It's funny -- when I read about this, my first thought was "This is appalling." But my second thought was, "Gee, is this really that bad compared to the amount of privacy invasion we're faced with almost continuously these days?"
Unless you run a half-dozen browser plug-ins (and few people do), your every move online is likely being tracked by dozens of companies. Unless you're careful to turn off various features on your phone, tablet, etc. your location is likely being tracked by dozens of apps.
In the grand scheme of things, this may be one of the most "private" acts, but it's also potentially one of the least worrying in terms of what companies could do with the data. The common cookies/trackers, apps, etc. that most users have running continuously are frankly much more worrying in terms of how much corporations could invade your life, use the data in nefarious ways, etc.
On the other hand -- it might take something like this to actually get consumers to wake up and realize the dangers of all of the more common tracking going on. Perhaps when some hacker manages to get into the data from these devices and publishes some Congresswoman's vibrator use data, there might finally be a public outcry to have a serious public discussion on privacy issues and tracking without a clear "opt-in".
If you run a TV commercial for a buffet restaurant and it shows a big pile of crab legs, but your buffet doesn't actually sell crab legs, you should rightly expect some legal trouble.
Depends. I imagine most such commercials will contain a disclaimer in the "fine print" that appears at some point saying "Actual availability of food items may vary by time and location" or something like that. After all, restaurants do run out of food sometimes, particularly at all-you-can-eat buffets. So unless the commercial identified the crab legs as a specific selling point, they may be in the clear.
But yeah, your point is taken. It really depends on expectations, though. If you were to believe dozens of beer commercials I've seen in the past few decades, drinking several brands of beer should cause bikini-clad women to just show up and form a party around you or something. Can beer companies be sued for false representation if that doesn't happen when I crack open a Miller Light??
Obviously a "reasonable person" would realize that such scenarios are not an implied part of the actual experience of drinking that brand of beer, unlike your buffet example where someone might understand that.
The question then becomes: what is "essential" to a movie trailer and what should a "reasonable person" expect in terms of how much a trailer and a movie should agree? The New York Timesran a story a few years back about how different the National Treasure sequel trailers were from the movie. That's a pretty extreme case. The trailer for the movie In Bruges implies that it's a hilarious comedy; it most certainly is NOT. (It's a very dark drama, which just happens to have a couple wisecracking characters, but the use of music and cutting in the trailer clearly implies a different genre.) A similar thing could probably be said for the trailer to Lost in Translation. And then there are trailers like the one for Comedian which doesn't represent the film at all.
Moreover, I think it's pretty common knowledge (or at least so it could be argued in court) that trailers are often cut long before the final edit of the film -- and frequently they are put together by people who have only a tangential relationship to the film. It's incredibly common for trailers to contain at least some minor scenes in editing that aren't in the final cut.
So unless you could prove that there was deliberate misrepresentation going on (e.g., a memo from a studio exec saying, "I know the director doesn't want those Joker scenes in, but we should add the to the trailer anyway..."), I really doubt there's a serious case to be made here.
There could be legit reasons for it. Maybe those joker scenes were in the movie, but were edited out.
It's pretty common knowledge (at least I thought it was) that trailers are often released before the final cut of a film is necessarily finished. The "rough cut" of many films is often much longer than the final cut, as the director and editor work through how to make everything work the best. Then they do test screening and maybe edit some more, etc.
Thus, I have NEVER had the expectation that every single scene in a trailer is necessarily in the final product. And over the years I've noticed a number of times this has happened. Moreover, there are clearly elements of trailers which are NOT in the final cut -- for example, the music is often some sort of generic scoring for parts of the trailer, sometimes from an older movie even. And pacing/juxtaposition of scenes is often played with in cutting trailers to "up the drama" or to "play for laughs" in a comedy in ways that don't happen quite the same way in the final cut.
Again, I thought this was all fairly obvious. The trailer is an ADVERTISEMENT, not a literal excerpt from the final product
However if the deleted scenes are a key draw, it could still be valid depending on the case.
Maybe. Then again, whenever I drink a Coors or a Budweiser or whatever,** I'm waiting for the magical bikini-clad women with water running off of them and wind in their hair to appear too... but somehow the final experience of drinking the beer isn't quite like the commercial. I doubt I could win a lawsuit against a beer company for "false advertising" in this case.
Basically, I don't think there's any actual or implied promise in the marketing of trailers which guarantees that ALL of the content in the trailer WILL be in the final film. Hell, the trailer for The Sixth Sense implied that Bruce Willis was alive, and the trailer for The Village implied that I might be able to see a decent horror flick set in an isolated community in the 19th century or something... except... oh crap, SPOILER ALERT...
Yeah... trailers don't necessarily tell you what's in the final product. How many times have you seen a comedy trailer and thought "that's gonna be AWESOME!" only to show up and realize they packed the only funny 90 seconds from the film into the trailer. Is that "false advertising"? Frankly, I think even that would be a stronger argument than what's going on in this case.
[**Note: I don't think I've drunk either one of those beers in the past five years. Perhaps the bikini-clad women now DO magically appear??]
I will actively fight anyone who thinks they have a right to put advertisements in front of me without my explicit permission.
HUH?
If you don't want to see ads on Facebook, don't use Facebook. It's that simple. If you don't want to see ads in your newspaper, stop buying the newspaper. If you don't want to listen to somebody trying to give a free sample of cheese at a grocery store, stop shopping at that grocery store.
You don't have any "right" to use a service and demand that a company offer it on your terms. You can ask for them to obey your terms, but they are a private company who can determine their own business model. If you don't like it, stop using their service. That's your choice.
P.S. I hate ads with a passion and will do a lot to avoid them. But if a site or service insists on showing them to me (e.g., by setting up a block that won't show content if they detect an ad-blocker), the ethical decision is to leave, not try to gain access to their service by circumventing their explicit terms.
The "We insist on force feeding you ads" mentality has to stop though. I wonder whether the right solution is that if a company is particularly obnoxious about bypassing ad-blockers, to code those ad blockers to simulate clicks on ads, preferably in a way that's detectable by the ad buyer, but not the ad seller.
Sorry, no -- the "solution" is you stop using the site.
I believe ads are EVIL, and I also think people have the right to control what they download from a site -- so if they want to run an ad-blocker, that's their prerogative. If a website still posts information on a publicly-accessible site, I have every right to refuse to download their ads while still downloading other content.
HOWEVER....
If a site specifically sets up a block for those with ad-blockers or posts giant messages saying, "We depend on ads, and you should view them if you want to see our content," then the moral and ethical decision if you don't want to see ads is to stop going to the site.
Trying to circumvent anti-ad-blocking measures is not moral. You have no "right" to see content just because you want to. And what you're proposing (essentially setting up a "sting" to get site owners in trouble with their advertisers) is just nasty.
I get it -- you don't want to see ads. Neither do I. But if a site wants to say "this is the price of admission to see our content," that's also their right. They get to run their business the way they want. Find what you want elsewhere, rather than free-loading off of people who explicitly tell you they don't want you.
The newspapers are doing this because they are in decline. Every form of mass media is saturated with advertising, The value of ads is going down, as we are become so used to them we are blocking them out like the sound of the train in the background.
Yes, but the problem is -- it was likely always thus. Random print ads never had a lot of value either. Most people I've seen read newspapers seem to just look past them to find the stories they want to read. The actual "ad sections" of newspapers (e.g., with real estate listings or "help wanted ads" or dedicated flyers) were more useful, because the people who were looking at those sections actually were in search of ads.
The problem with online advertising is NOT that it's less effective -- it's that advertisers now have access to metrics. They can see how few people actually click on ads. They can see the number of page views. And for big companies who buy tracking data, they may even have a sense of whether your buying habits are affected at all by ads.
So, ad value is going down because companies are realizing how useless they probably always were, except for people who actually were specifically looking for ads.
Anyhow, what I don't understand is why a newspaper wouldn't be willing to quote you a price for an ad-free experience. Sure, maybe it costs several times the price of a normal "online subscription," but I imagine quite a few people may be interested in it. Being dependent on online ad sales is NOT going to be sustainable for most of them in the long run, so they might as well crunch the numbers and figure out what it would cost them to stay afloat if they sell subscriptions without ads.
