Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
The problem is that the current trend is replacing good jobs with crap jobs. Even worse, many of the crap jobs exist not because they can't be automated but because it is cheaper to pay $8 per hour to a person than it is to automate the job. This means that automation has put a ceiling on all those jobs so they will never be middle class jobs. Take a job at mcdonalds and figure out how much it would cost to automate it and depreciate that over 20 years and you can easily calculate the point where raising minimum wage would cause that job to disappear. Likewise, you can calculate what the price of the robot needs to drop to before that job vanishes.
If people don't work, they can't afford to buy things. So who is going to buy the things that get created? Robots?
The 0.01% have more money than they can spend in a lifetime. What makes you think they need people to buy their stuff? If a robot provides your food and a robot cleans your house and a robot provides your entertainment and a robot hauls you from place to place why do you need people?
There will likely still be a few hundred thousand craftsmen that create the luxury lifestyle for the 0.01% but the other 98% of the population will be useless.
That doesn't sound like loses badly. That just sounds like a relatively normal loss. A normal loss should probably include attorney fees. I'm glad the student won and didn't end up having to pay money but the student was probably still out a ton of time and hassle and it didn't sound like there was any compensation to the student or punishment to the firm besides having to pay the other side's court cost. Again, glad the student fought it but the only thing the student got to show for it was to be able to keep their review online. The student should be rewarded somehow for fighting a frivolous lawsuit instead of taking the easy route and just deleting the review.
On the other hand, if you compare items sweetened with Aspartame and those sweetened with stevia, you'll find that they taste similar.
Not at all. I can tolerate aspartame but stevia tastes bitter to me like black coffee bitter. Stevia has a horrible aftertaste to me. Splenda is my favorite, the pink stuff is overly sweet to me, and aspartame is somewhere in the middle. I can easily tell which sweetener is used in which diet soda with a single sip. None of them taste the same to me especially stevia. I'm always amazed how anyone can tolerate stevia at all. It's like someone added cleaning chemicals to my sugar. Of all of them, I would probably have the hardest time telling splenda and real sugar apart so no, it's not the artificiality, it's that everyone tastes them a little bit different or in some cases a lot different.
I don't think that's true, judging from coffee which usually smells fantastic but has a bitter taste.
That's just because it's concentrated. Vanilla, salt, coffee, etc... are pleasant in their weaker forms. I can't think of anything though that is opposite where the weaker form is unpleasant and the stronger form pleasant. There might be but not that I can think of.
Being a womanizer is not the same as bragging about literally sexually assaulting people. You're fucking delusional.
Please explain to me what the difference between bragging about being able to use your power to take advantage of women and what Bill Clinton did which was *actually* use his power to take advantage of women. I'm not a fan of Trump and didn't vote for him but trying to say that what he said is somehow worse than Bill Clinton *did* is idiotic. I realize that it was Bill and not Hillary but Hillary has plenty of her own problems. If you want people to vote based on the character of candidates then you need to give people candidates who actually have *some* character. When your only choices are two deplorable characters then people have no choice but to vote on the issues and ignore the character of the candidates. -- For the record, I think someone like Kasich or Sanders would have easily beat Trump or Clinton because they at least appear to be normal people with morals. Kasich lost because the republican primary had too many candidates and really needed some form of runoff voting. Sanders lost because Clinton and the DNC flat out cheated and rigged the entire primary against him.
Exactly. It's also a double edged sword. The internet allows someone (perhaps with a rare disorder) to find a support group of similar people to talk to so that they don't feel as alone and are not as depressed and feel happier while at the same time it allows a different person who is also depressed instead of finding a support group ends up finding a group that promotes violence against their perceived enemy and ends up self-radicalizing and blowing something up.
The business model of TV is also built upon "maximizing the time users spend inside of it". Millennials need to stop trying to think. They aren't good at it.
The big difference is that TV has to create something the maximizes the average time of all their users so it has to create something relatively generic that will appeal to a large cross section. Facebook doesn't have this limitation. It can custom tailor its drug to the individual user. Every time a person "likes" something on facebook, facebook can now show them more of what they like and less of what they don't like. Facebook is the perfect echo chamber. Add in VR and you have the perfect escape from reality where you customize your virtual world to be exactly how you want it just like the addicts in movies like "Strange Days" or "Inception".
