Especially that human drivers will easily be able to troll autonomous cars, some of them which may carry elderly, blind or other people who don't drive, and/or there's no steering wheel in the car. By trolling, I mean, forcing their way in lane merges, cutting off autonomous vehicles, suddenly braking before them for lulz, or involving in reckless driving, knowing that all the autonomous cars ahead will detect it and do their best to get out of their way. Humans plus machines will be an interesting combo.
If the hypothetical person jumped from the overpass, he's already as good as dead, whether you crash into it or not. So what remains is, braking aggressively, or not, depending on an outcome optimization process. If the autonomous car can detect (and it can) that it's being followed by another car at a high, or much higher speed, and predict that it'll seriously crash into it from behind, the autonomous car may decide that it's better to run over the person who'll be dead, no matter what. More likely, the optimization process will be such that some braking will immediately be generated, but it'll be meted out so as to just avoid the trailing car to crash into it. So, depending on whether you're being tailgated or not, the car will react differently to a plastic bag.
Also, the car may be smart enough to figure out that small, gently floating things are likely to cause less damage to the car than 2 tons of metal from behind. But, by the same token, it can probably figure out that if something floats, it can be a lot of things like a plastic bag, corrugated paper or similar highway debris (very common thing; car software developers are not from the Moon or something so they may know this), or a puff of smoke, or a bird, or... but definitely not a human, an animal, or something made out of metal (vehicle) or concrete (roadblock etc.).
The 200 million Africans of 1950 will shoot up to 2bn in around 30 years. Asia and now Africa dwarf Europe and the US. We here have irresponsibly high per-capita carbon footprints; Asia and Africa have irresponsibly high population growth. The latter is the way bigger problem because economic growth is on course in Asia, consequently their carbon footprint per capita converges, i.e. their overall carbon growth is quadratic. In Africa, if their level of procreation, and other factors don't lead to productivity, prosperity and thus more carbon intensive living, then there's gonna be hell and Africans will swarm the rest of the Earth, especially developed parts which are characterized with high per capita carbon use.
European population size is actually decreasing. I wouldn't worry about Europe and US because plain technological advance, electric cars and the ever growing popularity of eco-oriented thinking etc. ensure that these economies are decarbonized. However there's little regulation and enforcement in Asia, South America and Africa. Worry about these.
In no country do people drastically scale back their own consumption of anything in favor of saving the planet. Some government initiatives do work, e.g. you hand out subsidies for thermal insulation or replacement of heater units, but individually, even the climate-alarmed people don't do a lot. They may bike more etc. but if everyone in the World had the carbon footprint of a Dutch treehugger, we'd still be screwed, for life in general in the 1st World has a huge footprint per person, no matter what an individual does. Sure, ride your bike... but you need extra calories, and food isn't only a more expensive fuel than gasoline, it also has a carbon footprint. So does the bike and the bike road. Few cities make the decision that 'no road should go there, except a bike trail`; mostly, bike roads are add-ons. Even if you remote work and don't use a lot of resources yourself, your kid will go to school (big carbon footprint), you'll enjoy culture, media, public utilities infrastructure.... I recycle selectively. Good thing. But instead of the former one garbage truck visit per week, now it's on average, two.
Probably all these are worth it carbon-wise but make no mistake about it, the most ecologically minded Western family still uses orders of magnitude more carbon than the Earth average.
And even if the entirety of Europe and the US went low-carbon, what difference does it make, with China, India, Russia, Brasil; with a HUGE expected population growth of Africa; with the ever shrinking Amazonian forest etc.
This may explain why we don't encounter alien life. It takes billions of years for evolution to go from a dead planet to technological civilization, and once technology exists, it's bound to be a positive feedback loop that destroys itself within a century or so of the discovery of radio signals, the briefest blip on the cosmological timeline. Corollary: even those civilizations that discover this law will not be able to stop the death spiral.