Unlike email vs telegrams, Facebook adds nothing that didn't already exist before (in email, instant messaging, newsgroups/forums/mailing lists, websites, etc) except ads.
That's NOT true. I'm absolutely NOT a fan of Facebook (and frequently go several months between checking on my account -- I only keep it because there are a few people who seem to only know how to use Facebook to contact people now; they can't figure out email anymore), but the social media experience of Facebook is distinct from all other things you've mentioned.
Namely: you can broadcast information to a specific group of people (your "friends" or subgroups of them), while simultaneously also allowing them the option to "tune in" or "tune out" as they wish.
To do this with previous tech, you'd have to do something like set up a specific email list with all of your friends AND have them simultaneously set up email filters so they could control when they saw your messages (rather than just getting spammed in their inbox by your random posts). AND they'd have to do that for each of their friends individually.
But that's not even it -- because the ability to respond to posts by friends (and have them be visible to specific sets of people) couldn't really work with previous tech without a lot of configuration. Facebook is probably closest to a concatenated set of private blogs from all of your friends (where the typical blogpost is rather short, but you can post comments), but again that wasn't really easy to set up with previous tech.
Again, I'm not a huge fan of the Facebook experience, but it does lead to a different sort of interaction compared to previous social media.
Somehow I feel like in order to graduate from high school one requirement should be to realize thermostats aren't magic. Too bad we can't revoke HS diplomas.
I still remember the reactions I got when I told people I replaced the basic thermostat model I had in a house when I moved in with a basic programmable model that I could setback during the day or at night for energy savings, etc.
Many people I know -- a lot of them with graduate degrees -- looked at me like I had told them I just built my own car after smelting and processing the metal from raw ore I had dug out of a mine myself. I'm frankly astounded at how few people have ANY knowledge of basic electrical stuff. Swapping out a bad switch or an old ceiling fan or whatever is really basic stuff (as long as you follow truly basic safety measures), but for some reason everyone acts like this is rocket science... or at least way too difficult and dangerous for anyone except a "licensed electrician" to attempt.
Anyhow, whenever I think of thermostats and the public, I always remember my grandmother, who had grown up in the days before air conditioning was at all widespread. But she had central air installed when she was older and to the day she died, she could not comprehend that turning the dial to a LOWER number meant that the air conditioning effect would increase. She was stuck on this idea that a thermostat was just some sort of arbitrary numbers where higher meant "more" or something. And, frankly, she was a pretty smart person otherwise... she just couldn't get that.
I don't know what it is about thermostats that people just are incapable of understanding. Most people seem to think that by turning the numbers much higher or lower that the system will "work harder" (even though that's only true in a minority of setups, and only under certain conditions). Even fewer people understand the impact of humidity on comfort perception and realize how to make thermostat adjustments accordingly.
I used to be baffled as to why consumers would even want such things. But, of course, it is not the consumers who want all this IOT, but the vendors who sell the devices and the services, trying to turn us into the product.
I agree that I can't understand the desire for many IoT devices, but internet control for a thermostat does make a certain amount of sense, particularly for those who are frequently out of town or take long vacations. In those cases, getting an alert that your thermostat is no longer responding correctly could make the difference between realizing your heat or A/C is busted immediately vs. dealing with potentially tens of thousands of dollars in water damage (from frozen pipes in winter), mold damage, or whatever when you get home a week or more later. And there are lots of less dire situations where someone who takes frequent trips might benefit from being able to make adjustments remotely. (And even if you don't travel, if you set back your thermostat during the day, this could be a convenient feature to have if you plan to come home a little earlier than expected and want your house warmer or cooler when you get there, etc.)
Anyhow, obviously such things need adequate security, and they should never REQUIRE an internet connection to function correctly. But at least in the case of thermostats, I can imagine quite a few cases where consumers might actually like the connectivity as an option.
Just realized my faux-pas in saying they might spend time on "Facebook" when I really meant social media in general. I do realize Facebook isn't as popular these days with the younger crowd. (I'm not THAT out of it....)
The snarky part of me wonders whether the correlation isn't in fact between academic performance and "not playing many traditional sports".
If true, it's probably not just sports, but organized social activities in general. Yes, it's a stereotype, but there's probably a greater percentage of introverts, "loner"-types, etc. in those who play video games frequently. In the past the extroverts and socially adept folks would be participating in all sorts of organized activities after school, and then going out with friends for a meal or something. Nowadays they probably spend some of that time on Facebook and texting, which also takes up time. (Note this doesn't require ALL gamers to be like this, only a somewhat higher percentage in the gamer pool to explain the measured effect.)
Loners and introverts tend to have more time for self-reflective activities in general, like studying, thinking, etc. When these kids aren't playing video games, are they playing sports, going out with friends, or checking Facebook incessantly? Or are they more likely (on average) to have more "downtime" by themselves to pursue intellectual stuff in general?
I was never much of a gamer myself, so I don't know if this is true or not (and I know the dynamics of gamers is changing over time). But my sense when I was younger and had many friends who were into gaming was that this was a closer correlation and explanation.
Oh, and by the way -- if you think that normal U.S. citizens have "the right to vote" today, that's really up to interpretation. For example, you really don't have the right to vote for President of the U.S. You have the right vote in an election, but it's up to your state legislature to decide in what manner the results of your state voting can be tallied to select members of the Electoral College to vote for President on your behalf.
Basically, the Constitution is profoundly undemocratic in sense of "direct democracy." It was designed to have many layers between the votes of the people and the actual officials and laws in the government.
Fuck you, you undemocratic piece of shit. The constitution says nothing about "putting in an effort" or any other such crap. You've proven the original poster's point - that people who complain about those that vote are usually wanting to clear out their notion of undesirable voters (in your case those undesirables that aren't putting in an effort).
Well, to be fair, "the Constitution says nothing about" the requirements for suffrage in general. In the early days of the U.S., states restricted voting rights to mostly white male landowners... by your standards, the original Constitution as interpreted by the states who decided who got to vote was profoundly "undemocratic." The phrase "right to vote" never even appeared until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War.
Gradually, over the years, we've added suffrage to other folks, and now it's pretty much universal for people over the age of 18 (excepting felons serving time and such edge cases). But twas not always thus, and citing the "Constitution" in this discussion brings in a host of problems... since that Constitution had to be amended at least SEVEN times SPECIFICALLY to enfranchise voters which had been previously excluded.
And Congress has had to pass other bills to extend voting rights to other random groups who would not necessarily otherwise have it under the Constitution (e.g., citizens overseas, some Native Americans, residents of D.C. in some elections, etc.).
Anyhow, I do NOT agree with GP's attitude here. But the Constitution is pretty much a terrible model for enfranchising people to vote -- the default position over the centuries has basically been "no, you don't really have the right to vote..." because the Constitution does such a poor job of granting it.
Yup. I'd wager it's about 50/50 between knowingly leaving the kid in there but intending to be back soon and leaving the kid there intending to kill it. The people who actually forget the kid is in the car when they themselves leave the car represent a rounding error.
If this were true, you'd expect statistics to be relatively constant over the past few decades. Instead, there was a sudden uptick in deaths per year beginning right when car seats were required (1998) to be placed in the back seat to avoid the required dual airbags now always present in cars. Analysis of stats suggests that the majority of these deaths are attributed to "accidents," and mostly by people who thought they already had dropped the kid off somewhere else (and thus didn't go check), rather than those "intending to be back soon."
If you leave your kid in the car, you are drug-addled as far as I can tell. I don't care if it's legal SSRIs or legal meth (Adderol) or something else. Give them all postpartum Darwin awards.
Well, since it's clear you didn't take my advice to read the link, I sincerely hope you never have kids... or if you do, I wish them luck in avoiding this situation, which (again) can and has happened to all sorts of parents, including the most meticulous ones on the planet. The answer is some combination of awareness of situations where this sort of thing does happen to meticulous parents as well as additional safety features, but simply denying this could happen isn't going to prevent it from happening to you. Good luck.