There is an issue there but it is not what liberal media made it to be.
The issue is that he did it not that he admitted to it. The other problem I have with the liberal media is bringing up stuff that happened 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. Everyone has a past. Both Clinton and Obama were anti-gay just a few years ago and the media is talking about Trump discriminating against black people 30 years ago. If you don't allow people with pasts you either end up with someone like Clinton who has had a fake persona for years, someone like Obama that appears out of nowhere with no past at all, or someone like Trump who has no political experience. I would much rather see a candidate that has grown, made a few mistakes, changed their position where they realized it was a mistake, and is a better person now because of it than all the fake BS that we get now.
It was considerably worse than this. Bill Clinton held one of the most power positions in the world and had sex with an intern. Many teachers, professors, and military personnel have been fired and in some cases jailed for abusing considerably less power than that. Having sex with a low level subordinate is probably as close to non-consensual sex as you can get and is the reason it's highly against the rule in the military, in education, and in almost all companies.
But then you know this, don't you, you piece of utter alt-right shit.
I'm definitely not alt-right. I didn't even vote for Trump. I find it strange though how the main problem that anti-trump people have with Trump is that he is a bully and he spews hate and then these same anti-trump people bully Trump supporters and spew their own hate. I was curious where I stood on positions so I tried isidewith. Both Trump and Hillary were at the bottom with all three third parties at the top. I find both main parties disgusting mirrors of each other and find the mock outrage of the opposing side laughable when honestly these days it's hard to tell them apart. Hillary was the most Republican candidate in history and Trump the most liberal candidate. There was a reason that former republican presidents crossed over to vote for Hillary because they knew she would keep up the charade.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of civil society:)
Sadly, I expect it to continue to get worse and worse until it gets bad enough that the "resistance" decides to reset society with an EMP bomb or some such weapon like the tv show "Revolution".
calling pussygrabbing not Pc is a bit of an understatement.
As opposed to Bill Clinton, Kennedy, etc... who are actually documented as womanizers? Yes, Trump might be a womanizer but you would be hard pressed to name a president that wasn't. Really the only difference between Trump and most other former presidents is that he says in public what other presidents say and do in private. That's what most Trump supporters realize that the left doesn't seem to understand. Sure, Trump is an asshole but so were all the other presidents. They were just better at hiding it.
I would much prefer that *only* verified buyers review an item.
I think a threshold should probably be used. If there are less than 100 verified buyers then include them all and flag it so you can tell. If there are more than 100 verified buyers then either completely remove the non-verified buyers or bury them away some where. A non-verified review may be somewhat useful for a product with only a couple reviews but once you have a large quantity of verified reviews there is no reason to let them continue to taint the reviews as they could be freebies, spam, etc...
The real issue with Amazon is that the actual seller's feedback score is not clearly shown on the product page. If you want feedback for the actual seller, it is buried at least 1 click away. Other websites with 'marketplaces' make this a lot more transparent on the product page. Putting their feedback score front and center would fix several issues.
The problem that I've found on amazon is that it's hard to separate the reviews of the product from the reviews of the shipper. Many times a product will be rated poorly but then looking at the reviews the problem is really that people are getting knockoffs or dealing with a crap company. It might make a little bit of sense for a company to be docked for selling crappy products but docking the product because the shipper just happens to suck doesn't usually make sense. You would think it would be to amazon's advantage to try to discourage this kind of thing because having a bad shipper in the mix that might be a few pennies cheaper drag your average score down from 4 star to 5 star probably loses them business.
This isn't Apple's responsibility, it's yours, and yours alone to do the absolute minimum amount of "research" (if it can be called that) before spending money.
But Apple and Google both claim to be screening their apps and most consumers expect them too just as most consumers expect amazon to police their third party sellers and weed out fraud. I personally almost never buy an app unless they also have some sort of free trial or demo that I can test first. I think the quality of apps would greatly improve if apple and google automatically gave an instant refund for any app uninstalled in the first 30 days. I find that 90% of the apps I download I almost immediately delete because they are crap. When I do find a good app I have no problem paying for it and most good apps know this and have a demo with an inapp purchase to upgrade.