Your perspective is valid for the US and maybe parts of Western Europe. Some regions of the World _got_ the Commodore 64 around the mid 80's. There was no time for a secondary market to have developed, and ebay and Internet didn't exist, and half of Europe lived behind the Iron Curtain, where a Commodore 64 in the mid-80's wasn't a second-hand thing, but of a luxury item for few, who clang onto them for like a decade, and a dream for most, its initial price in the range of a teacher's annual salary. And since you mention the Vic20: sure it was slightly cheaper and earlier (but way less prevalent outside the US i.e. no secondary market), but that wasn't really seen as a gaming platform or console alternative even by the standards of the time.
Interestingly, these statement you quoted and the statement you made might be simultaneously true, they don't contradict each other. In any case I'm unlikely to respond more on this overall thread because it's more about labeling the other based on some non sequitur than something of a meaningful discussion.
> You cannot see the possibility that you're justifying one manifestation of injustice by another manifestation of the same injustice?
I do see that possibility. There is such a possibility.
> It's perfectly possible that males commit more crimes. Or there could be some amount of bias against them, or it could even be both things at the same time.
It is _mathematically_ possible of course, if we use sterile variables for which we have no priors. However we're not living in some kind of a vacuum and even before reading statistics about gender distribution of the incarcerated, I formed the view that boys/men are more likely to get violent, aggressive, become a bully or a rapist etc. and a good part of it was of course based on sampling (called life experience) and I also learnt some math and statistics. My conclusion is that yes, in _theory_ it would be possible, however I believe that men being locked more often than women is _at least_ somewhat positively correlated with the actual crime prevalence and severity. I don't claim that there is no bias against men; there may be some; there may even be a lot. And it may vary by type of crime. But I think very few people would say that they have lots of insight, data or personal experience on this matter and men should only take up half the prison population, and that the overly male prison population is largely a result of prejudice or bias against males.
To reduce the above 2.5x argument I took issue with, it's like saying, 'the problem is that 10x more men get mistreated by guards or other inmates and killed in prison than women, per capita; this 10x factor is horrible!'. No, what's horrible is that people and/or men systematically get mistreated and killed by guards and other inmates, period. That society doesn't do its best to detect, observe, record, prevent and eliminate the unjust killings by the guards (or other inmates).
Clinging to the 1:2.5 ratio detracts from discussing the real issues, partly because it's irrelevant without proper, actionable context, partly because there would still be 57% that many killings if the ratio suddenly became 1:1 but overcompensating the wrong done to one group does nothing to solve the wrong.
Men are also more heavily policed than women; adults as children or frail etc. Do you advocate that 1) overall policing levels overall should be decreased, while policing levels for white people should remain level, or 2) policing levels for white people should be increased?
> [...] are more likely to be arrested than a white person for the same crime, they are more likely to be convicted if they face charges that a white person for the same crime, they are more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime, etc. This holds true even if you control for factors like poverty and other demographics.
Indeed, this is wrong, unjust, horrible and in need of fixing. Nothing I said is to the contrary so I see this statement as a possible attempt at building a strawman...
[...] > That's a very casual and inappropriate dismissal
OK strawman is debunked! Nothing I said is a dismissal; again, my original point was that a per capita incidence rate multiple is NOT the real issue; in fact such a comparison doesn't control for a large number of factors such as general level of crime across parts of the population. Not disputing (and for lack of data on my part, not attesting to, though it seems likely) the racial bias you and the HuffPost article describe, even after you accounted for said bias, probably we're in agreement that various demographies don't have the same uniform level of law violation. For example, men are likelier to commit a lot of types of crime; poor people are more likely to commit certain types of crime etc. So even if the policing, charging, conviction and incarceration rates shifted such that there's no longer racial bias, a significant part of the unevenness of the prevalence remains. Which leads to a higher number of very regrettable and tragic outcomes per capita for certain groups (gender, economic background, size of city, location etc.) than for others. It is a problematic yet indisputable fact of life _currently_ that some of these boundaries and features in the distribution of the data will be correlated with ethnic background too. It is therefore can't be escaped in the short term that certain ethnic boundaries at least somewhat align with crime prevalence by crime type, resulting in per capita comparisons that aren't useful without such context.
> It sounds to me like you are trying to justify the problem rather than solve it.