BMI is a 95% accurate predictor of obesity in men and 99% in women. IOW if you pick a random member of the population, measure their BMI and body fat percentage 95-99% that BMI says you're obese, the fat percentage will agree (and also BMI will miss quite a few). And bear in mind of those 5% wrong, some number will be merely overweight rather than obese. So if you take an obese BMI to mean "should I lose weight", if it says "yes" it's going to be wrong way under 5% of the time.
That's pretty bloody good.
I have no idea where you get your supposed 95% figure. Actual studies tend to show that the BMI cutoffs for obesity are only accurate for somewhere between 50% and 80% of people. Errors are usually large in both ways in most studies (i.e., errors that misclassify obese people as not obese, or the reverse). Usually the error is larger in misclassifying obese people as merely overweight... though I recall a study which said if we lowered the BMI "obese" threshold to capture at least 95% of actual obese people, we'd misclassify at least 1/3 of merely overweight people as "obese."
Bottom line -- BMI is terrible, and there are much better ways to do stuff like this. (And, frankly, easier -- waist size, for example, has been shown to correlate with obesity-related illnesses better than BMI... and that's waist measurement regardless of height or weight or anything else. That shows how bad BMI is.)
Oh, and I'd cite studies, but just search for "BMI inaccuracy" or something, you'll get links immediately to half a dozen studies which back up what I just said. I've never seen any study claim anything close to a 95% accuracy for BMI correlation to adiposity. That's just bogus.
Why is this so hard to believe?? Firefighters have no duty to risk their lives for people who don't pay them to. -- it's a local service paid for by local money.
What people may be even more surprised by is that police have no duty to protect them either, as has been repeatedly upheld in rulings like this and this.
Basically, no matter how negligent the cops may be in not responding or not helping people (even with supposedly legally binding and enforceable documents like restraining orders) or not generally giving a crap, they aren't legally responsible and can't be sued over it.
I don't think many people in the U.S. realize in general how much "on their own" they really are, when legalities are strictly followed. You think you have "public services" that have some sort of "duty" to help you? Think again.
But start with Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer-Winning Feature, 'Fatal Distraction' from 2009:
I absolutely second this -- one of the most important articles I've ever read. I still remember when I happened upon it a few years back after reading a bunch of judgmental articles about such deaths.
For people who think, "Who the heck could ever leave their kid in a hot car... what kind of parent could they possibly be???" You NEED to read this article. This could happen to many more caring parents than we might realize, given the right set of unusual circumstances. If you have kids or ever plan to have kids and don't think this could ever happen to you, read this and realize how such things do happen, and not just to drug-addled neglectful idiots.
Excuse me! That would be just the Nobel Peace and Literature prizes. The real Nobel prizes are awarded for science, not politics.
I love it how folks around here love to create their own "perfect" definition of what constitutes a "real" Nobel prize.
The "economics prize" is obviously out (for many folks here) -- since Mr. Nobel didn't create one, so obviously even if it's awarded by the same methods and the same body, it can't be a "real" Nobel. (Personally, I'm pretty skeptical of those folks claiming to have "real" "Harvard" degrees from the "Harvard medical school" -- John Harvard gave money to what was effectively a divinity school back then, so I don't trust those weird guys claiming to have "real" Harvard medical degrees. Would John Harvard approve of those quacks using his name??)
And "literature" and "peace" -- I mean, come on.... obviously those aren't "real" Nobel prizes.... who would award a prize for that sort of BS?! [\sarcasm]
How convenient -- the "real" Nobel prizes are restricted only to those named by some dead guy (why does he have the ability to define exactly what "science" is?), except when he created prizes we find inconvenient and "unscientific," in which case they aren't "real" Nobels.
It's just a name... created by some random dead guy. It doesn't endow some mystical significance to winners that make them the greatest people or scientists or politicians or whatever ever. It's just a prize awarded by a committee. I'm not trying to downplay the winners of those prizes, but we also shouldn't try to shoehorn them into some weird pedestal of scientific perfection by ignoring those prize categories we wish weren't there. It's just a name attached to a prize.
But why should we set the goalpost at average human instead of setting the goalpost of optimum human potential?
Well, for one thing, because the history of eugenics proves that "optimum human potential" is generally more of a culturally contingent set of metrics rather than an objective measure of human potential.
Are we better than the Nazis or various other eugenics projects in recognizing how "unscientific" our values sometimes are? Hopefully we're better than that... But I'll bet in a hundred years or so, scientists will look back and shake their heads at how ignorant we were in thinking X signified a good measure of human superiority, when actually it's just an arbitrary cultural norm in vogue now (or worse, it turns out that it's a cultural idea that actually correlates negatively with other better measures of human progress, or limits diversity in ways that have a long-term worse genetic impact or whatever).
That last idea is the biggest issue from my perspective... What if we end up "optimizing" genetic trait X, leading to much less genetic diversity... But it turns out that selecting for X (mostly a socially desirable trait currently) actually weeds out the sort of diversity that could promote traits Y and Z, which are not yet fully understood? Lots of potential issues once we start tinkering with the genetic building blocks of our species.
You literally can't think of a better solution to dictatorship than condemning everyone you ever know and yourself to eternal oblivion of death?
Unless you figure out how to rejuvenate brain plasticity of youth periodically or something, which will probably lead to massive changes in personality and mental shifts, no... Not and maintain things like social progress. Thomas Kuhn and other historians of science has shown that sometimes the only way major changes happen is when an older generation can die off... Because older folks just sometimes are incapable of seeing things in a new way with the fluency of someone who grows up in a new paradigm. Older people staying in power longer will eventually inhibit progress, unless our mental capacities start to change dramacally with these life extensions.
Has it ever occurred to you that in a world where most people expect to be around in a few centuries, and for the foreseeable future unless a big war or planetary scale disaster happens, might be a world where wiser, more long sighted decisions generally are made?
No, actually, because it basically goes against what most psychological and sociological research has repeatedly shown us about the inability of average people to consider long-term consequences NOW, within current normal lifespans. If people actually made rational choices based on the fact that they will still be living even a few years or decades in the future, we wouldn't need automated forced retirement contribution plans and such. Heck, I know a lot of people who seem to be living paychecks to paycheck constantly... Even though they make an upper middle class income. And you think the average person is going to plan better when a lifetime is centuries long?? They can barely make it to the end of the month.
How much of these poor decisions now are due to decaying brains in people who still have voting power?
I don't think the "old person" vote is any worse than the average "uninformed" vote, which is basically most voters...or all the stupid people who vote regardless of age. People who truly have "decaying brains" don't tend to be able to get to the voting booth... The average older voter just has different priorities based on their longer experience and based on problems more relevant to their daily lives (which obviously have different concerns from younger folks).
You do realize that aging related intelligence decline would have to be fixed, or life extension wouldn't extend your life...
"Would have to be fixed?"Actually no, I DON'T realize that... It would certainly be desireable. But the reality is that we've already accomplished significant life extension compared to a century or two ago, without solving mental decline... Which is why we see fewer people dying of random medical conditions at younger ages and more people than ever with brains going to " mush" before they due in their 80s and 90s. I don't have faith at all that our system will make it a priority to extend intellect at the same pace as physical life extension... People these days are just too afraid of death and our society teaches us to extend life at all costs... Even if it's horrible cancer treatments and pain and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a few more months.
The fact is that America is no longer a conservative country. For example, for the first time in history there are more "nones" (people with no religious affiliation) than any other voting block. That statistic is never going to go back down, ever. That's clearly not the sign of a conservative country.
I'm not sure that this is the best metric of a "conservative country," but where do you get this data from??
Here's the history of Gallup polls on religion for example. According to them, in 2015, 38% of people identified as Protestant, 23% as Catholic, 9% as other Christian... that's 60% Christian right there. The "None" only accounted for a measly 17%. Pew polls put the number more at 70% Christian in 2014, with only 23% unaffiliated.
Moreover, when you start looking down that Gallup Poll list, you find stuff like, "Do you believe in God?" 1944 - 96%, 2016 - 89%. A downtick for sure, but hardly the sign of lack of religious belief.