Yes, kindof. But shouldn't a business have some say over who he does business with? Should I have to offer my services to a nudist colony if I'm offended by nudity? If I own a video store, should I be required to sell gay porn? If I own a filming studio should I be required to rent it out to people to make porn? If I own a public building I rent to the public do I have any say at all who I rent to? Can I ban alcohol? Can I ban smoking? Can I ban any behavior that happens there? Where should the lines be drawn?
Businesses already do discriminate against lots of people for lots of reasons. Some of these are arbitrarily protected while others are not. Some are perfectly legal. Some are legal in certain situations. Some are defacto discrimination like an expensive neighborhood preventing poor people. Others like senior only neighborhoods are generally ignored for some reason. It's not as cut and dry as some people make it out to be.
Kleptomania and paedophilia are both considered mental disorders. Are you saying homosexuality is a mental disorder?
It used to be considered one. What makes being attracted to a child a mental disorder and being attracted to the same sex not one? There is obviously the issue of consent but society decides what is and is not a mental disorder and what is and is not socially acceptable. Currently, polygamy is taboo but it used to be rather common and still is in many places. Personally, I find the idea of wanting to marry a 4 year old a mental disorder even if you do wait until they are an adult before having sex but in many countries this still happens. Ironically, many of these same countries think homosexuality is a mental disorder while having a child bride is not.
Obviously that one is not, on the face of it, a hateful opinion in either sense of the phrase. But most of them are, and I was addressing the OP's overall point. Presumably the OP included it because it's the type of thing you often hear in debates over abortion. In that context it implies hate of the pro-choicer (child murderer!), an accusation most pro-choicer's would find hateful I imagine.
No. The exact opposite. I included it and the ones about paedophilia to show that it is possible to have an opinion that something is wrong without it automatically being hate speech. Cultural norms change. The Eskimos used to practice infanticide. Some cultures used to practice cannibalism sometimes even as a sign of respect for the deceased. Polygamy used to be the norm as did child brides. Saying you don't agree with something doesn't automatically make it hate speech.
You can absolutely refuse to make a cake if the customer wants something you think is offensive written on it. You just can't refuse to make a normal generic wedding cake for someone who's gay.
What exactly is the difference? Some people find gays being married offensive. Some people find declawing cats offensive. Some people find abortions offensive. Some people find a 40 year old marrying a 4 year old offensive. Some people find religion offensive. What if I am offended by a cake that says "Jesus is the only way"? What if I'm offended by someone wanting me to draw a giant penis on a cake? What if I'm muslim and I'm offended by a picture of jesus on the cross or a picture of Mohammad? Should a muslim have to violate their belief to draw a picture of Mohammad on a cake?
What is really the difference between a photographer that says he doesn't want to do nude photos and a photographer who says he doesn't want to attend a gay wedding as a professional photographer? I guarantee that there are plenty of photographers out there that would refuse to do pictures of someone with a swastika or old dixie.
Sure, if they want a generic cake, then sell them a generic cake. If it was a generic cake then how exactly did they even know that they were gay? Wedding cake designers and wedding photographers are an integral part of the celebration. Wedding photographers even have to attend the ceremony. Professional performers routinely practice discretion when deciding what events to be part of. Try to organize a KKK meeting and see how many speakers, cake decorators, photographers, etc... that you can get to willing participate in your event.
Being gay is not a political statement, it is a fact of life. In your example the baker is discriminating on something the discriminated has not control over.
Even if being gay is not a choice, getting married certainly is. I know multiple people who are attracted to men but would get very upset if you called them gay and have instead decided to remain single. On the flip side, you can also look at video interviews with people in prison for paedophilia that flat out say that they can't help being attracted to young children and they have no control over it. Same with kleptomania and many other things we have decided as a society is not acceptable. Just because someone comes wired someway doesn't automatically mean we have to accept it. Personally, if it's two consenting adults, I don't care what the flip they do but saying someone was born that way so we have to accept it is naive.
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a gay couple?
Let's just try an experiment:
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a black couple?
When the right to free speech conflicts with the right to equal protection, you have to decide which right wins. The correct decision is the latter.
Take the experiment in the opposite direction: 1) What if I wanted the cake to say "Kill all N*ggers"? 2) What if I wanted the cake to say "Homosexuality is Wrong"? 3) What if I wanted the cake to celebrate a 40 year old getting married to a 4 year old? 4) What if they wanted me to personally draw a giant penis on the cake? Should I have to lend my artistic skills to that?