Neither: it was just a post on the web, not an attempt at either solving it or justifying it, let's not get carried away. I solely took exception with the claim that the problem is the 2.5x per capita factor. I think 'solving' something and 'grabbing whatever metric by the hair in an attempt to show our concern' are two different things. If anything, I'm pointing out and rejecting out-of-context per capita by ethnic group factors to let us not get distracted from the real issues at hand, some of which yourself cite above (higher punishment for like things etc. and IMO sheer brutality and racism from a significant number of people in the police).
Of course it is in theory _possible_ that the ethnical distribution of unjust killings vs. that of the convicted population is vastly different. But likely, there is a good level of correspondence. To offer something of a less controversial analogy: males are N times more likely to be shot by cops. Yet no one points to this factor N as proof of injustice. Let's face it, the prison population is overwhelmingly male.
I as a tax payer not only accept but expect that police be efficient, and do not enforce that 50% of those ID'd are women etc. in the name of some kind of misinterpreted social justice. The allocation of constrained resources is best done with knowledge of likelihoods in mind.
Having said that, there seem to be HUGE problems with cops killing people and detainees suddenly dying in custody.
But I didn't write about that; all I'm saying is that a factor of 2.5x is not the problem. The problem is elsewhere.
The problem is not the multiple, the problem is that in a lot of cases, the means and killings are totally unjustified.
> if you were black, you were 2.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as a white person
Does it have to do with the fact that crime has a higher prevalence rate among the black? Or should they artificially increase the white and asian killings to adjust this KPI? Nah I think it's expected that sometimes police kill people and in a small fraction of that it's totally unwarranted, wrong and avoidable; in such a case these random outliers will of course more likely impact blacks than non-blacks, males than females, etc.
The problem is if anybody, or blacks in particular, are systematically slaughtered and nobody does something effective about it. The problem is _not_ the 2.5x multiple. In fact it feels like an overly low multiple, relative to crime demographics. So maybe blacks are wrongly killed but non-blacks, even more so, relatively speaking.
Yet is it also not true that the availability of such old records might enanble the reconstruction of other cold cases? Btw. your argument is in theory, sound, but in reality, there is always value in having an alibi, because it can shut down directions of investigation sooner, which benefits the wrongly suspected as well as the investigators.
Or the caller's image gets imprinted... 'honey, you have a mistress? I can't peel off this woman's face from the rubber broche you printed for me. Oh here's her number"
Yes, you need _lots_ of drug dealers for effective supply of drugs, but you don't need lots of terrorists for effective supply of terror. Simple as that. Love it when someone compares terrorist kills to road accident victims or do other plain numerical or frequency comparisons. It's not how it works.
Is there still such a thing as voicemail? It's so annoying when someone leaves on this 80's dinosaur. You get to pay for the privilege of hearing a beep and a robotic reading of the number (never the person's greeting) and on the off-chance you assume the dear callee has his voicemail on because he uses it and you leave a message, it never gets heard.
Voicemail is scam by phone companies, they leave it on and make it bothersome to opt out of it, because they exploit the human weakness of procrastination and charge as much as they can get away with.
The _real_ answer is that if you have an incoming call, you can pick it up on your laptop, watch or tablet, if you're an Apple user. I assume Google will have similar facilities. The real question is, how does the printer app on the phone disable the call screen. Or do you need to put it in airplane mode?
I get what you're trying to say, and it's related to the very point I tried to make. Democracy is not some ultimately stable thing; in fact it relies on a population that continually reaffirms its wish for democracy. It is possible for democratic, popular-vote processes to yield a parliamentary composition that dismantles democracy itself, e.g. subsequently transitioning toward leadership styles and political regimes experienced in many other countries with Arab and/or Islamic majority, and elements of Sharia law that contradict democratic concepts. Before you vest too much staying power in current democratic institutions, let's remember that given sufficient majority, every and all laws can be changed. It's completely possible for a currently European nation to transition into full-blown Fascism or Sharia law or whatever. Democracy _is_ an advanced point in the phylogenesis of political systems but you can't change the population and still expect that it can be taken for granted. History is rife with relapses and regressions, all former flag holders and empires eventually fell.