"Do you believe in heaven?" 1968 - 85%, 2011 - 85%
Hell - 1968 - 66%, 2011 - 75%
Belief in angels is still up there in 2016 at 72%, which is a little lower than it was in the early 2000s, but about the same as it was back in the 1970s.
Now, there are other polls that put the numbers a little lower. The Harris Poll for example only puts belief in the virgin birth at 57%, with 68% saying he is the Son of God.
Religious belief and attendance is down more than ever before in history. There are fewer churches and places of worship in this country than ever before in history. Religion is dying off here, both figuratively and literally.
Is church attendance down? Yes. And the percentage of folks who say religion is "very important" in their lives is down (though still the MAJORITY of Americans, according to polls). But given that the majority of Americans still seem to strongly subscribe to religious beliefs, including significant numbers of your "unaffiliated" folks, I'd hardly say it's "dying off" yet.
I have absolutely no idea where you get your idea that there are more "nones" than any other voting block. It may be true that the majority of Americans no longer attend church every week, but it's still a highly religious country.
the fact is that America is slowly but steadily moving towards more liberal social and political systems, not away from them. It's been doing this since the late 50's, but has sped up a bit considerably the last decade or so.
I agree with this, though to go back to your previous point -- the number of people identifying as "Evangelical Christians" has been fairly constant over the past few decades. It hasn't even declined as much as the other general religion numbers. So... it's not like the true "conservatives" (in terms of religion) are going away... it's more like the people in the middle are becoming less concerned about religious values holding sway over their lives. But there's still a rather huge contingent of people with far right values (certainly larger than your "none" contingent), and that block isn't going away anytime soon.
Pot is now fully legal for recreational use in multiple states with more coming (count on it). That's not the sign of a conservative country.
We MIGHT just be getting back to the level of acceptance of recreational/medicinal drug use enjoyed in the 1900-1930 era or so. If that's "liberal" and "progressive" to you... well, gosh, that's great!
They maintain they did nothing wrong. That means that their lack of ethics remains fully at play in every other business decision.
I'm generally the last person to defend Facebook, but this case appears to be a bit different from the typical "Kids rack up bills in in-app purchases" scenarios we've seen in Google or Apple in previous years. In particular, note the follow from another article on this case:
One child's mother let him spend $20 on her credit card to let him unlock features within the game Ninja Emblem, but the account was charged several hundred dollars for purchases the child subsequently made with what he thought was fake money.
The other child racked up charges of $1,059 after taking his parent's debit card without permission.
While the lawsuit was class-action and applies to a lot of other cases, these were the ONLY two kids who actually were directly involved in the suit, one of whom simply took his parent's card without permission.
That's something that ANY online site could have issues with -- a kid who takes a parent's card could be making purchases anywhere online. Why exactly should Facebook be more culpable than any other online site in dealing with payments like that?
Would it be NICE for Facebook to return that money? Sure. But not all companies would, particularly for goods that were non-returnable. In that case, most parents would have to take this up as a dispute with their credit card company, who probably would work it out. (Unfortunately, though, this says it was a debit card -- one more reason never to use debit cards... they simply don't give you as much protection if they are ever used in an unauthorized manner.)
Anyhow, obviously it would be reasonable for Facebook to refund most or all of the money in a case like this. But it's a rather different scenario from some of the other "in-app purchase" judgments we've seen. In those cases, the issue was that a credit card was generally entered by parents, say to make a couple app purchases, and they didn't realize that their device was set to automatically authorize all future purchases or whatever. In those cases, what was lacking was a proper control setting to turn off in-app purchases, a proper password requirement, or some sort of warning.
In other words, the credit card information was entered knowingly for an authorized reason, but the parent had no clear notice that it could be used further without limit.
Here the bar is much lower -- basically, any kid under 18 is eligible for refunds, regardless of what level of negligence on the parent's part, whether the card was basically stolen from the parents, or whatever. Again, it's generally the "right thing to do" to refund the money, but ethically I think at least in one scenario here Facebook is not as culpable or "evil" as some other cases we've seen.
One gross miscarriage of justice is not a rationale to commit another one, nor to entrench systematic miscarriages.
You're assuming that this would be a "miscarriage of justice" to Getty. But corporations and commercial infringement SHOULD be different from individual infringement.
And in this case, it's much, much worse -- because the artist explicitly wanted to license the works effectively to be used freely by the public. (Not technically public domain, but free for use with attribution.)
Getty then truly "stepped over the line" when they not only charge fees for someone else's work, but then threaten people who don't pay fees to them.
I know you probably won't agree with this, but to me stealing "from the public" is one of the worst sins that can be committed. I find modern copyright extensions to a horrific infraction against human knowledge and culture. (Copyright should be "for limited times," perhaps a few decades at most, as it was originally.) The natural state of "intellectual property" should be public domain, i.e., the cultural resources of the public. To threaten people with legal action for using the resources of the public is despicable behavior and should be punished accordingly.
It would be one thing if this were a first offense. It was not -- Getty has done precisely this before, and that's why the lawsuit is entitled to treble damages. It would also be one thing if they merely mistakenly were selling rights to photos without vetting them -- that's a copyright violation, and should be subject to the smaller fees you've discussed, raised higher for commercial violation and increased because they've done it before.
But Getty has gone far beyond that in appropriating material for itself that was released for free to the public and threatening people who used it. THAT is an offense against our society and our culture. And they've done it before. It's no different from the level of outrage that should be directed at a public official who embezzled funds out of the public school treasury. Or even an official who went around and started charging rent to people who owned land claiming, "This is actually state property." Those are equivalent scenarios here -- Getty has committed an offense against the public.
It would not be a "miscarriage of justice" in this case to sue Getty out of existence, along with any other entity who systematically tries to deny the public access to free intellectual property when it has been released as such.
Basically this finding is something that should make scientists go "huh, that's curious - we should follow up on this once we have more data".
And that's actually what MOST science should be. Particularly with human studies, it's often difficult to get huge amounts of data for a decent sample, so most studies should be exploratory. Then a larger future study should be designed in such a way that it could easily DISPROVE the previous one. In that case, we'd actually make scientific progress more efficiently.
Instead, what generally happens today:
-- Data shows small correlation, but too little statistical power to draw firm conclusions. ("X might be related to Y.")
-- Researchers often exaggerate significance in discussion section of paper, frequently extrapolating even more findings related to other stuff that wasn't even supported directly by data. ("X likely causes Y, and it might have something to do with A and B.")
-- University press releases and media shout results from the rooftops. ("X is now implicated in A and B!!" Third paragraph: "Study actually showed a connection between X and Y; researchers emphasize this is preliminary finding.")
-- Future studies cite the original without retesting. ("As shown by Jim, Sam, et al., X causes Y...") If A and B were mentioned in the abstract, you might even get references to how X "was shown" to be related to A and B.
-- 20 years later, somebody does a study on something else, but happens to also measure X and Y. Turns out X isn't even correlated with Y at all, and the mechanism postulating a connection to A and B is based on an entirely bogus set of assumptions.
That's why we have all these metastudies in the past few years saying, "Retesting shows 70% of findings in field X are false!"
What we actually should recognize is that most studies (even if they seem to have a high level of statistical significance) should be regarded as "preliminary" and need verification in retesting with a more rigorous experimental design before they are accepted. It's not gonna happen in our current grant environment which rewards "innovative" and "groundbreaking" research, but that's what science should be.
This study is precisely the kind of things that preliminary research should be about. They can't have a larger sample size yet, but they tried some testing with mice and there might be something. It's the first step in a rigorous scientific process. (Note if you actually the discussion section in this study, the authors hedge a lot and point out what they're doing is inconclusive and preliminary, though suggestive of possible effects that had previously not been measured.)
What we DON'T need from stuff like this is headlines screaming: "Astronauts FAR MORE LIKELY TO DIE from X." That's bogus BS, and it's part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Is nothing sacred anymore?
In a word, "no".