Yes, #1 and #3 are illegal in the USA but #1 and #2 are covered under free speech and there is nothing to prevent someone from celebrating #3 in the USA even though the actual wedding happened in a country where it was legal. I could probably think of other better examples if I tried. My brother actually had a situation similar to #1. He owned a sky writing business where he carried banners behind his airplane. He refused to do business with someone that wanted him to drag a racist message behind his plane. Yes, this is covered under free speech but it seems reasonable for someone to sometimes refuse to do business for ethical reasons.
When you apply for a business license, you are making an agreement with the city that you will follow the law when it comes to serving your customers. If you're in a city where sexual orientation is a protected class like gay cake guy or gay marriage license clerk, then sorry, no, you can not refuse service or you will be fined and/or have your license revoked.
But the far left has decided that even voicing an opinion different from them is wrong. Look at the CEO of mozilla. He donated money to a measure that passed by popular vote and was railroaded because of it. So if being a pedophile became a protected class then even trying to change that law makes one a bigot. The liberals want a one-way street. They don't want you to say that anyone's lifestyle choices are wrong. And yes, I'll probably be slammed for being a troll by comparing homosexuality and paedophilia but whether it is homosexuality, paedophilia, bestiality, circumcision, pornography, polygamy, abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, honor killings, or any host of other issues there isn't a single formula for deciding what is acceptable by society. The way a society decides what is acceptable and what is not acceptable is by people taking sides and discussing the issues. You can pass laws to protect certain classes but you can also pass laws to change that protection if you decide something like homosexuality, polygamy, or childhood weddings should no longer be protected.
I'm sorry but tolerating hate is not tolerance, it's cowardice
But defining hate speech is problematic. Which of these is hate speech: 1) I don't think it's right for a man to marry a man. (A stance taken by many christians) 2) I don't think it's right for a man to marry a 4 year old. (A stance taken by most westerners but still practiced in some countries) 3) I don't think it is right for a man to have sex with a another man. (An old stance that was once common and still held by many christians) 4) I don't think it's right for a black to marry a white. (An old stance that was once common but mostly rejected today) 5) I don't think I should have to help a man marrying a man celebrate his wedding by baking a cake. (A stance taken by many christians) 6) I don't think it is right to refuse to sell a cake to someone because you object to their wedding. (A stance taken by many liberals) 7) I don't think I should have to sell medicine to countries that are going to use it for lethal injection. (A stance taken by many countries in europe) 8) I don't think it is right to kill an infant. (A stance taken by most today but was once common in some cultures) 9) I don't think it is right to kill a baby just because it hasn't been born yet. (A stance still held by most christians)
There is obvious hate speech but voicing your opinion on what you feel is right or wrong and/or not wanting to participate in something that you feel is wrong is not hate speech. The problem today is that both sides of many debates have decided that their side is morally superior and think that the other side is immoral or unethical if they have a different opinion.
I've never understood this notion that working hours are a natural constant that can never be changed, whereas time of day is arbitrary.
Exactly. Alot of business already have winter hours and summer hours. It makes no sense to change the clocks AND change the start time of businesses. I would rather the clocks stay the same and if schools don't want children getting on the bus in the dark then have the schools shift the school schedule at the point they decide it is necessary.
Permanent DST works better in the Northeast (or North in general) than the South. Arizona has permanent standard time, and the evening darkness allows for outdoor exercise after school/work without people dying of heat stroke. Riding your bike is comfortable going both to and from work despite the desert climate.
Meanwhile up North, when DST ends it gets dark far too early. The sunlight that had warmed the car and house during the day is long gone; for the house this means the heat has to work that much harder to get back to a good temperature, than if you were getting home while the sun is still out. The black ice on the roads is harder to spot and more treacherous for both pedestrians and motorists than if people were travelling with a little sunlight.
If the North went to permanent DST and arizona stayed on permanent standard time then they would just be in different time zones then. It works fine in both situations. What you really should be optimizing is usable evening hours in both places. I would much rather drive to work in the dark than I would get home in the evening and not be able to do anything because it's already dark. For people with office jobs, it sucks to burn all the good hours inside only to get outside once the sun goes down.