So the question now, is it democratic to let in immigrants en masse, knowing that it hugely increases the likelihood that democracy will evaporate once the indigenous population is crowded out? Demography changes from muslim immigration on a democratic substrate can yield Sharia law just by following the new majority's wish. The demographic tipping point is calculated to take around 2-4 decades (depending on country, variables and model parameters) but it's not like we can expect wholesale Westernization of already immigrated folks and their offspring. For much of the current problems and several terror events are caused by disgrundled second and third generation immigrants.
Western Europe is already quite islamized; the die is cast and now the gradual population shift is taking its natural course. The Balkans already has a partly Muslim population. It seems as though current migration intentionally targets Northern countries: http://i.imgur.com/BSG7Vio.png So pretty much only Eastern Europe (Visegrad countries and former European Soviet states) remains white.
Stupid immigration policies letting in people from under medieval governance, plus demography, plus democracy can literally end democracy as we know it. The result won't be a consensual, equality-based legal system, but something more reflective of the wishes of the most violent, determined group of the population, guess who they will be.
Lol how cruelly difficult you make it to them. Renounce their religion? Their scripture tells them to lie, beg and cheat to get past such obstacles, only to cling on to their beliefs ever more strongly. It also doesn't deal with the fact that major cities are already past 30% muslim. A better solution is to aggressively persecute religious teaching of violent religions and put in prison, if needed, a large fraction of population if they disobey. Even then it's pretty leaky and yields backlash for a while, but full-on brainwashing children with non-fundamentalist, secular education will address the root cause.
Enjoy the peak atheism in Netherlands while you can. For the child-bearing habit is much stronger among your fellow Muslim citizenry. They'll eclipse the native population and there goes the nice atheistic trend, giving way to Sharia law.
Lol how do Western Europeans think they can stop Islam, when around 30% of their largest cities is Muslim, and growing leaps and bounds? No need for terrorism, just demography and a generation or two. The same way UK can vote for a Brexit now, it can vote on entering the EMEA Caliphate in 30 years. Then it can be in the same union with France again. Terrorists only try to speed up the getting used to part.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah so this is why elevators no longer have personnel operating them!
Especially that human drivers will easily be able to troll autonomous cars, some of them which may carry elderly, blind or other people who don't drive, and/or there's no steering wheel in the car. By trolling, I mean, forcing their way in lane merges, cutting off autonomous vehicles, suddenly braking before them for lulz, or involving in reckless driving, knowing that all the autonomous cars ahead will detect it and do their best to get out of their way. Humans plus machines will be an interesting combo.
If the hypothetical person jumped from the overpass, he's already as good as dead, whether you crash into it or not. So what remains is, braking aggressively, or not, depending on an outcome optimization process. If the autonomous car can detect (and it can) that it's being followed by another car at a high, or much higher speed, and predict that it'll seriously crash into it from behind, the autonomous car may decide that it's better to run over the person who'll be dead, no matter what. More likely, the optimization process will be such that some braking will immediately be generated, but it'll be meted out so as to just avoid the trailing car to crash into it. So, depending on whether you're being tailgated or not, the car will react differently to a plastic bag.
Also, the car may be smart enough to figure out that small, gently floating things are likely to cause less damage to the car than 2 tons of metal from behind. But, by the same token, it can probably figure out that if something floats, it can be a lot of things like a plastic bag, corrugated paper or similar highway debris (very common thing; car software developers are not from the Moon or something so they may know this), or a puff of smoke, or a bird, or ... but definitely not a human, an animal, or something made out of metal (vehicle) or concrete (roadblock etc.).
Car robberies are probably way less frequent than car theft. Not the same thing.
Have the chicken wings been safely recovered and repatriated to their rightful owner?
One word: skiing.
The 200 million Africans of 1950 will shoot up to 2bn in around 30 years. Asia and now Africa dwarf Europe and the US. We here have irresponsibly high per-capita carbon footprints; Asia and Africa have irresponsibly high population growth. The latter is the way bigger problem because economic growth is on course in Asia, consequently their carbon footprint per capita converges, i.e. their overall carbon growth is quadratic. In Africa, if their level of procreation, and other factors don't lead to productivity, prosperity and thus more carbon intensive living, then there's gonna be hell and Africans will swarm the rest of the Earth, especially developed parts which are characterized with high per capita carbon use.
