There is something called the Backfire Effect. In short, the more factual information you give to someone pointing how/where they're wrong, the more strident in their viewpoint they become.
As the Amazon summary says "Over the past three decades, we [Americans] have been choosing the neighborhood (and church and news show) compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred that people don't know and can't understand those who live a few miles away."
Living and working in communities of exclusively like-minded people tends to reinforce beliefs (and make them more extreme) over time. Confirmation bias becomes ingrained, and the willingness to even consider an alternative viewpoint diminishes.
In such an environment, rational argument is useless. Inconvenient evidence is simply ignored. Sadly, this is not just an American phenomenon. I've seen similar trends emerging in the UK in recent years.
Umm, First Amendment? Pretty sure you'd be running afoul of the First Amendment if you did that....
That's a popular misconception. The First Amendment means you can say whatever you want, but nobody is legally required to help you say it. Obligatory xkcd link.
Though I work with computers I don't use them to read books. I have an epaper reader for that. What's your experience for reading for long times on LCDs?
I was under the impression that it wasn't very good for your eyes. I even read some people developed eyesight problems because of that
[Snip]
E-Ink makes a hug difference, IMO, when you're just plowing through text. I think most people who try both types of screens very quickly see the difference. Plus, and this is not Apple's or Amazon's or anybody's fault by mine, I get more reading done when I'm not reading on a device that has Youtube, Slashdot, etc.
Definitely E-Ink FTW. I read a lot and I find it much easier on the eyes. And I also agree that a dedicated e-reader is better; no online capability means no distractions.
As a general rule of thumb, if some person or group makes that sort of claim in their name then it's probably not true; see "family values" candidates, the Patriot Act, etc. etc.
I try not to buy anything made in China, even if it costs more to buy things made elsewhere.
The sad reality is that globalisation has made this really difficult to do. Even if it doesn't say "made in China" on the box, the odds are that at least some of the component parts come from there.
Chaos Manor was always one of the first things I read in Byte. I liked Jerry's (sometimes brutally) honest reviews; he only wrote about things he actually used himself. And of course his humour; writing about the infamous Clipper chip (a proposed mandatory cryptography module with a backdoor for law enforcement) he wrote that if you believed the assurances that the backdoor would not be abused, "then I am Queen Marie of Romania".
When did I miss the episode where hate speech and hate crime became synonyms ?
Well you may have missed this episode, which is an important reminder that freedom of speech does not grant you some magical immunity from the consequences of what you say. You only have to look post-Trump USA, and post-Brexit UK, to see how racist (or sexist, homophobic) rhetoric has real world outcomes. As the WWII slogan says "careless talk costs lives."
There's "censorship", and then there's "you're an asshole, and association with you will hurt my reputation, so I won't do business with you".
It's not like an ISP is proactively blocking people who want to read this site's content, or the government is forcing people to abandon him. The free market is acting.
Exactly this; obligatory xkcd explaining the difference between censorship and freedom of speech.
As the "hover text" on the xkcd image says, "defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express"
It's not punishment for Brexit. They've wanted to do this kind of stuff for years but needed to be out of the EU to do it. Once the UK is out of the EU the government will be free to trounce upon the rights of the people because citizens won't be able to go to the Supreme Court in Brussels.
Exactly this. Theresa May wanted the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights even before the Brexit referendum took place. It isn't hard to work out why a politician would want to do away with human rights.
I would not be reading this if there was not RSS. I don't have time to manually check dozens of sites for updates.
Same here. In addition to automating the checking, it allows me to efficiently find (and aggregate) new articles about topics I'm interested in across multiple sites; and allows me to control how the aggregation is done!
Same here. I learned a lot on the BBC and it started me on the path to a new career in software development. I subsequently sold it when I got my first "IBM compatible" PC; something I still regret today.
Yes - that thing the human drivers of Uber don't have when they are working as Uber taxi drivers.
That's not strictly true, since Uber insures them while they have a fare. The only time they aren't covered is while they are on their way to pick up a fare.
Which is part of the problem. Away from Planet Uber, if your journey is undertaken for work purposes (which going to meet a customer clearly is) you are "at work", and should be covered by work-related insurance. That's why regular taxi drivers have to have commercial insurance; private car insurance doesn't cover operating as a driver-for-hire.
The fun part is that, despite the all the penny-pinching (and the hype), Uber is hemorrhaging money.
Seriously this article makes it sound like life just after a devastating conflict is better than economic prosperity because most people are equally poor.