It's funny -- when I read about this, my first thought was "This is appalling." But my second thought was, "Gee, is this really that bad compared to the amount of privacy invasion we're faced with almost continuously these days?"
Unless you run a half-dozen browser plug-ins (and few people do), your every move online is likely being tracked by dozens of companies. Unless you're careful to turn off various features on your phone, tablet, etc. your location is likely being tracked by dozens of apps.
In the grand scheme of things, this may be one of the most "private" acts, but it's also potentially one of the least worrying in terms of what companies could do with the data. The common cookies/trackers, apps, etc. that most users have running continuously are frankly much more worrying in terms of how much corporations could invade your life, use the data in nefarious ways, etc.
On the other hand -- it might take something like this to actually get consumers to wake up and realize the dangers of all of the more common tracking going on. Perhaps when some hacker manages to get into the data from these devices and publishes some Congresswoman's vibrator use data, there might finally be a public outcry to have a serious public discussion on privacy issues and tracking without a clear "opt-in".
If you run a TV commercial for a buffet restaurant and it shows a big pile of crab legs, but your buffet doesn't actually sell crab legs, you should rightly expect some legal trouble.
Depends. I imagine most such commercials will contain a disclaimer in the "fine print" that appears at some point saying "Actual availability of food items may vary by time and location" or something like that. After all, restaurants do run out of food sometimes, particularly at all-you-can-eat buffets. So unless the commercial identified the crab legs as a specific selling point, they may be in the clear.
But yeah, your point is taken. It really depends on expectations, though. If you were to believe dozens of beer commercials I've seen in the past few decades, drinking several brands of beer should cause bikini-clad women to just show up and form a party around you or something. Can beer companies be sued for false representation if that doesn't happen when I crack open a Miller Light??
Obviously a "reasonable person" would realize that such scenarios are not an implied part of the actual experience of drinking that brand of beer, unlike your buffet example where someone might understand that.
The question then becomes: what is "essential" to a movie trailer and what should a "reasonable person" expect in terms of how much a trailer and a movie should agree? The New York Times ran a story a few years back about how different the National Treasure sequel trailers were from the movie. That's a pretty extreme case. The trailer for the movie In Bruges implies that it's a hilarious comedy; it most certainly is NOT. (It's a very dark drama, which just happens to have a couple wisecracking characters, but the use of music and cutting in the trailer clearly implies a different genre.) A similar thing could probably be said for the trailer to Lost in Translation . And then there are trailers like the one for Comedian which doesn't represent the film at all.
Moreover, I think it's pretty common knowledge (or at least so it could be argued in court) that trailers are often cut long before the final edit of the film -- and frequently they are put together by people who have only a tangential relationship to the film. It's incredibly common for trailers to contain at least some minor scenes in editing that aren't in the final cut. So unless you could prove that there was deliberate misrepresentation going on (e.g., a memo from a studio exec saying, "I know the director doesn't want those Joker scenes in, but we should add the to the trailer anyway..."), I really doubt there's a serious case to be made here.
There could be legit reasons for it. Maybe those joker scenes were in the movie, but were edited out.
It's pretty common knowledge (at least I thought it was) that trailers are often released before the final cut of a film is necessarily finished. The "rough cut" of many films is often much longer than the final cut, as the director and editor work through how to make everything work the best. Then they do test screening and maybe edit some more, etc.
Thus, I have NEVER had the expectation that every single scene in a trailer is necessarily in the final product. And over the years I've noticed a number of times this has happened. Moreover, there are clearly elements of trailers which are NOT in the final cut -- for example, the music is often some sort of generic scoring for parts of the trailer, sometimes from an older movie even. And pacing/juxtaposition of scenes is often played with in cutting trailers to "up the drama" or to "play for laughs" in a comedy in ways that don't happen quite the same way in the final cut.
Again, I thought this was all fairly obvious. The trailer is an ADVERTISEMENT, not a literal excerpt from the final product
However if the deleted scenes are a key draw, it could still be valid depending on the case.
Maybe. Then again, whenever I drink a Coors or a Budweiser or whatever,** I'm waiting for the magical bikini-clad women with water running off of them and wind in their hair to appear too... but somehow the final experience of drinking the beer isn't quite like the commercial. I doubt I could win a lawsuit against a beer company for "false advertising" in this case.
Basically, I don't think there's any actual or implied promise in the marketing of trailers which guarantees that ALL of the content in the trailer WILL be in the final film. Hell, the trailer for The Sixth Sense implied that Bruce Willis was alive, and the trailer for The Village implied that I might be able to see a decent horror flick set in an isolated community in the 19th century or something... except... oh crap, SPOILER ALERT...
Yeah... trailers don't necessarily tell you what's in the final product. How many times have you seen a comedy trailer and thought "that's gonna be AWESOME!" only to show up and realize they packed the only funny 90 seconds from the film into the trailer. Is that "false advertising"? Frankly, I think even that would be a stronger argument than what's going on in this case.
[**Note: I don't think I've drunk either one of those beers in the past five years. Perhaps the bikini-clad women now DO magically appear??]
I will actively fight anyone who thinks they have a right to put advertisements in front of me without my explicit permission.
HUH?
If you don't want to see ads on Facebook, don't use Facebook. It's that simple. If you don't want to see ads in your newspaper, stop buying the newspaper. If you don't want to listen to somebody trying to give a free sample of cheese at a grocery store, stop shopping at that grocery store.
You don't have any "right" to use a service and demand that a company offer it on your terms. You can ask for them to obey your terms, but they are a private company who can determine their own business model. If you don't like it, stop using their service. That's your choice.
P.S. I hate ads with a passion and will do a lot to avoid them. But if a site or service insists on showing them to me (e.g., by setting up a block that won't show content if they detect an ad-blocker), the ethical decision is to leave, not try to gain access to their service by circumventing their explicit terms.
The "We insist on force feeding you ads" mentality has to stop though. I wonder whether the right solution is that if a company is particularly obnoxious about bypassing ad-blockers, to code those ad blockers to simulate clicks on ads, preferably in a way that's detectable by the ad buyer, but not the ad seller.
Sorry, no -- the "solution" is you stop using the site.
I believe ads are EVIL, and I also think people have the right to control what they download from a site -- so if they want to run an ad-blocker, that's their prerogative. If a website still posts information on a publicly-accessible site, I have every right to refuse to download their ads while still downloading other content.
HOWEVER....
If a site specifically sets up a block for those with ad-blockers or posts giant messages saying, "We depend on ads, and you should view them if you want to see our content," then the moral and ethical decision if you don't want to see ads is to stop going to the site.
Trying to circumvent anti-ad-blocking measures is not moral. You have no "right" to see content just because you want to. And what you're proposing (essentially setting up a "sting" to get site owners in trouble with their advertisers) is just nasty.
I get it -- you don't want to see ads. Neither do I. But if a site wants to say "this is the price of admission to see our content," that's also their right. They get to run their business the way they want. Find what you want elsewhere, rather than free-loading off of people who explicitly tell you they don't want you.
The newspapers are doing this because they are in decline. Every form of mass media is saturated with advertising, The value of ads is going down, as we are become so used to them we are blocking them out like the sound of the train in the background.
Yes, but the problem is -- it was likely always thus. Random print ads never had a lot of value either. Most people I've seen read newspapers seem to just look past them to find the stories they want to read. The actual "ad sections" of newspapers (e.g., with real estate listings or "help wanted ads" or dedicated flyers) were more useful, because the people who were looking at those sections actually were in search of ads.
The problem with online advertising is NOT that it's less effective -- it's that advertisers now have access to metrics. They can see how few people actually click on ads. They can see the number of page views. And for big companies who buy tracking data, they may even have a sense of whether your buying habits are affected at all by ads.
So, ad value is going down because companies are realizing how useless they probably always were, except for people who actually were specifically looking for ads.
Anyhow, what I don't understand is why a newspaper wouldn't be willing to quote you a price for an ad-free experience. Sure, maybe it costs several times the price of a normal "online subscription," but I imagine quite a few people may be interested in it. Being dependent on online ad sales is NOT going to be sustainable for most of them in the long run, so they might as well crunch the numbers and figure out what it would cost them to stay afloat if they sell subscriptions without ads.