Slashdot Mirror
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
The problem is that the current trend is replacing good jobs with crap jobs. Even worse, many of the crap jobs exist not because they can't be automated but because it is cheaper to pay $8 per hour to a person than it is to automate the job. This means that automation has put a ceiling on all those jobs so they will never be middle class jobs. Take a job at mcdonalds and figure out how much it would cost to automate it and depreciate that over 20 years and you can easily calculate the point where raising minimum wage would cause that job to disappear. Likewise, you can calculate what the price of the robot needs to drop to before that job vanishes.
If people don't work, they can't afford to buy things. So who is going to buy the things that get created? Robots?
The 0.01% have more money than they can spend in a lifetime. What makes you think they need people to buy their stuff? If a robot provides your food and a robot cleans your house and a robot provides your entertainment and a robot hauls you from place to place why do you need people?
There will likely still be a few hundred thousand craftsmen that create the luxury lifestyle for the 0.01% but the other 98% of the population will be useless.
That doesn't sound like loses badly. That just sounds like a relatively normal loss. A normal loss should probably include attorney fees. I'm glad the student won and didn't end up having to pay money but the student was probably still out a ton of time and hassle and it didn't sound like there was any compensation to the student or punishment to the firm besides having to pay the other side's court cost. Again, glad the student fought it but the only thing the student got to show for it was to be able to keep their review online. The student should be rewarded somehow for fighting a frivolous lawsuit instead of taking the easy route and just deleting the review.
On the other hand, if you compare items sweetened with Aspartame and those sweetened with stevia, you'll find that they taste similar.
Not at all. I can tolerate aspartame but stevia tastes bitter to me like black coffee bitter. Stevia has a horrible aftertaste to me. Splenda is my favorite, the pink stuff is overly sweet to me, and aspartame is somewhere in the middle. I can easily tell which sweetener is used in which diet soda with a single sip. None of them taste the same to me especially stevia. I'm always amazed how anyone can tolerate stevia at all. It's like someone added cleaning chemicals to my sugar. Of all of them, I would probably have the hardest time telling splenda and real sugar apart so no, it's not the artificiality, it's that everyone tastes them a little bit different or in some cases a lot different.
I don't think that's true, judging from coffee which usually smells fantastic but has a bitter taste.
That's just because it's concentrated. Vanilla, salt, coffee, etc... are pleasant in their weaker forms. I can't think of anything though that is opposite where the weaker form is unpleasant and the stronger form pleasant. There might be but not that I can think of.
Being a womanizer is not the same as bragging about literally sexually assaulting people. You're fucking delusional.
Please explain to me what the difference between bragging about being able to use your power to take advantage of women and what Bill Clinton did which was *actually* use his power to take advantage of women. I'm not a fan of Trump and didn't vote for him but trying to say that what he said is somehow worse than Bill Clinton *did* is idiotic. I realize that it was Bill and not Hillary but Hillary has plenty of her own problems. If you want people to vote based on the character of candidates then you need to give people candidates who actually have *some* character. When your only choices are two deplorable characters then people have no choice but to vote on the issues and ignore the character of the candidates.
--
For the record, I think someone like Kasich or Sanders would have easily beat Trump or Clinton because they at least appear to be normal people with morals. Kasich lost because the republican primary had too many candidates and really needed some form of runoff voting. Sanders lost because Clinton and the DNC flat out cheated and rigged the entire primary against him.
Exactly. It's also a double edged sword. The internet allows someone (perhaps with a rare disorder) to find a support group of similar people to talk to so that they don't feel as alone and are not as depressed and feel happier while at the same time it allows a different person who is also depressed instead of finding a support group ends up finding a group that promotes violence against their perceived enemy and ends up self-radicalizing and blowing something up.
The business model of TV is also built upon "maximizing the time users spend inside of it". Millennials need to stop trying to think. They aren't good at it.
The big difference is that TV has to create something the maximizes the average time of all their users so it has to create something relatively generic that will appeal to a large cross section. Facebook doesn't have this limitation. It can custom tailor its drug to the individual user. Every time a person "likes" something on facebook, facebook can now show them more of what they like and less of what they don't like. Facebook is the perfect echo chamber. Add in VR and you have the perfect escape from reality where you customize your virtual world to be exactly how you want it just like the addicts in movies like "Strange Days" or "Inception".
