guy has the launch codes? Like, that's the truly scary thing here for those of us outside the US. The man's very likely suffering from an early onset of alzheimer's, if you look a the way he speaks. He's never been a master of rhetoric, but if you compare his speech now to clips from him from earlier daces, he's clearly degraded even from that. He can't speak, he can't write, and he lacks the basic understanding of how governments and diplomacy functions. I'm fairly certain if you asked him to name the three branches of government he'd be able to name himself, maybe the legislative and then change the topic 'cause he doesn't remember the third one. And this man is at the helm of the largest military machine ever developed by man? Every time I think about that it sends shivers down my spine, so I mostly just try not to think about it.
The US presidency is a much more powerful position than most western presidencies, so if anything Trump illustrates that it would perhaps be a good thing to have the candidates go through a basic medical screening for obvious mental issues, because putting people like him into positions of power is a genuinely risky move. Not because they're evil, he's way too dumb to be intentionally evil but that makes it even worse. The silver lining here based on the quotes from the book is that apparently even his close circle recognizes that he's a baffoon, so at least they're vary of what kind of information he's given so as to not confuse/anger him too much.
The US produces some of the smartest minds on the planet, but when a major chunk of the voters is by and large uneducated about basic civics this is what happens and that's truly sad. Please do something about that for your own sake more than anything, but also for the sake of global stability.
They could do that yes, but if they decided to go that route they'd be handing chips over to competitors like Google who have no qualms about selling ad space on these devices. The echo is the most popular device of its kind currently and I assume Amazon's plan is to keep it that way. Keep in mind they can and very likely still do advertise themselves on the platform, but I can see no reason why they'd want to close off the ad ecosystem entirely. I mean, if someone's looking for services that Amazon doesn't provide, like a restaurant or a dentist, if they can't serve ads for nearby restaurants and services they're essentially throwing out money.
The way I look at Amazon's strategy as someone with a business background (though I'm not a marketing specialist) on the retail side is that they don't want to be seen as picking favorites. See the thing is that you're not quite correct about Amazon not having house brands. They own a wide variety of brands already that most people don't even realize are owned by them, because they haven't slapped their name on them. In addition there are several companies (mostly clothing companies, also listed in the above link) that only sell items via Amazon and have no other online presence anywhere and are all incorporated in the same address in Delaware. While these are not directly owned by Amazon, it's very likely that these too are 'covert house brands' hidden behind holding companies. The intent behind hiding the house brands is quite clear: Amazon wants to be seen as a neutral marketplace where you have a lot of options. If they only advertised products and brands that they own directly it would make the marketing of these covert brands impossible, as well as give up the game as it would highlight to consumers what these brands are, and this is not desirable for Amazon in the current position.
'Pay no heed to the man behind the curtain' is the way Amazon's brand management works on the retail side and they're quite successful at it. This decision fits perfectly with that strategy.
No, that's not what's being done here and anyone who reads this like that is scientifically illiterate.
The entire 'weather is climate' argument is used by the denialist baffoons to try and discredit the entire concept of climate change. It's essentially saying 'since it happens to be very cold outside the climate cannot be warming.' This is not that in reverse, because the scientists are not trying to prove that the climate is warming by pointing at singular weather events, they don't need to do that because the fact that the global climate is warming has been proven a long time ago by the data and the scientific consensus on the topic is very clear.
They're not claiming that 'weather equals climate', but the entire core of the issue of climate change is that climate affects the weather, that's the whole reason it's a problem. Heating of the entire climate is predicted to increase extreme weather phenomena on both ends of the spectrum (meaning: extreme cold and heat) as well as storms.
It's right there in the damn summary:
No-one's saying that these events were solely caused by global warming but it's pretty clear at this point that the continued warming of the atmosphere is bound to make heat waves and droughts both more common and more severe. Why anyone would think that studying how big of an affect the added energy is having on these events somehow means the experts in the field are 'reversing' the definitions of the term is beyond me.
The reason it's good that this is done is because there exists a misconception both among the general public as well as politicians that climate change is somehow a threat that solely exists in the future. But seeing as how nearly every year in the 2000s so far has broken the record for the hottest year, it's obvious that we're already seeing/feeling the effects of a warming climate, so in my opinion it's very good that this is brought to people's attention so that the sort of 'oh well, we'll deal with the problem later' attitude that some people seem to have can be countered. The problem is already here, and it's already affecting the global populace's health, economy and food production.