Well life after both world wars was certainly no bed of roses. But there is no doubt that both wars were major "disruptors"of the prevailing social order. The massive loss of life (especially men in their 20s, 30s and 40s), the destruction of whole countries (or continents) which had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, the changing attitudes towards authority figures as a consequence of the conflicts, and the influx of women into the workplace (with men away fighting) were all powerful drivers for social change.
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
No, profit doesn't have a factor in it, at least in what I've seen. It's just metrics for the metric god. The management bureaucracy wants to see numbers which they can then pretend to read like tea leaves. From that point they issue some nonsensical decree ("There are too many commits to the repository! Why can't you guys get your software right the first time! I want to see less commits!") and go pat themselves on the back for being effective managers. In the meantime, the employees who have to deal with that BS expend mental energy trying to make sure whatever they're doing results in good metrics, possibly at the cost of productivity and efficiency.
While I wouldn't disagree that metrics have become a fetish with many management types, and there is a lot of "metrics for the sake of metrics" about, the underlying driver for this kind of employee surveillance is still typically profit. It's the "crank out more units of work with fewer people" mentality. And it's close relative, the "hours at the desk = productivity" mentality which persists despite being debunked.
Many years ago, local governments would dredge river channels every so often, so they wouldn't flood. Good. Then Britain joined the EU. Along came unelected Eurocrats, who imposed ridiculously punitive/expensive standards regarding the disposal of the dredged up mud/silt. Result...
* local authorities couldn't afford to dredge river channels
* river channels silted up
* rivers flooded
Well... like... duhhhh. To add insult to injury, the flooding was wrongly blamed on global warming. It was crap like this that contributed to the Brexit vote result.
Except it had nothing to with the EU. In the UK we should be looking at our own national politicians, especially the Conservative Party. From TFA:
"Cameron cannot say he was not warned: he has ignored red flag after red flag, right from the start of his premiership. In the first year of the coalition, he cut capital spending on flood defences by 27% year-on-year. That was despite the 2008 Pitt Review – a systematic analysis of major floods in 2007 – concluding that much more funding was needed."
The Daily Mail is about as reliable as Wikipedia is these days.
I'm guessing you are not familiar with The Daily Mail then. It has long history of running sensationalist, and frequently fabricated, material. The Daily Mail gets a whole chapter to itself in the excellent book Flat Earth News. Personally, I wouldn't trust the Mail (or the Daily Express) to tell me what day of the week it was.
A few years ago, on the BBC satirical show Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle commented that the quintessential Daily Mail headline would be "Immigrants Carry New Form of AIDS That Lowers House Prices"; completely untrue but guaranteed to push all the hot buttons of their target demographic in the UK.
Well to use an old Jerry Pournelle catchphrase from his Byte Magazine column, "you maybe won't need it often, but when you do need it, you need it bad".
Case in point. I run Linux Mint 17 LTS. When I moved from Windows one of the few Windows-only applications I wanted to keep was my usenet client - xnews. It is, IMHO, the best usenet client I've found over many years and I have it tweaked just how I like it. YMMV. So being able to continue to run it under Wine was a win for me.
The whole point of corporations in the US is so that nobody's liable for what corporations do. Corporations can't/don't go to jail, and a member of a corporations going to jail for something done under the auspices of the company is rarer than lightning strikes or lottery winners.
This is the result of corporate lobbying over the last 20 years, and the growing view (among the wealthy elite) that white-collar crime isn't really a thing. After the savings-and-loan collapse in the 1990s, over 900 bankers were convicted of criminal offenses; after the most recent (and much worse) financial crash, nobody in the banking industry has spent even a night in jail.
I just don't get the mentality of people who refuse organ donation. If you're dead, you're dead, why take other people with you?
The concern is not "If you're dead". The concern is, If i'm in critical condition, the hospital that knows I'm a potential organ donor
may treat me differently in a manner that makes me less likely to survive, Or they may prematurely declare me dead out of concern for
the organs they could get from me to save someone else..... perhaps someone they deem "More worthy" of being saved.
I think the real reason, for many, is not fear of not being revived in ER if they are a card carrying donor. It is the fact that many people, deep down, have an emotional attachment to the idea of being buried "intact". I've even seen cases where families have tried to override (sometimes successfully) the wishes of a deceased donor because "we want him to be buried whole".
I expect they will try the rubber hose method first. Not literally of course, they will pick someone who uses a VPN, take their equipment away for forensic investigation and maybe throw in some child porn charges for good measure. Make their lives a misery for a few years, then eventually return their equipment wiped and broken.
It will have to be someone who is innocent, so that people get the message that innocence is no defence if you use a VPN. You will be investigated and your life wrecked, name and face in the newspapers, unemployable and unable to afford legal council.