There is an issue there but it is not what liberal media made it to be.
The issue is that he did it not that he admitted to it. The other problem I have with the liberal media is bringing up stuff that happened 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. Everyone has a past. Both Clinton and Obama were anti-gay just a few years ago and the media is talking about Trump discriminating against black people 30 years ago. If you don't allow people with pasts you either end up with someone like Clinton who has had a fake persona for years, someone like Obama that appears out of nowhere with no past at all, or someone like Trump who has no political experience. I would much rather see a candidate that has grown, made a few mistakes, changed their position where they realized it was a mistake, and is a better person now because of it than all the fake BS that we get now.
men who simply cheated on their spouses.
It was considerably worse than this. Bill Clinton held one of the most power positions in the world and had sex with an intern. Many teachers, professors, and military personnel have been fired and in some cases jailed for abusing considerably less power than that. Having sex with a low level subordinate is probably as close to non-consensual sex as you can get and is the reason it's highly against the rule in the military, in education, and in almost all companies.
But then you know this, don't you, you piece of utter alt-right shit.
I'm definitely not alt-right. I didn't even vote for Trump. I find it strange though how the main problem that anti-trump people have with Trump is that he is a bully and he spews hate and then these same anti-trump people bully Trump supporters and spew their own hate. I was curious where I stood on positions so I tried isidewith. Both Trump and Hillary were at the bottom with all three third parties at the top. I find both main parties disgusting mirrors of each other and find the mock outrage of the opposing side laughable when honestly these days it's hard to tell them apart. Hillary was the most Republican candidate in history and Trump the most liberal candidate. There was a reason that former republican presidents crossed over to vote for Hillary because they knew she would keep up the charade.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of civil society :)
Sadly, I expect it to continue to get worse and worse until it gets bad enough that the "resistance" decides to reset society with an EMP bomb or some such weapon like the tv show "Revolution".
calling pussygrabbing not Pc is a bit of an understatement.
As opposed to Bill Clinton, Kennedy, etc... who are actually documented as womanizers? Yes, Trump might be a womanizer but you would be hard pressed to name a president that wasn't. Really the only difference between Trump and most other former presidents is that he says in public what other presidents say and do in private. That's what most Trump supporters realize that the left doesn't seem to understand. Sure, Trump is an asshole but so were all the other presidents. They were just better at hiding it.
I would much prefer that *only* verified buyers review an item.
I think a threshold should probably be used. If there are less than 100 verified buyers then include them all and flag it so you can tell. If there are more than 100 verified buyers then either completely remove the non-verified buyers or bury them away some where. A non-verified review may be somewhat useful for a product with only a couple reviews but once you have a large quantity of verified reviews there is no reason to let them continue to taint the reviews as they could be freebies, spam, etc...
The real issue with Amazon is that the actual seller's feedback score is not clearly shown on the product page. If you want feedback for the actual seller, it is buried at least 1 click away. Other websites with 'marketplaces' make this a lot more transparent on the product page. Putting their feedback score front and center would fix several issues.
The problem that I've found on amazon is that it's hard to separate the reviews of the product from the reviews of the shipper. Many times a product will be rated poorly but then looking at the reviews the problem is really that people are getting knockoffs or dealing with a crap company. It might make a little bit of sense for a company to be docked for selling crappy products but docking the product because the shipper just happens to suck doesn't usually make sense. You would think it would be to amazon's advantage to try to discourage this kind of thing because having a bad shipper in the mix that might be a few pennies cheaper drag your average score down from 4 star to 5 star probably loses them business.
This isn't Apple's responsibility, it's yours, and yours alone to do the absolute minimum amount of "research" (if it can be called that) before spending money.
But Apple and Google both claim to be screening their apps and most consumers expect them too just as most consumers expect amazon to police their third party sellers and weed out fraud. I personally almost never buy an app unless they also have some sort of free trial or demo that I can test first. I think the quality of apps would greatly improve if apple and google automatically gave an instant refund for any app uninstalled in the first 30 days. I find that 90% of the apps I download I almost immediately delete because they are crap. When I do find a good app I have no problem paying for it and most good apps know this and have a demo with an inapp purchase to upgrade.
You're defending discrimination.