European population size is actually decreasing. I wouldn't worry about Europe and US because plain technological advance, electric cars and the ever growing popularity of eco-oriented thinking etc. ensure that these economies are decarbonized. However there's little regulation and enforcement in Asia, South America and Africa. Worry about these.
http://www.ucar.edu/communicat...
In no country do people drastically scale back their own consumption of anything in favor of saving the planet. Some government initiatives do work, e.g. you hand out subsidies for thermal insulation or replacement of heater units, but individually, even the climate-alarmed people don't do a lot. They may bike more etc. but if everyone in the World had the carbon footprint of a Dutch treehugger, we'd still be screwed, for life in general in the 1st World has a huge footprint per person, no matter what an individual does. Sure, ride your bike... but you need extra calories, and food isn't only a more expensive fuel than gasoline, it also has a carbon footprint. So does the bike and the bike road. Few cities make the decision that 'no road should go there, except a bike trail`; mostly, bike roads are add-ons. Even if you remote work and don't use a lot of resources yourself, your kid will go to school (big carbon footprint), you'll enjoy culture, media, public utilities infrastructure.... I recycle selectively. Good thing. But instead of the former one garbage truck visit per week, now it's on average, two.
Probably all these are worth it carbon-wise but make no mistake about it, the most ecologically minded Western family still uses orders of magnitude more carbon than the Earth average.
And even if the entirety of Europe and the US went low-carbon, what difference does it make, with China, India, Russia, Brasil; with a HUGE expected population growth of Africa; with the ever shrinking Amazonian forest etc.
This may explain why we don't encounter alien life. It takes billions of years for evolution to go from a dead planet to technological civilization, and once technology exists, it's bound to be a positive feedback loop that destroys itself within a century or so of the discovery of radio signals, the briefest blip on the cosmological timeline. Corollary: even those civilizations that discover this law will not be able to stop the death spiral.
Your perspective is valid for the US and maybe parts of Western Europe. Some regions of the World _got_ the Commodore 64 around the mid 80's. There was no time for a secondary market to have developed, and ebay and Internet didn't exist, and half of Europe lived behind the Iron Curtain, where a Commodore 64 in the mid-80's wasn't a second-hand thing, but of a luxury item for few, who clang onto them for like a decade, and a dream for most, its initial price in the range of a teacher's annual salary. And since you mention the Vic20: sure it was slightly cheaper and earlier (but way less prevalent outside the US i.e. no secondary market), but that wasn't really seen as a gaming platform or console alternative even by the standards of the time.
Interestingly, these statement you quoted and the statement you made might be simultaneously true, they don't contradict each other. In any case I'm unlikely to respond more on this overall thread because it's more about labeling the other based on some non sequitur than something of a meaningful discussion.
> You cannot see the possibility that you're justifying one manifestation of injustice by another manifestation of the same injustice?
I do see that possibility. There is such a possibility.
> It's perfectly possible that males commit more crimes. Or there could be some amount of bias against them, or it could even be both things at the same time.
It is _mathematically_ possible of course, if we use sterile variables for which we have no priors. However we're not living in some kind of a vacuum and even before reading statistics about gender distribution of the incarcerated, I formed the view that boys/men are more likely to get violent, aggressive, become a bully or a rapist etc. and a good part of it was of course based on sampling (called life experience) and I also learnt some math and statistics. My conclusion is that yes, in _theory_ it would be possible, however I believe that men being locked more often than women is _at least_ somewhat positively correlated with the actual crime prevalence and severity. I don't claim that there is no bias against men; there may be some; there may even be a lot. And it may vary by type of crime. But I think very few people would say that they have lots of insight, data or personal experience on this matter and men should only take up half the prison population, and that the overly male prison population is largely a result of prejudice or bias against males.
To reduce the above 2.5x argument I took issue with, it's like saying, 'the problem is that 10x more men get mistreated by guards or other inmates and killed in prison than women, per capita; this 10x factor is horrible!'. No, what's horrible is that people and/or men systematically get mistreated and killed by guards and other inmates, period. That society doesn't do its best to detect, observe, record, prevent and eliminate the unjust killings by the guards (or other inmates).