Unlike many other countries, the UK has no written constitution (despite periodic hand-waving about "Magna Carta"). The UK parliament can basically enact any laws they want. In the past, UK citizens could take a case to the European Court on the basis that a particular law contravened the European Convention on Human Rights. However leading Brexiteers, and even the current Prime Minister Theresa May (a notional Remainer), have made it clear that they want to plug that "loophole".
Even if the defender product was not bundled with windows, I find it very likely that users would prefer it over your advertisment laden, system resource hogging, nagscreen insistent offering of similar price. In comparison, windows defender consumes significantly fewer resources, wastes far fewer manhours of development on elaborate eye candy on an app that users would prefer did not have to be there in the first place, but simply need because of fuckwits who want to abuse the shit out of their computers when they arent looking-- and quite frankly, does not constantly demand money out of them every 6 months.
Great point. A couple of years ago I switched from third party anti-virus products on my (sole remaining) Windows 7 machine and on the Windows machines of family and friends I provide tech support to for exactly those reasons. Windows Defender does the job well and does it unobtrusively.
The hackernoon link seems rather oriented toward simple, hack-it-together sorts of applications. Yes, if you're just making a personal web page or something you probably don't need a complete build system or anything like that.
Sadly, that's not the case. The whole Javascript/front-end development scene is awash with tools/libraries du jour; what this article calls "magpie front-end developers". As the cited Airbnb example demonstrates, there's a quite a few large web development teams using shiny new things because they are "cool" but that don't add much (if any) business value.
From TFA: "In the 15 years between 1997 and 2012: 72,000 small US manufacturers shut down; as did 108,000 local retailers and 13,000 community banks (fully half of America's complement of small banks!). The number of US startups has dropped by 50% since 1970. These statistics are not the result of the changing times: they're due to massive, monopolistic corporations stacking the deck against small competitors".
Slashdot Mirror
There is something called the Backfire Effect. In short, the more factual information you give to someone pointing how/where they're wrong, the more strident in their viewpoint they become.
There is a more fundamental issue here; one that is well described in the book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.
As the Amazon summary says "Over the past three decades, we [Americans] have been choosing the neighborhood (and church and news show) compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred that people don't know and can't understand those who live a few miles away."
Living and working in communities of exclusively like-minded people tends to reinforce beliefs (and make them more extreme) over time. Confirmation bias becomes ingrained, and the willingness to even consider an alternative viewpoint diminishes.
In such an environment, rational argument is useless. Inconvenient evidence is simply ignored. Sadly, this is not just an American phenomenon. I've seen similar trends emerging in the UK in recent years.
Umm, First Amendment? Pretty sure you'd be running afoul of the First Amendment if you did that....
That's a popular misconception. The First Amendment means you can say whatever you want, but nobody is legally required to help you say it. Obligatory xkcd link.
Though I work with computers I don't use them to read books. I have an epaper reader for that. What's your experience for reading for long times on LCDs? I was under the impression that it wasn't very good for your eyes. I even read some people developed eyesight problems because of that
[Snip]
E-Ink makes a hug difference, IMO, when you're just plowing through text. I think most people who try both types of screens very quickly see the difference. Plus, and this is not Apple's or Amazon's or anybody's fault by mine, I get more reading done when I'm not reading on a device that has Youtube, Slashdot, etc.
Definitely E-Ink FTW. I read a lot and I find it much easier on the eyes. And I also agree that a dedicated e-reader is better; no online capability means no distractions.
It's neither democratic, nor a republic.
As a general rule of thumb, if some person or group makes that sort of claim in their name then it's probably not true; see "family values" candidates, the Patriot Act, etc. etc.
I try not to buy anything made in China, even if it costs more to buy things made elsewhere.
The sad reality is that globalisation has made this really difficult to do. Even if it doesn't say "made in China" on the box, the odds are that at least some of the component parts come from there.
Chaos Manor was always one of the first things I read in Byte. I liked Jerry's (sometimes brutally) honest reviews; he only wrote about things he actually used himself. And of course his humour; writing about the infamous Clipper chip (a proposed mandatory cryptography module with a backdoor for law enforcement) he wrote that if you believed the assurances that the backdoor would not be abused, "then I am Queen Marie of Romania".
....be pining for the fjords?
When did I miss the episode where hate speech and hate crime became synonyms ?
Well you may have missed this episode, which is an important reminder that freedom of speech does not grant you some magical immunity from the consequences of what you say. You only have to look post-Trump USA, and post-Brexit UK, to see how racist (or sexist, homophobic) rhetoric has real world outcomes. As the WWII slogan says "careless talk costs lives."