Yes, kindof. But shouldn't a business have some say over who he does business with? Should I have to offer my services to a nudist colony if I'm offended by nudity? If I own a video store, should I be required to sell gay porn? If I own a filming studio should I be required to rent it out to people to make porn? If I own a public building I rent to the public do I have any say at all who I rent to? Can I ban alcohol? Can I ban smoking? Can I ban any behavior that happens there? Where should the lines be drawn?
Businesses already do discriminate against lots of people for lots of reasons. Some of these are arbitrarily protected while others are not. Some are perfectly legal. Some are legal in certain situations. Some are defacto discrimination like an expensive neighborhood preventing poor people. Others like senior only neighborhoods are generally ignored for some reason. It's not as cut and dry as some people make it out to be.
Kleptomania and paedophilia are both considered mental disorders. Are you saying homosexuality is a mental disorder?
It used to be considered one. What makes being attracted to a child a mental disorder and being attracted to the same sex not one? There is obviously the issue of consent but society decides what is and is not a mental disorder and what is and is not socially acceptable. Currently, polygamy is taboo but it used to be rather common and still is in many places. Personally, I find the idea of wanting to marry a 4 year old a mental disorder even if you do wait until they are an adult before having sex but in many countries this still happens. Ironically, many of these same countries think homosexuality is a mental disorder while having a child bride is not.
Obviously that one is not, on the face of it, a hateful opinion in either sense of the phrase. But most of them are, and I was addressing the OP's overall point.
Presumably the OP included it because it's the type of thing you often hear in debates over abortion. In that context it implies hate of the pro-choicer (child murderer!), an accusation most pro-choicer's would find hateful I imagine.
No. The exact opposite. I included it and the ones about paedophilia to show that it is possible to have an opinion that something is wrong without it automatically being hate speech. Cultural norms change. The Eskimos used to practice infanticide. Some cultures used to practice cannibalism sometimes even as a sign of respect for the deceased. Polygamy used to be the norm as did child brides. Saying you don't agree with something doesn't automatically make it hate speech.
You can absolutely refuse to make a cake if the customer wants something you think is offensive written on it. You just can't refuse to make a normal generic wedding cake for someone who's gay.
What exactly is the difference? Some people find gays being married offensive. Some people find declawing cats offensive. Some people find abortions offensive. Some people find a 40 year old marrying a 4 year old offensive. Some people find religion offensive. What if I am offended by a cake that says
"Jesus is the only way"? What if I'm offended by someone wanting me to draw a giant penis on a cake? What if I'm muslim and I'm offended by a picture
of jesus on the cross or a picture of Mohammad? Should a muslim have to violate their belief to draw a picture of Mohammad on a cake?
What is really the difference between a photographer that says he doesn't want to do nude photos and a photographer who says he doesn't want to attend a gay wedding as a professional photographer? I guarantee that there are plenty of photographers out there that would refuse to do pictures of someone with a swastika or old dixie.
Sure, if they want a generic cake, then sell them a generic cake. If it was a generic cake then how exactly did they even know that they were gay?
Wedding cake designers and wedding photographers are an integral part of the celebration. Wedding photographers even have to attend the ceremony.
Professional performers routinely practice discretion when deciding what events to be part of. Try to organize a KKK meeting and see how many speakers,
cake decorators, photographers, etc... that you can get to willing participate in your event.
Being gay is not a political statement, it is a fact of life. In your example the baker is discriminating on something the discriminated has not control over.
Even if being gay is not a choice, getting married certainly is. I know multiple people who are attracted to men but would get very upset if you called them gay and have instead decided to remain single. On the flip side, you can also look at video interviews with people in prison for paedophilia that flat out say that they can't help being attracted to young children and they have no control over it. Same with kleptomania and many other things we have decided as a society is not acceptable. Just because someone comes wired someway doesn't automatically mean we have to accept it. Personally, if it's two consenting adults, I don't care what the flip they do but saying someone was born that way so we have to accept it is naive.
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a gay couple?
Let's just try an experiment:
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a black couple?
When the right to free speech conflicts with the right to equal protection, you have to decide which right wins. The correct decision is the latter.
Take the experiment in the opposite direction:
1) What if I wanted the cake to say "Kill all N*ggers"?
2) What if I wanted the cake to say "Homosexuality is Wrong"?
3) What if I wanted the cake to celebrate a 40 year old getting married to a 4 year old?