Unlike email vs telegrams, Facebook adds nothing that didn't already exist before (in email, instant messaging, newsgroups/forums/mailing lists, websites, etc) except ads.
That's NOT true. I'm absolutely NOT a fan of Facebook (and frequently go several months between checking on my account -- I only keep it because there are a few people who seem to only know how to use Facebook to contact people now; they can't figure out email anymore), but the social media experience of Facebook is distinct from all other things you've mentioned.
Namely: you can broadcast information to a specific group of people (your "friends" or subgroups of them), while simultaneously also allowing them the option to "tune in" or "tune out" as they wish.
To do this with previous tech, you'd have to do something like set up a specific email list with all of your friends AND have them simultaneously set up email filters so they could control when they saw your messages (rather than just getting spammed in their inbox by your random posts). AND they'd have to do that for each of their friends individually.
But that's not even it -- because the ability to respond to posts by friends (and have them be visible to specific sets of people) couldn't really work with previous tech without a lot of configuration. Facebook is probably closest to a concatenated set of private blogs from all of your friends (where the typical blogpost is rather short, but you can post comments), but again that wasn't really easy to set up with previous tech.
Again, I'm not a huge fan of the Facebook experience, but it does lead to a different sort of interaction compared to previous social media.
Somehow I feel like in order to graduate from high school one requirement should be to realize thermostats aren't magic. Too bad we can't revoke HS diplomas.
I still remember the reactions I got when I told people I replaced the basic thermostat model I had in a house when I moved in with a basic programmable model that I could setback during the day or at night for energy savings, etc.
Many people I know -- a lot of them with graduate degrees -- looked at me like I had told them I just built my own car after smelting and processing the metal from raw ore I had dug out of a mine myself. I'm frankly astounded at how few people have ANY knowledge of basic electrical stuff. Swapping out a bad switch or an old ceiling fan or whatever is really basic stuff (as long as you follow truly basic safety measures), but for some reason everyone acts like this is rocket science... or at least way too difficult and dangerous for anyone except a "licensed electrician" to attempt.
Anyhow, whenever I think of thermostats and the public, I always remember my grandmother, who had grown up in the days before air conditioning was at all widespread. But she had central air installed when she was older and to the day she died, she could not comprehend that turning the dial to a LOWER number meant that the air conditioning effect would increase. She was stuck on this idea that a thermostat was just some sort of arbitrary numbers where higher meant "more" or something. And, frankly, she was a pretty smart person otherwise... she just couldn't get that.
I don't know what it is about thermostats that people just are incapable of understanding. Most people seem to think that by turning the numbers much higher or lower that the system will "work harder" (even though that's only true in a minority of setups, and only under certain conditions). Even fewer people understand the impact of humidity on comfort perception and realize how to make thermostat adjustments accordingly.
I agree -- this should be taught in schools.
I used to be baffled as to why consumers would even want such things. But, of course, it is not the consumers who want all this IOT, but the vendors who sell the devices and the services, trying to turn us into the product.
I agree that I can't understand the desire for many IoT devices, but internet control for a thermostat does make a certain amount of sense, particularly for those who are frequently out of town or take long vacations. In those cases, getting an alert that your thermostat is no longer responding correctly could make the difference between realizing your heat or A/C is busted immediately vs. dealing with potentially tens of thousands of dollars in water damage (from frozen pipes in winter), mold damage, or whatever when you get home a week or more later. And there are lots of less dire situations where someone who takes frequent trips might benefit from being able to make adjustments remotely. (And even if you don't travel, if you set back your thermostat during the day, this could be a convenient feature to have if you plan to come home a little earlier than expected and want your house warmer or cooler when you get there, etc.)
Anyhow, obviously such things need adequate security, and they should never REQUIRE an internet connection to function correctly. But at least in the case of thermostats, I can imagine quite a few cases where consumers might actually like the connectivity as an option.
Just realized my faux-pas in saying they might spend time on "Facebook" when I really meant social media in general. I do realize Facebook isn't as popular these days with the younger crowd. (I'm not THAT out of it....)
The snarky part of me wonders whether the correlation isn't in fact between academic performance and "not playing many traditional sports".
If true, it's probably not just sports, but organized social activities in general. Yes, it's a stereotype, but there's probably a greater percentage of introverts, "loner"-types, etc. in those who play video games frequently. In the past the extroverts and socially adept folks would be participating in all sorts of organized activities after school, and then going out with friends for a meal or something. Nowadays they probably spend some of that time on Facebook and texting, which also takes up time. (Note this doesn't require ALL gamers to be like this, only a somewhat higher percentage in the gamer pool to explain the measured effect.)
Loners and introverts tend to have more time for self-reflective activities in general, like studying, thinking, etc. When these kids aren't playing video games, are they playing sports, going out with friends, or checking Facebook incessantly? Or are they more likely (on average) to have more "downtime" by themselves to pursue intellectual stuff in general?
I was never much of a gamer myself, so I don't know if this is true or not (and I know the dynamics of gamers is changing over time). But my sense when I was younger and had many friends who were into gaming was that this was a closer correlation and explanation.
Oh, and by the way -- if you think that normal U.S. citizens have "the right to vote" today, that's really up to interpretation. For example, you really don't have the right to vote for President of the U.S. You have the right vote in an election, but it's up to your state legislature to decide in what manner the results of your state voting can be tallied to select members of the Electoral College to vote for President on your behalf.
Basically, the Constitution is profoundly undemocratic in sense of "direct democracy." It was designed to have many layers between the votes of the people and the actual officials and laws in the government.
Fuck you, you undemocratic piece of shit. The constitution says nothing about "putting in an effort" or any other such crap. You've proven the original poster's point - that people who complain about those that vote are usually wanting to clear out their notion of undesirable voters (in your case those undesirables that aren't putting in an effort).
Well, to be fair, "the Constitution says nothing about" the requirements for suffrage in general. In the early days of the U.S., states restricted voting rights to mostly white male landowners... by your standards, the original Constitution as interpreted by the states who decided who got to vote was profoundly "undemocratic." The phrase "right to vote" never even appeared until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War.
Gradually, over the years, we've added suffrage to other folks, and now it's pretty much universal for people over the age of 18 (excepting felons serving time and such edge cases). But twas not always thus, and citing the "Constitution" in this discussion brings in a host of problems... since that Constitution had to be amended at least SEVEN times SPECIFICALLY to enfranchise voters which had been previously excluded.
And Congress has had to pass other bills to extend voting rights to other random groups who would not necessarily otherwise have it under the Constitution (e.g., citizens overseas, some Native Americans, residents of D.C. in some elections, etc.).
Anyhow, I do NOT agree with GP's attitude here. But the Constitution is pretty much a terrible model for enfranchising people to vote -- the default position over the centuries has basically been "no, you don't really have the right to vote..." because the Constitution does such a poor job of granting it.
Yup. I'd wager it's about 50/50 between knowingly leaving the kid in there but intending to be back soon and leaving the kid there intending to kill it. The people who actually forget the kid is in the car when they themselves leave the car represent a rounding error.
If this were true, you'd expect statistics to be relatively constant over the past few decades. Instead, there was a sudden uptick in deaths per year beginning right when car seats were required (1998) to be placed in the back seat to avoid the required dual airbags now always present in cars. Analysis of stats suggests that the majority of these deaths are attributed to "accidents," and mostly by people who thought they already had dropped the kid off somewhere else (and thus didn't go check), rather than those "intending to be back soon."
If you leave your kid in the car, you are drug-addled as far as I can tell. I don't care if it's legal SSRIs or legal meth (Adderol) or something else. Give them all postpartum Darwin awards.
Well, since it's clear you didn't take my advice to read the link, I sincerely hope you never have kids... or if you do, I wish them luck in avoiding this situation, which (again) can and has happened to all sorts of parents, including the most meticulous ones on the planet. The answer is some combination of awareness of situations where this sort of thing does happen to meticulous parents as well as additional safety features, but simply denying this could happen isn't going to prevent it from happening to you. Good luck.