There's "censorship", and then there's "you're an asshole, and association with you will hurt my reputation, so I won't do business with you".
It's not like an ISP is proactively blocking people who want to read this site's content, or the government is forcing people to abandon him. The free market is acting.
Exactly this; obligatory xkcd explaining the difference between censorship and freedom of speech.
As the "hover text" on the xkcd image says, "defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express"
It's not punishment for Brexit. They've wanted to do this kind of stuff for years but needed to be out of the EU to do it. Once the UK is out of the EU the government will be free to trounce upon the rights of the people because citizens won't be able to go to the Supreme Court in Brussels.
Exactly this. Theresa May wanted the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights even before the Brexit referendum took place. It isn't hard to work out why a politician would want to do away with human rights.
I would not be reading this if there was not RSS. I don't have time to manually check dozens of sites for updates.
Same here. In addition to automating the checking, it allows me to efficiently find (and aggregate) new articles about topics I'm interested in across multiple sites; and allows me to control how the aggregation is done!
Same here. I learned a lot on the BBC and it started me on the path to a new career in software development. I subsequently sold it when I got my first "IBM compatible" PC; something I still regret today.
Yes - that thing the human drivers of Uber don't have when they are working as Uber taxi drivers.
That's not strictly true, since Uber insures them while they have a fare. The only time they aren't covered is while they are on their way to pick up a fare.
Which is part of the problem. Away from Planet Uber, if your journey is undertaken for work purposes (which going to meet a customer clearly is) you are "at work", and should be covered by work-related insurance. That's why regular taxi drivers have to have commercial insurance; private car insurance doesn't cover operating as a driver-for-hire.
The fun part is that, despite the all the penny-pinching (and the hype), Uber is hemorrhaging money.
Seriously this article makes it sound like life just after a devastating conflict is better than economic prosperity because most people are equally poor.
Well life after both world wars was certainly no bed of roses. But there is no doubt that both wars were major "disruptors"of the prevailing social order. The massive loss of life (especially men in their 20s, 30s and 40s), the destruction of whole countries (or continents) which had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, the changing attitudes towards authority figures as a consequence of the conflicts, and the influx of women into the workplace (with men away fighting) were all powerful drivers for social change.
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
No, profit doesn't have a factor in it, at least in what I've seen. It's just metrics for the metric god. The management bureaucracy wants to see numbers which they can then pretend to read like tea leaves. From that point they issue some nonsensical decree ("There are too many commits to the repository! Why can't you guys get your software right the first time! I want to see less commits!") and go pat themselves on the back for being effective managers. In the meantime, the employees who have to deal with that BS expend mental energy trying to make sure whatever they're doing results in good metrics, possibly at the cost of productivity and efficiency.
While I wouldn't disagree that metrics have become a fetish with many management types, and there is a lot of "metrics for the sake of metrics" about, the underlying driver for this kind of employee surveillance is still typically profit. It's the "crank out more units of work with fewer people" mentality. And it's close relative, the "hours at the desk = productivity" mentality which persists despite being debunked.
Many years ago, local governments would dredge river channels every so often, so they wouldn't flood. Good. Then Britain joined the EU. Along came unelected Eurocrats, who imposed ridiculously punitive/expensive standards regarding the disposal of the dredged up mud/silt. Result... * local authorities couldn't afford to dredge river channels * river channels silted up * rivers flooded
Well... like... duhhhh. To add insult to injury, the flooding was wrongly blamed on global warming. It was crap like this that contributed to the Brexit vote result.
Except it had nothing to with the EU. In the UK we should be looking at our own national politicians, especially the Conservative Party. From TFA:
"Cameron cannot say he was not warned: he has ignored red flag after red flag, right from the start of his premiership. In the first year of the coalition, he cut capital spending on flood defences by 27% year-on-year. That was despite the 2008 Pitt Review – a systematic analysis of major floods in 2007 – concluding that much more funding was needed."
And their current plans to promote the construction of one million new houses while refusing to implement legal requirements for new developments to include sustainable drainage aren't helping either.
The Daily Mail is about as reliable as Wikipedia is these days.
I'm guessing you are not familiar with The Daily Mail then. It has long history of running sensationalist, and frequently fabricated, material. The Daily Mail gets a whole chapter to itself in the excellent book Flat Earth News. Personally, I wouldn't trust the Mail (or the Daily Express) to tell me what day of the week it was.