4) What if they wanted me to personally draw a giant penis on the cake? Should I have to lend my artistic skills to that?
Yes, #1 and #3 are illegal in the USA but #1 and #2 are covered under free speech and there is nothing to prevent someone from celebrating #3
in the USA even though the actual wedding happened in a country where it was legal. I could probably think of other better examples if I
tried. My brother actually had a situation similar to #1. He owned a sky writing business where he carried banners behind his airplane.
He refused to do business with someone that wanted him to drag a racist message behind his plane. Yes, this is covered under free speech
but it seems reasonable for someone to sometimes refuse to do business for ethical reasons.
When you apply for a business license, you are making an agreement with the city that you will follow the law when it comes to serving your customers. If you're in a city where sexual orientation is a protected class like gay cake guy or gay marriage license clerk, then sorry, no, you can not refuse service or you will be fined and/or have your license revoked.
But the far left has decided that even voicing an opinion different from them is wrong. Look at the CEO of mozilla. He donated money to a measure that passed by popular vote and was railroaded because of it. So if being a pedophile became a protected class then even trying to change that law makes one a bigot. The liberals want a one-way street. They don't want you to say that anyone's lifestyle choices are wrong. And yes, I'll probably be slammed for being a troll by comparing homosexuality and paedophilia but whether it is homosexuality, paedophilia, bestiality, circumcision, pornography, polygamy, abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, honor killings, or any host of other issues there isn't a single formula for deciding what is acceptable by society. The way a society decides what is acceptable and what is not acceptable is by people taking sides and discussing the issues. You can pass laws to protect certain classes but you can also pass laws to change that protection if you decide something like homosexuality, polygamy, or childhood weddings should no longer be protected.
I'm sorry but tolerating hate is not tolerance, it's cowardice
But defining hate speech is problematic. Which of these is hate speech:
1) I don't think it's right for a man to marry a man. (A stance taken by many christians)
2) I don't think it's right for a man to marry a 4 year old. (A stance taken by most westerners but still practiced in some countries)
3) I don't think it is right for a man to have sex with a another man. (An old stance that was once common and still held by many christians)
4) I don't think it's right for a black to marry a white. (An old stance that was once common but mostly rejected today)
5) I don't think I should have to help a man marrying a man celebrate his wedding by baking a cake. (A stance taken by many christians)
6) I don't think it is right to refuse to sell a cake to someone because you object to their wedding. (A stance taken by many liberals)
7) I don't think I should have to sell medicine to countries that are going to use it for lethal injection. (A stance taken by many countries in europe)
8) I don't think it is right to kill an infant. (A stance taken by most today but was once common in some cultures)
9) I don't think it is right to kill a baby just because it hasn't been born yet. (A stance still held by most christians)
There is obvious hate speech but voicing your opinion on what you feel is right or wrong and/or not wanting to participate in something that
you feel is wrong is not hate speech. The problem today is that both sides of many debates have decided that their side is morally superior
and think that the other side is immoral or unethical if they have a different opinion.
I've never understood this notion that working hours are a natural constant that can never be changed, whereas time of day is arbitrary.
Exactly. Alot of business already have winter hours and summer hours. It makes no sense to change the clocks AND change the start time of businesses. I would rather the clocks stay the same and if schools don't want children getting on the bus in the dark then have the schools shift the school schedule at the point they decide it is necessary.
Permanent DST works better in the Northeast (or North in general) than the South. Arizona has permanent standard time, and the evening darkness allows for outdoor exercise after school/work without people dying of heat stroke. Riding your bike is comfortable going both to and from work despite the desert climate.
Meanwhile up North, when DST ends it gets dark far too early. The sunlight that had warmed the car and house during the day is long gone; for the house this means the heat has to work that much harder to get back to a good temperature, than if you were getting home while the sun is still out. The black ice on the roads is harder to spot and more treacherous for both pedestrians and motorists than if people were travelling with a little sunlight.
If the North went to permanent DST and arizona stayed on permanent standard time then they would just be in different time zones then. It works fine in both situations. What you really should be optimizing is usable evening hours in both places. I would much rather drive to work in the dark than I would get home in the evening and not be able to do anything because it's already dark. For people with office jobs, it sucks to burn all the good hours inside only to get outside once the sun goes down.