BMI is a 95% accurate predictor of obesity in men and 99% in women. IOW if you pick a random member of the population, measure their BMI and body fat percentage 95-99% that BMI says you're obese, the fat percentage will agree (and also BMI will miss quite a few). And bear in mind of those 5% wrong, some number will be merely overweight rather than obese. So if you take an obese BMI to mean "should I lose weight", if it says "yes" it's going to be wrong way under 5% of the time.
That's pretty bloody good.
I have no idea where you get your supposed 95% figure. Actual studies tend to show that the BMI cutoffs for obesity are only accurate for somewhere between 50% and 80% of people. Errors are usually large in both ways in most studies (i.e., errors that misclassify obese people as not obese, or the reverse). Usually the error is larger in misclassifying obese people as merely overweight... though I recall a study which said if we lowered the BMI "obese" threshold to capture at least 95% of actual obese people, we'd misclassify at least 1/3 of merely overweight people as "obese."
Bottom line -- BMI is terrible, and there are much better ways to do stuff like this. (And, frankly, easier -- waist size, for example, has been shown to correlate with obesity-related illnesses better than BMI... and that's waist measurement regardless of height or weight or anything else. That shows how bad BMI is.)
Oh, and I'd cite studies, but just search for "BMI inaccuracy" or something, you'll get links immediately to half a dozen studies which back up what I just said. I've never seen any study claim anything close to a 95% accuracy for BMI correlation to adiposity. That's just bogus.
Hard to believe, I know.
Why is this so hard to believe?? Firefighters have no duty to risk their lives for people who don't pay them to. -- it's a local service paid for by local money.
What people may be even more surprised by is that police have no duty to protect them either, as has been repeatedly upheld in rulings like this and this.
Basically, no matter how negligent the cops may be in not responding or not helping people (even with supposedly legally binding and enforceable documents like restraining orders) or not generally giving a crap, they aren't legally responsible and can't be sued over it.
I don't think many people in the U.S. realize in general how much "on their own" they really are, when legalities are strictly followed. You think you have "public services" that have some sort of "duty" to help you? Think again.
But start with Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer-Winning Feature, 'Fatal Distraction' from 2009:
I absolutely second this -- one of the most important articles I've ever read. I still remember when I happened upon it a few years back after reading a bunch of judgmental articles about such deaths.
For people who think, "Who the heck could ever leave their kid in a hot car... what kind of parent could they possibly be???" You NEED to read this article. This could happen to many more caring parents than we might realize, given the right set of unusual circumstances. If you have kids or ever plan to have kids and don't think this could ever happen to you, read this and realize how such things do happen, and not just to drug-addled neglectful idiots.
Excuse me! That would be just the Nobel Peace and Literature prizes. The real Nobel prizes are awarded for science, not politics.
I love it how folks around here love to create their own "perfect" definition of what constitutes a "real" Nobel prize.
The "economics prize" is obviously out (for many folks here) -- since Mr. Nobel didn't create one, so obviously even if it's awarded by the same methods and the same body, it can't be a "real" Nobel. (Personally, I'm pretty skeptical of those folks claiming to have "real" "Harvard" degrees from the "Harvard medical school" -- John Harvard gave money to what was effectively a divinity school back then, so I don't trust those weird guys claiming to have "real" Harvard medical degrees. Would John Harvard approve of those quacks using his name??)
And "literature" and "peace" -- I mean, come on.... obviously those aren't "real" Nobel prizes.... who would award a prize for that sort of BS?! [\sarcasm]
How convenient -- the "real" Nobel prizes are restricted only to those named by some dead guy (why does he have the ability to define exactly what "science" is?), except when he created prizes we find inconvenient and "unscientific," in which case they aren't "real" Nobels.
It's just a name... created by some random dead guy. It doesn't endow some mystical significance to winners that make them the greatest people or scientists or politicians or whatever ever. It's just a prize awarded by a committee. I'm not trying to downplay the winners of those prizes, but we also shouldn't try to shoehorn them into some weird pedestal of scientific perfection by ignoring those prize categories we wish weren't there. It's just a name attached to a prize.
But why should we set the goalpost at average human instead of setting the goalpost of optimum human potential?
Well, for one thing, because the history of eugenics proves that "optimum human potential" is generally more of a culturally contingent set of metrics rather than an objective measure of human potential.
Are we better than the Nazis or various other eugenics projects in recognizing how "unscientific" our values sometimes are? Hopefully we're better than that... But I'll bet in a hundred years or so, scientists will look back and shake their heads at how ignorant we were in thinking X signified a good measure of human superiority, when actually it's just an arbitrary cultural norm in vogue now (or worse, it turns out that it's a cultural idea that actually correlates negatively with other better measures of human progress, or limits diversity in ways that have a long-term worse genetic impact or whatever).
That last idea is the biggest issue from my perspective... What if we end up "optimizing" genetic trait X, leading to much less genetic diversity... But it turns out that selecting for X (mostly a socially desirable trait currently) actually weeds out the sort of diversity that could promote traits Y and Z, which are not yet fully understood? Lots of potential issues once we start tinkering with the genetic building blocks of our species.
You literally can't think of a better solution to dictatorship than condemning everyone you ever know and yourself to eternal oblivion of death?
Unless you figure out how to rejuvenate brain plasticity of youth periodically or something, which will probably lead to massive changes in personality and mental shifts, no... Not and maintain things like social progress. Thomas Kuhn and other historians of science has shown that sometimes the only way major changes happen is when an older generation can die off... Because older folks just sometimes are incapable of seeing things in a new way with the fluency of someone who grows up in a new paradigm. Older people staying in power longer will eventually inhibit progress, unless our mental capacities start to change dramacally with these life extensions.
Has it ever occurred to you that in a world where most people expect to be around in a few centuries, and for the foreseeable future unless a big war or planetary scale disaster happens, might be a world where wiser, more long sighted decisions generally are made?
No, actually, because it basically goes against what most psychological and sociological research has repeatedly shown us about the inability of average people to consider long-term consequences NOW, within current normal lifespans. If people actually made rational choices based on the fact that they will still be living even a few years or decades in the future, we wouldn't need automated forced retirement contribution plans and such. Heck, I know a lot of people who seem to be living paychecks to paycheck constantly... Even though they make an upper middle class income. And you think the average person is going to plan better when a lifetime is centuries long?? They can barely make it to the end of the month.
How much of these poor decisions now are due to decaying brains in people who still have voting power?
I don't think the "old person" vote is any worse than the average "uninformed" vote, which is basically most voters...or all the stupid people who vote regardless of age. People who truly have "decaying brains" don't tend to be able to get to the voting booth... The average older voter just has different priorities based on their longer experience and based on problems more relevant to their daily lives (which obviously have different concerns from younger folks).
You do realize that aging related intelligence decline would have to be fixed, or life extension wouldn't extend your life...
"Would have to be fixed?"Actually no, I DON'T realize that... It would certainly be desireable. But the reality is that we've already accomplished significant life extension compared to a century or two ago, without solving mental decline... Which is why we see fewer people dying of random medical conditions at younger ages and more people than ever with brains going to " mush" before they due in their 80s and 90s. I don't have faith at all that our system will make it a priority to extend intellect at the same pace as physical life extension... People these days are just too afraid of death and our society teaches us to extend life at all costs... Even if it's horrible cancer treatments and pain and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a few more months.
The fact is that America is no longer a conservative country. For example, for the first time in history there are more "nones" (people with no religious affiliation) than any other voting block. That statistic is never going to go back down, ever. That's clearly not the sign of a conservative country.
I'm not sure that this is the best metric of a "conservative country," but where do you get this data from??
Here's the history of Gallup polls on religion for example. According to them, in 2015, 38% of people identified as Protestant, 23% as Catholic, 9% as other Christian... that's 60% Christian right there. The "None" only accounted for a measly 17%. Pew polls put the number more at 70% Christian in 2014, with only 23% unaffiliated.