A few years ago, on the BBC satirical show Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle commented that the quintessential Daily Mail headline would be "Immigrants Carry New Form of AIDS That Lowers House Prices"; completely untrue but guaranteed to push all the hot buttons of their target demographic in the UK.
Well to use an old Jerry Pournelle catchphrase from his Byte Magazine column, "you maybe won't need it often, but when you do need it, you need it bad".
Case in point. I run Linux Mint 17 LTS. When I moved from Windows one of the few Windows-only applications I wanted to keep was my usenet client - xnews. It is, IMHO, the best usenet client I've found over many years and I have it tweaked just how I like it. YMMV. So being able to continue to run it under Wine was a win for me.
The whole point of corporations in the US is so that nobody's liable for what corporations do. Corporations can't/don't go to jail, and a member of a corporations going to jail for something done under the auspices of the company is rarer than lightning strikes or lottery winners.
This is the result of corporate lobbying over the last 20 years, and the growing view (among the wealthy elite) that white-collar crime isn't really a thing. After the savings-and-loan collapse in the 1990s, over 900 bankers were convicted of criminal offenses; after the most recent (and much worse) financial crash, nobody in the banking industry has spent even a night in jail.
I just don't get the mentality of people who refuse organ donation. If you're dead, you're dead, why take other people with you?
The concern is not "If you're dead". The concern is, If i'm in critical condition, the hospital that knows I'm a potential organ donor may treat me differently in a manner that makes me less likely to survive, Or they may prematurely declare me dead out of concern for the organs they could get from me to save someone else..... perhaps someone they deem "More worthy" of being saved.
I think the real reason, for many, is not fear of not being revived in ER if they are a card carrying donor. It is the fact that many people, deep down, have an emotional attachment to the idea of being buried "intact". I've even seen cases where families have tried to override (sometimes successfully) the wishes of a deceased donor because "we want him to be buried whole".
I expect they will try the rubber hose method first. Not literally of course, they will pick someone who uses a VPN, take their equipment away for forensic investigation and maybe throw in some child porn charges for good measure. Make their lives a misery for a few years, then eventually return their equipment wiped and broken.
It will have to be someone who is innocent, so that people get the message that innocence is no defence if you use a VPN. You will be investigated and your life wrecked, name and face in the newspapers, unemployable and unable to afford legal council.
Unlike many other countries, the UK has no written constitution (despite periodic hand-waving about "Magna Carta"). The UK parliament can basically enact any laws they want. In the past, UK citizens could take a case to the European Court on the basis that a particular law contravened the European Convention on Human Rights. However leading Brexiteers, and even the current Prime Minister Theresa May (a notional Remainer), have made it clear that they want to plug that "loophole".
Makes you proud.
I'm genuinely curious, provide links to actual racist quotes made by him.
The summary of this article doesn't count, saying country is also it's citizens besides economy isn't racist
Maybe reading up on dog-whistle politics will help. Many on the alt-right will hear an implied "white" in front of "civic society".
Even if the defender product was not bundled with windows, I find it very likely that users would prefer it over your advertisment laden, system resource hogging, nagscreen insistent offering of similar price. In comparison, windows defender consumes significantly fewer resources, wastes far fewer manhours of development on elaborate eye candy on an app that users would prefer did not have to be there in the first place, but simply need because of fuckwits who want to abuse the shit out of their computers when they arent looking-- and quite frankly, does not constantly demand money out of them every 6 months.
Great point. A couple of years ago I switched from third party anti-virus products on my (sole remaining) Windows 7 machine and on the Windows machines of family and friends I provide tech support to for exactly those reasons. Windows Defender does the job well and does it unobtrusively.
The hackernoon link seems rather oriented toward simple, hack-it-together sorts of applications. Yes, if you're just making a personal web page or something you probably don't need a complete build system or anything like that.
Sadly, that's not the case. The whole Javascript/front-end development scene is awash with tools/libraries du jour; what this article calls "magpie front-end developers". As the cited Airbnb example demonstrates, there's a quite a few large web development teams using shiny new things because they are "cool" but that don't add much (if any) business value.
Hard to understand how we have not applied historical norms of Monopoly to Amazon
Because there are thousands of mail-order/online-shopping businesses in the country? Amazon isn't anything like a monopoly.
Except that the picture isn't quite that rosy; e.g. Monopoly power and the decline of small business.
From TFA: "In the 15 years between 1997 and 2012: 72,000 small US manufacturers shut down; as did 108,000 local retailers and 13,000 community banks (fully half of America's complement of small banks!). The number of US startups has dropped by 50% since 1970. These statistics are not the result of the changing times: they're due to massive, monopolistic corporations stacking the deck against small competitors".