Clinging to the 1:2.5 ratio detracts from discussing the real issues, partly because it's irrelevant without proper, actionable context, partly because there would still be 57% that many killings if the ratio suddenly became 1:1 but overcompensating the wrong done to one group does nothing to solve the wrong.
> Black people are more heavily policed [...]
Men are also more heavily policed than women; adults as children or frail etc. Do you advocate that 1) overall policing levels overall should be decreased, while policing levels for white people should remain level, or 2) policing levels for white people should be increased?
> [...] are more likely to be arrested than a white person for the same crime, they are more likely to be convicted if they face charges that a white person for the same crime, they are more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime, etc. This holds true even if you control for factors like poverty and other demographics.
Indeed, this is wrong, unjust, horrible and in need of fixing. Nothing I said is to the contrary so I see this statement as a possible attempt at building a strawman...
[...]
> That's a very casual and inappropriate dismissal
OK strawman is debunked! Nothing I said is a dismissal; again, my original point was that a per capita incidence rate multiple is NOT the real issue; in fact such a comparison doesn't control for a large number of factors such as general level of crime across parts of the population. Not disputing (and for lack of data on my part, not attesting to, though it seems likely) the racial bias you and the HuffPost article describe, even after you accounted for said bias, probably we're in agreement that various demographies don't have the same uniform level of law violation. For example, men are likelier to commit a lot of types of crime; poor people are more likely to commit certain types of crime etc. So even if the policing, charging, conviction and incarceration rates shifted such that there's no longer racial bias, a significant part of the unevenness of the prevalence remains. Which leads to a higher number of very regrettable and tragic outcomes per capita for certain groups (gender, economic background, size of city, location etc.) than for others. It is a problematic yet indisputable fact of life _currently_ that some of these boundaries and features in the distribution of the data will be correlated with ethnic background too. It is therefore can't be escaped in the short term that certain ethnic boundaries at least somewhat align with crime prevalence by crime type, resulting in per capita comparisons that aren't useful without such context.
> It sounds to me like you are trying to justify the problem rather than solve it.
Neither: it was just a post on the web, not an attempt at either solving it or justifying it, let's not get carried away. I solely took exception with the claim that the problem is the 2.5x per capita factor. I think 'solving' something and 'grabbing whatever metric by the hair in an attempt to show our concern' are two different things. If anything, I'm pointing out and rejecting out-of-context per capita by ethnic group factors to let us not get distracted from the real issues at hand, some of which yourself cite above (higher punishment for like things etc. and IMO sheer brutality and racism from a significant number of people in the police).
Of course it is in theory _possible_ that the ethnical distribution of unjust killings vs. that of the convicted population is vastly different. But likely, there is a good level of correspondence. To offer something of a less controversial analogy: males are N times more likely to be shot by cops. Yet no one points to this factor N as proof of injustice. Let's face it, the prison population is overwhelmingly male.
I as a tax payer not only accept but expect that police be efficient, and do not enforce that 50% of those ID'd are women etc. in the name of some kind of misinterpreted social justice. The allocation of constrained resources is best done with knowledge of likelihoods in mind.
Having said that, there seem to be HUGE problems with cops killing people and detainees suddenly dying in custody.
But I didn't write about that; all I'm saying is that a factor of 2.5x is not the problem. The problem is elsewhere.
The problem is not the multiple, the problem is that in a lot of cases, the means and killings are totally unjustified.
> if you were black, you were 2.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as a white person
Does it have to do with the fact that crime has a higher prevalence rate among the black? Or should they artificially increase the white and asian killings to adjust this KPI? Nah I think it's expected that sometimes police kill people and in a small fraction of that it's totally unwarranted, wrong and avoidable; in such a case these random outliers will of course more likely impact blacks than non-blacks, males than females, etc.
The problem is if anybody, or blacks in particular, are systematically slaughtered and nobody does something effective about it. The problem is _not_ the 2.5x multiple. In fact it feels like an overly low multiple, relative to crime demographics. So maybe blacks are wrongly killed but non-blacks, even more so, relatively speaking.
Yet is it also not true that the availability of such old records might enanble the reconstruction of other cold cases? Btw. your argument is in theory, sound, but in reality, there is always value in having an alibi, because it can shut down directions of investigation sooner, which benefits the wrongly suspected as well as the investigators.