Moreover, when you start looking down that Gallup Poll list, you find stuff like, "Do you believe in God?" 1944 - 96%, 2016 - 89%. A downtick for sure, but hardly the sign of lack of religious belief.
"Do you believe in heaven?" 1968 - 85%, 2011 - 85%
Hell - 1968 - 66%, 2011 - 75%
Belief in angels is still up there in 2016 at 72%, which is a little lower than it was in the early 2000s, but about the same as it was back in the 1970s.
And heck, 73% of Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, including about 1/3 of your "unaffiliated" no-religion group.
Now, there are other polls that put the numbers a little lower. The Harris Poll for example only puts belief in the virgin birth at 57%, with 68% saying he is the Son of God.
Religious belief and attendance is down more than ever before in history. There are fewer churches and places of worship in this country than ever before in history. Religion is dying off here, both figuratively and literally.
Is church attendance down? Yes. And the percentage of folks who say religion is "very important" in their lives is down (though still the MAJORITY of Americans, according to polls). But given that the majority of Americans still seem to strongly subscribe to religious beliefs, including significant numbers of your "unaffiliated" folks, I'd hardly say it's "dying off" yet.
I have absolutely no idea where you get your idea that there are more "nones" than any other voting block. It may be true that the majority of Americans no longer attend church every week, but it's still a highly religious country.
the fact is that America is slowly but steadily moving towards more liberal social and political systems, not away from them. It's been doing this since the late 50's, but has sped up a bit considerably the last decade or so.
I agree with this, though to go back to your previous point -- the number of people identifying as "Evangelical Christians" has been fairly constant over the past few decades. It hasn't even declined as much as the other general religion numbers. So... it's not like the true "conservatives" (in terms of religion) are going away... it's more like the people in the middle are becoming less concerned about religious values holding sway over their lives. But there's still a rather huge contingent of people with far right values (certainly larger than your "none" contingent), and that block isn't going away anytime soon.
Pot is now fully legal for recreational use in multiple states with more coming (count on it). That's not the sign of a conservative country.
We MIGHT just be getting back to the level of acceptance of recreational/medicinal drug use enjoyed in the 1900-1930 era or so. If that's "liberal" and "progressive" to you... well, gosh, that's great!
They maintain they did nothing wrong. That means that their lack of ethics remains fully at play in every other business decision.
I'm generally the last person to defend Facebook, but this case appears to be a bit different from the typical "Kids rack up bills in in-app purchases" scenarios we've seen in Google or Apple in previous years. In particular, note the follow from another article on this case:
One child's mother let him spend $20 on her credit card to let him unlock features within the game Ninja Emblem, but the account was charged several hundred dollars for purchases the child subsequently made with what he thought was fake money.
The other child racked up charges of $1,059 after taking his parent's debit card without permission.
While the lawsuit was class-action and applies to a lot of other cases, these were the ONLY two kids who actually were directly involved in the suit, one of whom simply took his parent's card without permission.
That's something that ANY online site could have issues with -- a kid who takes a parent's card could be making purchases anywhere online. Why exactly should Facebook be more culpable than any other online site in dealing with payments like that?
Would it be NICE for Facebook to return that money? Sure. But not all companies would, particularly for goods that were non-returnable. In that case, most parents would have to take this up as a dispute with their credit card company, who probably would work it out. (Unfortunately, though, this says it was a debit card -- one more reason never to use debit cards... they simply don't give you as much protection if they are ever used in an unauthorized manner.)
Anyhow, obviously it would be reasonable for Facebook to refund most or all of the money in a case like this. But it's a rather different scenario from some of the other "in-app purchase" judgments we've seen. In those cases, the issue was that a credit card was generally entered by parents, say to make a couple app purchases, and they didn't realize that their device was set to automatically authorize all future purchases or whatever. In those cases, what was lacking was a proper control setting to turn off in-app purchases, a proper password requirement, or some sort of warning.
In other words, the credit card information was entered knowingly for an authorized reason, but the parent had no clear notice that it could be used further without limit.
Here the bar is much lower -- basically, any kid under 18 is eligible for refunds, regardless of what level of negligence on the parent's part, whether the card was basically stolen from the parents, or whatever. Again, it's generally the "right thing to do" to refund the money, but ethically I think at least in one scenario here Facebook is not as culpable or "evil" as some other cases we've seen.
One gross miscarriage of justice is not a rationale to commit another one, nor to entrench systematic miscarriages.
You're assuming that this would be a "miscarriage of justice" to Getty. But corporations and commercial infringement SHOULD be different from individual infringement.
And in this case, it's much, much worse -- because the artist explicitly wanted to license the works effectively to be used freely by the public. (Not technically public domain, but free for use with attribution.)
Getty then truly "stepped over the line" when they not only charge fees for someone else's work, but then threaten people who don't pay fees to them.
I know you probably won't agree with this, but to me stealing "from the public" is one of the worst sins that can be committed. I find modern copyright extensions to a horrific infraction against human knowledge and culture. (Copyright should be "for limited times," perhaps a few decades at most, as it was originally.) The natural state of "intellectual property" should be public domain, i.e., the cultural resources of the public. To threaten people with legal action for using the resources of the public is despicable behavior and should be punished accordingly.
It would be one thing if this were a first offense. It was not -- Getty has done precisely this before, and that's why the lawsuit is entitled to treble damages. It would also be one thing if they merely mistakenly were selling rights to photos without vetting them -- that's a copyright violation, and should be subject to the smaller fees you've discussed, raised higher for commercial violation and increased because they've done it before.
But Getty has gone far beyond that in appropriating material for itself that was released for free to the public and threatening people who used it. THAT is an offense against our society and our culture. And they've done it before. It's no different from the level of outrage that should be directed at a public official who embezzled funds out of the public school treasury. Or even an official who went around and started charging rent to people who owned land claiming, "This is actually state property." Those are equivalent scenarios here -- Getty has committed an offense against the public.
It would not be a "miscarriage of justice" in this case to sue Getty out of existence, along with any other entity who systematically tries to deny the public access to free intellectual property when it has been released as such.
Basically this finding is something that should make scientists go "huh, that's curious - we should follow up on this once we have more data".
And that's actually what MOST science should be. Particularly with human studies, it's often difficult to get huge amounts of data for a decent sample, so most studies should be exploratory. Then a larger future study should be designed in such a way that it could easily DISPROVE the previous one. In that case, we'd actually make scientific progress more efficiently.
Instead, what generally happens today:
-- Data shows small correlation, but too little statistical power to draw firm conclusions. ("X might be related to Y.")
-- Researchers often exaggerate significance in discussion section of paper, frequently extrapolating even more findings related to other stuff that wasn't even supported directly by data. ("X likely causes Y, and it might have something to do with A and B.")
-- University press releases and media shout results from the rooftops. ("X is now implicated in A and B!!" Third paragraph: "Study actually showed a connection between X and Y; researchers emphasize this is preliminary finding.")
-- Future studies cite the original without retesting. ("As shown by Jim, Sam, et al., X causes Y...") If A and B were mentioned in the abstract, you might even get references to how X "was shown" to be related to A and B.
-- 20 years later, somebody does a study on something else, but happens to also measure X and Y. Turns out X isn't even correlated with Y at all, and the mechanism postulating a connection to A and B is based on an entirely bogus set of assumptions.
That's why we have all these metastudies in the past few years saying, "Retesting shows 70% of findings in field X are false!"
What we actually should recognize is that most studies (even if they seem to have a high level of statistical significance) should be regarded as "preliminary" and need verification in retesting with a more rigorous experimental design before they are accepted. It's not gonna happen in our current grant environment which rewards "innovative" and "groundbreaking" research, but that's what science should be.
This study is precisely the kind of things that preliminary research should be about. They can't have a larger sample size yet, but they tried some testing with mice and there might be something. It's the first step in a rigorous scientific process. (Note if you actually the discussion section in this study, the authors hedge a lot and point out what they're doing is inconclusive and preliminary, though suggestive of possible effects that had previously not been measured.)
What we DON'T need from stuff like this is headlines screaming: "Astronauts FAR MORE LIKELY TO DIE from X." That's bogus BS, and it's part of the problem.