On a related note, the talk of climate change 'alarmists' has always seem moronic to me. It's not 'alarmism' to point out facts such as the global average temp is going up year after year, or that there are more and more extreme weather phenomenon. Take an analogy from medicine. Saying you wake up one day with a cough that gets increasingly worse as the days go by, until one day you spike a fever and start coughing blood. You go to the doctor who says they're going to need to do some tests on you, because the symptoms clearly indicate that something is wrong with your body and you may be in danger if that's left unchecked.
If one takes the same attitude in this scenario that many people seem to take towards climate change you'd stand up, laugh, and go 'ahahaha, you're just one of those 'human health alarmists'. Plenty of people have coughed blood and not died, so what do you know? Clearly nothing, so I'm just going to go home."
Now the thing to understand here is that the skeptic maybe right, but we need to consider the game theory of the situation: if your goal is to live longer, then your chances of survival are drastically increased by seeking medical attention, even though it is possible that your body will heal on its own without outside help. Put yourself in this situation and ask, would you rather choose a doctor who wants to ru
This is not coming from the government. This is coming from the company.
It's perfectly possible that everything they've said is accurate, they only stated that they themselves are not monitoring the chats, they never claimed that they've not given the government access to the data for them to be able to do monitoring, which is certainly happening.
Not that I'm in favor of hate speech laws although they exist in most countries here in Europe but I'm gonna present a counter-argument to the 'so what'.
Speech that incites violence is illegal everywhere, including the States to my understanding. That is, no-one can go stand up on a soapbox and declare that all members of [insert ethnic or a political group/religious group/etc] must be killed. However, you can incite mobs to act in violent ways without directly calling out for violence if you essentially dehumanize your opposition hard enough. This is how most totalitarian states have done it in the past. They've not come out the gates right away and said that the enemies of the state need to be killed, but they've began by amping up propaganda about how said group is evil, vile and immoral and doing damage. That riles up the populace, so that when you finally bring out the death squads and the mass executions they'll be tolerated because after all, they're only killing the scumbags.
I agree with you that just screeching 'hate speech!" at someone is not an argument, and often it's thrown about when it's not even applicable and is instead used as an attempt to silence valid criticisms of ideologies or religions. However, actual hate speech, meaning the kind that portrays a group of people as somehow less than humans is in fact dangerous because it fuels lone wolf attackers and lunatics of all sorts. True hate speech is the kind that's semi-effectively used by terrorist organizations in their propaganda for example, but it's not limited to only that. Both the left and the right at times engage in hate speech to varying degrees of success. The goal is always to paint the opposition as scum, whether it be 'nazis' or 'antifa/marxists' or any other group being targeted.
The point here is not to say that hate speech will go away with more laws. One of the reasons I'm more in favor of a US-style approach to free speech is that the hate speech laws themselves have an inbuilt problem: utilizing them will make the targeted individual/group gain a sort of martyrdom status and can even unintentionally re-enforce the hateful message. That is, if you ban radicals from spouting their BS the leaders can turn to their following and go: 'see, see, they're trying to silence us because they're afraid of us, keep going!"
But that being said it doesn't mean one shouldn't be concerned over increasing polarization and hate speech because the more vitriol that's spread around, the easier it is for all sorts of internal conflicts to escalate and different kinds of strongman-led violent movements to spring up once more and more people start to hold onto the view that the $OTHER_SIDE are all raving lunatics that can be hit, shot, ran over with a car or blown to bits without doing anything wrong. This is why the Kremlin is supporting extremists movements on both ends of the political spectrum in Europe, directly and indirectly. They're not interested in picking winners and losers, just like they weren't in the american elections, they're interested in creating more chaos and division in western countries because that's the most effective way of sabotaging free and open societies and causing them to stagnate.
The only way to effectively counter bad ideas is with better ideas and actual conversations, not finger pointing and demonizing.
Wrong. Bitcoin has production costs that keep rising over time as the math to solve blocks get harder and harder by design. These costs set a bottom price for the coin that has to be paid for anyone to do any mining. Depending on the price of electricity and what kind of equipment one is using, that price is anywhere from a 500 to 1500 dollars per coin mined (not including hardware costs, that's just the electricity the actual costs with hardware are higher), and it's going to keep going up. You can't get the coins below this pricepoint, because at that price producing the coins will mean losses for the miners.
So the system has a built-in design factor that causes the costs to go up over time. This means there's much more than just 'experts' and demand at play when it comes to the price of the coin. If the value people assign to bitcoin drops below the costs of production, mining will seize and transactions will become impossible.
A more apt comparison to BTC would be if Basquait was creating and selling one such painting every 5 days, because at the current BTC market price (13 376 euros per coin) 100 million euros worth of new coins are created approximately every 100 hours.
If that was the case, his art would certainly be a bubble, as is bitcoin.