Then they should certainly clean it up!
Good luck finding a non-Chinese table.
Or the caller's image gets imprinted... 'honey, you have a mistress? I can't peel off this woman's face from the rubber broche you printed for me. Oh here's her number"
Yes, you need _lots_ of drug dealers for effective supply of drugs, but you don't need lots of terrorists for effective supply of terror. Simple as that. Love it when someone compares terrorist kills to road accident victims or do other plain numerical or frequency comparisons. It's not how it works.
Is there still such a thing as voicemail? It's so annoying when someone leaves on this 80's dinosaur. You get to pay for the privilege of hearing a beep and a robotic reading of the number (never the person's greeting) and on the off-chance you assume the dear callee has his voicemail on because he uses it and you leave a message, it never gets heard.
Voicemail is scam by phone companies, they leave it on and make it bothersome to opt out of it, because they exploit the human weakness of procrastination and charge as much as they can get away with.
The _real_ answer is that if you have an incoming call, you can pick it up on your laptop, watch or tablet, if you're an Apple user. I assume Google will have similar facilities. The real question is, how does the printer app on the phone disable the call screen. Or do you need to put it in airplane mode?
I get what you're trying to say, and it's related to the very point I tried to make. Democracy is not some ultimately stable thing; in fact it relies on a population that continually reaffirms its wish for democracy. It is possible for democratic, popular-vote processes to yield a parliamentary composition that dismantles democracy itself, e.g. subsequently transitioning toward leadership styles and political regimes experienced in many other countries with Arab and/or Islamic majority, and elements of Sharia law that contradict democratic concepts. Before you vest too much staying power in current democratic institutions, let's remember that given sufficient majority, every and all laws can be changed. It's completely possible for a currently European nation to transition into full-blown Fascism or Sharia law or whatever. Democracy _is_ an advanced point in the phylogenesis of political systems but you can't change the population and still expect that it can be taken for granted. History is rife with relapses and regressions, all former flag holders and empires eventually fell.
So the question now, is it democratic to let in immigrants en masse, knowing that it hugely increases the likelihood that democracy will evaporate once the indigenous population is crowded out? Demography changes from muslim immigration on a democratic substrate can yield Sharia law just by following the new majority's wish. The demographic tipping point is calculated to take around 2-4 decades (depending on country, variables and model parameters) but it's not like we can expect wholesale Westernization of already immigrated folks and their offspring. For much of the current problems and several terror events are caused by disgrundled second and third generation immigrants.
Western Europe is already quite islamized; the die is cast and now the gradual population shift is taking its natural course. The Balkans already has a partly Muslim population. It seems as though current migration intentionally targets Northern countries: http://i.imgur.com/BSG7Vio.png So pretty much only Eastern Europe (Visegrad countries and former European Soviet states) remains white.
Stupid immigration policies letting in people from under medieval governance, plus demography, plus democracy can literally end democracy as we know it. The result won't be a consensual, equality-based legal system, but something more reflective of the wishes of the most violent, determined group of the population, guess who they will be.
Lol how cruelly difficult you make it to them. Renounce their religion? Their scripture tells them to lie, beg and cheat to get past such obstacles, only to cling on to their beliefs ever more strongly. It also doesn't deal with the fact that major cities are already past 30% muslim. A better solution is to aggressively persecute religious teaching of violent religions and put in prison, if needed, a large fraction of population if they disobey. Even then it's pretty leaky and yields backlash for a while, but full-on brainwashing children with non-fundamentalist, secular education will address the root cause.
Enjoy the peak atheism in Netherlands while you can. For the child-bearing habit is much stronger among your fellow Muslim citizenry. They'll eclipse the native population and there goes the nice atheistic trend, giving way to Sharia law.
Lol how do Western Europeans think they can stop Islam, when around 30% of their largest cities is Muslim, and growing leaps and bounds? No need for terrorism, just demography and a generation or two. The same way UK can vote for a Brexit now, it can vote on entering the EMEA Caliphate in 30 years. Then it can be in the same union with France again. Terrorists only try to speed up the getting used to part.